Government Of Canada Investing To Grow Alberta Agriculture

Sep 15, 2017

A strong and competitive agriculture sector is vital to Canada’s prosperity; creating good jobs, growing the middle class, and bringing high-quality products to the tables of Canadian consumers.

Minister of Sport and Persons with Disabilities and Member of Parliament for Calgary Centre, Kent Hehr, on behalf of the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food, Lawrence MacAulay, was in Calgary today to announce our Government is investing $4.4 million to help farmers stay on the cutting edge of innovation, expand markets and manage their business risk.

As part of this investment, our Government has committed $2.2 million to projects that will help support the world-class cattle industry in Alberta and across Canada.

Projects include:

$839,485 for the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association to explore the use of remote sensing as a tool to insure forage crops.
$901,240 to help the Alberta Beef Producers develop satellite data to help improve forage insurance.
$255,000 to help the Canadian Angus Association develop tools that will improve better breeding cattle.
$205,500 for the National Cattle Feeders Association to develop and implement a national feedlot animal care assessment program.

The remaining funds, just over $2.2 million, will support a number of innovative projects that will help market development, emergency planning, competitive pricing, animal care assessments and farm software development.

These investments are part of our Government’s plan to grow the economy in a way that works for the middle class and those working hard to join it.

Source : Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada

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.