Your provincial research leads
As the research director at Alberta Canola, I am committed to ensuring your levy dollars are put toward research projects that cover timely challenges and opportunities affecting your farm and canola production. Alberta Canola’s research portfolio continues to grow in exciting ways. However, research costs continue to increase, which puts a strain on tight budgets, yet it is still critical to ensure that canola growers’ needs continue to be met.
In April of 2024, the research committee at Alberta Canola expanded on its research priorities and identified the top eight research funding targets. The committee used grower feedback received from the first two Research Symposiums (Lethbridge 2023 and Grande Prairie 2024). Alberta Canola recognizes the diverse growing landscape across the province and understands research needs can reflect this. That is why it’s important to the research committee that the Research Symposium moves each year to reach as many canola growers across the province as possible. Our 2025 symposium will be in Red Deer where we hope to identify the needs of central Alberta canola growers.
Alberta Canola is excited to continue engaging with growers and learning how to best meet your needs. We strive for a well rounded, applicable and leveraged research portfolio to find better ways to grow canola, investigate new uses and health benefits of canola oil, and promote the use of canola meal in livestock feed rations.
Brittany Visscher
Research director
Alberta Canola
brittany@albertacanola.com
As the research manager with Manitoba Canola Growers Association, I’m responsible for prioritizing farmer-identified research needs, managing funding, exploring new research collaborations and growing our applied research programs. I have been immersed in agriculture my entire life through farming, industry jobs and post-secondary education. My love for the agricultural community paired with curiosity has driven my research career and continues to push me to ensure that the MCGA research program is aligned with the priorities of Manitoba farmers. I also ensure that results produced from our programs are available to farmers in a format they can use on their farms.
In 2024, we launched our Manitoba Canola Variety Evaluation Program with trials at six locations across the province. We are very excited to see this program come to the field after there was no independent variety testing on the Prairies in 2023. As this program grows and evolves, we continue to work with industry members to ensure we are best representing canola performance on a field level and that we can include a wide range of varieties across the market. This program is paired with our On-Farm Research Program to provide Manitoba farmers with applied research results from across the province to help farmers make informed management decisions on their farms.
Amy Delaquis
Research manager
Manitoba Canola Growers
SaskOilseeds continues to invest in important new research to help farmers. This year, two new projects deal with management of herbicide resistant kochia. We funded several projects to continue building our knowledge on the four major diseases of canola. These include screening sources of resistance to verticillium stripe and how it interacts with the blackleg pathogen, looking at natural viruses that could control sclerotinia, and attempting to culture the clubroot pathogen outside of plants and developing methods to isolate single spores so that pure lines can be used in research. As for insect pests, we are funding projects for monitoring swede midge, tracking the spread of different flea beetle populations, and using volatiles to attract and kill flea beetles.
Other projects include further optimizing canola’s oil profile, continued development of breeding tools to allow wider genomic variation to be brought into canola more easily, and evaluating co-extrusion of canola meal with pea starch to lead to better balanced nutrition rations for livestock.
Our on-farm field scale program expanded to four protocols this year. Co-operators could choose a protocol and use it to perform valid research trials on their farm. We have many ways for you to take advantage of our extension activities to learn more about these projects, our free disease testing programs, and to find out how you can participate in on-farm research!
Doug Heath
Research manager
SaskOilseeds