Crop Development Centre (CDC) Plant Growth Facility
Term: 2 years, beginning in 2021
Status: Ongoing
Funding Amount: $2,000,000
Lead Researcher(s): Dr. Angela Bedard-Haughn
Project Description
The Crop Development Centre (CDC) Enhanced Breeding Facility (the Facility) Infrastructure Project is a critical re-development of the current Crop Science Field Lab, located on the University of Saskatchewan Campus, it will provide a much-needed expansion in work space capacity devoted to seed processing and storage, safe storage of chemicals, quality labs, grain drying facilities and field equipment maintenance and storage. In addition, it will add new workspace capacity devoted to indoor plant growth rooms for breeding programs, growth chambers for pathology programs and lab space for the recently hired WGRF Research Chair in Integrated Agronomy and the current CDC forage breeder.
The CDC currently faces significant bottlenecks and gaps in available workspace devoted to the aforementioned activities. As a result, CDC plant breeders and pathologists are overutilizing limited capacity and are unable to increase the size of their programs. This limits competitiveness and restricts their ability to continue the Centre’s long tradition of breeding improved varieties for western Canadian producers. The Facility has a number of merits including; 1) its use for twelve crop types (wheat, barley, canary seed, chickpea, durum, dry bean, faba bean, flax, perennial forages, lentil, oat and pea) important to western Canadian producers, 2) it will increase overall breeding outputs (i.e. varieties), 3) it will complement innovative breeding tools like “rapid generation cycling” aka “speed breeding” and genomic selection, 4) it will support the deployment of basic plant-related research outputs, through the release of new varieties, that would otherwise not be capitalized upon, 5) it will provide a workspace that does not currently exist for WGRF Research Chair and the CDC forage breeder.
The Facility outlined in this proposal models new breeding facilities used by the private sector (e.g., BASF, Australian Grain Technologies) and has been developed based on consultations with CDC breeders and pathologists, the WGRF Research Chair, the College of Agriculture and Bioresources, and the University of Saskatchewan. These discussions captured the critical infrastructure needed for the CDC to improve efficiency and expand its already significant impact on western Canadian producers, and help meet its vision to be “a world-class crop improvement centre that delivers crop genetics for society”. A preliminary architectural design of the Facility has been completed, and both committed and potential funding sources for the construction and operation of the Facility have been identified.