100% seed purity impossible

Canola breeders go to great lengths to protect the purity of their genetic lines, but once seed production starts at the field level, it's almost impossible to prevent pollen from entering the field from other places. You will get some surprises.

Farmers across the Prairies have experiences with Roundup Ready canola in their fields — even if they've never grown Roundup Ready canola before. As one reader told me, lots of farmers used straight glyphosate to spray out poor Clearfield and InVigor canola fields only to find a significant number of plants also carry the RR gene and were not controlled.

This week, Linda Nielsen, who farms near Starbuck, Man., sent this photo of her son, Erik, beside two rogue canola plants. They are nearly six feet tall and "stick out like sore thumbs" in a field of four-foot tall canola. They are throughout the field at counts of two or three per acre, Linda says. So you know they came with the seed.

A local agronomist figures they're probably winter canola plants. They're immature and she expects that at harvest, the seeds will be so green, they'll just turn to mush and blow out the back of the combine.

She says it would be neat to somehow segregate the plants, let them mature and save the seeds to plant for next year — just to see what she gets.

Do you have any strange experiences with impure seed? Comment on this blog or send me an email. I'd like to hear about them.