Major Announcement at Western Canadian Crop Production Show

Jan 15, 2025

ADAMA Canada invites you to an exclusive breakfast meeting and news announcement at the Western Canadian Crop Production Show in Saskatoon, SK. Join us as we unveil a groundbreaking innovation poised to address a significant challenge faced by Western Canadian farmers.

This announcement marks a milestone in agricultural innovation and has far-reaching implications for the future of crop production and sustainability. Be among the first to learn about this major development directly from the industry leaders responsible for this break-through.

Event Details:

Date: January 15, 2025
Time: 8:00 am (breakfast will be served)
Location: World Trade Center Saskatoon at Prairieland. Hall A Breakout Room #2 - 503 Ruth Street West Saskatoon, SK

What to Expect:

ADAMA Canada presentation
ADAMA Canada announcement including exclusive insights into this innovation’s significance for Canadian farmers
A chance to engage directly with key ADAMA Canada representatives, including CEO Cornie Theissen

RSVP Details: Please respond via email to audra.lesosky@theshowandtellagency.com to confirm your attendance by 2:00 pm CST, January 14, 2025.

We look forward to welcoming you to this exciting event and sharing this important milestone with you. The official media release will be distributed to all media on January 15, immediately following the announcement.

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