Share the Big Picture to Move Ag Policy Forward

Nov 04, 2022

When explaining agriculture issues to policymakers and consumers, those in the ag industry need to look at the broader pictures to share what benefits there are to the public and not just those in agriculture.

“I think it’s framing the information in terms of the larger challenges that often are focused on,” Kent Schescke, executive vice president and CEO for the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology (CAST), says on the Nov. 2 episode of Seed Speaks. He says if you’re working on something to do with environmental sustainability, explain that while it will lessen the impact on the environment it will also help provide safe, affordable food.

Governments take a lot of things into consideration when it comes to new agricultural policies. They may take consumer thoughts into account, but it’s important to remember everyone is consumer even if you work in the ag industry.

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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.