Hail, harvest & inspection strips

Aug 21, 2026

With harvest fast approaching in some areas of the province, producers with hail-damaged crops are starting to wonder if Agriculture Financial Services’ (AFSC) claims adjusters will make it to their farm before they need to start harvest.

“Our adjusters are working hard to assess hail damage,” said George Kueber, AFSC Claims Adjusting manager. “This year’s storm season is a bit unprecedented. We had two large scale hail events back-to-back on July 4 and 5. We haven’t had claims volumes like this since 2016.

“We can’t get to everyone immediately,” said Kueber, adding that there are 2,951 outstanding hail inspections as of August 18. “We prioritize our work based on a number of factors and with harvest getting underway across the province, we will be asking clients to leave representative strips.”

Producers with hail-damaged acres can harvest before the crop is assessed, provided they contact their preferred AFSC branch office for approval to leave inspection strips before starting any work. Inspection strips allow adjusters to evaluate crop damage, while allowing producers to begin swathing or harvesting.

Ensuring an efficient claims process

AFSC adjusters are committed to handling every claim with professionalism, fairness and efficiency. Following a storm, clients can help speed up inspections by checking their fields for signs of damage. Please note that claims that include non-damaged fields can add to overall workload levels and affect inspection timelines.

To help clients identify potential crop damage, email alerts are sent from AFSC when storm activity is detected near insured fields. Clients must be enrolled in client notifications to receive email alerts.

Click here to see more...

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