Tape measure that makes measuring areas on the farm easy

Aug 14, 2023

Say goodbye to old-fashioned tape measures

By Braxten Breen
Farms.com Cool Tool Intern
Photo Credit: Moasure

Spring tape measures have been around since 1829. No matter which tape measure brand you use, they all have the same purpose with slightly different features.

The Moasure® on the other hand, offers something a little bit different, and perhaps particularly well suited to working on a farm.

After 20+ years of research, 10+ prototypes, and 1800+ software iterations the Moasure® ONE™ offers a motion-measuring tool.

With patented tech providing speed and accuracy, farmers will be able to measure anything from length, height, area, perimeter, angle, radius, gradient, rise, and run. As a farmer is measuring, the Moasure will simultaneously create a drawing on the farmer’s mobile device, allowing the farmer to save time, and get more done.

Anything from the area of an individual shape, measuring around obstacles, interiors, and exteriors of buildings, also being able to measure around circles, arcs, curves, change in elevation, and even 3-D models. Farmers will be able to efficiently measure matter in minutes, compared to a more time-worthy traditional measuring method.

The Moasure Pro app allows farmers to pair their Moasure ONE to an app via Bluetooth. This results in enabling all measurements to automatically transfer to the app to draw and calculate on the app, creating a convenient yet detailed layout of whatever the farmer may be measuring. If you want to share the drawings, Moasure Pro allows a farmer to export the drawings in up to 5 different types of formats.

Farmers can save even more time with the Moasure Stick, increasing efficiency even further. The ergonomic design allows the farmer to mount a smartphone at the top, along with a foam-lined enclosure that protects the measuring tool while reducing the risk of shock. Overall resulting in the farmer effortlessly guiding the Moasure ONE without the need to bend or reach into tight spaces.

The farming industry is an industry that can definitely use the funcationality offered by Moasure ONE.

Video: The 15-Year Bet Behind Every New Variety!

Canada is trying to decide how much agricultural research capacity it can afford to lose. Brian Rossnagel believes the better question is whether the country can afford to rebuild it.

The longtime barley and oat breeder makes the case with a simple fact about his profession: the consequences of today’s decisions may not become visible for 10 or 15 years.

“Pick the right parents. That’s the biggest thing,” Rossnagel says. “If you pick the wrong parents, you’re not going to get anywhere—and you don’t know that until 10 years, 15 years later.”

That warning carries particular weight as Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada moves to reduce spending and streamline parts of its science operations. The department’s 2026–27 plan anticipates the loss of approximately 665 positions by 2028–29 and says some research will be reduced where capacity exists in academia or industry. AAFC says the changes will make its science operations more cost-effective over the long term.

For Canada’s seed industry, Rossnagel’s career illustrates what is at stake.

This fall, the retired University of Saskatchewan breeder will be inducted into the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame. During his 35-year career at the Crop Development Centre, he helped develop more than 100 barley and oat varieties, including CDC Austenson—one of Western Canada’s most widely grown feed barleys. His induction recognizes not only those varieties, but the collaboration and research system that made them possible.

Rossnagel is quick to emphasize that none of it was the work of one person.

“The first thing I thought about was all the other people who contributed to whatever success I and my program had over the years,” he says. “We know that it’s not an individual who does this. It’s a group—a team.”

That team extends well beyond the breeder whose name appears beside a variety. It includes technicians, pathologists, quality specialists, statisticians, regional testing sites, seed growers and industry partners. It also includes the breeders who came before and those who will carry the germplasm forward.

CDC Fraser barley, for example, moved through three breeding careers. Its parents came from Brian Harvey’s program. Rossnagel advanced the material after Harvey retired, and Aaron Beattie later guided it through registration and release.

That kind of handoff is normal in plant breeding. The person who makes the original cross may never see the resulting variety reach farmers.

It also explains why lost research capacity cannot simply be switched back on when budgets improve.

“If you shut it off, it’s very, very difficult—and particularly costly—to start it up again,” Rossnagel says. “If you have to start from scratch, it’s going to be at least 10 years before anybody notices whether you’re getting anything done or not.”

The concern is not simply how many experimental lines Canada can process. Modern equipment, statistical tools and genetic technologies allow today’s breeding programs to evaluate tens of thousands of lines—far more than Rossnagel could handle when he entered the field in the early 1970s.

But efficiency and automation do not generate every idea.

“If you pare back down, and instead of having six or seven individual scientists concentrating on wheat breeding, you go down and say three people could handle all this, well, that’s half the ideas gone,” he says. “Particularly if you happen to lose the three people who had the really neat and innovative ideas, boy, that’s a problem.”

It is a timely distinction for Canadian agriculture. Consolidating programs may preserve the volume of material moving through a system, at least initially. It may not preserve the diversity of thinking, regional knowledge or willingness to pursue unconventional crosses.

That regional knowledge matters because Canadian agriculture is not one uniform production environment. A variety suited to southern Alberta may face different disease, moisture and maturity pressures than one grown in Manitoba, Ontario or Atlantic Canada.

“Agriculture is applied biology,” Rossnagel says. “Biology, all around the Earth, moves from the poles to the equator. It does not move from Newfoundland to B.C. like politics do.”