Nancy Tout
Chief Scientific Officer,
Global Institute for Food Security (GIFS)
Justine Hendricks
President & CEO,
Farm Credit Canada (FCC)
The Global Institute for Food Security at the University of Saskatchewan is helping to drive agricultural innovation and bridge Canada’s productivity gap.
Canada is a leader in agricultural innovation. The crop varieties, inputs, and best management practices developed by the country’s agriculture sector all help farmers to produce more with less. Since 2011, however, Canada’s agricultural productivity growth has been declining, as Farm Credit Canada (FCC) highlighted in a 2023 report.
“There’s been a steady decline in agriculture productivity growth since 2011, and this isn’t unique to Canada,” says Nancy Tout, Chief Scientific Officer at the Global Institute for Food Security (GIFS) at the University of Saskatchewan.
We’ve really got to focus now on doing things
differently and smarter.
Many factors are contributing to this decline, including an innovation pipeline that doesn’t efficiently translate research discoveries into market-impacting innovations for producers and consumers. FCC’s 2023 report identifies a $30 billion opportunity over 10 years to rekindle Canada’s agriculture productivity growth. With a growing global demand for food and other challenges, Tout said there’s a pressing need – and opportunity — for researchers to address the issue.
Bridging the gap
GIFS is helping to tackle this productivity challenge and bridge the innovation gap within the agriculture and food sector. Tout points out that while Canada ranks high in innovation inputs — 8th among the 133 economies featured in the Global Innovation Index 2024 — we perform worse in innovation output.
“We’d like to see an improved return on our investment,” she says. The solution: Smarter investments in agriculture research and innovation that deploy transformative technologies and support meaningful partnerships and consortia models.
We’ve got great institutions, private industries, and funding programs in Canada, but they’re not necessarily working together and finding synergy.
“We’ve got great institutions, private industries, and funding programs in Canada, but they’re not necessarily working together and finding synergy,” says Tout. “That’s what we’re really doing differently at GIFS.”
GIFS works with a diverse range of partners to discover, develop, and deliver innovative solutions for the production of globally sustainable food. Through these partnerships, both public and private research organizations can leverage GIFS’ world-class team and leading-edge technologies to scale and accelerate research and development.
Investing in accelerated breeding
GIFS’ investments in accelerated breeding are a great example of this. The FCC Accelerated Breeding Program at GIFS combines technologies such as genomic selection, speed breeding, bioinformatics, artificial intelligence and digital twining to increase the rate of genetic gain for crop and livestock breeding programs, delivering new products into the hands of producers faster. The program is enabled by a $5 million investment from FCC.
“The FCC Accelerated Breeding Program at GIFS supports the deployment of innovations, data-driven decision-making and transformative technologies like genomic selection to increase rates of genetic gain per dollar invested,” says Tout. “Enabling collaboration, we are currently establishing a consortium-based model to deliver innovations more rapidly for breeding organizations.”
In crops, accelerated breeding has the potential to double the rate of genetic gain and shrink breeding cycles by a number of years, according to Tout, helping to address climate resilience, disease resistance, and productivity.
FCC’s investment in the Accelerated Breeding Program is a commitment to improving Canada’s agricultural productivity and addressing the pressing challenges of improving food security.
“FCC’s investment in the Accelerated Breeding Program is a commitment to improving Canada’s agricultural productivity and addressing the pressing challenges of improving food security,” says Justine Hendricks, FCC’s President and CEO. “This collaboration with GIFS moves us toward seizing the generational opportunity in front of us and will keep Canada at the forefront of agricultural excellence and sustainable production through innovative solutions.”
“Canada has a $30 billion innovation opportunity, and programs like this are the key to unlocking it,” adds Tout.
Learn more at gifs.ca.
