Actually, it's been promoted in The Western Producer that it should take about 13 years to get it from the initial cross. We're actually very fast.
In order to even get something to test, you have to go through at least eight breeding cycles. If you use winter nurseries, you can break that down to about four. You've got to put those through all your nurseries so that you can select the right material, and then you have to have some level of confidence going forward. Maybe you can knock a year off that, but in less than that amount of time, it would be difficult to know if you had anything worth taking to the market.
If you use more advanced breeding techniques, such as double haploidies. It's really important if you've got a winter crop like winter wheat, but to do it even in seven years..... You can speed it up a little bit, but it also reduces some of the genetic variability that you're looking for. You have to be careful that using some of those fast techniques don't actually result in not getting what you want at the end.
We're using a thing called single seed descent. In those early years we could actually push three generations per year, but it still takes time to select the material in the area of adaptation. Seven years is actually pretty fast.