Farmers Encouraged to Take Part in Participatory Wheat Breeding Program
A researcher with the University of Manitoba is calling on wheat growers to consider participation in a program aimed at developing new lines of wheat. Last year the University of Manitoba in cooperation with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and farmers launched a Participatory Wheat Breeding Program. Under the program farmers are asked to plant populations of wheat over three seasons then return the best seed for further research. Iris Vaisman, a technician in the University of Manitoba's Department of Plant Science, says the project was created to bring farmers and plant breeders together and the hope is to have as many farmers as possible participate.
"Our preference is to work with organic farms since we know that organic farms tend to be variable from farm to farm and so this participatory approach tends to very useful but also we're interested in working towards a wheat variety that grows well under organic conditions which would also be very beneficial for organic farmers." Having said that we do welcome all farmers so it doesn't have to be an organic system.
In terms of what we expect from farmers, there's actually a lot of flexibility because the idea of the whole project is to have a lot of input from farmers and put a lot of the process into the farmers' hands. But we do expect the farmers to seed and harvest their plots. The farmers will receive about three different populations of wheats. It's up to the farmers how they decide seed their plots but an example would be about a plot that's a metre by about 30 metres for example so just maybe six rows of wheat by 30 metres and they would have about three plots of that size. The farmers are expected to make selections throughout the growing season.
They can visit their plots how many times they want and they would get rid of the plants that look, for example, very diseased or too short or too tall, pretty much whatever they think. Then at the end of the season they harvest about 500 of the best spikes for the seed to be used in the following year. After the farmers have done that for three years they will return the seed to Agriculture Canada.
Vaisman says seed provided by participating farmers will be entered into yield trials aimed at developing new wheat varieties.
Bruce Cochrane, University News, University of Manitoba Faculty of Agricultural & Food Sciences, April 20, 2011
