Agriculture Day Highlights the Importance of Public Research for Prairie Farmers

Feb 18, 2026

As Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) works through research and staffing changes, clear communication will be key for Alberta farmers and seed developers as they plan for the next phase of Canadian agricultural innovation.

Today’s Agriculture Day is a good moment to recognize the people, partnerships, and public institutions that keep Canadian agriculture competitive, resilient, and innovative. It’s also a natural time to reflect on how agricultural research in Canada is changing, and why transparency and communication matter to the people who rely on that work every season.

AAFC is currently in a period of transition. Like many federal departments, it is navigating workforce adjustments and internal decisions that will shape how its research programs operate in the years ahead.

So far, aside from occasional confirmations to media about closures and layoffs, AAFC has not publicly released formal details on the changes underway. That’s understandable. Staff deserve time to make decisions, and fairness and clarity for employees must come first.

At the same time, Alberta farmers, seed growers, and research partners are understandably eager to know what these changes will mean on the ground. Public research plays a unique role in Western Canadian agriculture, especially in long-term plant breeding, pre-commercial innovation, and region-specific agronomic work that supports crops across Alberta’s diverse growing conditions.

This matters even more because AAFC has already been clear that its role in plant breeding is evolving. The department has signalled a move away from commercializing field-ready cultivars and toward a more enabling role focused on upstream science, collaboration, and knowledge generation. That shift reflects global trends and the growing strength of the private seed sector.

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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