Aaron Beattie completed his undergraduate science degree at the University of Waterloo, his master’s in plant breeding at the University of Guelph and his PhD in plant pathology at the University of Saskatchewan. He grew up in Saskatchewan and currently lives in Saskatoon.

Where did you work before the Crop Development Centre (CDC)?

I worked at Southern Seed Technology, a winter nursery in New Zealand for about a year. This is the nursery we collaborate with and send our barley to in the winter. Prior to that, I was working in the dry bean breeding program at the University of Guelph.

What got you interested in this area of work?

My background from my undergrad was biology and genetics. When I finished my undergrad, I knew I liked genetics, but I wanted to do something that wasn’t pure research. That’s where plant breeding made sense because it leans heavily on genetics and various aspects of biology, but it has that applied piece as well. That helped me make my decision to go to the University of Guelph. My thesis was focused on plant breeding and I continued in that area afterwards in my work. I came back to Saskatchewan for school, and eventually landed my current job.

Tell us a bit about what you’re working on at the CDC.

The summer is busy between running tours for the barley and oat programs for farmers and funders, doing selections in the field and keeping my crew organized leading into harvest. Teaching is a big part of my winter, as well as evaluating data we collect from the fields in the summer and organizing our winter work, such as the quality and molecular data. I’ve got four graduate students working at the moment, and we have a lot of industry interactions.

In terms of research, one project we are working on, Phenotyping and Genomic selection for improved barley Deoxynivalenol (DON) resistance, is funded by Manitoba Crop Alliance, SaskBarley, Alberta Grains and Western Grains Research Foundation. This project deals with trying to get a better handle on fusarium resistance in barley, which the barley research community has made a lot of good progress towards over the past 20 years.

This project aims to develop genomic tools to help me select for better resistance. We’re working closely with James Tucker at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in Brandon. We send him a few thousand lines every year and he evaluates them for DON and fusarium resistance. We are also genotyping these lines to create prediction models for fusarium resistance.

Eventually, we hope to develop a way to select for better DON resistance using genomic tools early on in our breeding program, and evaluate only those lines that we think have better resistance in the nursery as a means to confirm the better resistance.

What can you say about the value of farmers providing funding and support to your organization?

The work we do as breeders spans fairly large periods of time. You’ve likely heard that it is an eight-to-10-year process to go from a cross to moving forward a variety. Funding from farmers is key to our program, as well as to other barley breeding programs in Western Canada because it allows us to make long-term plans. It allows us to test more, which means we have a higher probability of producing something better in the future.

How does that farmer funding and support directly benefit farmers?

It allows farmers to have a voice in terms of what we do, which is critical. Hearing new ideas from farmers based on things they are seeing in the field is invaluable. We try to listen to the whole value chain, and farmers are at the start of that chain. They need to be engaged in the process because we want them to see value in our work and keep barley in their rotation.

How do you spend your time outside of work?

I coach and play hockey.

What is the best part about your job?

I like the idea that what I do is practical to people. The idea that you can take research and translate it into something that has value to other people is rewarding. Also, it’s a very nice community to work in. There are a lot of very engaged and enthusiastic people in agriculture and a lot of innovation. People are willing to incorporate new ideas – I really like that about the industry.

What gets you most excited about your work?

Interacting with people across quite a wide range of disciplines; researchers all the way to the end users and farmers. Having that diversity of viewpoints is quite interesting, and then trying to figure out how to make it all come together into a variety. It’s fun to go through that process and interact along the way with people influencing your end goals.

Follow @CDC_USask on Twitter.

Dilantha Fernando is a professor in the Department of Plant Science at the University of Manitoba (UM) and dean of studies at UM’s St. Paul’s College. Dilantha was born in Sri Lanka where he completed a bachelor of science in botany with a chemistry minor, as well as a master’s in microbiology. He then moved to the U.S. and completed his PhD in plant pathology at Oregon State University.

Fernando has been recognized with several prestigious awards for his work in research and teaching. He is an editor of six journals, including two where he is editor in chief. He lives in Winnipeg with his wife, who is also a researcher, and the two youngest of their three sons.

Where did you work before UM?

I have been very fortunate to have had work opportunities in many places. After completing my PhD, I held a postdoctoral position at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, where I worked on rice diseases. Next, I was presented the opportunity to come to McGill University as a postdoctoral fellow, which brought me back to North America.

After McGill, I held postdoctoral positions with the University of Arizona, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s Ottawa Research and Development Centre (where I first worked on fusarium head blight) and Michigan State University. I then accepted a full-time position with UM.

What got you interested in this area of work?

While doing a degree in botany, one must have that moment of realization: “This is what I want to do.” I was not going to be a top scientist looking at plants, I was more fascinated by what I could not see – the bacteria, the viruses, the fungi. My microbiology research was entirely on bacterial microbiology. I became fascinated with how a single cell of a bacterium can do so much – good or bad. That’s where it all started, with my background and fascination with microbiology.

Tell us a bit about what you’re working on at UM.

I begin my days very early. I generally wake up around 5 a.m. to do any editing work and catch up on emails with a nice cup of Sri Lankan tea, before sending the kids off to school. In my office which is beside both of my labs, I spend time with my graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, working on research papers, developing new ideas and writing proposals and reports, before heading to St. Paul’s for the afternoon to do administrative work.

I teach two courses: plant disease management in the fall and the epidemiology of plant diseases in the winter. I also work with graduate and post-graduate students in the lab. This is one of the best parts of my job, mentoring students through research.

In research, I focus mostly on canola and cereal diseases. I have been working on Fusarium in wheat and barley, and training post docs in this area. The population structure of Fusarium pathogens of small grain cereals, their distribution and relationship to mycotoxins research is funded by Manitoba Crop Alliance, Western Grains Research Foundation, Alberta Wheat Commission, Brewing and Malting Barley Research Institute, SaskBarley and Sask Wheat.

In this research we are looking at the western Canadian cline, or the way the pathogens are moving, and how that is impacting farmers. Our studies are also looking at how different chemotypes can impact the cereals.

Building on this opportunity, we have received thousands of isolates from different sources, including scientists in the east and in Ontario, enabling us to do several studies and make comparisons, which is very important. With these isolates, we are starting to see differences and to understand why a certain area might be getting less or more disease pressure. One of the key questions we are interested in is to understand why the 3A-DON chemotype is displacing the 15A-DON chemotype.

What can you say about the value of farmers providing funding and support to your organization?

The funding farmers give to support any research is so important. If you have good ideas and you want to help the world, to execute those ideas you need funding. It enables us to train highly qualified personnel and to answer farmers’ key questions that can only be answered through doing the research.

In our lab, we as researchers have a moral obligation to provide applicable results back to farmers.

How does that farmer funding and support directly benefit farmers?

The direct benefit a farmer would see in the type of research I do on Fusarium is increased yields and decreased loss of quality. Because of that, farmers will gain a lot of opportunity at the trade level.

Safeguarding their fields is another direct benefit, because if they know how to reduce the inoculum of any fungus, any pathogen, they are going to have a better opportunity the next season with less inoculum of the pathogen in their fields.

How do you spend your time outside of work?

I have a very busy lifestyle. My biggest hobby seems to be family and keeping in touch with friends, which has been a pleasure, especially when I am travelling. When I travel overseas, I always have somebody to meet up with, and some of those friendships have continued for more than 40 years.

What are you excited about for the future of agriculture?

This is a discussion we have at home because we feel very proud to work in agriculture. There are industries that come and go or change, but everyone in the world has to eat. Our land is not going to grow, but the population is.

So, we have to find new techniques to improve production, with less diseases, higher yields and high quality. I think agriculture is going to be one of the most desired industries also from a work standpoint where there will be more opportunities for people trained in agriculture to find jobs.

Who or what inspires you?

I give the highest credit to my parents. Both my brother and I were interested in playing sports, but my parents told us, “If you want to play sports, you have to be really good to be someone in the sports world. If you have an education, you can go a long way.”

I loved doing science and up until my PhD I had never worked in agriculture, but that opened up a new area that got me excited.

Connect with Dilantha Fernando on LinkedIn.

Gurcharn Singh Brar grew up in Punjab, India’s “breadbasket,” where he completed his B.Sc. in agriculture (honours in crop protection) at Punjab Agricultural University. In 2012, he moved to Canada’s breadbasket, Saskatchewan, and completed his M.Sc. and PhD in wheat genetics and breeding at the University of Saskatchewan.

Currently, he is an assistant professor of plant science in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, and lives in Surrey with his wife.

Where did you work before UBC?

I started my job at UBC in January 2020, and before that I was working at the Crop Development Centre (CDC) of the University of Saskatchewan where I did my M.Sc. and PhD. For a short time after I completed my PhD, I was working at the CDC as a research officer in wheat breeding and genetics.

What got you interested in this area of work?

I often say I am in a long-term relationship with wheat. I’ve been around wheat fields since I was a child – my dad grows wheat and rice on his farm. When I was in high school, I would visit the wheat fields and loved wheat as a plant. When I started my bachelor’s degree, I used to interact and look at wheat from a different perspective. In my third year, I saw stripe rust in our field and decided I would focus my work on wheat rusts.

Tell us a bit about what you’re working on at UBC.

My research program is split between wheat and barley. I work closely with public wheat and barley breeders in Western Canada. The major focus of my research on wheat and barley is breeding for disease resistance.

We focus on the five priority diseases, and in my program, we’ve established uniform disease screening nurseries, mainly for Fusarium Head Blight (FHB) and stripe rust, where wheat and barley breeders send us their material, we plant it and provide them with data. We also started working on bacterial leaf streak (BLS) of wheat.

For barley, my main focus is on FHB, net blotch, scald and stripe rust. Recently, we started working on BLS of barley, which is emerging as a new disease, especially in southern Alberta and Manitoba.

For wheat, pre-breeding is where we do a lot with genetics. The Mapping novel FHB and stripe rust resistance genes from Watkins landraces project – funded by Manitoba Crop Alliance, Alberta Wheat Commission, Saskatchewan Wheat Development Commission and the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture – will feed into our pre-breeding research pipeline.

Our colleagues genotyped a panel of Watkins landraces (a few thousand lines) and shortlisted a core panel of about 300 lines. Of those 300 lines, which we screened with stripe rust and FHB, we have identified close to 12 which have a very high level of resistance to FHB and deoxynivalenol (vomitoxin) accumulation. Of these 12, there are two which are highly resistant to FHB and stripe rust.

We have two graduate students working on this project, aiming to identify the genes that are making these landraces resistant to both diseases, and we are very close to finishing this research. The goal is to develop breeder-friendly markers with the aim to transfer these resistant genes into elite CWRS wheat lines that breeders in Western Canada can use.

What can you say about the value of farmers providing funding and support to your organization?

We can’t do the research if we don’t have the funding from producer groups. I really appreciate the funding and support from the deepest core of my heart. One thing I learned from my mentors and I keep in mind is to make sure my research goes back to help the farmers. If not in the short run, in the long run it should pay back.

I think the Prairie producer groups are doing a commendable job. For me, the biggest positive is although I am sitting on a UBC campus far from Manitoba, they understand my research has value, too. They don’t limit funding to the provincial boundaries, which I think is a very visionary approach.

How does that farmer funding and support directly benefit farmers?

If we develop a variety, for example, that is a direct benefit to the farmer because it gives them another option. The other research we are doing, like genetics and pre-breeding, also has benefits. Suppose we identify novel genes for resistance to FHB from these Watkins Landraces. We transfer that resistance to some CWRS wheat lines and develop markers that we give to breeders. They can use that resistance in their future varieties.

When these varieties are released, if they have improved resistance over today’s varieties, there is potential to minimize and possibly eliminate fungicide reliance. Or, for example, in some years you have to spray twice, maybe we can limit it to one application. That will save money and a lot of effort. It will also improve the grade of the crop, and grade improvement means more money in pocket.

How do you spend your time outside of work?

I am a workaholic. I really love my work, but I like to spend time with friends whenever I get the chance. I also like to read Punjabi literature – fiction, poetry, etc.

Who or what inspires you?

 My father is a big inspiration. He worked tirelessly in the field and I don’t think I can work as much as he did at my age, or even now. For wheat breeding, my PhD supervisor Pierre Hucl is my biggest inspiration. He is hardworking and very passionate about wheat – I think he is crazy for wheat, but in a good way!

Follow @gurcharn_brar on Twitter.