Tropics Quiet Down as Season Passes Peak

Oct 13, 2020

By Pam Knox

The latest 5-day tropical outlook for the Atlantic shows just one area of investigation. This wave has only a 30 percent chance of developing into a tropical storm in the next five days, and once it gets farther west will run into stronger wind shear, which will make any development more difficult. We are still not out of the woods yet, but we are past the peak of the tropical season, so at least for now, farmers can breathe a sign of relief and get their harvesting down without having to worry about getting it all done in a couple of days. Don’t wait too long, though, since it is not impossible that we could still get a storm that could cause more impacts on agriculture.

Source : uga.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.