Risk pays off as Canadian Dairy Xpo celebrates 10 years in Stratford

Apr 05, 2024

The Canadian Dairy Xpo owner always admired the prestigious, multigenerational dairy operations around him while growing up on a beef and cash crop farm in Ayr. He knew what challenges producers faced, and it gave him a head start when he created the industry’s largest event in Stratford, which was in the heart of the country’s biggest dairy producers.

“Risk is necessary and that’s what got us here,” he said Wednesday as the show celebrated its 10th operating year. “The biggest risk was the concept of trying something new. You can either think outside of the box or think about a new box, and this was a new box for the industry. There was a lot of uncertainty when we made the announcement. As it came together and producers showed up, it just grew its own legs.”

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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.