Challenges and Opportunities in Growing Canola
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EmailMarch 6, 2025
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What happens when you want to go beyond corn, soybean, and wheat? Brook Wilke from the Kellogg Biological Station will share about his experience growing canola at the Long Term Agroecosystem Research.
The 2025 MI Ag Ideas to Grow With conference was held virtually, February 24 - March 7, 2024. This two-week program encompassed many aspects of the agricultural industry and offered a full array of educational sessions for farmers and homeowners interested in food production and other agricultural endeavors. More information can be found at: https://www.canr.msu.edu/miagideas/.
Video Transcript
If you'd go to the next slide, please, Brooke. Hi everyone. I am Nicole Richie, Phil Crofts educator and we'll be hearing from Brooke Wilkie today. First, we want to thank our sponsor, Agra Strategies, LLC. Thanks to them, we're able to have this program and offer it free of charge to you all. But otherwise, we'll turn the time over to doctor Brooke Wilkie. I'm excited to hear from him today about opportunities and challenges for Canola in Michigan. Good morning, everybody. I'm excited to have a chance to share what we've been learning about Canola in Michigan. I'm working at the Kellogg biological Station primarily with our long term agro ecosystem research project, also known as LTA or LTAR. Many of you possibly familiar with this, but we're doing agro ecosystem research and canola has been a crop that we've chosen to include in our research. We've been learning some things. I don't claim to be a canola, expert per se. I don't spend my entire world working on canola, but we have been learning some things. This presentation, my goal is to share generally what I know about canola, where we are with canola in Michigan and in the US and in North America, and then what the opportunities for canola in Michigan are and where it seems like the sweet spots are for economy and so forth to make it successful. Here's US canola, distribution. About 2 million acres of canola, most of it is grown in North Dakota, almost 2 million acres in North Dakota and then some in Washington, Montana, Idaho, Minnesota, and then you can see spread throughout a number of other states. Most of that canola in North Dakota, Montana is spring canola. Then as you go a little further south, winter canola becomes a little bit more common, including some spots in Kansas, Oklahoma, although It seems like canola has been disappearing from rotations there. I know in the Great Plains and northwest areas, they're actually using roundup ready canola to combat herbicide resistant ye grass and other grasses that they're having trouble with in their wheat rotations and a little bit ironic for us in Michigan where roundup resistance is our problem there, it's a solution for their herbicide tolerance. Canada grows a lot more canola, I said 2 million acres in the US and Canada has roughly 20 million acres and you can see that the distribution of where it's grown is quite similar to in the US, where we have that bulk of it North Dakota and Montana in those plains areas, and then a few spots throughout the east side of Canada and Ontario. Where they do grow some winter canola there. And then there's a lot of producers or canola processors, we'll say in Canada, and some of them are in Ontario and actually the canola that's grown in Michigan currently is primarily shipped to the processing plant in Windsor just across the bridge from Detroit. So what is canola actually? I think that there's a lot of uncertainty and people don't really know because if you don't have experience growing it. Here's a little background. Canola was bred from rapeseed cultivars in Canada and original rapeseed cultivars had a problem of having relatively high ustic acid. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right. But anyways, they found varieties and lines that had lower acid profiles, and they came up with this name that they called canola that's derived from Canada and oil put together. You can read more about that if you're interested in learning more, but essentially came from Canada, but rape seed has been produced for decades and generations. So markets, canola is a crop that can be pressed relatively easily to extract the oil, and so there are occasionally small processors that pop up to create smaller batch, you know, small company oil. But the major market that we have, the commodity scale market that we have in Michigan is through ADM, and they will ship the canola or arrange for you to ship it to their facility in Windsor, Ontario, which is a big facility. They're crushing and producing a lot of canola oil. Then canola is used for oil for cooking, processed foods, animal feeds such like soybean meal would be used, biofuel, plant based proteins like meat replacements, and other industrial uses like soybean oil would be. Then the price ranges from well in the past three years has been $0.20 on the low end per pound to $0.37 per pound. That's the USDA RMA price points. And then projected price for 2025 is $0.21 a pound. Canola is 50 pounds per bushel, and so I'm doing the math right, $0.20 a pound, I believe, would be $10 a bushel. It's in the range of soybeans, sometimes a little bit higher than soybeans. Then yields can range from 25 all the way up to 75 bushels per acre. We're finding quite a bit of variation depending on varieties that we grow, when we plant it, how we manage it and so forth. I'll get into that a little bit as I tell the story of what we've learned. So canola can be planted in the fall, summer or fall, we commonly call winter, just like winter wheat or in the spring. Here's a picture of a side by side that we planted, I think in 2022 with winter canola that was planted the previous September on the left side of the pictures and spring canola on the right. You can see that the winter canola was already flowering by the time the spring canola was coming out of the ground. Relatively early planting is important for both, but obviously winter canola has an advantage of getting ahead and growing in the cool weather. It likes the cool weather just like wheat, barley, and other small grains do. Spring canola can be grown throughout Michigan, but in the hotter parts of the state, it can really suffer from some heat stress and drought stress as we get into those periods in the summer or late spring. Here's a field of spring canola that we grew in 2022. We no tilled it after rain corn and looked pretty good. I think we planted it sometime in April whenever we could get out in the field, like o get out there as soon as you can. And then June I remember June that year, it was really hot and dry in June for a week and the top parts of the plant basically just gave up. And we had probably potential for 40 bushels per acre out there, that heat just zapped, a big proportion of it and we ended up with 27 bushels per acre that particular year in that field, which in most years is not enough to make a profit. I'll get some profitability numbers a little bit later on where we're landing with spring and winter canola. Hey, Brooke, here's a question on winter and spring canola. Are they from the same seeds or are they different like wheat? They're different seeds. Yeah. So the winter canola, gosh, I don't know if it has to ernilize or not, but it definitely has more winter hardiness built into it. And so different varieties, I don't know of any that you can use for both and be successful. Thanks. So in our LTA project, which is where we're doing most of this investigation, we're comparing business as usual systems to an aspirational system. Business as usual is conventional corn and soybeans. And then this aspirational system has these five crops in rotation that we're comparing side by side. And so you can see winter canola is in there after winter wheat, and then we go to a perennial forage slash cover crop after the winter canola and we have some cover crops in between these two. As you dive into the specific rotations, the year that's wheat, we have fall planted wheat, it's coming up, we harvest the wheat, and then we have a cover crop growing after the wheat and before the winter canola is planted in September. But it's 45 days or so it's mostly been a sorghum sedan based cover crop. Then we plant the canola in September. And then the canola keeps growing until the following July. It's ready for harvest. Winter canola is ready for harvest about the same time as winter wheat, which when you're growing both creates a little bit of a timing conflict which do you focus on. We're going to talk a little bit about harvesting canola too because that's a little bit of a challenge. Then we see this perennial foraging afterwards. We've done this for two years. We're on our third year of this winter canola rotation point. The first year we use spring canola because of how we started this project and that's where that picture I showed you came from. So what does this look like in practice? I'll have some eronomic slides coming up of details, but here's winter canola emerging in ten inch rows. You can see residue from what's underneath that volunteer wheat and the sorghum sedan based cover crop that we had cut and baled as feed. And then this picture is probably late September. You see those little canola plants emerging. By November or December, the canola would look like this when it's planted in September. You can see those leaves tend to grow close to the ground and spread out quite a bit. In some places our winter canola disappears, and I'm going to spend a little time on this. This particular example here, there's a lot of missing spots. This is a low area in one of our fields, and we realized that slugs have gotten to be a major challenge with canola because we're terminating the previous cover crop. There was food there for the slugs. These little canola plants are emerging and the slugs will feed on the cottydens they're emerging and if they eat all the cottylens basically the plant dies. We've had pretty big areas of fields that are completely gone some years by this time in the fall because the slugs just ate all the plants coming up. Likely due to the high residue, no till, and that green bridge that we're creating from crop to crop leading up to the canola and then the other food disappears and then the canola is the only thing there, which the slugs do like to eat and it's really vulnerable. And so that's become a challenge for us to deal with in this situation. Brooke, here's a question related to that. Did you burn down on the wheat before canola? We did. So we planted the cover crop right after wheat, and then 45 days later, early September, we cut it, we bailed it, and then we sprayed what was left. Around the time of planting the canola. Just so you can see, this is a few agronomic protocols for a few of our different crops. The blue is conventional corn and soybeans, the red is winter wheat, and then the black on the far right is winter canola. You can see hopefully my cursor is showing up that we're using some Clearfield varieties, CL is Clearfield, which is a variety that's resistant to a certain type of herbicide labeled as beyond. We planted in September mid September 14th and ten inch rows, 235,000 seeds per acre. Our fertility program included 105 pounds of nitrogen per acre, and the rest was similar to what we do for wheat with potash, a fair amount of sulfur, and some phosphorus. We used glyphosate and glyphospnate as a burn down, and then beyond as a post merge. The harvest date in 2024 was actually a little bit early like wheat was. It was July 2nd, but a lot of times it's July 10th to 15th when the canola is ready. So going back to the slugs don't deer like to eat canola and if so, how do you know slug versus deer or both damage? Yeah, Deer do like to eat canola, but they will eat it after those secondary leaves have already emerged, and so and woodchucks. Woducks canola too, and so you can see where a woodchuck problem is because it's very localized to the edge of a field or to where a woodchuck hole is, and you'll see a round pattern, like a very defined round pattern that's getting worse and worse from the center, and they will start eating it after. So usually the canola plants are still alive. They just eat all those leaves down to nothing. And deer will do the same thing, especially in the winter if there's a deer problem, they'll eat a lot of those leaves. Like this stage, they'll go in the winter and eat a lot of those leaves off, and then coming out of winter, we've seen very deer heavy areas that they'll have most of those leaves eaten. The plants are still alive, but they don't do as well the next spring. We're still learning how bad is it susceptible to deer in relation to some of the other crops. I don't have a firm answer on that yet, but they are susceptible. Okay. A few more pictures about what this looks like as it goes through its seasons. Flowering in mid May, it will start flowering in April, especially last year it was early flowering. So it's kind of full bloom. There's lots of bees. Winter canola and flies. Winter canola tends to be pollinated by non bee insects. I don't know what they all are, but it's early and so the honey bees and so forth aren't out as much yet. Spring canola is definitely honey bee pollinated. As it nears finishing flowering, you can see some of those flowers falling off. As it's nearing ready for harvest, it looks like this. It's got green stems left, but then all the pods on the top are brown. The seed pods shatter very easily and birds like to eat them. The edges of our fields and plots typically have a lot of bird damage because the birds will fly in there, eat the seeds and shatter others. Then harvesting is difficult to do. It's possible but difficult to do without shattering some of the seeds, especially along the snouts and so forth. Having improved headers to help minimize loss helps. We're still using just an auger head a 15 or 20 foot platform auger head to harvest, and we figured we'd lose several bushels per acre when we're harvesting that way. And so there's definitely room to grow on that front. This is a couple of profitability scenarios and yield scenarios that we've run into with winter canola. In 2023, canola is here down on this line, you can see the business as usual crops are in yellow corn and soybeans. It was a dry year 2023, so our yields weren't great, but we still made some money. Our aspirational corn and soybeans would be no till cover crops, and then wheat was only 64 bushels, which is below our average, and then canola was 17 73 pounds per acre, which is about 35 bushels per acre. And you can see that the net profit, not including land costs, none of these numbers include land costs, but do include everything else was $180 an acre, so less than wheat, soybeans, corn that year, but more than our forage crop in that particular year. I'll show you another year coming up for profitability. After canola is harvested. I've been learning from canola experts that there's a saying that says, once a canola farmer, always a canola farmer. Meaning that it likes to reseed itself. Now, I've also learned that it's not impossible to get rid of either. It's not going to become a weed, but it will regrow after harvest because of those seeds, they're so small that if you lose a bushel per acre, we're only planting 2-3 pounds per acre when we plant a field. If you lose 50 pounds per acre during your harvest, there's a lot of seeds going out there and they will regrow. This is forage mixture clover, alfalfa, ryegrass planted after the canola. You can see a lot of canola regrowing in there. Then the next spring, we had a lot of canola still growing and we cut that for hay and it increased the yield of the hay, but it decreased the quality, at least in terms of protein and fiber contents. Challenges with going from canola to a forage if you want. You're going from canola to a corn crop, it probably would be great because canola also makes a good cover crop, you mix in other cover crops and so forth. Interesting crop sequence scenarios that we've observed. This is a couple of pictures from 2024 and you can see April 19, 2024, this was a warm spring 2024 and everything was ahead and the canola started flowering in mid April, it's a little bit earlier than expected. But you can see what it looked like compared to wheat. Wheat is just starting to elongate at that time, whereas canola is already starting to flower. Then later in the year, Probably these pictures are probably about July 1st when we were harvesting both crops. You see a field of canola on the left, field of wheat on the right, canola, well, I'll talk about herbicide options in a little bit, but we did have some problems with mares tail starting to grow through the canola. I don't think it influenced our yield, but it was ugly and annoying and so there is options to control that. I'll talk about that in a second. But our yields were a little bit better in 2024. We had more rain. We were up to 2,300 pounds per acre, which is 47 48 bushels per acre of canola. You see wheat, we were 95 bushels per acre. Here's the numbers that we came up with for this year. Corn and soybeans yields were over 200 bushels for corn and soybeans, over 70 for business as usual, almost 60 for aspirational. We had incredible slug issues on our soybeans last year too. Profitability in the $200-470 per acre range. Wheat with straw and a cover crop harvest was $350 per acre, but the wheat itself was only $226 per acre and the Canola came in at $287 per acre. We're in the ballpark of those other crops for growing canola in the ballpark of wheat, it means even with some relatively minor slug damage in 2024. A little bit more on this rotation sequence and what's challenging is this is that cover crop we been growing between the wheat and the canola. Uh, it gets to be about five feet high before we cut it in early September for feed, and then we come in and we plant after it somebody asked about herbicides, so we're planting greenish, maybe spraying before or after we plant. This year, we decided to plant in wider rows, 30 inch rows because we felt like it was dry. We needed to get the seed in the ground and we needed to be consistent with our seeding and also trying to use row cleaners to spread the residue away from the seed, but see what it looked like when we planted and then what it looked like coming up in those 30 inch rows, um, mid September, again, was our planting date, and I was not sure if we were going to get emergency even because it was dry down to an inch. So we planted it a little bit deeper than an inch this year, but we still had most of those seeds came up pretty well. Um, that rotation sequence is making it hard and I think we're suffering because of it. B because we're using that cover crop, we're bringing slugs over where it's a green bridge and we're also taking moisture away from what could be the emerging canola plants, and we're delaying our planting until mid September, which I think is resulting in smaller plants going into winter and potentially smaller yields, where we could be planting earlier into more of a less, uh, um, moisture extracted soil and potentially doing a lot better with our canola at the cost of not having that cover crop in there. But anyways, it's a work in progress, but I encourage you, our data that we're coming out that we're showing in terms of yields and profitability are partially impacted by this intense cover crop and no till sequence that we're going through to try to get it in the ground. Example, let me show you something here. In the fall of 2025, we also have a canola variety trial out there with our seed provider and that's this picture on the right. These were planted only a week apart. I think the canola variety trial was planted in mid early September, and then the fields are planted late September and the variety trial field was tilled, it was followed beforehand and you can see how big those plants are. They're pretty much filled out the canopy. Whereas where we planted in the fields and the 30 inch rows, no till after cover crop, the plants look okay, but they're certainly not as big or well developed as the variety trial. We're leaving some things on the table by using this no till cover crop sequence in terms of where the canola is. We're trying to figure out how we can sustain that no till in cover crops, but maybe not hurt the canola so much. We're actually thinking about using clover as frost seeded in the wheat as the cover crop, and then we can kill that earlier, plant the canola earlier, maybe in August and use that as a sequence instead. Hey, Brooke, here's a question. Is that fall 2025 or fall 2024 for the winter canola variety trial? Well, that would be hard to be fall 2025, would it? Good question. Obviously not fall 2025. It's fall 2024. Yeah. And I'm not sure how much more you have. We're getting a little close to time here. So there is one other question, but we can hold off. I want to make you aware. I only have this slide and one other, perfect. Here's some agronomy information just to think about if you're wanting to get into this. Emerging pests include slugs, which are really only problem in no till situations. Cabbage seed pod weevil, and lig bugs have been documented in our plots to be above threshold for action, but we have not taken action yet. But they are pests that we need to be concerned about in our part of the world. They're known to be pests in other parts of canola growing regions, but we don't really have recommendations from Michigan yet. Tillage is probably advisable if you're starting with canola, but no till is possible. Planting window for winter canola mid August to early October earlier is better, so on the August end is better than October, but you can grow canola anywhere in that range. You can grow a narrow or wide rows, similar to soybeans, with probably narrow rows being advantageous for yields. Fertility is similar to winter wheat, although probably a little higher on the sulfur because canola loves sulfur. Weed control, we're using beyond based on that clear field trait. There are some glyphosate and buphosnate resistant canola varieties as well, and then we're using stinger to control mares tail. Any canola will tolerate stinger for mares tail control. Then last but not least, and then a couple of questions is, canola can grow with rye. We intercroppt canola and rye accidentally one year, and then we did it on purpose another year and it turns out that you can grow them together, you can harvest them together, and it's questionable whether it's worthwhile from a yield and profitability standpoint. But some preliminary data show that you can do it, it will reduce your canola yield, but you'll get ry yield along the way. So interesting in terms of intercropping that might be worth exploring. I'll stop there and answer the last question or two. Great, thanks, Broke. Where can we buy roundup ready canola seeds? We're not planting any roundup ready canola seeds. I don't know roundup ready winter canola. I would have to look into it, but I would assume through some of the major suppliers like major seed companies could be a great start for the roundup ready ones. We're buying our seed through Rubisco seeds, which is a company out of Kentucky and they're selling the quite a few varieties of winter canola that has this clear field trait. Thank you. All right. Thanks so much, Brooke. I don't see any other questions. No. Thanks, everybody.