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
“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.
When it comes to the adoption of agricultural
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.
According to the federal government, Canada exports about
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.”
According to an RBC analysis from February 2025, Canada had slipped from fifth to seventh on the global food export leaderboard — overtaken by China and Brazil — and could fall to ninth over the next decade.
The RBC analysis also said Canada’s market share
The RBC analysis also said Canada’s market share since 2000 has declined by 12 per cent. Though the country’s food exports have still quadrupled in that time, the analysis noted the rest of the world’s exports have grown five-fold.
Fraser said that Canada has a reputation for having a very slow policy and regulatory framework that leads to slower uptake by farmers of new technologies and agricultural products.
However, he acknowledged that the same framework means Canadian food “is among the highest quality, most trusted and safest in the world.”
Roberts said there’s not a single solution
Roberts said there’s not a single solution to this issue, but rather several small aspects that need to be improved. He highlighted some positive signs, such as Canada rebranding its pesticide regulator, which he hopes will improve timelines around crop protection products and approvals.
“But again, this is still new as well,” he said. “We need to see it on the ground here at the farm gate.”
Infrastructure and labour challenges
Even if he can get access to the latest technologies to bolster his farm output, Roberts said he faces another big challenge: getting his crops to global markets.
The vast, vast majority of our crop
“The vast, vast majority of our crop is going to go to export, and for my farm where I sit, there is only oneoberts said. “The average western Canadian crop has 1,500 kilometres of rail line to tidewater.”
But those railways are subject to all sorts of delays, like bad weather in the mountains or on Canada’s West Coast, Roberts added. If that happens, fewer rail cars can operate, which backs up the grain elevators where he deposits his time-sensitive crops.
“And when there’s one week of delays at the railways, it can take weeks once service resumes to resolve the bottleneck because the system is generally running fairly full,” Roberts said. “I can’t drive my truck 1,500 kilometres to Vancouver to dump at the port.”
Evan Shout, co-founder and CEO of Maverick Ag,
Evan Shout, co-founder and CEO of Maverick Ag, an agriculture business consulting and risk management firm in Saskatoon, concurred with Roberts and said infrastructure concerns often come up when he coaches other farmers.
“Those infrastructure issues that are real issues come to the forefront when you’re the last person to get paid,” said Shout, who’s also CFO of Hebert Grain Ventures, one of the largest farms in Saskatchewan.
“It’s one of those uncontrollable risks,” he added. “We don’t control the trade partners our government works with. We don’t control the investment into infrastructure. We don’t control when they load what boats.”
Roberts and Shout also highlighted issues with finding
Roberts and Shout also highlighted issues with finding enough workers to harvest crops, since farming can be a very challenging profession with seasonal work schedules.
“We’re very busy in seeding, harvest and spraying over the summer months. When guys want to be at the lake, farmers usually aren’t,” Shout said. “And then all of a sudden we get into winter and it’s a little slower. So how do you get somebody that’s used to that seasonality?”
Roberts said farming equipment has also become more complex, meaning operators need to be highly skilled.
You can’t just find anybody off the street
“You can’t just find anybody off the street to run it anymore. You have to have a certain tech background. You have to have a certain mechanical inclination to fix it, work on it,” Roberts said.
To raise these issues, Shout stressed the importance of having a seat at the table with federal decision makers, and added that while advocates exist, he feels they are often relegated to the “secondary table.”
“I think part of it is, we need to be seen as what we’re actually providing to Canada,” Shout said, adding that it’s beneficial for Canada’s food security to have farmers involved in key conversations.
If we don’t produce strong food, we don’t
“If we don’t produce strong food, we don’t have the ability to send it to other countries,” he said.
Agriculture Minister Heath MacDonald said in a statement to CBC News that the federal government is “tackling obstacles that hold our farmers back and creating new opportunities for Canadian agri-food exports.”
MacDonald said Ottawa is investing in critical infrastructure projects through the Trade Diversification Corridors Fund and assisting the Vancouver Gateway Strategy, which is now with the Major Projects Office.
Our government remains committed to reducing barriers
“Our government remains committed to reducing barriers to trade, strengthening our supply chains, and ensuring Canadian businesses can thrive both at home and around the world,” MacDonald said.
Is boosting exports the right goal?
The federal government’s national food security strategy includes several initiatives such as red tape reduction and billions of dollars to scale up Canada’s domestic food production. The strategy is focused on bringing down the cost of food for Canadians, but it also references boosting export capacity.
Jennifer Clapp, a professor and Canada Research Chair in the School of Environment, Res a compelling goal but needs to be thought through carefully — and that may be easier said than done
Clapp said rather than simply trying to boost
Clapp said rather than simply trying to boost its exports, Canada can refashion itself as a “sustainable agricultural powerhouse” and help other countries improve their own domestic capacity through eco-friendly agriculture.
She added that if Canada pursues new markets for its crops, it may run into roadblocks since other countries are also pursuing greater agricultural self-sufficiency.
“I think we shouldn’t necessarily be encouraging other countries to also become reliant on imports if we’re not trying to do that,” Clapp said. “It’s a little bit contradictory.”
Also, there’s risks for other countries because if
“Also, there’s risks for other countries because if we’re dumping our products on poor countries, that could undercut the ability of their small-scale producers to have a livelihood,” Clapp added.
Fraser said Canada should prepare itself to be a more important agricultural power, since modelling he’s done has found climate change will make Canada more productive while reducing the output of other countries, especially those near the equator.
“I think we should be preparing ourselves as a country for the future where we become a more important breadbasket,” Fraser said. “I think saying no isn’t appropriate because it’s going to happen, given the nature of the changes we’re facing.”
Asked whether he thinks it’s possible for Canada
Asked whether he thinks it’s possible for Canada to feed the world, Roberts said the country has lots of arable land and a great climate for farming.
“So absolutely, we can feed a lot of the world. I don’t know about the entire world with one province, but we can take a shot at it.”
Source: ca.news.yahoo.com
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