One of last year’s research columns bemoaned the fact that only four out of 119 alfalfa varieties registered in Canada between 2012 and 2022 had been developed in Canada. The rest were from China, Australia or the U.S.
Since then, the CFIA has approved nine more varieties originating from Washington, Wisconsin, Idaho or California. These latest varieties have all been selected for yield and resistance to a variety of biotic (living) threats posed by insects, worms, bacteria and fungi. Two of them have been selected for winterhardiness, but none mention any selection for resistance to other environmental threats like flood or drought. Several of them had been tested in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Washington and Idaho, but as far as I could tell, none had been evaluated in Canada before being registered.
Anyone who’s purchased breeding stock from another region, then watched them shrivel up, lose condition, fail to rebreed and fall out of your herd understands the importance of developing genetics to match the environment they’re expected to work in. The same thing applies to forage crops. With Canada’s best agricultural land being seeded to soybeans, canola, lentils, corn and other high value annual crops, forages need to be able to survive and thrive in poorer quality soils that are often more subject to drought, flooding or both–sometimes in the same year. Can we really expect alfalfa genetics to cope with drought or flood when they’ve never been tested under those conditions?
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