The Canadian Agri-Food Automation and Intelligence Network (CAAIN) is supporting agtech research and innovation projects through its 2022 Open Competition and its Beef & Pork Primary Processing Automation and Robotics Program.
CAAIN is contributing $682,028 towards the $2,225,680 total cost of Made in Canada autonomous equipment.
Edmonton’s Mojow Autonomous Solutions has developed an Autonomous Tractor Kit. President Owen Kinch is a grain farmer who worked off farm and spent seven years in SeedMaster’s R&D department, before becoming the first employee of the company’s autonomous vehicle spinoff, DOT Technology Corp.
While there, he met his friend and eventual Mojow co-founder, Mojtaba (Moji) Hedayatpour, a systems architect and software developer.
While still at DOT, Kinch farmed his own land year-after-year with the company’s autonomous platform, and the experience provided unique insight into the challenges that slow adoption of such innovation. When Kinch left DOT and returned to his farming roots, he soon became frustrated with how much of his work still required manual labour. He sat down with other producers to better understand how technology might improve broad-acre farming.
What emerged was eye-opening and led Hedayatpour and Kinch to found Mojow in early 2020. Autonomous agtech is widely viewed as a key to reducing the agri-food sector’s reliance on increasingly scarce labour. However, existing models generally depend on GPS-driven navigation controllers, which don’t deal well with unplanned obstacles. Kinch said they require constant supervision of a trained human operator.
“It’s relatively easy to develop machines that can drive up and down fields independently in straight lines,” Kinch said. “But that’s not the entire farming story. Three important bottlenecks or complex challenges must be addressed if agricultural machinery is to operate without human intervention.”
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