When Mark Keating started farming, the hardest part of the job was the labor. Heading into his 35th crop, the heaviest load is financial, and it has him thinking hard about the case for continued Canadian plant breeding investment.
Keating’s family has farmed in Canada since the 1930s. A certified seed grower at Keating Seed, he tests new varieties for years before they reach the wider market, which gives him a frontline view of what the breeding pipeline actually delivers. Over more than three decades on the land he has watched genetics quietly do some of the heaviest lifting on his operation, improving everything from yield to resilience against difficult weather. What pulls him back to the field every spring has not changed: the smell of the soil on the first day of seeding, the fresh grain coming off the combine at harvest.
What has changed is the math.
Why Canadian plant breeding investment matters to farmers now
“The financial risk right now is enormous, and the reward possibility doesn’t match the risk in most cases,” Keating says. When he took over the family operation, his biggest constraint was the sheer amount of labor a farm demanded. Today it is capital. Input costs, equipment, land and the size of the bet a grower places every season have all climbed, while the margin for error has narrowed.
That imbalance is the warning sign he wants the rest of the industry to take seriously. A farm carrying enormous downside with limited upside is a fragile business, and fragile businesses cannot absorb shocks or fund their own future. For Keating, this is where Canadian plant breeding investment stops being an abstraction and becomes a practical tool for staying solvent.
Canadian plant breeding investment and global competitiveness
Keating’s larger worry is where Canada sits in a global market. “We’re exporters of what we produce,” he says, which means Canadian farms are measured against the rest of the world whether they choose to be or not. Staying in that race, in his view, comes down to having the right tools, and advanced genetics is one of the most important.
His concern is that Canada is not keeping pace. Sustained Canadian plant breeding investment is what produces the steady stream of improved varieties that hold growers competitive on yield, quality and resilience. Let that pipeline slow, and the gap between Canadian farms and their international competitors widens a little more each season.
There is a quieter point underneath the economics. Most people never think about how their food reaches the table, Keating notes, because the supply has always been there. Keeping it that way depends on decisions being made now about whether Canada continues to invest in the genetics its farms run on.
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