Today’s Breeding Decisions Will Shape Farmers’ Options for Decades

Jun 19, 2026

Canada’s crop breeding system needs long-term funding and industry support to avoid future gaps in variety development, FP Genetics’ Colette Prefontaine told an audience in St. Paul.

ST. PAUL, Alta. — Decisions being made today about crop breeding and agricultural research funding could shape the varieties available to Western Canadian farmers for decades to come, according to Colette Prefontaine of FP Genetics.

Speaking during the Alberta Seed Processors Managers Association Summer Training event in St. Paul today, Prefontaine outlined growing concerns about the future of plant breeding in Canada, arguing that both public and private investment will be needed to maintain innovation in cereals and pulse crops.

“The clock is ticking,” Prefontaine told attendees. “We need to find a way.”

Her presentation focused on Plant Breeders’ Rights (PBR), the impact of UPOV 91 legislation, declining public research capacity and the challenge of creating a sustainable funding model for crop improvement.

Long timelines mean today’s decisions affect tomorrow’s varieties
One of the central themes of Prefontaine’s presentation was the lengthy timeline required to develop new crop varieties.

Breeding a new wheat, barley or pulse variety can take 10 to 12 years and requires millions of dollars in investment before a breeder sees any return.

“A breeding cross made today will not produce a commercial variety until approximately 2037,” she said. “That’s how long it takes.”

Click here to see more...

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids