AgTech offers founders a testing ground for advanced AI and biotech

The panelists said AgTech combines three things most young tech companies struggle to find at once: early adopters, lower regulatory hurdles and the chance to prove a product on real farms.

Douglas Mills, who handles external relations as a vice-president of CAAIN, the Canadian Agri-food Automation and Intelligence Network, called it “a sector rich with opportunity.” He urged founders to think well beyond tractors and cows. In his view, the field stretches from animal health and transport to solar power, food processing, machinery, analytics, computer vision, robotics, AI research and biotech.

His point was that almost any deep tech skill has a farm problem waiting for it. A startup working on data, sustainability or advanced manufacturing can find a paying use case somewhere in the chain that takes food from a field to a shop.

The idea that farmers are slow to change is out of date, according to Colin Coros, chief operating officer of Nanostics, a precision diagnostics and medical technology company. He said agriculture is a leader in technology and that its users are early adopters.

His favorite example: self-driving machines have worked in farming for over ten years, and he said virtually every combine harvester in Alberta now steers itself. If a tool helps a producer get more done, Coros said, the industry will adopt it faster than almost any other sector.

Coros knows the field from both sides. Before Nanostics, he ran Delta Genomics, where he worked on livestock biobanking, the practice of freezing and storing genetic material so that breeds and agricultural diversity can be preserved or even rebuilt later.

The most striking advice was aimed at health care founders. Coros said deep tech companies in medicine can face a journey of around 15 years before a product reaches patients. Livestock, he suggested, might get the same kind of technology to market in about five years.

That gives a startup time to fix problems, earn revenue and build a track record before it takes on the much stricter rules of human medicine. For a diagnostics or biotech company, an animal health product can become the stepping stone, not a detour.

The same logic applies to companies that don’t think of themselves as AgTech at all. A sensor, drone or AI model built for another industry may have a second life on a farm, which is why the panel pushed founders to look for dual uses.

BJ Fuchs, a cattle rancher whose company Business Wide View has helped trial new technology in real farm settings, said producers should be a founder’s first stop. “Sky’s the limit,” he said, pointing to tools ranging from drones to monitors on water troughs.

His warning was that no two operations are alike. A tool that suits one ranch may fail on the next, so he told founders to speak with more than one producer. Those conversations, he said, reveal what the real problem is before a startup spends money building the wrong thing.

The fourth panelist, David Bressler, a University of Alberta vice-president whose role covers international innovation and enterprise, rounded out the panel, bringing a research university’s view to a discussion otherwise led by people building and buying the technology.

The panel’s case is backed by public money. In May, federal Agriculture Minister Heath MacDonald announced up to $6.25 million for CAAIN, part of a $30 million program called the Agricultural Clean Technology Accelerator. CAAIN is one of six not-for-profit groups chosen to hand that money on to companies.

CAAIN will pass its share to Canadian firms through a program focused on validating and integrating clean agricultural technology. The aim is to expand its network of smart farms, back technologies that are already well developed, and improve on-farm testing so producers find it easier to trust new tools. Companies in the program also get mentoring and access to CAAIN’s network.

For Canadian founders, the message is practical: if your product needs real users and quick feedback, farms may give you both faster than hospitals, cities or big enterprises. For job seekers, AgTech is quietly hiring the same skills as mainstream tech, from computer vision and data analysis to robotics and biotech.

For farmers, more startups knocking on the door means more tools to cut fuel costs, watch livestock and track water, but also more pitches to judge. The panel’s advice works both ways: test with several farms, and only scale what clearly pays.