Farm equipment logjam not clearing any time soon

Nov 11, 2022

Guy Deroche of Notre Dame Motors was pleasantly surprised about parts orders this fall when delivery was better than expected.

Supply chain disruptions were a hallmark of the year, forcing producers and agri-businesses to scramble for inputs, for manufacturing components, for livestock ear tags and a long list of consumer products.

There were few big issues for the machinery parts desk, but the same could not be said of new equipment.

Why it matters: A shortage of new equipment will affect producers who would normally be in the acquisition phase of their replacement cycle.

Notre Dame Motors, like most ag machinery dealers, is having trouble getting new equipment on the lot, which Deroche links to manufacturers’ issues with sourcing components.

Some orders are still a year to a year and a half out, he noted.

“Some of [the producers] are just waiting, and some of the equipment we can’t even get prices on them, so they’re saying, ‘well, we’ll just put it on the back burner and look at it in three months or six months or something’,” Deroche said.

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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