Research Agronomist Returns Home to Aid Rice and Row Crop Producers

May 23, 2025

By Maddie Johnson

Justin Chlapecka’s new role as assistant professor of agronomy comes with an office just about 35 miles from where he grew up a return home he sees as an opportunity to give back to his community through recommendations for enhancing crop production.

Growing up in Newport located in one of the state’s top rice-producing counties, Jackson County Chlapecka went to a rural school and remembers being surrounded by agriculture.

Service to farmers

In his new role, Chlapecka will continue his close connection to farming by conducting research through the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station and offering guidance to rice and row crop farmers through the Cooperative Extension Service. He will be based at the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture’s Northeast Rice Research and Extension Center, or NERREC.

Located on 600 acres between Harrisburg and Jonesboro, NERREC’s mission focuses on researching rice production practices that strengthen farm income while promoting sustainability when it comes to resource use.

When he is not in the office writing manuscripts documenting his studies and drafting grant proposals, Chlapecka is in the field conducting rice trials aimed at answering farmers’ rice-related questions to help them optimize their production with research-backed recommendations.

Source : uada.edu

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