CELPIP Reading Part 3 Practice Test: Canola: A Canadian Crop Invention

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Drive across the Prairies in July and you will see fields of brilliant yellow stretching to the horizon. These are canola fields, and the crop they produce has become one of the most valuable in Canadian agriculture. Most of it is grown in Saskatchewan, Alberta and Manitoba, and Canada ranks among the world’s leading producers and exporters. Yet many Canadians who cook with canola oil every day do not realize that the plant is a homegrown invention. Its name, adopted in the late 1970s, blends “Canada” with “ola,” a reference to an oil that is low in acid.

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Canola’s story begins with rapeseed, an older relative that had been grown for centuries in Europe and Asia. Canadian farmers began planting it on a large scale during the Second World War, when its oil was in demand as a lubricant for the steam engines of naval and merchant ships, because it clung well to metal surfaces exposed to water and steam. Once the war ended, much of that demand disappeared. The crop also had two serious drawbacks. Its oil contained high levels of erucic acid, which raised health concerns about using it in food, and the protein-rich meal left over after pressing contained bitter compounds called glucosinolates, which limited how much of it livestock were willing to eat.

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In the 1960s and 1970s, plant scientists at the University of Manitoba and at a federal research station in Saskatoon set out to solve both problems, in work that is still regarded as one of Canada’s great agricultural achievements. Baldur Stefansson led the Manitoba program and Keith Downey the one in Saskatoon; the two groups worked separately but shared their findings. They tested thousands of seeds, searching for rare plants that naturally contained less of the unwanted substances, and then crossed them over many generations. The work relied entirely on conventional breeding rather than on transferring genes in a laboratory. Reducing erucic acid came first; lowering glucosinolates took several more years. By the mid-1970s, the first variety low in both had been released, and the improved crop soon needed a name of its own to set it apart from ordinary rapeseed.

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Today, canola oil is valued for being low in saturated fat, and it appears in everything from cooking oil and margarine to salad dressings. Very little of the harvested seed goes to waste: after the oil is pressed out, the remaining meal is sold as a high-protein feed for cattle, pigs and poultry. Since the 1990s, varieties that can tolerate particular herbicides have been widely planted, and they now make up the great majority of the Canadian crop. Much of the harvest is shipped abroad, either as raw seed or as oil and meal, making canola an important source of income for the country’s farmers. Many growers also plant it in rotation with wheat and other cereals, which helps to break the cycle of crop diseases.