Strip-Till Award nominations are open

Jan 03, 2024

Nominate someone for the 2024 Strip-Till Innovator Awards.

By Andrew Joseph, Farms.com; Image via Strip-Till Farmer

With the new year comes new nominations, and you can help recognize a strip-tiller for their hard work.

Strip-Till Farmer and Montag Manufacturing are seeking 2024 Strip-Till Innovator Award nominations from farmers, equipment and input dealers, manufacturers, and other agribusinesses to honor outstanding leaders of the conservation-tillage industry.

The awards are open to individual growers in the US and Canada who have made a significant contribution to the advancement of strip-till farming, regardless of crops grown or brand of equipment, seed, or crop protection products used.

The deadline for nominations is Wednesday, January 31, 2024.

The award winner will be recognized at the 11th annual National Strip-Tillage Conference, to be held August 8–9, 2024, in Madison, Wisconsin.

To nominate someone, click HERE.

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.