Winter Webinar: Balancing Farmland Protection & Housing Supply

Sep 27, 2023

The increasing demand for housing supply and affordability in Ontario is leading to pressure on municipalities to develop their shrinking agricultural land base. At the same time, the need to preserve these food-producing landscapes is becoming increasingly critical in the face of climate change. This session explores the challenges and opportunities faced in balancing the need for housing with farmland protection while contributing to climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies for municipalities.

Webinar attendees will learn about the current policies and practices in Ontario and other jurisdictions that have been successful in protecting farmland. By the end of the session, participants will have a deeper understanding of the complex issues at play, leaving with practical and innovative strategies for balancing these competing demands and ways to get involved in locally.

This webinar series will run from October to April.

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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