Western Crop Innovations looking for producer input

Sep 19, 2024

Western Crop Innovations (WCI), a newly established non-profit organization in Lacombe, is reaching out to producers for their valuable input on its research priorities. Emerging from the 50-year legacy of the Field Crop Development Centre, WCI is transitioning to an independent model with renewed focus on advancing agricultural research and development.

Currently, WCI specializes in developing barley and triticale varieties tailored for the prairies. As part of its mission to serve Canadian crop and livestock producers effectively, WCI is evaluating its research directions and is keen to align its efforts with the needs and concerns of the farming community.

To ensure their research addresses real-world needs, WCI is inviting producers from across the West to participate in a brief survey. This survey aims to gather insights on the most pressing areas of research and development, including expansion into new crops, the generation of local agronomic data, and potential areas of research extension. Responses will help shape the organization’s business plan and research focus.

The deadline to participate is September 27.

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.