A growing coalition of breeders, seed companies, farmers and industry leaders says Canada’s variety registration system is slowing innovation instead of enabling it. Their message: the biggest risk isn’t changing the system — it’s refusing to.
For decades, Canada’s variety registration system has been treated almost as untouchable — although regulators say the ability to change it has been there and it is not being taken advantage of.
It’s been the mechanism that decides which new genetics reach farmers’ fields, balancing quality, performance and market confidence. But one message has begun to surface: the system that once helped build Canada’s reputation may now be limiting its future.
“If there was no registration system in Canada today, what would we design? I think most of us would agree we wouldn’t design the system we have,” says Jeff Jackson, general manager for SeedNet.
It’s not just a provocative question. It’s the central theme of an emerging discussion.
From Hallway Conversations to a Movement
Those conversation didn’t begin in a boardroom. According to Saskatchewan Pulse Growers’ (SPG) manager of strategic initiatives and policy, Cory Solheim, it started the way many industry shifts do: in hallway conversations, including after meetings of the Prairie Grain Development Committee (PGDC).
People kept asking the same question: is Canada’s merit-based registration system still delivering the value everyone assumes it does?
“We were hearing from a number of private breeding organizations that regulations were keeping them out of the pulse market in Canada,” Solheim explains. “Putting those two pieces together, staff made a proposal to the SPG board and said there might be an opportunity to move pulses, specifically peas and lentils, into Part III of the regulations, with the hope that we could get new genetics into farmers’ hands faster.”
That proposal eventually grew into a workshop held at the recent Seeds Canada annual meeting in Saskatoon. That workshop involved roughly 40 people representing breeders, farmers, seed companies, processors, exporters and other members of the value chain.
Their focus wasn’t on all crops. It centered on peas, lentils, flax, rye, triticale and faba beans — crops where many participants believe regulatory requirements have become disproportionately burdensome.
The Cost of Waiting
For Lorena Pahl, commercial product development manager at Limagrain Cereal Seeds, the problem isn’t theoretical. It’s measured in years.
“Our own internal breeding program tests new lines for three years before we advance them into registration trials for another two years,” she says. “That’s five years total. We can reduce that to four at minimum.”
One year may not sound significant to outsiders. Inside plant breeding, it’s enormous. A year earlier means disease resistance reaches growers sooner. Better agronomics reach the marketplace sooner. New export opportunities become possible sooner.
Pahl also argues that reducing registration requirements doesn’t mean reducing science. Instead, she sees the opportunity to redirect money into research that creates more value. She estimates Limagrain’s program alone could redirect $50,000 to $75,000 currently spent navigating the registration process.
That money could instead support field root rot research, genomic selection and stronger early-generation breeding systems.
“It’s not a cost reduction to our R&D project,” she said. “It’s actually going to reallocate to higher-value research priorities.”
The Uncomfortable Question
Solheim challenges one of the industry’s longest-held assumptions: that farmers strongly support the current variety registration system.
“I don’t believe farmers have a fulsome understanding of what the registration system is,” she says. “I think farmer support of variety registration is probably rooted in the belief that that’s where their data is generated. It isn’t.”
Instead, she argues, the information farmers rely on increasingly comes from regional variety trials, company testing, seed growers and retailers, and even fellow farmers, not necessarily from the regulatory process itself.
Meanwhile, competing countries continue accelerating genetic advancement with fewer regulatory hurdles.
“Our competitors are catching up,” she says. “Farmers today are more educated, more informed, have more access to data than they did when this system was devised. They don’t need us protecting them like back in the early 20th century when there was no quality control. What they need are better genetics, faster.”
A Canadian Habit of Waiting
Jackson believes Canada has fallen into a dangerous pattern: playing the waiting game.
“We consider ourselves global leaders. We were fifth in exports. Now we’re seventh, projected to be ninth. That’s not leadership. That’s dwindling capacity,” he says.
“We’ve got this Canadian way where everything’s fine. But is it?”
He points to tariffs, shrinking breeding resources, increasing market demands and Canada’s declining export ranking as evidence that the status quo isn’t as comfortable as it appears.
His conclusion is blunt: “We need to ask ourselves why.”
One reason the discussion is gaining traction is that stakeholders now have more data than ever, not just opinions.
At the Seeds Canada workshop in Saskatoon, participants overwhelmingly supported moving peas, lentils, flax, rye and triticale into Part III registration. For faba beans, it was acknowledged that low vicine/convicine was an important characteristic and could be the sole merit criteria if faba beans were kept in Part I.
The room also unanimously agreed that any registered Canadian variety should still be:
- distinguishable and stable,
- meet varietal purity requirements, and
- be publicly listed.
In other words, advocates aren’t arguing for eliminating oversight. They’re arguing for changing where the oversight occurs.
Still, industry stakeholders have concerns about maintaining reliable performance data. SeCan Western Business Manager Todd Hyra warns that regional variety trials already face significant challenges in several provinces. He says a misconception exists that variety registration data is a duplication of regional variety trial data, when in fact most of the data that is presented in the provincial seed guides (other than yield and maybe limited quality data) is generated from variety registration trials.
Without strong regional trials, smaller breeding programs could lose access to critical disease and quality information currently generated through cooperative systems, he says.
“I’m not necessarily hung up on variety registration,” he says. “But I am hung up on data.”
Pahl counters that seed developers aren’t proposing less information, just in a different package.
“I really see it as a win-win,” she says. “We’re not saying we’re going to do away with data collection. I think there’s a huge opportunity where we can provide more data and more relevant data.”
Even the Regulator is Listening
Wendy Jahn, national manager of the Seed Section at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), notes Ottawa isn’t standing in the way of change. In fact, she says the regulatory framework was intentionally redesigned nearly two decades ago to allow it.
“The CFIA changed our regulations in 2009 implementing a flexible variety registration system,” Jahn says. “At that time the expectation was that crop types would move amongst different parts of the regulations.”
She points to soybeans and forage crops as examples of commodity groups that had already shifted to different regulatory categories as industry needs evolved.
“We’re open to other potential movement,” she says. “I really feel that variety registration is in stakeholders’ hands.”
Rather than asking whether merit testing should stay or go, she encourages the industry to ask a different question: which parts of the current system still create value?
“It’s important that everyone who uses the system understands that even for crop type subject to merit evaluations, what those merit criteria are is entirely up to the stakeholder recommending committees. They can be changed when and as needed if there is agreement by the committee.”
Using faba beans as an example, Jahn notes that stakeholders could decide to retain a single quality check — such as confirming low vicine-convicine levels — while eliminating other requirements they no longer see as necessary.
In a nutshell, the future of variety registration doesn’t have to be dictated by regulators, she adds. If industry can build consensus and clearly define what it needs, the system is flexible enough to evolve with it.
Members of the various regional registration committees responsible for rye have already agreed that the best path forward for rye is Part III, so it is a step ahead of the other crops.
Proponents for change plan to continue forward progress, expanding their discussions to additional stakeholders and other regions in Canada, as well as having discussions with Canadian regulators.
