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GW
: What are your current wheat
projects?
HR:
My focus is Alberta—most of our
wheat varieties are good for all of Western
Canada, with some emphasis on irrigation
for the south—except for the northern
climate (they need to breed varieties with
longer maturity; there are researchers in
the north working on those).
I just registered AAC Awesome—it
is the highest-yielding variety in West-
ern Canada. It’s a spring wheat, mostly
targeted for ethanol. It has a non-milling
wheat special-purpose classification. Good
plant type and straw strength, resistant to
all rust and a mid-resistance to FHB and
midge tolerance.
GW
: Tell us about your public-pri-
vate-producer partnership Partnership
with the Alberta Wheat Commission
(AWC) and Canterra Seeds that started
in 2014.
HR:
It’s a five-year agreement and it’s a
unique partnership, the first time we’ve
had it in Western Canada. Usually, we’re
funded by producer money, like the AWC
check-off or Agriculture and Agri-Food
Canada money. This funding gives us the
money to conduct research, but some-
times we don’t need money. This group
is different because Canterra, as a seed
company, does research and has commit-
ted to in-kind support. I need support in
Manitoba—I can’t take my people all the
way out there to do the work—so they
have plots, collect data and do quality
analysis. It’s really helpful.
GW
: Have any new varieties come out of
this partnership?
HR:
We have two varieties ready for
release in the next year, AAC Crossfield
and its sister variety AAC Entice. Cross-
field is a semi-dwarf variety that yields as
much as top varieties like AAC Foray, even
though Foray is on the taller side. Some
farmers don’t want to manage as much
straw, for instance if they have wet condi-
tions or irrigate, so a semi-dwarf variety is
a good choice. It also has good resistance
to leaf, stem and yellow rusts. Add in the
intermediate FHB resistance and you have
what farmers growing CPS wheat in Al-
berta are looking for. Crossfield should be
available to farmers in 2018. Entice is very
similar, although not as high-yielding.
The third variety is similar but has a
good midge tolerance, which is important
for central Alberta. It should be in seed
production in 2020.
GW:
What could be done to speed up
plant breeding?
HR:
Plant breeding is like a pyramid. We
select plants that have characteristics we
want and we start crossing. For example,
you can have five traits from parent plant
one, five from parent two and five or so
from parent three. Then you have 15 traits
you want. That’s the first generation—
growing hundreds of thousands of plants
and selecting among them. We make
selections at every step. After 10 years,
as we go up the pyramid, only one or two
selections will make it to new varieties.
We discard and select, discard and
select, for four or five plant generations
based on simple genetics. After that, we
focus on complicated traits like yield and
resistance to FHB. Once we fix the line
and develop it, we do agronomic testing.
It’s a long way and a lot of work, with plot
testing and disease screening and quality
trait analysis all the way along.
To speed up the process, we use our
winter nursery in New Zealand. We plant
here in May and harvest in September,
then we take it to New Zealand and plant
there by mid-October because it’s spring
down there. Then I go in the end of Jan-
uary and harvest all selected rows. They
come back in March and we start again.
We can do two generations in one year to
speed up the process.
GW:
Biotechnology and molecular
biology are fast-growing industries.
Will you employ advancements in these
areas as a wheat breeder?
HR:
There are tools and techniques
coming up, like gene editing. We will
have those, but they won’t replace tradi-
tional breeding. We will use them to help
selection and make changes in genetic
expression and enhance a certain gene,
but we’ll still have to go through breeding
and agronomic testing. The technology
will be assisting, not replacing.
Fall
2017
Grains
West
24