Think locally, nationally, and globally

Jul 22, 2022

FCC article describes how global markets affect Canadian farmers.

By Andrew Joseph, Farms.com; Image via FCC

There is an adage people throw around and hope people get: think locally, act globally.

It’s simple enough… what we do locally has the “butterfly effect” on the whole planet, so make sure whatever we do on our farm is in the best interests of the planet.

But it’s a bit more complex than that, especially for farmers who not only have to think locally, but provincially, nationally, and internationally.

That’s the only way to increase the chance of having a successful season.

According to an article written by Farm Credit Canada (FCC), with input from Kyle Burak, an FCC Senior Economist, farmers need to be aware of how supply and demand should drive their production and marketing decisions.

Anyone can have the best yield of a crop ever, but who cares if there’s no demand for it?

The key is to read the market and where it is going.

Read the FCC article HERE.

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