Autonomous agriculture featured at Alberta conference

Dec 06, 2017

A team from the United Kingdom planted and harvested a hectare of barley without physically operating equipment

By Diego Flammini
News Reporter
Farms.com

A robotic engineer from Harper Adams University in England showed Alberta farmers that it’s possible to produce a crop without ever climbing into a tractor or combine.

Jonathan Gill was the keynote speaker during the Farming Smarter Leadership Conference. He explained how his “Hands Free Hectare Project” team produced a hectare of spring barley while operating the machinery remotely.

“We were the world’s first to grow an entire crop without actually going into the field,” he told Global News yesterday. “We worked an entire area of land, a hectare, completely without having anybody in the driving seats or any agronomist on the ground.”

Canadian producers likened his research to a classic action movie franchise.

“It’s kind of scary, you get thinking of the terminator,” Craig Walsh, a farmer from Foremost, Alta, told Global News. “Not necessarily that, but now all of a sudden (the equipment) is running itself.”

The team transferred autopilot capabilities from a drone to an Iseki TLE3400 tractor and created a communication channel between the autopilot and the steering wheel to control the tractor.

A SimTech drill attached to the tractor performed the seeding and an automated Sampo Rosenlew 130 combine harvested the crop, which yielded about 4.5 tonnes of barley from the one-hectare plot.

If farmers don’t have to worry about operating their equipment, they’ll be free to perform other tasks, said Gill, adding the researchers hope to perform tests on a 100-hectare field.

“The idea in the future is to set the vehicles off from your main farm building and watch them go in their field,” he told Global News. “They could work together in larger fleets and swarms … It’s about allowing you to get to those other jobs that you just didn’t have time to do.”

Video: Evolution of Beef Cattle Farming

The Clear Conversations podcast took to the road for a special episode recorded in Nashville during CattleCon, bringing listeners straight into the heart of the cattle industry. Host Tracy Sellers welcomed rancher Steve Wooten of Beatty Canyon Ranch in Colorado for a wide-ranging discussion that blended family history and sustainability, particularly as it relates to the future of beef production.

Sustainability emerged as a central theme of the conversation, a word that Wooten acknowledges can mean very different things depending on who you ask. For him, sustainability starts with the soil. Healthy soil produces healthy grass, which supports efficient cattle capable of producing year after year with minimal external inputs. It’s an approach that equally considers vegetation, animal efficiency, and long-term profitability.

That philosophy aligned naturally with Wooten’s involvement in the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, where he served as a representative for the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association. The roundtable brings together the entire beef supply chain—from producers to retailers—along with universities, NGOs, and allied industries. Its goal is not regulation, Wooten emphasized, but collaboration, shared learning, and continuous improvement.