PGDC recommends new pulse varieties for registration

Mar 08, 2023

The Prairie Grain Development Committee held its annual meeting in Banff last week.

Committees evaluated potential new breeding variety lines and recommended the best of the best for registration.

This year the Pulse and Special Crops Committee recommended 16 new lentil lines, 13 pea lines, 5 faba bean and 5 dry bean lines for registration.

Dr. Glen Hawkins, a Senior Manager and Agronomist with DL Seeds, chairs that committee and says there's some great potential coming forward.

Out of the new breeding lines recommended for registration, Limagrain put forward twelve new lentil lines and five pea lines.

Limagrain registered six small red lentils, three large green, one French green, one extra small red and one small green along with five pea lines one green and four yellow.

Click here to see more...

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids