Award-winning wheat breeder Pierre Hucl pulls no punches in this candid chat. Despite delivering some of the most successful wheat varieties in Canada, he says public breeding has been chronically undervalued for decades — and short-term, five-year funding cycles are crippling innovation. From the public’s lack of awareness about breeders (“40 million Canadians don’t even know we exist”) to the pressure to commercialize research, Pierre warns that flashy buzzwords like climate-smart and digitally enabled can’t hide a system that’s still underfunded and unstable. His solution? Scrap rigid five-year plans, encourage true outside-the-box thinking, and give plant scientists the freedom to innovate without fear of being sidelined.