It’s a new year, and we’re very excited to welcome a new member to our team here at BrettYoung.
Justine Cornelsen has come on board as our Agronomic and Regulatory Services Manager. You may already recognize Justine’s name from her time with the Canola Council of Canada where she worked for nearly eight years as an Agronomy Specialist. Justine has also had a presence in some of our previous editions of BY PLUS notes as a canola management expert.
In her time with the Canola Council, Justine worked primarily with crop disease management. This included not only developing research projects and priorities for the industry, but also helping to provide growers with the appropriate information and tools to help them manage the challenges they face on their own farms. She’s spoken across Canada on canola production at many major farm shows, academic meetings like at the Canadian Phytopathological Society, and extensively at many canola-industry meetings.
“What I enjoy about working in the ag industry is problem solving by providing agronomic information that helps farmers find solutions that fit their farm”– Justine
Justine has been passionately involved in the ag industry for over 10 years. Growing up near Onanole, MB on the edge of Riding Mountain National Park, she earned a B.Sc. in biology from Brandon University and more recently an M.Sc. from the University of Manitoba around her work on the deployment of blackleg resistance gene groups in canola across Western Canada. Justine’s work has also taken her overseas to Europe, China, USA, and Australia to study different agricultural practices. She also spoke at the 2019 International Rapeseed Conference in Germany on blackleg disease management.
For all of her work accolades, Justine still has a lively life outside of it all. The majority of her time is spent taking care of, raising, riding, and training quarter horses at her acreage northeast of Virden, MB, on the Assiniboine River Valley. She mainly competes on young horses at barrel racing futurities (5-year-olds) and derbies (6 to 7-year-olds) and has competed at amateur, semi-pro and pro rodeos across the Prairies and Northern Plains states. Extra spare time is usually spent outdoors with her dogs, out running, hiking, or out on the water paddling.
She’s happy to try to escape Canadian winters for a few weeks each year. Having travelled to 6 continents (not Antarctica… yet) with many of the trips being camping and backpacking excursions.
We’re excited to welcome Justine to our team and know she’s going to bring incredible knowledge and another friendly face to BrettYoung! If you happen to see her at a tradeshow or out in the field, be sure to say “Hi”.
