SASKATOON – Crop diversification has been largely a spectator sport for farmers in the hot, dry southern prairies.
But that could change in a few years if Al Slinkard and his cohorts at the University of Saskatchewan win their war against ascochyta blight.
That would allow farmers to grow chickpeas, plants that Slinkard says are uniquely adapted to the brown soil zone and dry parts of the dark brown zone.
“The important thing about chickpeas is it’s adapted farther south,” he said last week. “In the rush to diversification we’ve kind of overlooked that area.”
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Chickpea, which resembles a small shrub with a woody stem, is the number three pulse crop in terms of worldwide consumption, ranking behind beans and peas and ahead of fababeans and lentils.
It’s got a lot going for it, says Slinkard: It’s extremely drought tolerant, with a tap root system that can exceed two metres; it’s very effective at fixing nitrogen, accounting for 80 to 90 percent of its requirements compared with 70 percent for lentils; it requires no specialized production or harvesting equipment; it provides returns similar to lentils; and there’s a strong and growing market.
But all that will mean nothing unless the deadly ascochyta fungus can be overcome.
How big a problem is it? As Slinkard puts it, the top three priorities in the crop science department’s chickpea breeding program are ascochyta resistance, ascochyta resistance and ascochyta resistance.
“You haven’t seen a disease until you’ve seen this,” he told farmers and grain industry officials attending the university’s annual Cropportunities conference. “This stuff is wicked.”
If so much as one out of 400 seeds is infected, the entire crop will likely be lost.
In an interview later, Slinkard said he’s confident that resistant (not immune) varieties suitable to southwestern Saskatchewan will be developed by 1998. There are 4,000 acres in production this year and he expects to see 75,000 by the end of the decade.
“Beyond that, by the year 2010, I can see 200,000, maybe more,” he said, adding he’s “usually on the conservative side.”
There are two types of chickpea. The kabuli variety, also known as garbanzo bean, is familiar to consumers as a canned product often sold in salad bars. It has a higher value, but its large, delicate seed must be treated with a fungicide to have any hope of survival. It’s also late maturing, something breeders are working on.
The other variety, called desi, is smaller with a durable seed coat and is split and ground into flour.
Slinkard said the university received a lot of calls this year from farmers interested in growing chickpeas. Anyone who does plant it has to assume every lot of seed is infected with ascochyta, he said. Fields should be monitored and inspected constantly. And if the producer can do anything to keep it from raining too much, that would help.
There’s not a lot of world trade in chickpeas, with the biggest producers, India and Pakistan, consuming all of their own production. But Slinkard said there could be opportunities to develop export markets as populations become more ethnically diverse in Europe and North America.
“There’s a lot of Indians in London (England), for example, and they want chickpeas,” he said.
