YORKTON - If you like to eat and want everyone to go to bed each night with a full belly you should be a lover of science.
The world has made zero effort to control population growth, so the number of mouths which need to be fed continues to grow.
And there are few new acres to come into food production – not at least without clear cutting critical forest.
So we need to find ways to continually feed more from the same land base.
To do that means producing more per acre of land.
The only way to do that is to boost yields, which can occur by maximizing nutrients, and by growing improved varieties which have the genetics to produce more.
In terms of varietal development it is a process that has taken place for well over a century.
Plant breeders have accomplished major steps forward, introducing varieties with genetics that offer better straw strength to avoid crop losses from lodging, rust resistance once a major production impactor, and better yields.
Each step has occurred incrementally, often being baby steps, but over the years, having a huge impact of consistently better yields.
Rare are the developments which make monster steps in production, but they do happen.
Creating herbicide resistant canola is one of the huge steps – although not an overnight thing as years of research typically happen before farmers are planting a new variety.
Still farmers and scientists are always hopeful, for the next ‘big step’.
So farmers had to be excited by the recent headline; ‘Canola yields reach new heights’.
The article by Robert Arnason offers a look at a newer canola development which could offer producers that giant step forward in production they always hope for.
The story focuses on the efforts of Liping Wang, a researcher at the University of Guelph, who has used gene editing and transgenic technology to create canola plants with corn genetics.
Why is that significant?
Well the story goes on to explain “the corn genes are changing how the canola makes starch, which in turn boosts yield. Greenhouse tests show that the canola plants can produce 50 per cent more pods and 50 per cent higher yields.”
While the results to-date are in the controlled environment of a greenhouse, if field trials, expected to start in 2024, capture even half of the results found inside it would be massive for canola producers.
Imagine a new variety a few years down the road, based on the lines of transgenic canola from the UofG boosting farmer canola yields by even 25-30 per cent, potentially with no other production change other than variety section.
While regulatory channels will mean the breakthrough could be years from approval, this is hugely exciting made even more exciting by the suggestion the technology could likely be extended to other crops.
That is a possibility that offers hope from science to feed our growing world population in the years ahead.
