Digital Agriculture Table

The first meeting of Manitoba’s Digital Agriculture Table that took place on June 22nd. We were pleased that approximately 40 people from industry and academia joined the zoom call. Thank you to all those that joined the meeting, contributed their insights in the main session, the breakouts and in the meeting chat feature.

The table is jointly led by Manitoba’s Industry-Academia Partnership and the Enterprise Machine Intelligence and Learning Initiative.

• MIAP is an initiative that brings together the Manitoba Business Council and nine post-secondary institutes from across Manitoba to collaborate on innovative approaches to talent, technology and the future of work.
• EMILI was created to prepare and empower the Manitoba economy to leverage intelligent technologies for success. We work with industry and academia to accelerate the adoption of intelligent technologies and grow Manitoba’s digital agriculture ecosystem.

Our shared vision for Manitoba’s Digital Agriculture Table is that Manitobans from our robust agri-food industry and post-secondary institutions have committed to sharing their expertise to enhance our competitive advantage, growing our collective agricultural capacity and the economy of Manitoba.

This session was led by Ryan Ramsdale from InVision Edge who led us through a number of activities including defining digital agriculture. A number of definitions were presented. All of them are correct and pulled from various sources, the one that received the most votes was: “The application of intelligent technologies to any or all components of the agri-food value chain; before, during and after on-farm production.”

This gives us a broad scope to where intelligent technologies can play across the agri-food value-chain and what technologies are included under the digital agriculture banner.

We also discussed where on a life cycle curve does the development of digital agriculture fall in Manitoba. Everyone placed us either in the start-up or in the beginning phases of the growth stage.

This means that there are many more opportunities to be realized in digital agriculture in Manitoba and that this is the time to innovate, collaborate and seize the opportunity in the province.

In break-out groups we completed a SWOT analysis of the current level of partnership between industry and academia.

What we heard was that the most urgent skills and competencies were in digital literacy, business analysis and instrumentation and robotics. Next, the ability to apply technology skills to real-world digital agriculture issues and opportunities and think about how intelligent technologies can add-value along the digital agriculture value chain.

Your participation as a member of Manitoba’s Digital Agriculture Table is greatly appreciated. It’s our intention that by getting industry and academia around the table we will:

• accelerate the digital agriculture industry here in Manitoba
• we will identify and seize new innovation opportunities faster as a result of increased collaboration
• Provide more work-integrated learning opportunities to students, source available subsidies to fund these positions and increase the talent pipeline for digital agriculture. leading to increased talent in the pipeline
• And make visible partners, opportunities and pathways for collaboration on a digital agriculture asset map