b'fingertips so well continue to work diligently and build on what weve learned. Disease management is going well and hopefully, that wont change. Insects have not been a concern in the past but this year, blister beetle showed up.Milling and marketsLPI continues its work developing the entire lupin value chain. Choi has a core team of six, and hires about 12 field associates and project managers each year to provide seasonal advice to his contracted growers. Currently LPI ships seed to a Minnesota mill for various U.S. customers making high-protein keto pasta, beverage mixes and more. In Canada, Choi uses a mill in Saskatoon,Lupin field.Photo: Tristan Choi, CEO of Lupin Platform Inc.Sask., but he is now retrofitting a mill he recently purchased in Swift Current. ALKALOID REMOVAL FROM OTHERThis will allow us to scale up, he explains. We are very mindful of how we grow. We stay focussed on our small groupLUPIN SPECIESof about 10 customers. Each is unique in their needs for a customized product, for example steam-treated or heat-treatedAlthough breeders have been making progress with reducing forms. On the feed front, weve run a feed trial on an Albertaalkaloid levels in sweet lupin varieties discovered almost a century dairy farm with lupin meal instead of canola meal, and interimago, only recently has the biochemistry of alkaloid production in results for butterfat and milk yield are very positive. the lupin taken a huge leap forward. Two enzymes involved in He hopes the results will lead to a graduate student doing aalkaloid synthesis had been identified, but a team at the University two-year study. of Copenhagen in Denmark discovered a third acetyltransferase After limited acreage three years ago, LPI contracted 680enzyme.acres and milled about 160 tonnes in 2022. This year, acreageTeam leaders Fernando Geu-Flores and Davide Mancinotti is 1,000 acres, mostly in Alberta with some in Manitoba. Nextcompared L. albus varieties with both high and low alkaloid levels year, the target is between 1,200 and 1,500 acres with LPIsand narrowed their focus on a mutation that must exist to prevent small group of select growers.alkaloid production in the sweet varieties. Geu-Flores and Mancinotti Meanwhile, Choi is keen to collaborate with breedingthen approached a Danish firm called Traitomic (a spin-off of companies and/or customers in Europe, Australia, the UnitedCarlsberg Brewery) to create a similar mutation in L. angustifolius States, Argentina and beyond.through chemical mutagenesis. This traditional breeding technique is The future looks fantastic for lupin, he says. We willexempt from the European Union regulations that ban other types of continue to grow slowly and wisely and work with our selectedgenetic modification such as gene editing.growers and talented agronomists. Were also marketing ourTraitomic developed a platform of more than 100,000 genetically-own food products, with R&D supported in part by thedifferent lupin variants and using their FIND-IT technology, they [Canadian] federal government. were able to identify a plant with exactly the right change in the He adds that LPI will launch lupin pickles next year andacetyltransferase gene. continues to explore ice cream and other products.The batch we made with the famous Bridge Drive-in iceTraitomic team leaders Gustav Hambraeus and Toni Wendt note cream shop in Winnipeg sold out this summer and the tractionthat the full process, from the initial request to the handover of got the attention of national news outlets. I hardly got to trythe specific lupin variant, took less than a year. And, with the lupin any of it he adds.platform established, Traitomic could also deliver many other specific gene variants requested by the University of Copenhagen in just a few weeks.Further work with this gene mutation should enable researchers to reduce alkaloid production in other species of lupin with even higher protein contents than existing cultivated varieties (such as L. mutabilis, or Andean lupin).44GERMINATION.CAJANUARY 2024'