I thought after harvest I would do a little variety comparison, what we liked and didn’t like about what we grow and sell on our seed farm. I want this review to be unbiased so that farmers know exactly how it grows in the area from a farmer perspective. We use seed treatment on all our acres, and we use in season fungicide though this year we did not spray the peas, it wasn’t economical. If you’re looking for specific yield numbers, please call or text me at 780-581-5693 and I’ll be happy to let you know, I’ll leave it out of this review because rain was so scattered your numbers will be different than mine.
2018 saw our farm add new varieties to our line up. Here are our thoughts on how they performed, note that we had very little rain throughout the growing season and 10 days of smoke at the beginning of August that delayed maturity.
Peas.
Our 2 pea varieties were split on a half section that on a normal year has negligible yield difference from the north quarter to the south quarter so we feel it is a good varietal performance test on our farm.
AAC Barrhead Peas. The Barrheads were the last peas we planted and were the first to combine; 102 days to maturity. We were very impressed with the early maturity. These peas stood excellent and were easy to combine, downside this year was that the seed weight ended up higher than usual but I’ll chalk that up to the dry conditions. Impressed with the seed coat quality, very little to no splitting. Out yielded CDC Amarillo on the same field by 3bu/ac. With the early maturity, lodging resistance, strong seed coat and stand-ability Barrhead peas should be in the running for more acres.
CDC Amarillo Peas. These peas still stand excellent, similar to many of the newer varieties. Yield is consistent and they combine easy. The downsides we are finding with these peas are the weak seed coat and later maturity. I have found in our few years of growing them the germination suffers from seed coat issues. It is best to take them off on the tough side to keep splits low, which was very hard in the hot weather of August. The later maturity runs the combines into September which can reduce the benefit of growing peas, though we like to have a mix of early and late to combat taking peas off at 12% moisture
Wheat.
AAC Redwater. Redwater is due to be demoted into the Northern Hard Red class of wheat in 2021. We have grown this variety commercially for 5 years and found that it always kept its color well and had decent protein and yield. We did find that in dryer years this variety tended to give up some yield for the early maturity. On years where yield potential was still high Redwater tended to lodge more than AAC Brandon and AAC Elie which both have excellent lodging resistance. This year Redwater yielded 15-20bu/ac less than Brandon and Elie on our farm though the protein was anywhere from 14-16.8%. We do not sell any AAC Redwater though many of our commercial wheat acres were AAC Redwater and it is popular in the area. We are looking to replace this early maturing variety with AAC Redberry from Alliance Seed which is in the CWRS class. Again we like to grow a mix of early and late hard red varieties to spread out when they are ready to combine.
AAC Brandon and AAC Elie. These wheats are siblings as they share common parent plants. We grew them on our farm across the road from one another, again trying to plant them on fields that are generally similar in yield and growing conditions to get a good comparison. We found both extremely easy to thresh but found Elie was slightly easier than the Brandon. The Elie yielded 6bu/ac higher than the Brandon, though the Brandon averaged 14.2% protein to the Elie’s 13.8%. Lodging resistance was excellent in both varieties up until the 6+ inches of snow we received in the middle of harvest. We found the Elie managed to stand up better after the snow and took less time to combine. The late maturity rating on these varieties gave them an edge of around 15-20bu/ac higher than Redwater that was grown commercially. We are happy with both these varieties and judging by Yield Alberta data they continue to be a couple of the highest yielding hard red varieties and are growing in popularity in our risk area.
The final note I want to add is that we are always looking into new varieties or crop kinds, flax, lentils, barley, cps wheat etc. With that being said we are open to suggestions of what to bring in and open to feedback on this review. Thanks for reading.
Scott Konieczny