Todd Hirsch
It sure wasn't Silicon Valley. It wasn't even Waterloo, Ont. But the gathering of hundreds of Prairie farmers at an agricultural forum in Saskatoon was probably just as tech-savvy as any gathering anywhere.
Business cards? How old-fashioned. This conference was all about the QR code. You've probably seen the crazy little boxes speckled with a strange black and white pattern in newspapers and advertising. You scan it with your phone, and suddenly you have all the information you need. Farmer delegates each had a name tag personalized with a unique QR code; they would introduce themselves, then pull out their BlackBerrys and scan each other's code - an instant exchange of contact information.
The QR label on name tags is only a trivial application of technology in agriculture. More important, the labels are being adapted to store and track information about agricultural goods. A container of canola, for instance, can easily be labelled with a QR tracking code: The information would include where the canola was grown, the kind of seed (genetically modified or not), the sorts of herbicides and pesticides, how much fertilizer was used, when it was harvested, etc. This technology is beginning to transform the tracking of agricultural commodities.
A common myth is that farming has been on a long-term decline since the 1950s. Certainly, the number of farms has plummeted, and the traditional family-owned and -operated farm is becoming rare. But agriculture itself is booming, thanks to the adaptation of technology.
The QR tracking application is just one example of how embracing technological advances has helped vault a very traditional industry into its own economic renaissance. GPS technology has brought farmers into an age of possibility that their forefathers would have thought incomprehensible: to monitor moisture levels on thousands of acres of crop, all at the click of a mouse.
This point is sometimes missed by economic development strategists. Every government has a plan to promote its "high tech" industry - but this usually involves subsidies or R&D credits. Every region wants to create its own personal cluster of high-tech research and manufacturing. The jobs pay well, and it gives the region a sexy, high-tech cache.
But the adoption and application of new technology within traditional sectors is surely just as economically powerful as developing the technology in the first place. It wasn't a Western Canadian canola farmer who developed QR. But that doesn't matter, because agricultural producers are finding ways to tap into the technology and make their industry more profitable.
Agriculture isn't the only resource industry seeking ways to harness high-tech gadgetry to improve the bottom line. Oil and gas, forestry, potash, mining - the drivers of Western Canada's booming (once again) economy - have excelled at high-tech adaptation.
In a perfect world, it would also be Canadian companies undertaking the research and commercializing the high-tech applications globally. We need more Waterloos. But a "high tech" economy doesn't end at the science lab, the digital campus or the robotics manufacturing facility. It's also about finding ways to boost productivity through the application of existing technologies. And some of the most creative applications are taking place in what are usually considered unsophisticated industries: Western Canada's resource sectors.
Just ask a young Saskatchewan farmer. After she's checked her crop's progress with GPS, Skyped her grain purchaser and updated her Twitter, she'll text you an answer.
Todd Hirsch is a Calgary-based senior economist at ATB Financial. The opinions expressed are his own.