No loafing around at the research farm

Here at Sollio Agriculture’s research farm, we leave nothing to chance. It takes several years of research and field work all over the country to get a product to your field. Our team will even hand make certain varieties and use them to bake bread. It’s that kind of attention to detail and innovative spirit that ultimately helps farmers improve their yields.

When summer ends at the research farm, there’s no loafing around. To make sure that Sollio Agriculture is marketing only the most high-performance cereal varieties, our experts study them down to the most minute details. They even bake their own bread to test the flour’s baking quality.

Selection protocol

“Not all wheats make good bread flour. If we want our farmers to be able to sell their crops to mills, we need to develop cultivars specifically designed for that market,” explains Sollio Agriculture researcher Roxanne Henrie. She starts by selecting the flours most likely to produce good bread. Then, her colleagues get to work. In the research farm kitchen, everything is precisely calculated, weighed and measured. “We follow each step to the letter,” Henrie says.

Once the bread is out of the oven, our experts check for volume, colour and air bubbles. They also compare it with control bread already known to be high quality. “These tests allow us to predict the chances that mills will be interested in a particular flour,” Henrie adds. “When we develop bread wheat varieties, it opens up new markets for farmers.”

Striving for better yields

Henrie’s work and that of her colleagues doesn’t stop at breadmaking, of course. At the research farm and in other locations across Canada, our experts test many varieties of forage crops and cereals.

“It takes years before a new cultivar makes it to market,” Henrie says. “We have to make sure that our products are well adapted to their environment and that they offer the best possible yield for farmers.”