Farmers pay price of short rotation in hot canola market

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/04/2012 (4958 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Years ago, one of the striking memories of my first trip into farming counties outside Chicago was the crop rotations — if you could call them that.

Farmers there either grew corn and soybeans or soybeans and corn. It was a remarkably narrow crop range compared to what typically took place on the farms I was familiar with in Manitoba. The southern rotation was largely driven by economics — the value of those crops exceeded the added costs by way of increased fertilizer, herbicides and fungicides. And if they didn’t, government programs stepped in to fill the gap.

Here, farmers routinely grew from four to seven crops, including several types of cereals, up to three kinds of oilseeds, and legumes (in those days, it was most often peas.) These days, they are capable of growing an even wider range, thanks to improved corn, soybean and edible bean varieties that are conditioned to our relatively short growing season.

That diversity played and continues to play several roles on the farm. That was back in the Canadian Wheat Board days, so farmers were diversifying their cash flow between their cereal “board” crops sold through the CWB pools, and cash crops sold into the open market.

Likewise for weather risk. Some crops perform better than others in hot, dry years, while others come through when it is cool and damp.

The varied rotation — growing different crop types on different fields over four-year cycles — reduces disease and weed pressures, which reduces the amount of herbicides and fungicides needed. In some cases, it even improves soil fertility; growing wheat after peas, for example, requires less fertilizer because of residual reserves left behind by the nitrogen-fixing legume.

That healthy diversity is being threatened, oddly enough by a crop that originally helped promote it. These days, if you fly over the Canadian Prairies in July when the canola crop is in full bloom, you will see an increasingly wide sea of yellow. Insatiable demand and high prices for Canada’s super oilseed have proven too tempting for farmers.

Market analysts are predicting canola producers will once again set a new record for plantings this spring. The publication Oil World predicts acreage will jump six to 12 per cent, perhaps exceeding the EU’s area of the crop for the first time.

More significantly, Canada could meet the Canola Council’s objective of producing 15 million tonnes by 2015 three years early.

But some agronomists are wondering at what cost. If farmers are increasing their canola acres, it is at the expense of other crops, and at the expense of what historically has been seen as a sustainable rotation of once every four years on the same field.

Government and industry extension agronomists have expressed concern as farmers tightened their rotations to the point that as much as two-thirds of crop planted in Manitoba is grown on the same field every second year, usually with wheat in between. As many as six per cent of farmers are now growing canola on canola.

With canola, using the same field two years in a row accounts for a 15 to 20 per cent yield loss compared to putting two or three years between crops, says Anastasia Kubinec, a provincial oilseed specialist.

This is drawn from what actually happened in farm fields over 10 years, based on data from the provincial crop insurance database.

The industry has already experienced a wreck chalked up to squeezed rotations. Farmers in dozens of Alberta counties must now follow a mandatory rotation cycle of four to five years to address an outbreak of clubroot, a devastating fungus that lives a long time in the soil. Clubroot hasn’t surfaced in Manitoba yet, but two infested fields in Saskatchewan were identified last year.

However, Manitoba has seen a breakdown in the genetic resistance to blackleg, another fungal disease. Farmers are relying more heavily on fungicides to suppress this disease and others.

In a recent newsletter, the Canola Council of Canada cited a rise in canola seedling diseases, more pests such as root maggots, and weeds in canola crops as rotations become tighter.

“Recent research by AAFC indicates that hybrid canola removes as much soil nitrate as wheat, and therefore high yields in tight rotations with canola and wheat will result in low soil nitrate levels,” it says.

What more can they say? Farmers are listening to only one siren call, the market, and banking on continued improvements in technology to see them through.

As the saying goes, it’s all good — until it’s not.

Laura Rance is editor of the Manitoba Co-operator. She can be reached at 792-4382 or by email: laura@fbcpublishing.com