Prairie Canola Groups Fund Five Research Projects

Mar 17, 2023

The three Prairie provincial canola grower associations will be funding five new research projects focusing on developing and evaluating disease resistance, abiotic stress resilience, and integrated pest management, a March 15 news release said.

The funding is being doled out under the Canola Agronomic Research Program (CARP) with the total investment being over $1.7 million. The funding also includes over $1 million from Alberta Canola, SaskCanola and Manitoba Canola Growers, as well as over $600,000 from the Western Grains Research Foundation (WGRF), the release said.

“CARP allows the Prairie canola groups to work together and leverage grower dollars to increase research capacity, while simultaneously benefiting all canola growers in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba,” Roger Chevraux, chair of Alberta Canola, said in the release. “Although our specific research priorities may differ from province to province, we are committed to investing in research that contributes to the continued successful and sustainable production of canola in Canada.”

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.