Oh, the times, they are changing – and that’s especially true in agricultural sectors as automation and AI technology continue to rapidly advance, offering farmers new opportunities to enhance their efficiency, lower their costs, and produce a higher yield.
While some farmers continue to thrive with a more traditional approach, many operations, like McBlain Farms just west of Caledonia on Hwy. 54, are investing significantly in these new technologies and seeing drastic changes to their roles as stewards of the land.
Farmer Paul Makey wanted to clarify the type of technology we’re talking about here: “We didn’t want you thinking it was like Google AI, where it will write an email for you. That’s not the technology we’re using in agriculture.”
Makey described McBlain Farms – a corn, soybean, and wheat farm operating on 4,000 acres of land – as “automated to the max.”
Sixth generation farmer Tyler McBlain has been a driving force behind the adoption of new technologies on his family’s operation, dating back to 1996.
“We were mapping fields, the amount of crop coming off on the go. The first systems were crude compared to what we’re using today. The grids were a lot larger versus now we’re down to really small grids on our maps.”
He said the introduction of autosteering technology in the “late 90s, early 2000s” allowed the farm to advance their sector control capabilities: “The machine planting with a 36-40-foot-wide planter is able to automatically shut sections off on the go. Our sprayer is 120 feet wide, so if you’re overlapping, you’re not wasting product. GPS signals will shut off those sections that are overlapping.”
The next leap forward was integrating variable rating technology.
“All our seed and fertility on this farm is variable rated based on yield maps…. We’re also using satellite imagery, we have people come and fly drones looking at crop health, and then the last thing we’ve been using is an EC (electric conductivity) machine, which you can pull across the field and it maps whole properties so we can get a full view of that field out there.”
He said the resulting data yields information on potash, phosphate, and sulphur levels, as well as areas that are nutrient-deficient, resulting in much more efficient fertilizer deployment.
“By using this technology, we are more efficient. We are getting a return on our investment. In today’s day and age, it’s harder to find labour, so we have adopted this technology to relieve labour a little bit, make us more efficient, and effective,” said McBlain.
He continued, “It’s amazing in the last 10 years the advancements in accuracies in our industry. What we’re able to see now versus 10 years ago. It takes a little more time; I spend a lot of my winter sitting in front of my computer to analyze it, figure out how, and then put it back into the machines to make the data useful, but it’s a different job than we did 15 years ago. My part-time job now is analyzing data.
While a percentage of the farming community remains reticent to the new tech, Makey explained, “A lot of it has to do with the age of the farmer. As we know, older people are struggling to adopt to newer technology, so there’s some farmers we know that just say ‘I don’t want to deal with that stuff, I want to keep it simple’.”
He said cost was is another limiting factor.
“Unfortunately, some farmers, because of the age of their equipment, they can’t put on all this technology, so they won’t adapt to the technology. It’s too big of a step for them financially to adapt to the technology and that’s slowing down people adopting it.”
He believes that as that older generation settles into a well-earned retirement, the younger generation coming in will be much quicker to integrate automation and AI systems into their operations.
While McBlain could not give a complete picture of the cost savings this technology generates on an annual basis overall, he noted that it’s the many small details combined that lead to big results on the spreadsheets.
“We’re using less herbicide, less pesticide, because we’re reducing overlap, so that’s a pretty easy (return on investment) for us,” said McBlain. “We can put a dollar figure right to that using variable rate technology. We’re producing more grain on less fertilizer now, by putting the fertilizer where it’s needed. We’re using a soil sample with an EC machine to find where we need to put the fertilizer, what nutrients need to go into the fertilizer, and then we’re coming through with a strip tiller and putting that fertilizer right where it needs to be to grow that crop. We are gaining more yield by diving deeper and figuring out what’s needed.”
Makey also noted that the environmental benefits of the advancing tech are of equal importance to the financial ones.
“This is a key thing for us, is to be stewards of this land, to make sure these fields can grow these crops forever. Technology is helping us do that, by saying ‘this is a poor area of the field, it needs more fertilizer to get the same crop as this good part of the field’,” he said.
McBlain added, “We’d like to see this farm carried forward to the next generation. We want to make sure the farm is sustainable for future generations.”
“We’re producing more food than we ever have,” said Makey. “Twenty years ago, to farm the same acreage that’s being farmed today, you would have had three to four times the amount of people. In those 20 years, the amount of return, the bushels of corn we’re getting off the land, is that much greater because the technology is helping us get it right.”
Today, McBlain said getting real-time information is as simple as logging in through his phone or iPad: “I can log into a piece of equipment and see what’s going on, see the monitors, and make adjustments as needed.”
Makey described a typical day behind the driver’s seat of a combine on the McBlain farm: “I sit in the seat, hit the autosteer button, and then it adjusts itself for the conditions of the field. It has cameras that are monitoring the grain as it’s coming in, as it’s being cleaned. It uses AI to take what those cameras are telling it and adjust the combine as it crosses the field to match the conditions.”
When asked if he sees a day coming where the equipment is fully autonomous, without the need for a human operator, he said that tech is already here, just not yet commercially available. McBlain isn’t sure he’d jump that far yet even if it was available, noting that he still trusts the human operator to avoid a fallen tree branch, or a child running in front of the equipment: “Maybe these cameras are foolproof. I don’t know if I’ll have to draw my line in the sand at some point.”
Makey added, “I was in California five years ago, vegetable farming out there, everything is in a straight row, flat land, and they have autonomous tractors going up and down cultivating for weeds. It’s in a set environment, it’s flat, there’s no trees to have a limb fall off. Will it get to this scale? Probably not in my lifetime I don’t think.”
McBlain noted the other important roles an operator plays in the cab, when they can observe the field and catch problems earlier being freed from more traditional operating tasks behind the wheel.
The pair hopes that by sharing their experience with the public, a greater understanding of the modern farmer can emerge. Both are optimistic of a future filled with greater and greater efficiencies in the field as AI and automation technology evolves.
“You’re not going to see it go backwards,” concluded Makey.
