Basic HTML Version
Winter
2015
grainswest.com
33
Feature
A lesson in
patience
Plant breeders play the long game
by TREVOR BACQUE • ILLUSTRATION BY TOMMY WILSON
f there was ever a golden rule when
conversing with a plant breeder, it may be this: Be
prepared. To talk plant breeding requires a colossal
amount of brainpower, especially once you dive into the
genetic nitty-gritty.
Being able to harvest a uniform crop is the result of two
factors: hard, carefully planned work by the farmer, and
painstaking, meticulous, calculated time in the lab and field by
the breeder. Think of a breeder as the portion of the iceberg
under the water and a farmer in a field as what’s above.
“It is a science,” said Ron DePauw emphatically. “The
underpinning is science principles. If you miss that point, you
won’t be successful.”
With more than four decades of breeding experience to his
name, DePauw is the senior principal wheat breeder at SPARC,
the Semiarid Prairie Agricultural Research Centre, in Swift
Current, SK. Western Canadian farmers have benefited over
the years from SPARC’s well-known varieties, such as AC Barrie,
Carberry and Stettler Hard Red Spring,
and Kyle, Strongfield and Avonlea durum.
When it comes to breeding, the goal
is just the same as it ever was, despite
private interest, if you ask barley breeder
Joseph Nyachiro, who works in Lacombe’s
provincial Field Crop Development Centre.
“The broad fundamental nature and goals of plant breeding
have not changed from increasing agricultural productivity in
order to supply adequate food and feed,” he said.
Genetic selection has also made significant gains over the last
half-century thanks to computer technology for data collection
and cross-referencing, as well as instrumentation advancements
to shave time off lab and field work.
“When I started, we were using wet chemistry for protein—
the Kjeldahl method,” said DePauw of the longstanding
quantitative test that determines protein content. “Now, with
infrared, you can get a reading on protein in 20 seconds, so we
I
can just crank them through. We are able to select for protein
concentration simultaneously when selecting for yield.”
Despite such advances, breeding is still very much a lesson in
patience. Consider this: If a breeder successfully creates a new
line, tack on another eight to 10 years for that successful genetic
combination to become commercially available for farmers. This
means developing a new line can easily take 11 to 13 years in total.
“Why does it take time? You have to go through a biological
cycle,” said DePauw, who likened it to pregnancy. “You can’t
really do much about that. You can’t throw any dollars at it. It’s
the same with plants.”
Breeders look for similar climates the world over to mimic
western Canadian conditions to expedite the process by
growing two crop cycles per year. Locations include northern
NewMexico’s Yaqui Valley, southern California’s Imperial Valley
and New Zealand’s Canterbury Plains. The latter has netted the
most success, saving breeders up to four years in development.
From there, a breeder will work to select desirable gene
combinations and create “inbred lines,” or lines that will annually
reproduce the same traits. This is no small task, as there are truly
millions of selections a breeder couldmake with each plant cross.
“There are more ways of failing than succeeding,” said
DePauw. “We get lucky every once in a while.”
The story remains the same in private breeding—long
timelines and small, incremental success rates. However, private
breeding has popped up more and more as companies see
renewed interest in hybrid cereals, namely wheat.
“A hybrid breeding model gives one the opportunity to
achieve genetic gains in a faster and more efficient way than in
a classical inbred model,” said Marcus Weidler, vice president
of seeds operations at Bayer CropScience. “You can introduce
desired characteristics for the hybrid from both sides: the
female as well as the male. One doesn’t need to pyramid all the
desired traits in one single line.”
The time commitment is still
approximately the same as conventional
breeding—about 12 years—but Bayer
hybrids, scheduled for release between
2020 and 2025, are what Weidler calls
superior, asserting that the lines are “higher
yielding and have a higher yield stability.”
However, hybrid breeding still requires two distinct
programs, according to Brian Rossnagel, a longtime breeder
and University of Saskatchewan professor emeritus with the
department of plant sciences.
“You need an inbred breeding program to create each of
your hybrid parents, one male and one female, thus there is a lot
of regular breeding to be done to produce those best parents,”
he said. “Initial hybrid plants will show heterotic advantages,
but from there it’s just small incremental gains. This business
of ‘faster and more efficient’—I would say that that’s not a
defendable statement.”
“There are more ways of
failing than succeeding.”
–Ron DePauw