Let’s talk about the weather!

Jan 06, 2023

The average person spends eight minutes a day talking about the weather. I just looked it up.

I had done a handful of freelance articles for the Co-operator before coming on board as a staff writer in May. I’m a journalist by trade, and don’t have a ton of agriculture in my background. I knew I had a lot to learn about the nuts and bolts of a farming operation; about soil science and botany, weeds and diseases, and I was excited to start my new journey.

One subject I thought I had sufficient knowledge in was weather. Eight minutes per day for a lifetime adds up. So, I figured I could hold my own.

Of course, I knew weather played a role in agriculture. Whenever you’re talking about growing crops or raising livestock outdoors, the topic of weather is bound to come up. Even the most agri-ignorant city-slicker has shared the notion that rain, in spite of its negative effect on parades and the like, can at least be ‘good for the farmers.’

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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.