Two growers and two entrepreneurs took to the stage at the Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Convention to share their experiences with trialing new technologies on-farm.
Why it matters: Testing new technologies in commercial settings can offer the information farmers want to know, and increase the chance of adoption.
Gerbe Botden, orchard manager at Blue Mountain Fruit in Thornbury and Jenny Lemieux, co-founder and CEO of Vivid Machines, discussed their orchard trials with technology that gives fruit growers accurate, real-time crop data down to the tree level.
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Dave Petheram, chief operating officer at Schuyler Farms Ltd. in Simcoe, and Cole Powers, co-founder and CEO of IntelliCulture, talked about how the company’s system helps growers manage labour availability, pest prevention and machine safety.
Vivid Machines’ Vivid X system uses a real-time spectral sensor and computer vision system mounted onto farm equipment to automate the prediction and management of apple yield and quality.
Vivid X counts blossom clusters, which helps growers decide how to manage each tree so it grows the right number of apples. The system can also count and size apples from fruitlet all the way through harvest, enabling early yield predictions that growers can share with markets and packers.
“We used this (Vivid) in 2024 for doing bloom counts and measuring how many clusters there are in each tree. This lets us make bloom thinning decisions,” Botden explained.
More and better data supports more accurate marketing plans, which helps increase revenue, and as harvest approaches, Botden relies on knowing how much his own orchards will yield so he can fill the rest of his storage facility with fruit from other growers.
According to Lemieux, the system delivers over 90 per cent accuracy in its predictions, and Botden is now starting to overlay soil analysis information with his yield maps and using ChatGPT to help with correlation.
“This is the future of what we want to do, correlating soil analysis, heat map tree data and leaf analysis to target markets,” he said.
IntelliCulture uses specially developed data loggers that easily plug into a tractor to offer a real-time view of a farm’s equipment fleet. This gives farmers and farm managers detailed information that can help keep businesses competitive and costs under control.
CabView shows where each sprayer is in operation and sends instant notifications if the operator is overlapping, respraying or has missed a section.
CropView supports planning and coordinating crews and equipment, tracks how many acres were covered in how many hours by each machine, and issues alerts on overdue or inefficient work, and ShopView offers weekly equipment summaries of the general health of the farm fleet, automated maintenance scheduling and alerts of machine issues.
Schuyler Farms was the company’s first customer, starting with spray management and now monitoring all on-farm tasks. “I’ve been using IntelliCulture since the beginning of my time at Schuyler,” said Petheram, adding the transition has gone from simply presenting information to creating insights on what to with it.
The plug and play device records where each machine has been, and this is correlated to orchard block information to give a clear picture of what happened in the orchard on any given day.
