Canadian farmers slow to warm to AI, automation

Nov 08, 2019

Standing onstage in an ornate conference room at the Delta Bessborough Hotel in downtown Saskatoon, former Saskatchewan premier Dr. Grant Devine pitched the agri-food industry on a new idea: a wheat tube.

More specifically, a hypothetical hyperloop Devine says could fire shipments of wheat from Moose Jaw to Langley, B.C. at hundreds of kilometres an hour. He says students at the University of Saskatchewan, where he is a professor, had priced the idea at around $18 billion.

“You’d load it like you would any other hopper car, load it in the capsule and — zoom! — it’s out there in a matter of hours,” Devine said.

It’s an odd example of how artificial intelligence, robotics and automation transforming agriculture.

This week’s conference organization by the Agri-Food Innovation Council aimed to highlight how tech could address problems like labour shortages on Canadian farms – and address a dissonance between what’s already available and what farmers are using.

“It’s not a question of when AI is coming. AI is already here,” Agri-Food Innovation Council CEO Serge Buy said. “The new technologies are coming much faster than anticipated. The problem now is how we enable producers to adopt those technologies.”

Canada is generally recognized as a world leader in AI innovation, propelled by hundreds of millions in federal funding for “superclusters” of research. One supercluster aims to make Western Canada a leader in producing non-animal protein, for example.

And while the traditional image of agriculture might clash with images of robots and the next generation of tech, AI is already being used to sort seeds; deploy pesticides; spread fertilizer and even harvest crops.

Dawn Trautman, is the manager of smart agriculture and food innovation with Alberta Innovates, one of the groups that received a $49.5 million grant from the federal government to expand automation and digitization of farming.

She calls it “the next revolution for agriculture.”

“Governments in general are very interested in the potential of digital technologies in multiple industries. There’s a big potential to fill that gap of all the data that might be available for producers, like sensors in the soil or cloud computing,” Trautman said.

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Video: Spring 2026 weather outlook for Wisconsin; What an early-arriving El Niño could mean

Northeast Wisconsin is a small corner of the world, but our weather is still affected by what happens across the globe.

That includes in the equatorial Pacific, where changes between El Niño and La Niña play a role in the weather here -- and boy, have there been some abrupt changes as of late.

El Niño and La Niña are the two phases of what is collectively known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO for short. These are the swings back and forth from unusually warm to unusually cold sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean along the equator.

Since this past September, we have been in a weak La Niña, which means water temperatures near the Eastern Pacific equator have been cooler than usual. That's where we're at right now.

Even last fall, the long-term outlook suggested a return to neutral conditions by spring and potentially El Niño conditions by summer.

But there are some signs this may be happening faster than usual, which could accelerate the onset of El Niño.

Over the last few weeks, unusually strong bursts of westerly winds farther west in the Pacific -- where sea surface temperatures are warmer than average -- have been observed. There is a chance that this could accelerate the warming of those eastern Pacific waters and potentially push us into El Niño sooner than usual.

If we do enter El Nino by spring -- which we'll define as the period of March, April and May -- there are some long-term correlations with our weather here in Northeast Wisconsin.

Looking at a map of anomalously warm weather, most of the upper Great Lakes doesn't show a strong correlation, but in general, the northern tiers of the United States do tend to lean to that direction.

The stronger correlation is with precipitation. El Niño conditions in spring have historically come with a higher risk of very dry weather over that time frame, so this will definitely be a transition we'll have to watch closely as we move out of winter.