INDUSTRY PROFILE
Taking the Lead
By David Morris

Greg Stewart describes himself as an innovator, so it seems appropriate that in being hired as the “Program Lead” for corn extension in Ontario, he is the first person to be appointed to a position of this type within OMAFRA.

Greg’s appointment is for a two-year term, as a co-operative pilot project of the Ontario Corn Producers’ Association, the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA), and the Department of Plant Agriculture, University of Guelph. OCPA and OMAFRA are jointly funding his salary, benefits and operational costs while the university is providing an office in the Crop Science Building and office support. Part of the uniqueness of this appointment is the co-funding by a farm organization and OMAFRA. The expectation is that the pilot project will be replaced by a more permanent arrangement in the future.

As the lead person for corn extension, Greg will be a liaison among researchers, extension workers and company agronomists, as they collectively work to ensure that the corn growers of Ontario have access to state-of-the-art information. One of his roles will be to compile the results of the best research from around the world and to “translate” it into recommendations for Ontario that can then be communicated to corn producers by extension workers in OMAFRA and agri-business.

Although the role of Program Lead is new, Greg is not a newcomer to research on corn production systems in Ontario. He is a native of Ontario, having grown up on a mixed farm near Peterborough. He graduated from the University of Guelph with a B.Sc.(Agr.) in Crop Science (1986), and an M.Sc., also in Crop Science with an emphasis on tillage and soil compaction (1988). Subsequently, Greg obtained a B.Ed. Degree from the University of Western Ontario and an Ontario Teaching Certificate, in the hopes of being able to combine a teaching career in Peterborough with farming the family farm. However, this hope was dashed by the cutbacks in the educational system. In recent years, Greg combined some farming with part-time work as a sales representative at a local farm machinery dealership and as a research associate with Dr. Tony Vyn in the Crop Science Department. Greg is quick to note that his involvement with corn research and extension has been largely due to the continued support and encouragement he has received from Tony, beginning even when Greg was a student.

Over the past 10 years or so, Greg has frequently collaborated with Tony on many cropping systems projects. These entailed investigating conservation tillage systems for corn from a range of perspectives, including nitrogen fertilizer management, potash placement, crop rotations, cover crops and planter modifications. Most recently, Greg has assisted with a project looking at the effect of row width and plant spacing on corn productivity. One part of this study which particularly interested him is the determination of whether bulk air seeders can place seed evenly enough to be suitable for planting corn. While the preliminary results are encouraging, and of great interest to many producers, Greg says more work is required before a conclusion can be made about this approach.

Greg is excited by the challenges and opportunities offered by his new extension position. He is well aware that he is “breaking new ground”, as this type of position has not existed within OMAFRA before (at least not in recent years). Because of that, he has a fair degree of freedom in what he will be able to do and where he can go in the course of investigating new and improved ways of growing and managing corn.

Greg’s goal is to keep Ontario corn growers aware of the state-of-the-art in corn production. He will have direct involvement with some applied research projects himself, but as he sees it, his primary task is to develop and maintain a knowledge of the new technologies for corn that are being employed or developed throughout the world and to assess the suitability of those technologies for use in Ontario. It will then be part of his role to help co-ordinate the development of cropping systems for Ontario using those technologies that appear suitable here and to develop information packages to assist the farmers in integrating these technologies into their farming operations. However, he doesn’t want anyone to think he’s going to be able to provide definitive answers about every question. Sometimes, all that can be done is to identify what is known and what yet needs to be discovered.

One of Greg’s immediate priorities is to do a complete inventory of on-going corn research in Ontario. Currently, there is no one in Ontario with an overview of everything that is happening here and Greg sees that as a major weakness in the communications system. He feels that by developing a central clearinghouse for information about corn, he can improve communications within the research community...leading, one hopes, to a more coordinated approach on some issues and more complete answers to many questions. With an awareness of the overall situation, he would also be in an excellent position to suggest directions for public corn research within Ontario in the future.

Greg will also have the task of summarizing information from across the province, and beyond, and providing an assessment of how all the pieces might fit together into cropping systems that can be used in Ontario. His emphasis will be on compiling information from the public research centres (university and government), but he is also interested is assisting with some of the on-farm projects that are co-ordinated through farm organizations such as the Innovative Farmers Association of Ontario and the soil and crop improvement associations, so that wider use can be made of the valuable information generated by many of these efforts. Overall, the result should be an improved flow of up-to-date information to the producer.

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