“We’ve invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into smart equipment that knows what it’s doing but can’t talk to each other,” said the Lacombe-area farmer at the recent AgSmart event at Olds College.

“There’s so much data now available to us on many, many different platforms — all the way from your grain company’s platform and your accounting software to the bin monitoring software you use.

“But all the data in the world doesn’t matter if it’s not easy to disseminate to make better decisions.”

Big data has been hailed as the future of agriculture for nearly a decade, and it’s easy to see why. As margins become razor thin and land prices skyrocket, farmers need to do more with less — maximizing every inch of rain every pound of fertilizer and every single seed — to make a profit.

But at this point, farmers have picked the low-hanging fruit. Now, they’re looking for smaller tweaks that, when added up, can lead to big savings on the balance sheet.

“It’s all about being more profitable. It’s about maximizing the products that we’re using and being more efficient with our time and resources,” said Marvin Talsma, product marketing manager at the Climate Corporation.

“Everything we’re doing is trying to make the next crop better. We’re trying to learn along the way and tweak things, whether it’s a fertility rate, seeding rate, seed placement, or water management.

“We’re trying to improve, but without knowing what we’re doing, it’s hard to evaluate and make those decisions.”

That’s where data comes in — and the average farm collects a lot of it. Yield maps, soil moisture probes, variable-rate technology, drones, and GPS all generate data.

But as Bruggencate points out, whether that data is useful is another question altogether.

“That data needs to be usable,” said Talsma, one of the speakers at AgSmart, an event designed in part to give farmers a better sense of the practicality of new ag technology.

“Every plant in that field is a potential data point. So how can we use that plant to change what we’re doing in the field?”

Making it pay off

That’s one of the biggest challenges on Holly Johansen’s farm.

“Technology on the family farm has really become a decision-making tool — you can literally be making on-the-spot management decisions from anywhere in the world,” the Wetaskiwin-area farmer said during her visit to AgSmart.

“On our farm, lots of the pinch points we have will be corrected by technology. But how do we turn yield mapping into profitability mapping?”

There are no easy answers for that yet.

As new technologies come online, new platforms are also introduced into the mix — and these platforms don’t always play nice together.

“If you’re running all green, it works fine, but we’ve got a rainbow farm, and those things don’t always mesh,” said Bruggencate.

“There are just too many platforms needed to access too many different pieces of data out there. So the challenge to industry is to get some platforms and some co-ordination with this.”

Bruggencate invested in Climate FieldView (the platform created by Climate Corporation) a few years ago, and so far, “it’s fairly colour blind,” he said.

“We’re seeing progress on that front, but that’s an area that really needs to be worked on with all the different platforms and tech companies.”

Airdrie-area farmer Larry Woolliams was so discouraged by the lack of co-operation between the platforms he was using that he decided to build his own.

“I couldn’t find anything that really fit our needs, so we’ve started to build our own platform,” said Woolliams, who launched Crop Boss earlier this year with three business partners.

“Not everything fits together, so we wanted to customize a platform to work for everybody. We wanted to try and build something that would play well with other programs and make it more universal to fill this gap.”

Crop Boss was designed to replace the myriad spreadsheets and software Woolliams was using to make his farming decisions. The tool itself tracks everything from daily production to finances in a more integrated way, allowing farmers to make better decisions more quickly and easily.

“If you’re doing stuff real time, it’s going to save you days — if not weeks — of sitting in front of a computer trying to dissect all this stuff,” he said.

“If we can make this stuff connect so that it all talks, it’s going to be big on the savings. It will give you time to focus on other avenues in your organization, grow your business, and spend time with your family.”

Data-driven decisions

Using Crop Boss, Woolliams was able to go paperless last year, and this spring, the tool was launched for other producers.

“This is still relatively new, but it’s the wave of the future,” he said. “All of this stuff needs to talk. It needs to be universal. There’s a whole other side to this coming that’s going to take ag to a whole new level.”

Talsma agrees.

“We believe that this digital ag space is the next breakthrough in agriculture. It’s going to get us to that next step in our performance,” he said. “And in some cases, it’s not on the horizon — it’s here today.”

Climate FieldView is one example, he said. As a relatively well-integrated platform, Climate FieldView has focused on building partnerships with companies to make it easier to move data from platform to platform.

Talsma likens it to professional hockey players watching post-game tapes of their performance to see what they can improve on — but farmers only get one game a year, so they have to make it count.

“We have one chance to put a crop in the ground the right way at the right time. The end of the year is when we look at our playbook,” he said.

“These digital pieces give us the opportunity to watch game film as the game is progressing.”

As a result, on-farm data is more useful and usable than ever before, despite the platform limitations. Farmers no longer need binders full of yield maps or financial records that sit on a shelf and gather dust, he said.

“With these digital tools, you can carry around years of information on your smartphone and access it anywhere in the world.”

Targeted prescriptions

And things like artificial intelligence and machine learning are edging agriculture ever closer to a day where the right platform could make targeted prescriptions for a given farm.

“If the computer knows my crop rotation history, the hybrids I’ve grown in the past, their susceptibility to different diseases, the soil type I’m on, and the weather events coming, we can use that,” said Talsma.

“If all that information is in one place, I as a farmer could get a notification that says, ‘Based on everything we know, you need to go out and scout this field for disease.’

“But we’re not there yet. This is where we need to go.”

And we’re getting there, slowly but surely, said Brianna Elliot a “techgronomist” at Olds College Smart Farm.

“I think that’s what the next few years are going to be about — integrating this technology at the field level,” she said.

The college is currently comparing different platforms on the marketplace to see how data is being collected, whether the platforms are able to share data with each other, and how often this data actually comes in a usable form.

“We need to be able to make decisions with this data and see that return on investment,” said Elliot.

“Farmers can get spreadsheets and spreadsheets of data all day long, but what are they going to do with it? And do they have time to do anything with it?

“You need to be able to take that data and use it right now in the field in real time. But some of these technologies have a few hurdles to get over.”

Ultimately, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution that’s going to work for everyone, she added.

“In our comparisons, they all have their strong points — it’s just about finding what works for you,” said Elliot.

“I don’t know that there’s one that stands above everything else. You’ve just got to find what works for you on your farm.”

The post The farm data overload needs a fix appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

Those are the goals of the two agriculture and agri-food proposals vying for a slice of $950 million of federal cash that Ottawa will spend on ‘superclusters’ — business-led collaborations that aim to turn innovative ideas into powerful engines of the Canadian economy.

“Canada needs to continue to be competitive on the world stage,” said Ron Styles, acting president of an organization backing a supercluster proposal to boost both production and processing of pulses and other crops in Western Canada.

“The whole idea is to increase economic growth. That is at the heart of it.”

Similarly, the Smart Agri-Food supercluster aims to greatly accelerate an existing trend — in this case, the use of Big Data — to make Canada a world leader.

• Read more: The federal government’s supercluster game plan

“Farmers and ranchers have access to a lot of data and are generating a lot of data,” said Rob Davies, interim CEO of that initiative.

“So how do we make it simple to have that tracked through the value chain, allowing them to get paid for what they’re already doing and increasing the value proposition for them?

“How do we make it simple for all of the systems involved in our industry to communicate with each other and, at the end of the day, drive improvements in the value chain for everybody?”

Five spots, nine candidates

Both proposals have made a shortlist of nine finalists — winnowed down from more than 50 proposals involving more than 1,000 companies, organizations, and learning institutions. The federal Liberal government is due to make its final selection by the end of March, splitting the $950 million between five superclusters over the next five years.

The hope is that each will act as a catalyst in different economic sectors by concentrating innovation and entrepreneurship in the way Silicon Valley was able to power the development of software and computer technology.

“Through the superclusters initiative, we’ve started conversations and created solid partnerships between government, the private sector, academia, and communities,” Navdeep Bains, minister of innovation, science and economic development, said in October when announcing the finalists.

“In today’s knowledge-based economy, this collaboration is essential.”

But while capturing two of the nine finalist spots shows agriculture and agri-food is prominent in the federal Liberals’ economic thinking, they face tough competition. Among the other finalists are proposals involving artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, and transforming the mining, infrastructure, and aerospace sectors. There are also provincial interests to consider, with Ontario, Quebec, Atlantic Canada, and B.C. all having dogs in the hunt.

The backers of the two ag proposals both say Canada needs to leverage its strengths in food and farming.

“One of the critical pieces for Canada longer term is being able to drive ourselves forward in the agriculture and agri-food sector,” said Davies, who was previously CEO at Saskatchewan’s Weyburn Inland Terminal.

“There’s an opportunity for Canadian agriculture to step into a leadership position in a number of areas.”

One of the key advantages of the supercluster approach is “allowing all these pieces to talk to each other in a meaningful way and work together on meaningful solutions,” added Styles, who is acting president of Protein Industries Canada.

“There are a lot of great ideas, but there often isn’t a way to leverage that for larger markets,” he said. “All these groups have a good understanding of various sectors, and they have an idea of what they need.

“We’re the connecting point. We help them get together to do the work.”

Smart Agri-Food supercluster

Davies likens this supercluster to the adoption of auto steer — initially, the benefit seemed pretty limited to many farmers.

“‘I can drive my own tractor,’ they said. Once we saw the value proposition of less overlap and less use of fertilizers, it was a value proposition that made sense to producers. And now auto steer is incredibly common.”

• Read more: Agri-food supercluster announces board, CEO

Enhanced traceability is a little like that, Davies said.

“With traceability of food sources, right now they’re saying they don’t make money from it,” he said. “So how do we find a way to build systems that allow producers to be appropriately compensated? How do we get producers to say, ‘Obviously I’ll do that because the value proposition is there.’?”

The key to that is improving the way the agriculture industry works on a “digital platform basis,” he said.

The Smart Agri-Food supercluster has also a large number of backers, including Agrium, Telus, BIXSco, AgriTrend, FarmLead, Bayer Crop Science, Cargill, and other companies, policy groups, and academic institutions.

“The Smart Agri-Food cluster is really designed to build a backbone that will allow us to cross a lot of different industries, and sectors within our industry, and build links through the value chain to drive our performance over the longer term,” said Davies.

An existing pilot project that tracks cattle ‘from birth to burger’ is a good example of that.

“That’s a great chain of custody example on the livestock side, but we really struggle with that on the grain side,” he said. “Walmart has sustainability goals. General Mills has sustainability goals. At the end of the day, they want to be able to provide that traceability.

“How do we make that simple for producers so they can track the work they’re doing? We need to get all the systems talking to each other.”

The supercluster will focus on four different ‘innovation communities’ for its projects — digital technologies; sustainable livestock; genetics; and processing and the bioeconomy.

And the systems that come out of this supercluster will be “durable forever,” said Davies.

“It’s certainly a lofty goal, but it’s where agriculture is going to be,” he said. “We need to make sure we’re looking far enough ahead of the curve that we’re able to meet those objectives longer term.”

Protein Innovations Canada supercluster

Development of plant-based proteins has been taking place “for a long time,” but the sector is poised to take off, said Styles, because of population growth; an increasing scarcity of land and resources for livestock production; and growing consumer interest in plant-based proteins.

“This kind of population growth is very difficult to address solely with meat production,” he said. “Plant protein is going to have to be a larger and larger part of that base. We see a lot of that already developing in other countries. And this trend is going to continue.”

The two key crops for this market right now are canola and pulses, but others — such as hemp and quinoa — also have rich potential. But it’s not enough to grow these crops, there also needs to be domestic processing, said Styles.

“In Western Canada, we grow the crops, but we don’t extract the protein — we don’t get that value add,” he said. “There’s really no reason why we can’t be an international player in that part of the market. It’s large. It’s growing. We’re well positioned. It’s just a matter of building on that.”

This proposal has more than 125 supporters, including AGT Foods, Parmalat, Stantec, Viterra, Parrish & Heimbecker, Maple Leaf Foods, Loblaw, Microsoft, and many other companies, academic institutions, and policy groups.

“After the Phase 1 proposal was approved by the federal government, we had just over 60 different contributors and supporters,” said Styles. “By the time we got to the point of finishing off our Phase 2 submission, we had more than doubled the number of contributors and supporters. These are companies that have approached us to join and participate. They saw the opportunity that is here.”

The proposal is focused on four pillars — improving seed quality and yield; sustainable production; processing technology innovation; and commercialization.

Farmers would share in the benefits of making Canada a leader in the global plant protein sector, said Styles.

“We’re talking about a crop that, at the present time, we export as a fairly raw commodity,” he said. “By moving up the value chain, we’re going to end up getting more out of it, so primary producers should be able to benefit economically a lot more than they have been in the past.

“We think economically it should be very good for producers.”

Western Canada should be the “go-to location for crop protein in the future,” he added.

“It’s where it’s being produced. It’s where it should be processed. And it should be the place where the research, the technology, and the innovations are developing.”

The post Superclusters: Creating a silicon valley for agriculture and food appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

Dr. Keith Coble, chair of the Mississippi State University’s department of agricultural economics, says we’re in the “overexuberance” phase of technology development, driven significant venture capital injections and moves by big companies that drove everyone else in the industry to jump into precision agriculture.

Coble, who spoke to the Big Data, Changing Climate and Agriculture conference put on recently by the department of food, agriculture and resource economics at the University of Guelph, said the deal that saw Monsanto buy Climate Corp., a leader in agriculture data, sent other companies scrambling.

The solutions they came up with don’t always give farmers value, said Coble, who was working on Capitol Hill as part of an appointment to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, when the Climate Corp. deal news broke.

“We’ve seen a lot of change over last five or six years,” he said. “Can we harness the data to make it more useful and valuable?”

There have been some failures, and that has scared off the results-driven venture capital funds. AgFunder reports that 2016 agriculture-focused venture capital investment declined 30 per cent compared to 2015, but was still ahead of 2014.

There are several impediments to farmers making full use of their data, says Coble, including the fact that it is trapped in multiple devices that don’t talk to each other.

Coble expected the big hitters in the industry to win out, including Monsanto and John Deere, as farmers need systems that will work with all of their data.

Big data in agriculture, he said, will defined by 4 ‘Vs’:

Volume – The amount of data is getting so huge that you can’t move it into analytical tools. The analytics have to move to the data, or be built into the data gathering.

Velocity – It may seem like farmers are creating a lot of data now, but the next step is velocity of data — having current data and data that cover the extent of a production system. That will include sensors that will enable managers to make decisions as things happen, not after the fact.

Variety – Sensors are being developed through the agriculture production chain and will be on equipment and controllers and in ear tags. The challenge will be to have that data structured so that it is usable.

Veracity – Big data is messy. Sensors and humans both can make errors, said Coble, and it will often not be scientifically complete.

“It will have missing variable problems. The person who can put it together and effectively use it will be very valuable,” he said.

For example, don’t calibrate your yield monitor on a combine and “you will get really useless data.”

Beyond the challenge of getting useful and clean data is the whole question of privacy and data ownership. Farmers are suspicious about handing over their data. They have several worries, said Coble, including that companies with whom they share their data will use it as leverage during pricing or service negotiations. There are trust issues.

Data availability issues apply to researchers too, said Coble, and having reliable data is integrally important to researchers.

He expects farm data will be housed in an independent repository. A researcher will be able to access the data to do the research, but won’t be able to keep the data.

The questions are legitimate, he said, and the law has not yet caught up. He showed a slide of an image given to him by a Mississippi Delta farmer. Who owns the image? he asked.

“Under U.S. law, we don’t know,” he said. “I care less about ownership. I care more about who has access. Will farmers share with us as researchers or government so we can make better policy?”

These are question the industry will have to sort out before big data can be translated into bigger efficiencies or bigger profits.

— John Greig is a field editor for Glacier FarmMedia based at Ailsa Craig, Ont. Follow him at @jgreig on Twitter.

The post Greig: Farmer trust key to big data’s future appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

“Ultimately, that is what’s going to change the way we manage our crops, by giving us better information about them,” Markus Weber, president of Edmonton-based LandView Drones, said at the recent FarmTech conference.

And for an eye in the sky, it starts with the camera.

“We start with the sensor, and then find the drone that can carry that sensor reliably, and then lastly package in all the software you need to use it effectively,” said Weber, whose company sells drone packages ranging from $2,250 to $17,850 plus GST.

Drones — or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) — can, among many other things, measure the size of silage pits, count animals, check crop health, determine yield potential, assess hail damage, and compare crop trial strips.

But more importantly, they offer “a lot more insight into what is going on in that field,” by using near-infrared sensors that provide a Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), which measures vegetation and, hence, crop health.

“Healthy and unhealthy plants reflect that kind of light differently,” said Weber, adding that near infrared is the “magic sweet spot for plant health.”

“You’re taking in stuff you can’t see with the human eye, and that’s giving you more insight into your crops.”

This takes crop scouting to an entirely different level and using drones in mid-season is perhaps “the biggest use for this thing,” said Weber.

However, that also means employing precision ag techniques since you’ll want to tailor your pesticide, fungicide, or in-crop fertilizer applications to the scouting info from the drone.

“Unfortunately, not a whole lot of people have adopted variable rate wholeheartedly, and I think a big part of that is it’s difficult to manage all that data,” he said. “Data acquisition has been difficult, and I think drones will eventually change that, especially as they get even easier to use.”

Satellite images have their uses, especially at the start and end of the growing season, said Weber. But while they’re low cost and don’t require an operator, their lower-resolution images limit their usefulness mid-season.

“At the start of the season, for variable-rate fertilizer or seeding, satellite is as good as UAV or better,” he said. “For those types of zones, you can establish that with satellite imagery. It’s the same thing with post-harvest. There really isn’t too much to do with a drone there.

“But UAVs excel with all the other stuff that’s happening mid-season.”

Getting very precise

Drones can detect insects and disease early on with astonishing detail.

“If you fly this really low and slow at 40 metres above the ground, it will use the NDVI to count individual plants,” said Weber. “It will give you a population count of the entire quarter section — not an estimate, a count.

“That is especially useful if you’re growing some high-value crops and hybrids where germination is an issue. Double-checking those kinds of things makes a whole lot of sense.”

And when used for crop scouting, drones do a better job. Someone scouting on foot might use a diamond or a W-pattern or, if short on time, go straight to known problem spots.

“That’s what we all do. We need to be fast, but it’s not the same level of insight,” he said. “This lets you get a look at your whole field mid-season, when normally we lose sight of our field when the crops get knee deep. Realistically, we don’t see the back end of our canola mid-season.”

It only takes a couple of minutes to “get you airborne,” he added.

“If you’ve been walking that field for 20 years, that will give you insight. It will get you to places in that field that you didn’t typically go to.”

Though drones with near-infrared sensors have dropped in price, high-end packages (drone, sensor, and software) can come with price tags pushing $20,000. But if used effectively, the payback can justify that expense, said Weber.

“Drones just let you see your farm in a different light. You will see problems you just didn’t know you had before,” he said. “It lets you confirm your own management decisions — and that double-check on equipment and management decisions is worth a lot of money. For one problem you fix with equipment, that’s thousands of dollars right there.”

The caveat

But so far, drone software hasn’t advanced as far as sensors have.

“A lot of the drone hype you’ll hear out there is ‘fly to apply’ or ‘from drone to tractor,’” said Weber.

“Yes, they do create the ability to move data because they’re all cloud-based systems, but there is no software out there right now that is going to effectively, in my opinion, go straight from a GeoTIFF map to an effective prescription.”

That functionality may be coming in the next few years, but it’s not there yet, he added.

“I think we’re going from spotting where the problems are to telling you what that problem is. You’re going to be able to see individual weed species and create a map of them.”

But right now, there are too many factors that go into making an effective prescription.

“Ultimately, this is where there needs to be a person involved,” he said. “Regardless of the fact that there’s data flow, you want a person in there making those decisions. And in a lot of cases, it’s the person who farms the land.”

The post The last big challenge for drones appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

The name of their crystal ball is called Big Data. Companies are watching consumers like never before via sophisticated tracking software and monitoring of social media.

“Most grocery stores in the U.K. and the United States are way ahead of us in terms of using data for targeted promotions,” said Goddard, an agricultural economist and professor at the University of Alberta.

How far ahead?

Well, some American and British companies are sending email promotions to people’s cellphones as they walk into their stores. They also have mechanisms for gauging which products people look at the most. U.K. grocery giant Tesco has even partnered with the British Health Ministry to track people’s regular grocery purchases.

“If they thought the foods were unhealthy, they would send messages to that person offering sales on healthier food products, or send social media information to see if they could sway people to buy more in the fruit and vegetable aisle,” said Goddard.

• More from the Alberta Farmer: A memorable year in the books, and another one on the horizon

According to one survey, consumers in Europe are ready for the onslaught of technological information, and are expecting it to come to them via their portable technology. Technological programs that track physical activity and food purchases will make health information more personal.

“People don’t seem very concerned about this type of technology, even on the privacy aspect,” she said.

How it shakes out for Canadian farmers remains to be seen, but the mind meld between consumers and the companies that sell them food is definitely coming here, said Goddard, who figures Loblaws will be one of the first adopters.

And an existing trend — food safety and traceability — will deepen in all food sectors in the coming year, she said.

“I really think there is going to be an increasing concern because people are getting more sophisticated about the kind of information they want about food.”

Some companies have reacted to customer pressure and have closed their supply chains. Maple Leaf Foods, for example, has a very tight supply chain and knows where all its products come from. Loblaws is also moving in this direction.

“I think this will be a big thing in Canada and it will change the business,” said Goddard.

Sustainability — with a corresponding increase in monitoring of environmental and production practices — will also grow in importance.

“If the global roundtable (on sustainable beef) strategy is to be successful, it will be very successful when they put hard definitions on things for particular countries, and then they are evaluated by third parties,” she said. “We’re going to end up with a system like that for beef production.”

And what about the debate about genetically modified food? Is it finally going to get a rest?

Nope, said Goddard.

She points to a genetically modified potato, recently approved for use in the U.S. but not Canada, that reduces acrylamide when the potatoes are fried, cutting the carcinogenic potential of the food. Two days after the potato was released, McDonald’s announced it would not use them.

That quick response to a product with “an explicit and identified health attribute” is a sign the debate on GM foods is moving into new territory, she said.

“When a company is making a choice not to use it because it perceives public acceptance is very low for the product, somebody somewhere is going to point out that maybe they should be sending the signal that the technology is acceptable and they’re using it because it’s better for the health of their customers,” she said.

“I think this will open the GM debate up much more widely than it has in the past. Up until now, there hasn’t be a debate about health.

“The debate is now going to change.”

The post Consumer tracking is changing the way people shop — and view food appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

“Information and data gathering will become increasingly important,” said Thomas Lynch-Staunton, Livestock Gentec’s director of industry relations.

Lynch-Staunton is involved with what’s called a “life cycle analysis” — essentially a snapshot of what’s happening now in terms of things such as manure management and the amount of feed and fuel used to produce a pound of beef. In other words, a measure of how well the industry is doing now.

“If anyone makes a claim and says, ‘Here, we’re selling 100 per cent sustainable beef,’ then someone will say, ‘Prove it,’” he said. “If you can’t prove it with some data to back it up, then it’s not really worth anything.”

But the ultimate goal is to use Big Data to drive improvements — not just sustainability, but also productivity and profitability.

“One of the fears of all this information is that it is going to make a lot more work for everybody,” said Lynch-Staunton. “I think it will initially, but once things are set up and running smoothly, I think it will make things a lot easier.”

And that day is not far off, he added.

“There are so many things coming together right now. There is the actual recording of data, the Internet and its speeds, software programs, and databases like BIXS that are coming online that allow you to gather some carcass information that we really had a hard time gathering before.”

Canada’s robust traceability system is the foundation, he said, pointing to the recent E. coli contamination of some Cargill beef (that was quickly determined to involve only one truckload and was swiftly recalled).

By adding everything that happens during a cow’s life into that traceability system and using sophisticated software to mine the data, you can not only identify the best-grading and most profitable cattle but the genetics, feed regimes, and management practices that produced them.

That’s Big Data in action, and that’s the future, said Lynch-Staunton.

“We’ve got all those tools to be able to do this. I really think that those who don’t believe in data management will be lost in the dust.”

The post Big Data is coming to the cattle business — and that’s a good thing appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.