Canada and Ontario Invest $5 Million in Traceability

Aug 08, 2024
By Farms.com

Boosting Small Agri-food Businesses with Safety Investments

The governments of Canada and Ontario are investing up to $5 million to help small businesses in the agriculture and food industry enhance their food safety systems and stimulate growth. If you are a producer who wants to improve in food safety and traceability, keep reading to find out more.

This funding, through the Sustainable Canadian Agricultural Partnership (Sustainable CAP), aims to improve food safety and traceability systems.

The Food Safety and Growth Initiative will provide funding to eligible food processors, producers, and service providers.

This support will help them adopt new food safety and traceability equipment, technologies, and standards, and provide related training to employees.

This initiative will also enable operators to respond to market and consumer demands, promoting business growth.

This investment aligns with the Grow Ontario Strategy, which aims to strengthen the stability and competitiveness of Ontario’s agri-food supply chain.

The initiative will help smaller businesses build consumer confidence and support investments to detect, prevent, and mitigate food safety risks.

“It is vitally important that our farmers and food processors have access to the latest tools and resources they need to continue to produce their top-quality goods,” said the Honourable Lawrence MacAulay, federal Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food. “This investment in technology and equipment upgrades will help folks prevent and quickly address food safety risks and keep their operations on the cutting edge.”

“Our government is committed to working with smaller businesses in Ontario’s agriculture and food industry to help them ensure food safety so they can increase sales and expand,” said Rob Flack, Ontario Minister of Agriculture, Food and Agribusiness. “Investments through the Food Safety and Growth Initiative will allow smaller food businesses to improve their operations so they can grow and compete in Ontario and outside our borders.”

Projects supported through this initiative include the development or improvement of food safety or traceability programs, equipment and technology upgrades, and first-time certification audits.

Successful projects can receive 50 per cent of eligible costs, up to $75,000 per project. Applications open on August 21, 2024, and will be accepted until December 1, 2025, or until funds are fully allocated.

The Sustainable CAP is a five-year, $3.5-billion investment by federal, provincial, and territorial governments to strengthen Canada’s agriculture sector.

This includes $1 billion in federal programs and a $2.5-billion commitment cost-shared by federal and provincial/territorial governments.

The food and beverage processing industry are the largest employer in Ontario's manufacturing sector, with over 90% of the 4,000 companies being small businesses.

This funding announcement is designed to support these businesses by enhancing their food safety systems, upgrading their equipment, improving standards, and providing training.

This support will help them meet market and consumer demands more effectively and allow them to grow their businesses.

Kevin Schinkel, President of Meat and Poultry Ontario, praises the collaboration between the federal and provincial governments. He believes this investment will strengthen the food system's resilience by helping businesses improve their food safety practices.

According to him, this support benefits everyone by ensuring safer food production and promoting the growth of small agri-food businesses.

Video: The 15-Year Bet Behind Every New Variety!

Canada is trying to decide how much agricultural research capacity it can afford to lose. Brian Rossnagel believes the better question is whether the country can afford to rebuild it.

The longtime barley and oat breeder makes the case with a simple fact about his profession: the consequences of today’s decisions may not become visible for 10 or 15 years.

“Pick the right parents. That’s the biggest thing,” Rossnagel says. “If you pick the wrong parents, you’re not going to get anywhere—and you don’t know that until 10 years, 15 years later.”

That warning carries particular weight as Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada moves to reduce spending and streamline parts of its science operations. The department’s 2026–27 plan anticipates the loss of approximately 665 positions by 2028–29 and says some research will be reduced where capacity exists in academia or industry. AAFC says the changes will make its science operations more cost-effective over the long term.

For Canada’s seed industry, Rossnagel’s career illustrates what is at stake.

This fall, the retired University of Saskatchewan breeder will be inducted into the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame. During his 35-year career at the Crop Development Centre, he helped develop more than 100 barley and oat varieties, including CDC Austenson—one of Western Canada’s most widely grown feed barleys. His induction recognizes not only those varieties, but the collaboration and research system that made them possible.

Rossnagel is quick to emphasize that none of it was the work of one person.

“The first thing I thought about was all the other people who contributed to whatever success I and my program had over the years,” he says. “We know that it’s not an individual who does this. It’s a group—a team.”

That team extends well beyond the breeder whose name appears beside a variety. It includes technicians, pathologists, quality specialists, statisticians, regional testing sites, seed growers and industry partners. It also includes the breeders who came before and those who will carry the germplasm forward.

CDC Fraser barley, for example, moved through three breeding careers. Its parents came from Brian Harvey’s program. Rossnagel advanced the material after Harvey retired, and Aaron Beattie later guided it through registration and release.

That kind of handoff is normal in plant breeding. The person who makes the original cross may never see the resulting variety reach farmers.

It also explains why lost research capacity cannot simply be switched back on when budgets improve.

“If you shut it off, it’s very, very difficult—and particularly costly—to start it up again,” Rossnagel says. “If you have to start from scratch, it’s going to be at least 10 years before anybody notices whether you’re getting anything done or not.”

The concern is not simply how many experimental lines Canada can process. Modern equipment, statistical tools and genetic technologies allow today’s breeding programs to evaluate tens of thousands of lines—far more than Rossnagel could handle when he entered the field in the early 1970s.

But efficiency and automation do not generate every idea.

“If you pare back down, and instead of having six or seven individual scientists concentrating on wheat breeding, you go down and say three people could handle all this, well, that’s half the ideas gone,” he says. “Particularly if you happen to lose the three people who had the really neat and innovative ideas, boy, that’s a problem.”

It is a timely distinction for Canadian agriculture. Consolidating programs may preserve the volume of material moving through a system, at least initially. It may not preserve the diversity of thinking, regional knowledge or willingness to pursue unconventional crosses.

That regional knowledge matters because Canadian agriculture is not one uniform production environment. A variety suited to southern Alberta may face different disease, moisture and maturity pressures than one grown in Manitoba, Ontario or Atlantic Canada.

“Agriculture is applied biology,” Rossnagel says. “Biology, all around the Earth, moves from the poles to the equator. It does not move from Newfoundland to B.C. like politics do.”