Fusarium head blight (FHB) is a fungal disease that infects wheat and other cereal crops. Depending on when infection occurs, FHB can reduce the number of kernels developed or result in Fusarium damaged kernels (FDKs) and contamination with deoxynivalenol (DON). If infection happens later, kernels may not appear damaged, but could still contain DON, which is a health risk for humans and animals.

“The presence of FDKs in harvested grain results not only in a reduction of yield and downgrading, but the infection will also impact functional characteristics of the grain for end users,” explains Kelly Turkington, a research scientist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.

FHB is a difficult problem to manage. “Breeders have made incremental improvements, but the varieties we have available still don’t provide a high level of resistance,” Turkington says. “Fungicides provide suppression at best, and the crop rotations we’re using are not quite long enough to be an effective disease management tool.”

He recommends an integrated approach. “You can’t rely exclusively on one tool, you need a set of tools,” he says. “You need to rotate (not plant wheat on wheat), you need to apply a fungicide at anthesis (flowering), and you need to grow a ‘resistant’ variety.”

Turkington is running two different trials to explore a number of cropping strategies to reduce the impact of FHB. One is looking at crop rotation and residue management.

“We’re hoping to demonstrate the role extending the rotational interval from one year to two, or even three years, can have on disease risk, meaning the amount of infected residue that persists until the next time you grow wheat in that field,” explains Turkington.

Infected residue allows the pathogen to overwinter on the field and can result in spore production and reinfection if a cereal is grown the following year. The idea is to remove some of that highly infectious crop residue to reduce the extent of FHB infection in subsequent years.

The other trial is looking at row spacing, seeding rate, and fungicide timing.

He’s comparing narrow row spacing (7 to 10 inches) and wider row spacing (12 to 14 inches). Traditional thinking, he explains, suggests wider row spacing will lead to more air movement and shorter periods of high relative humidity and leaf wetness, which should discourage FHB. However, wider row spacing may also provide more wind access to infected stubble, which means spores could be more readily carried up onto the head. His theory is that low row spacing likely won’t have an impact on micro-environments, but it might help reduce spore dispersal.

He’s also comparing low and high seeding rates. Lower seeding rates result in more secondary tiller development and a less uniform crop. If you spray a fungicide when the main-stem tillers begin to flower, which is the ideal time, the heads on secondary tillers may not even be out and won’t be protected. Turkington’s theory is that higher seeding rates will result in more uniform crop development, more uniform head emergence, and hopefully better management of FHB when fungicides are applied.

Finally, he’s looking at four different fungicide treatments:

• No spray (as a check)

• Early application (about 4 days after head emergence)

• Later application (about 7 to 10 days later)

• Dual application (early and again later)

Traditionally, fungicide application happens at the beginning of anthesis. “It’s a key time for infection and production of FDKs and DON,” Turkington says. “If you apply a fungicide later, the concern is that it might not have the same impact. Based on research out of the US over the last five or so years, that simply isn’t the case.”

He says you can apply a fungicide later and have very similar, if not better management of FDKs and DON. However, later application may have implications for recommended pre-harvest intervals. Later or dual applications would likely require revisions to fungicide labels.

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. Turkington is hopeful his research will lead to improved strategies to mitigate FHB in wheat, thus limiting the impact of this issue for producers.

To read the project profile, CLICK HERE.

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.

Robert Graf, a research scientist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Lethbridge Research and Development Centre, is developing improved Canada Western Red Winter (CWRW) wheat varieties for Western Canada.

Winter wheat acreage is relatively small, he says, so before he proposes a new variety for registration he wants to be sure it will really make an impact for producers. “Having a huge number of varieties is not going to serve anyone if we’re not making improvements,” he explains.

In his new varieties, he’s targeting resistance to the priority-one diseases—rusts (stem, leaf, and stripe), Fusarium head blight (FHB), and common bunt—but he’s also looking to add resistance to the wheat curl mite (which provides protection against wheat streak mosaic virus) and resistance to the Russian wheat aphid (which is a problem in some parts of the US and presented a scare in Western Canada in the late 1980s).

Wheat stem sawfly is another insect pest on his radar. Sawfly has long been an issue in spring wheat, but it hasn’t been a problem in winter wheat in Canada. Graf says there are populations of sawfly in the US that have synchronized their life cycles with winter wheat and have become a major problem as close as Montana, so he’s developing solid-stem varieties that will be inhospitable to sawfly.

His highest agronomic priorities are higher yield and winter survivability. “With climate change, we’re seeing a lot more variability in our extremes,” he says. “Some suggest that, over time, we may not need the level of winter hardiness that we currently strive for, but in the short and medium term, we need to maintain that excellent level of cold tolerance to reduce production risk.”

He’s also working to increase yield by up to 18% over CDC Buteo. He says, “that’s a stretch goal, but we’re definitely going to be able to approach it, and actually exceed it in some areas.”

AAC Network, a milling quality variety that has high protein, will be available this fall. Graf says, “It has the most complete disease resistance package of any winter wheat variety available.”

It also appears to have improved drought tolerance, which Graf says is something he’s going to be watching over the next couple of years. “This variety works in all areas of Western Canada,” he says, “but it seems to be best adapted—where we see the biggest jump in yield over other varieties—for southern Alberta.”

In 2020, he received support for a new, as yet unnamed, variety known as W583. He sees W583 as a potential replacement for Emerson, one of its parents. Ten years ago, Emerson was quite a breakthrough, explains Graf. It was the first variety in Canada rated resistant to FHB, and it had good resistance to the rusts, but that resistance came at somewhat of a cost in terms of yield.

“We’ve been working really hard to maintain that disease resistance and increase yield,” he says. W583 is the first result of these efforts and will be registered with a name this spring.

In 2021, he received support to register W601, which he describes as a “really exciting variety that looks like a breakthrough in yield.” In registration trials, it yielded significantly higher than all the checks and well over 20% more than CDC Buteo in some areas.

Next year he expects to get support for another variety that’s showing yield similar to AAC Wildfire, but has a more complete disease resistance package.

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 Winter Cereals Development Commission, Western Grains Research Foundation, and Winter Cereals Manitoba.

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.

“Canada exports wheat all over the world because we produce premium wheat that meets or exceeds quality standards. Farmers know that if they fill their bins with Canada western red spring (CWRS) wheat, it will sell,” says Santosh Kumar, research scientist, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Brandon Research and Development Centre.

Kumar develops CWRS wheat for the Eastern and Northern Prairies. These regions enjoy very good wheat growing conditions, so his breeding program focuses on disease resistance and improving yields. Growers in the Northern Prairies have a shorter growing season so, in addition to optimum disease resistance, they also want early maturing varieties.

 “We look for a very high tolerance for Fusarium head blight (FHB) and resistances to leaf, stem, and stripe rusts,” he says. “We also focus on common bunt and orange blossom wheat midge resistance.”

In the Eastern Prairies, wheat midge is very prevalent, so Kumar makes wheat midge resistance a priority in his research and variety development program. The germplasm he develops is shared with other breeding organizations who use them to develop improved midge tolerant lines.

“Within the wheat breeding community, we operate as one big unit,” he says. “Breeding is something that needs to be done collaboratively. Nobody can do all of it, so we all compete, but we help each other as well.”

Kumar’s breeding program is divided into three stages:

• Pre-breeding, or early germplasm development, is when the emphasis is on incorporating new sources of disease resistance, abiotic tolerance (against stresses like drought, heat, cold), and establishing the desired plant type.

• Advanced generation selection is when the elite germplasm is tested in various agro-climatic zones for agronomic, disease, and quality performance. This happens five or six years after the pre-breeding stage.

• Variety testing is when registration trials are done and results are submitted to the Prairie Grain Development Committee (PGDC) to get support for registration of new varieties.

“We start with 500,000 or 600,000 plants in the early generation and bring it down to three or four important lines that can be tested to become varieties at the registration trial level,” he explains.

He says registration trials are also done collaboratively for three years in 12 locations. “The goal is ultimately to give farmers the best—without compromise, regardless of where it came from or whose line it was.”

A number of Kumar’s lines have been released as new varieties in recent years.

AAC Leroy is a premium quality CWRS wheat. It’s midge tolerant and resistant to all the priority-one diseases (FHB; leaf, stem, and stripe rusts; and common bunt). It also yields more than any other currently available variety. “The farmer doesn’t have to worry about anything,” says Kumar. “They can just grow it.”

AAC Magnet is a hard red spring wheat that is not midge-tolerant, but it has very good FHB resistance and very high yield. “If they don’t have midge pressure in their area, a lot of farmers don’t like to sacrifice other traits for midge tolerance,” explains Kumar.

AAC Redstar is an early maturing variety with very good resistance to all the diseases, and it yields really well. “Finding that rare variety that is early and high yielding is a challenge,” Kumar says.

He’s very excited about his newest line, AAC Hodge. He says it’s among the best for yield and it has all the disease resistance.

“Every year, varieties keep improving. They have better yield, a little bit better disease packages, and they meet new quality standards,” says Kumar. “Bringing all of that in one package is the goal of breeding.”

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. The 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.