Canary seed becomes official grain Aug. 1

Jun 10, 2021

The designation means the crop receives the same protections as wheat, canola and other grains

By Diego Flammini
Staff Writer
Farms.com

A new crop will be designated as an official grain under the Canada Grain Act in the coming months.

The Canadian Grain Commission (CGC) announced canary seed will join its counterparts like barley, lentils and wheat as an official grain on Aug. 1.

This decision comes after grain company ILTA Grain filed for creditor protection in July 2019. The situation left canary seed producers unpaid for $2.1 million of grain deliveries.

At the time, canary seed was not an official grain and therefore producers didn’t quality for payment protections.

Designating the crop as an official grain means producers are ensured payment.

“After successive licensee failures where canary seed growers were left empty handed, it was clear we needed to extend regulatory safeguards to the sector,” Doug Chorney, chief commissioner of the CGC, said in a statement. We’re very pleased to be able to offer canary seed growers the rights and services provided by the Canada Grain Act and help ensure they are fairly compensated for their deliveries.”

Saskatchewan is a major canary seed producer.

The province accounts for more than 95 per cent of Canada’s total canary seed production and is the world’s leading producer and exporter of the crop.

Growers began working towards having the crop designated as an official grain after the ILTA Grain situation in 2019.

Canary seed growers are pleased with the CGC’s decision to protect their grain deliveries, said Darren Yungmann, chair of the Canary Seed Development Commission of Saskatchewan.

“We put forward a motion at our 2020 annual general meeting to solicit the CGC to include canary seed as an official grain,” he told Farms.com. “This is great news because now it means our crop is protected by the commission. You can’t have farmers losing $2 million.”

A majority of canary seed marketing opportunities is for bird feed.

But in January 2016 Health Canada approved the grain for human consumption.

This opens up new revenue streams for farmers, but multiple hurdles are in the way, Yungmann said.

“We’re working to bring down barriers like registering herbicides for human use,” he said. “We’re doing research trials on the stability of the flour and we’re trying to get the seed into grain companies’ hands to do more research.”

Video: Western Canadian Agriculture: Hard Times Made the World's Best Farmers

Western Canadian agriculture produced the most advanced farmers in the world not through abundance but through adversity. The crow rate fell. The wheat price went nowhere. The brown envelopes stopped.

When the subsidies disappeared, the bad farmers left and the good ones stayed. And the ones who stayed could not just grow wheat anymore. They started growing lentils and canola and peas and flax and faba beans. They built crop rotation. They got serious about agronomy because there was no government backstop. That process produced the Western Canadian agriculture Dennis Bulani describes in this clip: the most advanced, most educated farming culture in the world.

His contrast with Iowa corn and soybean farmers is sharp. At a DeKalb farmer meeting in Okoboji, Iowa, he asked what crop rotation they ran. Beans on corn stubble, corn on bean stubble. How do you fertilize? The co-op agronomist handles it. Have you considered other crops? No need. We make so much money on corn and soybeans. Western Canadian agriculture was never allowed that comfort. And now those Iowa farmers are watching soybean markets lock up with China and corn prices slide, and they do not have the agronomy knowledge or the research base to pivot. Western Canadian farmers adapted on a dime because they had done it before.

Dennis also makes the case that Western Canadian agriculture keeps adapting in real time. Low commodity prices over the past year have pushed growers to look seriously at precision spot-spray technology. He knows a neighbor who bought a sprayer with the seeing-eye system and sprayed only 80 out of 320 acres. As a chemical retailer Dennis acknowledges that will affect his sales. He supports it anyway, because if it advances Canadian agriculture and makes farmers money, that is a good outcome.

The lesson Dennis draws from the tale of two farms: continuous improvement is the only durable strategy. When canola was $22 a bushel some growers went to Arizona instead of the Crop Production Show. When the price came down those same growers came back to the research and the discipline. Products do not go on Rack Petroleum's shelves unless they pass a replicated trial first. That is what Western Canadian agriculture built through hard times: farmers who do the work whether the times demand it or not.

Dennis Bulani is CEO of Rack Petroleum and Ultimate Yield in Biggar, Saskatchewan. Dan Aberhart hosts GTF Productions, Western Canadian Agriculture's foremost live briefing platform and its foremost AI training platform for ag operators