The road to 60-bushel soybeans

Manjula Bandara’s evaluation of promising soybean lines is helping southern Alberta producers consider this new crop with the best possible set of information.

How much room is there to increase soybean acreage in this province? Consider that in 2016, Manitoba grew 1.6 million acres of soybeans, with Saskatchewan contributing 240,000 acres. Last year, Alberta farmers grew 15,000 acres of soybeans.

On the face of it, then, Alberta seems to have plenty of runway for more soybeans. In practice, however, Manjula Bandara believes the crop could be a tough sell in the region south of Highway 1 where it’s best suited.

“We have so many cropping options in southern Alberta today,” said Bandara, Brooks-based Pulse and Special Crop Research Scientist with Alberta Agriculture and Forestry (AF). “Beyond the traditional crops, there’s now more corn, perennial forage crops like alfalfa, sugar beet, potatoes as well as dry beans. So when we have the option to introduce a new crop into southern Alberta’s irrigated areas, it has to be competitive.”

As AF Economist Ron Gietz pencils out the costs and returns of soybeans in southern Alberta, he finds the proposition interesting but not necessarily compelling, yet. Assuming soybeans sell for around their long-term price of $9 per bushel, a grower would need to produce a 60 bu./ac. crop to earn a place in a crop rotation.

Yields approach economic competitiveness

Over the past four years, Bandara has been working on a project that could tip the balance in soybeans’ favour. With funding support from the Alberta Funding Consortium including Alberta Pulse Growers, he’s been evaluating soybean varieties under southern Alberta growing conditions. This is part of a longer-term involvement with soybean that, for Bandara, began in 2004.

“Based on the varieties that are available, not a lot of people will be growing soybeans north of Highway 1,” he said. “Our goal is to evaluate soybean varieties south of Highway 1, in order to minimize the risk for growers.”

Soybean breeders send their lines to Bandara, who evaluates them based on agronomic criteria such as seeding date, density and spacing, as well as the use of nitrogen. At any one time, he’d like to see 16 to 18 promising lines in his program.

Overall, Bandara sees soybean yields approaching a threshold where southern Alberta farmers will start to get interested. Yields in recent years’ evaluations have ranged from 35 bu./ac. to 60 bu./ac., with the occasional spike north of 70 bu./ac.

Bandara suggests that, for areas with 2,300 to 2,400 heat units available, and 115 to 121 days of growing season, soybeans can be competitive with other high-value southern Alberta crops. One wild card is the incidence of disease under irrigation.

After 12 years evaluating soybeans in southern Alberta, Manjula Bandara isn’t predicting explosive acreage growth to the levels seen on the eastern Prairies. Still, if the right factors align, there’s a good chance Alberta will see more soybeans in the coming years.

“That is our hope,” Bandara said, “but it all depends on the price and how crushing capacity unfolds. As long as the price is reasonable, a moderate increase can be expected.”

In order to be competitive on the global market, Canadian crop producers require access to the most advanced genotypes and agronomic practices in their production systems. Southern Alberta, with relatively warmer and longer growing conditions, and over 0.64 million hectares of arable lands with irrigation, provide producers with several cropping options. Soybean is a potential candidate to be included in crop rotation systems in southern Alberta, but for it to be economically viable, superior genotypes and effective agronomic practices should be available to producers.

This multi-site year project will evaluate low heat unit (=2300 CHU) requiring soybean genotypes for production superiority, and determine the optimum plant population density; efficient irrigation schedule; effective root nodulation based on residual soil nitrogen, and also will compare the economic and rotational benefits of soybean with those of dry bean, a well-established irrigated grain legume crop in southern Alberta.

This project will identify superior genotypes and effective cultural practices, which will potentially improve the current provincial average soybean productivity from 2.7 t/ha (40 bu/ac) to over 4.0 t/ha (>60 bu/ac), and consequently helping to increase the soybean crop extent in southern Alberta in support of the local oilseed processing and livestock industries.

Collaborative research delivers new and better red lentils

Alberta’s growth to 500,000 acres of lentils is one of the big stories of the past decade. Rising market demand and many years of plant breeding dedication helped make it possible.

From just 8,000 acres in 1999, Alberta farmers grew half a million acres of red lentils in 2015. If market conditions are right, there’s every reason to believe that acres of red lentils – long an agronomic stand-by in Saskatchewan – can continue to move forward here.

For an inside view of how red lentils went from obscurity to rising prominence, the scientist to talk to is Manjula Bandara. The Brooks-based Pulse and Special Crop Research Scientist with Alberta Agriculture and Forestry has been a central figure in red lentil crop improvement in Alberta since 1999.

Bandara’s lentil crop improvement project has often collaborated with the world-renowned and long-standing University of Saskatchewan lentil breeding program led by Bert Vandenberg. This relationship has been one of the drivers of the growth of lentils in Alberta. Another has been the availability of funding from producer and government sources. Alberta Pulse Growers has been a long-time supporter of Bandara’s work, specifically between 2001 and 2017.

Variety development under Alberta conditions

“Before 2001, Alberta Agriculture had been evaluating lentil cultivars that were F7s or F8s, as part of the co-op trials,” said Bandara. “Being so advanced, those lines weren’t really well-adapted to Alberta.”

His innovation was to obtain lines much earlier in the development cycle, such as F4s, and screen them for flowering, crop standability, crop height, disease resistance, seed colour and seed yield. This work was performed at Alberta Agriculture and Forestry sites at Brooks and Bow Island. After two or more years in Co-op trials, superior lentil lines are submitted for the variety registration process with CFIA.

Still, what Bandara sees as the biggest leap forward for red lentils in Alberta came in 2003.

“When Clearfield lentils came out, that was very significant,” he said. “Weed control is the number-one factor for lentil production, because lentils are poor competitors with weeds. With the introduction of Clearfield lentils, acreage got a real boost and, along with international demand, helped get us to where we are today.”

With lentil acres in Alberta roughly 50 times higher than when he started, Manjula Bandara is proud of the foundational work that he and many others have done. Looking forward, he sees two new areas for improvement. The first is to ensure that gains in weed control endure, as reliance on Group 2 herbicides risks the development of resistance in the longer term. The second issue is managing emerging lentil diseases, such as root rot and other foliar diseases.

“We need to have multiple herbicide resistances, not just to Group 2,” Bandara said. “Over the next five years, we were hoping to collaborate with the University of Saskatchewan to bring Group 5 and Group 14 resistances into the crop improvement program.”

The goal of the proposed activity is to increase Alberta pulse production from 5 per cent to 15 per cent of the annual cropped acres (3 million acres), in the next ten years. This activity will APG Research Investment: Production Projects – Cont’d Fusarium root rot symptoms on pea seedlings. 27 Summer 2015 identify superior pulse varieties suitable for Alberta producers.

There are three distinct components to this activity:

1. screening new pulse genetics;
2. western Canadian pulse co-op testing (field pea and faba bean) voluntary sites;
3. regional pulse testing.

This project provides a unique method of screening pea and faba bean genetic material from European (Germany, France, Netherlands) and Western Canadian breeding programs. It is less costly than a full breeding program and allows for more rapid registration of the best germplasm for Alberta growers based on varietal performance in specific growing regions.

Field pea variety development is a continuous process. It takes more than 10 generations to develop a variety. Each generation is built upon the materials developed in the previous generation. Several varieties have been developed in the GF1-PSC project. These varieties are currently at the stage of variety releasing and pedigree seed production. In addition, a large quantity of breeding materials have been developed, which include materials in the early generations (F2 to F6), breeding lines in F7 to F9.

The objectives of the project include the following components:

1. Evaluate advanced breeding lines in Western Canada Field Pea Cooperative Registration Tests (Pea CO-OP Tests) for variety registration and produce breeder seed of new varieties.
2. Develop and evaluate elite breeding lines at multi-geoclimatic regions to identify adapted genotypes. Field pea production areas in Western Canada include vast geoclimatic regions. The only way to identify adaptability of breeding lines to these regions is to evaluate their performance and select the most adapted ones in each and every region.
3. Develop breeding materials with improved disease resistance and harvestability. Ascochyta complex, powdery mildew, and root diseases are most common and damaging diseases in Canadian field pea production. The level of the diseases, particularly Ascochyta, is associated with standabilty of a variety, the lesser the level of the diseases the better the standability.