Inside the race to develop a perfectly Prairies-suited soybean

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Brad Eggum’s family farm in southeastern Saskatchewan is a thriving, 7,500-acre spread today that didn’t spread too far at all four or five generations ago, when his great-grandmother Alice was abandoned by her no-good husband and left to face the Prairie winter in a tarpaper shack with a wee babe in her arms.

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“They didn’t have two cents to scrape together,” he said.

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But mother and child did not hightail it to the nearest town. They stuck it out, and after Alice met Kris Eggum, a nice, hardworking Norwegian fella, at a community dance, a story of perseverance evolved into one of relative prosperity. And the enduring moral of that tale? When you believe in something, you don’t quit on it even if times get tough.

It is a lesson Brad Eggum has taken to heart. He’s certainly not a quitter, and he rates as a one-of-a-kind in his corner of the Prairies due to his unwavering devotion to cultivating soybeans.

“Soybeans are a Cinderella crop,” the 57-year-old said.

Alas, Cinderella appears to have gotten lost on her way to the ball in much of Canada. Soybeans are the fourth-largest crop produced globally, and trade in soybeans is expected to increase an additional 22 per cent by 2025, according to the United States Department of Agriculture projections. But Canadian farmers account for just two per cent of the world’s production, the same amount as a decade ago, while their American counterparts and others take advantage of the ever-growing demand for soy protein and oil.

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“Soybean produces two of the most highly-sought-after food products in the world,” Eggum said. “And if you can get a combination of that in one plant, it is really where you want to be.”

The legume’s fairy tale charm is undeniable. Like other legumes, such as chickpeas, lentils, peas and so on, soybeans interact with bacteria in the soil to manufacture nitrogen. That means farmers don’t need to purchase nitrogen fertilizer for their soybean crops, as they do for wheat, canola and many other Prairie staples.

Even more enchanting than the cost savings is the soybean’s individuality. The plants are protein rich, not unlike other legumes, but they are also singularly unique in that they contain a high vegetable oil component. Who cares about that, you ask? Global food manufacturers, since they can use soy to produce, say, tofu burgers — or, more likely, high-grade feed for livestock — and turn the rest into cooking oils.

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That’s why it’s not just vegetarians, with their taste for soy milk and tofu-doo-dads, who are driving demand, but an overall increase in global wealth, which has increased global appetites for livestock, a.k.a. good old meat, a good chunk of which gets fattened for slaughter by consuming high-soy-content feed.

But the challenge facing prospective soybean farmers in Canada is that the Prairies are not generally, historically and genetically, where soybeans want to be. The Cinderella crop has some evil growing conditions to overcome in Saskatchewan and Alberta, most notably a relatively short, cool and dry growing season.

On top of the weather is the entrenched belief of many farmers, who are ultimately in the game to make an almighty buck and many have been doing perfectly fine by growing wheat and canola for generations, thank you very much.

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Convincing American farmers of the wonders of soybeans has been an easier sell. Apart from auto-magnate Henry Ford, who was an early soybean acolyte and experimented with using plastics made from soybeans for car parts, the crop wasn’t a big draw south of the border until the 1940s.

Flash forward to today and the U.S. is the world’s second-largest soybean producer, with exports — most of them to China — topping US$47 billion in 2022. Canadian soybean exports, meanwhile, rang in at a paltry $3.5 billion, the bulk of which was shipped from Ontario and Quebec growers.

In other words, there is potentially big money to be made in soybeans, but it isn’t being made here. However, soybean enthusiasts, such as Eggum, plant-breeding academics and private-sector research scientists, are determined to revolutionize the West by engineering a perfectly, Prairies-suited soybean.

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“Soybean is actually a semitropical crop,” said Tom Warkentin, a crop-breeding specialist and professor at the University of Saskatchewan.

Known primarily as a pea guy, he grew up on a farm south of Winnipeg. He started tinkering with soybeans a decade ago in collaboration with Elroy Cober, a federal government research scientist.

“We knew it would be challenging to select varieties with sufficiently early maturity and cold tolerance to fit in the Prairies,” Warkentin said.

What he means is that in warmer, wetter locales, soybeans have the luxury of taking their sweet time to mature; it’s a plant that isn’t in a rush. But time isn’t the farmer’s friend in Saskatchewan. Hot July afternoons can abruptly give way to August frost warnings. There are also extended dry spells to contend with.

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Unlocking a soybean’s sense of urgency in Canada requires the studied patience of a plant breeder, initially wielding a pair of tweezers in a lab, as Warkentin does. He takes the pollen from a soybean variety known to mature early and mixes it with a variety known to be more tolerant of the cold — a process known as crossbreeding or crossing.

The hardiest-looking plants among the hybrids are then subjected to field-growing conditions at test plots around Saskatchewan. The top performers are ultimately entered in provincial trials in what amounts to an annual summer Olympics for plant breeders.

Warkentin and co. have four lines of soybeans slated to compete in this summer’s trials, and he is confident they have nailed the early maturation component to the plant’s genetic make-up, while the final hurdle involves maximizing on yields.

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“We should have something that is a winner in a year or two,” he said.

The professor isn’t the only one who is keen to declare victory over Prairie growing conditions. Warkentin was still very much preoccupied with peas when Shawn Rempel began his journey as a soybean seed salesperson 20 years ago.

“It has been a roller-coaster, to say the least,” the Western Canadian sales manager for Semences Prograin Inc., a Quebec-headquartered soybean company, said.

He was somewhere north of Winnipeg on his way to a meeting in April as the rain pounded heavy upon his windshield. Rain, and lots of it, was what initially changed the prospects for soybeans in Manitoba and parts further west.

Soybeans love a good dousing, and an unprecedented wet cycle descended over the West starting around 2009. Prairie staples, such as wheat and canola, are much less tolerant of excessive moisture. It was the opening soybean champions had been waiting for.

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“You had canola drowning out in the fields, you had wheat drowning out and, you know, good old soybeans were just kind of smiling with all the wet weather, and that led to massive growth,” Rempel said.

Farmers aren’t averse to swapping trade secrets over the back fence, so word soon got around that soybeans could handle the wet weather, and for a brief, rainy spell, Rempel was arguably the most popular seed guy west of Ontario.

For example, Manitoba farmers in 2001 seeded less than 50,000 acres of soybeans, while Saskatchewan farmers did not seed any soybeans whatsoever, according to Statistics Canada. A decade later the rains came, and the crop that didn’t account for much previously was planted on close to 2.3 million acres of farmland in Manitoba in 2017, plus a million more in Saskatchewan.

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Even Alberta farmers dipped their hoes into soybeans, and it looked as though the crop had finally arrived in the big time. Until, that is, the weather cycled back into a more drought-like pattern, and the number of acres planted plummeted.

“The growth we saw in soybeans, if that trajectory had remained the same, it would have been unbelievable, but those planted acres left as quickly as they came,” Rempel said.

The growth we saw in soybeans, if that trajectory had remained the same, it would have been unbelievable

Shawn Rempel

Manitoba farmers seeded about 1.1 million acres of soybeans in 2022, while Saskatchewan registered 45,400 acres and Alberta none.

Accelerating the rapid rise and fall of soybeans was that the farmers had gotten ahead of the plant breeders. Soybean seeds that take well in, say, Iowa or southwestern Ontario didn’t take too kindly to western summers once the weather reverted to a more semi-arid mean.

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Scientists at Prograin are currently working to insert a drought-resistant gene, common among soybean crops in South American growing regions, into the Prairie seed pool.

“We have zero idea how this gene is going to react with the ultra-early genetics suited for Western Canada,” Rempel said. “But I think this is the direction we need to go to tap into that Saskatchewan and, to a lesser degree, Alberta market.”

I truly feel there is a future in soybeans for our geography, once we get the right seed varieties developed, because it has got it all

Brad Eggum

One thing that hasn’t changed through the years is farmer Eggum’s enthusiasm for the crop. He was an early adopter — arguably the earliest adopter — and planted his first soybean crop in 2009.

Farmers are known to be innovators, and working with the seeds he had, Eggum would push the envelope to encourage an early maturing, higher-yield crop. In wetter years, he seeded up to 30 per cent of his land with soybeans.

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He would make good money some summers, and nearly lose his shirt in others. But he kept at it, and today can draw from a wide breadth of grower experience.

“Soybeans are a little hit and miss,” he said. “We’ll have a very good crop one year, and then it is mediocre to average, and then we’ll have a real stinker year.”

Sizing up his prospects for 2023, Eggum struck an optimistic note.

A mid-April blizzard walloped southeastern Saskatchewan, blanketing his farm in close to 60 centimetres of snow. The nasty weather was not an unwelcome sight, since the moisture absorbed by the ground will make for much happier soybeans in the drier months ahead. Eggum felt as though he was holding “a couple of aces” with seeding day just around the corner in May.

“We are sitting pretty good for our part of the world,” he said. “I truly feel there is a future in soybeans for our geography, once we get the right seed varieties developed, because it has got it all.”

• Email: joconnor@nationalpost.com | Twitter: oconnorwrites