A Match Made for Success: How Farmer Dollars and Breeder Expertise Can Keep Canada Competitive

Walk into any Prairie coffee shop and you’ll hear two conversations: harvest and uncertainty. Harvest is the here-and-now. Uncertainty is what happens next — especially for wheat. Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) is signalling a shift away from commercializing field-ready cultivars in the years ahead. That change won’t happen overnight, but it will change who develops, tests and delivers the next Brandon-level winner to your farm.

Experts lay out, in plain terms, what’s at stake and what farmers can do to make sure wheat doesn’t just survive the transition — it thrives.

Why the Urgency?
SeCan’s Western business manager Todd Hyra says the quiet part out loud: “When you think about 75% of the products coming out of one breeding program, the threat of that going away is something to be considered.”

He’s talking about AAFC Swift Current’s long track record of top picks. But he quickly adds that the bigger risk isn’t just fewer varieties — it’s losing the backbone of the whole Prairie wheat network: pathology support, coordination, and shared expertise that “provides a base for which all of them work.”

Translation for the farm gate: even if another organization steps up to release varieties, the system only works if the disease nurseries, quality testing, and breeder pipelines continue running — and talking to one another. Shutting the tap part-way upstream changes the pressure everywhere else.

Stuart Smyth, an ag economist at the University of Saskatchewan who’s tracked breeding investment for years, notes the trend lines: public funding for wheat peaked at $34.5 million in 1998. It’s bounced since, but the direction of travel is clear. “Other countries have gone through this,” he says. “Some got it wrong and had to backtrack. Others — like Australia — got it mostly right by building long-term, farmer-backed models.”