ONTARIO GRAIN FARMER AGRONOMY GO TIME is PRO TIME Optimize your nutrition plan at GoTimeIsProTime.ca Zn Mn P N PROTIVATE and the PROTIVATE logo are trademarks of Koch Agronomic Services, LLC. Koch and the Koch logo are trademarks of Koch IP Holdings, LLC. ©2025 Koch Agronomic Services, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Ready with essential nutrients straight out of the planter box, PROTIVATE is a talc/graphite replacement that makes early-season planting a go. Maximize emergence and set your season up for more success from the start. Plant when you’re ready with PROTIVATE™ READY, GO, SET. IS NOW For growers in southern Ontario, whether they’re planting winter or spring canola, the options for switching to other crops are greater than in the “Near North.” For those in Nipissing and Temiskaming, their choices of crop alternatives are scarce; corn isn’t an option (except for a handful who start their corn (for feed) under plastic), soybeans, spring cereals, and forages. Managing volunteer canola and other brassica weeds was also mentioned. ALTERNATIVES The lack of viable alternatives is a limiting factor in dealing with clubroot. Will Runnalls, a grower from New Liskeard, acknowledges the importance of the recommendations listed during last December’s webinar, but most have differing layers of complexity. Opting out of canola in favour of two, four, or six years of soybeans isn’t something he wants to consider, yet the idea of switching to barley or oats is less appealing because of the pricing. The problem is northeastern Ontario is mired in perception issues: it isn’t similar to southern Manitoba, be it in terms of weather or soils. But growers in Temiskaming or Nipissing can’t source the same registered products as those in Western Canada. The same is true with soybean varieties, where Runnalls doesn’t always have access to 00 or 000 varieties. “If you’re trying to sell 1,000 or 1,500 tons of spring barley, there’s no one you can sell that volume to,” says Runnalls, who farms roughly 1,000 acres with a spring wheatsoybean-canola rotation. “Canola’s in a really good spot now—there’s virtually unlimited capacity for what could ever be grown in Ontario. But it’s small grains—oats and barley—where there isn’t enough capacity. They’re becoming illiquid—you cannot turn them into cash quickly.” With clubroot in canola, the default that what can work in Western Canada doesn’t translate to the east: soils in Temiskaming and Nipissing receive more moisture than the west, which is a bigger help to the movement of clubroot spores. “Clubroot’s like nothing we’ve ever dealt with,” adds Runnalls. “When you see a field with no canola, and people ask why, that’s starting to educate them. But even starting with the basics—what it is, how we can’t control it with chemicals, how it’s in your soils for a long time—people are more receptive, and not that it’s too late, but the education is happening because you can see the problem.”
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