When Perry Casson wanted to begin variable rate trials on his 2,400 acre Saskatchewan farm, he knew he would need a yield monitor to outfit his combines and validate the results. The problem was that new machinery carried a significant price tag and technology that was fast becoming outdated. A yield monitor that was affordable, leveraged the resources he already had and could be added to his various model combines was missing from the precision ag market.
Perry catches up with Angela Kokott from 770 CHQR Global News Calgary to discuss some of the ideas and motivations that led to FarmTRX and why the system is being adopted on farms across the globe.
Listen to the full interview here:
(Full transcript below.)
Transcript:
Angela Kokott: On today’s agricultural report: Today’s farm machinery has the latest technology helping growers keep track of practically everything. But what about farmers who can’t afford such high-priced items? A Saskatchewan farmer has come up with an inexpensive retrofit. Perry Casson is with Troo Corp, joining us from Saskatchewan this morning. Hello, Perry.
Perry Casson: Hi, Angela.
Angela: First of all, where do you farm?
Perry: We have a family farm north of North Battleford, in the big town of Maidstone — population about 200 people.
Angela: Now you’ve got to tell me about this product your company, Troo Corp, came up with. It’s called FarmTRX. What is FarmTRX?
Perry: This all started about five years ago. We were working with our agronomist and starting to treat land no longer as a single monolithic quarter section. We were getting into variable-rate fertilizer and that kind of thing, and we wanted to validate some agronomy.
At the time, we had three combines on the farm and none of them had a working yield monitor. I went and looked at what was available. I have a background in software and some hardware — computer design — and what I saw looked kind of dated.
I thought, I’ve already got a smartphone in my pocket with a nice display, internet connectivity, and everything else. Why don’t we build a low-cost data logger that pulls information off the harvester, lets me see it in real time on my phone, and uses the phone to push the data up to the cloud?
We leveraged some of the code we’d written for aviation products and used it to generate yield maps so we could see what was happening in the field. That’s really where it all started.
Angela: That’s crazy. How long have you been a farmer?
Perry: Well, I was born in 1964, so quite a while.
Angela: I’m curious — when did you really start to see technology creep into farming in a big way?
Perry: I actually left the farm to pursue the high-tech world. I graduated high school in the early ’80s, and back then it was rusty tractors and not a lot of technology.
Through the ’80s and ’90s, you started to see the beginnings of what we have now. Farming tends to lag the high-tech world by a few years, but once GPS came along, all these revolutions were just amazing for farmers. The challenge was that it all came at a pretty high price.
Now we’re in what I call a golden age of electronics. Computers that used to run my servers 20 years ago can now be bought for a couple of dollars, with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and all kinds of capability. You can build incredibly powerful products at extremely low cost.
That’s the technology we wanted to leverage to build a next-generation, low-cost monitoring system for harvesters. This way, you don’t have to buy a brand-new combine to get the benefits of modern technology and all the information it gathers.
Originally, we built this just for ourselves. Then 20 or 30 neighbors said, “That’s pretty interesting — we’d be interested in that.” We thought it would mostly be for harvesters that were 10 years old or more.
But it’s a big world. We’ve seen tremendous uptake in Eastern Europe, where virtually none of the harvesters have this type of electronics. In many places, they’re installing this even on brand-new equipment.
Even in North America, people like it because it’s more convenient to get the data. We can automatically generate maps for them and handle the data processing. Our user base ranges from 1969 John Deeres to brand-new combines. It’s very diverse.
Angela: Very interesting, Perry. Thanks so much for telling us about it. For anyone listening who wants more information, what’s the website?
Perry: FarmTRX.com. Everything you need is on it.
Angela: FarmTRX.com. Perry, thanks for your time.
Perry: Thank you, Angela.
Angela: That was Perry Casson with Troo Corp.
