Farmers Waited Years For Legislative Fix To Rail System

May 28, 2018

The President of the Grain Growers of Canada said, after roughly 30 years, farmers finally have a legislative fix to Canada's rail system.

Jeff Nielsen notes Bill C-49 (The Transportation Modernization Act) was introduced in the House of Commons about a year ago, and was finally passed last Tuesday, May 22.

He said there's important aspects of the Bill they want to see in place for the coming crop year starting in August.

"One would be the ability to have the grain companies in the contracts, so the railroads have reciprocal penalties in there. That will ensure that if, myself as a farmer, if I have a delivery month, that my grain will be delivered in that month to the elevator."

He said it will take some time to get parts of the Bill working properly.

"We would've rather had this done back in early winter, and we could've started working on some of these things. One of the components of it is the long haul interswitching. With CN dragging its feet throughout most of the winter, we could've probably used that to ensure producers effected by the slow down on Canadian National rail lines had the ability to move grain."

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.