Florian and Betty Possberg Honoured for Lifetime Achievement

Dec 09, 2024

A Humboldt, Saskatchewan area pork producer is being recognised by his piers for a lifetime of achievement. Among the highlights of Saskatchewan Pork Industry Symposium 2024, held last month in Saskatoon was the Saskatchewan Pork Development Board's Awards of Distinction presentations.This year's Award of Distinction: Lifetime Achievement was presented to Florian Possberg, a pork producer from Humboldt.

Sask Pork Communications and Marketing Coordinator Steve Seto says Florian, his wife Betty and their family have been involved in the pork sector since the mid-1970s.

Quote-Steve Seto-Saskatchewan Pork Development Board:

Lifetime Achievement goes to recognise people who have put years and years of hard work into our industry and made a lasting impact, one that as soon as you hear their name or their company or the business or the farm, what ever it may be, you can find a way that you have been connected by them or have had an impact.

When you talk about hog production in the province, I think the first name that comes to a lot of people's minds is Florian and Betty Possberg.They started off with their 60-sow hog operation in 1976 and then built it up from there to Big Sky Farms and now Polar Pork and are known for the donations that they've made and really standing up for everybody in the hog industry as well.

It shows from what they do on the production side and from the support and backing that they've shown for every producer in the province.That really goes to show that they're taking the extra step in order to make sure that pork production is sustainable, profitable and healthy in this province.Without them I don't know if the pork industry would be where it's at today.

Seto says Florian Possberg has been an absolute rock in the industry and its gratifying to give him the recognition that he fully deserves.

Source : Farmscape.ca

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