Introduced in 2024, the variety was bred to address rising labour shortages and costs in squash production, helping growers improve profitability while maintaining a reliable supply of fresh squash.

WHY IT MATTERS: Labour shortages and rising costs are driving demand for crops with shorter harvest times while maintaining freshness and quality.

Rebecca Wente, product specialist at Syngenta, told Farmtario labour savings are still being quantified, but research is providing some early insight.

“Because of differences in production environments, we are not able to offer a dollar figure, but in field trials we observed the upright plant and elongated stalks connecting the fruit to the main branch made the picking process more straightforward because the fruit is easier to see and reach,” she said.

The new variety of hybrid, medium-green zucchini is available through Syngenta’s wholesale partners and Canadian seed distributors.

The variety was developed to help growers more easily see the fruit and assess readiness. The plant structure also improves airflow, reducing the risk of disease by creating less favourable conditions for development.

In trials conducted in Italy to reflect real commercial conditions, covering several thousand hectares of open-field green squash, data showed a 15 per cent reduction in harvest costs.

Wente noted the variety was bred to handle pressures specific to Ontario fields.

The disease resistance package includes cucumber mosaic virus, watermelon mosaic virus, zucchini yellow mosaic virus, powdery mildew and papaya ringspot virus.

“It is possible for all these pathogens to affect crops in Canada, although some are more prevalent than others,” she said.

In Syngenta’s trials, the plant’s architecture and habit, measuring how open and upright the plant is, performed significantly better than other trial participants, contributing to easier harvesting.

She added Syngenta has not made recommendations for production changes such as spacing, irrigation or equipment, noting these decisions depend on individual operations.

“We anticipate any operation type can see a benefit from this variety’s open and upright plant structure, including large commercial growers and backyard gardeners,” she said.

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“I don’t know if anybody in this room experienced rootworm in 2025, but it was a bad, bad rootworm year,” said Jocelyn Smith, an assistant professor in field crop entomology at the University of Guelph’s Ridgetown campus. She was part of a panel on corn rootworm at the 2026 SouthWest Agricultural Conference in Ridgetown.

Why it matters: Corn rootworm has been well-controlled in Ontario since the introduction of Bt traits and more diverse crop rotations, but that is changing with more resistance showing up.

The biggest problem is fields where corn is repeatedly planted, usually using the same trait packages.

“We’ve gotten maybe a little lazy with some of our rootworm management,” Smith said.

The growing season was dry in 2025, which meant more corn rootworm larvae hatched and survived.

“The weather saves us a lot of times on rootworm pressure, but in 2025, it didn’t,” she said.

Resistance is spreading, especially in areas with more livestock, where it’s more likely farmers with limited acres grow corn after corn.

That means there are problems with resistance in Huron and Perth counties, and it’s spread to Middlesex and Lambton, Smith said, with resistance now found in eastern Ontario and Quebec.

Near-continuous corn

In the United States Midwest, a variant of rootworm has shown up that can hang around for a crop rotation out of corn. Smith said that hasn’t been confirmed yet in Ontario.

Canadian growers can feel a bit better compared to their counterparts in the U.S., where many growers only plant corn and soybeans, and corn-on-corn for grain corn is more common.

That means resistance started showing up shortly after the Bt trait arrived, said Erin Hodgson, a field crop extension entomologist at Iowa State University.

Hodgson said there are about 13 million acres of corn in Iowa, but about four million of those acres are in continuous corn, meaning at least three years of corn. Some have been in corn each year for 20 years.

The industry is used to evaluating the damage in Iowa.

For each corn root node that is pruned to within 1.5 inches of the stalk, there’s about a 15 per cent yield loss, she said. Corn rootworm feeds mostly on nodes four, five and six. There’s no rescue treatment once the damage has been done, she said, so prevention is the key.

Back to chemistry

As Bt corns have failed — and in Iowa, they’ve failed across the valuable traits, including multiple resistance to three of the traits — corn growers have been relying more again on soil-applied insecticides. That has included older chemistries such as organophosphates and pyrethroids, but also some new compounds.

Using soil-applied insecticides involves retrofitting planters to hold chemical boxes, and means farmers have to work with highly toxic chemicals.

Research in Iowa by Aaron Gassmann at Iowa State shows that there’s little value to using soil-applied insecticides if Bt traits are working.

There are new RNA interference (RNAi) technologies now available, but they don’t result in immediate effect, as they shut down insect metabolism. Larvae could still feed for a week, therefore it’s difficult to tell if the technology has been effective. The risk of resistance to RNAi is also high, Hodgson said.

Crop rotation in Ontario helps a lot, she said, but encouraged farmers to question whether they need Bt traits in their corn every year, especially if they’re practicing rotations.

If corn only sees a field every three to five years, if the populations aren’t there, corn without Bt could perhaps be planted, she said.

“Rootworm is the easiest insect to control if you want to, if you just play the game right,” Smith said. “It’s got to be corn roots. If there aren’t corn roots there, they will all die.”

Could biocontrols help?

Researchers have known since the 1980s that nematodes can kill rootworm, but the distribution of nematodes to the field level has not worked.

Tuesday Schroeder, a master’s student working with Smith and Dave Hooker at Ridgetown, and a biological innovation manager with Corteva, is looking at ways to improve the application of entomopathogenic nematodes (EPNs) to the field.

The challenge is that “EPNs are really susceptible to environmental conditions. They’ll dry up and die, and they’re not really tolerant to cooler conditions,” said Schroeder.

She said they could be used in conjunction with Bt traits to help increase the longevity of the traits.

The nematodes are washed into a tote and then applied using a sprayer with streamer nozzles at 50 gallons of water per acre.

What is the lifecycle of corn rootworm

Corn rootworm beetles — both the western corn rootworm and northern corn rootworm that exist in Ontario — lay eggs from July to October.

Over the winter, the eggs are “just totally dormant,” says Smith. “They’re pretty indestructible in the soil throughout the winter.”

Tillage doesn’t affect the eggs; neither does freezing weather.

The beetles burrow as deeply as they need to so their eggs are laid into moisture, even to depths of a metre into the soil.

The eggs start hatching in southern Ontario around June 10, feed on roothairs and move through three instar development stages by the middle of July at which time they are large enough to feed on the roots of corn.

This is the point of the most damage, with goosenecking of corn plants indicating a severe infestation.

By late July or early August the rootworm pupate and emerge as adults, ready to start the process again.

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The report by the Canadian Malting Barley Technical Centre (CMBTC), in collaboration with the Manitoba Crop Alliance, says new Canadian malting barley varieties can be grown successfully in Manitoba.

With yields and quality comparable to the check variety — AAC Synergy — the study found new varieties including AAC Connect, CDC Fraser, CDC Copper, CDC Churchill and AAC Prairie are the next generation of varieties for Manitoba growers, the CMBTC said in a release Friday.

“The study showed that these new varieties offer good agronomics and the high end-use quality traits that are the hallmark of Canadian malting barley,” CMBTC managing director Peter Watts said.

According to the Manitoba Crop Alliance, total barley acres, whether for feed or malting, have declined over the last two decades on “a combination of disease concerns, market forces and difficulty to meet malting grade.”

That said, seeded acreage reports from Manitoba Agricultural Services Corp., the provincial crop insurance agency, have found Manitoba barley acres steadied in the years 2020 to 2023, at a level between 365,000 and 400,000.

Producers in Manitoba have struggled with diseases such as fusarium head blight in malting barley, but with improved disease resistance packages, better fungicide products and improved management practices, fusarium has not been a significant issue in recent years, CMBTC said.

Producers growing malting barley varieties have the option of both malting and feed markets. With a malt barley variety, farmers gain an additional 2.5 million-tonne market that they could not access with feed varieties, the centre said. As well, malt barley generally offers a premium of around $1 per bushel or more.

“Manitoba is one of the best barley producing regions in the world,” Manitoba Crop Alliance CEO Pam de Rocquigny said in the same release. “This success can be attributed to climate and geography, and our advanced farming practices.”

Barley is a good cereals crop option, as it provides many benefits when included in crop rotations. It can be planted early in the growing season and is both competitive and high yielding. Furthermore, including barley in crop rotations can provide flexibility during harvest, as it matures early, allowing harvest to be spread out between crop types, the centre said.

“In combination, these attributes make barley a great option for farmers,” says de Rocquigny.

Registrations of new malting barley varieties for producer use in Canada in recent years led to the need to evaluate those new varieties in field-scale trials, under Manitoba growing conditions, to provide data for that province’s growers on how new varieties could fit in their cropping systems.

More details from the CMBTC study can be viewed on the Manitoba Crop Alliance website.

Several companies in Manitoba source malting barley to supply domestic and international markets including CMBTC members Cargill, Richardson, Viterra, Malteurop and Boortmalt, among others.

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The University of Arkansas last week announced its ag researchers had found glufosinate-resistant Palmer amaranth in crops in two eastern Arkansas counties across the Mississippi River from Memphis.

The finding “does not appear to be widespread” in those counties, they said — and among other weeds, only four grasses are known to have developed glufosinate resistance, three of those in other countries overseas.

But the finding may not bode well for the chemical’s expanded use against weeds that have already developed resistance to other chemistries.

Bayer, for example, recently expanded its Roundup Ready Xtend crop system to include a new line of XtendFlex soybeans, which have tolerance not only to glyphosate and dicamba but to glufosinate as well, partly as a way to expand growers’ options against herbicide-resistant weeds throughout the growing season.

Glufosinate, a broad-spectrum Group 10 product, “is one of the few remaining chemistries that are effective in controlling pigweed in soybeans and other crops,” Arkansas extension weed scientist Tom Barber said Thursday in a release.

“We have put a lot of selection pressure on glufosinate the last 10 years or more, so no, it is not surprising… and likely was inevitable.”

The resistance in Palmer amaranth was first reported last summer in two “fields of concern” in Mississippi County where three applications of the chemical had failed to control the weed. “These two fields had that ‘look’ and were very suspicious, to say the least,” Barber and other researchers wrote in a blog post last week.

Putting the strain of Palmer amaranth through the screening process to confirm resistance, the researchers found the biotype from Crittenden County was 3.5 times less sensitive to glufosinate, and the cases in Mississippi County “appear to be at least 15 times more resistant than the susceptible standard used for evaluation in the screening.”

Without glufosinate, “in cotton or soybean crops, the options are limited, especially post-emergence,” Barber said, recommending the use of two residual herbicides at planting, along with “paraquat at planting to make sure we start clean.” Dicamba and use of the Enlist system are also options.

However, “the best plan is to rotate to corn or rice on the acre if possible as well as remove all pigweed escapes, which will reduce seed returning to the seed bank,” he said.

Tommy Butts, also an extension weed scientist and co-author of the blog post, said growers can slow herbicide resistance in weed populations by avoiding “overreliance” on a single control method.

“Now, more than ever, it is a must to diversify weed control strategies and implement an integrated weed management approach including cultural, mechanical and preventative tactics,” he said. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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Quebec’s Reseau d’avertissement phytosanitaire (RAP) last Friday reported a patch of waterhemp with resistance to mesotrione herbicide in the Haut-Richelieu municipality, in the province’s Monteregie.

A Group 27 HPPD enzyme inhibitor, mesotrione is the active ingredient in Syngenta’s Callisto herbicide and one of several in products such as Halex and Acuron, all used mainly for broadleaf weed control in corn crops.

Tests by the Centre de recherche sur les grains (CEROM) also confirmed resistance to Groups 2, 5 and 9 (atrazine, metribuzine and glyphosate respectively) in the same waterhemp patch, RAP reported.

Established in Ontario since 2002, Manitoba since 2016 and Quebec since 2017, having arrived via the central and eastern U.S., waterhemp is able to germinate all throughout a growing season.

The weed is also known to be highly prolific — a single plant can produce up to 300,000 seeds — and if left unchecked, has been known to cause yield losses of up to 73 per cent in infested corn and soy crops, RAP said.

The plant also grows rapidly, at a rate of up to 2.5 to three centimetres per day, and is tough to distinguish visually from relatives such as redroot and green pigweed.

Waterhemp patches in Ontario have previously shown resistance to groups 2, 5 and 9 and, more recently, Group 14. That group includes PPO inhibitors such as Syngenta’s Reflex and Corteva’s Goal, also used mainly for broadleaf weed control.

The Quebec agriculture ministry previously set up a support program to help corn and soy growers deal with waterhemp infestations. RAP, in its notice last Friday, urged affected producers to sign up for the program, to help limit the weed’s further spread in the province. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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Canola is pushing upside chart limits and modest corrections are likely going forward, but the fundamentals remain supportive and “the trend is up until further notice,” said analyst Mike Jubinville of MarketsFarm Pro.

While activity in the Chicago Board of Trade soybean market remains a key driver in canola, “the demand for canola, in and of itself, has also been quite powerful,” said Jubinville.

“We are now in a demand-pull environment, whereas typically we are supply-push — where growers are just pushing supply into the marketplace.”

A demand-driven market, he added, was a situation “that has not emerged, not just in canola but for grains and oilseed markets in general, for almost a decade.”

The unique situation “is providing lift across the spectrum… amazingly in the midst of harvest,” he said.

From a chart standpoint, long-term resistance is very close in the $535-$540 per tonne area. “That would send a very big message to the market if we were able to break through there,” Jubinville said.

The November contract, which traded as high as $533.30 on Sept. 21, settled Wednesday at $525.40. Breaking above the resistance will take support from outside vegetable oil markets, such as palm oil and soyoil, according to Jubinville.

He thought such a move was possible, as canola is still cheap compared to other oilseeds. “It’s not overvalued relative to competing products.”

While he felt higher prices were inevitable given the current market conditions, Jubinville recommended farmers continue to make sales on a scale-up basis.

— Phil Franz-Warkentin reports for MarketsFarm from Winnipeg.

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“We’re running into the top end on the monthly and weekly charts,” said Jamie Wilton, senior commodity futures specialist with RJ O’Brien in Winnipeg.

The November contract settled Wednesday at $530.20 per tonne, while some of the more deferred positions topped $540.

Looking at the charts, Wilton said the $530 per tonne level has been a “tough level of resistance” for a number of years.

With harvest operations picking up over the next few weeks, “I think there will be enough supply around, which should put a halt on the uptrend at some point,” he said.

However, he added, solid demand on the other side will remain supportive and temper any correction lower.

In addition to harvest conditions in both Canada and the U.S., Wilton said South American weather may also provide some direction for futures, with Brazil on the dry side as its soybean growing season gets underway.

— Phil Franz-Warkentin reports for MarketsFarm from Winnipeg.

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The November contract hit an intersession high of $482 per tonne on Wednesday, but settled below the $480 mark.

“You can’t discount at least the potential of this time being the breakout time, but for right now it (resistance) continues to hold,” MarketsFarm Pro analyst Mike Jubinville said.

Gradual strength in outside vegetable oil markets, including European rapeseed futures and Chicago Board of Trade soyoil, were supportive influences, and Jubinville said it would take continued gains in those outside markets to keep canola pointed higher.

Weather conditions in the United States and their influence on the CBOT soy complex will likely be a major driver over the next few weeks, with Canadian weather also being followed closely.

Excess precipitation may lead to issues with slow development and possible disease issues in parts of Western Canada. However, Jubinville said it was too early to cut yield estimates.

— Phil Franz-Warkentin reports for MarketsFarm from Winnipeg.

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DeKalb’s DKTF 92 SC and DKTF 94 CR will not be available for 2020, Bayer said. Canola growers who have already booked those seeds for this spring are now asked to talk to their local sales reps or retailers about suitable replacements.

“Last season proved to be a challenging environment for Canadian growers across the board,” Bayer said in a release Wednesday. “Some expressed concerns about the performance of these two hybrids in particular, while others saw these hybrids perform as expected.

“Ultimately this inconsistent performance did not meet Bayer’s expectations.”

The company said it ran side-by-side trials with other DeKalb TruFlex canolas and confirmed “the inconsistent yield results were limited to these two hybrids,” while “all other TruFlex canola, straight cut and clubroot hybrids performed to expectation.”

Separately on Twitter, the company said it would recommend DKTF 96 or 75-65 RR to replace DKTF 92 SC, while a TruFlex canola clubroot hybrid is “an alternative” for DKTF 94 CR.

DKTF 92 SC was announced in 2018 for use in the 2019 growing season, and was billed as having “improved pod strength for straight cutting” plus “very good combining ease and multigenic, R-rated blackleg resistance.”

DKTF 94 CR was also first made available to growers for the 2019 season and was billed as having resistance to five clubroot pathotypes (3, 2, 5, 6 and 8) plus an R rating for blackleg.

DeKalb promoted both TruFlex varieties as offering growers “a wider (herbicide) application window, with up to as many as 14 more days, without sacrificing yield potential.”

The two varieties’ herbicide tolerance packages were also marketed as allowing growers to control 51 weed species, “24 more than the Genuity Roundup Ready canola system.” — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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Manitoba’s agriculture department reported Friday that clubroot pathotype 3A — a strain that can “overcome some first-generation sources of genetic resistance” in commercial canola — has been positively identified in the south-central rural municipality of Pembina.

Canola varieties that have been traditionally rated as “R” or “resistant” won’t be effective in preventing clubroot infection against 3A, the department said.

Those canolas are tested against pathotypes 2, 3, 5, 6, and 8 but aren’t labelled as effective against 3A and 5X, both of which are “breaking-resistance” pathotypes.

Genetic resistance to pathotype 3A can be found in just a “small number “of commercially-available canolas, and those are specifically labelled for resistance to 3A, the department said.

“Outside of Alberta, very few fields have been found to contain novel pathotypes like this, and this is the first finding in Manitoba,” the Canola Council of Canada said in a separate release Tuesday.

“This is yet another cue for the industry to continue to take this disease seriously and implement clubroot management plans,” council agronomy specialist Dan Orchard said in Tuesday’s release.

“We still have an opportunity to get ahead of this disease and limit the impact it has on canola producers and the industry.”

Selection pressure

Caused by soil-borne Plasmodiophora brassicae, clubroot first became established in Canada mainly in vegetable-growing regions of Quebec, Ontario, Atlantic Canada and British Columbia.

Swollen galls appear on roots of a clubroot-infected canola plant, choking off its supply of water and nutrients and forcing it to prematurely ripen, either reducing its yield or killing it. Typical yield losses run around 50 per cent but can run up to nearly 100 per cent in fields under severe clubroot pressure.

The disease’s first appearance in Canadian canola was in Quebec in 1997, but it took until 2003 for clubroot to turn up on the Prairies, in spots near Edmonton.

Clubroot has since landed in thousands of Alberta fields, mainly in central regions but also in the province’s south and its northwestern Peace region, and in canola fields in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and North Dakota.

The first R-rated canola variety was released in 2009, but by 2013, significant clubroot infections began appearing in some Alberta fields seeded to R-rated canolas.

Pathotypes that are virulent against R-rated canolas were found to have been widespread in clubroot-infected areas of Alberta before R-rated varieties were introduced — but those pathotypes had usually been seen only at low levels in the galls on infected, non-resistant canola plants.

Experts say those findings confirm that the virulent strains of clubroot were able to thrive due to selection pressure from the use of R-rated canola.

Of the clubroot pathotypes affecting otherwise-R-rated canola, 5X was confirmed in central Alberta in 2014 — and 3A was found in a study last year to be the “predominant” virulent subtype in fields in that province.

Scouting time

A soil-borne disease, clubroot can be transferred from field to field on soil particles, travelling via footwear, vehicle tires, farm machinery and/or wind or water movement across a landscape.

The long-term sustainability of Prairie canola production will depend on suppression of clubroot infection through effective crop rotation — and rotation of sources of genetic resistance — together with good farm biosecurity, the Manitoba government said Friday.

Even when using resistant varieties, growers need to scout their crops to make sure the resistance they’re using is effective against the pathotypes in their fields and to see if new sources of resistance are needed.

Under high resting spore loads, symptoms can occur after using the same resistance source two or three times, or even sooner, the canola council said.

Producers are “strongly encouraged” to familiarize themselves with clubroot symptoms and start scouting this fall, the council said. Clubroot symptoms are most noticeable late in the season and can still be seen during and after harvest on canola roots.

“It is critically important to limit the pressure we put on resistance by using resistant varieties before spore concentrations are high, extending the break between canola crops and changing up resistance sources if necessary,” Orchard said Tuesday.

“The development of clubroot and discovery of a pathotype that is virulent to the original source of clubroot resistance is concerning to Manitoba canola farmers,” Ron Krahn, a director with the Manitoba Canola Growers Association, said Tuesday.

“We know how important canola is for a profitable crop rotation, which is why we feel the research dollars that MCGA spends every year on current production challenges is money well spent.” — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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