The future of canola - what's next for Canada's greatest crop?

Thanks for tuning in to today’s RealAg Radio show, brought to you by Bayer Crop Science Canada! On today's show, we bring you another episode of the Bayer Canola Series panel discussion, examining how Canada stays ahead and develops canola for tomorrow. Our panel includes Kerran Clements of Bayer, Scott Horner of HyTech Production, and Dr. Stuart Smyth of the University of Saskatchewan. 00:00 - Coming up… 02:20 - Bayer Canola Series Panel 18:38 - Bayer Canola Series Panel 33:16 - Bayer Canola Series Panel 43:46 - Bayer Canola Series Panel 57:00 - Bayer Canola Series Panel Thoughts on something we talked about on the show? Connect with host Shaun Haney at shaney@realagriculture.com, on X/Twitter by using the hashtag #RealAgRadio, or give us a shout on the response line, 1-855-776-6147. Trending Last Friday, U.S. President Donald Trump announced the U.S. will import up to 300,000 metric tons of foreign beef and sell it to the consumer 25% below current market prices, saying, "This deal will reduce prices for Americans while giving space for our Great American Beef Herd to grow again." American farmers and ranchers were... Read more » Without question, one of the most profitable crops on the Western Canadian prairies has been canola. But what does the future look like for canola? What needs to happen? What are growers' needs? What are end users' needs? This is a very complex scenario where solutions are just not found overnight by the breeding community. Today on RealAg Radio on the Future of Canola series, part 5, brought to you by Bear Crop Science, we're going to dive into the future. and talk about what do genetics need to look like going forward in order for canola to hold its position as the most profitable crop on the prairies. Is it insect control? What about disease? Verticillium is a major issue to be added to the list of blackleg and clubroot and issues like that. We got a great lineup of guests in a fantastic panel to talk about it and try to dive into what some of the solutions are Food use, biofuels, what could be next? Looking forward to the discussion today. I hope you enjoy it. Please send your feedback to shaney@realagriculture.com. Cheque it out today, RealAg Radio, 4:30 Eastern on Rural Radio Channel 143. This RealAg Radio podcast is brought to you by CropPlan. Put trusted genetics to work on your farm and take advantage of the CropPlan Seed 0% interest financing programme. Purchase CropPlan Seed and receive 0% interest until September 30th, 2027 through FCC financing. financing. With the CropLand Seed 0% interest programme, it can help you maintain cash flow flexibility throughout the growing season. Ask your local independent ag retailer for details. It's time for RealAg Radio on Rural Radio Channel 143 on SiriusXM. RealAg Radio and RealAgriculture.com are your home for insight and analysis of the issues that are impacting your farm business. Let's get real and get connected with RealAg Radio. Welcome to RealAg Radio here on Rural Radio 143 SiriusXM. Thanks so much for making RealAg Radio and Rural Radio 143 a big part of your day. Also a huge shout out to everybody listening out there on the RealAg Radio podcast or watching on YouTube. Well, today is part 5 Welcome back to another episode of our Future of Canola series brought to you by Bayer CropScience, and today we're going to look at, we're going to kind of put a bit of a lens on the future. What do we need to be thinking about when we're developing canola for tomorrow? Does it look any different than today, and what are some of those future end-user needs that companies and breeders and seed companies are going to be chasing for as we move forward? Looking forward to today's discussion. If you have any feedback on today's show, maybe you've got some thoughts on this topic, or maybe some feedback on some of the things the guests have to say, you can send me an email, shaney@realagriculture.com. You can also call or text the RealAg feedback line, 855-776-6147. Well, let's bring in our panel. Let's have them all come in here and we'll get to the discussion and not have me yitter-yattering anymore. Up first, it is Kieran Clements. He is the Chief of Staff, North America Breeding for Bayer CropScience. How are we doing today, Kieran? Awesome, Shaun. Thank you for having us. Yeah, it's great to chat. What do you— talk about your role at Bayer CropScience. Yeah, so I sit within our crop science R&D organisation, specifically on our North America breeding team. I have a bit of a joint role, Chief of Staff for the organisation and also lead business and pipeline enablement. So I live in Alberta. We're not talking about the pipelines that Alberta usually talks about when it's pipeline enablement. It's all of our breeding pipelines across North America. So is that focused on canola or is that focused on corn and beans and all 5 crops? All 5 crops, so corn, soybeans, cotton, canola, and wheat. Nice, okay. Also joining us here is Dr. Stuart Smyth. He's at the University of Saskatchewan and he's in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics. Stuart, it's great to chat with you. Yeah, thank you for the invite, Shaun. Yeah, so talk about what you're doing at the U of S and some of the research that you're focused on. Sure, so I do a lot of research trying to quantify the sustainability of prairie agriculture over the last 30-35 years, really that transition away from using tillage as the lead form of weed control to continuous cropping, herbicide controls, what has that meant for herbicide use, for soil carbon sequestration, GHG emissions, soil health, so really interesting and then at this time of the year I warble to the students a couple of times a week about ag policy issues. Nice, well there's no shortage of those issues either to be talking about at this current time, so it's great to have you here on RealAg Radio. Also joining us is Scott Horner, he is the CCO at Hi-Tech Production Limited based out of Coaldale, Alberta. Hey Scott, how are we doing? Good morning, doing really well, thanks. Tell everybody, what is Hi-Tech Production and what do you do? Hi-Tek Production is an independent seed production company formed back in 1998, based in Lethbridge, Alberta, and we really focus on hybrid seed production, as the title states. Canola has been the crop we've been most involved in, so we do nursery services, parent seed production, commercial hybrid production. We operate in Chile, the US, and Canada, delivering services to most of the canola seed companies in Canada. Nice, well, it's great to have you here on the show as well. Guys, we got a lot to talk about and kind of break down here. I guess, Karen, let's start with you. I guess when you look at the pipeline and trying to forecast forward, because, you know, we can say, hey, we need this next season, but it doesn't necessarily work that way. It's not like a car manufacturing plant, it probably doesn't work there. How do you prioritise some of the long-term breeding investments in Canada relative to some of the other global markets? How do you kind of work through that process? Yeah, as you mentioned, we need this next season is what makes us in R&D or plant breeding kind of cringe a little bit. It's a long game that we're playing, so you need to take a long-term approach to that, and the investments that you make today are going to pay off kind of 6 to 10 years from now, and the innovation that we're realising today is on the heels or on the backs of investment that was made kind of 6 to 10 years previous. It's all about creating that tension for us of investing in the now but also investing in the future so that hopefully when we're having a conversation 5 to 10 years from now, the innovation and the investment that we're making today is reflected in our competitiveness and where the canola market is and ultimately making sure that it still remains a profitable crop for growers across Western Canada. Stuart, in a lot of your research, you're kind of looking at the whole crop production system for growers, and of course they do want those future hybrids to have higher yield and all these different characteristics, but also it's got to work out economically as well. That's very much top of mind for them. Yeah, that's one of the things we've seen over the last, say, 25 to 30 years is that the canola yields have doubled, certainly The price is strong, so it's really providing sort of that economic backbone for farmers to allow them to have those good, ideally 3-crop kind rotations of cereal, pulse, oilseed, and hopefully they can make a little bit of money, but in lots of cases they're just breaking even on those other 2, and canola is really what drives some of the sustainability for many prairie farmers. Yeah, and Scott, I'll come to you in a second, but Karen, I just want to follow up there because One of the interesting things with a company like Bayer CropScience is there are multiple crops that you're dealing with at one time and trying to make sure that you get the dollars internally to make the investments needed for a crop like canola, which is, you know, it's a big deal on the western Canadian prairies. Let's not kid ourselves. Absolutely. Over 23 million acres here in 2026. but that falls massively behind some of the other 90 million acre crops like corn and beans. So what does that battle kind of look like? Yeah, so canola is a real Cinderella storey. It's been an incredible crop for us, I think is highlighted by a recent R&D investment that we've made looking at— sorry, announcing a $45 million investment in a new canola innovation facility to be built in Winnipeg over the coming years. Really, that sort of investment when you're competing with other crops like corn and soy doesn't happen unless we see a future not only in the crop but also in the growers and in the real estate and the environment that canola is going to be grown in. We're not going to tie that kind of money up in a crop that's on the decline. It's all about innovation for us and making sure that we have the best facilities so that we can continue to provide the best hybrids to market and ultimately be as disruptive as we can. And like Stuart said, make sure that canola remains the backbone of a lot of prairie farm families across Western Canada. Yeah, and Scott, you've been in canola pretty much your entire working life. We joked on a prior episode about how when canola was 8 million acres, we thought it'll never get to 12, then it got to 12, it'll never get to 16, and the same thing just kind of replicated itself. Here we are at 23 million or north of 23 million, When you look at the landscape, Scott, what investments do you think are needed for the Canadian seed industry in canola to keep scaling and remain globally competitive as maybe more regions look at canola as an option for their farmers? That's a great question, Shaun. I think, I guess from my perspective as somebody involved in canola for 30 years, I remember when there was, you know, 6 million acres and 10 million acres was a great number to shoot for. You know, Kieran talked about long-term investments and the breeding approach, and certainly a lot of our gains have come from genetic advancements, but in the short term, I think the more accessible areas that the greater consortium that the value chain can focus on are the more incremental gains. So Look at the— look at, you know, do research to understand the best genetic by soil climatic zone fit. Really focus on crop establishment, focus on fertility utilisation and optimization, you know, disease resistance rotations, insect resistance management, soil management. I think there's a lot of incremental gains that can be made that will really help, you know, raise the the yield floor, so to speak, and put us in a really good, a better position to compete. Well, Scott, think about it. Go back to early days in your career. We had Hyola 401 across the entire, you know, pretty much the entire prairies where we were growing canola at the time, and now we're developing hybrids for specific regions based on exactly what you just said. We have very much evolved, ensuring that no matter if I farm in Weyburn or I farm in the Peace, I'm planting a hybrid that fits my conditions. Yeah, that's right, and I think we've got the tools and the technology now today to be a lot more prescriptive. I think canola has a— and Kieran would probably agree based on the numbers they've seen— but canola has a genetic yield potential of 70 to 80 bushels an acre, even more probably. Last year, our average yield, the crop's average yield, was 44.7 bushels per acre, we're leaving a lot of yield on the table. There's amazing potential to be captured if we can just address those yield robbers, sclerotinia, flea beetles, and so I think there's lots of opportunity to invest in those areas to best product, best place, best fit, how best to use the new technology that's coming, that's here. Stuart, when we look at When we look at, based on what we've heard here so far, and we look at canola as such a success storey, and Cinderella, I think, was one of the phrases that was used, it's critical that from an investment standpoint we don't rest on laurels, like we're just, we don't get complacent, right? Like, oh hey, we're awesome at this and the hybrids are fantastic and what are we worried about? It does take serious investment to continue to move and push forward. Yeah, and from a Canadian perspective, again, canola is really the one that stands out because it's virtually the only crop that's got any private sector investment in Canada, and so that I think underlines one of the reasons why it's so economically— its performance is above everything else because Bayer, Syngenta, the other multinationals are really dumping in tens of millions of dollars a year in the development of new varieties, looking for new traits, whether they're agronomic or some of the value added on the processing side of things, and we just lack those investments in the cereals and the pulse sector. We're talking a few millions of dollars compared to tens of millions of dollars, and that does have an impact on what farmers are ultimately growing. It would be great to see these levels of investment across the board. When Scott said we're leaving yield in the field due to insects and diseases, it's not just canola that's happening in, so it would be great to see more investment into all of the crop kinds, but canola is certainly the example for everybody to shoot for. Karen, where do you see some of the innovation gaps for canola when you look at the R&D programmes in order to achieve some of the the ultimate potential that canola has? Yeah, I think the most glaring one at the moment is probably on the herbicide-resistant trait front. The industry as a whole has had a heavy reliance on Group 9 and Group 10 chemistries for the last 40 years when it comes to canola, so sort of where we're actively engaged in looking at new opportunities there, bringing some new herbicide trait resistances to market just to try and extend the life of the products that all of us as growers rely on so heavily. I think secondly, Scott mentioned that we leave a lot of yield in the field and this kind of notion of we need to target the yield ceiling so that when the plant gets everything that it needs, the right amount of heat, the right amount of rain, the right amount of sun, that ceiling is really high, sort of 70-80 bushels for canola, but we also need to make sure that we bring the floor along with it so that in the years that we don't get all of those things, it's not an absolute wreck and we're ploughing it in or the yield monitor is only showing single digits of yield. Another challenge is around disease resistance because majority of the resistance methods or sort of functions that we have in the market at the moment are genetic resistances, whether it's a full resistance or just a tolerance, and we have to understand that as soon as we deploy them to the market, you start the stopwatch, right, on how long that resistance is going to be around for, because as soon as you apply a resistance to a population, that population is going to start doing everything that it can to get around the resistance. It's not to be looked the other way just in terms of the amount of money and resources required to keep bringing new sources of blackleg resistance and clubroot resistance and Verticillium stripe resistance and that sort of thing to market because these tiny little pathogens are just working so hard against us and there's billions of them, so we have to work super hard to stay in front of them and stay really creative on that front. Well, we've got a great panel here today for— this is part 5 of our Future of Canola series brought to you by Bayer CropScience and Plan for success in 2027 with help from the Co-op Grow Team. With the latest on-farm technology, our agronomists will work with you to gather and interpret soil samples, analyse data, and gain more insight into your fields. We offer local expertise and trusted advice to help you plan your inputs and prepare for the unexpected. Get ready to make data-driven decisions. Make a successful 2027 crop plan to meet your field's potential. Talk to your Co-op Grow Team today. It's summertime and you've got a lot of important decisions to make when it comes to your corn crop. Let The Corn School on RealAgriculture.com help guide you through those big decisions with input from leading experts in the field. If it's spray timing, disease identification, or any other field issue, we've got you covered. The Corn School's got you covered. The Corn School on RealAgriculture.com, brought to you by BASF and Pride Seeds. Peter Johnson @WheatPete, RealAgriculture.com. I'm the host of The Word, and I love doing The Word. I love the questions. I love the challenges. I love having to apply agronomics to all over the globe and areas outside of my normal jurisdiction. Also, I love the feedback the most where growers challenge me, tell me about their plot results, help me to learn. The word, absolutely the best part of my day. And welcome back to RealAg Radio here on Rural Radio 143. Really appreciate everyone joining us, hopefully you had yourselves a great weekend. We are today talking about the future of canola and we're talking about developing canola for tomorrow. We're kind of putting a little bit of our crystal ball here Together, we are joined by Karen Clements, who is the head of North American breeding with Bear Crop Science. We've also got Dr. Stuart Smyth at the University of Saskatchewan and Scott Horner with Hi-Tech Production based out of southern Alberta, but doing seed production really around the world when it comes to canola. During the commercial break, Karen, Scott asked a really great question in terms of, you know, when we're talking about blackleg and Verticillium and yield and herbicide traits and all these things we want to do, there's only so much, as we've discussed, kind of a pocket of dollars. How do you prioritise all of those and the allocation of funding to really solve some of those problems? Yeah, it's a great question and truly one that is one of the most complex and complicated things that we deal with on a day-to-day basis. The approach that we take is what we refer to as BEI or bioeconomic indices, where for each of these bioeconomic traits, whether it's clubroot resistance or whether it's shatter tolerance or herbicide trait, it's about through a number of grower surveys, through working with industry groups and determining sort of weighting and impact to the final market and to producers and that sort of thing, we create a ranked list where each trait or each kind of characteristic personality trait of the canola has a value associated with it and then we go in and tackle it that way. The caveat there is it's not always you start at the top and you work your way down to the bottom of the list because things can jump up and years provide different challenges. I'll take the example that we always get where at the end of the season or somewhere in the season you talk to some growers and it's like, hey, we really need frost tolerance, or then the next year it's, hey, we really need water tolerance for wet feet, and then the year after that it's, hey, we really need heat blasting tolerance. So the years are becoming more and more unpredictable. All of that to say that we rank our traits and then we try and assign targets, whether it's there's a genetic or a chemical pathway to get us there, and then we start chipping away at the list. But there, you can't deploy all of your resources to everything because you still need the ability to be dynamic when you see the market shifting quickly. Yeah, I, you know, in 2026, it's about heat during flowering time and that lack of that last shot of rain. It's really unfortunate that a lot of the rain, that last shot of rain, came in the first week of September, incredibly not timely. Mother Nature, if you are listening and paying attention to what we need, we have a bit of a habit of always trying to solve last year's production problems. I think that's not just the case in canola but also in the other crops as well. In the previous segment, Karen, you also said about raising that floor, And a good analogy there for some of the sports fans out there is, you know, it's, it's, you know, Major League Baseball is going to be having a strike and they're talking about a salary cap and addressing these high salaries. But one of the bigger issues is how to make, how to raise that floor and get some of the lower teams to actually spend more money on salaries to raise the competitive nature of the entire league. So I think that's a really good baseball analogy based on what you said. Scott, you're working really early, not just producing certified seed, but also really early in the process, and there's an immense amount of what I would call funnelling. You're seeing all that early material, and it's not just a case of starting with a potential hybrid and working its way through. There are many that are in the system to start with. Yeah, for sure. We don't deal with the amazing numbers that the breeding programme would, thousands of new entries on an annual basis that they're screening for potential parent lines. We see that pipeline as it starts to really narrow. So what we would receive would be dozens of inbred lines in tents and nurseries that we operate in Chile. And then we watch as those numbers are narrowed down until the final selections, the final hybrid advancements are made. And that's where the Chile cycle plays in, is final hybrid advancements are usually made following crunching the yield data that comes out of this season. We're talking end of September, early October, and then that group that has been selected as high performers go to Chile for increase, either experimental hybrid increase or parent lines that are associated with those hybrids increased, and then we see that material come back to Canada. We watch the lines come through the programme eventually become commercial hybrids. The ability to produce the hybrid is also like, that's a piece, a component of this that the grower doesn't think of, but being able to produce that hybrid is absolutely critical. Yeah, you know, we've, you know, Stewart, they do a lot of production research, commercial kind of phase production research. We do a lot of production research as well, but our production research is all about understanding how those inbred lines those new parents that we've never seen before interact and what unique characteristics do they have that need to be managed. Flower timing, for instance, is one of the primary characteristics that we can actively manage in production to try to maximise the hybrid seed yield. Stuart, I think in terms of raising the yield floor through a connected system, I think of some of the research that you've done is looking at the grower's production system and how all this ties together. Just an example is the herbicide tolerance crops really have allowed us to do things like no-till, which is sort of like a 1 1 3 kind of scenario in a production system on the prairies. Yeah, absolutely. One of the things we're we've observed is over the last, say, 25 years when GM canola, the acres started to shoot up as we talked about earlier, we really started to see farmers transition summer fallow pretty much predominantly out of their rotations and canola again was really well placed. One of the advantages canola had is it didn't have to displace wheat acres or pulse acres, it displaced summer fallow acres, so the competition was very minimal for canola to gain that very early leap from sort of that 8, 9, 10 million up into that upper teens towards 20, right? It was those canola acres that transitioned in so quickly, and we've seen a lot of sustainability benefits coming out of that that do spill over into these other years. We've got increased moisture conservation in soil because we've got so much post-harvest residue staying on our fields. Talking to farmers a few years ago when we had some extreme heat temperatures in July, farmers said if we'd still been putting wheat into summer fallow or canola into summer fallow, we wouldn't even have needed to take the combine out this fall because there was nothing there, but this conservation tillage system has really provided benefits across whatever a farm's rotation is. So, to take that, what we've seen, and apply it to the go-forward, what are some of the questions that you have in terms of how, you know, the grower production system and how that matches potentially to where canola is going in the future? Are there any questions that come to mind? I think, you know, some of the ones that are of interest to me are gene editing is a really phenomenal breeding system that should allow a little bit more downstream consumer side of things. That's always been one of the comments about innovative biotech side of things is it's really ag-oriented, there's not much on the consumer side, but I think there's an opportunity with gene editing to really start to bring out maybe some hybrid niche varieties that do have these value-added, whether it's certain frying attributes or other consumer health attributes, and we might see that side of things start through contract production. You probably don't need 5 million acres of a specialty oil, but a few hundred thousand under contract, so that might be something that opens up down the road. Breeding specifically for the biofuel market. Exactly. The potential to raise some of the oil profile that is already, canola already has a significant advantage over soybeans when it comes to crushing for things like renewable diesel, you know, pretty much double the oil content for sure. Kieran, when you hear what Stuart says there, you write some of those down and get to work here this afternoon? Yeah, I'll get right on it. No, it's super well aligned, totally agree. Gene editing is kind of the next frontier in traditional breeding as I think we know it, and I think 10, 15 years from now when we're looking back, a lot of the new innovations that we're talking about in the market will be delivered through a gene editing approach. requires a— obviously it needs to be backed and allow science to kind of determine what the facts are around it, requires a strong regulatory framework to make sure that the edits can have a path to market and are safe for consumers, safe for growers, that sort of thing. But it's a massive opportunity for sure. We hear gene editing all the time though, Kieran. Is it— can it deliver on the way that we've talked about it, like the promise of some of these new techniques that are available to breeders? I think it can, just because of how fast it can scale. And there's 2 kind of distinct tracks of thought around gene editing as it pertains to breeding. There's the approach where you conduct pipelines that have a number of edits in them. We're talking in the tens, or some pipelines may even have hundreds of edits at a certain time, and they all kind of come together collectively similar to a native breeding approach, and collectively through all of those edits and shifts in recombination in the genomes you get a lift, be it in yield or some sort of tolerance or some sort of resistance, or you have the very specific, very targeted ones that I think Stuart was also referencing around changes to certain fatty acid chains and that sort of thing which may make it better for downstream consumers, and both of those approaches are enabled quite quickly and quite easily through gene editing. The challenge is, and Stuart referenced it as well, is what does that acre footprint look like and is that enough of a critical mass to kind of justify the investment? Because these things are very expensive to do. You think of it from a grower standpoint, now we're talking about segregation of bin space and that sort of thing, sort of closed-loop commodity chains. You just need to make sure that the juice is going to be worth the squeeze at the end of the year before we invest as an R&D organisation, but also before growers are going to put their hand up and commit to it, because it truly needs to be treated as if it's another crop on farm, and that's pretty hard when the commodity crop and the specialty crop looks exactly the same. There's good precedence out there in the market at the moment with some of the specialty canola, but it would be another fragmentation again, which is not— it can't be overcome, it's just something that needs to be considered. Yeah, and it's, it's a, you know, you try to estimate what the grower uptake would be. You know, I think of what we've seen in some of the pod shatter areas, right, when it first came out. Yeah, straight-cut canola, I don't know. And now look, it's like growers are like, you know, they look at you sideways if you don't have some of those things in your hybrids, right? So, and in a breeding timescale, that switch happened essentially overnight. Right, it was very, very quick. 6 or 7 years, went from pretty low percentage of straight cut to almost wholesale right across the board. If you're not straight cutting these days, your neighbours are probably asking questions, looking at you, wondering why you still got the swather out. Yeah, exactly. Okay, we're gonna take a break. We've got more of the future of canola coming up right after this. As a second-generation farmer, it's always been Proven Seed. It performs on our land and our conditions and to our standards. Every year brings high yields and new innovations, and it's tested in fields like ours. It keeps pace with every goal, stands up to every challenge. On our farm, trust isn't given, it's proven. Proven Seed. Seed earns its place. 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And we are back here on RealAg Radio, brought to you today by Bayer CropScience. It is part 5 of our Future of Canola series. We're wrapping up this series. Episode 6 will be at AgriCanada. Looking forward to that in the first week of December. Today we're talking about where does canola need to go into the future to remain that competitive crop that prairie producers have enjoyed for multiple decades now and continue to look at it as really one of the most profitable or the most profitable crop on their farm. Scott, I guess let's continue the breeding discussion. As breeding targets evolve for some of the things we've talked about, too hot, too wet, too dry, all these kinds of things, how does that impact hybrid seed production complexity for a company like you? Hybrid seed production has always been complicated. Hi-Tech started, we started really focused on hybrid canola. That was the main driver for the founding of the company. And so for many years, that was, you know, the only hybrid crop we worked on was hybrid canola, and then we started working on hybrid sunflowers and hybrid sorghum and some other hybrid crops. And canola is really quite complicated in comparison to some other production of some other hybrid crops. Hmm. And so, you know, it's always been challenging, I don't really see the steady evolution and introduction of new characteristics and traits as really adding exponential kind of complexity to what we do. I think Stuart said it in the last segment around segmentation, and I think if we see success in our ability to breed new high-value characteristics that require segmentation and the industry can manage that segmentation, then our job becomes a little bit more complicated. Right now, producing a commodity canola, we can kind of have one stream, one management system, one isolation kind of requirement in order to do that. But if we bring on new traits that need to be segregated to a higher degree, then isolation becomes more challenging, isolating parent line production from hybrid production and from the new trait from the commodity That's when complexity really increases, and we have seen it before, and I think we're in a good position to manage it. We know the challenges and the risks. What makes canola hybrid production more complicated than some other crops that are hybridised? The fact that it's insect pollinated is one big challenge, so you've got to manage some livestock in the field in order to get seed production to what it needs to be. You've also got breeding companies who are introducing a lot of new, and I won't say new, but different germplasm into the programme that provide different characteristics from a height perspective, from a maturity perspective, from a flowering time perspective. The best hybrids are created from the most distantly related parents, so bringing unique material together to produce hybrids gives the best hybrid vigour. From a production perspective, managing flowering timing, managing those different characteristics can be challenging. Yeah, so Kieran, what near-term traits, like we can blue sky some of this for sure, but what are some near-term traits that farmers can realistically expect to see in their fields over the next, say, 5 years? Yeah, I would say that the first trait is going to be a bit of a soft answer, but it's going to be yield. We've still got some stuff that we can chase on the yield front, be it both the top end and the bottom end of yield, and creating some more stability around that. I think we're seeing, especially in Manitoba, Verticillium stripe is kind of the new kid on the block from a disease perspective. As an industry, we're still very much figuring out how that that disease moves, how it works, how it sets infection, and ultimately the impact that it seems to have on yield. There's some sources of resistance that are out there through kind of different closely related species, so I think we're going to see some movement on that front where we're going to have some better tools in the toolbox to control Verticillium stripe. Stray cut, I'll kind of go through the list here a little bit, or pod shatter resistance, That's an interesting one because there is a law of diminishing returns there where you can get too much and you can get the pods sort of binding up too much and that makes life pretty tough when you're sitting in the combine at this time of the year and you've got lots of green material trying to move through and you're threshing pretty hard. So I think as an industry we're in a pretty good spot on the pod shatter front. Clubroot is a beast, it's a tough one that we're going to have to stay in front of. There's probably, or there's a couple of schools of thought there around are we getting resistance breakdown or is there just so much diversity within the clubroot populations that as we deploy new sources of resistance, the big ones are kind of covered off in the field but it allows some of the smaller populations to kind of rise up and come around that resistance. So not to be undersold the amount of work that is continuing and needs to continue long into the future to make sure that clubroot is kind of kept at the gate as much as we possibly can. Blackleg, we've seen big shifts in resistance and race types over the last 10 years across the prairies, and some of the genes that the industry used to rely on and could be counted on to provide quite strong broad resistance across a lot of different pathogens, we're seeing them not have as much effect in the field as we did in the past. So we need to be creative on the blackleg and the clubroot front. I get it, it's not the fun, flashy, sexy new frontier to be operating in, but it's absolutely one of those, or both of them are those licenced to operate traits, and the way sort of farmer buying behaviour has gone, if you don't have a really strong blackleg resistance package, and for almost all of the prairies, not every acre, but the vast majority of it, if you don't come with a pretty solid clubroot package, that automatically gets you a couple of points off the list. So we need to make sure that we're leading on that front as well. So Stuart, if you apply some of your area of research to the list that Kieran just gave us, what are your thoughts in terms of impact on the production system and the grower? I was really struck when Kieran was talking. I was at a genomics conference in Perth, Australia a couple years ago, and there was a guy presenting from there. He said what they were doing is going out and sequencing weedy relatives to many of their main crops to try and identify some of these unique disease-resistant traits or drought-tolerant traits and then once they were sequenced, they were using gene editing technologies to replicate those gene expressions within some of their major crops. And so, I wondered, that would sort of be my question to Kieran, is do you see the sequencing of weedy relatives on the oilseed side to provide some of those agronomic benefits that maybe some of the parental lines are sort of lacking a little bit in right now? I guess from an economist's perspective, that seems like kind of an exciting genomics thing, but I'm by far, far away from being an expert. No, no, you're spot on, Stuart, and that is absolutely happening in canola. So the good thing is that canola is part of the Brassica family, and the Brassica family is huge, so there's lots of opportunities to snoop around in the genomes of other related Brassica crops as well. And some of the things that I just mentioned, we have absolutely stolen from cousins and uncles and aunties and relatives of canola and been able to successfully bring them over into the canola genome too. So that's the easiest place to find it. Scott kind of mentioned it earlier that the more distant relatives you can find, that's where some of your best hybridity comes from. And if you think about the Brassica family, there's radishes, there's rutabagas, There's broccolis, there's all sorts out there that we can go kind of snooping through to see if there's interesting or at least some curious phenotypes or genotypes that reason some further investigation. Scott, can we steal from Kochia? Because that seems to grow in any condition possible. Wouldn't that be nice? Can't kill it with a stick. Oh man. That's a billion-dollar idea right there, Yeah, yeah, hey, well, just send me the royalty when it hits the market, just send me the royalty. Hey, today we're talking about the future of canola, and today's show is brought to you by Bayer CropScience, and we are back right after this. Get ahead for next season and get rewarded for planning early. Buy and take home Vantage Ag products by October 12th and save 10% off current suggested retail prices. Then buy with confidence with our best price protection programme. If prices drop later, we'll rebate the difference, guaranteeing you this year's best price. With nutrients delivered directly to the plant, Vantage Ag helps you use less, pay less, and get better results. Lock in your savings by October 12th at vantage.ag. The Canola School on RealAgriculture.com is your one-stop shop for everything a canola grower needs. Cheque out our free video series on YouTube YouTube for all the latest in canola agronomy, research, marketing, and more. Don't have time to watch? Download the podcast version of The Canola School on RealAgriculture.com or anywhere you download your podcasts. Stay on top of all things canola with The Canola School on RealAgriculture.com, brought to you by BASF and InVigor hybrid canola. Welcome back to RealAg Radio here on Rural Radio 143. Today's show is brought to you by Bayer CropScience. We're talking about how Canada stays ahead developing canola for tomorrow. This is episode 5 in our 6-part series talking about the future of canola. We're joined by Kieran Clements, who is the Chief of Staff in North America Breeding with Bayer CropScience. We've got Scott Horner from Hi-Tech Production and Dr. Stuart Smyth at the University of Saskatchewan. You know, Kieran, one of the questions I get from a lot of our audience is, okay, spring canola, fantastic, lots of yield potential, obviously it's had a lot of success. What about winter canola? We see winter canola in Europe and we see it in the US. What's holding us back from it being a potential? Is it just essentially the harsh Canadian winters? The short answer is yeah, what's holding us back is 6 months of snow in western Canada and some of the vernalization or some of the dormancy genes in winter canola is very good at handling even down to kind of -20 if you've got a little bit of snow insulation on it. You think about where the majority of the canola acres sit in Canada and Saskatchewan and a large chunk of them in southern Saskatchewan, it can be quite common for us to go through stretches in January, February with not a lot of snow cover in the fields. And when you're getting down to -30, -40, unfortunately those dormancy genes or those kind of winter sleepy genes really break down and you can't get the growing point low enough and the vernalization expression to be strong enough to handle that kind of cold other than having antifreeze pumping through the roots and the leaves of the canola plant, and we haven't bred that just yet. So are you breeding— okay, so let's just— that's unfortunate. I figured that would be the answer, so Stuart's like, man, if we got a winter in Saskatchewan at only -20, I would take it. That's right. -40 is definitely not uncommon. What about breeding specifically for the biofuel market? Are we more at a 20 million acre crop, are we more likely to try to do kind of that all-in-one package? It could be no matter what stream it goes down, so it's food or it's fuel, it really doesn't matter, or could we see actual hybrids that are specific for the biofuel market? I think we could. I think it's certainly possible. You see some of the announcements and investments made by some of the breeding companies, ourselves included, looking at closely related but sort of distant species from canola as a viable option across, especially across that southern Saskatchewan corridor for biofuels. One of the big benefits and why biofuels is such a great fit in Canada is the carbon intensity score. So Stuart referenced it earlier, some of the behavioural practises that we've adopted in Western Canada around zero tillage, around all of fertiliser applications kind of upfront and innovation adoption, the use of new technologies, Western Canada has one of the lowest carbon intensity scores for growing rapeseed, period. That sees us in a real favourable spot in terms of marketability of canola, be it to the fuel market, because the amount of carbon required to grow that crop is so much lower, and that is really how that crop is marketed from an an end-use sort of combustion profile standpoint is how much energy was required to produce it, and Canada holds a massive advantage over the rest of the world in that space. Stuart, from an economic perspective, the changing landscape in the biofuel market, not only in the US but also in Canada, and those CI score advantages that canola provides, plus the higher oil content, it is a real economic driver. Yeah, absolutely. Before I get to the biofuel, I just want to follow up on a comment Kieran made, is that, you know, consumers are really looking for more sustainable products, right? And so I think we can tell, you know, and that's something I've been talking to farmers about over the last couple of years, is saying, how do we brand our sustainability, right? So, you know, Kieran, I think you were sort of alluding to this, but, you know, a study came out about a year and a half ago that said you could transport Canadian canola canola 17 times to Europe, and it still would be more sustainable than rapeseed production in Europe. So how do we brand that to consumers and start to extract, you know, meet some of their demands? And I think on the biofuel side, Shaun, that also complements too, right? They're looking for more sustainable ways to get food to grocery stores. You know, the Harper administration had a number of support policies for the biofuel industry, and when the Trudeau government came in, they wound a lot of those down. And So if you look back at what the biofuel sector was about 2013, 2014, there was 7 new biofuel facilities that were announced to be constructed over the next 4 or 5 years. Not one of them was built because this government support shifted to alternative green energy, that there was no support there for conventional biofuel production, and so that policy shift has really hurt, I think, a lot of the R&D side of things in the prairies, a lot of farm opportunities. but really on the environmental sustainability of the biofuel sector. We could be far more sustainable than what we're doing. Scott, what are your thoughts on biofuels? Yeah, I think biofuels are a real opportunity, that's obvious. I'd like to go back to something Kieran said and just ask, you know, Bayer's actively breeding, I think, for biofuels in different crop kinds, you know, Closely related to canola, and also I think in canola, do you see an opportunity or where is the greatest opportunity with breeding Brassica napus high oil product to fit a biofuel maximum yield per oil yield per acre, or from an investment perspective, is camelina a better place for money, karenata a better place for money, How are you facing that right now? Yeah, there's a supply-demand kind of fight going on there in terms of, at the moment, Canadian growers aren't paid for oil yield, they're paid for gross yield across the scale. So it would require some wholesale change in terms of the entire canola industry and how that is purchased, how that is merchandised, and how that is marketed and sold to get to a shift where we're paying for oil yield or per tonne of oil as opposed to per tonne of grain. It's not to say that it can't be done. You look at places like Australia, they pay growers based on oil yield, and that does allow sort of going back to breeding pipelines, that does allow you to shift your targets a little bit as well. There's good diversity in the Brassica family around oil yield. However, the incentive for Canadian growers to chase oil yield just hasn't been they'd been there in the past because a tonne of canola across the scale is a tonne of canola, whether that's 40% oil or 50% oil, the cheque to them is exactly the same. So, it would require a pretty big wholesale shift. I think your point about is it, do you just target oil yield in the canola market or do you target some of these kind of closely related species around camelina and ginseng and carinata and that sort of thing? I think the answer is both. Those crops have, yes, they have good oil yield, but they also have a slightly different profile in terms of hardiness. Their ability to grow in more moisture-stressed environments is their real kind of jewel in the crown and what sets them apart, and I think what will help carve out viable markets for them moving forward. So the short answer is both, the long answer is both with a lot more detail behind it. Well, and we also can't, you know, there's a lot of talk and hype and reality around the biofuel market right now, but also the food use of canola also has its own advantages, Stuart, that we also can't leave behind and forget about. Yeah, I think that's a huge growth market, right, is that we go back to Scott's earlier comment about leaving yield in the field. I think we're leaving a lot of opportunities on the meal side of things to start to look at developing consumer newer products coming out of some of those, you know, what we would call the byproduct from the biofuel side of things. Can we develop functional food products that can, you know, resonate with consumers and meet the attributes that they're demanding? I think that's a virtually untapped market. Well, U.S. dairy cows like the canola meal. They love it. 2 thumbs up from them. Sorry, go ahead, Kieran. Yeah, I just think we need to be careful, right, to make sure that the fuel market doesn't totally cannibalise the food market because it's important to have that diversification that will only make us stronger going forward as a group of Western Canadian producers and our marketability going forward. Having a couple of different options there for us to be able to move our canola into those systems will be of critical importance and we shouldn't be thinking of this as a wholesale swing to all of our canola going from food to fuel or vice versa. We need to find an approach that tries to ride the middle as much as we can there, I think. And trying to make sure that maintains some of those properties that allow it to have multiple market uses, right? That's really the advantage for this crop is it does have multiple uses and that sustains the acre, right? And that industry is, and that investment's been built on 20+ million acres of canola going largely to the food lane for the past couple of decades, so we need to make sure that that stays intact as well and that the biofuel opportunity is complementary or supplementary to that. Yeah, like Scott, you look at like the history here, like specialised oils were, you know, they're still a relatively small component of the acre relative to where, like, I think back a number of years ago, I kind of thought they would be higher. So it's maintaining that multi— lots of different opportunities, because the more opportunities there is for use, the better it is for the grower at the end of the day. Yeah, for sure. But I learned something new today, and that's bioeconomic indices. And the reality of the matter is that, you know, breeding companies will value traits that provide the grower the greatest return, and that's where they'll invest. And the small segments, the niche-shaped segments, while they may have value above, you know, commodity oil, they're not going to get attention unless they're a significant segment. So that's a bit of a revelation because I've been a, you know, pretty strong proponent of let's segment the market and capitalise on every use case opportunity that might come about with specialty specialty traits and characteristics, and Stuart referenced it earlier, but the reality of the matter is there's a base value that has to be reached in order for breeding companies to invest in it. Well, we're going to take a break. We've got one more segment coming up here on today's show. We'll be right back right after this, brought to you today by Bayer CropScience. years of seed innovation and unwavering commitment to farmers, Pioneer 100 Series canola hybrids deliver a step change in yield performance and agronomic traits. This isn't just better canola, it's different canola. Pioneer 100 Series. Contact your local Pioneer sales representative or visit pioneer.com/100series to learn more today. Hi, I'm Bernard Tobin, host of the Soybean School on RealAgriculture.com. Throughout the year on the Soybean School, we'll bring you timely agronomic video content from planting to harvest, from the latest agronomic research to the latest in production technology. Cheque out our massive video library on YouTube, RealAgriculture.com, or download the audio podcast versions wherever you get your podcasts. The Soybean School is brought to you by Pioneer Ag. Soybean School is brought to you by Maizex Seeds and Lallemand Plant Care. To finish up today's show, brought to you by Bayer CropScience, we're gonna blue sky a little bit here. We're gonna go through the panel and ask them what's that— what would they like to see, that next big thing. Now sometimes these things are probable and sometimes maybe they're a little bit more blue sky and we can use a little bit of our imagination. I guess, Scott, let's start with you. What's your thought? What would you like Okay, the next big thing. Hey, I think if I look back, the success of the industry has really been built on value chain collaboration, and so something maybe a little out of the box would be to really double down on that value chain collaboration. And I think specifically about all of the new technology that's coming to to the market. Producers are faced with tools and solutions like never before, and I think a role— a really interesting thought experiment would be what kind of a role can producers play with on-farm testing to test biologicals, crop protection products, monitoring products, decision-making tools So test on a farm scale at a wide, broad distribution, we can generate an amazing amount of data in one year to really tease out the best place, the best fit, the best way to use the new technology that's coming to the market. Nice, like it. Collaboration, good. Stuart, how about you? I wonder, we've seen a significant increase in the crush capacity in the prairies, If we can process more of our own canola rather than exporting the raw seed, that's great economically for us, and so maybe there's traits that the processors are saying, if we could get a bit of a tweak here, a bit of a tweak there, that would increase our attractiveness of crushing more canola domestically. There might be a good market in working with some of the crushers to explore what gene editing could bring in solutions for them. Yeah, that seems probable. I like it. And Kieran, you get the last word. I'm going to give a 2-part answer, a blue sky answer and then a really blue sky answer. For the first one, I think like the digitization of environments and phenotypes so that we can run better predictive models, try and understand the type of environments that we're going to experience and really test the shoulders of that distribution graph for all the weird and wonderful things that are are really robbing yield from us. You know, I think about really, really blue sky, would love to see some more work done in frost tolerance, be it either on the very front end of the season or the very back end of the season, for the purpose of us trying to get some heat avoidance through that July-August timeframe. I think we lose a lot of yield there, so the ability to pull our seeding times forward and try and escape some of that, or push them back a little bit and have some frost tolerance on the back end of the season, I think would Well, my really blue sky was canola young cotyledons with lasers to kill all the flea beetles, but the other one was, I think it has to do with heat during flowering time. That is one of our biggest debilitators when it comes to achieving canola yield. We saw it in '26, we saw it in '24, and that's one for me for sure. Well guys, this has been a lot of fun, really do appreciate it. Scott, thanks so much for joining us here, and good luck with the harvest there on those seed production trials. You bet. Thanks, Shaun. And Stuart, it was great to get a chance to chat with you. We got to do this more often. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Fantastic show. And Kieran, great insights. Really appreciate it. Keep up the great work. Thanks everyone. Appreciate it. Now here's your opportunity now to provide your feedback on anything some of our guests said around some of these topics. You can provide me with some of your feedback. Send me an email, shaney@realagriculture.com, or you can call or text the RealAg feedback line, 855-777- 866-6147. A big shout out to Bayer CropScience for really, you know, making sure this series happened. It's really been some great discussions and look forward to the next episode. You can find all the previous episodes at RealAgriculture.com or RealAgRadio.com. Thanks everybody for getting real and getting connected with RealAg Radio, and we will chat again tomorrow. Cheers everybody. Thank you for downloading this RealAg Radio podcast brought to you by CropPlan, trusted genetics high yield potential, added financial flexibility. With the Crop Plan Seed 0% Interest Programme, receive 0% interest until September 30th, 2027 on Crop Plan seed purchases through FCC Financing. 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