Grant: Applied Research and Development Grants - Level 1

Woodleigh Farm Ltd is an agricultural crop producer operating in Cavan, Ontario. They are presently farming 500 acres of diverse crops namely Corn - 210 Acres, Beans, 205 Acres, Hay 50 Acres, managing Forest & Maple Syrup Production, Areas 100 Acres. Wheat will be added to the rotation in 2016. They have recently started providing third party imaging services to other crop producers where they use drones to inspect in-progress crops with Normalized Difference Vegetative Index (NDVI) or near-infrared (NIR) sensors. A task that traditionally was done by college interns walking fields. Use of drones allows for coverage of more acres, and removes much of the human error aspect of traditional scouting. This technology provides significant environmental benefit through reduction of the use of herbicides and the proper placement/quantity of fertilizers and ultimately improving soil conditions. The company is fully insured and has been approved by Transport Canada for activities in Ontario under a Special Flight Operating Certificate (SFOC). There are several softwares available in the market for the farmers to collect the data. Woodleigh Farms during their farm scouting operations identified the inability to incorporate and process their NDVI images into the farm software programs that farmers use. They have approached Durham College to develop a middle ware that can interface with a variety of existing farm software suites so that farmers can easily incorporate the finished images into their existing databases. Durham College has a team of researchers with a rich experience of developing software applications. The outcome of this project will translate into more competitive offerings to the farmers, allowing for increased revenues and market penetration for Woodleigh Farms Ltd. They have generated $20,500 in 2015 through imagery services and anticipate going to $60,000 in 2016 and $100,000 in 2017.