The AgTech Breakfast at Ag in Motion 2025 showcased Canada’s new innovative agricultural startups, from weed management to loss reduction to crop disease detection.
Entrepreneurs delivered pitches for their products and startups at the sold-out event at the Langham show Wednesday morning.
Geco
Read Also
Stock dogs show off herding skills at Ag in Motion
Stock dogs draw a crowd at Ag in Motion. Border collies and other herding breeds are well known for the work they do on the farm.
Greg Stewart from Geco Engineering began by introducing his company’s predictive weed control system.
“We are trying to understand how the weeds behave at the population level,” Stewart said.
He said Geco will use five years’ worth of satellite images and patented algorithms to identify weed patterns.
“You take that prediction, turn it into a prescription and drop it into the existing farm equipment and in that way there’s no new hardware, no new practices needed on the farm.”
ClearCost
The second presenter was Keith Busch, founder of fertilizer purchasing platform ClearCost Ag.
“About three and a half years ago, I moved to Saskatchewan, the first things I did was take my kids down to the Western Development Museum,” Busch said.
“When I look around here at the expo or the Western Development Museum, I can see advances in machinery and equipment and science, chemistry, technology … and all of these are helpful, but there’s always been, from my perspective, one thing missed. It’s the market for fertilizer.
“I wondered if we couldn’t build a better fertilizer market, or at least a good one, and so that’s what we’ve attempted to do with ClearCost.”
He presented ClearCost as a secure and transparent marketplace for purchasing fuels and fertilizer.
“We try to put security, timing and quality and quantity into a system that you can trust when you’re ordering from people that you haven’t met,” he said.
“What it means is that farms in Western Canada can order fertilizer on the same delivered price from a source anywhere on Earth.”
SimpleHedge
Next, Evan Boyle, co-founder of risk management system SimpleHedge explained how his background in agricultural trading led him to creating the platform.
“There’s a lack of accessibility for farmers and knowledge on how to actually hedge their crops,” said Boyle.
“What I saw was there is this bigger need for this. As the economics in the market has changed so drastically over the past five years, we’ve seen increased trade tensions, increased volatility. You’re seeing canola and meat are just going on these crazy runs up and down and oftentimes there’s no way for partners to really protect it.”
He said the SimpleHedge app allows for a quicker entry into the world of hedging and trading.
PathoScan
Tayab Soomro, chief executive officer of the biotechnology and research company PathoScan, followed with a presentation about the company’s PathoBox system.
Soomro said farmers often face the challenge of waiting for weeks to receive results for pathogen tests.
“We provide you results within 30 minutes,” he said.
“Then you can start spraying the same day that you do the testing.”
The portable PathoBox allows farmers to quickly DNA test plant samples in test tubes.
CombingSettings
The next presentation was from grain farmer and CombineSettings CEO Trevor Schermann. He began by explaining that grain spilling in Canada is a $750 million problem annually.
The digital platform aims to help farmers limit harvest loss through knowledge-sharing.
“We’re trying to get all that knowledge is in one spot,” Schermann said.
“We want people to go to a website and share what they’re doing with the company and what their conditions are and everything. And if you’re willing to share your ideas, you get to see everybody else’s.”
Users, who include farmers, dealers and food companie,s can narrow down results to be as relevant to them as possible.
AgScouter
Jill Sharko, co-founder of AgScouter presented next. She described the app as “built farmers for farmers” to simplify data collection and improve communication between farmers and agronomists.
“If you’re a farmer and your agronomist is out in your field and you get his report, then you instantly know where to spray, what products to use and what rate to spray them at.”
Sharko said the subscription-based service is now used on more than 1,100 farms across the Prairies.
FarmSimple
Finally, Katlin Lang spoke about FarmSimple solutions, an agtech company that provides remote power solutions and farm monitoring.
“On a modest 5,000-head feed lot, if you shut the water off for two hours, you’re looking at a possible two pound loss per animal. That adds up almost 30,000 just in weight loss.”
The technology from FarmSimple allows farmers to remotely monitor water levels, pressures and temperatures. Lang said the idea came from a friend who was worried if his livestock would have water while he was away at the lake.
