Research Improves Canola Yields, Adds Benefits for Farmers

(Agricultural Research Service, USDA)

Canola, a flowering plant known for its low saturated-fat cooking oil, can also help winter wheat farmers in the Pacific Northwest control weeds, as well as convert into biodiesel, and produce cattle feed supplements. Those are the results and impacts of research conducted by Frank Young, an agronomist with USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) office in Pullman, Washington.

Canola comes in winter and spring varieties, with winter canola growing similar to winter wheat. Pacific Northwest farmers who produce winter wheat must also find ways to control the germination and growth of weeds in their crop fields. But winter canola typically hasn’t been a good candidate for weed control because it struggled to grow in the fall and often couldn’t survive the winter.

Young and his team varied planting dates, planting rates, and other techniques for winter canola and found they obtained consistently good yields — an average of 1,300 pounds per acre — when they planted in mid-August on 28-inch row spacing. This also gave the seedlings enough time to bulk up before the onset of winter. These findings have encouraged wheat farmers in Washington’s Okanogan County to begin planting winter canola to rid their fields of feral rye and diversify their market options.

ARS says some of the experimental winter canola crops were grown on land leased from the Colville Confederated Tribes in North Central Washington state, which now plans to purchase the canola seed from the growers and process it in a biodiesel production facility that they own. The tribes then plan to sell crushed canola meal back to the farmers for supplementing cattle feed and use the biodiesel to power the tribes’ fleet of logging trucks, school buses, and other vehicles.