Keeping You Connected Through the Canada Post Strike

Dec 03, 2024

While we await resolution to the Canada Post strike, we’ve prepared alternative solutions to keep the Canadian seed sector informed and supported.

While we at the Alberta Seed Guide, like many Canadians, are surprised by the continued Canada Post strike, we are — as always — committed to supporting our partners and moving forward with our business. We hope that the national strike will be resolved before the end of the year. If the mail disruption continues into 2025, however, we have proactively planned the following:

Expanded Distribution Channels: We’ve secured strong distribution opportunities at various industry events nationwide.
Enhanced Digital Presence: We’ve bolstered our already strong digital offerings, including email communications, website resources, and social media platforms, to keep you informed and connected.
Key Pick-Up Locations: We’ve identified convenient pick-up locations in partnership with organizations across the country. Stay tuned for details if/when needed.

We hope Canada Post and its workers reach a mutually beneficial deal as soon as possible. Until then, know that we at Alberta Seed Guide, have strong alternatives in place. Strike or no strike, we’ll continue connecting, informing and serving the Alberta seed industry.

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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