Niagara grapevines well-poised for fruitful growing season

Mar 25, 2025

With the first day of spring officially here and temperatures already hovering around 20° C, Niagara grape growers will be keeping a close eye on the temperature swings predicted in the weather forecast.

Jim Willwerth, Brock University assistant professor of biological sciences, says that grapevines in the region have overwintered well.

Growers’ attentions have now turned to being mindful of spring’s warmer daytime temperatures which can threaten the cold tolerance those vines built up during the winter dormancy period.

That’s because large fluctuations can also increase the threat of injury to buds, he says.

“Right now, our vines are staying winter hardy, the risk is that if we start getting very warm daytime temperatures in March, they might then lose hardiness quite rapidly,” says Willwerth.

Willwerth’s research conducted with Brock’s Cool Climate Oenology and Viticulture Institute (CCOVI) focuses on climate change and vine resiliency.

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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