Digital tools making inroads on farms

Veteran Saskatchewan grain producer Kleven MacDougall says it’s both physically and mentally exhausting to manually control switches on booms when spraying for disease control. 

“It’s a real pain,” says MacDougall, who farms 3,800 acres of wheat and canola with his brother Larry in Langbank, 180 kilometres east of Regina. “You can never relax. By the end of the day you’re played out.” 

All changed two years ago when the brothers switched to spraying canola fungicide using a new digital farming tool. 

Zone Spray, a feature of Bayer’s Field Manager suite of digital or precision farming tools, uses satellite imagery and other data to provide producers with field-level control over when, where and how much fungicide to apply using technology that is already available in their equipment cabs. 

“It makes spraying so much easier,” MacDougall says, one of roughly 300 canola producers in Western Canada who began using the tool as part of a pilot project in 2016. 

Growing use of precision ag tools

The MacDougall are not alone.  Across Canada and around the world, producers are turning increasingly to the many networked precision agricultural tools being researched and developed to make farms more efficient, productive and sustainable. FCC Express recently reported that in its second annual survey of field data management software on Canadian farms, Stratus Ag Research found just over 34 per cent of the 700 farms surveyed are using one or more of the 20 field data management software solutions available in Canada.

Many of those ideas and products were on display in recent weeks at two major international digital farming events, including the International Conference on Precision Agriculture in Montreal, Que. and the InfoAg Conference in St. Louis, Mo. 

“There are so many data points and variables in agricultural production," says Chris Paterson of Bayer Canada’s CropScience digital farming arm. "Everything from time of planting, variety and the type and time and amount of fertilizer or fungicides to apply to weather patterns and rainfall.” 

Paterson says precision agriculture helps correlate information with soil test results, drainage and other factors that influence yield to help producers make the right decisions at the right times. He says digital farming will continue to make inroads into the everyday reality of modern farming.