EMILI marks 10 years of agriculture innovation with support from the Government of Canada

Jul 21, 2026

Federal investment announced at EMILI Field Day will help more digital agriculture companies test, grow and bring new technologies to market
As producers face rising costs, unpredictable weather and a competitive global market, practical technology can help farms become more productive, sustainable and resilient, while supporting Canada’s long-term food security.

Today at Enterprise Machine Intelligence and Learning Initiative’s (EMILI) Field Day in Grosse Isle, as EMILI celebrates its 10th anniversary, Dr. Doug Eyolfson, Member of Parliament for Winnipeg West, on behalf of the Honourable Eleanor Olszewski, Minister of Emergency Management and Community Resilience and Minister responsible for Prairies Economic Development Canada, announced $3.5 million in federal support for EMILI. The investment will help EMILI support more digital agriculture companies as they test, grow and bring new technologies to market.

“New technologies have tremendous potential, but lasting success depends on ensuring they solve real challenges on the farm,” she said. “This investment enhances our ability to evaluate and de-risk emerging innovations, giving farmers greater confidence to adopt technologies that have been tested, validated, and proven to deliver value. By serving as a trusted bridge between innovation and on-farm application, we can help accelerate adoption, foster meaningful collaboration, and ensure Canadian producers benefit from practical solutions that drive productivity, sustainability, and long-term growth.”

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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