Equipment manufacturers have long promised a hands-free future in which autonomous units seed, spray and harvest with little or no human input. At Hannover, Germany’s Agritechnica 2025, the world’s largest agricultural trade show, there was an obvious shift from this fanciful vision to practical implementation. Across all equipment categories, from sprayers and spreaders to headers and tillage tools, manufacturers switched focus away from full autonomy to machines that monitor themselves and make continuous, real-time adjustments.

It’s funny to discuss AI today as if we haven’t been living our lives with real applications of this seemingly Back to the Future technology for decades. With many examples from ’90s era voice-to-text software and Roombas to social media algorithms and Watson the AI Jeopardy contestant, artificial intelligence has been embedded in our social fabric for some time. It’s only now, given the ability to interact with it, that average citizens are starting to glimpse its true potential.

Leonard Retzlaff of Saddleridge Farming bets sunlight will help stabilize the family farm’s income. Located near Rosemary, the farm is operated by Retzlaff, his father Ralph and brothers Philip and Luke. The family raises purebred Charolais cattle, custom backgrounds beef cattle, produces pedigreed alfalfa seed supported by leafcutter bees and grows canola, corn, wheat and winter rye. All their cropland is irrigated with pivots, which require a significant supply of electricity, one of the main reasons the family pursued solar power generation.

Launched in 2001 by three ambitious New Zealand scientists, AbacusBio is an agricultural science and tech consultancy whose sole purpose is to help ag businesses and farmer organizations maximize their research investments. The company creates custom strategies, systems and platforms built on genomic and genetic data to optimize crop and livestock breeding, business operations and value chain performance. It helps clients make sense of massive, complex data sets across multiple interconnected facets of agricultural business and production. “There is often a gap between the academic and the business sides of agriculture,” said John Crowley, managing director of AbacusBio Canada. “We can walk between the two.

Wilfred Romanowski took over the operation of his family’s Sturgeon County farm in 1961. Though his family once raised cattle and chickens, today the Romanowski farm 20 minutes north of Edmonton strictly produces field crops.

Farmland is sacred, just ask a farmer. Historically, when land changed hands, it was a simple process: Farmer A sold land to Farmer B. However, in the last 20 or so years, a curious trend has emerged. As the farm economy has risen, so has the financial potential of the land as an investment vehicle. The ownership details of Canadian farmland are hard to quantify and lately have generated anger, speculation and plenty of conversation across the Prairies.

Long before sustainability became a policy buzzword, farmers worked to protect soil from wind erosion, manage moisture conditions and conserve fuel and other inputs. What’s changed in recent years is the level of public and industry awareness of environmental issues. This has generated a host of funding initiatives directed at conservation, climate and environmental programming in agriculture. Over time, federal and provincial governments have rolled out an ever-growing suite of programs aimed at soil health, biodiversity, water conservation and greenhouse gas reduction.

Variety is the spice of life, and a shakeup in crop rotation may add bite to the farm bottom line. This is the premise of recent research on crop rotation and its impact on profits and the environment. Through analysis of 20 years of Saskatchewan farmland insurance data on rotational choices in correlation with soil organic carbon (SOC) levels, researchers Devin Serfas and Richard Gray found clear benefits in certain rotations.

Most farms evolve on their own, but the five farm families in the Bow Island area that make up Quattro Ventures chose to grow together to take advantage of collaborative opportunities, economies of scale and shared vision. They chose a unique business model that has merged their farm operations.

For our latest farm family portrait, GrainsWest visited the van de Ligts whose farm was established as a dairy operation in 1960 near the north-central hamlet of Jarvie. Fred and Rita began farming in 1974. Their sons and their wives, Donald and Maya, with Mitchell and Kayla, represent the farm’s third generation.