Ground Truth Agriculture Inc. a start-up company is trying to break boundaries in the AgTech world with their innovation for measuring yield quality for farmers’ yield production.
“I grew up in a grain farming family. I have been exposed to the Agri. world for my entire life. I also had a start-up company that I grew and sold prior to this one, it was also an AgTech company,” CEO and Founder of Ground Truth Agriculture Inc. Kyle Folk said.
Ground Truth Agriculture Inc. officially launched in Nov. 2021, building a system able to grade the grain quality on the combine in real-time.
Their AgTech goal is to have information at-hand when the farmer needs it to make better marketing and precision agriculture decisions. The information on grain quality puts some power back into a farmer’s hands to make better decisions on marketing and precision agriculture. “Giving them the information of grain quality puts some power back into their hands, so they have information to be able to make decisions that otherwise they don’t have access to”.
He says the project is still in the development phase, although some real-life testing has already been done on his father’s farm. “We did some field trials on my dad’s farm on his two combines, and we will be doing field trials again in the upcoming harvest season,” he said.
Last year, the team had a successful field trial run for gaining information during harvest season, which only comes once a year. He stated that the tests must be made every year.
Folk says they are going to interact with farmers at trade shows and in many other ways. “By advertising in any way that we can get in front of the farmers to start building up the interest, you are marketing a product; you ultimately hope that the farmers or your customers come to you, but there is always work that you have to do to get in front of them.”
Farmers make their decisions based on yield because yield is something that can be measured. What Ground Truth Agriculture Inc. is interested in is measuring the quality of that yield. Their process is to take a small sample from a very large volume and send those sample data to the prospective buyers to have them graded. “If farmers could know the quality per acre the same way they know their yield per acre, they could start making decisions that benefit both of those factors and not just the yield,” Folk concluded.
Background
Ground Truth Agriculture Inc. made their early announcement of their start-up seed funding of about $4 million in investments for their agriculture technology which was funded by Conexus Venture Capital and their AgTech-focused Emmertech fund on Nov. 29.
Although Ground Truth Agriculture Inc. is still in their beta-testing phase, their AgTech is going to generate more data and confidence for farmers across the Prairies to market their grain products when they are trying to sell their crops. The development of this technology will give lab-quality, real-time grain quality analysis feedback right off their combine. This AgTech will provide a piece of more detailed information on the outcome of their farming and precision agriculture practices, ultimately created through their efforts which will help inform them on new ways where they can best think about changes; they want the input to allow them to optimize for the best quality of their grain crop.
“Kyle is truly the type of person that we seek out and to work with. We believe what they are building, which is a solution that helps the farmer understand grain quality at the combine level, directly within their precision mapping systems. I will say that he is the whole reason this is happening and certainly we are thrilled to be working with them and the whole team,” Managing Director of Conexus Capital inc. and Emmertech Sean O’Connor said.
He said Ground Truth Agriculture Inc.’s technology is the missing solution in precision agriculture where the farmers are doing a lot of different new practices around variable inputs and precision agriculture to optimize their yields around their cost base. It is fundamental to have grain-quality information which is critical to understand the quality of their crops for grain marketing purposes.
“Saskatchewan is poised to become a global leader in the AgTech space,” O’Conner said.
He believes Saskatchewan has the potential to become dominant in agriculture and for that, more investments are required for future agriculture innovation. “Our belief is the future of agriculture is going to see autonomous equipment become far more prevalent in a cultural space that we are going to see precision agricultural practices become more robust, and that we are going to arm the farmers across Canada.”
