By Mel Luymes

A few decades ago, this may have been science fiction, but finally, the future has arrived. There are a host of autonomous machines working in Ontario fields this summer. They could very well change farming over the next decades, helping farmers overcome labour shortages, improve yields and efficiency, and increase environmental sustainability. It doesn’t appear to be a hostile takeover, not yet at least. 

Chuck Baresich is a farmer and together with his family, he runs Haggerty Creek Ltd near Bothwell. supporting farmers with grain marketing, agronomy and inputs. And more recently, he founded Haggerty AgRobotics to pioneer digital agriculture and autonomous farming.

“What first drove me into farm robots was talk of the ban on Roundup and other crop protection products,” says Chuck. “I still think it is coming in our lifetime, and I didn’t want to wake up 10 years from now thinking, well now what am I going to do.”  
For Chuck, he sees autonomous farm vehicles and implements fundamentally changing the way we grow food, with equipment that replaces tedious hand labour, smaller equipment that reduces compaction and precision equipment that reduces our use of inputs.

But he recommends slow adoption of the technology, so there is time to work out the kinks with the manufacturers. Farm equipment needs to be robust and predictable, he says. Chuck works closely with the Ag Robotics Working Group, which is now 400 members strong and has received funding from the Sustainable Canadian Agricultural Partnership (Sustainable CAP) and other sources. A network of farmers, industry and academia, they meet for a call every Friday to connect and are running several trials of various equipment, to see how they stand up to real world farming in Ontario and determine their return on investment (ROI). They test whether they work in the rain and other local conditions, whether they can be easily fixed, etc.

“We’re looking at people’s livelihoods here,” says Chuck, who doesn’t want farmers’ incomes to be jeopardized by companies that could be over-selling their technology. 

He reflects on the earliest adopters of precision agriculture and says that the roll out to farmers was done a bit prematurely.  “We had grid sampling, GPS and maps, but we were still using old machines with a drive chain going 18 miles an hour” he says. The seed and fertilizer were missing their mark until all parts of the farm operation were working together and making it work. 
The goal is to have ag robotics roll out well for farmers, so the Ag Robotics Working Group is doing the testing and research so the technology will (eventually) hit the ground running. The group is supported by The Grove at the Western Fair District, an agri-business innovation hub, and it operates trials on Innovation Farms Ontario, which is a network of real farms for industry testing, including Chuck’s farm in Bothwell, Smith Gardens in the Keswick Marsh and others. These farms are working with IntelliCulture’s farm management software to get standardized data between the various units, powered (and funded) by FCC AgExpert to crunch the data. 

“Ontario is a great place to be doing this research because we have so many types of fruit, vegetables and field crops, all within a few hours drive,” says Chuck. And with Ontario’s precipitation and soils, it also gets a lot of weed growth to contend with.  
The Working Group hosted a Demo Day on the Holland and Keswick marshes on July 8 and near Simcoe on July 22, showcasing various technologies. On the Marsh, they work closely with Ontario’s Muck Crop Research Station. 

There was a focus on weed control, including some laser technology, an autonomous electric weeder, precision sprayer and autonomous cultivator.  It makes sense that weed control robots would be one of the first to come to the Marsh, says Chuck. “Considering that it can cost a farmer $1000/acre to hire people to hand weed, these machines will pay for themselves pretty quickly,” he adds.  

At the Demo Day, participants learned about Carbon Robotics’ LaserWeederTM that has both an autonomous and a PTO-powered unit, now with 155 deployed around the world. Costing around a million dollars, depending on the size of the unit, they estimate a payback within one to three years. 

As well, Pixelfarming Robotics’ Laser One was demoed at the Muck Crops Research Station on July 8, by burning confetti on the concrete. Running on just a few car batteries, it can go for four hours. The cameras identify what they are told to kill, says Chuck, and then it targets energy to that plant, which evaporates the water in a plant to the point that its cells burst. 

“Of course, it is very satisfying to smell a weed burning,” laughs Chuck in his presentation, but he notes that it isn’t necessary to use that much power to kill a weed. The software not only identifies what is a weed but also determines its size and the amount of power needed to kill it.   The speed of the unit will depend on the size of the weeds and in the Marsh, growers could do a weed removal pass every week at least.  For field crops, this technology could be needed for herbicide-resistant weeds in the future. 

BHF had their autonomous electric weeder on display. Powered by a gas generator, cameras identify weeds, and an electric arm touches the weeds to deliver 5000V of electricity. Participants needed to be sure to stand at least five metres from the machine as it was operating. It could be programmed to zap weed by weed in row, or to run a small bar between rows. 

Moving to Smith Gardens and their Innovation Farms field trials, Ecorobotix’s ARA high precision smart sprayer ran for participants. Using a camera to identify and target weeds, it can be programmed with a safety zone around plants for non-selective herbicides, or without one for selective ones. Usually run with a skirt that eliminates 95 per cent of the drift, they were removed (and run with water) to show the precision spray on an onion field, even at speed (7 km/hr).  At under $275,000, and an ongoing annual subscription of $15,000, there are savings of at least 50 per cent on crop protection products. As well, there is less spray damage to crops, which means more resistance to pests and disease.  While the unit is still being trialed at the Innovation Farm location, there are several growers in the Marsh that have jumped on the technology. 

Lastly, participants saw the FarmDroid, which was the only farmer needed in the seven-acre demonstration field at Smith Gardens. A 900 kg square robot, it travels at top speeds of 800 metres per hour. It has a solar panel on the top and works 23 hours a day. It planted and geo-tagged onions in perfect rows, and it can also install drip tape, spray and cultivate between the rows. But it can’t reverse. 

“It’s not exciting,” laughs Ian Smith, as participants gathered around to watch it, “it just keeps slowly working.” 

Lessons learned from the livestock sector
But let’s take a step back and see what we can learn from the dairy industry; it started into robots over 25 years ago. Milking robots were first developed in the Netherlands and the Lely Astronaut started in 1992. Before the year 2000, there were two robotic milkers installed in Ontario. And a few years later, they were taken out.

Dean Miller, now with Conestogo Agri Systems Inc., has spent most of his career working with milking robots and says the trick to making them work here in Canada was working with farmers to change how they feed. In Europe, cows were fed grass in the bunk and then had feeding stations for the extra ration, so they were used to going into a stall for food. With a total mixed ration (TMR) being used in on Ontario farms, dairy cows weren’t going to the robot as easily as they did in Europe.

But once they figured that out, it has been relatively smooth sailing, says Dean. There are big advantages to have robots on a farm, especially for family-sized farms that may struggle with labour issues. 

The other advantage is that cows are milked the exact some way, every time. “Cows love consistency,” he adds. 

There is still maintenance required on the robots, however, and it is a different type of skilled labour needed on a farm. Some farmers are tech savvy and mechanically inclined, doing most of the maintenance themselves, while others will call a tech from Conestogo Agri out for even the most minor job. 

“It all depends on the farmer,” says Dean. Some want to jump on the technology, and others are wary of it. While milking robots are now quite common, there are still farmers who aren’t sold on the idea and need to watch their neighbours for a few more years before they will make the investment themselves. 

But robots aren’t just for milking. A modern dairy barn is equipped with several other robots that may be cleaning up manure, feeding calves or pushing in feed. Now several Ontario farms have robot-operated TMR feeding systems as well. Whether running feed to the TMR mixer through conveyors or a robotic arm, farmers can program different rations for different groups and can even program their feed on-demand when a group’s feed runs low. 

And there are other robots that are starting to be seen more frequently in pig barns, replacing one the most tedious of jobs. EnviroLogic’s Evo Cleaner is a programable robot on wheels with an extendable pressure washer arm. It was designed to protect human health in cleaning out hog barns, and it definitely has labour savings as well. A farmer begins by using a joystick to teach the robot where to wash. Once the pens are programmed into the Evo Cleaner, all that is needed is to put it in the room and press start. The Evo Cleaner will follow its program and clean exactly what it was told to clean. The robot can run for up to 40 hours before needing to recharge its batteries. Running off most pressure washers, it has an effective reach between 18 and 20 feet. Due to the programmability of the Evo Cleaner, the farmer is able to decrease labour costs, focus on other tasks, and limit exposure in a toxic environment.  

Tri-Mech is an Ontario dealer with approximately 12 robots in operation so far. As for next steps, Ontario farmers may soon see a large, automated equipment for wash bays that will help automate washing field equipment as well.

The evolution of field technology
For field operations, there have been incredible advances in GPS and technology that have allowed for auto-steer, then automatic row shut off and variable rate of seeds, fertilizer and sprays. And John Deere “See and Spray” sprayers are now capable of identifying weeds in the field real-time and applying a targeted spray, saving thousands of dollars on herbicides. 
But there is just something “next level” about seeing farm equipment without a driver. For a few years now, you may have seen some farms in Ontario using PTx Trimble’s OutRun software operating a John Deere 8R or 8000R tractor with a grain cart. The combine operator can call the buggy to it in the field and unload on the go, before sending the grain cart to a predefined zone for manual unloading to the truck. At Agritechnica, the world’s leading machinery fair in Germany, nearly every tractor manufacturer had a cab-less, driver-less option for pulling implements in the field.        

       
But then there are the companies who have re-envisioned the tractor altogether.  Haggerty AgRobotics began testing few of the strangest looking robots in the early days: 

Raven OMNiPOWER™ (formerly know as DOT), which is essentially a self-propelled toolbar that can carry a planter, sprayer, or other type of implement;  Korechi’s  RoamIO™, which is a smaller autonomous robot that can pull small implements like a tillage tool for weeds, or a fertilizer spreader; and Naïo Oz, which was the smallest robot that does weeding.  

Over the years, they have brought on more robots into the fleet: Naïo Ted can do pruning and weeding in orchards or vineyards, straddling large trees or vines; VitiRover is a small lawn mower that can manage grasses in orchards, and the Burro is an autonomous platform that carry or tow loads to and from the orchard. AgroIntelli’s Robotti also runs on diesel but there are others that are solar powered, like FarmDroid FD20 or DJI’s AGRAS T-40 drone that can do spraying and surveying automatically. 
Haggerty AgRobotics is also working to develop new farming robots in-house. 

Chuck Baresich has worked with the most tech-savvy farmers in the province, and he says that farmers will often need a “bridge machine” as they work towards the smaller, “swarm”-type of machines.  A farmer in Chatham-Kent planted 150 acres of soybeans and corn this year with a Robotti. “It has an engine, hydraulics and a three-point hitch,” says Chuck, “so at least it looks like something the farmer is familiar with.” 

Small is the new big
But, on the other hand, there are seven very small robots working in seven large corn fields in Bruce County, working day and night to spoon-feed corn plants a weekly dose of UAN 28%.

Upside Robotics have built a 22-inch-wide robot that goes up and down corn rows with a 40L tank at a steady walking pace. It can run for about an hour before needing to come back to home base to recharge its battery and refill the tank. 
They (aptly) call it the Maize Runner. 

Only 18 months old, the robot and the company was built by two engineers, Jana Tian and Sam Dugan. They wanted to use technology to solve real-world problems and saw that improved nitrogen efficiency would be a win-win-win, for corn yields, farm profitability and for the environment. 

“You look where you can find the largest impact,” says Sam. “In this day and age, it is possible to build just about anything, it is just a question of whether we should.” 

They are working out of Velocity, a start-up incubator associated with the University of Waterloo. 

They started in 2024 with a few farmers, including Biermans Farms HM Limited near Chesley and Christhill Farms near Tara. With an office trailer parked at the edge of the corn field, they worked non-stop on the technology. Now, in year two they have a team of more than 13 people, working on 15 fields across Ontario.

“Everyone on the team is working so hard and putting their mark into Upside Robotics,” says Tanya Franklin, an agronomist that Jana and Sam brought on for 2025.

When they found her last year, Tanya was looking for an opportunity to really contribute to Ontario agriculture, and boy did she find it, she says. She is bringing the technology and science together: Soil Optix soil mapping, weather data, years of research on nitrogen mineralization, nutrients and yields. Using artificial intelligence (AI), she is able to bring it all together at ten times the speed.

With last year’s rate trials, they found that with weekly doses of nitrogen based on the corn’s growth stage, they could reduce nitrogen use by up to 70 per cent, without any decrease in yields.

They continue to do rate trials to understand not only “how low can you go,” but what is the true potential for yields?  They have replicated rate/timing trials across the 15 fields to understand how soil type and weather also impact yield. 

They are moving beyond nitrogen to the other macro- and micro-nutrients with an eye to growing corn yields to 300-400 bu/ac in Ontario. 

The Maize Runner is guided by computer vision to go between the corn rows, and it has temperature and humidity sensors, GPS, a canopy camera, and more. At 150 pounds, it does less compaction damage than an adult human walking across a field. While it can work in most conditions, it will stop when it starts collecting mud on its tires, and if it ever falls over, it will send a signal to its human supervisor through an app. Now a few generations in, the robot is learning to assess and deliver the nitrogen needs of a plant in real time. 

The base station that restocks and recharges the robot is in turn charged by solar panels that can store enough power for a few days of run-time. It also has a weather station to better understand the growing conditions in that field. 

Mike Christie of Christhill Farms was already bought in to split N application and when he just didn’t have enough time to get it done, he moved to ESN for a timed release. When he had the chance to partner with Upside Robotics, he didn’t hesitate.
The cost of the Maize Runner is based on a subscription model that is just about on par with the costs of hiring a custom sprayer, Tanya says. Considering the fertilizer savings, however, growers can expect to save up to $150/acre, depending on the year. 

It made a splash as one of the stops on the Bruce County Soil and Crop’s Mystery Bus Tour in early July. There is definitely more demand from farmers than we can keep up with, says Tanya, and she is so excited to see where this technology will take the industry in the future. 

Around the world, there are hosts of robots for agriculture being designed by hosts of passionate people, hoping to transform the industry. There is a lot of venture capital invested in these companies and not all of them will succeed. Chuck Baresich has seen several companies go bankrupt already and believes the key is to be patient, focus on doing only a few things well, and to work with farmers for continuous feedback on products. 

It is exciting to see where this new technology will take us in the next decades and I’m sure this won’t be the last story about robot farming in the Rural Voice.  ◊