Grower-Leaders Featured in News Articles

Jul 09, 2024

Over the past couple of weeks, several Minnesota Corn grower-leaders were featured prominently in news articles.

Minnesota Corn Research & Promotion Council member Jim O’Connor, who farms in Blooming Prairie, was featured in a Star Tribune article entitled “Minnesota rains mean ‘some real agony’ as farmers lose crops.” Written by agriculture reporter Chris Vondracek, the article noted how the torrential rainfall of mid-June was affecting Minnesota’s agriculture industry.

O’Connor told Vondracek that farmers are looking at some “real agony” with all the lost acres, and he emphasized that the federal program will “make bearable thinking of next year.”

Meanwhile, Minnesota Corn Growers Association President Dana Allen-Tully, who farms in Eyota, was featured in a Rochester Post-Bulletin article entitled “Minnesota Pollution Control Agency addresses nitrates with proposed feedlot regulations.” The article covered proposed changes to the permits that regulate the construction and operation of feedlots with at least 1,000 animal units.

Allen-Tully told News Editor Brian Todd that corn farmers will let the feedlot operators and their organizations take the lead on making suggestions on the new rules during the current 45-day review period that runs through Aug. 9.

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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