Michigan Dry Beans: It's in the Can

Feb 05, 2024

Amid a search for a lead faculty member in the Bean Breeding and Genetics program, PSM staff and faculty hosted the program Dry Beans: From Pod to Process for Bush Bros and Company-- a major canning partner for Michigan farmers.

Members of Bush Brothers Beans executive team visited the bean breeding facilities at MSU to interact with breeding professionals, to:

• Improve organizational competencies in agricultural production within S&T and across Bush Brothers

• Enhance quality and innovation based on production and handling of dry beans, issues and trends

• Create ambassadors for the complexities of supply of dry beans for Bush Brothers’ products.

"We have hosted other processors, Scott Bales said. "But this event is much greater in scope than we have done for others.” This training demonstrates a comprehensive response to the MSU dry bean breeding program stakeholder requests/requirements including the Processors’ needs for communication and integration, committed to superior quality products, including thorough training to help align needs and expectations for Michigan dry beans, Scott said.

In this program, Dr. Cichy and staff covered the basics of dry bean breeding and variety development and Evan Wright discussed the Dry Bean Breeding and Genetics Program.

Halima Awale demonstrated disease Screening and Dry Bean Crossing, and encouraged them to try it. Though the season is passed for bean flowers, Halima and her team grew these plants specially for this activity.

Dr. Karen Renner showed the group how dry beans fit into the basic principals of MSU’s crop and soil science program, including row crop production combined with climate resilience and sustainability. Also in this session, Dr. Miranda Haus (horticulture) offered a plant science primer –photosynthesis, respiration, nutrient use and uptake.

Source : msu.edu

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