Farmers Come Together To Gain Insight, Formulate Recommendations For NCGA Activities

Feb 08, 2013

Grower leaders from across the country gathered in St. Louis this week to explore a variety of issues that will affect corn farmers in the upcoming year and to determine a course for National Corn Growers Association activities to support them. For three days, members of five of NCGA’s issue-focused action teams and committees listened to reports from industry experts and discussed programs to guide NCGA staff as they work on behalf of growers.

“These meetings play an important role in that they allow specialized teams to focus on their area of expertise and guide programs with a comprehensive, detailed understanding of the issues,” said NCGA President Pam Johnson. “It is inspiring to see the passion these volunteer leaders bring to their duties and to converse with such knowledgeable industry experts. As a farmer, I feel confident that they will lead us in the right direction.”

With industry leaders including representatives from a variety of seed technology and grain trade companies, subject area experts from ethanol and research groups and government officials providing information, team members asked thoughtful, pointed questions. They will use this information to develop a team perspective on upcoming issues including promotion of biofuels, investment in scientific research and the furthering of efforts to coordinate communications across the value chain.

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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.