Quality Assured Seeds is continuing its effort to win contract registration for HY644, a high-yielding wheat variety with improved resistance to fusarium head blight.
After the variety was denied full registration more than two years ago, attention shifted to gaining contract registration. That effort hinges largely on the Regina company’s ability to demonstrate that HY644, intended as a feed wheat, can be kept separate from milling wheat moving through the licensed grain handling system.
Ron Weik, Quality Assured Seeds’ manager of intellectual property and regulatory affairs, said the company has devised a strategy that it thinks addresses that issue.
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Weik said HY644 growers would have to sign a contract committing them to deliver to an identified end user. That way, the feed wheat would be moved outside the licensed grain handling system, he added.
“We feel we’ve dealt with every concern that we’re aware of. Is it 100 percent foolproof? No. Is it more foolproof than most of what we have now? Yes.”
HY644 has characteristics that most resemble Canadian Prairie spring wheat, but up to 25 percent of the kernels that it yields can more closely resemble Canada Western red spring wheat. Weik said that lack of varietal purity would make it easy for elevator employees to know if someone was trying to pass it off as a milling wheat.
The Canadian Wheat Board and the Canadian Grain Commission must review the segregation proposal and comment on whether they think it would be effective.
“We’re not going to say it’s a good plan or a bad plan until it’s had a proper review,” said CGC spokesperson Paul Graham.
“Our focus will be to look at the plan the proponent is putting forward and whether it will do what it is supposed to do.”
He said quality issues won’t be a factor in the review because the intent would be to grow HY644 only as a feed wheat and to keep it outside the licensed grain handling system.
A group from within the Prairie Registration Recommending Committee for Grain wheat-rye-triticale committee will likely meet within the next three months to decide whether to support the application for contract registration. If that support is granted, the matter still would have to go before the Canadian Food Inspection Agency for a final decision.
Fusarium head blight attacks cereal crops, particularly wheat and barley, in years when it is warm and humid while crops are flowering. The disease drives down yields and is a concern mostly on the eastern Prairies. It was not as prevalent this year because of the hot, dry summer.
Weik suggested the registration system needs to be changed to better deal with new wheat varieties developed in Western Canada exclusively for the feed market. The current system is an echo from the days when there was a greater emphasis on growing milling wheat on the Prairies, he said, noting that times have changed because of increased livestock production and the coinciding demand for livestock feed.
HY644 was developed by Doug Brown, an Agriculture Canada plant breeder. Although it has improved resistance to fusarium head blight, it does not have full resistance.
