Alberta Canola Announces Director Election Results

Nov 03, 2023

The call for nominations for growers to serve on the Board of Directors of the Alberta Canola Producers Commission in Regions 2, 5, 8, and 11 closed today. This election cycle resulted in four growers being elected by acclamation for all four regions.

The four canola growers elected by acclamation are Andre Harpe from Valhalla Centre, Justin Nanninga from Neerlandia, Jeffrey Frost from Olds, and Roger Chevraux from Killam. Harpe will represent Region 2, Nanninga Region 5, Frost Region 8, and Chevraux will represent Region 11.

Immediately following the Annual General Meeting on January 24, 2024, Harpe and Chevraux will begin their third terms as directors, Nanninga will begin his second term, and Frost will begin his first term as director.

Alberta Canola directors may serve up to three consecutive terms on Alberta Canola’s Board as long as they remain an eligible producer. They are subject to the same nomination procedure for each term.

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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