Nominations open for Alberta Pulse Industry Innovator Award

Jun 27, 2022

The award recognizes work which helps the pulse industry

By Diego Flammini
Staff Writer
Farms.com

Albertans who know a person or organization trying to support the pulse industry can submit names for the 2023 Alberta Pulst Industry Innovator Award.

The award, now in its eighth year, recognizes those who “worked to help nurture and shape the pulse industry and has helped contribute to the success of the industry as it is today,” Alberta Pulse Growers said in a statement.

To be eligible for consideration, a nominee must have made significant contributions to Alberta’s pulse industry through production, marketing, promotion, research or another area.

Nominations must be completed by Dec. 6, 2022, at 4:00 p.m. Mountain Standard Time.

Once the applications are submitted, directors with the Alberta Pule Growers Commission will select the winner. The winner will be revealed in early 2023.

Clifford Cyre, a producer from Barrhead, Alta., posthumously received the 2022 award. He passed away in 2021.

“Cliff was a big supporter of research and worked hard to promote pulse crops in Alberta,” Shane Strydhorst, a producer with Alberta Pulse and farmer near Neerlandia, said during the presentation at the organization’s 2022 annual general meeting in January.

Lud Prudek, the organization’s first president, won the first innovator award in 2015.

Strydhorst's remarks about Cyre begin around the 37:30 mark of the video.

Video: Wheat Yields in USA and China Threatened by Heat Waves Breaking Enzymes

A new peer reviewed study looks at the generally unrecognized risk of heat waves surpassing the threshold for enzyme damage in wheat.

Most studies that look at crop failure in the main food growing regions (breadbaskets of the planet) look at temperatures and droughts in the historical records to assess present day risk. Since the climate system has changed, these historical based risk analysis studies underestimate the present-day risks.

What this new research study does is generate an ensemble of plausible scenarios for the present climate in terms of temperatures and precipitation, and looks at how many of these plausible scenarios exceed the enzyme-breaking temperature of 32.8 C for wheat, and exceed the high stress yield reducing temperature of 27.8 C for wheat. Also, the study considers the possibility of a compounded failure with heat waves in both regions simultaneously, this greatly reducing global wheat supply and causing severe shortages.

Results show that the likelihood (risk) of wheat crop failure with a one-in-hundred likelihood in 1981 has in today’s climate become increased by 16x in the USA winter wheat crop (to one-in-six) and by 6x in northeast China (to one-in-sixteen).

The risks determined in this new paper are much greater than that obtained in previous work that determines risk by analyzing historical climate patterns.

Clearly, since the climate system is rapidly changing, we cannot assume stationarity and calculate risk probabilities like we did traditionally before.

We are essentially on a new planet, with a new climate regime, and have to understand that everything is different now.