New canola program at Suncrest College

Jan 20, 2025
By Diego Flammini
Assistant Editor, North American Content, Farms.com

The Introduction to Canola Crushing Careers program’s first intake will be exclusively Indigenous students

A new program at a Saskatchewan postsecondary school is preparing students for careers in canola processing.

The Introduction to Canola Crushing Careers program at Suncrest College provides learners with skills and knowledge to succeed in the sector.

The 12-week program started on Jan. 13 and will tun to April 11.

“Newcomers to the field will gain practical information about oilseed and oil processing in Canada,” the program’s page says. “You will learn about the wide range of careers in this industry and the many opportunities for career growth. Resume building, industry certifications, work placement and more!”

Students will learn about multiple facets of canola and its processing.

This includes canola and oilseeds in general, learning the crushing process and about why this industry is thriving in Canada.

And the industry is indeed performing well.

In 2023, Canadian oilseed processors crushed a record 10,522,947 tonnes of canola, up 20 per cent from 2022.

This increase came “because of high prices and increased exports of canola oil,” Stats Canada says, adding that domestic crushers accounted for almost half of the total disposition of canola in the 2022/2023 crop year.

The Introduction to Canola Crushing Careers program is a collaboration between Suncrest College and the Yorkton Tribal Council.

Because of this, the first intake of 12 to 15 students will be exclusively from Indigenous communities. The school has plans to expand the program to the public.

Greg Tomcala, the school’s applied research coordinator, is the program instructor.

Students will receive the curriculum in two phases.

The first is a general course about employment in crush plants. The second will provide deeper learning on topics like power engineering.

“With this knowledge base, the students are now the ideal candidates for positions within the Canadian oilseed crushing industry,” he said in a statement.

Anyone enrolled in the program can find canola crushing and other ag job opportunities at AgCareers.com.

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