Prairie canola producers brace for ‘devastating’ 100 per cent tariffs from China

Mar 26, 2025

Canola farmers are bracing for impact as China looks to impose hefty tariffs on their industry in response to Canadian tariffs on the country’s electric vehicle exports.

Just mere weeks away from when farmers plant their first seeds, China is to enact a 100 per cent levy on Canadian canola oil and meal, plus a 25 per cent duty on seafood and pork.

“All in all, it’s just bad news,” said Clinton Monchuck, a fourth-generation canola farmer from Lanigan, Sask.

The tariffs come in response to Canada’s 100 per cent levies on Chinese-made EVs and a 25 per cent tax on aluminum and steel products. Former prime minister Justin Trudeau said China had claimed an unfair advantage that was hurting Canada’s auto industry.

It’s unclear how consumers will be affected by the tariffs, but industry players say the sticker price of canola oil may not increase in Canada. The federal government has said China’s tariffs are unjustified, but it has not announced any concrete plans to help canola farmers.

“From the beginning, our focus has been and will continue to be the protection of Canadian workers and the unwavering support of our hard-working farmers,” read a Tuesday joint statement from three federal cabinet ministers including Agriculture Minister Kody Blois.

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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.