American researchers have developed a line of winter lentils that yield up to twice as much as traditional spring-seeded varieties.
Morton lentils were released last September and plenty of commercial seed will be available for growers in the Pacific Northwest this fall.
The small red lentil developed by researchers at the United States Department of Agriculture in Pullman, Washington, outperforms existing spring-seeded lentils by a wide margin.
“We estimate that we can get a 50 to 70 percent increase in yield,” said lead researcher Fred Muehlbauer, adding that in some field trials, there was a 100 percent increase in production.
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Seed will first be made available to producers in Idaho and Washington. The two states traditionally grow between 100,000 and 120,000 acres of lentils, a tiny percentage of which is devoted to small reds.
Muehlbauer estimates growers will initially plant somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 acres of the new winter lentil. The crop will be direct seeded into cereal stubble in late September.
“Growers are very excited about the prospect of planting lentils in the fall,” he said.
“We expect that it will be used extensively in direct seed systems.”
If Morton performs well in those two states, the variety will be introduced to pulse growers in Montana and South Dakota. The climate is too cold in North Dakota for the crop to take root there.
News of the high-yielding winter lentil was not well received in Saskatchewan, a province that planted nearly 1.5 million acres of lentils last year.
“It’s certainly a threat,” said Garth Patterson, executive director of Saskatchewan Pulse Growers.
The majority of Saskatchewan’s acreage was planted to large and small green varieties, but 41 percent was in a class called “other” that includes medium green, French green and red types.
Patterson said Morton will provide stiff competition for Saskatchewan’s red lentil industry. The winter lentil performed well at the two test sites in Washington last year, yielding an average of 2,364 pounds per acre.
That compares to the 773 lb. per acre that the “other” category of lentils yielded for Saskatchewan growers in 2002, a year of bad weather, according to Saskatchewan Agriculture’s specialty crop report.
“Any producing nation is always looking for an edge and if you can do it with yield then it lowers your cost of production,” said Patterson.
While growers are nervous about the competition, one Saskatchewan processor welcomes the news. Murad Al-Katib, who runs a red lentil splitting plant in Regina, has been struggling to find good quality product since the facility opened for business last fall.
“We are actively looking at the U.S. market as a source of raw material for our splitting plant,” said the president of Saskcan Pulse Trading.
He estimates Saskatchewan growers seeded 420,000 acres of reds last year, which yielded about 150,000 tonnes of poor quality crop.
In a normal year, growers would produce about 250,000 tonnes of good quality reds, based on average crop yields of 1,800 lb. per acre.
That is still a far cry from the yields attributed to Morton, giving American lentil growers a “huge advantage” over their Canadian counterparts.
If the crop takes off south of the border, there could be significant price pressure in domestic small red markets, although some of that will be offset by the freight differential, said Al-Katib.
Muehlbauer doesn’t anticipate Canada becoming a big market for the crop. He expects Morton lentils will primarily be sold in South Asian countries such as India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, but could also fit well into traditional Turkish red lentil markets.
It produces seeds that are a little bit smaller than Crimson lentils, which should be “very acceptable” to buyers in those areas, he said.
