Bayer’s wheat breeding station at Pike Lake, Sask., southwest of Saskatoon. (Cropscience.bayer.com)

Canada clears Bayer’s Monsanto play, with conditions

Canada’s Competition Bureau says it’s “actively reviewing” BASF’s suitability as a buyer of the crop seed and chemical assets Bayer has to sell to get the bureau’s blessing to buy Monsanto. The Competition Bureau said Wednesday it has an agreement with Bayer to deal with “concerns that the proposed transaction would have significantly harmed competition […] Read more



There are a lot of ships, like this one at Tiplam terminal in Santos, loading Brazilian soybeans for shipment to China this spring. The country has been the largest purchaser of American soybeans but stopped buying in early April after being threatened with U.S. tariffs.

While U.S. soybean growers fret, canola keeps shining

China has stopped buying American soybeans, while canola trade is comfortably boring

Reading Time: 4 minutes A potential U.S.-China trade war has American soybean growers anxiously watching the horizon, but it looks like smooth sailing for canola markets. “Canola is a high-quality oil that processors would use more of if they could get their hands on it. This does encourage more growth and also the increase of crush capacity we’ve seen […] Read more





(Dave Bedard photo)

Extended-tolerance canola now on deck for 2019

Giving growers a wider window to spray in-crop weeds with glyphosate, the new platform for Monsanto’s future canola trait stacks is now booked to make its way into the Canadian market next year. The U.S. seed and chemical company’s Canadian arm announced last week it plans to commercialize TruFlex canola in 2019, following plot trials […] Read more

(Dave Bedard photo)

ICE weekly outlook: Canola waits on stocks data

CNS Canada — ICE Futures Canada canola contracts continue to chop around within a fairly tight range, but that could all change in the next few days as stocks data for North American oilseeds are due to be released. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is set to release its May supply and demand report on […] Read more


In this video from the Canola Council of Canada, Angela Barnes, the council’s agronomist for southern Alberta, 
holds what appears — from the ground up — to be a fairly healthy canola plant. But the roots of the same plant 
(inset photo) show it is heavily infected with clubroot galls. This hidden spread of clubroot illustrates why a breakdown in resistance may not be immediately obvious in a canola field.

Key source of clubroot resistance goes AWOL

‘Grandparent’ can defeat new mutated clubroot strains but somehow it doesn’t get passed down

Reading Time: 3 minutes The ‘grandparent’ of clubroot resistance in most Canadian canola varieties is resistant to new virulent strains of clubroot — but its offspring aren’t. “It’s possible that, in the course of breeding, some of the resistant genes were lost,” said provincial research scientist Rudolph Fredua-Agyeman. European clubroot differential (ECD) 04 is a key source of clubroot […] Read more

Understanding how resistant varieties build stronger cell walls in their roots is key to protecting canola from clubroot, says plant pathologist Gary Peng.

Building a stronger wall to keep out clubroot

New research finds resistant canola varieties are better at strengthening cell walls in their roots

Reading Time: 2 minutes Researchers want to build a better wall — at a cellular level — to thwart clubroot. Of the dozens of canola varieties, only eight have resistance to the fungus-like pathogen and all of them are now showing signs of losing resistance, said Gary Peng, a plant pathologist at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s research centre in Saskatoon. […] Read more