CAAIN
CAAIN
Ukko Agro, Toronto, ON
Chrysalabs, Montreal, QC
Hawks Agro, Moose Jaw, SK
After graduating from high school, Ukko Agro CEO, Avi Bhargava, moved to Canada with his family from their native India. He attended McMaster University, earning the degree in electrical engineering that netted him a job at Research in Motion (RIM). It was a terrific position that didn’t interest him. Drawing on his experience of adapting to life in Canada, he founded and volunteered with an organization that helped new Canadians navigate the complexities of our nation’s education system, including adding high economic value. He greatly enjoyed making a tangible difference both to individuals and to Canadian society more broadly. To this day, he volunteers to talk to students at his alma mater to add value to their career choices. These experiences prompted him to take a job as a business analyst with the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, where his projects included reducing wait times for service access, which gave him the satisfaction of creating tangible benefits for people who needed help. He then joined the University Health Network, applying transferable skills as a consultant working with healthcare providers to digitise their work and manage change. This led him to accept a position with Deloitte Consulting focusing on large scale technology strategy and technology implementations across several industries, before moving on to PwC Consulting, where he worked on Enterprise Architecture and behavioural science as it pertained to the adoption of technological solutions—the psychology of decision-making, if you will. It was around this time he met his eventual business partner who talked about challenges in the agriculture industry.
They built a disease-forecasting solution for potato crops that was designed as a predictive tool to guide farmers in the most profitable, productive use of inputs. Avi’s background in helping professionals adopt and adapt to new technologies was an essential contributor to their early success. Three seasons in they realised the key to influencing producer decisions lies with retail agronomists—the ag sector’s trusted sources of truth. Accordingly, they focused efforts to market their broad-acre (soybean, canola, wheat, corn, and, recently, lentils) forecasting platform to these advisors, who would in turn have access to the valuable aggregated and individual data that feeds decision-making. Ready access to this comprehensive data and insights allows agronomists to service more acres. As for the farmers, they gain access to useful information laying out current conditions and providing suggestions for effective next steps. This is the very essence of precision agriculture. Part of the beauty of the Ukko Agro solution is that it is a hardware-agnostic solution. That is, agronomists can integrate the platform to any existing data network—for instance, if they have 200 weather stations operating in a range of locations, Ukko Agro’s software can tap into the units to generate insights at scale, thereby immediately adding real value.
That is Ukko’s existing product. It drives profitability. CAAIN/ISED support is enabling Ukko Agro’s environmental sustainability function. Specifically, the project will allow agronomists to guide farmers on in-season nitrogen use in precise locations for target yield goals, reducing GHG-producing applications. One of Ukko’s partners in this work is Montreal-based ChrysaLabs, whose soil probes are used to provide data on real-time nitrogen levels, which is then communicated to Ukko’s platform, generating recommendations on appropriate inputs. When fully operational, this closed-loop system will reduce waste and provide significant benefits in terms of broad-acre GHG emissions. The platform effectively creates a 2-D digital twin of the agronomist’s client fields, including data on nitrogen use—how much was applied to what soil on what date. Additional relevant data such weather and moisture levels are added, allowing the system to make predictive recommendations based on various factors. The ChrysaLabs probes are then used to evaluate the accuracy of the Ukko platform’s analysis, allowing Ukko’s team to fine tune the AI-generated results and continually improve outcomes. Data is added as it becomes available.
Avi’s background in technology adoption allows him to guide the excellent Ukko team’s marketing strategy. And his diverse experience is bearing fruit. Ukko has doubled its client base year-over-year from eight retailers to 16 to 35+, with all signs pointing to continued growth. Despite this profitability, the process of developing such sensitive state-of-the-art agtech is expensive, requiring extensive contributions from highly specialised professionals. For example, one of the contractors playing a vital role is an Australian who is guiding the nitrogen level modelling. Training the AI to reach a critical mass is expensive and time-consuming. A recent hiccup was Ukko’s realisation that its in-house researcher’s computing system was not up to the task of crunching the massive amounts of data needed for the system to calibrate the algorithm. It requires a much more sophisticated approach than anticipated. And, while Ukko’s stellar team of developers is addressing this challenge to improve the accuracy and reliability of the target outcomes, none of this ramping up would have been possible without significant support provided by CAAIN/ISED.
CAAIN Contribution
$768,717
Total Project Value
$2,331,519
CAAIN Contribution
$768,717
Total Project Value
$2,331,519
Avi Bhargava
CEO
Ukko Agro Inc.
avi@ukko.ag