Rick White is worried about canola seed.

As CEO of the Canadian Canola Growers Association, White has been keeping a close eye on the slew of agriculture mergers in recent months: Dow Chemical Co. with DuPont Pioneer, Syngenta with ChemChina, PotashCorp with Agrium Inc., Monsanto with Bayer.

The pressure is on for Canada’s federal and provincial governments to cut carbon emissions and demonstrate meaningful progress to reduce the impacts of climate change. In an ever-evolving environment of new policies and regulations, Western Canada’s grain growers are working to make sense of what the impacts will be when the dust settles and the bills come due.

Here are three women with different roles in the agriculture industry. Each showcases a unique perspective on the parts women play in ag, as demographic shifts suggest more women are taking on key responsibilities, both on and off the farm.

For years, the Alberta government has struggled to reconcile efforts to promote the province’s craft brewing industry with a privatized liquor system that attracts hundreds of breweries from around the world to vie for consumer dollars. In its most recent attempt to give local beer a fighting chance against out-of-province competition, the government has made sweeping changes to provincial beer markups and introduced a new grant program for Alberta breweries.

At the movie theatre, trailers for “coming attractions” are designed to whet your appetite. Unfortunately, for many years in Alberta, the most hyped “coming attraction” in the agriculture world was a rapidly spreading cereal disease with an appetite for destruction. After scathing reviews in other provinces, the B-movie thriller known as Fusarium head blight (FHB) is taking Alberta by storm, and producers have a front-row seat.

A new software program allows Alberta scientists to use fragments of the barley genome—known as DNA markers—to improve and accelerate barley variety development. A genome is the complete set of genetic material present in a cell or organism.

Alberta wheat and barley growers will be taking full control of how their check-off dollars are spent next year as the industry moves to a system where each provincial commodity commission collects its own check-off funds.

It has helped fund the development of numerous crop varieties, advanced controlled-traffic farming in the province, supported agronomy research and strengthened ties between researchers and the crop industry. Yet, the future of the Alberta Crop Industry Development Fund (ACIDF), a private, not-for-profit company that works for both industry and government, is uncertain.

Sheri Strydhorst is an agronomist, an internationally recognized agriculture researcher and an adjunct professor at the University of Alberta, who also somehow finds the time to work on her own farming operation—tremendous accomplishments for a city kid who grew up in St. Albert, knowing little about the land and how the Canadian agriculture industry functioned.

Marketing decisions are difficult at the best of times, particularly prior to planting given the uncertainty and potential scenarios that could play out over the ensuing year. However, understanding the dynamics that drive values, keeping an eye on profit margins, managing risk and leaning toward crops that have growing demand will help farmers make the best decisions in an environment full of unknowns.