b'YOUR FIRST LINE OF DEFENSEWhat made you want to retire at this point?My wife Linda and I have always had the attitude that weAGAINST WHITE MOULDknow weve got limited time on this earth, and at some point we need to retire and pass the torch on to the next generation. Im really happy and satisfied with the breed-ing progress Ive been able to accomplish over the years, of course with the financial help and advocacy of farm- Heads Up Protects Yourers, producer commissions, and Ducks Unlimited Canada.Beans From.Everyone involved is really part of the success story. Sudden Death SyndromeWhat guided you in your winter wheat breeding journey?Rhizoctonia Root RotWhen I started breeding winter wheat in 1999, there had certainly been progress in developing improved varieties White Mouldfor Western Canada, but from an industry perspective, it certainly wasnt as great as what had been accomplished in spring wheat. What I very rapidly discovered was that there were still many improvements that needed to be made. In my mind, it was pretty clear where we needed to go. Where was that?A lot of work had already been done on improving plant type and yield, with shorter stature varieties of better lodging resistance available to farmers. An obvious area for improvement was disease resistance. For example, AC Bellatrix had just been registered. It was a good milling quality winter wheat with bunt resistance, but thats the only type of disease resistance it had. There were also couple of other varieties that had leaf and/or stem rust resistance but were of poorer quality which were eventually removed from the Canada Western Red Winter (CWRW) class. It became pretty clear to me that we needed to develop good milling quality varieties that combined many types of disease resistance, including fusarium head blight and stripe rust resistance, objec-tives that were added in the mid-2000s. From the quality side, the classes are pretty well defined. When I started, Canada Western Red Winter was the only winter wheat class, and in order to get be registered, lines had to have certain milling, baking and dough functionality attributes. Starting in 2008, the Special Purpose class created the possibility of developing varieties for alternative markets in both spring and winter wheat, though to date these varieties have had limited uptake.What did that process look like?The primary objective was to develop agronomically superior CWRW varieties with resistance to all three rusts and then add resistance to FHB, bunt, wheat curl mite,Visit HeadsUpST.com orand so on. Weve accomplished that, but the challenge is now to pyramid several effective genes for each diseaseCall 1-866-368-9306into new varieties so achieve long-lasting, durable resist-ance. Thats really the next phase and is well underway. In order to do that, we can use marker assisted selection, where we use molecular markers to track the genes thatPMRA Reg. #29827we incorporate.NOVEMBER 2022GERMINATION.CA 25'