Is your farm ready for autonomy?

Feb 02, 2021

“Autonomous agriculture is more than just equipment and robots.”

Have you ever wondered what it would take to implement autonomy on your farming operation?

“When you’re getting ready for autonomy, part of it is a mindset change – autonomous agriculture is about more than just equipment and robots,” says Chuck Baresich, General Manager of Haggerty Creek.

Attendees of the 2020 Farms.com Virtual Precision Agriculture Conference & Ag Technology Showcase tuned in to Chuck’s presentation ‘Getting Your Farm Ready for Autonomy - What I Have Found and What We Are Doing’.

He says that right now, the technology is available to make autonomous equipment, but there are some factors delaying its progression:

Efficiency and capability
- Potentially slower speeds to save battery life
- Smaller size, less weight, less acres per hour
- Must transport on a trailer to various fields
Market demands issues
- Must preplan everything
- In the moment decision making can be very efficient
- Are we as farmers just not ready?

“Farmers want efficiency and large equipment is designed to be efficient,” adds Baresich.

Using the AGRIFAC Endurance sprayer as an example, which has a 2000 gallon tank, 180 foot boom, and sprays 327 acres per hour, Baresich says that it’s difficult for autonomous equipment to compete with machines that size.

“Large equipment has made us change the way that we farm. We actually shape our fields around the equipment that we’re using – not necessarily around the farms that we’re farming,” he explains.

Things like field sizes, shapes, drainage, waterways, and square corners are designed “not to get the best crop that we could possibly get, but to be more efficient with our equipment.”

So, what do farmers have to consider when getting ready for autonomy?

First, they need to determine what outcomes they are trying to achieve and have a clear set of objectives and parameters.

“Once you have a clear sense of your outcome and what parameters you’re trying to maintain, are there some things within the parameters that limits your ability to achieve your outcome, and can autonomy help bridge that gap?” asks Baresich. “Are there some regular, repeatable tasks that allow you to use an autonomous machine to do that?”

There are many factors that farmers need to consider with autonomous equipment, “you cannot start by simply saying I’m getting a robot to do ‘x’.”

Factors that could discourage farmers from adopting autonomous farming include:

What is the cost of the robot?
What about the old machinery?
Who is watching the robot?
How do you get it to the field?
Will it do the same job or better?

“Will it do the same job or better than what we we’re doing before? I think that’s the key piece,” adds Baresich.

In the below video, Chuck discusses the ins-and-outs of autonomous farming and shares his insights on working with autonomous equipment.

Photo: haggertycreek.com

Video: Western Canadian Agriculture: Hard Times Made the World's Best Farmers

Western Canadian agriculture produced the most advanced farmers in the world not through abundance but through adversity. The crow rate fell. The wheat price went nowhere. The brown envelopes stopped.

When the subsidies disappeared, the bad farmers left and the good ones stayed. And the ones who stayed could not just grow wheat anymore. They started growing lentils and canola and peas and flax and faba beans. They built crop rotation. They got serious about agronomy because there was no government backstop. That process produced the Western Canadian agriculture Dennis Bulani describes in this clip: the most advanced, most educated farming culture in the world.

His contrast with Iowa corn and soybean farmers is sharp. At a DeKalb farmer meeting in Okoboji, Iowa, he asked what crop rotation they ran. Beans on corn stubble, corn on bean stubble. How do you fertilize? The co-op agronomist handles it. Have you considered other crops? No need. We make so much money on corn and soybeans. Western Canadian agriculture was never allowed that comfort. And now those Iowa farmers are watching soybean markets lock up with China and corn prices slide, and they do not have the agronomy knowledge or the research base to pivot. Western Canadian farmers adapted on a dime because they had done it before.

Dennis also makes the case that Western Canadian agriculture keeps adapting in real time. Low commodity prices over the past year have pushed growers to look seriously at precision spot-spray technology. He knows a neighbor who bought a sprayer with the seeing-eye system and sprayed only 80 out of 320 acres. As a chemical retailer Dennis acknowledges that will affect his sales. He supports it anyway, because if it advances Canadian agriculture and makes farmers money, that is a good outcome.

The lesson Dennis draws from the tale of two farms: continuous improvement is the only durable strategy. When canola was $22 a bushel some growers went to Arizona instead of the Crop Production Show. When the price came down those same growers came back to the research and the discipline. Products do not go on Rack Petroleum's shelves unless they pass a replicated trial first. That is what Western Canadian agriculture built through hard times: farmers who do the work whether the times demand it or not.

Dennis Bulani is CEO of Rack Petroleum and Ultimate Yield in Biggar, Saskatchewan. Dan Aberhart hosts GTF Productions, Western Canadian Agriculture's foremost live briefing platform and its foremost AI training platform for ag operators