Perth County sheep farmer loses leg in auger accident

Dec 01, 2023

MONKTON — A 34-year-old Perth County sheep farmer suffered life-altering injuries in what a family member said was an auger accident. One leg was lost in the accident and the farmer’s other leg was broken.

Lucas Stock was caught in a sweep auger, which are most commonly used at the base of a grain bin to clean and maintain it. Emergency crews responded just after 11:30 a.m. on Nov. 6 to the rural address near Line 49, south of Monkton. Stock was flown by air ambulance to a trauma centre.

“He’s in tough shape,” John Kolkman, uncle to the injured man’s wife, told Farmers Forum on Nov. 28. “His one leg is off and they are trying to save the other. The other leg is broken with the artery cut.”

Local Christian Farmers Federation of Ontario director Tom Diemand said that he understood that the accident involved the use of a sweep auger. “The power was supposed to have been off but … activated. Clothing gets caught in those augers very badly, fast.”

Stock works with his father-in-law and brother-in-law on the farm, Diemand said. “I was led to believe that his spirits are good and was optimistic towards the future and thankful to be alive.”

Diemand said that his Stratford-area parish would be reaching out to the family. “Sometimes our prayers are the strongest thing we can start out with.”

Source : Farmersforum

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