Building relationships to get results

Nov 19, 2024

By Drew Spoelstra, President, Ontario Federation of Agriculture

It’s been a year since I was chosen to lead the Ontario Federation of Agriculture as its president, and as we prepare for our annual general meeting next week, it’s a good time to reflect on what’s been a busy 12 months in this new role.

Advocating for Ontario farmers is a business based on relationships and during this first year, my biggest focus and that of our board has been around building and fostering those relationships as we work toward achieving results for farmers.

We’ve had some great opportunities this year to build better relationships and encourage a greater understanding of Ontario agriculture with the Premier, provincial cabinet ministers, parliamentary assistants, and elected officials of all major political parties.

We’ve also built a productive working relationship with the new minister at the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Agribusiness and his team, and we’re active locally and nationally on issues that matter to our members.

Growing our partnerships, for example, with the Rural Ontario Municipal Association and the Association of Ontario Municipalities is bringing broader perspectives to discussions around farmland, energy, railway issues and more.

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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