Agriculture and Agri-food Canada and Cereals Canada launched a National Report that aims to improve the profitability of Canada’s wheat industry on September 19. The report outlines research priorities, goals and measures needed to be taken in the wheat sector to increase the sector’s global competitiveness.
The research priorities are: improving wheat yield and reliability, increasing sustainability, improving food safety, for example by reducing mycotoxins, and being able to respond to consumer needs by developing a feedback mechanism from purchasers to researchers.
The report is intended as a roadmap for innovation and success. All parts of the value-chain will know where efforts and funding should be focused to achieve greater success for the wheat sector. The process will be ongoing, allowing the value chain to measure work against the established goals and refine objectives for success.
The report was initiated back in 2014 when Cereals Canada commissioned a White Paper on the present state of Canadian innovation in cereal research with a focus on wheat. This paper was designed to start a discussion on what Canada needs to have a world-class cereal research innovation system. In the 2017 Canadian Wheat Research Priorities report, wheat Research Priorities were developed as a national collaboration of farmers, federal and provincial governments, public research institutions, exporters and processors in an effort led by Cereals Canada and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. The report lays out the priority areas of research that public, private and producer groups should focus on for the next five years to ensure the $7 billion wheat industry remains strong and grows in the future.
Cereals Canada is leading work to create a research inventory and evaluation tool that houses and categorizes a complete listing of Canadian wheat research. This listing will help to measure progress and drive improvements. This information database will allow funding and research agencies and governments to easily compare their activities and identify potential synergies, redundancies, and gaps. The scope of an evaluation tool could also be expanded to provide a knowledge transfer component for producers. This would address knowledge transfer as one of the key focus areas across all goals and a recommended priority.
The agriculture sector is a cornerstone of the Canadian economy and the Government of Canada wants to increase agri-food exports to $75 billion annually by 2025 to create jobs. Canada’s wheat industry plays an important role in this sector and, by identifying and focusing innovation on high-impact areas of research, it will be better able to increase productivity and competitiveness.
Canada is one of the world’s top five wheat exporters exporting an average of $7 billion of product annually. The country produces an average of 30 million tonnes of wheat each year across an area of 24 million acres making it the largest field crop in Canada. It is the world’s largest producer of high-protein milling wheat. Each year Canada exports between 20-24 million tonnes of wheat to more than 60 countries and uses approximately 8-10 million tonnes domestically for food, animal feed and industrial uses.
There has been substantial improvement in wheat yield over time, averaging 1.4 per cent per year since the mid-1990’s, with about half of this improvement being genetic and the rest attributed to agronomy. Innovation, because of research investments, both public and private, has driven this improvement with new wheat cultivars and more effective crop management practices being widely adopted by farmers.
