Governor Shapiro, Secretary Redding Call for Expedited Federal Support for Pennsylvania Growers Impacted by Devastating Crop Freeze

May 12, 2026

Governor Josh Shapiro and Pennsylvania Agriculture Secretary Russell Redding visited Cherry Hill Orchards in Lancaster County to meet with local growers impacted by the devastating freeze in April and call on the federal government to quickly deploy more support for Pennsylvania farmers. Earlier today, the Governor sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins(opens in a new tab) requesting a Secretarial Disaster Designation and urging the U.S. Department of Agriculture to expedite disaster assistance for Pennsylvania farmers affected by the April freeze, including faster damage assessments that will help growers begin filing crop insurance claims.

As the Shapiro Administration continues to assess widespread crop damage and push for federal assistance for Pennsylvania growers, Governor Shapiro is calling on the federal government for their support in helping growers recover financially and maintain long-term market stability. The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture is exploring additional flexibility with appropriated state funds to respond to this situation and working with Penn State Extension to collect early industry assessments.

Since the freeze event, the Shapiro Administration has directly engaged with more than 200 growers and agricultural stakeholders across the Commonwealth to gather firsthand damage reports and identify immediate needs facing the industry. While the Department of Agriculture expects a clearer understanding of long-term impacts in the coming weeks, early estimates indicate Pennsylvania’s specialty crop industry could face between $150 million and $200 million in economic losses.

“This freeze didn’t just damage crops – it jeopardized years of hard work and the future stability of family farms across Pennsylvania,” said Secretary Redding.

Source : pa.gov

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