Ag-icon influence endures

Sep 21, 2023

The influence of George Shook won’t stop anytime soon, given the countless number of students he taught and advised during his 40-year career as a professor of dairy genetics in the University of Wisconsin-Department of Dairy Sciences – now the Department of Animal and Dairy Sciences. Many of those students are currently leaders in the dairy industry.

Kylene Cook Anderson is a senior marketing manager for ABS Global of DeForest, Wisconsin. Shook was her adviser for her entire undergraduate experience in the early 2000s. She also took one of his classes focused on animal-science genetics and breeding.

“I learned (from him) a passion for how quickly we can make genetic progress in cattle, and I believe it strongly helped foster my enthusiasm for genetics,” she said. “This passion for genetics led me to a now-15-plus-year career working for ABS Global.

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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