New Crops for Canadian Agriculture

The designation “new crop” may be applied to virtually any useful plant that in some respect is new. The following categories of newness (which are not all mutually exclusive) are economically important in discussing new crops: (1) gathering new wild crops from nature; (2) cultivating an undomesticated plant not previously grown; (3) domesticating (changing genetically) an undomesticated plant; (4) breeding improved cultivars of domesticated plants; (5) growing crops in new areas; (6) growing crops for new uses; (7) growing crops with new management techniques; (8) selling crops in new markets. Category 2 and (especially) category 3 represent “new crops” in the narrow sense perhaps most widely understood. Although all domesticated crops originally came from the wild, in recent times the domestication of wild plants relatively infrequently produces crops of notable economic significance. Based on 160 crops grown and/or imported in the US that had a value of at least $1 million, Prescott–Allen and Prescott–Allen (1986) found that only six crops with this value were domesticated since 1900, a rate of success of less than 7 per century. Almost all potentially important new crops for a political or agronomic region are cultivated elsewhere, and indeed the leading domesticated crops of Canada all originated in foreign lands. Crop diversification, especially involving new crops, is considered to be a fundamental area deserving support in Canada (Small, in 1999; note Fig. 1). The following reviews what is significantly new (for any of the eight kinds of newness pointed out above) with respect to the major classes of crops in Canada, such as cereals, oilseeds, forages, vegetables, and fruits. These crop classes represent arenas of competition, and new crops generally can only compete within one of these arenas. As will be noted, some of these arenas thrive on the introduction of new entities, while others are like clubs that are very hostile to the entry of new members. Given the breadth of the topic, only a limited amount of detail and selected examples will be presented for the crop categories, and minor crops that either have had very limited success in Canada or show little potential will not be discussed or will be given only incidental mention. For those seeking additional information on new crop development in Canada, it should be noted that the following present a wealth of information on the World Wide Web: (1) the federal department of agriculture, i.e. Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC), Canada’s primary plant breeding institution, which has research stations in all provinces; (2) the provincial agriculture or resource departments; and (3) a wide variety of farm-oriented organizations.