As debates about funding and additional royalties continue, one thing is clear: Canada’s plant breeding programs have delivered billion-dollar benefits to farmers and the Canadian economy.
By Delaney Seiferling, Freelance Writer
To build a strong crop export program, countries need several core elements working in concert.
These include some of the more visible, well-known parts: logistics infrastructure, market and trade agreements and innovative on-farm production.
But another critical element, perhaps less visible and appreciated, is a plant breeding program that produces a continuous stream of new and improved, resilient, competitive, high-yielding crops.
Such a program is also supported by regulatory structures — including variety registration protocols and plant breeders’ rights laws — that promote innovation and long-term sustainability and growth, while also ensuring plant safety.
As it sounds like, facilitating such a program is no easy task.
But yet, Canada has a proven track record of success in this area.
The hidden backbone of Canada’s crop success
Over the past 25 years, Canada’s public plant breeding programs have delivered a return on investment of up to$20 for every $1 invested.
For barley alone, farmers have received returns of 26:1 in direct value on their plant breeding investments, through increased yields and enhanced variety performance, equating to over $1.36 billion in cumulative gains.
Improved barley varieties have also led to yield increases of 1–2% per year, enhanced disease resistance, and quality traits that have strengthened Canada’s position as a leading global exporter of malting barley.
These successes wouldn’t have been possible without Canada’s regulatory processes around plant breeding, says Peter Watts, Managing Director of the Canadian Malting Barley Technical Centre (CMBTC), which actively promotes the adoption and sale of Canadian malting barley varieties worldwide.
“Canada’s strict process for new variety evaluation and registration ensures only the best malting barley varieties are approved,” he says.
“This helps maintain Canada’s position as the world’s leading supplier of high-quality malting barley and malt, supporting exports and associated premiums with our products.”
How does the variety selection program work in Canada?
Before a crop variety can be commercially sold in Canada, it must undergo independent testing through cooperative variety trials, which are guided by a Recommending Committee made up of plant breeders, agronomists, processors, farmers and end-users.
The variety is assessed by the committee for its “merit,” meaning agronomic performance, disease resistance, and end-use quality, all measured against established check varieties.
The “merit based” aspect of our system is one of the elements that make Canadian production strong and our export program competitive, according to many experts, as it ensures new varieties will meet the needs of the entire value chain before being approved to move on to commercialization.
“Because our system has a check variety that says the new varieties submitted for approval have to at least equal, preferably exceed, what the check variety is, we’re constantly moving forward in terms of all of the quality attributes that a buyer will be looking for,” says Stuart Smyth, a professor and researcher at the University of Saskatchewan’s College of Agriculture and Bioresources.
Our merit-based system also sets us apart from other countries’ systems, such as the United States and Australia, where breeders can release and commercialize new varieties without proving their merit and where variety release systems are market driven.
How Canada’s Plant Breeders’ Rights Act impacts innovation
Research plots at the CDC’s Kernen Crop Research Farm in Saskatoon, SK
In Canada, plant breeders’ rights (PBR) are governed by federal legislation under the Plant Breeders Rights Act, which serves to provide intellectual property protection for new plant varieties in Canada.
One of the benefits of our PBR system is that it allows for something called “breeders’ privilege,” which allows the use of protected varieties to develop new ones, without needing permission from the original rights holder.
“What that means is that just because I have this variety and I’ve put PBR protection on it, it doesn’t prevent another breeder from being able to use the variety in their breeding program to make further improvements in that crop,” says Aaron Beattie, a barley breeder at the University of Saskatchewan Crop Development Centre.
“So PBR actually protects the ability of other people to use that variety for further benefits – you can’t kind of just squirrel it away to yourself forever.”
There are also similar privileges in place for researchers, Beattie says.
“We can’t create synthetic germplasm – it’s all based off of lines that have come before. So PBR is a system that does acknowledge that science builds on previous science. It is a system designed specifically for plant varieties, and that acknowledges how historical plant breeding has been carried out.”
The future of Canada’s plant breeding programs
Rules and regulations around plant breeding in Canada are constantly being reviewed and updated.
For example, in 2015 the Canadian PBR Act was updated to be compliant with the 1991 framework established by the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV), an intergovernmental organization based in Switzerland that sets international standards for plant variety protection.
One of the biggest outcomes of that change was the expansion of breeders’ rights to cover not only seed, but also harvested material. This gave breeders stronger legal tools to protect their innovations and paved the way for broader use of royalty collection systems – which could translate into higher costs for farmers when adopting new protected varieties.
“So, if the breeder didn’t have an opportunity to collect fair remuneration on their intellectual property at the seed level, UPOV 1991 allows them to collect at the grain level,” says Lauren Comin, Director of Policy atSeeds Canada.
The change also opens up the door for additional farmer royalties, either at a farm-saved, harvested or end-point level, she says.
Farmer and farm organizations have expressed concern about these changes, as well as the fact that, in recent years, the federal government has signalled interest in decreasing public funding for plant breeding programs.
“There’s a lot of pushback from farmers, because they see that what’s happening is the expectation to fund a lot of the research is being pushed onto them, and that’s becoming more evident the further we go,” says Smyth.
Smyth says that part of the move to UPOV ’91 was likely to drive more private investment in plant breeding in Canada and this has been mildly successful: a study he facilitated in 2021/22 of Canadian plant breeders and research funders found that 52% of breeders agreed the 2015 changes to the Canadian PBR Act provided incentives to increase investment in plant breeding.
However, he does not believe this is a sustainable solution for funding these programs in the future.
“The federal government is misguided into thinking that all of the cost, or a significant portion of the development costs, can be pushed further down the innovation pipeline to farmers.” – Stuart Smyth, University of Saskatchewan
At the CDC, all royalties generated from PBR are all invested back into the breeding program, Beattie says.
“That’s something unique about the CDC is that we can definitely make that claim,” he says.
When it comes to royalties generated from private industry, stats show that approximately 30% of plant variety royalty money is reinvested back into plant breeding programs, Comin says.
“While that seems low, you also have to consider that most companies are for profit, and they have to pay all of their overhead and other activities … beyond just research and development,” she says, adding they are also uniquely incentivized to re-invest the money into R&D.
“If you don’t invest back into your programs, you’re not going to have anything to sell in the future. So, breeding programs have an incentive to reinvest their royalties. That drives future innovation.”
Canada’s success in plant breeding
Despite the challenges that come with plant breeding funding, one thing remains true, according to the data: Canada’s plant breeding programs, under the current regulatory system, have been critically important to the success of the industry.
Our ROI stats speak for themselves, but on top of that, in recent years we have also become known as a leader in terms of sustainable agricultural production. Recent research published by the Global Institute for Food Security (GIFS) showed that barley produced in Saskatchewan and Western Canada has the lowest carbon intensity in the world, surpassing regions like Australia and France.
This type of achievement is possible because our farmers have access to plant varieties developed and commercialized under our rigorous regulatory system – and that is something that barley farmers like Chad Ferguson takes pride in.
“I think it [Canada’s system] is superior to the rest of the world, really, and that’s why we need to maintain the system that we have in place,” says Ferguson, who is also on the board of SaskBarley and sits on the Quality Committee for the Prairie Recommending Committee for Oats and Barley (PRCOB).
“We’re definitely the leader when it comes to the testing, the disease ratings, the amount of research that goes into it, the whole nine yards.”
After being involved in the R&D and breeding world through his work with SaskBarley, he says the one thing he wished is that more farmers – and policy makers — appreciated was the value everyone receives from Canada’s breeding programs.
“I don’t think many farmers realize how tough it is to fund breeding programs. PBR is part of the reason we can keep them going, particularly public breeding, which is the hardest to sustain. – Chad Ferguson, SaskBarley board member
