Agriculture Roundup for Friday February 17, 2023

Feb 17, 2023

The Western Grains Research Foundation has created a series of twelve regional factsheets that show the benefits of diversifying crop rotations.

The Resilient Rotations project is part of the Integrated Crop Agronomy Cluster (ICAC) that is evaluating various crop rotations to help create more productive, sustainable, and resilient cropping systems on the prairies.

The project is led by Dr. Kui Liu, a research scientist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC).

“We are approaching crop rotation by looking at a systems approach – all the elements that impact crop rotation from soil health, economics and yield to local growing conditions,” Liu said. “It’s a more holistic way to look at crop rotation and one we hope will provide new insights and options for farmers in Western Canada in a more customized, prescriptive type of approach.”

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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.