If 100 canola seeds are planted, slightly more than half survive and mature into viable plants.
The remaining seeds succumb to the many perils they encounter from the time they leave a seed bin back at the yard until the combine rumbles over in August.
If a farmer is seeding his own bin-run canola, it’s not a huge economic loss. But it’s more likely that he is putting down expensive hybrid seed, in which case there can be a lot of lost money.
“In canola, it’s commonly accepted that only 50 to 60 percent of the seeds will grow and give you a yield. Canola seed is notorious for not emerging,” said Gord Hultgreen, an engineer with the Prairie Agricultural Machinery Institute.
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“These are very expensive seeds. If it’s at all possible, you want every damn one of them to mature into a healthy plant that will make money for you. But with canola, we’ve all come to accept that what we put in the ground isn’t what comes up. So we double our seeding rate.”
Hultgreen said 100 percent seed success in canola is probably not possible because of a
variety of factors.
He said producers often blame their air delivery system for poor seed performance. Fan speed is another popular culprit. But new research from PAMI, done in 2005 and to be released this year, sheds new light on the subject.
After reviewing a study conducted by the Canola Council of Canada, PAMI decided it needed to take a closer look at what happens to canola seed in a typical air delivery system.
In their study, the Canola Council compared seed taken from the tank with seed taken from the ground.
In the emergence test, seed that went through the system suffered a 30 percent drop in emergence.
“So we followed up with a bunch of controlled tests of our own using Conserva Pak, Bourgault and New Holland,” said the PAMI engineer.
“Much to our surprise, the canola tests contradicted some of the research we had done earlier on pulse crops. We expected to see significant canola seed damage from the machines, and we did not see it.”
Hultgreen said contrary to what people think, the seed emergence problem is not the fault of the air system or the fan speed.
The earlier PAMI work had looked at damage to lentil and chickpea seeds. It concluded that the pulse seed damage related more to excessive fan speed than to the air system itself.
In the new canola study, less than 10 percent of the loss was attributed to the air system,
Hultgreen said.
“We think that the other 30 or 40 failed seeds are due to natural occurrences and seeding practices – fungi, seedbed quality, too much moisture, not enough moisture, soil temperature, seed bounce. There are so darn many variables.
“My view is that seed bounce from excessive fan speed could be one of the biggest factors.
“We’ve been saying for years that you should not use more air than necessary because you’ll bounce that seed out of the trench and up onto the soil surface. And that’s where it’ll stay.”
Hultgreen said seed damage and seed bounce are two distinct problems. Good seed can go through the air delivery system undamaged, yet fail to grow because it is bounced by the air flow and ends up baking on the soil surface.
“If we were getting 20 or 30 percent seed damage through any of the three air delivery systems we tested, then we would have cause for concern. But I don’t think 10 percent is going to make that much difference.
“Also, with all the numbers below 10 percent, that tells us we may not even be getting accurate measurements anyway.”
In the test, PAMI used open pollinated and hybrid varieties. The results of that comparison were similar to what they found previously in lentils and chickpeas. Open pollinated varieties were more susceptible to mechanical damage in an air delivery system.
The tests were conducted in the PAMI shop at Humboldt, where Wayne Stock fabricated a testing device that would propel the seeds at a higher velocity than normally found in an air delivery system.
Seed damage, assessed by visual examination and germination test, still ranked lower than 10 percent, despite the higher air speed.
Hultgreen said there were other revelations.
“There has been a long-standing prejudice against the Bourgault air delivery system because it uses a primary and a secondary. The air and the seed have more corners to go around. People have always made the assumption that a primary-secondary system with more corners will automatically cause more seed damage.”
While that’s logical, Hultgreen said the myth doesn’t stand up. The Bourgault did not cause more seed damage.
“I can take a FlexiCoil or a Bourgault or a Conserva Pak and crank the heck out of the fan and create major seed damage. You can do that with any air system. But if you run the fan speed within the recommended range, seed damage should be less than 10 percent regardless of the brand name.”
Hultgreen knows that as the seeding window becomes tighter, the temptation is greater to increase ground speed and thus fan speed. Farmers always need enough air to keep product moving out at the tips when they pull the hydraulics and the fan speed drops. More air than that is too much.
“If you require a lot of air to move fertilizer with your seed, then you’ve got to take the time to damper the seed plenum down so you’re not blowing those expensive canola seeds out of the ground. “That’s not at all a seed damage issue. That’s a simple matter of placing your seed into the soil.
“The biggest obstacle here is usually operator error.”
