Agriculture Committee on Sept. 20th, 2018

[Howard Mains]

Yes, you're absolutely right. The typical combine, after a day in the field, will generate five gigabytes of data. That has to be uploaded if the farmer wishes to manage that data. It's not very efficient to put it on a stick and take it back to the farm, right? That doesn't quite work. This is a problem that is certainly being compounded.

I'm sure the manufacturers are trying to figure out the most efficient way to have that information transmitted through wireless technology from the cabs of the machines in terms of how that works, but also in terms of how it then gets onto the network and eventually back to the farm office. That is something that there's going to have to be a lot of investment in over the next few years.

[Bev Shipley]

Mr. Orb would likely agree with your issue.

One of our earlier witnesses talked about investor confidence. We have manufacturers invested in this incredible technology—precision farming, precision manufacturing and processing, precision robotics—but we need to be able to generate the investor confidence to continue to manufacture that.

Are we on a level field with our competitors in Europe and the U.S.? You've talked a bit about that, Mr. Mains, in terms of the lack of high speed in certain areas. Are we in a competitive position with respect to other countries, though?

[Howard Mains]

I wouldn't have the answer to that. I can certainly get back to you on it. I can tell you that the farm of the future will be a race over who is going to be the data manager. Mr. Orb has spoken about that. There may be studies by the CWTA—the Canadian Wireless and Telecommunications Association—and their 5G Canada council. They may have research pertaining to that.

[Bev Shipley]

Mr. Orb, do you have any comments?

[Ray Orb]

Really, it will take more federal funding. The federal government has gone through the connecting Canadians program, and that has almost run out. We'll be asking the federal government to look at some kind of a new program.

We need a couple of things. We need to improve the backbone—the cable delivery of high-speed Internet in rural areas. We also need that last mile, to make sure that farm residences can hook up to that site. That's very important.

Our technology isn't that bad in this country. For instance, my neighbour bought two combines that were manufactured in Germany. They're compatible with the software we have here, and they're able to download. The problem is they don't have enough capability. We need probably 25 gigabytes of download speed and almost the same upload speed to be able to transfer that data on the farm to keep track of the crop yields.

It will take more funding, but also strategic partnerships in the provinces themselves. We need to talk to the Internet service providers to make them understand that it's not just urban Canada but also rural Canada that's important.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Thank you, Mr. Orb, and thank you, Mr. Shipley.

We'll go now to Mr. Peschisolido for six minutes.

[Joe Peschisolido, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

It's great to have Mr. Shipley back here, and I'd also like to welcome Mr. Duguid to our committee, as well as Mr. Mains and Mr. Orb.

This has been a fascinating study, and kudos to Mr. Shipley. I'd also like to do a shout-out to Mr. Longfield for all the wonderful work he's done on this study. We all work hard, and we all work well, but Mr. Longfield, you in particular have done a lot of work and spent some quality time on this file. I think agriculture is going to be better moving forward.

Mr. Mains and Mr. Orb, I was struck when you said that farming is a way of life and is the future of agriculture. Can you elaborate on where you see agriculture going, and how the federal government can help both of you and your organizations in implementing that vision?

[Howard Mains]

It would be helpful to look forward into what the future will bring. Mr. Orb spoke about robotic tractors. There's a company in Saskatchewan in that space. Mr. Drouin, I'm sure there are dairy farms with robotic milkers in your constituency. We are in that phase.

The next phase of what's called farming 3.0 is where we start to see data analytics. Mr. Orb talked about satellite imagery and being able to analyze that to get a better understanding of crop yield on a county-by-county or township-by-township basis. There's new technology around wireless field sensors for fertilizer. You can put these sensors in a field and measure the nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium—NPK—on a 24-7 basis.

What that all points to, though, is that in the future the farmer becomes more of a data manager. He's not so much an equipment manager or a crop manager; he's a data manager.

It all comes back to the point that Mr. Orb and Mr. Shipley made, which is about access to the pipeline for data. That is where the federal government, working through both its regulatory and policy roles, has a fairly important role to play. The industry committee issued a report in April that spoke to this.

[Joe Peschisolido, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

Mr. Orb, please go ahead.

[Ray Orb]

I'd just like to say that I agree with the gentleman's comments as well. Of course agriculture—and I think we all realize this—is a huge contributor to the GDP, more so in provinces like Saskatchewan, because we have almost half of the arable land of the entire country in our province. But it's also a contributor to the national GDP, and I think it's a very reliable contributor because it's fairly stable.

Our producers have become very efficient. Even in the years of drought, such as what we just went through in Saskatchewan and parts of Alberta this year, producers are still able to produce crops. They're very efficient because they have access to a lot of the modern technology. The problem is that they need to be able to handle it. I compare it to pumping water through a hose. You can have a large volume of water, but if you don't have a good hose, a good delivery system, you're going to have a lot of problems with it.

I think we need to be able to increase that connectivity. It seems like the best bang for your buck for any program, federally or provincially, is to be able to use that funding very efficiently. I think it would actually increase economic development throughout Canada.

[Joe Peschisolido, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

You talked about precision farming. Can you elaborate a little on what that is and why it's, I'm assuming, a good thing, and how we can, once again, be helpful to you?

[Howard Mains]

There's a great example in the report that I'll circulate through the clerk, which shows a vision of a technology-using machine. The developer is a company called Blue River. It's now owned by John Deere. It's a pesticide sprayer, and what it does, especially in the high-value crops, like lettuce—that's the crop that you'll see in the photographs—is to apply herbicides or fungicides or insecticides. As it's going down the field, it identifies the lettuce plants, and then, if it's putting on a herbicide, it identifies the weeds. It puts the herbicide on the weeds, and only the weeds, where it's needed. That's an example of precision farming.

Another example of precision farming—and again they talk about it in the report—is that right now we are able to map fields down into areas that are smaller and smaller and smaller, but as we move out, we're actually going to be getting to plant by plant by plant. Today when farmers here in Ontario are applying nitrogen fertilizer to their corn, there is a camera on the boom of the sprayer that measures the greenness of the plant. If it's greener, it needs less nitrogen; if it's a bit off the green, it needs more nitrogen. It's taking those measurements five times a second, and it's doing that across 60 feet. For 60 feet, five times a second, with the tractor travelling about five miles an hour, you can figure out that it's probably covering a couple hundred plants. In the future it will be one plant.

That's what the future is bringing us. It's bringing us agriculture in certain crops where precision agriculture is applying either the fertilizer or the pesticide or the other crop inputs on a plant-by-plant basis. That's what I'll call the extreme example of precision agriculture.

[Joe Peschisolido, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

Mr. Orb, would you like to talk about precision farming?

[Ray Orb]

I'm not an expert on it. I'm of the generation that is not as savvy about the new technology, but I know if I spoke to my son about this, he could certainly fill you in.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Ray Orb]

I don't now about this.

[Joe Peschisolido, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

I look forward to speaking with him as well, Ray.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Pat Finnigan]

Now we go to Mr. MacGregor for six minutes. Thank you.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Thank you, Chair.

Mr. Mains, I'll start with you.

As a committee and as politicians, I think we find it easy and convenient for us to look at the negatives of a situation, whether or not it's the regulatory environment. Aside from that, we do have companies, successful companies, that are operating in Canada and we do see start-ups. For your member companies, can you just tell us some of the biggest reasons they choose to set up shop in Canada? What are some of the positives that we, as a country, are currently exhibiting? Where can we, as a committee, maybe emphasize those positives in our recommendations to the government?

[Howard Mains]

There's a couple of areas that are important. One is access to skilled labour. When you talk to a company, whether that's MacDon in Winnipeg or companies elsewhere in the country, it's about access to skilled labour, whether they are the engineers that design the equipment, the welders that fabricate the equipment or other lines across the workforce.

Probably the number one priority is access to skilled labour. I think you hear that across industries, but it is certainly a critical factor for the manufacturing sector. We have grown up in an era where we want to have our kids go off to university, not to the skilled trades colleges to learn about the skilled trades that are required to build equipment. That's the number one issue. I'll leave it at that.

Mr. Orb may have a comment on why CNH decided to expand up in Saskatoon.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Yes.

[Ray Orb]

Obviously the climate is an attraction to companies like that, and of course they'd be a base, because a lot of their sales would be in western Canada, so that would make sense.

I'd like to make one comment about some of the smaller businesses that are looking to set up in rural Canada. They've cited to us more than once that they need high-speed Internet to be able to be competitive, and not only competitive within the province but competitive globally. That is a real issue, because there are a lot of people who would like to move out of the big city or the suburbs where they're already congested in terms of expanding their companies. They'd like to get out into a rural area. I think that makes perfect sense. Because of that, we need to be able to deliver better services as far as Internet goes.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Mr. Mains, I think that over the past several decades the machine shop floor has changed dramatically. Now, besides fabricators, you have programmers and computer scientists. You mentioned in your opening comments how in addition to precision agriculture we also are going to be seeing machines using artificial intelligence and machine learning. Can you talk a bit about that with some examples of how a piece of equipment operating out in the field can take some real-time data analysis and maybe change how it behaves in relation to the crops it's looking after?

[Howard Mains]

That's right. A great example of that is the precision farming systems with GPS technology that we see in farm equipment today. I'm sure that just about every combine that rolls across the Prairies has GPS systems in it now.

One of the things I try to do is to get out and spend time with farmers. One of the farmers that I did a ride-along with this spring, in his cab as he was planting soybeans, ran a little plot. It was a 100-acre field and he ran this little two-acre plot inside the field where he decreased the seed count by 20%. That was all programmed into the computer.

When you see that technology first-hand, you can see how farmers are taking on that technology and applying it. When he goes through the field this fall to harvest the soybeans, he can see in that little plot that he put in whether the yield dropped by 20% or stayed the same, and he'll see whether or not there was an economic benefit. There are astounding numbers of areas where we see precision agriculture being applied.

There's another example that I really was surprised about. We hosted a field day for the Pest Management Regulatory Agency back in August. We had 40-odd people from the PMRA visit a farm. We had two sprayers and two planters. One of the planters was controlled by an iPad. Instead of a dedicated computer in the cab of the tractor, hitched by wires, for that planter, the farmer was able to control it on an iPad, including the seed rate and the fertilizer rate. I don't think Steve Jobs thought that was ever going to be the case.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

In the few seconds I have left, Mr. Orb, when you're talking to the next generation of farmers in the rural municipalities around Saskatchewan, in addition to the concerns about rural broadband, what are some of their concerns that they're outlining to you about getting into agriculture and making their businesses successful?