Saskatchewan Harvest Mostly Now Complete

Oct 05, 2023

The Saskatchewan harvest is mostly now complete, with canola and flax making up most of the remaining fields still to be combined.

Thursday’s weekly crop report estimated the provincial harvest at 95% done as of Monday, up 4 points on the week and comfortably ahead of the five-year average of 84%. Last year at this time, 90% of the crop was off.

Harvest in the Southwest and West-Central regions is virtually complete with the odd field still left standing, the report said. Things are almost wrapped up in other parts of the province as well, with the Northwest and Southeast regions both at 93% complete, followed by the Northeast at 92% and the East-Central at 90%.

Producers have finished harvesting their cereal and pulse crops and are now waiting for their remaining fields of flax or canola to dry down. The report estimated the canola harvest at 90% complete, and flax at 68% as of Monday. Producers who still have flax standing are hoping for frost to help stop the regrowth that is occurring due to recent rainfall, the report added.

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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