New funding to support potato growers

Sep 13, 2024

Fredericton, New Brunswick – Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada

New Brunswick potato producers who endured extraordinary costs resulting from excessive moisture during last year's growing season will have access to financial assistance starting this November.

The 2023 Canada-New Brunswick Potato AgriRecovery Initiative will compensate eligible potato producers for the extraordinary costs incurred to grow, harvest, store or dispose of last year's potato crop.

AgriRecovery is a disaster relief framework to help agricultural producers with the extraordinary costs associated with recovering from disasters. Its initiatives are cost-shared – 60% federally and 40% provincially/territorially – as outlined under the Sustainable Canadian Agricultural Partnership.

The program will offer up to $25 million in funding provided by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and the Department of Agriculture, Aquaculture and Fisheries through the AgriRecovery Framework.

Source : Canada.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.