The Innovate BC on-farm technology program last year provided $4.5 million to farmers to purchase new technology.
Imagine a farm with a barn set in a lush green pasture where chickens graze the grass. Then the barn begins to move on its own. It turns out that the barn is a robot.
That's Lentelus Farms, which has land in Courtenay and Kelowna, British Columbia, managed by farmer Dave Semmelink. He has a robotic barn thanks to Innovate BC's On-Farm Technology Adoption Program (BCOFTAP). The government agency announced this week that the program awarded just over $4.5 million in grants to 80 farm projects across the province last year to help farmers acquire new technologies.
BCOFTAP funds up to $100,000 for farmers to adopt new technologies that save labor, from autonomous crop propagation to GPS location monitoring of cows.
BCOFTAP covers up to 65 percent of a farmer's eligible project costs (up to $100,000) to implement new labor-saving technologies, from autonomous crop growing to GPS location monitoring of cows. A farmer finds a technology that could save him time and money and applies for a grant to help with start-up costs. The program is administered by Innovate BC with financial support from the governments of Canada and British Columbia through Sustainable Canadian Agriculture Partnership.
In front of his autonomous robotic pasture house made by UKKÖ Robotics In Manitoba, Semmelink had to spend about an hour a day starting a tractor and moving the grass-fed chicken enclosure himself. He told BetaKit by phone Wednesday that moving the barn allows the birds to enjoy fresher grass and spread manure more evenly across the field.
“They get really excited every time the barn moves because they want to run around in the fresh grass and look for bugs and look for new ones.” [grass] something to snack on,” Semmelink said, adding that the exercise results in happier chickens and higher-quality meat.
This freed up time doesn't mean less work; it just means more time for his slaughterhouse, slaughterhouse, farmer's market and “meat operations.” Semmelink was unable to answer BetaKit's first call because he was too busy “unloading the cows.”
ROVA|BARN 400 from UKKÖ Robotics. Images courtesy of UKKÖ Robotics.
Like many farmers, Michelle Van Ecklen wears many hats. He experienced the BCOFTAP program as a farmer and as a distributor through his company M-Automation. He told BetaKit over the phone Wednesday that he was first introduced to the program when his family wanted to purchase a “robotic laser weeder” for their vegetable farm near Abbotsford, British Columbia.
They applied and received support for the acquisition Robot One from the Dutch company Pixel Farming. The machine drives through farmers' fields and scans kidneys. Once the farmer determines which of the scanned plants are weeds, the machine tracks and vaporizes the weeds using a laser.
Van Ecklen estimates the machine saves him up to $60,000 a year in manual weed removal. He said it's a good addition to the farm, especially since he believes B.C. typically lags in adopting new agricultural technologies. As a distributor, he also sold technology to British Columbia farmers supported by the program.
BCOFTAP “helps balance that out a little bit, in terms of bringing technology to farms in British Columbia, it's always been difficult to bring it here,” Van Ecklen said.
Van Ecklen said the program's application process was relatively simple compared to some other grant programs he has applied for, while Semmelink said it is “a little more involved” than some others he uses. However, they both agreed that the program administrators were very helpful by providing feedback on their applications.
“They are really easy to deal with, but they are very thorough, which I appreciate as a taxpayer,” Semmelink said with a laugh. “[That’s] That’s not always the case with government funding.”
Image provided Pixel Farming.
