Tragedy averted as central Alberta farmhand rescued from grain bin

Jul 02, 2026

On an early morning in May, Aaron Dingle, an 18-year-old New Zealand man here in Alberta working as a farmhand, was rescued from a canola bin where he was buried up to his neck.

The entire incident could have ended in tragedy but for the quick response of his employers, and the actions, training, and use of specialized equipment by Hardisty and Killam firefighters who answered the call.

Dingle is working at the Burden farm north of Lougheed on an informal farm exchange. John Burden says, “We were part of the Ag Exchange program for many years, and now all those kids keep sending their friends and family our way.” Burden says it’s also much easier for foreign farm workers to come now than in the past.

Burden, his son Graham, and Dingle were unloading a canola bin last week, one where they saw a heated core and some sprouting in a small area.

Graham says he’d worked in the bin all day Tuesday with a grain vac, sucking out any problem spots, and could see that the further down towards the centre, there was a lot of good grain.

Burden says the bin had been full, but they’d taken out two truckloads, then dropped a ladder in to catch any remaining areas of bad grain.

Graham says when he’s working in a bin alone, he has a signal worked out to bang on the side if he’s in any trouble.

He says, “Aaron and I talked about that on the way to the bin. It’s a vulnerable position, and I told him that if he felt like his feet were sinking that he had to start moving to get bouyant.

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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