By this time next year the University of Guelph will have pretty well cut the agronomy program from Kemptville College. Corn and cereals have gone this year. Beans and forages will go next year.

The plan is disgustingly narcissistic and short sighted. I’ll tell you why and what farm organizations should be doing about this.

Kemptville College is the only institution doing variety trials and management trials in the province on shorter season varieties. It has produced management packages for farmers for three quarters of a century.

The soybean and corn revolution came about in the 70s and onward largely because researchers at the college were able to provide farmers with data that included seeding rates, row widths and planting times.

That kind of data will no longer be available for short season varieties. Nor will new, independent information. In addition, herbicide research will also be discontinued.

Let’s put the program in perspective by looking at the overall picture. Roughly, 800,000 acres of corn and soybeans are grown annually in eastern and central Ontario. The value of the two crops is somewhere above half a billion dollars.

The cost of running the corn, cereal, bean and forage programs at Kemptville is just over $200,000. The provincial government donation to the research and education budget for the University of Guelph is $50.3 million.

While everyone and his cat are touting the value of research, the move to eliminate local research will leave farmers in our region without independent data for managing their crops. We don’t think $200,000 is a high price to pay for research to back up the expansion of these crops in our region.

When we asked Alan Wildeman, in charge of research at the University of Guelph, what crops were being cut, he responded "Whatever the researcher (person let go) has been teaching." He seemed unaware that the decision would cut the heart out of core agronomic research in the east.

The technician that worked with corn and cereal research has been transferred to environmental projects.

Now Wildeman spoke to us about the University of Guelph being a world leader in agricultural research and the importance of centers of excellence. The talk is all poppycock. Most of the agricultural research at the university is a copy of what has already been done in the U.S. or Europe. The best the university can do is provide an adaptation of that research for Ontario farmers.

However, the university apparently has not chosen to go that way. Instead, it will get on the environmental band wagon. That band wagon won’t put money into anyone’s pocket who is farming.

We suggest farm organizations put pressure on the university to return to its original mandate, to provide practical information to farmers at the local level.