Jeff Melchior

Jeff Melchior

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Jeff Melchior is a reporter for Glacier FarmMedia publications. He grew up on a mixed farm in northern Alberta until the age of twelve and spent his teenage years and beyond in rural southern Alberta around the city of Lethbridge. Jeff has decades’ worth of experience writing for the broad agricultural industry in addition to community-based publications. He has a Communication Arts diploma from Lethbridge College (now Lethbridge Polytechnic) and is a two-time winner of Canadian Farm Writers Federation awards.

Stories by Jeff Melchior

The Repair Association is an American organization that says owners of equipment — from cars and tractors to appliances and medical equipment — should have access to software codes and other tools needed to repair it. But so far, efforts to pass right-to-repair legislation in the farm sector in 42 states and two provinces have not been successful.
Machinery

Right-to-repair advocates fighting but not gaining ground

No right-to-repair laws have been passed; dealers association says lack of broadband is the real issue

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Glacier FarmMedia – It’s an uphill battle but the right-to-repair movement is getting closer to winning over lawmakers, says a leading American advocate. Right-to-repair legislation has been introduced in 42 states and two provinces but none of the bills have made it into law, Gay Gordon-Byrne, head of The Repair Association, conceded during a recent […] Read more
This trial conducted by Farming Smarter’s Field Tested Program on a farm near Coaldale, Alta. compared the performance of a precision planter to an air seeder when planting canola. Stakes were used to identify which treatment was applied in each pass. That way, when the research team came back later, they could match the results to the treatment. Manager Lewis Baarda is pictured reviewing equipment calibration and seed rate protocols on his cellphone prior to the next pass.
Crops

Are on-farm trials a fit for your operation?

Testing something on the farm isn’t the same as conducting a scientifically valid field-scale trial

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Glacier FarmMedia – We’re hearing more and more about producers conducting their own on-farm trials to sharpen their management decisions. And it makes sense. Before committing to a practice, product, or variety, many growers want to see results on their own land. But on-farm trials demand time, resources, and determination. “You have to keep in […] Read more
Chemistry professor Maria DeRosa was looking for a better way to target drugs in human medicine when she realized her technique could be used in a fertilizer coating that would only release the nutrient when a plant needed it.
Crops

When the plant speaks, nutrients listen

Canadian researcher may have found a radically new way to fertilize crops

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Glacier FarmMedia – It sounds like science fiction, but some day there may be a fertilizer that only activates once the plant tells it to. That’s an oversimplification, but it’s the premise behind a researcher’s prototype for a “smart” fertilizer that uses a unique chemical to “listen” to calls for nutrients from the plant roots. […] Read more
It’s critical to slash the amount of energy needed to produce nitrogen fertilizer — and quantum computing and artificial intelligence could do that within five years by revolutionizing the chemical process used to make N, says Teo Laino, manager of IBM Research Zurich.
News

A fertilizer revolution is on the horizon

IBM says it will produce a breakthrough within five years that will greatly lower the energy needed to make nitrogen

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As fledgling technology goes, quantum computing sounds as science fiction as it gets. But if IBM fulfills a bold promise it made in September, crop producers will see the fruits of this technology within five years. By using quantum computing and artificial intelligence to speed up the process, IBM researchers are confident they can revolutionize […] Read more
The GrainViz imaging sensors (the black device) magnetically attach to the inside bin wall. A 24-sensor array provides 3D imaging, revealing the moisture content of every bushel in the bin.
Crops

Is 3D grain bin monitoring tech for you?

Electromagnetic imaging is pricey but the technology can reveal hot spots anywhere in a bin

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Three-dimensional bin monitoring is one of the more talked-about new ag technologies. Proponents of this type of grain monitoring — more formally called three-dimensional electromagnetic imaging or 3D EMI — claim it can spot potential trouble anywhere in the bin and alert producers before grain even begins to spoil. There’s also a safety factor out […] Read more

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