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Farmer Bill Craddock acknowledged he plants canola with only a one-year break in Manitoba, where clubroot first appeared in 2013.

Clubroot first hit Western Canada’s canola in 2003 but dates back centuries in Europe.

“The first generations of a canola-by-rutabaga cross will look pretty wild,” said Jed Christianson, trait lead at Monsanto’s Winnipeg office, where some 30 breeders and technicians are involved in the search for clubroot solutions.

It’s an early stage of a high-stakes effort to control the biggest threat to Canada’s C$27-billion canola industry - a crop disease called clubroot that presents unique challenges for Monsanto, along with rival seed developers DowDuPont and Bayer AG.

Worse, clubroot spores make themselves at home in the soil for up to 20 years, unlike most crop diseases that damage harvests for a single season.