The future of Canadian plant breeding research may not be formed by public hands or in farmers’ interests unless the system is changed, a Winnipeg consultant said during the recent Saskatchewan Seed Growers Association annual meeting in Saskatoon.
Bert Innes, a former federal crops researcher, urged more co-operation between federal and provincial governments, universities and farmer groups.
He said the breeding of new varieties that will provide improved returns to producers can’t be assured unless farmers and governments are part of the system that invests in variety research and release.
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“If farmers are going to be deriving the benefit from any new crops, then farmers need to be the ones working to set the agenda, pushing government and universities with checkoff funding and lobbying,” he said after the meeting.
“Businesses can’t be blamed for attracting university and government researchers into collaborative efforts to develop new varieties when money for that work is in short supply.”
Bryan Harvey, recently retired vice-president of research with the University of Saskatchewan, said a lack of direction and planning for the future of research is having a negative effect on plant variety development.
“There is no vision out there right now, even at the federal level,” he said.
Harvey told seed growers during a panel discussion that plant breeding in Canada now consists of an unco-ordinated combination of market forces, academic inertia, producer groups and a still emerging federal plan for crop research.
“There is probably more money out there for university research than in the past, but it doesn’t reach applied work like plant breeding.
“And we have reduced student enrolments in university agriculture programs. Graduate students aren’t looking to get into applied areas like plant breeding.”
Innes said universities and government are abandoning breeding programs because of their cost.
Harvey said the new direction for those institutions is in building block research, creating breeding techniques and finding genetic paths to novel traits or patentable discoveries.
“If both the federal government and the universities think they can just do basic research, then we’re going to be in a hell of a mess in a few years when it comes to delivery of useful varieties for producers.”
Harvey said Saskatchewan, Alberta and Ontario still finance breeding in producer interests and producer checkoffs remain valuable to breeding programs. However, he said those two sources of funding would be hard pressed to meet the needs of programs that are intending to release new varieties.
He said the private sector would continue to finance breeding to create varieties that it can market at a profit, but these new varieties may not translate into more money for farmers.
Dave Sippell of Canterra Seeds in Winnipeg, who also participated in the panel discussion, said public money won’t be enough.
“There has to be private industry investment with a profit motive. We can all do more working together.”
Sippell sees a western Canadian plant breeding future that will have all of the parties working together to create varieties that can be tailored to international markets.
He said the future of plant breeding for a Canadian market might depend on producers, companies, universities and governments developing exportable plant varieties. A healthy research sector would also benefit Canadian farmers, he added.
Sippell said the future for Canadian farm production might be in producing crops for biofuel and feed grains for expanded export industries.
“We will need new varieties to serve those needs.”
Steve Morgan Jones of Agriculture Canada told the audience that his department would continue to develop products outside what are seen as traditional crops, such as novel products in the area of functional food, biofuel and feed grain and would not abandon its varietal release programs.
“We are currently working on a new business plan (for the research department) and in that we will be addressing the issue of vision and direction.”
Harvey said the cuts to federal and university variety development have resulted in a shortage of scientists to perform the work.
“Today we have universities (with agriculture research programs) without plant breeders.”
He said the number of plant geneticists at his university has been cut in half in recent years and the college no longer has a staff member with grain quality development experience.
Innes said new methods of co-operation need to be developed between the public and private sectors that will deliver increased margins for producers in exchange for the public research dollars that now flow to private companies through matching funding.
