Proactive risk management key to unlocking Canadian agriculture’s future

Oct 01, 2025

A new report released by the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute (CAPI) calls for a shift toward proactive, comprehensive risk management to strengthen the long-term resilience of Canadian agriculture.

Striking the Balance: Proactive Strategy versus Reactive Response authored by Farm Management Canada urges government and industry to look beyond traditional Business Risk Management (BRM) programs and look at a modernized, nationally aligned approach that equips farmers to better anticipate and manage risk; not just recover from it.

CAPI Managing Director Tyler McCann said too often when risk management is talked about in agriculture policy it is only about business risk management programs.

“Risk management is much more than that. This paper highlights the proactive and reactive ways that farmers can approach risk management and encourages policies that support more proactive risk management,” he said. “Changing the risk management policy landscape so that it aligns with how farmers approach risk management is essential to effective risk management policy.”

The report provides a practical, farm enterprise-wide framework—spanning People, Finance, Markets, Production, Business Environment, and Business Strategy—to help align policy, support services, and farm practices around prevention and preparedness when it comes to managing farm risk.

It highlights how over-reliance on reactive BRM programs can discourage alternatives and leave gaps at the farm level, while proactive planning and skills development can build confidence, reduce stress, and improve performance and long-term returns.

Heather Watson, Executive Director, Farm Management Canada said it’s no secret that Canada’s farmers are under immense pressure.

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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