Beef Farmers Call for Resolution to Cargill Labour Dispute

Jun 14, 2024

Guelph, Ont. – We remain highly concerned by the ongoing labour dispute between members of UFCW Local 175 and the Cargill Dunlop facility in Guelph.

In the short-term, beef farmers have been mitigating the impact by sourcing alternative facilities in Canada and the U.S. to process their cattle, or keeping animals on farm for a longer period of time, both of which present unique challenges and, in many cases, additional costs. We do remain concerned about the sustainability of these efforts if the strike is prolonged.

The supply chain challenges that come with the loss of eastern Canada’s largest beef processor cannot be understated, consequences that will only increase with each passing day and week that the strike continues.

Yesterday afternoon, we were fortunate to meet with Ontario’s new Minister of Agriculture, Rob Flack, to brief him on the current situation, reiterate the significance of the disruption, and outline our list of short-term measures that we believe will help mitigate the extra costs associated with marketing and transporting cattle to new locations, if the dispute persists.

Since the onset of the strike, our leadership has been in close contact with government representatives, the Canadian Cattle Association, the National Cattle Feeders’ Association and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to discuss the current and evolving situation, and potential mitigation measures that could be invoked if the strike is prolonged.

Beef farmers who need to move cattle have been grateful for the remaining buyers and processors in the marketplace who have been helping to manage the growing backlog.

While we fully respect and support the collective bargaining process, we urge both sides to get to the negotiating table and a find workable solution as soon as possible.

Source : Ontario Beef

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