Dormant seeding forages can be a good option

Oct 12, 2022

Seeding forages in the fall can be a good alternative to spring or summer seeding.

Range Management Specialist Paige Straf says timing is critical with dormant seeding.

"A good rule of thumb is to seed forages when the average daily air temperature are at five degrees Celsius or less. Ideally producers should target for soil temperatures that are less than two degrees Celsius."

She notes if you seed before the soil temperatures are low enough, seeds will take on moisture, can start to germinate, and can get killed off by the cold winter temperatures.

Straf encourages producers looking at dormant seeding forages to increase seeding rates by 20-30 per cent, purchase good quality seed, and ask for a seed certificate to verify the content.

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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