ONTARIO GRAIN FARMER COVER STORY 204.364.2244 sales@romafa.com www.romafa.com Parts You Can Count On. People You Can Call. Make Every Seed, Every Pound, and Every Acre Count. Stainless upgrades built for your air cart Scan to find parts for your cart “On a fertilizer application that can cover 700 acres a day, removing the driver from that machine doesn’t make a lot of sense because your labour is your lowest cost. What we’re looking at in the robotics space is generally in the smaller, lighter or higher value crops. Some examples of that are some of the robots we have here (today), and the robotic lawnmower bouncing around behind us,” he says. That autonomous lawnmower – relatively inconspicuous by comparison to the larger machines scattered around the Haggerty Creek yard – served as a particularly important demonstration of what Baresich identified as the potential use case for robotics and autonomous systems in agriculture. “The reality is, when I come home from work at night, it is a significant relief to come home and the lawn is already cut. It’s something I don’t have to do. And it might sound silly, but that is actually what the allure of robotics is all about. What is that little task that I no longer have to do? We have four acres of lawn and at full tilt on my riding lawnmower takes me 3.5 hours. And so yes, that little robot cannot cut that in 3.5 hours. It takes it 2.5 days. But who cares? It doesn’t matter.” He also encourages farmers to analyze their thought processes when it comes to the problems technology can solve, and reiterates his belief in the potential for autonomous systems to succeed as the community around them grows. “As farmers, we have so much generational knowledge and ingrained knowledge, sometimes we can’t define our problems very well. The problems come out as ‘my costs are too high,’ or ‘I don’t have enough labour to weed my onions’ or ‘the herbicide isn’t working to kill the palmer amaranth.’ That’s kind of how the problems get expressed, when the reality is there’s probably a process question, or applications question, that needs to get answered,” says Baresich. “One of the things this journey has showed me is the network of people interested in this space is very, very large. I think we’re going to do lots of things with this.” •
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTQzODE4