The Nature Conservancy of Canada launches campaign to conserve Alberta's Yarrow Ranch

Oct 25, 2022

The Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) announced a major fundraising campaign to conserve a key piece of property near Waterton Lakes National Park.

Tom Lynch-Staunton, Alberta's Vice-President of NCC says they've been working on the Yarrow Ranch project for about 15 years.

The land covers 4,077 acres and is home to 27 different wildlife species of provincial or national significance.

The Yarrow Ranch was bought by Charlie Fischer who was interested in conservation and sustainable ranching.

The property features endangered prairie grasslands, wetlands, creeks and mixed forests in the Waterton Park Front.

It also has a number of wetland areas that hold vast amounts of water, helping to both reduce the severity of drought and buffer the impact of flooding in the area and downstream.

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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.