2024 Early bird registration is now open for CrossRoads – Alberta’s Crop Conference

Dec 07, 2023

Farm and industry leaders can now register for CrossRoads – Alberta’s Crop Conference and take advantage of early bird pricing. Brought to you by the FarmTech Foundation of Alberta, CrossRoads is excited to host 800 participants in Calgary, Alberta, from January 29-31, 2024. During the conference, producers and industry will gather to network and share ideas with their peers in the industry, including topics such as farm business management, sustainability of farming operations economically and environmentally, policy impacting the farm gate, innovation and agronomy.

“The conference is a forum for producers to gain insight and knowledge to assist their operation today and into the future,” says farmer and foundation chair Todd Hames. “We are excited for this year’s speaker content as it directly relates to issues and opportunities that producers are facing and will help them set their strategic direction and make operational decisions”.

Early bird pricing of $460 for full access pass is in effect now until December 1, 2023, at crossroadscropconference.ca. Each ticket is value-packed with insightful speakers, hot breakfast & lunch, special events like the Opening Reception, Beer Hour Reception and more. With registration limited to 800 of western Canada’s farm and industry leaders, tickets are sure to sell quickly.

Over two days, CrossRoads will feature keynote speakers like Canadian author and geographer Lenore Newman speaking about innovation in agriculture, technology professional Walter Schwabe talking about big picture IT as it relates to agribusiness and agricultural meteorologist, Drew Lerner.

The FarmTech Foundation of Alberta is a working collaboration by three of Alberta’s crop commissions - Alberta Canola, Alberta Grains and Alberta Pulse Growers. Following a longstanding history of successful events under FarmTech’s legacy, CrossRoads is proud to take its place as the premier agriculture conference in Western Canada.

For additional information and to purchase tickets, visit crossroadscropconference.ca

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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.