Besides helping farmers save money on inputs, digital technology could pay dividends if and when governments start reimbursing producers for environmentally friendly farm management practices.
So says Kris Kinnaird, product market manager for Farmers Edge, a Winnipeg-based agricultural technology company which markets a digital platform called FarmCommand.
This product, and others like it, could enable farmers to measure the carbon being sequestered by sustainable practices (such as no till and cover crops), calculate the value and get paid for it from a government sustainability program, said Kinnaird.
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Many farmers already use digital tools on their tractors and other equipment to generate field work data. It wouldn’t take much to combine that data into a package, using tools such as FarmCommand, and calculate the amount and value of sequestered carbon, Kinnaird said.
Farmers could then sell carbon offsets to the market if there were government programs to pay them for it, he said.
A lot of that work is already happening, Kinnaird added.
“Carbon offset generation is a byproduct of what we’re already doing,” he said. “We record field passes, know how much fertilizer is applied and what implements and machines we’re using. We’ve been doing no till for as long as I can remember. We do variable rates of fertilizer and nitrogen, so our inputs are reduced. Now it’s just a matter of consolidating all of that, getting it into the market and being able to sell it. For farmers right now, that’s an opportunity for additional revenue.”
Farmers Edge is one of four agriculture technology companies which partnered with the U of M’s agriculture diploma program in staging a recent course titled “Agricultural Technologies For Farm Management Decision Making.”
Kinnaird, who also farms with his family near Virden, said environmental pressure from climate change will eventually force farmers to produce more with less. Producers say reducing greenhouse gas emissions while increasing food production is a challenge for which they should be financially compensated through government policy.
Agricultural digitization will be central to quantifying the benefits from sustainable farm practices and measuring their value in dollars and cents, said Kinnaird.
“We’re digitizing the farm and putting a dollar value on almost everything.”
