(Alice McFarlane/farmnewsNOW Staff)

By Alice McFarlane

Pulse Crop Research

New agreement changes pulse crop research

Jul 6, 2020 | 3:58 PM

There will be changes in the way new pulse crop research is conducted.

A funding agreement between Saskatchewan Pulse Growers (SPG) and the University of Saskatchewan’s Crop Development Centre (CDC) will end in September.

SPG has invested roughly $40 million in pulse breeding through grower checkoffs for the past 20 years. Another $20 million went to genomic projects that support crop breeding.

Director of research and development Dave Greenshields said SPG has been able to provide those varieties to Saskatchewan farmers royalty free.

“That agreement allows SPG to have the commercial rights to all the intellectual property developed on pulse crops at the centre,” Greenshields said. “That will continue regardless of whether the agreement will be in place or not. We will continue to have those rights.”

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Greenshields said 129 pulse varieties are covered under the variety release program. These account for approximately 90 per cent of current acreage. He said farmers will have to pay royalties on future pulse varieties but there are positives for farmers.

“The more breeders involved in the new varieties will hopefully lead to increased choice in what you can grow. I think it will speed things up in terms of getting new traits like herbicide tolerance or disease resistance,” he said.

Greenshields said he believes there will be an acceleration in breeding.

“When you have a single program breeding for a lot of acres you end up getting some bottlenecks where you can’t use all the material in the world at one time,” he said. ” If you have different bases of genetics from different places developing into the next set of varieties, I think there will be interesting differences between varieties.”

SPG will continue to invest grower checkoff dollars for research in a number of specific areas including work on root diseases in peas and lentils as well as the development of herbicide tolerant lentils. There will be more work on finding alternative crops to give producers additional options when dealing with root rot.

Even though the details have yet to be worked out Greenshields said SPG and CDC will continue to work with each other.

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alice.mcfarlane@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @AliceMcF