Plant Breeding and Genetics Award | CPBI ’26  
Weikai Yan’s Long Game
The breeder behind Canada’s dominant oat varieties says AI will transform agriculture — but 
human judgment still matters most. 
WEIKAI YAN STILL  believes in the human breeder.
That may sound almost contrarian in 2026, at a moment 
when artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping everything 
from software engineering to drug discovery. But Yan — the 
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) Ottawa scientist 
behind some of the country’s most successful oat cultivars and 
the 2026 recipient of the Plant Breeding & Genetics Award 
sponsored by Seed World Canada and Seeds Canada — has 
spent four decades studying systems too complex for easy 
answers.
Agriculture, he says, is one of them.
“AI looks like it can do almost everything,” Yan says. “But 
plant breeders are still essential to ask the right questions.”
That tension between machine intelligence and human 
judgment sits at the centre of modern agriculture. Climate 
volatility is making crop breeding dramatically harder. Growers 
want higher yields, stronger disease resistance, better nutri­
tional profiles, and more resilient crops capable of performing 
across increasingly unstable environments. At the same time, 
genomics, predictive analytics, phenomics, and AI are trans­
forming how breeders work.
Yan has spent much of his career preparing for exactly this 
moment.
Over the past 25 years, he has become internationally rec­
ognized for his work on genotype-by-environment interaction, 
or G×E — the notoriously difficult challenge of understanding 
how genetics behave differently under changing environmental 
conditions. It’s one of the defining problems in plant breeding, 
and one that climate change is rapidly intensifying.
“The climate becomes more fluctuating and more erratic,” 
he says. “That means we are facing more G×E and lower herit­
ability.”
In practical terms, breeders are trying to hit moving targets. 
For Yan, solving that problem required more than intuition. It 
required systems thinking.
Since joining AAFC’s Ottawa Research and Development 
Centre in 2002, Yan has helped develop analytical frameworks 
12   SEEDWORLD.COM/CANADA   JULY 2026

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