Grainswest - Tech 2024

Tech 2024 grainswest.com 25 capacity of common harvesters,” said Hannah Ovelhey, NEXAT agronomist. The system’s single-wheel drive travels on permanent tramlines that limit compaction. “You’re basically using every tramline twice as compared to normal controlled traffic farming, and thus reducing the traffic share of your fields, so we can eliminate compaction from up to 95 per cent of your field,” said Ovelhey. The solidness of the compacted soil in the tramlines allows it to be trafficked earlier in the season, which gives farmers a head start on field work. Ovelhey’s goal is to continue to improve NEXAT’s contribution to regenerative agriculture. “Not compacting your soil anymore gives a lot of opportunities for reducing tillage and reducing soil disturbance in general, improving your soil life, health and fertility,” she said. The company is at work on improvements to the system’s autonomous capabilities and in the early research and development of a hydrogen fuel cell replacement for its diesel engines. “Our vision at NEXAT is that we want to make climate-neutral agriculture possible,” said Ovelhey. An Australian company has taken yet another approach to improve field work efficiency. In a move away from high- horsepower machines, SwarmFarm offers lightweight, 86-horsepower, autonomous robots that can operate 24/7. “There’s really big adoption of our own robots here in Australia now,” said Andrew Bate, CEO of SwarmFarm. These units now work more than four million acres. North American adoption has just begun, with one machine being employed in the United States and a trial run that was conducted on a Saskatchewan farm late last year. Bate founded the company with his wife Jocie, the company’s CFO. “The reason we started SwarmFarm robotics was not to save labour, it was actually to be better farmers,” said Bate. The couple grow wheat, barley, chickpea, mung bean and sorghum on 11,000 acres and maintain a herd of 800 cattle. When they launched the company, they managed 20,000 acres. “What we found was, as we got bigger, we weren’t as good of farmers as we used to be,” he said. “We found that machines were so big and so heavy, they were causing super compaction.” The use of large tires or tracks may reduce compaction on the top four inches of soil, but they cause deeper, long-term compaction. SwarmFarm units feature a lightweight base and light axles to reduce soil damage. “The only way to truly prevent deep soil compaction is to reduce your axle weights,” said Bate. Docking stations allow the autonomous units to refill their small fuel and spray tanks up to 15 times a day. Like NEXAT, SwarmFarm partners with additional companies that provide compatible implements. These are sprayers for now, but fertilizer and seeding equipment is in development. With its own onboard weather station, each robot reacts to the environment on the go and will stop and start as conditions dictate. Because the system is autonomous, farmers pair it with spot spray technology and the unit completes multiple field passes. “They go and spray it again, and they spray it again, and they spray it again, and they’re only using a miniscule amount of product,” said Bate. This can reduce weed pressure to where Bate has seen farmers sow crops they previously could not have. Whether it’s higher horsepower or autonomous equipment big and small, the shared goal among farmers and manufacturers is to increase efficiency and sustainability. “The sophistication and the technology that’s in agriculture right now is just really off the charts; it’s phenomenal,” said Schmeiser. “This is one of the best kept secrets about agriculture, about how sophisticated it is.” The NEXAT system’s single-wheel drive travels on permanent tramlines that limit compaction.