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.