Matt Yanick, owner of My Precision Ag Ltd., says the flare that various space weather monitoring stations detected Oct. 3 doesn’t seem to have too caused many issues at all.

“I think it’s just kind of grazing us,” said Yanick.

“We’re not going to get really hammered by it like the one last spring.”

The springtime solar flare Yanick is referring to was an X8.79 flare that occurred May 14.

According to the spaceweatherlive.com website, the flare generated Oct. 3 was the 15th most-powerful of all time, rated as an X9. An X7.1 flare, ranking 26 of all time, was recorded Oct. 1.

X-class solar flares are the largest, according to NASA. The classification system NASA uses ranges from A-class flares to B, C, M and then X.

“Similar to the Richter scale for earthquakes, each letter represents a 10-fold increase in energy output,” says a NASA backgrounder on solar flares.

Spaceweatherlive.com lists the top 50 solar flares of all time, and the largest was an X40+ that occurred Nov. 4, 2003.

“Associated with (that) flare was an ejection of a billion tons or more of gas from the sun’s tenuous outer atmosphere, or corona,” NASA said at the time.

“But because the flare occurred on the limb of the sun, pointing away from the Earth, the charged particles it emits will probably only glance off the Earth.”

A solar flare is a tremendous explosion on the Sun that happens when energy stored in “twisted” magnetic fields, usually above sunspots, is suddenly released, according to the European Space Agency (ESA) website.

“In a matter of just a few minutes, they heat material to many millions of degrees and produce a burst of radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves to X-rays and gamma rays,” the ESA says.

It’s a bit of a mystery why this flare hasn’t caused a greater disruption.

Yanick says his reading indicates scientists still have difficulty tracking these flares as they move toward Earth.

It helps that lots of farmers are done harvest by now and those doing fieldwork, like harrowing, don’t require GPS.

“It wasn’t horrendous, nothing really hit until (Sunday) night,” said Yanick.

“The northern lights kind of showcased that.”

Yanick says there’s not a lot producers can do to guard against interference from solar flares.

Running a higher-accuracy system can help, he said. Farmers running those typically fare a lot better. However, had this flare hit us head on, Yanick says it likely would have knocked out everything anyway.

“With the flare that occurred last spring, even the best systems were having issues,” said Yanick.

“There was no way around it.”

Despite the magnitude of this most recent flare, Yanick says he figures we may get lucky this time round.

“There’s going to be some minor interference that started (Sunday) night,” said Yanick.

“There will likely be more, but nothing major — minor to moderate at best.

“For me, that’s a really good thing.”

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“Time to freehand the field,” wrote Wawanesa, Man., farmer Simon Ellis in a post on X on Friday. “At least this field isn’t against the highway.”

Responses to his post suggested farmers in Kansas, Central Saskatchewan, and Rivers, Man., were also having issues.

Via text, Ellis said as he switched fields on Friday, he noticed his GPS wasn’t matching up.

“Initially there were large misses or large over lap. Up to half the air seeder width,” he said. “That was with the auto steer engaged.”

Ellis said he uses the Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS). By Saturday, the issues had mostly smoothed out, he added.

The New York Times reported yesterday that farmers across the American Midwest had also suffered from GPS outages, with some having to halt seeding entirely.

On Friday, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration put out a media bulletin warning that it was following a series of solar flares and coronal mass ejections that had begun on May 8. It warned that the storm conditions could last throughout the weekend.

Coronal mass ejections are “explosions of plasma and magnetic fields from the sun’s corona,” NOAA said. “They cause geomagnetic storms when they are directed at Earth. Geomagnetic storms can impact infrastructure in near-Earth orbit and on Earth’s surface, potentially disrupting communications, the electric power grid, navigation, radio and satellite operations.”

The solar activity also caused brilliant aurora borealis, or “northern lights” to be visible Friday night.

NOAA alerts as late as today suggested the solar activity was ongoing.

Farmers using WAAS may see further interruption to their signal as the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, which administers the civilian-use GPS network, had plans to switch one of its WAAS satellites into test mode starting yesterday and lasting until June 7. Its other two satellites remain in operation.

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Regina-based Brandt announced Tuesday it has closed its previously-announced deal to buy the assets of GeoShack Canada — two weeks after Dallas-based GeoShack declared that “a mutually beneficial deal… has not been attained.”

GeoShack has been the “long-time exclusive supplier” for Topcon Positioning Systems equipment in Ontario, including sales, service, and rentals of GPS and other equipment for the ag, construction, survey and engineering industries, through locations in Toronto, Ottawa and London.

California-based Topcon’s agricultural products include precision seeding, spraying and harvest equipment as well as autosteer and guidance systems.

Brandt, which already had a “pre-existing Topcon footprint” in Western and Atlantic Canada and last month made a deal with Topcon for distribution rights to the Quebec market, is now “the exclusive dealer for Topcon Positioning Systems and other complimentary tools and technology for the entire Canadian market.”

GeoShack, in a separate release Monday, said the deal also makes Brandt “likely Canada’s largest geopositioning technology supplier.” Its staff in Ontario are employed by Brandt “effective immediately,” GeoShack added.

“The combination of… GeoShack’s Ontario-based team and Brandt’s national infrastructure is going to be powerful for our Ontario customers,” GeoShack president Scott Beathard said in the same release.

“We’ve worked very hard to build strong relationships and a solid operation in the Ontario market over the last 16 years and we’re completely confident that Brandt will continue to grow the business and provide unmatched value for clients in that market.”

“We’ve worked hard to make this a great deal for our survey, engineering and construction customers in Ontario and Quebec,” Brandt CEO Shaun Semple said Tuesday.

“Brandt’s 56 locations from coast to coast to coast coupled with GeoShack’s strategic locations in Ontario will position Brandt, with the industry’s largest team of experts, to provide an unmatched degree of aftersales support,” Brandt said.

Brandt’s deal with GeoShack parent Ultara Holdings also includes Inteq Distributors, a “complementary business” with a distribution centre at Exeter, Ont. providing sales and service on “an extensive selection of construction instruments, optical equipment, survey supplies and accessories.”

Both the GeoShack and Inteq brands and operations in Ontario will be “transitioned” into Brandt Positioning Technology, the company said.

Neither Brandt nor GeoShack said exactly why the deal had appeared to die late last month, nor did either company say what had happened to revive it. Privately-held Brandt did not disclose the financial terms of the final deal.

Formed in 1995, GeoShack expanded to Ontario in 2003 when it merged the Toronto- and Exeter-based businesses of Laserline Ontario with those of three other independent distributors in Texas, Ohio and Michigan.

Outside Ontario, GeoShack will still have 16 U.S. locations in eight states. –– Glacier FarmMedia Network

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The Regina-based Brandt Group announced Wednesday it has reached a deal to buy the assets of GeoShack Canada Co. and the Canadian assets of Inteq Distributors, both owned by Dallas-based Ultara Holdings.

In Ontario, GeoShack is billed as the “long-time exclusive supplier” for Topcon Positioning Systems equipment, including sales, service, and rentals of GPS and other equipment for the ag, construction, survey and engineering industries, through locations in Toronto, Ottawa and London.

California-based Topcon’s agricultural products include precision seeding, spraying and harvest equipment as well as autosteer and guidance systems.

Formed in 1995, Geoshack expanded to Ontario in 2003 when it merged the Toronto- and Exeter-based businesses of Laserline Ontario with those of three other independent distributors in Texas, Ohio and Michigan. Outside Ontario it will still have 16 U.S. locations in eight states.

The GeoShack deal, on top of Brandt’s “pre-existing Topcon footprint” in Western and Atlantic Canada — and a new separate agreement in which Topcon has assigned distribution rights to Brandt for the Quebec market — makes Brandt “the exclusive dealer for Topcon construction and geopositioning products for all of Canada.”

“The territorial expansion of the Brandt operation will scale our presence and penetration in Canada,” Eduardo Falcon, general manager for Topcon’s geopositioning group, said in a separate release.

Brandt’s other acquisition, Inteq Distributors, is a “complementary business” with a distribution centre at Exeter, Ont. providing sales and service on “an extensive selection of construction instruments, optical equipment, survey supplies and accessories.”

The deal with Ultara is expected to close June 26, giving Brandt what it calls a “comprehensive retail footprint to supply premium geopositioning equipment to Canadian construction and forestry contractors, engineering firms and survey companies.”

“We are very excited to add this highly respected team along with these key product lines and support services for our customers in Ontario and Quebec,” Brandt CEO Shaun Semple said in Wednesday’s release.

“The combination of the GeoShack team and Brandt’s national infrastructure is going to be powerful for Ontario customers,” GeoShack president Scott Beathard said in the same release.

“We’ve worked very hard to build strong relationships and a solid operation in the Ontario market over the years and we’re completely confident that Brandt will continue to grow the business and provide unmatched value for clients in that market.” — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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At the Agritechnica machinery show in Hanover, Germany, in November, AGCO revealed the project has moved beyond the development stage. Now the company is almost ready to let the machines loose on a limited release ahead of a full-scale market introduction.

And along with entering a new phase of development comes a new name for the 60-kilogram robots: Xaver.

“We started with a research project funded by the European Commission in May of 2015,” explained Thiemo Buchner, project lead at Fendt Robotics. “The research part lasted 18 months. In October of 2016 we finished the research. After that it was completely taken over by AGCO. That was the pre-product development. We’re now in the product development phase, because we’re aiming at the commercialization of the Xaver.”

The new name demonstrates that the project is on track, Buchner continued. “We’ve left the research phase and gone into real product development now. MARS was the research project. Xaver is the product. Xaver is the first name of our founder, Xaver Fendt. And it’s also like Alexa from Amazon. You can now say, ‘Okay, Xaver, please seed the field.’”

The little robots are designed to work in groups. The “swarms” are completely controlled by a special program that sends instructions to the machines and gets data back from them through the Cloud, such as the exact GPS position of each planted seed.

“What’s important to understand is that the whole system is working autonomously,” said Buchner. “The farmer just puts the trailer, which is the logistic unit, near the field, presses a button, and after that our algorithm and the Cloud take over. It does plot planning for all the robots. It receives the position of each robot and it also stores each seed position in its database. So for later applications you know where the plant will grow.”

Each robot is capable of planting between 0.1 and 0.15 hectares (about 0.25 of an acre) per hour, so a swarm of 10 will cover about one to 1.5 hectares (2.5 acres) in the same time.

Buchner believes in the conditions typical of Western Europe 15 robots could replace a conventional eight-row planter.

“And if you think of the 24/7 capability of the system, even less (robots would be needed), because they all work all night long,” he added.

There is redundancy built into the Xaver system to account for any unexpected failure of a single unit. The control program will automatically issue new instructions to the remaining units to cover for any one that goes down, and operators can monitor the progress of the machines from a portable smart device.

“You can look on your app and see how far the seeding process is, where the robots are driving,” said Buchner. “You can stop or let the robot return to the logistic system if you want to. But the important thing is you don’t have a necessity to input with the system during operation. So no operator needed.”

Each unit can travel up to 60 km/h, and the battery powering them will last for 2.5 to three hours. When the power level gets too low, each unit will automatically return to the charging station, which is in the logistics trailer. There it not only gets a recharge, the seed hopper is also automatically refilled. Each Xaver unit can hold up to 25,000 seeds. That’s enough to plant about 0.25 of a hectare (0.6 of an acre).

Starting in 2019, the brand will offer Xaver on a limited market introduction basis.

“We will have a pilot series in 2019, maybe a pay-for–use model, where we go out with the robots and do some seeding in clients’ fields,” said Buchner.

Right now the Xaver system is only designed to seed corn, but after it becomes widely available as a regular product from Fendt (and possibly dealers of other AGCO brands), Buchner thinks engineers will look at expanding what the little robots can do.

“We have this in the back of our minds, of course,” he said. “It’s highly modular. You could maybe put other modules inside. Instead of seeding, you could maybe think of scouting applications, for instance, or weed control.”

The post ‘Xaver’-ing success appeared first on Country Guide.

The latest release from StatsCan’s 2016 Census of Agriculture showed farmers were particularly keen to jump into new technology if it improved the efficiency of their operations or their bottom lines.

StatsCan spokesperson Erik Dorff said the agency has been going through old census reports dating back to 1871, showing farmers have long been ahead of the curve when it comes investing in new technology.

“As we look through what we collect on the census, we always see that farmers have been fairly aggressive in adopting new technology,” he said in a phone interview.

From using horses to pull plows, to ever-increasing engine horsepower, to zero tillage, to seed genetics, Dorff said farmers are consistently early adopters of change.

“Farmers have been really innovative businessmen in applying and leveraging technology to make their operations more efficient.”

The StatsCan report showed large-scale farmers are most likely to adopt new technology, with the percentage of farms that report technology use as part of their operations growing as sales increase.

On farms with sales of $1 million or more, 95.9 per cent reported using at least one of the technologies listed. That compares to 42.7 per cent for farms with sales of less than $10,000. On farms with sales of $100,000-$249,999, 73.3 per cent reported using one of the technologies listed.

Those include robotic milking, greenhouse automation, automated animal housing environmental controls, automated animal feeding, GIS mapping, automated steering, GPS technology, smartphones, tablets or computers for their farm operations.

On grain and oilseed farms, 48.6 per cent reported the use of automated steering, 62.5 per cent used GPS and 15.8 per cent used GIS mapping.

The more acres farmed by grains and oilseed farmers, the more likely they were to adopt these technologies.

On farms reporting 10,000 acres or more of cropland, 93.6 per cent used automated steering, 97.1 per cent used GPS and 52.7 per cent used GIS mapping.

The report also noted more farms are using larger and more advanced equipment.

The value of farm machinery and equipment rose 15.4 per cent across the country from the last census in 2011, to $53.9 billion in 2016.

Larger tractors and other equipment enable farmers to complete field work more quickly, the report noted.

“Well, we’ve got some really, really cool technology that is being deployed on the farm,” said Dorff.

“The technology does allow operators, where suitable, to be much more productive, to really do more with less.”

In the report, the average total value of machinery per farm registered at $278,405 in 2016, up 22.7 per cent since 2011.

On livestock operations, hog and pig, and poultry and egg operations were mostly likely to use automated environmental controls for housing and automated feeding. In 2015, 53.6 per cent of hog and pig farms reported they used automated animal feeding and 43.3 per cent of poultry and egg type farms reported the use of automated environmental controls.

Nationwide, 11.1 per cent of livestock farms reported the use of automated feeding systems and 10.2 per cent reported the use of automated environmental controls.

For dairy, 8.9 per cent reported robotic milking technology. Not surprisingly, the percentage of farms that reported having robotic milkers increased as the number of cows increased. However, the number peaked at 17.4 per cent on operations milking between 201 and 500 cows. Operations with 501 cows or more and having robotic milking machines declined to 13.1 per cent.

The StatsCan report said the initial investment to buy robotic milkers for a large herd, combined with the particular management challenges of a large herd may outweigh the benefits for large operations.

Canada-wide, 66.3 per cent of farms reported using technology of some type. That could include anything from using computers or smartphones for farm management, to GPS technology, auto steering or automated animal feeding.

— Terry Fries writes for Commodity News Service Canada, a Winnipeg company specializing in grain and commodity market reporting.

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Of course, from many farmers’ points of view, the issue looks entirely different. Why should they adopt a technology when it’s still so time-consuming and costly?

When GPS-based yield monitors arrived in the early to mid-1990s, they were an easy sell to growers. Not only was the technology supposed to track yields and print out detailed maps, it was also supposed to help by defining specific acres in a field that would benefit from specific management.

At that point, “variable rate” became a buzzword, with assurances that it was coming, and that growers needed to be ready for its arrival, and the talk turned to variable rate spraying, liming, fertilizing, planting — even manure applications.

Unfortunately, the technology couldn’t develop as fast as the concepts or the expectations.

As the 2000s became the 2010s, conditions changed for farmers as well. Costs for land and machinery increased, commodity prices became more volatile and farmers had to cope with an increasingly intrusive consumer sector bolstered by government interventions in farming practices.

Add to this whole scenario the generational shift on our farms and the changing genetics of our major crops, and it’s clear why this variable rate situation can get more complicated, not less.

That’s the setting against which a group from Niagara College is trying to introduce a new computer-based system to enable farmers to input their own data, including any maps they’ve generated and other information pertaining to their farms, to create a variable rate “tool set.”

Dr. Michael Duncan and Sarah Lepp are part of that team, working with Ian McDonald, Nicole Rabe and Ben Rosser from the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA). The Precision Agriculture Advancement for Ontario (PAAO) project is a three-year initiative, with funding from the Grain Farmers of Ontario. Duncan is a professor at Niagara College as well as the industrial research chair for the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), and Lepp is the senior research associate with Niagara College.

The two have been working on the program’s “crop portal” in an effort to empower growers to do much of the work of analyzing their farming practices themselves. The work is slow for a number of reasons, not the least of which is a reluctance on the part of many farmers to plug their farms into a new computer-based management tool that has so many working parts.

It’s one thing to own a yield monitor and have those numbers available, but it’s another to pull together those data points with other properties of the farm, “clean” that data, and then generate the analysis.

Even then, the grower still has to evaluate the date and decide whether it makes sense to invest the money necessary to put the resulting plans to work, which may require yet more computer programs and more new machinery.

In the end, maybe it’s easier to just stick with the status quo, or maybe shell out a bit more for a certified crop adviser (CCA).

Or is it?

By the numbers

There’s an important question when considering the use of computers on the farm: What are people using them for?

According to the 2011 Agricultural Census, the percentage of farmers using computers for “farm business” was 59.6 per cent (122,697 farms out of 205,730 reporting). In 2006, Statistics Canada reported 106,409 farms using a computer for farm business. The challenge here is one of quantity versus quality. Is a computer used for accounting? For tracking weather? For pricing new or used equipment? Or monitoring commodity prices? How much time is spent on Twitter or Facebook? How many farmers are using their computers for analysis of yields, soil types, fertility levels and topography, and then generating a comprehensive field map analysis that helps them manage their fields variably?

At the other end of the digital communications spectrum, Ipsos conducted a survey in 2015 and found 86 per cent of commercial farmers read websites and online content for farming while 80 per cent used smartphones.

For all of the positive numbers from surveys though, it’s the anecdotal evidence that Duncan encounters — of an unwillingness to invest time and effort in learning to manipulate data through a computer program — that is most telling. He admits that it does take time for someone to familiarize themselves with the hardware and the software, but beyond the time or any investment costs, there’s the mindset that creates the first barrier.

“It’s a huge paradigm shift,” says Duncan, referring to the generational thinking on many farms. “‘Grandpappy put down blankets, I put down blankets, and we’ve been profitable all these years’. Typically what happens is that the farmer will say, ‘Don’t even talk to me about technology, I don’t want to hear about it’.”

What often happens during that same conversation is that the farmer will direct Duncan or Lepp to talk to their son, who often runs through the make and model of the systems he’s researched — and would love to have. The question at that point is often whether Dad will sign the cheques.

Defining variable rate

If establishing the level of computer adoption and usage rates is a barrier, Duncan contends another important barrier is to define variable rate and show the computational process, and what it means to change from the old paradigm to the new. A simple model of the variable rate computational process includes:

• Gather your data (ideally, multiple years of data).
• Upload into a program.
• Clean the data by removing outliers and unlikely values.
• Grid the values using an interpolation scheme like “kriging”or “nearest neighbour.”
• Apply a classification algorithm to the resulting map that divides the field into management zones.
• Upload soil chemistry/recommendation maps to show nutrient levels in various parts of the field (every four years or so).
• Assess the yields in each zone and begin to create a prescription based on the yield found in the zone.
• Upload your list of fertilizers and nutrients.
• Assign or let an algorithm assign fertilizer values to the zones based on yield and/or current nutrient levels in the zone.
• Capture the resulting prescription map.
• Convert the map scale to match the variable rate spreader you have.
• Upload the prescription to the spreader (usually through a dealer API like John Deere’s APEX).
• Apply the prescription.
• Collect the “as applied” (the actual values the spreader is capable of laying down).
• Compare as-applied maps with prescription maps.
• Adjust applications if needed.
• As you do this year-over-year, keep track of the raw data and generated maps to find usable patterns.
• Back up your data — one day you will realize this stuff is gold.
• Find a secure location for your data SD cards.
• Collect crop with yield monitor to create raw yield map.
• Compare results with as-applied, any additions, and the prescription map.
• Assess financial gains/losses.
• Start at one and adjust levels as needed.

Remember, this is the simple model. Companies such as Trimble and John Deere also recognize the sheer mass of calculations involved that are beyond the capacity of most home computers. That’s why Trimble and Deere offer their services via Cloud-based technology. But it’s important to stress that the PAAO project is based on building a system that does all of this for the farmer and by the farmer. There’s no aggregation or selling of data with this technology. Farmers learn how to use the computer program to build their own analytical tool and recommendations for their own farm.

Getting started the toughest part

At first glance, the crop portal is an impressive sight, with a variety of tables for farmers to input their data. It’s not just a database, however. Lepp emphasizes that it processes yield data and analyzes its place among available details and other information, such as topographical maps or soil test results — whatever a farmer has at their disposal.

“It’s more than just a database, and originally, the PAAO project wanted just a database to drop data, but that wasn’t enough,” says Lepp. “They needed a tool set to look at and process the data, and actually do something with them. The next step was to expand the tool set, to be able to do different calculations on layers and different years of data or work on both elevation and yield data together to create products. That’s what we’re working to expand out into.”

The other aspect that’s important from Lepp’s perspective is what this system provides in terms of visualization. It’s one thing to have a table of soil test results or year-over-year yield data. But when those data points or test results can be combined with a visual guideline or recommendations, that’s when the system begins to attract attention.

Is this complicated? Is it time consuming? Yes — at least in the beginning, concedes Lepp. It’s far more complex than anything else that exists out there — and it’s a system that lets the farmer maintain their own information for their own use. She also agrees that it can be very intimidating, and she’s spent hours talking farmers through the process. Some farmers opt to hire a CCA to do this for them, and that’s great: one way or another, those growers are adopting variable rate technology on to their farms. That they’re hiring a professional to do it in no way diminishes its value or the impact the technology can bring to their farms.

The worst-case alternative is to have all of this information, but not use it to any of its potential. It’s been estimated that more than half of growers with a yield monitor look at the final results, perhaps take a picture of the screen or memorize the numbers, and then hit “delete”. Those are lost opportunities. And investing in new technologies — be they computer-driven or systems that are installed in-cab — may not be as overwhelming as the time needed for a person to familiarize themselves with new technology to the point where it becomes a benefit in terms of on-farm efficiencies.

It’s similar to upgrading from a typewriter to a computer (but on a much larger scale). Is the typewriter simple? Yes. Does the computer take up more time to assimilate and incorporate into a familiar and manageable process? Yes. But in the end, the efficiencies are undeniable. The same is true with smartphone technologies: how many farmers have smartphones that they’ve learned to use? And those took time, as well, but the benefits seemed undeniable.

It’s the same with the PAAO project and its crop portal, but farmers are asking how can they afford to adopt new technology.

But, says Lepp, “At $4 for corn, the farmer can’t afford not to invest, because he’s breaking his back to make $4 — and that’s where we come in. We need to make it fast and painless so the learning curve is almost zero. We’re trying to lower that learning curve to nothing so that it’s easy, it’s quick and they do it almost instantaneously.”

Additional information

The crop portal for the Precision Agriculture for Advancement in Ontario (PAAO) project can be found at cropportal.niagararesearch.ca. It requires a user to register, but if you have questions as to its use and process, you can call Sarah Lepp at 905-735-2211 (ext. 7182) or email slepp@niagaracollege.ca.

The post Getting started at variable rate appeared first on Country Guide.

Two days before her last email, I was in the small garage above, tucked behind a house in Regina, and I was looking at what could become the long-term solution to her HR problem. It was a compact tractor matched to a special two-row corn planter, with both of them wrapped in a network of electrical cables and computers.

It made me think of Hewlett and Packard inventing the computer era in their own garage, because this is no average tractor and planter. Instead, they’re the foundation for a general-purpose farm robot that will be entered in the upcoming AgBot Challenge to be held in Illinois this May. The winner of that event will need to prove their machine can work entirely on its own.

In this case, that means the robot must be capable of loading its own seed and planting a series of corn rows in a field, all without human intervention.

The small group of industrial systems engineering students from the University of Regina who were busy working on that little tractor and planter in their urban workshop were urged by their professor to enter the competition as their final-year class project.

• So how did the team do in competition? Click here to find out!

“The driving force for students has been the excitement,” says Mehran Mehrandezh, associate professor in industrial systems engineering at the U of R. “If they see something exciting, they go for it. We can make this very exciting and at the same time very useful.”

Of course, the US$50,000 first prize in the AgBot Challenge helps add to that excitement.

Autonomous systems have been appearing with increasing frequency at farm shows lately. And as I stood among the budding engineers in that Regina garage, joined by their mentor and a farmer who has actually put robotics to work on his farm, it seemed unstoppable; general-purpose robots in agriculture are about to hit a critical mass.

Major manufacturers all quietly acknowl­edge they could put an automated tractor on the market tomorrow, and even though they aren’t yet willing to do so, efforts like those of these students are proof the future is getting impatient.

The widespread adoption of farm robotic systems may actually be poised to mimic the initial phase of the home computer. In the 1970s, the first personal computers came as DIY projects made up of a box full of parts that needed to be assembled on the workbench. The same is likely to be true for the first wave of on-farm robotic control systems.

But unlike those home computer kits, which didn’t really have a clearly defined purpose in the early days, on-farm robotics may fill an immediate need for manpower and efficiency.

“Will there be (robotic control) kits available?” Mehrandezh wonders rhetorically. He also sees a parallel to those early days of the personal computer.

“Right now it’s a community of hackers that are buying these cheap components and working in garages,” chimes in Sam Dietrich, one of the students on the team. “There’s nothing on the market yet, which is kind of surprising, I think.”

“A lot of people are able to get these components, use open-source libraries and do stuff like this,” adds Joshua Friedrick, another team member.

Maybe, but putting together an entry with all the sophistication to make it a contender in the upcoming AgBot Challenge required getting some sponsorships. In this case, a local Kubota dealership provided a 26-horsepower tractor for them to modify. And Saskatchewan-based Seed Hawk, an implement manufacturer, custom built a two-row planter for it to pull.

“Technology and robotics are all becoming very mainstream in agriculture,” says Edward Lambert, vice-president of R&D at Seed Hawk. “It will get to a tipping point where the next phase is automation. A lot of our customers are excited about new technology and what we’ve come up with. They can see there’s going to be another leap in the future as well.”

And Professor Mehrandezh wants his team to ensure this leap is a big one.

“I told these guys, let’s not just move forward this much,” Mehrandezh recalls, holding his fingers an inch or two apart. “Let’s have a quantum leap. Let’s go to swarm farming so we’ll be ahead of everybody else. Taking this to the next level of swarm farming is not that difficult.”

The swarm idea refers to having a group — or swarm — of smaller machines working together in a field.

“If we can make this navigate off a GPS signal, it’s just an extra 20 lines of code to make it follow another tractor,” agrees Friedrick. “It’s very easy for us to just expand it into a lot of different areas.”

That’s an idea that Lambert thinks has merit.

“I don’t like the word swarm, especially in agriculture,” he says with a laugh. “But it’s something a lot of companies are working on, to get multiple machines in the field working together. I think one of the trends going forward is faster machines and smaller machines, because not everybody can handle a 100-foot-wide implement. I think we’re probably getting to the limit of how big tools and tractors will be.”

He isn’t alone in that thinking. Another industry insider I spoke to recently confided that he believed the trend to bigger implements is about to reverse itself, in large part due to the potential offered by automation.

“The next phase going forward, it may be five years or 10, I don’t know the time frame just yet, but autonomous vehicles will be something farmers will go for,” says Lambert. “I think it can be produced in a very economical way and provide value to the farmer. It’s not too far away. I can see it happening within my career.”

For Manitoba farmer Matt Reimer, a robotic tractor he can put to work is no longer a pie-in-the-sky idea. He has already created a robotic control system to use on a high-horsepower tractor on his farm.

“There are definitely some people who think what I’m doing is nuts,” he says, but many others have expressed genuine interest.

The quality and durability of a wide variety of the electronic components and sensors necessary to create robotic systems has grown exponentially in recent years, while their cost has fallen at an almost equal rate.

The U of R team’s little tractor takes advantage of that. Relatively inexpensive components — that are becoming progressively cheaper as time goes on — are what make up the bulk of the team’s autonomous system. To keep things simple, a computer controls off-the-shelf actuators that manipulate the manual controls on the tractor just as a driver would.

“Our main goal right now is to interface all our components with the controls that are already there,” says Friedrick. “What we’re focusing on is the software and control system. Most of our time is spent programming.”

Reimer took the same approach to automating his tractor. Although he had no formal training in computer programming, he was able to find an online course to get some basic skills allowing him to write the software code he needed, borrowing much from free, open-source programs available online.

The U of R students will be busy over the next two months getting their robot ready for the upcoming challenge. Lambert thinks the work they’ll do will help the industry overall, even if they don’t end up creating a market-ready system.

“As manufacturers, we don’t always have the opportunity to take something right from the grassroots,” he says. “To get the university to help us with that is really a benefit.”

The team also thinks of the tractor as the start of a legacy project that future students can build on and develop further.

“We’ve actually started a club at the U of R, an agricultural robotics club,” says Dietrich. “We kind of see it as being a lasting piece at the University of Regina.”

Mehrandezh thinks the team’s efforts could be a significant stake in the ground, putting the U of R firmly on the robotics engineering map.

“I want to make this like a centre of excellence, headquartered at the University of Regina,” he says.

For Reimer and his farming operation, the benefits of robotics are already here for the taking. Having his driverless tractor pull a grain cart during harvest last fall freed up manpower to tackle other jobs that needed to get done.

Says Reimer, “I had the best fall I’ve ever had in terms of getting things ready for this coming spring (with a robotic tractor in the field). We’re not going back.”

The post A new era on the farm begins appeared first on Country Guide.

On the farm, though, progress isn’t so fast. And it’s true that finding out whether our tractors are idling at Tim Horton’s isn’t really a problem for most of us, and we don’t need to file the same kind of endless road reports.

Even so, the costs to own, operate and maintain farm equipment are huge for today’s farmers, and the pay offs for efficient co-ordination of equipment and reduced downtime can be bigger than ever.

But how do we achieve those goals?

Rob Saik, founder of AgriTrend Agrology, based in Red Deer, Alta. still remembers the day 30 years ago when he was putting in some crop and he needed a wrench, but was eight miles from home. He drove all the way back to the shop only to find out when he finally got back to the field that a bolt had snapped too, and he had to make the round trip all over again.

It’s the sort of snafu that most farmers at the time experienced. Talk about downtime… and frustration!

Then along came two-way radios, cell phones, texting and, more recently, GPS, and the picture felt like it was getting a lot better.

But there is more. Beyond agronomic data, today’s GPS systems and the computer sensors on our farm equipment can wirelessly transfer data that can be used to maintain, fix, move and co-ordinate equipment like never before.

Plus, that wireless capability brings in the potential to link our machines directly to the experts at the dealership.

Welcome to the new world of farm fleet management.

Farm equipment that can communicate data directly to the home office or a dealership’s computers will facilitate tracking a machine’s exact location, how it is operating, and whether something will fail shortly or needs to be fixed.

A crew can then be sent out to the field right away with the proper part, reducing or potentially even eliminating downtime. No more frustrating wrench runs.

Plus, since locations are known, the job of co-ordinating equipment and inputs can be more efficient. If fuel or fertilizer is getting low, a truck can be organized so it’s waiting at exactly the right time at exactly the right end of the right row. Even lunch could be delivered hot.

One example of this type of system is AGCO’s AGCommand Fuse. This enables a central program to connect data with vehicles, either by USB or wireless. A typical new Challenger tractor has eight to 10 computers on board, all measuring and controlling things like RPMs and engine temperature, but also tracking maintenance needs, plus watching sensors that indicate if a part or a system is at risk of failure — not to mention collecting and processing the agronomic and field information.

As already noted, today’s technology can shoot all this data wirelessly to a home office or directly to a dealership. But there’s more. A web-based application can also make it easy to access that data, along with iPad and iPhone mobile apps.

Wireless transmission of data is also making it faster to use the data in real time. This is particularly useful when co-ordinating movement of people and equipment over vast farms with multiple locations, especially in variable weather with limited application windows. The data can be linked directly to the farm’s main office computer and/or to the dealership’s condition monitoring centre, or even shared with a trusted adviser.

In Alberta this past summer, Saik talked with a large farm customer with two farms, one south of Calgary and one near Peace River. While they chatted, the farmer watched his equipment on his iPad as both farms were being seeded simultaneously.

Saik has also witnessed first-hand how a large-farm manager in Ukraine tracked 25 to 30 tractors. Employees inserted ID cards under their tractor seats to ensure their butts were in the seat, and sensors measured seeding depth relaying the information back to the main office to ensure the job was getting done correctly.

“It’s on these multi-person, multi-equipment farms where fleet management really starts to pay for itself,” says Saik.

Yet in Canada, it’s generally the medium-sized farmers, not the really big farmers, who are making the jump to high-tech solutions. It seems easier to integrate wholesale changes like this to moderately sized farms, believes Saik. The 20,000-acre-plus farms are focused on trying to move large amounts of equipment as quickly as possible. To fully leverage GPS technology takes time, technological expertise and sometimes patience and imagination, and it’s a whole other leap to integrate the data into a fleet management system.

“Adoption of this type of technology is psychographic, not demographic,” says Saik.

To date, the uptake of technology has been limited by the lack of easy interfaces and the time it takes to cobble together systems and to manage the data. Once these get easier, more farmers will jump on board, says Saik.

The AGCO Fuse program works with all makes and sizes of equipment. The ability to send data has been on their new equipment for the last few years. The software is part of the maintenance agreement and for the first year it’s free. Yet very few people take advantage of it — so far.

Two buckets of data

“There are basically two buckets to this data,” says Jason O’Flanagan, AGCO’s North American field marketing and sales support manager for advanced technology solutions. “One is for agronomic data (for example, yield data) and the other is mechanical and performance.”

Spatial positioning platforms that tell you where things are at any given time has been revolutionary and it’s everywhere. Outside of agriculture, it’s as ubiquitous as cell phones.

Now it’s becoming ubiquitous on the farm too, allowing us to integrate geography, application and weather into a data summary locked into the system forever.

Today, the data from scouting, tissue and soil sampling, and yield monitors can also be layered over each other throughout the season and over years to become more and more accurate, says Saik. “This last summer we (Agri-Trend) had some 79,000 in-season scouting images on our Agri-Data platform, all meta-tagged and geo-coded, so we knew the exact time and place of any event. We could see that at 3:44 p.m. on the northwest corner of a specific field, there was herbicide carryover on the headlands.”

Fleet management by contrast depends on the data from the mechanical and performance bucket.

One of the big opportunities is to co-ordinate equipment with deliveries of inputs and outputs. “It can help you get maximum efficient use of the equipment and labour,” says O’Flanagan.

Similar to AGCO’s software, Trimble’s Connected Farm Fleet can compare the use of each vehicle during a 24-hour period, capturing time spent idling, moving, working and travelling and any reasons for delays. It can also monitor fuel usage, battery voltage, oil pressure and help you view trends of vehicle health and performance graphed over time.

Preventive maintenance, tracking, fuel use, stress alerts, engine use and efficiency, driver in seat, and RPMs can be monitoried, and alarms can be sent calling for help when warranted. For example, with the AGCO system, if a cable harness is fraying, an error code can be immediately sent so the farmer or mechanic knows exactly what part needs to be replaced. Then they can get out to the field right away to replace it before the whole machine goes down.

Preventing downtime during the critical season is where the payback can be huge for this system, no matter how big the fleet, says O’Flanagan.

This data can also be used to create bigger-picture analysis of a fleet. For example, a graph can give you an exact number of operator hours and how long equipment sat idle at the side of a field in the year. Instead of estimating, this can tell you if the implement isn’t sized appropriately for the tractor and operation.

It can also give an indisputable record of what the equipment did at any given location and time, which may be necessary as more environmental regulations and litigation are pushed onto farmers.

There’s no doubt that having and sharing information can be powerful. Using it to increase efficiency and decrease downtime, in real time, could be revolutionary. Which leads us to the potential next step ­— driverless tractors and combines.

The post Manage your farm fleet appeared first on Country Guide.

AgJunction, which in 2013 relocated its head office from Calgary to Kansas and shut its Calgary manufacturing plant, announced Wednesday it will reduce its total workforce by about 20 per cent by the end of its third fiscal quarter in 2016.

As of mid-October, AgJunction had 182 employees worldwide following its merger with California-based precision steering equipment firm Novariant. AgJunction and Novariant came to the merger with 130 and 52 staff respectively.

AgJunction’s product lines include Outback Guidance farm equipment guidance systems and Satloc equipment for aerial applicators.

The job cuts and other consolidations are expected to cost the company about $600,000 and reduce annual expenses by about $3.3 million through lower overhead and manufacturing costs and improved operating margins.

AgJunction didn’t say where specifically its job cuts would be made. Its operations include its head office at Hiawatha, about 110 km north of Topeka; its global engineering centre and Satloc sales office at Scottsdale, Arizona; its Canadian sales office, in Winnipeg; and an engineering centre and sales office at Brisbane in Australia.

The company’s “near-term” consolidation program is meant to “leverage the immediate business synergies available which reduces costs and improves operating efficiencies,” AgJunction CEO Dave Vaughn said in a release. “We are also aligning our workforce to our current needs to focus on the core business.”

The merged company, he said, will also be reviewing “longer-term synergies, under which we can rationalize products, engineering projects and geographic markets.”

During the streamlining process, the company said, its core business and customer service “will not be interrupted.” — AGCanada.com Network

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