Startup’s predictive model can help with spraying decisions

An Ontario company with predictive crop models that can help farmers optimize when and where to spray fungicides is the only agriculture-focused innovator chosen for the 2022 Google for Startups Accelerator Canada. 

Ukko Agro Inc. has developed an analytics platform that alerts farmers to disease risk up to a week in advance and predicts crop growth up to two weeks into the future.

Why it matters: Precision agriculture tools like farm-specific fungicide spray recommendations can help farmers optimize crop management, get the most return from costly inputs and reduce crop losses.

“When we started, we wanted to see how we can help farmers grow crops more sustainably. More crop input doesn’t necessarily mean more crops,” says Ukko Agro co-founder and chief technology officer Avi Bhargava. “Timing of application is becoming more dynamic with climate change and there are so many factors that go into it.”

In his previous role, Bhargava’s co-founder and Ukko Agro CEO Ketan Kaushish worked at Syngenta, where he visited farms across North America and learned about resistance problems that were often driven by frequent use of specific chemistries. He discovered that farms had a lot of data, but there was a gap in connecting that data to decision-making.

“We saw a need for predictive technologies in agriculture, to develop tools that tell you to do things before it becomes a problem,” Kaushish says. “This happens in a lot of industries already; maintenance for an aircraft is done before there is a problem.”

The Ukko Agro model pulls together farm-specific data from weather stations installed at strategic locations on-farm along with crop details, management practices, crop growth stages and spray history. Its disease-forecasting algorithm alerts growers to potential disease risk in potatoes, soybeans, wheat and canola, suggesting when and where they should spray to minimize or prevent disease.

Ukko can also predict crop growth stage in soybeans, wheat and canola for each field up to two weeks in advance, which helps with crop and labour management.

Although the current focus is on fungicide application, work is underway to expand into nutrient deficiency, yield gap forecasting and crop health.

The company has been selling its services commercially to agricultural retailers, chemical input providers and manufacturers, and farmers for the past four years, validating their tool with each stage of that value chain as it has expanded.

“The farmer is the end user, but we also need to work with retailers, for example, so we began working on what problems we can solve for them and how they can be more proactive in helping farmers,” Kaushish says.

“And ag chemical companies want to make sure that product is used at the right time and in the right place … so we cater to all three audiences.”

Their footprint extends east into Quebec and Prince Edward Island and west into the Prairies, as well as a little bit into the United States. The firm has also done some work in Sweden on potatoes.

William Houde Ltd. is an independent agricultural retailer in Quebec that started using Ukko Agro with a small number of growers this year.

“It’s our first year but there was excitement when it first arrived and we set it up in the area,” says product manager Jean-François Racette.

“In farming we have thousands of variables that are hard to control so as much information as we can isolate will help make better decisions. As demographics change, there is more pressure on agriculture, so we have to master the information and know how crops react.”

Both Bhargava and Kaushish are looking to their Google Startup Accelerator experience to help their company get bigger, better and faster as it expands into more crops and more countries.

“The brilliant thing for us is it gets us to think outside of agriculture,” says Bhargava. “This is very important because we need to understand what is happening in other industries and see what innovations, tactics and process improvements we can bring here.”

The long-term goal, he adds, is building intelligence so that automated equipment can act on it and ultimately make farms more efficient as well as bringing sustainability and profitability to the sector.