A decade ago, winter wheat was a significant crop on the eastern Prairies.
Farmers in Manitoba and Saskatchewan routinely seeded 800,000 acres of winter wheat, with some years topping one million acres.
But around 2015, a new trend took hold. Acres began dropping every year, going from 500,000 to 400,000, then 250,000 and so on.
Growers moved acres out of winter wheat for a number of reasons, including a new variety of spring wheat, AAC Brandon.
“I think it was 2014 that Brandon spring wheat was first introduced. It was one those ‘change the game’ varieties,” said Alex Griffiths, an agrologist with Ducks Unlimited in Manitoba. “Everyone realized you could get a winter wheat yield with a spring wheat. And Brandon is still one of the most, if not the most, common variety of spring wheat grown in Manitoba.”
The data show that AAC Brandon is extremely popular with farmers. In 2020, it was seeded on 62 percent of all spring wheat acres in Manitoba, based on figures from Manitoba Agricultural Services Corp.
Other factors also pushed farmers away from winter wheat, such as growing seasons with extreme levels of fusarium head blight, severe winterkill and terrible autumn weather.
In 2019, heavy rain or snow fell from late August to the middle of October in Manitoba, making it impossible for farmers to harvest and then seed winter wheat.
Winter wheat acres sank to 32,000, a fraction of the acres seeded in the early 2010s.
“For Manitoba we had around 600,000, as (recently) as 2013…. But I was still in high school at that time,” said Griffiths.
Griffiths and DUC have tried to revive farmer interest in winter wheat because research has shown that ducks thrive when winter wheat is available for spring nesting.
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