New suite of initiatives aimed at growing the Prince Edward Island livestock sector

Jan 31, 2025

In collaboration with the Government of Canada, the Province of Prince Edward Island (PEI) is launching new funding opportunities to further support its cattle and livestock sectors.

Through the Sustainable Canadian Agricultural Partnership (Sustainable CAP), the governments of Canada and PEI will be introducing the Grow the Herd Pilot Program, as well as a new PEI Livestock Champion. The pilot program will include 2 funding streams focusing on supporting the unique growth requirements of each Island farm.

Heifer or Cow Retention / Purchase Incentive: Applicants will be eligible

for additional funding per retained heifer or the acquisition of bred heifers,
bred cows or cow-calf pairs;

PEI Certified Beef Brand Incentive: PEI feedlot and cow calf producers

can receive additional funding for increasing the availability of cattle eligible under the PEI Certified Beef marketing brand.
The PEI Livestock Champion position, created in collaboration with the PEI Cattle Producers and Atlantic Beef Products, will complement these programs, as well as other existing programs and services offered, by providing leadership, expertise and direction to Island livestock producers. The programs announced in this suite of initiatives support PEI’s Livestock Strategy and will continue to improve the quality of PEI’s products available to local markets as well as help drive new markets.

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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