Cautious optimism the feeling at Ag Expo

Feb 08, 2024

Iowa Ag Expo hosted a crowded trade show Jan. 31, but as farmers descended upon the Iowa Events Center for the event, moods were mixed.

The three-day event, billed as the third largest indoor ag exhibition in the country, ran from Jan. 30 to Feb. 1. Exhibitors and farmers had the chance to share ideas and show off what’s new in agriculture, and coming off a year dominated by headlines of drought, there seemed to be a fair amount of optimism.

“It’s been very upbeat,” said Colton James, territory sales manager with New Holland. “It’s been a really good crowd overall.”

James said farmers have been actively checking out new equipment, with New Holland focused on their new track system that is fully suspended. It will be featured on the model year 2024 combines and all manufactured in-house. James said it is “much better than what we had.”

John Deere integrated solution specialist Eric Mensen said their newer electric transmissions have been a focus for many farmers looking at equipment. The change in the transmission comes as Deere replaced hydrostatic motors and inserted electric motors. Mensen said that makes it more durable, smoother and efficient.

“I think (electric) is what we are moving toward,” Mensen said. “It’s not that it’s not being asked for, but hydrostatic motors couldn’t handle 410 horsepower tractors and the electric motors can. That’s going to let us reach up in to the higher horsepower models.”

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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