CCA narrowing down finalists in the Young Leaders Mentorship Program

Aug 27, 2024

Participants in the Canadian Cattle Association's Young Leaders Mentorship Program took part in the final round of competition last week during the Canadian Beef Industry Conference.

The group of 24 took part in roundtable discussion with the other participants and judges as they work to narrow down the group to the 16 finalists.

Jessica Radau, the CCA's Policy, Programs and Engagement Manager says the roundtable discussions covered a variety of topics from succession planning to biosecurity, building public trust in the industry and more.

"We give them an industry topic to discuss at each of the round tables and then they rotate amongst the discussion questions."

She say although it is a competition, it's a really fun format because we've got the next generation sharing their ideas of what they see as solutions to our challenges.

Results from the competition will be announced in a couple of weeks.

Radau was a graduate of the CYL program in 2018 and farms with her husband and his family near Bowden (Alberta), a fourth generation, mixed farming operation that has purebred Herefords, commercial cattle, and grain production.

Through the CYL program young people (18-35) involved in various aspects of the beef supply chain apply to participate in a nine month mentorship program.

Canadian Cattle Young Leaders Program is considered an industry succession plan, giving the next generation the tools and skills they need to continue to grow the beef industry.

The Canadian Cattle Association has seen over 180 graduates from the CYL program since it was established in 2010.

More information on the program and the 2023 participants can be found here.

Source : Pembinavalley online

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