OFVGA re-elects board chair, vice-chair

Feb 21, 2025

The leadership of the Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers’ Assocation remains unchanged for 2025. Shawn Brenn was re-elected as the organization’s chair and Mike Chromczak was re-elected as vice chair at a board meeting following the organization’s annual general meeting in Niagara Falls, February 18.

“It’s my honour to lead this organization for another year and I appreciate the support from the OFVGA’s strong board and staff team in this role,” says Brenn. “Issues around trade, grower profitability, labour and regulatory burden will remain priority files for the OFVGA this year and we will continue to work hard to put grower needs and concerns in front of provincial decision-makers as well as support local and national advocacy efforts.”

Brenn is president of Brenn-B Farms Ltd near Waterdown, where the fourth-generation family business grows potatoes, onions, cilantro and dill, and corn, soybeans and wheat as rotation crops. He represents the potato sector on the OFVGA board and is also chair of the Ontario Potato Board. Brenn has led the OFVGA since 2023, after a one-year term as vice chair.

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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.