Soil testing can save time and money

Nov 01, 2022

The open fall has meant farmers have a window of opportunity to get their fall soil tests done.

Crops Extension Specialist Matt Struthers says there are a number of methods to consider, but it all begins with knowing what your field needs are.

"Some will be able to get away with a random sampling of their whole field depending on how uniform that field is. Some might be able to take a benchmark approach, where they sample the same location in each field. each year, and kind of get a baseline to continue on from there. The third would be they create what we call crop management zones. So every field is mapped completely different depending on its soil characteristics, topography and management history."

He notes while there's many different avenues that producers can take, it still involves collecting the soil at either a six inch, or twelve inch depth, putting it all together for that one location and then sending it into the lab for analysis.

Click here to see more...

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