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12 CapitalPress.com August 25, 2017 Engineers are designing systems for 24-hour operation “In the future, all farm equipment and vehicles will be connected to the inter- net,” Kellerman said. “They will have a sense of their en- vironment and some form of artificial intelligence. (Farm equipment) will look at the environment and act on its own.” Not all of the technology will be devoted to agricultural production. Country Finan- cial, the Midwest crop insur- ance and financial services company, recently announced it expanded its “crop claims” drone fleet from four to 12. In a news release, a com- pany loss control executive said, “A crop claims adjuster using a drone can scout three times as many acres as an ad- juster on foot. This innova- tive technology will provide our customers extra peace of mind knowing all their crop damage is accounted for.” FUTURE from Page 1 sends their GPS location back to the rancher, then goes off to check the stock ponds. If needed, it can drop to within 2 meters to read a cow’s eye- ball temperature, an indicator of health. John Church, a professor at Thompson Rivers Univer- sity in British Columbia who advocates using drones for “precision ranching,” gleeful- ly suggested they could be de- ployed against Pacific North- west ranchers’ most fearsome foe: wolves. “What if you put pepper spray on board?” Church said. “Send a drone out to the GPS and spray them all.” Technology and the labor problem Young Kim, CEO of Dig- ital Harvest, said he was in- spired a couple of years ago by the da Vinci surgical ro- botics system. A doctor sitting at a control panel across the room or even across an ocean can operate on a patient using technology that replicates a surgeon’s hand movements to manipulate micro-instru- ments. Kim, a former U.S. Air Force pilot with experience in drone technology, had been speaking earlier with one of Oregon’s premier winemak- ers, Ken Wright, about the severe labor shortage facing vineyard owners and others in agriculture. What if, Kim asked him- self, you removed the require- ment that the workers had to be physically present in the field? What if, like the sur- geon, they could do the work remotely? Then there would be plenty of ag workers; they could be anywhere. From that came the Re- mote Operated Vineyard Robot — ROVR — now in development. Wearing a vir- tual reality helmet and gloves, workers could manipulate tools mounted on a robotic vehicle that moves through the vineyard rows. They could prune, pick, lift wires that support vines and other tasks. The vehicle — a converted golf cart is serving as the test platform — could follow a navigation wire buried in the ground, so it wouldn’t need a complicated guidance system. “A dumb robot with a hu- man operator equals a smart robot,” Kim said during the Aug. 15-17 expo in Pendle- ton, Ore. He envisions ag employees teleporting to work, harvest- ing grapes in the cool of night for delivery to the vineyard crush pad at 7 a.m. The job might be especially well-suit- ed to people close to his heart: “wounded warriors,” military personnel injured in action. He hopes to have ROVR operational by 2019. His de- velopment partners range from Yamaha to staff at the Pendleton Airport’s Un- manned Aerial Systems Range and students at Walla Walla Community College. Business Oregon, the state business agency, in August granted the project $100,000 to help develop a prototype. “This project proceeds at The Hand on the plow Photos by Eric Mortenson/Capital Press Students Zack Thorn, left, and Dru Striefel are part of a Walla Walla Community College team that is testing the ROVR system. The college has an agricultural technology program. Young Kim, CEO of Digital Harvest, makes a point during the Future Farm Expo. Kim’s company and partnering firms are developing a vineyard pruning and harvest robot that can be remotely manipulated by an operator. Jeff Lorton is an evangelist for agricultural technology and or- ganized the Future Farm Expo. He moved his advertising firm to Pendleton, Ore., to associate more closely with the city’s Unmanned Aerial Systems test range and development center. Range. California vineyards are beginning to use the he- licopters to replace workers with backpack tanks, and Or- egon’s may follow suit. The vineyard is owned by Lloyd and Lois Piercy, who also operate a winery tasting room in the small town of Echo. They’ve opened their vineyard to testing the ROVR, as well. Lloyd Piercy, 66, a for- mer World Cup ski racer who turned to farming in 1974, sees the technology as an ex- tension of the evolution that replaced mules with tractors and eventually added GPS guidance and auto-steer. The technology is a leap in food safety and farmworker safety, he said. With an unmanned sprayer, for instance, “No- body is sitting in that cloud of spray.” Piercy said the technology is “an absolute sea change” for agriculture. “Here it is,” he said, “here it is.” Jeff Lorton, who produced the Future Farm Expo and is something of an evangelist for ag technology, believes the same. He moved his ad- vertising agency from Yam- hill County, where he’d done economic development con- sulting, when Pendleton was chosen one of only six UAS ranges in the country in 2014. The Columbia Basin, in- cluding Southern British Columbia and Alberta in Canada and the Pacific North- west states, is “one of the most productive agricultural zones on the planet,” Lorton said. Producers in Oregon, Washington and Idaho grow wheat, potatoes, apples, wine grapes, berries, livestock and much more, producing an annual harvest worth $20 billion before processing, he said. “When I say $20 billion in farmgate sales, that gets peo- ple’s attention,” Lorton said. “It’s the perfect place for an ag tech accelerator to exist.” George Kellerman, chief operating office of Yamaha Motor Ventures and Labora- tory in California’s Silicon Valley, was keynote speaker on the first day of the expo. The company works with Young Kim on ROVR and has its RMAX helicopters at the UAS range. “You are at the leading edge,” he told expo attend- ees. “This is the future of farming. Jake Joraanstad, CEO and co-founder of Myriad Mobile Systems in North Dakota, said advances in robotics and artificial intelligence provide a “clear path to completely automated farming.” the speed of cash,” Kim said. Develop, demonstrate — and then deploy The proving ground is Echo West Estate Vineyard, west of Pendleton. Across the way, a remotely piloted Yamaha RMAX helicopter lifts off, finds its bearings and drops down to spray a vine- yard. It covers the length of a row, then flies in reverse to spray the next one over. It’s a miniature bird, 2.75 meters from nose to tail — a little more than 9 feet — and can carry 16 kilograms, 35 pounds, of spray. It’s been used for 25 years in Japan, where it’s primarily used to spray rice fields. Yamaha has more than 2,500 RMAX oper- ating in Japan and perhaps a dozen in the U.S., and three of them are at Pendleton’s UAS ‘We were just asking for a fair shake’ TRIP from Page 1 “We don’t twist arms,” Stuhl- miller said. “The fact is they grant- ed us an audience and heard our concerns. We walked away with- out any assurances. There was no doubt in my mind they could still ban” chlorpyrifos. The meeting came one month before a court-ordered deadline for a decision on whether to ban chlorpyrifos. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, tired of delays, had originally ordered the EPA to act by the end of 2016, but the Obama administration, which had proposed a ban, won a three-month extension that pushed the final de- cision onto the Trump administra- tion. White House adviser Don Ben- ton, a former Washington state senator, hosted the meeting with Stuhlmiller and the rest of the del- egation. According to the EPA’s notes, Benton said the new admin- istration wanted to be transparent, inclusive and “help farmers comply with the law in a way that makes sense.” EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt joined the meeting briefly, telling the delegation that it was “a new day, a new future, for a common sense approach to environmental protection.” The Times drew on the remark for its headline: “EPA Promised a ‘New Day’ for the Agriculture In- dustry, Documents Reveal.” Stuhlmiller agreed with The Times that the EPA has promised a “new day” in its relationship with agriculture. The meeting with EPA officials at the agency’s headquar- ters was unprecedented, he said. “We were just asking for a fair shake in the policy process, which hadn’t happened, particularly in the past eight years,” Stuhlmiller said. According to EPA notes, the Washington delegation’s concerns included complicated regulations, the availability of pesticides and EPA support for What’s Upstream, a lobbying campaign to mandate 100-foot buffers between farms and waterways in the state. On chlorpyrifos, the delegation asked for “a reasonable approach to regulating this pesticide and would like the farming community to be more involved in the process.” Stuhlmiller said the notes accu- rately reflected the meeting, which he said lasted about 30 minutes. Four weeks later, the EPA said the science was unresolved on whether the pesticide poses a risk to fetuses and infants at even low levels. The agency said it will con- tinue with a congressionally or- dered review of the pesticide due in 2022. The EPA issued a statement Monday criticizing The Times for not reporting that the USDA and the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture op- posed banning chlorpyrifos. Those positions, including the USDA’s, were taken during the Obama ad- ministration. The EPA also chastised the newspaper for not reporting that the circuit court declined in July a motion by the Natural Resources Defense Council and Pesticide Ac- tion Network to overrule the EPA. The circuit court said it only or- dered EPA to make a decision, not arrive at a particular outcome. The engineers and entre- preneurs involved in agricul- tural technology acknowledge they are designing systems for 24-hour operation. Young Kim, of Digital Harvest, said night will be- come the default time for spraying. Less wind at night means less spray drift, he said during a panel discussion. Drones fly better at night, too, he said. Another panelist said lasers work better at night as well. “Fortunately, robots don’t get tired,” said Stewart Moorehead, a field robotics manager for John Deere who also was part of the panel. “This march from automa- tion to autonomy is going to change how farming is done,” he said. But what happens to the farmer? What is his or her role? Is the farmer relegat- ed to machine tender? Data analyst? Marketer? Or is the farmer simply a landholder, and the farm’s machines be- come the farmer? Several Future Farm pan- elists noted the world pop- ulation is projected to reach 8.6 billion by 2030, a billion more than now. By 2050, the earth may have nearly 10 bil- lion people to feed. The venerable family farm may not be up to the task. It’s more than an American con- cern; the Future Farm Expo was attended by scientists, researchers and innovators from Chile, Peru, Uruguay, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Cana- da, Japan and Germany. “We can’t afford to have people die of starvation,” said Jake Joraanstad, CEO of Myriad Mobile Solutions, based in Fargo, N.D. His company sells an applica- tion that lets grain elevators communicate directly with farmers, storing and sharing data. “There’s a clear path to- ward completely automated farming,” Joraanstad said. “To solve the hunger prob- lem, we have to be going there, that has to be the fu- ture. “Ideally, with artificial in- telligence, it should be better at farming than we are.” ODFW investigations confirm two wolf attacks on calves on private land WOLF from Page 1 issues and “asked all the right ques- tions.” Rosa also sent Minor a letter, suggesting he ask the governor to end the “needless suffering and kill- ing of our cattle in Eastern Oregon.” “OCA strongly recommends le- thal removal of the ENTIRE pack to prevent continued needless suf- fering, injury and death to our de- fenseless cattle,” Rosa wrote. He said killing four wolves, the action ODFW settled on, will not be an ef- fective deterrent. “Our biggest concern is that progress can get slowed down,” Rosa said in an interview. “We hope (Brown) will reach out to ODFW to speed up the process.” A coalition of 18 conservation groups, including Oregon Wild, took the opposite view. They asked the governor to intervene, saying ODFW’s recent action “clearly demonstrates the need for stronger requirements for transparency and public accountability.” The groups said they are will- ing to work with ODFW to adopt a wolf management plan that achieves those goals. The state’s plan is up for review and possible revision this year by the ODFW Commission, a citizen panel. ODFW spokeswoman Michelle Dennehey said the department has kept the Governor’s Office in- formed about the Harl Butte pack and ODFW’s lethal control deci- sions. “The governor has not asked us to change any decision,” Dennehey said in an email. Meanwhile, ODFW investiga- tions confirmed two wolf attacks on calves on private land in Uma- tilla County. The Meacham Pack was blamed for injuring a 550 pound calf found Aug. 15 and a 450 pound calf found Aug. 17, both in the Sheep Creek area. In addi- tion, the ODFW also confirmed the Walla Walla Pack killed a calf found partially consumed Aug. 13 on private land in the Government Mountain area.