Brian Fowler’s contributions to agriculture have been recognized by the likes of the Canadian and American societies of agronomy, but if you ask him, his three decades of work on winter wheat were a flop.
“If you were to look at my program and my career I think it has been one of underachievement,” he said.
Shortly after earning a PhD from the University of Manitoba, Fowler got a job as a breeder at Agriculture Canada’s central experimental farm in Ottawa, where he was given a choice between two crops.
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“I took one look at the soybean flower. It’s so small you’ve got to use a magnifying glass, so I decided I would work on winter wheat,” he said.
After three years in Ottawa, Fowler returned to his roots, accepting a job as a research scientist at the University of Saskatchewan’s Crop Development Centre.
It was 1972, and winter wheat was a dead crop that the centre was attempting to resuscitate.
“You could probably count on the fingers of one hand the people who had been playing with winter wheat,” he said.
Fowler was asked to find a solution to the cold hardiness issue that had limited production to a small area around Lethbridge.
Thirty-five years later he still hasn’t been able to crack the cold hardiness nut from a breeding perspective.
“From a practical standpoint we haven’t moved an inch, so it hasn’t been a very successful career,” Fowler said.
Colleagues say the researcher is far too hard on himself and is underplaying his considerable contributions to the industry.
“In fast and dirty terms he created the industry with his genetics,” said Jake Davidson, executive manager of Winter Cereals Canada.
Farmers planted 1.23 million acres of winter wheat last year and there are projections of four to five million acres in Saskatchewan over the next 10 years.
“To a great extent that growth is going to be based on work that was initiated by Brian over the years,” Davidson said.
Early in his career at the Crop Development Centre it became apparent to Fowler that he was going to have to find an agronomic solution to the cold hardiness
problem because little progress was being made on the breeding front.
He started working with winter wheat growers on no-till farming techniques long before it was popularized in spring crops. The conservation practices provided farmers with a way to plant the crop into their standing stubble so they could keep snow on their fields.
Considerable work went into providing innovative farmers with the necessary research and extension support they required, such as determining optimal seeding dates and depths. The agronomic work that came out of Fowler’s winter wheat program led to the northern and eastward expansion of the crop out of southwestern Alberta.
“There were more acres of no-till winter wheat in the 1980s than there were all the other crops combined in no-till,” he said.
With the expansion of the growing area came the realization that there were significant problems with the winter wheat varieties of the day.
Fowler turned his attention to developing the first semidwarf, rust-resistant varieties with at least some level of winter hardiness. Eight of those lines were released in the 1980s and they had a tremendous impact on yields.
During a five-year stretch starting in 2000, winter wheat yielded 150 percent of spring wheat in Manitoba, 130 percent in Saskatchewan and 120 percent in Alberta.
Fowler is proud of that breeding accomplishment and of being recognized as a no-till pioneer.
However, he is still haunted by his inability to resolve the cold hardiness issue and by the fact that progress made over three decades is now in jeopardy as the Crop Development Centre winds down
his winter wheat program.
“I don’t think we should go there. There has been enormous frustration,” he said.
Davidson said there is a concerted effort afoot to salvage the germplasm from Fowler’s program because despite what
the breeder says, considerable progress
was made on the cold hardiness issue, although the industry would like to squeeze at least another two weeks out of seeding dates.
Fowler hasn’t given up battling his life-long nemesis either. In his new role as a professor in the department of plant sciences at the University of Saskatchewan, he is working on a Genome Canada project attempting to tackle the cold hardiness issue using genomics rather than crop breeding.
He is convinced the answers will come from developing a better understanding of the genetic mechanisms behind cold tolerance.
“It’s just our ignorance that is holding us back,” he said. “The big payoff would come if we could produce a winter wheat that has the cold hardiness of (fall) rye.”
