News

The Alliance helps food and farming businesses thrive and protects the province’s food supply.

Visitors to the Alliance booth on Tuesday, Sept. 10 will have a chance to connect with a U of G Cyber Security Lab expert and learn steps they can take to keep their farms safe from cyber attack.

It’s not only big organizations that need to worry. As farms increasingly rely on new technology like smart systems, cybercriminals see producers as easy prey. Whether for ransom or activism, cyberattacks can derail businesses and threaten animal health.

At the close of a second season, University of Guelph professor Dr. Mary Ruth McDonald and research technicians Geoff Farintosh and Kevin Vander Kooi shared their progress on the three-year project with Bradford Today, and explained how technology validated in Ontario's muck soils help growers meet the demands of farming.

This season, Ontario soybean specialist Horst Bohner is running research trials at the Ontario Crops Research Centre in Elora.

Bohner is comparing rates ranging from zero to 400 pounds of potash per acre.

A record number of University of Guelph faculty have been named Fellows of The Royal Society of Canada, the country’s most prestigious body of independent scholars, researchers and creatives at the forefront of intellectual leadership.

A new research network, CANN2ONET, will gather leading nitrogen experts to find ways to reduce Canada’s emissions of N2O, a potent greenhouse gas, with new funding from the NSERC-SSHRC Sustainable Agriculture Research Initiative. It spans several universities and colleges across Canada, as well as partners from industry, government and producer organizations.

In research funded in part by the Alliance, Kelsey Boucher has evaluated sudden death syndrome (SDS) in soybeans over the past two years, testing about 250 different soybean varieties. This will lead over the long term to her long-term goal of producing hardier soybean crops, particularly those with more disease resistance.

Boucher is supervised by U of G researchers Dr. Istavan Rajcan and Dr. Milad Eskandari.

Chowdhury, an Alliance-funded researcher, was awarded $70,000 for his work in Getting Research into Practice (GRIP) and Dr. Sam Workenhe receives $40,000 to further his work in discovering and developing antiviral treatments for highly pathogenic livestock and poultry viruses.

U of G’s Ridgetown Campus has added a world-class field crop pathologist to its teaching and research repertoire. Leading pathologist, Dr. Gursahib Singh is Ridgetown’s new Grain Farmers of Ontario Professorship in Field Crop Pathology. Dr. Singh joins the University of Guelph from Irrigation Saskatchewan (formerly ICDC) where he served as Research Director.

The new position is supported by a $2-million gift from the Grain Farmers of Ontario.