Farm groups urge producers to call on Senators to pass Bill C-234

Nov 21, 2023

Farm groups across the country are calling on the Senate to finally push Bill C-234 through.

The bill calls for the exemption of the carbon tax on natural gas and propane for farm use including grain drying, heating and cooling barns and greenhouses.

Earlier this month, just as the Bill was in its third reading there was a call to adjourn debate which was granted by the Senate speaker.

With the Senate returning this week, farmers and ranchers are getting emails encouraging them to reach out to Senators calling on them to pass the bill into law.

The Agriculture Carbon Alliance and many other farm groups created a letter for producers to sign on their websites and submit via email to Senators.

The Senate calendar shows the Agriculture Committee Meeting is set to convene again on Thursday.

Source : Pembinavalley online

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