Hello to Spring’s Possibilities

Feb 03, 2023

I’m delighted to say it’s February! January flies by in a snowstorm of trade shows, meetings and face to face visits with real people. When I turn the calendar to February, spring seems on a not-quite-as-distant horizon. Though it’s still the quiet of winter, I can already feel the earliest hints of the upcoming season percolating. Trade show season has come and gone, a few lucky people have gone on real holidays to a sunny warm climate and the days are getting longer. The season is still a ways away, but it’s coming. Are you feeling the possibilities of the season ahead?

February is the perfect time to start thinking about what’s going to happen next for your farm business. With the major work of the growing season on seasonal pause, now is the time to dream and scheme, plan and prepare. What do you need for a successful season ahead? What might you like to change up, throw away or try out this year? What can you plan for now to be as prepared as possible? Perhaps most importantly, what would make you excited and energized for the season ahead?

I won’t tell you that seed selection is the silver bullet to farm success and blissful life happiness. But, I really do think trying new things – be they new varieties, new techniques, new technologies – keeps farming fresh and engaging. The farmers I know who have the biggest pep in their step about farming tend to be the guys and gals who show up for spring farmer meetings, who call me up to chat about new variety options, who approach farming with a spirit of possibility and lifetime learning.

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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