Protecting your canola yields

Feb 09, 2021

Evaluating levels of disease risk for sclerotinia, fusarium and white mold with Q-protect

Do you struggle to see disease in your crops? Do you know how to evaluate the level of a disease before it’s too late? Are you losing yield across your field because of your indecision to spray?

These questions were asked by Kirsty McCormack, Technical Sales Manager at Quantum Genetix, to attendees of the 2020 Farms.com Virtual Precision Agriculture Conference & Ag Technology Showcase.

Her presentation ‘Q-protect Your Crop – a Tactic to Tackling Sclerotinia, Fusarium & White Mold’ was delivered with Quantum Genetix General Manager, Heather Deobald.

“Q-protect is a tool for the farming community. To help increase timing and decision confidence based on knowledge of spore presence, we aim to take the guess work out of spraying and provide you with the power to better manage your disease level,” said McCormack.

She discusses the disease triangle, a model with three components: the host crop, which with over 20 million acres of canola planted in Canada annually, there is an abundance of host crops; the environment, which is dictated by weather, rain events, moisture, humidity, and heat units; and lastly, pathogen.

“The one unknown element that we cannot visually see until it is already doing damage is our pathogen. This is the value of Q-Protect, to be able to determine the amount of pathogen that is present, allowing you to increase your accuracy in predicting disease risk and impact,” said McCormack.

She explained that as yields, price volatility and the cost of production rises, farmers need to be more efficient and sustainable in every growing decision.

“Being able to better monitor and predict these diseases, can have a large impact on your canola and soybean yields. Knowing the cost of your decision is crucial,” added McCormack.

So how does Q-protect work?

Each Q-protect kit comes with 40 sampling tubes, a set of tweezers for collection, as well as a submission form. Armed with a single kit, farmers can test up to 320 acres.

“When we are collecting our petals, we want to take a sample from the top of the plant, the middle and the bottom, then we will repeat this eight times at the five different sites within a field,” said Deobald. “Once you have your sample collection complete, you package everything back up send it to the lab. Within 24 hours we will send you a result sheet showing what levels of spore infection you have in your field.”

To learn more about Quantum Genetix’s Q-protect, watch the below video with McCormack and Deobald.

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids