A plant breeder with the University of Manitoba says creating a general purpose class of wheat, along with elimination KVD as a registration requirement, has created exciting opportunities for plant breeders and farmers.
At the start of the 2008-2009 crop year the Canadian Grain Commission eliminated kernel visual distinguishability as a registration requirement for wheat and added a new general purpose class.
Dr. Anita Brûlé-Babel, a plant breeder with the University of Manitoba’s Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences says, prior to the new class, plant breeders had no way to register lines suitable for some specific end uses.
We had to be registering wheats into specific end use market classes.
There were eight end use market classes.
None of them included a feed class or an industrial purpose class and so, from that perspective, we were limited in terms of other possible markets that we could develop wheats for because we were not allowed to register into end use classes that didn’t exist at that time.
So, even though the feed industry is a fairly large buyer of grain, we were not able to develop grain specifically for the feed industry and there’s definitely a difference between what the feed industry wants as feed grain versus what a feed grade is.
In the system that we’ve had in the past, a feed grade is essentially a down graded food use quality of some sort and so the feed grain is a mixture of a whole bunch of different materials that didn’t meet food grade quality standards.
That wasn’t always the best for the feed industry because they want good sound grain with high energy content and we weren’t able to develop grains that were specific to that industry.
Dr. Brûlé-Babel says, as early as February, there were recommendations for registration of new cultivars that fit into the general purpose class and also didn’t meet KVD so we already have situations where wheats have been registered or are being registered under the new guidelines.
Source: Farmscape.Ca
