Agriculture Roundup for Tuesday September 20, 2022

Sep 21, 2022

MELFORT, Sask. – A rail strike in the United States was averted, much to the relief of the agriculture sector.

Agricultural Retailers Association president Daren Coppock said a strike would have gridlocked commodity supply chains during harvest.

He said farm retailers were already feeling the impact of a potential strike as railroads started to cancel shipments of fertilizer products such as anhydrous ammonia and affecting domestic fertilizer production earlier last week.

A labour deal was brokered by Labour Secretary Marty Walsh who tweeted a deal was reached after roughly 20 hours of talks.Specific details on the agreement were not released. The talks involved 12 unions representing more than 100,000 engineers, conductors, mechanics, and other railroad workers.

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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.