Map: Well Below Normal September Rainfall for Ontario

Oct 07, 2025

After ramping up sharply in August, abnormal dryness and drought across southern Ontario did not get any better in September.

In fact, conditions have likely deteriorated further, with precipitation over the past 30 days well below normal all the way from Windsor in the west to the Ontario-Quebec border in the east, as shown on the map below. Meanwhile, all of southern Ontario saw above normal temperatures over the past month as well.

The dry conditions have allowed the soybean harvest and winter wheat planting to advance quickly, although the latest field observations from Grain Farmers of Ontario (GFO) noted that corn plants that have turned brown may have succumbed to an early death due to drought and heat stress. Similarly, higher temperatures and dry weather have led to quicker soybean seed maturity and drydown, resulting in earlier full plant death.

Overall, it was an extremely dry growing season for eastern and central Ontario as well as the Niagara region and parts of west-central Ontario. The deep southwest fared relatively better, although still not without some dry weather impacts.

According to the Canadian Drought Monitor, 84% of agricultural land in the Central Region – which includes both Ontario and Quebec – was classified as abnormally dry or in some form of drought as of the end of August. That compares to just 34% in July, 20% in June, and a mere 1% in May. The September update of the drought monitor should be released in the coming days.

Source : Syngenta.ca

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