This is agriculture: Third-generation Manitoba grain farmer

Nov 21, 2025

Rick Rutherford is a third-generation farmer whose deep passion for agriculture has led to local and international partnerships focused on advancing innovation and supporting the next generation of farmers. Rutherford is the first producer EMILI partnered with when launching Innovation Farms powered by AgExpert in 2022.

Locating the first Innovation Farms on Rutherford’s 5,500-acre seed farm in Grosse Isle, Manitoba has allowed EMILI to provide innovators with access to leading-edge equipment, technology, and production practices to increase productivity, sustainability, and profitability across the agriculture and agri-food sector.

Rutherford Farms has hosted Harvest on the Crescent since 2021. Each year a different crop grows on Wellington Crescent while raising money for Harvest Manitoba. Over the past five years this initiative has raised thousands.

Describe your job in one sentence.
I am a third-generation farmer operating a pedigreed seed and commercial grain farm located in the South Interlake at Grosse Isle, Manitoba, with a second farm in Gypsumville, Manitoba..

What early experiences fueled your passion for a career in agriculture.
When I was 18 years old I had an opportunity to go work on a farm in Australia. I worked for a very entrepreneurial person that changed my view of the world. When I came home, I had applied and was accepted at university but when it was time to go, agriculture was just taking off and things were happening so quickly that I went straight to work on my family farm.

Since then I’ve had the luxury of being able to travel and work in agriculture in other countries. There is a global aspect to everything I’ve done, from going to Agritechnica in Germany to travelling annually to Chile for the past 12 years. My friend in Chile also has 100 acres in Peru; all flowering vegetables which he is producing for seed. I’m looking forward to travelling there in December to consult with him.

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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.