Old Macdonald Had a Drone: Inside Farming’s Tech Boom

T he MacLellans can pinpoint the moment their farm in Kensington, Prince Edward Island, underwent a significant change: spring 2009. That’s when the family tractors were outfitted with GPS. “You can take someone with less experience, throw them in the tractor, and the tractor drives itself,” says Bevin MacLellan.

At twenty-four, Bevin is the youngest son of the family and works on the property with his older brother, Rylan. Together, the men will eventually inherit the farm, the ninth generation of the MacLellans to do so. They farm potatoes, barley, and wheat on a three-year crop rotation and have a crew of about eleven employees outside of the family. The MacLellans can trace their farming history back to roughly 1790, when their forebears broke ground on sixty acres. Each generation has since brought something new to the operation, a different set of ideas to boost productivity, starting with the first MacLellan to hitch his plow to a horse. Bevin, who studied plant sciences in university, is the agronomics guy, looking at new fertilizer formulations and seed mixes; Rylan, with a diploma in agriculture business, deals with the machinery. Alongside their father and grandfather, they plan the planting, cultivating, and harvesting. But while farming is still a physical job, the men know they live in an era where more and more of it can be done on smartphones, using apps that run extensive irrigation networks or receive real-time analysis of soil health and nutrient levels.

Bevin and Rylan get excited about the possibilities of tech to make their farming smarter, more strategic, but given the costs, the brothers have to be selective. No shots in the dark; additions to the farm have to be proven. “There’s always someone coming in your driveway, trying to sell you something,” Rylan says. Everything comes back to efficiency. How many tasks can you squeeze out of a day? How much faster can you move? GPS in the tractors doesn’t just mean that a specialized crew member might be freed up to work more demanding jobs. It means that, by moving perfectly up and down the rows, the tractor shaves off precious seconds every time it traverses the field. The family can thus get more done with a single machine. As the farm grows, they rely increasingly on these kinds of hacks, wringing more out of each day than the previous one.

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