Terramera on Monday put forward a $730 million proposal for an initiative it calls the Global Centre for Regenerative Agriculture, which would oversee efforts to help Canadian farms and ranches reduce atmospheric carbon, by “incentivizing regenerative farming practices.”

Terramera said its Global Centre would enable Canadian farms and ranches to pull 78 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent out of the atmosphere by 2050, stimulate 2.5 million new jobs and generate over $8.7 trillion in new economic activity “over the coming decades.”

The company said its $730 million plan would combine private investment “along with applications for federal and provincial support” to build and scale the technology needed.

The technology proposed would “reliably quantify” soil carbon sequestration and compensate farmers by establishing a sustainable carbon credit market, the company said.

The funding needed would go to create “the world’s largest regenerative agriculture initiative, building multi-purpose facilities including labs, greenhouses, offices and classrooms in British Columbia and integrate field testing sites across Canada.”

Assuming funding goals are met, Terramera said its plan is “shovel-ready and ready to staff in 2021, with sensing studies and facility construction extending through 2025.”

Terramera is no stranger to public-private partnerships, having spearheaded a $6.9 million project which earlier this year scored support from Canada’s Digital Technology Supercluster. Privately held Terramera, which formed in 2010, was one of the founding members of the digital supercluster.

Its supercluster project aims to use computational biochemistry, genomics, machine learning and robotics to develop new pest and pathogen controls, reducing the use of synthetics and improving the efficacy of so-called “natural” alternatives.

In the Global Centre proposal, software giant Microsoft is expected to play a “central” role, providing Microsoft Azure storage and computing services for Terramera’s proposed artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) platforms.

Microsoft FarmBeats would be used to provide a data collection platform that integrates field data from IoT (internet of things) sensors, drones and “many other sources.”

Using that technology, Terramera proposes to scale up Canadian regenerative agriculture, which it defines as “a set of practices that pull carbon from the air and sequester it in the soil, improving plant and soil health and resulting in higher farm profits, reduced pesticide and fertilizer use and a dramatic reduction in atmospheric carbon dioxide.”

“Microsoft Azure is perfectly suited to enable our AI/ML platform to perform at the national and global scale the Global Centre will entail,” Terramera chief technology officer Travis Good said in the company’s release. “With Azure, we can deliver impactful, human-centric solutions to farmers and provide Canadian leadership in technology, climate change and agriculture.”

“Microsoft has a long-standing commitment to sustainability and the work Terramera is doing with AI will go a long way to help farmers and ranchers fight climate change,” Microsoft Canada’s national technology officer John Weigelt said in the same release.

“Leveraging Microsoft Azure supports a scale that would be impossible to achieve without the cloud. We look forward to seeing the outcome of this initiative and see potential to apply the learnings globally.” — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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Why it matters: Non-agriculture companies can bring new approaches and expertise to agriculture technology.

Ranveer Chandra, chief scientist of Microsoft Azure Global, leads the FarmBeats project for the company.

Chandra, who has a doctorate in computer science from Cornell University, looks well beyond North America’s farmers when developing technology, but most of it is trialed in the United States and will be useful there.

There’s little question that precision agriculture can make farmers more efficient and reduce the use of expensive inputs that are harmful to the environment if over applied, says Chandra.

“It hasn’t taken off and the biggest reason is the cost,” he said during the recent Canada’s Digital Farm Show.

Chandra attended an agriculture expo recently at which companies talked about their agriculture technology solutions and the least expensive was $8000. For something data and sensor-based, farmers need to have an inexpensive entry point that can show them value.

Chandra’s s not only talking about farmers who pay a lot for large equipment, but also small scale farmers in places like India where he was raised.

He’d spend time at his grandparents’ farm each year and hated it. There was no electricity and a lot of hard work. Farmers like those can’t afford thousands of dollars for sensor technology. But now, most of them have smart phones, so Microsoft is working on ways of inexpensively aggregating data and feeding it in useful ways to farmers’ smart phones.

There are several streams in Microsoft’s agriculture system.

One is looking at using TV signal white space to broadcast data signal.

Especially in rural areas, there aren’t that many television channels broadcasting. The excess signal space is available everywhere, including in the middle of fields.

One of the largest challenges with field-level sensors, such as moisture sensors, is to connect them to a data network. It’s difficult enough to get decent internet at a farm house, let alone in the middle of a field.

Twenty channels of white space can be half a gigabit of capacity, which is enough to stream video, drone images and data from sensors.

The use of wifi transmitted through TV signal white space is now legal in many countries including Canada, says Chandra.

If enough of the information can be moved from the field to the home or office computer, it will be a challenge to then move that information somewhere else, or into the computer cloud for analysis, with slow rural internet.

That prompted Microsoft to develop a computer for processing data on a farm so there is less need for moving vast volumes into the cloud.

Only the processed and valuable data is then moved onto the internet for distribution to other devices, equipment and partners.

Microsoft calls its local processor the Azure IoT Edge. IoT stands for Internet of Things. The company’s platform is FarmBeats and Chandra says it is set up so that many potential sensors like those made by Pessl Instruments can seamlessly integrate data into the system. Other companies can build upon the FarmBeats system, says Chandra.

Moisture sensors are another example where there has been low adoption and Chandra says they suffer from a few problems. The first is that they are expensive when many need to be purchased to cover a larger acreage, especially because they need to be connected to have value.

Microsoft recently won awards for its Strobe technology, which uses wifi signals passing through soil to measure soil properties. Such technology would make soil sensors less expensive, he says.

The company has also used drones to create data to feed into artificial intelligence processing so fewer sensors are needed to create field-wide data.

Drones are well-used in North America, he says, but there are challenges in other countries including cost and the fact that the defence department controls drone approvals in some areas so civilians aren’t allowed to use them.

As a result, Microsoft floats balloons into the air with inexpensive cameras on them to collect data, which they call the Tethered Eye. The inexpensive helium balloons stay up for four to seven days and provide an option. One farmer at a farm Microsoft uses for testing near its Seattle headquarters uses the balloons to spot bears – which prefer red lettuce to green, so that bear control measures and harvest timing can be perfected.

Chandra says Microsoft understands that using more technology in agriculture will demand more people with those skills and so it is providing agriculture skills kits to schools, 4-H and Future Farmers of America groups to encourage more young people to choose agriculture as a career.

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According to the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) and tech-giant Microsoft, these three barriers reduce the competitiveness of a significant portion of Canadian businesses. They say it applies particularly to mid-level food manufacturers.

In response, the two companies are now trying to make tech adoption easier through a program called Go Digital.

Why it matters: A program designed to help ease businesses into new technologies will help those companies become more competitive.

The company says the program is designed to remove the three barriers by leveraging Microsoft cloud and Partner Network, as well as innovation financing and financial advice from RBC.

Through consultation, Canadian companies can garner recommendations from Microsoft on what tech is most relevant to them, and access tech-specific financing through the bank.

Niranjan Vivekanandan, vice-president of business financial services for RBC, says Canada’s food sector — identified as a manufacturing area with significant digitization potential — is part of Go Digital’s initial focus.

Food quality, product monitoring, inventory predictability, and production predictability are all examples of aspect of food production that can be improved, he says. Solutions are expected to focus on artificial intelligence, cloud business applications, data analytics, blockchain, and the Internet of Things, which refers to digital platforms that aggregate data from a community of linked objects.

Tyler Whale, president of Ontario Agri-Food Technologies, says digital transformation ultimately means gathering data to more effectively generate return on investment. He applauds the RBC-Microsoft initiative for seeing a need and exploring it, despite not necessarily knowing what the outcome will be.

“It’s good to recognize that we need to put a little more as a country in all sectors, to apply new ideas and tech more aggressively to stay competitive,” says Whale. “Maybe more of an amplification in the food system is a little more important just because we are smaller compared to other global competitors.”

Potential impacts on farmers and the public

Vivekanandan believes greater tech-adoption by food manufacturers will “have ripple effects across the broader ecosystem,” including better food traceability for the Canadian public and other end-users.

The effects on primary producers, though, will vary based on what technology the manufacturer needs. A vegetable processor adopting blockchain to more rigorously certify production claims, for example, might affect the farmer and what information they can access. The same processor incorporating factory automation may not.

Whale adds true digital change and value can’t be achieved by just working individually, and says companies like RBC, IBM, WalMart, and others need to think bigger.

That means considering systems where information can be more openly shared across value chains, government, and the research community. Empowering farmers – the primary producers from which the food sector is based – to improve their businesses is also critical.

An example, he says, is the product-quality data system used by VG Meats, a Simcoe-based meat processor. Supplying farmers, that is, get paid more for a better product. The company analyzes the product, and makes that data – along with recommendations to improve quality – available to the farmer, who can then act on that feedback.

“If you don’t give farmers the ability to cooperate and evaluate their data, they’re going to lose out on the value of it […] If you’re not enabling them to take ownership of their own digital transformation, it’s not going to have as big an impact as they hope,” he says.

Vivekanandan says RBC’s interest in day-to-day management of food manufacturers — and manufacturers in other industries — comes from a long-term strategy to improve RBC’s business.

“We need to help Canadian businesses thrive. We think that’s a great outcome for our customers and ourselves.”

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Monsanto will join a Brazilian investment fund with up to 300 million reais (C$118 million), managed by Microsoft, evaluating ideas for new digital tools to be applied to agricultural production in the country, executives said.

Selected ideas will receive initial funding of up to 1.5 million reais (about C$591,000) for early development. Project owners will have the option to pay back the investment after three years or convert the money into equity.

“We want to foster new startups in the agricultural sector. There is a vast area for research and development,” Rodrigo Santos, head of Monsanto in Latin America, told reporters on the sidelines of the Global Agribusiness Forum (GAF 2016).

Technology company Qualcomm is also investing in the fund.

— Reporting for Reuters by Marcelo Teixeira.

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