Submitted by: Janice Janiec, Golden Horseshoe Regional Communication Coordinator

There is excitement building about a new suite of tools to enhance producer learning at field-based soil health and compaction events. OSCIA announced the Ag Field Demo and Applied Research Suite during the OSCIA annual meeting in February.

The mobile unit is made up of six key components: a 6.5 x 10-foot high-resolution, weather-proof display screen, portable speaker and audio system, high resolution video camera for broadcast, mobile soil health lab, portable pad scales with Wi-Fi connectivity and enhanced soil compaction monitoring equipment. The components will be housed in a trailer that can travel to field events, along with trained personnel, to enhance the learning opportunities. The concept for the mobile learning unit and its components stems from the large compaction events held around the province in the past few years. It takes a large fleet of equipment, sometimes at significant cost, to pull these technical events together, and to allow a large number of attendees to view the resulting information in a meaningful, and engaging way.

Envision a field event with a soil pit—the front row can see and hear what is being presented, but anyone further back is missing key elements of that presentation. The high resolution, portable screen and audio equipment would be used to project the information to a much larger audience. Another example is broadcasting the impact of equipment driving over sensors at a compaction field event. Being able to display these results live on a large screen is impactful to experience, as the learnings from the compaction events have shown.

This project is a perfect fit with OSCIA’s mission of ‘Facilitate responsible, economic management of soil, water, air and crops through development and communication of innovative farming practices’. There is great enthusiasm around an agricultural organization owning such a unit and making it available for field demonstrations and related research.

The vision is that the unit, and related technical staff, can be booked for a fee through OSCIA. It is expected the unit will be available to OSCIA counties/districts, regions and partners for some limited weigh clinics in 2021 and for soil health and compaction events in the 2022/23 field seasons.

For additional information on this project see Introducing the OSCIA Mobile Soil Technology Suite (MSTS)