Lack of snow not ideal, but winter not too bad for potato fields so far

Jan 17, 2018

January's hard frost will help make for a good farm season in 2018, says the P.E.I. Potato Board, and snow coming Wednesday could make it even better.

"From a pest perspective it's good. The colder the ground gets and the deeper that the frost goes, it's favourable in helping to control some of the pests that overwinter in the soil," said board general manager Greg Donald.

"In a perfect world we'd have that frost and a snow cover and it would help to protect the soil better."

That snow cover is forecast to come for much of the Island Wednesday, with a snowfall warning in effect for Kings and Queens counties.

The fields have been largely bare this winter, with Environment Canada recording just a few days with 10 or more centimetres of snow on the ground.

But that is not unusual. In seven the last 20 years there has been less than 10 centimetres of snow on the ground in mid-January.

Source : CBC

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.