There is a lot of anxiety in the media right now about the future of artificial intelligence: Will AI steal our jobs, copy our artwork, plagiarize our writing? Just this week, the dangers of artificial intelligence, the existential threat it could represent, the extinction level risk that could be on par with climate change, nuclear war and the Matrix - the articles are rising to the top of the Google ranks faster than many of us human bloggers can keep up.

The Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA) is a branch of Health Canada responsible for the registration, evaluation, and sustainable usage of pesticides. A new update to PMRA policy, “PMRA Guidance Document, Tank Mix Labeling” will go into effect at the end of December 2024, with big implications for Canadian spray operators. In this week’s blog, we will go over the basics of tank mixing, the reasoning behind the process, the current regulations governing it, and the forthcoming changes that will shape future implementation.

In recent years, the agricultural industry has witnessed a significant increase in automation investments. According to the Western Growers Center for Innovation Technology's 2022 Specialty Crop Automation Report, automation-related investments on farms saw a remarkable 25 percent surge in 2022. Approximately 70 percent of participating growers indicated that they had invested in automation in 2022, with an average annual spend of $450,000-$500,000 per grower. The biggest percentage of investment? Weed management: 45 percent of survey respondents reported investing in automated weeding technology.

As the world population continues to grow, so does the demand for food. For centuries, agriculture has been a labor-intensive industry, and many farming practices still require a considerable amount of manual labor. But as the global agricultural workforce is aging and the number of people entering the sector is decreasing, labor shortages are becoming the norm in agriculture each year. To overcome this challenge, the agricultural industry is investing in automation to reduce labor costs and increase productivity.