As farmers plan for the 2026 growing season, many are making deliberate decisions about which technologies to leave on the shelf.
Despite a steady stream of agricultural innovation, from biological inputs and precision equipment to artificial intelligence, adoption across Canadian agriculture remains uneven. The reasons are not rooted in resistance to change, but in cost pressures, unclear returns, infrastructure gaps, and the growing role of scale in determining what technologies make sense on a given farm.
While basic guidance systems and GPS technology are now commonplace, more advanced tools such as variable-rate application, AI-driven analytics, and data-intensive platforms remain far less widely used. Research and farmer experience suggest the issue is not whether innovation works in theory, but whether it works on a specific farm under real-world conditions, when margins are tight.
