How technology is helping farmers feed a changing world

The landscape of Canadian agriculture is quickly changing: the Farmer’s Almanac is out, and Excel spreadsheets are in. Today, a tech-savvy farmer can use GPS-guided planters to precisely space seeds and smart sensors to monitor the health of individual animals. With precision ag tools like these at our disposal, we see an opportunity for Canada to level up to agriculture superpower status and drive economic growth in a rapidly changing world.

Primary agriculture—work that is performed within the boundaries of a farm, nursery or greenhouse—is an economic driver across the country. GDP is about $36.3 billion (1.8%), with 249,900 jobs to be had on 189,874 farms. Farms cover about 62.2 million hectares, or 6.2%, of Canada’s land area concentrated across the Prairies, Quebec and Southern Ontario. The average farm size in Canada has almost doubled over the last 50 years, due to both consolidation and technological advances.

With food insecurity rising at home and abroad, there is an urgency to ramp up the output of this country’s farms. Canada needs to produce more food, more efficiently, in more extreme conditions. Can we meet the moment?

The Challenges

Farms have always had good years and bad years, but in the 2020s, changing weather patterns make this reality even more extreme. Consider how in 2021, drought in Western Canada caused wheat production to fall to 16 million tonnes, down from 26 million in 2020. Then in 2023, massive amounts of summer rain flooded fields in Quebec. By August, the province had received nearly 2,500 reports of weather-related damage to fruits, vegetable and cereal farms; ten years ago, during the same period, there were fewer than 1,800 reports.

Climate disasters come at a time when Canada has less land available to farm. All 10 provinces have been losing arable land for decades, largely due to urbanization, according to the Census of Agriculture. Nationally, the total reported area is down eight per cent in the last two decades — from 68 million hectares in 2001 to 62 million in 2021. During that same time period, Australia’s arable land did the opposite: instead of losing six million hectares, it added six million hectares. This trend puts Canada under even greater pressure to adopt the best technologies more quickly than its competitors. In particular, Brazil is expanding its cropland at the fastest rate in the world, increasing at a rate of 2.6% annually.

Canadian agriculture also faces a severe and chronic labour shortage that dates back decades. During peak season in 2022, more than 28,200 jobs were estimated to have gone unfilled, resulting in an estimated $3.5 billion in lost sales. The shortage could get worse, with retirement looming for many in the industry: the median age of farm operators in Canada hit 58 in 2021.

Despite these challenges, Canada is not keeping pace with competitors when it comes to public agricultural research and development (R&D) investment. Brazil is now one of the top spenders in the world, joining China, the U.S., the EU and India. Australia’s public R&D investment in agriculture has also steadily increased over the last 10 years. Canadian farmers tell us they are frustrated by what they see as an expectation to produce more food on less land in more difficult conditions (and using fewer emissions), without a matching level of government investment.

In the next 40 years, the world will need to produce the equivalent of all the food produced in the last 10,000 years.

The Opportunities

This doesn’t mean the cards are all stacked against Canadian agriculture. These sector-wide issues are glaring, growing—and solvable. We need to take a step back and reconsider the who, what, where, when, why, and how of growing.

Demand is increasing for the kinds of food that Canadian farmers and processers can deliver, e.g. meats, grains, oilseeds, fruits, vegetables, pulses, and processed foods.

Some key advantages of agriculture in Canada include abundant land and water resources, access to international markets, strong research and development capacity, strong global reputation as a trusted supplier of safe, top-quality food, and strong stewards of the land.

We know capital investments in the right technologies can and will increase productivity.

Positively, Canada is recognized as one of the global leaders in the agricultural technology (agtech) industry. The market value of precision agriculture in Canada reached $870 million in 2021. Precision agriculture refers to a new set of farm management technologies, as well as data and analytics, that are used to increase efficiency, production, and sustainability. These tools include GPS, sensors, robotics, drones, autonomous vehicles, and software.

While a more standardized industry like the auto sector can unite behind a growth strategy, agriculture is made up of nearly 200,000 individual farms; in a sense, each needs its own strategy to address its own opportunities and challenges. As of 2021, about one-quarter of grains and oilseeds farmers were using variable-rate input application and geographic information system mapping. Early adopters will be rewarded; but smaller operations may fall behind owing to the upfront costs, unclear ROI, and complex implementation. The industry needs to attract new people with the right skills to agriculture, who are ready and willing to take production to the next level.

It’s important to remember this transformation doesn’t stop once the crops are harvested. It will take investments in the whole food processing chain to add value. Currently, commodities like grains, oilseeds, and red meat are being exported to be processed in other countries—and then sold back to Canadians as a new product. We haven’t built the infrastructure to do further processing ourselves and would need more skilled labour to power it.

Doing things differently

In the mid-2020s, we’ve reached a pivotal moment for the future of Canadian agriculture. Capitalizing on it will require investment, resources, government support, and careful consultation with farmers.

Our country’s farmers face competing pressures: to increase yields despite land and labour shortages; to invest in new technologies despite tight margins and rising costs; and to navigate changing market demands and climatic conditions in an industry built on tradition.

The first step is understanding the need for change, the reasons behind it, and the opportunities that await.