Interest-Free Portion of Advance Payment Program Bumped Up to $250,000

Mar 26, 2024

It’s not all the way back to where it was last year, but the interest-free portion of the 2024 federal Advance Payment Program has been raised from its original level.

The federal government announced Monday the interest-free portion of the program has been set at $250,000 for the current year.

Originally fixed at $100,000, the upper limit on the interest-free portion was raised by Agriculture Canada to $250,000 in 2022 and to $350,000 in 2023 due to rising interest rates and input costs. However, the interest-free portion of the program was quietly returned by the government to $100,000 for the 2024 growing season – a move that spurred an outcry among farm organizations that maintained producers still needed the financial break a higher limit would provide.

In a news release today, Ottawa said raising the interest-free portion to $250,000 from $100,000 will save nearly 12,000 participating producers almost $5,000 each in interest costs on average, for a total savings of up to $58.7 million on a nationwide basis.

The Advance Payments Program gives producers easy access to low-cost cash advances of up to $1 million, based on the expected value of their agricultural product.

“With this support at the start of the production cycle, farmers will be able to purchase important inputs to support production this growing season,” the government release said, adding it will also provide marketing flexibility by allowing producers to sell their agricultural products at the most opportune time, rather than just when they need cash.

Under the Advance Payments Program, cash advances are calculated based on up to 50% of the anticipated market value of eligible agricultural products that will be produced or are in storage. The program is delivered through 27 industry-led associations.

Source : Syngenta.ca

Video: Seeing the Whole Season: How Continuous Crop Modeling Is Changing Breeding

Plant breeding has long been shaped by snapshots. A walk through a plot. A single set of notes. A yield check at the end of the season. But crops do not grow in moments. They change every day.

In this conversation, Gary Nijak of AerialPLOT explains how continuous crop modeling is changing the way breeders see, measure, and select plants by capturing growth, stress, and recovery across the entire season, not just at isolated points in time.

Nijak breaks down why point-in-time observations can miss critical performance signals, how repeated, season-long data collection removes the human bottleneck in breeding, and what becomes possible when every plot is treated as a living data set. He also explores how continuous modeling allows breeding programs to move beyond vague descriptors and toward measurable, repeatable insights that connect directly to on-farm outcomes.

This conversation explores:

• What continuous crop modeling is and how it works

• Why traditional field observations fall short over a full growing season

• How scale and repeated measurement change breeding decisions

• What “digital twins” of plots mean for selection and performance

• Why data, not hardware, is driving the next shift in breeding innovation As data-driven breeding moves from research into real-world programs, this discussion offers a clear look at how seeing the whole season is reshaping value for breeders, seed companies, and farmers, and why this may be only the beginning.