A weekend feature for you - Horses to horsepower

Sep 18, 2023

How much has the type of agricultural equipment available to you, determined how you farm? How much did the type of machinery available to your father or grandfather influence the way they farmed?

Obviously, the kind of equipment available to farmers has changed a lot over the decades, and so have general farming practices. But did we change how we farmed and looked for machinery to accommodate those changes, or did the machinery available to us at the time change our methods?

Throughout the last century, a handful of inventors saw a way to do things better, and created machines that could improve farming practices. Then the rest of us changed what we did when those new and innovative machines became available.

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Video: Seeing the Whole Season: How Continuous Crop Modeling Is Changing Breeding

Plant breeding has long been shaped by snapshots. A walk through a plot. A single set of notes. A yield check at the end of the season. But crops do not grow in moments. They change every day.

In this conversation, Gary Nijak of AerialPLOT explains how continuous crop modeling is changing the way breeders see, measure, and select plants by capturing growth, stress, and recovery across the entire season, not just at isolated points in time.

Nijak breaks down why point-in-time observations can miss critical performance signals, how repeated, season-long data collection removes the human bottleneck in breeding, and what becomes possible when every plot is treated as a living data set. He also explores how continuous modeling allows breeding programs to move beyond vague descriptors and toward measurable, repeatable insights that connect directly to on-farm outcomes.

This conversation explores:

• What continuous crop modeling is and how it works

• Why traditional field observations fall short over a full growing season

• How scale and repeated measurement change breeding decisions

• What “digital twins” of plots mean for selection and performance

• Why data, not hardware, is driving the next shift in breeding innovation As data-driven breeding moves from research into real-world programs, this discussion offers a clear look at how seeing the whole season is reshaping value for breeders, seed companies, and farmers, and why this may be only the beginning.