Al Slinkard remembers the early days of the pulse breeding program at the University of Saskatchewan in 1972 when he was sharing a tiny room with a durum breeder.
Flash forward 33 years and Slinkard is attending the grand opening of a $3 million pulse lab that will be home to more than 25 full-time researchers and another 20 seasonal workers developing new lines of peas, lentils, chickpeas and beans.
“It is unbelievable,” said the man who developed 19 pulse varieties during his 26 years at the Crop Development Centre, including the popular Laird lentil.
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“Look at this thing. Man, this is built to last,” said Slinkard, surveying the 1,200 sq. metre gleaming addition to the centre’s field lab.
He was one of about 150 people who gathered for the Nov. 9 grand opening of the new facility during which CDC director Rick Holm publicly thanked Saskatchewan Pulse Growers for co-ordinating the financing and construction of the much-needed expansion.
“We had been horribly overcrowded, trying to do way too much in too little space,” he said.
In addition to two breeders and their staff, the new facility will house a pulse pathologist, a crop physiologist and their associated technicians.
Holm said the extra space will improve workflow, which should result in improved varieties for the province’s 20,000 pulse growers.
“Plant breeding is really a numbers game, so the more plants you run through the system the greater your odds of picking out something that is going to be an improved variety,” he said.
More than two-thirds of the funding for the addition came from the federal and provincial governments with private companies such as BASF Canada and Philom Bios Inc. picking up the rest of the tab.
The original plan called for a $10 million, 2,000 sq. metre facility but project promoters soon realized that was too ambitious.
Saskatchewan agriculture minister Mark Wartman said the lab is a testament to how far the pulse sector has come.
Few pulses were grown in the province when Slinkard started his breeding program. Today one out of eight acres in Saskatchewan is devoted to peas, lentils, chickpeas and beans.
Wartman thanked Saskatchewan Pulse Growers for its vision in creating a pulse industry that is expected to exceed six million acres by 2008.
Pulses have become the province’s third most important crop export, accounting for about 15 percent of farmgate income.
“The addition of this research facility truly makes Saskatchewan a world leader in pulses,” he said.
He added it will help solve some of the disease, maturity and quality challenges facing the industry and should be a boon for the province’s producers and more than 100 special crops processors.
SPG chair Dean Corbett said a 2003 study by two University of Saskatchewan agricultural economists concluded every check-off dollar invested in research returns $15.60 to the province’s farmers.
Facilities such as the Crop Development Centre keep Canada one step ahead of the competition, in particular the growing threat emerging in the United States.
“If we continue to invest in research here we’ll always be maybe a year or two ahead of (U.S. farmers) in terms of our varieties.”
Corbett said one of the top priorities for the new facility will be adding a chickpea breeder.
Holm said the centre is already in the process of adding a third full-time breeder to the staff, a process made easier by being able to show off a top-notch facility to potential candidates.
Since the centre’s inception in 1971 it has released 92 pulse crop varieties including 32 lentil, 20 pea, 22 bean, 13 chickpea and five fababean lines.
