OSCII Activity A.1
Participatory plant breeding and seed production approaches for Canadian organic crop production
Activity summary
The main objective of this project is to enhance the development of organic crop varieties by engaging farmers directly in the breeding process. The crops in question include potato, wheat, oat, and corn. Institutional plant breeders from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) and the University of Manitoba will provide segregating populations of all crops to organic farmers in different parts of the country. Farmers will spend a minimum of 3 years selecting within individual populations of wheat, oat, corn and potato. This work builds on existing farmer participatory breeding programs for corn (started 2010) and wheat (started 2011). The interaction between the farmers and the breeders will be conducted by a coordinator hired for the project and will be supervised and directed by Dr. Martin Entz, University of Manitoba working in concert with the farmers and plant breeders.
After the three years of on-farm selection, representative samples of the populations will be tested for yield, quality, disease resistance, etc. These 鈥測ield trials鈥� will be conducted on AAFC and University of Manitoba research stations and on some organic farms. These replicated trials will allow the following questions to be addressed:
- How much do the same populations selected by different farmers differ in field performance, disease resistance, grain yield and quality;
- Do farmer selections perform differently than the same population selected by plant bre