If you take Alberta’s Highway 2 south from Edmonton toward Calgary, the landscape is pure prairie. The highway bisects fields that unfold endlessly toward a horizon that most evenings is a pastel blend of mauve and sherbet orange.
There’s little else along this stretch of rural paradise, save for rest stops and the occasional lonely highway casino, their parking lots full of F-150s. Driving this route between Alberta’s major cities can become so routine that the only way to tell you’re actually moving is to count the passing farms that dot the landscape.
One of those farms is distinctly not like the others.
Just 45 minutes shy of Red Deer, in Olds, Alta., sits the Olds College Smart Farm. The 3,300 acres on which this part of a century-old post-secondary institution sits look like most other farms in the area. The fields rotate with the seasons between green, canola yellow, and gold. Its herd of purebred Red Angus cattle and flocks of sheep graze leisurely in the feedlot.
But looks can be deceiving. This farm—and a network of others like it across Canada—is growing the next generation of agricultural innovation.
IP farming
The Olds College Smart Farm officially began in 2018 with the idea of finding a way to support technology development in the Canadian agriculture industry. Today, it leads the Pan-Canadian Smart Farm Network, a $2.9-million coalition of farms focused on research and development. With members throughout Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Southern Ontario, the network of smart farms tests and refines R&D projects across the agricultural sector, serving as vital proving grounds for IP, and refining innovations so they are adoption-ready for industry professionals.
“As companies come out with different technology, they want to have that validated or evaluated for their own use. They can come to Olds College, and we can help them create a project where we are validating or demonstrating their product, which they can then use for their own purposes going forward,” said Herman Simons, the manager of smart agriculture applied research at Olds College Smart Farm.
“It’s definitely that last step between product development and actually showing off what [a piece of tech] does so that producers can see and have confidence in it,” he added.
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