Strong Manitoba Pea, Dry Bean Yields

Sep 20, 2022

Strong, and in some cases exceptional, dry pea yields are being followed up in Manitoba by solid dry bean yields as well.

“What we saw in areas of southcentral Manitoba and western Manitoba, peas were anywhere from 55 bu/acre to all the way into the 90s, which was quite something,” said Daryl Domitruk, executive director of the Manitoba Pulse and Soybean Growers (MPSG). “We had a few fields which were probably affected by late seeding or excess moisture on poorly drained ground and those yielded less. But overall, the yields on peas were encouraging.”

Domitruk added the wet spring raised concerns about the potential for root rot in the pea crops. However, those fears weren’t realized for the most part, as the soil in pea growing areas became drier over the summer.

The Statistics Canada crop production report released earlier this month pegged the average Manitoba dry pea yield at 52.6 bu/acre, up from last year’s drought-impacted average of just 34.9 bu/acre. If accurate, it would be the highest Manitoba dry pea yield on record, just narrowly topping the 2020 average of 52.5 bu/acre.

Meanwhile, the dry edible bean harvest only started three weeks ago, but if early yields are any indication, this year’s harvest will be a success, Domitruk said.

“(We are seeing) 1,800 to 3,000 lbs/acre and that’s extending from Glenboro (in southwest Manitoba) to the Red River Valley and places in between. There are a lot of fields to be reported, but so far across the three main classes we grow which are the black beans, the pinto beans and the navy beans, we are seeing good solid yields and some exceptional yields, as well.”

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids