Rick Rutherford is a third-generation farmer whose deep passion for agriculture has led to local and international partnerships focused on advancing innovation and supporting the next generation of farmers. Rutherford is the first producer EMILI partnered with when launching Innovation Farms powered by AgExpert in 2022.
Locating the first Innovation Farms on Rutherford’s 5,500-acre seed farm in Grosse Isle, Manitoba has allowed EMILI to provide innovators with access to leading-edge equipment, technology, and production practices to increase productivity, sustainability, and profitability across the agriculture and agri-food sector.
Rutherford Farms has hosted Harvest on the Crescent since 2021. Each year a different crop grows on Wellington Crescent while raising money for Harvest Manitoba. Over the past five years this initiative has raised thousands.
Describe your job in one sentence.
I am a third-generation farmer operating a pedigreed seed and commercial grain farm located in the South Interlake at Grosse Isle, Manitoba, with a second farm in Gypsumville, Manitoba..
What early experiences fueled your passion for a career in agriculture.
When I was 18 years old I had an opportunity to go work on a farm in Australia. I worked for a very entrepreneurial person that changed my view of the world. When I came home, I had applied and was accepted at university but when it was time to go, agriculture was just taking off and things were happening so quickly that I went straight to work on my family farm.
Since then I’ve had the luxury of being able to travel and work in agriculture in other countries. There is a global aspect to everything I’ve done, from going to Agritechnica in Germany to travelling annually to Chile for the past 12 years. My friend in Chile also has 100 acres in Peru; all flowering vegetables which he is producing for seed. I’m looking forward to travelling there in December to consult with him.
As a third generation farmer, what would your father and grandfather think about today’s farm?
They are the original visionaries in their own right. When my grandfather and his brothers came from Ontario, they didn’t have any money. They started farming corporate farms, farming 2,000 acres with horses in the early 1900s. They made enough money to each buy their own farm. Rutherford Farms built its first seed processing plant in 1960, upgrading in 1979 and completely rebuilding in 1998.
When I started farming, my father had three quarter sections. Between our two farms in Grosse Isle and Gypsumville, it’s now 75 quarter sections with a variety of crops including wheat, oats, barley, canola, corn, and soybeans.
In my dad’s last year of farming, he was swathing crops with a GPS-guided swather that had auto steer on it. He thought that was the greatest technology he’d ever seen. He was 88 years old. He started at 8 years old so that was probably his 80th crop. He thought it was a cool thing to go to the field in an air-conditioned swather.
Now for example, we can access advanced analytics (such as the amount of rain, windspeeds, the last frost-free day) from a Crop Sentry station on our farm in Gypsumville two hours away. I think he’d be blown away by that.
What is the first technology you remember adopting on your farm?
We’ve always been interested in new technologies, and a lot of it revolved around our farm equipment. One of the first things we adopted, close to 30 years ago, is auto-steer. And we saw the benefits of steering a vehicle by itself, maximizing widths and this type of thing. And that actually led into a lot of the data collection that was tied to it.
You are known for your detailed data collection. Why is this important to you?
One of the things about the seed business is we want to know what we are growing on a certain piece of land, and we might even want to know it back as far as 10 years. At that time we were using little books that we carried around in our shirt pocket. It wasn’t long before we were documenting every pass, and everything we did on our farm in the John Deere Operations Center.
We’ve seen a lot of different products coming to the market that could benefit from historical data. It might be a spray application, a yield application, or a yield map that would help our farm in the future. All the layers of data that we’ve accumulated over the years tells a great story and the world is starting to demand that story.
It helps tell a story about our farm too. If we can show our seed customers how technology helps us be more efficient in what we are doing on our farm, it’s going to benefit them in the future. Partnering with EMILI has given us the opportunity to do this, and agriculture as a whole is benefiting from it.
What is your favourite part of working in agriculture?
One of my tag lines that I use is “my success is my customer’s success.” At the end of the day, like a lot of things, it comes down to the people you meet. That’s what develops further relationships with different technologies. It starts with the people.
What advice would you give to someone considering a career in digital agriculture?
You’ll succeed wildly in agriculture if you turn it into a way of life. It doesn’t end at four o’clock in the afternoon. If you’re going to look at moving into agriculture and be successful, it has to be a way of life.
This profile is part of EMILI’s This is Agriculture series, highlighting talented and diverse individuals across the digital agriculture sector. While individuals working in agriculture come from a variety of backgrounds, they share a common interest in growing and strengthening Canadian agriculture to ensure an environmentally and economically sustainable future for generations to come.