George van Vlaanderen used to spend hours each day moving fences so his dairy goats could graze on fresh forage. Now an app does the job.
Van Vlaanderen, who makes cheese and kefir at Does’ Leap Farm in Bakersfield, moves 45 goats around his fields using Norwegian technology called Nofence. He uses the Nofence app to draw a GPS-defined virtual enclosure in his pasture. The app sends the GPS information to the goats’ solar-powered collars, which beep insistently to warn the animals when they approach the invisible fence, then deliver a shock if they try to cross it.
“When the herd wants to come in for milking, or it’s buggy or hot, they’re all just waiting there on the boundary,” said van Vlaanderen, who estimates it took just three days for the goats to learn their limits. “I can set up the pasture on my phone in minutes, and the whole herd is contained.”
High-tech innovations such as Nofence are increasingly finding a place on Vermont farms, where software and new machines can ease the workload and guide decision making. Some dairy cows, for example, sport Fitbit-like devices that transmit information about their behavior and health to farm managers. An array of sophisticated data-gathering systems helps crop growers fine-tune their planting and fertilizing, minimizing waste and runoff.
Tech plays a role in the maple industry, too. In some operations, when a squirrel chews a hole in a maple sap collection tube, sensors can alert the sugar bush manager immediately that the vacuum pressure in the system has changed, and where.
And indoor cannabis growers rely on sensors and software to adjust humidity, light, fertilizer and other environmental conditions with the aim of producing healthy, high-value plants.
Tools that use satellite imagery, AI, machine learning and data have been helping out on farms, even small Vermont ones, for a while. But the rate of change is accelerating, according to Laura Ginsburg, who runs the Northeast Dairy Business Innovation Center, hosted by the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets. A decade ago, Ginsburg said, so-called precision agriculture was largely limited to field-based practices such as using GPS on tractors to help farmers map fields.
Nowadays, computers on farm equipment can make a lot of important decisions instantaneously while rolling through a field, for example by adjusting the pressure used to put seeds in the ground according to variations in soil type from one planting row to the next.
“We’re in a new age,” said Ginsburg, who is also dairy strategy and innovation manager for the Agency of Ag.
“With a lot of dairy barns, you don’t really need a person there to take care of the things you’d do manually five or 10 years ago,” she said. “We’re seeing smart barns with ventilation systems that operate independently of human control.”
Efforts to help farmers adopt these tools are proliferating in Vermont, too. That’s essential in a state with many farms too small to buy expensive new technology on their own. The 11-state innovation center that Ginsburg leads has given out $45 million in grants to help goat, cow and sheep farmers and milk processors try new methods and tools.
Heather Darby, a University of Vermont Extension agronomist, recently started the Precision Agriculture Farmer Network. It’s intended to help farmers use the enormous amount of detailed information collected by sensors and GPS in areas such as crop yields, soil quality and field mapping. She’s hiring a new worker who’ll show farmers how to analyze the information.
“There is so much data; how do you take it all in?” she said. “How do we use it to become more precise in our manure applications, manage pests with less inputs and manage animals better?”
Scott Magnan is working on that, too. In 2012, the St. Albans native who does planting and harvesting on contract started using software created by the Iowa company Ag Leader to monitor and manage fields. Two years later he trained to become a dealer for the company. Now he partners with Darby to help farmers use the equipment and the information it yields.
Magnan and others hope high-tech tools can help reduce fertilizer use — an important goal, given that federal regulators have ordered Vermont to address waterway pollution from fertilizer runoff.
“We’re hoping to do a better job of putting the fertilizer where we need it and not putting it in areas where we don’t,” Magnan said.
Asim Zia, a professor of public policy and computer science at UVM, is using a $3.5 million National Science Foundation grant to help farmers measure their impact on the environment. He’s working with 10 Champlain Valley farmers, and others in Virginia and South Dakota, on a five-year project that assesses the impact of precision agriculture technology on water quality and climate change mitigation.
He and his farm partners are looking for a way to downsize some of the expensive precision agriculture technology used on big farms in the Midwest.
“We’re creating new agriculture technologies that will work at the small-farm scale,” he said.
He noted in an interview that agriculture — particularly methane from cows — is one of the leading contributors to climate change. Artificial intelligence and machine learning, he said, can help provide farm-specific recommendations by creating a detailed analysis using soil quality, crop yield and other information to show farmers the places where they can use less fertilizer.
“How can we produce food but have a minimum impact on the environment?” Zia said, describing his research. “That’s the sweet spot where precision agriculture can be very helpful.”
The U.S. Department of Agriculture recommends that small farmers lower their costs by banding together and sharing information.
“Smaller farms in Vermont generally trail behind in the adoption of new tech strategies,” said dairy policy veteran Dan Smith, executive director of the Brattleboro-based Agritech Institute for Small Farms. The group looks for ways to make farming more efficient and environmentally sustainable. For his first big project, he’s testing the Nofence invisible collars on four farms and a mobile goat-grazing company this year. Does’ Leap in Bakersfield is one of them.
Van Vlaanderen is already a fan of the software. “This technology is much more reliable in containing goats than our very advanced, biggest fence energizer,” he said of the high-voltage traditional electric fence that also surrounds his fields.
He uses the Nofence collars to corral his goats into small areas of high-quality forage within his larger pasture system and to graze them in brushy, steep or rocky areas where it would be difficult to erect temporary fencing. In years past, he said, goats have escaped the electric fence, causing havoc.
“We have not had a mass exodus with Nofence,” van Vlaanderen said.
Meanwhile, the state’s 509 cow dairies are also making more use of high-tech assistants. Robotic milkers have been sharing the workload in Vermont barns since 2004, but these days, according to Ginsburg of the Northeast Dairy Business Innovation Center, robots also feed the cows and can even assess feed quality to deliver the proper measure to individual bovines.
Many farmers have started cleaning their barns with a fridge-size rolling scraper that vacuums up manure, wood shavings and other detritus, dumps it, and parks itself to recharge.
“In my team, we lovingly refer to them as ‘poop Roombas,'” Ginsburg said, referring to the small vacuum cleaners that roll independently around homes and businesses.
UVM scientist Joao Costa is researching the activity trackers for cows. The devices are attached as collars or ear tags and assess how much time an animal spends on activities such as walking, ruminating, lying down and eating. Cows are creatures of habit, Costa said, and when the routine changes, the farmer gets an alert.
“We can see when they are undergoing a challenge or going through a disease and individualize management,” Costa said.
Achieving consistency and precision is easier indoors. That’s where Satori, Vermont’s largest indoor cannabis cultivator, is growing thousands of plants under LED lighting in the tightly controlled conditions of a 10,000-square-foot former factory in Middlebury.
Employees and visitors wear scrubs and foot coverings to view the plants, which are potted in a special polymer and receive their nutrition hydroponically, through water. Software called Growlink uses AI to make recommendations for adjusting relative humidity, carbon dioxide, vapor pressure, light levels and other inputs.
“We’re constantly making little tweaks depending on how the living plant responds to what we are doing,” said Bobby Young, Satori’s crop health and research manager. “It’s all about gaining more control over production.”
Up next for precision-focused farmers: drones that can assess where pesticides or fungicides are needed and apply them in tightly targeted doses. Magnan, the farm software dealer, is waiting to see them make an appearance in Vermont.
“If someone was entrepreneurial, they could probably do pretty well with those,” he said.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Ground Control | Precision agriculture helps Vermont farmers handle chores, increase production and reduce environmental impacts”
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This article appears in The Tech Issue 2024.
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