NDSU Sets Fruit, Hemp, Vegetable and Woody Plants Field Day

Aug 21, 2024

The North Dakota State University Department of Plant Sciences will host a fruit, hemp, vegetable and woody plants field day on Thursday, Sept. 5, at the NDSU Horticulture Research Farm and Arboretum near Amenia and Absaraka, North Dakota. The field day will begin at 4 p.m.

“This event will showcase some of the exciting research being conducted in our horticulture department at NDSU and give field day participants a chance to see how some of the projects we are working on might be suitable for their gardens, orchards or farms,” says Harlene Hatterman-Valenti, NDSU Department of Plant Sciences professor and field day organizer.

The field day will include presentations on caterpillar tunnel grapes, high tunnel tomatoes, apples for fresh eating and hard ciders, hydro-mulching for weed control, evaluating new brassica cultivars for yield and stress tolerance, evaluating garlic cultivars, floral hemp research, grape and juneberry breeding research, and woody plant breeding research.

Source : ndsu.edu

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.