Sowing the seeds of success
Ellen Sparry honoured with lifetime achievement award from Canadian Seed Growers’ Association
ELMIRA — When Ellen Sparry was in high school, she completed a career quiz to help her plan her future, and the two answers she remembers most were tug boat captain and hotel and restaurant management.
Growing up in landlocked rural Ontario ruled out the first option fairly quickly, but Sparry — who was raised on a farm near Fergus — thought she’d give the second one a shot.
In September 1981, she went off to college to study hotel and restaurant management, but within a few weeks she knew it was the wrong decision.
Sparry withdrew and went back to work on the family farm until she could figure out what to do next. She saw an ad for the agricultural college at the University of Guelph. She’d always enjoyed working with plants, so that January she attended Guelph to study plant agriculture and breeding.
Now, more than 35 years later, Sparry has been recognized with the Honorary Life Award from the Canadian Seed Growers’ Association. She collected her award on July 12. She is only the second recipient from Waterloo Region to receive it, after Kitchener’s A.H.S. Martin in 1961.
“It was a little shocking,” said Sparry, 56, who lives in Elmira and has worked for C & M Seeds in Palmerston for 24 years. She started as the genetics manager, leading the company’s genetics and research program, and was appointed general manager in 2015.
“It’s not what you necessarily work toward. I enjoy what I’m doing and work for the betterment of seed producers and the industry.”
She graduated from Guelph in 1986 and joined King Agro in Listowel as a cereal research technician, followed by roles as a senior research technician and assistant breeder, and in 1994 moved on to C & M. It can take up to 12 years for a new seed variety to be ready for distribution to farmers, and Sparry says she steps in at about year five or six of that process to help finalize the crop development.
Over the past 20 years, she has registered more than 25 cereal crops and eight soybean varieties, and obtained Plant Breeders’ Rights on 14 varieties on behalf of C & M. The majority of those cereal crops are wheat, with some barley and oats
mixed in as well.
Plant Breeders’ Rights are a form of intellectual property rights that allows plant breeders to protect their new varieties, similar to an inventor’s patent.
The Canadian Seed Growers’ Association life award has a long history of recognizing the best in the industry across the country. The Honorary Life Award began in 1932 and it has nearly 300 recipients, including Sparry and two others in 2018.
Association branches from across the country submit names to the board every year for people they think are worthy of recognition, and the board makes the final decision.
Caroline Lafontaine, managing director of communications with the Canadian Seed Growers’ Association, said Sparry has dedicated her career to improving the genetic variation of seed crops, but she’s also gone above and beyond that responsibility.
“She’s a mentor and provides lots of time and energy to someone new to the field, and she’s very generous with that time,” said Lafontaine. Sparry has become an important voice for the industry, Lafontaine added.
Beyond her work with C & M, Sparry also co-ordinates the provincial cereal trials, is secretary of the Wheat Technical Committee, and currently sits on the board of the Canadian Seed Trade Association and represents that association on the International Seed Federation Board and Field Crops committee.
Sparry said the challenges the wheat industry faces include competing with the other big two crops, corn and soybeans, for acreage among farmers. Also, wheat’s complex genome makes it difficult to breed and develop. New diseases and ongoing climate variation are also continuous challenges.
The lifetime award is certainly welcome recognition for her dedication to the industry.
“It’s a great honour and very humbling.”