On-Farm Climate Action Fund (OFCAF) to re-open for a limited number of applications

Sep 05, 2024

After reviewing and approving more than 1,000 applications, RDAR is pleased to announce the re-opening of the 2024 OFCAF program for an additional intake of 150 funding applications. The new intake will fulfil RDAR’s commitment to distributing all available OFCAF funds to Alberta producers, enabling them to adopt impactful, sustainable changes on their farms and ranches.

The ARGO online application system will open at 0800 h on September 6th, 2024, to accept applications. RDAR will continue to receive project applications on a first-come, first-served basis until funding is fully committed.

How to Apply:

Please submit your application online through ARGO.
Detailed application guidelines, tutorials and templates are available on the OFCAF website.
If you have any questions or require further clarification, please do not hesitate to contact our office at
1-877-503-5955 or ofcaf.bmp@rdar.ca. We are here to assist you.

Important Dates and Information:

Funding Available: Support for up to 150 new on-farm beneficial management practice projects
Funding Call Opening Date: September 6th, 2024, at 0800h, on ARGO
Funding Call Closing Date: Funding will be allocated to eligible projects until all available budget is committed.
Project Eligibility: As per the OFCAF Program Guide
Project Timeline: All projects should be completed following approval between September and December 2nd, 2024. Projects cannot be carried over into 2025.
OFCAF provides financial support to producer projects that implement on-farm Beneficial Management Practices in the areas of:
Nitrogen Management: Strategies to optimize nitrogen use and reduce GHG emissions.
Cover Cropping: Practices involving cover crops to improve soil health and capture carbon.
Rotational Grazing Practices: Techniques that enhance pasture management and reduce soil degradation.
This is the final opportunity in 2024 to secure OFCAF funding for your on-farm or ranch project. Act quickly to ensure your project is considered.

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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