Edible Bean School: Growing and marketing black beans

The Edible Bean School on realagriculture.com is brought to you by Hensel Co-op. Welcome to The Edible Bean School. Today I'm at the Hensel Co-op processing plant where we're going to talk about black beans, a class of beans that are grown across North America, across Canada, and certainly in Ontario. I'll be joined later in the show by Hensel field marketer Dave Luigi to discuss agronomics and crop management tips, but we'll kick things off with Hensel Co-op's origination manager Wade Bickle for a look at the black bean market. Now Wade, let's start with the name. Now we call them black beans, but in many parts of the world it's a little different. I think the name started out as black turtles initially, so most people call them black beans in North America, but I think the proper name is black turtle beans. Now what are the major markets, the main markets for black beans, you know globally? Where are they? I think the most consumption is in Mexico, Central America, but you know there's regions in here in North America, Canada, that the consumption of black beans is steadily increasing as well as in Europe. Now I love black beans in my burrito. Sure. Where do they fit in the diet and on the menu? Yeah, so it's a salad bean, it's beans and rice, but boy there's a good place for black beans in a burrito too. Yeah. So let's talk about bean production in North America. Where are they grown? What's the landscape like? So initially you know black beans were mainly grown in New York state and have evolved into the major production areas being Michigan and now North Dakota, but you know the varieties nowadays they can fit them into Alberta, Manitoba, and certainly lots growing here in Ontario as well. Yeah. So how has it changed though? How has the bean evolved from a grower's perspective? Yeah, so you know many years ago all these beans that we grew were a bush type bean and now they've grown into, they've bred the uprightness and direct harvest, a really easy bean to harvest as far as a grower is concerned. Now Hensel moves a lot of beans, a lot of different classes. Why don't you tell growers about the opportunities for black beans? Right now the opportunity is there for Hensel Co-op growers and Hensel Co-op to market more beans into Mexico. They've had a production problem in 2023 and I think that that's going to carry over into this 2024 crop and demand for black beans is increasing in North America and around the world. We're now going to talk agronomy with Dave Luigi. Dave, let's start with planting populations. You know there's a couple of schools of thought here on black bean. What do we need to think about? We've got to think of a few things here obviously for planting populations. One is row width and generally speaking as you narrow your row width you bump up your population a little bit. Number two is your soil conditions at planting time and the weather that's to follow afterwards. If we kind of get some cool weather and conditions aren't ideal you may want to bump that population up a little bit. Three is the production capacity of the soil or the zone. There again when we bump up the population, bump up population in the poorer yielding zones and lower the population in the high production areas. The last item is to manage disease particularly white mold. We'll talk about that in a second. What about variable rate planting? Are black beans a good candidate for that? Absolutely they are as any class of dry bean is. Your ROI is the best on dry beans. A couple reasons for that is we're able to reduce our planting populations so we save ourselves some money on seed. At the same time we're managing disease. It's a strategy to control disease particularly white mold and we're maintaining yields and in fact we're increasing yields by variable rate populations. Let's talk about planting date and planting conditions and you know and what we're putting that seed into. Ideally this part of Ontario like to plant the last few days in May, first few days in June when the soil is nice and warm. Hopefully adequate moisture as well. Definitely want to plant into moisture to get uniform emergence. If we don't get uniform emergence then we have uneven maturity come harvest time. One of the things my dad always said was don't try to beat a major rain event. It doesn't matter the weather we get before planting, it's the weather that comes afterwards. So nice warm weather after planting. Ideally you want to see the beans twice in one week. Once when you're dumping them in the planter box, second is when they're coming up out of the ground. Let's talk about weed control. Obviously a key for any type of production. What's the strategy here? Two pass is always part of this but you might want to think a little bit earlier on right? Yeah absolutely. Your weed control program should start with the previous corn crop and or wheat crop. You definitely want to control your perennial weeds and your tough to kill weeds in those two crops because you have more options. On the bean crop itself definitely a two-pass approach. The first pass should be a soil applied herbicide that predominantly controls your annual grasses and some broadleaf weeds as well. And then the second pass will come about 21 to 24 days after planting and there you're going to address some broadleaf weed escapes. You may also need to address escaped annual grasses and some volunteer corn. So in fact it might be a three-pass approach. You can mix the grass herbicide and broadleaf herbicide together but ideally should be done separate passes because of timing and because of efficacy. It's very important to control your annual grasses in crop and edible beans because the products we have for desiccation do not do a particularly good job on grasses. I want to talk about disease control. You've already tried to sort of sneak white mold in there a couple of times. I'm assuming that's an important consideration. Yeah that's the difference between a great crop and a poor crop. So definitely white mold is one of the key diseases in edible beans. So we definitely want to address that. So we do that in a couple different ways. One is through the use of fungicides and two is managing our populations as a strategy to control the white mold in the crop. Final question that is about harvest. What do we need to think about as harvest approaches and as we get into the field? So desiccation is certainly key for successful harvest operations. Be patient. A lot of growers think that if you apply a desiccant early you'll hasten maturity. That's not the case at all. It does not speed up maturity. So be patient. Wait till the crop is ready to desiccate and you'll be much more successful. Number two is desiccants, their performance is based on the weather. So you want nice sunny warm weather is ideal. If we don't get those conditions at least we want to try to maximize that as much as possible. So that's key there. When it comes to combine settings, again be patient. Wait till the crop is ready to harvest. If conditions are less than ideal, slow down a little bit with that combine speed. Do a good job. It's not a race to the finish line. Do a good job. You've worked hard all season to get a good product. Make sure you do that final step and do a good job of that. One of the other things too is tip that feeder plate forward so that the header is on a lower angle to the ground and you can reduce your cutting height and then reduce your field losses that way too. And finally when it comes to setting your concave and your rotor speed, just set it so that you're gonna have to find that happy medium where you're just thrashing out the beans and what that does is minimizes crack seed coats and splits. So the better job you do of combining your beans you'll get paid more for your product and then ourselves as processors we're able to produce a better product for the end user and it's a team effort. Everybody wins that way. Well hey Dave, great stuff, great to chat about black beans on the Edible Bean School. Thanks for stopping by. All right Vern, glad to do it.