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The Food Issue
2017
grainswest.com27
MODERN DAY
Today, there are thousands of varieties of wheat grown around
the world. However, on the Prairies, there are still fewer than
a dozen varieties that are grown in large quantities each
growing season.
For many of those varieties, Canadians can thank Ron
DePauw, a mild-mannered, 73-year-old former wheat breeder
from Kamsack, SK. If you’ve eaten any bread product in Canada
over the last few decades, there’s an extremely high chance it
was made with a wheat variety he and his team created in the
Swift Current test fields during his long and illustrious career.
DePauw is considered to be one of Canada’s top wheat
breeders of the last 50 years. He developed a love of the natural
world early in his life and has spent more than four decades
dedicated to public breeding research with Agriculture and
Agri-Food Canada. His goal from the outset was simple:
“When I started working at Beaverlodge [Alberta] in 1973, I had
set myself a personal goal of wanting to develop really good
varieties that would grow successfully on farmer fields, and
farmers would be satisfied to grow them again,” he said.
By all accounts, DePauw succeeded. One of the most notable
contributions was in 1993 with his team at the Semiarid Prairie
Agricultural Research Centre (SPARC)—a CWRS wheat variety
called “Barrie” that boasted high yields, high protein, disease
resistance and wide adaptation for the Prairies. Not only that, it
had shorter, stronger straw to stand up to the abiotic stresses and
adverse conditions common across the Prairies.
“It was the first product that broke the yield and protein
link,” said Todd Hyra, business manager for Western Canada
at SeCan, a Canadian seed company. “Normally, when protein
goes up, yield goes down. In this case, both were high.” It
didn’t take long for farmers to take note of this novel innovation.
Barrie quickly became the dominant variety grown on the
Prairies from about 1996 to 2005, hitting a peak in 1999 with a
share of 47.5 per cent of all CWRS acres.
Less than a decade after Barrie’s creation, DePauw produced
“Lillian,” another CWRS variety with a high yield, a solid stem
and a greater resistance to a damaging pest known as the
wheat stem sawfly. Lillian took a turn to unseat Barrie and was
the major variety from 2007 to 2010 in Western Canada. “It’s
one thing to try something, but if [they] repeat growing them,
that’s a measure of success that farmers are satisfied,” said
DePauw of his varieties’ uptake.
That success has come from decades of institutional hard
work and dedication, according to Hyra. “I was in a field with
him last year in southern Manitoba, the temperature was in
the 30s, it was humid … he was trekking through it like he was
25 years old. I can’t imagine what he was like when he was
younger.”
According to certain plant breeders, having one wheat
variety as successful as Barrie or Lillian to their name would allow
them to retire happy. Breeding research is painstaking work and
discovering “the one” is far trickier than finding the proverbial
needle in a haystack. Bringing the average new variety to
market typically takes about 10 years, and it’s not a guarantee
it will gain market acceptance, either. However, DePauw and
company defied the odds and many of their greatest hits can
be found in fields all across the Prairies. In total, DePauw and
his team registered more than 65 higher-performing wheat
and durum wheat varieties, such as Brandon, Carberry, Kyle
and Stettler. DePauw himself is listed as the lead breeder on 29
different CWRS varieties. DePauw estimates the team at Swift
Current has spent more than 500 collective years breeding
wheat during his tenure.
Much of that work wouldn’t be possible without the average
farmer directly contributing to the success. Western Canadian
farmers voluntarily pay for research funding through levies,
also called check-offs, on their grain sales. That money is used
for funding public research, an immeasurable contribution,
said DePauw. “That money we got from producers had a very,
very big impact. It allowed us to double our genetic gains and
enabled us to double our breeding program. Farmers are big
time investors of this.”
The work DePauw has done throughout his entire career was,
is and continues to be acknowledged by farmers. According to
DePauw, 40 to 50 per cent of seeded CWRS acres are breeds
that originated in Swift Current.
Photo: CourtesyofRonDePauw
Manitoba was the first bastion of Prairie wealth andmany Europe-
ans came to Canada in order to escape feudal societies. Above was
a typical advertisement seen in many European cities and towns.
Continued on page 45.