Farmers and ranchers in Canada face numerous challenges, from avian flu infecting poultry flocks, to climate change adaptation and the loss of farmland to urban sprawl. Increasingly, they also face a human resources challenge, as farmers age into retirement.
Over the next decade, 40 per cent of Canada's farmers are expected to retire, and farm labour is getting increasingly harder to find, said Woo Soo Kim, professor of mechatronics engineering at Simon Fraser University and scientific director for the B.C. Centre for Agricultural Innovation (BCCAI).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, automation, innovation and technology are playing an increasingly important role in agriculture, and B.C.'s Fraser Valley is becoming a bit more Silicon Valley, with the growth of locally based agtech businesses. "A new generation of farmers is adapting traditional growing and harvesting practices to greenhouses, urban rooftops, shipping containers and other unconventional sites," a 2020 report by the B.C. Food Security Task Force noted.
"These new farms often utilize innovative new technologies, such as robotics, drones, LED lighting, monitoring sensors and farm management software." A cluster of agtech companies has grown up around the farms, fields and dairy farms in the valley, and some traditional farm operations have been going increasingly high-tech.
Read more at biv.com