$34 million to support agricultural producers

Feb 20, 2024

Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec – Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada

The Government of Canada and the Government of Quebec have announced 34 million to support farm businesses committed to improving their farming practices. This investment makes it possible to launch the third enrolment period of the Initiative ministérielle de rétribution des pratiques agroenvironnementales (Ministerial Initiative for the Rewarding of Agri-Environmental Practices). It will allow to support more than 1,200 new farm businesses, bringing the total to nearly 4,000, for a direct investment of $119 million.

The announcement was made today at Ferme Jocelyn Michon in Saint-Hyacinthe by the Honourable Marie-Claude Bibeau, Minister of National Revenue, on behalf of the Honourable Lawrence MacAulay, Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food, and André Lamontagne, Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and Minister Responsible for the Centre-du-Québec region. To take account of the impact of last summer's weather conditions on businesses' ability to implement certain practices, Minister Lamontagne also announced a change in the terms of payment of financial assistance. As a result, a complete deferral of payments of unused amounts has been granted.

As part of the new Sustainable Canadian Agricultural Partnership 2023-2028, the federal government will contribute $24.1 million to the Initiative.

Source : Canada.ca

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