Sask. irrigators urged to make straw available for feed

Aug 19, 2022

WESTERN PRODUCER — Grain producers are again being encouraged to drop their straw at harvest so it can be baled and used by others for feed and bedding.

For the second straight year, the South Saskatchewan River Irrigation District No. 1 (SSRID) in Outlook, Sask., is co-ordinating a drop straw campaign for livestock producers who may face feed shortages this winter.

Rather than spreading it as chaff, irrigators are encouraged to sell their straw this fall.

“It’s community-minded farmers helping farmers,” said Matthew Lawless, a director at SSRID.

“Last year, with the drought, and then this year with the continuing drought in some parts of the province, irrigation land has more consistent and reliable sources of straw so irrigators are co-operating to provide a source of straw to stock growers who may require it for feed or for bedding to get their herds through the

The district has 125 irrigators with 46,000 acres under centre-pivot irrigation, much of it in the Rural Municipality of Rudy. Irrigation starts at Lake Diefenbaker, runs as far west as Outlook, as far east as Glenside and to the northern end of the RM.

The SSRID office is co-ordinating communication between farmers and livestock producers through the following process:

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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