A Winnipeg agricultural technology company is in discussions with Walmart to help the global retailer achieve its goals for sustainable agriculture.
President Wade Barnes said his company is talking with Walmart about variable rate fertilizer and how the technology could be a keystone component of sustainable food production.
“We’re in a lot of discussions right now with major retailers, one of them being Walmart,” said Barnes, who founded Farmers Edge in 2005.
“There’s a big push coming on sustainable food production. Walmart is looking for companies to supply them with sustainable production, and variable rate has been identified as the number one portion of that.”
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As noted on the Farmers Edge website, applying a blanket rate of fertilizer across an entire field remains a common agricultural practice. The practice may over-apply nitrogen to parts of the field, which leads to environmental consequences. The excess nitrogen may dissipate into the atmosphere as nitrous oxide, which is a greenhouse gas, leach into groundwater or run off into nearby creeks.
Applying variable rates of fertilizer increases nutrient use efficiency and minimizes environmental impacts, the website states.
It’s why Walmart and other grocers are particularly interested in Farmers Edge variable rate technology, Barnes said.
“Walmart is very focused on variable rate. Moving nitrogen into the right spot in the field is a practice they want to see adopted.”
Matt Loose, a corporate sustain-ability specialist with Stratos, a consulting firm in Toronto, said global companies have developed sophisticated and ambitious plans for sustainable agriculture.
“There seems to be a very strong movement for companies to be marketing or branding their products as sustainable food items.”
Unilever, for instance, intends to source 100 percent of its agricultural products sustainably by 2020.
On its website, Walmart said it wants its suppliers to produce food with fewer resources, which meshes well with variable rate technology.
Earlier in June, Farmers Edge announced it had bought variable rate fertilizer patents from Mosaic. Barnes said the patents would help Farmers Edge protect its intellectual property, which the company uses to convert satellite or aerial images into variable rate maps.
“We have a process where we use imagery and we determine, through a vegetative index, production areas of the field,” Barnes said.
“Then we segregate those areas out, we determine yield potential and we build a variable rate prescription map.”
By buying Mosaic’s trademark on similar technology, known as Fieldinsite, Farmers Edge will be in a position to legally challenge rival companies.
“There are competitors of Farmers Edge who are using our technology. I can’t tell you who, but they are actually using our proprietary platform,” Barnes said.
“The trademark that Mosaic was using for their system, we’ve developed a very similar system. We’ve bought the patent so that we, essentially, weren’t infringing.”
The patent applies to Canada, the U.S., Brazil, Argentina and Australia.
“As we go forward, we see these other markets adapting really quickly to the technology,” Barnes said. “We want to be the technology provider.”
- Founded in 2005, Farmers Edge provides nutrient management planning and agronomic services to producers on more than four million acres in Western Canada, the United States and Russia.
- In 2013, Profit 500 magazine ranked Farmers Edge as the 18th fastest growing company in Canada. Its revenue growth increased by 2,573 percent from 2007 to 2012.
- The company had approximately 100 employees and revenue of $43 million last year.
- In Canada, Farmers Edge consults directly with producers. In the U.S., the company sells its services indirectly to farmers through fertilizer companies and ag consultants.
