Times change and people like Trenton Baisley insist that the crop variety registration system must change with them.
Baisley, chief executive officer of Quality Assured Seeds in Regina, says today’s variety registration system is inflexible and stifles innovation in prairie crop production.
“The variety registration system, because of KVD, is very inflexible to innovation, which is something we desperately need in agriculture in Western Canada,” he said.
KVD stands for kernel visual distinguishability, the ability to tell one grain variety from another based on how the kernel looks. It is a quick and accurate way to identify different varieties of wheat and keep them separate. Every elevator has someone trained in KVD who acts as the first line of defence in preserving Canada’s grain quality system.
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However, the link between KVD and variety registration has been one of the hitches in Quality Assured Seeds’ effort to gain contract registration for HY644. It is a high-yielding feed wheat with superior resistance to fusarium head blight, but sometimes looks like milling quality wheat.
Baisley said government policy encourages innovation in agriculture, but KVD stands in the way. Attempts to find a practical alternative to KVD, such as affidavits and DNA fingerprinting technology, have so far failed.
“There’s this incredibly entrenched system, and I’m not saying it hasn’t served us well over the years, but times do change,” Baisley said.
“How come every other bloody country in the world can figure out something and we can’t?”
Wheat is among the crops most heavily regulated by variety registration on the Prairies. The crop has traditionally been grown with milling markets in mind, but Baisley and others see an emerging need for high-yield feed wheat varieties to support expanded livestock and ethanol production. On the eastern Prairies, where fusarium has plagued cereal crop production, growers are keen for varieties with improved disease resistance.
HY644 offered this, but was blocked from registration over concerns that a visually indistinguishable feed wheat would be hard to keep separate from milling varieties in the grain handling system. Those opposing its registration cannot be convinced that segregating the crop under rules established under contract registration would eliminate the risk.
Because of the roadblocks, plant breeders are shying away from developing high-yielding feed wheat varieties. With only a slim chance of getting them registered, even Agriculture Canada is opting to invest research dollars elsewhere, said Jim Bole, the department’s science director of cultivar development.
“We were hoping by now that the systems would have changed to allow us to go full speed on some of these, but there hasn’t been any change.”
Don Cox, a seed grower and regional director with the Alberta Barley Commission, said change in the grain variety registration process is needed to take advantage of niche market opportunities.
New barley varieties are registered only if they are equal to or better than those already available in at least one of the three areas of assessment: agronomics, quality and disease resistance. Cox said new varieties with specialty traits might not be better than existing varieties, but they could still put more money in farmers’ pockets because of the prices they command in premium markets.
“Sometimes, the way the system is now, it’s hard to get some of these things through.”
Attitudes about how the registration system should be changed have ranged from eliminating it to keeping it as it is. Cox is among those in the middle.
“You need a registration system. Otherwise, it would be a zoo. You have to have some standards, but I’m not saying the standards shouldn’t change in some areas.”
