Reading Time: < 1 minute Southwestern Ontario crop input retailer and grain handler South West Ag Partners has made a deal to sell its precision agriculture analytics business to an expansion-minded drone data provider. Toronto-based Deveron UAS announced Aug. 28 it will trade a 9.9 per cent share of its business plus $320,000 cash for South West Ag’s Veritas Farm […] Read more
Drone data firm invests in precision ag analytics
‘Clean’ tech adoption up for federal funding
Reading Time: 2 minutes Provinces and territories can apply starting April 1 for chunks of a three-year, $25 million federal fund to support programs that encourage on-farm adoption of precision ag tools or use of renewables from ag waste. Federal Agriculture Minister Lawrence MacAulay on Monday launched the fund, to flow through what’s dubbed the Agricultural Clean Technology (ACT) […] Read more
Farmers Edge to use data to edge into insurance sector
Reading Time: 2 minutes Farmers Edge has signed a four-year agreement with global reinsurance company PartnerRe to bring precision farming technology together with ag insurance. Under the agreement announced this week, the two companies plan to work together to develop new insurance products for the agricultural market. While Canadian farmers have access to government-run, subsidized crop insurance programs, as […] Read more
Numbers drive dynamic decision-making
Jeannette Mongeon and Michel Dignard use spreadsheets to guide everyday decisions and to analyze and embrace change. It’s good for the farm, and it also keeps peace in the family
Reading Time: 6 minutes This past spring, Michel Dignard carefully walked his saturated soybean fields, counting the thin, yellowing plants while some were still fully submerged in water. It was emotionally exhausting work, but at least Dignard and his wife Jeannette Mongeon knew what they would do next. They crunched the numbers. They added up the costs and yield […] Read more
A place for community data
“Mining data isn’t a substitute for doing actual research,” warns seed company scientist
Reading Time: 7 minutes In the past five years, precision agriculture systems have begun providing an exciting opportunity to collect and pool data on factors ranging from yields to soil quality and beyond. Each data set offers greater insight into the characteristics of a field and its variability, or to its potential response to different treatments and management practices. […] Read more
Getting rich from your farm data
Data protection isn’t just for geeks. If you farm, you’ve got a pile of real dollars at stake. Here’s how
Reading Time: 8 minutes Farmers do all they can to protect their crops and livestock from pests, diseases and weather. We insure our buildings and equipment. We adopt marketing strategies to protect against price declines. But if you ask what we do to protect our farm data, you’ll usually get met with a blank stare. That’s not good. Information […] Read more
Lessons learned from the last crop
It pays to do some ‘regressive analysis’ to see if some practice or treatment helped a crop excel even under adverse conditions
Reading Time: 3 minutes Yield results aren’t necessarily the end of the story, says a longtime western Canadian agrologist who recommends farmers get more scientific about how they use those yield numbers as a reference point for examining the past season, and for planning the next year. Increasingly, data analysis will drive crop production, says Rob Saik, who founded […] Read more
Farm groups, ag tech companies agree on data privacy standards
Reading Time: 2 minutes Reuters — A consortium of farmer organizations and agriculture data technology providers on Thursday published a set of data privacy and security principles aimed at reassuring farmers that data they share with Big Data services providers will not be misused. The non-binding principles are also meant to provide companies that collect, store and analyze farmer […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
