Consider more than yield when choosing a canola hybrid

Yield is still king when it comes to selecting which canola hybrids to grow. But other attributes, like pod integrity and clubroot resistance, are also starting to become must-haves for farmers

By Trevor Bacque

You have some tough choices to make when it comes to canola hybrid selection. With numerous quality hybrids on the market, sifting through scads of field trial data can be a challenge as you try and pick a winner. It seems everyone has the latest, greatest hybrids to plant. So, which one is right for your farm and how can you be sure?

First, always assess your needs before you read a word about any hybrid. Ensure you address any problems, then find the hybrids to match them and not vice-versa. It’s too easy to simply find the highest yielding hybrid and hope it outweighs other in-field issues.

That’s the approach Bayer takes when developing canola hybrids — start with what farmers need and go from there. That ethos is behind the drive toward improved agronomic metrics across the board, including greater pod integrity, earlier maturity, improved yield, strong disease packages and more choice when it comes to herbicide tolerant growing systems.

The result has been a steady strengthening of DEKALB canola genetics over the years. If you haven’t shopped around in a while, maybe this is the year to take another look at what’s on offer.

One farmer’s experience

Brady Ferris has grown DEKALB canola hybrids since 2019 at his farm near Maymont, SK, with much success.

Last year he grew DKTFLL 21 CRSC and DKTFLL 22 SC, both TruFlex LibertyLink series canola, one with straight cut traits, and one with combined strait cut and clubroot resistance traits.

While 2023 was very dry, bringing canola yields down across the board, Ferris says the DKTFLL 22 SC was his second-best performer out of eight hybrids, averaging about 32 bu/ac on the 180 acres he planted. That’s not bad considering that the average canola yield across Saskatchewan in 2023 was only 34.8 bushels per acre.1

“I had it on one of our better fields and it did pretty well stand-wise,” he says. “It’s one of those varieties that puts more energy into the seed pod, not the stand. It combines well and it’s quite competitive.”

This year Ferris planted DEKALB’s new 400 series canola hybrids, DK400TL and DK401TL2, which are also dual trait TruFlex LibertyLink hybrids. The dual trait makes clean out a cinch with no trepidation about contamination between fields when switching between glyphosate and glufosinate. Both were planted on May 30 and Ferris labeled them as “some of the best performing varieties,” which is noteworthy considering he planted five different hybrids this year.

He says the dual traits made a real difference because it allowed him to choose the best herbicide option to tackle both wild oat and kochia. “It’s nice and flexible like that.”

This year Ferris received considerable rain early on and these hybrids performed quite well. July and August were hot and dry then, just prior to this year’s harvest, a hailstorm ripped through his area. He was amazed with what he saw in the aftermath: “On the pod shatter, it has very good performance on hail,” he says. “I was impressed with that.”

At time of writing, Ferris had yet to harvest his DK400TL and DK401TL, but says the pods were full, considering the nasty weather, and lodging wasn’t an issue either, despite it being a typical concern in his area. Because these hybrids are not as big or bushy as some others, he expects high yields with routine straight cutting. “DEKALB has the edge on harvestability and standability,” he says. “It’s been very competitive.”

Always willing to try new things, Ferris was eager to seed these two hybrids from DEKALB’s new 400 series and says his favourite features are yield, relatively early maturity, harvestability and standability. And while he likes what he sees so far, he always believes in improvement and appreciates that Bayer takes farmer feedback seriously, citing clubroot as hard evidence.

“You don’t have to pick varieties based on clubroot resistance or not anymore,” he says. “DEKALB varieties all have clubroot (resistance) integrated into them. It shows they listen and work with farmers as much as they can.”

Ferris says he understands why some farmers are apprehensive about dual trait canola hybrids, but thinks such worries are unfounded. He encourages farmers to try a few test strips if nothing else and see how they like it for themselves. “With the disease pressure we’ve seen the last few years, it would benefit a lot of farmers to have diversity of genetics on their farm,” he says. “Try some new varieties and see how you like it.”

Ken Saretzky is a customer solutions agronomist with Bayer based in Saskatoon, SK. He says the company’s new hybrids have been engineered with farmers’ needs in mind.

Along with high yield potential, today’s DEKALB hybrids come chock full of different agronomic characteristics such as ultra-early maturity, blackleg and clubroot resistance, straight cut readiness and herbicide tolerant options. Plus, these types of hybrids are coming out at a progressively faster clip.

In the last few years, Bayer’s Precision Breeding program has continued to shave years off its breeding selection times prior to F1 seed certification, which is important considering less than 0.1 per cent of hybrids ever make it to registration and commercialization. In the lab, improved screening tools allow the team to ascertain if two parents’ combining ability will make a good cross while ensuring they carry the desired herbicide tolerance, disease resistance and Straight Cut Plus traits.

“Breeders no longer have to screen all these traits in the field,” says Saretzky. “They can make a lot of selections early in the program, which accelerates the whole breeding process.”

The farmer-to-rep-to-breeder pipeline is equally important for Bayer. Farmers, like Ferris, carry out the practical field work and know first-hand what could make a better experience with hybrids. Saretzky says that agronomists like him track their own comments in conversations with farmers, plus they rely on retail networks to be a conduit of farmer comments. He meets with retailers quarterly and says they arguably know the most about what happens in farmers’ fields.

“We take this information and then do whatever we need to do to address it,” he says. “We like to hear the good stories and any objections, too.”

Farmer feedback is integral to the creation of better product offerings, such as dual trait technology that addresses Group 9 resistant kochia and Group 1 resistant wild oat, and other tough-to-manage weeds in canola, like cleavers. “It wasn’t too many years ago I’d be at a field tour, and it was always hard to talk about this technology because these weren’t big issues then,” says Saretzky. “Now, that has changed.

Group 9 resistant kochia was always a southern Alberta and Saskatchewan problem, but now it’s a larger issue and concern in the north.”

The road ahead

Tim Darragh, Bayer’s canola technical strategy lead, says they’ve worked hard to give farmers what they want, an effort that starts in its R&D pipeline.

“We spent a lot of time to make sure that we had all the agronomic trait boxes ticked and I feel like we’ve been able to accomplish that,” he says. All new DEKALB canola hybrids now come standard with straight cut, clubroot resistance and blackleg resistance traits.

“Our focus now is on performance and making sure that we’ve got products that will help growers be profitable in whatever environment they’re in,” says Darragh. “Our goal is to build on the needs of growers and combine some of the desired traits into the same hybrid, such as earliness and high yield, which often requires a trade-off.

“Breeders have such an important and difficult job; they’re trying to package so much into these hybrids,” says Darragh. “For us, it’s about making sure that you’re going to have the opportunity to make money year over year, having a good stable product that’s going to perform even in those tough environments. That’s the key.”

SOURCES

¹Brady Ferris grew DK401TL in 2024 for Bayer trial data purposes and was provided with one bag (10 acres) from Bayer for this demonstration.

² Canola Council of Canada, Canadian Canola Production Statistics, https://www.canolacouncil.org/markets-stats/production/