If you’ve been attending agricultural conferences in the past few years, you’ve likely heard the phrase “social license to operate.” It essentially boils down to the approval of a certain industry by local communities and public stakeholders. With new regulations affecting farms, maintaining social license has become a priority for modern agriculture. At the 2015... Read More

The application of “big data” in farming makes sense in theory. More data enables better decision-making, but at the individual farm level it can be difficult to accumulate a large enough sample size for actionable agronomic analysis. Variety XYZ performed well on one field last year, so should you grow more of that variety next... Read More

David Lobb, professor in the department of soil science at the University of Manitoba, and senior research chair for the Watershed Systems Research Program, has been studying the effects of tillage erosion for over twenty years. Tillage erosion is the process whereby soil is moved down slope, to convergent areas of a field. It causes... Read More

Cibus, a trait-based company that was founded in 2001, uses a “Rapid Trait Development System” to edit native genes without the introduction of foreign DNA. “The technology is applied in such a way that it’s a non-GM approach,” explained James Radtke, vice president of product development, at the Canola Discovery Forum in Canmore, this winter.... Read More

Individual nozzle control is becoming a reality, or at least an option, when it comes to applying pesticides with precision. Although they don’t have a major presence in Canada, Italian spraying technology manufacturer Arag has been selling its Seletron control system for several years. With individual nozzles that are automatically activated by a GPS-linked controller... Read More