Content
As part of our renewed commitment under Sustainable Canadian Agricultural Partnership (Sustainable CAP), Vineland Research and Innovation Centre (Vineland) conducts the priority-setting process on behalf of the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Agribusiness (OMAFA).
Vineland continues to be responsible for collecting and synthesizing research priorities from various horticultural groups. These priorities feed into OMAFA’s priority setting process, which is used by researchers across the province to address the gaps and needs of Ontario’s horticultural sector.
Ontario Horticulture Research Priority Setting
Year 1 Summary: 5 Year review
In Year One, a review of Ontario’s Horticultural Research Priority Reports from 2017 to 2023 examined priorities from 16 crop groups. The analysis grouped priorities into five main themes: commercial and market research, pest and disease management, sustainability, technology, and variety development.
The full report can be found here:
Year 2 Summary
Emergent Themes
Four common themes emerged from consultations across crop groups, highlighting shared challenges in setting and advancing research priorities for 2023-2026. These challenges include research priorities that are too broad and unchanging, limitations around funding and research capacity, and representation of crop groups within the research priorities.
The full report can be found here:
Ontario Horticulture Research Priorities
The efforts currently underway to streamline the priority setting process and identify ways to capture high level priorities across sectors and themes is a way to improve the engagement process and usability of the results.
Vineland aims to help create a meaningful set of research priorities and transition to a three-year priority setting process. Improvements will be made by addressing the needs of small, medium and large crop commodity groups while also considering short-medium-and long-term priorities within and across these groups. Enhancing the alignment of funding and granting opportunities at the regional, provincial and federal levels will also aid these improvements. Additionally, key contacts, such as researchers and industry organizations, will be compiled to provide a resource list that supports the horticulture sector’s sustainability, competitiveness and growth.
- Year 1 (2023-2024) of this project concentrated on identifying crop commodities’ attitudes towards the previous research priority setting process to identify priority areas which were used to inform sector consultations.
- Year 2 (2024-2025) involved sector consultation with each of the commodity groups. All 16 groups were contacted, and consultation was completed with 13 of them to understand their opinions and concerns around priority setting which were used to develop recommendations for a new priority setting process.
- Year 3 (2025-2026) will involve using these recommendations and further industry consultations to establish the new priority setting process and priority list for 2026-2029.