Nurturing innovation, growing collaboration

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This article was published 21/06/2024 (495 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In addition to its agricultural production, Rutherford Farms, a 5,500-acre seed farm near Grosse Isle, is producing and analyzing data.

Lots of data.

This growing season marks the second year of operations for the Innovation Farms Powered by Ag Expert project that has turned Rutherford Farms into the largest commercial smart farm of its kind in the country.

Operated by EMILI (Enterprise Machine Intelligence & Learning Initiative), a Manitoba artificial intelligence non-profit that has been around for more than five years, it will host about 25 ag-tech tests and demonstrations focusing on farmer-centric innovation.

“We really want to test and validate products that are highly aligned with gaps and opportunities that farmers are seeing,” said Jacqueline Keena, EMILI managing director.

EMILI established a relationship with Rick Rutherford a few years ago.

The progressive farmer was already procuring data on what was happening in his fields some 30 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg, data now fed into some of the machine learning technologies of the more than 20 companies that will be hosted at Innovation Farms this year.

With about $8.5 million of funding for about five years from a bunch of sources, including PrairiesCan, Farm Credit Canada, Enns Brothers, John Deere Canada and Access Credit Union, Innovation Farms is helping dozens of start-ups prove out their technologies.

Meantime, there is also advanced work being done on site, from analyzing carbon sequestration data to AI-fuelled analysis that can help dramatically reduce the amount of herbicide farmers need to use.

Greg Stewart, founder and CEO of Geco Agriculture, has a hard time putting into words how helpful Innovation Farms has been to his company’s development.

Geco is developing an algorithm to predict where weeds will emerge and to feed that mapped data directly into sprayers, allowing farmers to save as much as 80 per cent on herbicide budgets.

“Innovation Farms has been fantastically helpful for us,” said Stewart. “Last year, we did a series of experiments in a couple of fields comparing satellite data and drone imagery data mixed in with human scouting to identify weedy patches.’

EMILI has also provided Geco with a couple of micro grants, helping Stewart finetune the technology.

“We went to market in August 2023, and at that we were on three farms in Alberta,” said Stewart. “Now, we’re on 55 farms thoughout the Prairies.

“The work we did over at Innovation Farms allowed us to do the validation of all these things using EMILI’s drones and staff on the ground, so we got third-party validation, which is even better.”

Keena said there is a virtuous circle being created where EMILI might be able to provide a small grant, the company demonstrates and tests technology at Innovation Farms and then continues to iterate the technology into updated versions.

“For small companies that are in the midst of trying to scale their innovation and get to the next stage, this can be very helpful,” she said.

AGI3 is another company that has developed a deep, integrated partnership with Innovation Farms.

The company has developed sensors and AI analytics that provide 24-7 monitoring of crop performance. It has developed insurance products around the technology that has done significant development work at Innovation Farms including the “ground-truthing” that can verify data from the sensors.

Lysa Porth, CEO of AGI3 and a finance professor at Guelph University, who was formerly at the Asper School at the University of Manitoba, said the Innovation Farms partnership is valuable on several levels.

“It is a collaborative experience,” she said.

“We have our devices out there capturing data and we’re building models, but ultimately we are collecting ground-truth measurement to validate what we are doing. We do weekly scans and their agronomics are taking measurements for us.

“We want to be able to look at other trials that other companies are doing and our exposure being at Innovation Farms with the people who come through and the other companies working there has led to other partnership opportunities.”

It is that kind of collaboration Keena said EMILI looks to foster at Innovation Farms, by hosting not only the companies working there but people from throughout the ag industry, including farmers and agronomists, tech community and teachers and students, as well.

“We want to be able to show what the current state of technology in agriculture looks like.”

Towards that aim, Innovation Farms has a new 8,500-square-foot office/shop/warehouse space that will be able to host researchers throughout the year.

“We’ll be able to show folks in real time (and) on screen some of the data collected and inferences we make,” Keena said.

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca