Saskatchewan Is Key Player In Global Fertilizer Industry

Oct 16, 2018

A change in the weather should see some good harvest activity over the next week.

Farmers continue to work on increasing production to meet growing population needs and for many producers, fertilizer is a key input to boost crop yields.

Ron Styles the Executive Director for the Saskatchewan Potash Producers Association says Saskatchewan is a key player in the Global Fertilizer Industry.

He says we are the number one producer of potash in the world, adding we have ten potash mines in the province and a very strong industry.

“We have three major companies K+S Potash Canada, which opened up a new mine out by Bethune. We also have Nutrien which is a much more recent company, an amalgamation of Potash Corporation and Agrium, and they are the single largest producer in the world at the present time and we have Mosaic as well. All three are very critical in the industry and all are major players on the world market.”

He notes Saskatchewan exports Potash to over 75 different countries.

“The industry itself exported around $4.8 billion dollars worth of Potash exports in 2017. If you were to broaden it out from potash to the overall fertilizer industry here in the province; the industry itself contributes approximately $8.8 billion of economic activity in Saskatchewan and to our GDP is $5.5 billion so very sizeable numbers.

Saturday, October 13th was Global Fertilizer Day.

Source : Discoverestevan

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.