Farmers support grain safety training and equipment

Jul 23, 2024

By Crispin Colvin, Director, Ontario Federation of Agriculture

Safety is important in farming, and many organizations work hard to raise awareness of being safe around farm machinery or when working with livestock. The topic of safety around harvested grain can be overlooked – but with grain harvest now underway in Ontario, it’s also an important one to know about.

In many areas of the province, you’ll see the golden fields of ripe wheat or barley become grain kernels and straw as farmers work on their fields. Harvested grain is hauled away from the field in wagons or tractor trailers, and stored in grain bins on the farm, delivered directly to a local grain elevator or sometimes even taken straight to a port for export.

Regardless of how it is handled and stored, however, it’s important to keep safety top of mind. Trailers and bins of grain can be dangerous when you’re working with them and it’s easy to become trapped inside – an experience often described like quicksand. If help doesn’t come in time, it can lead to suffocation.

That’s why the Ontario Federation of Agriculture (OFA), where I serve as part of the provincial board of directors, is supporting a variety of projects around the province that focus on safety awareness as well as training for first responders who will be the ones called to the rescue – literally – in case of an emergency.

Through these projects, local and regional federations of agriculture are helping to fund grain extraction units and equipment for rural fire departments as well as training on how to use these tools. The goal is to ensure that an emergency call involving someone trapped in a grain bin or trailer will be a successful rescue instead of a recovery mission.

These projects are part of OFA’s Revive Fund, which was launched in 2021 to help communities struggling impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Through the fund, our 51 county and regional federations can apply for matching funding from OFA to help plan, develop and launch new projects and initiatives in support of agriculture and their local communities.

So far, about $975,000 has been invested into the program by the OFA, its county and regional federations and other partners since its inception, and new project ideas come forward every year.

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Video: Why Your Food Future Could be Trapped in a Seed Morgue

In a world of PowerPoint overload, Rex Bernardo stands out. No bullet points. No charts. No jargon. Just stories and photographs. At this year’s National Association for Plant Breeding conference on the Big Island of Hawaii, he stood before a room of peers — all experts in the science of seeds — and did something radical: he showed them images. He told them stories. And he asked them to remember not what they saw, but how they felt.

Bernardo, recipient of the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award, has spent his career searching for the genetic treasures tucked inside what plant breeders call exotic germplasm — ancient, often wild genetic lines that hold secrets to resilience, taste, and traits we've forgotten to value.

But Bernardo didn’t always think this way.

“I worked in private industry for nearly a decade,” he recalls. “I remember one breeder saying, ‘We’re making new hybrids, but they’re basically the same genetics.’ That stuck with me. Where is the new diversity going to come from?”

For Bernardo, part of the answer lies in the world’s gene banks — vast vaults of seed samples collected from every corner of the globe. Yet, he says, many of these vaults have quietly become “seed morgues.” “Something goes in, but it never comes out,” he explains. “We need to start treating these collections like living investments, not museums of dead potential.”

That potential — and the barriers to unlocking it — are deeply personal for Bernardo. He’s wrestled with international policies that prevent access to valuable lines (like North Korean corn) and with the slow, painstaking science of transferring useful traits from wild relatives into elite lines that farmers can actually grow. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But he’s convinced that success starts not in the lab, but in the way we communicate.

“The fact sheet model isn’t cutting it anymore,” he says. “We hand out a paper about a new variety and think that’s enough. But stories? Plants you can see and touch? That’s what stays with people.”

Bernardo practices what he preaches. At the University of Minnesota, he helped launch a student-led breeding program that’s working to adapt leafy African vegetables for the Twin Cities’ African diaspora. The goal? Culturally relevant crops that mature in Minnesota’s shorter growing season — and can be regrown year after year.

“That’s real impact,” he says. “Helping people grow food that’s meaningful to them, not just what's commercially viable.”

He’s also brewed plant breeding into something more relatable — literally. Coffee and beer have become unexpected tools in his mission to make science accessible. His undergraduate course on coffee, for instance, connects the dots between genetics, geography, and culture. “Everyone drinks coffee,” he says. “It’s a conversation starter. It’s a gateway into plant science.”