Leduc is the founder of Mon Système Fourrager (My Forage System), a digital decision-support platform built specifically for forage-based livestock operations. He’s currently one of 10 semi-finalists in Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s Agricultural Methane Reduction Challenge.

WHY IT MATTERS: There is currently little to no good quality field-level data Canadian farmers need to identify problem areas, calculate production costs or assess impacts of best management practices for forage crops.

Finalists will be selected this spring, with up to two winners to be announced in 2028, who will each receive up to $1 million to scale their solutions.

Leduc, a sheep and beef farmer with a PhD in animal science from Université Laval who completed post-graduate work with McGill and Lactanet, kept running into the same issue: farmers are being encouraged to adopt best management practices for forages, but few had the data needed to know whether those changes actually worked.

“Forage systems are long-term systems,” he said.

“If you make a mistake in seeding, you might not see the impact for a long time. If you choose the wrong bull, it’s two years before you fully understand the outcome.”

That makes it harder to connect management decisions to results — and even harder to justify change. The core problem, Leduc said, is data.

“In forage systems, data is not collected in a standardized way. Producers want answers right away. But to get analytics, you need data — and in forage, that takes time,” he said, adding this gap limits progress not only on productivity, but also on greenhouse gas reductions.

Enter Mon Système Fourrager, an integrated platform that connects data “from soil to animal,” letting users log and import field management data, harvest information, forage and silage analyses, and observations such as winter survival or stand density.

Leduc also acquired and is modernizing EweManage, a sheep and goat management software program, and is developing Agri-Doc, a module for agronomists to easily log information during farm visits, generate reports required for provincial support programs and transcribe voice notes directly into structured records. The goal is to make data capture faster and less burdensome.

“Data collection is like accounting,” said Leduc.

“Rationally, it’s good. Emotionally, it’s boring.”

He is also experimenting with mobile chatbot interfaces that will allow producers to ask questions and receive insights based on their own Excel-based records.

According to Leduc, helping producers measure yields, track forage analyses and link feed quality to animal performance will support more precise feeding strategies that can improve digestibility, reduce methane intensity and increase overall farm efficiency.

Leduc emphasized that practices that reduce emissions often also improve profitability — but only if producers can see and measure the impact.

“You need to recognize you have a problem, know the possible solutions, evaluate them and then monitor the results,” he said.

“Without data, you can’t do that.”

Rather than marketing directly to individual producers one by one, Leduc is focusing on partnerships with forage labs and agronomists who already need to collect and interpret data. If advisers adopt the platform, producers are more likely to follow.

He currently has a few hundred users of his technologies, mostly in Quebec, where he works closely with a network of producers, agronomists, agricultural organizations like the Canadian Forage and Grassland Association, and forage labs.

Next milestones include launching the agronomists’ tool and hopefully advancing to the final round of the methane challenge, which would provide an additional grant of up to $500,000 to support further development and testing of his system. He’s also received funding from Investissement Quebec.

His longer-term vision is straightforward: keep the business viable and help producers become more profitable while reducing their environmental footprint. The forage sector’s future depends on closing the data gap, he says.

“The answer lies in accessing and leveraging the data producers already collect, but don’t use fully,” he said.

The post Closing the forage data gap: innovation aims to cut methane and boost margins appeared first on Farmtario.

The Agricultural Industry Electronics Foundation (AEF) has announced that connectors will use ethernet, which is commonly used in business and consumer computer networks, and will make data transfer 4,000 times faster.

WHY IT MATTERS: Farm equipment is increasingly data-driven, and connection infrastructure has not kept up.

“Driving that is primarily the desire to have cameras on the equipment,” said Ryan Milligan, who helps manage communications for AEF. Most of the major equipment manufacturers in the world are part of AEF.

More cameras are being added to equipment so farmers can see larger equipment from more angles. Cameras are also a critical part of partial and full autonomous operation, and fast movement of data to processors is important for safety.

Standards are important if farmers are to mix their tractor and implement brands, as most do. The first explosion of electronic data collection and control happened when ISOBUS standards were accepted across the industry at 250 kilobits per second speeds.

The first stage of standards, set in the 2000s, handled functions like planter, sprayer and fertilizer spreader section control, and GPS data.

A rapid expansion in data, sensors and cameras on equipment means new speed is needed.

The T1 ethernet standard was borrowed from the automotive sector, said Milligan, so the technology is already proven.

T1 ethernet can transmit a gigabit of data up to 40 metres in one second. With the new standard, video through ethernet and ISOBUS data will be able to be transmitted to the tractor, or to the implement.

That means farmers could be using multiple implements with cameras, from different companies, and feed that data into the monitor and processors of the tractor.

It won’t only be the hardware that’s standardized, but also the datasets, said Milligan at the AEF booth at Agritechnica.

Wireless transmission is also being standardized in a project in Europe that will let people in cars know that there’s a piece of farm equipment ahead of them on the road. BMW and Volkswagen vehicles already have this capability.

The AEF guideline is expected to become a documented international standard in 2026.

“It’s going to unlock use cases we haven’t even determined yet,” said Milligan.

The post New tractor-implement data connection will boost speeds by 4,000 times appeared first on Farmtario.

The National Index on Agri-Food Performance 2025 Update, created by the centre, is meant to support the credibility and competitiveness of Canadian agriculture amidst scrutiny in business and politics worldwide.

Why it matters: Rising expectations of consumers and retailers make respected data important for the agriculture sector to support its claims.

The index is comprised of a wide range of indicators and metrics, developed with input from some 165 partners across the agri-food industry. It’s organized into four sustainability blocks: environment, food integrity, economic, and societal well-being. Key take-aways from the 2025 update are:

• Environment indicators: Greenhouse gas emissions have plateaued, soil health continues to improve and water quality remains strong. However, methane emissions are increasing, and rising water use signals potential future stress.

• Food integrity indicators: Food security is worsening, with one in four Canadians experiencing food insecurity in 2023, underscoring affordability as a critical social and policy issue.

• Economic indicators: The agri-food sector’s economic contributions remain steady, but face challenges. GDP output is up, yet the sector’s share of the economy has slightly declined. Rising farm debt ratios and declining research and development investment raise concerns about long-term competitiveness and innovation capacity.

• Societal well-being Indicators: Social indicators are mixed. Fatality rates are falling and wages are increasing, but mental health stress, inclusion gaps and temporary foreign worker non-compliance highlight ongoing vulnerabilities in the sector.

Amanda Richardson, executive director for the centre, says the 2025 update is also useful in identifying what sustainability areas are still missing in current assessment efforts. The absence of robust metrics for measuring pest control and biodiversity, for example, make it impossible to accurately determine if progress is being made in those areas.

“That’s a risk all on its own,” Richardson says.

“In terms of what we need to do going forward…that’s exactly the purpose of the Index is identifying what these gaps are, and to identify which ones we need to prioritize the most. Where can we put our efforts towards collecting better data?”

The scale and diversity of Canadian agriculture also remains a perennial challenge in developing accurate whole-sector assessments. Richardson describes data under environmental indicators, for example, as “all over the place,” and reiterates the presence of regional differences.

Indeed, some conclusions appear to conflict with those of other regional sustainability reports.

According to the 2025 benchmarking update, for example, methane remains the dominant greenhouse gas from agriculture, increasing by 13.4 per cent year-over-year. Nitrous oxide emissions, conversely, declined by 12.3 per cent.

Informed by data from Environment and Climate Change Canada, these numbers differ from the 2025 “Report on Progress to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions” from the Office of the Auditor General of Ontario. The latter states that, in Ontario, greenhouse gasses from the province’s cattle herd – the animal most often associated with agricultural methane – have dropped as the provincial herd fell by 500,000 between 2005 and 2023.

However, emissions from crop production doubled over the same period, in part driven by the conversion of land from livestock production to crop production. This increase “more than offset the emissions reductions from animal production,” and is “the main cause” of the net increase in emissions from Ontario’s agriculture sector.

Another challenge, Richardson says, is the lag time between data collection and analysis, and events occurring in real time. Things happening now or in the recent past, that is, are hard to account for in such analysis, particularly as the impacts of those events – tariffs, weather events, etc. – are often not immediately clear.

Other findings highlight longer term trends.

“Food security – I still find it to be quite a shocking statistic,” Richardson says, referring to the finding of one in four Canadians experiencing food insecurity as of 2023.

“We’re not hearing that for the first time. That’s a big number we all need to pay attention to.”

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Why it matters: Precision feeding pigs promises to add cost efficiency and advocates have also tied the technology to better animal welfare and sustainability.

Aline Remus is an associate professor at the University of Guelph with a focus on precision feeding. She spoke at a virtual symposium hosted by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s Sherbrooke Research and Development Centre.

“Individual precision feeding means daily tailoring diets for each one of the animals in our pens. So, we use real-time data obtained for each one of these animals,” Remus said.

She found that tailoring individual pigs’ diets can reduce nitrogen and phosphorus excretion by 40 per cent and decrease greenhouse gas emissions by seven per cent compared to traditional group feeding methods.

The technique can also decrease feeding costs by 12 per cent while reducing labour requirements for handling fees and caring for animals, Remus said.

Using precision feeding techniques in pig growing operations can reduce production cost by eight per cent, protein and phosphorus intake by 25 per cent, and excretion by 40 per cent, according to a paper published by Oxford University Press.

Traditional phase feeding provides the same diet to all animals in a pen during a specific growth phase. In contrast, precision feeding adjusts each animal’s diet daily based on individual data, gradually decreasing nutrient supply as animals approach their requirements.

“We not only can feed these animals closer to the requirements, but we can also tailor their growth,” Remus said.

Changing the mix of amino acids and energy in the pigs’ diet changes the growth rate of the animals and also their body composition.

Testing metabolic responses

The study involved 60 pigs divided equally between conventional group phase feeding and individual precision feeding systems. To test how the different feeding methods affected metabolic responses to stress researchers used a 24-hour fasting protocol.

“Fasting 24 hours is a great model for physiological stress,” Remus said, adding that such extended periods without feed can worsen feed conversion by seven points and increase costs by three U.S. dollars per pig.

Results showed that despite receiving 23 per cent less lysine, an essential amino acid, precision-fed pigs maintained similar blood concentrations of the nutrient compared to group-fed animals.

“We have a very similar plasma concentration, which means these animals are probably very efficient, (at) preserving and keeping this lysine,” she said.

Surprising efficiency findings

The precision-fed pigs broke down nitrogen more efficiently, demonstrated better nitrogen retention and showed enhanced metabolic pathways related to antioxidant defenses and stress response.

The research suggests precision-fed animals are more reactive and can quickly mobilize their reserves and respond better to oxidative stress than group-fed pigs. This finding surprised Remus, given that precision-fed animals receive fewer nutrients overall.

Market opportunities

The study also found evidence that precision-fed pigs may produce different muscle proteins, including increased carnosine, an antioxidant compound that some companies are trying to enhance in meat products.

“There is an opportunity to actually not only decrease environmental impact, but also have a niche market,” Remus said.

The research concludes that precision feeding creates metabolically flexible animals that can adapt to nutritional challenges while using resources more efficiently.

“In practice, this means that we can formulate diets closer to the requirement of the animals, especially in terms of amino acids, without compromising resilience,” Remus said.

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They called for a national data strategy during a round table discussion at the Canadian Federation of Agriculture summer meeting and ahead of the federal-provincial-territorial annual ministerial meeting.

Why it matters: Data-driven technologies will help farmers meet sustainability and productivity goals, but governance and management of data are major hurdles.

“The agriculture sector is in the midst of a transition characterized less and less by diesel and more and more by data,” said CFA first vice-president and Saskatchewan grain farmer Todd Lewis.

He told the ministers the low-hanging fruit that drove productivity is gone. Agricultural productivity around the world has declined since 2011, according to a 2023 Farm Credit Canada report.

“FCC, RBC, the OECD and FAO all agree — if we want to reverse this trend, and improve our productivity growth, we need to invest in innovation and data-driven technologies,” Lewis said.

This would generate stronger economic outcomes, support development of more responsive risk management programs and improve sustainability, he added.

Full use of data generated on farms is a ways away. A survey found less than half of farms used data to manage production, Lewis said.

CFA and its member organizations presented four recommendations to ministers:

• Form a pan-Canadian data strategy to signal to farmers and industry that the country has a plan to invest in innovation, digital skills, data management and reporting;
• Finish the job of rural connectivity;
• Devise programs to help farmers invest in digital infrastructure tools and a legislative framework to support interoperability; and
• Support standards development and capacity building for projects already underway.

Lewis said farmers’ credibility is at stake. As well, he said the forthcoming Sustainable Agriculture Strategy must be based on data if it is to succeed.

“If it isn’t, we won’t get buy-in from the sector and we won’t get the end result we are looking for on the environment. The inability to communicate (that) our data is informing policy undermines Canada’s reputation at home and abroad, and creates uncertainty around the climate for investment.”

Data ownership is one of the big questions around this topic. During a panel presentation, Prince Edward Island farmer Matthew Ramsay said farmers should leverage the governance structure of their member organizations to keep data secure.

He has done several projects for the P.E.I. Federation of Agriculture (PEIFA). One that used remotely sensed land use data and the federal Holos model quantified emissions and future reduction potential. The idea was to find how farmers could access voluntary carbon markets.

However, he said data and governance were major hurdles.

“Few farms have enough data to meet the reporting and verification requirements of carbon markets,” he told the ministers.

That also means farmers can’t use data to become more resilient and sustainable.

The future “requires a safe and secure system of managing highly complex soil carbon model data owned by farmers and managed by farm organizations,” Ramsay said.

He and others developed an agricultural Internet of Things network infrastructure that uses infield hardware and PEIFA-owned secure servers. Farmers could use the organization’s governance structure to manage data ownership and emissions reduction credits.

It’s designed to take field data, analyze it and put it back in the field, Ramsay said. It’s only possible if data exists in a common format and place, however.

He and several universities have already done work showing significant dollar savings and nitrous oxide emissions reductions using map data. He said that work led him to conclude that having farmer-owned data, all in one place and governed by existing democratic farm organizations, can prove to farmers and stakeholders that changes in practices are providing ecosystem services.

Producer participation

Tyler Fulton, vice-president of the Canadian Cattle Association and president of Manitoba Beef Producers, said the beef industry is so dependent on trade that science-based metrics are key.

That has to be true abroad and at home, he said.

However, the industry is challenged by low uptake in programs such as Verified Beef Production Plus and the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, which provide valuable data.

“Speaking on behalf of the export-oriented sector, we need voluntary third party certifications that work with government,” he said during the round table.

“In the United States, they have the Agricultural Marketing Services, or AMS, that verifies that process and certifies third parties. We would like to see Canada have a similar system through AAFC across the board, both for domestic and international purposes. Working with third party verifiers would help AAFC collect data without adding additional burdens on producers.”

Both Saskatchewan and Alberta have incentives for producers to sign on, and Fulton said industry-led initiatives are also important. Data gives the sector potential to “leapfrog” ahead.

“Satellite remote sensing technology is really a game changer for land management and managing range land and pasture.”

Genetic evaluation tools that didn’t exist three years ago are now commercially available, he said. Individual rumen boluses could report data on those animals and their health outcomes.

“There’s just a phenomenal amount of data and potential to lever that into real positive economic outcomes for ranchers and farmers,” Fulton said.

Data can inform policy

Better data on what’s happening in farm fields may have prevented the controversy over the federal fertilizer emissions reduction target. Frank Annau, director of product stewardship at Fertilizer Canada and co-chair of the working group on fertilizer emissions reductions under the SAS, said recommendations are developed but are under embargo.

However, he said there is a pressing need to update the national inventory report of greenhouse gas emissions with better data about farm practices that reduce emissions.

“We also believe that data reporting capacity must be enhanced for experts to provide better knowledge extension at the farm level. And most importantly, any farms that collect data must receive direct economic return if they want to voluntarily share, and sharing must be voluntary,” he said during his presentation.

Annau used federal carbon offset credits as an example of how farmers could be rewarded. They could receive credits in exchange for data on reduced emissions.

He also said farmers must be confident their data will be kept confidential.

Ministers were receptive to the idea of improved data management but said better connectivity and more money are required.

New Brunswick agriculture minister Margaret Johnson said the province recently invested in a digital chair for agriculture at the University of New Brunswick.

She said governments “need to recognize the urgency of incorporating digital systems and at the same time must assure, with the help of the federal government, that with this need for digital and cellular technology … that rural Canada has access to that stuff.”

Several ministers noted how much their provinces have spent on rural connectivity, but there is still a long way to go and billions to be spent. Manitoba minister Ron Kostyshyn said federal dollars are required to help provinces get there.

Ontario minister Rob Flack said Ontario’s largest dairy, at 3,300 cows, is in his riding, along with the largest chicken processing plant and hundreds of other farms and agricultural businesses that rely on connection.

“When I drive through my riding, I lose connection all the time, so if you’re not connected, none of this matters,” he said. “I would maybe ask a pointed question: will somebody else step up and help us out?”

Federal minister Lawrence MacAulay said all jurisdictions are spending money and pledged to continue working with the provinces.

“Without it, none of the rest of it is any good,” he said.

CFA president Keith Currie reminded the ministers that this requires a whole-of-government approach because all of society benefits.

RJ Sigurdson, Alberta’s minister, said farmers who are more profitable will innovate quicker. That government has allocated money to the Simpson Centre for Food and Agricultural Policy at the University of Calgary to build a digital strategy for agriculture.

The post Farmers want data strategy appeared first on Farmtario.

Farms in North and South America, Europe and Australia are facing crop losses as extreme weather spreads over an unusually wide geographic area. Canada is the world’s fourth-largest wheat exporter and the biggest shipper of canola.

Statistics Canada estimated all-wheat production at 29.8 million metric tonnes, the second-lowest in eight years, and down 13 per cent from last year. The estimate was slightly higher than StatCan’s estimate of 29.5 million tonnes in its previous report on Aug. 29.

The new wheat estimate fell short of the average industry expectation of 30.4 million tonnes.

“It does seem that global high-protein wheat is snug for another year,” said Ed Broschinski, lead analyst at MarketSense, Cargill Canada’s grain advisory service.

Broschinski added that U.S. supplies may partly offset Canada’s small wheat crop, with anecdotal reports of better than expected North Dakota spring wheat yields.

StatCan estimated durum production at 4.1 million tonnes, down 30 per cent year over year, and the second-smallest crop of the wheat used to make pasta in 13 years, after the worse 2021 drought. The agency had previously estimated production of 4.3 million tonnes.

StatCan based its estimates on satellite and agroclimatic data as of Aug. 31, one month later than it used for the previous report.

Farmers look to produce 17.4 million tonnes of canola, down seven per cent from last year and their second-smallest crop in nine years. StatCan had previously estimated 17.6 million tonnes.

Canola supplies also look tight if demand is average, Broschinski said.

ICE Canada November canola futures dipped 0.4 per cent, little changed from before the report’s release.

StatsCan left its oat harvest estimate at 2.4 million tonnes, down 53 per cent from last year.

— Rod Nickel is a Reuters correspondent in Winnipeg.

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In a world with a dwindling number of grain producers and a growing population, Deere and its rivals are developing self-driving equipment loaded with the latest software that is harvesting a new kind of bumper crop: data. All that translates into recurring revenue, something companies such as Apple have long enjoyed and industrial manufacturers like Deere hungrily eye.

“The more technology we can develop to allow farmers to get productivity out of their land without having to spend so much money on fertilizer and inputs, the better off everybody is,” Julian Sanchez, Deere’s director of emerging technology, told Reuters.

Investments in automation for high-horsepower equipment is only at its inception for Deere and rivals Agco and CNH Industrial. The next step is to equip machines to plant seeds using satellite imagery and soil data, Sanchez said.

While Deere has not outlined what that could mean to its bottom line, last fall U.S. automaker General Motors said it was targeting up to $25 billion in software-driven services by 2030, and added its Cruise self-driving unit could achieve $50 billion in annual revenue within six years (all figures US$).

The race among farm equipment companies to automate agriculture has accelerated amid a burgeoning food crisis. And Deere’s strategy around scaling its suite of tech products is now in the spotlight, after the manufacturer’s stock plunged 14 per cent on May 20 following a quarterly revenue miss. It was the biggest drop for Deere in 14 years.

The timing comes as the war in Ukraine and widespread drought in key grain-producing countries have roiled commodity markets, causing grain and farm input prices to spike as supplies shrink. That, in turn, has U.S. farmers scrambling to boost crop yields, yet limit their fertilizer and pesticide use.

That and a shrinking farm labor workforce has opened the door for Deere and others to make their high-tech push. For farmers, the prize is higher crop yields. For Illinois-based Deere, it’s the revenue.

Autonomous machinery is where Deere is placing its bet as artificial intelligence becomes more integrated in farming. Its self-driving 8R tillage tractor will be the latest addition to the company’s algorithm-enabled offerings when the green machines go on sale in the fall.

The new tractor will be priced at $500,000. However, the autonomy feature will be sold separately. Deere executives told analysts at a conference that the company will largely maintain its “point-of-sale” model for equipment, but will integrate a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model for its autonomous solutions. That will likely include their self-driving tractor.

“While it may take us a few years to build out a base of recurring revenues, autonomous solutions, on top of our underlying machine forms, will be recurring,” said Joshua Jepsen, Deere’s deputy financial officer.

The recurring revenue model can be economically favorable to heavy machinery manufacturers “based on those data insights,” said Michael Staebe, a Bain and Co. partner focused on machinery.

In Deere’s case, using a subscription model by either selling or leasing its driverless tractor can result in higher margins.

“After expenses, every incremental dollar falls straight to the bottom line,” Edward Jones analyst Matt Arnold said. “We would expect it to be an attractive offering to farmers given the efficiency it offers them, and lucrative to Deere.”

Agronomic data helps bottom line

Farmers have long been wary about how machinery and supplier firms profit off the data gleaned from their operations, and how secure such data is. But with farmers facing economic pressures, Deere and other manufacturers said it is easier to sell farmers on making such investments.

One key reason: The ability to glean crop insights from huge amounts of agronomic data takes the guesswork out of when to plant and how many seeds to use — which saves farmers money.

“Everybody in the industry is much more data-focused than we have ever seen them,” said Michael Boehlje, a professor at Purdue University. “(Companies) can do profit projections by geographic space in fields. That takes you to a different level of thinking and analysis.”

In 2020, Deere acquired Harvest Profit, a farm profitability software company that has been integrated into the John Deere Operations Center. The platform stores and lets farmers access their machine data from the cloud.

“When I look at what precision ag has done for our operations and what we can accomplish in a day’s time compared to 10 to 20 years ago, it’s so much easier,” said Jeremy Jack, a row-crop farmer in Mississippi and chief executive of Silent Shade Planting Co.

Ron Heck’s fleet of Case IH combines and tractors are equipped with automated steering to harvest his 4,000 acres where he rotates soybeans and corn.

The fourth-generation farmer in Iowa said some of his new equipment is loaded with technology. “Unfortunately for us it costs more, but hopefully the costs will be paid back in the long run by better efficiency.”

— Reporting for Reuters by Bianca Flowers and Joseph White.

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“For instance, with nitrogen back in 2017, about 40 per cent of dealers said that there was some influence or major influence on a nitrogen decision. In 2021, 86 per cent of dealers said that data provided some influence or a major influence on their nitrogen decisions,” said Bruce Erickson of Purdue University, who led the study.

Why it matters: As data collection on individual farms becomes easier to gather and understand, more farmers can use it, contributing to their profit margins.

“I have similar parallel data for phosphorus, potassium, hybrids, plant rates, variable seeding rates, irrigation, and for the most part everything has doubled.”

Erickson said the survey illustrates that management decisions on farms are increasingly made with the information collected on farms, as opposed to information gathered from seed dealers and university or extension research.

“More and more they’re looking at what’s happening on their farms and making decisions based on that data, which they really weren’t capable of collecting all that data in years past like they can today,” Erickson said. “It’s a pretty major sea change.”

For the survey, 225 American ag retailers answered questions on the technology used in their business, precision products and services offered to customers, retailers’ estimation of farmer use of precision products, as well as profitability and constraints to adoption of precision ag technologies.

Variable rate applications of seed and fertilizer are commonly offered by retailers, with almost 90 per cent of residents offering these services. However, only 25 per cent of respondents offer variable rate pesticide applications.

Erickson said there are a few reasons the latter is lagging.

“It’s a lot harder to characterize a weed or a disease or an insect in a part of a field versus, you know, doing something like grid soil sampling and you can get a test result and then that’s used to determine how much fertilizer to put on in various parts of the field,” he said.

“There’s also not a lot of tolerance for escapes, and so farmers would rather just treat the whole field at a high rate.”

Survey respondents said they believe there will be a doubling of precision pest management applications they offer within three years.

However, Erickson said previous surveys received similar results and the level of precision pest management services did not significantly increase.

“For the last three surveys it’s been the same story and so, if their prediction was right, we should be at 50 per cent now, but we’re not,” Erickson said.

The survey found dealers see a big promise for UAVs in the future for data gathering and applications.

In 2021, 14 per cent of dealers offer a service that uses a drone to apply crop inputs, but by 2024, 29 per cent of respondents expect to offer this service.

“We’re seeing in the future that dealers are really interested in using UAVs not only for scouting fields and taking imagery, but also to apply fungicides, insecticides and herbicides,” Erickson said.

By 2024, 16 per cent of dealers expect to offer a robotic crop scouting service, while 13 per cent plan to offer robotic weeding.

This article was originally published at The Western Producer.

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Russia is the world’s largest wheat exporter, supplying it mainly to Africa and the Middle East. It competes with the European Union and Ukraine.

The ministry “is currently doing technical work with the regions to refine the form and structure of the operational data on crop harvesting and sowing of winter grains,” it said on Wednesday.

“Once this work is completed, the information will continue to be published on the ministry’s website on a daily basis,” it added.

The latest harvesting data on the ministry’s website is as of Aug. 6. Its analytical centre Specagro last published the data as of Aug. 11, when Russia had harvested 74.9 million tonnes of grain before drying and cleaning.

The ministry last week left its 2021 grain crop forecast unchanged at 127.4 million tonnes, including 81 million tonnes of wheat, the Interfax news agency reported.

Its forecast is higher than those of analysts.

The ministry is in discussions with state statistics service Rosstat over a difference in their estimates of Russia’s 2021 grain sowing area, Interfax reported last week, citing the ministry.

The ministry’s crop forecast takes into account one million hectares which farmers resowed with grain this year, it told Interfax, adding that the ministry and the stats service planned to disclose their consolidated point of view on the issue soon.

Rosstat’s estimate of the pre-harvest winter wheat area was one of the reasons behind a wave downgrades of Russia’s 2021 grain crop in August, along with dry and hot weather.

— Reporting for Reuters by Polina Devitt.

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Telus Agriculture and Rabo AgriFinance, which is headquartered in St. Louis and serves U.S. farm customers, announced Monday they’ve jointly bought software firm Conservis for an undisclosed sum.

Conservis comes to the joint venture already handling farmers’ financial reporting data via the Rabo AgriFinance platform since 2018, along with data from Climate Corp.’s Climate FieldView platform, the John Deere Operations Center and Crop Data Management Systems’ crop chemical database.

The Minneapolis company’s products are meant to allow a farmer to integrate as-applied and yield data directly from those platforms into a “unified view” of the business, with “no extra hardware or manual data re-entry required.”

Thus, “with all your activity records in one spot, you can decide to share reports with landowners, regulators and lenders using data directly from your fields at any point in the season,” Conservis says on its website.

“Understanding your true cost, including cost per bushel and per acre will help ensure you make informed decisions that yield higher profits.”

Calgary-based Telus Agriculture has been shopping for farm management platforms since before Telus created the new ag unit last year, among them Decisive Farming, Farm At Hand, Muddy Boots and Feedlot Health Management Services.

The joint owners said their vision for Conservis is to deliver an “even more robust” platform across a “diverse range of crops and livestock.”

For its part, Telus Ag’s existing tech portfolio is expected to “help enhance the Conservis platform’s functionality” and include access to Telus’ Agricultural Data Exchange (ADX) and Agricultural Services platform (ASX).

The new owners said they “remain committed to Conservis’ strict data privacy standards,” emphasizing farmers on Conservis will still own their data and will still control when partners — Rabobank and Telus Ag included — get that information. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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