|
April 08, 2008 09:19 am
|
Photos
Mark Parker /Farm Talk
Mark Parker /Farm Talk
|
Canola gets a good look
Grower assesses alternative to wheat in cropping strategy
By Mark Parker
CNHI News Service
— Brent Rendel wades through dew-damp plants hinting at an explosion of yellow flowers only days away.
He smiles and agrees - yes, probably plenty of folks drive by and wonder what’s growing in those fields north of Miami, Okla.
Canola is far from common in this part of the world but then Rendel doesn’t always go about farming in a common way.
The operation, which runs side-by-side with that of his father, Mark, includes the usual suspects: wheat, beans, corn and milo. Rendel, however, doesn’t take for granted that those are his only - or even his best - options.
“Canola is an alternative to wheat,” he says. “An acre of canola is going to replace an acre of wheat so it has to make you more dollars per acre to be a viable alternative.
“It has some interesting advantages and, thinking in the long-term, I believe there will be more price stability in oilseeds so canola merits a good, hard look.”
Increasing demand from diet-conscious consumers has spurred interest in canola, which has the lowest saturated fat content of any available vegetable oil. Production has primarily been in the northern United States and Canada where spring varieties are grown.
Farther south, though, the productivity and value of the crop have inspired growers like Rendel, seedsmen and university researchers to work on its adaptation as an alternative to wheat.
This isn’t the first time Rendel has grown canola. In the late ‘90s, he tried it for three seasons with mixed results.
“It wasn’t working but I kept an eye on the research the universities were doing and the progress in variety development and decided it was time to try it again,” he says.
Although Rendel wasn’t satisfied with his earlier canola results, only one of the three was a complete bust as atrazine carryover decimated the stand.
Canola’s challenges, he points out, begin with planting and end with harvesting. Unlike wheat, you can’t just dust it in and expect a good stand, he says. And, unlike wheat, you can’t run the combine across the standing crop and expect optimal results.
The planting window is much narrower than for wheat. Rendel believes the seed needs to be placed in the ground during the last half of September - not before and not after.
The potential for shattering at harvest is one of the biggest knocks against canola and, this year, Rendel will swath the crop and combine with a pickup attachment. That will give him a little more flexibility in terms of harvest timing and should help prop yields up.
“If you harvest standing canola you’d better do it exactly when it’s ready or you’ll suffer significant shattering losses,” Rendel says. “By swathing, you can get in there a little bit earlier and the windrow helps protect the seed - it gives you a little more window at a busy time of the year.”
A member of the mustard family, canola develops a rosette of leaves at ground level. The rosette may die during the winter but the crown remains dormant and as warmer temperatures return it shoots up a stalk, which begins flowering usually in early April.
Rendel also acknowledges that canola requires more nitrogen than wheat but adds that a significant part of the nitrogen investment goes right back into the soil through vegetative matter that breaks down fairly rapidly.
“You put on more N,” he says, “but you end up taking less N out of the field.”
Canola has other advantages. As a broadleaf, canola offers the chance to control perennial ryegrass and other weedy grass infestations in wheat ground.
It also matures just a little ahead of wheat, opening the doublecrop soybean planting window just a little wider.
“And, when I grew canola before, I felt the beans following the canola got a small but noticeable yield boost compared to beans following wheat,” Rendel says. “That’s just a seat-of-the-combine observation but I believe the beans after canola had a yield advantage.”
Of course, in the final analysis, it’s all about the bottom line and Rendel likes the profit prospects of canola. Right now, you can contract canola for about 21.5 cents per pound and he’s expecting yields to average about 2,000 pounds per acre. That translates into $430 per acre.
“You’re going to have to have 35-bushel wheat at better than $12.35 per bushel to equal that,” he says.
Another boost for Oklahoma canola prospects came when Plains Oilseed Producers partnered with Producers Cooperative Oil Mill to process canola in Oklahoma City, reducing transportation from the southern plains.
That development was spurred by the fact that canola is getting an especially hard look in central and western Oklahoma where farmers are struggling to control grassy weeds on what have been continuous wheat acres.
As unique as Rendel’s canola fields are to the area territory, the crop isn’t exactly brand new. Kansas State University has been breeding canola varieties for more than a decade and at the Southeast Kansas Agricultural Experiment Station at Parsons, researcher Jim Long has been evaluating varieties for even longer.
Most of his concerns about the crop echo those of Rendel. Planting too early can result in the plant bolting too soon during warm spells in winter only to be hammered by extreme cold temperatures later. Get it in too late, Long says, and the plants may not establish an adequate root system to survive the winter.
His other concerns include herbicide carryover issues and the potential for shattering during direct harvesting.
But, Long says, things are looking up for canola.
“In the last five to 10 years we’ve identified more winter hardy varieties,” Long says. “It’s not a crop that everyone is going to want to grow but I do think it has good potential if you’re willing to manage it.”
Straying beyond traditional cropping practices isn’t new for Rendel. He’s been an early adopter of the Greenseeker system of optically sensing nutrient needs in crops and credits the Oklahoma State University-developed technology with saving him thousands of dollars annually in nitrogen costs.
And, in addition to canola, Rendel has added sunflowers to the farm’s cropping repertoire.
“We shut down soybean planting about July 10 and, last year we still had about 800 acres of ground to go,” he says. “We decided to go with oil-type sunflowers and ended up with about the same profit per acre as we did with our soybeans.
“The sunflowers are a lot more bug-prone than beans but they’re also more drought-tolerant. We liked them well enough that we’ll be planting more this year.”
In fact, Rendel intends to plant some early confection-type sunflowers in April.
“I like the contract they offer,” he says, “and we can plant in the gap between corn planting and milo planting. And, they’ll come off in mid-August before corn harvest so they fit into the operation real well.
“It’s certainly not all gravy. We expect to have to fly-on material for pests at least once and we budgeted for two applications. Sunflowers present some unique challenges, too, but I guess if it were easy everybody would want to be growing them.”
Rendel may also try some sunflowers after canola but he does have concerns that the canola may be more of a pest haven than wheat and end up causing increased problems in the sunflowers.
That doesn’t mean he won’t take a shot at it. An Oklahoma State University-trained mechanical engineer who spent “a few years driving a submarine around for the Navy,” Rendel isn’t content to keep on doing things the same old way. As a fifth-generation farmer in Ottawa County, he has plenty of tradition to follow. Part of that tradition, however, is being willing to change.
“We are uniquely positioned from a diversity standpoint in this area,” he says. “We can grow a lot of different crops. Ten years from now, who knows? I may not even be growing corn and beans and wheat. It may be completely different. I know one thing, though, I will be growing something.”
Mark Parker writes for Farm Talk in Parsons, Kan.
|
