A couple weeks ago, BASF introduced a new brand of canola aimed at the hotter, drier areas of the U.S. and Canada.
InVigor Gold will be the first LibertyLink-tolerant, yellow-seeded canola.
InVigor Gold is actually canola quality mustard. The scientific name for canola is Brassica napus. Brown mustard and oriental mustard are Brassica juncea. The new InVigor Gold being developed by BASF is Brassica juncea, but it will have all the qualities of canola.
Canola quality mustard has been around for a long time, but it has never been very successful.
Wade Stocker of BASF says InVigor Gold is a breakthrough innovation in many respects. Testing has shown a yield advantage in hot, dry regions on both sides of the border.
"Over the last few years…we're showing about an 8% increase over Brassica napus," Stocker said. "What's exciting about that is, of course, it's outperforming in those difficult years, right, in the difficult, harder, drier, more difficult years. But equally important, I think, is it's competing with Brassica napus or traditional canola in the good years, so in the years where maybe you do have adequate moisture and it's not as hot during flowering and those sorts of things. That's equally as important as outperforming it in the difficult years, I think."
Rather than the black seed coat colour of regular canola, InVigor Gold, as the name suggests will have a yellow seed coat.
"We're actively addressing these market acceptance topics as part of an ongoing collaboration with industry stakeholders, including elevators and crushers, to make sure that we're tackling these downstream customer questions, and certainly that question regarding meal and the color and these nuances is one of them that we're working towards right now." he said.
Stocker says the current roll-out plan will give U.S. farmers access to InVigor Gold a bit ahead of Canadian producers, pending regulatory approval in both countries.
"Targeting a 2027 northern Great Plains, so think of Montana, South Dakota, maybe a little bit in the (Pacific Northwest) that geography, so that would be the initial launch. Following up, let's call it end of the decade, early in the next. So, you know, 2029, 2030-ish, if we think of those time frames, that's when we're hoping to launch in central Great Plains, so Kansas area, as well as the brown soil zone in Canada."
According to BASF, decades of research and development across dozens of plant breeders and scientists led to the development of InVigor Gold.
