Expertise and technology driving innovation and collaboration at GIFS at USask

Apr 08, 2025

The Global Institute for Food Security (GIFS) at the University of Saskatchewan (USask) has established world-class expertise and technologies to meet the needs of agri-food partners and stakeholders.

At a reception at the Saskatchewan Legislature in Regina on March 24, GIFS CEO Dr. Steven Webb (PhD) provided an update on the growth of GIFS’ programs and technology services to members of Saskatchewan’s Legislative Assembly and agri-food stakeholders.

The Honourable Daryl Harrison, Saskatchewan Minister of Agriculture, and Todd Klink, Executive Vice President, Marketing and Public Affairs at Farm Credit Canada (FCC), representing GIFS’ Board of Directors, also spoke at the event.

“Today, we are an innovation catalyst and a connector with world-class capabilities and we play up and down the entire innovation pipeline,” Webb told attendees.

The Government of Saskatchewan is one of GIFS’ founding partners. In 2024, it committed $15 million over five years to advance GIFS’ mission to discover, develop, and deliver innovative solutions for the production of globally sustainable food.

Through ongoing initiatives, including the development of GIFS’ Engineering Biology Platform, GIFS is establishing unique capabilities and capacities that are serving as the basis for collaborations with researchers and organizations around the world.

“Our ambition is to be the preferred partner for ag and food innovation — not just here, but globally — and we are global. We’re bringing an exciting complement of expertise and leading-edge technologies to really operate at scale,” said Webb.

“We’ve created an organization that is complementary and not competitive. We’ve created an organization that operates at scale. We think in and operate at levels of 100, 1,000, 10,000, and 100,000 at a time, optimizing resources, automation, processes, and technologies to deliver results effectively and efficiently.”

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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.