Although Ghana is 11,000 kilometres as the crow flies from Kofi Agblor’s current home of Edmonton, Alta., it was his childhood in the West African country that made him the man he is today.
More specifically, it was his mom who he says molded him into the leader he has become.
“My dad died when I was young. She impressed on me the value of hard work. There wasn’t enough farmland left for my family in Ghana to allow me to get into that line of work. She made sure I understood that education was the only way out for me,” says Agblor, who for eight years served as managing director of the Crop Development Centre at the University of Saskatchewan.
“I saw my mother’s struggles and saw how her life improved when I introduced a new technology for rice farming. Since I left Ghana I have been relentless — nothing is good enough. Good is the enemy of better. You have to continuously improve — take what others see as impossible and show it can be done.”
Agblor and the CDC have certainly shown what can be accomplished through creative thinking and hard work.
“The CDC is up to 475 varieties introduced in a range of crops. It’s gone from 9% market share in wheat to close to 30%. The private sector looks to [the CDC] as a real authority on breeding, which for a public institution is a major accomplishment,” he says.
For Agblor, that push to innovate applies to the Canadian seed industry as a whole. As the Seed Synergy project forges ahead to create a next-generation seed regulatory system for the country, he sees some challenges ahead.
One of those challenges is the potential formation of a National Seed Organization (NSO), the design of which is currently being carried out by the Seed Synergy partners and StrategyCorp. But he knows that unlikely partners can come together if everyone is on board and willing to do what is right to create something better.
“In 2013, Viterra met us for lunch and said, ‘You have good germplasm in wheat, but you need more monetary resources to expand the pipeline and use more double haploids to do it.’”
That lunch meeting led to Viterra investing $5 million to enhance the CDC’s success in wheat research and breeding.
“Would you believe that from the day we had lunch to the day we executed was only six weeks? That tells you the relationship the CDC has with its partners,” Agblor says. “That was my favourite example of when an external entity came to us and asked us to help them bring more value to the industry.”
He says it shows that different segments of the industry can work well together when there is a will to do so. Agblor believes it’s imperative that the industry come together to take the bull by the horns and see the Seed Synergy project to its intended fruition — to have the Canadian Seed Growers’ Association (CSGA), Canadian Seed Institute, Commercial Seed Analysts Association of Canada, Canadian Plant Technology Agency and Canadian Seed Trade Association (CSTA) join together.
“If we can get 80% of what we want in terms of efficiency, we should go for it. Launch it and everything else will fall into place. It’s come far, and there’s no time to stop now. We should go ahead.”
Bridging Gaps
When it comes to bringing the gaps that exist between the public and private spheres, the Plant Breeding Coordinating Committee (PBCC) works to advance the interests of public sector plant breeders in the United States and beyond.
The PBCC founded the National Association of Plant Breeders (NAPB), which enjoys a Canadian membership and held its first meeting in Canada at the University of Guelph in 2018.
According to PBCC chair Michael Kantar, an assistant professor at the University of Hawaii and former postdoc at the University of British Columbia, the PBCC is developing its new strategic objectives in light of changes within public sector plant breeding — like last year’s announcement that the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) is being moved out of Washington, D.C. to Kansas City.
Many NIFA staffers — about two-thirds — have chosen to quit rather than relocate, causing concern that NIFA offices will be staffed by skeleton crews that lack the resources needed to do their work.
“As a discipline — in terms of sheer numbers — public sector plant breeding isn’t healthy. We need to look to the future and figure out how we can keep public sector breeding healthy and move it forward,” says Kantar.
“Every five years we have to decide what our new objectives are, how we promote plant breeding, how to ensure we continue with this discipline that’s fundamental to human survival. We’re in the process of drafting our new objectives and finding people who want to take these on.”
One proposed objective is to foster communication among public breeders and federal agencies on public policy issues, including alerts to existing and emerging threats to agricultural security that affect plant breeding.
“There are some things we will always do — like trying to identify what capacity we have for plant breeding; keeping track of all the public sector breeders across the country; we will always care about germplasm; we will advocate for plant breeding. But we want to ensure everyone knows and cares about it. We have a lot of room to do new things beyond what we’ve traditionally done.”
Prisoners of History
Facilitating such paradigm shifts will require everyone to look in the mirror and challenge some of their preconceived notions of what our industry looks like and how it functions. That’s according to David Harwood, technical services manager for Corteva Agriscience.
He’s been in the industry for 35 years, spending 25 in plant breeding roles. He trained as a breeder, and a decade ago the opportunity to work on the business side of the industry came along. He seized it.
“Bringing the outside in is key to Corteva’s business model — it’s about being open to bringing new technology into your portfolio and not being obsessed with inventing everything yourself,” he says.
“We don’t want to be prisoners of our history. Just because we have done it this way forever, don’t assume we have to keep doing it the same way. Sometimes I think we as an industry are married to the current system of varietal registration, seed certification and seed production, when there may well be opportunities we can realize by stepping outside those confines and making commercialization of products more straightforward and more appealing to new entrants.”
One of those opportunities is value creation. As 2020 begins, the seed sector in Canada continues to work toward implementing either an end-point royalty or the Seed Variety Use Agreement (SVUA) as a means of stimulating innovation in the cereals sector.
Ellen Sparry, manager of Ontario wheat seed company C&M Seeds, has been involved in the value creation discussion from the start and represents the Canadian Seed Trade Association at the international level via the International Seed Federation (ISF).
“I work with 10 or more breeding companies at many levels of importance to wheat breeding, and they’re looking to invest in Canadian wheat. We do need a value creation mechanism. For me it’s a matter of what happens if we don’t go ahead with it, as opposed to whether or not we should,” she says.
“I’m hopeful we will implement something, but it’s a guarded optimism. There are still lots of questions out there from growers and producers.”
Circle of Trust
As 2020 begins, the Seed Synergy project begins to ramp up. The CSTA intends to vote on a consolidation proposal in July. The CSGA is working toward the same timeline but passed a resolution at its 2019 interprovincial meeting to extend the ratification timeline to 2021 if needed.
Dan Curtis, past-president of the Ontario Seed Growers Association, says the biggest problem standing in the way of progress is a lack of trust within the industry.
“I think members of CSGA see some of the other associations — especially CSTA — as large all-encompassing multinationals with more money and more power. What most don’t realize is CSTA is run as an ultimate democracy with one member-one vote. Large companies don’t have more voting power,” Curtis says.
“CSGA members need to understand we are the gorilla in the room with more members. As much as we fear the other organizations, they have as much to fear from us, and I think more so. That fear ultimately breeds mistrust.”
The CSGA’s numbers officially show 3,500 members according to its most recent annual report. CSTA membership stands at just over 130.
“For this to work, we need to trust the other people involved. Showing them you don’t trust them, that’s a bad way to go into any negotiation. At some point we need to realize that we do need to move forward with this and we need to do it in good faith and realize the other organizations have no hidden motives and neither should we. Most would argue CSGA doesn’t, and I see no reason to think otherwise, but we need to move forward with trust,” Curtis adds.
He sees the trust issue being borne largely from the fact that eastern Canadian seed growers have been dealing with larger companies for longer than growers out West.
“There are more contract growers in the East. In the West I see many more independent seed growers and processors and they haven’t dealt with the change we have in the East, and they see the multinationals as trying to eliminate smaller seed growers. What they don’t realize is no matter what happens, these large companies will always require seed growers. That will never change.
Everyone involved has good motives and it’s not about anyone ‘taking over.’ It’s about working together.”
Credits:
Created with images by Miguel Bruna - "2018 he we come!" • PublicDomainPictures - "connect connection cooperation" • Pezibear - "wheat field wheat cereals"