If you stand quietly in a canola field that’s bursting with blooms, and listen carefully, you can hear the buzz. It’s the sound of domestic bees and wild pollinators gathering pollen and nectar and that’s music to canola farmers’ ears.
In February 2019, the U.S. Canola Association, in partnership with the Honey Bee Health Coalition, issued a list of “Best Management Practices for Pollinator Health in Canola Fields.” The list and the accompanying research paper looks at the steps of canola production and offers farmers guidance on how to manage their fields for not only canola yields, but also the pollinators that rely on them as a food source.
A mutual love
Rob Rynning, a canola farmer in Minnesota, is the current USCA president. Over the past couple of years, he said pollinator health has been a topic of concern for canola farmers because of the symbiotic relationship between the crop and bees.
Bees love canola because its flowers are loaded with nectar, with a sugar profile ideal for honey production. Canola also has an abundance of pollen that has a good balance of amino acids, protein and fats critical to bee health. And because canola fields bloom for longer periods than other flowers in the environment, bees can spend up to a month gathering nectar for their hives and without traveling long distances.
Beekeepers say that domestic hives do very well on canola pollen and nectar because of the nutrient density. Hives can expand and reproduce very rapidly on canola over other crops, like almonds for example that have very little nutrient value in the nectar.
On the crop side, pollinators are key to hybrid canola seed production, since the hybrid female plant is sterile, it doesn’t produce its own pollen. To create hybrid seeds that a farmer plants, the pollen must be moved from other male plants mechanically, and pollinators do that.
Pollinators also are great harvest help, as they increase seed germination, reduce green seed counts that can be discounted at harvest, and they raise the oil content of canola, according to USCA. When bees pollinate canola fields, the crop has more uniform flowering, and sets pods earlier. This reduces bloom time, and plumps up the canola seed weight, puts more pods on each plant with more seeds per pod. A healthy pollinator community is really the farmer’s best business partner.
A balance of needs
But balancing the economic and agronomic needs of canola farmers with the protection of beneficial pollinators is tough.
“It gets mentioned in a lot of our meetings,” Rynning explained. “And yes, there are concerns for the pollinators. But there have been threats to the crop protection products we have to use in canola.
“One example, is our neonicotinoid seed treatments,” Rynning continued. “It’s really important for canola because it’s the only thing we have available to protect the really small plant as it is coming up from sucking insects like crucifer flea beetles and striped flea beetles.” These insects can zero out an emerging stand of canola in as little as three days, at great cost to the grower.
Keeping neonicotinoids available to growers as a crop protection product can literally mean the difference between a healthy growing canola crop and a failed one.
“The big thing is to get growers to understand that we have to take care of this upfront and be proactive,” Rynning said. It shows that farmers are trying to work toward a compromise to any governmental regulators who might have the products in the crosshairs. And it helps them keep their farming partners—the pollinators—happy and healthy.
The process
It just made sense to partner up with the Honey Bee Health Coalition to create these BMPs, Rynning said. The full paper can be found on USCA’s website, www.uscanola.com, under the Crop Production/Pollinator Health tab. Or you can find it directly at http://www.uscanola.com/site/files/956/160174/526587/796193/HBHC_Canola_030119.pdf.
A technical committee of canola and beekeeping industry professionals, environmental agency representatives, and governmental and university researchers looked at existing BMPs for other crops, geographies and beekeeping. Then, they identified points in the crop growth cycle that could be adjusted to improve pollinator health and survival.
Jay Bjerke, one of the lead authors of the BMP paper, is a retired canola product manager and production leader in the private sector, having worked for both Monsanto and Land O’Lakes canola teams.
“One of the things I wanted to emphasize in the document is that, yes, we’re all concerned about honeybees, but there’s a tremendous number of species of wild bees that are also adversely affected by decisions farmers make or don’t make,” Bjerke said. “The goal is to protect both because they are equally important in terms of pollination activity.”
Being a good neighbor
Even with decades of canola production knowledge, Bjerke said he was surprised to learn from pollinator expert committee members that there are production practices that are beneficial to wild bees, such as no-till.
“If you’re doing a Roundup Ready system, for example, and leaving the stubble in the fall, it’s 10 times better for the wild bees than tilling up that ground,” Bjerke said. “It’s because wild bees almost all nest in the ground. So their nests need to be undisturbed through the winter. Otherwise, you dig up the larvae and stop their process.” No-till has long been touted for other agronomic benefits, but he’d just never thought it could help wild pollinators, he said.
One issue that the committee had to address was that both spring and winter canola is grown in the U.S., which means that production practices happen at different times of the year depending on the geography of the farmer.
“Part of the reason we wrote the document by crop stage is that in winter canola there are lots of times that there are more pests present in the field when it’s in bloom than in spring canola,” Bjerke said. “We shied away from saying ‘Don’t ever spray blooming canola’ because if a farmer has a choice of spraying and controlling damaging insects and saving his crop, or not spraying, he’s going to spray. But even in those instances there are plenty of things a farmer can do to lesson the damage.”
For example, in this instance, the farmer should contact any local beekeepers who have hives near those fields and notify them that he’s going to spray, Bjerke said. Then, if he sprays later in the day, around sunset, the bees have returned to their hives for the most part so that fewer bees are exposed to the spray, he added. And, the farmer has a choice of those pesticides that have much less toxicity to bees than to the insects he’s trying to control.
Proactively making a difference
By taking the proactive step to create these BMPs, Rynning emphasized that canola growers can show to regulators and Washington, DC, they are working toward solutions for the industry and beekeepers.
“Down the road, when we go up to Capitol Hill, we can show that we have these and that we’re working with the beekeepers and their association for both the bees and the crop,” Rynning said. “There’s already serious issues in Europe where they’ve lost the use of neonicotinoids in their edible rapeseed and the industry is going down rapidly. They can’t keep their crop from getting wiped out by pests and some have had to replant two to three times and have had to apply emergency sprays time and time again.” He said in his region of Minnesota, if he couldn’t use neonic seed treatments and instead had to rely on topical sprays, he’d have to go over his crop three to four times with foliar applications, or replant the entire crop and lose money.
Bjerke said he hopes these BMPs provide farmers an opportunity to start conversations with their local beekeepers and start a process of being better business partners with the pollinators.
“I think my hope is that farmers should give this document a good read and the majority will see that it’s relatively minor changes to their programs that can make a big benefit to the pollinators,” Bjerke said.
Jennifer M. Latzke can be reached at 620-227-1807 or [email protected].
