NOVEMBER 2026 SEEDWORLD.COM/CANADA 29 A Farmer Who Learned the System Velestuk grew up on a first-generation family farm between Wishart and Wynyard, Sask. Her parents built up the opera tion, and she remembers the time being difficult for farm profitability due to low priced commodities and not a lot of risk management tools being available. She pursued a career away from farming before she and her husband decided to return to agriculture. It was not the safe choice. “Farmers make hard decisions every day,” she says. “We choose to go into a business with really high risk. But there is also the opportunity to build and grow and to have some agency over the decisions we make.” On their farm near Broadview, Velestuk focuses heavily on the business side. That work taught her to see research not as an abstract public good but as part of the farm’s risk-management strategy. Her involvement with Sask Wheat’s research committee for more than six years brought her into conversations with breeders and scientists. She learned how long variety develop ment takes, how many people contribute and how easily an apparently small loss of capacity can affect the entire process. She also saw a disconnect. Farmers were investing heavily in breeding, but many did not have a clear picture of how the system worked, where its weaknesses were or what their money ultimately secured. Since 2020, the CWRC has invested $70.5 million in Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) and university wheat breeding programs. Its current agreements include $19.9 million for AAFC breeding from 2025 to 2028 and $16 million for university programs. With that level of investment, Velestuk argues, farmers should help determine the system’s direction. Success Can Conceal Risk The immediate difficulty is that Canadian wheat breeding still appears highly successful. The CWRC’s review found that AAFC varieties are planted on roughly 80% of Canadian wheat acres in an average year. In 2025, the four leading Canada Western Red Spring varieties were developed through AAFC’s Swift Current Research and Development Centre program. “If you’re a farmer and you don’t know the background, you might say, ‘What’s the problem here?’” Velestuk says. “We’re growing some of the best varieties we’ve ever grown.” The problem is the delay between investment and impact. Today’s leading wheat varieties began as crosses made between 2001 and 2009. The average journey from an initial cross to commercial release is 13 years. A cross made today may not reach the marketplace until 2037. Farmers are benefiting from research capacity assembled more than a decade ago. Reductions made now may not become fully visible until the varieties needed to confront a future disease, climate or market challenge fail to arrive. Velestuk points to AAC Brandon as an example of what a connected system can deliver. “If we didn’t have Brandon come out when it did, I don’t know where our industry would be,” she says. Farmers Need More Than Genetics The CWRC examined five connected stages: foundational science, germplasm enhancement, variety development, pre- market evaluation and commercialization. Its review identified the most serious vulnerabilities in variety development and pre-market testing — the stages where promising genetics are turned into field-ready varieties and tested against regional conditions. Velestuk is particularly concerned about disease nurseries, where researchers deliberately expose plants to enough pressure to distinguish meaningful resistance from good fortune. Dana Maxwell, chair of the Prairie Recommending Committee for Wheat, Rye and Triticale, says that kind of test ing produces information farmers may not realize they use. “PHYSICAL FACILITIES ARE ONLY HALF OF THE RECIPE FOR SUCCESSFUL BREEDER SEED PRODUCTION.” —David Gehl Discussions are ongoing about a proposal to move rye, triticale, flax, peas, lentils and faba beans from Part I to Part III of the federal variety registration system. The change would remove the requirement for recommending committees to assess merit before registration. It would not prohibit testing. But Maxwell says the value chain must establish who would generate the information cur rently produced through registration trials. For fall rye, Western Canadian protocols require 15 site- years of testing over three years. Those years increase the chance that a variety will encounter winter conditions capable of revealing where it can survive. While the data set is not exhaus tive and cannot capture all conditions, it reduces the risk of a variety with poor winter survival reaching market. The resulting data can feed seed guides, inform commer cialization and give farmers an independent basis for comparing varieties. Maxwell is open to changing the process where change makes a positive impact for all value chain members, particu larly primary producers. Her concern is that its functions be understood and replaced deliberately rather than lost unin tentionally. That distinction fits Velestuk’s approach. Farmer leadership does not mean resisting change. It means asking what farmers need both before and in future years once the change is made.
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