Canola groups recap research priorities at Canola Week

Dec 05, 2024

At this year’s Canola Week, representatives from Alberta Canola Producers, SaskOilseeds and Manitoba Canola Growers Association (MCGA) presented an overview of each group’s research focus over the past year and moving forward.

Brittany Visscher, research director at Alberta Canola Producers, says their funding targets for 2024-25 include disease management, resistant weed management, flea beetle management, optimized nutrient uptake efficiency, water management and more.

“They’re not ranked from most important to least important, because they’re all important. However, number one, the majority of the respondents prioritized improving yield stability under environmental extremes as number one,” says Visscher.

Doug Heath, research manager at SaskOilseeds, recalls how SaskCanola amalgamated with SaskFlax to form SaskOilseeds earlier this year. Heath spoke about their free disease testing program for farmers that focuses on blackleg, verticillium and clubroot. In 2024, they received samples for 133 individual fields; the results showed 112 samples with Lepstosphaeria maculans (L. maculans) only, eight had L. biglobosa only, 13 had neither and 18 had Verticillium longisporum. They’re still waiting for results for clubroot. In conjunction with that program, they helped to host disease field training days for agronomists.

Heath says they continued their on-farm research trials, launched in 2023 with nine sites across the province. This year, they expanded to 25 sites. “The program aims to help producers answer questions that they have that are specific to their farm, so producers are able to try a practice or a product on their own farm using their own equipment and existing practices,” says Heath. “The important part of these trials is that they’re randomized and replicated in your field, to help account for field variability and to take some of the anecdotal evidence that might come out if you’re just looking at a single strip.”

Amy Delaquis, research and agronomy manager at MCGA, says their funding targets include flea beetle management, verticillium stripe, nutrient management, yield stability in environmental extremes, profitability risks and opportunities, as well as commercial hybrid evaluation. Disease and insects were the two research areas with the largest funding in the past year, with 36 per cent going toward disease and 21 per cent allocated to insects.

Their canola variety trial program launched in 2024 with the goal of providing farmers access to independent, third-party field-testing data for commercial hybrids. “This program has proven,” says Delaquis, “even in its first year, from interest, as the program launched during the season, as well as after these results went out, that this is our most highly sought out information from our members.”

Video: Can Gene Editing Give Seeds a Stronger Start?

Reagan Reed has a way of describing his research that might make a plant breeder pause.

“I’m the sort of person who likes to break things to understand them,” he says.

What he breaks are genes involved in seed germination. Reed, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Davis, is investigating whether changing those genes can help seeds establish healthy plants under a wider range of conditions.

Reed recently attended the National Association for Plant Breeding meeting in College Station, Texas, as an NAPB Borlaug Scholar. His work speaks to a question that matters well beyond a research lab: what does it take for a seed to get a crop off to a strong start?

A seed that germinates quickly, alongside the others planted with it, spends less time vulnerable to stresses before seedlings become established.

“If you’re able to bridge that gap between germination to stand establishment, then that’s going to give you the highest probability of having a solid yield that year,” Reed says. “There’s a bunch that can go wrong after that, but it maximises your yield from the start, at least.”

Reed works in Dr. Imtiyaz Khanday’s lab at UC Davis, where his research focuses on seed quality in tomatoes and potatoes. He brings an unusual academic background to the work: at Skidmore College, he studied both biology and Latin.

Reed believes that combination prepared him for research. Translating an ancient text means studying each word, weighing its possible meanings and using context to reach the best interpretation. There is rarely a way to know with complete certainty what an author intended. Science, he says, requires a similar willingness to work through uncertainty.

“Attention to detail and comfortability working with uncertainty,” is how he sums up what Latin taught him.

In the lab, uncertainty can produce a surprise. Reed describes changing one gene and seeing little effect. Changing a second gene also appears to do little. Put both changes in the same genetic background, though, and the result can be substantial.

“I break this gene, nothing really happens. I break this other gene, nothing really happens. I combine them into the same genetic background, and now there’s a massive effect,” he says.

Those interactions matter as researchers gain the ability to edit multiple genes at once. They also complicate any simple account of how a trait works: improving a seed may depend on understanding what several genes do together.

For Reed, the question is whether that knowledge could help seeds germinate reliably when conditions are difficult. Some of the genes he studies prevent germination under certain conditions. That response may serve a plant well in one setting while limiting its usefulness in agriculture. He wants to learn what happens when those genes are changed, and whether the result improves establishment.

Yet a discovery that works in a lab still has a long way to travel before it reaches a field. Reed argues that agricultural biotechnology faces an economic challenge as well as a scientific one. New tools can create value for farmers, he says, but developing them requires a way to support the work in an industry where margins can be thin.

His fellowship with Flagship Pioneering gave him a view across AI, agriculture-related work and human health research. It also reinforced the importance of bringing people with different expertise into the same conversation—a benefit of gatherings such as the NAPB meeting.

“You need to have a team of people with different backgrounds who are willing to work together and approach the same problem in different perspectives and different ways,” he says.

That thinking connects the different parts of Reed’s path. Latin taught him to examine details without expecting a perfect answer. Gene editing lets him test what individual genes do—and what happens when their effects combine. Working with people beyond his own field helps him ask what those findings could become.

He came to agriculture because of its reach: the possibility that work by a small group of researchers could eventually make a difference on a much larger scale. His immediate focus is smaller and more precise. He wants to understand what helps a seed get through its first days and become a healthy plant.