FARMING IN THE FINGER LAKES: Embrace the diversity of agriculture

Nov 15, 2023

(Editor’s Note: In 2017 and ‘18 we ran a monthly column on our Monday Farm Page called “Farming in the Finger Lakes.” Thanks to the effort and initiative of Eileen Jensen, that feature is returning. Eileen’s columns focusing on the local agricultural scene will run the first Monday of every month).

The time is here when the holidays are creeping up quickly and family gatherings become more abundant. We are fortunate to live in a region surrounded by farmers and an abundant food supply. As consumers of food, we have the pleasure of walking into local grocery stores to fill our bags with whatever food item we’re craving. It’s something that most of us don’t think twice about as food is the centerpiece for our tables.

Living in the Finger Lakes region allows all of us to have access to a diverse array of food. Let’s take a closer look at the diversity in a four-county radius including Ontario, Seneca, Wayne, and Yates counties.

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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