Mobile apps use grows on the farm

Thursday, January 3, 2013

But use tends to be generational. Some farmers are still dependent on the telephone – and working their way through desktop computers to smartphones and tablets.

by MIKE MULHERN

By 2014, Ontario farmers will be able to use their smartphones or tablets to monitor their grain bins from anywhere in the world. The soon-to-be-available system will check grain volume and temperature as well as control fans. MiFarm Ag Management Inc. of Calgary (www.mifarm.ag) has developed the system, which is working now on seven farms in Alberta.

The MiFarm application (app) is one of a number of mobile apps available to farmers, some for a price, some free. Keith Robson, MiFarm's board chair, says MiFarm's plan is to expand in the province by marketing through an Alberta farm organization. Once their marketing is established there, they will be ready to go nationwide.

Robson says MiFarm did its initial market research by attending farm shows and discovered its customer base was among farmers with large bins in the 40,000 to 50,000 bushel range. The show that best demonstrated that market was Edmonton's FarmTech.

"This is a high-tech and a much more expensive show for both exhibitors and attendees," Robson says, "and it caters to the leading edge farms. Our product fell into that category and, as a result, we experienced tremendous interest."

Scott Robson, MiFarm's operations manager and Keith's son, is involved in the installation. He says the cost depends in part on the number of monitoring cables a farmer wants in a bin. The cables, which fall from the top of the bin, measure temperature at three-foot intervals. A router on each bin is connected to a piece of computing hardware called a co-ordinator which is used to send signals to the internet.

Installation for a 40,000 bushel bin would be in the neighbourhood of $3,000. Annual cell phone charges of about $100 would be added to that to cover communicating with the devices. Users can continually monitor their bins from any web-based device or they can set the system to automatically alert them to any problems or changes.

To help with the cost of commercializing the grain bin monitoring system across the country, the federal government has committed $750,000 from the Agricultural Innovation Program. Keith Robson says the government money is not a grant. It simply allows MiFarm to borrow from the $750,000 up to 43 per cent of what they spend rolling out the product.

Grain farmer and technology innovator Peter Gredig says he expects to see more farming apps in the future as farmers are weaned off the "coal-fired" desktop computer.

But some farmers are still communicating from a place even further back – the telephone – and working their way through desktop computers to smartphones and tablets. Sometimes, three generations on one farm do it the old way (telephone), the new way (desktops) and the smartphone or tablet way.

Gredig, a partner in the mobile technology development company AgNition, based in Guelph, says one of the bottlenecks has been in the agri-business sector. It has been slower to move to smartphones, he says, "because in many cases the powers that be in those entities are working from a desktop. They haven't yet made the leap to what I call the mobile mindset."

None of the sectors – grain handling, feed and seed – have been fast off the mark, Gredig says, "not in a way that's really delivering the benefits that the technology offers." Farmers, on the other hand, "are extremely quick on the uptake with this stuff because it is so powerful for us."

That may be true on a lot of farms, but not all. Bill Mitchell, a Dairy Farmers of Ontario (DFO) spokesperson, says DFO just did a communication survey with its 4,100 members. More than 800 responded to the survey conducted this summer. DFO is still analyzing data but some things are clear. Twenty five per cent of dairy farmers who responded to the survey don't use computers at all. Among those that do, 90 to 92 per cent have high-speed Internet.

"On the same farm," Mitchell says, "you might have three types of user because you might have three generations."

One way for dairy farmers to get information is through Milk Line, a service offered via telephone. "That's extremely popular," Mitchell says, "because, even in the barn with no other tool but the phone, even if it's noisy, you can get results quickly." The results he's talking about are "component test results" that show levels of butterfat, protein and lactose and other solids.

While DFO is looking at developing mobile applications, so far the only offering is a RSS (Really Simple Syndication) tool on its website that pushes news items out to users.

Grain Farmers of Ontario (GFO) did a survey in 2011 and 2012 to gauge how well its communications tools were working. Interestingly, 606 of the 851 responses received were paper-based with just 243 of the responses online. Fifty eight per cent of respondents said they were interested in new technology. About the same number said they found the GFO website useful.

Agnition (www.agnition.ca) offers proprietary apps such as ScoutDoc ($49.99 at the App Store), an iPad app available from Apple that allows users to create maps and save information collected scouting or inspecting field crops.

It was also involved in the development of Aphid Advisor, a multi-platform smartphone app and free download (www.aphidapp.com) based on the work of University of Guelph researcher Dr. Rebecca Hallett. It gives farmers in the field advice about whether to spray soybean aphids. It also allows farmers to report aphid populations in their fields and that information can be added to a map showing other farmers aphid progression in their area.

There are also commercially provided apps available to farmers. Monsanto's DeKalb, for example, offers a free app for seed population calculation at planting time (and planning time in the fall) and another to help farmers estimate yield.

Denise Hockaday, DeKalb's marketing manager, says the apps were originally developed for BlackBerry users because, back in 2010, the BlackBerry was the device of choice for Canadian farmers. That has changed and now DeKalb offers the apps across all platforms.

"The biggest thing I wanted to do," Hockaday says, "was to have something that's useful when you really need it most. It's not too practical to have the computer in the field when you're trying to estimate corn yields, but when you have your smartphone, it's right there and easy to use."

Access to the apps is gained by going to your browser and logging in to www.dekalb.ca on your smartphone or going to www.dekalb.ca/mobile from your desktop. BF