Innovation Challenge Winners Bring Local Tech To British Columbia Farms

Mar 16, 2017

Four B.C. companies have each won $20,000 for developing B.C. technology to help solve a problem identified as part of the BC Ministry of Agriculture and the BC Innovation Council’s Innovation Challenge.

The winning companies are using local technology to deter birds from B.C. berry farms, provide up-to-the-minute health checks on crops, turn B.C. wood waste into fully compostable yarn for farm uses, and improve nutrient recovery from farm waste.

The winners were selected by a panel of experts, with representatives of the BC Innovation Council, the BC Agriculture Council, Genome BC, the National Research Council, the Investment Agriculture Foundation, SRC Tec, Bioenterprise BC and the federal and provincial governments.

The Agritech Innovation Challenge is a partnership between the BC Ministry of Agriculture and the BC Innovation Council with $80,000 in funding provided through Growing Forward 2, a federal-provincial-territorial initiative that provides a $3-billion investment over five years in innovation, competitiveness and market development. The challenge was launched in November 2016 and brought together innovators with industry to develop a product or process to enhance productivity, sustainability and resiliency of B.C.’s agrifood sector.

Source : Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada

Video: Cleaning Sheep Barns & Setting Up Chutes

Indoor sheep farming in winter at pre-lambing time requires that, at Ewetopia Farms, we need to clean out the barns and manure in order to keep the sheep pens clean, dry and fresh for the pregnant ewes to stay healthy while indoors in confinement. In today’s vlog, we put fresh bedding into all of the barns and we remove manure from the first groups of ewes due to lamb so that they are all ready for lambs being born in the next few days. Also, in preparation for lambing, we moved one of the sorting chutes to the Coveralls with the replacement ewe lambs. This allows us to do sorting and vaccines more easily with them while the barnyard is snow covered and hard to move sheep safely around in. Additionally, it frees up space for the second groups of pregnant ewes where the chute was initially.