b'Rick, as a seed grower, how have you seen technologytied back to drainage. Jump ahead a quarter evolve? century and look at a map generated on the We farm roughly 6,000 acres. Most of it issame field. Youre going to see far more detail devoted to seed production, and we also run adue to using many layers of technology to come retail seed business as well out of our location. Iup with the result you see in our final yield map, Rick Rutherford remember the first combine that I operated whenwhich shows the results of very site-specific fer-President,I started my farming venture, actually. Wevetilization that were now able to do based on the Rutherfordcome a long way since. My fathers family cameproductivity of the year before.Farms to Manitoba at the turn of the 19th century from Grosse Isle,Ontario, and they were farming over 2,000 acresWhat are some examples of exciting new technolo-Man. with horses.gies coming out of the EMILI partnership?When he was a young boy, he drove the horseWere working on a new next-generation and wagon of grain to the elevator. He did thatweather station with EMILI, kind of like a mobile when he was 10 years old. The last year that heagronomist. This particular station has cameras was with us, he actually drove a GPS-guidedon it and can detect through algorithms insects swather. Weve been farming on our land forthat are in the crop. Its taking relative humid-roughly 95 years, and weve been involved in theity readings as the crop grows larger, and it can seed industry for roughly 70 years. The techno- start developing modeling to know if were going logical change has been immense. to have to apply fungicides on a particular field. Weve got many more deliverables rather than You have the honour of being a part of one ofjust moisture and wind.Manitobas newest projects in regard to machineWere also working on a protein tester with learning and artificial intelligence. In June, theJohn Deere, which is allowing us to geo refer-Enterprise Machine Intelligence and Learningence protein as well as yield on a combine. This Initiative (EMILI), announced a partnership withopens up huge amounts of information that can Farm Credit Canada and the renaming of its innova- give us many more deliverables as we move tion farm to Innovation Farms Powered by AgExpert.ahead. For example, right now we can layer a Your farm will be one of these innovation farms andyield and protein map to determine if were over will be part of a larger network of farms that will usefertilizing. We can determine protein levels on new technology, knowledge and labour to address thethe go from plot to plot. changing needs of the agriculture industry. What areAs Rob was talking about, we can reduce the some ways these technologies have transformed youramount of fertilizers and other inputs on farm-operation? land with machines which give us the ability to Our seed plant was built around the year 2000.learn whats happening in the field in real time. It has a monitoring system that monitors all theWith the help of EMILI, we have some two-acre operations of our plant and lets us know when aplots and what were doing there is actually piece of equipment is not functioning optimally.physically imaging the crop. Were building algo-A lot of technology comes together in our treat- rithms for cameras to be able to detect differ-ing facility; we can put four individual productsences between crops in order to identify weeds. onto a pound of seed thats weighed as it goesThis further builds our algorithm library, where into a mixing drum. Theres a main control panelwe can start looking at doing weed control in that lets us actually put the amount of MLs pervery site-specific ways. kilogram of seed we want to apply to different products, and when the treating job is done, weWhats a big challenge in this area?can actually export the data right to our officeAs Rob was saying, theres a huge investment where they can access the information of howbeing made in this technology, and for growers many kilograms were treated, and what productsto use it successfully they have to be on the right were put on it.side of the technology curve. Around 80 per cent of these technologies today are not being used Are you developing yield maps using machine learning? to for what theyre really designed for. An initia-Definitely. Its been over 25 years since we actu- tive like the one EMILI is undertaking is going to ally generated our first yield map. Our first outputbe very helpful in helping solve this.from a lot of our yield maps 25 years ago was SEPTEMBER 2022GERMINATION.CA 27'