Tomato breeder travels the world to evaluate her creations

A former Brantford woman’s love for science has led to a rewarding career in the agri-food industry.

Kelsie MacLellan is a plant breeder for HeinzSeed in Leamington, Ontario where she has developed a new variety of processing tomato that is showing much promise.

“I try to create new varieties that are extremely resistant to tomato diseases or pathogens,” MacLellan explained. “H2590 is one of my new offerings that has been performing extremely well through the trial phase in Europe and South America.”

She is responsible for crops in the largest tomato-growing countries in the world including Italy, Portugal, Spain, Brazil, Chile, and parts of North America.

MacLellan creates 300 new varieties of tomato each year and spends summers working 10-to-12-hour days, seven days a week in tomato fields around the world evaluating red fruit on the vine.

“The travel sounds really glamourous but I’m living in a tomato field basically,” she quipped. “I have two kids and I’m lucky that my husband is amazing and takes over 95 per cent of the household duties for about two-and-a-half months while I’m all over the world, or even if I’m in Canada.

“If there’s daylight, I’ll be in the tomato field.”

MacLellan grew up in Brantford, attending Notre Dame Catholic Elementary School until the age of 12 when the family relocated to Caledonia. She developed an early interest in science.

“I think I used to always be that kid that was annoying my parents with a million questions. Why is this? why is that?” she recalled. “But maybe more seriously in high school (when) I got introduced to introductory genetics, that really first caught my attention to genetics and population dynamics and things like that.”