The executive director of Winter Cereals Canada expects livestock producers to continue to grow CDC Falcon even after it is moved from the Canada Western Red Winter class to the Western General Purpose class.
The Canadian Grain Commission plans to move CDC Falcon from the Canada Western Red Winter class to the Western General Purpose class at the start of the new crop year August 1.
Jake Davidson, the executive director of Winter Cereals Canada, expects commercial grain producers to start making the switch to the new milling wheat varieties that will continue to bring premiums while those growing grain to feed their own livestock will continue to grow Falcon.
As of the end of this crop year Falcon is going to become a general purpose and so its value on the international type or sell to your grain elevator business is going to go down.
If you’re a hog farmer and you’re a hog farmer, if you’re a Hutterite Colony and you’re feeding your own chickens and your own pigs, they will probably stay with the Falcon till they’ve seen a couple of years of these new crops come along and get a feel for what they’re going to do.
There’s one new one coming up this year out of Rob Graf’s program.
I think he calls it W495.
It’s a very high yielding product with reasonable straw height.
The one reason people like Falcon is because they don’t get a lot of straw so one of the goals in all of these breeding programs is to come up with a good quality grain without leaving the farmer with an awful lot of trash on the field that he has to get rid of.
Overall I think Falcon is going to hang in in Manitoba for a year or two while people adjust to it and then I think it’ll slow fade out.
We don’t see much in Saskatchewan so in Saskatchewan it isn’t going to be an issue.
Davidson notes, based on numbers from 2012 Falcon made up about 77 percent of the market share in Manitoba.
