If there’s anyone who has a pulse on the field crops market and the technologies that seek to disrupt it, it’s Chuck Baresich. As a grower, entrepreneur and automation enthusiast, Baresich has his hands in nearly every part of the process.
For starters, Baresich and his brother, Justin, farm 2,000 collective acres of corn and soybeans. They also own Haggerty Creek Ltd., an agronomy and precision agriculture business that serves customers using a whole-farm approach in partnership with AGRIS Co-operative Ltd. Their services range from precision planning and application to grain handling and marketing.
On the technology side, the brothers own Haggerty AgRobotics Company, which focuses on research and testing autonomous farm equipment on the Haggerty Creek farming operation. This endeavor was born from Baresich’s interest in helping customers who were facing labor challenges, herbicide resistance issues and other problems that robots could potentially solve.
The brothers got their feet wet in 2020. Four years later, they’ve worked with everyone from local engineering companies to industry leaders like Naïo Technologies. The plan is to continue learning and experimenting. Today, Baresich can do this with the benefit of a big-picture perspective. His various endeavors have taught him a lot about what’s working and where there are opportunities to do better.
“We have all this technology coming into the field crops space, and it’s very exciting,” Baresich says. “It can also be overwhelming for a farmer to look at. There are probably 5,000 entrepreneurs around the world who are saying, ‘I have a robot for farmers.’”
When it comes to the autonomous robots that were developed to assist field crops growers with tasks like sowing, mechanical weeding, and grain guidance and analysis, Baresich has seen a disconnect between what farmers need and expect, and who will be first in line to adopt the technologies.
“A lot of companies are targeting field crops like corn, soybeans and wheat, but a lot of the robotic systems are not designed to accommodate that space,” he says. “They aren’t big enough, strong enough or robust enough. I’m actually seeing a lot of companies that started by going after the field crops market have transitioned to focus on the horticulture space.”
Baresich says that this actually makes more sense, as most robotic systems are better suited for the horticulture, viticulture and tender fruit markets. Although these sectors have a less acreage dedicated to them than commodities crops, they tend to be more profitable on a per acre basis. This translates directly into dollars available to invest in the latest technologies.
That doesn’t mean everyone has abandoned the field crops market for greener pastures. The manufacturers that continue to innovate in the space have mostly taken an alternative approach to what they create.
“I think what we’re seeing on the field crops side is figuring out how to automate an existing piece of equipment in a meaningful way—one that directly benefits the farmer,” Baresich says. “The challenge that robotics companies are up against there is that field crop farmers have gotten really, really good at being efficient on the field crop equipment.”
He gives the example of a Rogator agricultural sprayer with a 120-foot boom and a 1200-gallon tank. The return on investment of replacing this machinery with a small robot would be incredibly cost inefficient. Large equipment like sprayers can also be easily driven to the area where they need to work. This is where small robots often struggle. The logistics of getting where they need to go in the field often requires the assistance of a truck, trailer, appropriate laneways and more.
Instead of trying to overcome these barriers, many companies have opted to simply automate the Rogator. Baresich has worked on these types of projects himself. The first began nearly four years ago with a computer system his company adapted to control the spray rate and automate the spraying. The next step was to add a connectivity system that takes the machine’s collected data and automatically uploads it to the cloud. This enables Baresich to see what the machine is doing, regardless of who’s driving. He can even control it remotely if he needs to.
After that, they added an after-market camera guidance system from Raven Industries, to allow the sprayer to navigate the field without running over any of the crops. This vision system gives it the ability to perceive the rows and drive in between them. It can do this autonomously, even turning around at the end of the field to go down the next row. All the operator does is drive the machine to the field, monitor the area for obstacles and make sure the machinery is running like it should.
“I think the future of field crops is going to look like that—we’ll keep automating the implements as much as we can,” Baresich says. “As far as tillage, seeding, depth planting and all of these things, that’s where the automation is going to happen in field crops, more so than self-driving. It’s still robotic automation technology. It just means that the machine might not drive itself to the field automatically.”
There are other opportunities for the next generation of field crops robots to deliver new advantages to farmers, too. Baresich believes that lighter robots will help to mitigate some of the soil compaction caused by larger, heavier machines. Because soil compaction negatively impacts yield, new autonomous technologies could help growers increase their gains with greater precision in a smaller footprint.
Another benefit of increasingly smart machines is that they help farmers manage their crops on a highly granular level. This could mean that the theoretical yield of corn plants (1600-1800 bushels per acre) could become within the realm of possibility. For context, award-winning corn growers in the U.S. have managed to hit 600 bushels per acres. The average U.S. corn grower rarely hits 200 bushels per acre on average.
“There’s a lot of opportunity there,” Baresich says. “But the other thing these machines can do is that they can be trained to multiply the farmer. As a grower, you have a skillset where you know a machine needs to work at this depth going this speed in this direction. You can then translate your knowledge to the robots, so now there are three or four of you with the same amount of knowledge, and they will all be doing exactly what you need them to do.”
These are the types of solutions that can have global impacts. Baresich anticipates that highly intelligent autonomous machines will be necessary to meet the increasing food needs of growing populations around the world. In Canada, there were a million new people in the last year alone. This means farmers need to be able to do more than grow commodities crops. They have to level up their fruit and vegetable production, too. As Baresich puts it, “All the new people who have come have to eat something, and they’re not going to eat field corn.”
The good news is that the agtech industry is taking these needs seriously. Those 5,000 entrepreneurs with robots? Baresich is happy to have them working on solutions. He compares the ag robotics space to the automotive sector in 1910 Detroit, where all the manufacturers were gathered together, experimenting and arguing about what would be the dominant technology.
“At that time, there were some car companies that made electric cars, some that made diesel engines, some had the steering wheel on the left hand side and others had it on the right hand side,” Baresich says. “Nobody really knew what the right thing was or what would happen. We’re seeing that in the robotics space today. Some are electric, some are solar powered, some use cultivation, others use lasers. We don’t really know at this stage what the silver bullet is going to be, but we’re working our way to find that out.”
