Dean Taylor joins CEA Alliance board of directors

Mar 21, 2025

The CEA Alliance has named Dean Taylor to its board of directors. He is currently the vice president of business development at Mastronardi Produce. As a seasoned veteran of controlled environment agriculture, he brings a wealth of experience, fresh perspectives, and expertise that will help the organization shape the future of indoor agriculture.

"I'm eager to help the organization address challenges and advance growth across the industry," said Taylor. The CEA Alliance represents and serves vertical farms and greenhouse producers growing fresh fruits and vegetables.

Since joining Mastronardi in 2010, Taylor has played a key role in developing award-winning products that inspire consumers to choose fresh produce, enhancing their healthy eating choices. His extensive experience includes leading innovation pipelines, managing worldwide trial programs, and overseeing new product development from seed to shelf.

He joins a diverse board of industry professionals from across North America.

Source : The Grower

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