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www.TheFarmerStockman.com November 2008
NewsWatch
Wheat producers deal with seed shortage
By CANDACE KREBS
I
NCREASED enforcement of the Plant
Variety Protection Act coupled with
a historic wheat crop failure in 2007
dramatically reduced seed supplies in
parts of Oklahoma and Kansas.
“Beyond a shadow of a doubt it
helped create the bind we were in
for seed wheat last fall,” says Terry
Detrick, a past president of the National
Association of Wheat Growers.
“Last year there were guys who were
crying for seed wheat,” adds Tom Glazier,
a grain and livestock producer from
Kingfisher, Okla., and past chairman of
the Oklahoma Wheat Commission. “If
you’ve got seed wheat in the bin, even
if it’s something you can’t legally sell,
and you get done sowing and you have a
little leftover, it’s just pretty hard to tell
your neighbor he can’t have any of it.
That’s just pretty tough, when he’s out
of wheat and still got land to plant.”
Any producer who buys a certified
version of a protected variety can replant that seed in subsequent years.
But buying seed from anyone who is not
part of the regulated seed industry is
going the way of the threshing machine,
demanding a compromise in flexibility in
exchange for a more sophisticated seed
industry and the assurance of a minimal
quality standard.
Nasty legal thickets over intellectual
property were once thought to pertain
Key Points
■ Enforcement of plant act and weather
aggravate seed shortage.
■ The seed wheat industry is growing in
Oklahoma.
■ On-farm storage urged for those wishing
to plant protected varieties.
only to privately developed varieties
and hybrids. But now public universities
are increasingly putting a value to the
varieties they develop. They are doing it
by establishing nonprofit entities — or
as in the case of Texas A&M University,
granting licensing agreements to companies like AgriPro — to collect royalties and enforce provisions of the Plant
Variety Protection Act.
After carefully studying public licensing arrangements in surrounding
states, the newest agency of this type is
the Kansas Wheat Alliance, formed earlier this year to collect royalties for KState-developed varieties including one
of the most popular recently, Jagger, long
the most planted variety in Oklahoma,
as well as Kansas. Oklahoma already has
a similar collection agency, Oklahoma
Genetics Inc., as do its neighbors.
It’s not the royalty fees themselves
but the potential fines — and the levels
of intolerance for noncompliance — that
have farmers worried. “That’s a minimal
cost. I don’t think anyone minds paying
the royalty fees,” Glazier says. “The
problem seems to be the availability of
seed wheat.”
Seed royalties on public varieties
run about 60 cents a bushel, and wheat
checkoff expenditures, much of which
goes into research and varietal development, are just a few cents a bushel.
Some checkoff programs are raising
their fees to better keep up with inflation. For example, the Kansas Wheat
Commission recently increased the assessment to 1.5 cents per bushel at the
first point of sale starting Jan. 1, 2009, an
increase of a half cent per bushel.
The majority of wheat producers still
keep back at least some of their own
seed, Glazier says. But as you move
southward across the Central Plains onfarm storage diminishes, and growers in
general have been reluctant to get certified as professional seed suppliers.
“There’s a lot of hoops to jump
through to sell registered or certified
seed,” Glazier says. “A lot of people
don’t want to mess with keeping their
own seed and cleaning it. If they can
do it, they’d just as soon go buy some
seed from a neighbor who is cleaning
thousands of bushels, and they’d rather
pay some premium — royalty included
— rather than have to mess with it
themselves. But you legally can’t sell
anything below certified-level seed.”
The second part of the Plant Variety
Protection Act stipulates commercially
sold seed of protected varieties must
be certified by a third party.
Glazier believes a longer phase-in
period is needed before legal entities
begin strictly enforcing PVP to ensure
seed supplies are adequate.
“If everybody in the state of
Oklahoma planted certified seed, there
are not enough bushels out there to
do that. I think we need to get more
seed that’s available for people to buy
before we can really go out and start
penalizing them for trying to better
themselves a little bit by getting some
from their neighbor, which legally now
they can’t do,” he says.
As private entities, most authorizing agencies are flexible enough to
respond to changes in supply and can
recertify seed to boost availability. Last
year, for example, Oklahoma Genetics
Inc. announced it would not be enforcing PVP due to seed shortages.
Roger Osburn, executive director
of the Oklahoma Crop Improvement
Association, says the wheat seed industry is expanding gradually.
Oklahoma’s certified seed acreage
has grown from 30,000 acres two years
ago to 45,000 acres currently. A couple
of grain elevators in the state — at
Fort Cobb and Burlington — operate
their own certified seed businesses.
“We could always use more,”
Osburn says.
Krebs writes from Enid, Okla.