Canadian Agricultural Youth Council drives action on food security, sustainability and labour challenges

Jun 30, 2022

Ottawa, Ontario – Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada

The mandate of the first cohort of the Canadian Agricultural Youth Council came to an end Tuesday with a final, virtual meeting with the Honourable Marie-Claude Bibeau, Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food. This group of 21 young Canadians aged 30-and-under represent a diverse mix of individuals from subsectors across agriculture and agri-food, as well as from every province and the North.

Under the chairmanship of Jerry Bos, a dairy farmer from New Brunswick, Council members met regularly to provide advice on food-related challenges and opportunities, as well as to share information and best practices. Their work ensured the perspectives of youth in agriculture were well-understood. The Council’s mandate – written by the members themselves – included promoting agricultural career development, awareness and education, and climate change mitigation.

A cornerstone of their mandate included providing input on their vision for AAFC’s Next Agricultural Policy Framework. The Framework will set the course for the sector past 2028, and youth feedback on both current and potential challenges and opportunities facing the sector was (and continues to be) sought.

Council members also acted as a sounding board for the design of AAFC’s AgriCommunication program, advising on concrete ways for the program to build public trust and consumer confidence and to raise awareness of the many sustainable food and farming practices in Canada. They also shared ideas on making Canada’s agricultural and agri-food sector more competitive, and on how to transfer knowledge between generations as well as from producers to consumers.

As part of the Government of Canada’s goal to work towards a creating a more sustainable global food system, various members of the Council helped deliver a Canadian youth perspective in other fora, including AAFC’s Sector Engagement Tables and at various United Nations’ Food System Summit and FAO Dialogues. This provided them with the opportunity to speak to the importance of supporting youth in food and farming, as well as inform Canada’s position on youth in agriculture and agri-food.

An announcement on the 15 successful applicants to the second cohort of the Canadian Agricultural Youth Council is expected in the coming weeks. The second cohort will be made up these new members as well as some returning members. Together, they will unite a cross section of Canadian youth passionate for food and farming, mirroring Canada’s regional and demographic diversity. They will serve on the Council for an 18-month term.

Young Canadians are dynamic, engaged and passionate about the future of the agriculture and agri-food sector. By providing a forum for the next generation to bring forward innovative and fresh ideas, Canadian youth are able to play an active role in the decisions that will shape their future.

Source : Canada.ca

Video: Can Gene Editing Give Seeds a Stronger Start?

Reagan Reed has a way of describing his research that might make a plant breeder pause.

“I’m the sort of person who likes to break things to understand them,” he says.

What he breaks are genes involved in seed germination. Reed, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Davis, is investigating whether changing those genes can help seeds establish healthy plants under a wider range of conditions.

Reed recently attended the National Association for Plant Breeding meeting in College Station, Texas, as an NAPB Borlaug Scholar. His work speaks to a question that matters well beyond a research lab: what does it take for a seed to get a crop off to a strong start?

A seed that germinates quickly, alongside the others planted with it, spends less time vulnerable to stresses before seedlings become established.

“If you’re able to bridge that gap between germination to stand establishment, then that’s going to give you the highest probability of having a solid yield that year,” Reed says. “There’s a bunch that can go wrong after that, but it maximises your yield from the start, at least.”

Reed works in Dr. Imtiyaz Khanday’s lab at UC Davis, where his research focuses on seed quality in tomatoes and potatoes. He brings an unusual academic background to the work: at Skidmore College, he studied both biology and Latin.

Reed believes that combination prepared him for research. Translating an ancient text means studying each word, weighing its possible meanings and using context to reach the best interpretation. There is rarely a way to know with complete certainty what an author intended. Science, he says, requires a similar willingness to work through uncertainty.

“Attention to detail and comfortability working with uncertainty,” is how he sums up what Latin taught him.

In the lab, uncertainty can produce a surprise. Reed describes changing one gene and seeing little effect. Changing a second gene also appears to do little. Put both changes in the same genetic background, though, and the result can be substantial.

“I break this gene, nothing really happens. I break this other gene, nothing really happens. I combine them into the same genetic background, and now there’s a massive effect,” he says.

Those interactions matter as researchers gain the ability to edit multiple genes at once. They also complicate any simple account of how a trait works: improving a seed may depend on understanding what several genes do together.

For Reed, the question is whether that knowledge could help seeds germinate reliably when conditions are difficult. Some of the genes he studies prevent germination under certain conditions. That response may serve a plant well in one setting while limiting its usefulness in agriculture. He wants to learn what happens when those genes are changed, and whether the result improves establishment.

Yet a discovery that works in a lab still has a long way to travel before it reaches a field. Reed argues that agricultural biotechnology faces an economic challenge as well as a scientific one. New tools can create value for farmers, he says, but developing them requires a way to support the work in an industry where margins can be thin.

His fellowship with Flagship Pioneering gave him a view across AI, agriculture-related work and human health research. It also reinforced the importance of bringing people with different expertise into the same conversation—a benefit of gatherings such as the NAPB meeting.

“You need to have a team of people with different backgrounds who are willing to work together and approach the same problem in different perspectives and different ways,” he says.

That thinking connects the different parts of Reed’s path. Latin taught him to examine details without expecting a perfect answer. Gene editing lets him test what individual genes do—and what happens when their effects combine. Working with people beyond his own field helps him ask what those findings could become.

He came to agriculture because of its reach: the possibility that work by a small group of researchers could eventually make a difference on a much larger scale. His immediate focus is smaller and more precise. He wants to understand what helps a seed get through its first days and become a healthy plant.