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By Alice McFarlane

Precision Agriculture

USask offers new precision ag certificate program

Oct 31, 2022 | 4:15 PM

MELFORT, Sask. – Starting in the fall of 2023, the University of Saskatchewan (USask) will offer a new agriculture program.

The Precision Agriculture Certificate will provide students with the opportunity to gain knowledge and develop skills to manage crops in both production and sustainability.

This includes satellite imagery, global positioning and information systems, big data, yield mapping, management zones to understand what drives within-field crop yield variability from year to year.

The program will be housed in the College of Agriculture and Bioresources and will bring together USask students from AgBio, the College of Engineering, and the Department of Computer Science to prepare them to be part of the evolving area of ag tech.

USask Plant Sciences professor Dr. Steve Shirtliffe said many of the world’s leading precision agriculture companies are based in Western Canada and look to hire USask graduates.

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“By leveraging competencies from their unique academic discipline students in the certificate program will be prepared for a variety of careers with a special focus on precision agriculture including agronomists, sales and marketing specialists, programmers and data analysts, and engineering machinery and control design,” Shirtliffe said.

It’s been a year of growth for the College of Agriculture and Bioresources.

Dean Dr. Angela Bedard-Haughn said this is the third new academic program announced by the college in the last year. Just last week the details of the Food Industry Management Degree were released. The third new program is the Bachelor of Science in Food and Nutrition degree which was announced in January.

“Our college is continually growing and strives to respond to student and community needs: providing hands-on training that combines both the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ and learning directly from industry-leading researchers,” Bedard-Haughn said. “With this new certificate program, we continue to equip students with the critical thinking skills they need that will go beyond when a certain technology may become obsolete.”

USask students can earn the Certificate in Precision Agriculture concurrently with a degree program from the College of Agriculture and Bioresources. This certificate is also available to USask students studying computer science or engineering.

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alice.mcfarlane@pattisonmedia.com

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