#cabio-biotech

#cabio-biotech

The goal is to create thousands of sperm from a standard tissue biopsy. The company has had a high success rate in generating sperm from dozens of tissue samples.

The response that we saw was more of a, well, we already have that authority... so really nothing much needs to change.

Aquaponics systems utilize one gallon of water to produce a kilogram of leafy greens, compared to over 30 gallons in traditional farming, showcasing remarkable efficiency.

Plump, wiggly slugs may look innocuous, but they can wreak serious havoc on a carefully-curated garden, even causing total crop failure.

"We didn't know what we had," Michele Stansfield, co-founder and CEO of Cauldron Ferm, told TechCrunch. But eventually, Stansfield realized they had more than initially thought.

Bayer is supplementing human security patrols around its 8,000 acre Hawaiian corn farm with robotic security dogs, supplied by the tech firm Asylon. The Asylon dogs are meant to guard the company's precious maize from vandals, wildfires, wild fauna, and other hazards around the clock.

"The awesome thing with pulse crops is no nitrogen needs... not having to put any nitrogen on a pulse crop is a great starting point," he says, noting that this allows growers to not only meet PKS requirements but, in some cases, build soil fertility for the rotation.

Biology is undergoing a transformation. After centuries of studying life as it evolves naturally, researchers are now using a combination of computation and genome engineering to intervene, generating new proteins and even whole bacteria from scratch. The use of artificial-intelligence tools to design biological components, an approach known as generative biology, is set to turbocharge this area of research. Just last year, scientists used AI-assisted design to produce artificial genes that can be expressed in mammalian cells.

"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.

Martschenko's argument is largely that genetic research and data have almost always been used thus far as a justification to further entrench extant social inequalities. But we know the solutions to many of the injustices in our world-trying to lift people out of poverty, for example-and we certainly don't need more genetic research to implement them. Trejo's point is largely that more information is generally better than less.

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.

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.

"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?"

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.

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.

You can go onto your cloud account either through the iPad or your desktop computer and pre-plan all your jobs... when your hired man goes into the field he can just pick the job... and then hit start and you can go.

Broadcasting from Calgary, Alberta, your host Shaun Haney is joined by Tyler McCann, managing director of CAPI, and Saskatchewan farmer Daryl Fransoo to talk about profitability in ag and the role of the biofuel industry from a Canadian agriculture perspective. Thoughts on something we talked about on the show? Connect with host Shaun Haney via [email protected], on X/Twitter by using the hashtag #RealAgRadio, or give us a shout or text on the response line, 1-855-776-6147.