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Spring
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Grains
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You have certainty that you have budget
allocated for the next five years.”
Breeding programs are a continuum,
said Pat Juskiw, a barley breeder with
Alberta Agriculture and Forestry at the
Lacombe Field Crop Development
Centre (FCDC). She uses AgriInnovation
funding for her malting barley breeding
program at the Centre.
“What it has allowed us to do—
which we were stumbling with or not
doing before—is to use markers in
our breeding program,” she said. “It
has enhanced our ability to identify
markers that were useful in our breeding
program, and to implement them on
an annual basis. That has been a real
strength and benefit to our breeding
program.”
Many research programs, including
those focusing on malting barley
breeding, are long-term games that
require long-term funding.
“From the time you make a cross until
the time it gets into your beer bottle, it will
be 15 years,” said Juskiw, although Juskiw
and other breeders are working hard to
get that number down to 10 to 12 years.
Jennifer Zantinge, an Alberta
Agriculture and Forestry research
scientist and molecular geneticist
specializing in wheat, barley and triticale
at the Lacombe FCDC, said the cluster
approach has fostered collaboration
between different groups of researchers
that might not otherwise interact.
“When I look at it as both industry and
research, academic research is more
academic, and ours is more applied,”
she said.
In research, there is often a missing
link. Academic researchers might do
a lot of gene sequencing, but then it
takes investment for applied researchers
to use those markers in their breeding
programs. The clusters help focus the
research, identify what work is needed
and encourage various groups to work
together. Academics can focus more on
general knowledge, and then applied
researchers take that research and tailor it
to things producers need on their farms.
Now all groups within the research
community have a better understanding
of what the other players are working on,
and there’s improved communication
between the sectors.
The AgriInnovation program is
currently working well under
Growing
Forward 2
, but things weren’t always as
straightforward.
“It took a long time to put all these
collaborators’ agreements in place,
so pretty much one year we ran
without funds because we were still
dealing with all these agreements,”
said Randhawa. “But I am sensing the
problem is solved now.”
He doesn’t think that problem will
BREEDING COLLABORATION:
Cereal breeders like Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s Harpinder Singh Randhawa have seen the benefits of the
AgriInnovation program’s collaborative approach to research funding.