Saskatchewan farmers in need of moisture welcoming the recent snowfall

Mar 06, 2018

Farmers say the foot of snow in southern Saskatchewan is a good start to replenish soil moisture.

APAS president Todd Lewis, said more moisture will be needed however for spring seeding and the growing season.

“I think this is just a good start,” Lewis said.

“We’ve been looking for snow all winter and hopefully we’ll get a little wind here now and get it blowing around and into some shelter belts, certainly a lot of dugouts are in need of some surface water as well,” he said.

Lewis added the snow is welcome, but low soil moisture will require timely rains throughout the growing season for a good crop in 2018.

“Lots more, we’re going to need some pretty timely rains, certainly the snow is welcome and good wet snow like this helps, but we’ve got such a depletion of the water table that we’ll need timely rains during the growing season to get a good crop off this year,” said Lewis.

Source : CKRM

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.