b"A field of AAC Wildfire hard red winter wheat during the 2022 growing season.PHOTO: ALEX GRIFFITHSprogram. His program is based in Alberta, but he has collaborators across the Prairies, ensuring the knowledge and benefits are for all Western Canadian farmers. He describes it as a ripple effect, which primarily will be first felt with the loss of agronomic best practices, followed by fewer quality varieties being released and commercialized.He explains a program cant be turned on and off like a light switch and expect zero hiccups.People talk about continuity with breeding programs, but if you don't have it on the agronomy side, once there's a gap in that innovation pipeline of agronomy and best practices, it's really hard to get it going again, he says. If, all of a sudden, we paused breeding in winter wheat for a while, it would be very hard to get the kind of pull you would need from the decision-makers and the funders to resurrect it; same applies to the agronomy piece. One of the key pieces lost within this is Beres five years of rotational study data which compares wheat class performance. As he pointed out on social media, that study now bites the dust.While Beres respects the decision, he doesnt agree with it.Its a mistake for winter wheat agronomy to fall through the cracks, particularly when it checked all the right boxes for S-CAP priorities he says. I've always tailored my own agronomy program based on the needs of farmer groups and funding stakeholders because they are the ones that basically send the message to government and other funding agencies as to what the priority Brian Beres, a federal senior research scientist focused on agronomy at theshould be. We'll eventually see what they decided to fund instead.Lethbridge Research and Development Centre Other programs on the breeding side were trimmed back as well, so Beres wasnt shocked when his funding was pulled. However, 22seed.ab.ca"