Farmers Who Code - Part One

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

Farmers have always found ways to solve their own problems, whether that’s fixing or modifying equipment, building their own solutions, or tinkering with new ways of doing things. So why should digital agriculture be any different? There is a growing open source movement of farmers around the world who are developing their own technologies to solve their problems. Alberta farmer Brian Tischler is one of them.

Tischler… “We seed who the disc type seed drill. We had GPS in that tractor but you couldn't see where you went and kind of where you had to go when you were turning around and that sort of thing to line up the tractor. So there was mapping software and that sort of thing, and we had RTK and the tractor, which is a very precise form of GPS. And I thought, well, how about I learn what GPS is? I knew nothing about it. I knew just nothing about GPS.”

Tischler leveraged his background as a hobbyist game coder to solve this problem on his farm.

Tischler… “So I just started learning, and just started programming in C sharp. I hadn't ever programmed in C sharp before, it was a more modern language. And I was able to take that information and put it in a Windows program. And I had other experience from gaming with using open GL, which is a graphics package. So I just had a little thingy on the screen and it mapped where I had been. And so now we could see where we had seeded.”

Tune into tomorrow’s report to find out more about open source ag technology.