Ag in the Classroom connects Indigenous youth with agriculture opportunities

May 21, 2026

Ag in the Classroom is working with First Nations to inform young people about the opportunities available in Agriculture.

An event was held last Wednesday at the University of Saskatchewan that was attended by more than 200 grade 8 to 12 students -- some travelling more than four hours to get to Saskatoon.

"The idea behind this event was to bring Indigenous youth from across the province to the College of Ag and Bioresources and begin to explore agriculture and food sovereignty and hopefully get inspired to consider how they could be a part of either agriculture as a career in their future or different initiatives that might be taking place now or in the future in their community." explained Sara Shymko, Executive Director of Ag in the Classroom Saskatchewan.

One of the guest speakers was Cadmus Delorme. While Delorme was Chief of the Cowessess First Nation, there was an agricultural revival, with more than 5,000 acres now being farmed.

"They don't necessarily farm exactly the same way that, you know, non-Indigenous people do, and he shared some examples of that and talked about how his First Nation began grain farming again when he was chief and bringing back the buffalo. The point of this conversation was that these young people have any opportunity to do anything they want and they can be entrepreneurs, they can be leaders, they can be involved in food and agriculture in so many different ways." she said.

Shymko says it is important for Ag in the Classroom to work with First Nations.

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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