All crops face production risks from seasonal uncertainties – adverse weather, pests, weeds and diseases – but as canola is a high-return, high-cost crop, these risks are magnified, particularly as Australian production environments continue to evolve as farm size increases and climate changes.
GRDC investment in research is critical to advance this risk-management knowledge. This research support continues to see the development of tools, techniques and recommendations offering growers choices and information to manage canola production risks to maximise their overall profitability. The following is a snapshot of investments underway to address some of these risks.
Climate risk
The main driver of crop production is climate, which can be highly variable and unpredictable. Crucial to managing this risk is to understand crop adaptation. At the heart of this is the plant growth cycle, or phenology, including switching from vegetative to reproductive phases.
If the traits involved in the plant growth cycle are matched better to a particular environment, frost, heat and drought risks can be reduced and yields improved.
Optimising canola flowering time in different environments was a key theme of the GRDC-supported ‘Optimising Canola Profitability’ project (2014–19) and has resulted in canola sowing times moving earlier in all production areas, with the best phenology types identified for the different environments.
Earlier sowing may require sowing into less-than-ideal conditions, which can compromise reliable establishment. Consequently, genetic and physiological traits appropriate for early sowing are being identified and a closer look is being taken at how growers can improve retained open-pollinated canola seed performance.
Grazing canola is one way to de-risk early sowing as this practice can slow development and crops can yield the same as ungrazed crops, with the added livestock income. The rotational benefit of grazing canola is being investigated further, together with other crop sequences to improve system health and fertility.
New methods are being developed to assess and improve the heat tolerance of canola and quantify frost damage, and decision-support tools are being fine-tuned to better match canola varieties to production environments.
Management of high-rainfall canola across the western and southern regions is being tweaked while benchmark metrics for irrigated canola are being developed.
Meanwhile, harvest efficiencies are being improved via satellite and drone-based, remotely sensed, multispectral imagery. This will better predict canola maturity and, therefore, optimal windrowing and desiccation timing.
Pest and weed risk
Insect pests and weeds compete for resources in canola production systems. Surveillance is important to monitor changes in both pest and weed occurrence and for resistance to chemical management options. To reduce the reliance on herbicides, GRDC is supporting agronomic methods of boosting canola’s weed competitiveness.
Disease risk
Canola suffers from several destructive fungal diseases that are adept at evolving with changing production environments, including Sclerotinia stem rot and blackleg. GRDC-invested field surveillance is identifying changes in these pathogen populations and distribution to warn of risks.
To continue to provide up-to-date management tools, genetic knowledge of both plant resistance and the evolving pathogens is being researched and markers developed and provided to breeding programs to continually develop robust, resistant canola varieties.
New investments to address canola production risks are continuously coming on stream as GRDC works with growers to close the gap in water-limited yield potential by reducing the occurrence of existing risks and identify evolving risks.
Read more in the March- April 2022 Groundcover Supplement: 'Canola success - an exercise in risk-management'.
More information: Kaara Klepper, kaara.klepper@grdc.com.au; Allison Pearson, allison.pearson@grdc.com.au