A cheesemaker and a mead-maker from Northern Ontario win big at the Royal Winter Agricultural Fair

Nov 05, 2024

An artisanal cheesemaker from northern Ontario now has an award-winning goat cheese at the Royal Winter Agricultural Fair in Toronto.

Fromagerie Kapuskoise won first prize in the fresh unripened cheese - natural category.

Denis Nadeau, who's in charge of marketing for the family-owned cheesemaker, says it was a spreadable goat cheese that won his company the top prize.

"It's an explosive, tangy flavour that goes well with just about anything," he said.

"You can put it in omelets, pasta, bread, crepes, you name it."

Nadeau says getting the recognition is a big deal because his company is still recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic.

"We lost the business of restaurants in the South and that has not picked up yet again," he said.

Nadeau says he's currently too busy to celebrate much. He says Fromagerie Kapuskoise produces around 20 tonnes of cheese a year, and will need to wait until after the Christmas season to enjoy the win at the fair.

"A lot of cheese. Factories sell 60 per cent of their inventories in the Christmas season," he said.

Award-winning mead
Fromagerie Kapuskoise isn't the only northern Ontario producer to come away with awards from the Royal Winter Agricultural Fair.

Liam Bursey, an amateur wine and mead-maker from Sudbury, won two prizes for the product he worked on with his brother.

Mead is an alcoholic beverage made with fermented honey, instead of grapes, as would be found in wine.

Bursey says he started making mead and wine during the COVID-19 pandemic when he started helping his father, who is a hobby winemaker.

"I kind of just love the experimental aspect of it," he said.

"I love conceptualizing your own recipes, finding recipes online and tweaking them."

As a hobbyist, Bursey can't sell his mead, but he's given bottles away to friends and family, and has hosted tasting events.

He says it was his mother who convinced him to apply to the competition with the Royal Winter Agricultural Fair.

"She was more aware of the fair than I was, and knew that there was a mead category," he said.

His brother submitted a spiced mead called Château Bursey, and he submitted one flavoured with freshly picked blueberries, called Good Enough Wine.

Château Bursey won first place in its category and Good Enough placed second.

Bursey says maybe one day he'll get the certifications needed to sell his mead, but says that could be a long way off.

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Video: The 15-Year Bet Behind Every New Variety!

Canada is trying to decide how much agricultural research capacity it can afford to lose. Brian Rossnagel believes the better question is whether the country can afford to rebuild it.

The longtime barley and oat breeder makes the case with a simple fact about his profession: the consequences of today’s decisions may not become visible for 10 or 15 years.

“Pick the right parents. That’s the biggest thing,” Rossnagel says. “If you pick the wrong parents, you’re not going to get anywhere—and you don’t know that until 10 years, 15 years later.”

That warning carries particular weight as Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada moves to reduce spending and streamline parts of its science operations. The department’s 2026–27 plan anticipates the loss of approximately 665 positions by 2028–29 and says some research will be reduced where capacity exists in academia or industry. AAFC says the changes will make its science operations more cost-effective over the long term.

For Canada’s seed industry, Rossnagel’s career illustrates what is at stake.

This fall, the retired University of Saskatchewan breeder will be inducted into the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame. During his 35-year career at the Crop Development Centre, he helped develop more than 100 barley and oat varieties, including CDC Austenson—one of Western Canada’s most widely grown feed barleys. His induction recognizes not only those varieties, but the collaboration and research system that made them possible.

Rossnagel is quick to emphasize that none of it was the work of one person.

“The first thing I thought about was all the other people who contributed to whatever success I and my program had over the years,” he says. “We know that it’s not an individual who does this. It’s a group—a team.”

That team extends well beyond the breeder whose name appears beside a variety. It includes technicians, pathologists, quality specialists, statisticians, regional testing sites, seed growers and industry partners. It also includes the breeders who came before and those who will carry the germplasm forward.

CDC Fraser barley, for example, moved through three breeding careers. Its parents came from Brian Harvey’s program. Rossnagel advanced the material after Harvey retired, and Aaron Beattie later guided it through registration and release.

That kind of handoff is normal in plant breeding. The person who makes the original cross may never see the resulting variety reach farmers.

It also explains why lost research capacity cannot simply be switched back on when budgets improve.

“If you shut it off, it’s very, very difficult—and particularly costly—to start it up again,” Rossnagel says. “If you have to start from scratch, it’s going to be at least 10 years before anybody notices whether you’re getting anything done or not.”

The concern is not simply how many experimental lines Canada can process. Modern equipment, statistical tools and genetic technologies allow today’s breeding programs to evaluate tens of thousands of lines—far more than Rossnagel could handle when he entered the field in the early 1970s.

But efficiency and automation do not generate every idea.

“If you pare back down, and instead of having six or seven individual scientists concentrating on wheat breeding, you go down and say three people could handle all this, well, that’s half the ideas gone,” he says. “Particularly if you happen to lose the three people who had the really neat and innovative ideas, boy, that’s a problem.”

It is a timely distinction for Canadian agriculture. Consolidating programs may preserve the volume of material moving through a system, at least initially. It may not preserve the diversity of thinking, regional knowledge or willingness to pursue unconventional crosses.

That regional knowledge matters because Canadian agriculture is not one uniform production environment. A variety suited to southern Alberta may face different disease, moisture and maturity pressures than one grown in Manitoba, Ontario or Atlantic Canada.

“Agriculture is applied biology,” Rossnagel says. “Biology, all around the Earth, moves from the poles to the equator. It does not move from Newfoundland to B.C. like politics do.”