Gordon Bacon, CEO of Pulse Canada, said during his CropSphere presentation that quality specifications for pulses have traditionally been based on size, shape and colour, but the industry must be prepared to meet more complicated specifications for the food ingredients industry. You can find all our coverage of Crop Production week 2019 here.
Robin Booker
Stories by Robin Booker
Canola yields inching toward 100 bu. per acre
Agri-Trend’s Canola 100 agri-prize wrapped up with a winner announced during the Farm Forum event in Calgary. The three-year contest set out to award the first grower to reach a yield of 100 bushels per acre on a 50-acre field, or the grower who had the largest yield over the three years. Merle Klassen took […] Read more
Knowing your microbes takes testing, and now there is one
A & L Canada Laboratories has developed a test that assesses the microbiological component of soils, called the VitTellus Soil Health test. The company started a research program in 2011 that used a restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP)-based analysis to determine the different organisms within the soil profile. “We took a number of samples from […] Read more
VIDEO: Agri-Trend founder joins DOT
MARICOPA, Arizona — DOT Technologies Corp. has brought in Rob Saik as chief executive officer of DOT Ready Retail, a new sales and marketing side of the business. DOT is a Saskatchewan-built robotic platform designed to bring autonomous farming to broad acre grain production. “DOT Ready Retail will run in parallel to the DOT manufacturing […] Read more
Robotic soil sampler eases workload
Rogo Ag hopes to have the autonomous soil sampler working in Canadian fields in the 2020 growing season
A Bobcat-mounted robotic soil sampler offers users consistent core samples and appears likely to drive down prices for sampling services. “It’s a completely autonomous robot. We developed all the technology in house, except the Bobcat platform that it rides on. We just drive it to a field, you unload it from the trailer, hit go […] Read more
The wild west of agricultural data
Canadian agriculture is in the midst of a sea change that stems from the digitization of farm production data. The sector was a little tardy in showing up for the digital revolution, but most growers now use techniques powered by complex algorithms and massive datasets. Telematics, cloud storage and processing, internet of things (IOT), sensors, […] Read more
Holograms leap from video games to fields
Augmented reality technology developed to help farmers compare crop conditions and review spray applications
Augmented reality (AR) will soon be used on Canadian farms to help producers make sense and manage their data. AR is the overlaying of digital information over the real world, and is already widely used in with video games such as Pokemon. Farmers will soon be able to look through a pair of AR capable […] Read more
Intercropping research explores benefits, downsides
More and more prairie producers are showing an interest in intercropping, the practice of growing two or more crops together in the same field. What crops grow well together and under which circumstances are still being determined by a growing number of research projects across the Prairies. In 2015, Saskatchewan Agriculture planted a pea-cereal intercrop […] Read more
The hazards of harvesting hemp
THC
Legalization of cannabis for recreational use has made way for a cannabidiol (CBD) industry to take root in Canada. There is currently more demand for this cannabis extract than supply, which means it could be lucrative for at least a few growing seasons before supply catches up. The problem is that little is known about […] Read more
Drones hold promise to ease scouting, spraying
Drone Volt is selling one of the world’s strongest mass-produced drones into the Canadian market, the Hercules 20 (H-20). “It’s probably one of the strongest in terms of payload that you will be able to find out of a company. If you are looking for anything that is that strong right now, you will have […] Read more
