COG research reports on Barriers and Solutions in Canadas Organic Food Supply Chain

Feb 01, 2023

A research report from the Canadian Organic Growers outlines Barriers and Solutions in Canada’s Organic Food Supply Chain. It was released on Sunday, the final day of the Guelph Organic Conference (January 29th, 2023).

There are industry findings with details on six commodities including blueberries, carrots, salad greens, oats, field peas and beef.

The report summarized in part discusses the challenges of transitioning from conventional to organic production involving a significant commitment of time and resources. New practices in the barn and on the field present a learning curve. Major factors including securing new customers, finances and marketing channels.

Other challenges: not much information about how to go about transitioning from conventional to organic, significant record keeping is involved and a potential double whammy -- yield drop combined with a delayed organic premium price during the transition.

There is more insight on supply chain challenges and solutions available free at the Canadian Organic Growers’ online store or stay tuned here for more.

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Source : Small Farm Canada

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