A drought resistant canola plant that could maintain or increase yields while battling drought could mean large gains for the Canadian canola industry. However, such a variety is years away.
Data gathered by Performance Plants Inc. from three years of extensive field trials in multiple sites shows that transgenic canola plants grown with the company’s Yield Protection Technology consistently outyielded current canola varieties by up to 26 percent under various conditions.
Although researchers have attempted for decades to develop crops that can cope with drought, little progress has been made. The drought tolerance gained from these attempts often results in lower seed yield, said Yafan Huang, chief scientific officer of Performance Plants from the company’s Kingston, Ont., head office.
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Huang said past studies have missed the mark because plants were put out in the field and monitored for yield with no control over the amount of moisture applied.
“The neat thing for our study is that we had the natural rainfall for each growing season, but on top of it, we had much control (over) how much irrigation we put down,” said Huang. “So you have two sets of identical plants: one set receives more irrigation; one set receives less irrigation. We wanted to see the differential yielding data under different irrigation conditions.”
Researchers found that even when they reduced irrigation, the crop yield remained normal. They believe this is due to the new technology, which is a built-in molecular switch that is only turned on when plants sense a lack of water in the soil, Huang said.
This engineered mechanism regulates the plant’s water use. Since 90 percent of a plant’s water loss is through its guard cells, the experimental canola is engineered to shut down these cells when the plant encounters drought conditions, so no water can escape. The mechanism is natural and reversible.
Huang said this technology was not designed to protect crops from yield losses in extremely dry years such as the 2001 and 2002 growing seasons where drought caused yields to drop by as much as 50 percent. Farmers can claim crop insurance for these extreme circumstances, he said. But this technology can offer yield protection under mild to moderate drought stress.
Huang said it would take three to five years before the seed is commercially available to farmers.
Roy Button, executive director of the Saskatchewan Canola Development Commission said he’s heard of the Performance Plants study, but doesn’t have enough solid field data to comment on what effect the technology could have in the long run.
“It’s got great potential. That’s about all I can say.”
Ashley O’Sullivan, president and head of Ag-West Bio Inc., was enthusiastic about the prospect of canola being grown in parts of the Prairies that traditionally are too dry.
“You have situations like the southern Prairies which are traditionally very dry and susceptible to drought, and that’s why we grow in those areas crops like durum wheat, which are more drought tolerant than say the hard red springs. This technology could expand the area where you could grow canola reliably on the Prairies, I would guess by at least a couple million additional acres,” O’Sullivan said.
“In addition to that, farther north on the Prairies a technology like this provides you with an insurance policy that in the event you do get an occurrence of drought, you certainly would maintain yield or even enhance yield. My sense is that there’s huge potential for this technology in canola.”
O’Sullivan said Agriculture Canada developed a drought resistant variety of canola in the past, but it didn’t offer herbicide tolerance.
“If you could build in drought resistance on top of the herbicide tolerance, that would be the real key to success for drought resistant canola in Canada.”
