Wade Barnes and Curtis MacKinnon have come a long way since they sold fertilizer in Pilot Mound, Man., a few years ago.
At the time, they would have laughed at the idea that they would some day own a high-tech lab and pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for robots.
However, that’s exactly what the two variable rate technology experts do now as part of Farmer’s Edge, their booming independent agronomy consulting business.
“We knew we wanted to be in the laboratory business, but we absolutely did not want to be in the lab business and run a lab by ourselves, because we really didn’t know anything about running a lab,” said president Wade Barnes during a tour of his company’s soil testing facility in Winnipeg.
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Farmer’s Edge has quickly grown from a one-location farm supply centre to a prairie-wide network of independent agronomic consultants with 42 full-time staff, 31 of which are in Manitoba. The company also employs 16 independent agronomists.
The company’s meteoric rise has won it a host of awards recently as it fills a need for independent consulting on the Prairies. Agri-Trend, based in Red Deer, offers wider-ranging consulting and is spreading east from its Alberta base.
This year, Manitoba Business Magazine named Farmer’s Edge the province’s fastest growing company. Last year, the company won the Ag Innovation award during the Agri-Trade farm show in Red Deer.
The company grew out of Barnes and MacKinnon’s conviction that they could convince farmers to pay for independent consulting about variable rate technology.
Manufacturing and input companies offered consulting for free, but farmers seemed to want more neutral advice.
Barnes and MacKinnon thought that with variable rate technology, the costs of up-front consulting could be balanced against hoped-for reductions in inputs.
“We felt that we could increase yields and reduce their fertilizer,” Barnes said.
“When you tell that to a farmer, it’s music to his ears.”
Farmer’s Edge grew so quickly that it became one of the top customers of three soil-testing labs, two outside of Manitoba. This was not only costly and logistically difficult but also confusing for the agronomists.
“You had to train field staff on three different procedures for three labs,” MacKinnon said.
The partners wanted to move the soil testing in-house but didn’t want to start from scratch.
Fortunately, a fully staffed lab went on the market in Winnipeg and Barnes and MacKinnon bought it, with one condition.
“If we wouldn’t have gotten the staff to stay on, we wouldn’t have made the investment,” Barnes said.
Since buying the lab, the company has invested in customized, robotic testing machinery. It has spent more than $500,000 on these machines and the investment will soon reach $650,000 with new manure-testing equipment.
The company has expanded faster than many businesspeople would find comfortable, but Barnes said his and MacKinnon’s casual farm backgrounds have made it possible.
“We’ve been accused of having a ‘farm boy’ culture,” Barnes said.
“You just kind of get up and get things done and you work until the work is done.”
