Winter wonder

Climate is changing. We must adapt to make the most of it.

“Many folks have been suggesting that global warming is good for Prairie agriculture,” says Dave Sauchyn, prof at the University of Regina and director of the Prairie Adaptation Research Collaborative (PARC). If that is true, our practices need to change to align with growing conditions and turn yields around. Can winter canola, which widely outyields spring canola in areas where it works, be one way to take advantage of a longer growing season, hotter summers and unpredictable moisture patterns?

That’s a big maybe. In practice, winter canola has been a dismal failure on the Prairies and no one grows it. The road ahead is long and may end at a cliff.

John Mayko, who farms in Alberta and was a Canola Council of Canada agronomy specialist when I first joined the CCC, says Alberta trials in the 1990s looked at suitability of winter canola. He says two factors hamper survival of winter canola in Western Canada: “Maintaining adequate snow cover during the cold temperatures and secondly, enhancing the ability to resist brief cold temperatures in the spring coming out of dormancy when the snow cover has melted.”

Michael Stamm, agronomist and canola breeder at Kansas State University, spoke at Canola Week in December about his winter canola program. Stamm is trying to show the rotational benefits of winter canola in a region where some counties have grown wheat back to back to back for over 100 years. Stamm and colleagues identified three key weather factors that influence winter canola survival: Number of days with temperatures below -10˚C, number of times temperature shifts from above to below freezing and wind chill. A blanket of snow insulates canola from cold and wind, but, as Mayko describes, spring can be the killer.

In North Dakota, Bryan Hanson, research agronomist with North Dakota State University, ran two winter canola trial sites in 2022 and 2023. Results, at first glance, are pretty bad. However, one site was bone dry and the other showed what one could interpret as a hint of promise: when canola plants went into winter at 8” height, spring survival was around 29 per cent. This sounds terrible, but 29 per cent survival would provide around two plants per square foot. If uniform across the field, two plants can produce great yield in a long growing season. Stamm says a winter canola stand-thinning study from Oklahoma State University “showed that one plant per square foot was plenty if inputs were not removed.”

Stamm’s job to bring winter canola to Kansas has not been easy. Winter canola acres throughout the U.S. southern plains – the target area for the wheat rotation crop – peaked at 350,000 in 2013-14 and have not cracked 50,000 over the past five years. One problem is that the local processor shut down. The facility has recommissioned, reviving a local market. Crop consistency is another problem. “This really frustrates farmers,” Stamm says. That may improve with some breeding efforts. Cultivars are mostly old open-pollinated options. Hybrids will be a “game changer,” Stamm says, showing a 13 per cent yield increase in trials.

Mayko doesn’t rule out winter canola on the Prairies. “The big issue with winter survival is that the growing point of canola is above ground, making it more sensitive to the cold temperatures,” he says. “Hopefully solutions to the problems can be found with gene editing or other new technologies.”

Ross McKenzie, retired agronomy research scientist with Alberta Agriculture, was involved with winter canola studies over the years. I reached out, expecting him to shoot down the idea of winter canola on the Prairies. He didn’t. His trials showed very good survival of winter canola in southern Alberta, but not in central Alberta. “With breeding effort, I suspect winter canola could have good potential in southern Alberta, but at the time of completion of the project, there wasn’t much interest due to the poor survival in central Alberta.” He then listed potential advantages of winter canola: “Increased yield potential, less disease and insect pressure, vegetative growth and flowering before summer heat.”

A Manitoba farmer told me this winter that his family doesn’t grow any of the same crops they grew 10 years ago. Farmers continually examine their crops and practices, especially as growing conditions and climate patterns change on the Prairies. Canola was born on the Prairies, and is our biggest cash crop, but that does not guarantee loyalty and growth. We have to constantly invest in the crop and examine opportunities. Is winter canola coming to the Prairies? Maybe not. But if we are to increase productivity in a changing climate, winter canola deserves another look.