However, he said that at some point in the last couple of years, he realized he could no longer fulfil that duty and truly make a difference.

Sure, he could churn out “me too” varieties of spring wheat, which would be marginally better than what’s currently on the market.

However, producing blockbuster varieties with much higher yields and much-improved traits had become difficult.

“I found I could no longer be productive,” said Cuthbert, a wheat breeder with Agriculture Canada in Swift Current, Sask., who resigned from his job in January.

“Farmers want better varieties…. Looking forward to the next 10 to 20 years, that’s what we need to do as breeders. I didn’t see it going that way any longer.”

Cuthbert’s resignation was massive news in Canada’s cereal industry because he developed some the most popular spring wheat varieties in Western Canada.

That includes AAC Brandon, which dominated wheat acres for a decade on the Prairies. He is also responsible for spring wheat varieties that could control acreage for the next decade, such as AAC Westking and AAC Hockley.

“The work that he’s done has been really tremendous,” SaskWheat chair Jake Leguee said in an interview with Golden West radio.

Cuthbert started at Agriculture Canada in 2011 and was in the middle of his career as a wheat breeder. Walking away from his job was a difficult choice.

“You don’t wake up one day and make that decision. I’ve been thinking about it for some time,” he said from Fernie, B.C., where he was on holiday with his family.

“I knew that more changes were going to be happening, based on signalling from government.”

Not enough plots

Cuthbert resigned prior to federal government cuts to Agriculture Canada’s budget and announced closures of research centres across the country.

He said knew something was in the works but had no knowledge about the details.

The news wasn’t a shock because Agriculture Canada had wanted to reduce its investment in plant breeding for many years.

However, the announced cutbacks will exacerbate the existing challenges within the cereal crop breeding system.

“There’s a large capacity void in Canada, right now, that needs to be fixed, very quickly,” he said.

“We did have larger capacity and we used it well. And our rates of (yield) gain have been better than many other jurisdictions. But it’s been declining since I started in 2011 … and (now) we’re losing sites, again.”

The “capacity” problem is largely a shortfall of small plots for testing and trials across a wide range of geographic, climatic and soil types in Western Canada.

A breeder needs sufficient data from dozens of sites and hundreds of thousands of small plots to make informed choices and develop those game changing varieties.

“The capacity for small plot research in Western Canada is very low compared to other places (in the world),” Cuthbert said.

Australian Grain Technologies, a plant breeding company, evaluates more than 300,000 small plots per year.

Cuthbert didn’t have a comparable number for Western Canada, but it’s much lower than 300,000.

“There is a large, large difference. We’re not increasing in Canada. We’re going the other way,” he said.

“Breeding is a numbers game, to some extent. If you’re doing all the other things right, it does come down to that capacity. Disease nurseries, adaptation testing … and number of plots do come into it.”

It’s not just about having more plots at more locations.

Canada’s cereal industry needs equipment at those sites, technicians to do the testing and plant pathologists, cereal chemists and others to gather and analyze the data.

That information is then used to select promising lines or parents for new lines of wheat.

“It’s a fact that we need more capacity and capacity is costly,” Cuthbert said.

“That’s been lost along the way … (and) taken for granted that small plot (research) will just happen. Disease nurseries (will) just happen. Quality testing (will) just happen.”

What’s next?

Cuthbert doesn’t have the answers to fix the wheat breeding system, but it’s become obvious to some grain industry leaders that change is needed, and the sooner the better.

The old model, where growers rely on public plant breeding and varietal development, is not the answer.

“We can’t do things the same way that we have,” said Jim Wilson, chair of Canterra Seeds.

“There are solutions out there … to increase the amount of funding that’s available for plant breeding.”

In the short term, Cuthbert will be on the sidelines of wheat breeding. He still loves the work and wants to help farmers, but he doesn’t have an immediate plan.

“I will look for opportunities.”

That said, this moment is a “fork in the road” for Canadian wheat breeding and the government’s role in that endeavor, Cuthbert said

What happens now and how a new system is funded will be difficult questions for farmers and the grain industry.

“It’s clear that things need to change. What hasn’t changed is that farmers need better varieties, and they need reliable data,” he said.

Cuthbert has been at the centre since April 2011 after taking over from well-known breeder Ron DePauw.

SaskWheat chair Jake Leguee said the resignation was a surprise and is a loss for producers.

“The work that he’s done has been really tremendous,” Leguee said in an interview with Golden West radio in Swift Current. “These are big shoes to fill and for our part that’s not something we can control. We’ll be monitoring this news and seeing where things go from here.”

Canada requires a strong public breeding program, and Leguee said SaskWheat has long advocated for openings to be filled.

“We need these positions,” he said.

“They’re absolutely critical to the entire breeding program in Western Canada.”

The Wheat Growers Association said it’s worried Cuthbert’s departure is a sign of things to come as Agriculture Canada is forced to make cuts.

Executive director Darcy Pawlik said Cuthbert was “one of our best and brightest wheat breeders who all of western Canadian farmers really rely on for the genetics that get planted every year.”

He said the apparent absence of a succession plan could be a problem.

In an op-ed piece issued Jan. 12, Pawlik said the 15 per cent federal budget cuts come on top of nearly 10 years of funding pressure on public wheat breeding. Grower commissions have stepped up to fill the gap, indicating they know what’s at stake, he said.

There is no indication at this time that Cuthbert’s resignation is due to budget cuts.

One of the most widely grown Canadian Western Red Spring wheats in Western Canada for the past nine years, Brandon first hit the seed market in 2014 and quickly became a farmer favourite, said SeCan western business manager Todd Hyra. SeCan is the distributor of the variety.

“Brandon has been a mainstay for us,” he said, adding it’s performed near the top of trials through both wet and drought years.

AAC Westking purports to build on AAC Brandon’s advantages with more yield and more attractive straw height.

Times change. For the past several years, breeders with Agriculture Canada have been working on a spring wheat with all the agronomic advantages of Brandon but with traits that address today’s challenges.

It’s called AAC Westking, and it’s being multiplied by seed growers across Western Canada and in New Zealand in advance of its 2026 crop season launch.

Westking carries most of Brandon’s traits but in most cases they’ve been improved, said Hyra. This includes six per cent higher yield and a straw height that will be attractive to growers.

“We’ve seen varieties that had higher yield before but not this combination of short, strong straw and lodging (resistance) as good or better than Brandon.

“You don’t want to be giving anything up when you’re taking on a new product. Westking looks like it’s going to be the one that has what it takes to replace those acres.”

Beyond specific agronomic factors, the key to Brandon’s longevity is its consistency, said Hyra. That has to be the case for any potential replacement.

“What we look for in its successor is the ability to generate good yields across a wide range of growing conditions and not having to require the stars to align to get the product to perform,” Hyra said.

“And so when I talked about AAC Brandon performing under dry conditions, performing under higher moisture conditions — in all cases always being consistent, always providing a good yield — that’s what’s made it the go-to product for so many years. And that’s what we’re hoping to see out of Westking.”

The variety features a moderately resistant (MR) rating for fusarium head blight, the same grade assigned to Brandon by the Prairie Recommending Committee for Wheat, Rye and Triticale.

That rating is more impressive than it may seem. A resistant (R) rating is rare because pathologists tend to err on the conservative side, said Hyra.

“Seeing a full R is rare in many things and there are no CWRS wheat varieties that have an R rating. MR is as good as they get. And then its leaf rust, stem rust are all either MR or higher so it’s got the full leaf rust protection package.”

Westking also shares some of the same talent that bred Brandon. Richard Cuthbert of the Agriculture Canada research centre in Swift Current, the lead breeder of the Westking development team, was part of the Brandon team led by Ron DePauw.

The three broad qualities Cuthbert and his team aimed for were agronomics, disease resistance and end-use quality. More specifically, they were looking for stronger straw, the right height for harvestability, and standability. This growing season had high lodging potential in parts of Western Canada but Westking appears to be standing proud, said Cuthbert.

“It’s standing very well from Alberta to the Red River Valley this year,” he said.

The researchers were somewhat surprised and pleased that Westking features very large kernels.

“That is an indicator of excellent drought performance,” Cuthbert said. “This year, we’re starting to take off samples in a very severe terminal drought here at Swift Current, and we’re still seeing large kernels, which indicate good filling under extreme heat and drought stress.”

The large kernel also lends itself to end-use quality and higher milling yield, providing more flour per unit of wheat.

Development of Westking started in 2013, around the time Brandon was released commercially. Its original parentage includes Canada Prairie Spring Red wheat AAC Goodwin by Brandon top-crossed with a sister of AAC Alida, a CWRS.

“All three of those lines brought some unique traits,” said Cuthbert. “We know Brandon now, but in 2013 it was just launching, so it was still relatively new but we knew it was a very strong variety. It was shorter, stronger straw. It had stable yield performance across a range of environments as it launched. We knew its FHB (resistance) was very good. We knew its rust (resistance) was very good.”

Goodwin is a cross of AC Carberry (CWRS) by AC Cadillac, a hard red spring wheat.

“We knew that it had very high grain yield across years and environments and we weren’t sure why,” Cuthbert said. “We’re starting to get more information on that now through some physiology studies. And we knew that the third parent, the sister of AAC Alida, was a very strong line at the time with very good FHB resistance, much stronger straw, better plant type.

“So we were trying to bring all those things together from those elite lines.”

Westking will only be marketed in Canada for the first several years of its commercial life. Part of the variety’s development occurred in New Zealand in 2023 and 2024, as SeCan sought to speed the replication process.

Although primarily done for logistical reasons, the cultivar’s performance in New Zealand, a different environment, further displayed Westking’s range, said Cuthbert.

“The day length is about the same. That works well. The growing season is similar but better. They tend to have higher solar radiation. They tend to have more rainfall than we would have in Saskatchewan, but they have the ability to irrigate as well.”

The New Zealand increase went “phenomenally well,” said Cuthbert.

“It managed to achieve about 107 bushels per acre clean in New Zealand, so the yield potential is really there with Westking.”

Cuthbert credits the Canadian Wheat Research Coalition, a collaboration between the Saskatchewan Wheat Development Commission, Alberta Grains and Manitoba Crop Alliance, for funding the breeding project.