Hundreds of petri dishes and test tubes containing little asparagus clones sit on shelves in a tiny climate-controlled room at the University of Guelph campus. One of these could breed the next asparagus strain that chefs and home cooks will adorn with hollandaise for brunch.

Aside from how to best cook them (roasted with a bit of lemon juice and salt) or that yes, they can make one's urine smell especially, um, funky, you might not know much about the vegetable that signals springtime in Canada. But the crop, which was first cultivated in Rome more than two thousand years ago and originally grew in the eastern Mediterranean and areas surrounding Turkey, was a favourite of King Louis XIV who was said to have grown it in Versailles's greenhouses.

At University of Guelph's dedicated Asparagus Breeding Program, professor David Wolyn has been studying the crop for more than 30 years. If you've eaten Ontario-grown asparagus, odds are it's the asparagus Wolyn introduced almost 20 years ago. And soon, two more varieties of his asparagus will be available.

"I think in general, people who don't have an association with agriculture don't realize that someone had to breed it, figure out a way to keep the pests down, how to handle it once it's harvested, there's a whole big research infrastructure in producing our food," says Wolyn who previously did his PhD studies in breeding a redder beet to use as food colouring. "It's quite extensive, from me as a geneticist and breeder, the farmers that do the trials, all these people in different disciplines come together and there's a lot of science behind everything leading to the production in the fields."

Wolyn grew up in New Jersey and studied plant science at Rutgers University and then earned his masters and PhD in plant breeding and plant genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 1988, he came to the University of Guelph, taking over the already decade-old Asparagus Breeding Program from the previous professor who died. He didn't have extensive knowledge of the vegetable, he was just looking for a faculty position. "Asparagus chose me," he says.

In the '70s, Canada imported a lot of asparagus from Washington state, says Wolyn. Local farming organizations worked with the Canadian government to create research programs to develop a local asparagus crop that could survive Canada's cold climate. One of them was the breeding program at Guelph.

At that time, the research was funded by the tariffs from the asparagus imports. But when U.S. President Ronald Reagan campaigned for the creation of the North American Free Trade Agreement in the 1980s, Canadian farmers knew that meant funding for the breeding program would soon dry up. When Wolyn started his job at Guelph in 1988, he had to fast-track creating a better asparagus that would flourish in Canada's cold climate.

"When I arrived, we immediately put the potential asparagus out in our three test locations at fields in Simcoe, Cambridge and Quebec," he says. "The asparagus rose to the top. We called it the Guelph Millennium asparagus because it came out in 2000. It was a 12-year process but that was considered accelerated because of the pressure we had."

The Guelph Millennium was a hit with Canadian farmers as well as with growers in Michigan and Washington, as well as England and Poland, where it would otherwise be too cold for asparagus to grow. This asparagus grew fast, survived the winter and most importantly, came back strong each year, something that a previous variety from New Jersey wasn't doing. Wolyn says his asparagus has come back for its 18th year at one farm in Norfolk County. If the asparagus was grown in Canada, it's likely a Guelph Millennium.

Still, Canada fails to crack the top 10 when it comes to worldwide asparagus production. Currently, China, Peru and Mexico are the top three exporters because those countries can grow it year-round. During the 1990s, part of America's war on drugs included subsidizing the Peruvian asparagus industry so that farmers wouldn't grow coca, the ingredient in cocaine. Peru could now provide asparagus year-round and sell it to the U.S. without tariffs. This flood of cheap and readily available asparagus inadvertently hurt American farmers of the crop.

Even if Canada isn't a world leader in asparagus production and the crop is not as synonymous with Canadian agriculture as, say, wheat or another University of Guelph invention, the Yukon Gold Potato, farmers grow more of it each year. Statistics Canada shows that there was an increase of 300 hectares of farmland devoted to growing asparagus from 2013 to 2017. In that same period, asparagus exports increased from $6.7 million to $7.9 million and production went up from 7,832 tonnes to 8,865 tonnes.

The Guelph Millennium was dubbed the Seed of the Year at the 2005 Royal Agricultural Winter Fair in Toronto, beating out new soybean and white bean varieties created by Wolyn's colleagues at Guelph (Wolyn also received an innovation award this month from the university for his work). Sales from the Guelph Millennium seeds were then used to further fund the asparagus research program, and the success of it also gave farmers and the government confidence to continue funding research.

"Asparagus farmers in Michigan were saying that the Guelph Millennium saved their industry," says Malcolm Campbell, vice-president of research at the University of Guelph. "They were really struggling with an asparagus that could bring a high, quality yield, year after year. Often times you either get something that has a high yield or something that comes back year after year, but to get both, that's the magic of the Guelph Millennium. What Dave (Wolyn) has done more than put us on the map, is put the university as the premier institution for asparagus production. We have a saying at the university that our goal is to improve life, and not only did Dave do that, he did it deliciously."

But the Guelph Millennium was an exception, says Wolyn. Even though 12 years seems like a long time, unless a crop shows a lot of potential early on, it can take 20 to 25 years for an asparagus strain to go from the lab to the farmers' fields. Here's why.

Wolyn starts by selecting two parent asparagus that have good traits such as cold-resistance, fast growth, smooth tips and longevity. This process of picking the ideal parents from previous trials can take four to five years.

From there, Wolyn plants around 100 asparagus hybrids every year at a test field in Simcoe County. During the first two years, the asparagus' root system needs to grow big enough that it can sustain itself. A small harvest can be had in the third year but it's not till the fourth year that there is a decent yield. Since farmers are spending six to seven thousand dollars per acre on the start-up costs of growing asparagus, they want to make sure the crop comes back next year without the need for replanting. After the asparagus' first harvest, the crop is monitored for an additional two years to ensure that they come back after multiple harvests. Altogether, the first field test takes six years.

After that, the asparagus is then sent to multiple research farms in places throughout the province as well as Michigan, Washington, Germany and northern Portugal so see how the crop does in different locations for another six years. The best specimens from this round are then picked to move on to a third round of testing. If that goes well, seed production starts, and it takes up to four years for the plants to go to seed.

A bundle of asparagus costs around $3, but a quarter century's worth of research and development went into it.

Despite the very slow-moving nature of asparagus innovation, two new varieties that Wolyn says has a higher yield than the Guelph Millennium are expected to hit supermarkets soon. The Guelph Eclipse, which was first bred at Wolyn's lab in 1995, will be trickling into grocery stores over the next three to four years. It is noted for its thicker spears and tighter tips compared to the Guelph Millennium. Meanwhile the Guelph Equinox, first bred in 2004 and available for seed purchase next spring, will arrive on shelves after the Eclipse. It is prized for being disease-resistant and for its long, smooth spears.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Even though Wolyn has put out multiple varieties of asparagus, the differences in taste are too nuanced for the average consumer to pick favourites like they would with apples or pears. And it's unlikely that there will be a tag identifying that the bundle of asparagus is a Millennium or an Eclipse.

"What I planted last summer probably won't be in the farmers' hands till 2045 when I'm 86," he says. "So now it's about legacy breeding and what will be out there when I'm long retired."