It is adding a winter wheat breeding program.
“The merger brought a lot of people together,” said Sheila Murphy, research operations lead with Corteva Agriscience.
“We needed space for the people, we needed space for the equipment, and we needed space for the technology.”
The building now is 53,000 square feet.
The change was requested by Dairy Farmers of Ontario and would provide producers with the option to store larger amounts of cow and goat milk on-farm without having to increase their building footprint, while maintaining food safety and quality requirements.
The Federal Development bank is backing two Ontario ventures with about $2 million.
VDB Grains (Van Der Burgt Grains Ltd.), a grain elevator near Mitclell, is receiving about $1-million to install a first-in-Ontario high-efficiency grain dryer and other new equipment.
This investment will help the company scale up capacity to meet customer demand, while the new grain dryer will reduce crop and food waste.
The equipment will enable VDB Grains to accept higher-moisture grains than traditional dryers can handle.
The money is repayable.
Mycionics Inc., located in Putnam, Ontario, is receiving $975,766 to invest in first-in-Canada equipment able to identify and pick harvest-ready mushrooms without damaging them or their growing beds.
Mycionics Inc. will implement the technology in two southern Ontario mushroom operations, test and develop the robotic harvesting system for industrial scale use, and ready it for commercialization and export.
Mycionics Inc. will also leverage an additional $2.9 million in private-sector investment and create six skilled jobs in Putnam.
Beekeepers are in line for a second round of federal-provincial subsidies to buy equipment to upgrade their operations.
Those with 50 more colonies can apply for up to $10,000; those with fewer hives, but not less than 10, are eligible for up to $3,500. They must match the subsidies with their own money.
The subsidies are higher this time than the first round when about $550,000 was spent on 350 projects related to about 20,000 hives.
The projects eligible for funding are for the purchase of equipment to prevent the introduction of disease and improve winter survival, to sample and analyze for pests and diseases and to purchase domestically-raised queen bees.
"This targeted bee health intake will provide beekeepers in Ontario the opportunity to address biosecurity risks in their operations,” said Melanie Kempers, general manage for the Ontario Beekeepers' Association.
In addition, the Ontario and federal governments said that under the new intake, applicants can be approved for a maximum of two applications.
Honey extraction equipment and activities related to COVID-19 recovery are included as eligible expenses – for example supporting the development of websites for online sales and producing Ontario stock to mitigate difficulty in accessing queens or worker bees due to COVID-19.
The attack was first identified in the JBS plant in Austalia, the largest beef and lamb packer in the country.
It quickly spread over the weekend to the United States and Canada.
The FBI is investigating, the Biden administration said.
The hackers are believed to be criminals in Russia who demanded ransom to provide the keys to restoring computer operations.
A similar ransom demand followed after hackers disrupted an oil delivery network serving much of the Eastern United States. In that case a ransom was paid.
“The shortage of pallets is adding stress to a supply chain that is already facing significant challenges,” Jane Proctor, vice president of the Produce Marketing Association, recently told Karen Davidson, editor of The Grower newspaper.
Proctor said importing pallets is costly because of tariffs and transportation; the shortage is made worse by hoarding.
She is calling for a concerted effort across the supply chain to ensure pallets are available.
Another complicating factor is wholesalers and distributors stocking up on produce to ensure they can fill orders and those inventories are sitting on pallets.
She said that associations, such as hers, and other key players in the pallet and produce industries, are co-operating across North America to find solutions.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson says that a new trade deal with Canada has been “slightly held up by the Canadian reluctance to allow too much British cheese to tempt the palates of Canadians.”
“I think what’s really needed now is more affordable, high-quality British cheese in Canada and I hope that we can do a deal to allow that,” he said in an interview with the CBC.
“We’re very hopeful that we can do a great deal. There are big opportunities for Canadian business here in the U.K. – we’re a giant market,” Johnson said.
It’s far from the first time that the entrenched Canadian dairy farmers have been cited as a stumbling block in reaching trade deals with, for example, the United States.