Red River Valley making progress with the corn harvest

Oct 27, 2022

Manitoba Agriculture's latest crop report shows the provincial harvest is now 95 per cent complete.

Harvest is wrapping up or done in most parts of southern Manitoba.

The corn harvest is most advanced in the Red River Valley with yields running 150 to 200 bushels an acre on average, and between 120 to 150 bushels an acre in the Southwest. The corn harvest was delayed due to wet field in the Interlake and Eastern regions.

The sunflower harvest is in various stages depending on the region. Some farms are done, while others are waiting for the crop to dry down after the recent rains. Sunflower yields have been average to above average, with more plump kernels and fewer empty shells than in 2021. Average yields are reported between 2,000 to 2,300 lbs/acre.

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids