Tomato breeder travels the world to evaluate his creations

A former Brantford woman’s love for science has led to a rewarding career in the agri-food industry.

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Kelsie MacLellan is a plant breeder for HeinzSeed in Leamington, Ontario where she has developed a new variety of processing tomato that is showing much promise.

“I try to create new varieties that are extremely resistant to tomato diseases or pathogens,” MacLellan explained. “H2590 is one of my new offerings that has been performing extremely well through the trial phase in Europe and South America.”

She is responsible for crops in the largest tomato-growing countries in the world including Italy, Portugal, Spain, Brazil, Chile, and parts of North America.

MacLellan creates 300 new varieties of tomato each year and spends summers working 10-to-12-hour days, seven days a week in tomato fields around the world evaluating red fruit on the vine.

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“The travel sounds really glamorous but I’m living in a tomato field basically,” she quipped. “I have two kids and I’m lucky that my husband is amazing and takes over 95 per cent of the household duties for about two-and-a-half months while I’m all over the world, or even if I’m in Canada.

“If there’s daylight, I’ll be in the tomato field.”

MacLellan grew up in Brantford, attending Notre Dame Catholic Elementary School until the age of 12 when the family relocated to Caledonia. She developed an early interest in science.

“I think I used to always be that kid that was annoying my parents with a million questions. Why is this? why is that?” she recalled. “But maybe more seriously in high school (when) I got introduced to introductory genetics, that really first caught my attention to genetics and population dynamics and things like that.”

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She went on to study at the University of Guelph where she fell in love with plant sciences such as population and quantitative genetics, going on to earn a master’s degree in the latter at the University of Ottawa.

While at the U of G she spent summers working at the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture’s Simcoe Research Station working for a crop specialist.

“That’s where the link happened with theoretical, mathematical and genetic things I love to study. Agriculture was a practical application.”

She began working for HeinzSeed in 2011, is now responsible for international breeding, and noted that it’s a long process to develop new varieties. She creates 300 new varieties each year and replicates them in different countries and growing conditions. Over five years of tracking their performance, the varieties get narrowed down to a winner like H2590.

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“It takes about five years to commercialize from the first time I design the genetic cross between two parents to have seed that is at the level to go into our catalog to be sold commercially,” she explained. “I do conventional plant breeding without genetically modifying anything. We’re just crossing one tomato to another tomato and using some molecular tools to get the DNA profile we’re looking for, but we don’t manipulate the DNA.

“I use pollen from one male to pollenate the female plant. We are GMO free.”

MacLellan said HeinzSeed has high hopes for H2590 that is “a beautiful tomato” with a very good fruit chemistry important for processing tomatoes that are used for products such as pasta sauce, ketchup, barbecue sauce, as well as diced and canned tomatoes.

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“It has really high yields, which in agriculture, yield is king,” noted the plant breeder. “Any time we can drive the yield up everyone makes more money. Plant breeding is critically important. That’s how we drive up yields on crops so that the world has enough to eat.”

She said she is making plants that are naturally more resistant to pathogens so the use of pesticides and fungicides by farmers is decreased. That’s better for the environment, she noted.

“I love being in a field full of new varieties,” MacLellan shared. “It’s the excitement of seeing what I have done.”

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