This variety accounted for about 90 per cent of Ontario dark red kidney bean acres in 2022
A kidney bean variety developed at the University of Guelph has won the school’s Innovation of the Year award for 2024.
The award went to Dynasty, which Dr. Peter Pauls, a professor at the Department of Plant Agriculture at the Ontario Agricultural College, and research technician Tom Smith developed.
Plant breeder Dr. Tom Michaels began the cross that led to Dynasty’s creation in the early 2000s.
The CFIA provided registration for the variety on May 9, 2012.
“Like all breeding programs there’s lots of people involved and they take a long time to develop. You’re probably looking at easily decade from the time the first cross is made to the variety having any sort of economic impact,” Dr. Pauls told Farms.com. “We share this award with everyone along the way.”
Dynasty is a major contributor to dark red kidney bean production in Ontario.
In 2022, about 90 per cent of the province’s dark red kidney bean acres were Dynasty. And the variety accounts for nearly 60 per cent of all dark red kidney bean acres in North America.
A main factor for this, Pauls says, is its yield potential.
Dynasty showed its yield prowess off earlier than usual.
“We typically expect progress in yield potential of a few per cent per year,” he said. “But in Dynasty’s case, it had a 25 per cent yield increase over one of the checks, which was one of the parents used in the cross to make Dynasty.”
Overall, Dynasty has increased yields by about 15 per cent compared to other varieties,and provides an estimated return of $250 more per are for producers.
Dynasty is a double-cross between four varieties.
Its parents are HR85-1885, Montcalm, USWA-39 and AC Litekid.
“We were looking for good cooking quality, disease resistance, and good plant architecture,” Pauls said. “We’re lucky that the genetics worked out in a really nice way.”
And Dynasty is already being put to work as a parent for another variety.
Dr. Pauls’ team recently released Gallantry, which has Dynasty as one of the parent varieties.
Gallantry has a slightly smaller seed size, matures a day earlier and delivers an additional 2.7 per cent yield improvement over five years.
“With larger beans, they can get knocked around more during harvest and get cracks, so the smaller beans help with that,” Pauls said. “In plant breeding we’re always trying to evolve.”
Anyone interested in head-to-head comparisons between Gallantry and Dynasty, and other crops, can visit GoCrops.ca.
The University of Guelph has presented the Innovation of the Year award since 2016 to celebrate work done at the school that impacts lives outside of the university.
Past winners include Drs. Christine Baes, Dr. Flavio Schenkel, Dr. Saeed Shadpour, Dr. Filippo Miglior, and Dr. Francesca Malchiodi.
The researchers won in 2023 for developing a national genetic evaluation system to identify dairy cattle with low methane emissions.