Digital agriculture needs focus on farm-level practicalities

Digital agriculture should be a national strategic priority with focused funding in the next federal-provincial-territorial policy agreement to help drive farmer-level adoption, says a new report from the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute.

CAPI collaborated with EMILI, a non-profit Manitoba organization focused on digital agriculture proving and adoption.

The report is the latest of several over the past eight months from the University of Guelph, Bioenterprise, the Simpson Centre at the University of Calgary and others that have looked at barriers to agriculture technology success.

The CAPI-EMILI report consciously focused on policy recommendations for government that would help encourage farmer adoption versus the wider ag tech ecosystem, said Dan Lussier, director of the Canadian Agri-Food Data Initiative based at EMILI, and one of the report’s authors.

The report makes five policy recommendations to governments:

• Make digital agriculture a national priority by making it a core pillar of the next federal-provincial-territorial agreement and establish a 10-year digital action plan for the Canadian agriculture sector. The current Sustainable Canadian Agriculture Program encourages innovation, but isn’t specific on digital agriculture.

• Establish digital agriculture hubs to connect farmers, technology developers, ecosystem organizations and provincial and federal governments. This engagement among players in the system has to be meaningful and include routes to support commercial-scale testing, to encourage farmer faith in new tools, the report says. EMILI already does some of this work, but the report highlighted La Ferme Digitale in France, which has brought together 100 start-up companies and teamed them with farmers.

• Launch a co-ordinated program suite that supports infrastructure and commercial-scale technology testing and encourages early adopters. This approach would include funding commercial technology trials on working farms and producing data that makes sense on farms.

• The federal government should facilitate the development of markets that leverage agriculture data to deliver tangible results to farmers. This means finding ways for farmers to be paid for the data they create, which would mean financial incentives for them to use digital technologies.

• The federal government should implement a comprehensive national data strategy to make it easier for ag tech tools to integrate with the broader digital economy.

The five policy suggestions come from the report’s evaluation of what’s limiting data adoption on farms.

The culture of new and exciting developments means there is hype around ag tech. A lot of it is legitimately awe inspiring and exciting, but the report says there’s too much time spent on the potential benefits versus farm-level realities.

“Sometimes there was a bit of a disconnect between the marketing material associated with a new product or service and some of the on-ground realities of bringing that into a working farm, whether you’re in Alberta or Ontario or Quebec,” says Lussier.

Farmers know what they’re looking for, and if the technology doesn’t help the farm in tangible ways that can be understood and profitable, it won’t be adopted.

“It’s really about building those bridges between some of the promise and some of the on-farm realities, so that that a new idea and a new practice can find its way into full flight, into full adoption,” he said.

The report says Canadian farmers are lagging in their adoption of digital technologies because of a lack of reliable internet and cellular connectivity.

There are improvements across the country in rural internet access, says Lussier, but the researchers heard about the persistent challenge of good data coverage from numerous stakeholders.

Data stewardship and trust around how the data is used is another concern of farmers. There’s a lack of transparency about just what happens to farmer data when it’s fed into the systems of ag tech companies, and that makes farmers reluctant to share it, says the report.

The irony is that farmer data is most valuable to the technology company and the farmer when it can be aggregated and compared to larger datasets. Moving toward transparency and interoperability will help, along with the standardization of systems and privacy protections that are becoming expected with other technology.

The report says digital tools are a foundation to unlock a potential $750 to $1 billion in annual sales for farmers, numbers it got by aggregating the estimates of other studies of productivity improvement potential in agriculture, including from Farm Credit Canada, the Canadian Federation of Agriculture and McKinsey.

Lussier collaborated with Kyle Hiebert, Elisabeta Like and Tyler McCann of CAPI on the report.

Source: producer.com