Hog and hop into spring with the March April issue of Small Farm Canada

Mar 03, 2023

Come lion or lamb, spring is around the corner and so is the March-April 2023 issue of Small Farm Canada magazine. Poultry continues to be prime but pigs too with advice on post farrowing success and keeping your herd bio secure.

Dan Kerr helps with strategies to prevent injuries due to repetitive motion and Dan Needles is out standing in his field once again. Do hogs and hops go together? We think so and have looked at another great combo, Canadian hop production and on-farm breweries.

Ever thought of hosting barn swallows or asking a farm vet or growing cherries or raising chickens in the city or feeding livestock pumpkins or why you can’t sleep? If so, we have you covered in the March-April 2023 issue of Small Farm Canada coming to mailboxes and retailer’s shelves near you.

For more news, information and inspiration you can use, subscribe here and get Small Farm Canada delivered straight to your door

Source : Small Farm Canada

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

Hog and hop into spring with the March April issue of Small Farm Canada

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

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