Farm Crime Season 2 Streaming on CBC Gem April 1

Mar 19, 2021

Big Cedar Films is thrilled to announce the return of the hugely popular series Farm Crime, premiering Thursday, April 1, on the free CBC Gem streaming service. Returning for a second season, the true-crime documentary genre once again gets a uniquely Canadian spin with a deep dive into the world of farming and agriculture.

Comprised of six episodes, Farm Crime Season 2 explores the largely unseen dark side of Canada's agriculture industry. The series covers a range of cases; from an invasion of the Asian giant hornet AKA ‘murder hornet’ in British Columbia to the heartbreaking story of a missing mare in Ontario and a million-dollar sting operation in the secretive world of Nova Scotia’s baby eel fishery. Directors for Season 2 include Farm Crime producer Geoff Morrison, Kat Jayme (Finding Big Country), Alexandra Lazarowich (Fast Horse), Conor McNally (IIKAAKIIMAAT), Stephanie Joline (Play Your Gender) and Maya Annik Bedward (The Haircut).

Created by Big Cedar Films’ principal Geoff Morrison and produced by Morrison and Christina Carvalho, Farm Crime Season 1 earned both Canadian Screen Award and Banff Rockie Award nominations and won a raft of web series prizes, including Best Canadian Series and Best Documentary Series at 2019 ToWebFest. Farm Crime Season 1 launched in August 2018 and set the record at that time as the most-streamed CBC Gem original unscripted series over its first seven days. Warner Bros. Unscripted Television has also optioned the Farm Crime format to develop a US version of the show.

A complete list of Farm Crime Season 2 episodes is below:

1. Invasion of the Murder Hornets (dir. Kat Jayme)

The Asian Giant Hornet, dubbed by the media as the “murder hornet,” made headlines when it arrived in America in Spring 2020. But nine months before the murder hornet became an overnight sensation, the honeybee’s deadliest natural predator had already arrived in the sleepy town of Nanaimo, BC. When a group of dedicated beekeepers discovered a nest — the first in North America — they quickly hatched a plan to eradicate it, save their honeybees and stem the invasion of the murder hornets.

2. The Million Dollar Baby Eel Deal (dir. Stephanie Joline)

Every Spring, in streams and estuaries in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, small groups of fishers fan out across the region to harvest one of the richest catches per kilogram in the world: baby eels, also known as elvers. A kilogram of elvers can sell for as much as $4,500, largely because it’s virtually impossible to breed eels in captivity and catch limits are strictly regulated to protect the species. In Spring 2018, fisheries officers received a tip about a poacher trying to sell 100 kilograms of baby eels illegally. Knowing they had a chance to lay serious charges, officers set-up a sting operation to stop the person taking hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of elvers out of the river. But to put them away, officers would need to catch them in the act.

3. Missing Mare (dir. Alexandra Lazarowich)

When Rachael Bakker was struck by a sudden illness and unable to care for her two horses, a friend in the equine community introduced her to a woman who agreed to lease the animals. But when Rachael sought to retrieve her horses a year later, they were nowhere to be found. Instead, she discovered a chain of horse theft, illegal sales, and broken promises that stretched from Southern Ontario to Nova Scotia.

4. Canola Caper (dir. Maya Annik Bedward)

No crop has done more for Canadian farmers in the last half-century than canola. Developed in the 1970s by two scientists at the University of Manitoba, canola has become a $26 billion-dollar industry, making it Canada’s most valuable crop. In 2010, Killarney, Manitoba RCMP Cst. Luanne Gibb received a tip about some suspicious canola sales at a grain elevator. The sales had come from an individual who was a suspect in a canola theft years earlier that Gibb was unable to crack. The new case gave Gibb a second chance at finding justice for the victim farmers. But to solve the crime, she would need the help of an innovative grain scientist to put an end to the suspect’s reign of thefts.

5. The Lobster Looting at Long Cove (dir. Geoff Morrison)

In late winter 2018, the price of lobster reached an all-time high, and Nova Scotia fisherman Ken Wyatt and his colleagues along the South Shore had every reason to expect a season of unprecedented profits. But a rash of brazen lobster thefts in their community undermined their earning expectations — as well as their faith in the sanctity of an honest catch.

6. My Father’s Horses (dir. Conor McNally)

Sykes Powderface raises paint horses on the Stoney Nakoda First Nation on the Rocky Mountains’ foothills. In Spring 2020, three of his horses went missing, so he turned to his daughter, Corleigh, for help. Corleigh posted on social media about the missing horses, spoke with local horse dealers and brand inspectors, and eventually involved an RCMP livestock investigator. The search for the missing horses unveiled the original thief and a string of buyers — as well as a moral dilemma for the family who, unwittingly, ended up in possession of the stolen animals.

Source : gem.cbc.ca

Video: Can Gene Editing Give Seeds a Stronger Start?

Reagan Reed has a way of describing his research that might make a plant breeder pause.

“I’m the sort of person who likes to break things to understand them,” he says.

What he breaks are genes involved in seed germination. Reed, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Davis, is investigating whether changing those genes can help seeds establish healthy plants under a wider range of conditions.

Reed recently attended the National Association for Plant Breeding meeting in College Station, Texas, as an NAPB Borlaug Scholar. His work speaks to a question that matters well beyond a research lab: what does it take for a seed to get a crop off to a strong start?

A seed that germinates quickly, alongside the others planted with it, spends less time vulnerable to stresses before seedlings become established.

“If you’re able to bridge that gap between germination to stand establishment, then that’s going to give you the highest probability of having a solid yield that year,” Reed says. “There’s a bunch that can go wrong after that, but it maximises your yield from the start, at least.”

Reed works in Dr. Imtiyaz Khanday’s lab at UC Davis, where his research focuses on seed quality in tomatoes and potatoes. He brings an unusual academic background to the work: at Skidmore College, he studied both biology and Latin.

Reed believes that combination prepared him for research. Translating an ancient text means studying each word, weighing its possible meanings and using context to reach the best interpretation. There is rarely a way to know with complete certainty what an author intended. Science, he says, requires a similar willingness to work through uncertainty.

“Attention to detail and comfortability working with uncertainty,” is how he sums up what Latin taught him.

In the lab, uncertainty can produce a surprise. Reed describes changing one gene and seeing little effect. Changing a second gene also appears to do little. Put both changes in the same genetic background, though, and the result can be substantial.

“I break this gene, nothing really happens. I break this other gene, nothing really happens. I combine them into the same genetic background, and now there’s a massive effect,” he says.

Those interactions matter as researchers gain the ability to edit multiple genes at once. They also complicate any simple account of how a trait works: improving a seed may depend on understanding what several genes do together.

For Reed, the question is whether that knowledge could help seeds germinate reliably when conditions are difficult. Some of the genes he studies prevent germination under certain conditions. That response may serve a plant well in one setting while limiting its usefulness in agriculture. He wants to learn what happens when those genes are changed, and whether the result improves establishment.

Yet a discovery that works in a lab still has a long way to travel before it reaches a field. Reed argues that agricultural biotechnology faces an economic challenge as well as a scientific one. New tools can create value for farmers, he says, but developing them requires a way to support the work in an industry where margins can be thin.

His fellowship with Flagship Pioneering gave him a view across AI, agriculture-related work and human health research. It also reinforced the importance of bringing people with different expertise into the same conversation—a benefit of gatherings such as the NAPB meeting.

“You need to have a team of people with different backgrounds who are willing to work together and approach the same problem in different perspectives and different ways,” he says.

That thinking connects the different parts of Reed’s path. Latin taught him to examine details without expecting a perfect answer. Gene editing lets him test what individual genes do—and what happens when their effects combine. Working with people beyond his own field helps him ask what those findings could become.

He came to agriculture because of its reach: the possibility that work by a small group of researchers could eventually make a difference on a much larger scale. His immediate focus is smaller and more precise. He wants to understand what helps a seed get through its first days and become a healthy plant.