After spending the better part of a decade as the undisputed king of red spring wheats, AC Barrie is facing a slew of new pretenders to the throne.
And that could signal the beginning of a new era of varietal choice for wheat growers.
The venerable variety accounted for 18.8 percent of Canada Western red spring wheat acreage in 2006, according to preliminary results from the Canadian Wheat Board’s annual variety survey. It’s still No. 1, but it’s a far cry from the 48 percent of seeded area it accounted for in 1999.
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Industry officials last week said it’s doubtful any variety will ever again dominate the way AC Barrie, and before it, Katepwa and Neepawa, did.
“I think one can assume the days of a highly dominant variety are gone,” said Dale Adolphe, executive director of the Canadian Seed Growers’ Association.
Instead, farmers will choose from a broad array of varieties, each tailored for specific needs in terms of agronomic characteristics, customer demand and quality specifications, and regional and climatic differences.
There will be varieties made for maturity or straw strength, others for disease or insect resistance. Some will emphasize protein or yield, others will provide resistance to weathering and sprouting.
Some varieties will combine a number of those characteristics but none will do it all.
“The big difficulty is to try to get everything together into one variety,” said retired Agriculture Canada wheat breeder Fred Townley-Smith, whose high-yielding variety Superb ranks a close second to AC Barrie in CWRS acreage this year.
“I think we’ll be looking at new varieties with different combinations of all those factors, but none of them will have everything. It doesn’t look like there is a clear successor to Barrie.”
The byword will be choice, and that’s good, as far as Limerick Sask., grain farmer and seed grower Barry Reisner is concerned.
“There is still screening through the registration process, but farmers will have more choices and that’s always good,” he said.
Some have expressed concern that farmers may end up with too many choices, perhaps among varieties that aren’t really different from each other, but Reisner said that’s preferable to the alternative.
“The less choice we have, it simply means someone else is making the choice elsewhere in the system,” he said.
Adolphe agreed, saying the more choices wheat growers have, the better.
“It means growers have to study a little bit more the differences between the varieties and what’s best adapted to his region or his farm, but I think it should be seen as good news for the farmers, because he’ll have more tools in his toolbox to choose from.”
In 2006, farmers planted 30 different varieties of wheat, about the same as three years ago, although that’s nowhere near the more than 200 canola varieties on the market.
Mike Grenier, agrologist for the Canadian Wheat Board, foresees a situation in which four or five CWRS varieties each have double-digit percentages but none exceeds 20 percent.
He said while it’s generally good to have a number of varieties from which to choose, producers should be cautious about jumping to a new one.
“Before you move to a new variety, you want to be sure it’s offering you something that you’re looking for, whether it’s yield or maturity or a particular disease package for your area,” he said, adding that a lot of the new varieties coming out don’t really offer much of an improvement over AC Barrie.
Reisner predicted AC Barrie will continue to hold a good market share in some regions, especially Manitoba where it still accounts for 45 percent of wheat acres because of its resistance to fusarium.
“Barrie was a breakthrough variety and farmers adopted it quickly,” he said. “It still has good qualities, but as we raise the bar, we’re bound to see changes.”
Among the varieties picking up acreage in 2006 were: Superb, a high yielding, later maturing variety that garnered 18.3 percent of the acres; McKenzie, another high yielder that took 10.1 percent (up from 8.2); Harvest, a sprout-resistant variety, at 5.7 percent and Lillian, a strong stemmed, sawfly resistant variety at 3.2 percent.
Other varieties above four percent are AC Intrepid at 5.1 percent, AC Eatonia at 5.0 and Prodigy at 4.5.
The numbers are based on about 5,000 responses to the CWB’s producer survey. The board hoped to receive at least twice that many responses.
