Ontario farmers feel their Dutch cousins’ pain

Aug 03, 2022

ONTARIO — Ontario farmers with links to Holland are watching the agricultural unrest in their ancestral homeland with a mixture of sympathy and concern — while thanking their lucky stars to be operating in Canada. Dutch farmers have rolled out tractorcades and tied up the streets of the Netherlands this summer in furious reaction to proposed environmental policies curtailing use of nitrogen fertilizer and cutting herd sizes.

After years of escalating and expensive regulatory requirements, Dutch farmers were like “a rat pushed into a corner” when the Dutch government proposed harsh new greenhouse gas cuts on the ag sector, says Marcel Smellink, an Iroquois-based farm realtor and cash-cropper who speaks daily with farmers in Holland. “This is the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

Weeks of protests that shut down highways drew as many as 40,000 Dutch farmers and were sparked when the Dutch government released a plan June 10 that would cut nitrogen fertilizer use 50 per cent by 2030 and almost completely eliminate its use in some cases. Nitrogen is applied to land as manure or as chemical fertilizer, releasing nitrous oxide, which is considered one of the main greenhouse gas and worse than carbon dioxide.

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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.