How the Farm Bill Protects Everyone

Sep 26, 2023

By Glenn Brunkow

This has been a tough year, there is no way around it. Rain did not come at the right times and our crops reflect that. Couple that with declining crop prices, rising interest rates and the increasing cost of inputs, things sure are tough on the farm. Without crop insurance, this year would have been disastrous. For many of us the same could have been said for several of the past years. Crop insurance is truly our safety net in agriculture.

That is why protecting crop insurance and other risk management tools is so important in the upcoming farm bill. Agriculture and food security are paramount in the future of our nation. A hungry nation is not a secure nation, and American farmers and ranchers have done their part in providing that food security. Crop insurance is vital to future of agriculture in the United States as it provides a bridge over troubled waters for ag producers.

As farmers we plant our crops not knowing what the weather will throw our way each year. We don’t know what prices we will receive at harvest. Still, we plant with the hope the weather and markets come through for us. We feel a duty to push on through all that uncertainty because we have a calling to feed a hungry world. We do so on razor-thin margins. The vast majority of farms and ranches are family owned and have been for many generations. Agriculture is not only heritage of families like mine, but the heritage of the United States itself.

While crop insurance is our No. 1 priority and critical to farmers and ranchers, other portions of the farm bill are critical also. Funding for conservation work helps to ensure that we protect our air, soil and water. Those of us in agriculture are the biggest proponents of preserving our critical natural resources, and we are constantly working on new methods of protecting the environment around us.

The funding for projects and technical expertise is vital to allow us to implement conservation measures. Without this help many projects like improving waterways or using cover crops to reduce erosion may never be implemented. It should also be pointed out that farmers and ranchers protect the natural resources around them while increasing their productivity and lessening inputs on the lands they have been entrusted with.

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Video: The 15-Year Bet Behind Every New Variety!

Canada is trying to decide how much agricultural research capacity it can afford to lose. Brian Rossnagel believes the better question is whether the country can afford to rebuild it.

The longtime barley and oat breeder makes the case with a simple fact about his profession: the consequences of today’s decisions may not become visible for 10 or 15 years.

“Pick the right parents. That’s the biggest thing,” Rossnagel says. “If you pick the wrong parents, you’re not going to get anywhere—and you don’t know that until 10 years, 15 years later.”

That warning carries particular weight as Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada moves to reduce spending and streamline parts of its science operations. The department’s 2026–27 plan anticipates the loss of approximately 665 positions by 2028–29 and says some research will be reduced where capacity exists in academia or industry. AAFC says the changes will make its science operations more cost-effective over the long term.

For Canada’s seed industry, Rossnagel’s career illustrates what is at stake.

This fall, the retired University of Saskatchewan breeder will be inducted into the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame. During his 35-year career at the Crop Development Centre, he helped develop more than 100 barley and oat varieties, including CDC Austenson—one of Western Canada’s most widely grown feed barleys. His induction recognizes not only those varieties, but the collaboration and research system that made them possible.

Rossnagel is quick to emphasize that none of it was the work of one person.

“The first thing I thought about was all the other people who contributed to whatever success I and my program had over the years,” he says. “We know that it’s not an individual who does this. It’s a group—a team.”

That team extends well beyond the breeder whose name appears beside a variety. It includes technicians, pathologists, quality specialists, statisticians, regional testing sites, seed growers and industry partners. It also includes the breeders who came before and those who will carry the germplasm forward.

CDC Fraser barley, for example, moved through three breeding careers. Its parents came from Brian Harvey’s program. Rossnagel advanced the material after Harvey retired, and Aaron Beattie later guided it through registration and release.

That kind of handoff is normal in plant breeding. The person who makes the original cross may never see the resulting variety reach farmers.

It also explains why lost research capacity cannot simply be switched back on when budgets improve.

“If you shut it off, it’s very, very difficult—and particularly costly—to start it up again,” Rossnagel says. “If you have to start from scratch, it’s going to be at least 10 years before anybody notices whether you’re getting anything done or not.”

The concern is not simply how many experimental lines Canada can process. Modern equipment, statistical tools and genetic technologies allow today’s breeding programs to evaluate tens of thousands of lines—far more than Rossnagel could handle when he entered the field in the early 1970s.

But efficiency and automation do not generate every idea.

“If you pare back down, and instead of having six or seven individual scientists concentrating on wheat breeding, you go down and say three people could handle all this, well, that’s half the ideas gone,” he says. “Particularly if you happen to lose the three people who had the really neat and innovative ideas, boy, that’s a problem.”

It is a timely distinction for Canadian agriculture. Consolidating programs may preserve the volume of material moving through a system, at least initially. It may not preserve the diversity of thinking, regional knowledge or willingness to pursue unconventional crosses.

That regional knowledge matters because Canadian agriculture is not one uniform production environment. A variety suited to southern Alberta may face different disease, moisture and maturity pressures than one grown in Manitoba, Ontario or Atlantic Canada.

“Agriculture is applied biology,” Rossnagel says. “Biology, all around the Earth, moves from the poles to the equator. It does not move from Newfoundland to B.C. like politics do.”