Are ‘tech dense’ farms the way forward for farming? | EUROtoday

Jake Leguee is a third-generation farmer in Saskatchewan, Canada.

Since his grandfather purchased the 17,000 acres in 1956, the Leguee household has grown canola, wheat, flax and inexperienced lentils.

As a baby, he watched his father and grandfather spending hours using their tractor to sow seeds and spray crops. Sweat would coat their shirts after these lengthy, scorching days.

“It was a lot less efficient back then,” says Leguee. “Today, technology has vastly improved the job that we do.”

To hold his farm aggressive, Leguee has made a number of improvements, significantly on the subject of crop spraying.

With software program and distant cameras hooked up to his John Deere tractor, he can kill the weeds way more effectively, a apply each farmer has to do earlier than planting seeds.

“It can look down and spray a nozzle when the sensors pick a weed, while we’re going around 15 miles an hour,” Leguee says.

He provides that he saves on pesticide spray because the nozzles solely activate when weeds are detected, versus the type of blanket spraying he used to do.

The return-on-investment for including these new layers to his farm operations are sometimes excessive, Leguee provides.

“There are low-cost solutions that won’t be as expensive as new spraying tech, and they could be an app to help you better keep your records, for example,” he says.

It’s a lesson that farmers throughout North America are taking over board.

A 2024 McKinsey survey discovered that 57% of North American farmers are more likely to strive new yield-increasing applied sciences within the subsequent two years.

Another report, from 2022, by the US Department of Agriculture mentioned that whereas the variety of farms within the nation is shrinking, the farms that stay have gotten “tech dense”.

Norah Lake, the proprietor and farmer at Vermont’s Sweetland Farms, says to get a profitable harvest, “there’s a lot of looking forward and then backwards and then forwards and then backwards in crop farming”.

She as soon as used Microsoft Excel to plug within the figures for, say, their yields from a latest harvest, or a given yr, and see how they evaluate to years prior.

“I’d want to know that if we planted 100 bed feet of broccoli, what did we actually produce?” she says.

More lately, Lake, who grows greens similar to asparagus, tomatoes and zucchini, in addition to pastured meat, has been utilizing software program and an app from an organization known as Tend.

She wished to digitise and streamline these laborious duties into a bit of tech that she will view on her cellphone or laptop.

Now she will enter these harvest numbers into Tend, and the software program may give her particulars, and recommendation, on how one can handle her crop finest for the approaching harvest.

“We can use Tend to calculate the quantity of seed that we need to order based on the row feet of a particular crop that we want to harvest,” she says.

There’s no scarcity of tech for farmers to select from.

Sygenta, the argri-tech large primarily based in Switzerland, presents farmers the software program Cropwise, which makes use of AI and satellite tv for pc imagery to information farmers on what to do subsequent with their crops, or alerts them to emergencies.

“It can tell the farmer that you need to visit the southeast corner of your field because something is not right about that section, such as a pest outbreak,” says Feroz Sheikh, chief info workplace of Syngenta Group. “And the system also has 20 years of our weather pattern data fed into a machine learning model, so we know exactly what kind of conditions lead to what outcome.”

With that knowledge, farmers can cowl their crops earlier than, say, an incoming snap frost that might kill a big portion of their acreage.

In Germany, Jean-Pascal Lutze based NoMaze to provide farmers a deeper understanding of how totally different crops will carry out underneath local weather situations.

Its software program is rolling out this yr. “We did field tests in a variety of environments and then created simulations through our computer model to give clients better insight into, say, how much water to use, how to get the maximum yield,” he explains.

The influence of those applied sciences is likely to be felt by the buyer, says Heather Darby, an agronomist and soil specialist on the University of Vermont.

Bringing extra meals to market might translate to decrease costs on the register, she says.

“When farmers get help to avoid crop failures, that could lead to a more controlled farm environment and a reliable and secure food system,” says Darby.

Back in Saskatchewan, Darby notes youthful farmers are turning to know-how whereas older tillers may resist main change.

He says that farmers should be open to vary.

“After all, when you think about it, some of these farms are multi-million-dollar businesses that are supporting multiple families. We need to embrace technology that works for us.”

“I heard someone say once: ‘If you treat farming as a business, it’s a great way of life, but if you treat your farming as a way of life, it’s a horrible business.'”