Today’s cutting edge crop science could seem an intimidating matter, involving chemistry, biology and physics well beyond the elementary stuff most of us struggled with in high school.
But it’s very, very easy to see and feel the excitement and enthusiasm of the folks who dedicate their careers and lives to developing new solutions and tools for farmers, especially when they believe they’ve managed to do it. Regardless of their academic achievements and years of applied scientific research out in the field, scientists and science-based professionals buzz when they’ve got something new to show to farmers.
That’s what I witnessed yesterday when I visited the BASF research farm at Vanscoy, east of Saskatoon, to learn about RevyPro, a new fungicide for pulse crop producers that relies on a radical new combination of two Group 3 products to spread out the use of the Group 11 products that are beginning to lose their effect against resistant diseases.
The researchers and developers are clearly thrilled about developing – in lightning fast speed – what they think will be a powerful tool against the disease pressures that ravage so many farmers’ fields. This made-in-Canada innovation involves Revysol formulated in a product to allow for some sort of a rotating molecule to find the weak bits of pathogens, attack and cripple them. The science was, as you can tell, way above my head, but with people like these out at research farms scattered across Canada, I don’t really need to understand how it works. They’re doing that work for me.
Much of this type of work by various companies will be on display at Ag In Motion for the next three days, and I hope to see lots of you out there taking it in. There’s no show like AIM, with a sprawling site giving lots of room for exhibitors to lay out their best new products and ideas, and lots of room for farmers to assess whether or not they think those things will work for them on their farms.
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AIM has become a very big deal in the continuing development of Western Canadian farming and farm technology. Much now contains a digital element. Scientific analysis of crop results is now commonplace. High-tech systems have become both omnipresent and the realm of specialists.
But, as I saw out in Vanscoy, it’s still all powered by the same excitement and ambition of some of the best and brightest we have in agriculture to produce something new for farmers that solves a real problem they have today. When they think they’ve done it, they’re just delighted, and it’s delightful to see how excited innovators can be when the fruits of their labour, their scientific rigour, their years of education and their commitment to creating Prairie-relevant products becomes ripe and is ready to pluck and show to farmers.
