Yvonne Turgeon
As I sat in on the agri-tech and innovation session at the Lower Mainland Horticultural Conference in January, I felt the buzz of anticipation not just for the coming year but for the entire decade ahead.
“We’re at a place right now where I believe we’re going to see an explosion of all kinds of solutions,” says Dean Maerz, operations manager of Klaassen Farms, a family-owned blueberry farm in Rosedale, B.C.
He and fellow blueberry growers Newton Sahota, grower and CEO of Twinberry Farms, and Bryan Van Hoepen from Stoney Creek Farms shared their journey of innovation and adopting smart solutions for their operations.
This trio has ridden the wave of automation, looking to modernizing every aspect of berry growing, picking and packing.
Twinberry Farms, delivering to over 300 nationwide customers, focused on their niche market, five- and 10-pound boxes of blueberries, replacing tedious and repetitive tasks—such as moving a box into position— with robotics. Over at Stoney Creek Farms, an irrigation system app now monitors water levels, ensuring the precise amount needed for their crops. At Klaassen Farms, advanced machinery does the berry picking.
With growing pressure from world markets, growing better quality fruit in the most efficient manner is the path forward. As Maerz says, “We can’t compete with their land costs, but we can compete with our quality.”
All three share a positive outlook for the next few years.
“We’re in a generation where technology is going to make a huge impact in agriculture,” says Sahota. “So, if you are a small producer, there are smaller technology solutions that will make a huge impact on your business. The whole idea is to take yourself from the process of working in your business to working on your business.”
Sahota is most excited about robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). It’s not the big, flashy, expensive things that he’s revved up about, but rather how this new intelligence can help solve the small problems and bring together years of knowledge.
“When it comes to AI, I think that it’s simply giving you an extra eye to give you a sense of what’s going on in the world,” he says. “But it’s doing it all the time.”
Maerz agrees. “It’s the details that I am excited about. It has the ability to crunch a lot of stuff, to go and look at your entire operation from start to finish, giving you metrics and information to work with.”
For most, embracing technology will be a step-by-step journey.
Maerz reminds us that the biggest ally in the technology field is your mind and encourages growers to break through those mental blocks of “we could never” or “there’s no way that we could.” There are solutions on every scale to every problem, he says.
Their farm adopted very economical solutions and then scaled up.
“The world has not even started to see yet what British Columbia has to offer in this area,” he says. I join in his excitement to see that by 2030 our region’s agricultural innovations will make a mark on the world stage.
— Yvonne Turgeon, publisher
As seen in Pre-Spring 2024 Orchard & Vine Magazine