THE WAIT IS (NEARLY) OVER
BY TREVOR BACQUE • PHOTO COURTESY OF CORTEVA
It’s taken many years of research and policy discussions, but it’s almost here. By 2027, American farmers will be able to purchase and grow hybrid wheat. Late in 2024, Corteva Agriscience announced its proprietary hybrid wheat system that pushes yield potential by 10 per cent and up to 20 per cent in drought conditions.
The plan is to launch a hybrid hard red winter wheat in the U.S., to be followed by CWRS and soft red winter wheat in Canada, although these release dates are not set.
Tyler Groeneveld, North America director of grains and oils at Corteva, said this is a significant step for wheat, which has had minimal success in hybridization. Crops such as corn and canola have benefitted from advances in this area. “This is an opportunity to really bring a genetic gain and yield stability for wheat growers under variable climatic conditions,” he said. “This technology can really help elevate the consistency of a very important crop that’s widely grown and adapted across North America.”
Corteva has worked on wheat hybridization for more than 30 years, said Groeneveld. Once the wheat genome was fully mapped in 2018, the initiative moved quickly, and the company filed for a wheat hybridization innovation patent.
As the hybrid breeding technique is applied to additional wheat classes, Groeneveld is confident farmers will benefit. “It works in all classes of wheat, so it’s going to result in more reliable and profitable crops for growers without the unpredictability of some of the older hybridization technologies that have been tried in wheat.”
Harwinder Sidhu is a federal winter wheat breeder at the Lethbridge Research and Development Centre. He believes hybrid wheat could have real potential, but it remains to be seen. He noted the breeding work is challenging, which is why hybrid wheat has remained elusive for seed companies.
“The struggle in the past has been to achieve absolute male sterility in the female plants,” he said. “For hybrid seed production the pollen must be from another male parent to fertilize the flower. You have to absolutely make sure no self-pollination happens. It’s a bit tricky to do in wheat.”
Theoretically, the advantages would be clear, just as they are with hybrid corn, Sidhu pointed out. This would include increased yield and improved disease and stress tolerance, but he added he hasn’t seen a variety that demonstrates these benefits.
He will look forward to reviewing data from hybrid variety trials and to see if 100 per cent sterility was achieved. If so, he said such a development could be groundbreaking.
“Research shows that by the time pollination starts, the flowers have not opened enough for the different sterilization chemicals to work well enough,” said Sidhu. “By the time flowers open enough, some fertilization has already happened.
Those kinds of physical challenges haven’t been overcome yet. Whenever somebody says they have a new proprietary technology, I want to see it, but over the last 20, 30 years, it has been hit or a miss.”
Corteva competitor BASF shut down its North American hybrid program as of 2023. With its Ideltis hybrid winter wheat, it now focuses on the European marketplace. Similarly, Syngenta released its hybrid wheat to American farmers last year, but Canada was snubbed. The company shelved its Canadian breeding program in 2018, claiming the country’s marketplace regulations were too cumbersome.
For more information on Corteva’s hybrid wheat program, visit corteva.ca.
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