Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: We have farmers, we have technology companies, we have influencers, we have industry experts, we have extension agents, we have funding organizations, we have all these people. And how do we turn that into something basically that advances Canadian agriculture? That's really what we're trying to do.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Robot Industry Podcast. I'm Jim Beretta. I'm your host and with me today is Chuck Bersich from Hagerty Creek and also from Hagerty Agrobotics. Welcome to the podcast, Chuck.
[00:00:38] Speaker A: Yeah, thanks, Jim. Thanks for having me, Chuck.
[00:00:41] Speaker B: So tell our audience a little bit about Hagerty Creek because I think it's really important to the, to the discussion today.
[00:00:47] Speaker A: Yes, Hagerty Creek is a joint venture agronomy company and grain elevator that was started 25 years ago. Our 25th anniversary is the end of this month. And my brother and I grew up as farmers and still farm in this area.
And we saw a need for this type of business back at, back in the year 2000. And we found a partner with Agris Cooperative Limited and opened our company in 2001. So we serve our farmers from the full gamut of their farming operation all the way from understanding the soil, like mapping their soil, soil testing, making recommendations, providing them seed, fertilizer, crop protection products, right through to harvest and marketing their grain.
[00:01:34] Speaker B: And can you also tell us about Hagerty Ag Robotic?
[00:01:38] Speaker A: Through our business at Hagerty Creek, one of the things that we discovered is that farmers do a better job if they know what's happening. And the way that they know what's happening is to use precision agriculture tools. So we started deploying and training and eventually selling field computers, rate control controllers, and technology for farmers to let the tractors record what's happening, document their operations, control the product, and also drive the tractors up and down the fields. Hydro Agrobotics is the next evolution of that precision agriculture business. What Agrobotics does is we take autonomous equipment and we look at what a, what farmers see as a problem, and it could be planting, it could be weed control, whatever that problem is. And we say, can we automate that process? Can we remove, essentially remove the driver and put a robot in, in the place of the, of the person doing that task. And that, that's an evolution of, of the precision agriculture side of things, because a lot of our traditional farm equipment actually does a lot of autonomy all, all on its own already, really, the removing the driver is just the next step.
[00:02:55] Speaker B: So I also wanted to. We're both members of the Ontario Agrobotics working group. Can you tell our audience a little bit about that?
[00:03:02] Speaker A: So the working group is a, is an ad hoc gathering of like minded individuals who are interested in both agriculture but also technology within agriculture, mostly based here in Ontario. Where it came from was I got a couple of weeding robots back in the year 2001. And what I discovered right away is that these weeding robots and I, and I knew this when I got them, they're designed for horticulture, for vegetable production. I'm a corn and soybean farmer. I don't actually know very much about growing vegetables and especially I don't know it from a commercial scale. And so I had these weeding robots and I'm looking at them saying what am I going to do with these things?
And I happened across an email from the Ministry of Agriculture and Food and in it they talked, you know, we get these emails regularly and they talked about various weeds and problems that are in there. And the weed specialist Kristen Obeed was listed in there as one of the contacts. So I thought I'm going to call Kristen and just tell her this is what we're doing and you know, could she help me try to find a use for these robots?
And she was very interested in this.
She also had a couple of contacts and one of them was Ian McDonald with OMAFA. And we started having a weekly conference call back in 2021 deciding what are we going to do with these robots on a trial basis. One of the other things I also knew is that I wasn't confident in saying I should just sell these to a farmer. We weren't at that stage of the business. And so we set up research trials with the help of the group. And so the purpose of the working group was to understand technology, what technology was available. It was to engage farmers on a grassroots level, a ground level. What problems, what do we actually want to solve? Let the farmers tell us what they want us to solve, match the technology together and then do demonstrations and then promote it to the, to the general public. So what that turned into, that little humble gathering has turned into a, a group that has over 500 members. There's, there's usually 60 to 80 people that join every week on our calls and is, is picking up. The, the, the, the momentum is picking up as time goes on.
[00:05:35] Speaker B: I find it really interesting and I've learned so much about ag and so, and it's, it's got me hooked. Like I'm there every Friday morning.
[00:05:43] Speaker A: Well, and, and I think one of the things That I grew up in ag, and almost daily I get humbled saying that I honestly don't know anything and there's so much to learn. And one of the things that this working group has done and the reason why it's attracting membership and interest is that the space is very complex and there's lots of parties involved. We have farmers, we have technology companies, we have influencers, we have industry experts, we have extension agents, we have funding organizations. We have all these people. And how do we turn that into something, you know, basically that encourages adoption and not even adoption? How do we turn that into something that advances Canadian agriculture? That's really what we're trying to do.
[00:06:33] Speaker B: What about agrobotics adoption in Canada? Like, I kind of think that there's always this, hey, what's holding users back and what's motivating them?
[00:06:41] Speaker A: There's lots of interest in robotics, and I think what motivates it for the most part is I haven't met a farmer yet who says, I have too many employees. You know, they might joke about it and say, boy, I wish I didn't have any, that kind of thing. But the reality is, is that most farmers cannot get enough skilled labor to do the jobs that are out there.
You know, the argument can be made, yeah, you could pay more and this kind of stuff, but. But, you know, the labor is a huge shortage. That is what's motivating the producers. The other thing that motivates people into robotics is that some of the jobs just aren't that fun. One of the reasons why milking robots in the dairy industry have just taken over is that milking cows just isn't that great of a job.
And who really wants to do that as a living?
And so when the first milking robots came out back in the early 2000s, a lot of people mocked them and said, nah, no one's ever going to use this. It's never going to work.
Now if you don't put in a milking robot in your dairy parlor, you kind of get looked at. You get looked at like you have two heads. And so really, the adoption piece starts with the motivation, which I think farmers have. What holds people back is the technology readiness and how well we understand the use case.
So, you know, in an indoor environment, that is well understood. You know, a dairy, you know, dairy barn doesn't move. The dairy stalls don't move. The milking parlor doesn't. You bring the. You know, the animals come to it on their own. So that's one of the reasons why the livestock industry has moved so quickly, the greenhouse sector is probably the next closest to adopting. So we're seeing lots of automation technology coming in the green greenhouse space.
And again, same thing. Greenhouses don't move.
The outdoor space is more challenging. And that is because the environment.
We have another whole thing where the crop rows change, that kind of stuff. And I think users are holding back on that because there's a combination of maybe sometimes the technology isn't quite ready and sometimes the. The cost of that technology might be a little too high for the benefits that it provides at this time. But that is changing.
[00:09:16] Speaker B: What is digital agriculture?
[00:09:19] Speaker A: So digital agriculture is a kind of a placeholder term, and I think really it is evolved. People used to talk back when I was a kid about farming is a business, and we really have to get beyond just doing it all in our head and writing stuff down.
That turned into precision agriculture. Precision agriculture was the precursor, and this was about adding some technology or whatever it is to kind of measure what you're doing. Digital agriculture encompasses those two things, but what it adds to is a layer of data collection and data analysis that is being generated. One of the things that's happening with the advent of, you know, rate controllers, field computers, GPSs and technology is the extraordinary amount of data that we can start to collect from our normal cropping operations. And really we do this without even thinking. It's just. It's just as it's happening. The having robots in the field or in the dairy barn or whatever is adding another whole level of data on production. And whatever digital agriculture is, what do we do with that data and what outcomes could be generated? I think that is.
That's how I see what digital agriculture is.
[00:10:36] Speaker B: One of the things I was going to ask you about is the weed zappers, like the laser zappers, is that kind of an easy way in for farmers to explore automation?
[00:10:47] Speaker A: When we talk about zappers, people are looking at, essentially what they're looking at is alternative methods of weed control.
What does that look like?
How do we do that? And when I say alternative, I mean alternative to using pesticides and chemicals. A lot of farmers, when we think about a laser zapping a weed, you know, if we want to describe that, what that looks like is a.
Essentially the camera takes a picture of the ground, the computer algorithm analyzes that picture and says, this is the crop, and whatever is not the crop is likely a weed. In some cases, they can actually tell you what kind of weed it is. And then based on the size of that Weed, it will trigger the laser to fire and it will. The laser beam will actually overheat the weed, the plant, and cause the cells to essentially boil and burn up in the field. And all of that happens in a. I don't know, in microseconds. That entire process happens in microseconds. That's what they do. Farmers like that concept because they can understand it. It's very, very easy to understand that there is a weed, and I will get rid of it. And honestly, when you watch one work and you smell the weeds burning, it's very satisfying. And the downside of that technology, that is very, very slow and very, very expensive. And so the use case has to be correct.
[00:12:13] Speaker B: And the window is short.
[00:12:14] Speaker A: And the window is very short. And the reason for that is that what they. When you're. When you're killing a weed, there's a. There's a term that's called a dwell time. And the dwell time is how long does it take to form a cycle. And I think that'll be very similar in other industries.
Robot has to work on something. And so in order to get the efficiency of the weeder, you want to go in there. When you almost can't see the weed, like when you walk across the field, the human eye almost can't see it. That's when you're zapping it. And that way the dwell time is very, very short. However, the window of that is like a day, maybe two days. And so if you can't get through the field fast enough, the weeds will outgrow the laser weeder and it can no longer keep up. And we have seen that happen in, especially in sandy or muck soil types.
[00:13:03] Speaker B: The. Where does, where is this equipment made right now? I mean, it's kind of a broad question, but you are on the front row of this, so you're pretty familiar.
[00:13:12] Speaker A: From an experimental and prototype level, almost every country in the world is making some version of something. And it depends on the level of support that those, you know, from research institutions and industry and governments and things, and as well as the farmers themselves from a commercial perspective. The countries that are. That are moving very, very quickly on this is, is you can never forget about Holland.
There is lots of technology coming out of there, California right now on, especially on the laser weeder market is really dominating with the carbon robotics unit.
They've got over 100 deployed worldwide, and I would argue they're probably the most well known. That being said, let's say when we talk about 100 or even 200 laser weeder units.
John Deere dealers in Ontario might sell that many tractors in a couple of months. So it's not super widespread, but it's. It sounds impressive, but you got to put that in perspective.
[00:14:21] Speaker B: Yeah, I'd say 100 right now is probably a pretty good number.
One of the things that. And we just came off of a conference, the Agrobotics. Can you just tell our audience a little bit about that? It was an excellent event.
[00:14:35] Speaker A: Yeah. So we had the Canadian Agrobotics Summit, and we felt that there was. Through the working group, we felt that there was a need to. To bring people together in person. And really what it was about, it was about. The main thing it was about is to get people to actually meet each other who normally wouldn't meet in the same circles. I think that was the primary role. And the secondary role was to give an inclination as to what is actually happening in the space. The purpose of this summit and one of the things that's been changing with the working group, or maybe not changing, but, you know, we want to. We want to support Canadian agriculture and advance it, but we also think within Canada, we have the capacity to grow and develop our own technology, infrastructure and ecosystem, you know, right here in Ontario. And one of the, you know, side purposes of the working group and the work that we're doing is to bring these people together from Ontario and to say we have all the pieces. We have funders, which we had at the summit. We had lots of funding, organ funding agents, both equity and investment funders, as well as government program funders. We had academia and researchers. So we had representatives from most of the major universities and colleges at the event.
We had government influencers, whether they're extension or in policymakers at the event. And then we had tech companies talking about the technology at the event, and we had farmers at the event. And so really we were putting. We put all this together in a mixing bowl. We let different people talk about what they were doing, and basically we'll kind of just let the chips fall where they may. One of the organizers, Joe Dales, likes to talk about flipping over the cards. So one of the expressions he has to me is that everybody has a card to play, and sometimes we just start flipping them over and seeing what kind of hand we have and what can we do with it. And really this event was about bringing those cardholders all in the same room.
[00:16:44] Speaker B: One of my favorite parts about the event was that the fact that you brought in a bunch of farmers who actually got up and reasonably impromptu and just told stories about the automation they're using or directions they're using or challenges that they're having. I thought that was hugely valuable.
[00:16:59] Speaker A: Well, and I think, and I think the, one of the things we try to avoid is a solution, looking for a problem, you know, and that's an old adage, it's a, it's almost cliche. The reason why I bring it up is that it still happens. You know, we have, you know, you know, universities and researchers really cannot lead this.
The, you know, they have, universities and researchers are very good at, you know, Jim, if you bring a problem and you say, can you solve this?
They can help you solve that problem. Their job is not really to, I don't want to say invent, but to come up with a new technology. And the same goes for governments and other institutions. You know, their role is to support the ecosystem, not necessarily lead the ecosystem. So they can put the tools in place to make sure the ecosystem is successful and that entrepreneurs are successful, but it's really difficult for them to lead that. And the reason why I thought it was important to have the farmers there is to have them tell their real world stories so that the problems get solved correctly the way the farmers need them done.
[00:18:09] Speaker B: One of the compelling stories that I have to ask a question on was one of the farmers who had a laser weeder. And he said, unfortunately it was down for six weeks. And it was kind of a sad story because they didn't have the extra components or power supplies or whatever it was. And I put up my hand, I'm like, can you give me a bit more information what happened? Well, it caught fire.
And you're like, yeah, of course it did. And so the industry, you're right, the industry has to have extra or they have to have components that they can plug back in and say, hey, listen, sorry, it caught fire. But fires are more common than people know in farms.
[00:18:47] Speaker A: Yes.
And in this case it was, you know, lots of people can point fingers and point blame it was an accident. Right? And, and unfortunately with technology, it is catastrophic. What separates agriculture and the reason why this matters is agriculture. In the kind of farming that we do, we cannot iterate. So if you have a factory or a manufacturing plant or whatever and something happens one week, you can make a change and try again next week or try again next week. With agriculture, you have your week to plant or your week for weed control. And if you miss that window, that's it. Like there is, there is no second chances to go back or.
And so, you know, Missing a weeding window with a tool is, is catastrophic. And it's really hard to explain that or illustrate that to someone who is not familiar with the industry.
[00:19:50] Speaker B: And that's why service and support becomes so important. It's like, here's the robot. Oh, and you know, by the way, we have others at the shop that will be able to put in in four hours if for some reason your robot fails and you can't service it.
[00:20:03] Speaker A: Yes. And so one of the things that we've been doing as a company is, is working through the logistics. You know, the logistics of delivery, the logistics of deployment, the logistics of service and supply support. You know, what parts do we need? Who are the technicians? How do we get to keep these machines running? And we don't have all the answers. Like, I mean, we, we've had failures of our own. And, and, but the, that logistics piece of having the machine working, the farmer will take the robot out. And we've seen this happen.
And let's say that it doesn't turn on the first time, that farmer may or may not try a second time to turn it on. And if it doesn't turn on, they'll just abandon it and they'll just go back to what they were doing before. We have seen that happen.
[00:20:51] Speaker B: Here's the. I wanted to ask you a data question and maybe this isn't appropriate or whatever, but cameras and computers are in every machine almost that you're going to be seeing on a farm, right?
[00:21:02] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:21:02] Speaker B: And so how do we get all that data? And do we need WI fi or is this on the edge or how does that data get to the farmer?
[00:21:12] Speaker A: So what's, what's happening now for the most part is we're relying on, on cellular communications. You know, and fortunately in Ontario, a significant chunk of the farming countryside has pretty good cell phone coverage. Not everywhere. And I'm gonna, and I'm sure someone will yell at me over the radio or whatever, saying, you come down to, you know, come down to the south part of Haldeman county and we'll show
[00:21:38] Speaker B: you our bars on our phones.
[00:21:41] Speaker A: Right. And, and I get it, but we've been relying on cellular communication for the most part. It's been working for basic video and stuff. Once we start moving into high precision where we're talking about terabytes of data, it's not going to work anymore. And we are starting to see, you know, starlinks mounted on top of tops of machines to update that speed.
Interestingly enough, the other debate that's happening within the within the industry in the AI space is do we actually need all of that data? Maybe we're collecting some useless stuff.
And, you know, there, there is another group that's actually working on parsing what do we actually need of this to. To help reduce the size of the data stream. That's a whole other podcast.
[00:22:32] Speaker B: Absolutely.
So with autonomous farming vehicles, especially the ones that follow you around, or tractors that now use AI, is that one of the other products or types of automation that farmers are likely going to delve into first?
[00:22:48] Speaker A: So there's been some arguments as to whether it makes more sense to take an existing tractor, which I think is what your question is, and make it autonomous versus a dedicated machine that's geared towards a specific task. And I think we're going to see both.
And one of the reasons why we're going to see both is that farmers have a lot of sunk costs. They already have a fleet of machinery, and how do they extract some more value out of that machinery during the transition piece?
On the flip side of that, some of that machinery is not well suited to become a piece of autonomous equipment. And mostly because it's too big to. The logistics end up making it impractical. You know, if you need a human to drive a tractor from one field down the road to the next field, getting, you know, getting out, you've already spent the money for that employee, they might as well just finish the task. And so there's a. We're going to see a little bit of both.
[00:23:50] Speaker B: So you, you're doing this a lot, right? Like you're doing demonstrations. You're, you've got your own automation, you've got other vendors coming in saying, can you, can you please try out my, what's your advice to farmers that are thinking about automation?
[00:24:03] Speaker A: So I think the, for a farmer, farmers do a lot of thinking in their own heads. There's a lot of, you know, kind of what I call generational knowledge that's, that's just ingrained in, in farmers.
Part of that is to get that out of your head and into a workflow process, you know, so if you think about an automotive, an automotive plant or a factory or something like that, there are people whose job is to analyze every step in that factory and every process and every task, you know, down to, you know, I don't know, just down to, you know, what side should, you know, what direction should the bolt lay as it's going through the sorter? We don't really have that in agriculture.
And so for farmers who want to start in this, you really need to work through a workflow of your farm on a very granular level. And just say, what pieces of that could I automate to try to figure out A, the feasibility and two, the economic return. The other thing that that might do is also trigger some thinking about why am I doing it that way? Am I using these wagons, for example, and tractors, because that's what we've always done, or do I eliminate the tractor in the wagon with carrier robots that just start in the field and end up at the barn and completely change my process around?
So having that kind of thought process is probably step one, and then step two is going to be really understanding your cost structure. And where farmers tend to undervalue things is they undervalue their own management value and their own cost. And so a farmer might say, well, I can hire a person for $20 an hour.
You don't hire the CEO for $100 an hour or for $20 an hour. And you have to start looking at those opportunity costs and value them correctly. Then we start looking at technology.
[00:26:08] Speaker B: One of the really exciting things about the event that we were just at, and I'm going to put them in the show notes so people can find out more, is the actual hardware that was brought to the, to the event. And so it's so important, right, to have scientists and data people and government to see these things in real life.
[00:26:28] Speaker A: Oh, yes, for sure. Because some of it is hard to conceptualize. Like if you're talking about a fruit thinner, a fruit thinning robot, like what finite farms had there, most of us have no clue what that even means.
And then to actually see a platform with linear actuators that move a set of cutters out that can thin apple blossoms on a wall, it's pretty impressive. And so being able to visualize that piece, it does a couple of things. One, it lets you understand the complexity, but it also lets you look at that machine. And similar to what I said about a farmer really understanding their processes, you can start to look at that machine and say, well, what components are in that machine? Well, who is building the batteries? Well, maybe we could. Who's making the tires? What about the motors that are driving that? What about the propulsion system? What about the software? You know, there are, there are all these pieces that the industry can start to say, well, hey, I want this piece or I can contribute to this piece. And that's how this comes together.
[00:27:33] Speaker B: I thought one of the other interesting parts to the, to the event was upside. Robots had a nitrogen dispensing robot for corn and, and we got to hear their whole story, which was really, really exciting.
[00:27:46] Speaker A: Yes. And I think that it's interesting to hear the founders stories and some of the challenges that they come through. And it's, you know, in the case of Upside, you know, when they talk about how, you know, they will admit that, hey, farming is hard and you know, and so whether they underestimated the difficulty or not, you know, only they can know that. But it's fun to listen to that story and about all the learnings that they have as well as the different skills that they had to bring in. You know, so they brought in agronomists and they brought in programmers and they brought in vision specialists and again, trying to figure out not only how to build a workable robot, but how to scale that business across the province was, was very interesting.
[00:28:31] Speaker B: Yeah, it's exciting and it's exciting to follow these people. And so where can farmers. Maybe we're, maybe we're reaching out to farmers right now and they're like, hey, I'd love to go see some demonstrations of automation.
[00:28:44] Speaker A: So there's lots of ways to have that happen.
The simplest way would be to go on.
There are three websites you could look at, which is. One of them is the autonomous working group.
And we welcome farmers to join the autonomous work group. We strongly encourage it.
The autonomous working group does at least one in person demo, if not two, every year, which are open to interested parties.
The upcoming demo will be I think July 22nd in Simcoe.
That will be on the website.
The other, the other side to look at is Innovation Farm Ontario. So Innovation Farm Ontario, which operates on our farm, we are a testing bed for various robotics technology as well as other agricultural technology. And so if you are a farmer and you're curious about how things are working for us, you can take a look at, at the projects that we're doing. If you're a technology company that is looking for land or somewhere to try your technology, contact us.
If we can't do it or accommodate it on our farm, we will find you someone or somewhere that can.
And lastly, you can look at Hagerty Agrobotics working or the Hagerty Agrobotics website as well.
[00:30:03] Speaker B: And again, I'll put all this in our, in our show notes and we
[00:30:08] Speaker A: have a tour at the Innovation Farm. There's somebody coming through to take a look at stuff probably every, every week.
[00:30:15] Speaker B: So it's not hard to get a spot.
[00:30:16] Speaker A: It's not hard to get a spot. Yep.
[00:30:18] Speaker B: How can people get a hold of you if they want to talk to you and learn a little bit more about some of the other things that are going on?
[00:30:24] Speaker A: So a couple of different ways. You can look me up on LinkedIn at the Sand Farmer on LinkedIn or you can email me at info haggertyagrobotics.com
[00:30:35] Speaker B: Chuck, thanks very much for coming. Did we forget to talk about anything today, by the way?
[00:30:39] Speaker A: I don't think so. I think that was good.
[00:30:40] Speaker B: No, I hope I I've enjoyed this conversation.
[00:30:43] Speaker A: That was fun. Yeah.
[00:30:44] Speaker B: Thank you for listening. And you might know that I run a marketing company called Customer Attraction where we focus on marketing, branding strategy and content creation. We do a lot of project work and help you with your marketing challenges and we are focused on automation integration and robotics and now agrobotics. And we welcome new customers and projects to help you get your marketing back on track, fix your website or perform a marketing audit. And I'd like to acknowledge a three the association for Advancing Automation. They are the leading automation trade association for robotics, vision and imaging, motion control and motors, and the industrial artificial intelligence technologies. Visit automate.org to learn more. And if you'd like to get in touch with us at the Robot Industry Podcast, you can find me Jim Beretta on LinkedIn. Today's podcast was produced by Customer Attraction Industrial Marketing, and I'd like to thank my team, Chris Gray for the music, Jeffrey Bremner for audio production, and my business partner, Janet.
