A team from the University of Guelph has taken the top honour at the 2023 Weed Science Olympics in Union City, Tennessee, winning first place overall.
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Seventeen Guelph students in total attended, many of whom took home achievements in individual events and competitions. A team of four took the first place overall award.
Why it matters: International competitions can help set up students in agriculture with career-defining experience.
Team member Curtis Vanrooy said that he and his three teammates, Stephanie Fletcher, Noelle Adams and Joe Rastapkevicius have known each other throughout their time at Guelph, meaning teamwork came naturally.
“We’re all 2023 graduates, which means we have all taken the same classes through undergrad and we’re all friends,” said Vanrooy, “so it made it really easy as a team to learn and practice together because we’ve been doing that anyways through our undergrad.”
The competition is comprised of five different events: wheat I.D, herbicide I.D, agricultural math, sprayer calibration and the ‘farmer’s problem’ event, which Vanrooy described as a sort of industry simulation.
“You’ll have a person talking to you and there’ll be an unknown problem, and you have to ask them a variety of questions which they will answer,” Vanrooy said, “and then the goal is to get to the bottom of the problem and get it correctly, and then make them a recommendation based on the problem.”
Vanrooy said he thought this exercise would be helpful for someone aspiring to a career in agriculture.
“It’s a real-life simulation,” he said. “It’s exactly what most people will be doing in an agricultural career because farmers always have issues.”
The competition was sponsored by Bayer and hosted at their research farm, though other companies like Corteva had employees present. Vanrooy said this was encouraging to someone entering the industry.
“They weren’t exactly scouting, but if you were successful, I’m sure they would keep an eye out if you were in the area of where they work.
“Based off of our results, we all know that we are very capable and there’s nothing you really can’t do,” said Vanrooy, “because as long as you work hard and learn, there’s nothing you can’t do”
This feeling was shared by weed science professor Dr. Francois Tardif, who acted as organizer and coach for the Guelph team. He said that overcoming major U.S. competition could be especially encouraging.
“We look up to the United States. Some of the big schools are represented there,” said Tardif. “Davis, Wisconsin, Cornell, Penn State. It’s like, wow, this is impressive. Like, some students said this is intimidating. And then you come back and you realize why we beat them, or we did very well. It’s a boost in confidence.”
He said that having a young, capable team encouraged like this could have future impacts on the Canadian agriculture industry.
“One of my colleagues said, you know, from one week ago, Canadian agriculture is better because we got these budding agronomists that will be working soon or are already working, that increased their confidence.”
Being held in the southern USA, the Weed Olympics posed certain challenges to a Canadian Team: Stephanie Fletcher, another member of the Guelph team said that Tennessee had many regional differences in agriculture.
“Things like having cotton as one of the problems is a huge, I guess you could say a disadvantage to the Canadian team,” said Fletcher.
“Dealing with cotton, so something we don’t grow in Canada and also the different weeds they have down there that we don’t have up here such as Palmer Amaranth. So, dealing with those kinds of things adds a different element.”
She said she felt that this added to the accomplishment of winning first place at the competition.
“I think that just bodes more for our success with winning overall competition for the undergraduate students,” she said. “Clearly having those challenges, you know, we were able to tackle them.”
She said the preparation often involved long nights of rigorous studying.
“It’s a lot of talking through it,” she said. “I mean, all of us have jobs within the industry. So, we have different experiences.”
She said those different experiences gave their team a variety of strengths.
“Noelle and I have done a lot more scouting jobs, so we maybe were a bit stronger in our weed identification,” she said. “Joe, our teammate, you know, works for BASF at their research facility, so he’s always calibrating sprayers and always doing all that math, and that’s the strength he brought to the team.”
“Curtis … is always talking to growers, and I think that really carried him through with helping us on the grower part.
“We all kind of brought our different strengths, and so I think when we were studying it was more like ‘okay, who’s taking the lead?’”
The win was not unprecedented for Guelph. Tardif said that students have been participating in similar competitions since the early 1980s.
“We have a big tradition of winning at Guelph over the years.”
Other students won individual awards at the competition. Here’s a summary:
NATIONAL DIVISION
Individual Events Award
1st Place: Jillian Ohm – Undergrad Farmer Problem
1st Place: Undergrad Team 3, Kaitlin Woods, Sophie Van den Borre, Lucy McNiven – Sprayer Calibration
Team Awards
1st Place Overall: Undergrad Team 1, Noelle Adams, Stephanie Fletcher, Curtis Vanrooy, Joe Rastapkevicius
NORTHEASTERN DIVISION
Individual Events Award
1st Place: Curtis Vanrooy –Undergrad Farmer Problem
1st Place: Marinda DeGier- Grad Farmer Problem
1st Place: Undergrad Team 3, Kaitlin Woods, Sophie Van den Borre, Lucy McNiven – Sprayer Calibration
Team Awards
1st Place: Undergrad Team 1, Noelle Adams, Stephanie Fletcher, Curtis Vanrooy, Joe Rastapkevicius
2nd Place: Undergrad Team 2, Maggie Durnin, Marissa Jeens, Kelly Ruigrok, Quinn Driscoll
