OFA applauds move by Ottawa on loan interest relief

Mar 27, 2024

The Ontario Federation of Agriculture (OFA) is welcoming news that the 2024 federal budget included a permanent increase to the interest-free limit under the Advanced Payments Program (APP).

The announcement is welcome relief to farm businesses across Ontario and Canada, the OFA said in a news release.

It marks a significant victory for Canadian agriculture and showcases the effectiveness of persistent advocacy efforts by OFA, provincial agricultural commodity partners and the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, the OFA said.

“The Advanced Payments Program is an important tool in the toolbox for farmers across the country to access short-term financing for their farm business,” said Drew Spoelstra, OFA president.

“We are at a critical point in time with high costs of production, inflation, elevated interest rates and falling commodity prices, and we’re grateful for the Government of Canada’s response by increasing the interest-free portion of the APP to $250,000 annually."

Click here to see more...

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.