Vineland leads research priority-setting process in Ontario

Jul 11, 2025

As part of a renewed commitment under Sustainable Canadian Agricultural Partnership (Sustainable CAP), Vineland Research and Innovation Centre (Vineland) conducts the priority-setting process on behalf of the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Agribusiness (OMAFA). Vineland continues to be responsible for collecting and synthesizing research priorities from various horticultural groups. These priorities feed into OMAFA’s priority setting process which is used by researchers across the province to address the gaps and needs of Ontario’s horticultural sector.

Vineland aims to help create a meaningful set of research priorities and transition to a three-year priority setting process.

Improvements will be made by addressing the needs of small, medium and large crop commodity groups while also considering short-, medium- and long-term priorities within and across these groups. Enhancing the alignment of funding and granting opportunities at the regional, provincial and federal levels will also aid these improvements.

Additionally, key contacts, such as researchers and industry organizations, will be compiled to provide a resource list that supports the horticulture sector’s sustainability, competitiveness and growth. Year 1 (2023-2024) of this project concentrated on identifying crop commodities’ attitudes towards the previous research priority setting process to identify priority areas which were used to inform sector consultations. Year 2 (2024-2025) involved sector consultation with each of the commodity groups. All 16 groups were contacted, and consultation was completed with 13 of them to understand their opinions and concerns around priority setting which were used to develop recommendations for a new priority setting process. Year 3 (2025-2026) will involve using these recommendations and further industry consultations to establish the new priority setting process and priority list for 2026-2029.

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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