Four Canadian agricultural leaders have been named the 2022 inductees into the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame.
Maurice Delage, Mabel Hamilton, Digvir Jayas and Ashok Sarkar will be inducted during a ceremony at the Liberty Grand in Toronto Nov. 5.
“This year’s inductees have all made major contributions to Canadian agriculture in the crop sector, livestock and agricultural education, further processing in the flour milling industry and food security through grain storage systems,” said Ted Menzies, president of the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame, in a press statement.
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- Maurice Delage from Indian Head, Sask., is an agribusiness leader and hybrid canola visionary.
His agriculture career began as a sales representative in the crop protection industry. Over the next 30 years, he helped lead Hoechst Canada, AgrEvo Canada and Aventis North America.
Delage was an early believer that biotechnology was vital to the future of agriculture.
He was instrumental in the creation of Liberty-resistant canola, the first herbicide-tolerant canola on the market in the mid 1990s. This brought about InVigor herbicide-tolerant hybrid canola that continues to impact most canola acres in Canada.
For the past 20 years, he has farmed with his family on Delage Farms, a 35,000-acre operation.
- Mabel Hamilton from Innisfail, Alta., has championed agricultural education for more than 40 years and is considered a leader in the beef industry.
A teacher by training, she developed a classroom agricultural program for Grade 4 students to foster urban youth’s understanding of where food comes from.
Hamilton was a member of the Alberta Cattle Commission (now Alberta Beef Producers) before helping to lead the Canadian Angus Association.
She helped guide the Beef Information Centre as it increased its connection to consumers, 25 years before the industry recognized the educational gap between producers and consumers.
Canada’s national livestock traceability system was also created with her input, which was essential after the discovery of BSE in 2003.
- Digvir Jayas of Winnipeg has been a researcher and stored grain ecosystem expert for more than 30 years, which helped minimize losses in stored grain and improved global food security.
His research team at the University of Manitoba conceptualized the horizontal airflow drying of grain and the first 3-D model that is creating better management systems for storing grain.
- Ashok Sarkar is a flour miller and Canadian grains advocate during a career that spanned more than 50 years.
From India to Switzerland, Sarkar worked at mills around the world before settling in Canada and joining the Canadian International Grains Institute (now Cereals Canada) in 1979.
He helped improve milling efficiencies and generated flours with selected attributes for food products around the globe.
Sarkar’s work focused on wheat, buckwheat, food barley, canaryseed and pulses to develop a variety of milled ingredients.
