#farm-system-evaluation

#farm-system-evaluation

More than 30,000 hectares of land are covered in plastic, a geometric labyrinth five times the size of Manhattan, where 3.5m tons of vegetables are produced every year from tomatoes to cucumbers, peppers to courgettes, aubergines to melons, enough to feed half a billion people and generate a turnover of more than 3bn euros.

Around a third of UK gardeners use pesticides, and our studies found that house sparrow numbers, for example, were nearly 40% lower in gardens where the pesticide metaldehyde was used. By reducing pesticide use, you can actively encourage birds back into your outdoor spaces, as they rely on invertebrates such as slugs and snails as natural prey.

The avocado seedlings enabled him to grow his farm income to close to 2m Kenyan shillings, with each mature avocado tree yielding 70kg annually. Improving farming methods and conserving the watershed has helped me to feed and educate my six children.

Starting plants from seed extends your relationship with the garden, gives you more control over seed sourcing, and saves real money compared to buying nursery starts, sometimes as much as 90% per plant.

Across Ontario, producers are building healthier soils and improving their operations through everyday decisions - ones that shape productivity today and influence the legacy left for the next generation. The Ontario On-Farm Climate Action Fund (OFCAF) supports this work by providing cost-share funding to support the implementation of nitrogen management, cover cropping and rotational grazing projects. Many operations are already putting these beneficial management practices (BMPs) to work.

It can drive through the field and look at every square inch. We really honed our craft on model performance and detection with rocks, and now we've transitioned that into weeds. The robot uses a boom-mounted camera system to capture detailed imagery across the field. With eight cameras operating at 1 millimetre resolution, TerraScout can generate billions of data points per acre, allowing it to identify specific objects, including individual weeds.

For someone aiming to end the global livestock industry, Bruce Friedrich begins his new book called Meat in disarming fashion: I'm not here to tell anyone what to eat. You won't find vegetarian or vegan recipes in this book, and you won't find a single sentence attempting to convince you to eat differently. This book isn't about policing your plate.

"If Canada wants generational change in agricultural innovation, we need to transform our policy around how we fund plant breeding," he says. The current system, heavily reliant on public funding and check-off dollars, is increasingly under pressure. Reinheimer points to signs that Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) is shrinking its breeding footprint-especially in wheat, where AAFC varieties still account for about 80 per cent of acres. The problem? There's no updated funding model to match that shift.

The input planning calculator is a robust tool that can help farmers and agronomists better understand on-farm finances while helping uncover which crops make the most sense to plant from a cost perspective. By inputting key on-farm financial and agronomic data, including seed and agronomy service costs, growers can compare each crop on their farm and explore their true cost of production.

If we did that today, it would be a hundred percent, because right now, without question, 2026 is riskier than 2025. So farmers really [face significant challenges]. The war in Iran continues and it works back to the world of agriculture. It's had an impact on fertiliser and diesel prices and commodity markets, as well as currency.

The term "soil fatigue" or exhaustion refers to the condition that soil profiles take on when they've been heavily monocropped and untended. This soil is devoid of the microbial content that offers plants bioavailable food. It lacks the fungal and bacterial organisms that interact with plant nutrients.

"I've been with Syngenta for 28 years," Ramachandran says, noting that early travels across Canada shaped his passion for seed care. "What really stood out to me is seeing firsthand the passion, the resilience and the impact the growers made." Those experiences, combined with Canada's short growing season, continue to guide his work. "Everything that we have done... is around addressing those challenges, and how do we create solutions that are fit for purpose, for Canadian growers?"

My older brother has worked with pigs his entire adult life, managing about 70,000 of them across five counties, Faaborg says. But we got to a point where he went from laughing at me to saying: well, I guess maybe I'll quit my job and help you out. Now he's the most dedicated, says Katherine Jernigan, director of the Transfarmation Project at Mercy for Animals, a non-profit that helped the Faaborgs make the switch and set up their new business, 1100 Farm.

Yaghi describes AI not as a silver bullet, but as an advanced form of statistical pattern recognition-tools that can identify trends in data that may be difficult or time-consuming for people to uncover on their own. The real opportunity, he says, depends heavily on what farms are already doing. Operations that are consistently collecting and digitizing high-quality data are better positioned to benefit, whether the goal is lowering per-cow costs in a dairy, improving financial analysis, or identifying operational efficiencies.

According to the job posting, the successful candidate will serve as the lead provincial specialist for edible beans and edible oilseeds, including Identity Preserved (IP) soybeans, spring and winter canola, flaxseed, and sunflower. The role centres on technology transfer - developing and implementing strategies, policies, and programs - while coordinating projects that assess new and existing practices for their suitability under Ontario conditions. The specialist will also prepare and deliver educational tools, act as a liaison between the research community and industry, support policy and program development, and manage high-priority or contentious issues in the sector.

As concepts such as "regenerative" and "biodynamic" continue to enter the mainstream coffee lexicon, scientists continue to literally dig into the soil to give them meaning. A recent peer-reviewed study from India's Western Ghats argues that one of the clearest signals of healthy, sustainable coffee farms lies in the ground itself, with organic coffee soils performing better than soils from conventional farms treated with synthetic inputs.

When you think of farming, what ingredients do you generally associate with a successful harvest? The basics certainly come to mind: fertile soil, plenty of sunlight and lots of water. But there are other variables that can also mean the difference between a crop of healthy fruits and vegetables and a large heap of organic waste. And it turns out that one of those variables is a very small hawk.

If summer is for growing things, winter is for learning things.

Future Farm is a modular vertical farming system designed by Qing Duan for integration within urban architecture, proposing a model where buildings function as hydro-ecological systems. Rainwater is collected, filtered, and redistributed to support plant growth and domestic needs, establishing a closed-loop water cycle that combines sustainable agriculture with everyday city life. The project incorporates public greenhouse spaces, shared kitchens, rooftop farms, and educational zones to enable collective care, learning, and interaction with urban farming processes.

Based on years of post-transition reviews, MNP has identified seven traits common to successful farm families, MacLean says. First, they start early. Early planning allows flexibility and time to work through the tough stuff. Clear, respectful communication is the second trait - and it's essential. Families who talk openly and establish expectations avoid the dangerous territory of unspoken assumptions. Farms that navigate the process well have a shared vision.