Western Canadian farmers could reap hundreds of millions of dollars in benefits from new wheat varieties if the rules governing kernel visual distinguishability were less strict, says a senior official from the Canadian seed trade.
Jeff Reid, general manager of SeCan Association and second vice-president of the Canadian Seed Trade Association, said the seed industry is poised for an explosion of new varieties with superior traits that could make farmers money selling to the feed and biofuel markets.
But the KVD requirement that new varieties be visibly distinguishable from existing hard red spring and durum varieties is handcuffing scientists and the industry, he said Oct. 3.
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“The cost of maintaining KVD in Western Canada we believe has been somewhat underestimated in the past and I guess it’s easy to underestimate the cost when you can’t see exactly what you’re missing,” Reid told MPs on the House of Commons agriculture committee studying proposed changes to the Canadian Grain Commission.
“There have been some suggestions that it’s somewhere in the neighbourhood of $200 million a year. That is arguably much higher when you consider the cumulative beneficial effects of plant breeding over time.”
Two days later, his argument received a boost from prominent prairie winter wheat breeder Brian Fowler from the University of Saskatchewan.
New varieties with great potential are being kept out of the system because they do not meet the existing KVD rule, he told MPs. The visual identification system has been used for 80 years and has been criticized for 50 years as an impediment to innovation, he said.
“KVD is creating a problem,” said Fowler. He called for its elimination, with grain quality being determined through farmer affidavits or new technology that tests quality.
Conrad Johnson, a Saskatchewan farmer and chair of the Great Western Railway in southern Saskatchewan, told MPs one of the greatest challenges his short-line railroad faces is erroneous grading on the Prairies using visual inspections. Grain graded and shipped in producer cars often is downgraded at port at a significant loss.
“Visual inspections have to be phased out,” said Johnson.
Customers care about the quality of the grain they are buying, not how it looks, and that often means Canadian exporters are losing.
Johnson cited a frost year that damaged the look of the wheat crop in southern Saskatchewan and resulted in a feed classification before it was sold into the United States. There, it was used as milling wheat and southern Saskatchewan farmers lost millions of dollars in potential revenue.
“Too often, we are selling oranges into an apple market,” he said.
Reid said experience in Ontario offers evidence of what innovation forces can be unleashed if the KVD restrictions are lifted.
In 1989, kernel visual distinguishability restrictions were lifted in Ontario and there has been an explosion of research and new varieties, he said.
Wheat acreage in Ontario has expanded, the need to import wheat from Western Canada has been reduced and 20 varieties of red winter wheat are available to farmers, many not visually distinguishable from others.
In contrast, no new winter wheat varieties have been approved for Western Canada in the past five years . All proposed new varieties have been rejected because they look like red spring wheat.
Plant scientist Fowler said if the KVD restriction is not lifted, winter wheat variety research for the Prairies might as well be shut down.
