Leaders Wanted to Represent Alberta’s Canola Growers

Oct 17, 2023

Alberta Canola is seeking canola growers in four regions to let their name stand to represent growers as a director on the Board of the Alberta Canola Producers Commission. Nominations in regions 2, 5, 8, and 11 are open until October 31, 2023.

Visit albertacanola.com/regions for a list of municipalities in each region.

Alberta Canola directors work alongside fellow farmers to represent growers in their region and collaborate with decision makers from across the agricultural spectrum to drive the industry forward.

The Board of Directors meets quarterly and is guided in decision making by five committees:

Governance and Finance
Government and Industry Affairs
Grower Engagement and Extension
Public Engagement and Promotion
Research

Who can become a director?

Anyone who has paid a service charge on canola to Alberta Canola since August 1, 2021, is an eligible producer and can stand as a director. Eligible producers can be individuals or represent a corporation, partnership, or organization.

To be nominated, eligible producers must grow canola within the defined region but do not have to reside within it.

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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