BIRSAY, Sask. — David Dolman knelt in the bean field.
“Look at this. There’s a phenomenal number of beans on this plant,” he said to his friend Alan Dolter, also of Wolseley, Sask.
The pair had driven 300 kilometres to look at dry beans during a production tour in central Saskatchewan. A week earlier they had driven east to Manitoba to check production there.
They are searching for an alternative crop on their southern Saskatchewan farms. Dolman wants a crop to grow in rotation on his irrigated potato land. Dolter wants to add a crop to his dryland farm.
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The potential for $700 an acre from a bean crop is intriguing, they admit.
Dixie and Dave Green of Swift Current, Sask., had also driven a few hours from home to look at beans. They’re growing hay on their irrigated land using effluent from the town’s sewage treatment plant, and are considering a bean crop instead.
Producers were shown fields of bean throughout the day; some had a few disease problems, but generally crops were healthy. The large cash return was beginning to look easy.
But it doesn’t always work. On the last stop of the day it was impossible to find the beans among volunteer wheat and diseased plants.
Other side of the coin
“This is somewhat of a disaster,” said Bill King, irrigation agrologist with Sask Water, which organized the tour. “If it rains, sclerotinia will take the whole damn field out.”
Sask Water helps fund the Saskatchewan Irrigation Development Centre in Outlook, which promotes special crop production under irrigation. The plan on this field was to plant with an air seeder into tall standing wheat stubble, so the beans would grow higher off the ground and special harvesting equipment wouldn’t be needed.
“Research showed direct seeding will work. Then you run head-on into the real world,” said King.
The problems began one year earlier when the field was 70 percent hailed out. Even after spraying twice with Roundup, a third flush of volunteer grain and weeds came up.
“The extraordinary level of voluntary wheat really screwed this up,” King said. The field, which cost close to $200 an acre to produce, was almost unsalvageable for hay, cereal or beans.
Dixie Green summed up everyone’s feelings when she looked at the field: “Maybe we’ll look around a bit more.”
