Jerome Konecsni has made an offer to help flax growers build their industry.
The head of Genome Prairie told growers attending Sask Flax’s Flax Day at Crop Production Week in Saskatoon last week that his agency would help them raise money for grower and market education, to organize meetings, to create new plant breeding opportunities, to assess market needs for new flax products, to create identity preserved growing and handling systems and assist them in market risk analysis.
Konecsni knows flax from his career in agriculture and science and he said it has tremendous potential, but that growth may be in jeopardy if the industry doesn’t accept the role of new technologies.
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“We can do for flax what has been done for canola and safflower. Flax is an excellent candidate for breeding opportunities,” he said.
Saskatchewan grows and exports 75 percent of Canada’s flax and Konecsni feels that with all the research and production capacity located there, the province’s farmers could benefit significantly from a new flax breeding strategy.
Canola and soybeans are the best-known oilseeds for the use of advanced breeding techniques and genomics in plant breeding, which is the use of DNA sequences of an entire plant to aid in creating desired traits.
Konecsni said the Canadian flax industry is seen as unwilling to accept genetic trait enhancements, so half of the investors that might be willing to work with the crop have decided to look at other oilseeds such as crambi and caranada, which don’t have producer groups to resist techniques such as genomics.
In the past, University of Saskatchewan plant breeder Gordon Rowland has had access to genetically modified flax germplasm that carried enhanced oil traits. But producers rejected the concept because they feared market loss in Europe if a genetically modified flax isn’t accepted.
“If you don’t accept that flax needs to keep up with other oilseeds and take advantage of opportunities to provide both improved yields and give buyers traits they are willing to pay for, the crop will be in danger of not being produced in the very near future.”
Konecsni said the crop is losing ground to safflower, a food oil crop that uses genomics in its breeding programs.
“Genomics doesn’t necessarily even mean that we are talking about genetically modifying the crop if the risk to markets can’t be worked out. We can also work on market acceptance.
“Market risk assessments are part of the work we do and it’s required within our mandate,” he said.
“Fears that we would be adding fish oils to the crop and polluting the entire flax industry have little basis.”
Citing research that shows flax doesn’t easily support the omega 3 fatty acid, long carbon chains found in fish, Konecsni said many of the traits that likely would be added to flax first would improve agronomics rather than add specialty genes for pharmaceuticals or industrial chemical compounds.
“Organic producers already provide identity preserved products to their clients and form a very small part of the industry.”
Rowland said flax is a good choice when it comes to adding specialty genes because it is self-pollinating and has few out-crossing habits.
Konecsni said Genome Prairie held a flax genomics workshop in December and had positive response from producers, government and scientists.
“(The National Research Institute’s Plant Biotechnology Institute at the University of Saskatchewan) is already sequencing the genome. We can get started very quickly. Because flax is so ideally suited, catching up with other crops could occur very quickly.”
