Canola rotates into harvest

With over 6,000 acres being harvested in the Flathead Valley right now, canola is a farming fad that’s catching on.

If a farmer does it right, they can clean up their fields and clean up at the bank by putting canola on their acreage as a rotational crop.

Lower Valley farmer Zack Brosten said it’s their second year using canola in their crop rotation. This year it was planted on just shy of 400 acres out of the 1,800 Brosten farms.

The reasons this fifth generation valley farmer brought in canola are many. Brosten said, like many other valley farmers, his farm is moving from using peas in the rotation to using canola simply because it’s a cleaner plant.

After harvest, canola leaves the ground with less work that needs to be done to get it ready for the next crop.

It’s a plant that can be direct seeded in the fall, without wasting a summer season of revenue fallowing ground. The crop is Roundup Ready, so they can spray for weeds without harming the crop.

“It’s nice to be able to go in twice during the spring and spray for wild oats,” Brosten said. “Finally we’re getting rid of wild oats and quackgrass.”

This year, Brosten’s spring wheat acreage has both those weeds, and he plans to plant canola for next year to help combat them. Seed barley took the place of last year’s canola in the fields. With the help of all the rain the valley had early this year, Brosten said his barley crop had pretty good yields and he will replace this year’s canola fields with seed barley for next year.

He estimates the canola harvest will bring in about 40 bushels per acre this year. At roughly $10-11 per bushel, the crop can bring in as much, if not more than wheat.

Duane Johnson, who worked as director of Montana State University’s Northwest Agricultural Research Center in Creston from 2001-07, said when he was growing canola at the research center, he noticed a 20 percent increase in wheat yields when it followed canola versus following wheat.

Canola’s high fetching price comes because of the demand for it as a cooking oil. Johnson said canola oil doesn’t have to be hydrogenated and doesn’t have trans fats like soybean oil.

Other than the price canola grabs on the market, breaking up the pest ecology of a field is the biggest advantage for growing the crop, Johnson said. Insects such as the orange wheat blossom midge and diseases like stripe rust love spring wheat in the Flathead Valley, but they won’t touch canola.

“When I looked at the crop rotation we had here in the valley, it was either wheat or wheat,” Johnson said.

He started growing canola at the Ag Center in 2001. By 2005 only one other farmer in the Flathead planted canola. Slowly the crop has started to gain acreage in the valley.

In 2011, the valley produced canola on a little under 2,000 acres. The state of Montana was the third largest producer of canola in the United States in 2011 with 30,500 acres harvested that produced 41.75 million pounds of canola. North Dakota was first with 1.28 billion pounds produced and Oklahoma was second with 85 million pounds.

In the last two years, Johnson said a lot has changed for Montana canola growers in terms of where they can sell their product and how it can be stored.

Whereas before 2010, the closest place to ship canola to be processed was Lethbridge, British Columbia, now Montana growers can ship their crop to North Dakota. In 2013 a canola processing facility is scheduled to open in Warden, Wash. capable of processing 314 million pounds of canola per year.

Until last year, Johnson said farmers in the valley had to store their canola crop themselves. In 2011, CHS began accepting the seed at their grainery next to the mall and railroad tracks in Kalispell.

“We lacked infrastructure for most of these farmers,” Johnson said. “Now anyone can grow canola and ship it to into the grainery to be stored.”

CHS general manager Mark Lalum said CHS saw that valley farmers were finally growing a large enough volume to need a place to store it and ship it from. He said they shipped out about 100,000 bushels of canola after last year’s harvest.

“We are now a shipping point for canola in the valley,” Lalum said. “We get it out by rail.”

He said that some farmers had a good year for canola this year and some didn’t. There was an early frost around May that caused about 1,500 acres to need reseeding. CHS began collecting canola for shipment two weekends ago.

With CHS acting as storage facility and courier for canola, Johnson anticipates canola has a strong future in the Flathead.

“I think you’re going to see some more expansion,” Johnson said.