More Support for Farmers Impacted by Extreme Weather, Wildfires in 2023

Feb 29, 2024

Farmers and other agricultural producers recovering from losses and damage due to the extreme weather or wildfires during the spring and summer of 2023 can now access new funding from the Province.

“Wildfires, floods, ongoing rain and wet conditions took their toll on agriculture, leaving thousands of hectares of damage, including extensive crop and yield loss,” said Agriculture Minister Greg Morrow. “Agriculture is essential to feed our families and maintain a healthy provincial food supply. This new funding will help fruit, vegetable, berry and forage farmers as they recover and plan for the upcoming season.”

The 2023 Season Response Program builds on other business risk management programs that were available last year. The new program is intended to help those still recovering or who were not covered by the other support programs.

The new program covers crop damage and yield loss that was a direct result of flooding, excessive precipitation or wildfire damage. Other losses such as farm infrastructure, supply losses and the cost of re-establishing fields may qualify and will be considered.

This program supports the government’s mandate to increase local food consumption and the percentage of Nova Scotians’ food budget spent on locally grown and produced foods.

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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