Oklahoma Department Of Agriculture Announces Specialty Crop Block Program Now Available

Mar 08, 2017

The Oklahoma Department of Agriculture Food & Forestry (ODAFF) is pleased to announce funding opportunities to enhance the specialty crop industry within the state thanks to the Specialty Crop Block Grant Program through the United States Department of Agriculture’s Agriculture Marketing Services. Eligible applicants include non-profit organizations, local, state, and federal government entities, for-profit organizations and colleges and universities.

“The Specialty Crop Block Grant Program is a great opportunity to fund research, education and outreach projects that benefit Oklahoma’s specialty crop farmers” said Jason Harvey, an Agriculture Marketing Coordinator for ODAFF. “These funds also help improve the quality and availability of locally produced fruits and vegetables to consumers.”

To be eligible, project(s) must solely enhance the competitiveness of an Oklahoma specialty crop, and they must benefit a specialty crop segment as a whole. Grant funds will not be awarded for projects that solely benefit a particular commercial product or provide a profit to a single organization, institution, or individual.

Projects involving the following specialty crops are eligible: fruits, vegetables, tree nuts, culinary herbs and spices, medicinal plants, as well as nursery, floriculture and horticulture crops. Proposals may be for but not limited to: research, promotion, marketing, nutrition, food safety and security, education, increased knowledge and consumption, improved efficiency and reduced costs of distribution systems, conservation, product development, good agricultural practices, good handling practices, and good manufacturing practices.

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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.