Roquette wants sustainably produced, premium field peas for its new $600-million pea-processing Portage la Prairie facility — the world’s biggest — and is paying a premium price to get them.
“Generally speaking we pay a $1 bushel for the Environmental Farm Plan and the traceability reports that they (farmers) do for us,” Derek MacLean, Roquette’s senior grain buyer, told four Glacier FarmMedia staff via a web meeting Nov. 2.
“We pay the producers well for the extra hoops they have to go through to do business with us.
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“As well as we pay them storage and delivery premiums depending on what delivery slot they pick to deliver their peas in.
“Generally speaking what our goal is, we want farmers to deal with us year after year… ”
Why it matters: Roquette offers Manitoba and eastern Saskatchewan farmers an expanding, domestic premium market for field peas — another economically attractive crop in the rotation that also fixes nitrogen.
- Farmers are expected to deliver Canadian Grain Commission grade No. 2 Yellow Peas.
- They must be grown on land that hasn’t been seeded to soybeans — an allergen for some people — the previous two years.
- Farmers who grow soybeans must clean their combines and augers to keep soybeans from being mixed with their peas.
- Farmers must guarantee the peas have not been sprayed pre-harvest with the non-selective herbicide glyphosate.
- Farmers must submit a management report detailing practices including seeding, fertilizer and chemical use, what bins the peas are stored in and the tonnage.
- Farmers must plant certified pea seed.
“We need to change the mindset of farmers from just growing a commodity pea to actually growing a food-grade pea and the quality specs that go along with that,” Bruce Brolley, Roquette’s senior agronomist said.
“(W)e have worked with seed growers in Manitoba as well as in southeastern Saskatchewan and got an inventory of what seed supplies are out there, and it is tight, but there is enough seed available for our purposes, plus some others as well,” Brolley said. “Farmers are going to have to make their minds up about contracting because pea seed will be sold out before springtime hits, just like many other commodities… ”
Roquette contracts come with an ‘act of God’ clause, which means farmers are not obliged to deliver, or buy back their contract should they suffer a crop failure.
“It’s a full ‘act of God’ contract so one of the benefits last year with guys… if they went and priced some product and they didn’t have any produce we weren’t sending any invoices out,” MacLean said. “It wasn’t on a select amount of bushels like some other contracts. We’re here to work with producers. We made changes on our contract… for the (2022) year we’re coming out with on recommendations from our growers. At the end of the day I feel strongly that we’re tied at the hip to our growers and our suppliers so we need to listen to them and we need to adjust. (T)here were a number of producers who had to instil that clause in the contract this year unfortunately.”
Roquette won’t just contract to take a portion of a farmer’s peas, it wants them all, MacLean said.
“We are doing some risk mitigation on our side… but they (farmers) are able to lock in a flat price whenever they want to do it… ” he said. “That’s one of the big changes that the farms asked for this year.
“If they want to be bullish prices on commodities we’ll let them do so. We’re listening… ”
Unlike some processors, Roquette is buying directly from farmers instead of through grain companies. MacLean agreed it’s more work “but at the end of the day it’s really good to be connected at the primary level.
“What it really gives us is traceability throughout the whole chain… what we’re selling to our end-use customer,” he added. “So we want to be in control. We want to be able to help our growers at the front line produce the good product that our end-use customer wants.”
That’s why Roquette has three agronomists — Brolley, Anastasia Kubinec and organic agronomist, Jennifer McCombe-Theroux.
“We are working with farmers to help them grow the best-quality crop that they can,” Brolley said. “We are also working to collect the traceability information that Derek was talking about.”
Roquette also works with other agronomists ‘training the trainers.’
Although the Portage plant is just starting to gear up, Roquette has been sourcing peas for two years.
“We’re lucky we had the first run in 2020,” Brolley said.
“It helped a wee bit in 2021. But 2021 goes to prove that there’s no such thing as an average year anymore because it did have its fair share of challenges (due to drought).”
In its first phase the plant needs 125,000 tonnes of peas a year. Over the previous five years (2020 to 2016) Manitoba farmers grew 110,750 acres of crop-insured peas, averaging 1.3 tonnes (48 bushels) an acre.
They grew almost 132,000 acres in 2020 and almost 198,000 this year. That’s up 50 and 78 per cent from 2020 and the five-year average.
In theory that should be enough to supply the plant, but both MacLean and Brolley stressed to assure supply Roquette is contracting in eastern Saskatchewan too.
“In most years that type of philosophy works because one region may have a little bit lower yield… and you hope the others can pick up the yield for the normal amount of tonnage,” Brolley said. “Unfortunately with 2021 the drought was all across Western Canada. No matter where we were sourcing yields tended to be low… there were some small pockets that did get rain with normal yields in that 40 to 45 bushels per acre. Unfortunately there just weren’t enough of those people.”
“We do have some organic growers spread out into that Alberta region as well,” MacLean said.
Manitoba farmers know field peas are sometime susceptible to diseases, especially in wet weather. One of the most serious is aphanomyces, which wasn’t identified in Canada and Manitoba until 2012 and 2016, respectively.
“Aphanomyces is a nasty pest,” Brolley said. “It’s probably the No. 1 concern that we have from a sustainability, long-term (view), but again that’s why we have an agronomy team to help work with farmers…
“(I)n fields where it is really high, it can reduce yields up to 80 per cent in a wet year because it’s a water-loving disease pathogen and the ooze spores can multiply very quickly. They cause the plant roots to die and the plants to wilt and the loss of yield.”
It’s likely aphanomyces has been in Western Canada awhile but its symptoms were masked by those of other root rots such as fusarium, pythium, rhizoctonia.
“So by the time we found we had the disease it was already pretty widespread across the area,” Brolley said. “So it’s probably as firmly entrenched in Western Canada as clubroot is in Western Canada and as soybean cyst nematode is getting to be in Manitoba.”
But just like clubroot, aphanomyces can be managed, he added.
“There are 10 million acres of crops in Manitoba,” Brolley said. “Our plant needs a fraction of that and then we have Saskatchewan as well.”
No chemicals control aphanomyces and there are no varieties resistant to the disease. However, crop rotation helps.
Farmers without aphanomyces should grow field peas in a four- or five-year rotation. Since disease spores can survive in the soil up to eight years, infected fields shouldn’t be seeded to peas for six to eight years, Brolley said.
“There is no magic bullet from a crop protection point of view,” he said. “There’s one seed treatment that has some protection against it, but aphanomyces can affect the plant at any point in time of its life so seed treatments, they only last for five to six weeks.”
The fact that aphanomyces has a limited number of hosts — peas, lentils and some varieties of alfalfa — helps.
Meanwhile, Roquette is working with the Pest Surveillance Initiative (PSI) in Winnipeg to develop a soil test to help growers assess the aphanomyces risk before planting.
Given that 80 per cent of the West’s peas are exported, sourcing peas shouldn’t be too difficult.
Statistics Canada estimates western Canadian farmers harvested an average of 4.25 million tonnes of peas a year the previous five years from an average of 4.0 million acres. That’s 32-fold more peas than Roquette can process annually.
Asked if he thought the recent increase in Manitoba’s pea acres is linked to Roquette’s demand, MacLean replied:
“I think it’s a huge advantage for the farmers if they have a domestic buyer,” he said.
“We’ve had tariffs imposed on these pulse producers in the past where they wouldn’t be able to sell their crop. So do I think Roquette has something to do with it? Yeah. I think any time producers have a local domestic option I think it’s way better for them and at the end of the day they support it.”
