JULY 2026 SEEDWORLD.COM/CANADA 7 disappear under stress. Disease pressure was mounting. Farmers needed varieties that could survive real conditions, not just perform in ideal years. CDC Meadow landed at precisely the right moment. “It sort of fit a niche at the time,” Warkentin says. That niche turned out to be enor mous. The variety offered a rare com bination of traits growers valued in the field: reliable yield, solid lodging resist ance, durable seed coats, and tolerance to environmental stress. It wasn’t flashy. It was stable. And stability scales quickly in agriculture. By 2011 — just five years after release — CDC Meadow had become the most widely grown pea variety in Western Canada. As of 2025, it was still the most popular variety. What makes that longevity remarka ble is that, in crop breeding terms, CDC Meadow is now old technology. “This is an older variety that’s now starting to be replaced by newer genetics with superior performance,” says Laurie Friesen, seed program manager with Saskatchewan Pulse Growers. “But that’s exactly why this recognition matters. CDC Meadow has had an incredibly long lifecycle and delivered value to growers year after year after year.” That staying power is rare in modern agriculture, where varieties often rise and fall within only a few seasons. “Growers trusted it,” Friesen says. “It performed consistently, and it helped build confidence in peas during a really important growth period for the industry.” The Saskatchewan Pea That Alberta Adopted The irony is that CDC Meadow didn’t become biggest where it was created. The original cross was made in Saskatoon in 1996 by breeder Bert Vandenberg. Early generations were selected there. The variety was built entirely within Saskatchewan’s breeding ecosystem. And yet Alberta ultimately embraced it most aggressively. “CDC Meadow has a slightly earlier maturity than other varieties we released,” Warkentin says. “That probably fit the central, northern and eastern parts of Alberta quite well.” That regional fit helped CDC Meadow spread rapidly across Prairie acres just as Canada was establishing itself as a global pulse powerhouse. Today, CDC-developed pea varie ties occupy more than 60% of Canadian pea acreage. Over nearly three decades, Warkentin’s breeding program alone has released more than 55 pea varieties. The cumulative impact is difficult to overstate. Grain yields in CDC pea varieties have climbed roughly 1% to 2% annually over the past 25 years. Lodging resistance has improved dramatically compared to 1990s-era peas. Protein yield — the combination of seed protein concentration and overall yield — has steadily increased. Resistance to diseases like powdery mildew and Mycosphaerella blight has strengthened generation after generation. In other words, the Prairie pea crop quietly became more productive, more reliable, and more profitable. CDC Meadow was one of the varieties that helped bridge that transformation. Modern Breeding Looks More Like a Tech Company Than a Greenhouse Walk through the CDC pea program today and it feels less like traditional agriculture and more like a biological R&D startup. The breeding team combines conven tional crossing and field selection with DNA-marker-assisted breeding, genomic selection, genome-wide association stud ies (GWAS), speed breeding systems, and advanced phenotyping technologies. Some generations are accelerated through contra-season nurseries in New Zealand. Near-infrared spectroscopy rapidly screens protein content. UAV sys tems developed alongside University of Saskatchewan agronomy and engineering researchers now help breeders evaluate plots from the air. Warkentin himself collaborated on the first published pea genome sequence in 2019 and has contributed to recent gene-editing research in pea crops. CDC Meadow peas up close. Laurie Friesen of the Saskatchewan Pulse Growers says CDC Meadow’s legacy is an important one, as it set a major benchmark for what a pea variety can do. And yet, despite the increasingly futuristic toolkit, the biggest challenge facing pea breeders today is pain fully physical: root rot. Specifically, Aphanomyces root rot — a soilborne disease capable of lingering in fields for years and quietly hammering pea yields. “We’ve been putting a big effort on that over the last five to 10 years,” Warkentin says. The next generation of pea breeding isn’t about perfection, but about resil ience. “We’re not going to have perfect resistance,” he says. “But if we can boost the resistance combined with good yield and other traits growers like, I think that will be a good contribution.”
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