Grainswest - Spring 2025

Spring 2025 Grains West 38 for delivering on performance expectations, he said. Enforcement of Canada’s plant breeders’ rights also needs improvement, said Piecharka, as fair compensation for breeding efforts remains a challenge and adoption of certified seed remains low. “We need to do a much better job of promoting the value of certified seed, and we need to achieve clarity on how we collect royalties,” he said. “A well-defined royalty collection strategy is needed to ensure fair compensation for breeders while maintaining affordability for farmers. Industry-wide collaboration will be key to making this happen.” OTHER APPROACHES Few people are better positioned to talk about the transition from public to private breeding than Jason Reinheimer, head of cereals and pulses research at Limagrain Field Seeds in France. His decades-long career has taken him from his native Australia to Canada and on to Europe. Reinheimer learned the value of private breeding efforts as a student. When he enrolled in plant breeding at the University of Adelaide, Australia’s public plant breeding programs were underfunded and underappreciated. By the time he graduated, the sector had undergone a radical transformation. Created in 1990, the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC), the federal equivalent of Canada’s combined grain commissions, had tendered for the development of three for-profit public corporations that would invest revenues from end-point royalties to fund wheat breeding. The move allowed the GDRC to shi• its focus to the use of levy-based funding for pre- breeding research efforts. Three for- profit public corporations were created: Australian Grain Technologies (AGT), HRZ Wheats and InterGrain. GDRC became a key shareholder in the newly developed companies. Reinheimer recalls his father’s frustration at the time. A farmer of grains and pulses in southeastern Australia, he thought the old system worked just fine and didn’t understand why he had to pay for the same variety twice. Reinheimer explained end-point royalties would give plant breeders adequate budget to deliver improved varieties, and farmers wouldn’t have to pay twice once the transition was complete. In 2004, while Australia’s public- to-private transition was in its infancy, Reinheimer became a wheat and triticale breeder at AGT. Farmers still had good reason to grumble. Newly marketed varieties weren’t much better than the old ones. That is, until 2008 when AGT released Mace, a wheat variety with a disease package better than most other varieties on the market. It became eligible for the top wheat quality grade, and within three years, Mace took 50 per cent market share and was declared Western Australia’s benchmark for yield. While they had to pay $3 per tonne in end-point royalties, farmers reaped 30 times that in additional profits. “With the value delivered in this new variety, industry [attitudes] turned almost overnight as farmers had never seen this large jump in variety performance; something that is the norm today,” said Reinheimer. Following nearly 12 years at AGT, he took a job as senior breeder at Limagrain Cereals Research in Saskatchewan. In Canada, he realized breeding the best varieties wasn’t going to be enough. “It was going to take the industry to change the way they were supporting plant breeding for us to be able to deliver value to Canadian farmers in the longer term.” TIME FOR CHANGE Canada’s top grain-producing competitors have strengthened intellectual property rights, bolstered investment in breeding efforts and relaxed once-taxing varietal registration schemes. In contrast, critics of the Canadian system describe it as paralyzed by underfunding and overregulation. Comin emphasized government must either get behind public breeding programs 100 per cent or revamp the system to build private sector capacity. To incentivize private breeding companies to operate in Canada, she suggested farmers could pay end-point royalties or VUAs on farm-saved seed rather than check-offs. “The registration system, in my eyes, absolutely needs a revamp,” she said. End-users may demand certain qualities, but registration criteria may block the approval of a variety that suits their needs. The process also generates complaints that new varieties are too similar. “Sometimes these archaic structures are just no longer suited for the reality of modern agriculture,” she added. Comin didn’t mince words about what holds Canada back. “Government has said until producers are ready for this, we’re not going to move,” she said. “Someone has to show leadership, and I would say that is going to have to be the government. Change is hard, and this is a big change. It’s going to take some leadership and some truth telling.” “It was going to take the industry to change the way they were supporting plant breeding for us to be able to deliver value to Canadian farmers in the longer term.” —Jason Reinheimer FEATURE