Is It Time for an Energy Audit on Your Farm?

May 03, 2023

What is an energy audit and why is it something those working in an agriculture should take a closer look at?

The Three Hills and District Seed Cleaning Plant has faithfully served its local farm community since 1958. However, a series of energy audits over the last handful of years showed that the equipment — much of which hasn’t been upgraded since the plant relocated to the west side of town in 1991 — was woefully energy inefficient.

Last fall, the Three Hills Plant underwent a major renovation to more than double grain handling capacity. The upgrades proved the perfect opportunity to dramatically improve energy use efficiency too.

Plant manager Greg Andrews says the efficiency upgrades should pay for themselves through decreased power usage within five or fewer years. It’s an investment he recommends other large, high energy-use agricultural plants, from seed cleaners to potato storages to grain dryers, consider, and he credits the energy audits for starting it all.

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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.