Author: cwrc2023dev

Spring wheat accounts for about 90% of the wheat grown in Quebec—half is milling wheat, the other half is feed wheat. Unlike other regions of Canada, the feed wheat market is very important in Quebec, explains Silvia Barcellos Rosa, wheat breeder, Centre de recherche sur les grains (CÉROM).

She says growing conditions in Quebec are not as well suited to producing quality wheat as those in the Prairies. Canada eastern red spring wheat often has lower protein content and gluten strength than Canadian western red spring wheat grown in the Prairies. While it’s reasonable to assume this quality difference is mainly due to environment, wheat breeders developing new varieties for Eastern Canada are selecting for traits that will improve bread-making qualities.

The price of feed wheat in Quebec is similar to the price of milling wheat, but producers grow feed wheat because they can get a higher yield. “Local millers want to use more wheat from Quebec,” Rosa says, “but there’s not enough good-quality wheat grown here. If we can improve the quality, farmers will benefit from higher prices and better local markets.”

Eastern farms are also more likely to be affected by Fusarium head blight (FHB), a fungal disease that can significantly reduce yield and produce mycotoxins. Rosa acknowledges that FHB resistance is important everywhere, but she says “it’s especially so in Quebec because of climate conditions. A variety with good resistance to FHB would have a huge impact for Eastern producers.”

Rosa is using new breeding technologies to develop varieties with higher yield, improved quality, and more disease resistance, especially to FHB. For example, her program has built an indoor quality lab. “We can now select for quality indoors, which is something we were missing in the past,” she says.

She is also using speed breeding to develop advanced lines and get them to market as quickly as possible. When you’re growing outdoors in Canada, you can only grow one generation per year in the field. Rosa is using indoor growth chambers with 22 hours of light to grow four generations per year.

“The idea is to advance the lines indoors until they’re genetically stable, then select in the field,” she explains. “We’re not jumping the selection stage, but we’re selecting later.”

She’s also employing marker-assisted selection to identify desirable traits. She screens for genetic markers on DNA samples in early generations to identify plants that have the traits she’s looking for. This lets her direct her efforts to plants/lines with higher potential, which reduces the cost of field experiments later in the breeding process.

She’s also trying to identify genes that will help new varieties be more resilient to climate extremes. “The idea is to identify genetic regions that are related to broad adaptability,” she explains.

Climate change is a big concern. “We need to focus on material that can better tolerate abiotic stresses like high temperatures and dry conditions,” she says. “We’re going to evaluate cultures from all over the Americas and have trials in Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Quebec to try to identify lines that have broad adaptability and good resilience. We can then use those materials in crosses to develop new cultures that can better adapt to climate change.”

This Wheat Cluster project received funding from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada through the AgriScience Program, which is part of the Canadian Agricultural Partnership, a federal, provincial, territorial initiative. This project also received funding from Producteurs de grains du Québec and SeCan. Rosa is using the funding to develop spring wheat varieties for Eastern Canada that will have higher yield and better quality for the milling industry, be resistant to major diseases, contribute to environmental sustainability, and, ultimately, increase profitability for producers.

To read the project profile, CLICK HERE.

In wheat breeding, there are three pillars, says Pierre Hucl, wheat breeder with the Crop Development Centre (CDC), University of Saskatchewan. He and his colleagues are developing spring and durum wheat varieties for Western Canada with targets in each of these pillars:

• improved yield

• good disease resistance package

• end-use quality characteristics requested by export and domestic customers

Their aim was to increase yield by 6.5% over the 2016 check. Hucl says they’ve developed both spring and durum wheat varieties that are yielding at least 10% higher, while maintaining other favourable agronomic traits and most of the disease resistance they were looking for.

“I think we’ve already met that objective in Canada western red spring wheat,” says Hucl. His CDC SKRush, which is yielding about 15% higher than the checks in registration, will be available in fall 2022 through SeCan.

To accelerate the release of new varieties, Hucl’s team used some of the Canadian Agricultural Partnership (CAP) Wheat Cluster funding they received to increase the size of their winter nursery. Typically breeders in Canada can only plant one crop per year, so most grow a second generation in the southern hemisphere (often New Zealand or Chile) in the winter.

Breeders also rely on disease nurseries, where they induce disease to test the resistance of new material. Hucl’s team used some of their CAP Wheat Cluster funding to double the size of their Fusarium head blight (FHB) nursery and improve their stripe rust nursery. This aspect of their project was managed by Randy Kutcher, plant pathologist, CDC.

“We’ve been able to set up a physically distanced stripe rust nursery,” Hucl says. “We used to have our leaf rust and our stripe rust nurseries together, but it can be a challenge to differentiate between the two.”

One of the most challenging diseases is Fusarium head blight (FHB). “It’s been a bugbear for us for a quarter century now and overcoming it has been a slow, slow process,” he says. “We’ve doubled our FHB resistance, but we’re still not where we’d like to be.”

Disease resistance in crops tends to break down over time because the pathogens mutate. “For something like leaf rust or stripe rust, the resistance only lasts about a decade, and then you’re back at square one,” he says. “So we try to combine as many genes for resistance as we can in each variety. If one goes down, the others will hold up.”

One of the most important developments in their arsenal of wheat breeding tools has been the breeder chip. Developed as part of a 10-year project to sequence the wheat genome (led by Curtis Pozniak, wheat breeder and CDC director), the breeder chip uses more than 5,000 DNA markers to target specific genes. This helps breeders more accurately select for specific traits (such as yield and disease resistance) and predict the performance of breeding lines. It doesn’t shorten the breeding process, but it makes the outcomes more predictable.

“The breeder chip has been an international effort to identify all the key markers,” says Hucl. “The process probably started 10 years ago, but it’s been getting cheaper and cheaper to deploy, and we’re identifying more and more useful markers.”

Hucl’s third and final pillar is dough strength improvement for end users. He says breeders have been given new targets for dough strength, essentially meaning how elastic the dough produced from a wheat will be. The test used to determine dough properties is very time consuming and the equipment (an extensograph) is very expensive. Michael Nickerson (Department of Food and Bioproduct Sciences, University of Saskatchewan) is trying to develop a quicker and easier predictive test to determine extensibility.

“If we can get a rapid test to work, it will be a benefit not only to our breeding program, but also to other Western Canadian wheat breeding programs,” says Hucl.

This Wheat Cluster project received funding from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada through the AgriScience Program, which is part of the Canadian Agricultural Partnership, a federal, provincial, territorial initiative. This project also received funding from Alberta Wheat Commission, Saskatchewan Wheat Development Commission, Manitoba Crop Alliance, and Western Grains Research Foundation.

To read the project profile, CLICK HERE.

Wheat producers face a variety of challenges that impact yield, grade, and farm operations. Richard Cuthbert, a wheat breeder with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Swift Current Research Development Centre, says new wheat varieties can provide solutions to many of those challenges.

He’s trying to develop field-ready varieties of Canada Western Red Spring (CWRS) wheat for producers in the brown and dark brown soil zones (southern Alberta and southwestern Saskatchewan) that will respond to stresses in those regions—typically heat and drought.

“We see more extremes from year to year in terms of climate—moisture may be limited in some years and excessive in others,” he says. “We can’t predict what the environment will be, so we need varieties that can withstand a range of conditions.”

Creating something that adaptable brings significant challenges, explains Cuthbert, “but we’re fortunate to be working with improved genetics that have been bred over decades, maybe even a century, in Canada. We have a pretty good base to work from.”

Among the five priority-one diseases—Fusarium head blight (FHB), leaf rust, stem rust, stripe rust, and common bunt—Cuthbert says FHB and stripe rust are the biggest challenges.

“Stripe rust in particular has become a bigger concern in the Western Prairies in recent years,” he explains. “There seem to be new races that are able to withstand higher temperatures and may overwinter in Canada . . . That could be due to changing climates, but that’s just speculation. We know that stripe rust is persisting and is more prevalent.”

To have a fighting chance against rust, Cuthbert says farmers can’t rely on chemical controls alone. “We need genetics that will reduce farmers’ reliance on chemical controls. The fewer controls you need to use the better, from a profitability standpoint and from an environmental standpoint.”

He recently released a couple of new varieties that he’s very optimistic about. AAC Starbuck and AAC Wheatland are both semi-dwarf CWRS varieties with excellent grain yield, high protein, good straw strength, and tolerance to orange wheat blossom midge. AAC Starbuck also provides fewer FHB symptoms and lower accumulation of deoxynivalenol (DON), the mycotoxin produced by Fusarium species.

 “They’re performing very well and the feedback is quite positive, so we’re optimistic for their launch this spring,” he says.

AAC Hockley is another new variety that came out last year. It’s not midge-resistant, but Cuthbert says it has an excellent disease resistance package, including improved FHB resistance.

Most breeding programs focus on resistance to the priority-one diseases, which is required for registration, but Cuthbert says his program has been maintaining resistance to loose smut as well.

“Doing the minimum is a good way to get in trouble, so we try to go above and beyond, especially with disease resistance,” he says. “Loose smut hasn’t been a concern in recent years, so it was removed from the breeding requirements, but we try to maintain it in our varieties so we don’t inadvertently introduce a susceptibility to the disease.”

Cuthbert’s new varieties are providing farmers with higher yields, assured performance, and a comprehensive disease resistance package. He projects that, by the end of the project, these new varieties could generate $100,000,000 in additional annual farm revenue.

This Wheat Cluster project received funding from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada through the AgriScience Program, which is part of the Canadian Agricultural Partnership, a federal, provincial, territorial initiative. This project also received funding from Alberta Wheat Commission, Saskatchewan Wheat Development Commission, Manitoba Crop Alliance, and Western Grains Research Foundation.

For the project profile, CLICK HERE.