AGI Saskatoon celebrates 10 years of safety

Oct 19, 2024
By Farms.com

AGI celebrates 10 years without lost time incidents

Ag Growth International (AGI) recently celebrated a significant safety milestone at its manufacturing facility in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, marking ten years without a lost time incident. The achievement was recognized with a special event and awards ceremony to honour the facility’s employees.

“I commend the AGI Saskatoon team for achieving an incredible safety milestone of ten years with no lost time incidents. Their achievement demonstrates that safety, as a guiding principle, is deeply ingrained in our work culture,” says Paul Householder, AGI President & CEO. “They embody AGI’s highest global priority that every employee – regardless of where they work or the type of environment they work in – returns home at the end of each day in the exact same working condition in which they arrived."

A lost time incident (LTI) refers to a non-fatal injury that causes an employee to miss work due to injury. The LTI measurement is a key indicator of a company’s safety performance and how injuries impact overall workforce productivity.

“This achievement entirely belongs to the team’s absolute dedication to safety leadership at all levels. Their ‘winning ticket’ includes vigilance, prevention and education. They are continuously on the lookout to identify, report and fix potentially unsafe conditions and processes. That allows them to avoid hazards and near misses before someone gets hurt,” said Kris Wingert, AGI Saskatoon Operations Manager.

The Saskatoon plant, commissioned by Westeel in 1989, produces engineered-to-order smooth wall grain and fertilizer bins for agricultural use. The facility, certified to ISO 9001:2015 standards, also provides custom welding services for other AGI locations.

“The skillset required is not robotic, but hands on. This means that multiple machines moving, lifting and transporting can create opportunities for things to go wrong. That is why having tight processes in place and maintaining a culture of ongoing education, welding certifications, and employees looking out for each other are crucial to safety,” said Wingert.

Harsha Bhojraj, AGI Vice President of Manufacturing, praised the Saskatoon team as a model of safety excellence.

“The AGI Saskatoon team has shown that it is possible to adjust and be safe every single day for ten years straight regardless of changing conditions -- through upturns and downturns, across day and night shifts, from summer to winter, and with new and experienced associates. Their record raises the bar for what safety excellence at AGI means,” said Bhojraj.

AGI’s Saskatoon facility is the second to achieve this milestone, following the Olds, Alberta plant in 2023. For more information on AGI’s commitment to safety, visit www.aggrowth.com

Photo Credit: AGI

Video: The 15-Year Bet Behind Every New Variety!

Canada is trying to decide how much agricultural research capacity it can afford to lose. Brian Rossnagel believes the better question is whether the country can afford to rebuild it.

The longtime barley and oat breeder makes the case with a simple fact about his profession: the consequences of today’s decisions may not become visible for 10 or 15 years.

“Pick the right parents. That’s the biggest thing,” Rossnagel says. “If you pick the wrong parents, you’re not going to get anywhere—and you don’t know that until 10 years, 15 years later.”

That warning carries particular weight as Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada moves to reduce spending and streamline parts of its science operations. The department’s 2026–27 plan anticipates the loss of approximately 665 positions by 2028–29 and says some research will be reduced where capacity exists in academia or industry. AAFC says the changes will make its science operations more cost-effective over the long term.

For Canada’s seed industry, Rossnagel’s career illustrates what is at stake.

This fall, the retired University of Saskatchewan breeder will be inducted into the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame. During his 35-year career at the Crop Development Centre, he helped develop more than 100 barley and oat varieties, including CDC Austenson—one of Western Canada’s most widely grown feed barleys. His induction recognizes not only those varieties, but the collaboration and research system that made them possible.

Rossnagel is quick to emphasize that none of it was the work of one person.

“The first thing I thought about was all the other people who contributed to whatever success I and my program had over the years,” he says. “We know that it’s not an individual who does this. It’s a group—a team.”

That team extends well beyond the breeder whose name appears beside a variety. It includes technicians, pathologists, quality specialists, statisticians, regional testing sites, seed growers and industry partners. It also includes the breeders who came before and those who will carry the germplasm forward.

CDC Fraser barley, for example, moved through three breeding careers. Its parents came from Brian Harvey’s program. Rossnagel advanced the material after Harvey retired, and Aaron Beattie later guided it through registration and release.

That kind of handoff is normal in plant breeding. The person who makes the original cross may never see the resulting variety reach farmers.

It also explains why lost research capacity cannot simply be switched back on when budgets improve.

“If you shut it off, it’s very, very difficult—and particularly costly—to start it up again,” Rossnagel says. “If you have to start from scratch, it’s going to be at least 10 years before anybody notices whether you’re getting anything done or not.”

The concern is not simply how many experimental lines Canada can process. Modern equipment, statistical tools and genetic technologies allow today’s breeding programs to evaluate tens of thousands of lines—far more than Rossnagel could handle when he entered the field in the early 1970s.

But efficiency and automation do not generate every idea.

“If you pare back down, and instead of having six or seven individual scientists concentrating on wheat breeding, you go down and say three people could handle all this, well, that’s half the ideas gone,” he says. “Particularly if you happen to lose the three people who had the really neat and innovative ideas, boy, that’s a problem.”

It is a timely distinction for Canadian agriculture. Consolidating programs may preserve the volume of material moving through a system, at least initially. It may not preserve the diversity of thinking, regional knowledge or willingness to pursue unconventional crosses.

That regional knowledge matters because Canadian agriculture is not one uniform production environment. A variety suited to southern Alberta may face different disease, moisture and maturity pressures than one grown in Manitoba, Ontario or Atlantic Canada.

“Agriculture is applied biology,” Rossnagel says. “Biology, all around the Earth, moves from the poles to the equator. It does not move from Newfoundland to B.C. like politics do.”