Take the Time to Write a Plan for the 2023 Growing Season

Feb 03, 2023

Time on the land or in the barn gives an undisputed feeling of accomplishment. For someone like me that spends a lot of time at the desk, the feeling of getting stuff done in this job isn’t as sweet, as working in the garden or woodlot.

But writing a plan, project or idea on paper can accomplish more than you may think.

The proactive action of writing it down on paper (rather than passive living) reduces anxiety.

It also helps your brain encode. Encoding is the biological process in the brain’s hippocampus that analyzes perceptions. Ultimately deciding whether to keep a ‘perception’ in long-term memory or discard it. The physical action of writing on paper improves the brain’s encoding function and the chances that you will remember.

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Source : Small Farm Canada

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