Nutrien Ag Solutions launches its 2025 Hometown Yield Challenge

Mar 24, 2025
By Andrew Joseph
Assistant Editor, North American Content, Farms.com

Photo above shows the harvesting golden wheat. Photo copyright: jodie777/iStock/Getty Images Plus photo

Nutrien Ag Solutions has launched its second year of the Hometown Yield Challenge, and is again available to growers in Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. Nutrien Ag Solutions is the retail division of Nutrien Ltd., a leading global provider of crop inputs and services.

Enrollment is open until April 11, 2025. Interested growers will need to work with their local Nutrien Ag Solutions Crop Consultant to sign up and nominate their community organization of choice.

At the end of the challenge, the community organizations of choice for the top two yielding farming operations will each receive $20,000. The community organizations chosen by the three runners-up will each receive $5,000 at the end of the challenge.

Program enrollment for Year Two comes on the heels of the announcement of the 2024 Hometown Yield Challenge winners and a donation of over $50,000 to community organizations across Western Canada.

“We were extremely pleased with the results from our first Hometown Yield Challenge in 2024. Supporting rural Canadian communities is something that our team and farmers are very passionate about, so getting to do this challenge again is something we’re looking forward to for the 2025 season,” exclaimed Jesse Hamonic, Vice President & Country Head of Nutrien Ag Solutions Canada. “Last year, we got to put money towards some great community projects, such as school lunch programs, playground refurbishment, and community centre funds. I’m excited to see the projects that our growers choose this year.”

2025 Program Requirements:

Mapping field boundaries in Nutrien Ag Solutions’ Echelon platform;
Growing at least 80 acres of a proven seed hybrid of their choice;
Applying phosphorous treated with Loveland Products’ ATLAS XCTM.

As part of the program, participating growers are encouraged to use crop nutritional products, including AWAKEN and RADIATE, from the Loveland Products portfolio. The company also encourages growers to post information about their progress throughout the season on social media using the hashtag #NutrienHometownPride.

“The Hometown Yield Challenge is a great way for growers to see our proprietary products in action,” stated Shelby LaRose, Crop Nutrition Product Manager.

“Proven Seed’s canola varieties are integral to the program while pairing well with AWAKEN and RADIATE, which demonstrate strong performance in promoting nutrient uptake and root development. For growers across Canada, this challenge showcases how working with Nutrien Ag Solutions can help drive yield results without sacrificing field health.”

For terms and conditions regarding Nutrien Ag Solutions’ Hometown Yield Challenge, go to www.nutrienagsolutions.ca/yield-challenge-terms-and-conditions.

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