It’s obvious to Rob Graf, and many others in Canada’s grain industry, that the country needs a new system for developing cereal crop varieties — one that attracts private investment while preserving public programs for crops too small to interest a company’s bottom line.

Graf is a winter wheat breeder who spent 35 years in public plant science, retiring from Agriculture Canada in 2022. He knows better than most what’s at risk.

“One of the things that concerns me (is) those crops that have lower acreage. How are those going to be funded? How are new varieties going to be developed?” he said.

WHY IT MATTERS: Grain farmers will soon need answers to Graf’s questions. A February report from the Canadian Wheat Research Coalition says the status quo — a public breeding system dominated by Agriculture Canada — is no longer a viable path forward. Federal plans to close research centres and lay off scientists are accelerating the timeline for change.

For decades, growers have relied on Agriculture Canada scientists to develop the latest varieties of spring wheat, durum and other cereals. The coalition’s February report found that Ag Canada varieties are grown on about 80 per cent of all wheat fields in Canada every year.

“It’s clear that the status quo is not a viable path forward,” says Jocelyn Velestuk, Canadian Wheat Research Coalition chair.

The public approach has delivered strong varieties to farmers, but in the last 15 years, the system has grown progressively weaker. It will soon be further undermined as the federal government plans to close research centres and lay off employees in its science and technology branch.

There are real-world examples of what happens when government stops investing in crop breeding. Flax is the clearest cautionary tale.

About 20 years ago, there were three flax breeding programs in Canada. Now, there’s one at the University of Saskatchewan. Without the breeders to improve yields, flax acres on the Prairies collapsed.

Other factors contributed to flax’s decline — competition from the Black Sea region chief among them — but poorly funded breeding programs and flat yields didn’t help.

What a new system could look like

Creating a new system to fund cereal breeding will not be easy. But a transition needs to happen, particularly for spring wheat, said Richard Cuthbert, a former wheat breeder with Agriculture Canada in Swift Current, Sask.

The public breeding system is currently handicapped by an insufficient number of test sites for small plot trials — sites that should cover a range of growing conditions across Western Canada. Without those sites and the related data, developing a competitive spring wheat variety is extremely difficult.

The crops that could fall through the cracks

Graf spent the bulk of his career working on winter wheat — a crop seeded on 300,000 to 350,000 acres on the Prairies. That is a small fraction of the 19 million acres of spring wheat grown in Canada, and a tiny sliver of the 65 million acres of all Prairie crops.

Winter wheat covers the soil through fall and spring, offering real environmental benefits — erosion control, early ground cover, reduced spring runoff. But its small acreage makes it a poor candidate for private investment.

“Will anybody be interested in developing winter wheat? We simply don’t know,” Graf said.

For now, the question is hypothetical — Agriculture Canada still has a winter wheat breeding program. But Graf’s concern applies to any specialty or low-acreage crop that lacks the commercial scale to attract private investment once the public system retreats.

“What we really need is a system where private and public can co-exist,” Graf said.

Key takeaways

• Agriculture Canada varieties cover 80 per cent of Canada’s wheat fields — but that dominance is built on a system the industry itself says in no longer sustainable.

• The federal government plans to close research centres and cut scientists, accelerating the timeline for change.

• Flax acreage fell 67 per cent over 20 years — partly a result of underfunded breeding. That pattern could repeat in other crops.

• Low-acreage crops like winter wheat may not attract private investment, creating a gap no one has a plan to fill yet.

• Industry leaders say the future requires private and public breeding to co-exist — but what that looks like is still unknown.

Read the Canadian Wheat Research Coalition’s February 2026 report.

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Research scientist John Laurie has just planted the federal government’s first plots of gene-edited wheat at the Lethbridge Research and Development Centre.

These lines are grown in a greenhouse after being successfully propagated in growth chambers. Laurie is excited for where his work could ultimately lead.

“The best thing that could come out of this would be increased drought tolerance,” he says. “That’s the biggest thing the plants might have to deal with moving forward into the future.”

The edited genes are linked to the plants’ circadian clock. Research scientists in other parts of the world have discovered and isolated a gene called Ppd-1, which regulates how long a plant perceives day length, which translates into date of heading and spike characteristics.

A good example is in tomato, where domestication of a circadian clock gene allowed cultivation in northern latitudes, not just near the equator where it was traditionally grown.

Laurie and project co-lead André Laroche are working with about a half-dozen circadian clock genes similar to Ppd-1 in this spring wheat research. He says if AAFC can create varieties with the Ppd-1-like edits, wheat varieties could function better.

“If these other clock genes are able to even partially do what Ppd-1 has done, then they could have a huge impact on wheat globally,” he says. “In tweaking the clock, we can probably push wheat to maximize its performance.”

Typically, wheat plants have the most photosynthetic ability in the morning and midday. With the edits, Laurie’s research could create wheat with greater ability to receive and use sunlight.

New frontier

During the Green Revolution of the 1960s, innovations were found using mutagenesis, in which plants could be exposed to radiation or various chemicals to create genetic variation. Breeders would then plant those mutated lines and try to discover beneficial mutations.

It was a painstaking process that took years, if not decades, to find improved genetics. Results will presumably flow faster for scientists of all stripes as gene editing gains popularity.

“With gene editing, we precisely target the exact sequence we want,” says Laurie.

His wheat edits were done through dual processes known as Crispr/Cas9 and HI-edit. This shaved years off conventional breeding because uniform genetics are produced the first time, eliminating the need to take a good plant and back-breed it with other crosses to produce new lines.

During the phenotyping stage — observing crop characteristics during selection — Laurie noticed differences in flowering time, plant height and stalk thickness; subtle, yet important, differences.

“It’s not like we’re creating a completely different type of wheat. It’s just we’re tweaking the control that clock has on the plant.”

Spring wheat is a hexaploid, meaning it carries six total genes — two A, B and D genes. Laurie is mixing and matching the edited genes in an attempt to produce elite lines.

“It’s like a thermostat on your house controlling the temperature. You can turn it down a little bit, turn it up a little bit. That’s what we were trying to do with the gene editing.

“It’s not to fully knock out these particular genes, but we actually have the power to regulate those genes.”

Edited lines are being planted alongside the control variety, AC Andrew, a soft white spring wheat.

Welcome development

Laurie’s research is music to the ears of Krista Zuzak, director of crop protection and production at Cereals Canada. Gene editing technology and the edited crops themselves carry significant upside, she believes.

“It can provide many benefits; at the farmer level in terms of production, pest management or better input use efficiency,” she says. “We also see overall benefits for the Canadian economy when we’re protected from pests, especially mycotoxins, which can cause human health issues.”

Zuzak says the technology can help in virtually all areas of production. There is recent gene editing research on powdery mildew resistance and even nitrogen use efficiency in wheat.

“All of it could save farmers money on input costs. That’s one of the exciting parts about gene editing, is that it does have such practical implications and benefits for Canadian farmers as well as the full value chain.”

Funding for this research was provided by RDAR, Alberta Grains, SaskWheat and the International Wheat Yield Partnership.

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“It’s a really elegant story about how both breeding and the fundamental science of why cadmium moves in the durum plant actually came together to provide a solution,” said University of Alberta researcher Neil Harris.

That story begins in the 1990s, when the Codex Alimentarius Commission (which sets international standards for food production) began exploring regulations for cadmium in food products, including grains such as durum wheat and rice.

Cadmium is a natural contaminant in the soil that can accumulate in plant tissues — and as a toxin in the human body if people eat foods with high levels of it.

Compared to food such as rice, sunflower seeds, and spinach, durum doesn’t actually have particularly high levels of cadmium — rice, for example, can have twice as much. But both are staple foods eaten in large quantities, so they pose the most risk to humans.

The Canadian durum varieties widely grown in the 1990s had high enough levels of cadmium that they would have exceeded limits being proposed at the time.

“There was a lot of concern amongst the durum wheat industry about the possibility of blockage of our exports of Canadian durum wheat,” said Harris.

So Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada scientists did a survey of cadmium levels and found a surprisingly big range in common varieties. Further study traced the variation back to the germplasm used for breeding.

“This really opened up two questions: Can we use that material to breed for low-cadmium durum wheat varieties? And can we understand why some varie­ties have high levels of cadmium while others are low?” said Harris.

The breeding question turned out to be easy to answer.

“The heritability — or the ease at which we can breed this low-cadmium trait into varieties with desirable agronomic traits — actually proved to be quite straightforward,” said Harris. “It appeared to be connected to a single gene that was easy to breed with.

“So they set about breeding for low-cadmium durum wheat, and they brought about success relatively quickly.”

By 2005, nearly all Canadian durum varieties had been converted to low-cadmium lines, and low-cadmium accumulation is now mandatory criteria for registering new varieties.

“So in effect, cadmium accumulation in Canadian durum wheat varieties is actually a solved problem,” said Harris. “Our breeding programs have eliminated the high-cadmium trait, and all of the varieties coming out of our breeding programs are now low-cadmium lines. They’ve removed the risk of possible export restrictions based on cadmium levels in grain.

“So it proved to be quite an easy problem to solve.”

Answering the ‘why’

But figuring out why some varie­ties were high in cadmium while others weren’t took a lot longer.

In the early 2000s, researchers began looking at the mechanism by which cadmium moves in plants.

“We established that the main difference between the high-cadmium varieties and the low-cadmium varieties was that the low-cadmium varieties tend to accumulate a lot more cadmium in their roots and not transport it up the shoot to the grain,” said Harris.

“So therefore, you get low-cadmium grain.”

However, that was only a partial answer. It was with the release of the durum wheat genome in 2019, that researchers could connect with transport mechanism with the gene responsible for causing cadmium to accumulate in the grain.

“As it turns out, the high-cadmium varieties have a mutation in one of the genes that causes cadmium to be held in the grain,” said Harris. “When the mutation is present, the roots don’t hold the cadmium. It passes into the shoots and the grain.”

Using genetic markers, breeders can now easily screen germplasm for this defective gene.

“So when we screened all the available germplasm in Canada using this marker for this defective gene — HMA3 — those with high levels of cadmium in the grain had the defective gene, and those with low levels of cadmium in the grain had the functional gene,” said Harris.

“Essentially, it provided a marker that would allow breeders to rapidly screen their germplasm.”

And that’s a very handy tool when trying to breed the varieties of tomorrow.

“By adding a genetic marker for those traits, these can be screened as seedlings, enabling a much quicker breeding process,” said Harris.

“And not only did we find a way of screening for low cadmium in Canada, we also provided the means for screening low cadmium in all durum wheat germplasm worldwide.”

As a result, the amount of cadmium in durum grain being exported by Canada is half of what it was in the 1990s — and well below the limits set for cadmium contamination.

“It’s a solved problem because there are no longer high-cadmium varieties in Canadian durum wheat breeding, and all the modern cultivars that have been released are all low cadmium,” said Harris.

“It worked out really nicely, although it did take quite a long time.”

Cracking the Code

Genomics is changing farming in a host of different ways. Glacier FarmMedia journalists did several stories on genomics, designer genes and other genetic breakthroughs as part of the ‘Seeding the Future‘ multimedia project. They can be found at gfmdigital.com or by clicking the ‘Seeding the Future‘ image below.

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“I think farmers would say the canola experience is a mistake — letting private enterprise take it over,” said University of Alberta professor, Dean Spaner.

“Effectively, they’re breeding to make profit. We’re breeding to improve crop production for farmers.”

Since 2013, the University of Alberta’s wheat-breeding program has developed 14 new wheat varieties for western Canadian farmers, including popular ones such as CS Tracker, CS Jake, and Parata. Breeding varieties suited for the northern Prairies is a key focus of the program.

It’s a dramatic turnaround from when Spaner arrived in Edmonton two decades ago and worked with his colleagues to cobble together funding for anything above and beyond the bare necessities.

“When I started, we didn’t even have a combine. We didn’t have a truck,” said Spaner. “But we did have a land base.”

Funds from the Western Grains Research Foundation’s now-defunct Western Canadian Deduction checkoff and grants from the (also defunct) Agriculture Crop Industry Development Fund were critical to getting the wheat-breeding effort off the ground.

“To get a viable breeding program, I had to have 10 grants from the get-go,” he said, adding he usually has about a dozen grants at any given time in order to keep the program operating.

“I can be Pollyanna about it and say, ‘I’m all right.’ But that’s after two decades of fighting for money. It’s been a struggle to get funding to adequately fund the program.”

But as time went on and new lines were released, organizations like Alberta Wheat also started to fund this breeding work. In May, the farm group and its Prairie cousins pledged $2 million over five years for the program. The goal is to breed “field-ready cultivars” resistant to diseases such as stripe rust and fusarium head blight while at the same time delivering better yield, earlier maturity, and strong straw — “all of which are key priorities of northern Alberta’s Parkland region where the program is located,” said a U of Alberta release.

“The commissions have given us reasonably large grants, which we try to match with government funding, and that’s kept us going to the point where we’ve been averaging about a million dollars a year for the last five years and going on for the next five years,” said Spaner.

And that level of funding is enough to work with for a public breeding program with very little overhead, he added.

“Having a million-dollar-a-year program is substantial, even in the modern world. When you only have $500,000 a year, you don’t have a viable breeding program.”

But recent provincial government cuts to the University of Alberta — including a $44-million reduction in its operating grant — could strip these breeders of the only real resource they had when they started out: their land.

“The cuts to the university that this provincial government has done has effectively decimated much of the infrastructure at the university, both physical and human infrastructure,” said Spaner.

“With the cuts to the university, they say we’re going to be losing one of our major land resources, and that will seriously affect the program badly. We’re effectively now running up to the limit of the land base because of the university being cut so heavily.

“The cuts to the university have been catastrophic.”

And it’s not just the university may have to sell off some land, it’s also laying off staff in droves.

“The university itself is suffering 33 per cent job loss,” he said. “It’s brutal. The morale on campus is awful.”

Right now, all of the workers in Spaner’s breeding program are funded through grants, but in the past, lost grants have meant layoffs for the team.

“When we lose a grant like we did four years ago, I laid off four people, one of whom is an internationally renowned scientist,” said Spaner. “I laid off a woman who was with me for seven years because I couldn’t afford to keep her.”

And with increased competition for dwindling research dollars across the country, more targeted investment in public breeding programs like his will be needed, he said.

“The real problems I see are the attacks on the education system,” said Spaner. “We are the last vestiges of publicly funded breeding in the world. Europe quit doing that — it turned it all over to private enterprises, and that’s a very scary prospect.

“The example is right in our faces — the ‘canola-ization’ of breeding, which is effectively the privatization of seed.”

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The aim is to develop three to five registered varieties with traits of early maturity, shorter straw stalk, and resistance to stripe rust and fusarium head blight. All are key priorities for northern Alberta’s Parkland region, the Canadian Wheat Research Coalition said in a release.

The program, led by wheat breeder Dean Spaner, also calls for delivering one to three germplasm distributions and training a minimum of three graduate students. Early maturity is a key trait for producers in more northern parts of the province, said Alberta Wheat chair Todd Hames. 

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The program focuses on development of hard red (CWRS) and high-yield (CPS) spring wheat varieties, and also conducts research into genetics of disease resistance, nitrogen-use efficiency in wheat, and supports other winter wheat-, spring wheat-, barley- and organic oat-breeding programs.

The Western Grains Research Foundation has given the university more than $3.5 million over the past two years, including funding for infrastructure investment at the Breton Plots and for establishing a research chair in cropping systems.

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“By having many complete gene assemblies available, we can now help solve the huge puzzle that is the massive wheat pan-genome and usher in a new era for wheat discovery and breeding,” said project leader Curtis Pozniak, director of USask’s Crop Development Centre.

The first wheat genome was fully sequenced in 2018, but having 15 will allow for more precise breeding by allowing breeders to identify genes linked to in-demand traits, which will accelerate breeding efficiency.

The 10+ Genome study is part of a larger effort to generate thousands of genome sequences of wheat, including those of wheat’s wild relatives.

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The Alberta Wheat Commission, Sask Wheat and the Manitoba Wheat and Barley Growers Association on Tuesday announced the formation of the Canadian Wheat Research Coalition (CWRC) to “facilitate long-term investments aimed at improving profitability and competitiveness for western Canadian wheat farmers.”

The commissions, in a joint release, said their new coalition will “facilitate a collaborative approach to producer funding of regional and national research projects in variety development and agronomy, including the next Canadian National Wheat Cluster and core wheat breeding agreements with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and universities.”

Other “regional” projects that line up with the coalition’s variety development and agronomic priorities will also be considered for funding, they said.

CWRC project funding will be shared on a proportionate basis based on checkoff revenue, the three commissions said.

The new coalition’s structure allows for more producer or private sector groups to join as “organizational members,” providing a platform for the coalition to pursue what it described as “public, private, producer partnerships (4Ps).”

CWRC administration will be handled by a “host” commission, rotating every three years, starting with Sask Wheat.

Eight farmers, including the AWC’s Kevin Auch, Jason Saunders and Terry Young, Sask Wheat’s Ken Rosaasen, Glenn Tait and Laura Reiter, and the MWBGA’s Cale Jeffries and Dylan Wiebe, will sit on the coalition’s first board.

The commissions took on an expanded role in handling checkoff funding after the Western Canadian Deduction (WCD) on wheat and barley sunset on July 31.

All three commissions had single checkoffs in place for Aug. 1, covering both their own work and the WCD’s funding obligations, which include funds for the Western Grains Research Foundation (WGRF), the Canadian Malting Barley Technical Centre and Cigi, the Canadian International Grains Institute.

The WCD checkoffs had been set up in 2012 by the federal government as a transition move following its deregulation of the CWB’s single marketing desk for Prairie wheat and barley.

Where the WGRF previously led research initiatives through WCD funding, the commissions said they will now “ensure continuity” in new spring wheat variety development is maintained through the CWRC, and will engage WGRF as “a key player” through the transition.

The WGRF, which will remain a separate entity, steered by its own board of directors, has already charted a four-year transition plan providing about $18 million per year in research funding out to 2020.

That money, coming from WGRF’s wheat and barley reserve funds, is to cover its core wheat and barley variety development commitments; ongoing funding commitments; new projects focused on “sustainability, resiliency and efficiency” of crop production systems; and new projects dealing with “specific research issues” in intermediate Prairie field crops.

The WGRF has said its transition plan has the commissions’ support and will “ensure the stability of core breeding programs” at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and the University of Alberta, University of Saskatchewan and University of Manitoba out to 2020.

“Most of the best performing wheat varieties available to farmers are the result of producer-funded wheat breeding efforts,” Auch said in the commissions’ release Tuesday.

“I look forward to working with my provincial counterparts to continue this work with the goal of seeing new, high-performing varieties that result in better returns and increased competitiveness for farmers.” — AGCanada.com Network

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Options in the report, from the newly-formed Wheat and Barley Variety Working Group, range from improving the way information is shared, to creating a new producer group to co-ordinate research — or even starting a new producer-owned cereal breeding company.

“Farmers’ interest is in seeing wheat and barley remain competitive in rotations over the long term,” says Garth Patterson, executive director of the Western Grains Research Foundation (WGRF), the agency that co-ordinated the new study.

Variety development research is needed, to make sure new cereal varieties with higher yields and disease resistance continue to be available.

The challenge is that wheat and barley are self-pollinating crops, less attractive to private-sector breeders than crops such as canola. Because farmers can save wheat and barley seed from year to year with minimal yield losses, they don’t need to pay for certified seed annually, and private-sector breeders find it difficult to recoup investments.

Neither the report’s authors nor the commissions involved recommend one particular option — just that farmers read the report, think about the issues and discuss the possibilities over the winter at producer meetings and commission AGMs.

Why now?

The commissions involved started discussing the need for this work about a year ago, Patterson says. “The driver here has been the changes to the wheat and barley checkoff.”

With the removal of the Canadian Wheat Board, new wheat and barely commissions and associations have been created across the Prairie provinces, funded through farmer levies on the sale of wheat and barley.

Until July 31, 2017, farmers also pay levies to the WGRF (56 cents per tonne of barley and 48 cents per tonne of wheat — except in Alberta, where farmers pay four cents per tonne of wheat to the WGRF, and $1 per tonne to their provincial wheat commission).

After July 31, 2017, it’s not clear if the WGRF levy will be discontinued or transferred to provincial commissions, or if another option will be found. For now, research will continue using the WGRF’s financial reserves. “We’re just finalizing five-year agreements to the end of 2019,” Patterson says.

Other regulatory changes have also led to the need for this study. There have been changes to the federal Plants Breeders Rights Act, designed to encourage increased investment. There is a possibility that end point royalties (EPR) — a system in which farmers would pay a variety royalty fee when they deliver their production — may be implemented in the future.

The study outlines two strategic choices farmers need to make. This first is “how should farmers be involved in varietal development?” Should farmers own assets? How much research should farmers fund through levies?

The second strategic question is “Should farmers support an EPR system?” Under such a system, farmers would pay royalties for the use of seed when they sold their production. This would increase farmers’ costs, but also provide more funding for cereal breeding.

The study

The study, “Exploring Options for Producer Involvement in Wheat and Barley Variety Development” was prepared by Ontario-based JRG Consulting Group.

The Wheat and Barley Variety Working Group, which commissioned the study, includes representatives from Alberta Barley, Alberta Wheat, the B.C. Grain Producers Association, Manitoba Wheat and Barley Association, SaskBarley Development Commission, SaskWheat Development Commission, Saskatchewan Winter Cereals Development Commission, WGRF and Winter Cereals Manitoba.

This leads to the need for a lot of logos on the final report. Patterson says the organizations are “very committed to working together and looking at this with a western Canadian approach.”

Patterson compares investing in variety research to investing for your retirement. It can take years for a new variety to come to the market — but new high-yielding varieties can make a big impact to farm economics.

“The little things you do now can have a big impact,” he says. “We don’t want to be 20 years down the road and say ‘This is how farmers might have positioned themselves in supporting wheat and barley breeding.'”

— Leeann Minogue is the editor of Grainews based at Griffin, Sask. Follow her at @GrainMuse on Twitter.

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