Cochrane local leading development of farming and ranching carbon analysis tech

Jul 14, 2022

A former Cochranite has found himself at the forefront of the agricultural tech sector, first academically and now in a commercial setting.

Jason Bradley is the president of Carbon Asset Solutions (CAS), an Alberta firm implementing a technology called ‘mobile inelastic neutron scattering’ to measure, record and verify carbon content in soil on farms and ranches. The technology is being tested at Olds College’s Smart Farm, of which Bradley was the first director before joining CAS in 2021.

“The college and the Olds College Smart Farm serves a a research and development location,” he explained.

“‘Applied research technology validation’ is the best way to explain that.”

Bradley’s path to running the Smart Farm program and CAS has been exceptionally diverse. After ten years as a project manager with Nortel, he left Cochrane in 1998 to manage a large-scale cattle operation with his family west of Sundre.

“There’s an interesting confluence there because my technology experience as a professional and my agriculture experience cattle ranching came together,” he said.

“When I came to Olds College in 2017 it was to be a one-semester contract constructor teaching beef cattle management. But it was really shortly after that, where the technology and agriculture came together when I was asked to fulfill the role of the director for Smart Agriculture and help the college establish the first iteration of the Olds College Smart Farm.”

The Smart Farm tests out various farming innovations on several plots of land, much of it directly adjacent to the Olds College campus. They test across a variety of crops like barley, oats, hay and ‘crop cocktail’, and also maintain herds of cows and sheep to study the management of grazing.

“The smart farm itself is a 3600-acre representation of a commercial enterprise using all types of ag technology to demonstrate those pieces of equipment, those technologies in an actual farm enterprise,” Bradley explained.

The school collaborates with a range of producers, economic development organizations and private firms.

“It was through that that I got introduced to many different companies that were looking to validate their technologies as projects on the Smart Farm, and one of them was Carbon Asset Solutions which is the company that I now work for.”

CAS uses a ‘lab on wheels’ roughly the size of two barbecues, which is towed through a farmer’s or rancher’s field as it analyzes soil content using mobile inelastic neutron scattering (MINS).

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Video: Evolution of Beef Cattle Farming

The Clear Conversations podcast took to the road for a special episode recorded in Nashville during CattleCon, bringing listeners straight into the heart of the cattle industry. Host Tracy Sellers welcomed rancher Steve Wooten of Beatty Canyon Ranch in Colorado for a wide-ranging discussion that blended family history and sustainability, particularly as it relates to the future of beef production.

Sustainability emerged as a central theme of the conversation, a word that Wooten acknowledges can mean very different things depending on who you ask. For him, sustainability starts with the soil. Healthy soil produces healthy grass, which supports efficient cattle capable of producing year after year with minimal external inputs. It’s an approach that equally considers vegetation, animal efficiency, and long-term profitability.

That philosophy aligned naturally with Wooten’s involvement in the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, where he served as a representative for the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association. The roundtable brings together the entire beef supply chain—from producers to retailers—along with universities, NGOs, and allied industries. Its goal is not regulation, Wooten emphasized, but collaboration, shared learning, and continuous improvement.