Podcast:What is a Smart Farm?

Clinton Monchuk: (00:07) 
From Canadian Food Focus, this is Ask a Farmer. I’m your host Clinton Monchuk, a Saskatchewan farmer. In this podcast, we talk to food experts to answer your questions about your food. 
 
Clinton Monchuk: (00:27) 
Welcome to the podcast, everyone. Today we’re going to be talking a little bit more about some of the research that goes into new technologies when it comes to farming. Now we live in an age that really has a ton of new technology, and it really is ever changing, but there’s a lot of new technology when it comes to food production as well. Olds College in Olds, Alberta specializes in testing new technologies that can be implemented on Canadian farms and ranches. Their new Smart Farm works with companies to develop solutions for tomorrow’s problems, while also educating students with hands-on learning. David Fullerton, who’s the director of Applied Research at Olds College, is going to highlight some of these research things that are going on there. Do you want to just give us a little bit of a background of yourself, kind of how you got into this position, just so a lot of our listeners can understand a little bit more about you. 
 
David Fullerton: (01:26) 
Thanks, yeah. So I’ve always been interested in agriculture, ever since I was, I suppose, a teenager. I’m not from a farming background myself; my parents were teachers, but, certainly, the family on both sides have agriculture in their system. At some point in the, in the ancestry, I’m originally from Nova Scotia, and sometime in my teenage years, I determined that I was going to either buy a farm or work in the agricultural world. I went to school at the Nova Scotia Agricultural College and ultimately chose the University of Alberta, where I did a master’s degree in agricultural economics with a focus on rural development. And in 2022, I applied for and received a position here at Olds College in Alberta. And that’s where we have been, my wife and I, living here in Olds and enjoying the western lifestyle again, and certainly the smalltown atmosphere. So, my role here at the college as the director is I’ve sort of took over from Joy Agnew, who’s now the VP of Research here at Olds College. I took over her role to manage the research enterprise at Olds College, which is called the Olds College Center for Innovation, where we’ve got a team of 40 plus researchers, whether they’re managers, research technicians, research scientists, and all in support of agricultural research at an applied level for western Canadian agriculture. 
 
Clinton Monchuk: (02:55) 
Can you give us maybe just for everybody listening, just a general overview of what the Smart Farm is at Old College and what are some of the plans for some of your accomplishments as you guys move forward? 
 
David Fullerton: (03:08) 
Certainly. So the Smart Farm Initiative itself started in 2018 with the new five year strategic plan of the college to try to transform the existing farm of about 1800 acres, transform it into an applied research venue, a showcase venue for ag technology to try to support the industry in adopting them and adapting them to what the growing conditions are here in central Alberta. So the initiative started with a launch of 110 acres, which we call Field 1516, a very imaginative field name, to start out with data collection and data analysis and all these types of activities to try to make sense of the growing conditions in that field, and how can we change them to apply the technologies in the new farming ways, perhaps in a way that that’s easily understood and easily demonstrable. That’s the college campus farm, we say, is about 1800 acres. 
 
David Fullerton: (04:14) 
Since then, over the last six years, we’ve been donated some land in different locations, and so we’re now about 3,600 acres in six different geographic locations, five of them here in Alberta. And then we are also located with 800 acres in Craik, Saskatchewan, which is our new smart farm in Saskatchewan, where it’s on donated land, where we’re trying to apply the same learnings that we have done here into different growing conditions, different environment there. But the intent of it is always to hyperfocus on accelerating progress and innovation in support of the ag industry in western Canada. Particularly why it’s called Smart Farm is because we’re using digital technologies and trying to identify the best technologies that are appropriate for our growing conditions and how they apply to both crop and livestock production. Trying to ultimately examine the technologies and see how does it support the farm operation, what are the constraints, what are the issues with that, helping validate technologies and looking at how can they improve the efficiency, which ultimately how do they improve the profitability of agriculture? The distinct part of the Smart Farm itself is that it’s a demonstration location. We’re open to the public. We have tours all the time. We have the Ag Smart event in July of this year, late July, and it’s open as a lab for the student education here at the college. So it’s using the technologies for education, for demonstration and applied research. The whole Smart Farm is the lab for the college, both for applied research and for education. 
 
Clinton Monchuk: (06:01) 
You have a lot of these different, say, research facilities that are kind of out scattered throughout Canada and other countries as well. But it’s awesome to hear that you have a component where you’re kind of trying to get the community involved as well and make sure that they understand what’s going on. One of the things that I saw when I was looking through the videos is how you have that integration between livestock and crops. So you’re really trying to use both of them. And maybe you can elaborate just a little bit on that, just how you’re trying to kind of mimic a mixed farm that would be out in Alberta, right? 
 
David Fullerton: (06:39) 
Certainly. So I’ll speak to the distinction around all the various research facilities that are in Canada. And the challenge of agriculture, as you would know as a farmer, is everything is different depending on where you live. That’s why you need to have research conducted in the area where you’re actually operating. Here at Olds College, we’ve been lucky in the last number of years to have the rains at the right time, but 10 miles east of us, it was bone-dry last summer and crops failed. So that’s why the public needs to understand how research happens for agriculture, because everything is distinctly different depending on where you are, and you cannot apply everything from one location to the other, which is also why now having the Craik property is going to be really interesting for us because we’re working and we’ve got many years of research on technologies, well, and practice, but how do we apply that in very different growing conditions? The integration between crops and livestock is an interesting perspective. We still have purely grain fields, and we still have pastures and never do they cross over, so it’s not fully integrated. One of the activities I would like to see is how do we integrate livestock onto grain crops? Can we manage to find out how to grow a cover crop on our grain fields and move the cattle out there so that they’re grazing and they’re depositing their manure and all these things so that we’re actually benefiting from that. But at this stage, they are two separate operations per se, but as part of the whole applied research activities and thinking about climate resiliency and everything, I would suspect in the future, we’re going to start trying to become more integrated. 
 
Clinton Monchuk: (08:28) 
So, one of the things that I saw on the website is there were kind of five areas that the college focuses on, and maybe it’d be good just to highlight those five areas so everybody can understand kind of what some of the focus is with Olds in the Smart Farm. 
 
David Fullerton: (08:43) 
Certainly. So, the five areas that, that we’re working within is crop production, whether that’s the large scale production on fields where, which kind of makes us distinct is we actually are conducting research at field scale, but we also, our crops research team is doing the traditional small plot research. That’s number one. We have the livestock production group, which again, has that thousand head capacity in the feedlot and a hundred cow calf and the sheep. We also have a purebred Angus herd as well that we’re developing in partnership with the student club. We’re working in the environmental stewardship world; primarily at this stage around water management issues, looking at agricultural change, climate change management practice through the water, and other environmental stewardship practices. We’re moving into partnering with a couple of renewable energy companies on agrivoltaics, trying to examine the potential to grow crops and create solar energy at the same time. That’s a relatively new activity, sort of just at the initial stages of development. We’re also in partnership with the Field Crop Development Center, who is a cereal breeding facility in Lacombe. That focus there is on barley variety development, triticale variety development. So it’s a nice collaboration between our two entities. 
 
David Fullerton: (10:12) 
And then the last one, the fifth one is sort of what we’re known for is the Smart technology, Smart integration. So that’s probably our largest group, and it’s where we’ve developed the furthest in terms of growth of activities, and that’s the Smart Ag Applied Research group where we’re taking all the technologies that are out there that people want us to examine, and understanding how that can be applied, what are the challenges, what are the accuracies, what’s the functionality of all these various technologies, and how do farmers apply those to become more productive and more efficient? That’s a whole growth area, and particularly because of the reliance on data when you have technologies and certainly within the livestock group, we’ve got some technologies, massive amounts of data that you’ve got to process to collect and manage and process and make it understood. And I think that’s one of the biggest challenges for farmers is their machines are collecting data all the time. What do you do with it? What is it telling me? Helping with that stream of information and data and helping make evidence-based decisions. 
 
Clinton Monchuk: (11:22) 
So with that, and you kind of highlighted a few of those different partners that you collaborate with, do you feel on the Smart Farm side, there’s even more companies or associations that want to collaborate with you because of this new technology? You kind of called it out there that there’s a lot of information that’s out there and, you know, just, for me, as a farmer, it’s kind of tough to, you know, decipher what would make sense, what’s beneficial and what’s not. 
 
David Fullerton: (11:52) 
We’re regularly–daily, it ,seems sometimes–getting companies coming to us and they want to know more about what we can do with them and their new ideas or their technologies to validate them. We’re not into fundamental research. We’re into applied research to help validate and evaluate technologies and see how that can be used to improve the productivity of enterprises. So we collect data all the time, and statistics for reporting purposes, but I think the number is, we’ve worked with about 380 different organizations since 2018. Anywhere from 75 to 85, 90 groups a year at this stage, on research projects. Our reputation has been enhanced over the years, and people are now knowing to come to us, but our real mandate is to support SMEs in the development and enhancement of their technology, validation of it. Then the farmers can pick up those technologies. 
 
Clinton Monchuk: (12:49) 
Obviously you’re getting, you know, you mentioned the small and medium enterprises SMEs, but you’re getting a lot of different people that are coming to your door saying, we want to do research with you, again for the validation, to bring back to the farmers to say, hey, this has been vetted, we know it’s going to work on your farm so you can try it out. 
 
David Fullerton: (13:08) 
So we’ll work with anyone. And that’s one of the fundamental items that we want to tell people is we want to be seen to be a third party validator, and so people will come to us and based on what we’re doing, they can trust our information. 
 
Clinton Monchuk: (13:29) 
This brings us to the part of the podcast where it is the fun farm fact. Did you know that based on a RBC study in 2022, a new generation of agriculture technologies could help cut potential 2050 emissions from Canada’s agriculture sector by up to 40%. This would be on top of the already low net emissions reported in data due to farming practices that have already been implemented. And I think this gets into the next area, David, that we’re going to be talking about, just on trying to help everybody else understand what some of these new technologies could be and just how we can do better going forward. 
 
David Fullerton: (14:12) 
A lot of the technologies that we’re working with, for the most part, are aimed at productivity. And farmers, as business people, have to make a dollar. They’re not going to stay in business long if they don’t make a profit. So if we can work with them to assist them to become more productive and more efficient, whether that’s increasing their yields without increasing their costs or saving money through a better, more efficient practice, then we’ve done our job. But at the same time, the industry is also, as you said, being mandated and encouraged to reduce its emissions of greenhouse gases. But certainly we have to recognize that, that yes, farming practices do emit greenhouse gases as a regular practice, and so what can we do as applied research individuals? And also examine the opportunities for environmentally more sustainable practices and help the industry reduce their emissions footprint over time. 
 
David Fullerton: (15:14) 
So we’re at the stage of development of our Smart Farm and all the research that goes on where we feel that we’re ready to work on some greenhouse gas projects. So we’re working with a number of other granting agencies trying to identify opportunities where we can buy the technologies to allow us to measure emissions, and then put forward projects that are going to examine how these various farming practices are emitting greenhouse gases. But we need assistance through the industry questions. What does industry want us to do? We work with industry to address their issues. So we need to, we need to have lots of consultations with industry to understand what their needs are and see how we can conduct research. Once we have that understanding, we’ll make applications to try to match dollars, whether it’s from an industry association or business or whatever, to try to maximize the amount of activities we can do. 
 
David Fullerton: (16:15) 
A lot of this new research costs money. We are fortunate now at a stage five years into our Smart Farm development where we’ve received grants over time and we’ve bought lots of equipment for analysis and all these things, but certainly the greenhouse gas side is new to us, and we’re just ramping up our activities where we’ve got some equipment that can monitor greenhouse gas emissions from soil on a real-time basis called the LI-COR system, which is coming out of Nova Scotia, I believe. But that only does a small amount of research because of the scale of what it is. So we need many more of those things so we can expand it away from us, one small plot to large amounts, and that costs a lot of money. So we’re fortunate that we’re in partnership with other universities and colleges where we’re applying for large grants. 
 
David Fullerton: (17:07) 
If we get them, we can scale up our activities. But what we’re trying to do is, in this case, it’s around nutrient management practice, using the coated fertilizers, applying the right rate, the right time, and the right source at the right place. And how do farmers actually apply those things and what are the results back from it? Farmers know a lot of good practices, but how can they demonstrate to the various regulatory agencies and so on to say, or the public even to say, what we’re doing or what we’re adjusting to is having this impact, X impact on greenhouse gas emissions, therefore we’re moving in the right direction, and the same time the farmer is still making the profit that they need to continue their business and help it grow and succeed. 
 
Clinton Monchuk: (17:57) 
Yeah. 
 
David Fullerton: (17:58) 
As economists we’re recognizing that farmers cannot afford to adopt a practice if it’s not going to help them survive as a business. Just because everybody says you need to do this, if the farmer’s farm’s going to go out of business, well, there goes a business and there goes the food that we need. So we have to figure out what works from the environmental perspective and balance that with the economics. 
 
Clinton Monchuk: (18:22) 
That sometimes gets missed in that general discussion that, you know, if you want a sustainable, long-term beneficial food system and, you know, the environment obviously is a key point. Because if you don’t take care of that, then you’re not going to grow the crops. You’ve got to make sure you’re growing something that society actually wants, but you also have to make sure that there’s level of profit in there, because like you said, if you can’t make money, then, then you’re not going to be able to do that. One of the things that lines up with that is you’ve had the ability now for the last five years to try some of these new technologies and these advancements. Is there any advancement or a solution that farmers or ranchers have been looking for that you’ve actually done some work on that you can say, you know what, this one’s kind of a game changer. We feel this is going to influence farmers going forward. I don’t know if you can tell that. I don’t know if it’s proprietary or not, but I think for me as a farmer, I think it’d be super interesting to understand, and I think for consumers as well, just to know what’s coming out in the future. 
 
David Fullerton: (19:31) 
So a lot of the work we do, some of it is proprietary. We’re like every other institution, where we’ll do non-disclosure agreements and all these things to protect what that company, and then perhaps a company that’s got a technology that’s not ready for that information out there. But we also pride ourselves on the ability to let people know what we’re working on and help share the information, the knowledge dissemination side of all the activities that we’re doing. So is there something I could talk about right now? There’s already existing technologies that we’ve evaluated. There’s an interesting soil probe called ChrysaLabs out of Quebec that they wanted us a couple years ago to evaluate in the conditions that we have. Basically take the probe, shove it into the ground, and it gives you a real time measurement of nutrients. So no longer do you have to take a soil sample, ship it off to a lab, and wait the 30 days to get the results back and see what the nutrient levels of your soil is. It basically shove it in the ground in real time. It’ll tell you you’ve got X amount of nitrogen in the soil. 
 
Clinton Monchuk: (20:35) 
Wow. 
 
David Fullerton: (20:35) 
Really interesting technology and it’s for sale. People can use it. It’s a prescription-based tool that allows you to go onto your farm and sample it to sort of see where you’re at. That’s a real technology that was developed out of Quebec. They wanted us to make use of it here and see how it works. So we did two years worth of work with them and sent the data back. They modified their algorithms trying to make it appropriate for here. To me, that’s a great tool for a farmer who perhaps they did sampling and now conditions have changed. Well, so they could mainly just go out there, do some sampling across their fields to sort of see how that fits and then adjust their practice accordingly. Perhaps they need to put more nitrogen on or or so on. 
 
David Fullerton: (21:22) 
That’s, to me, a really good example of the type of work we’ve done and how that can apply. We’re doing some work now with two different companies, one with Spornado, it’s a company out of Australia that both measure spores in the air for disease. We always say, once you’ve got disease present on your plant, it’s too late. You’ve missed the time just to spray a fungicide or whatever. What these technologies do is they’re capturing spores that are blowing through the air. You can take a look with Spornado; it quantifies the amount. You have to send the sample off, but it comes back right away and it says, okay, you’ve got X amount and then so you know when you should spray or if you should spray or not. The other one, so the company’s called BioScout. It does it in real time, telling you what the pressure is, how much and what the actual disease is. So it allows you to make an informed decision around, should I spray or not? And a business decision is ultimately to say, do I put this $50,000 fungicide on my field or do I not? Am I going to make $50,000 or more back, or am I better off allowing to have a little bit of disease and not have to incur that cost? So we’re evaluating those kind of technologies to see how they work here. It comes from Australia, does it work in Western Canadian conditions? Some of the other work we’re doing, which a lot of people would sort of recognize immediately is around drone work and the applications of drones for disease monitoring, for soil evaluation, comparing that with satellites and all these kind of things. 
 
David Fullerton: (22:59) 
We’re doing a lot of work in that area to collect data and evaluate really, how does a farmer use drone information? How do they use satellites to tell you if a disease is present in your field? Well, again, it’s too late. You fly a drone over on a regular basis and maybe you could start seeing it, or you could use different image capabilities and sort of know what it should look like on the drone image of disease or fertility or hail or other things. So, we’re trying to apply all those kind of different technologies that people wouldn’t think of: “well, that’s not farming.” Well, yes, it is. 
 
Clinton Monchuk: (23:36) 
So we talked a lot about how some of these different technologies and some of the research going on kind of feeds back to the farmers. Do you see some of this research feeding back to consumers? Is there anything that you feel that, that you can kind of pinpoint and say, you know what, consumers are going to benefit from this and this is something good then that farmers and ranchers can implement?  
 
David Fullerton: (23:59) 
We don’t directly do consumer-based research. Our focus is to assist the producer themselves, but ultimately the consumer wants cheap food, cheap product. And so the result is farmers need to consider how do we become more efficient so I can still maintain a good lifestyle for my family and make a profit for my business and provide the resulting food products or industrial products right back to the consumer. So we’re, we’re focused around supporting the industry. If we can do right by the industry to meet their needs, that’s going to benefit ultimately the consumer in the long run. The fact of the farm community is becoming obligated to address environmental issues because that’s what the public wants. I think farmers understand environmental sustainability. They’re looking at the legacy of passing on the land to the next generation, whether it’s in their family or not. They don’t want to to ruin things, but at the same time, you have to recognize that perhaps the consumer doesn’t understand that. 
 
David Fullerton: (25:06) 
And so whatever practices we can do to support them to get the message across and help them perhaps improve their practices to address that specific issue is going to benefit the the consumer in the long run. It’s a challenge, and I think it’s ultimately a role of the farming community themselves to continually get the message across to the consumer that what they’re doing is not because somebody’s told them to do it, but it’s because it’s the right thing to do for themselves and the right thing to do to try to feed the world. Right in our strategic plan is to talk about that the ag industry around the world has to feed 9 million people by 2050. And we’re trying to figure out how to do that, and that’s what the farming community wants to do too. 
 
Clinton Monchuk: (25:52) 
Awesome. So, I, want to say thank you very much for taking the time to be on the podcast, David, this was really interesting. I think we got a lot of insight into the Smart Farm and Olds College in general. So thank you very much and we look forward to having you again sometime. 
 
David Fullerton: (26:08) 
Oh, thank you very much. Very pleased to discuss what we’re doing and have a great conversation on the ag industry and technology integration. 
 
Clinton Monchuk: (26:23) 
I want to thank you for taking the time to listen to our Ask a Farmer podcast. We at Canadian Food Focus value the input from our listeners and ask that you share the podcast with your friends and family. Remember, this is a two-way street, so we seek your input for future segments that are of Interest to you about food and farming. To do this, please click on the ‘Ask Us’ icon at the top of our website, canadianfoodfocus.org. While you’re there, feel free to follow our numerous social media links and sign up for our newsletter. This segment was produced and edited by Angela Larson, research and writing by Dorothy Long and Penny Eaton, music by Andy Elson. I’m your host Clinton Monchuk, and from all of us at Canadian Food Focus, we wish you good health and great eats. 

Clinton Monchuk: (31:38)
I do believe that fundamentally changes your mindset about food when you have the opportunity to grow it, right? Like, it just provides an experience that really is priceless, right?

Alida Burke: (31:50)
A hundred percent. It’s a hands-on experience that you wouldn’t otherwise get, except if you were maybe in a farming family.

Clinton Monchuk: (31:57)
I want to say thank you very much Alida, for being part of the podcast today. It really was super interesting and great for our listeners to understand a little bit more about vertical farming. So thank you very much.

Alida Burke: (32:07)
Well, thank you so much for having me.

Clinton Monchuk: (32:16)
I want to thank you for taking the time to listen to our Ask a Farmer podcast. We at Canadian Food Focus value the input from our listeners and ask that you share the podcast with your friends and family. Remember, this is a two-way street, so we seek your input for future segments that are of interest to you about food and farming. To do this, please click on the ‘Ask Us’ icon at the top of our website, canadianfoodfocus.org. While you’re there, feel free to follow our numerous social media links and sign up for our newsletter. This segment was produced and edited by Angela Larson, research and writing by Dorothy Long and Penny Eaton.