$82 million targeted to irrigation and wastewater services in Niagara and Leamington

Aug 12, 2025

The Ontario government is investing $135 million in water systems and irrigation infrastructure in Niagara Region and the Municipality of Leamington to help build more homes, protect farmland and keep workers on the job. The announcement was made August 11 by Kinga Surma, minister of infrastructure.

Niagara Region will receive approximately $94 million, which includes approximately $53 million for six water systems projects to help unlock up to 14,000 new homes through the Municipal Housing Infrastructure Program’s (MHIP) Housing-Enabling Water Systems Fund (HEWSF) stream, and another $41 million for irrigation pipelines to help deliver water to hundreds of farms and agricultural businesses.

Leamington will receive $41 million to help protect thousands of acres of greenhouse operations with improved wastewater treatment services, supporting domestic food production.

The two agriculture projects in Niagara Region and Leamington will help improve crop yield, quality, and drought resilience by ensuring a consistent water supply that will particularly benefit high-value fruit and vegetable crops such as peaches for Niagara, as well as enhance water quality in Leamington through the collection of nutrient-heavy wastewater from the greenhouse operations.

“This investment is a clear example of our government’s plan to protect Ontario’s economy by supporting the people and sectors that drive it,”said Trevor Jones, Minister of Agriculture, Food and Agribusiness. “By funding critical infrastructure like the Niagara irrigation and Leamington wastewater projects, we’re strengthening local economies, safeguarding food security, and making sure Ontario farmers have the tools they need to grow, compete, and succeed, now and for the future.”

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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.