Opinion: Innovation is hard, hype is easy

Glacier FarmMedia – In November, the John Innes Centre announced it had discovered a gene that could lead to drought resistant wheat.

The centre is a well-known institution in Norwich, United Kingdom, specializing in plant science and crop genetics, so the new gene and its potential for improving wheat production will garner interest.

And maybe it will make a difference someday.

But it’s difficult to know because farmers, the agricultural sector and the agricultural media are bombarded with such announcements.

In an average week, I probably receive 15 to 20 emails from research centres, universities and crop science companies claiming their recent discovery is going to “revolutionize” agriculture. With the incredible volume of news releases and promotion, it’s difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff.

This avalanche of information is much larger than scientific discoveries. Producers are constantly being told that a new phone app, bio-fertilizer, weather forecasting tool or some novel and under-used crop will make their farm more profitable and sustainable and turn farming into a stress-free visit to a chocolate factory.

After 15 years as an agricultural journalist and 20 years working in the media, I still struggle to separate the true game-changers from stuff that is 99 per cent hype.

However, a couple of guidelines can be helpful:

• Rule No. 1: If a major discovery is made in 2022 and it actually is a major discovery, it probably won’t be on the market until 2032.

One example is AAC Brandon.

Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada wheat breeders in Swift Current, Sask., including Richard Cuthbert and Ron DePauw, developed the hard red spring wheat, and it came to market in 2014. It has become the most popular variety of spring wheat in Western Canada because of its consistently high yield and protein production in a range of conditions — hot, cold, dry or wet — across the Prairies.

In the 2017 growing season, when almost no rain fell in Saskatchewan, AAC Brandon and other improved wheat varieties made a huge difference for farmers across the province.

“Though we are hardly harvesting a bumper crop, I think it is safe to say that our crops are yielding better than we had anticipated,” said Bill Gehl, chair of the Saskatchewan Wheat Commission and a farmer near Regina, which recorded 1.8 millimetres of rain in July of 2017.

“The droughts that we experienced in Saskatchewan in the ’80s … certainly produced much lower yields.”

However, the benefits that farmers experienced in 2017 came from a discovery in the early 2000s.

In 2003, plant breeders in Swift Current crossed older lines of spring wheat to create the new and superior line that later became Brandon. It required 11 years of extensive field testing and patience to get AAC Brandon into the hands of farmers.

The length-of-time rule, from discovery to market, holds true for other agricultural innovations. That includes pesticides with new modes of action and products that take years to get through the regulatory system.

• Rule No. 2: If a game-changing technology was discovered last week and it’s available for purchase this week, it’s not going to do anything.

There is a long list of possible examples. One is drones.

Five or six years ago, it seemed like 10,000 small and new companies were promoting drones and how they could capture images of crops while flying over a field.

The data from the images could be used to monitor disease, forecast disease pressure, detect a nutrient deficiency in the plants and possibly predict the score of the Blue Jays vs. Red Sox game.

And, of course, the technology was promoted as a game-changing, time-saving innovation that would make farming more profitable and easier.

But, in 2022, how many producers in Canada used drone images to make decisions about spraying pesticides or applying fertilizer? Maybe 14?

Another way of phrasing Rule No. 2 is that just because a technology is immediately available doesn’t mean that it’s useful.

In the case of drones, farmers would still have to process the images, interpret the data, decide if action was required and then act.

The producer or a farm employee would have to get the necessary product (fungicide or fertilizer) and apply it to the crop in a timely manner so it would have an impact, and that’s assuming it wasn’t windy or raining that day and that the employee who was needed to the do the job actually existed.

There may be cases where drones are useful, but phone apps and other instant technologies are no different.

If a 19-year-old creates a crop production app in his basement in 10 days, and a week later it’s being promoted as a money-making tool for soybean growers, the phone app will do nothing for soybean growers, except maybe beep or emit a pleasant chime.

The fundamental issue is that useful inventions and innovation are hard, and it takes time to prove that they are useful — maybe a decade, maybe longer. True progress is slow.

However, there’s a reason why canola is still being grown in Western Canada nearly 50 years after it was developed. Baldur Stefansson and Keith Downey spent years and years in the 1960s and early 1970s turning rapeseed into a profitable and useful crop for Canadian farmers.

Not weeks or months. Years.

– This article was originally published at The Western Producer.