Canadian Cattle Young Leaders application deadline quickly approaching

Mar 22, 2023

The Canadian Cattle Association is looking for its next crop of individuals for the Canadian Cattle Young Leaders program.

Jessica Radau, the CCA's Youth Leadership Co-ordinator, says the overall objective is to use the program as a built in industry succession planning tool.

She says the program is designed for people 18 to 35 with an interest in any aspect of the cattle industry.

"We're taking young and upcoming leaders in the industry and pairing them with a mentor, and different opportunities for travel and networking to give them the tools and skills they need to continue to drive the growth of the Canadian beef industry for years to come."

She notes that while they see a number of beef producers come through the program, it's open to young people involved in all areas of the beef supply chain that have a passion and want to grow their careers in this space.

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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