Farmers Business Network thinks the deal is good news for farmers.

“The work that AgraCity did to build their portfolio of products and labels will still be available to farmers going forward,” said Breen Neeser, FBN’s general manager for Canada.

“They have some really good products.”

He is happy that the AgraCity assets are staying in the hands of an established western Canadian company that has been in the agriculture business for a long time.

“They know farming,” he said.

“They’re partners with farmers.”

Why it Matters: Generic farm chemicals are becoming more widely used in Western Canada and elsewhere.

Neeser believes UFA was keen on expanding their footprint in Saskatchewan.

“I think that was part of the play,” he said.

He is pleased that the assets did not end up in the hands of a foreign entity.

“UFA is part of the fabric of western Canadian farming, especially Alberta and in some ways Saskatchewan now,” he said.

“I’m glad it’s in the hands of somebody who sees the business the same way.”

Five other bidders vied for the AgraCity assets during the creditor protection sale process, but FBN was not one of them.

“A lot of what AgraCity had to offer, we already have,” said Neeser.

“There wasn’t that much that we haven’t already found a way to access, so it didn’t have the same appeal to us as it did to others.”

FBN is also expanding its asset base. The company recently opened warehouses in Brandon and Grand Prairie, Alta., which will augment its other warehouse in Saskatoon.

The Brandon warehouse is almost fully stocked with product, while the Grand Prairie facility is in the process of being filled.

The company had previously been using third party providers in those two locations.

“This gives us a little bit more control on timing of deliveries,” said Neeser.

“We have more of our own people and we have more of our own trucks, so we fully expect to operate at a higher efficiency than we’ve ever operated at before.”

“I would expect a full dollar per litre change on glyphosate,” said Breen Neeser, Canadian manager for Farmers Business Network (FBN).

That could happen any day now, he said.

FBN and many other crop input retailers get their products from China, which means there could also be looming supply shortages.

“When you have a world event like this, that long supply chain becomes extremely difficult to manage,” he said.

“I think it’s going to have a real impact on who has what to sell this spring.”

Why it Matters: Fertilizer and diesel prices are already sky high, so farmers don’t need another blow.

Bill Prybylski, president of the Agricultural Producers Association of Saskatchewan, said he is not surprised that agriculture chemical costs are rising, given what has already happened with fertilizer and diesel prices.

“Margins were thin already, and this is just going to exacerbate that situation,” he said.

“There’s going to be a lot of red ink on a lot of farmers’ books come this fall.”

He described the situation as “death by a thousand cuts.”

Neeser said there has also been a tightening in ocean vessel availability, leading to delays for product arriving at the Port of Vancouver.

FBN was recently informed about its first major delay with a glufosinate shipment.

He said people need to “wake up” to the fact that product they thought would land in April or May could be delayed by a month or two.

“Some of it is going to miss the season,” said Neeser.

There are a myriad of reasons why prices are rising for crop protection products.

Some of it has to do with the cost of production.

For instance, yellow phosphate is a key ingredient in the manufacturing of glyphosate and glufosinate. It is suddenly in short supply and has become very pricey. Natural gas is another key input that is rising in price.

The other main reason for the price hike is soaring diesel prices.

That is driving up the transportation costs of getting raw ingredients to the manufacturing plants in China, moving the finished product to Chinese ports, shipping that product across the ocean and then hauling it to distribution points throughout Western Canada.

Some crop input retailers may have stockpiles of cheaper, older product and may be able to shield farmers from the looming price shock for a little while.

However, most suppliers tend to bring in product as close to when it is needed as possible to minimize carrying costs, which means the impact will be felt immediately.

Neeser said some farmers in Western Canada have had tremendous financial success over the past decade with a combination of good grain prices, moisture levels and yields.

However, there are pockets where farmers have not been so fortunate, and he worries about their ability to withstand today’s harsh environment, where it is going to be hard to generate a profit considering where input prices are at.

He thinks it could result in some farmers going out of business.

“I don’t mean to be doom and gloom on it, but the economic impact of this war is going to have related impacts on farm size and on who is farming and who isn’t and who can survive and who can’t,” he said.

Prybylski said it is “absolutely” correct that some farmers could be exiting the business this year.

“There are some producers that have been kind of just hanging on. This may be the death knell for them,” he said.

There has been improvement in grain prices lately, but some farmers won’t be able to participate in that rally because they had a small crop and had to liquidate it to pay last year’s bills.

And now they are facing across-the-board hikes in input costs for the 2026 crop.

“This is just going to be an extra pressure on their margins that may very well be the deciding factor for some guys to pull the pin on their operations,” said Prybylski.

Neeser is particularly concerned about Diquat, a popular herbicide and desiccant.

“One of the plants that makes dibromide, which is the active ingredient in Diquat, has come under attack and as far as we know is not producing well,” he said.

There are not many other facilities in the world that make that active ingredient, so there are big supply concerns for Diquat.

Prybylski said products such as Diquat and glufosinate are used later in the growing season, so he is hopeful the supply chain issues will be resolved by then.

However, he is very concerned about glyphosate costs and supplies because that is a major tool farmers use in the spring.

He noted that some producers already have the majority of their farm chemicals on hand or in position in a warehouse, but others prefer to hold off on purchases until needed.

“Those guys may be rethinking their decisions this spring,” he said.

Neeser said growers might be forced to consider using alternatives to traditional fertilizer and crop protection products, such as plant growth benefactors and nutritional supplements.

Some farmers may even decide to forego using certain products altogether because they can’t make the numbers work, he said.

The pest injects a phytoplasma into the plant, affecting hormones.

The leafhoppers spread aster yellows disease, which affects over 300 plants; including crops like canola, wheat and carrots as a generalist pest.

Testing for leafhopper aster yellows infection using laboratory and field-adaptable DNA extraction has improved by leaps and bounds. Confirmation comes within a half an hour compared to a week previously.

Why it Matters: The speed at which pests can be identified, and the conditions and best practices used in combating them, are crucial in saving yields in various crops.

“Where do the leafhoppers come from, and when they come in, how infected are they? This is the key to the outbreaks,” said Tyler Wist, a research scientist in field crop entomology, during his Pest-Side Story presentation at the 2026 Irrigated Crop Production Update in Lethbridge.

“There are a few different hypotheses going around. One, they come all the way up from Texas. Two, they come up and they hang around in Nebraska, Kansas and then they come up. Some years they don’t even get all the way to Canada on this northward (wind) migration.”

Aster yellows’ impact on canola yields seems to be linked to moisture levels. Wist showed graphs of big outbreaks in May 2012 and May 2023, with a wide variance of moisture levels at the time. The much drier season in 2023 resulted in less damage overall, backed by a 2015 Elliott/Olivier study of leafhopper feeding density with corresponding canola seed yield in dry and wet conditions.

“I was catching leafhoppers that were infected over 61 per cent of the population, which is completely unheard of for aster yellows hoppers coming up here,” said Wist.

A working hypothesis is that canola seed treated with insecticide kills the leafhopper alongside the flea beetle. Under dry soil conditions, most of the leafhoppers died with 24 hours and did not affect the plants.

Under the wet soil conditions, only about half of the leafhoppers died with the rest remaining to hang around and feed on the plant.

Moist conditions cut down on the impact of the insecticides by taking a lot out of the root zone, where the plant does not pick it up, allowing the leafhopper to survive longer as a vector and increasing the chance of aster yellows infestation.

To date, only pesticides registered for use with drones — often called remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS) — can legally be applied by drones. Almost none are registered for drone application.

WHY IT MATTERS: The proposed regulations would make many existing pesticides available for application by drone. To date, almost no products have been made available for legal application by drone — though anecdotal evidence suggests drone application is happening on the down low.

Health Canada’s Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA) proposes to allow currently registered products, where the label permits aerial application — that is, by fixed wing or rotary aircraft — to be applied by drone.

Applicators would need to comply with all the label directions for aerial application, including spray volume, application rate, droplet size, treatment interval and spray buffer zones.

When used according to aerial application instructions, the PMRA said, drone application is not expected to impact the value of the pesticide being applied.

Based on data from global studies, spray drift with drone application is similar to ground application. Spray buffer zones established for conventionally-piloted rotary wing aircraft will be adequate. The PMRA also said pesticide residues on food crops are not higher than with conventional applications.

The PMRA said there isn’t enough data for a full risk assessment on safety risks of operators exposure to pesticides; however, it says available evidence suggests it’s “unlikely to be higher than with conventional equipment” — particularly because tasks such as mixing, loading and application must be done by different people, just as with other aerial spraying.

Consultations opened on Feb. 23 and close March 25.

Drone pilots would still require the relevant licenses from Transport Canada.

PMRA passes five-year mark on regulation studies

The PMRA began studying drone regulations in 2019. In September, members of the federal standing committee on agriculture asked the PMRA’s senior director general Frédéric Bissonette what was taking so long.

Bissonette cited scientific issues — for example, that a drone did not behave the same as an airplane — and pledged to have “something in place for next year.”

“Canada seems to be kind of falling behind other jurisdictions in terms of allowing this type of use,” CropLife Canada CEO Pierre Petelle told Glacier FarmMedia in late 2025.

“With these products being used in many other western-type jurisdictions … there should be ways of coming to conclusions much quicker than we have,” he added.

Crop protection companies, meanwhile, have been conducting studies to collect drone-specific data for their products.

Anecdotal evidence suggested farmers were using already drones to apply pesticides on the down low.

The European Union is taking an increasingly precautionary approach to agriculture innovation, removing about half of the crop protection products available to its farmers over the past 10 years.

The EU is now under pressure by its farmers to use pesticide reciprocity to block food imports produced using those same banned products.

“Depending on reciprocity’s implementation specifics as the policy comes into force in spring 2026 and then expands, all grain exports to the EU (cereal, oilseed and pulse crops) could be restricted or halted,” the council stated in a recent white paper on the subject.

“Allowing it to proceed unchecked will also impede Canada’s broader trade diversification efforts because many countries around the world are influenced by EU trade policies.”

Why it Matters: The EU has been identified as one of Canada’s top markets for trade diversification.

The council is calling on the federal government to establish and lead a coalition of like-minded countries to push back on the EU’s pesticide reciprocity measures.

It is also calling on Ottawa to use existing mechanisms in the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) and World Trade Organization to address trade irritants related to reciprocity on its own.

On Dec. 16, the European Commission published a proposed regulatory simplification package that includes amendments to the EU’s pesticide maximum residue limits law and regulation.

The proposal would allow the EU to set MRLs at the limit of detection, which is effectively zero tolerance, for substances no longer approved in the EU.

“We feel this issue is becoming more and more urgent,” said Mac Ross, vice-president of trade policy and crop protection with the Canada Grains Council.

The EU’s approach to regulation changed after it implemented the European Green Deal and Farm to Fork Strategy.

It departed from internationally accepted risk assessment principals and moved to a hazard-based system.

“Broadly, this means regulating pesticides on the basis of hazard alone, without considering the extent of exposure, which the rest of the world’s regulators consistently do,” the council said in its white paper.

That is why only two new active ingredients have been approved by the EU in the past decade.

This new approach led to a ban of neonicotinoid insecticides followed by the decision to slash MRLs that apply to neonic residues on imported food effective March 2026.

“Neonic insecticides are the first innovation targeted, but the EU has clearly articulated there will be others,” said the council.

In its notification to the WTO, the EU acknowledged that neonics are safe for consumers and that the ban was strictly to protect pollinators.

Ross said that is the first time a country or bloc has changed its MRLs based on environmental concerns rather than food safety concerns.

Global legal action to get an injunction on that policy change is ongoing, but the EU still intends to move forward with the controversial policy.

The EU’s pesticide reciprocity strategy has triggered almost 900 Specific Trade Concerns at the WTO filed by more than 30 countries.

Farmers around the world are being confronted by the choice of either losing the EU market or not applying pesticides that have been approved by their own governments.

Ross said the EU’s new neonic MRLs will not have a big impact on Canada’s ability to continue using those active ingredients.

“Those actives we use as seed treatments,” he said.

“We’re not worried about any detectible residues or anything like that.”

What he is concerned about is the precedent it sets. It will be the first time the EU’s pesticide reciprocity rules take effect, but not the last.

That is why the council wants Canada to lead the charge in forming a coalition to fight back in unison against the EU’s reciprocity regulations.

“This group’s first short-term priority should be to advocate that EU import tolerances for agricultural products must be determined solely on the basis of dietary risk rather than the introduction of environmental criteria,” stated the council.

The coalition should also try to achieve MRL alignment on pesticides using an approach based on “scientific rigour and commercial realities.”

The council also wants Canada to push back on its own. Canada’s concerns with the EU’s reciprocity measures should be added to the agendas for upcoming CETA and WTO committee meetings.

“At least show them that they can’t just move forward with this approach unimpeded and unchecked,” said Ross.

He said now is the time to speak up and talk about how divergence away from science-based risk assessment can disrupt trade at a time when Canada is attempting to double non-U.S. exports over the next decade.

AgraCity is a Saskatchewan crop input provider owned by Jason Mann and James Mann.

The firm and a multitude of affiliated companies were granted creditor protection by the Saskatchewan Court of King’s Bench on Dec. 1, 2025.

The court granted a stay of proceedings until March 6, 2026, providing the company with the breathing room to reorganize or restructure.

AgraCity’s financial problems first came to light in June 2025 when the company was forced to cancel orders for 1,228 farmer customers and issue store credit because it did not have sufficient liquidity to purchase the $32.4 million tonnes of product they ordered.

The court has granted AgraCity Group a sales and investment solicitation process (SISP) approval order that among other things approved a stalking horse agreement with UFA.

The agreement essentially sets a floor price for the AgraCity Group assets.

Why it Matters: Farmers are owed product by AgraCity.

UFA has agreed to pay $20 million for those assets. That total includes an allocation of $8 million to Genesis Grain & Fertilizer, which will be used to pay off a $7.7 million mortgage with the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC).

HarvestGuard Agronomy recently attempted to replace UFA as the stalking horse bidder.

HarvestGuard is a firm based in Moose Jaw, Sask., that is “dedicated to revolutionizing the way farmers access essential herbicides,” according to the company’s website.

Court documents list Bing Wang as the company’s president and sole director.

HarvestGuard offered a minimum purchase price of $34.1 million for AgraCity’s assets.

The offer included a cash purchase price of $22 million, $7.6 million for liabilities owed to creditors and $5.5 million for new products to generate new orders from customers.

Ernst and Young, which is the court-appointed monitor, did not approve of HarvestGuard’s attempt to replace UFA as the stalking horse bidder.

The monitor said HarvestGuard’s letter of intent was not done in accordance with the SISP procedures.

HarvestGuard eventually withdrew its application, which was never heard by the court.

That means UFA remains the stalking horse bidder entering phase 1 of the sales process.

The monitor has contacted about 80 potential bidders for the AgraCity assets.

During phase 1, those qualified bidders have an opportunity to submit a non-binding letter of intent to buy the AgraCity assets by Feb. 6.

The monitor, a sales adviser and AgraCity will review those letters of intent and select parties to enter phase 2 of the process.

During phase 2, parties will be required to submit binding offers to acquire part or all or the business.

The original deadline for that process was Feb. 16, 2025, but it is being extended to a yet-to-be-determined date.

If the monitor receives multiple bids, it will run an auction to determine the superior bid.

UFA will then have the right to top that superior bid by at least $2 million.

Farmers who invested in the Genesis Grain & Fertilizer distribution centre are going to have to wait and see what happens to that investment.

“It’s going to depend on the outcome of the sales process,” said Ernst & Young senior vice-president Peter Chisholm.

“Creditors would have to be paid in full before there would be funds available to any limited partnership unit holders or investors.”

That simple idea sparked a four-year research project at the University of Manitoba, where Yvonne Lawley, associate professor of plant science, and Alejandro Costamagna, professor of entomology have been testing whether standing cover from fall rye or spring-seeded nurse crops can reduce early feeding.

The work was demonstrated publicly at the U of M Field Day in Carman this past July, where Lawley and two graduate students presented the results and the agronomic questions arising from them.

Why it Matters: Flea beetles remain one of the Prairies’ most frustrating canola pests, and early feeding damage can push growers toward costly in-season sprays.

The concept started with a social media thread.

Several farmers had accidentally left fall rye standing too long in spring, then noticed their canola seedlings seemed to suffer less defoliation. Rather than brush off the anecdote, after a gentle nudge from her grad students, Lawley dipped her toe into the discussion, then quickly became immersed.

“Agronomists and farmers were sharing their collective observations in the social media space about this effect,” she said.

The outcome of those discussions led to a formal study with support from Manitoba Canola Growers and funding from CARP (Canola Agronomic Research Program). The goal was to test whether a living cover could shield canola long enough for seedlings to outgrow their most vulnerable stages.

Small-plot findings

Graduate student Aleksander Zashev walked farmers through four seasons of small-plot trials comparing fall rye termination timings. Late termination — holding off until canola reached the two-leaf stage — consistently led to less defoliation and fewer flea beetles. However, those same treatments also posed the highest risk of yield loss. In two of the four years, tall rye shaded the canola enough to drag yields down.

A clear pattern was emerging: more biomass meant more protection, but the added competition risked greater yield losses.

Spring-seeded oats were also evaluated as a nurse crop because they pose far less agronomic risk than fall rye. Oats emerge later and grow shorter, so they are far less likely to shade canola seedlings. The oat treatments produced little change in defoliation or flea beetle numbers, except in one case at a higher seeding rate. The results were predictable, but still useful: they reinforced the pattern seen with rye — biomass is the main driver of the hiding effect.

Lawley said the challenge is finding the sweet spot between maximum hiding and minimal shading. Waiting until canola reaches the two-leaf stage offers the strongest hiding effect, but that same biomass can shade seedlings and slow early growth.

Data showed the most balanced option was terminating when canola was still at the cotyledon stage. Because glyphosate doesn’t kill the rye immediately, the standing plants provide a short window of protection before they die off.

“We have a seven-day window before that fall rye is terminated,” said Lawley.

Taking it to the field

Graduate student Raquel Chinchin Talavera presented the on-farm phase of the study. That phase was launched in 2024 with four cooperating growers in the south-central region of the Red River Valley. Full-field strips, 36 metres wide, were seeded with and without a cover crop to see whether the small-plot trends hold under real farm conditions.

Early observations show slightly more flea beetles in bare canola strips than in strips with a living nurse crop, though the wider spacing between monitoring traps means overall counts are lower than in the small plots. Yield data from the second season is still pending.

While the research has validated that standing cover can interrupt flea beetle activity, Lawley wants growers to be cautious in how they interpret the early results. There are still many unknowns. Row orientation, stand density and fertility management could all influence outcomes. And, significantly, the agronomic costs (yield hits from competition, shading, moisture use and possible nitrogen tie-up) are real.

So, would Lawley recommend this for large acres at this point?

“No, we’re still working on it,” she said. “I feel like it’s still a high-risk practice for canola at this point.”

Where it could lead

Despite the uncertainty, she sees potential. Growers already experimenting with fall rye or spring nurse crops for soil health or weed management may one day be able to layer flea beetle suppression into those systems. But before any of this becomes a recommendation, researchers need to fine-tune the agronomy enough to reduce the risk of yield penalties.

The project concludes its CARP-funded phase after the 2025 season, but Lawley has already seeded more fall rye to continue teasing apart the variables. She hopes future work can answer questions about seeding rate, termination timing, nitrogen management and how to optimize cover without compromising stand establishment. The biggest unknown remains how the flea beetle feeding process is disrupted.

“We still don’t understand the mechanism of how flea beetles are seeing, smelling, sensing the canola, and how having living cover interrupts it,” she said. “It would be worthwhile trying to understand that mechanism so we can optimize this practice.”

For now, the idea remains a promising possibility rather than a new tool — a reminder that Prairie innovation often starts with a farmer noticing something odd, and a curious researcher willing to follow the thread.

“We’ve validated the observation that cover crops can hide canola from flea beetles. Now we need to de-risk it.”

The Court of King’s Bench for Saskatchewan has granted AgraCity Group protection against its creditors.

Related story: Genesis Grain & Fertilizer investors are fuming

The protection is designed to give the company breathing room to reorganize or restructure. It is in place until March 6, 2026.

In the meantime, AgraCity’s management is attempting to sell the crop input provider and its legion of affiliated companies.

Why it Matters: A lot of farmers are still owed product by AgraCity.

The company has a “stalking horse” agreement with United Farmers of Alberta Co-operative Ltd. (UFA) to purchase the bulk of its assets for $20 million.

That total includes an allocation of $8 million to Genesis Grain & Fertilizer, which will be used to pay off a $7.7 million mortgage with the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC).

The term sheet negotiated with UFA also includes $4 million in interim financing and a $1 million break fee if the deal does not close.

UFA recently announced that it is opening its first Farm and Ranch Supply store in Saskatchewan in 2026.

That first store will be in Emerald Park, nine kilometres east of Regina. The five-acre development includes three buildings totaling 18,600 sq. feet.

The potential AgraCity purchase would greatly add to UFA’s Saskatchewan footprint.

The $20 million agreement is a “back-stopping bid,” which means there will be an opportunity for other interested parties to top the offer.

They will be able to do so in a two-phase bidding process with deadlines of Jan. 30, 2026, and Feb. 16, 2026.

If another company has the successful bid, then UFA will be returned its $4 million in interim financing.

AgraCity was founded by Jason Mann and James Mann in 2007, each as 50 per cent shareholders.

It has since expanded into an integrated group of companies providing crop protection products to more than 2,000 Canadian farmers, according to court documents.

The company sources its inventory from suppliers in China, India, Mexico, Europe and the United States.

Those goods and raw materials are then processed by AgraCity and sold to farmers.

AgraCity’s assets include Genesis Grain & Fertilizer, which operates a distribution centre in Belle Plaine, Sask. That centre supplies product to AgraCity and other crop input providers.

That company has no relationship to Genesis Fertilizers, a firm that is attempting to build a $2.3 billion nitrogen fertilizer plant in Belle Plaine.

Genesis Fertilizers is not part of the AgraCity creditor protection proceedings and has no financial, governance, or operational connection to Genesis Grain & Fertilizer.

The only link is that Jason Mann is a director of Genesis Fertilizers.

BDC is the only secured creditor in the proceedings, aside from some companies that have leased equipment to AgraCity.

AgraCity’s problems first came to light earlier this year when it was unable to deliver $30 million worth of product to its customers due to liquidity issues.

The company announced in June that it was cancelling orders and issuing store credits to customers.

However, 1,200 farmers were still owed $27 million in prepaid product as of Nov. 25.

AgraCity intends to use some of the interim financing plus revenue generated from new crop input sales in addition to existing inventory to supply farmers with product they are owed.

Ernst & Young, the court-appointed monitor for the creditor protection process, has reviewed the plan and believes it is achievable.

The interim financing has also been used to pay employees what they were owed.

However, there is still $948,800 in payroll deductions that had not been remitted as of Nov. 20, 2025.

That money takes priority on the creditor list and will be remitted upon the closing of the sale of AgraCity Group.

The company has also implemented a $400,000 Key Employee Retention Plan (KERP).

That is a bonus that will be paid to key employees to retain them though the creditor protection process.

Glacier FarmMedia – At the end of October, the Pest Management Regulatory Agency quietly approved a copper sulphate product called Harvest Miracle.

The fungicide remains the only agricultural chemical in Canada available to be applied by drone — legally applied, that is.

It’s an open secret that, with more than a thousand drones already sold in Canada, crop protection products are being applied on the down low.

As the PMRA passes the five-year mark on drone regulation development, groups representing farmers and chemical manufacturers are calling for a clearer pathway to product approval.

The PMRA says to expect something soon.

The agency began studying drone spraying regulations in 2019. This September, members of the federal standing committee on agriculture asked the PMRA’s senior director general, Frédéric Bissonette, what was taking so long.

“There were scientific issues with drones at the outset,” Bissonette said, such as a drone possibly not behaving in the same way as an airplane.

Drone experts noted this issue early on.

In a 2019 Western Producer article, Sprayers 101 writer and researcher Tom Wolf said the agriculture industry didn’t understand the behaviour of droplets emitted from drones.

“In a multi-rotor drone, each individual rotor spins at a unique rate, depending on the place it needs to go. Every time the rotor speeds up or slows down, it changes the aerodynamics underneath that aircraft,” Wolf said.

By comparison, the aerodynamics of a fixed-wing aircraft is relatively constant.

There are other practical considerations.

A drone’s tank is much smaller than that of a ground sprayer and will need to be refilled frequently. Operators’ chemical exposure could be greater. In a sector with razor-thin margins, farmers may push the boundaries of what’s on the label for the sake of efficiency, said Kevin Falk, a field modernization scientist for Corteva who has been conducting drone spraying field trials in Manitoba.

Reducing water volume, such as applying a more concentrated product, is one way applicators might try to speed up spraying, Falk said. However, depending on the product they’re using, this can have implications for spray drift and product efficacy.

“That’s something we have to consider … so we’re not creating a label that they can’t follow, or that we’re cutting corners in order to sell more product,” Falk said.

Crop protection companies have set about generating data on drift, efficacy and safety. However, this is an arduous process requiring layers of approvals from the PMRA and Transport Canada.

Avoiding duplication

Drone trials are in progress around the world, and crop protection products are being applied by drones in other countries. The PMRA considers some of this information in its assessments.

“The PMRA will accept data generated in countries outside of Canada if use conditions are comparable/applicable,” a spokesperson said in an email.

“For example, the industry-led Unmanned Aerial Pesticide Applications System Task Force is conducting spray drift trials across several continents, and the PMRA is considering the latest data generated for use in drone-specific spray drift models.”

A spokesperson said the agency is reviewing safety and environmental risk data and also advised on a large-scale spray drift trial. Still, there may be more ways to avoid duplication, according to CropLife Canada, which represents pesticide manufacturers.

“Canada seems to be kind of falling behind other jurisdictions in terms of allowing this type of use,” said CropLife president and chief executive officer, Pierre Petelle.

“With these products being used in many other western-type jurisdictions, there should be ways of coming to conclusions much quicker than we have.”

Petelle suggested a dialogue between regulators in different jurisdictions.

The PRMA could also go the way of some jurisdictions in the United States and declare that any pesticides already approved for aerial application, such as a crop duster, could be used in a drone. This approach would be helpful to producers, Catherine Lessard told the House of Commons agriculture committee earlier this fall.

Lessard is the associate executive director of the Association des producteurs maraîchers du Québec.

The PMRA is considering this approach.

Bissonnette told the agriculture committee he was pushing to have “something in place for next year.”

When asked what this meant, the PMRA spokesperson said, “we expect to soon be in a position to issue a regulatory decision regarding drone application of pesticides, where aerial use is already authorized, following the completion of our scientific review.”

The PMRA isn’t the only federal agency involved in drone regulation. The safety of the actual drones is handled by Transport Canada.

New rules took effect in November that added a Level 1 Complex Operations licensing level for drone pilots. This allows pilots to fly small or medium-sized drones in lower-risk flights beyond visual line of sight if away from populated areas.

It adds a potential additional licensing option for agricultural drone operators.

However, for drone application of chemicals, operators may need a special flight operations certificate (SFOC), said Erika Carrasco, a partner at law firm MLT Aikins, who has expertise in technology law, including drone regulation. She said special flight operations certificates are Transport Canada’s way of managing drone use cases where they’ve yet to draft specific regulation.

“As we know more about the risk levels, then they can regulate for it,” Carrasco said.

“If they can’t regulate for it, then it goes through the customized special flight operation certificate process where Transport Canada basically sits down with the end user and tries to imagine how this will be safe and appropriate.”

When Transport Canada has enough examples of safe drone pesticide application, it may write specific regulations for that type of use. At present, anyone looking to apply pesticides by drone may need to check if they require the certificate.

Not all operations will require a SFOC to conduct agricultural spraying with a drone, a Transport Canada spokesperson said.

“Transport Canada regulates the safe operation of drones via the Canadian Aviation Regulations (CARs) based on aviation and public safety not the drone’s end use. Depending on the operating environment, a pilot may require specific certification (i.e.: Basic or Advanced or Level 1 Complex), or an SFOC-RPAS for special operations.”

Risks and Benefits

Agriculture groups have made the case that Canada’s slow roll on drone regulation is putting farmers at a competitive disadvantage.

“The Americans have access to this technology — they have for several years,” Canadian Grains Council vice-president Mac Ross told the agriculture agriculture committee in early October.

He said this illustrated the need to draw on expertise from trusted jurisdictions such as the U.S. to speed up the regulatory process.

“We need to be on a level playing field,” Ross said.

“Our growers need to have access to the same technologies as growers in other jurisdictions.”

Farmer interest in drone technology is growing if the expanding offerings at farm shows is any indication. Anecdotal evidence also suggests farmers are flouting PMRA rules and spraying anyway.

“Everyone knows it’s happening,” said Adrian Rivard, owner and operations manager of Ontario-based Drone Spray Canada, which sells drones and provides training to operators.

Not that all buyers are looking to spray pesticides. For example, Rivard said some cover crop seed companies offer drone seeding services. Others are interested in using drones to seed pastures or apply fertilizer.

However, irresponsible drone use is a concern, Rivard said. He cited a dicamba spray drift incident in Manitoba.

“It’s certainly not helping the dicamba chemistry. It’s also not helping the drone stuff,” he said.

“(It) certainly does increase that risk for, again, Health Canada to put the brakes on everything and say, ‘you guys are being idiots.’ ”

Beyond regulation, misapplication of pesticides can be an agronomic risk, Rivard said. Spraying less than is needed to kill weeds could increase resistance issues.

“It’s not just regulation. It’s stewardship,” he said.

News stories about drones gone wrong may also cause the public to associate drones with their downsides rather than their benefits.

“Those are the stories that in the past have been more publicized,” said Carrasco.

“Man gets charged flying drone near airport. Man gets charged flying drone in national park … all these things which make the public assume that drones are bad.”

“You just need to understand how it’s supposed to be used,” she said.

Do the benefits outweigh the risks? Will the Canadian economy succeed more with drone technology than without?

“By far, the answer is yes,” Carrasco said.

Today’s pesticides often struggle with non-specificity, said Justin Pahara, research scientist and principal investigator in the Nano Lab at the federal agriculture research station in Lethbridge.

While there are emerging products that target specific biological vulnerabilities of a given pest, for the most part, “the way they work now is they’re broad spectrum.… When you spray them, they impact different other species, whether it is a plant, insect or fungi,” he said.

Why it Matters: Ag companies are increasingly looking for pinpoint accuracy for targeting specific pests, allowing better control and less risk to farm-friendly insects such as pollinators or natural predators.

The researcher hopes nanotechnology might help farmers of the future reap the pest control benefits of chemical application without some of the environmental or farm productivity downsides.

Chemicals tend to target the nervous system of insects. The common insecticide imidacloprid, for example, mimics the toxic impacts of nicotine at the molecular level. It’s applied at doses too low to impact humans but are still deadly to insects.

However, Pahara and his team of five research assistants are working on new crop treatments that target pests at the genetic level. Their first targets: lygus bugs and cutworms.

“DNA is specific to a particular organism,” said Pahara.

“When you go across a species, from a honeybee to a cutworm, their genomes are quite different, and this gives us the opportunity to leverage that through a couple different ways.”

The project is one of a new wave of products under development that look to RNA.

“RNA is the intermediary between DNA and proteins, and there’s a very special pathway mechanism that happens in cells,” Pahara said.

“If you put a small piece of very specific RNA into a cell that’s foreign to that cell, there’s a good chance the cell will recognize it as foreign, and then it will act similarly to an antibody and an immune response. It’ll use that little piece of DNA that it found to target and cut up more of the RNA it sees.”

RNA, for example, is a critical component of most viruses.

“It’s highly technical, but basically, we’re targeting specific genomics or nucleic acid fingerprints within each (insect),” Pahara said.

In crop protection, RNAi, or RNA interference technologies, are already looking to influence certain gene expressions specific to certain organisms, turning pest control into more of a surgical sniper operation than a blanket chemical bombardment. Researchers have begun looking for RNAi solutions to a wide range of agricultural pests, from diseases such as sclerotinia to insect pests such as flea beetles or parasitic varroa mites.

Most of the appeal of RNA-based control comes from its novelty. It opens a new, non-chemical method to which pests have not yet begun to develop resistance, keeping more management tools viable for longer, reducing farmer reliance on chemical product, and also potentially dodging pesticide limits that can hinder trade.

“We need new crop treatments,” said Pahara.

“We need them to be less toxic.”

If crop treatments are determined to be so specific that they don’t harm other insects, let alone humans, that allows for a lot more freedom of use, he said.

The age of nano

Members of the research team, which includes students from the universities of Lethbridge, Calgary and Alberta, are developing methods to track how nano-substances move into and through insects so they can better choose which bits of RNA to target for control of that insect.

The team did some work at the Canadian Light Source in Saskatoon. That facility is based around a synchotron, which is a particle accelerator that accelerates electrons to the speed of light. Those electrons are then diverted and converted to high energy X-rays. The X-rays then go into little rooms around the synchotron ring, which in turn can be used for highly detailed, microscopic imaging.

To investigate treatments against lygus bugs, the team used different beam lines, including the BioXAS beam.

“This one is cool because it allows you to image something, just like you would in a camera,” said Pahara.

However, unlike a camera, imaging based on BioXAS data gives a full spectrum of information, such as revealing the chemical elements present in each pixel.

The researchers treated insects with nanoparticles and nucleic acids and then, after exposing them to imaging, were able to see where those elements went within the insect’s anatomy.

In order to get a 3D image (BioXAS data is usually presented in two-dimensions), each insect was cross-sectioned into 40 slices. Each of those slices was imaged and the data combined to form a full 3D picture of that insect.

“We had this three-dimensional insect, where we could see where all the elements are in it. That’s important because it gives us three dimensions of spatial resolution, so we can see where stuff is going,” the researcher said.

But what about if the insect pests start to adapt to this control avenue as well? If an insect’s DNA changes to the point that the RNA-based solution isn’t effective, Pahara believes the crop treatments can be adjusted.

“It allows us to tweak and reprogram them easily, whereas with the old generation of treatments, they’re just small chemicals. You just can’t tweak them,” he said.

The research has now been expanded to fusarium head blight and kochia.

“We’re developing methods that work for screening, and we’re starting to ramp up screening, which means we’re testing lots of different kinds of formulations that have different nano materials in them. As we screen thousands of different systems, we’ll know the ones that may work best,” he said.

After material has been tested in the lab, it will eventually move to greenhouse trials and field trials.