Minister MacAulay announces new members of the Canadian Agricultural Youth Council

Sep 10, 2024

OTTAWA, ON, The Honourable Lawrence MacAulay, Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food, announced the members of the third cohort of the Canadian Agricultural Youth Council (CAYC). Nine new faces and 13 returning youth from the second cohort will make up the new Council, all serving terms of 18 months.

The CAYC acts as a consultative body to Minister MacAulay and to Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, providing advice, enabling on-going dialogue on food-related challenges and opportunities, sharing information and best practices, and advising on policies and programs affecting the agriculture and agri-food sectors.

First established in 2020, the Council's primary role is to provide a youth perspective to AAFC and the Government of Canada. Young people in agriculture and agri-food are committed, energetic, passionate and full of ideas on the future of the sector. Their perspectives are vital in developing government policy and programs that meet the needs of future generations. The CAYC's input will help inform AAFC's policies, programs, planning and decision making.

The members of the third cohort represent a variety of subsectors from across the agriculture and agri-food value chain, from producers to researchers to members of non-governmental organizations.

Source : Newswire.ca

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.