IMPROVING ALFALFA’S FLOOD AND DROUGHT TOLERANCE

Apr 19, 2023

One of last year’s research columns bemoaned the fact that only four out of 119 alfalfa varieties registered in Canada between 2012 and 2022 had been developed in Canada. The rest were from China, Australia or the U.S.

Since then, the CFIA has approved nine more varieties originating from Washington, Wisconsin, Idaho or California. These latest varieties have all been selected for yield and resistance to a variety of biotic (living) threats posed by insects, worms, bacteria and fungi. Two of them have been selected for winterhardiness, but none mention any selection for resistance to other environmental threats like flood or drought. Several of them had been tested in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Washington and Idaho, but as far as I could tell, none had been evaluated in Canada before being registered.

Anyone who’s purchased breeding stock from another region, then watched them shrivel up, lose condition, fail to rebreed and fall out of your herd understands the importance of developing genetics to match the environment they’re expected to work in. The same thing applies to forage crops. With Canada’s best agricultural land being seeded to soybeans, canola, lentils, corn and other high value annual crops, forages need to be able to survive and thrive in poorer quality soils that are often more subject to drought, flooding or both–sometimes in the same year. Can we really expect alfalfa genetics to cope with drought or flood when they’ve never been tested under those conditions?

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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