The provincial soil specialist with Manitoba Agriculture and Resource Development suddenly started to hear from growers in the Red River Valley who were alarmed at the appearance of salinity in places they’d never seen it before.

While the heavy clay soils of the area are no strangers to mild salinity, this was something different, likely showing up because growers were planting more soybeans, which is a crop that can show issues more readily.

“The reality is those soils in the Red River Valley are heavy clay soils,” she said. “There’s mild salinity everywhere and it started rearing its ugly head when we started growing more soybeans in our crop rotations. They’re very sensitive to salinity and, when we’re talking about things like salinity or IDC (iron deficiency chlorosis), we’re talking about water-type problems.”

Soybean have proven to be an indicator for water problems and frequently it’s a combination of a number of different factors. Part of the problem is soil compaction and how it affects the way water moves through soil. For example, we see some of these effects in places like wheel tracks or in headlands that take a lot of compaction because of the constant wheel traffic where machinery turns.

“We know that this can cause more of those smaller compressed pores so we’ll have less internal drainage and more ponding of water during wet periods,” Riekman said. “If we have a loss of proper water flow through the soil, we start to see some of these problems become larger than they would have been in their natural state.”

Salinity is a good example of this. Salinity, a higher level of salts in the soil moisture, makes it more difficult for plants to gather and absorb soil nutrients. Although this may seem like a salt problem, it’s the physical interaction of soil and water that puts the salt there.

“Yes, those salts are there, they come up from below, but the reason why those salts fester and cause problems is because of the water movement in the soil,” Riekman said. “If we have a water table that’s near the surface and more upward movement of water than downward movement, we have a salinity problem.”

The other part of it is dry weather such as the last several summers. When the surface soil moisture evaporates the capillarity action in the soil draws more saline water from the water table up through the micropores. Then more of it evaporates and leaves the salt behind. A good soaking from a gentle snowmelt or prolonged rain will help carry salts back down if there is free transit back to the water table.

“Compaction may impede that downward movement but encourage capillary rise and this may be most noticeable in compacted headlands,” Riekman said. “We’re going through this period where upward movement of water is more prevalent and we’re not seeing that downward precipitation and leaching of the salts back down and deeper into the soil profile. In general, salinity always follows behind changes in precipitation.”

Iron deficiency chlorosis is another water-related problem for soybean and it’s a bit more complex. It’s partly poorly drained soils and a little too much water but it’s also a product of high-lime soils, elevated soil nitrates and herbicide stress among others.

“There’s a lot of different factors that affect iron deficiency chlorosis and so that needs to be considered,” Riekman said. “Often I see this iron deficiency show up along drains, along wetter areas in the field but really, especially along headlands and, again, these compacted regions of the field will show the problem worse.

It’s that poor drainage again and this could be because of the ratio of micropores to macropores. When you have poor drainage, high carbonate or free lime in the soil actually dissolves in soil water and affects the root’s ability to acidify the area around the root zone. That actually makes it harder for iron uptake by the plant.

“So we see these things come along following a wet period,” Riekman said. We’ll see the crop yellow up for a little bit in the new growth and it will grow out of it as the soil dries out, but the soil doesn’t always dry out as quickly in the headlands so we end up seeing these problems show up again in that new growth.”

You could use an iron chelate (EDDHA) in furrow while you’re fertilizing. This is expensive though so you’d want to do that in areas where you know the risk is high. The better option would be to select a soybean variety that tolerates higher-risk conditions.

“You want to look at these different ratings where they’ll group them based on say a tolerant, semi-tolerant and susceptible grouping. You want the most tolerant crops,” Riekman said. “If you know that IDC is one of those problems that you have and you know that compaction might be compounding the risk in certain areas of the field make sure that you’re thinking about varietal choices to be able to combat some of this.”

– This article was originally published at the Manitoba Co-operator.

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Previous generations of plant breeders did the same thing, but they relied more on trial and error. Today’s breeders know much more about the workings of the genes, how they affect each other and how they affect the performance of the plant. They’ve gone beyond genetics and into the realm of genomics.

“The genomic technologies that are coming online are quite exciting,” says University of Saskatchewan wheat breeder Curtis Pozniak. “It’s giving us an endless supply of new DNA markers that we can use to tag important genes and then follow those within the breeding program.”

Farmers were the first plant breeders and have have been selecting and reseeding the best plants for thousands of years. Charles Darwin observed how the traits of the parents shaped their offspring, but couldn’t explain how it happened. Then, 30 years after Darwin published The Origin of Species, England’s John Garton became perhaps the first commercial plant breeder, showing that many crops were self-pollinating, and inventing the process of crossbreeding. The Garton Brothers’ seed company released Abundance Oat, their first commercial variety, in 1892.

Then, two generations later, Crick and Watson described the structure of DNA in 1953, and we began to learn the mechanics of plant breeding.

Precision tools

“Now there are tools that help you make better and more efficient crosses so you can focus your resources or impose selection earlier, based on lab data,” explains Rob Duncan, a canola breeder at the University of Manitoba.

Old-school breeding meant making controlled crosses of several sets of parents, observing the agronomics as the progeny grew in plots, analyzing the seeds produced and then discarding the huge numbers of failures. Now Duncan can look for certain genes or groups of genes in the lab and make his first round of decisions based on what he finds there. He doesn’t need to go to the field, which was essentially using “visual phenotyping” to see if the genes were likely there. Today, molecular tools prove they are.

One of these tools is the SNP chip (called the snip chip) — a glass or silicon chip with thousands of tiny portals. Each portal has a strand of synthetically produced DNA, not the full helix that you see in the pictures. When breeders want to know what genes are in the parent plants, they tease out the DNA, dissolve it into a solution and drop it onto the SNP chip. The strands of DNA from the plant seek out and bond to the compatible strands permanently etched into the chip.

Now they have DNA that can be analyzed for “marker genes” with desired characteristics.

“Over the last number of years we’ve developed the 60 k brassica SNP chip and that’s 60,000 markers on one chip,” Duncan says. “Now we can select for thousands of markers across the whole genome of whatever cross you’re talking about and select the best combination on a genome-wide basis.”

That means that instead of painstakingly making thousands of crosses and observing the result, breeders in the lab can narrow their search to a few likely combinations.

“It’s not going to be accurate every time but it allows you to focus your resources,” says Duncan. “Rather than taking all of them to the field to evaluate them, you can do it in a more efficient manner in the lab.”

Still the final test

However, the field trial is still the last word on breed evaluation. Even though the understanding of genetics and genomics is as good as it’s ever been, the test plot is where the plant encounters the real world.

“Linking the genetic differences between cultivars and breeding lines to actual phenotypes is the next frontier,” Pozniak says. “We need to take to take full advantage of the genomic technology and using genomic tools really revolves around using marker-assisted selection.”

The marker provides a general idea of where the gene is located. If breeders understand that certain genes, or combinations of genes, give a plant characteristics such as rust resistance, then they know to look for those markers in the parent plant’s genome.

Breeders are now finding some traits are actually influenced by combinations of genes found in different locations throughout the genome. To make things more complicated, many crop plants have multiple sets of chromosomes. Bread wheat, for example has six.

As in so many other applications, computers can ease the job of sifting through data.

“The cost of high-throughput genotyping and phenotyping is going to improve and these tools are going to become more efficient and more cost effective and efficient,” Duncan says. “It’s going to provide the breeder with quicker, better, cheaper information to predict some of those best parental combinations. Our ability to use gene editing where we have a more controlled ability to edit or modify genomes is going to improve as well as our ability to evaluate how those genes are actually expressed.”

But the ultimate test is still in real soil under real weather conditions.

“So there’s still a lot of boots in the field in plant breeding and I don’t think that will ever go away,” Pozniak says. “Plant breeding is really about sifting through the massive numbers of individuals that we need to look at to identify the vast gene combinations. The technologies we’re using are really about helping us sift through those numbers more efficiently.”

The post Still sifting through genes, but… appeared first on Country Guide.

This field was unusual, however, because even though you couldn’t see it, red clover was sown under the wheat, so there were actually two crops occupying the same space: wheat for harvest this year and seed clover for next.

It’s a strategy that pays off with more biodiversity above the soil surface, and also underneath it.

Soil ecology is still on the frontier of science. We know quite a bit about what soil does, based on our observations above the ground and our knowledge of a few simple elements: nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus and sulphur. But soil itself isn’t simple and we’re starting to understand we have to look at it not as a simple workbench but as a highly complex factory.

“It’s a very, very diverse ecosystem — perhaps the most diverse ecosystem on Earth,” says University of Saskatchewan soil scientist Jim Germida. “Of course, all those micro-organisms are doing lots of different things in terms of ecosystem services, everything from cycling nutrients through the system and helping clean water to helping plants grow.”

The sheer number of different organisms living in a healthy patch of Prairie soil is staggering. If you count the number of stars that you’ll see on one of those clear western nights where even the edges of the Milky Way are visible as a creamy band down the centre of the sky, that’s about equal to the number of different kinds of organisms living in one teaspoon of that soil.

That’s a lot of living things doing a lot of work within a very small space. This kind of diversity and the genetic variability within their populations is called biodiversity, and it’s essential to the proper functioning of any ecosystem.

In 2010, the European Commission published a major report on soil biodiversity, classifying the work of soil organisms into three main functions. The first are the chemical engineers, made up of organisms that decompose dead tissue within the soil and transform it into the nutrient fuel that drives the system. The second are the soil regulators, including the predators and grazers that manage the populations of other soil organisms. These include our soil borne pests and diseases. The third, then, are the ecosystem engineers, the burrowers and tunnelers that move soil particles around and develop the pore spaces that make water and air infiltration possible.

What this means is that in the course of a year, the soil organisms within the area of a soccer field will process material equal to the weight of 25 small cars. This sort of biological activity is important to soil ecology and has a profound effect on agriculture.

But then, agriculture also has an equally profound effect on soil, points out Dr. Tandra Fraser of the Global Soil Biodiversity Initiative based out of Colorado State University.

Monocultures not only reduce biodiversity above ground, they also reduce biodiversity underneath it, Fraser explains. “Then this leads to a number of problems. Soil biota and microbes contribute to the maintenance of soil structure, they contribute to the hydrological process and to nutrient cycling which, in the end, is related to food production.”

Before the Green Revolution, farmers practised diverse crop rotations. Not only did they change fields from one annual to another, they rotated from annuals to perennials. Perennials keep roots in the ground year round for three or more seasons, conditioning the soil and energizing the soil biota. Since most farms were mixed, sections of land were also used for forage for livestock and the animal manure was used as fertilizer. Above the topsoil they had biodiversity over time and this helped maintain biodiversity below ground as well.

The development of farm chemistry and machinery changed all that. It may be said that the Green Revolution created today’s specialized agribusiness and our rotations of annual crops. Livestock farmers became more specialized as well, and there was a separation of animals from the plants. There was no longer any need to rotate to perennials, and animal manure was no longer available to most crop farmers.

This is the system we’ve been working under for multiple generations and it has its quirks. But the news here isn’t all bad either.

One benefit of farm chemistry is the emergence of zero-till agriculture, where leftover crop residue helps to keep topsoil in place. The remaining roots retain moisture in the ground and provide a source of organic matter, which helps explain why we’ve seen soil condition improve under a zero-till regime.

“The soil organic matter helps with stabilization of the soil,” Fraser says. “It provides the carbon source for the soil micro-organisms. On top of that you need nutrient balance between the carbon, the nitrogen and the phosphorus and the other nutrients for uptake. The reduced tillage since the ’80s has been huge.”

As we change land use from a natural grassland ecosystem into a more intensely cultivated system,  however, we need to understand that we are reduceing soil biodiversity, Fraser says, and we really need to learn more about the ecology of living soil, such as knowing what organisms are in there and what they do in a healthy system.

This is the problem. We really don’t know that much about soil biology and biodiversity. Most soil organisms are microscopic and they live in a dark world that’s very difficult to observe first hand.

“The thing that has changed in more recent time is the fact that we have new tools to help us study biodiversity,” Germida says. “Now we’re talking about using molecular tools where we can extract the DNA from soil or from the roots and we can start studying the microbial communities that are there. We can think about it as a sort of meta-genome of all these living organisms and how they work in concert to do these different beneficial things, just like we have the human microbiome. We have all these micro-organisms living on and in us, and these things are very beneficial and help us be who and what we are.”

If this is the same with soil, then we have a lot to learn about how we can use the subtle nuances of its biology to help grow food. Germida begins by saying we need some optimal equilibrium of different organisms. The right mix makes the whole system more resilient. For example, if moisture levels or the pH changes, one group of microbes may fail but another can step in to continue their work. This can involve any number of things such as mineralizing organic nutrients so plants can use them, decontaminating pollutants, or even controlling certain plant diseases.

Take-all is the Pacific Northwest name for a fungal disease that affects wheat along the west coast. It lives in the soil, infects the plant through the roots, and may infect its neighbours. It affects the conductive tissue and restricts water uptake. Too much of it in the soil, however, provokes an interesting reaction.

“We have this thing called Take-all decline and as the pathogen infects the plant, the plant starts to send out chemical signals that stimulate a certain group of bacteria in the soil,” Germida says. “Those bacteria get very abundant and they actually produce antibiotics against the pathogen and the incidence of disease declines after a period of time.”

In other words, nature doesn’t like an overabundance of pathogens either. Eliminating their predators may have made our crops more vulnerable, but by understanding the relationships between soil chemical engineers, soil regulators and soil ecosystem engineers, we may be able to create a food production system that is more sustainable and that makes economic sense as well.

“I grew up on a conventional farm and I understand it from an economic point of view,” Fraser says. “If farmers are not making money or if it’s going to be a huge expense to them they’re probably not going to change their management strategies.”

The post Going underground for soil ecology appeared first on Country Guide.

“I always like to say they’re a little bit ghostly in nature,” says University of Saskatchewan soil scientist Jeff Schoenau. “They’ll appear and manifest themselves, and then environmental conditions change and they disappear.”

The ghostly nature of micronutrient shortages breeds a typical “out of sight, out of mind” mentality, which is part of the reason why soil tests rarely look for them. Soil tests are based on macronutrients like nitrogen, the cornerstone of protein, or phosphorus, part of the framework of DNA. The contributions these elements make are well understood, and we know they’re needed in large quantities to make tissue and to set seed.

So our soil tests revolve around the macronutrients. But the micronutrients are quite different.

“They’re the nutrients that plants require in very small quantities, and this has nothing to do with the amount in the soil or even the amount that the plant will take up. It’s just the amount that’s required — and that’s very small,” says Don Flaten of the University of Manitoba. “For example, iron is a micronutrient required in very small amounts but in real life it’s the most abundant nutrient in the earth’s crust.”

Even so, that small amount of iron is crucial. It’s an important component of cytochromes, the proteins in the cell that act as electron carriers in the transport chain. It’s also a tiny part of many of the enzymes that drive the chemical reactions within the cell, so a shortage of iron means a weakened plant that may not survive.

There is a whole host of other micronutrients that plants can’t do without, but since they’re present in sufficient quantities there’s really no concern about shortages. Nickel is a classic example.

The really important micronutrients include molybdenum, boron, chlorine, copper, zinc, manganese and iron. “There’s a category that we can classify as the micronutrient metals, things like copper, zinc, manganese and iron,” Schoenau says. “They play an important role in electron transport and enzyme activation in the plant.”

Enzymes are proteins that work as catalysts, and they’re absolutely essential to the chemical workings of living things. A catalyst initiates a chemical reaction and then disconnects itself to look for another set of molecules to begin the reaction all over again. It’s sort of like a railway locomotive.

After a fashion, a train is like a long-chain molecule, assembled from a collection of smaller particles called freight cars. Once the train is assembled, the locomotives pull it to another location where it’s broken into smaller units. Some of it is reassembled into another train while other cars are sent to a final destination where their cargo is delivered.

Even though the locomotive is only a small part of the train, none of the assembly, hauling or switching happens without it. At the end of it all, the locomotive will disconnect from the train and then couple to another to start the process over again. In other words, the locomotive may be used to pull and process several trains, much the same as an enzyme which will pop out of the reaction after completion, find another molecule and start the process over again.

If the locomotive is the enzyme, then the various micronutrients are like the couplers that fasten the engine to the train. Even though it’s a tiny, almost insignificant part of the whole system, the locomotives still can’t pull a train without them. In the micro world of biochemistry, the iron, copper or boron in that enzyme is just that crucial, and the whole system would break down without it. And just like a coupler failure on a train, a shortage of micronutrients is relatively rare.

“Micronutrient deficiencies can occur but they tend to be fairly isolated and patchy within one field. It’s rare to find an entire field deficient in a micronutrient,” Schoenau says. “Instead they tend to occur in localized areas within a field, maybe in a gravel lens or a highly eroded knoll with low organic matter where the C horizon has been exposed.”

Often these shortages are geographic. These deficiencies are rare in the southern Prairies but they sometimes do occur in the northern fringe where the land was once under boreal forest. If the farm is located on some of those sandy grey soils, the coarse texture and low organic matter (i.e. below two per cent) can be a factor. Oddly enough, high organic matter above 30 per cent may also contribute, so those high-peat soils may cause some trouble. Soil temperature, pH and moisture content may also influence availability.

“And that would be the same for all the micronutrients. Not only are they very sensitive to geographic variability, but also to time or temporal variability,” Flaten says. “Environmental conditions play a huge role. Iron and manganese in particular are very sensitive to soil temperature, flooding stress and that sort of thing.”

It also depends on the crop type. Copper deficiency is probably one of the most frequent micronutrient problems in crops especially on sandy soils or on highly organic peat soils. Copper deficiency in wheat does happen and farmers should watch for that distinctive pig tailing along the leaves where the tips die off and twist leaving a brown frond instead of a healthy green leaf.

Manganese deficiencies often show up in the same kinds of soils, and may be seen with a pale green or yellowing in legume crops. It may also be seen as a grey speckling in oats. Zinc deficiency is most likely to show up in corn and may be seen as light yellow bands on the youngest leaves.

“Boron is a nutrient that’s sometimes deficient in canola,” Flaten says. “But the deficiency is extremely rare and I am aware of only one case in Manitoba and one case in Saskatchewan where a boron deficiency has been diagnosed with authority.”

Flaten also adds that chlorine deficiencies may show up in cereal crops, but this too is dependent on the variety. Some strains will respond to chloride fertilizers while others grown side by side will have no response at all.

With so many complicating factors, it’s no wonder that micronutrient problems can fly below the radar. It takes a lot of experience, observation and field notes from both farmers and agronomists.

Still, such things are site specific, so these spots can probably be teased out over time. There is also a number of ways to narrow down a diagnosis.

“The best approach to diagnosis is to use a multiple evidence approach,” Schoenau says. “You use a soil test, a tissue test, a visual inspection and, if you suspect a micronutrient deficiency, you may try a test strip with a micronutrient across a field area just to see if there is any response.”

There are some places that might recommend a more proactive approach with a micronutrient seed treatment. This is relatively new, however, and may require some verification before science can really say that it works.

“I know that in some parts of the world they have worked reasonably well, and if you have an acute deficiency maybe they have some potential,” Flaten says. “In a number of cases, I think that micronutrient-based seed treatments are being recommended for soils where micronutrient supply is sufficient.”

“The other time micronutrient deficiencies may show up is when you’re shooting for the top end of the yield curve, and you’re trying to squeeze every last bushel out so you’ve got your macro nutrients and other inputs applied to overcome any limitations,” Schoenau says. “Some growers will put on a micro-nutrient as a bit of insurance and there may not be a response, but they’ve got that there just in case. Some growers have that kind of philosophy.”

The post The ‘ghostly nature’ of phantom nutrients appeared first on Country Guide.

Buss has adopted a brand new form of field biosecurity designed to fight the spread of pathogens, so when he’s done his call, his boot covers will get tossed and he will carefully clean his tools before he heads to the next field on his next call.

Buss introduced the system at last winter’s Manitoba Agronomists’ Conference where he was recognized as what you might call the provincial poster boy for biosecurity, and he made some important observations.

“I’ve noticed two things,” Buss said. “One is that the term biosecurity turns people off because they immediately think of extreme stuff like hazmat suits. Getting people to realize that that’s not what we’re really talking about is important. And the other side of it is the ‘it’s not going to happen to me’ mentality. People figure these pathogens aren’t coming to their area, but when they do, then they’ll deal with it.”

Besides, biosecurity also has that unsettling feeling of somehow being linked to bioterrorism. Yet its origins are actually agricultural, with a focus on keeping potential pests and pathogens from multiplying and spreading.

Livestock producers deal with it already. It’s part of their routine vocabulary, and their hygiene protocols for chickens and hogs are proving at keeping diseases out or isolating them within one herd.

Sometimes in the livestock sector, biosecurity even ramps up to the international level, as it did in the early 2000s with the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the U.K. Travellers from Great Britain found themselves walking through trays of disinfectant at the airport to keep them from inadvertently spreading the virus to other countries.

Now, crop farmers here are starting to deal with biosecurity, and the reason is clubroot, a disease of the brassica crops that include cruciferous vegetables and canola. Market gardeners in Ontario and Quebec were already familiar with clubroot but in the mid-1990s it started appearing in Alberta canola fields.

“I work in the county of Leduc, and I’ve been dealing with this since I started my company in 2007,” says Paul Muyres, agronomist with Solid Ground Solutions. “I operate all through Leduc, Wetaskiwin and Ponoka, and I have to manage my biosecurity based on the fact that clubroot is present in that entire area.”

Clubroot presents some intriguing problems. First, we’re not quite sure what it is. Plasmodiaphora brassicae shows characteristics of three distinct types of organisms, including fungi, amoeba and slime moulds, but it doesn’t quite fit into any of those categories.

In the field, a brassica plant would first contact clubroot in its dormant form, an extremely tough resting spore with a potential life of 20 years. If one of these spores touches a brassica root hair, the seeping compounds unique to the plant signal the spore to “wake up.”

This is where the action starts. That tough little spore germinates into a zoospore equipped with two tiny flagella that act like a boat’s propeller, moving it through the film of soil water in search of the root hair that activated it. If the zoospore finds the root hair, it penetrates and infects it and forms a body called a plasmodium that produces and releases more zoospores. These secondary zoospores infect the whole root, so the plant now has a full-blown case of clubroot. The root swells and can no longer absorb water or nutrients. The plant weakens and may die.

Oddly enough, clubroot’s main strength as a survivor is also its weakness. That ultra-tough spore can’t move, so it’s locked in the soil until it’s woken by a suitable root hair. Although it becomes mobile when it germinates, it’s highly vulnerable in its short-lived zoospore state, and it’s very limited in how far it can move.

Agriculture really gave clubroot legs. We work the soil with large machinery, which means infected soil clings in clumps to the bottom of tractors and cultivators as well as the tires. As that machine moves into the next field, the infected dirt falls off and the spores are introduced. The machine becomes a vector.

Since chemical control for clubroot in canola isn’t feasible, the best way to deal with it is to keep clubroot where it is and to prevent it getting any further. But that means we need to be able, as a first step, to find it and identify it.

“There’s a line called the county line between Wetaskiwin and Leduc and for two years there was no clubroot in the county of Wetaskiwin because nobody was looking for it,” Muyres says. “I found it in 2007 but I couldn’t say anything because the farmers there didn’t want us to acknowledge that.”

Denial is merely human, and bad news often trips the reflex to “shoot, shovel and shut up.” Having said that, it’s really important to confirm the presence of a nasty disease like clubroot and make absolutely certain it’s there before going off half cocked. In the larger picture it’s equally important to take a proactive approach by developing ways to contain it, manage it and keep it from spreading. This is really what biosecurity is about.

“Trouble comes on an exponential curve, a mathematical curve that changes very little and very little and then suddenly it takes off,” Buss says. “That’s when my phone rings and that’s when it’s really, really expensive to fix. We need to keep everything back down at the beginning of that curve and that’s a very, very hard thing to get people to understand.”

“We were faced with a problem that we really didn’t have a handle on, so it was kind of the-sky-is-falling scenario,” agrees Muyres. “When I first started, I had an 80-gallon slip tank in my truck and a pressure washer and I had to wash my vehicle all the time, so I was probably washing my truck three hours a day. “I thought, ‘this is ridiculous, I can’t be doing this,’ and that’s when we came up with a checklist and started going through it.”

Buss says the Manitoba government went through something very similar but had the luxury of a later start, so it could look at what other people were doing and what seems reasonable to do. Then they developed protocols, starting with the assumption that every field you go into could have a transmissible problem. From there they came up with a group of procedures that they use all the time on all farms.

“It’s meant using booties, it’s meant procuring and modifying equipment that’s reasonable to clean,” Buss says. “It’s meant looking at alternatives to make it work quickly. We’ve got some basic paperwork that we’ve put together, some sheets where we get signatures from growers depending on what we’re doing, some reporting sheets that we fill out, I do mine on my smartphone digitally every time I go into a field so I’ve instituted some record-keeping.”

All fields that Buss works in are noted and recorded into a database so they’ll be monitored for clubroot and anything else that shows up in the checklist. Although clubroot has certainly brought biosecurity into agronomy, it’s not the only issue we deal with. That checklist has to take the holistic approach to agronomy. The farmer or agronomist who focuses on clubroot may miss something else that’s also important, such as soybean cyst nematode, one of the potential pests that keeps Buss up at night.

“These days I spend most of my time working on soybeans,” Buss says. “There’s a lot of surveying going on down south of us, and the rivers flow our way. I think when we get it (i.e. the nematode) we’re really going to get it because soybeans are such an important crop for us, really the bedrock of all of our crop planning.”

So this is how Buss thinks ahead and how he’s proposing a proactive approach about monitoring and management. We have to look at how these things can get into our fields and then keep looking for them. We have to think of all possible vectors, even the unlikely ones.

Joe Sierens, a farmer and seed dealer also promotes awareness and education, and not just among farmers and agronomists, but anyone who might put something in your field. Knowledge and vigilance have to be the cornerstones of biosecurity.

“I had my own experience. A dealership wanted me to change the colour of my tractor and he brought me a quad track to drive,” Sierens says. “So I get in there and I look and I see 700 hours and that’s a lot of hours on a demo tractor. I asked where this tractor came from, and he said Alberta. I asked, ‘have you ever heard of clubroot?’ and he says, ‘no, what is that?’”

“We need to educate our sales people and machinery sales forces,” Sierens says, “especially in big companies across Western Canada that move equipment on a truck.”

The post Livestock biosecurity strategies come to canola appeared first on Country Guide.

Then Canada got on with the job, creating the rail system that in turn created our country, and that keeps creating the West today. If it too rarely gets called one of the wonders of the world, that only shows how poorly we understand it.

“It’s distance and volume,” explains Barry Prentice, professor of transportation at the University of Manitoba’s Asper School of Business. Trucks can’t do it, at least on the required scale. Nor is there a St. Lawrence system or a Mississippi in the heart of the West.

Instead, it’s got to be rail.

The secret of the railway’s efficiency is the steel wheel riding on a steel rail that is anchored into a deep roadbed that supports the mass of a fast-moving freight train. This wheel and rail combination allows the use of heavy, high-capacity cars that, in spite of their size, have low rolling friction.

It’s a technology that came of age in Victorian Europe, about the same time the first generation of farm families settled in Western Canada, when the sheer expanse of the new land demanded some kind of connection with the heartland to aid settlement and cultivation.

The solution was to build a railway from the resource-rich west to the mills and factories of the east. The stipulation was that it had to be a southern route, close to the border to encourage new settlers to build political and economic ties with Ottawa rather than the expansionist United States.

The first Canadian transcontinental railway was the Canadian Pacific, running its mainline across the Prairies from Winnipeg to Calgary and then over the mountains to Vancouver. The Canadian National followed, although it was actually an amalgamation of several existing railways cobbled together by the Canadian government into one transcontinental carrier.

The CN paralleled the CP west from Winnipeg but they crossed outside of Portage la Prairie where the CP headed for Regina while the CN swung north to Saskatoon. They met again in Kamloops, B.C., before heading down the Thompson Valley to the Fraser and on to Vancouver.

• See more in the Country Guide photo gallery: Trains, mountains, and a marvel of engineering

Six by rail, or 280 by truck

Over a century of development, railway technology would evolve from tiny steamers pulling a string of boxcars over light gauge rails to the high-power diesel locomotives hauling the 120-car-unit trains we see today.

Those fragile 80-pound rails also supercharged the whole grain handling system, starting with country elevators on sidings, a length of track for 25 to 100 cars, Prentice says. “One of the advantages of our system is that it doesn’t require much labour. We use a lot of electric motors and diesel to move things around.”

The first railways put grain in boxcars. The boxcar was suitable for its time because it carried merchandise west while hauling grain east, running loaded in both directions. As more and more towns were connected to each other by road, trucks gradually took over the lucrative merchandise haul. Incoming loads got lighter while outgoing loads of grain got heavier, so the railways responded with the covered hopper car, a dedicated car specialized for grain transport.

“A typical hopper car carries 92 tons of product, or the equivalent of 2.5 Super B trucks, so a full train of 112 cars is equivalent to 280 Super B truck loads,” explains Mark Hemmes of Quorum Corporation. “If that train is carried 1,000 miles to port it will have three or four crew sets, six to eight people altogether, while the 280 trucks will need 280 drivers.”

So a 112-car train vastly reduces the person hours required to haul that much grain over that much distance. In doing this, that freight train also delivers over three times the fuel efficiency with one-third of the greenhouse gas emissions, with all of this at less than half the cost of a trucking fleet with none of the potential highway congestion.

Once our hopper car is full, it’s spliced into a train, and a lash-up of two or more locomotives is coupled to the front.

• Click here for an infographic of what it takes to get grain from farm to port

How many locomotives?

The number of locomotives is based on the weight of the train and the gradient. “The rule of thumb is to have a horsepower to tonnage ratio of about .80 to .90,” Hemmes says. “For example, if you have 100 cars with 92 tons of grain each, by the time you’ve added the weight of the cars plus the locomotives you have a train weighing in at 11,000 tons. Two locomotives at 5,000 horsepower each gives you 10,000 horsepower and a ratio of 0.9 horsepower per ton of train.”

In the days of the boxcar, trains were pulled by steam locomotives, big external combustion engines that burned wood, coal or bunker C oil to make steam. This high-pressure steam was fed into a front-mounted cylinder that pushed a piston that then turned the large drive wheels.

The old steamers were magnificent beasts. They were immensely powerful but difficult to operate. Their energy efficiency was very low and they drank huge quantities of water, a scarce resource in many parts of the prairies. Beginning in the 1950s, North American railroads retooled for the more efficient diesels, and they’ve been running those ever since.

“Today locomotives are, in fact, diesel electric,” Hemmes says. “The diesel engine turns a generator and this powers traction motors that are part of the locomotive’s axle system. A typical locomotive has six axles and traction motors. A typical train will have two locomotives for every 100 cars and each locomotive will have between 4,000 and 6,000 horsepower.”

The locomotives are coupled to the front of the train, and O-ring-sealed air pipes are connected to the cars. The locomotive’s big air compressors start pumping air into the braking system, and once the reservoir tanks are up to pressure, the crew waits for a clear signal from the traffic control.

When the line is clear, the engineer notches up the throttle and the train sets off with a full load of grain headed west. If it’s a CP drag, it’s headed for Vancouver by way of Calgary. If it’s CN, then it’s going by way of Edmonton. Once over the B.C. border from Jasper it will head to Vancouver via Blue River to Kamloops, or it may take the north line from Red Pass Junction to Prince Rupert.

Over Yellowhead

The CPR has the older route, and the first surveyors in the region proposed to run the line through the Yellowhead Pass between Jasper and Mount Robson. It was the easiest route with workable grades but the government at the time was adamant that the railway should follow a south route. Today’s Trans Canada Highway parallels the CPR through some of the most spectacular scenery in Canada but, for the railway, this means a more difficult route with punishing grades over three formidable obstacles.

“When you have traffic moving through an area with a fixed capacity, like a section of track through the mountains, it’s a bottleneck that they call a pinch point on the railway,” Prentice says. “The railways are very conscious of this and they’re continuously working on relieving them, but it’s futile effort in some respects. As soon as you relieve one pinch point, the cars move freely to the next one and things get backed up there. You can improve the system gradually over time but it will never be perfect because you’re always running from one bottleneck to the next.”

If our grain train is running on the CPR, it stops in Calgary where one or more additional locomotives are spliced into the middle of the train in preparation for the two major pinch points along the way. One is the climb over the Kicking Horse Pass and the other is the brutal heavy haul over Rogers Pass between Golden and Revelstoke, B.C.

Our train leaves Calgary and follows the Bow River to Banff, where it starts a long climb through Lake Louise to the summit of the Kicking Horse Pass. Then it drops abruptly into the valley of the Kicking Horse River where the grades measure in at around 2.2 per cent, i.e. for every 100 feet our westbound train moves forward, it drops two feet.

“It was worse than that before,” Prentice laughs. “Before the Spiral Tunnels were built they had a grade that was 4.5 per cent or something and they had a few runaway trains.”

The original Big Hill was a treacherous stretch that required all the skill the running crews could muster to keep a descending train under control. To solve the problem, the CPR had to lengthen the line and, in doing that they managed to reduce the gradient from the ferocious 4.5 per cent to a stiff but manageable 2.2 per cent. To do this, they drilled the two Spiral Tunnels, among the great engineering wonders of the railway world, just east of the town of Field, B.C.

As our train enters the upper tunnel it begins a long left turn that takes it into the core of Cathedral Mountain. It continues the turn and follows a giant corkscrew path, still descending, until it pops out of the lower portal in a cloud of acrid brake-shoe smoke. At this point the engineer and conductor can actually look up and see the last of the train going the other way about 40 feet above them.

From there the train crosses the highway and does a right hand bend into the upper portal of the second tunnel drilled into Mount Ogden. From here the train rolls out of the tunnel, the diesels once again watching the last of the cars moving over top, and carries on through Field following the Kicking Horse River to Golden.

Railways often follow river courses because, in the mountains, one of the rivers will point to the summit of the pass. Once our grain train leaves Golden, it parts company with the Kicking Horse River and runs along the Beaver River into Rogers Pass. This is the Selkirk Range with spectacular Alp-like mountains marked by sharp peaks, steep slopes and deep valleys. The grades are steep, sitting around the 2.2 per cent mark, so again the going is slow.

Breathtaking Rogers Pass

The original line actually climbed to the summit and crossed over the top of the pass. Nowadays, beside the highway on the western side of the summit, a series of huge stone bridge piers still stand. These piers supported a series of S-curve bridges that the old steam locomotives blasted over in order to crest the pass.

One of the old piers now lies on its side, knocked over by the careening snow packs that fall from the peaks, mute testimony to one of Nature’s formidable forces.

Still Rogers Pass vexed the company. Those heavy grades required big power, and this was the territory of the Selkirk-type steam locomotives built by the CPR, the largest steamers operated in the British Empire, although the Americans had even bigger ones, giants such as the Big Boys that hauled trains for the Union Pacific and the Great Northern’s Yellowstones that roamed the passes to the south.

Until the ’80s, westbound trains would stop at the helper station in Beavermouth, where another lash-up of six diesels would set shoulder and help push the trains over Rogers Pass, but projected increases in traffic prompted the CPR to drill another tunnel under the pass. Now, heavy westbound trains take the lower route through the nine-mile MacDonald Tunnel and then roll downhill along the Illecillewaet River to Revelstoke. From there it’s on through the Eagle Pass in the Monashees to Kamloops, where our train meets both the Thompson River and the CN line.

Joining forces with CP

After Kamloops the CPR encounters its third major obstacle, one that it shares with the CN. Once again the railways follow the rivers, in this case the Thompson as it carves a deep channel through interior B.C. At Lytton, the Thompson flows into the Fraser, and the Fraser cuts its own deep gorge through the Coastal Range to Vancouver.

These precipitous trenches were the site of some of the most difficult railway construction in the world. Both lines cling to the sides. Sidings are few and far between.

Running trains in both directions faces tough limits, which has led to another of the wonders of the railway world, but this time, it’s a wonder of a different sort.

“The railways have entered into a co-production agreement,” Prentice says. “There’s no room to put in a double track in the Fraser Canyon so one railway takes all the eastbound trains and the other takes all the westbound trains, and then they move back onto their own tracks outside the canyon.”

At Napa, close to the town of Ashcroft, B.C., the two lines run side by side, and it’s here that they trade routes. All trains bound for Vancouver, whether they’re CN or CP, take to the CN line, while all eastbound trains come up the canyons on the CP before moving back onto their own tracks.

Our CP grain train moves through the crossover onto the CN mainline and runs the canyons on the CN side of the river past Hell’s Gate and Yale. It then rejoins the CP mainline in Mission City in the Fraser delta and moves on to the port elevator in Vancouver.

It’s here that the journey ends and the train is unloaded in much the same way that farm trucks unload at the inland elevator. The car’s lower doors open over a collecting hopper and the grain pours out.

Then do it again

The empty cars then head back east for another load, and the cycle starts all over again. The cycling time for an empty car arriving at an inland elevator to be filled, shipped and return empty again is about 14 days.

That car cycle time has been coming down, thanks to longer train lengths of 50 to 100 cars and the hook and haul idea, which means the cars don’t have to come into a classification yard like Symington in Winnipeg.

Even so, to put this haul into perspective, the distance from Minneapolis to ports in New Orleans is around 1,200 miles as compared to a 1,400-hundred-mile run from Winnipeg to Vancouver.

Don’t forget the mountains that our trains face, though, or all the other obstacles. Ice and snow on the tracks make moving difficult, and the cold compromises the O-ring seals on the air braking systems, forcing the railways to run shorter trains below -25 C.

Canada’s railways are vital for getting grain to customers all over the world but it’s not an easy job. Again, it’s all that land between the points where it’s grown and the points from which it’s shipped.

Says Prentice, “We’re a long distance from the water, and that’s the truth.”

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Drones are becoming a big piece of the precision ag puzzle, and Dr. Kevin Price of Des Moines, Iowa, says they will completely change how we scout.

“What this technology does is help build a map to look for problem areas in the field,” Price explains. “The scout gets the co-ordinates and walks out into the field to get a first-hand look at what’s going on.”

Drones will also add huge new efficiencies, says agronomist Greg Adelman of Southey, Sask. “While a person out walking the field with a metre stick or GPS can assess 160 acres in an hour, I’m assuming the periday peak efficiency would be something like 6,000 acres with a fixed wing UAV.”

Adelman is a Canadian affiliate of Price’s company RoboFlight, a scouting data management company that takes images from UAVs and stitches them together into a composite image called an orthomosaic. Information gleaned from these images will help farmers make snap decisions about managing their crops, while the precision lends them tremendous potential to reduce costly inputs.

This really goes back to the dawn of the aircraft age at the beginning of the First World War. Initially, the primitive biplanes were used for reconnaissance, with camera crews dispatched to monitor enemy lines from the air. They took thousand of pictures and watched for troop movements, changes in the lines or massing of equipment. Command officers used this information to plan both their offence and defence according to the incoming data.

Farmers are no strangers to this idea either. Some have used aerial photography and satellite imagery to monitor their crops, although getting this data has often been expensive and inconvenient.

Now, what these drones offer is an inexpensive alternative that can fly at the farmer’s need. With the advent of the Global Positioning System, navigation software and smaller, high-resolution digital cameras, the stage is set to incorporate drones into farming.

“Companies build implements designed to do precision applications of chemicals and seeds and, as you’re driving through the field, the tractor is adjusting the rate of fertilizer or herbicide based on geographic co-ordinates that are fed into the sprayers by an on-board computer,” Price says. “If you have a map that tells the tractor where it is and what’s there, then the software can decide whether to turn on the sprayers or not.”

This kind of precision depends on highly detailed mapping, which is what the drones do. The first drones in agriculture were model airplanes with a camera mounted in a jury-rigged box on the wing. The plane flew along a programmed flight path transmitted from a computer to an on-board GPS sensor. The data directed the plane through a series of points and instructed the camera to snap images along the way.

Today’s navigation system is still the same, but the cameras have greater resolution and the current aircraft are a lot more suitable to the task. RoboFlight, for instance, uses the electric-powered RF70 airframe.

“This aircraft is amazing,” Price says. “It’s got multiple bays for mapping units and it will cruise for 45 minutes to an hour and 20 minutes depending on the load. It’s made of high-density EPP so it’s not like beer cooler foam. We’ve taken that plane and crashed it from 200 feet in the air, picked it up and put it back in the air again. It’s highly durable. We’ve flown it in 50-mile-an-hour winds and we’ve had it up to 100 miles an hour with a tailwind and it was still flying stable.”

So that’s what the airplane does. The next part of the package is the camera equipment that it carries in any of the payload bays. This is the farmer’s eye in the sky and can see things we’ve never seen before. In digital imagery, the picture you see is actually made up of thousands of points called pixels. The quality of the image (i.e. the resolution) is a direct result of how small an area of ground is represented in one pixel. In a satellite image each pixel represents about one square metre on the ground at best.

“Now we’re talking two centimetres,” Price says. “We’re looking at individual plant leaves and we’re able to assess the pigmentation of the plants. I can tell you the geometry of the leaves in three-dimensional space to see which way they’re oriented.”

Not only is the resolution much finer but we’re now able to see different wavelengths of light too. This gives us even more useful information as to what’s going on in that field.

Price recalls one farm client who had Canada thistle in a field, and who spent $4,000 to spray the entire 120 acres to knock the weed out.

“Well, once we got through flying the field a day or two after he sprayed, we could still see Canada thistle,” Price says. We found that he had only needed to spray 0.6 acre but he had sprayed 120. We were able to map the location of all the plants and flying the field and processing of the data cost $506. He could have easily gone in and spot sprayed and saved himself a tremendous amount of money.”

The first UAV cameras were digital units that you could get from any camera store. They were small, they required no film magazine and no motor drive so they were extremely light compared to the old film cameras. Additionally, because the images were digital, they were easily uploaded to a computer, where several images could be stitched together into a composite.

Now we’re sending specialized colour infrared cameras up there to give us eyes that can filter out certain wavelengths and see the world in terms of visible and infrared radiation.

“By putting the two of them together, you compute an index called the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index or NDVI that’s highly sensitive to chlorophyll concentration,” Price says. “Anything that affects the plant, anything that changes the concentration of chlorophyll on the ground, the NDVI will pick it up.”

The NDVI is much more sensitive than our own eyes in detecting some of the subtle differences in the way light is reflected back to it from the canopy. Changes in the plant’s pigmentation are sometimes the result of stress on the plant, such as nitrogen or water deficiency, disease or insects. The resulting images, Price says, can help farmers make much better management decisions.

“It can measure your biomass, it can measure the photosynthesis and it can measure the stress level of the plant,” adds Adelman. “You can actually see where the plant is stressed up to two weeks before you see symptoms. I’ve seen RoboFlight data where they could see nitrogen deficiency two weeks before symptoms showed up, so if you can see it that quickly you can address the problem before it’s showing symptoms and reduce yield loss in that field.”

The third part of the system is the computer power to take the data and quickly put it together into a ready-to-read package.

“That’s what our company is really all about,” Price says. “What we’re doing right now is working with the portals for allowing people to get the data to us in a very efficient manner. Basically you pull the SV card out of the camera, plug it into your computer and your computer will automatically download it to our shop. We process it and have it back to you.”

As the technology matures the data will get better and better and the computer capabilities will improve in step. What this means is that farmers and agronomists will become even better tuned to the behaviour of land on a section-by-section basis. If we can see plants are under stress, in time we hope to develop the algorithms that will tell us why the plants are stressed. We’ll be able to see different types of weeds, different insect pests at work as well as be able to identify specific diseases before they become a major problem. Precision agriculture will become more and more precise.

“This new UAV technology will be like auto  steer,” concludes Saskatchewan farmer Brad Hanmer. “Within five years it was mainstream and I think this is the next step for RTK technology. We can make even more management decisions based on science and less on intuition.”

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Then reality returns. The “tractor” stops, the room lights come up, and the driver steps out of the cab and into a small theatre that has a white curved screen where, only a few seconds ago, it had looked like there was a field.

Behind the cab there’s another wall separating the theatre from a bank of computers where a group of grad students and technicians is tweaking the simulation program that runs the on-board monitor as well as the projectors that cast the moving image of the field onto the screen.

It’s the tractor simulator in the biosystems engineering department of the University of Manitoba. Unlike an airplane simulator where a pilot sits in a closed cockpit and looks into a landscape shown on the simulated windows, the operator sits in an actual tractor cab surrounded by a projected farmscape.

The research job is to find the best way to divide the different tasks between the two operators — the human at the wheel and the computer in the wiring of the machine. There are some tasks that computers are really good at but, despite their growing power and capabilities, there are still jobs better suited to the human brain. This project is to look at what goes on during the seeding operation, strike the balance between who should look after what, and devise the best way for operator and machine to talk to each other.

“Right now we’re looking at automating various subsystems,” explains Danny Mann, head of biosystems engineering. “We need to know what is the right level of automation that keeps the human in the control loop so that if a problem arises, the human can still get up to speed very quickly and know what to do to take the corrective action.”

Farmers from a few generations back worked with a semi-autonomous machine called the horse that had a brain and a complex sensory system. A few thousand years of selective breeding gave us the draft model for pulling implements either by itself or in teams. It could be programmed with a few simple commands: go (giddy-up), stop (whoa), turn right (gee) or turn left (haw). An experienced horse could walk a reasonably straight line at a constant speed so it could pull a small seed drill up and down a field leaving the farmer to manage the drill and make the occasional correction. The farmer would take over on the big turns and get the drill oriented along the line again.

With the development of the tractor, the farmer had complete control of speed and direction. Today’s modern machines can haul big, wide implements up and down enormous acreages with no breaks for feed and water.

One problem for operators of these larger and faster machines, however, is dealing with huge amounts of information coming in from all corners. Unless you have another set of eyes set in remote places, you can’t see trouble coming or react to it when it gets there.

With myriad small procedures making up the seeding operation, we now need to split these assignments between the machine’s electronic silicon brain and the operator’s organic wet one.

“A computer is very good at doing routine or mundane tasks,” Mann says. “We’ve talked about auto steer where we’re using GPS so we can program in the width of the machine and the boundaries of the field. The auto steer gets the information from the GPS satellites, does quick calculations and decides whether to turn the steering wheel three degrees to the left or five degrees to the right. It can be doing that same calculation once every millisecond.”

The human, on the other hand, is more instantly adaptable. Computers require programming, which means you’re presenting a series of logical rules that the computer must follow. For example, you can program a computer to recognize a coffee cup and then program it to fill the cup if it’s empty.

Computers are binary creatures. The program has to give them a choice of one action or another because they can’t handle any more then two options at a time. This is called binary logic based on an IF/THEN/ELSE scenario. You tell the computer: IF you see a 10-ounce container with a handle on the side and it is empty THEN you pick it up and fill it with nine ounces of coffee ELSE ignore it and move to the next object.

Problems arise when the task becomes somewhat more complicated, for instance if the light changes. When the shadows change, the computer sees a different shape. A human still knows it’s a coffee cup but the different shadow completely bamboozles the computer.

“It’s only one tiny little piece of information that has changed but it can no longer function to deal with it,” Mann explains. “Whereas we human beings have that ability to say that we now have one extra piece of information, but it’s irrelevant. I’m just going to ignore it and I’m going to pick up the coffee cup.”

That’s why the auto steer moves the machine down a perfectly straight line according to information provided by the GPS, but the human operator still has to take the wheel for the wide turns at the edge of the field. The human knows there’s a ditch with a barbed wire fence there and has the eyeball judgment to know where to start the turn to avoid them. It’s a good way to make use of the strengths of both brains. The computer’s precision makes a straight line with no overlap while the human’s flexibility negotiates the obstacles.

The first step in this is to break down the operation into its distinct tasks.

“There are about seven different subsystems on an air seeder system that we can look at,” Mann says. “We can choose to automate one of them and compare it with automating another and see how this influences overall system efficiency.”

What they’re really looking at right now is how a machine equipped with sensors can monitor these different subsystems and keep the operator informed through the on-board display screen. They’re also working on an efficient way to get machine and operator to communicate with each other. The computer tells the operator what it knows by showing it on the screen, but we don’t want to overwhelm a human with too much information coming too fast. The operator also has to tell the computer what to do through some kind of input device.

“I have to use the keyboard or mouse to tell my laptop what to do and I get information back from my laptop via the screen,” Mann says. “It depends on the layout of the icons and how that is all arranged that defines how efficiently the computer communicates with me. That’s the same type of approach that we’ve been trying for designing an integrated air seed display for that system.”

So the computer gathers data from the different sensors and then relays information to the monitor. The next question for the simulator is how the monitor should display it so that the operator can make sense of it. There’s a fine line sometimes between sending enough information and sending too much. It’s up to the people working in the simulator to find out that balance.

“For example, we have the parameter for the seeding depth and a red flashing light that informs me there’s a problem and I have to make the necessary correction,” Mann says. “We could have a very low level of automation for any one of those subsystems where you have a sensor that detects a problem and it simply alerts a driver that there’s something wrong.”

From there we can test increasing levels of automation where a computer with greater processing power can deliver a detailed analysis of what’s tripping the warning light. A more advanced system could automatically make the correction and deliver an onscreen message explaining what it’s doing and how it’s adjusting the seeding depth.

Computer technology marches on and we’ll continue to develop smaller computers with greater processing power. Along with that we’re developing a variety of sensors that can feed more and more detailed information into a machine’s brain. Ultimately we will have machines that can go to work while the farmer stays home and watches through his laptop working on some accounting spreadsheets.

What may be satisfying to some of the old-school operators out there is the real goal of machine programming. The greatest success will be measured in how much the on-board computer will behave like a really competent human operator. After all, it’s still an experienced human mind that programs that computer, and a human hand that tests the program in a mounted tractor cab.

This article first appeared as ‘Brain plus computer’ in the March 31, 2015 issue of Country Guide

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“I’ll tell you,” Jennings laughs, “it’s fun to sit in the cab when you know you don’t have to touch anything, and to see if it reacts the same way you would if you were the operator, or some of the ways it reacts differently. It’s been neat to see the system’s ability to do that.”

Jennings is the service manager for Kinze at its factory in Williamsburg, Iowa. There, the company has been working with Jaybridge Robotics of Cambridge, Mass. to integrate more capability into farm machinery. Its first major project is the autonomous tractor and grain cart.

Ever since the development of auto steer, there’s been a concerted effort to get farm machines to do more and more. Now, a number of factors have come together to help make this possible. Computers are smaller, cheaper and more powerful than ever. Navigating technology and geographic information systems such as GPS are more accessible and, while farms and machines get larger, the labour pool available to run them gets smaller. As well, farm operations such as seeding and harvest are highly time sensitive, so expenditures to improve logistics could pay off handsomely.

“If the guy who we need to run that extra piece of equipment or run that grain cart is not readily available, that labour is at a premium,” Jennings says. “Without that grain cart, I lose the efficiency of my combine and that’s really where your return on investment is going to be, not specifically in a paycheque for a person but in the efficiency of the harvest by keeping the combine moving.”

That’s why Kinze made its first demonstration video with a driverless tractor suddenly sputtering to life all on its own and scampering out over the field to meet a moving combine. The tractor manoeuvres alongside, places the cart directly under the auger, and a torrent of corn starts pouring out. Just after the four-minute mark, the real show begins as the combine goes into a series of tight turns in several different directions. In a strange ballet, the tractor matches the combine step for step and keeps the cart perfectly positioned right under the spout of the auger. Not one kernel of corn hits the ground, no matter how wildly the combine steers.

“We give that tractor its own vision from sensors all around it — and inside the combine there is a tablet,” Jennings says. “Essentially the combine operator still orchestrates that part of the operation, and all of its cues as to what it should be doing still come from the combine.”

The combine is the heart of the system and the driver possesses the brain, so it’s still a human being making the decisions and directing the operation. The tablet in the cab has a map of the field with all the different obstacles placed in position and this is transmitted to the tractor. It knows, according to the map, where the crop has been cut and where it’s still standing. It’s aware of tile outlets or any other structures in the field. The operator has the advantage of the high seat and, if unmapped obstacles appear, they can feed new information into the tablet while driving the combine.

“The push of the touch screen can enter any other obstacles,” Jennings says. “If you want to make sure that it goes around a creek or a ravine or something, you can just draw around it with your fingers like finger paint on the screen. You can say go here but don’t go there.”

The other thing an operator can do is tell the tractor to idle and stand where it is while the combine makes another pass around the crop. At the push of the screen button, the tractor will start up again and catch the combine.

“When the combine operator says, ‘Hey, I’m on a nice, fairly straight stretch and I’ve got two-thirds of a tank and I want to get it emptied,’ they can press a single push button that says, ‘Unload,’ and it will come up, pull around the side and sync with the speed and distance as well as front to back. The combine can dump the grain on the go.”

To fine tune the system even more, the tractor has a series of on-board sensors that also feed information into its own computer. There are cameras mounted on strategic points in front, behind and off to the sides. If it stops, it feeds real-time video into the combine’s tablet so the operator can see why the tractor isn’t moving. If there’s an obstacle not entered into the tablet, the tractor will spot it with its own set of eyes.

The tractor is fitted with a radar system that sends pulses of radio waves out and measures what bounces back. Radar can see metallic things like other machines or equipment, as well as anything containing water. Since living things, such as wildlife, livestock or people are largely water, the radar can see them and the computer tells the tractor to act accordingly.

Radar can’t see wood or plastic so fence posts or PVC pipe might go unnoticed if it weren’t for another set of eyes called lidar. Lidar is a laser beam that will register objects that radar can’t, so the tractor can see just about anything that might be in that field. It also has an inertial measurement and GPS unit that uses satellite information, accelerometers and gyroscopes to tell the tractor what direction it’s going in and how fast.

All this information is fed into that on-board computer which is “ruggedized” in order to withstand the jarring a tractor takes as it moves up and down a farm field. The computer calculates the tractor’s speed and direction as well as noting its surroundings. Since computers work as fast as they do, it can turn with the combine almost perfectly. Once it’s full it can be dispatched back to its starting point where a truck driver climbs into the tractor cab and unloads it into a truck.

“The other thing is that the system is always running in a safe mode and what that means is that if there’s ever any question whether it’s a distance from an object or if one of the sending units reads something that it doesn’t like or isn’t expected or normal, it shuts down,” Jennings says. “There’s also a number of different manual safety devices on the exterior so that if you’re in and out of the vehicle to load the truck or you’re on the road or something, whenever you roll the steps down to climb into it, it’s in manual mode and it can’t be taken out.”

There are visions of the future where farm machines programmed for complex tasks could work on their own without a human operator in the cab. There’s no denying that other operations such as swathing or seeding are a lot more complicated and will require a great deal more study. The grain cart was one of the simpler operations and a good place to start.

“The autonomous grain cart that we’re doing today has a relatively low input from an operator’s standpoint,” Jennings says. “As we look at machine functionality we’ll just grow on that and be able to add additional functionality for other machine types.”

You can have a look at the autonomous tractor and grain cart in action with this YouTube video.

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