Canterra Seeds says seed supplies for Western Canada’s first fusarium resistant wheat will be broadly available next fall.
Canterra Seeds has scheduled the broad-scale introduction of AC Emerson, a new Canadian Western Red Winter milling wheat, developed by Dr. Rob Graf with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in Lethbridge, for the fall of 2014.
The variety offers good leaf stem and stripe rust resistance, it’s the first variety of any class in western Canada to be rated resistant to fusarium head blight and, while suited to all winter wheat growing areas in western Canada, the focus will be areas with higher incidences of fusarium head blight, primarily the eastern prairies and potentially southern Alberta.
Brent Derkatch, the Director of Operations and Business Development with Canterra Seeds, says with the proposed move of CDC Falcon to the general purpose class next August there’s a lot of interest in AC Emerson and its disease resistance is also attracting attention.
We’ve just finished having the second seed production crop harvested here this fall.
Yields have been very very good as many crops and many varieties have been yielding very well this year.
Quite common to have yields in the 80s and 90s bushels per acre which is very very good.
Over all we had about a thousand acres in western Canada of seed production and we have many many more planned this year.
Orders are still being taken now and we don’t have a final number on exactly how much seed we should anticipate will be available next year but it will be quite significant with that primary supply based in eastern Saskatchewan and southern Manitoba.
Mother Nature needs to cooperate a little bit for us here as well.
We’re relatively dry in many areas so we’re going to need some moisture for producers or seed growers in this case to be able to successfully get winter wheat established this fall.
Derkatch acknowledges more work is needed on market development and understanding the end use quality fits in more detail but clearly AC Emerson is going to be a valuable variety for producers.
