Leduc, a fourth-generation producer who grows more than 10,000 acres of wheat, durum, mustard, canola, peas and lentils in an area dominated by grazing cattle, thinks that the long-awaited technological improvement, a plant that produces canola-like oil, could help him eke out a few more dollars per acre.

“All I’m trying to do is improve the bottom line of our farm,” he said.

WHY IT MATTERS: Mustard growers worry BASF’s InVigor Gold hybrid will destroy Canada’s condiment mustard industry. BASF says the oilseed could be grown safely in arid regions where canola routinely fails.

But Trent Dewar, who farms elsewhere in the Canadian semi-desert known as Palliser’s Triangle, fears the new GMO mustard plant will ruin the pure mustard he grows for the premium Dijon bottlers in France, the United States and Japan, as well as other specialty mustards. The industry is worth about $150 million (C$209 million) in exports annually — only a fraction of the $8.9 billion (C$12.4 billion) canola exports market. But in a geography where canola fails more often than it flourishes, mustard has been the lifeblood of many farms since growers started planting it 90 years ago.

“Everybody I’ve talked to personally is quite shell-shocked that this would even be considered,” he said.

Mustard is a tiny crop in Canada, with usually less than 200,000 metric tons of mustard produced by a few hundred farmers. Mustard production soars and sags with volatile world prices and local weather, like other specialty crops. Canadian canola growers, by contrast, usually plant more than 20 million acres of their crop, which produces upwards of 19 million metric tons. That makes canola Canada’s biggest source of crop income by far.

That’s why so many are excited about the drought-resistant GMO mustard plant. Global agricultural giant BASF hopes to win approval from Canadian and U.S. agencies for commercialization as soon as next year in the U.S. and a couple of years later in Canada.

It’s not without risk, however. The GMO plant looks nearly identical to a traditional mustard plant. Neighboring fields could be contaminated with seeds and pollen carried on the wind or by bees. Both traditional brown and oriental mustards and the new mustard canola are brassica junceas, so they can breed, with pollen from one type fertilizing the other.

“It has the potential of wrecking a whole industry,” said farmer Norm Hall, the chair of SaskMustard, which represents Saskatchewan’s mustard growers. The group is lobbying the government in Ottawa to keep the crop out of Canada.

Brent Collins, head of BASF’s seeds and traits division in Canada, said the crop was an “innovation” that would “truly unlock new canola acres, helping meet market demand.”

The French connection

France, which sources about half its mustard supplies from Canada, has a strict non-GMO standard. Other large global buyers are similarly stringent. Many Canadian mustard growers and sellers fear the door could slam shut if traces of the hybrid mustard-canola were detected.

“They look at it like a razor blade that shows up in a bag of rice,” said Peter Gorski of Broadgrain, a company that sells Canadian specialty crops like mustard to buyers around the world.

Foreign buyers have not said how they will respond if GMO traces appear. Most contracts contain a commitment to be non-GMO, and two contracts shared with Reuters contained that specification. A French law limits the presence of GMOs in the food supply, but the threshold of acceptable traces is mostly left to the buyer.

Christophe Planes, sales and marketing director for French mustard processor Reine de Dijon, said the GMO plant could spell trouble for Canadian exports.

About half of the company’s seeds are sourced from Canada, he said, adding: “We’re clearly committed to a non-GMO policy.”

“Since France is quite strict regarding GMOs we systematically check all our supplies to ensure that there are no traces, or very few traces,” Planes said.

Since Canada’s crippling drought of 2021, which hampered mustard production and triggered panic in French shoppers finding grocery store shelves bare of the condiment, France has boosted its own domestic supplies. There are other sources for mustard seed, such as Argentina, Germany and Ukraine, but Canadian mustard is both high quality and cheap, Planes said. Switching could affect quality and raise prices.

A flax grower’s nightmare, revisited

Canadian mustard growers are haunted by a historical precedent: tainted flax. Canada lost a well-paying and steady European market for flax when traces of a GMO variety called Triffid were found in European food products in 2009. Exports plunged and never recovered.

Mustard is an ancient crop, its seeds found in stone-age settlements of the Near East, in ancient Sumerian texts, and even in the tomb of Egypt’s Pharaoh Tutankhamun. In the Bible, Jesus of Nazareth told a parable about the mustard seed.

By contrast, the mustard-canola hybrid is a 21st-century scientific marvel, employing decades of traditional plant breeding and later GMO methods to produce a mustard plant that produces a version of canola oil, and that survives a herbicide controlling the plague of tumbleweeds in western North America. Many farmers in the mustard-growing region have been eagerly awaiting this new crop since the 1990s, but it has been a tortuous scientific development process. Canola is a cool-weather crop that thrives in northern latitudes like Canada, but climate change’s bouts of extreme heat and drought are expected to make it more challenging to grow.

Some of the original research into using a mustard plant to produce canola-like seed was done by scientists working for a farmers’ cooperative in the 1990s, as well as by university researchers. Now global agriculture giant BASF has brought what it calls InVigor Gold to the cusp of commercialization.

Traditional clashes with bold and new

From discussions with mustard and canola industry key players, it is clear that the two camps have sharply different assessments of whether the GMO mustard can flourish alongside traditional mustard.

“We know we can’t co-exist,” said Rick Mitzel, executive director of Sask Mustard.

BASF, however, thinks two million acres of its mustard-canola could be grown in arid areas of Canada and the U.S., with safeguards against pollen flow and seed spread between mustard and canola fields.

“We understand the areas that mustard growers are concerned about and it’s our responsibility to be able to explain what exactly we’re doing to be able to appease some of these concerns,” said Collins.

The two sides have sporadically met in recent years, but as the widespread release of the crop approaches, mustard growers and the mustard industry have grown desperate.

At an industry meeting this winter, mustard growers and merchants called for their representatives to take legal and political action to block the introduction of InVigor Gold. But Hall told them it would be an “uphill battle” because BASF is following the usual crop development protocols, and market impact is not considered during the Canadian crop approval processes.

Kacy Gehring of Mountain States Oilseeds, a U.S. mustard merchant in American Falls, Idaho, said the concern about GMO contamination destroying markets could trigger farmers to just stop growing mustard. That wouldn’t just be a problem for companies like hers, but also bad for world culinary culture, she said.

Farmer Leduc understands the worries of his mustard-growing neighbors, but doesn’t apologize for wanting to get InVigor Gold into his fields as soon as possible. Farming in an arid region isn’t easy, but it’s where his great-grandfather settled. He needs every survival tool he can get.

“I wish I was in a wetter part of the province,” he said.

— Additional reporting by Sybille de la Hamaide and Gus Trompiz in France.

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“This significant investment strengthens our ability to bring forward the next generation of high-performing hybrids, supporting yield gains, agronomic resilience and long-term success for Canadian farmers,” Leta LaRush, vice-president of BASF Agricultural Solutions Canada, said today in a news release.

BASF announced the expansion of the Canola Breeding Centre of Innovation in Saskatoon. Construction will begin this spring with completion expected by the end of 2027.

WHY IT MATTERS: With climate change driving weather unpredictability, canola producers need varieties that survive better and yield more.

The expansion will add advanced infrastructure, including precision-controlled growth systems and a research-grade glasshouse, the company said in the news release. These will increase breeding capacity and shorten innovation cycles, it added.

“These enhancements are critical to implementing genomic selection at scale, enabling faster, more precise breeding decisions and accelerating genetic gain across all InVigor programs,” BASF said.

The new glasshouse – a facility that enables researchers to develop experimental climates — is designed to support future hybrid breeding programs.

The centre will focus on the development of new InVigor hybrid canola varieties to better withstand changing environmental pressures and accommodate growing global demand.

Saskatchewan agriculture minister David Marit said the announcement was great news.

“It just shows the research that’s happening here and the confidence of a company like BASF to invest here. They see opportunities around the research and looking at genetics,” Marit told Glacier FarmMedia.

“You look at where the canola industry is going just in the least 15 years with new varieties, new higher oil contents, straight cut varieties, higher drought tolerant varieties — it just adds to what’s going on here in the province.”

-With files from Karen Briere

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They don’t know if they can stop it, but they do aim to try.

“We know at the end of the day it’s going to destroy the condiment mustard industry in Canada, that that’ll be the end of it,” said Rick Mitzel, chief executive officer of Mustard 21 and executive director of SaskMustard.

Industry has been meeting with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, Agriculture Canada and BASF, which announced last June it was going to introduce the crop in the United States in 2027 and in Canada a couple of years later.

WHY IT MATTERS: InVigor Gold is a genetically modified LibertyLink-resistant crop, which the European market won’t accept. Although BASF has called it a yellow canola, it is actually a brassica juncea, or from the mustard family, and not brassica napus, which is the canola grown in Western Canada.

Sask Mustard officially opposes the introduction of InVigorGold.

In December, it issued a news release and letter to producers to draw attention to what it called a critical threat from the crop. Saskatchewan supplies about 80 per cent of Canada’s mustard and 50 per cent of global supply.

Sask Mustard, Mustard 21 and the Canadian Mustard Association strongly disagree with BASF’s assertion the technology won’t negatively affect mustard producers, they said.

“The introduction of a GM B. juncea crop threatens to irreversibly contaminate Canada’s non-GM mustard supply through expected gene flow within a single species,” they said.

“This would destroy the trust we have built with international buyers, particularly in the European Union and Japan, who rely on the guaranteed non-GM status of Canadian mustard seed.”

French’s and France

In an interview, Mitzel said the next step is to consult with companies such as McCormick and others to gain their support.

In December he went to France to meet with four major processors that control about 80 per cent of the mustard in Europe. Some of them attended the recent mustard meetings online and are planning a trip to Saskatchewan this summer.

“They’re very concerned about it,” Mitzel said.

“They don’t want to lose the Canadian supply because it’s such high quality. They did tell me that 50 per cent of the mustard they buy comes from Canada. They’re not backing down on GMOs.”

The French would be faced with buying lower-quality crop from competitors such as Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan if Canada couldn’t guarantee GMO-free. That would cause milling issues, Mitzel said.

During the meeting, Kacy Gehring from Mountain States Oilseeds said U.S. farmers are also concerned. The first effects of possible contamination will be seen there and could limit their markets.

She asked if pressure from U.S. signatories would help the Canadian cause.

Others at the meeting likened their fight to a “David and Goliath” situation and wondered how they could possibly take on a huge company with far more money and people. They noted the similarity to when Triffid flax appeared years after the GM variety had been discontinued, resulting in expensive testing.

Howard Love, crop breeder for Mustard 21, said the crop is “absolutely not” canola. He discussed the science behind InVigor Gold’s development and how contamination could occur.

Contamination won’t be a problem in year one but will take a few years to develop, he said.

‘The right reasons’

In Canada, BASF would be targeting the brown soil zone where about 80 per cent of Saskatchewan mustard is grown, said Sask Mustard chair Norm Hall. Cross-pollination is a huge concern.

CMA chair Dave Macfarlane said his members see the threat based on Triffid and also from a 2009 finding of GM canola in European mustard. That incident led to testing as well.

He said the industry doesn’t know if the EU would allow similar testing protocols if InVigor Gold is approved.

Some growers asked what support they have from oilseed producers. Mitzel said the Canola Council of Canada appears “very much on side with what BASF is doing. They feel they need this product to continue to grow canola.”

During the SaskOilseeds meeting, chair Dean Roberts said his organization does not have an official position.

“Right now we’re gathering as much information as we can,” he said.

He said they have to be aware of what it means to come out against an innovation, particularly when a company is willing to invest in research and development.

“If we were to say no, we want to be sure we’re saying no for the right reasons, but we also want to be aware of the impacts those decisions could have on other markets,” he said.

“One hundred per cent, we’ve got our eye on it.”

The mustard industry is pinning its hopes on the CFIA and its regulatory process. Although often seen as burdensome, both Mitzel and Macfarlane said in this case that system is their best bet to save their sector.

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Through its Fields of Purpose program in 2025, the company donated $100,000 worth of seed and crop protection products to charitable growing projects across Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario.

The initiative builds on the community harvest fundraisers already happening in many rural areas, where farmers seed, grow and harvest a crop entirely for donation. All proceeds go to local causes or organizations such as the Canadian Foodgrains Bank.

“BASF is a proud partner of Canadian growers, their communities and the causes that matter most to them,” said Leta LaRush, vice-president of BASF Agricultural Solutions Canada. “Rural communities are the heartbeat and backbone of Canada, and BASF is proud to help amplify their efforts.”

This year, 36 community fields benefited from the initiative. One of them, the Leduc & District Growing Project in Alberta, held its 20th annual harvest fundraiser on Sept. 25. BASF donated fungicide to the project, which project organizers said helped them get more for the crop.

Every bushel from the project’s fields is sold, and the proceeds are donated to the Foodgrains Bank.

“All of the inputs and the time for seeding and harvest are donated,” said one project member. “And that goes a long way.”

Growers or retailers interested in nominating a community project for 2026 can contact their local BASF representative.

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Health Canada, in an email, said PMRA employees are coping with a large number of safety evaluations, thus delaying its decision on glufosinate.

“The target timeframes for post-market reviews typically vary between two to four years … depending on the complexity of the re-evaluation, availability of data, stakeholder engagement and other factors,” Health Canada said.

“However, like many other regulators (in other countries), PMRA is facing a backlog of post-market reviews.”

Agency experts began looking at the health and environmental safety of glufosinate-ammonium in 2018. It expects to complete the evaluation in 2027.

Liberty, which has glufosinate-ammonium as its active ingredient, is a popular herbicide on Canadian farms. It’s used to control weeds on fields seeded with BASF InVigor canola, hybrids that have tolerance to glufosinate. It’s also sprayed on weeds in other crops in Canada, the United States, South America and dozens of other countries.

The herbicide is not used in Europe, where the registration of glufosinate expired in 2018 and was not renewed. The European Union classified the herbicide as presumed toxic for human reproductivity.

BASF rejects that assessment, with its website saying it was based on lab studies where rats were exposed to “doses impossible under realistic and responsible conditions of use.”

“Glufosinate-ammonium has been used safely for 30 years… and to date, there are no known cases of harm to humans when applied according to labelled instructions.”

The PMRA launched its special review of glufosinate after France “prohibited all uses due to health reasons,” Health Canada said.

Meanwhile, the PMRA started a re-evaluation of glufosinate in 2019. Re-evaluations of pesticides happen every 15 years, which is required under the Pest Control Products Act.

The PMRA merged those efforts into one evaluation.

“There is a substantial amount of information to analyze as part of these reviews,” Health Canada said.

“Products containing glufosinate ammonium can continue to be used according to the current label directions during these evaluations.”

However, the PMRA will not permit new uses of glufosinate until the evaluation is complete.

As part of a plan to speed up reviews and decisions, the PMRA wants to focus its attention on pesticides that require more oversight.

“PMRA will continue to explore opportunities to streamline its processes and optimize resource allocation,” Health Canada said. “Thereby supporting industry competitiveness and reinforcing the PMRA’s ability to deliver on its core mandate over the long term.”

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The Ludwigshafen-based chemical giant had already warned that it was facing high levels of uncertainty from U.S. tariffs and the potential backlash from other countries, cautioning that the threat of trade duties was prompting customers to order more cautiously overall.

Why it matters: BASF is a key supplier of crop protection products for Canadian farmers.

In an unscheduled release of preliminary results on Friday, BASF said that earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA), before special items, would likely be between 7.3 billion euros ($C11.67 billion) and 7.7 billion euros in 2025.

That is a reduction from its previous outlook of between 8.0 billion euros and 8.4 billion euros.

“Global gross domestic product is projected to grow less in 2025 than previously assumed. This development is essentially attributable to the U.S. tariffs,” it said.

“In 2025, market demand for chemical products will likely grow less than previously expected,” the company added.

The company also announced that second-quarter operating profit declined 9.7 per cent, in line with market expectations.

EBITDA before special items dropped to 1.77 billion euros, right in line with consensus posted on the company’s website, but lower than the 1.96 billion euros generated a year earlier.

—Reporting by Ludwig Burger and Tom Sims

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The German industrial chemicals giant has said that its Agricultural Solutions unit should be ready by 2027 for an initial public offering that could see BASF sell a minority stake in the maker of pesticides and seeds.

Hybrid wheat

“We aim to further increase our share of revenue from seeds. We are at close to 22 per cent and we want to move more towards 25 per cent,” Livio Tedeschi, the division’s president, told Reuters.

Among new products underpinning that ambition, BASF is working on hybrid wheat, an approach that has for years been pursued by the industry to boost wheat yields, and new soy variants that resist pests such as soil roundworms.

Tedeschi said this was a high strategic priority and it could be supported by collaboration deals and small acquisitions.

Increasing Asia market share

A particular geographic focus across products including crop chemicals and digital services was Asia, he added.

“When measured by market share, we are under-represented in Asia. We want to increase our market share,” said Tedeschi.

BASF’s agriculture business, among the four largest industry players alongside Syngenta, Bayer and Corteva, posted global 2024 sales of 9.8 billion euros (C$15.4 billion), with Asia accounting for 11.6 per cent of that.

From North America, Europe and South America it derived 39.8 per cent, 24.6 per cent and 24 per cent of sales, respectively.

Parent BASF last week said it was facing high levels of uncertainty from U.S. tariffs and other countries’ reactions to them, but reaffirmed its earnings guidance for lack of clearer economic indicators.

Tedeschi added that BASF’s decision to separate the agriculture unit from the rest of the business gave the unit more autonomy and would allow it to sustain research and development spending at nine to 10 per cent of sales.

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The threat of trade duties was prompting customers to order more cautiously overall, finance chief Dirk Elvermann said in an analyst call. “We are maintaining our outlook because the assumptions that we have taken can’t be replaced by better assumptions,” he added.

BASF’s shares fell two per cent to a one-week low at after the company also reported that adjusted EBITDA slipped 3.2 per cent in the first quarter to 2.63 billion euros (C$4.11 billion), slightly below market expectations.

Net income in the period from January to March dropped 41 per cent to 808 million euros. The firm attributed this in part to a disposal loss, which it previously put at around 300 million euros, from selling a stake in a wind farm project due to lower energy needs in Europe.

The group reiterated it was targeting 2025 earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) and adjusted for one-off items of between 8 billion euros and 8.4 billion euros, up from 7.9 billion euros last year.

Among positive developments, Elvermann said demand for agricultural products was perking up, there was an improved business sentiment in China and lower oil prices were providing cost relief.

BASF, which is holding its annual investor meeting on Friday, said in March it would sell its 49 per cent stake in two planned North Sea wind farms back to the original owner Vattenfall while retaining the Swedish utility as a renewable power supplier.

— Reporting by Ludwig Burger and Patricia Weiss

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Corteva Agriscience in mid-November said it’s made a “revolutionary breakthrough” with which it expects to produce hybrid hard red winter wheat for the North American market “as early as 2027” and add other hybrid wheats to the product line over time.

The U.S. company sounds quite upbeat about the performance of its “first-of-its kind, proprietary non-GMO hybrid technology.” It notes its internal yield trial testing shows a 10 per cent increase in yield potential “while using the same amount of land and resources” and yields roughly 20 per cent higher than current “elite” varieties in “water-stressed environments.”

(Those trials, Corteva says, were run at six to 10 locations per year over two years, with hard red winter wheat testing done in Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and Colorado.)

Of course, a lot of unknowns still swirl around this announcement. Will this wheat, or one like it, be available to Canadian growers? Corteva has since told us it anticipates introducing the product to the Canadian market at some point but doesn’t yet have a hard timeline for it. It also says it plans to also bring this technology to the hard red spring class by decade’s end.

Also: how will this differ from hybrids other companies have in the pipeline? We’re still waiting to hear more, though we know the answer will be different from just a few years ago, when several players appeared to be racing to get hybrid wheats to market.

From Prairie wheat growers’ perspective, the most significant of those was Bayer, which in the mid-2010s set up a breeding station and trial acreage near Pike Lake, south of Saskatoon, devoted to hybrid wheat. But in 2018 Bayer, needing antitrust approvals for its takeover of Monsanto, sold that shop among others to BASF — which in turn walked away from North American hybrid wheat development in 2023, saying its trials “have not achieved the development goals we set to meet the needs of growers in Canada and the United States” and that it would instead focus its work on European markets.

Syngenta, working on its own hybrid wheats since 2010, rolled out a few thousand acres’ worth of hybrid HRS wheat seed for U.S. growers in 2023 under the brand name AgriPro. It also expects its products to show a 10-12 per cent bump in yield potential compared to current wheats — and that it will produce other hybrid HRS and HRW wheats for the U.S. market within the next few years.

The company, however, also walked away from hybrid wheat development for the Canadian market in 2018, and says it has no plans to bring its new U.S. wheats up here either. “The products continuing to come through the pipeline are not a fit for the industry standards that Canada has today,” a Syngenta rep told the Western Producer in 2023.

Past all that is the big question: cost. As Jim Timlick notes elsewhere in these pages, Corteva alone spends $4 million per day on R+D and needs to recoup such investment from somebody. If its new wheats are ultimately a fit for the Prairie market, that somebody is you.

Setting that price point is the challenge facing Corteva and others. Whatever they ultimately charge growers for this achievement, is a 10 per cent boost in yield potential — 20, in a dry year — going to pencil out for growers who put down cash for this product?

It’s a question the seed companies need to consider carefully — because along with the big breakthroughs come the bills for all the work that didn’t pan out. And while a lot of those expenses are deductible down the road, the bills have still gotta be paid.

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LDC has partly shifted its focus towards the consumer end of the food chain to become less reliant on commodity trading. It launched its own juice brand and established a pulses unit to support expansion into plant-based protein products.

The deal with BASF includes a production site and an R&D centre in Germany and three application labs outside of Germany, LDC said.

BASF said separately that the food and health performance ingredients business had limited synergies into the group and was no longer a strategic focus area for it.

The companies did not give financial details of the agreement.

— Reporting by Sybille de La Hamaide

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