It’s early May in southern Saskatchewan. The fields, once dusted with a wintery white, have turned a rich brown in anticipation of another farm year. It’s seeding season on the Prairies, and hope is in the air.

As the quonset doors open, the purr of a diesel engine bubbles across the yard and a U-shaped vehicle rolls into the field — part transformer-like robot, part tractor. There’s no driver anywhere in sight, but this self-propelled device will soon plant the year’s first quarter-section of canola with scientific precision.

Fast forward a few weeks. The fall’s bounty has now broken through the spring soil and from the budding, new life has emerged the first healthy green leaves, marking the window where most farmers would apply two passes of herbicide to eliminate the growth of unwanted weeds.

But the sprayer hasn’t left the shop. The 120-foot-wide boom that has been a staple part of the annual routine for the past decade has instead been swapped out by the unlikeliest — and tiniest — of competitors: A drone.

You can barely hear the hum of the vehicle’s rotors as it lifts from the concrete pad and drifts towards the horizon. Equipped with a high definition camera and game-changing artificial intelligence (AI) capability, the unit analyzes each plant in real-time, identifying which is canola and which is broadleaf or grassy weed. It then applies the expensive chemical only to those unwanted plants and returns home.

To some, these two processes may sound like a futuristic vision of agriculture 10 or 20 years down the road. Thanks to two innovative Saskatchewan companies, however, this technology is already here — and the market is salivating at its arrival.

The next question is: Are the rest of us ready?

There are many parallels between the province’s agricultural community and the insurance sector. Consolidation is reducing the number of individual farms — down 12.4 per cent since 2006 — in exchange for fewer, larger operations. That trend is, in turn, driving the need for greater efficiencies and more cutting-edge, scalable solutions.

Daniel McCann is the founder of Precision.AI, which is pioneering the use of drones and AI for chemical application. He says when it comes to the marriage between farming and AI, it’s a matter of simple math.

“Farmers are spending $20 to $40 per acre on spraying, and 80 per cent of that spray hits the dirt and does absolutely nothing. It’s hugely wasteful and environmentally problematic.”

Recent field trials suggest that targeted, drone-based spraying could bring that cost down as much as 93 per cent, to $2.80 per acre.

“Machines are capable of doing things that human beings simply cannot,” says McCann. “We need to sleep, and we want to spend time with loved ones. But a machine can work the field 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

A short drive east of Regina, DOT Technology Corp. has embraced that same creed.

DOT is the brainchild of Norbert Beaujot, who founded and nurtured SeedMaster into one of the world’s leading manufacturers of high-capacity seeding equipment. The company debuted its fully autonomous platform at the 2017 Ag in Motion show, just north of Saskatoon, to industrywide acclaim. The vehicle is able to connect with different interchangeable implements, including seeding, planting, fertilizer spreading, and sprayer tools. In fact, other businesses that may have once been thought of as competitors are now designing products to fit with the DOT-powered system.

Apart from its self-driving capacities, its unique U-shaped design affords other engineering advantages. For example, implements are effectively ‘carried’ on the platform in lieu of being ‘towed’ behind. That eliminates the need for equipment traditionally used in towing — hitches, wheels, axles — and results in a more efficient use of horsepower.

Field, road, and air

In the field, an autonomous vehicle such as DOT has a limited — albeit complex — scope of risk.

The issue begins to compound when the unit needs to travel on public roads to move from one plot of land to the next.

DOT uses a special ‘follow me’ feature that enables the driverless vehicle to trail behind a truck or combine much in the same way a pilot vehicle would lead a large semi load. The company’s team has been working closely with SGI to develop the necessary regulations, and the hope is that framework will eventually be able to be duplicated in other provinces and states. Until then, DOT needs to be loaded onto a trailer to be transported from one place to the next.

Drones, on the other hand, are a different beast altogether.

Also known as unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, drones are regulated federally by Transport Canada for both personal and commercial use. Effective this past June, all drones exceeding 250 grams in weight must be registered, and operators must be both licensed and have a line-of-sight with the UAV at all times.

While most farm policies exclude the use of drones, drone-specific coverages and specialty endorsements are now widely available. Yet, insurance companies and regulators have not caught up to Precision. AI’s business model — fully autonomous UAVs.

“Typically, you have inexperienced drone operators at the remote controls and they end up flying these things into airspace and power lines, or they drop out of the sky from 100 feet up onto unsuspecting cars below — that’s the model insurers have built drone insurance on,” explains McCann. “What we’re doing is completely different. It’s wholly autonomous, so humans can’t screw it up. And they fly very low to the ground — two or three metres off the crop canopy — so you don’t get the same risk factors associated with normal drone insurance.”

McCann contends the rules need to change — not just to respond to shifting agricultural needs, but to adapt to other potential uses, including in urban settings.

“In the next 10 to 15 years, drones will be a big part of our lives, whether it’s having your food or Amazon packages delivered, or taking medical supplies into remote communities,” he predicts. “All of these alternate models that transition from this idea of drones as toys or photographic tools to low-flying, autonomous U AVs will cause the industry to balloon out, and I don’t think anybody knows what to do with it yet.”

Adapt and accelerate

For 150 years, My Mutual Insurance in Waldheim has prided itself on its farming focus. It has seen the mechanization and industrialization of agriculture, and has survived as a small mutual through those decades by being nimble, agile, and responsive to the needs of its largely rural owners — its policyholders. The integration of AI and automation into farm practices is now its next major challenge.

And the challenge is incredibly varied. Navigating reinsurance treaties is one obstacle, as is ensuring the right coverages are available for the right types of risks.

Take, for instance, the intersection between hardware, software, and data. Equipment malfunction or software failure on an autonomous farm implement could theoretically result in physical damage or even bodily injury should the vehicle veer outside its designated boundaries. The software, meanwhile, could be at risk of cyber intrusion; and the data collected by that software could be vulnerable as well. Additionally, there is an inevitable element of human error and liability associated in all three areas.

 “These are all big questions, and we’re doing our research to better understand where we can fit,” says My Mutual CEO Valerie Fehr. “But there are other implications beyond the type of coverage, too. With autonomous vehicles, farmers will also have to consider the amount of coverage to properly protect the expensive electronics some of this equipment will contain.

“So, it’s a matter of being able to identify and understand the risk, and then establish an appropriate rate for the exposure.”

It’s all part, she says, of the Fourth Industrial Revolution — with seismic implications on the economy at-large as well as individuals.

“We’re in the middle of the next big societal change, and I don’t think we know yet what it will look like. Really, who would’ve thought we’d need to be considering cyber insurance on a piece of farm equipment? “It’s an exciting time to be alive. And it’s a fascinating time to be in insurance.”