Recently, I filled in as a temporary replacement for a driver at another dealership, delivering and picking up equipment. There was a little over 40 years between those two jobs. The truck I used this time was a T800 Kenworth pulling a tridem RGN trailer with loads that have sometimes pushed the truck’s gross weight north of 80,000 pounds — with a permit, of course.

That’s how the scale of farm equipment has changed in my lifetime. And the farmer that took delivery of that earlier combine would laugh out loud at the sticker prices for new equipment these days.

Farm size and machinery expectations have grown significantly over the last 40 years. But not on every farm. There are still many farms without high-end machines and the crew of employees to operate them, including many that are more of a lifestyle operation with income supplemented from off-farm jobs. YouTube is full of vloggers who document their day-to-day adventures on those types of farms.

For many of these farmers, the idea of buying brand new equipment has become more of an aspiration than a reality. Instead, they’re making the most of used machinery.

New iron and new tech

Many years ago I had a conversation in Germany about how most young German farmers dreamed of one day owning a Fendt tractor. Fendts, at the time, were among the few tractors with a very high level of technology, and their price tag reflected that. It took young farmers quite a few years to build a big enough bank account to buy one.

Famers took pride in owning German-built machines. On top of the comfort and convenience Fendt offered, they were also a kind of status symbol.

While there’s nothing quite like that new cab smell — just like that new car smell — is it still practical for many farm operations to consider buying new? Or is it even necessary? An average high-horsepower MFWD tractor will be somewhere in the vicinity of $500,000, depending on horsepower. A new top-of-the-line combine or four-wheel drive tractor can easily top $1 million.

A machinery brand executive once made a comment to me that spelled out pretty clearly what manufacturers see as the big reason more farmers are quicker to trade in for new machines.

“All machinery built in the last decade or two can still go out into the field and do the job very satisfactorily,” he said. (I’d go so far as to stretch that age limit quite a bit further in many cases.) “Incorporating advanced technology into new equipment is what brands will need to do now and into the future to convince farmers to spend their money on the newest machines.”

New technology gives buyers something they don’t already have in their existing equipment. Brands are spending a lot on R&D to make machines smarter and to automate as many features as possible, with full automation on the horizon.

“Productivity and yield for farmers … that’s where our (R&D) investment is going,” said CNH Industrial’s CEO Scott Wine during a technology day presentation in the spring of 2023.

Smart machines and automation can help increase efficiency and raise yields for sure, but the trade-off is the price of admission, so to speak. And the net return, if any, will depend on each operation’s specifics and needs.

How old can you go?

The year-end numbers on a balance sheet are also important for those choosing older, lower-cost equipment. But there are other factors besides affordability.

New equipment under warranty is likely to perform pretty well with limited downtime. Although it’s likely, it’s not a given. I once bought a new tractor and after just 25 hours on the clock it had to go back to the dealer for a major rear-end overhaul due to faulty assembly at the factory. The model was so new some parts had to be shipped in from Europe. It spent weeks sitting at the dealership.

My case was obviously an extreme one. Typically, when a new machine breaks down, a dealership technician will soon head out to determine the problem and fix it on warranty. And that’s important in some operations. But that kind of reliability may come with significant stress associated with living with the size of loan or lease payments.

It all means the cost of ownership for new machines is predictable, but very high. By comparison, the cost of running used equipment is likely to be lower but not as predictable. An older machine might perform flawlessly one season and leave you stranded the next.

Is that a stress that’s more suited to your personality and farming considerations than losing sleep over a finance payment?

If choosing the used equipment option, the first thing to think about is how old do you want to go? Here’s an example of what needs to be considered.

Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers recently sold a 1982 875 Versatile tractor at a sale for $29,000. They also sold a 2017 400 Versatile for $355,000. Those are both within the price range you’d expect.

The two tractors have similar capabilities with horsepower ratings of 360 and 400, respectively. But they have very different purchase prices and probable reliability levels, not to mention comfort levels. Which will best meet your needs and fit your definition of an ideal purchase? Or are you operating on a scale that allows you to buy both and keep the old 875 in reserve for some jobs, just in case? Compared to the price of a single brand new 400 horsepower model, you’re likely still money ahead.

But consider that the 875 will have a Cummins engine with a mechanical injection pump. No pesky computer, sensors or emissions system to fail, causing the tractor to derate its power or quit completely. Computer, electronics and emissions systems are the most common failure points on modern machines of all types, and often only a dealership service department can identify those problems and correct them, because of the proprietary software needed to diagnose them.

The 875 won’t give you any of that trouble. And if you need to completely overhaul its 855 Cummins engine, the parts are still readily available with rebuild kits available for around $2,500.

The cost of an overhaul kit for the QSM11 Cummins in the 400 is similar, but it is an electronically controlled engine. That means the 875 overhaul might be simpler to tackle in their farm workshop for anyone who isn’t as skilled as a Red Seal mechanic.

If you’re more than a little handy with a set of wrenches, you could opt for the 875, invest some money in parts and time and get a pretty reliable machine for well under $50,000, a tiny fraction of the cost of a new tractor of similar size, although finding some replacement components for older machines may require hunting for a donor machine at one of the few remaining wrecking yards, or looking for a parts tractor on Kijiji.

In this case, investing in a very good and well-equipped farm shop makes a lot of sense.

On the other hand, for someone who isn’t that handy in the shop, the newer, lower-hour 400 may be the better bet, unless they have a good friend who just happens to be a diesel mechanic.

Old dogs, new tricks

Maybe you want some of that new technology that goes well beyond guidance, such as features on the seed drill like zone control to prevent overlaps, or variable rate capability. New machines will definitely give you that, but increasingly those kinds of features can be added to older equipment. Going old school doesn’t necessarily mean going without some level of technology.

Want to put GPS auto guidance on that 875, which didn’t come auto-steer ready from the factory? Outback Guidance, for one, can set you up with a bolt-on kit for between $10,000 and $15,000. Raven’s RCM (Rate Control Module) system can give a variety of older drills variable-rate capability, as long as they have hydraulic metering systems.

Getting RCM installed on drills may require some specialized assistance from companies like My Precision Ag Ltd. in Rocanville, Sask., which specializes in that.

“You can’t just take it out of the box, plug it in and go,” said Matthew Yanick, owner of My Precision, when I spoke with him this past summer. “You have to change some connections and that kind of stuff.

“There are more and more people wanting to upgrade tanks to get the newer technology.” he said. “They just want to be able to do what the new tanks can do.”

If you want to add sectional control to a drill, there are some after-market manufacturers, such as Romafa Metal Works in Arborg, Man., that build updated metering systems to accommodate that technology. Romafra offers new metering boxes for John Deere, Flexi Coil and Morris drills.

Of course, there are still older, cheaper seeding equipment options other than air drills that can get the job done efficiently and won’t put comparable hydraulic demands on a tractor. But they aren’t compatible with VR or sectional control technology. So once again the question is: “Will the rate of return justify the increased investment in implements to put behind the tractor?”

Increasingly, major brands are taking notice of the farming segment that can’t or won’t pay the kind of money they demand for a new machine. They’re starting to look seriously at the retrofit market as another revenue stream for their businesses. That’s good news for producers running older machines and wanting to get more out of them.

In his third-quarter earnings address to shareholders, AGCO president and CEO Eric Hansotia said the brand aims to offer “autonomous retrofit solutions” for grain cart hauling by 2025. It will also offer a retrofit targeted-spraying system by 2024 that will work on any brand of machine. That’s two full years ahead of the company’s goal of releasing the system as an OEM option on new sprayers.

John Deere, too, is offering a limited range of upgrades for its late-model S Series combines and sprayers to bring their features a little closer to the current range of machines.

For its part, CNH Industrial spelled out just how important precision farming technology will be to the company in the coming years. A good deal of their revenues will come from providing retrofit solutions to farmers.

“CNH Industrial’s full year 2022 agriculture net sales are expected to include an estimated $900 million contribution coming exclusively from precision technology components,” reads the company’s press statement from early 2023. “We forecast a 10 to 15 per cent annual growth rate across the next two to three years and are aggressively pursuing an estimated US$1 billion in 2023 net sales contribution from precision technology components. Precision technology components include technology contained in whole goods, retrofit components and Raven third-party sales.”

It means a good portion of the digital wizardry on the newest and shiniest machines can now be bolted on to older equipment. Is that food for thought?

– This article was originally published in the January 2024 issue of Country Guide.

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Maybe, though, we’re seeing the shape of a solution.

The latest piece of precision ag equipment to launch — literally — is nanosatellite technology. An incredible leap forward in the design and deployment of orbital platforms, nanosatellites are considerably smaller, lighter and quicker to develop than the satellites we’ve always read about. They’re less expensive to build and launch, too, and they have lower trajectories and can orbit the globe 14 to 16 times per day.

Conventional satellites with sizes that range from small cars to cub vans can take five to 15 years to design and build, and costs can run as high as $500 million.

That’s according to the website of Alén Space, a company based in Spain that has been developing nanosatellites since 2007, adhering to CubeSat standards.

Nanosatellites weigh between 2.5 and 25 pounds, have a volume of one to 10 litres, and cost as little as $500,000 to develop and deploy, based on an eight-month construction process.

The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), states that more than 8,000 objects have been launched from Earth since 1957. Partly due to nanosatellites, it now expects the number of such objects to, well, take off.

Current research

Early in 2020, a news release described a study conducted at the University of Illinois, comparing how nitrogen stress in corn was measured by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or drones) versus CubeSat-based multispectral sensing technology. The researchers, led by Kaiyu Guan, Yaping Cai and Emerson Nafziger, had monitored nutrient stress in 28 nitrogen (N) management treatments in central Illinois in 2017.

Drones and CubeSats were set up to detect changes in corn chlorophyll concentrations due to varying N application rates and timings, and the research found that two technologies worked with a similar degree of accuracy.

What the study illustrates is not only the capabilities of nanosatellites but the technology’s vast potential. According to the university’s news release, there are now more than 100 nanosatellites in orbit, with more on the way.

There are still issues, including familiar precision ag issues like too much technology, questionable cost-efficiency and the extraordinary amounts of data generated.

Still, in discussions surrounding the use of any imaging technology, it seems costs are only a short-term hurdle. Like computers 25 to 30 years ago, prices come down as usage increases, although there’s disagreement over whether there are enough farmers to “lighten the load” quickly enough.

Rising on-farm costs are challenging most producers and an expanding set of variables are being factored into most equations involving investments in new equipment.

But hidden in the talk of potential opportunities is the one basic question that has to be asked of any precision ag tool: What do you want to do with it?

For images, it’s not a question of whether a grower is using drone technology or satellites — or nanosatellites — that’s important. It’s understanding the goal. For example, the Sentinel satellite now flies over parts of Ontario four times a week, using resolution that’s publicly available. If a grower or retailer or agronomist wants higher resolutions, someone has to be willing to pay for it.

“We also have to make sure we’re comparing apples to apples,” says Brandon Yott, strategy and business development manager with A&L Canada Laboratories, in London, Ont. “It’s hard to compare drone to drone imagery, and that includes discussions on high-resolution RBG (red-blue-green) cameras versus multispectral versus hyperspectral cameras. If I can read a license plate, that’s the resolution of an RBG camera, like the ones on a phone. But resolution can be a function of the camera, it can be a function of how many pictures you take for overlap and stitching images together. It can be a function of how high and how fast you fly.”

For something as simple as a contractor installing tile, an RBG camera will do the job. But Yott adds that when it comes to reading soil nitrogen or CECs, predicting yield or detecting stress, an RBG camera is insufficient.

This is where costs become a key consideration. Lower-end multispec cameras, which capture a few wavelength bands can cost as little as $2,000. Higher-end multispec cameras, capable of capturing up to 10 bands, are closer to $10,000. That’s still relatively inexpensive next to hyperspectral units that capture the entire bandwidth and are more for military and research uses: those can run in excess of $100,000.

“But the bigger barrier is not the dollars, it’s the dataset,” says Yott. “Let’s say I’m flying over a 10-acre field and I can capture decent resolution with an RBG camera at two to 20 MB. If I want to do that with our multispectral camera where I have seven bands and an RBG that’s not super high res, I’m at two to 20 GB. If I’m going up to that hyperspectral, I’m likely up around 200 GB.”

The computers, the storage and cloud capacity required to deal with that amount of data is almost as astronomical as the potential for the technology. The good news is if a grower simply wants to determine when to apply nitrogen, a standard NDVI, with additional bands and RBG can provide sufficient resolution. (There is some new research looking into N recommendations with only RBG imagery, where they’re using a newly developed Greenness Index to look at the colour of leaves, chlorophyll and nitrogen relationships.)

Benefits and drawbacks

Yott concedes that both drones and satellites have their strengths and weaknesses. Satellites — and, yes, nanosatellites have the same challenge — offer imaging with reasonably high resolution that is publicly available, with frequent orbits on a weekly basis. But cloud cover can render those images unusable, even with four weekly passes over a region.

“If I’m two days away from doing my nitrogen application and I need to know, and I know I can do it with the drone or I have to cross my fingers for the satellite, I’m probably pulling the trigger on the drone,” says Yott.

At the same time, drones are more labour-intensive and more costly in their operation. Also, the frequency of flying over a field isn’t the same as with a satellite. Yott likens it to the discussions surrounding robotic weed management: as advanced as the systems have become, growers’ knowledge surrounding the use of the systems isn’t keeping pace.

For Mike Wilson, that steep learning curve is one of the bigger impediments with precision ag adoption, including satellite versus drone imagery. Nanosatellites are a wonderful evolution but it’s technology that is largely unusable by the vast majority of producers.

That isn’t meant as a criticism as much as an acknowledgement of the demands of farming. Shrinking margins and rising costs are stressing management decisions, and the time needed to study new technological systems and implement them can simply be unrealistic.

“Growers are embracing technologies that have been tested and proven,” says Wilson, affiliate program lead and a certified crop advisor (CCA) with Veritas in Chatham, Ont. “It takes so long to see results that it’s hard for growers to keep up with the pace that technologies are changing. For certain, a drone image is centimetre-quality resolution versus three-metre, and you can see a lot more with a drone than a satellite. But if you’re going to pump that data into a 60-foot-wide drop boom, three metres is good enough.”

If a grower has electric drives on a planter and the farm is variable and there’s individual row population control, then a higher, sub-metre resolution is necessary. But even then, the basic question always comes back to “What do you want to do?”

“Until we get to a cost-effective source of that technology, I can’t see the majority of farmers implementing it,” says Wilson, stressing that he’s not trying to be critical, just recognizing the demands on the farmer. “Until there is easy-to-use software that provides actionable results from these large datasets and the technology in our equipment allows for more precision in our application, these large datasets will struggle to show their real value and farmers’ adoption rates will be slow.”

But again, that’s the drawback on the technology side in agriculture. Unlike computer software or cell phones — which evolve rapidly and discard older models — agriculture is very selective about what it declares obsolete. Varieties and hybrids are discontinued but farmers still use atrazine or older formulations containing dicamba. As more new systems, designs and chemical products are introduced, they’re added to the knowledge base. That means as fast as developers and manufacturers can innovate, farmers are forced to either expand their understanding or hire someone to learn it for them.

Wilson concedes that’s an imposing challenge for many, particularly since cell phones and computers can see the advent of new systems, implement them and test their viability and move forward with them, while in farming, the learning and evaluation process can often take 18 months or even considerably longer.”

“You decide now whether you want to make a change in your operation, so you try it this growing season, you get the results back and if you’re lucky, you would have something corresponding to next year — probably longer,” says Wilson. “By the time you figure out if something works, you have a whole year that’s gone by and everything’s changed — it’s all new again.”

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The list of key players and systems includes WEEDit, Xarvio, Bosch, Agrifac and Einböck. And the potential is large enough that major players are entering the sector, like John Deere’s 2017 purchase of Blue River Technology, a company that adapted “machine learning” technology to spray applications.

Last September, Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show hosted a field demonstration of the Dot A-U1 power system. Designed by DOT Technology Corporation, it’s a platform that incorporates seeders, sprayers and spreaders in a completely autonomous, GPS-based operating system. It can house a SeedMaster 30-foot seeder or row-crop planter or a New Leader spreader.

It can also accommodate a Pattison Connect 120-foot sprayer, offering an entry point for robotic weed management. In addition to herbicide applications, the unit can provide sectional control, variable-rate application capabilities and turn compensation.

For Robert Saik, the potential for using robotics in weed management is immense. During the speaking and meeting season, he’s been posing questions to growers and industry stakeholders on what lies ahead for autonomous systems.

One of the questions is about growing crops, and about the struggle to get the right product on the right plant at the right time and at the right rate.

“What would you do if you didn’t have to do it?” asks Saik, chief executive officer of DOT Technology Corp. “When you start thinking about that and start with the whole agronomic process — variable-rate seed, variable-rate fertilizer — the answer there is ‘Yes’ and ‘Yes’. But what about in-season variable-rate fertilizer application as a granular? What about variable-rate herbicide, variable-rate fungicide, variable-rate insecticide, variable-rate desiccation or in-season foliar application or late-season nitrogen on wheat for protein?”

Such questions are getting asked in the followup to the GreenSeeker and WeedSeeker systems of the 2000s. New systems like WEEDit and companies like Xarvio and Bosch are working on optical recognition systems for weeds.

“The technology has advanced far enough where we can identify green-on-brown and spray for it,” says Saik. “That technology exists, but the really exciting stuff is when you start to diagnose and ascertain green-on-green. Could you figure out what sowthistle is inside a soybean field — and kill it? That’s where the technology is evolving.”

At a recent Agrifac meeting in Red Deer, Saik listened to an Australian farmer who’d installed cameras on his sprayer and was experimenting with herbicide applications, reducing them by 90 per cent. Such savings on their own are worth considering, but with Blue River’s latest technology there is a system that eliminates weeds around a lettuce plant, then rogues the weaker lettuce plants. It creates a more uniform, precisely spaced crop, leading to greater consistency of produce.

That’s also where the technology has its easiest, more probable entry point, i.e. into the horticulture sector, where margins are higher than in row crop production and growers can justify the initial outlay and spacing requirements.

Is that spacing issue a problem for robotic weed management in corn, soybeans or wheat? If it’s a robotic tillage implement that runs between plants, then perhaps cereal production would challenge such a system.

Saik foresees another impediment to the adoption of automated weed management and that’s the fact that GPS is not used in the majority of herbicide applications for row crops. Drift in GPS signals can result in applicators driving on the rows instead of between them, crushing crop plants. That, notes Saik, is why driving a sprayer is done manually.

“I sat in a Case sprayer (last fall in Sioux Falls, North Dakota) that was using stereoscopy cameras mounted on the sprayer and it was running between the rows of soybeans, 30-inch rows and 15-inch tires at 15 miles an hour,” he says. “And it was 100 per cent driven by camera-vision guiding the sprayer. The cameras were looking at the rows of the crop and the furrow, and that was guiding the sprayer.”

That technology is currently available and companies are working to bring more of that to the field. It’s one aspect that Saik believes most people don’t realize when considering robotic systems in weed management, yet it’s likely to catch on quicker than any other technology.

Costing the possibilities

The question that enters into most of these discussions is “How much will this cost me?” Last September at the Outdoor Farm Show, the Dot A-U1 platform was listed at US$260,000, and Saik says the pushback on the price has been minimal. In Western Canada, the key determinant is whether a farm can operate more than one Dot and be cost-effective. In Eastern Canada, one Dot platform is expected to fit operations in the 2,000- to 2,500-acre range.

The economic drivers will be numerous, adds Saik, and DOT Technology will be working to compare its systems, including the Pattison Connect sprayer with existing technologies, and the capital expenditure calculations. It’s believed they are $100,000 cheaper than using a high-clearance sprayer.

“The second piece of the puzzle is that operationally, Dot only consumes about 4.7 gallons of diesel fuel per hour,” says Saik. “A third component is that you don’t have a person to drive the sprayer and a fourth is that we believe compaction is less.”

Those factors are to be tested in 2020, particularly the compaction issue since the Dot system weighs 42,000 to 44,000 pounds fully loaded, meaning it’s as much as 12,000 pounds lighter than a high-clearance sprayer.

Yet despite the savings and potential for improving soil health, the biggest challenge with robotic weed management might be convincing a grower that they can trust GPS signalling technology and thus be willing to relinquish some level of control.

“It’ll happen over time, but right now, you can’t blame the marketplace for being skeptical,” says Saik, conceding that progress will be slow, regardless of the positive numbers. “Growers have to see it, they have to know it’s proven so we have a long ways yet. But even by summertime, we anticipate turning heads with Dot doing full-fledged field operations, seeding and spraying. It’s high tech, with high touch, but it’s years in the future.”

More than just driving

Another person who believes in the enormous potential for robotics and advanced weed technology is Mike Cowbrough. He agrees that the capability within these systems and the benefits to growers and the industry are far-reaching. But as with the precision ag sphere of technologies, it often amounts to the same questions: How do I effectively manage my weeds, and what do I use to effectively manage them?

What’s often not being examined in the consideration for these systems and technologies is the physiology of the plants. Herbicides are the chemical means, robotics are the mechanical means, but how will the plant be controlled?

“It’s reminiscent of herbicide development and exploration in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s,” says Cowbrough, field crops weed specialist with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA). “Ultimately, it’s going to come down to who will be the best at differentiating crop from weed, and once they’re able to do that differentiation, who has the best strategy to kill the weed?”

And that encompasses two components in the robotics sphere: recognizing what is crop and what is weed. The industry is evolving and questioning whether the technology developers have spent too much time worrying about identifying weeds instead of identifying the crop. Cowbrough believes the company that can do that and combine that with an effective strategy to kill the weed will be the most successful.

“My skepticism on the artificial intelligence is that when you’re identifying plant species, you’re not only looking at them, there are lots of senses in the identification phase,” says Cowbrough. He adds there are tactile and sensory aspects in identification. “There’s no question that the technologies are getting cheaper and better and more efficient. But I do think it’s oversold, this idea that a technology can differentiate between common waterhemp and pigweed at the cotyledon stage.”

Yet Cowbrough agrees that perhaps identification of specific weed species is less of a focus than identifying how it grows and reproduces or whether it’s a vining, upright or rosette species. How they’re killed may become the primary concern, in which case the robot still needs the guidance of a person on how to effectively deal with weeds.

“There are a lot of things that conceptually make sense,” says Cowbrough. But, he adds, “There’s this idea that this going to be out in two or three years. Maybe that’s the case, but I think we’re in the early days.”

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Unfortunately, as the internet has become increasingly indispensible, the frequency of cybercrimes has also risen.

The risks associated with phishing scams, malware and ransomware attacks are real, and small businesses can be at greater risk than ever because many cybercriminals know they are so vulnerable, says Jason Besner.

Besner is director of partnerships at the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security, which leads the federal government’s response to cybersecurity, and he says cybercriminals are looking to gain access to data about customers, suppliers and employees, with a focus on banking and credit card information and payment systems.

Cybersecurity incidents don’t just affect data; these incidents can also result in reputational damage, productivity loss, intellectual property theft, operational disruptions and financial loss due to large recovery costs.

But the biggest risk of all is being unprepared, says Besner. Too often companies take steps to protect themselves only after they have been a victim of a cyber incident.

Being proactive will save you time, money and a great deal of stress, agrees Steve Brown, manager of cybersecurity practice at BDO Canada LLP in Toronto. “The cost of resolution is much more than prevention,” he says.

Country Guide reached out to Besner and Brown for tips on how to protect your business from cybercriminals.

Assign at least one person to be responsible for your business’s cybersecurity, says Besner. Ensure the person understands the breadth of their responsibility and stays up-to-date with emerging cyberthreats.

Ensure all employees understand the importance of cybersecurity and are trained to use the internet safely and to recognize potential threats, says Besner.
It’s essential to have policies and procedures in place for safe use of email and the internet, says Brown. In the event of a cyberincident, everyone needs to know who to contact and what steps to take to minimize damage.

One of the most common threats is phishing, the use of deceptive emails to trick individuals into disclosing information or to trick people into downloading malicious software (malware) onto their computers, says Brown. Employees need “to take the extra minute to verify the source of an email,” he says. “Too often we are working on autopilot.”

Increasingly common, smishing is a form of phishing using text messages.

Whaling, says Besner, is a type of phishing where an employee with authority to issue large payments receives a message, which appears to be legitimate, urging them to direct funds to an account controlled by a cybercriminal, resulting in major financial losses.

Brown also warns against using free WIFI at coffee shops or elsewhere. “Bad actors can jump on that,” he says. “There’s a high risk of being intercepted. They can get usernames and passwords… they can get everything.” Instead, he recommends using your cell phone’s Hot Spot.

Doing an end-to-end cybersecurity threat risk assessment of all internet-connected devices will pinpoint any weaknesses in your system, says Besner. Some of the less obvious weak spots include:

• When possible, software should be set to update automatically so that all security fixes are up to date. When that’s not possible, manual updates should be scheduled regularly.
• Older versions of software that are no longer getting security patches from the developer are a potential risk, says Brown.
• Point-of-sale terminals and other internet-connected devices with operating systems are often overlooked, says Besner. “These devices are often not thought of as something to update and keep secure because they don’t look like computers,” he says. According to the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security, “by targeting out-of-date IT systems, cyberthreat actors can install malware that steals customer information, interferes with business operations, makes fraudulent purchases, manipulates pricing and causes other forms of disruption.”
• The security of any device should be considered before connecting it to the internet, continues Besner. All default usernames and passwords should be changed from the factory settings.
• A password policy should be part of your overall cybersecurity plan, says Brown. These are rules around how passwords are created and changed. (See “TIPS” below for more information on creating strong passwords.)
• Ransomware attacks that prevent you from using your computers until you pay a ransom are becoming increasingly common, says Brown. Having up-to-date backups in multiple locations can assist with data recovery.

When it comes to cybersecurity, putting the effort into securing your system through employee training, assessing your vulnerabilities and following best management practices will save you time, money and headaches.

Resources

The federal government’s Canadian Centre for Cyber Security has many free resources to help businesses and individuals protect themselves from cyberthreats.

These include a 46-page guide, Cybersafe Guide for Small and Medium Businesses which has a “Cyber Security Status Self-Assessment.”

TIPS for small and medium businesses*

Implementing anti-malware software and a firewall is a great first step toward strengthening your business’s cyber security. Malicious software (malware) is any software created and distributed to cause harm or steal information. Malware exists for desktop computers, laptops, smartphones and tablets.

Always be suspicious of phone calls, emails or other communications from an unknown source. Before providing personal information to anyone, verify that they are a trusted source.

Only visit legitimate and trusted websites while using business computers or working with business information. Hovering your cursor over a link will display the actual destination URL. Try this before clicking on a link. When in doubt, copy and paste the URL into a search engine to identify the site without visiting it.

Never remove or disable security safeguards put in place on business networks and computers (such as anti-virus software).

Implement a site-rating tool as an extension to the browser on user computers. This will help identify safe websites.

Illegally copied software is not supported by developers, which means your business cannot expect any sort of technical support if you experience problems.

Clear your browsing history or cache after online banking and shopping.

If a website or browser asks to keep you signed in, unclick that option and take the time to re-enter your password each time.

(* from the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security)

The post How to protect yourself online appeared first on Country Guide.

In the past, the collaborative approach had always saved agriculture. Farmers have pooled their ideas, shared their results and found big solutions much faster than anyone could find them on their own.

But how could the old ways work with today’s new threats?

As Cox looked harder at that word “collaborative,” he began to think maybe it’s still the right strategy, if only it could be brought up to technological date. Maybe collaborative, he thought, should actually be “open source.”

Now his work is beginning to look like the start of a hugely innovative change in farming.

“We’re asking a lot more of agriculture now, not just to produce food, but also in land management, and mitigation and adaptation to climate change, as well as habitat for biodiversity,” says Cox. “Agriculture hasn’t always been fully recognized in terms of these roles.”

Cox and his family still operate the 250-acre, certified organic farm where he grew up in Lee, New Hampshire. Tuckaway Farm’s production is highly diversified, integrating livestock and timber enterprises with over 100 different types of crops including fruits, vegetables, grains, oilseeds and hay. The family operates a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program and sells their produce direct at local markets, restaurants and valued-added businesses.

A systems approach to the farm

Cox took his farm experience to the University of New Hampshire, earning a PhD in natural resources and earth systems science by focusing on collaborative, open source agricultural research development.

He began to develop the concept of open source farming, and was looking for some way to demonstrate the value of the OpenTEAM digital tools and platforms he was working on.

That’s what led him to join the Research Advisory Committee at the Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture and Environment in Freeport, Maine, where he later became research director.

“All of these systems need to be translated into action on the ground, and Wolfe’s Neck Center was a great test platform because we had the capacity to do research as a non-profit farm,” Cox says. “More importantly, unlike the university, its mission was to create intersections between the general public researchers and producers, and to move agricultural science forward.”

It may not exactly be conventional agriculture, but Wolfe’s Neck Center had some real strengths. It was focused on education, hosting about 30,000 visitors a year with educational programs and even summer camps for kids, and it was looking for a way to build a research farm that could somehow bundle and distribute agricultural research from around the world for use on all sorts of mainly organic and regenerative farms.

It was an opportunity that finally morphed into OpenTEAM, a collaborative research project launched last July that aims to create the digital tools and platforms to provide everyone, everywhere with access to the best agricultural knowledge about improving soil health and mitigating climate change using regenerative practices and technologies.

From there, the technology could form a model that would be used to support almost every kind of agriculture, almost everywhere.

The birth of OpenTEAM

OpenTEAM has over a dozen partners, including Stonyfield Organic, the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research (FFAR) and the USDA, and brings together farmers, universities, food companies and cutting-edge technologists to create easier farm access to existing tools, and to develop new tools for improving soil health. It creates an open source digital platform to share knowledge and innovation that is designed to help a growing network of farmers around the world make better decisions about how to improve soil health.

The development of open science and open source technology is a reflection of the increasing awareness that agriculture is a large-scale system encompassing everything from the microbiome to the biosphere and biogeochemistry.

“In order to get at, and understand, and ask the next round of questions, it’s necessary to transition how we do agricultural science and who’s involved,” says Cox. “There’s a new conception of agriculture as a shared human endeavour, and this public science is a system science, which means that we have to collaborate.

“It can’t be done in laboratories or even on isolated research farms if we’re going to achieve what we need to achieve.”

The three components

There are three main components of OpenTEAM. The first is the technical ecosystem, consisting of all the tools and communities associated with the tools.

The second is the farm network, which is where it’s actually put into practice and translated into local production systems at different scales, from a small holding in Africa to a large-scale grain operation in Canada.

The third part connects the two other components. “We have a team which is essentially adapting the tools and technologies led by the users who are going to actually implement it in the field,” says Cox.

When visualizing open source farming, it’s important to begin by seeing it as an ecosystem, not a single technology, and that its tools and functional communities work together to create something greater.

The tools themselves are observation and decision tools. Observation tools are things like the Quick Carbon application, farmOS, and the Our.Sci application. These are all tools for gathering high-quality observations of soil, land cover and agricultural management practices.

FarmOS is a free, open source farm-management and record-keeping tool that can also connect to other farm management record-keeping systems, and it can also connect them beyond that to other tools.

Cox’s concept for farmOS was motivated in part by his desire for a system that would help him manage the complexity of his own diverse farm, which has become a research laboratory for many of the open source farming ideas he has come up with over the past decade.

FarmOS enables the aggregation of huge amounts of data collected from individual farms, universities, research institutions, government agencies and the entire global food system and connects it together to make the information both secure and controlled by the farmer, and shareable and easily accessible to anyone who loads the free software to their computer or mobile device.

“What we aim to do with farmOS is understand a farm at its most fundamental,” says Cox. Sensors on the farm measure soil and other environmental indicators like temperature, humidity or soil moisture and relay it back to the farmOS platform, where it can be accessed and also overlaid with other data, such as USDA soil survey maps. “The intention is to be able to have democratised access to environmental data so that everybody has access to high-quality, high-resolution data that will help them understand soil health and aim to improve soil management techniques in the future, at very low cost.”

LandPKS is a land cover and soil mapping app that’s especially useful in areas that don’t have good soil maps. “It allows you to generate a very high-quality map, with rigorously peer-reviewed methodologies, but in a very simple and inexpensive way,” says Cox.

The Quick Carbon app adapts to any in-field methodology to digitize and share that methodology and reproduce it regularly, so that results can be compared. It also connects to hand-held, in-field measurement devices like a spectrometer that will do in-field soil carbon assessments and soil colour evaluations. “It’s basically laying the ground work for new low-cost digital tools in the field,” says Cox.

Making open source tools accessible for everyone is a big focus for the OpenTEAM project, and at Wolfe’s Neck Center, Cox and his collaborators are using low-cost sensor and data loggers alongside high-end, industry-standard equipment to compare results and try to develop the best, low-cost tools for farmers to use in their own fields.

The farmer or crop advisor collects and inputs data from the field, which is then assessed with huge, up-to-the-minute archives of research and farm experience.

The power of open source

The potential for open source farming goes far beyond the individual on-farm level. Its real power will come in aggregating field-level and site data with other participants to feed more quality data into remote sensing tools like satellite imagery.

What’s important about the design of recent generation open source tools and technologies is that they can be inter-operable, and they’re a part of a larger system, says Cox.

“When people are doing research or developing tools to do research or developing products, they’re doing it with the knowledge and intention that it will be used and re-used by others,” says Cox. “It’s a different cultural approach.”

Open source is also not to be confused with open data, says Cox.

“There are certain types of data that we’re already investing in that are part of the public knowledge commons,” he says. “Those are the things that are the basis for our understanding in science, so that’s things like climate data, soil data, weather data and the way in which we describe our understanding of the plants in the world, what grows well where.”

Open source tools involve making the software blueprints available so others can figure out how to work with them and continually improve them to interpret open data.

Farmers control the data

The underlying concept of open source farming tools is that farmers can control their own data but also have the option to share it. Data entered into the OpenTEAM tools like farmOS can be used by anyone the producer chooses to share it with, such as researchers or certifying bodies.

“If they choose to share their data, they can have confidence how it’s going to be used and that’s really important because often ‘open’ means a free-for-all and everything is free, and that’s not the case with OpenTEAM,” Cox says. “It’s a different approach, but we think it’s a better approach.”

There is additional value if producers need to obtain environmental, organic or other certifications, because they can use the data for things like food safety programs or supply chain verifications.

“That’s all data,” says Cox.

A collaborative system like open source farming creates multiple points of connection that increase the confidence in outcomes, says Cox.

“It cannot exist with a single entity owning it, nobody would trust it, so that’s why we have to have this sort of pre-competitive space where we agree on how this system works, so that we can do these other things,” he says. “OpenTEAM is really focused primarily on creating value for the farmer and allowing farmer control.”

Local knowledge applied globally

Looking at other large-scale, collaborative projects (i.e. the internet) that rely on open source servers, Cox feels the OpenTEAM project has almost limitless potential as a global ag information system.

“The underlying collaborative science project is not dissimilar from something like the Human Genome Project,” Cox says, although it’s actually more complex because agriculture is constantly changing.

For Cox personally, it’s encouraging to see the community grow. “We have gone from a concept to essentially launching a functioning community in three years,” says Cox. “This is a human process, something that we can do together. It’s not something that you have a robot go out and do. It doesn’t work to have just a bunch of scientists saying, ‘If you do this, it’s going to work.’ You have to engage people where they are, and who they are, in order to make this transition happen, and this participatory, engaged science is the foundation of it.”

The post The open source farmer appeared first on Country Guide.

That’s probably a good thing. Certainly, the potential benefits are amazing.

“The smartphone is going to be one of the major delivery vehicles for the farmer,” says Joe Dales, founder of RH Accelerator, a company that assists startups in the agriculture and food innovation space.

But what will our phones deliver? “We still don’t know what the data can do for us on our farms because we haven’t done a good job yet of unlocking all the different layers of data,” Dales says. “We are just at the early stages of that.”

Best, perhaps, is to begin by envisioning the endpoint. It’s remarkably simple to put into words: farmers won’t be going to manage an acre at a time, as most do now. They’ll manage a square metre at a time.

In fact, the farmer’s job is going to feel like it’s a lot more about managing the data than about actually managing the soil.

The data capability of farm equipment is growing for all operations, covering everything from seeding and scouting to harvest, storage and transportation. And the change is happening in the office too, with data generated by all our business management functions.

As the availability of data grows, the return on making data-based decisions grows too, which is why tomorrow’s farmers and their farm teams will transform themselves into highly informed data specialists, as expert at finding new ways of making money from data as farmers today are at comparing crop varieties or tractors.

That’s where data is taking us, and with the everyday use of mobile and digital devices, and with improvements in internet connectivity in rural areas, it will launch a revolution in how farmers monitor and manage their soil, crops, finances, markets, equipment and workforce.

“We have never had this kind of digital history available,” says William Ashton, director of the Rural Development Institute (RDI) at Brandon University. “It’s being mapped out on a landscape basis geographically in a way that we’ve never been able to do before.”

That’s going to mean that, for the first time, rural areas do not have to be in a deficit position when it comes to technology and the opportunities it can bring; farmers just have to realize how much their world is opening up and explore the possibilities.

“As an example, here at the RDI, located in Brandon, we don’t have the candidate selection for employees as we would if we were located in Winnipeg but all of a sudden, we’ve got people that are in Toronto, Italy and London, England, doing research for us,” says Ashton. “If you think of a rural small business, we now have access and can connect with people with particular skills and interests and be able to move forward. We are beginning to make those kinds of connections, but in some ways we’re behind the times of thinking about this digital connection.”

Data post-harvest

Bill Rimmer, managing partner of Rimmer Technology Partners based in Glenboro, Man., believes there are endless post-harvest opportunities for tech companies to manage inventory and connect buyers and sellers. Compared to precision agriculture, which focuses largely on pre-harvest production, the post-harvest applications haven’t made as many headlines yet, but that’s already changing.

These opportunities will come largely thanks to digital cloud technology that allows for a large amount of data to be stored, processed and used without the heavy investments in things like dedicated servers that up to now have limited the potential of companies, worried about recouping that investment, to share and collaborate with their data sets.

“There is going to be more consolidation, not just with producers and farms getting larger, but also with things like software vendors and equipment manufacturers that are in that space,” says Rimmer. “It’ll be interesting to see how all that plays out. I think the biggest challenge that the producer is going to face is having silo platforms out there. My John Deere stuff doesn’t talk to my input stuff, doesn’t talk to my inventory management stuff, doesn’t talk to my grain marketing stuff. I think that’s going to be more of a problem for people because everyone’s play seems to be, we want to own all your data.”

Who owns the data?

That’s where the strain will arise, predicts Ashton. We need to sort out who owns the data and who gets to manipulate it, and what it’s used for, says Ashton. “Some producers are trying to own it themselves. Some of the equipment automatically does a satellite link-up, so they simply don’t have access to all of that data,” he says.

“Every cloud platform wants to own all your data because that’s the leverage to get you hooked in and sell it to you every year forever,” says Rimmer. “There aren’t any open standards really around all this stuff, so it’s a bit wild west right now.”

It’s going to be a struggle for producers and ag companies to start collaborating and sharing their data, just as it is in other business sectors. But the payoffs are so big, it’s going to happen.

Brennan Turner, CEO and founder of online grain marketplace FarmLead, thinks it’s coming. He says that it’s inevitable that more cross-platform collaborations will happen, noting that they just launched an API that will seamlessly connect Combyne, their latest cash grain trading tool, to other digital tools used by farmers and grain buyers. This API (an application programming interface, which connects data between two systems at the user’s request) will help farmers and grain buyers stop having to double- or triple-enter pieces of information into various digital tools.

“I might not be only sharing the quality characteristics of my bin in the grain that I harvested but also the production practices, no till, how many passes I took on each field, fertilizer use, relative crop input use relative year over year, application rates, and all these different factors,” says Turner. “That could be transferred up through the value channel by the precision ag platform, by data management platforms and by market price mechanisms to the buyer side of things, and potentially all the way to a food processor to give more credibility to the ag industry from a consumer standpoint.”

But, says Turner, that doesn’t automatically mean there will be a financial benefit to the producer.

“It’s hard for me to see a world where people are going to be paying for this sort of process,” he says, “But it will naturally increase the optionality for farmers to decide, for example, which type of seed or equipment they use. It will be successful if multiple different platforms can connect with one another so it’s malleable in that sense. Producers can connect with different tools and still have the option in terms of how this information flows from where to where.”

AI to unlock the hidden answers in data

Some in the agricultural industry, like Montreal-based Motorleaf, a company specializing in artificial intelligence (AI) solutions mainly for the horticultural industry, believe the truly complex questions in agriculture can only be solved through manipulating data.

“Data already exists today; it needs to be put to use,” says Scott Dickson Dagondon, director of AI for Motorleaf, who predicts that in the next 10 years, the ag industry will invest a lot of resources to make sure data is collected properly, so it can use AI to uncover answers hidden in the data.

“We believe AI and robotics will help push for more data-driven agriculture because there are a lot of questions without a clear answer today in agriculture, such as how do we optimize irrigation to conserve resources, what crop strains are suitable for a specific location or region and how do we minimize the cost of cultivating specialty crops in response to changes in consumer dietary trends.”

The post Farming in 2030: Big data appeared first on Country Guide.

What benefits will it provide? Will its chain-of-custody and traceability for identity-preserved (IP) crops, including seed, keep Canada competitive? Is it actually going to provide higher profits for individual farms? How would that work?

For this and more, Country Guide went with your questions to some of the top minds in Canadian ag blockchain application.

But first let’s go over the technology. A blockchain is simply a secure digital ledger. It’s a permanent record that can be used to keep track of goods in a given supply chain and to record payment transactions and more

It’s as simple as its name. “Blocks” of information are added at each step in the “chain” along with a timestamp. If an input error is made, an amendment is added. No data can be deleted or changed.

While blockchains can be public, with all their information visible to everyone, Grain Discovery CEO Rory O’Sullivan notes that private, permission-based blockchains are generally used in ag supply chains. (Grain Discovery is a new firm working to integrate blockchain into the Canadian grain system.)

In these scenarios, users are all verified and receive access to view or add information according to given defined permissions. For example, a certain party may have permission only to accept or reject a shipment of this or that at a given point in a supply chain. Blockchain does not replace existing systems, notes O’Sulllivan, but is a layer on top that enhances data management by connecting information that was previously isolated.

With support from the Grain Farmers of Ontario, Beechwood Agri Service and Agriculture & Agri-Food Canada, Grain Discovery and the Canadian Seed Growers Association (CSGA) recently completed a blockchain pilot demonstration project involving tofu. (Visit the project webpage at id.graindiscovery.com)

The tofu in the project was made from an IP soybean variety developed and grown in Ontario. Tofu shoppers could see this information on the project webpage (along with other illustrated steps in its processing and distribution) by taking a picture with their smartphones of a “QR” code on the package.

The demo helped the team members understand some specifics about what’s involved in creating this type of blockchain. CSGA managing director of certification and technology services Doug Miller (who has also recently finished an MBA on blockchain) explains that as he and others went through the process of adding information to the blocks, they learned where in the supply chain there was ease and where there was a bit more difficulty in accessing information. That is, some parties already had all their systems completely digitized and their information was very easy to access and insert into the blockchain. For others, the situation was more paper-based.

Benefits for farmers

There are several ways farmers can achieve benefits through participation in supply chain/traceability blockchains. Some of these are down the road, and some are more significant than others. In looking at them, we do have to remember that blockchain is a new technology and it will take time for it to be integrated and put to full use.

Miller first explains that blockchains have the potential to reduce administrative burden for grain shipments, and these savings should flow directly back to farmers in the form of higher prices.

Grain storage on farms is increasing, adds O’Sullivan, and grain sales, like all other aspects of agriculture, are going to evolve into more streamlined and efficient forms. Blockchains are likely to play a role.

Reduction of the on-farm paperwork burden is also a way that farmers can directly benefit from blockchain use. The verified information in a blockchain could be used when applying for crop insurance, for example, allowing farmers to manage information more efficiently. “With blockchain, as with any digital system, information is entered once,” says Miller. “In the future, producers will be able to agree to share information with different sources — retaining control and gaining administrative efficiencies.”

Another benefit will likely come in price premiums on grain shipments and more, Miller explains. “In low-cost, high-volume situations, farmers accept the commodity price,” he says. “Using the verified data in blockchains, Canadian farmers will be able to achieve a premium on higher-cost, lower-volume transactions. At this time, an ideal area would be IP programs. Also, by providing value chain traceability downstream, companies may see blockchain as a way to mitigate their risk. That is, they can see what the product is, where it came from, how it was produced, and so on.”

However, this all assumes that every other country won’t also come to offer verified supply chain data using blockchain. “Yes, other countries will come on board,” agrees O’Sullivan, “and the extra traceability data that blockchain collects and records may be required to access certain premium markets, but if Canada is first in adoption, then we have that reputation established and that will be a lasting competitive advantage.”

So, how would farmers ensure they actually benefit and receive a premium? Miller puts it like this: “What we’re trying to do is create a model that is developed by producers and is producer-friendly. The idea is that we are out here building these networks where we want the producer to see some additional value. We don’t want big multi-nationals coming in and dictating the terms. We want the producers to have a seat at the table.”

Product premiums?

There is also the possibility for blockchain to enable price premiums directly from retail sales of food products. Miller notes that, as demonstrated in the pilot project, blockchain can enable farmers, processors and others to weave verified local detail into the presentation of a retail product, and for farmers to therefore tell their stories in an unprecedented way. Additional verified information could be added to blockchains as well, for instance about the ingredients and production practices that went into a food or bioeconomy product (more on this later).

Indeed, we are in an era where customers want more information on how their food is being produced, and to determine if the food aligns with their values, notes Miller. In the midst of a sea of food product and company claims about sustainability and more, blockchain provides verified — and therefore highly valuable — information that can be used as a product differentiator. “To be able to visually see the steps of production outlined in a blockchain, as consumers could do in the pilot project, we are proving local production in a very concrete way,” Miller says. “Some consumers are definitely willing to pay a premium for that.”

However, Miller does agree that in the retail arena, as with international grain sales, making blockchain-verified traceability accessible through smart phone apps or another way may become standard with most or all food products. Said another way, this sort of thing could become the expected norm and not a market-differentiation factor that warrants a premium.

It’s also important to note that because the pilot project was mainly a technology versus a product marketing demo, there were no point-of-sale materials in the store to distinguish the blockchain tofu from other tofu — that is, there were no marketing efforts to entice customers to buy it because of its added blockchain-traceability value.

There was also no measure in the project of how many customers bought the product because it had an online blockchain associated with it. Nor did the study actually track how many shoppers or customers actually used the QR code to view the supply chain details.

Adding information

Returning to the idea that blockchains allow farmers to tell their story in new and verified ways, O’Sullivan notes again that blockchain is not a singular technology, but part of a larger digital architecture ecosystem ensuring information is recorded accurately. But with the rapid shift to automation on farms worldwide, much of the information that will be added to blockchains could be automatically deposited from multiple tamper-proof “internet of things” (IoT) sources, such as barn feeding stations, precision ag systems or weather sensors in the field.

This will raise the trust level in our food system, O’Sullivan says, and allow Canada to be proactive in future food traceability requirements, thereby earning a premium compared to our competitors.

Indeed, blockchains that contain agronomic data from IoT sources are the focus of a pilot project involving Grain Discovery, an Alberta-based precision ag firm called Decisive Farming and researchers at Olds College. Data on hops production will flow directly from existing farm management software in the tractor/combine to a blockchain related to beer production.

Another project that Grain Discovery is working to propose involves calculating the carbon intensity (CI) of corn at the farm level. “Displaying and recording this granularity of data may make sense for premium or niche commodities, but it also makes sense for the biggest crop of all — yellow corn,” explains O’Sullivan. “Ethanol is the biggest user of corn in North America, consuming around 40 per cent of the crop. Ethanol plants use a variety of life-cycle assessment (LCA) models to calculate the carbon intensity (CI) of their fuels — it’s basically a scorecard for the carbon dioxide emissions associated with extraction, processing and distribution over the entire life cycle from corn in the field to the final processed product. Currently, LCA models are calculated using regional averages. Verified farm-based data would provide much more accuracy.”

Many factors contribute to the CI of a corn crop, including fertilizer application, fertilizer technologies, cropping practices such as tillage, distances (tail pipe emissions), drying methods and moisture at harvest, yield, and field drainage. If the proposal proceeds, a pilot project will integrate much of this data into a blockchain that traces a shipment of corn from grower to the ethanol facility. Through data from precision ag software, each farm (and eventually each truckload of corn) can have its own “digital passport” and assigned its own CI.

When attached to corn offers in an online marketplace, the verified data will allow ethanol producers to buy low-CI corn and receive performance incentives/credits for blending lower-CI ethanol. To further enhance the effectiveness of the initiative, some of the profits could be used to establish a premium for farmers. “That is, through premiums for lower-CI corn, producers can be incentivized to use lower-CI practices relating to agronomic factors that are within their control,” O’Sullivan explains.

While capturing the value of adding more verified information on traceability, food safety and sustainability to food, fuel and other ag products “is still ahead,” says O’Sullivan, he notes that adding blockchains to harness this value should not be terribly difficult.

Blockchain payment

An Ontario-based startup called mPowered is using the power of blockchain to create income opportunities for farmers (to “empower” them, if you will), using the data they generate on their farms every day. Over the last few years, its founder Joel Sotomayor has also co-founded the revolutionary “Be Seen, Be Safe” geo-fencing biosecurity system, its sister system Farm Health Monitor, and Transport Genie, a system that uses real-time feedback from sensors in livestock transport trucks to ensure animal welfare standards — all with former Livestock Research Innovation Centre CEO Tim Nelson.

Before we look at how blockchain comes into play in what mPowered offers, we must understand what it offers. Every day, farmers are generating valuable data through their precision ag systems and automated barn systems, and this data is being transmitted and used by the makers of the technology, without compensation to farmers. “Your data has significant value and the days of providing it to companies for nothing are coming to an end,” says mPowered chief technology officer Idris Soule. “Your data is being used in several ways, for R&D for example, to get a competitive edge over other precision ag or automated system makers, to get a picture of your farm and also your industry. We are now creating a market for your valuable data, enabling you to be rightfully compensated.”

Hold on, you might say — why would the companies who have been getting data without paying for it suddenly agree to pay? And isn’t there likely something in the precision ag contract that specifies that the company can collect and use individual farm data?

To explain how mPowered believes the situation will play out, Soule underscores two things: farm ownership of data, and the critical mass of farmer pressure. “There are a lot of companies out there with leaders who already understand what’s in the cards with regard to compensation for data,” he says. “The rest will come to understand very quickly that data generated by farmers running their tractors and operating their barns belongs to farmers. And that farmers are going to realize this and realize that there is a value to their data. As farmers become educated, it will be in the best interest of companies to be respectful and pay for the data. Said another way, they will not want to risk losing their farmer-customers to their competitors who respect farmers and will pay them for data. At some point in the near future, one company will be the first to pay and others will follow suit. It’s inevitable.”

(It’s also inevitable, in the view of mPowered, that we as individuals and consumers will be paid for the data that we have traded for membership on platforms like Facebook, but that we give away for free every time we shop online or in reality, every time we search the internet, and so on.)

He also wants it understood that there will never be a cost to use mPowered to manage and sell on-farm data — mPowered is paid by data buyers. There is no registration or sign-up fee, and buyers of data incur fees when they purchase it from a farmer/seller.

Because farmers’ understanding of all of this is critical, mPowered is focusing in on education. In the near future, they will host a Q&A in Guelph, Ont., and will also be presenting at conferences, AGMs and so on (the firm is also working with some commodity groups, but can’t provide details at this time). “We are currently approaching the stage where individuals can sign up for trialing the app and provide their feedback,” says Soule. “They will of course be compensated for this information. We are planning to offer early beta testers the ability to be ‘virtual’ hosts of master nodes, so that they will receive a sum for every transaction on their node.”

In addition, Soule explains that there is much more data on a farm that has value, outside of precision ag and automated barn system data, and that companies definitely want that data.

(And as Miller and O’Sullivan have highlighted, data from various sources can also be amalgamated and put into useful forms for farmers and other members of the supply chain using blockchain technologies, making farms and the entire food system more responsive, efficient and secure — something which Sotomayor presented on in August when he was invited to visit South Korea to meet with government officials, researchers at Seoul National University, producer groups and tech companies to discuss the potential of blockchain.)

Farmers generate vast amounts of data every year, notes Soule, from which varieties of crop or livestock feed they choose to buy and why, to how much water the farm uses, to what pests their crops have, to which animal health issues they face. He says mPowered will enable farmers to gather data that they already are generating, and package and offer this data on the market if they wish to do so. Based on the type of data and demand, they can sell to researchers or big corporations.

Blockchain will ensure the buyer of authenticity and security of the data. There are particular systems that will “lock” data from automated farm systems to the mPowered platform, and Soule says right now, he and his team are working out these issues by forming various partnerships with companies such as data broker Farm Mobile. Data from farm spreadsheets and other formats can also be loaded onto the mPowered ecosystem with ease.

In terms of payments, they will all be transacted through one large blockchain. “Payment is immediate and settled as soon as the transaction is confirmed on the blockchain,” says Soule. “For those who are financially savvy, mPowered also enables the use of futures contracts.”

The post Real blockchain payoffs appeared first on Country Guide.

In theory, the internet puts all this great material at our fingertips, but the truth is that we have never been fed so much that is fake, false or misleading.

Simply put, it’s more difficult than ever to separate what you should believe from what you should reject.

Country Guide reached out to Levitin and others involved in teaching information literacy for tips on how to be a discerning consumer of information. After all, scientific studies have proven that, thanks to the way we use social media, false information spreads faster and further than the truth, so the stakes have never been higher.

Levitin, who teaches critical thinking at McGill University, doesn’t hold back. He calls internet literacy the single most important issue facing our society. “A great number of the problems that we are facing will all dissolve if we can do something about this as a society. And I think that that something is education in critical thinking and information literacy and internet literacy.”

The way our brains work also makes us more prone to drawing the wrong conclusions. They didn’t evolve in a technological society so we aren’t very good at detecting patterns in statistics or applying logic to complex cases, says Levitin.

We are also prone to suffering from what psychologists call confirmation bias, the tendency to embrace data that confirms our views while ignoring or rejecting information that doesn’t support our pre-existing opinions or beliefs.

Heather Woodley, supervisor of technical services at the Region of Waterloo Library near Waterloo, Ont., says it’s important to be an informed consumer when it comes to information on the internet. “Anybody can write anything they want online.”

The internet makes it easy and inexpensive for anyone to publish information and make it look legitimate and appealing, so we need to think especially critically about what we read, see and hear online.

Given that three-quarters of Canadians get their news from the internet, the importance of being an informed consumer is clear. There are several steps we can take to help us evaluate the legitimacy of information.

Get aggressive

First, Levitin recommends considering the source of the information. Is it a reliable source or is it biased? If it comes from a growers’ organization, they may have a vested interest and it might be biased, says Levitin. “You wouldn’t believe the reports of a drug company over Health Canada which is neutral,” he says by way of example.

Woodley, who gives workshops on spotting fake news for library patrons, uses a mental checklist when reading information online. Why does it exist? Is it for information purposes or are they trying to sell me something? What’s the motive behind the information? What is the authority of the person making the claim?

For example, for medical information, are they a trained medical professional? Are their credentials relevant to the subject matter being presented?

When possible, Levitin recommends taking the word of an expert (although not blindly) over someone who is not an expert. For example, if you hear about dietary supplements that are reported to extend your life, look to see if any of those reports are from medical researchers, he advises.

Next, Levitin says you should ask yourself if there is some missing information. Are you only seeing part of the story? Farmers are already good at evaluating product claims. If a company promotes test results that show a new product led to a yield increase, growers will start asking questions about other variables, such as weather, different seed, etc.

Now, farmers need to be equally aggressive with what they see online.

When looking at information online, Woodley recommends checking to see if it is current. With new research becoming available every day, information becomes outdated. “Information changes,” explains Woodley. It may have been reliable and credible at the time but may no longer be valid. Old information often doesn’t get taken off the internet, she says.

A Canadian solution

To help create a citizenry that is digitally literate, the non-profit, non-partisan registered charity CIVIX has teamed up with the Canadian Journalism Foundation to deliver the NewsWise program in Canadian schools. With funding from Google, a series of videos, interactive tools, and other resources has been made available to teachers for classroom use.

With evidence that fake news has had an impact on past elections, digital literacy is critical. According to the NewsWise website, “Digital literacy is one of the most pressing issues facing democracies. Being able to determine what is fact or fiction online has become an essential skill of citizenship in the digital age.”

Jessica Johnston, a journalist and manager of News Literacy Programming at NewsWise, says determining if information is credible on the internet, especially with social media, is a problem we all face. While no person, organization or publication is immune to making errors, some sources are more credible than others. Newspapers that follow professional journalistic standards of fact checking, accountability, and issuing corrections, set themselves apart from those that do not, says Johnston.

Wikipedia can be a good place to start to find background information on a source or publication. How long has it been around? What is its circulation? These are what Johnston refers to as credibility signals.

Johnston recommends thinking like a fact checker and getting as close as possible to the original reporting source. “The closer you can get to the source, the better you will be able to evaluate the authority of the source and the validity of the information.”

Checking to see if the claims can be verified through other sources is another way to confirm the accuracy, adds Woodley. While opinions are fine, it is important to differentiate between opinion and fact.

According to the NewsWise website, there is no single path to assessing the credibility of information online. Each case will be different. “The important thing is to understand the importance of accuracy, and to know how to assess it. A verification mindset is one of critical thinking and healthy skepticism.”

Levitin agrees. “Critical thinking isn’t something you do once in a while… It’s something you have to do every day, and you have to remind yourself to do it.”

Resources

• A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age, a book by Dr. Daniel Levitin, (recently reprinted with the title, Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era), teaches how to think critically and evaluate information so you can recognize misleading statistics, graphs, news stories, etc.
• For health information, look for the Health on the Net logo. Health on the Net is a non-profit organization with a relationship to the World Health Organization. The logo indicates information that has been deemed to be reliable and transparent.
• FactsCan is an independent and non-partisan fact checker on Canadian federal politics. It is a registered non-profit organization.
• Politifact is a not-for-profit U.S. journalism fact checker.
• Snopes.com is an independent website that has been fact-checking information on the internet since 1994.
• Use tools like Google Scholar to find peer-reviewed scientific papers or Google Images “reverse lookup” to find the origins of a photograph and determine its authenticity.
• NewsWise, a program delivered by CIVIX and the Canadian Journalism Foundation, with the support of Google Canada, provides teachers with resources and tools to help school-aged children find and filter accurate information online.
• This YouTube video ‘Why your newsfeed sucks‘ explains the fact-checking process.

The post ‘Learn to discern’ in the information age appeared first on Country Guide.

I can remember hearing AGCO president and CEO Martin Richenhagen discuss the challenges that grain storage presents in sub-Saharan Africa. AGCO had purchased the grain storage and handling company GSI, and Richenhagen talked of how agricultural development for Africa must be higher in our priorities.

Now GSI has announced it is working on a product that could significantly improve the chances of keeping stored grain in good condition, and it turns out it has the potential to be useful to Canadian growers as much or more than to farmers in Africa.

That new technology, GrainViz, creates a moisture map of grain inside a bin, using technology similar to a medical MRI or CT scan.

“I think this technology, as we’re trying to develop it, could be very, very market disruptive,” says Roger Price, GSI’s director of North American grain sales. “You take that data and run it through very complicated algorithms, and it creates an image of the moisture in the bin. This is like an MRI, only instead of magnetic resonance, which requires very powerful magnets, this is electromagnetic imaging.”

There are already a few different grain-monitoring products on the market, but because GrainViz uses a significantly different approach, it raises the bar on the technology level available to producers.

GrainViz is currently in trials ahead of commercial market release, but Price is optimistic it will see public introduction sometime in the spring of this year.

“We won’t see it until spring,” he says. “We’re in the middle of beta testing it right now. We’ll have the product available to the market, probably in April.”

At first, GrainViz is likely only to be of interest to large-scale growers with very high capacity bins or commercial grain storage operators. That’s because of the cost to install and operate the system.

“It becomes a very economical proposition for large bins, not so much for small bins,” Price notes. “We expect a system like this to cost somewhere between $20,000 and $25,000 (per bin). In addition, there is a monthly subscription fee when there is grain in the bins and you want the images created. That’s $200 per month, regardless of the bin size. There is a $1,000 per year site fee as well.”

The system can be installed in bins that already have interior cables to monitor grain temperature, and the data from those cable sensors can be integrated with GrainViz’s own data to add more layers of information.

“You can also overlay temperature from the cables that most people have today,” says Price. “So you can continue to use that temperature system and overlay it with the moisture. It’s not necessary to have that, but if you already have it, it might be nice to see the temperature in addition to moisture in areas of the bin.”

The information collected from GrainViz sensors is used to create a 3D map that shows the moisture variations inside a bin. Those maps can then be downloaded wirelessly directly to a smartphone, device or computer.

“It takes an hour to set up and create the image, and you’ll have historical data as long as you need it,” Price says. “It can detect where the moisture is down to a very small size. It can even detect a leak in a bin, if a sidewall or roof is leaking water in. The thing about this is you know when you’ve got a problem before it’s hot and you have damage. It’s a proactive approach to grain bin monitoring.”

The system can also detect other anomalies inside a bin, such as rodent or insect infestations, or even human entries. This can then add a security layer to the information available to a grower.

“It’s revolutionary technology,” Price continues. “It’s more than just moisture imaging; it also can detect bug infestations. With bug respiration, the moisture is different on that. It can detect inventory levels very accurately. It can detect a person in the bin, which would be helpful from a safety perspective or food security issue. You’d know if there was unauthorized entry into a bin.”

And it could detect unauthorized removal of grain.

The data from a GrainViz map can be also used to automatically control fans in aeration bins or regulate dryers.

“That’s an integral piece of this,” confirms Price. “Most of the time it will be set up that way. It senses the humidity and it has a plenum sensor. It is a grain controller, but it’s a lot smarter than the existing products on the market, because you can see exactly what’s happening, down to the per-bushel level.”

Thanks to moisture maps accurate to about 0.1 per cent, the data allows producers to make much more informed decisions about running fans or dryers, minimizing the risk of grade losses from excess drying.

“If you know you have wet pockets, you’re a lot smarter about blending or fan management or when you’re going to physically turn the grain,” Price says. “If you only knew how much money you were blowing out the roof vents. In addition to throwing that water away, you’re running the fans to do it. And you never knew what that cost was, because you never knew what you had in the first place. Now you can virtually calculate it from week to week, see how much money you gained or lost running the fans.”

It also simplifies the decision on whether or not blending is required.

“You can watch the grain dry, or stubborn pockets not dry,” Price says. “Or, in some cases, moisture getting added back into the grain becomes visible right on the image.”

Installation of a GrainViz system has to be done by professional installers in order to position all 23 sensors correctly and ensure they are calibrated.

“The system has to be tuned, for lack of a better word,” Price adds. “It has to know where the receivers are and what grain is in the bin.”

GrainViz was developed as a joint project with a Canadian company called 151 Research.

“Our next-generation GrainViz imaging technology, combined with GSI’s global grain system leadership, will maximize grain condition and storage efficiency throughout the world,” said Paul Card, CEO of 151 Research, in a press release.

The system would allow Richenhagen’s agricultural development efforts in emerging countries to take another step forward, but the cost for them as for Canadian growers — at least for now — means its initial market penetration on farms will be limited.

But as the cost of all technology seems to fall dramatically over time, the technology level offered by GrainViz could set a new standard for grain storage monitoring and inventory control.

“This is disruptive technology,” says Price. “You may see lenders requiring this monitoring so they can have loan protection. Or you can see producers eliminating a lot of redundant handling, because they know what it is and where it is.”

As this new technology application crosses from the medical field to agriculture, it’s just one more way, it seems, that the term “connected farm” is coming to have an ever more inclusive meaning.

The post Where it’s warm appeared first on Country Guide.

The contrast with the heavy truck sector is striking. There, we’re seeing a consistent and rapid march toward alternative drive systems. Electrification is going mainstream.

Already, several electric truck models are about to enter the market. Prototypes are logging miles at commercial carriers, where transport executives are actively evaluating their usefulness, and a few manufacturers are even reporting firm orders on the books.

There are clear duty-cycle differences between Class 8 highway truck engines and those in farm machines, so it’s hard to say how advances in the truck sector will carry over to ag equipment. Besides, unlike in trucking, big capacity in a single machine may not be the future for farmers. Instead, many concept ag machines have shrunk to the size of current lawn-and-garden equipment, hitching their wagons to automation instead of scale.

But like the trend in heavy trucks, many of these next-generation small ag robots also rely on electricity for drive systems. So if automation continues to advance, electric drives may also become mainstream in ag equipment — at some point.

Even so, the number of companies vying to break into the electric heavy truck market suggests it’s the sector that will take the lead. Here’s some of the evidence:

Volvo Europe recently introduced two separate trucks to the market there. One of them, the FE, is designed to be a garbage truck and the first model will begin making the early morning rounds collecting refuse in 2019 in Hamburg, Germany, where city fathers like the idea that silent electric drives won’t be waking up as many residents.

The FE gets an effective 200-kilometre range. Its lithium-ion batteries fully recharge in just 1.5 hours.

Back on these shores, Tesla, the company founded by Elon Musk, whose recent pot-smoking public interview shook up investors and regulators, expects its all-electric Tesla Semi to hit the market soon. It’s arguably the most famous of all the alternative-drive heavy trucks introduced to the public so far.

Tesla is now taking deposits for future delivery of the trucks, which have MSRPs of US$190,000 and US$230,000 for the two models that will be built.

The cheaper truck offers a 475-kilometre range, while the more expensive version gets a published range of 800 kilometres, although some industry analysts chalk that claim up to marketing hyperbole and doubt the technology exists to deliver 800 kilometres on a single battery charge. That hasn’t seemed to dampen interest, though. Musk revealed during an investor-relations session — when he was apparently not stoned — that the company has about 2,000 standing orders for them.

Thor, a small California-based company with just 18 employees, is also offering a truck along the lines of the Tesla Semi. The Thor ET-One uses cylindrical lithium-ion battery cells capable of rapid charging, giving the truck a 300-mile range. Thor says the battery pack can be easily replaced to take advantage of new battery technologies as they become available.

The company, which calls itself a “transportation lab,” is now offering fleet owners a chance to get in on a limited number of private demonstrations of the ET-One. Production is scheduled to begin in 2019 and the firm is already accepting pre-orders. Sale prices will range from US$150,000 to US$200,000, depending on the model.

With Elon Musk already taking the surname of the famous electrical inventor Nikola Tesla for his company, another firm has taken what’s left and branded their truck with that inventor’s first name, Nikola.

Nikola Motor Company trucks use 800-volt electric drive motors and rely on compressed hydrogen fuel cells to keep the 240- to 320-kilowatt-hour battery packs charged. Two models, the Nikola One and Nikola Two, are on offer, and the specs are impressive, with 1,000 horsepower and 2, To make refuelling stops possible, the firm is planning to open a network of hydrogen refuelling stations across North America to support future truck fleets. And it, too, is already taking orders for production trucks, which it plans to start delivering in 2020.

Daimler, the parent company of the better-known Freightliner brand, has created a spin-off organization called E-Mobility Group to consolidate all its electric truck R&D under one roof. The company’s Fuso brand has already released the eTruck with a 26,000-kilogram GVW. Now, it’s getting ready to launch an electric version of the popular and long-running Freightliner Cascadia model, which will be built on the same chassis as the diesel version. It will be paired with an all-electric medium-duty model called the eM2 106

The eCascadia will get a range of 250 miles (400 kilometres) and an effective power peak output of over 700 horsepower. A corporate description says the truck can be “recharged to 80 per cent in about 90 minutes” to add another 320 kilometres to its range.

The plan is to have about 30 electric Freightliners delivered to fleets by the end of this year for in-field testing.

In August of 2017 Cummins unveiled a “demonstrator” all-electric truck that uses a 140-kWh battery pack as a replacement for a typical Cummins 12-litre diesel. That replacement, claims the company, is equal in weight to the removed engine and fuel tanks, so payload capacity is unchanged.

This truck has a range of about 100 miles, but that can be extended to 300 with an expanded battery pack. The truck can get some recharge from a regenerative braking system, and there is potential for solar panel installation on the roof of the trailer.

Paccar’s Kenworth brand announced in 2017 it was embarking on research into three separate alternative energy models that included battery electric, CNG and hydrogen power. It’s new T680 prototype HCET (Hybrid Electric Cargo Transportation) truck uses lithium-ion batteries to give it an electric-only 30-mile range. The CNG engine can recharge the batteries and extend its range up to 250 miles. It will enter service to do local hauling for the Port of Los Angles and Long Beach late in 2018.

But as all this advancement on the electrification front takes place, those with an interest in diesel power aren’t just taking things lying down. Responding to discussions at the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco in September, Allen Schaeffer, executive director of the Diesel Technology Forum, a lobby group whose members include AGCO, General Motors, Cummins and Bosch to name a few, had this to say:

“The diversity of economic and energy needs around the world is substantial. While the summit has focused on options like ‘electrifying everything’ or switching to alternative forms of energy, many such approaches are aspirational or far outside the practical consideration for many cities and countries.

“We should all embrace innovation and opportunity in every form, and at the same time not lose sight of technologies that deliver climate progress today on a wide scale. Making progress on global climate commitments requires a mix of proven and existing technologies working alongside new technologies. Among these must be the new generation of diesel power.”

For most applications diesel still has the edge. That much is clear, but as technology advances and needs change, it’s hard to say how long this will remain true. With virtually every manufacturer exploring energy alternatives, it looks more and more obvious that diesel’s reign as king of the heavy machinery world is under threat.

The post A jolt for heavy trucks appeared first on Country Guide.