BROADVIEW, Sask. – When the Broadview Snow Busters snowmobile club won the bid to host the 2007 Saskatchewan snowmobile rally, it needed some fundraising.
Dale and Tracey Richter, local farmers and members of the club, had been doing canola variety trials on their farm and had found the companies generous. Dale thought this might be a good way to make some money for the club.
In 2005, R and R farms ran a seven-variety strip trial. Richter approached some companies and worked with them to develop a larger trial that could also be used as a fundraiser.
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“Probably for the past 10 years I’ve been doing these, comparing varieties side by side on my own farm, to see which variety performs better and which one gives me a better contribution margin,” Richter said.
“When the InVigor varieties first came out, I was comparing them with the Roundup Readys and sometimes the higher yielding one wasn’t the one that put more dollars in your pocket. So I’ve done that on and off for the last 10 or 12 years.”
The 2006 trial was done on a field scale. Each trial patch was about 10 acres. With the 13 varieties, plus buffers between the Roundup Ready and Liberty Link sections and a few other treatments, the total trial covered 480 acres.
“They’re a mile long and not very many trials are that size. This gives a good representation of your field, plus it’s replicated twice, so you take an average of the two,” Richter said.
The fields were heavy harrowed in the spring, then received a burnoff with 0.33 litres of Transorb per acre. Fertility was the same across the whole field.
Richter seeded each plot with his 43-foot disc drill, making two passes per plot. The 86-foot plots were swathed down the middle with his 30-foot swather to ensure all trials included an equal area. Any short stretches in each swath that weren’t harvested were measured and adjusted for, to ensure a fair trial. And one combine harvested all the test strips in each replication, to maintain consistency.
“All summer there were tours through these canola plots. A lot of dealers like to do combine demonstrations, but it’s hard to get around to 80 guys to demonstrate their combines. So we approached some dealers and told them what we were doing. They were all in favour of coming, bringing a combine for a donation and they got to promote their machines. They had 80 farmers there who could take them for a drive. The ones that were really interested were trying them out.”
Seven combines cleaned up the swaths. Two were Richter’s, while the others were from dealers in the area, plus a neighbour who brought his Lexion. The combines included a Cat Lexion 580R, a Case IH AFX8010, an MF 9790 and John Deere models 9600, 9660STS, 9750STS and 9860STS.
“For myself, I like doing these trials to see what varieties perform best on your own ground. By doing them on your own farm, you can come up with a pretty good representation of what they will perform like. You can make decisions to determine which ones suit your farm the best,” Richter said.
“It’s not just the yield. You see the characteristics of the canola – how it grows, which is easier to swath, which stands up better and which has less disease. You can compare all those between all the varieties.”
While the final yields, adjusted for moisture, dockage and other factors, aren’t yet available, rough yields for this year ranged from 37 to 46 bushels per acre.
Richter said seed companies like to get involved in trials like this because it’s a good opportunity to show off their canola varieties.
“With this trial being done independently, a lot of times those numbers mean more than if the company does it on their own plots. They do yield, moisture, dockage and oil content tests, then compare them all.”
Every company donated seed from its varieties: four from Cargill, two from Canterra and three each from DeKalb and InVigor, and a control from Pioneer. All varieties were either Liberty Link or Roundup Ready. Cargill brought one weigh wagon and DeKalb brought another.
Curtis Russell, a sales manager with Bayer CropScience at Katepwa Lake, Sask., said the main reason he gets involved is to get field-scale, quality data.
At the end of the day, growers can make better decisions based on data from their own areas.
“Every company does their own tests across Western Canada, just not this size. We do them with farmer equipment, so that’s not new. But they’re not that long, often less than half a mile. What a mile does is make your data more accurate, because there’s less variance. That’s why this is such a huge undertaking. There’s a lot of work to be done,” said Russell.
“It’s much better, much more accurate and farmers are more open to hearing the information from it. When dealing with small plot data, a lot of farmers are skeptical of the information. The larger you get, the less variance there is and the more accurate your numbers are going to be.”
Jon Habok, a specialty canola supervisor with Cargill based out of Yorkton, Sask., said the trial gives him a better idea how his company’s varieties perform across Western Canada.
In the planning stages, Habok provided some suggestions about how to lay out the plots.
“What I try to do in my territory is I keep (the varieties) in the same sequence, so it doesn’t matter if you’re at a trial in Broadview or Yorkton, they’re all in the same order. If I have other people come out to look at those trials, they know where everything is at,” said Habok.
“And we put 45H21 in all our trials as a check. If you went to a trial in Alberta, you’d find 45H21 in that one, as well.”
Habok prefers trials with more than one replication per variety. It removes variability, allowing more accurate averaging.
Habok said along with using a weigh wagon on each plot, they also measure out the swath length to establish the total area harvested.
“Then we retain samples from all the reps and send them away for grade analysis, moisture, dockage and that sort of thing, to get an accurate net yield number,” he said.
“We also send the samples to our lab in Clavet, (Sask.,) for an oil analysis, to see what our oil profile is. Once we get that back, I go back out to the growers and go through those numbers with them.”
All the seed for the trials was supplied. Richter donated 100 acres of land for the fundraising effort and about $15,000 in inputs were donated from local businesses. That was close to covering the cash costs, Richter said.
The trials are expected to raise $25,000 for the Broadview Snow Busters snowmobile club.
“Our main goal is to raise enough money to buy our own trail groomer. That was why we wanted to host the rally. We’ll make some money there, too, but we needed some startup money to get things in place. With good snow, that could also be a very good fundraiser for us,” Richter said.
The club expects to need $40,000 to $50,000 for the trail groomer, plus another $10,000 to $15,000 for a drag to pull behind it. So the initial $25,000 is a good start.
Richter said the main snowmobile trail to the Qu’Appelle Valley runs right across the field where the plots were.
“We’ll be leaving up all the signs out there. It’ll be something interesting for snowmobilers to come by all this and see what’s been done.
“I want to promote agriculture at this rally. Areas in B.C. and the U.S. have promoted the sport and they have a really good tourism industry built there. I feel we have some great, unique riding areas right in our own back yards here and we’d like to promote that as a tourism attraction for the province.”
For Russell, Bayer’s involvement in the project is a great benefit for his company.
“We can showcase our varieties. For the donation part, it’s great that we can support something like that. But for a lot of the growers there, they like the information it provides,” he said.
“We didn’t do it just so the Snow Busters could get a new groomer. The main reason we did it was for the data it provides to our customers. The (fundraising) is a bonus.”
