New Grading Changes Coming for the 2024-25 Crop Year

Jun 14, 2024

The Canadian Grain Commission has announced new grading changes for the upcoming 2024-25 crop year that it says will better meet the needs of the grain sector in Canada and grain buyers around the world.

Among the changes are new variety designation lists for food barley, and updates to the assessment of seed coat discolouration in soybeans.

According to a CGC release, food barley varieties are unique and different from malting or feed barley varieties due to the distinct quality features desired for food, such as high beta-glucans. And to ensure Canadian producers and the agriculture sector can realize the benefits of developing and growing these varieties, the CGC is creating variety designation lists for Barley, Canada Eastern Food, which will take effect on July 1, 2024, and Barley, Canada Western Food, which will take effect on Aug. 1, 2024.

Meanwhile, as part of the CGC grain grading modernization project, the official Grain Grading Guide will be updated to clarify the assessment of seed coat discolouration in soybeans, effective Aug. 1, 2024. The changes include updates to definitions and grade determination tables for factors related to soybean staining. The CGC will also be adding new photographs to the web version of the guide to assist in the evaluation of seed coat discolouration.

Finally, the CGC said it is reformatting the Grain Grading Guide to be clearer, more user friendly and accessible. Effective Aug.1, 2024, grain grades will be moved to column (vertical) format and grain grading factors will be listed in row (horizontal) format. This change will be to the formatting only and won’t change any grading factors or tolerances.

The new and previous versions of the tables will be available in the online version of the Grain Grading Guide for at least six months to help with the transition.

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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