By Trevor Bacque
Olds College of Agriculture & Technology is a hotbed of innovation and sustainability for Canadian agriculture. In 2018, the college established its ‘Smart Farm’ to focus on the innovation that is needed to grow Canada’s ag industry. It’s dubbed “smart” because of its highly connected, digital-first approach to managing crops and livestock. This true-to-life farm where students simulate real farm and ranch conditions, is now comprised of 3,600 acres in six different geographic locations across Alberta and Saskatchewan . The College also boasts multiple livestock herds, in addition to greenhouses, laboratory space, an on-site brewery and meat cutting shop. With an annual applied research fund of $13 million and approximately 70 people on its team, it’s clear the College is committed to researching the latest and greatest technologies to make Canadian farming better every day.
The Smart Farm is a real-life arena to test and validate technology, accelerating the adoption of practices to advance the industry and help farmers, who often can’t afford to try something and have it fail in such a costly business. This is where the Smart Farm stands out, according to VP of research Joy Agnew.
Photo courtesy of Olds College of Agriculture & Technology
“We take risks to help farmers and industry better understand what will work in a given environment,” she says, likening the College to a small-scale R&D wing that works with industry.
The College has five key focus areas within its applied research field:
- Autonomous agricultural equipment
- Sensors
- Data utilization
- Technology development and validation
- Regenerative agriculture
A sixth, unofficial category, is environmental stewardship, which underpins all five values at once.
Smart Stock
With a 1,000-head feedlot, 110 cow-calf pairs and another 100 sheep at the College, the livestock program is busy. The 40 students involved are with the animals year-round, from birth through to marketing (selling). Students are responsible to feed the animals, track and maintain their health and ensure they receive a good quality of life all while learning what it takes to manage a herd.
During calving (birthing) season, students are out with the animals and constantly monitor their health during this critically important time. They perform nightly welfare checks, and even assist in the births, when necessary. The students largely operate independently. Qualified instructors are on hand if students need help, but overall, it’s the students’ time to shine. This helps prepare them as they either graduate to work at a ranch or in animal services.
Agnew labels it a special experience to watch students grow in their confidence and ability.
“It opens their eyes as well and broadens their perspective and ideas on what they could be doing in ag,” she says. “It’s just incredible to see.”
Bring in the digital harvest
Every fall, there is a new crop being harvested and stored at the Smart Farm: data. Countless gigabytes of data are scraped off fields when farmers roll through with their combines. It’s a primary focus of the Smart Farm—what to do with all those zeroes and ones.
Increasingly, students are being trained on powerful software that is able to render and interpret field data through machine learning. By understanding predictive models at the farm, College students learn to morph this data into “prescriptions” for the coming year, which helps farmers know what inputs (generally fertilizer and micronutrients) a field requires to successfully grow a crop.
“This will be an ongoing area of focus for us for years just because of the potential for using data in a simplified way so farmers can make sense of that data and make really good decisions,” says Agnew.
On the ground and in the skies
At the Smart Farm, the College recently concluded a years-long project into autonomous field machinery. In summary, staff and students helped prove that these vehicles can work in Canadian farm fields. They discovered glitches during their research and made valuable suggestions to manufacturers as to how the situation could be even better for farmers. With this project in the rearview, everyone is now looking forward to another type of autonomous vehicle, the drone.
Drone applications continue to increase, from agronomists scouting fields to insurers assessing wildlife damage. Now, research is underway to understand its effectiveness to spot spray for weeds, diseases and pests. At the farm, students regularly pilot drones and are very comfortable at the controls as they learn how and when to spray and are learning proper aircraft operation. On Canadian farms, many now use drones in their daily activity. Many believe this is the next revolution in Canadian farming as field scouting will largely be done from the comfort of a truck cab or a kitchen table.
The future is variable
Another massive priority centres on variable rate, or VR. This is the practice of applying inputs via a prescription map to fields at variable rates, meaning not everything gets a blanket treatment—that’s costly and could be environmentally irresponsible. By precisely understanding which part of a field needs fertilizer, water, a micronutrient or a crop protection spray, farmers become that much more efficient and sustainable.
It’s estimated well under half of Canadian farmers utilize VR tech, which is why the Smart Farm will continue to test its intricacies to determine its merit for farmers. While reasons vary for the slow uptake, one thing is clear: a more exact approach to agriculture is required to continue on and be sustainable in a business with razor thin profit margins.
“How ‘variable’ does a field have to be for it to make sense to use variable rate? What ROI will there be for me on my specific field? Those are the types of questions that we need to answer and help support the understanding of the value of variable rate.”
Smart today, smarter tomorrow
For all the work done at the Smart Farm, it can be best distilled as hitting the gas pedal on best management practices to help farmers be more productive and sustainable in food production.
“The only way to do that is to provide producers and industry with better access to a learning environment, unbiased information and help tech developers accelerate these best practices. The technology we’re working with will enable us to have a more sustainable food production system,” says Agnew.
