Planting the seed money to grow digital agriculture

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This article was published 04/11/2020 (1781 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitoba’s agri-food and agriculture industries are becoming high-tech operations. And with about $11 billion in annual revenues, its growth and sustainability is vital to the future of the province.

Now that there is no doubt digital technology advancements are coming fast and deep there are strategic efforts underway to ensure that as many players as possible are able to access both the technology and the skills required to leverage that technology.

Last year, the University of Winnipeg, in partnership with Enterprise Machine Intelligence and Learning Initiative (EMILI), received about $2.5 million from Western Economic Diversification to develop, among other things, labelled data sets of weed and crop images.

Such data sets — with hundreds of thousands of labelled images — could eventually be used to develop machine-learning algorithms that could allow farmers to spray herbicides only of the weeds, saving money on inputs and saving the environment on minimizing spraying.

At an EMILI-sponsored virtual conference on Wednesday called Enlightened Agriculture, the provincial and federal governments came up with another $630,000 for EMILI to strengthen collaborations between industry and academia to ensure greater alignment in developing skilled workers for this new digital ag tech era.

Ray Bouchard, the founding chairman of EMILI, which is focused exclusively on digital agriculture, said ensuring the skills gap gets closed is crucial to the industry’s future.

“A good example is the role of data science within a number of ag companies today,” Bouchard said. “Some have data scientists but many don’t. We certainly believe that will be an evolving requirement for that in the ag sector and the more we can do and the better we can collaborate now, the better prepared we will be. If we don’t identify it (the skills gap) and take steps now, when it hits us we won’t be prepared to deal with it.”

Jacqueline Keena, EMILI’s managing director, said there are a number of ways that can be addressed. It is already working with the Manitoba Industry-Academia Partnership and as well it is looking to create more work-integrated learning opportunities for students across disciplines.

“For instance we’d like to see computer science students in co-op work placements with agri food companies,” she said. “Their skills would be more applicable and they would become more aware of opportunities in digital agriculture.”

EMILI gets very strong support from the province and industry with a number of heavyweights on the board. Bouchard is CEO of Enns Brothers, a large equipment dealership, and he’s joined on the board by the likes of Sandy Riley, CEO of Richardson Financial Group and Bob Silver, CEO of Western Glove Works.

Provincial Resource Development Minister Blaine Pedersen, said new strategies and technologies will be key to ensuring that industry meets growth targets and that partnerships will ensure schools are delivering curriculums that are relevant to future workforce needs

And Bouchard said there is lots more to come. He said EMILI is working on “some pretty aggressive moon-shots on what we think we can do for the digital ag economy in Manitoba.”

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca