“While these technologies [automation, data analytics, etc.] hold the potential to optimize production and enable data-driven decision-making,” the report said, “their adoption has led to increased demand for workers with higher levels of education and skills.”

According to the report, published at the end of July, adoption of precision technologies like GPS guidance, yield mapping and variable rate application has been growing steadily. This is most prominent on large-scale farms. Sixty-four per cent of farms with revenues over $1 million use some kind of precision technology.

The report said that, in light of agriculture’s persistent labour challenges and its aging workforce, businesses may increasingly turn to automation. However, it also called adoption of technology “lethargic.” It attributed this to the perception of insufficient return on investment, lack of government support, and lack of in-house expertise.

Technology adoption will increase the need for certain roles and decrease demand for others.

The report put the top five fastest-growing agricultural jobs as nursery and greenhouse labours, truck drivers, landscape and horticulture technicians, animal care workers, and biological technologists and technicians.

The top five fastest declining roles are agriculture managers, specialized livestock workers and farm machinery operators, livestock labourers, harvesting labourers, and accountants and bookkeepers.

Automation technology adoption in the agri-food workforce will require a more educated workforce.

“The skills most in demand for the future agriculture workforce are product design, digital production, and digital literacy,” the report said.

The Conference Board of Canada recommended investment in education programs to develop worker proficiency with “digital tools, product design, and complex problem-solving and emphasize soft skills such as adaptability.”

It also recommended promotion of the role of farming and food production in the economy, particularly the need for tech-savvy workers.

The post A third of agricultural jobs could be automated in next decade, report says appeared first on Country Guide.

“These cutting-edge solutions will help the sector overcome some of the challenges it faces, leading to a more prosperous and competitive future for Canadian agriculture,” said federal Minister of Agriculture Lawrence MacAulay in an April 5 news release.

Five projects were funded up to $1 million each. These included projects to develop a robotic mushroom harvester, packer and harvest lift; another to develop a robotic arm to pick, harvest and de-leaf cucumbers and strawberries, a robotic arm to work alongside humans to harvest fruit and vegetables, and others related to task automation, the news release said.

The post Feds fund agriculture and food processing robotics projects appeared first on Country Guide.

However, large-scale grain farmers could also use the technology if they think about it differently.

“Let’s say my brother and me are growing 1,500 acres of corn,” said Baresich, who owns Haggerty AgRobotics and also operates Haggerty Creek Crop Inputs and Marketing at Bothwell, Ont.

“(So) why are we growing that corn instead of tomatoes instead of a higher-value crop?”

The answer is labour.

He cannot find farm workers or afford to pay labourers to kill weeds and manage a high-value crop such as tomatoes.

As a result, Baresich and his brother grow corn because it’s manageable.

“The weed control options for the vegetable crops… (it’s) too much labour and work,” said Baresich, who spoke at the Agriculture Enlightened conference held Thursday in Winnipeg.

The host and organizer of the conference was EMILI, which is trying to help Canada become a leader in digital and precision agriculture.

“EMILI works with producers, industry and academia to advance the adoption of intelligent technologies and provide people with the skills and training required to succeed in a digital economy,” its website says.

READ MORE: Think outside the agriculture box for labour

Baresich spoke at the event and was joined on stage by Rick Rutherford, who operates Rutherford Farms north of Winnipeg.

Rutherford doubts that robotic equipment to spray weeds and perform other field tasks are useful on a 7,000-acre grain farm in Western Canada.

“We’re definitely not into robots yet,” he said.

“The return on something like that, today, in broad-scale agriculture isn’t there.”

Baresich agreed.

Putting a small robot into the field can’t compete with a large and efficient piece of equipment.

“Rick is correct. On a broad-scale (situation), labour is your lowest cost. So, removing the driver out of the sprayer doesn’t make any sense,” he said.

“If you’ve got a 60-foot seeder that can seed 400 acres per day, it’s hard to replace that with a robot. The ROI (return on investment) doesn’t work.”

However, getting back to his example of 1,500 acres of corn, Baresich said a robotic machine could change what a farmer grows.

Instead of seeding 1,500 acres of corn, Baresich could plant 1,400 acres of corn and 100 acres of onions or another high-value crop because the robot would do the work of a couple of paid employees.

This isn’t happening on his farm yet.

“We’re looking at it very closely,” he said.

“What we’re seeing in Ontario, we’re seeing a growth in the vegetable market and the higher-value crops.”

That sort of approach to robotic farm equipment could make sense in parts of Western Canada.

The region around Portage la Prairie, Man., for instance, is a major producer of carrots, onions and other vegetable crops. Maybe grain growers in the region could dedicate a portion of their acres to a higher-value crop if the robot was able to reduce labour and production costs.

This sort of innovation and adoption of technology could become more critical for Canadian farmers.

However, producers may be hesitant to take the risk and test it out on their farms.

That’s the benefit of groups like EMILI, which operates Innovation Farms on Rutherford’s land north of Winnipeg.

Innovation Farms is part of a network of similar farms across the country, called the Pan-Canadian Smart Farm Network.

At these locations, innovators and entrepreneurs can test and refine their agricultural technologies at scale or demonstrate the value of more established technologies.

These farms are critical because Canadian farmers want to see something that works under real-world conditions.

“It’s fun to look at those things (new technologies like robots), but you’re not moving the needle by saying, ‘I did this on 200 square feet,’ ” Baresich said.

“You’re going to move the needle by saying, ‘I did this on 70 acres.'”

— Robert Arnason reports for the Winnipeg bureau of the Western Producer.

The post Robots may help grain farmers diversify appeared first on Country Guide.

JBS Foods Canada on Friday announced a $71 million project in partnership with New Zealand-based Scott Technology, to design and build a system that can handle and store up to 85,000 boxes of food products at the JBS beef slaughter and processing plant at Brooks, Alta.

The system would manage 600 stock keeping units (SKUs) in a “highly flexible manner, allowing for optimized order management,” and would allow for picking of 3,000 cartons per hour, shipping of 40,300 cartons per day and “high-speed palletizing” of 120-plus pallets per hour.

The new system would tie into warehouse execution software for “complete monitoring, management and control of goods,” JBS said in a release.

It would replace the plant’s current “fully manual” system and boost the plant’s product handling efficiency through “more flexible, high-speed carton sortation and management.”

JBS Foods Canada president David Colwell, in a release Tuesday, said the project “creates an opportunity to increase efficiency and promote a safe working environment for our team members.”

Scott CEO John Kippenberger described the JBS system as “the largest project of its kind for Scott to date.” The company also said it would be Scott’s first end-to-end materials handling system for a client in the North American market.

Scott, in a separate release on May 31, estimated the value of its contribution to the JBS warehouse project alone at NZ$56 million (about C$45.1 million).

Kippenberger said the new system would “help reduce storage costs and errors, and deliver improved inventory turns, while also improving worker safety, as one box can weigh up to 110 pounds.”

North America, like New Zealand, “continues to experience labour supply issues, particularly in the meat processing space,” he said.

“The new system will not only address this challenge, but it will also improve safety… reduce storage costs (and) errors and deliver improved inventory turns. It represents significant efficiencies and cost savings for JBS Canada.”

The JBS plant at Brooks, about 165 km east of Calgary, is estimated to handle about 3,800 cattle per day at full capacity. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

The post JBS to automate beef warehousing at Brooks appeared first on Country Guide.

Not-for-profit organization Palette Skills has launched a new eight-week online program for Saskatchewan residents focused on automation and digitization in agricultural production and processing. The enrolment deadline for the new program was May 22.

Palette’s automation and digital agriculture specialist program, running June 6 to July 29, is billed as allowing its candidates to specialize in “identifying, managing, and implementing technologies to solve challenges and improve efficiencies across the agri-food value chain.”

More specifically, it focuses on “emerging technologies” in the agrifood sector such as GIS (geographic information systems), IoT (the Internet of Things), unmanned aerial vehicles, artificial intelligence, robotics, sensors and big data.

Workers who are “upskilled” through the program “can expect to develop careers in technology and business, farm robotics, agriculture automation, precision agriculture and production management,” the University of Saskatchewan, which supported the program’s design, said in a recent release.

The program is looking to recruit participants from Indigenous communities, newcomers to Canada, recent graduates and “experienced professionals looking to transition into the growing and exciting agri-food sector,” the U of S said.

“Today’s employees often need to understand how data and digital tools are being incorporated into everything from on-farm agriculture to food manufacturing,” said Bill Greuel, CEO of Protein Industries Canada, the federally-backed plant protein supercluster billed as a co-investor in the program.

“By having increased access to the right skills and talent, trailblazing companies across the country can increase their workforce, expanding their production and, as a result, growing Canada’s plant-based food and ingredient ecosystem.”

More information about the program and its format is available on the Palette Skills website.

CORRECTION, May 24, 2022: An earlier version of this article incorrectly characterized the automation and digital agriculture specialist program as a University of Saskatchewan program. We regret the error.

The post Automated ag skills program developed for Saskatchewan workforce appeared first on Country Guide.

This is a really big deal.

“Autonomy is no longer just a concept or a demo,” said Jahmy Hindman, chief technology officer at Deere. “It’s real.”

Yes, we’ve seen a smattering of other autonomous machines in the last couple of years, but on a small scale. Nothing so far comes close to the impact the autonomous 8R Deere is bound to make on the industry. 

Other major brands have shown concept autonomous tractors but shied away from commercial release, mainly because of the risk of civil liability or the need for more R&D.

That created a gap for a few smaller firms and tech startups that led the way in a pattern that is becoming familiar. A California-based startup, Bear Flag Robotics, got to the market first. Then, last summer, Deere bought Bear Flag.

As she spoke to reporters, Bear Flag co-founder and COO Aubrey Donnellan was optimistic the technology was ready for a much broader market.

“Get excited. It’s going to be available very soon,” she said.

This will make Deere the first major brand to offer an autonomous production tractor on a broad scale. The initial launch is focused on automated tillage work, just as Bear Flag had done, but Deere execs say the range of operations will grow significantly. 

“John Deere autonomous farming equipment will also execute other jobs that farmers need to do throughout the year,” said Deanna Kovar, vice-president of Deere’s production and precision ag business.

In the field, farmers will be able to let the 8R loose to work on its own, unsupervised.

“When the tractor is running autonomously, farmers can monitor its progress remotely on a smartphone, tablet or computer,” Kovar said. “They could be watching from inside the cab of another John Deere piece of equipment in a nearby field, from their office or somewhere else entirely with their family. Not only are they tracking where the tractor is, they’re tracking the quality of job it’s doing and if any adjustments need to be made.”

Deere has owned the pole position on developing technology in the ag equipment world in the last decade or so. It led on telematics and forced other brands to play catch-up. Now, it’s bound to repeat that with autonomous tractors. 

And it heralds the arrival of a new major milestone in equipment the same way the introduction of hydraulics and then electrical advancements did in previous generations. It’s hard to overstate the significance of it.

What makes autonomy possible is the current state of AI (artificial intelligence).

What exactly is AI? According to the Oxford dictionary it’s “The theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making and translation between languages.”

It’s that ability of a computer to perceive its environment and make decisions that enables autonomous tractors.

Existing AI technology is becoming increasingly capable of learning and making decisions. And Deere’s engineers have been busy providing information to the “brain” of the autonomous system that allows the 8R to learn from images of farm fields. That library of reference knowledge is then used to help it make decisions based on what the tractor sees in front of it through its six pairs of cameras. 

“The image the cameras capture gets passed into the deep neural networks that are trained on hundreds of thousands of images,” explained Willy Pell, Deere’s vice-president of autonomy and new ventures. “The neural networks classify these pixels with amazing speed — in about 100 milliseconds. Then, depending on the objects they detect, the machine either continues or it stops.”

Building what Deere calls “a production-worthy vision system” has required a world-class machine-learning research team and many hard fought innovations.

And it’s continually getting better, says Pell. “In addition to the more than 50 million images we’ve collected from farms all over the U.S. in the last three years, we’re constantly feeding it new information and new images. And the training process rewards it for making correct decisions and penalizes it for making incorrect ones.”

Yes, you heard the right. These robots respond to rewards. After all, they work for us!

It has actually been an incredibly challenging job. What makes autonomy on the farm so difficult, Pell said, are “all the rare, difficult-to-foresee events for which we have no training data. For example, a billboard falls in a field … to handle these types of situations, we built an anomaly detection system which recognizes nominal images of sky, ground and trees. When it encounters new objects that don’t fit within the standard class of objects, the machine just stops. Using this technology, we’re able to achieve a very high degree of safety and performance, despite situations where the tractor sees a completely new or random object.”

Although the autonomous 8R is a breakthrough machine, it is just one more application where AI is already pushing ag equipment design into an entirely new future. At Deere alone, AI systems have already been used in other applications, like Combine Advisor that allows a Deere combine to constantly re-evaluate its operating settings for maximum threshing, and See and Spray Select that allows a sprayer to detect plants in a field and spray only when needed.

But AI isn’t unique to Deere machines, it’s popping up nearly everywhere. It’s what Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, has coined as the “fourth industrial revolution.”

“I still get goosebumps,” said Kovar. “Autonomy isn’t a convenience on the farm, it’s a necessity today and into the future … What’s unique about this tractor (the 8R) isn’t just the technology. It’s that it’s working today and ready for production.”

The post The 4th industrial revolution begins appeared first on Country Guide.

Dan McCann, founder and CEO of Precision AI, claims conventional spraying results in 80 per cent of chemicals being wasted on the ground, with another 10 to 15 per cent hitting the crop.

“You’ve got a critical business process used by virtually every farm in the world, unless you’re organic, that operates at a five to 10 per cent efficiency,” he says.

“The benefits extend beyond farmer’s time and money savings into reduced carbon emissions, reduced chemical runoff into our water, less residual chemicals in our food, and it opens the possibility of more trading with countries whose pesticide regulations are more stringent.” 

Drone survey first

“We’re capable of doing a drone survey of an entire field, precisely geo-locating every single weed in the field, and then creating a weed map in a format your sprayer can already support,” McCann says.

He says real-time precision spraying from ground sprayers can be difficult to keep accurate. 

“Close to the sprayer the cameras would be accurate, but the further away from the sprayer, the more the cameras have trouble focusing due to driving through rough fields. Drones remain at a consistent pace to map out weeds accurately.”

Flying at up to 70 km/h, the drones can map out weed locations using GPS markers, and collect sub-millimetre images, allowing for the detection and identification of weeds as small as the two-leaf stage.

McCann says that at a pixelated level, artificial intelligence algorithms can detect and distinguish between the patterns of various plant species based on their leaf shapes, sizes and angles, as well as plant heights, orientations and even shadows.

“Once these patterns are repeated and the data is trained against the patterns to a known plant species, the artificial intelligence (AI) takes over and recognizes plant species before and better than a human can.”

McCann says the company’s green-on-green AI models allow for in-crop spraying, as opposed to green-on-brown technology that relies on chlorophyll sensors to spray everything green and leave bare soil untouched.

“This limits the technology to only be useful during the initial growing season, and not later into the season when there is too much crop growth. The farmer’s herbicide costs will be at least 10 to 15 per cent higher than if it was green-on-green spraying.”

The shapefiles — data packages — generated by the survey are supported by major high-clearance sprayer manufacturers, McCann says.

Precision AI is currently entering its pre-commercial phase for its AI weed survey system, with plans for limited release in spring 2023.

“We are not quite ready to announce costing, but we can confidently say the cost of our machines will dwarf that of purchasing a new traditional sprayer. For use on upgraded high-clearance sprayers, the savings from less herbicide easily pays for itself.” 

Mini aircraft

Longer-term, Precision AI is developing drones which could eliminate the need for an expensive high-clearance sprayer. Spray drones can travel at 70 km/h, three times faster than any ground sprayer, and don’t cause soil compaction, McCann says. “Air-based ‘see and spray’ can reach new areas, more often, without the limitations of wet, hilly or narrow fields.”

After working unsuccessfully with manufacturers of helicopter-style spray drones, the company decided to design its own 21-foot propeller-driven model in the style of a traditional crop duster. McCann says, copter-style drones can’t target small areas. “The problem is that it’s like using a spray bottle in a tornado. Trying to precisely target anything is just impossible.”

The plan is to deploy a swarm of six of the drones, which would provide the same swath width as a high-clearance sprayer but cover the field three times more quickly. McCann sees limited commercial release in 2023.

He acknowledges that that drone spraying is not currently allowed by the Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA), but says this could be reversed if the crop-duster type of drone is used to minimize spray drift. Precision AI plans to collect the data to demonstrate that its drones would be subject to the same regulations as aerial applicators.

The Regina-based company appears to have considerable resources. It lists 31 staff on its website, and McCann says that Precision AI last March raised $20 million in seed round funding from several sources, which he believes is the largest in western Canadian history.

CropLife on pesticide labels

In our February 1 issue, Gerald Pilger suggested a system under which pesticides would be sold with a “prescription” for their specific use, similar to the system when buying medications from a pharmacy. CropLife Canada asked for space to outline its position on pesticide labelling.

CropLife Canada represents the Canadian manufacturers, developers and distributors of pest control and modern plant breeding products. We understand there is a vast amount of complex information available on pesticides which can be challenging to wade through. That’s why we are working with the Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA) to support their new labelling initiative. The goal is to make labels more consistent, which also makes them easier to search, read and understand.

Product labels are the primary tool to communicate information to enable the safe and effective use of pesticide products. Pesticide labels are regulated by the Pest Control Products Act (PCPA) and are required to include specifics like directions for use and safety information.

In an effort to make pesticide label information easier to find and the approval of pesticide labels more efficient, the PMRA is currently working with pesticide registrants and other stakeholders to develop a new standard for pesticide labels, which includes standardized templates, risk mitigation statements and use of consistent language. The PMRA is consulting numerous stakeholders on the standard label template, including large grower associations, provincial agriculture representatives, and registrants.

CropLife Canada supports the continuous improvement of product labelling and is supportive of the PMRA’s current initiative to modernize pesticide labels in Canada. Our members look forward to working with the PMRA on the different components of the label improvement initiative as they are developed. We encourage you to reach out to your grower organization or directly with the PMRA through the consultation process as it continues.

The post Low-clearance spraying appeared first on Country Guide.

But not all field jobs. Precision ag had seemed like it would also lead to site-specific weeding, but this never gained ground, due mostly to the development of herbicide resistance and the need for broadcast weed management as a standard practice. 

Robotic weed control may be coming though, if Chuck Baresich continues working diligently towards that goal. In 2020, Baresich started testing autonomous robotic systems using the Raven OmniPower to spread fertilizer. In 2021, he and his team at Haggerty Creek Ltd. used Naio Technologies Oz autonomous robots for weed control trials in Brussels sprouts, celery, cauliflower and onions, along with strawberries and nursery stock.

Baresich chose horticulture and berries since high-value crops generally require more labour but also because there are limited weed control options other than physically removing the weeds.

“The other reason why it works (with hort crops) is that field sizes tend to be smaller and they’re better prepared in terms of soil conditions,” says Baresich, general manager with Haggerty Creek. “Essentially, the autonomous robots are self-propelled cultivators but they’re not cultivating deep, just brushing the surface.” 

Weed management using robotics follows the same principle as any other method. To be effective, you have to get to the weeds when they’re small, before they can develop a deep root. 

“What the autonomous robot lets you do — and one of the reasons why they’re going to take off — is weed more often because farmers tend to wait as long as they can and try to get as many weeds up,” says Baresich. “Since it’s so costly to hand-weed or cultivate, they won’t do it as often as they should. But an autonomous system lets you weed regularly, like once a week.”

It might seem more costly to use a robot compared to sending in a crew to manually weed a field (in horticultural crops, at least), but not if the robot is weeding six times during the summer, which it can. That’s why the use of robots has to be considered from a cost and efficacy perspective.

Early in 2021, Baresich worked with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, the University of Guelph’s Ridgetown Campus and the Holland Marsh Growers’ Association to help create the “Autonomous Working Group.” That collective set priorities and direction, along with which crops they wanted to test. 

It keeps going…

The units tested by Baresich are battery operated and will run seven to 10 hours on a charge. The larger unit that Baresich used in 2021 — roughly the size of a Mini Cooper car — is designed to weed 10 acres per day, so that would go into a 50-acre field. 

“You can’t always go every day, so over a seven-day period we believe it would do 50 acres and then start over again,” he says. “The smaller Oz robots are designed for a five- to 10-acre field, so they’re for more of a market garden operation.”

Although they’re being tested in horticulture crops, Baresich believes there will come a day when these robotic units are used in row crops. 

“In wider-scale field crops, there’ll be a hybrid approach where people might do a burn-down application like they’ve always done, then go in with the robots and use AI systems to do targeted weeding,” he adds. “You might say, ‘I want the robot to get horse nettle or Canada fleabane or waterhemp’. The robot isn’t being challenged to do 200,000 plants per acre so that would increase the speed.”

That technology is in its infancy and Baresich is working with the Small Robot Company from the U.K., which has designed a system that targets weeds in crops such as winter wheat. It maps out the weeds then inputs them into an AI system named Wilma, which then alerts the agronomist who can identify which weeds are the issue. 

“Then the robot goes through and uses electricity to ‘zap’ weeds in the field,” he says. “It can do that at a much faster rate and handle no-till or reduced-tillage situations because it’s not dragging a cultivator through the trash.”

Another company Baresich has been talking to is Carbon Robotics which uses lasers to do the same thing. It’s more focused on horticulture crops whereas the Small Robot Company is looking at traditional field crops. Baresich notes the Small Robot Company is promoting its robot design as one that can handle a 50-acre field, requiring two or three of the weeding robots to get the desired capacity. 

A Canadian company, Nexus Robotics, is taking a different approach, using mechanical “fingers” as well as computer vision to identify non-desirable plants, pulling them out and depositing them in the centre of the row. The Nexus GOAT will be field tested by Baresich in 2022.

The value statement with autonomous field technology is the absence of emotional ties in decision-making. A robot doesn’t need to weed a field in a set time period nor does it have prior commitments. It doesn’t have to prepare dinner or do any bookwork. The only thing it has to do is weed a field, and it will do that in 37 C heat and humidity, without getting tired or thirsty. 

“This is part of rethinking the workflow and rethinking how we’re doing this,” says Baresich. “We don’t need to cultivate the whole field in one day.”

Change is coming

If there is a significant challenge with using these autonomous systems it’s the degree of change that comes with the technology. Using robots in the field is definitely something new and farmers would need to be persuaded it’s worth the time and effort to learn. 

Connectivity is another hurdle to successfully incorporating these robots. Cellular connectivity and good RTK signals are vital. All of these systems require good access to the internet — for monitoring and for safety.

“General field conditions can be a challenge, for instance how much tillage was done and how smooth are the fields,” says Baresich. “Residual trash can also cause a problem. These robots were mostly designed in Europe and their production systems are quite different from what we do here, where they have no trash on their soils.”

Yet another barrier to overcome is trying to understand how the work flow may change. Baresich wanted to cover off how to get the robots to the field, but also who looks after them, how they will be deployed and recharged, and how they can be washed and cleaned. That’s an underrated step since growers want to avoid moving nematodes or weed seeds from one field to another. 

Yet, robotics is nothing new

If there’s a positive to the evolution and adoption of robotics, it’s that the process has already begun. Consider the acceptance of robotic milkers by the dairy industry. They took a very specific part of the producer’s life and automated the milking part. Similarly in field crops, the industry needs to ask which pieces can be automated.

“Now we’re saying, ‘What is the next piece we can automate?’” says Baresich. “We’re testing the only Raven OmniDrive this fall that’s here in Eastern Canada, and that’s the autonomous grain buggy. We’re automating a specific task or component of harvest, driving the buggy up and down the field, not automating the corn harvest.”

It’s not a matter of getting rid of machinery operators either, but of accelerating the knowledge transfer that goes with advanced training on the farm while increasing efficiency. It frees up managers and growers to do more of what they’re good at — farming. 

“Sitting in the seat of the tractor doesn’t necessarily make you the farmer,” notes Baresich. “Nor does having your hand on the hoe. Choosing productive and sustainable uses for your land assets makes you the farmer. The robots can’t do what a human can do. Humans don’t give themselves credit for how smart we are.

“What I encourage for success is to look at the jobs we’re doing and break them up into small tasks, and ask which task or component of what I’m doing can I use an autonomous machine to simplify or improve.”

Change will come, says Baresich. “It’s probably very similar to when the first tractor showed up on farms, and some people said, ‘It’ll never replace the horse’. We really are at that stage in the autonomous ag field.”

The post The robots are here, and ready to weed your field appeared first on Country Guide.

“We are effectively in market with real customers today,” Dan Leibfried, Deere’s Director of Automation and Autonomy, told Reuters. Bear Flag has been testing automated tractors on farms in California. Deere began working with the startup in 2019.

Over the next 12 months, Leibfriend said, Deere and Bear Flag intend to develop their automated tractor technology for commercial production in higher volume.

“We want to get this on farms as fast as possible,” he said.

Bear Flag Chief Operating Officer Aubrey Donnellan said the company’s technology is designed so it can be installed on an existing tractor.

“We retrofit existing machines. We want to deliver a solution growers can use in the short term” to respond to shortages of skilled labor in agriculture, Donnellan said.

So far, Donnellan said, Bear Flag has focused its development on automating tractors for tilling fields on California farms that aim to plant two or more crops a year. Self-driving tractors that run 24 hours a day can allow farmers to squeeze in extra plantings, she said.

“That’s dollars in their pocket,” she said.

– Reporting by Sanjana Shivdas in Bengaluru

The post Deere, Bear Flag aim to automate tractors as ‘fast as possible’ appeared first on Country Guide.

Several farm robots featured at the recent AgRobotics and Automation event hosted by the RH Accelerator focused on higher-value crops instead of corn, soybeans or wheat.

The interest is creating new players in the field.

Haggerty Creek AgRobotics is the first field robot dealership in the province. It’s not surprising that it belongs to Chuck Baresich, as his family’s farm and farm supply company Haggerty Creek was the first to run a Dot autonomous power unit in Ontario.

The Canadian-developed automated crop power unit is now owned by Raven Autonomy, the American farm technology company. Raven also plans to have a driverless grain cart system available by harvest 2021, along with continuing to develop Dot.

Baresich has been working with Korechi and its RoamIO autonomous unit and is now also focusing on bringing smaller automated units to Canada.

Those include NAIO products from Toulouse, France. Baresich says he expects to have two of NAIO’s Oz autonomous weeding robots to use in a field this year.

He’s also bringing in the NAIO Dino product – a larger version of the Oz.

“It’s a great time to be in agriculture, especially for a technology nerd like myself,” said Baresich during the event.

He’s also in discussions with FarmDroid, a zero-emission, fully autonomous seeding and weeding robot and the Small Robot Company, a British firm with a low-disturbance weeding system, as well as systems that can plant and feed crops. Their robots are called Tom, Dick and Harry.

The Dino and Oz units are meant for use in vegetable crops. Dino can run on its battery for eight to 10 hours at once, covering up to four acres per day of everything from lettuce to leeks, guided by RTK GPS.

Other Canadian companies with presentations at the AgRobotics and Automation event included Korechi, which produces smaller machines that can complete autonomous soil sensing, broadcast seeding and mowing and Precision AI, a Saskatchewan company that aims to identify weeds and then spray them precisely by differentiating between a weed and a crop to centimetre-level precision. Doing so means saving on chemical costs.

Hussam Haroun, director of automation at the Vineland Research and Innovation Centre, said that automation has to have a return on investment for farmers either by reducing labour costs, improving quality and yield or increasing efficiency.

Vineland is developing a robotic cucumber harvester that identifies fruit and assesses ripeness, so far at a 90 per cent success rate.

IntelliCulture, an Ontario company, also talked about its product, which can track and help manage fleets of equipment, along with some farm processes, such as vineyard spraying.

The event was hosted by the RH Accelerator, a London, Ont.,-based organization that helps early stage companies grow, including in agriculture.

This article was originally published at Farmtario.

The post Farm automation likely adopted in high-value crops first appeared first on Country Guide.