No easy path ahead for wheat sector advances

It’s been about 20 years since canola, dubbed Canada’s “Cinderella crop,” unseated wheat as the biggest earner of farm cash receipts in the Prairie kingdom.

For a time, it appeared wheat — which made Canada famous as a global agricultural exporter — would become the “other” crop farmers grew because they couldn’t grow canola all the time.

Prairie folklore is full of tales of farmers who have followed the canola-snow-canola crop rotation, but it’s well demonstrated that practice is a shortcut to reduced yields due to disease, reduced soil health and pests. Rotating among as diverse a range of crops as the farmer can manage is considered key to good agronomic management.

Although wheat still trails canola as the biggest earner, it has regained some of its stature as an attractive crop for farmers to grow. Newer varieties have combined yield gains with the famous Canadian premium-fetching quality and robust built-in disease resistance, which along with more intensive management on the farm, have helped make the difference.

Most of those varieties emerged from public plant breeding efforts rooted in Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada programs that, due to budget cuts and changing policy priorities, are at risk of disappearing in the not-so-distant future.

The costs of AAFC varietal development are paid by taxpayers and by farmers, who pay a royalty when they buy new seed. Farmers also support plant breeding through checkoffs when they sell at the elevator.

The wheat sector has fretted over this declining federal commitment for years, but so far has been unable to agree on a common vision as it grapples with how it will finance the next wave of varietal improvements.

Many point to the canola success story.

The crop was initially developed by public plant breeders, but the private sector took over its continued development with the advent of hybridization, which dramatically increases yields but makes it necessary for farmers to buy new seed annually.

As well, biotechnology allowed breeders to insert genes that make it tolerant to popular herbicides.

Farmers pay a lot more for canola seed every year, but yield increases have so far kept them a step ahead in profitability. Plus, it’s been easier to control weeds.

So why not do the same with wheat? There are a few reasons why that’s not so easy.

Even though there have been decades of research, successful hybridization of wheat has proven elusive.

The wheat genome is complicated, containing a mix of DNA more than five times that of the human genome.

Secondly, while plant breeders have shown they can use genetic modification to make wheat tolerant to non-selective herbicides such as glyphosate, which would allow farmers to kill the weeds but not the crop, many say the disadvantages outweigh the advantages.

For one, some consumers and key export customers don’t want to buy GMO wheat. And for another, controlling herbicide-resistant “volunteers” (wheat that grows from seed left on the field after harvest) is a weed problem they don’t relish having to manage.

Thirdly, around 80 per cent of the wheat sown on the Prairies every year is seed saved from the previous year’s crop.

Farmers will typically only buy new cereal seed every few years, which makes it hard for private plant breeders to pay for research and make a profit.

Without hybridization to force the issue, the private sector must rely on contracts where the farmer agrees not to replant the previous year’s seed or on legislative changes to break the practice.

One model pitched for supporting private breeding would require farmers to pay a royalty when they sell their crop, but so far there’s no consensus.

The unanswered question is whether a privately funded research model would result in significant new advances or whether wheat breeding will go the way of chemical weed control. There are new herbicide “products” released annually, consisting of new combinations of existing chemistry, but it’s been three decades since a new herbicide class has been developed.

What everyone can agree on is that it’s decision time.

It takes about 13 years to bring a new variety to market.

A break in today’s research funding will cost tomorrow.

Laura Rance-Unger is editor emeritus for Glacier FarmMedia. She can be reached at lrance@farmmedia.com