The nearly $3.6 million from three prairie farm organizations will help fund an effort to sequence the wheat genome
Prairie grain growers will pay nearly $3.6 million over the next four years to support a wheat genomics research project.
The Canadian Triticum Applied Genomics program (CTAG2) has a budget of $8.8 million.
About $3.6 million of that will be furnished by three producer funded organizations — the Alberta Wheat Commission, the Saskatchewan Wheat Development Commission and the Western Grains Research Foundation (WGRF).
The project is part of a larger international effort to sequence the wheat genome and identify genetic resources that can be used to create better, more productive wheat varieties.
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Kent Erickson, chair of the Alberta Wheat Commission, said the CTAG2 project will lead to enhanced breeding techniques and will add value to wheat breeding efforts in Western Canada.
“By enhancing innovation in wheat breeding techniques, scientists will be better equipped to develop high quality wheat varieties that result in better returns for farmers,” Erickson said in a Nov. 12 news release.
Wheat producers in Saskatchewan and Alberta paid more than $12 million dollars in 2014 to wheat commissions in the two provinces.
The money was paid in producer checkoffs applied on a per tonne basis to all commercial wheat sales.
In addition, wheat growers across the West paid an interim checkoff of 48 cents per tonne to support programming at the WGRF, the Canadian International Grains Institute (CIGI) and the Canadian Malting Barley Technical Centre (CMBTC).
In the 2013-14 crop year, interim funding collected on wheat contributed roughly $8.6 million to WGRF’s annual revenues.
The CTAG2 project will involve scientists from the U of S, the NRC, Agriculture Canada, the University of Guelph and the University of Regina.
A major goal of the project is the development of a breeder-friendly genotyping platform that will make it easier to identify and use genes that are related to important agronomic traits in wheat.
If developed, new genotyping platform is expected to allow wheat breeders to more efficiently create new wheat varieties that produce more grain and are less prone to losses caused by disease, pests, drought and other yield-limiting factors.
Additional funding for the project is provided by Saskatchewan Agriculture, Manitoba Agriculture, Genome Canada, Viterra, SeCan, the University of Guelph, Bayer CropScience and the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium .
CTAG2 is being led by researchers Andrew Sharpe at the National Research Council of Canada and Curtis Pozniak of the University of Saskatchewan’s Crop Development Centre .
brian.cross@producer.com
