Modest Advance in Saskatchewan Harvest Progress

Sep 30, 2022

Producers in the southwest and west-central regions are mostly done but the harvest in other parts of Saskatchewan was slowed this past week by cool, damp weather, as well as continued high moisture crops.

The weekly crop on Thursday pegged the overall harvest in the province at 81% complete as of Monday, up a relatively modest 8 points on the week although still ahead of the five-year average of 75%. Last year, 95% of the crop was in the bin.

Small amounts of rainfall were received across the province last week, with the most falling in the northeast and southeast regions. Meanwhile, many producers in the eastern and northern areas of the province are still waiting for canola stems to dry down or for some warm, windy days to lower the moisture content of cereal grains, the report said.

Harvest is most advanced in the southwest region, where 98% of the crop was combined as of Monday. The west-central region was 97% complete, followed by the southeast at 74%, the northwest at 70%, the northeast at 69% and the east-central at 65% done.

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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