Canadian farmers slow to warm to AI, automation

Nov 08, 2019

Standing onstage in an ornate conference room at the Delta Bessborough Hotel in downtown Saskatoon, former Saskatchewan premier Dr. Grant Devine pitched the agri-food industry on a new idea: a wheat tube.

More specifically, a hypothetical hyperloop Devine says could fire shipments of wheat from Moose Jaw to Langley, B.C. at hundreds of kilometres an hour. He says students at the University of Saskatchewan, where he is a professor, had priced the idea at around $18 billion.

“You’d load it like you would any other hopper car, load it in the capsule and — zoom! — it’s out there in a matter of hours,” Devine said.

It’s an odd example of how artificial intelligence, robotics and automation transforming agriculture.

This week’s conference organization by the Agri-Food Innovation Council aimed to highlight how tech could address problems like labour shortages on Canadian farms – and address a dissonance between what’s already available and what farmers are using.

“It’s not a question of when AI is coming. AI is already here,” Agri-Food Innovation Council CEO Serge Buy said. “The new technologies are coming much faster than anticipated. The problem now is how we enable producers to adopt those technologies.”

Canada is generally recognized as a world leader in AI innovation, propelled by hundreds of millions in federal funding for “superclusters” of research. One supercluster aims to make Western Canada a leader in producing non-animal protein, for example.

And while the traditional image of agriculture might clash with images of robots and the next generation of tech, AI is already being used to sort seeds; deploy pesticides; spread fertilizer and even harvest crops.

Dawn Trautman, is the manager of smart agriculture and food innovation with Alberta Innovates, one of the groups that received a $49.5 million grant from the federal government to expand automation and digitization of farming.

She calls it “the next revolution for agriculture.”

“Governments in general are very interested in the potential of digital technologies in multiple industries. There’s a big potential to fill that gap of all the data that might be available for producers, like sensors in the soil or cloud computing,” Trautman said.

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Video: Why Your Food Future Could be Trapped in a Seed Morgue

In a world of PowerPoint overload, Rex Bernardo stands out. No bullet points. No charts. No jargon. Just stories and photographs. At this year’s National Association for Plant Breeding conference on the Big Island of Hawaii, he stood before a room of peers — all experts in the science of seeds — and did something radical: he showed them images. He told them stories. And he asked them to remember not what they saw, but how they felt.

Bernardo, recipient of the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award, has spent his career searching for the genetic treasures tucked inside what plant breeders call exotic germplasm — ancient, often wild genetic lines that hold secrets to resilience, taste, and traits we've forgotten to value.

But Bernardo didn’t always think this way.

“I worked in private industry for nearly a decade,” he recalls. “I remember one breeder saying, ‘We’re making new hybrids, but they’re basically the same genetics.’ That stuck with me. Where is the new diversity going to come from?”

For Bernardo, part of the answer lies in the world’s gene banks — vast vaults of seed samples collected from every corner of the globe. Yet, he says, many of these vaults have quietly become “seed morgues.” “Something goes in, but it never comes out,” he explains. “We need to start treating these collections like living investments, not museums of dead potential.”

That potential — and the barriers to unlocking it — are deeply personal for Bernardo. He’s wrestled with international policies that prevent access to valuable lines (like North Korean corn) and with the slow, painstaking science of transferring useful traits from wild relatives into elite lines that farmers can actually grow. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But he’s convinced that success starts not in the lab, but in the way we communicate.

“The fact sheet model isn’t cutting it anymore,” he says. “We hand out a paper about a new variety and think that’s enough. But stories? Plants you can see and touch? That’s what stays with people.”

Bernardo practices what he preaches. At the University of Minnesota, he helped launch a student-led breeding program that’s working to adapt leafy African vegetables for the Twin Cities’ African diaspora. The goal? Culturally relevant crops that mature in Minnesota’s shorter growing season — and can be regrown year after year.

“That’s real impact,” he says. “Helping people grow food that’s meaningful to them, not just what's commercially viable.”

He’s also brewed plant breeding into something more relatable — literally. Coffee and beer have become unexpected tools in his mission to make science accessible. His undergraduate course on coffee, for instance, connects the dots between genetics, geography, and culture. “Everyone drinks coffee,” he says. “It’s a conversation starter. It’s a gateway into plant science.”