Western Canada needs a single agency to co-ordinate research funding, say some members of the Barley Development Council.
Jim Helm, a barley breeder at the Field Crop Development Centre in Lacombe, Alta., said the research funding process is cumbersome and frustrating.
He said researchers sometimes get approval from one funding agency for a priority project, and then get turned down for matching funds from another, jeopardizing the project.
The Barley Development Council plans to gather representatives from funding agencies together this year to discuss solutions.
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Jim Bole, director of Agriculture Canada’s cereal research centre in Winnipeg, told the council it is naive to think an outside body can set research priorities and simply get funding agencies to agree with them.
Clifton Foster, of the Alberta Barley Commission, told the council he’s been working with Alberta producers long enough to know “they will never give up the hammer” on deciding how their checkoff money is spent.
Producers can decide
But Foster said the commission would be open to working with the council to make sure research priorities get funding. He suggested the Canadian industry run something like the tri-state research review for Oregon, Washington and Idaho. In this forum researchers present their ideas, critique each others’ proposals and answer producers’ questions. Later, producer groups decide what research they will sponsor.
“I thought that was a very useful forum,” said Foster.
Michael Edney, a researcher at the Canadian Grain Commission’s Grain Research Lab, warned the council of a potential loss in fundamental barley research.
Edney said the barley section of the lab is losing 30 percent of its staff because of budget cuts at the commission.
“That’s a major hit for the barley research community as a whole in Western Canada,” he said.
Brian Rossnagel, a barley breeder at the University of Saskatchewan, reported to the council that Australia is becoming a tough adversary in barley markets because of the way it funds research.
Rossnagel, who went to an annual meeting of the five-year-old Grain Development Research Council in Australia, said one of the goals stated in the council’s annual report is to remove Canada as its main competitor.
“I believe they’re just about ready to blow our doors off,” he said.
The 50,000 grain producers in Australia pay $100 million a year for research in more than 21 crops, he said. They pay for $6 million in research for the four to five million tonnes of barley they grow.
“No matter what way you add it up, around here it (barley research funding) doesn’t add up to that much,” he said.
Rossnagel believes a similar council for Western Canada would raise about $10 million for barley research, compared to the $2 million now spent each year.
Farmers in Australia see research checkoffs as an investment, whereas Canadian producers tend to see them as a tax, he said.
Helm said raising the Canadian checkoff isn’t the answer.
He noted it might be time for industry to have some type of research checkoff.
Farmers can’t pass on their checkoff costs to the industry or consumers, yet the industry benefits as much or more than farmers, he said.
“Don’t expect the producer to do the work when you’re making the money on it,” he said.
