Ontario Crop Update: Progress … Amid the Rain Delays

May 31, 2024

The story of the crop season in Ontario continues to be dominated by regular rain, confirmed the weekly update from the Grain Farmers of Ontario. Good planting progress is being made in some areas, but other areas remain overly wet. Winter wheat is developing rapidly.

Corn

Planting progress has slowed due to rain delays, with 60 to 95% of corn acres planted, depending on geography. Corn has emerged within seven days in warm areas. Fields should be monitored for crusting after heavy rains. Some farmers are switching to soybeans due to the calendar.

Soybeans

Soybean planting is 25 to 40% complete. There are some discussions about switching to shorter-season varieties as planting moves into June. Soybeans planted earlier this month are in the cotyledons stage (VC).

Winter Wheat

Winter wheat is progressing ahead of normal in most areas. In the deep southwest, wheat has finished pollination, while other areas are in the boot stage with the flag leaf sheath opening. Treatment applications are ongoing as field conditions allow. Lodged wheat has been seen after heavy rains, which may be common this year due to rapid growth during the stem elongation stage.

Stripe rust has crossed into Ontario and is being identified in fields across southern regions, notes the GFO.

Source : Syngenta.ca

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