Maple syrup producers gather near Moose Creek to discuss storm recoveries, deforestation

Nov 29, 2023

MOOSE CREEK — Some SDG maple tappers will try making up for the loss of sap-producing trees north of Highway 417 damaged by the May 2022 derecho.

“Some of our neighbours are extending (their sap-gathering tubes),” said Anne Zoeller, operator of Zoeller Maple Products/Glengarry Maple Sugar Shack.

She said adding trees to the production isn’t readily possible, however, as an individual tree must be of a certain age. She personally won’t be adding trees, but rather working to overcome additional damage her woodlot suffered during an ice storm last winter.

While more sap production may be possible, Zoeller said she wasn’t sure if expansion plans were a direct correlation to the derecho, which was a topic at Saturday’s Ontario Maple Syrup Producers’ Association – Eastern Local (OMSPA) annual meeting/seminar.

The need for government assistance to help syrup operators recover from the derecho was widely accessed, South Nation Conservation CAO Carl Bikerdyke told OMSPA members and expert presenters at Sand Road Maple Farm in North Stormont.

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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