Autonomous agriculture research at Olds College of Agriculture & Technology has gained interest from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia.
Jay Katupitiya, an associate professor at UNSW Sydney, has spent the last few months at Olds College working closely with Research Project Manager Roy Maki – an expert in the autonomous agriculture field.
“The main goal is to see how well a larger machine like the OMNiPOWER™ platform operates,” said Katupitiya. “The machines we have in Sydney are quite small. The largest horsepower of the machine we have is only 79 horsepower. These machines (in Olds) are up to 200 horsepower – some of the machines are much bigger.”
Olds College recently finished a four-year applied research project on the evaluation and improvement of economic, environmental and logistical benefits of autonomous agricultural equipment for broadacre crop production on the Canadian Prairies.
“The results of this four-year study demonstrate how autonomous equipment could be a beneficial agricultural asset for a producer – and that specifically OMNiPOWER efficiency and fuel usage has improved over the past few years to a point where it rivals typical equipment used on Canadian Prairie farms,” said Maki. “Olds College is looking forward to continuing its work with autonomous agriculture equipment.”
Back in 2020, Olds College purchased OMNiPOWER with three compatible implements for academic, training, farming, research and evaluation purposes. In 2023, the team also was gifted a new OMNiPOWER 3200 platform from Raven Industries, Inc. Over the past four years, more than 20,000 autonomous acres of broadacre cropland were farmed on the Smart Farm and three different producer partner sites.
Meanwhile, Katupitiya will take the information he has gathered in Olds back to Australia, which will be beneficial for testing his autonomous agriculture algorithms.
Read more about the four-year study on autonomous agriculture equipment in the 2024 Smart Farm Impact Report.
