Farming Smarter

“We’re hitting it out of the park these days on the custom research front for commercial innovation,” says Ken Coles, executive director of Farming Smarter.

Farming Smarter has become Alberta’s leading crop innovation hub. This 300-acre, nonprofit educational institution, located between Lethbridge and Coaldale, Alberta, is described as “a Canadian charity created by farmers for farmers.” Farmers, scientists and agronomists work together to discover and transfer new knowledge into practical farming information. 

The organization was formed in 2012 from the combination of the Southern Applied Research Association and the Southern Alberta Conservation Association. Coles serves as executive director, but jokes that he is also executive director of his own irrigated, mixed grains farm near Coaldale.

Plots to fields
Science-based small plot research has high value to the farming industry, but it needs to be scaled up to meet the logistical challenges of modern commercial farming. Farming Smarter enables that to happen. 

“When I started, we just signed an agreement with Lethbridge College for 60 acres so we could do some demonstrations,” he said. “Today, we still do both small plot and field-scale work.”

Officially, 14 counties and municipal districts comprising 12 million acres of dryland and about 2 million acres of irrigated land are under the Farming Smarter umbrella. Farming Smarter has a team of 10 full-time staff. For the growing season, it employs 10-15 students and term employees. Funding comes from grants, commercial innovation projects, sponsorships and subscriptions. 

Farming Smarter acts as a bridge where agricultural knowledge is transferred two ways: from the top down and from the field up. 

“We have about 160 trials right now between grant-based projects and our contracts,” Coles says. “It amounts to about 14,000 small plots.” The small plots measure 2x6 meters and usually have four replicates. About 25% of the farm is in small plots.

The best findings from small plot research are then scaled up to field size. For the farmers and ranchers of southern Alberta, that’s where Farming Smarter really shines. It is constantly dealing with regional adaptability and with trust.

Adapting the technology 
“The challenges farmers face are logistical by nature,” Coles says. “If the logistics don’t work, then the economy doesn’t matter. We often say logistics will trump agronomy.”

For example, the best treatment in a small-plot trial may be achieved by putting all the fertilizer in a single sideband but that will not work for some farms. They may want to broadcast some or may want to use a sprayer to dribble band later. 

Coming from the other direction, a company may want to introduce Canadian growers to a product that has proven very successful in another country. 

“What are their challenges here at the farm level? Can they get their technology or their product into field settings here? Do the same principles work in our soil types? We can help them with those issues,” Coles explains. “The amount of adaptation that has to go on is actually pretty significant, and it’s very regional by nature.”

Successful projects
As a nonprofit charity, Farming Smarter is not necessarily motivated by profit. 

“We’re trying to build trust. It’s one of our core values, to be unbiased,” Coles says. “We look for opportunities to help our farmers and that puts us in a pretty unique position. There’s decreasing trust for government and on the flip side, the industry is motivated by profits. Somewhere in the middle, farmers have to find what works best for them and provides a return on investment.”

One of his early, smaller projects began when farmers had questions about herbicide efficacy with the new practice of night spraying. GPS-based autosteer would handle the machine after dark, but what happened to the interaction of weeds, herbicide and crop? 

“We did a whole bunch of studies and ended up finding that spraying first thing in the morning when it was quite cold was one of the worst times to spray,” he says. “Often, farmers would get up nice and early to beat the wind and spray in the dark.”

“We found up to a 30% reduction in efficacy of herbicides when you’re spraying first thing in the morning. Farmers grabbed onto that quite well. They also learned a little more about what conditions are best for optimal efficacy, especially when you have herbicide resistance or particularly weedy fields.” 
 
Glyphosate resistance in kochia populations is a growing problem in western Canada with over 50% of strains carrying resistance. 

“We were the first to the gate, talking about random glyphosate-resistant kochia,” he continues. “We worked with the local Ag Canada scientists and put communication and extension work together and did actual research trials. To this day, we still work with glyphosate-resistant kochia.” 
 
In addition to site-specific management, their work with kochia aims to use practices that are both economically viable for the farmer and environmentally sustainable.

Testing new ideas
Awhile back, farmers were asking Coles about new products that claimed to help a crop recover from hail damage. He tried studying the products at a field scale, but found hail was too variable to reach any conclusions.

“We built a hail simulator and tested a whole bunch of products at different timings and different damage levels,” he explains. “One of the big things we found was that, most often, there was no value in trying to spray nutrients or growth regulators on the crops. We saved farmers a lot of money from that study.” 

Recently, Farming Smarter helped build the hemp industry in southern Alberta. “We figure out how to grow it for what end use,” he says. “We play a good bridge or broker role in bringing the industry together to discuss the challenges and opportunities in developing the new crop.”

Coles and his crew use a New Holland T4.90 tractor equipped for seeding the research plots, maintenance spraying, tillage and other activity needed at the trials and a T8.330 for larger field work.  

Bridging farm-science gap
Sweeping changes were underway in farming during Cole’s early years. The focus was on conservation, on escaping from the wheat-fallow rotations to rotating wheat and peas and reducing tillage. Then crop diversification came along. 

Today, Farming Smarter is working with smaller, more focused projects across a wide spectrum of technologies and opportunities, but still building trust, dealing with the real questions that arise with the new era. 

“We play a bridge role between scientists, manufacturers and what happens at the farm level,” he adds. “There is stuff that we’ve initiated, but agriculture is a big, big industry and big business. There are a lot of moving parts, but we’ve always played an important role in bridging what’s being done as well as doing our own work.” 

“I think it’s research when you take it to the farm and make incremental changes and adaptations to make it work for farmers. That’s why we’ve got those different programs within Farming Smarter, both the small-plot and the field-scale and multi-pronged methods of communication.”