Farming Smarter

By Becky Zimmer

Ken Coles hates the term “applied research organization.”

The industry has evolved beyond that to help and support farmers instead of solely creating profit-focused policy and practice, he says.

As CEO of Farming Smarter, this is the goal for Coles and his team of 10 diversely educated staff members. In addition to 10 to 15 summer, practicum and intern students, they thrive on researching and testing practical, bottom-up agricultural innovations with only one goal in mind: “keep our farmers as profitable and sustainable as possible,” he says.

Just like in the name, projects are not designed to reinvent the wheel but look at farming ideas and practices that are already being done on the farm, working smarter and making them more valuable.

But there are plenty of social and political challenges ahead as Coles works to bring innovations to Canadian agriculture.

In terms of expanding, challenging and succeeding in innovation, failure is not the F-word people make it out to be, says Coles, as there is need for the agriculture industry to continuously try new things from around the country and the world.

Coles knows that can be difficult when your business and livelihood is on the line. If a crop fails, it is not a quick fix for a farmer who’s not only lost their income for the year, but has also spent money on planting that crop.

However, that is one of the benefits of Farming Smarter. They can take those risks on behalf of farmers and truly innovate instead of doing the same thing, says Coles.

“The types of impacts and the scale and magnitude of mistakes we have is pretty tremendous in agriculture,” he says. “That builds in a general fear of trying something different and new.

“With any new innovation, there is always going to be a touch of risk.”

Nineteen different projects, from precision agriculture testing to crop, pest and input variation trials, were listed for 2022 on the Farming Smarter website. From small plot to field-scale studies under their agronomy research, custom research, extension, field-tested programs, Coles says they test and examine all their projects from an unbiased, scientific approach on all the different practices and products that farmers use or could potentially add to their farming toolbox. Their grassroots approach still doesn’t stop certain farmers from being hesitant as adoption is very much operation dependent, says Coles. If farmers see more of a profit margin from year to year—Coles cites southern Alberta with irrigated farms and high-value crops as an example—those operations are more risk tolerant and are more willing to take the plunge compared to dryland farmers who are more likely to still do what already works, he says. And, as always, there are also farmers who will simply never take the plunge.

While there are many moving parts to that puzzle of how to promote producers to adopt new farming techniques, there has also been a drop in the public’s unbiased perspectives in the industry, so much of whether an operation will adopt a new innovation depends on what information farmers receive.

While this adds a new layer of challenges for the innovators like Coles, there have been two positives that he has seen since Farming Smarter started in 2012.

Retailers are needing to prove the value of their products to farmers as they’re starting to realize more and more what harm this can do to their business if this is not done, or done incorrectly.

The other positive is how this is opening the discussions on best practices.

Through his recent Nuffield Scholarship, Coles has been looking at the benefits of thriving non-profit organizations and how they communicate with and help farmers innovate the industry. He has hosted ag professionals in Canada, and has travelled to six countries with New Zealand soon to be a seventh. His primary goal is to investigate how these organizations work within other countries.

The same grassroots organizations that exist at the regional and provincial levels in Canada are only pipe dreams in a country like France, he says. Farmers he spoke with didn’t know what was going on in their own backyard due to not having that bridge from innovators to the end users. That is a huge message he wants to bring back to Canada—keep farming supports local.

“What I’ve experienced so far is that there is very much still a need to have a more localized community that works together on these things because we tend to have big broad scope organizations, like the federal government or the provincial government, but farms still kind of work in communities,” he says.

While the country and industry focus on big solutions that will “solve everything,” Coles notes data and genomics as two of the things policy-makers and industry leaders are not taking enough of a realistic and holistic approach to innovating the agriculture industry. A lot of funding is available for projects before people know what the problem is they’re solving, he says, with investments in drone technology being an example.

It makes Coles skeptical. He says he is not completely dismissive of things like big technology, but also believes that throwing money at new technology, venture capitalism and centralizing helpful ag organizations is not going to make the Canadian market more competitive.

Instead, the agriculture industry needs to focus on what they already do great—raising the best cattle, wheat and canola in the world.

“We’re switching gears to technology and venture capitalism without maintaining good agronomics and breeding, sort of the tried, tested and true stuff that Canada excels at,” he says.

“We’re trying to be something we’re not.”

Value-added businesses have always been a topic of discussion throughout Coles’ career, he says, but that is not something that will magically benefit the Canadian agriculture market either, unlike European countries that have unrestricted access to seaports and less distance to participate in the global markets.

Existing in a larger sphere of global agriculture, Coles says the Canadian industry has lost its sense of their own competitive advantage. To gain that back, Coles says the industry has to keep those grassroots growing.

“I’m an advocate for the farm, and the farmer and the farming community, and that’s what our true resources are.”