and Agri-Food Canada who’s based in Indian Head, Sask., is more than familiar with the existing high-tech approaches to agriculture such as variable-rate technology and auto-steer systems.
He’s been one of the Canadian researchers who’s worked the most on GPS applications. But Lafond says he’s beginning to wonder if the agriculture industry as a whole is missing an opportunity to take established and proven technology from another industry and apply it to their fields.
“A lot of this technology is on the shelf already — it just hasn’t been used for agriculture,” Lafond explains. “But if you look at what we’re doing, running a seeder or a harvester down the field certainly isn’t as complicated as landing an airliner, and it’s nowhere near as risky.”
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Crop in, crop out
Two of the key operations in agriculture which could benefit from enhanced technology are the perennial busy seasons — seeding and harvest, says Lafond.
They’re also the times when farms suffer the most from a labour crunch — and an even bigger crunch in labour that actually knows something. Take the average combine, for example. It’s bigger than many small planes, it’s worth about as much, and it’s hardly something you’d want to put in the hands of just anyone.
Yet the answer of the agriculture engineering community has been the opposite of their colleagues who work on aircraft. In agriculture, the answer has been “more.” More accurately, the answer has been somewhere between “much more” and “much, much more.”
At every stage, whenever farm equipment designers have looked for ways to make the farm more efficient, a key part of their solution has been to simply make the equipment bigger. After all, if the problem is that you have a limited number of people to operate your machinery, it can make a lot of sense just to make the machinery bigger, so you get more acres out of each operator.
But these days, most of those gains have already been made. Really, if you’re already pulling an 84-foot air drill on the Prairies or driving a 12-row combine in Ontario, you’re already testing some pretty harsh size limits. Is it going to be practical to make those units any larger?
A better solution might be to go smaller and either reduce the required skill level of operators, or eliminate the operators altogether, says Lafond. Under one possible scenario, you could have unskilled operators with just a few key responsibilities, mainly hitting the emergency stop button if something went wrong — or you could do that remotely and have a number of machines operating in one field, with a single supervisor.
“I could see multiple units being supervised and serviced by a single farmer who might be, say, monitoring and supplying seed and fertilizer to them,” Lafond says.
It’s not a new idea. This time, though, the industry that’s done the most with it might come as a surprise to you. So the next time you’re picking up a burger at your local McDonald’s, keep a close eye on the action in the kitchen.
A couple of generations ago, running a restaurant took skilled staff, especially cooks. In fact a good cook could make or
