Farming from space

Manitoba farmers are embracing new technology and they want more of it, but bells and whistles don’t interest them. They want results.

“You can’t test everything before you buy it, but we always want to try and do as much research on the topic as we can, whether it’s new technology, new machinery or a new crop variety,” said Reid Mazinke, who farms with his father and brothers southwest of Morris.

“We really want to get it on the farm and test it out,” he said. “If it’s a new variety, put a couple of strips in the field or, for machinery, we want to put it head-to-head with something. We just want to really make sure that it’s a proper fit for our farm before we make that decision.”

Mazinke was joined on the panel by Tyler Menold, who farms with his father, brothers and all their families southwest of Carman, and third-generation farmer Fiona Jochum, who grows wheat, oats, canola and soybeans on her family’s farm near St. François Xavier.

The panel was moderated by Manitoba Agriculture pulse specialist Dennis Lange, who walked the panelists through a series of technology-related questions.

Testing the waters

Jochum said it is sometimes difficult to see the benefits of changes implemented on the farm without a good baseline for comparison.

This spring, her farm tried new seeding rates on several crops. For cereals, they seeded based on 1,000 kernel weight. For soybeans, they switched from seeding on 20-inch spacing to 10-inch spacing, and with canola, they lowered seeding rates.

They had different-looking stands than they were used to, and since Jochum was in charge of seeding, eyebrows were raised in her general direction.

“I went out there with my tape measure and spent a lot of hours doing seed counts and checking out our emergence, and we did have very good emergence – 90 per cent,” she said.

But without knowing the farm’s emergence numbers in previous years, there was no baseline comparison to be had so it was difficult to know whether the changes were favourable.

Why it matters: Getting a leg up with new technology can help farms run more efficiently.

Mazinke was one participant in a mid-December producer panel focused on how farmers are using new technology, held during the Manitoba Agronomists Conference hosted by the University of Manitoba.

He grows oats, canola, soybeans and sometimes sunflowers, and said the first step when assessing a new technology is talking to others who are familiar with it. But that’s not the only headache-saving strategy he uses. When possible, he looks for a hands-on experience.