By Angela Lovell
Rick Rutherford’s grandfather would be astounded if he could set foot on the family farm near Grosse Isle, Manitoba today. Back in the early 1900s, he and his brothers custom seeded over 2,000 acres for area farmers with five teams of four horses. Today, Rutherford Farms is an Innovation Farm that works with technology accelerator EMILI (Enterprise Machine Intelligence and Learning Initiative) and private companies to test and validate the most cutting-edge agricultural technology and equipment available.
The third-generation farm has always embraced innovation and technology throughout their operations, which includes a pedigree seed business offering; a state-of-the-art, fully automated seed cleaning facility with the capacity to clean over 500 bushels of seed per hour; grain storage capacity of over 800,000 bushels; and hopper bins with bean ladders and conveyors for handling sensitive crops like soybeans and peas.
Since taking over the farm from his father, Jack, in 1980, Rick Rutherford has expanded the operation from three quarter sections to over 12,000 acres, which now includes a second farm two hours north at Gypsumville, Manitoba purchased three years ago. Over the years, he has used just about every technology available to improve productivity and efficiency, starting with his first geo-referenced field map in 1997. The innovation journey continued to autosteer, then sectional control on tractors, sprayers, seeders and fertilizer equipment, through to satellite images for monitoring different crop conditions.
The first Innovation Farm in Canada
Six years ago, Rutherford Farms moved to the next level by becoming the first Innovation Farm in Canada after EMILI’s managing director, Jacqueline Keena, and board chair, Ray Bouchard, (who is also CEO of Enns Brothers), approached Rutherford about working with the organization because they knew he had one of the most complete data sets of farm operations in Western Canada, dating back 12 years.
“Until I went with EMILI, I guarded my data fairly closely because I knew it was becoming something special,” Rutherford says. “When they came to me with the opportunity to use it to assist some of the tech companies for which this data was important, I felt that if the data set had value to it, I wanted to make sure it was shared with the right people.”
Initially, they had discussed doing some small plot work on the farm, but for Rutherford it was all or nothing, and he granted access to the entire farm.
“I said let’s take this to another level and make it a full-scale validation farm,” Rutherford says.
Rutherford was also motivated by a strong desire to help validate new technologies while ensuring they were feasible with practical applications for farmers under real-world conditions.
“We have to prove there’s a return on investment (ROI),” Rutherford says. “Farmers don’t need to find out the hard way that something isn’t what it is cracked up to be, or doesn’t have a practical application on their farm. We can’t be supporting things that don’t have an ROI.”
Rutherford admits that not every new technology pans out – and that they are more involved in some projects than others, depending on the technology and the goals – but he meets with EMILI regularly to discuss existing and new project ideas.
“Ray and I will get together with Jacqueline and chat about where things are going,” Rutherford says. “They work on other projects too that may not relate to our farm at all, but the point is they are not handcuffed with what they’re doing here; they are always looking for different ways to innovate in other areas as well.”
Projects proving theory
Rutherford Farms has hosted drone projects for fungicide application and for identifying resistant weed patches in fields, as well as verification testing of new equipment, such as Elmer’s Manufacturing’s Hive Motherbin, a portable grain bin on wheels that can store up to 8,250 bushels in the field.
It’s a perfect example of how Rutherford Farm’s data helped validate the efficiencies of a new technology. In comparing data from corn crops harvested at the farm in previous years with a grain cart and truck, they found their combine was idle in the field 15 to 20 per cent of the time and the complete operation required five people. When they used the Hive Motherbin, they could harvest a quarter section with just three people, and the combine was idle less than three per cent of the time.
“This has become a huge selling point for big corn farmers in the U.S. Midwest because it’s something that can increase their efficiencies,” Rutherford notes. “That’s one example of a large manufacturer seeing a lot of benefit in having a third-party group verify what they actually know.”
Sometimes part of the project leads to identifying new applications for technologies that come as a result of their own experience as farmers. A good example is their work with LiDAR to show the exact amount of grain in a bin.
“We have challenged this group of people by saying if you can get your accuracy down on these bins by using LiDAR, it may be something that crop insurance will accept going forward,” Rutherford says. “So here’s a technology that they’ve used, but now we’ve given them ideas to put it into other practical applications that they hadn’t thought of. That’s part of the tech accelerator idea, that we can take something from an idea, put a practical twist to it and say there is more that you could do here.”
Next step: autonomous farming
The team, which includes Emily Laudin, who serves as farm manager of Rutherford’s South Farm at Grosse Isle, has also worked with John Deere to beta test new technology that uses RTK to establish permanent, fixed boundaries in a field – an essential next step to the deployment of autonomous equipment.
“Once we have these boundaries, it lets us design every path in the field before we even go into the field, and the passes are designed to be the most efficient,” Rutherford says. “When you create an absolute boundary like this, the data you collect is to a very high level, and that’s part of the introduction of autonomy; it has to be precise.”
Rutherford admits that their farm may well be one of the first to employ autonomous farming in the future, although he’s not entirely sure that the technology will be ready to run without a human being present for a while yet.
“If we are in the field harvesting corn, the autonomous tractor could be working in the same field, coming up behind us and tilling the field as we move across it, so in that specific case we’re still sitting with eyes on it,” Rutherford says.
For Rutherford Farms, their partnership with EMILI has given them first access to new equipment and sneak peeks at evolving technologies that help them continue to improve their own productivity and efficiency in ways they would not have discovered if they hadn’t been involved in this research and validation work.
“I’m not the innovator that I can be without them, and they’re not verifying stuff without me, so it’s a great marriage for us,” Rutherford says.
