Gov’t of Alta. increases AFSC borrowing limit

Mar 03, 2021

Individual lending limit also increases from $15 million to $30 million

Staff Writer

Farms.com

The agriculture industry in Alberta can now take advantage of an increase in borrowing limit for Agriculture Financial Services Corporation (AFSC).

Alberta Agriculture and Forestry representatives recently announced the increase in borrowing limit from $2.8 billion to $3.6 billion by 2024 for AFSC.

“That's going to be direct loans to farmers, ranchers, food production companies and food processors. It really will go a long way in helping to attract new investment into agriculture, specifically in Alberta,” said Devin Dreeshen, minister of Alberta Agriculture and Forestry.

Along with the $800 million increase in borrowing limit, the individual lending limit is increasing from $15 million to $30 million from AFSC, said the release.

There is also a change to approvals. A new quick loan process means loans up to $150,000 can be approved in less than a day and there is a reduction on loan approval turnaround overall so more loans can be approved in under a week, said the release.

“The hard work of farmers and ranchers is something that's very key to the economic recovery of the province,” Dreeshen told Farms.com. I want to “thank farmers, ranchers and ag producers across the province for all their hard work in last year, and if they're looking to expand and to grow their operations, now is a great time to invest and try to have more economic activity.”

laughingmango/iStock/Getty Images Plus photo

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