MPSG’s mission is to provide research, production knowledge and market development support to Manitoba pulse and soybean farmers. With 207,000 acres of dry beans grown in Manitoba in 2025, MPSG staff were keen to spend a day this July with a few of Canada’s top dry bean breeders. Our MPSG staff along with Manitoba Agriculture specialists walk fields and have knowledge and flow observations to scientists and breeding programs. It was such an informative day!
The people involved in dry bean breeding are excellent and have momentum and are increasing the capacity of their programs.
– Daryl Domitruk, Executive Director, Manitoba Pulse & Soybean Growers
Anfou Hou, based at Morden Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC), has been breeding dry beans since 2008. Anfou has focused on early-maturing dry bean variety and germplasm development for Manitoba and western Canada, the development of processing strategies for innovative commercially-ready pulse ingredients for the Canadian food sector, short season food type soybean breeding and evaluation and selection of adzuki beans for adaptation and production in Manitoba.
Going forward, Anfou will now be focusing more on soybean breeding.
Dr. Jamie Larsen, works with AAFC at Harrow, Ontario (Harrow is south of Windsor, and is about as far south as you can possibly go in Canada). Jamie works on Ontario dry bean Performance Agronomic Testing, dry bean disease screening, development of germplasm with disease resistance and emerging threats for Ontario dry beans. The breeding done at Harrow is heavily focused on pathology, soybean cyst nematode, and root rots. Harrow AAFC is the largest greenhouse research complex facility in North America.
The dry bean breeding program has been building up and focusing on resistance to bacterial blight and anthracnose.
Navy beans are predominant in Ontario, so at Harrow they breed a large number of navy bean varieties and they also work with a lot of pinto bean crosses.
Crosses are made inside the green house and they do what is referred to as speed breeding, where they can make crosses all year round. They use flood benches in the greenhouse. These are trays with sides that automatically flood multiple times a day and can grow 7,000 plants in one greenhouse as seedlings. Under high pressure sodium lights dry beans grow tall, and under LED lights dry beans grow shorter. By controlling the climate and maintaining high temperatures and long day lengths, in 8 weeks they are able to produce fully podded dry bean plants. With speed breeding they can cross all the way to the F5 generation (from a cross to a row) in 1 year. A row is grown outside in the field. F4 stage is still individual rows. The plant bulks out in the field. They have 4,000 rows in the field and work with each market class of dry beans: adzuki beans, black turtle beans, cranberry beans, dark red kidney beans, Dutch brown beans, great northern beans, kintoki beans, light red kidney beans, mung beans, otebo beans, pinto beans, small red beans, white kidney beans, white pea beans and yellow eye beans. . They spray paint rows and do hand pulling and threshing. They visually rate the crosses for maturity.
Buyers like bigger seed.
They rate for seed size and yield. The University of Guelph does yield trials from the F5 material that Harrow AAFC provides. These are tested in bacterial blight nurseries and tested for anthracnose resistance. We talked about how they screen for sclerotinia (white mould) in dry beans in Ontario. They obtain sclerotia bodies and sprinkle them in the plots, then they irrigate but some years it is actually too hot for sclerotinia to develop for them to study. The trial types that dry bean varieties go through are preliminary, advanced, private, and then registration. New varieties are tested at 2 locations in Ontario and then sent to Anfou at Morden, where yield trials are done at Morden, Winkler, Portage, and Carman.
Varieties have to be evaluated under Manitoba conditions and show their traits here before being recommended in Manitoba.
In the Manitoba registration trials varieties are further tested for 2 years.
Dry bean varieties that are a fit in southern Alberta are usually too early for Manitoba and dry beans that are a suitable in Harrow, Ontario are usually too long for Manitoba.
Navy beans are not as popular in Manitoba as they are in Ontario, currently due to lygus bug and earth tag issues.
Navy beans need to have maturity similar to T9905 to be successful in Manitoba. T9905 is broadly adapted navy bean with consistent and excellent yield potential. It has an upright growth habit and high pod set making it a good choice for direct harvest. This variety has an above average white mold tolerance and a maturity of 102 days. T9905 has no anthracnose resistance.
We discussed that:
Anthracnose was a problem in dry beans in the early 2000s in Manitoba, and the lessons learned were:
*use resistant varieties
*use crop rotation
*use good quality seed
Bacterial blights and root rots are the main Manitoba dry bean concerns.
Dry edible beans are expanding to non traditional areas in Manitoba and many areas have had success with black beans. The black bean variety Blacktails is known for late flowering and finishing quickly. A record, 127,000 acres of Pinto beans are being grown in Manitoba this year and the average yields last year were about 1800 lbs/acre provincially.
It takes skill to grow dry beans and there can be seed quality issues. The old (1991) navy bean variety OAC Laser was know to be very prone to seed coat crack. Edible bean seed from the USA is usually very dry at 10-12% moisture which leads to cracking. For solid seeded dry beans it is critical that we have good seed coat integrity, if not we begin the cropping season with poor plant stands.
We want to screen varieties in western Manitoba and have PAMI do equipment research with them too.
In Manitoba, we have a challenge with getting good dry bean plant stands consistently from plot to plot. Good seed quality is key otherwise you get half a stand.
Ontario also had to deal with seed with decreased germination when they receive seed from Idaho that has low moisture content.
Jamie Payton, the chair of the Ontario Bean Growers says they are looking at bringing seed production back to Canada. From dilution testing, they are able to shake seed and then test for bacteria from the solution, and this is a good way to test if that sample is safe for seed production.
Anfou, Jamie L, researchers at NDSU and Kristen Bett, dry bean breeder at the Crop Development Centre USask are working on flooding tolerance (abiotic stress) in dry beans. At the University of Saskatchewan they are able to compare irrigated and non irrigated trials to learn about stress & drought tolerance. Their research shows that drones can quickly and accurately measure important dry bean traits without damaging the plants. By using both LiDAR and multispectral sensors, breeders and researchers can better select high-yielding, climate-resilient varieties more efficiently.
The pathologists at the Manitoba AAFC locations are going to shift responsibilities to become specialists. Ahmed Abdelmagid at Morden AAFC will be specific to soybeans. Yong Min Kim, at Brandon AAFC will be the pulse pathologist.
We also discussed how important it is to promote the connection between soil health and growing legumes with policy analylist Carl Friesen at Morden AAFC. There is a National Soil Health Conservation group and coming from Senator Rob Black’s soil health report, a bill to require a National Soils strategy. It will gain momentum and it is important to keep that momentum industry led. Legumes deserve to be included in emerging soil health policy and become a focus equal in importance to emissions and mitigation strategies.
We travelled to Calvin Rothenburger’s pinto bean field south west of Morden and 7 miles north of the US border.
Calvin and his family operate a third generation select seed farm. Their fields received so much rain this season! This field had 11.8 inches of rain during the growing season, with 2.8 of those inches coming in a bad storm on July 4. The variety was Vibrant, and planted on 15 inch rows with a plant stand of 87,000 plants/ acre. Having 75 lbs N/acre and Edge spring applied, it was noticeable, compared to the check strip, how well the Edge did work. Calvin tried dry beans on canola stubble for the first time this year, but usually seeds dry beans into wheat stubble and has a 4 year year rotation for dry beans. In Manitoba, it is inadvisable to seed dry beans too deep because of cold soil temperatures. We learned that in Ontario, they can seed 2-3 inches deep successfully and mostly worry when they have seeded dry beans too shallow (out of the moisture). Calvin did double fungicide on 800 acres of dry beans this year. No check strips for fungicide except where the plane had to pull up due to trees. Trees affect humidity on the field edges. We discussed dry beans planted on 22 or 30 inch row spacing could do inter-row cultivation, but Calvin’s experience is that 15 inch spacing seems the nicest when it comes to a balance between yield and standability.
Calvin and Dennis Lange both agreed that the field we looked at had phoneminally good yield potential and they were seeing differences between varieties this year, as far as white mould incidence. In other years, white mould was less in upright varieties. 2025 seems the worst year in a long time for white mould in dry beans in southern Manitoba. Previously 2004 was the worst year on record for white mould according to disease surveys. That year, upright varieties with flowers on the top of the plants and those flowers fell into the canopy and feed the sclerotinia. Some samples were as high as 30% sclerotia bodies. Cool nights and moisture trigger white mould. Calvin estimated that he had only sprayed his dry beans for fungicide 2 or 3 years out of 15. Alberta does a lot of research on white mould in dry beans.
These pinto beans were rolled after planting. Rolling depends on the conditions of the day. The 15 inch rows covered in and offered excellent help as far as weed control on this silty clay loam soil. Calvin plans to harvest without knifing, with a 50 foot flex header (might use air reels , might not depends on conditions).There is a lot of wear on the combines when knifing. Vibrant is an upright type variety and upright growth type is ideal for solid seeding because they harvest easier and harvesting on an angle works well to even out the damage or losses at the cutting bar. More material feeds in nicer into the combine. Buyers will take dry beans at 18% seed moisture, if selling into the States at Wahalla, they will take them at 16% seed moisture. For kidney and speciality beans you would need a specific bean harvester. Pintos and blacks don’t need a speciality combine. Edible beans are generally hauled into the buyer, right off the combine. This harvest season producers will want to haul in all the Pinto beans that they have contracted, because by the looks of the majority of fields, there will be yields higher than planned.
Lowest pod height is a big concern and growers want to do everything they can to increase pod height. Pod height is determined by genotype x environment. Flower abortion lower down might help to increase the lowest pod height. Under cutting doesn’t leave as many beans behind in the field but now with draper headers they can scrape the ground and pick up more/most pods.
Best tip of the day whether in Ontario or Manitoba:
*Generally it is not a great idea to grow dry beans on heavy clay soils. Dry Beans will grow best on well drained, lighter soils. Dry beans NEED better drained soils.