Fall Collection Sites for Unwanted Pesticides and Medications Announced

Sep 10, 2024
By Jean-Paul McDonald
Assistant Editor, North American Content, Farms.com

Five Provinces to Host Agricultural Waste Disposal Events

Cleanfarms is set to continue its vital environmental stewardship efforts through its Unwanted Pesticides and Old Livestock/Equine Medications (UPLM) program.

The initiative, which spans five Canadian provinces, provides farmers and agri-businesses a secure way to dispose of outdated or unwanted agricultural chemicals and medications.

Scheduled for October and November, the program includes 72 collection events, ranging from one-day blitzes to multi-day gatherings.

These will occur in regions including North Saskatchewan, South Alberta, and areas across British Columbia, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia.

The diversity in locations and schedules ensures accessibility for farmers across these provinces, enabling them to participate conveniently.

Farmers can dispose of unwanted agricultural pesticides and livestock, equine, and poultry medications.

Items accepted include products with a Pest Control Product number, medications used in the rearing of animals with identifiable numbers like DIN, and commercial pesticides used in golf courses or for industrial pest control.

Notably, the program does not accept treated seeds, large quantities of unopened products, needles, or any household hazardous wastes.

The program is crucial for environmental health and the safety of farming operations.

Safe disposal of these substances prevents potential environmental contamination and aligns with responsible farming practices. Each collection provides a trusted avenue for farmers to manage accumulated agricultural waste responsibly.

Barry Friesen, Cleanfarms' Executive Director, emphasized the program's role in offering a dependable solution for material management that might have accumulated over the years.

He noted that farmers look forward to the program's return every three years, appreciating the opportunity to clean their storages of obsolete products.

Cleanfarms has been facilitating this collection initiative since 2010, expanding it in 2014 to include animal medications in partnership with the Canadian Animal Health Institute (CAHI).

This collaboration underscores a commitment to sustainable agricultural practices and responsible animal health stewardship.

With funding from the crop protection industry and CAHI members, the program is free for farmers, underscoring a shared commitment to environmental care and agricultural safety.

The last collection round in 2021 saw the disposal of over 201,000 kg of pesticides and 5,550 kg of animal medications, highlighting the significant impact and success of the initiative.

Farmers interested in participating in this year’s collection can find event details and locations on the Cleanfarms website under ‘What to recycle & Where’.

This resource facilitates easy access to necessary services, ensuring that all participants can find their nearest collection event.

Photo credit: Cleanfarms

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.”