For the third year in a row, the Macdonald Campus Dairy Unit has been awarded the title of Regional Club of Excellence Milk Quality Champion by dairy industry giant Agropur.

Accepting the award at a regional meeting on November 25, Natasha Lapointe, Animal Science Coordinator of the Dairy Unit, credited her team’s commitment to maintaining high standards.

In this new policy brief by Brenden McKinney, we learn that the effects of climate change are causing risk management to become an increasingly essential tool to help farmers anticipate and react to weather- related shocks like droughts and floods.

The glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup has been found to trigger the loss of biodiversity among phytoplankton communities in freshwater ponds. In their experiments, scientists found that while some populations developed resistance to the herbicide and were able to survive exposure at high levels, this came at a cost, with a 40 percent loss in biodiversity.

"The ubiquitous presence of glyphosate in the environment has sparked concerns over its potential health and ecotoxicological effects," Andrew Gonzalez, from Canada's McGill University, said. 

Canadian research is part of an extensive global climate change study that has found billions of the world’s poorest people are at risk.

The results, published Thursday in the journal Science, raise troubling questions about who will be able to adapt in a shifting, less dependable world.

“There’s a great potential for the problems to occur where people have the least ability to cope with it,” said Elena Bennett [NRS], who studies ecological systems at McGill University and is one of the paper’s 21 co-authors.

Dalhousie University, Lethbridge College and McGill University are collaborating with Farm Credit Canada on a 2 year pilot project to bring Canadian post-secondary agriculture students together to create innovative solutions to Canadian agricultural challenges. Fifteen students will bring their diverse Canadian perspectives together in cross-institutional teams responding to a specific regional agricultural issue. The challenge tasks will take teams through a creative problem solving matrix as they meet with local producers to discover the full amplitude of the challenge question.

Martine Bourgeois [BSc(Agr)'82] gagne pour une deuxième année consécutive le prix de l’Agricultrice de l’année de la Montérégie-Est. … « Quand je faisais mes études [au baccalauréat en agriculture à l’Université McGill], il y avait peu d’accès pour les filles. J’ai été chanceuse d’avoir eu un emploi, mais il a vraiment fallu que je fasse ma place. J’ai osé faire des changements et sortir de ma zone de confort, ce que je ne regrette pas.

The average Canadian might hold a romanticized view of agriculture in this country, but for a group of nearly 100 industry, academic, government folks, big data is key to the sector’s future.

The $250 million Smart Agri-Food Super Cluster (SASC) is one of nine industry-led projects, and one of two that focuses on agriculture, to be shortlisted for up to $950 million in federal innovation funding earmarked in last year’s budget.