One of Western Canada’s most prolific plant breeders will be spending less time perfecting new varieties of field crops this year and more time perfecting his golf swing.
Brian Rossnagel, a full-time oat and barley breeder at the University of Saskatchewan’s Crop Development Centre for the last 34 years, will be exchanging work boots for golf shoes in 2011.
Rossnagel has led the CDC’s oat and barley program since he joined the centre in 1977.
He will continue working with the CDC’s new oat and barley breeder, Aaron Beattie, during a transition period before retiring officially in the next few months.
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Rossnagel will remain involved in some aspects of the CDC’s oat and barley program.
“I won’t disappear completely but I’ll do my best to stay out of every-one’s way,” Rossnagel said.
“One thing that I’m looking forward to is spending more time on the golf course during the day instead of just in the evenings.”
Since Rossnagel joined the CDC, the centre’s barley and oat program has released more than 40 barley and 18 oat varieties with improved agronomics and enhanced milling, feed and malting characteristics.
He arrived at the CDC in the summer of 1976 to do preliminary selections on experimental cereal lines.
He returned the following year as a full-time plant breeder and worked with U of S barley breeder Bryan Harvey on new malting and feed barley varieties.
He also established the CDC’s oat program, which is recognized by many as the most productive oat breeding program in Canada.
Oat varieties originating from the CDC include: Calibre, Derby, CDC Boyer , CDC Pacer, forage variety CDC Baler, milling varieties CDC Dancer, CDC Orrin, CDC Weaver and CDC Seabiscuit, and specialty high-beta glucan varieties such as CDC Sol-Fi.
Two of Rossnagel’s more notable oat varieties, Calibre and Derby, offered significant yield and quality improvements over older varieties and dominated acreage throughout Saskatchewan and Alberta during much of the 1980s and 1990s.
Rossnagel said a top priority as oat breeder was to develop varieties with better grain quality and improved end-use characteristics.
When his first oat lines were being released, Saskatchewan’s oat acreage had reached a historic low and the future of the prairie oat industry was uncertain.
“We really worked hard at improving the physical aspects of the grain, so that when the buyer buys it, he gets more groats per tonne and less hulls and better nutritional characteristics.”
The release of varieties with improved quality and enhanced nutritional characteristics improved markets and helped put the crop back on the map.
Barley varieties developed at the CDC include CDC Brier , CDC Dolly, CDC Bold , CDC Helgason, CDC Cowboy, CDC Polarstar, CDC Meredith, CDC Austenson, CDC Mindon and CDC Kindersley.
Along with Harvey, Rossnagel also co-developed Harrington, CDC Kendall and CDC Copeland.
Harrington, a two-row malting variety, is widely regarded as one of the most successful cereal varieties ever developed at the CDC.
Other projects headed by Rossnagel included the development and release of CDC Lophy-l, a low phytate barley that has the potential to reduce phosphate pollution from swine feeding operations.
The variety also offers improved fermentation and diminishes the need for mineral supplementation during the brewing process.
Rossnagel also conducted pioneering work on hulless barley lines that are high in beta glucan content and have market potential in the specialty food processing industry.
The centre has already registered a number of hulless barley lines including CDC McGwire, CDC Rattan, CDC Fibar and a hulless malting variety called CDC ExPlus.
Rossnagel, known to colleagues as a man who speaks his mind, said the cereal breeding environment has changed significantly since he began in the late 1970s.
Reputation for quality
Over the past 40 years, the CDC has developed a reputation for producing outstanding crop varieties, he said.
As a result, funding has stabilized and the centre’s staff and operations have expanded.
The introduction of producer check-off fees has also enhanced the centre’s ability to develop and register new varieties.
“We did most things by hand and you just couldn’t do as much work as we can do today. With the introduction of plot machinery, it’s allowed a plant breeder to cover so much more ground and with the introduction of computers, it’s allowed us to handle all of that extra data much more quickly and more efficiently.…
“Computers have really revolutionized the business. In the past 15 years, I’ve been able to work with people in the U.K. or Australia as if they were just down the hall.”
Most recently, the centre has added new molecular breeding tools such as DNA based genetic markers for marker assisted selection for specific disease resistance and quality traits.
In collaboration with long-time colleague Graham Scoles, Rossnagel’s programs have taken advantage of this new technology.
Raised on a farm near the small town of Plumas, Man., about 150 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg, Rossnagel considers himself a “feet-on-the-ground and mud-on- the-boots” character who excelled at identifying farmer and industry needs and addressing them through basic plant breeding.
His penchant for breeding work, as opposed to in-depth scientific research, was well-served at the CDC.
Rossnagel said the reputation of CDC scientists and programs opened the door to productive collaborations.
“It (the CDC and the University of Saskatchewan) has given me just a tremendous group of colleagues to work with.
“There are some who are really strong on the science end of things and others, like myself, who are really mud-on-the-boots type of people who are strong in the plant breeding, agronomy, pathology and grain quality side of things.”
According to Beattie, who has worked with Rossnagel for nearly a decade, one of Rossnagel’s biggest assets was his ability to form relationships with stakeholders.
“He knows just an incredible number of people in the industry and he always seems to have some insight into how an organization works or what the upcoming areas of interest will be,” Beattie said.
“Spending time with him has certainly allowed me to get a good sense of what’s important, and what’s not, to the oat and barley industries and who the key people are.”
Rossnagel said he will miss the consultations, discussions and collaborations with colleagues and grad students.
He won’t miss the paperwork, the politics and the increasingly stringent regulatory environment that plant breeders and plant scientists must work under.
Because much of their work is publicly funded, Rossnagel said most plant breeders recognize the need for a system that ensures financial accountability.
But in recent years, some large publicly funded research projects have placed an increasing emphasis on accountability, he said.
As a result, administrative costs are growing and the paperwork and administrative time required of plant breeders and other scientists are becoming unmanageable.
Rossnagel also expressed concerns about the future of public plant breeding, suggesting that new technologies will require more funding and commitments by all levels of government and industry.
Failure to provide public plant breeders with modern but expensive molecular breeding tools could limit the relevance of some institutions.
“When public breeding programs are gone, they’ll be gone for good. It will be very difficult, if not impossible, to get them back.”
Rossnagel said the most gratifying moments of his career occurred when farmers thanked him and his team of researchers for developing a variety that made a difference.
“The most satisfying thing is when you drive down some country road and you drive by a half section that you know has been planted to one of the varieties that you were involved in producing,” he said.
“That to me is the best part about being a plant breeder is knowing that you’ve helped an individual producer, or that you’ve helped a seed grower or that you’ve helped the industry overall….”
