AI is used to track your buying habits and predetermine your buying needs. It is also the robotics that clean fields or make cars, do complex surgery or make a digital diagnosis. It is the smart fridge that knows what to tell you to buy or the smart watch tracking your health.

And it is everywhere.

There is no doubt that AI has a profound effect on consumer spending. One visit to online shopping and you are repeatedly alerted, invited or cornered with your upcoming needs in pop-ups or ads. Even something as simple as leaving your location on in your phone and driving past a real estate sign may alert that company to send the listing to your number — uninvited. Clothing is recommended in your size and favourite colour to encourage you. Indeed many companies now put a package together based on your previous buying habits and pitch it to you before you knew you wanted it.

When it comes to groceries, AI has been used for a long time.

All your purchases are recorded and if you happen to have a rewards card with a store, they can match the online advertising to your email address or cellphone according to your last purchases. If you tend to buy green tomatoes, there will be some sort of media alert for you every time green tomatoes are featured. It may include all the things that go well with green tomatoes or a list of other items that just happen to be your favourites.

• More with Brenda Schoepp: What makes you great at what you do?

Each time one shops online and agrees to terms and conditions, we release all of our private information and that is tied to other streams which are tracking you. Ever wonder how Facebook knows which retailers to pop up in your feed or how a blue dress or snazzy coveralls just your size are on sale at three different outlets at once? This information is mined and put into your profile.

With the current events of the world there has been a need and a rush to make a shift into more online purchases and banking. The intersections of all of these purchases make up your profile which will be used in the future to drive marketing specific to you.

One day in February I was caring for two children, one a 10-year-old girl. We were talking about the future and she very frankly said: “We will all be replaced by robotics.”

I was stunned at the severity of the comment and as I always like to think of the possible, I countered with this question: “What is your role in the future then?”

To this she replied, “My role is to think harder and smarter and to be more intelligent than the robot replacing me.”

An interesting perspective.

Shortly after, an adult student asked me about my position on artificial intelligence from a leadership perspective. I surmised that it required a lot of respectful investigation because it was real. And AI has recently led me to think about how COVID-19 has spearheaded rapid change in that space and how this will indeed be a foundation for marketing through the rest of the year.

Be assured that toilet paper ads will become creative and tied to other products ‘of necessity’ and that robotics may replace those working in laboratories. It may be faster to take the talent of an already educated brain and code that into a machine than it is to educate thousands of specialized workers.

If you think this column is about mad science and what you may consider the dark side of technology, it is not.

It is possible to have robotic hands handling contaminated samples rather than humans and that saves lives. And an algorithm of consumer buying patterns may be quite sobering and life altering. Most certainly it is a lens to human behaviour.

As we face the real issue — which is the health and well-being of all persons — we must also consider the importance of functioning food systems and of the availability of food. If an algorithm is reflective of alternate buys between toilet paper and beer, we may have a challenge in the days ahead. That particular buying pattern is shaping the advertising and production of tomorrow to all people, including the youth who are not of drinking age.

If we as a society wish for the well-being of ourselves and our communities based on healthy, nutritious and available food, then that is what we need to buy. Why? Because AI is determining what to put on the shelves in the future, how much of it to have available and at what cost. This will be based on the newest and largest database in history — the one of 2020.

Our ability to not only survive but thrive is tied to our habits and to our ability to out-think the forces that challenge us. This we can do.

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The self-driving platform can be equipped with a variety of implements. In addition to the platform, the college has acquired a DOT Seeder-SeedMaster Ultra DSR, DOT Sprayer-Pattison Connect, and the DOT-ready New Leader NL5000 nutrient applicator.

“Our goal is to demonstrate how this leading-edge technology works and provide research results for producers to use to make informed decisions about how to incorporate this technology into their own operations,” said Joy Agnew, the college associate vice-president of applied research.  “And of course, our students will also benefit from working with and understanding autonomous technology.”

However, farmers won’t be able to see the unit in action this summer as the college has had to cancel AgSmart 2020 because of the pandemic.

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“I can see downtown Calgary from my window right now, and I feel like I’m in the sticks,” said Shelagh Blatz, who lives near Priddis.

“I’m so close to Calgary, but I might as well be five hours north of Valleyview.”

With Blatz, her husband, and their four children social distancing at home, their “smart hub” just can’t keep up with the increased demand.

“It’s very overloaded,” said Blatz. “The more people who get it in the neighbourhood, the slower it gets. So with everyone in the neighbourhood home, it’s always dropping or it’s incredibly slow.”

So slow that Blatz’s husband has had to block all of the other devices in the house from accessing the internet in order to download a single email from work.

“We’ll all take turns doing our work — we have to kind of ration it out,” Blatz said April 9. “It’s such a necessity, from business to work to school.”

The night before, she took part in a 4-H meeting via the Zoom video-conferencing app, praying the whole time that the connection would hold.

“We’ve been doing a lot of those with 4-H over the last week, and I would say 80 per cent of the people have to turn off their video so it’s not lagging,” she said.

“It’s for sure a widespread issue. It’s so bogged down with everyone at home.”

It’s the same story in Sarah Hissett’s home near Wainwright.

“I have the Telus internet hub, which is trying at the best of times, let alone when you have everyone working from home and not allowed to go out,” said Hissett. “But we have found now, during this lockdown, that peak times — like when everyone is home in the evening Netflixing — are a tough time for internet.”

Like the Blatz family, Hissett and her husband are juggling work, volunteer duties, and homeschool with this slow internet — and rationing it to make it work.

“I’m lucky that I have a kindergartener and a fourth grader,” said Hissett. “The kindergarten isn’t too intense with internet use, but when the fourth grader has her conferences, we make sure that no one else is doing anything on the internet.”

But the internet has also become a lifeline to friends and family for the Hissetts during this period of social distancing, and the slow speeds have been a barrier to that as well.

“Last Tuesday, when Telus had its internet outage, it was right when (my daughter) was supposed to be doing her weekly conference call with all of her friends, so she missed out on the social aspect for the week just because the internet wasn’t working,” said Hissett.

Last weekend, the couple hosted a virtual games night over Zoom — or at least they tried to.

“The entire internet in the house crashed,” she said. “We both hot-spotted off of our phones in order to play. We decided we weren’t even going to touch the house internet because it’s so unstable.”

Hissett also sits on the local health foundation board, and their last monthly meeting was held over Zoom, with mixed results.

“It’s always scary when people are freezing and you’re missing stuff, and then you get the warning — ‘Your internet connection is unstable,’” she said.

“A lot of our board members are rural. There’s only a couple who live in town. One woman, her internet booted her, and she couldn’t get back in through the internet. She had to call in.”

The pandemic has underscored just how important reliable high-speed internet is in today’s world, she said.

“Internet has become so vital in our day to day, and rural Alberta is getting the bum rush,” said Hissett.

“We’re only 15 minutes outside of town. I can’t imagine how it is for people who are actually rural.”

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Dot Intelligence Inc. will focus on developing leading-edge technologies — such as computer vision, machine learning optimization, and intelligent navigation — and enhancing adoption of the Dot robotic system for use in autonomous farming.

Saskatchewan-headquartered Dot, a sister company of SeedMaster, is the maker of a self-propelled, hydraulically driven platform that can carry a number of implements, such as an air seeder or sprayer.

The new subsidiary will hire 20 new employees, the company said.

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The lab is a technologically advanced workspace, available for students, instructors, and industry partners “to meet, collaborate and learn,” the college said in a news release.

“The AgExpert Data Lab brings together data from our agriculture operation, allowing us to analyze and demonstrate innovative technology and practices for entrepreneurs, companies and producers and for student learning,” said college president Stuart Cullum.

The Smart Farm uses cutting-edge technology to provide a hands-on learning environment for students and an opportunity for industry to develop, integrate, and test new ag technology and practices.

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The upgraded and free app enables easy access to the CLTS database from Android and iPhone devices and is more user friendly than the basic MOBO app launched in 2010.

It now has an ‘offline mode’ and has Optical Character Recognition technology, which converts images of number lists into editable, searchable data for easy uploads to a CLTS account.

For step-by-step instructions go to the CCIA website or call at 1-877-909-2333.

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“Producers can also adjust individual crop costs and evaluate the effects that different risk management strategies will have on their operation — such as purchasing crop insurance and renegotiating land rental agreements,” said provincial production crops economist ML Manglai.

The program also provides probabilities for achieving margins for various cropping scenarios. Traditional budgets typically only provide a single estimate of yield and price, which only gives a simple average.

“CropChoice$ recognizes that future crop yields and prices cannot be precisely known,” said Manglai. “Based on that, it takes the revenue calculation one step further to include your own price and yield expectations. It does so by allowing you to enter high, low, and most likely price and yield values.”

The program then calculates the likelihood of achieving every possible profit outcome based on those price and yield expectations.

“It narrows down cropping options to find the mix of crops that gives the highest possible profitability while maintaining agronomic stability and taking into account personal risk preferences,” said Manglai.

This also allows producers to figure out their second-best option, he said.

“Once you are in the field, you don’t have time to evaluate last-minute options. The wrong option can be costly.”

CropChoice$ scenarios can also be used to evaluate crop insurance options.

“The software includes AFSC’s current offerings for risk coverage levels, insurance premiums, and spring price endorsement. Use the software to evaluate your crop plans with different crop insurance scenarios before the April 30 deadline.”

What to grow

The program has up to 40 dryland and irrigated crops (depending on location) and each scenario handles up to 32 fields.

To download a free copy, go to alberta.ca.

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“This is one of the hottest topics in agriculture,” said Fred Wall, Farm Credit Canada’s vice-president of marketing.

“It’s something that I think the industry needs to take very seriously.”

And that shift is already happening, Wall told the Canadian Association of Farm Advisors’ Farm Update event here in early February. As the Canadian agriculture industry becomes progressively more digitized, data management is becoming top of mind for farmers who want to know who owns their data and how it’s being used.

A recent Farm Credit Canada Vision Panel survey — the largest ever done on this topic — showed that producers’ attitudes toward sharing their data has shifted significantly over just the past three years.

“The thing that really threw me was the depth of passion around this topic. There were 2,001 responses and over 5,700 comments,” said Wall. “It was a real eye-opener.”

More and more, farmers are gathering data on everything from farm finances to data generated by equipment, and using it to improve their efficiency and decision-making. Most Canadian farmers find value in responsible data usage, said Wall.

“There’s no lack of imagination or lack of desire to use this data on the part of producers,” he said.

But right now, between 40 and 50 per cent of all farm records aren’t digitized in any way. And in some cases, large-scale farming operations across Canada are being run out of a Hilroy notebook, said Wall.

“We know our customers are smart. They run multimillion-dollar corporations. There must be some good reason why they’re not doing it.”

Reduced trust

Part of the problem is the ‘ag-tech adoption gap.’ In 2016, Farm Credit Canada studied the slow uptake of new technologies in the agriculture industry and found three major obstacles to adoption. First, farmers often find new technology too complex and hard to use. Second, farmers couldn’t justify the return on investment — not just in the price of the tools, but also in the time cost of learning and using them.

But the third and most significant barrier was trust.

“We heard at the time that they weren’t sure they trusted big companies to handle their data. That’s a significant issue,” said Wall.

And that issue hasn’t gone away in the three years since then, he added.

“What we’ve heard from producers today is that we have made some progress on complexity and return on investment. It’s nowhere near where it needs to be, but it’s still better than 2016,” said Wall.

“But here’s the piece that nobody predicted in 2016 — we’re actually no further ahead in trust. In fact, we’re sliding back a little bit.”

When asked whether they had become more or less comfortable sharing their data over the past two years, one-quarter of survey respondents indicated that they had become less comfortable. And with good reason.

“Some of the nightmare fuel that came out of the survey were things like, ‘I have people showing up to my farm knowing things about my operation that they shouldn’t know. This is making me more and more nervous,’” said Wall.

“Ultimately we know that those who digitize their records tend to run better operations. That’s good for everything from the health of their operation to eventual market access for Canadian farm products.

“But I understand where their fear comes from.”

Seventy-one per cent of those surveyed said that the conditions governing the use of their data are very important, but only 25 per cent understand who owns their data.

“Producers think it’s important to know what happens to the information they share, but it’s not clear who owns it or how it’s being used, and they feel many companies don’t ask for their approval in sharing it.”

And this fear transcends age or willingness to adopt new technologies. Those farmers who answered that they like to use digital channels as much as possible were just as likely to have lost trust, and the same is true for different age groups — the under-35 crowd was just as concerned as the over-55s.

This might sound surprising, given that people post all manner of things on social media. But while things like vacation or restaurant preferences feel like public information, trade secrets are different, and that’s where this fear stems from.

“Most producers look at their farm data much more as trade secrets. So there’s a very different expectation around privacy and sharing,” said Wall.

Ask the right questions

In order to rebuild producer trust, the first step to these types of commercial arrangements needs to be transparency.

“What can farmers do to help with this? They need to ask the right questions,” said Wall.

The first question farmers need to ask is, ‘Who owns my data?’

“This becomes hugely important when you’re thinking about succession and farm transfer,” he said. “If lots of the farm’s records are kept digitally with a service provider, it’s going to be pretty important to know who gets access to that and who owns it.”

Next, who is the data shared with and why?

“This is a serious point of anxiety for farmers that they’ve only just started talking about,” said Wall. “They’re starting to get an awareness that their data has real value — that it is an asset on their operation.”

Finally, ‘can I take my data with me?’ “This is kind of a litmus test. You obviously don’t own it if you don’t have a right of exit.”

That’s one of the commitments Farm Credit Canada is making to its clients, Wall added. In order to combat some of this digital uncertainty, Farm Credit Canada has become the first Canadian company to receive Ag Data Transparent certification for its AgExpert software. This certification shows that Farm Credit Canada is committed to transparency in data collection, access, use, portability, availability, and retention.

“As we became more and more aware of this problem, this is one of the steps we decided to take,” said Wall, adding that as many as 10 other Canadian ag-tech companies are now exploring this certification.

“I’m hoping this will be a solution that works for farmers everywhere.”

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Tom Stein, senior strategic adviser for Quebec-based Maximus Systems, gave nine examples of “smart barn” technologies already in use or on the way at the recent Banff Pork Seminar.

“One must remember, these nine technologies are the beginning, not the end,” said Stein.

Several monitor the activity and behaviour of pigs in real time, including one that looks for changes in eating and drinking patterns; another that detects estrus in sows; and a third — called the Pig Cough Monitor — that employs microphones and an algorithm to detect respiratory problems in pigs up to two weeks before producers or vets relying on their observations could.

Similar technology is used to listen for piglet sounds and squeals to prevent crushing deaths in the first four days after farrowing. When it identifies the unique sound of a piglet being crushed, it sends a vibration to a patch attached to the sow, causing it to immediately stand up.

Stein also outlined technology that improves work practices and reducing work.

One of the former is called AgVoice, a voice-enabled data entry that allows agriculture professionals to capture insights while on the move. Another system using Bluetooth improves biosecurity by warning workers if they aren’t following proper procedures. And a system called FeedTrackur uses GPS location data and a cloud-based database to let feed truck drivers know if they are delivering feed to the right location as well as providing traceability for feed deliveries.

There are two monitoring systems that use Wi-Fi and Bluetooth-enabled smart dosing devices to provide automatic medication delivery, data recording, and weight-based and fixed-amount dosing. Both systems record treatments, manage medication inventory, and integrate with scales, RIFD readers, and livestock management software.

Finally, Stein also outlined technology that uses 3D imaging to estimate the weight of pigs. With a margin of error below four per cent, it can be used to give an average daily weight gain for a pen of finishing pigs. For the full article, go to www.meristem.com (click on Special Reports and then on ‘Smart technologies here or emerging in pork production’ in the 2019 Banff Pork Seminar section).

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The online platform has already helped more than 1,000 farmers manage environmental risk across the province and will soon have an updated look and functionality.

The new version is mobile friendly and a revamped FAQ section matches relevant resources with each question. The tool also offers online chat with Environmental Farm Plan technicians, a downloadable action plan for on-farm implementation, and storing the workbook for a farm online.

For more info, go to the Alberta Environmental Farm Plan website.

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