Drought sets back breeding programs

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Published: October 17, 2002

The 2002 season injured breeding programs for prairie grains.

Insects and poorly timed weather near Edmonton left plant breeders who

traditionally see yields of 1,300-1,500 grams per plot harvesting only

200. That limits their ability to study yield data.

Two years of drought at Saskatoon claimed the last remnants of some

lines of breeder barley seed that were planted to replace a crop lost

last year. It resulted in the end of those breeding lines.

Near Brandon and in eastern Saskatchewan, rainfalls of more than 100

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Swift Current cereal programs saw their seed increases cut off at the

stems by sawflies and poor yields due to late, cold spring weather and

mid- season heat shock. But the head of those breeding programs said

this season both hurt and helped.

Ron DePauw of Agriculture Canada’s Semiarid Prairie Agriculture

Research Centre said the cold, dry seedbeds of the 2002 spring helped

sort out “the seed that couldn’t cut it.

“Producers want seed that is hardy. They buy seed that can withstand

poor seedbed conditions, because somewhere in the Prairies it’s going

to be bad every year and there’s no telling where. This season we

sorted out some of those lines right away.”

He said the same about heat shock.

“On the Prairies we get heat shock from those three to five annual 30

degree plus days, and when we are developing a line of seed, we need to

find out which lines can take it and which can’t. This summer hit us

with more 30 plus days than normal … it sorted those lines for us and

we don’t need to invest any more time in them,” he said.

Time is money in the seed breeding business. Most of the cost involved

in producing new germplasm comes from the labour needed to develop,

grow, harvest, monitor, sort and record the new plants and their seed.

Brian Rossnagel at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon is one

of Canada’s leading barley breeders.

“Twenty-seven years. Twenty-seven. And I’ve never seen a year like

this. We lost germplasm last year, OK. We planted what we had left and

we lost that this year. That is the end of those lines. We have to

presume they wouldn’t have made it, I guess. Never before have we had

this much drought damage to our program,” he said.

“Whatever did make it at places like Scott (Sask.) got eaten by

grasshoppers. If it was early enough, it got high humidity and warm

temperatures in August and sprouted in the heads. If it was late, it

froze. We had to abandon plots at Elrose (Sask.) because of drought and

grasshoppers. The scald research at Edmonton and Lacombe (Alta.) was

off.”

For breeders like DePauw and Rossnagel, the costs associated with their

research rose as their results fell.

Rossnagel said: “After last year’s drought damage to the program, we

sent greater amounts of seed to New Zealand (for seed increases). That

is very expensive. Then we lost them to weather and insects when we got

them back here.”

In many plots the harvest had to be done by hand this year, requiring

more staff. The harvested samples had to be sorted carefully to remove

damaged kernels, requiring even more labour.

The few visually healthy kernels then had to be tested for germination

and other damage to establish if they were viable for further testing

or seed increase, adding more cost.

To make matters worse, the remaining samples had to be increased in the

southern hemisphere.

“When we lose a line we can’t go over to Sask Wheat Pool and buy

another bag of this stuff …. If you have one seed left, do you plant

it or save it? You plant it, because you won’t be getting any more of

it by saving it.

So we have to plant what is left and next year in some cases there will

be nothing to plant,” he said.

DePauw said the cost of plant breeding increases in years like 2002.

“Four or five years from now we will be the only ones who know there

was a bad year. The losses this year were for crops that could be

licensed in 2010 at the earliest. Just like farming, we’re the only

ones who’ll remember by then.”

About the author

Michael Raine

Managing Editor, Saskatoon newsroom

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