Fighting global hunger one crop at a time

May 09, 2025

As Saskatchewan farmers begin seeding the 2025 crop, Grow Hope Saskatchewan is launching its eighth growing season with a new partner at the table.

Canadian Lutheran World Relief (CLWR) has joined the ecumenical project expanding the collective effort to end global hunger.

“We are thrilled to join this vital project, partnering with Canadian Foodgrains Bank, local farmers, and fellow agencies as we work together toward our shared goal of ending world hunger,” said Cody Cleave, CLWR Donor Relations Manager.

Saskatchewan Representative for the Canadian Foodgrains Bank and a member of the Grow Hope SK Steering Committee Rick Block said CLWR is a welcomed addition.

“It’s encouraging to see more churches coming together around something so tangible and effective,” Block said.

Grow Hope Saskatchewan connects farmers who donate land with donors who cover input costs of roughly $350 per acre. Crops are grown and harvested, and proceeds are matched up to 4:1 through Canadian Foodgrains Bank, multiplying the impact for communities facing food insecurity.

In 2024, 440 acres were sponsored, raising over $248,000. This year, the goal is 500 acres.

Support comes from both new and returning sponsors and first-time participants, including farmer Diana Dolack, who has donated 80 acres near Biggar, Sask.

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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