Farmers Edge: Helping match farmer practices with processor specifications

Consumer expectations look a lot different today than they did 50, 25 or even 10 years ago. Today, grocery shelves are lined with a much wider array of product labels, representing new consumer health needs, beliefs and trends, not to mention the regulatory expectations that don’t make it onto product labels.

The range of specifications can be hard to keep up with, but harder still is matching plant proteins that meet certain specifications with the processors and trade partners looking for them. Digital agriculture company Farmers Edge, however, is working on changing this.

Together with OPIsystems, and with a co-investment from Protein Industries Canada, Farmers Edge is developing a new platform that will both increase on-farm efficiencies and expand plant-protein market opportunities. A significant aspect of this will involve tracking on-farm data, which will be used to both create prediction models for farmer use and support traceability and specification tracking for processors.

“Everyone knows, it all starts with what happens on the farm field,” Farmers Edge former Head of Sustainability and Stakeholder Relations Bruce Ringrose said. “From selecting the right varieties to choosing the best management practices for crop inputs and protection to meet the specifications of the ingredient and food processor.”

Farmers Edge and OPIsystems chose to work together on the project because of the complimentary work the two businesses were already undertaking. Farmers Edge has been providing clients around the world with prediction models based on artificial intelligence and machine learning for 15 years. OPIsystems, meanwhile, has been providing their clients with insight into grain management and storage solutions for 35 years. By building on the expertise each company provides, the integration of platforms will provide farmers with an enhanced experience, from predicting yield and the effects of diseases and pests to grain management, while later connecting them with processors and exporters best suited to using and marketing their crops.

Ringrose said development of the advanced features of the FarmCommand platform has already led to an acceleration of innovation capacity within Farmers Edge.

“By having this additional support, we’ve been able to attract more talent and put them to work in the digital agriculture sector,” he said. “We see this as an opportunity to continue to build out our expertise and drive Canada to be the premier agri-data player to service all of global agriculture and support the whole value chain … We believe we will be creating new intellectual property, new processes and prediction models, which will help growers in Canada and elsewhere perform better and more sustainably.”

This knowledge-based, data-driven approach to agriculture, Ringrose explained, will contribute to Canada’s GDP and job growth in a way that many don’t instinctively associate with agriculture. Farmers Edge, however, has come a long way in proving they should. With clients and offices in six countries, and more on the way, the company has shown that the world is hungry for not only Canadian plant proteins, but our expertise, as well.