The Ag Tech Breakfast showcased the newest in agriculture tech startups at Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show in Woodstock.
Tech on display included a portable cattle weighing system, a silo moisture measurement system and a robot to help boost efficiency for fruit and vegetable farmers.
Startup pitches are where much on-farm tech gets its first public airing. The five here all chase the same thing, less work and better timing for the producer, from a picking robot to a scale that tells a rancher when to sell.
Tandem Robotics can help with harvest efficiency
First, Tandem Robotics presented a new robot to help producers reduce the physical toll of their work while increasing efficiency.
Founder Ming Chen explained how Tandem Robotics grew out of the work of a previous startup, Apidae Systems. He said the original goal was to build farm sensors to help producers monitor crops.
“We then brought that technology into farms, vegetables, cash crop, and also greenhouses,” Chen said. “And we were monitoring sort of like rainfall, microclimate, soil. We presented them to the farmers in a dashboard on their phone.”
The problem, he said, was that farmers weren’t engaging with the dashboard regularly.
“That really got us to wondering, okay, what do the farmers actually need,” he said. “We felt that they actually got more value out of just that extra pair of hands on the farm than us giving them all this data, all these numbers, essentially extra work.”
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This led to the next venture, collaborative robots meant to help farmers do their tasks more easily, helping to do low-bending work more safely and efficiently.
“Whatever tool we give these farmers, it should be giving them less work and not more work.”
Chen said the robot allows producers to work two to four times more efficiently on tasks like picking fruits and vegetables, plus giving them the freedom to use more of their land for growing.
StrongBó Agritech gives real-time info on beef
Michael McInerny of StrongBó Agritech presented the Auto Weigher system, which won an award at the Innovation Awards earlier in the week.
McInerny began by presenting what he saw as a persistent challenge in the beef sector, that of beef being processed without any live information.
“Our solution to this, I will say, is extremely simple, and we’re really proud of how simple we’ve made it,” he said.
That solution is the Auto Weigher, a portable system, which coaxes animals in with salt, weighs them, sends the information into the cloud, then back to the farmer in a usable format.
“The primary value proposition is farmers selling at the right time,” McInerny said. “They’re able to mark their animals at the right time. They’re able to monitor their pasture performance.”
Terralynx offers aerial intelligence
The next presentation was Terralynx, a multi-platform imagery analysis company.
Founder Andres Hurtado explained Terralynx’s focus is on the insights that come from its data points, and how they can translate into better decisions on the farm.
“How can we make a farm more productive, (with) better management practices?” Hurtado said. “Whether it is by using a variable rate over the farm, what is the specific solution that that grower is going to have?”
“We have lidar, and of course, we have bathymetry. Now we’re also seeing underwater,” he continued, “and we’re turning it into this end-to-end platform, this aerial intelligence platform that is serving the industries to make better decisions and to get better insights as we grow.”
EcoDrone’s drone mapping
EcoDrone Research and Consulting founder Vinay Rajdev explained how his startup uses multispectral drone tech to boost efficiency for growers.
Rajdev said thermal imaging can help to understand stress on plants, while mapping can help with yield estimation.
“It can also help with the variable rate application based on the vigour zone,” he said. “The higher the zone, higher the vigour.”
Multispectral imaging can also help with early virus detection to limit spread between plants.
He said EcoDrone has been used on vineyards in the Niagara Region, where the startup operates.
Grain Data Solutions offers a silo moisture measurement system
Finally, Mahla Mirali presented Grain Data Solutions’ portable silage moisture meter.
Mirali said the idea began when she heard a farmer talking about different weather conditions leading to unpredictable moisture changes in his bunker silo.
“We told him there should be some solutions out there, but he told us they’re either time-consuming, they’re not user friendly, or … they cost a lot.”
Grain Data Solutions, which functions as a software company, partnered through Bioenterprise to create a silage moisture sensor the farmer can take into the bunker to “get some samples, and in less than a minute, measure the amount of moisture, and adjust the amount of feed that he should give to the cows.”
Follow more of our coverage at Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show here.
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