Farmer Focus: Why Canadians call wheat ‘poverty grass’

I started the new year with a trip across the Atlantic to speak at Canada’s South West Agricultural Conference about improving wheat yields.

This was a difficult gig as Canadians frequently refer to wheat as “poverty grass” because they get far superior income from maize and soya beans.

However, growers are recognising that including wheat in their rotation is improving corn and soya bean yields due to the different rooting characteristics of wheat which improve soil health.

See also: Farmer Focus: Defra delivers another stewardship conundrum

About the author

Mark Stubbs

Mark Stubbs manages his 700ha family arable farm in Lincolnshire, in partnership with his parents. The farm grows wheat, malting barley, oilseed rape, linseed and cover crops. Mark won the highest yielding winter wheat crop in the 2024 YEN awards.

Read more articles by Mark Stubbs

My talk started off about the importance of soil health and how I improved soil organic matter levels on my home farm from 1% 25 years ago to now more than 5%.

We removed the plough and introduced min-till cultivations, started cover cropping and added organic manures in the form of poultry manure.

I followed this up by expressing the importance of establishment, and how I like to have a sowing rate of 500 plants/sq m and a row spacing of 12.5cm to reduce competition in the row.

I think attention to detail contributes 10% to final yield and the weather contributes 90%.

Canada has a much shorter growing season compared with the UK, so their nutrition and agronomy is slightly different to ours.

They usually only apply fungicide at T1 and T3, although their higher-yielding farms are finding a T2 spray helps.

This is because T1 and T3 is usually only four weeks apart where ours is an eight-week period. 

Nutrition is usually a front-loaded sulphur application in March and 150kg/ha of nitrogen in two applications.

Their main obstacle to overcome is the rainfall and temperature in June, which is equivalent to our July of grain set period.

Usually, during this period the Canadian temperature is above 30C, with low moisture levels.

However, last year cooler weather and higher moisture enabled them to get record yields of more than 10t/ha compared with averages of 6-8t/ha.

Maize and wheat are traded at similar prices.

On January 7 2026, the Canadian wheat price was £126/t compared with the UK at £165/t.