Physics professor Christopher Bidinosti has been at the University of Winnipeg since 2007, and much of his recent work sits at the intersection of computing and agriculture. As a co-founder of the TerraByte research group, Bidinosti is helping advance digital agriculture in Manitoba by supporting plant science research with new data and imaging tools.

Where did you work before?

I’ve been in universities most of my life. Before coming to the University of Winnipeg, I was a postdoctoral researcher at Simon Fraser University and prior to that at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France. Before that, I was a graduate student at the University of British Columbia and an undergraduate student at Brandon University. I also worked at Ayerst Organics in Brandon, MB, where they extracted estrogen from the pregnant mare’s urine and made hormone replacement drugs.

What got you interested in this area of work?

I’ve always had an interest in plants, gardens and growing food. Even though I don’t do it, I still find it fascinating. So, when my colleague and I were working on advanced computing techniques about 10 years ago, I saw this as an opportunity to engage my interest in agriculture. With the shrinking cost and size of sensors, like cameras in our phones, and the massive increase in computing power, it felt like the right time to jump into this kind of research.

Tell us a bit about what you’re working on at the University.

Our research group, TerraByte, works on several aspects of digital agriculture, including data generation, data hosting and sharing, and machine learning models for things like plant classification and disease detection. We primarily work with plant scientists, helping them automate and expedite visual tasks like phenotyping and disease assessment. We like to think of what we do as research helping research.

Michael Beck, Christopher Henry and I have been pushing digital agriculture for a long time. When Manitoba Crop Alliance (MCA) put out its “hope and dreams” call last fall, we knew we had to pitch the idea for the Manitoba Centre for Digital Ag (MCDA). When you look at other jurisdictions, there is significant investment in digital agriculture, and we felt strongly that Manitoba needed a more co-ordinated approach. The MCDA isn’t about a single building or institution. It’s about bringing researchers, grower organizations, government, and industry together around a shared provincial strategy. Our focus is on mobilizing researchers across universities and colleges to work collaboratively, apply for funding together and make better use of the digital tools we already have. That’s the vision we’re working toward, and we really appreciate MCA’s support in helping move it forward.

What can you say about the value of farmers providing funding and support to your organization?

It’s huge and we appreciate it very much. It’s very forward thinking. There is no doubt that computers will bring as much change to agriculture as engineering, chemistry or genetics have in the past.

How does that farmer funding and support directly benefit farmers?

It really goes back to work we do with plant scientists and researchers. If we can help them expedite their breeding programs, then heartier crop varieties that are more pest, disease or heat resistance, for example, can make it to farms much sooner. That’s where we see a real, long-term benefit for farmers.

One example of this is work we do in the lab using low-cost cameras to take images of plants from many different angles and build 3D computer models of them. From those models, we can automatically extract plant traits like height, width, volume and leaf angle, without disrupting the plant’s growth cycle or relying on visual scoring. A lot of plant science still depends on people visually ranking plants, which takes a huge amount of time and can be quite subjective. What we’re doing replaces hours or days of manual work with something that takes minutes and produces consistent results.

For plant breeders, that’s a big deal. It means they can evaluate more plants, more accurately and much faster than before. That speeds up research and helps identify promising varieties earlier in the process. While this work isn’t showing up directly on farms next year, it influences the varieties that farmers will eventually be growing.

We’re very thankful for the trust farmers have placed in us. We’re always happy to talk about what we’re working on and to hear about other projects we could be involved in. This kind of work is an investment in the future, and we take that responsibility seriously.

How do you spend your time outside of work?

Biking, running and reading.

What is the best part about your job?

The best part of my job is working in an area that I find genuinely fascinating and working with inspired students. Over the last several years, my focus has shifted more toward digital agriculture, which brings together engineering, imaging equipment and computation. We often talk about how engineering plus agriculture gave us tractors, chemistry plus agriculture gave us pesticides, genetics plus agriculture gave us breeding, and now it’s computers plus agriculture. No one knows exactly where it will land, but there’s no doubt it’s going to be big, and that’s what makes it so interesting to work on.

What gets you most excited about your work?

The people I work with. I have amazing colleagues and collaborators who are incredibly talented and fun to work with, and I’ve worked closely with some of them for many years. The work itself is also fascinating because of how complicated it is. Plants and real farm fields are insanely complicated systems, even more so than physics, and that challenge is what keeps the work exciting.

Learn more at terrabyte.acs.uwinnipeg.ca