A Manitoba approach to testing agricultural technology under real farm conditions has gone national through the Agriculture Innovation, Validation and Adoption Network (AIVA), Don Norman of Grainews reports in the Manitoba Co-operator.

AIVA was launched in May 2026 by the Manitoba-based Enterprise Machine Intelligence and Learning Initiative (EMILI), the Indiana-based Wabash Heartland Innovation Network (WHIN) and Farm Credit Canada. Its purpose is two-fold: to help developers validate their products and to give farmers more confidence in the technologies reaching the market. EMILI has run commercial-scale Innovation Farms at Grosse Isle since 2022 and near MacGregor since, and after a single joint project in 2025, nine validation projects are under way this year.

On the adoption side, modelled on WHIN's network of early-adopter farmers in Indiana, producers test market-ready technologies on their own farms and give structured feedback; by late August 2026, 35 farmers with more than 360,000 acres in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta had joined. The goal, said EMILI chief executive Jacqueline Keena, is report cards showing how technologies perform on Canadian farms. Full-scale validation hubs operate at EMILI, at Olds College in the west, and at Innovation Farms Ontario and Area X.O. in the east, covering topics such as spray-drone fungicide applications, autonomous weed-control robots and predictive weed mapping.

Geco Strategic Weed Management, now in its fourth year of trials with EMILI, uses artificial intelligence, satellite imagery and field history to predict high weed pressure within fields, so that measures such as higher seeding rates or extra herbicide are focused where weeds are worst. This year's AIVA trials compare seeding rates and herbicide programmes across several sites while measuring weed pressure and yield. "There is a big difference as you move between the Red River Valley and Calgary," said Geco founder Greg Stewart.

Before AIVA, he said, each smart farm had to be approached separately, with its own onboarding and funding rules; the network offers one point of contact, coordinates replicated trials and gives companies access to agronomists who often improve the trial design.

Photo: Trevor Bauer / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Source: Manitoba Co-operator