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.”
