Taiwan U.S. Beef Dispute Not Over

Jul 30, 2012

U.S. and Taiwan to Resume Trade Talks

The announcement made by the Taiwanese government to lift its ban on U.S. beef is conditional. It’s expected that Taiwan and the U.S will begin their discussion over the resumption of six year stalled trade talks in October 2012. The resumed discussions will take place under the Trade and Investment Framework Agreement. This news comes after the Taiwanese governments passed amendments to its food and safety act to conditionally allow important on U.S. beef containing ractopamine – a drug that has been previously banned. The drug is administered to livestock to enhance meat tenderness.

The key condition revolving around the ban is restrictions over safe traces of ractopamine levels. Representatives from the U.S. Congress seem optimistic that the two parties will be able to solve the trade dispute and agree upon a full-fledged trade agreement.

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.