Bayer’s Battle of the Bushels

Jul 29, 2026
By Diego Flammini
Assistant Editor, North American Content, Farms.com

Saskatchewan and Alberta canola producers are going head-to-head

A new ag competition is pitting farmers against one another.

Bayer’s Battle of the Bushels sees 15 selected canola growers (14 from Saskatchewan and one from Alberta) seed a 40-acre plot with either DK401TL or DK400TL, plus a BUTEO start seed treatment.

Bayer reps visit the competitors’ farms during the growing season to validate certain information.

Aside from that, it’s up to the producer to achieve the highest yield.

“It’s a fairly wide open competition. You need to submit your location, so you can’t move it around. The rep comes out and confirms and feeds with you, and after that, it’s just the most bushels win,” Nathan Kuhn, a participating farmer from Unity, Sask., told paNOW. “So you hope you picked a good spot. I know a few of the contestants had some drowning out issues and of course it’s going to be all kinds of weather related issues. But as far as rules go, it’s pick 40 acres, submit it, and grow the most bushels.”

A live leaderboard tracks each farmer’s progress and anticipated yield.

Kuhn, for example, started with a pre-burn of Roundup Transorb HC before seeding DK401TL.

His projected yield is 55 bushels per acre.

Each farmer seeded in May, with harvesting dates ranging in September and October.

As of July 29, Borden, Sask. farmer Lucas Saunders is in the lead with a projected yield of 87 bushels per acre using DK401TL and an estimated harvest date of Sept. 23.

For comparison, the national canola yield averaged 44.7 bushels per acre in 2025, Stats Canada data showed.

And Bayer’s social media channels provide updates on farm visits.

On July 24, reps visited Garth George – the lone Alberta participant – at his farm in Marwayne.

“I’d hope to win but there’s a pretty stiff competition,” George said. “The other farmers are pretty professional as well.”

Video: Western Canadian Agriculture: Hard Times Made the World's Best Farmers

Western Canadian agriculture produced the most advanced farmers in the world not through abundance but through adversity. The crow rate fell. The wheat price went nowhere. The brown envelopes stopped.

When the subsidies disappeared, the bad farmers left and the good ones stayed. And the ones who stayed could not just grow wheat anymore. They started growing lentils and canola and peas and flax and faba beans. They built crop rotation. They got serious about agronomy because there was no government backstop. That process produced the Western Canadian agriculture Dennis Bulani describes in this clip: the most advanced, most educated farming culture in the world.

His contrast with Iowa corn and soybean farmers is sharp. At a DeKalb farmer meeting in Okoboji, Iowa, he asked what crop rotation they ran. Beans on corn stubble, corn on bean stubble. How do you fertilize? The co-op agronomist handles it. Have you considered other crops? No need. We make so much money on corn and soybeans. Western Canadian agriculture was never allowed that comfort. And now those Iowa farmers are watching soybean markets lock up with China and corn prices slide, and they do not have the agronomy knowledge or the research base to pivot. Western Canadian farmers adapted on a dime because they had done it before.

Dennis also makes the case that Western Canadian agriculture keeps adapting in real time. Low commodity prices over the past year have pushed growers to look seriously at precision spot-spray technology. He knows a neighbor who bought a sprayer with the seeing-eye system and sprayed only 80 out of 320 acres. As a chemical retailer Dennis acknowledges that will affect his sales. He supports it anyway, because if it advances Canadian agriculture and makes farmers money, that is a good outcome.

The lesson Dennis draws from the tale of two farms: continuous improvement is the only durable strategy. When canola was $22 a bushel some growers went to Arizona instead of the Crop Production Show. When the price came down those same growers came back to the research and the discipline. Products do not go on Rack Petroleum's shelves unless they pass a replicated trial first. That is what Western Canadian agriculture built through hard times: farmers who do the work whether the times demand it or not.

Dennis Bulani is CEO of Rack Petroleum and Ultimate Yield in Biggar, Saskatchewan. Dan Aberhart hosts GTF Productions, Western Canadian Agriculture's foremost live briefing platform and its foremost AI training platform for ag operators