Harvest activities are quickly wrapping up in the province

Oct 10, 2022

Provincially, 90 per cent of the crop is in the bin.

That's up from 81 per cent last week, and well ahead of the five-year average of 82 per cent.

Crops Extension Specialist Matt Struthers says another week to ten days of good weather and everything should be complete.

Harvest is virtually complete in the southwest and west-central regions other than a few flax fields, which will likely occur after the next killing frost.

Farmers in the northwest have 94 per cent of the crop in, 87 per cent is done in the northeast, 86 per cent in the southeast, and 81 per cent in the east central part of the province.

Heavy fog and dew in the mornings are pushing harvest activities into the afternoon.

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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