The stereotypical image of the hard-working Canadian farmer, rising before dawn and working til after dark, while forging a mystical connection with the land, is getting a refresh thanks to technology.

Farmers are still working hard, but some would say they are also working smarter. Kyle Thurston certainly is. The 25-year-old, third-generation farmer has a dairy and cash crop operation near Dunsford that looks like a farm designed by NASA. From the barns to the fields, technology is solving problems and increasing productivity while reducing costs.

The most obvious application of technology at the Thurston operation was made in 2015 when Kyle’s dad and grandfather installed two Lely robotic milkers.

Thurston explains how they operate. “All of our cows wear a collar with a transponder so when they walk into the robot, a reader identifies her weight and how much milk she's giving and then determines how much grain they get as a little incentive to keep them coming back. So, one who's milking 25 to 30 litres a day is only going to get 0.8 of a kilogram of pellet when she walks in versus somebody who's milking 55, 60 litres a day who is maybe going to get like 1.8 to 2 kilograms of feed. It tracks and records it all on a computer in the office. We're able to keep track of health a lot better and herd management a lot better.”

Thurston notes that if there's a cow that was milking 50 to 60 litres “and then all of a sudden she's down to like, 20 litres, it’ll flag her and then it notifies us on the computer or on our cellular devices now.”

The impressive part comes when the milking operation starts. “When the cows walk in, a laser guided robotic arm locates all her teats. A brush kicks out and sprays a disinfectant and then brushes them clean. Next it sprays each quarter with air to dry everything off, and then the milk cups – also laser-guided – come up to connect.

Outside the barn, technological advances are just as ground-breaking. All tractors are outfitted with GPS and have auto steer capabilities. With the GPS engaged, the extreme outside rounds of a field are driven under the control of the operator. He then sets up an “AB” line, and the tractor does the rest.

“You just set the implement back in the ground and hit the auto track and it'll steer for you. It makes things less stressful when you're in a machine 16-17 hours a day.”

Like the robotic milkers, tractors gather and distribute data. The farm’s John Deere tractors record what is planted and where, so the Thurston’s know what variety or hybrid of corn went into each field. Then, at harvest time, it tracks the yields of the fields and that’s when things get interesting. By importing satellite imagery and overlaying it with data about productivity across the farm, farmers get a custom map showing what areas give the best yields. The following spring at planting time, this information determines how seed is scattered.

Thurston says this is known as prescription mapping. “You get a view of the field, showing, say, your higher points that are maybe, rocky, shallow dirt. There's not a lot of topsoil there, it’s low fertility, and it hasn't yielded great over the last couple years. But then at the bottom of that hill is heavy dirt that can put up a 200-bushel crop of corn. With that data in our planting map, as our corn planter gets to the less productive spot in the field it'll cut the population of the planting and bump itself back up automatically at the productive soil.”

Even more technological changes are in the air. This spring when the Thurston’s found some ground was too wet to fertilize with a tractor, they had a service come in and do it all with a drone. 

The operator came out on day one with a small drone and flew the outskirts of the field to make boundary maps. The next day he returned with two big drones pre-loaded with data and sprayed the area. Thurston adds, “the operator doesn't even fly the drones himself. They take off, go over to wherever they are needed, and start just going back and forth. They land on a trailer when the job is done.”

“In the coming years, drones will become more popular because you're able to switch it out from putting fertilizer down to spraying fungicide or herbicide with these drones. We have a big self-propelled sprayer, but it's not equipped to go in and spray corn when the corn is six feet tall.”

One area that Thurston still feels has room for technological advances is weather forecasting. “I’m on my weather app more than any other (app). I’m still a little shocked nowadays with how inaccurate our forecasts can be. Past generations of farmers who felt like they could fix anything with bailing wire and Vise-Grips might not recognize farms as they are today, but they would still agree with that.”