Oil Fields

Fields of brilliant-yellow canola flowers are at the heart of a Canadian innovation story. After the Second World War, Canada was looking for new crops and a domestic source of edible seed oils. By the 1960s and ’70s, Canadian plant scientists were working to create a genetic variation of rapeseed, a centuries-old crop that’s closely related to mustard, kale and cabbage. The trouble with rapeseed (besides its problematic name) is that its oil at that time had high levels of a nutritionally undesirable fatty acid called erucic acid. Plus, it was bitter. A cultivar low in both of those traits, dubbed “double low,” was the big goal.

Baldur Stefansson of the University of Manitoba and Keith Downey of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in Saskatoon are considered the “Fathers of Canola” — sometimes collaborating, sometimes competing — for their pioneering work in creating the eventual new double-low crop. In 1978, it was officially named canola — a mashup of “Canadian” and “oil.” Today, not only is it our second-biggest crop (after wheat) but we are also the world’s biggest producer of canola. Saskatchewan is by far the largest producer, followed by Alberta and Manitoba, but canola has been grown in every province, so that bright yellow will catch your eye from B.C. to P.E.I.