I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to address this committee. I'm a professor in the department of plant sciences at the University of Saskatchewan, and I've had a long-term interest in Saskatchewan farms. I've been involved in the wheat industry on the Canadian prairies for my entire life, and I've spent most of the last 38 years on winter wheat development and related issues.
Since 1991, my breeding program has released eleven winter wheat cultivars that have occupied as much as 95% of the winter wheat acreage in western Canada and have been grown extensively from Minnesota to Washington state. I've been the coordinator of the Central Hard Red Winter Wheat Co-operative test for the prairies recommending committee for wheat, rye, and triticale since the inception of the tests. This involvement has provided me with a unique vantage point from which to view and compare the practical operation of western Canadian quality and quality assurance programs.
In the time I have this morning I will restrict my comments to a consideration of problems associated with kernel visual distinguishability, or KVD, and the Canadian wheat quality assurance program.
As you know, the western Canadian wheat industry has been using KVD as the main tool for identifying wheat classes delivered to the elevators for over eighty years. For at least fifty of those years, KVD requirements have been criticized as a major restriction to cultivar release and the development of new wheat markets.
From the onset here, I must take issue with the second sentence of the quality and quality assurance section--this is section 6 on page 47 of the Review of the Canadian Grain Commission and the Canada Grain Act. This sentence states:
KVD has made possible the efficient segregation of quality based on defined visual characteristics of different classes.
As far as I am concerned, there is a complete lack of objective evidence in support of the claims that KVD has played a positive role in our wheat marketing system. All the data I have seen suggests that it never was an effective method for segregating cultivars according to class when the farmer delivers it.