Canada’s crop breeding system did not appear overnight. It was built plot by plot, generation by generation, through public investment and farmer partnership.
It produced wheat varieties that compete globally, barley that meets exacting malt standards and pulses that opened new export markets.
It has served us well.
However, systems built for one era are not automatically sustainable in the next.
The recent reductions within Agriculture Canada have sparked understandable concern across the farm community.
Behind every program are people, communities and decades of work. No one should dismiss that.
At the same time, reacting as though this is a temporary storm that will soon pass risks missing the larger reality.
Public budgets are tightening. Research costs are rising. Expectations for speed, commercialization and global competitiveness are increasing.
Those pressures are not cyclical. They are structural and exemplified by the news of Richard Cuthbert’s departure.
The question facing Canadian agriculture is not whether public crop breeding has value. It unquestionably does. The real question is whether the current delivery model is built to thrive under modern constraints.
For decades, farmers have been active contributors to this system.
Through checkoffs, commissions and collaborative funding models, growers have helped sustain research capacity across cereals and diverse field crops.
We are not distant beneficiaries. We are co-investors, and that distinction matters.
WINNIPEG — Richard Cuthbert says he loved working as a wheat breeder and developing game changing varieties for Canadian farmers.
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.
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“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.”
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.
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