The future of farming is autonomous, and it's already here

People from the agricultural sector are getting a look at the future of farming at conference in Banff this week.

The groundbreaking technology on display includes driverless farm machinery, innovative uses of GPS and remote controls, and new methods for tasks ranging from seeding to harvesting.

Cory Beaujot's family founded the Saskatchewan-based Dot Technology Corporation, which designed and sells a robotic farm vehicle that performs a variety of fieldwork.

He says there's no question that farming will become increasingly autonomous.

"It's here, basically, in a modest way. It's not taking the world by storm now, but we firmly believe that it's here to stay. The nature of farming today is very much semi-autonomous," he said.

"A farmer can sit in a truck or a home office and be monitoring and effecting change to the machines that are rolling around the fields and doing their job."

He says autonomous farming can help farmers with several issues, such as expanding their operations while dealing with shrinking labour pools.

"We have a lot of farmers in Western Canada who are very forward thinking, very adept at making changes on their operations and are very warm to what we are doing with Dot," he said.

Beaujot says the new technology can also free up farmers for other tasks.

"Really, the sky's the limit as far as what it's capable of doing," he said.

Fellow conference presenter Jonathan Gill agrees.

The U.K. university researcher was behind a project called the Hands Free Hectare, where automated machines grew the first arable crop remotely in 2017.

"It's becoming really exciting that their capabilities are not being sat on a tractor and working from it like an office," he said.

"They can start thinking, the future, that they can start running their entire business without sitting on a vehicle."

The four-day conference for the Association of Alberta Agricultural Fieldmen ends Friday.