Results Driven Agriculture Research (RDAR) has invested funds in a collaborative project between Alberta’s producer-led Crop Sector Working Group (CSWG) and three major life-science companies. The collaboration will be working on a water stewardship and monitoring project.
The new project will help ensure that farmers have access to innovative crop protection tools, while upholding sound environmental stewardship. The project aims to gather scientific data to evaluate the effectiveness of wetland management practices in mitigating the movement of crop protection products into wetlands’ aquatic ecosystems.
From this on-farm research, best management practices will be developed to protect water habits from crop protection product use while providing substantive knowledge transfer and translation to producers.
The project objectives were developed in close collaboration with the Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA), which requires science-based data to support their regulatory evaluation and re-evaluation decisions. Data collected from this project will ensure there’s a representative set of western Canadian data available for regulatory bodies such as the PMRA.
Dr. David Chalack, RDAR board chair, says the research will ensure that decisions can be made based on accurate use and application of crop protection products.
“The collection of on-farm data in this project will increase the quality and relevance of information that can be used to inform policy and regulatory guidelines for crop protection product use, which are more realistic than laboratory data,” Chalack says. “Collaboration is in our DNA. This landmark project brings together producers, researchers, commissions, and national regulatory bodies, all dedicated to supporting the success and sustainability of Alberta’s agriculture industry.”
RDAR’s funding contributions — of which $417,500 comes from the Canadian Agricultural Partnership (CAP) — are valued at $750,000 over three-years.