Grant: Applied Research Tools and Instruments Grants

The one factor that a farmer cannot control is the weather. The ability to generate accurate forecasts for regionsas small as a farm field, a day or two in advance of harmful events, can be the difference between life and deathfor the crops. Reliable forecasting (2 to 3 days) of damaging conditions such as catastrophic killer frosts, highwinds, continued drought, or other conditions that might hit the farm gives the farmer the knowledge needed toengage the best mitigation strategy. Niagara College (NC) Agriculture & Environmental TechnologiesInnovation Centre (AETIC) is requesting funding to purchase an advanced heavy-duty easy-to-use ruggedrover, rover prototyping hardware, Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) and sensors, and a high-performancecomputer. Rovers, UAS (also known as drones), and modern high-performance computing can providenumerical weather forecasting, decision support, farm management help, and actionable data - all withprecision agriculture techniques. Precision agriculture involves the use of modern hardware, tools, and data tosupport farm management practices and actions, to increase profitability and foster environmental stewardship.Dr. Mike Duncan, the NSERC Industrial Research Chair for Colleges (IRCC) in Precision Agriculture &Environmental Technologies, leads the AETIC team. Together they will collaborate with industry partners tosupport and develop rover smart data collection, automation, and sensor packages, as well as UAS datacollection and analysis to identify crop disease and deficiencies; and enhanced numerical weather prediction.The NC team has trained and experienced UAS operators, and has a 40-acre campus vineyard and multiplepartner farm sites to test the prototypes. The initial farmers that will benefit are vineyards, apple growers, grainfarmers, and hazelnut producers, who are all SMEs. These four producer groups represent more than 29,200SME farming operations in Ontario, and more than 177,000 SME farming operations in Canada. Theequipment will enable current partnerships to advance significantly, and it will create opportunities for newpartnerships with farm, crop, and technology SMEs.