OMAFRA

OMAFRA (Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs) is the provincial government ministry responsible for the food, agriculture and rural sectors of the province.

In an effort to drive forward its strategic objective of becoming a leader in digital transformation, OMAFRA enlisted the help of CMS specialists, Zengenti, to digitally transform its crop protection publications. Its team were committed to providing its stakeholders – farmers – with more innovative working methods, while helping to develop more sustainable farming practices.

The challenge ahead

One of OMAFRA’s key responsibilities is to keep farmers in the province informed about the use of crop protection products, in particular pesticides.

This responsibility demands scrupulous attention to detail to provide accurate and up-to-date information to support farmers in protecting their crops.

The Ministry’s legacy system relied upon the design, print and distribution of various crop protection guides for farmers throughout the year. In this case, there were 13 print publications, many over 200 pages long. Each print publication required time to produce, translation from English to French and updates every one to two years.

Given the scale of the Ministry’s publication process, publications would often take months and many resources to produce. OMAFRA recognised that the costs to produce these publications needed to be reduced, but that there were also major opportunities to increase information accuracy, drive innovation and boost sustainability through a digital solution.

The status quo needed to change. The data needed to migrate to a digital solution powered by a comprehensive and workable CMS. And, the end result needed to be capable of functioning in the unique environment in which farmers operate.

What do Ontario’s farmers need?

This transformative project aimed to bring OMAFRA’s crop protection system into the 21st century, all while bringing about the team’s objectives to become a leader in digital transformation. Creating a smart, digital resource through which food producers and other stakeholders could access vital data to make important crop protection decisions.

This primary aim brought several important benefits. Firstly, the chance for a government organisation to spearhead a project designed to innovate and bring about sustainability. Secondly, introducing a future system that would enable farmers to identify and integrate non-chemical methods of pest control, reducing their reliance on pesticides.

It was hoped that the change would, ultimately, help to create a comprehensive new agricultural practice that would work to protect land and nature, inspiring other governments to follow suit.

What OMAFRA needed went far beyond simply digitising the existing print guides. Farmers were looking for a straightforward, dynamic and searchable system, that would enable them to simplify and streamline the way they do business.

With the legacy publications, information often went out of date as soon as it was printed. This process required numerous, costly reprints and updated versions.

For this project, OMAFRA needed a powerful tool to manage its content, giving them the platform to fulfil its strategic ambitions.

Finding a solution

The Zengenti team, using its CMS, Contensis, set out a plan of action. Fundamental to this was user experience, understanding what data a user would need and for what purpose. They then worked to establish how a new, intelligent system could benefit OMAFRA and its users.

After learning everything about the existing process, and what OMAFRA wanted to achieve, Zengenti set about designing a comprehensive end-to-end system in Contensis.

The CMS was loaded with all of the migrated legacy data, which added up to over 100,000 data points. Each data point had up to 50 fields that could interact with one another, leading to a potentially infinite number of calculations. All of this information, which is always changing, needed to be presented to users in a practical and informative way.

One of the team’s biggest challenges was to find a new standard approach for presenting the data, which had to be unique in each publication, including finite details such as the naming of crops and the measurement values that farmers and other users would understand.

The end result is a web-based resource that is easy for farmers to access. The next step is to enhance the system to allow data to be automatically downloaded and saved on the browser until it refreshes. This enhancement will provide access to the resource even without mobile data – essential for farmers working remotely in the fields.

Commenting on the project’s outcome, scrum master at Zengenti, Joe Miller, said: “We know how busy the agricultural industry can be; with operators managing expansive farmlands and working tirelessly during all months of the year. The previous system Ontario farmers relied on took five minutes to search through documents, often burdened with the risk of relying on outdated data. Now, all of the relevant, accurate information is just a few clicks and seconds away.

“The search function we implemented also cuts down the possibility of human error and allows users to more precisely calculate the measurements of pesticides needed for any given crop. This satisfied a key condition of the project: to reduce the overall amount of chemicals being used on crops.

“Now, as a result, farmers can save both money and reduce unnecessary use of pesticides, enabling more sustainable practices.

“We were delighted to work on this project alongside OMAFRA, helping to fulfil the team’s ambitions to become a leader in digital transformation, while providing Ontario farmers with key crop protection information. The digital resource will soon include integrated pest management information, providing additional resources to farmers to support sustainability goals. Like them, we hope other governments and organisations across the world see this change as a positive move towards digital innovation and sustainability in agriculture – with the right technology, we know this development is possible.”

The technology transfer specialist at OMAFRA, added:

“Working with Zengenti on the Ontario Crop Protection Hub project was an absolute pleasure. The task of creating a digital solution to house data from several very distinct crop protection publications was no small feat, and the Zengenti team went above and beyond to ensure that the new solution would meet user needs.

 

“The Zengenti team worked tirelessly to understand the data and user needs before creating the new digital tool, and without their guidance and skills, the end solution would not have been as functional and intelligent.

“The way that crop protection information is being shared with Ontario farmers has been completely transformed, all thanks to the Zengenti team, and OMAFRA and the agri-food sector will benefit greatly from this hard work for years to come.”

Get in touch

If you want to change your CMS this year and need extra development resources to get it done in Contensis, contact our professional services team.