Carl Siemens is one of three Saskatchewan irrigation farmers who is growing an unusual crop this year – dryland beans.
The reason he’s growing a crop that has been developed for arid regions in one of the few irrigated districts of the province is that bean boosters feel this new variety shows a lot of promise and they want to increase the commercial supply.
Garth Patterson, executive director of Saskatchewan Pulse Growers, said about 20,000 acres of beans were seeded in the province this spring, 65 percent of the total was in irrigated districts.
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He expects seeded acreage to quintuple in the next four years as stocks of CDC Pintium becomes more readily available to commercial growers.
Pintium is an early maturing, upright variety of pinto bean developed by the University of Saskatchewan’s Crop Development Centre that is well suited to the province’s thin black soil zone.
Saskatchewan hasn’t been able to produce or import a bean variety that is well adapted to the province’s growing conditions so bean acreage hasn’t exploded the way pea and lentil acreage has in the past five years.
Most of the bean seed grown on the Prairies comes from Idaho, but that could change if Pintium takes off the way breeders and pulse growers think it will.
“We’re hoping we can have a made-in-Saskatchewan bean seed industry,” said Patterson.
Saskatchewan irrigation farmers want to be an integral part of that burgeoning industry.
“With irrigation here we can reliably increase seed of any of these newer varieties – especially in a year when you get drought like this,” said Irrigation Crop Diversification Corporation director John Linsley.
It’s also a way for irrigation farmers, who have already had quite a bit of success growing beans, to add even more value to their operations.
“We want to see if we can take it another step now by adding premiums to our bean production by growing beans for seed,” said Linsley, who is also the manager of agriculture services for Saskatchewan Water Corp.
Three irrigation farmers are part of a prairie-wide group of 44 select seed growers who got their hands on the 3,625 kilograms of Pintium breeder seed that was released this spring.
Siemens said there’s a “real steep learning curve” for growing beans. He seeded 50 acres of CDC Pintium in the spring and harvested between 1,200 and 1,500 pounds per acre this fall. He will have a better idea of what the precise yields are in a few weeks.
The biggest lesson was learning how to take the crop off with conventional lentil harvesting equipment.
“That’s a bit of a challenge,” said Siemens.
The harvest losses with the solid seeded crop were high.
The large seeds don’t cope with rough handling, leading to some breakage in the combining process.
But in the end Siemens and the other two irrigation growers had what Linsley referred to as “very good” results.
“Indications look like we’re onto something here,” he said.
That’s good news for Patterson, who at last winter’s Pulse Days forecast a Saskatchewan bean crop of 100,000 acres by 2005. It’s an ambitious goal for a province that seeded only one-fifth that amount this year.
“It’s not very big on the radar screen right now but some people refer to us as the sleeping giant in the bean industry,” said Patterson.
Saskatchewan earned that “sleeping giant” title by the way pea, lentil and chickpea acreage has exploded in the province the past five years. Pulse growers seeded nearly 5.7 million acres of those three crops this year.
Beans is the one pulse crop where Saskatchewan isn’t the dominant player. Manitoba and Ontario account for the vast majority of Canada’s 191,000 acres, but that could change if CDC Pintium proves to be the “breakthrough” variety the industry hopes it is.
Patterson wants the seed industry to grow hand-in-hand with commercial production.
Linsley said the Canadian dollar could make Saskatchewan seed growers competitive in the high quality seed market. Judging by this year’s encouraging results, growers in the irrigated districts could create a good business for themselves supplying pedigreed Pintium bean seed to farmers in Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
“People know that Idaho bean seed is where it’s at. We want to challenge those guys.”
