Canadians who are eager to learn more about food production on family farms have a lot more opportunities available to them now. The much popular website, www.FarmFood360.ca, now presents three new VR Tours that were filmed on chicken, Ontario beef, and turkey farms.
Visiting a farm is an ideal way to connect Canadians with the food producers and the food itself. However, doing this in person is quite difficult at times. The FarmFood360° website, using virtual reality technology and 360° cameras, lets people explore real food processing plants and working farms, that too from the comfort of their classrooms or home.
Digital Tours
To access these digital tours, people must have either desktop computers or tablets. VR devices and mobile phones will also do the job. The site has additionally added 12 traditional videos as a supplement for the 360° feature tours. They include explanations on where the animals live and their food, interviews with the farm families, and conversations about their daily farm chores. Nutritionists, veterinarians, and other specialists join them in describing their roles regarding the farms’ animals.
Beef Tour
The beef tour explores both a feedlot farm and an Ontario cow-calf farm. Rob Lipsett, President of Beef Farmers of Ontario, explains their new digital resource as a fantastic way to present the two main kinds of beef farms to people who might not otherwise get the chance to visit them in real life.
Lipsett wants the consumers to know how they responsibly raise their beef cattle and the way their grasslands protect the environment. He wants the public to make informed decisions as well as feel good to choose beef for their meal. Lipsett believes that the new tool will showcase the farms in a way they have not been able to do before.
Chicken Tour
The chicken tour offers people an immersive experience of an Ontario-based farm that raises broiler chickens. The videos describe what chickens eat and the way the farmworkers take care of them. The tour showcases a program named ‘CFO Cares Farmers to Food Banks’. It encourages farmers to provide fresh meat to food banks. Ed Benjamins, Chair of Chicken Farmers of Ontario, said that owing to the farm’s biosecurity practices, they are unable to provide visitors with personal tours of their barns. He feels that the VR chicken farm tour helps display their industry’s commitment to both quality and transparency.
Turkey Tour
In the last tour, the farm family lets guests go through both their grow-out barn (for mature birds) and poultry barn (for young birds). They chat about their life as a farm family and their regular farm routine. Brian Ricker, Chair of Turkey Farmers of Ontario, mentioned that the public does not have much knowledge about turkey farming as there are just 160 farmers in the province. He believes that a lot more people will get to know about turkey farming through the virtual reality program.
The Canadian Agricultural Partnership’s AgriCompetitiveness program has partly funded this VR project and continues to attract a good number of users every year.
