Nominations Open for Inaugural Alberta Grains Board

Sep 21, 2023

Nominations are open for the Alberta Grains, the newly named, amalgamated Alberta Wheat and Barley Commissions, board of directors, a Sept. 19 news release said. Farmers from across all six growing regions in the province can be nominated to run for one of twelve open director positions, comprised of two from each region.

“All it takes to be a director is a good head on your shoulders, and a willingness to speak up and strive for positive change, no matter how steep the roadblocks,” Tara Sawyer, interim chair for Alberta Grains, said in the release.

Directors lead Alberta Grains and advise on its priorities of research, agronomic extension, government relations and policy, national and international markets, and the FarmCash cash advance program, while supporting the commission’s governance, events and industry-focused publications, the release said.

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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