Family Farms Go High Tech

New technologies are making agriculture in Alberta more sustainable and competitive

By Caitlin Crawshaw

After a long day glued to a computer or plugged in to a Blackberry, sitting down to a piping hot, home-cooked meal with your family might seem pretty traditional.

You might be surprised to learn that food production is often a far cry from traditional. The romantic image of the wheat-chewing, pastoral farmer is far from the truth: farmers these days are using the most cutting-edge tools to get the job done. Just as technology has changed the music you listen to (heard of the iPod?), the way you drive your car (GPS) and your doctor’s visits (electronic health records), agriculture is changing, too. But farmers and scientists say technology is making your food cheaper and more nutritious Ð and helping Alberta agriculture better manage changing economic realities at home and abroad.

Dairy farmer Hendrik de Gier sure thinks so. He runs the de Gier Dairy alongside his father, Govert, and brother Poul, and has struggled to cope with the province’s shortage of reliable labour.

Like any farm, the dairy is a busy place. Naturally, the most time-consuming task is milking the 210 cows that reside at the family’s two farms west of Ponoka.

But the de Gier family has found a technological solution: robotic milking stations. Still rare in Alberta, the Voluntary Milking System (a creation by Swedish company Delaval) has been catching on in Ontario and Quebec and is quite common throughout Europe.

The system is simple: rather than requiring a human to manually connect a cow’s udder to a milking hose, a cow decides when it needs to be milked and approaches the robot.

“When they’re in the station, the robot decides if they’re allowed to be milked or not, and if they’re allowed, it will find the teats and put the hose on,” said de Gier. “It goes on 24 hours a day.”

It takes an average of 7.5 minutes to milk a cow and, on average, a cow needs milking 2.7 times a day, but some as often as five times a day. For the de Gier family, the robot means shorter working days and more family time. “It gives us more flexibility, because we’re not so fixed to milking cows at regular intervals and getting up at 4 a.m.”

This is good news for cows too, as the robot means greater comfort for the herd, says de Gier. “It means less stress on their udders. In a traditional parlor, they’re chased to get milked two or three times a day - now they do their own thing, find their own schedule, and it’s a lot more relaxed,” says de Gier. This also benefits consumers, as a more proficient operation lowers the cost of milk.

De Gier, whose father built the farm in 1981, says he’s open to new technologies. “You have to keep changing with your industry, especially when one of the challenges you face is labour.”

In beef farming the challenges are different, but the openness to technology is likewise apparent. Since 1986, Yvonne Tollens and husband Ralph have offered technological solutions to the challenges facing ranchers, feedlot operators and packagers. Their Okotoks-based company, Computer Aid Professional Services Ltd., helps track the many factors affecting the profitability and quality of the end product. Factors include the resources required to raise cattle (including grain and veterinary care) and the ability to offer full traceability of cattle.

“It’s comparable to if you were to take every man, woman and child in Alberta and keep track of everything they eat, every time they move, every dollar they expend on drug treatment or diagnosis - we keep track of all of that and we do it every year,” says Tollens.

The company can help farmers collect data on an individual animal level, from certifying an animal for export to the U.S., to maximizing feeding systems and keeping track of animal health issues.

It’s all about supplying farmers with all of the information, allowing them to make informed business decisions, says Tollens, who grew up on a multi-generational farm in B.C. Before computer technology, it was hard to get the facts, she says.

“People made decisions without necessarily having the information to back them up. They used intuition, and there’s tremendous value in that. However, sometimes that was 180 degrees wrong.”

Ultimately, she and her husband are in the business of keeping Alberta beef producers profitable and, therefore, sustainable. “The reason we’ve been around 20 years is because that’s what we help people do: we help them be more profitable, bottom line.”

On the consumer side, more efficient management of these operations means safer meat, which can be traced back to the individual animal from which it came.

“You can start to trace it back to find out where  an animal came from. How was it treated? From a safety point of view, that becomes important. The technology also means better quality meat and lower prices,” says Tollens. “We tend to forget that because we’re using the latest technology, it keeps our food costs among the lowest in the world, for the quality we’re getting. When you do that quality-price comparison, there’s huge value.”

Grain farmers may be the real front-runners when it comes to adding value to agricultural products. For the past 10 years, Alberta farmers have been growing Nexera canola - a variety that’s low in trans fat (linked to heart disease  and found in fast food, commercial baked goods and many other products) and saturated fat but high in polyunsaturated fats (which are believed to be healthier).

Developed by pesticide-guru Dow AgroSciences Canada Inc., Nexera was developed through traditionally breeding the plants for specific traits and is not a genetically modified product. The canola variety produces oil that is chemically stable without requiring hydrogenation, a process which keeps oils from breaking down chemically, but creates trans fat in the process.

The nature of Nexera’s chemical makeup is appealing for health-conscious consumers as well as food processors, including fast food chains which are increasingly avoiding trans fats. Nexera canola is also more economical for fast-food outlets, since it can be used in fryers for longer than traditional canola oils, due to its chemical stability.

Nexera isn’t brand new (after about a decade on the market, 2,500 farmers in Western Canada now grow it, including 1,000 Alberta farmers), but its surge in popularity is, particularly in the U.S. and wok-loving Japan.

“In the last two years, the bans you see on trans fats have really made companies sit up and take notice, and change what they’re doing,” says Stan Audette, communications manager for Dow AgroSciences Canada. “It is farmers right outside your door who are creating this specialty oil, which is helping the trans fat situation.”

For farmers, raising crops for the trans fat reduced oil can mean bigger returns than they would get with traditional, commodity canola oil.

“Some farmers do it because it’s good for the canola oil industry in Canada, it’s good for the health of food, and it’s making a difference, per se. But generally farmers are businesspeople and they look to see the crops that are going to give them the most returns,” he says.

In fact, Alberta grain farmers are trying many different strategies to add value to their crops, says Connie Phillips, acting director of the bio-industrial technologies division of Alberta Agriculture and Food. Many are starting to grow grains specifically for biofuel, including biodiesel (made from canola) and ethanol (made from wheat).

The growing drive to deal with fossil fuel emissions and global warming is creating demand for alternative sources of energy, and farmers in Alberta are beginning to cash in on the trend.

That trend, says Phillips, is being advanced by global drivers. “In Canada and particularly in Alberta we have our own drivers. They’re not the same as the United States, but we’re very much affected by what’s going on in the U.S.”

Right now, Permolex Ltd. operates a 40-million-litre-per-year ethanol plant in Red Deer, Alberta, and Calgary-based Husky Energy Inc. runs a $110-million, 130-million-litre-per-year ethanol plant in Lloydminster, Saskatchewan. A $400-million integrated biodiesel and ethanol refinery is currently being planned in central Alberta by Florida-based Dominion Energy Services, and is scheduled to open in 2008.

Farmers are also profiting from the latest cooking and health trends. They are creating heart-smart oils such as cold-pressed canola oil and cold-pressed flax oil, like those of Edmonton-based Gold Tops or Highwood Crossing Farm in Aldersyde. Cold-pressing eliminates the use of chemicals and heat during the process of deriving oil from seed.

New processing techniques and technological advances ultimately benefit the consumer by adding value to farmers’ products, which in turn makes them more sustainable. This keeps food costs low and quality high, says Audette. “In Canada, we spend 11 per cent of our disposable income on food. In Africa or India or other developing countries, they spend 65 or 70 per cent of their disposable income on food.”

“We have the cheapest, safest, most nutritious food in the world. Because our farmers embrace technology, getting the higher yield and the higher production, it helps keep the price down.”

What’s next for Alberta farms?

When it comes to agricultural science, everyone has heard the sci-fi tales: strawberries spliced with spider DNA or glow-in-the-dark tobacco. While some of the stories may have a grain of truth, agricultural research in Alberta is primarily practical in nature, and focuses on developing better, higher yielding products, says University of Alberta agriculture biotechnologist Randall Weselake. “If you watch too many Frankenstein shows, you’re likely to get the wrong idea,” he says.

Weselake says researchers are focused on consumer interests. His own research supports this: Weselake is the head of the U of A’s Bioactive Oils Program (BOP), which has received a $5.3-million grant from Alberta commercialization company AVAC. The interdisciplinary research program involves biochemists, nutritionists, biotechnologists and other experts from across Western Canada.

The program has two main thrusts. One is to develop canola with increased amounts of saturates. While saturates are not the healthiest fat, they are a stable fat for processed foods to substitute for existing man-made trans fats. The other thrust, says Weselake, is to modify flax oil so that it will have a higher omega-3 content.

Studies suggest omega-3 fatty acids have numerous health benefits, including preventing heart disease and aiding brain function. While found in high quantities in fish, Weselake says that’s not an ideal source. “Fish stocks are diminishing and some species of wild predatory fish have high levels of toxins. This would provide a land-based source of fish oil.” Weselake expects his program will put better varieties of canola and flax on the market within five years.

Presently, vegetable oils have more dollar value than biofuels, but there’s also a push to create more efficient, profitable ways of growing grains for biofuel. According to Connie Phillips, acting director of the bio-industrial technologies division of Alberta Agriculture and Food, the province and its partners (including the U of A, the Alberta Research Council and Agri-culture and Agrifood Canada) are researching processing techniques to help producers and processors capitalize on the burgeoning biofuel industry. They aim to create higher-value crops, such as new varieties of triticale with higher starch contents and biomass more conducive to ethanol production. The partners also hope to find better ways to separate the component parts of the crop, such as starch, protein and straw for use in different industrial products. These products could include biofuels, polymers and other chemical agents. Separating components may open up multiple markets for farmers.

No matter the approach, biofuel research means big things for Albertans, says Phillips. “We see this as a huge opportunity for the agricultural sector to diversify their business.”