Research projects aimed at improving crop performance and net profits for farmers have received funding from the Alberta Wheat Commission.

Alberta Wheat is committing $720,625 in five research projects that will give Western Canadian wheat farmers with innovative tools and solutions to improve crop performance and net profitability.  An additional $622,625 will come from the Western Grains Research Foundation, Saskatchewan Wheat Development Commission and Alberta Innovates – Bio Solutions.

Three of the five projects will attempt to give new insights on management practices for hail damaged crops; better understand stripe rust in Western Canada and improve water use efficiency for better yield and drought tolerance.

Alberta Wheat Commission Chairman Kevin Auch tells Rural Roots Canada he looks forward to seeing the results of these projects and extending the results to farmers.

“We try to pick project that benefit everyone and give us our best bang for our buck,” says Auch adding, “they could apply to me in any kind of year, you just don’t know what your weather is going to be like, you don’t know when those diseases are going to come or when you are going to get hit with drought versus too much water.”

Auch says while the results on most of the projects won’t be available for a year or two, the hail project will have data by the end of the year.

“We’ll have some good preliminary results on what we should be doing with hailed out crops as far as fungicides or recovery methods that we can make sure that wheat crop will be a profitable even after a hail storm.”

The other two projects approved will lead to new low-cost testing technology for mycotoxin detection and new tools to improve wheat grain yield under normal and abiotic stress conditions.

For more information on these projects click here.