Soybean biologicals remain a good investment

May 25, 2023

An agronomist says soybean seed inoculants remain a good investment for farmers.

Kurt Seevers with Verdesian says the rhizobia in the treatment helps provide adequate nitrogen for crops without having to add as much fertilizer. “If you find something that’s going to give you a return on investment, it doesn’t matter how big that return is, as long as it’s a return, then you’re making money.”

Seevers says many farmers believe having rhizobia in the soil means they don’t need to add more, but he says when the soybean plant deteriorates in the fall, the rhizobia leave the nodules and compete for resources in the soil making them less effective.

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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.