b'PLANT BREEDING & GENETICS 2021100% FOCUSED ON CANOLAThis years Plant Breeding and Genetics Award winner says learning to put aside distractions has been the key to a successful career in plant breeding.Marc ZienkiewiczOVER A CAREER that has spanned threepleting his PhD in crop breeding in decades, Van Ripley of Turtleford, Sask.,1995 under the supervision of Wally has been intent on pioneering majorBeversdorf. It was Beversdorf who improvements in one of Canadas signa- recruited the young Ripley to work with ture cropscanola. him on what would be the ushering in of Currently the North American canolaa new era for canola.R&D lead for Nuseed, he has built aWhile working on my PhD, pollina-canola hybrid strategy and pipeline totion control systems were just coming fit the needs of Canadian farmers andinto play. Wally was the chairman of the industry. In 2020, Nuseed was able touniversitys crop science department at launch the first in a series of canola prod- that time, and he was doing a lot of work ucts into the Canadian market thankson pollination control systems, which in no small part to Ripleys vast knowl- ultimately allowed us to produce canola edge of canola. He has also developed ahybrids, Ripley recalls. pipeline of Nuseed canola products withHe was doing some work with a multiple oil profiles to meet the needs ofsmall company at that time called Plant industry and growers. Genetics Systems, or PGS, which was Thats just the tip of the iceberg for thedeveloping the LibertyLink system. It was 59-year-old, whose colleagues considerfascinating because not only were we him a visionary who helped make canolaworking on the new pollination control what it is todayone of Canadas topsystems and trying to decide which one crops grown by 43,000 Canadian farm- would work best for canola long-term, ers who produce about 20 million tonnesbut then also thinking about how to of canola annually, according to Canolatransition an open pollinated crop to a Council of Canada statistics. hybrid crop. I was eight or 10 or something like that, and I remember collecting seedsNew Ways of Thinkingfrom our garden. We lived in the countryDoing that required a new way of think-at that time, and I remember just collect- ing about plant breeding, Ripley says.ing seeds and saying to my parents thatAs excited as Ripley was about work-I was going to keep them so we coulding with canola, he was also a pragmatist. use them next year. I was just so thrilledAs a young plant breeder at that with the idea that I could just keep thesetime, I just wanted to get a job after seeds and then I could grow them againgraduation, and there werent really a lot next year, Ripley says.of plant breeding positions available in Once I got into university and IOntario at that time. Canola was really started taking plant breeding courses, Iexpanding in Western Canada, so it gave just found it extremely fascinating thatme an opportunity to start my career.you could actually select material andThat career began in the 1990s at make crosses between individual plantsAventis CropScience in Saskatoon, where and develop something totally new. he worked as a canola breeder runningVan Ripley, winnerHis academic career began in thea full breeding program for develop- of the 2021 Canadian 1980s at the University of Guelph, whichment of Liberty resistant canola varieties.Plant Breeding &is where he stayed right up until com- He worked closely with Agriculture andGenetics Award.2GERMINATION.CAINTERNATIONAL EDITION 2021'