An innovative breeding project is underway in Quebec to help small-acreage crops, or niche crops, escape from a chicken-and-egg dilemma.

“We have a lot of crops that have very low acreage, so they don’t get much investment in terms of all sorts of things but genetic development in particular. You need larger acreages to be able to get that investment. But in order to get those larger acreages, you need the investment in resources to develop new varieties,” explains Michel McElroy, a crop breeder and researcher with CÉROM (Centre de recherche sur les grains).

“I feel that many crops in the province have a tremendous amount of potential but they can’t really get off the ground because they are stuck in this negative feedback loop.”

So, McElroy and his research group are working with interested crop growers to improve the genetics of some niche crops, breaking this negative loop and allowing progress toward greater success.

Breeding on a shoestring budget
Producer requests for genetic improvement of niche crops helped to trigger this project. “I kept getting producers asking about the possibility of developing new varieties for various niche crops. And I kept telling them that we just don’t have the resources to have a full breeding program for such crops,” says McElroy, who leads CÉROM’s winter wheat breeding program.

“However, the more I thought about it, the more I thought it would be possible to generate some of that genetic diversity a little more efficiently if we are not going through the whole breeding process, but if we bring in interested producers to help with plant selection. That way, we could move the crop forward without having to get the significant investment needed to construct a whole breeding pipeline.”

In other words, this project is taking a participatory breeding approach. “Participatory breeding can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. But I see it as a collaboration between researchers and producers, where a researcher or breeder generates genetic diversity, and those diverse materials are then sent on-farm for producers to select the types that look best to them,” McElroy explains.

This approach draws on the expertise of farmers who are very familiar with producing a certain crop and have direct knowledge of key traits that can benefit the crop’s production and limit it.

“A participatory approach is important for niche crops where a smaller community of people are involved, allowing you to get a better idea of people’s opinions,” McElroy notes.

“Also, sometimes there are some very specific particularities to these crops that you would not know about unless you were really involved with them. The niche crops that we are working on in this project are pretty new to me. So, I’m relying as much on the producers’ knowledge of these crops as they’ll be relying on me in terms of the genetic diversity that I can bring to them.”

He adds, “We hope to create a kind of consortium around each crop where we can have many different producers selecting material but all with the same breeding objectives in mind. Hopefully, we will come up with something that is interesting to everyone. We really want this to be a producer-driven initiative in terms of the breeding objectives and end-products.”

As a first step for the project, which started in 2023, McElroy and his group conducted consultations to decide which of Quebec’s many niche crops to work on.

These consultations included not only growers but also buyers and processors. McElroy notes, “We’ve found that many of the people who are growing some of these niche crops in Quebec have a pretty tight relationship with the people who are turning that crop into an end-product. Sometimes the crop growers themselves are making the end-products.”

McElroy and his group used four criteria to make the crop choices. “First of all, we needed to check that no breeding program was currently serving that crop in our region.”

“Second, we wanted to make sure it was a crop with proven agronomic potential in Quebec, with producers already growing it here. We didn’t want to be introducing a completely new crop.

“Third, we wanted to make sure that the problems with the crop were things that we could solve through breeding. There are a lot of crops that producers have problems with, but when we discussed the crop with them, sometimes the problems were more with the market or because some of the agronomic practices haven’t been figured out so far.

“And fourth, we wanted to make sure that all the people sitting around the table had a set of common breeding objectives for the crop.”

In the consultation process, they considered flax, camelina, peas, faba beans, buckwheat and sunflower.

“Finally, we decided that buckwheat and sunflower were the ones that had a lot of potential and a lot of people interested in them, and had some interesting problems that we thought we could solve with breeding.”

Breeding better buckwheat
“There are many passionate buckwheat growers in Quebec. It is a crop that’s been around for a long time, but the genetics are stagnant; nothing new has been developed in a very long time,” McElroy says.

“Many producers have told us that buckwheat has very variable yields. Some years it will be very good, and some years it will be very poor. That kind of uncertainty really makes it hard to keep producing the crop over the long term.”

When McElroy and his group looked into what might be causing this yield variability, they found that an important factor is heat tolerance. Some varieties don’t seem to do well in hot conditions. He notes this issue might become a bigger problem in the years ahead, given climate warming trends and an increasing likelihood of getting hot weather during flowering, which can lower buckwheat’s grain yields.

The next step was to acquire seed for the two most grown buckwheat varieties in Quebec and for different buckwheat accessions (seed samples from genebanks). These accessions encompass buckwheat genetics from all over the world, particularly from regions that are warmer than Quebec.

In a field plot at CÉROM in Saint-Mathieu-de-Beloeil, Que., McElroy’s group planted buckwheat seeds in a pattern that maximized possibilities for crossing between different lines. Then they let the bees do the crossing for them. Then they harvested the seed.

In 2025, they’ll multiply the seed so they’ll have enough for on-farm selection in 2026. McElroy says, “We will be going back to the producers that we consulted with and asking, ‘Would you be interested in growing this seed in a small plot on your farm and then selecting the ones that look most interesting to you?’” They especially hope to find plants that seem to do better in hot growing conditions.

The participating growers will send their buckwheat selections back to McElroy’s group, who will clean and sort the seed to get rid of any unwanted material, and then maybe multiply the seed again.

Then the group will send the seed back to the growers for another round of on-farm evaluation and selection.

Updating open-pollinated sunflowers
“The sunflower producers we talked to said one of their biggest issues is it can be very difficult to get seed [for oil-type sunflower production]. There is not really anyone producing this seed within Quebec now because most of the production is based around hybrids. Sometimes it is difficult to get seed, and sometimes for the organic growers it is difficult to find seed that isn’t treated,” he explains.

He mentions that, although sunflower hybrids are very productive, the seed costs can be comparatively high. So, in some situations, it might be profitable to grow an open-pollinated variety with its lower seed costs, and potentially taking a hit on yield compared to a higher cost hybrid.

“We wanted to see if we could come up with an open-pollinated variety, or a plant population at the very least, that could be used maybe just as a backup for years when it might be more difficult to find seed.”

McElroy and his group decided to look for older open-pollinated varieties and see if they could update those varieties with disease resistance traits found in today’s hybrids, such as resistance to sclerotinia (white mould) and other important diseases in the province.

“We found some older varieties from eastern Europe that are used for oil production and that look really nice in the field right up until the disease hits. Then we took what are essentially parents of hybrids bred for disease resistance. And we’re trying to cross some of those lines into the open-pollinated lines to see if we can get some plants that do well as open-pollinated plants but also retain some of that disease resistance.”

Since sunflowers are insect- and wind-pollinated, McElroy had hoped to simply plant the different lines together in a plot and allow them to cross naturally.

“However, there was such an issue with different maturity times that it was tough to get them to sync up. So, I had to do some manual crossing. That is a challenge because sunflower is a compound flower which means that every little seed has its own little flower. Also, sunflowers get up very early in the morning, so I had to be out there at the break of dawn,” he says.

“We had reasonable success with that. And we will do more crosses in the greenhouse this winter to see if we can improve on what we have.”

Next year, they hope to plant another field plot, and multiply the seed. Then they’ll send the seed to the growers for on-farm selection of types that seem to have better disease resistance.

Toward more options for growers
“We’re not necessarily aiming to register new varieties of these two crops. We will look at the results as they come in and then consult with the farmers and say, ‘If you would like a variety, then we could go through the system to be able to register it. Or, if it’s okay to have farm-saved seed, then we’re open to that. Or perhaps a common seed sharing arrangement between farms could work. Or whatever might work for you,’” McElroy says.

“We want to be able to provide some new genetics to producers of these niche crops because we feel that the more acres the crop gets, the more investment it will get, and the more we can push these improvements forward to further diversify the menu of crops that producers have.”

He adds, “One of the secondary objectives of this program is to help increase crop diversification in Quebec. Many producers want to lengthen and diversify their rotations because they see the negative effects of having short rotations or rotations with similar crops. But it is hard to take a loss one year out of three or four on a crop that is not up to snuff in terms of its genetics.”

For now, the selection process will mainly look at how the plants perform in the field. But in the coming years, McElroy’s group will also be testing for end-use quality traits to ensure that their new lines or varieties will also meet market needs.

“It has been a blast learning about these new crops – you don’t really get an appreciation for a crop without growing it at least once throughout a whole season – and about the challenges that producers have with them,” McElroy says. “I’m really looking forward to continuing on and learning more about them.”