Going Beyond the Ag Chemical Headlines

Dec 15, 2022

Consumer misconceptions about ag chemical use are usually based on a grain of truth.

Headlines about agriculture chemical use aren’t always the most kind to the industry. And while these headlines may be flashy and attention grabbing, they’re usually overblown with consumers not being given the full truth.

“It can be a hard pill to swallow when you read some of these. They are often rooted in a kernel of truth that is then taken way out of context. And that’s what’s really frustrating,” Ian Affleck, vice-president of plant biotechnology at CropLife Canada, says on the Dec. 14 episode of Seed Speaks.

Affleck says he has found these stories will use data from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), the Canadian government department in charge of food safety, and will spin it to fit the story they’re trying to tell. He adds the CFIA has pesticide allowance levels that are set at 100 to 1,000 times below the level that could cause harm to humans.

“We’ll often see headlines about pesticides residues being found on food. Understandably, that can sound alarming to consumers. But what’s left out is the context about how most foods have no detectable residues and those that do are at levels far below those that would pose a risk to our health and safety. Context matters,” he adds.

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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