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About the Harvest Sample Program

The Canadian Grain Commission’s (CGC) Harvest Sample Program is a voluntary program that has been benefiting Canadian grain producers and the entire grain value chain since 1927.

In exchange for their harvest samples, producers receive a personalized crop quality report at no charge that they can use when marketing and delivering their grain.

The harvest samples producers send each year are essential to maintaining Canada’s grain quality assurance system, as they:

  • allow CGC to generate quality and safety data that helps marketers promote domestic and international sales of Canadian grain
  • help evaluate the effectiveness of grading factors, to make sure they continue to protect Canada’s reputation as a reliable source of high-quality grain
  • allow CGC to conduct scientific research to mitigate grain quality and grain safety issues, and to help support the creation of new markets for Canadian crops 

The Harvest Sample Program is a voluntary program that benefits Canadian grain producers and the entire grain value chain.

When you sign up, you’ll receive a Harvest Sample kit annually that contains envelopes for sending in samples of your crop at no extra cost to you. For each sample, our inspectors provide unofficial grade and quality results at no charge, including:

  • Falling Number for wheat and rye
  • Vomitoxin (deoxynivalenol or DON) levels for wheat, corn, barley and oats
  • Dockage assessment on canola and mustard seed
  • Protein content on barley, beans, chickpeas, lentils, oats, peas and wheat
  • Oil, protein and chlorophyll content for canola
  • Oil and protein content and iodine value for flaxseed
  • Oil and protein for mustard seed and soybeans

Quality results provided through the Harvest Sample Program are unofficial because samples aren’t collected by a Canadian Grain Commission inspector.

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Trending Video

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

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