On a Tuesday morning in Coleville, Sask., Dean Roberts watched as a large grey drone whizzed up into the air and flew around his 4,000-hectare farm, which produces an array of crops including canola, wheat, barley and lentils.
He was getting a demonstration of the DJI T100, currently the largest available spray drone in Canada. It sports a 100-litre tank that can be filled with pesticides to spray onto crops — a practice the federal government approved in June.
For the demonstration, the equipment dealers filled the drone tank with water. As it zipped around the fields, Roberts explained how this technology could make a difference to his farm’s operations.
“The lentils like a drier climate,” Roberts told CBC’s The House. “So in our area when we get very wet, we have to apply a fungicide to keep the leaf disease pressure down until the crop reaches maturity.
“One of the challenges is, our ground rig often can’t drive across the field when it’s that wet. So this drone could be an option for us.”
The drone, Roberts added, is the next iteration of the sort of technological adaptation that Prairie farmers like him have been making for generations, all in the service of increasing their crop output.
But when it comes to the adoption of agricultural technology, Canada is lagging behind other countries, Roberts said. The U.S., China, Brazil, Japan and Australia are well ahead of Canada in allowing drone spraying.
“Drones existed, we could physically buy them, but we didn’t have a regulatory environment to actually use them [to spray pesticides]. So in this case I would say regulatory holdup was our delay here,” Roberts explained.
Experts count red tape, infrastructure bottlenecks and labour shortages among the factors undermining Canada’s ability to send more food around the world, while competing countries continue to scale up their exports.
Health Canada lifted its restrictions to allow drones to spray pesticides at the end of June. Since then, dealers and farmers say there’s been a surge of interest in the technology.
According to the federal government, Canada exports about $100 billion worth of agri-food products annually, but the rate of growth is not keeping pace with other nations.
“Essentially, the total size of the pie of global food trade has grown faster than Canada has grown,” said Evan Fraser, executive director of the Arrell Food Institute at the University of Guelph. “We are producing less in terms of the overall percentage.”
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