Canada: Canola takes the slow road to 52 bushels per acre

Barring a perfect growing season, Canada’s canola industry will not achieve average yields of 52 bushels per acre in 2025.

Growers could have reached 52 bu. per acre by 2025, but tight crop rotations, disease pressure and regulatory issues put a lid on canola gains over the last decade, say a group of canola industry representatives.

The group includes Wilf Keller, a canola biotechnology expert who is a member of the Saskatchewan Agricultural Hall of Fame and the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame.

“We’ll keep moving forward, but that 52 bu. per acre, I wonder if we could hit it 10 years from now,” said Keller, who grew up on a farm near Melville, Sask., and now lives in Calgary. In the 1990s, Keller’s research helped with the development of herbicide tolerant canola.

The 52 bu. target comes from a 2014 strategic plan published by the Canola Council of Canada, which set a target of 26 million tonnes of annual production by 2025. To reach that target, Prairie canola growers would need an average yield of 52 bu. per acre.

Looking back, the canola council’s yield and production targets were ambitious.

From 2010-12, Canada produced about 13.6 million tonnes annually, and average yields were around 33 bu. per acre.

Production and yields did increase following 2014, with yield sitting at 40 to 42 bu. from 2016-20 and production around 20 to 21 million tonnes.

But after 2020, canola growers struggled to top 40 bu. per acre. With the exception of 2021, a year with the worst drought in decades, average yields have been around 36 to 38 bu.

Some growers posted yields below 30 bu. per acre last year.

Consequently, the mood around canola this winter is not cheerful and bright.

“Canola — it seems to be great or it’s bad. In our area, 35 bu. an acre is bad with these costs,” said Darren Bond, a farmer in Manitoba’s Interlake region and a farm management specialist with Manitoba Agriculture.

“I spoke to an input retailer in our area last week. He said, ‘canola is a new swear word in our office.”

Such comments about canola are unusual. It’s been a profitable crop for Prairie farmers during much of the last 20 years.

The crop’s success has driven up farmland values across Western Canada and it’s become “the premier crop in the country, for cash,” Keller said.

“If farmers had their choice, they would grow canola continuously because of the value it brought to them.”

However, some of the negative feelings this winter can be explained by the high cost of growing canola. Plus, yields have been inconsistent and average yields are nowhere near the target of 52 bu. per acre.

It’s easy to be a Monday morning quarterback and slam the canola council’s yield target, said Garth Hodges, former vice-president of North America field crops for BASF and a previous executive with Bayer CropScience.

However, the canola saga from 2000-20 is a story of success. Yields have gone from around 25 bu. in 2000 to 33 in 2010 to 41 bu. in 2020.

“I think we’re being too hard on ourselves,” Hodges said.

“Twenty-five, 30 to 40 bu. — that is remarkable.”

It’s incredible yield growth during a time when acres were expanding in Western Canada, going from 13 million in 2005 to 21 million in 2020.

It is very difficult to push yields higher when disease pressure is increasing because of tight crop rotations.

“If you look at a large chunk of the black and grey-wooded (soil zones), other than Manitoba, it’s pretty much (now) a one-in-two rotation,” Curtis Rempel, vice-president of crop production and innovation with the Canola Council of Canada, said in 2023.

If those tight rotations didn’t happen and canola was still at 13 million prime land acres, average yields would have climbed at a faster rate, Hodges said.

“Had we not done that, we would have (reached) the 52…. I’d guarantee that. Absolutely,” he said.

“We knew it’s not sustainable (tight rotations), but we have to sacrifice something. We’re sacrificing yield.”

Growing canola every second year has been beneficial for soil diseases such as blackleg, verticillium wilt and clubroot but hard on canola breeders.

“The fact that we’ve done these short (crop) rotations … it puts a tremendous pressure on the breeders to divert some of their resources to disease breeding to help with the ever increasing disease pressures,” Hodges said.

That disease pressure isn’t going away because 20 to 23 million annual acres of canola is “here to stay” in Western Canada, he added.

Forcing canola breeders to find resistance genes and incorporate those into the best hybrids meant they spent less time on traits connected to yield, Rempel said.

Factors such as nitrogen use efficiency and how to move carbon to the seed received less attention.

Rempel was part of the canola council team that wrote the 2014 strategic plan and set the 52 bu. per acre target.

At the time, he assumed that new technologies to control pests and diseases would push canola yields higher. However, some of those innovations never reached the market because of regulatory issues.

“When we put that (plan) together … I thought the on-ramp for gene editing and double stranded RNA technology would come on faster that it did,” he said.

“I should have known better, given the regulatory environment.”

Gene editing is a technique where scientists can delete or change specific genes in the code of a plant to achieve desired traits.

Health Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency took years to evaluate the safety of gene edited crops, with the CFIA declaring in May 2024 that it’s safe for livestock feed.

That final decision created a clear policy around gene edited plants in Canada, about 11 years after American and French researchers developed the technique known as CRISPR.

Another promising technology, RNA-interference, has also been delayed.

For years, Canadian scientists have been studying RNA-i molecules and how they could potentially control sclerotinia (white mould) or flea beetles in canola fields.

Despite all the work and money, commercial products haven’t reached the market.

“I thought (by now) we would have more traits around insect resistant, double stranded RNA,” Rempel said.

“There are a lot of companies (still) working on it, (but) some have just shelved stuff because… (the) regulatory (approval) just took so long.”

Progress has been slow over the last decade, but Rempel believes the necessary “tools are falling into place.”

Getting to 52 bu. per acre or more is becoming more probable.

“We’ve had a series of meetings (recently) with a number of the producer groups around unlocking the yield potential of canola and what the next 10 years could look like,” he said.

“To get that yield potential of 55 to 60 bu. or higher is achievable.”

Tags: canola, Canada, Production, yields, crop