Meet The Company Uprooting Atlantic Canada’s Potato Industry
FREDERICTON–A New Brunswick company on the cutting edge of the province’s agricultural industry has just closed a $300,000 pre-seed investment round.
The money will help Picketa Systems deploy its instant plant nutrient sampling technology into Atlantic Canada’s potato industry.
Plant nutrient analysis on its own is a process that can typically take weeks. But Picketa founder and CEO Xavier Hébert-Couturier says the company is showing how growers and agri-service providers can leverage Picketa’s plant tissue analysis in real-time.
“We’re developing real-time plant tissue analysis to be able to instantly tell farmers what nutrient concentrations their plants are, and what to buy,” Hébert-Couturier told Huddle.
He says there are tons of soil and plant samples being taken this time of year, on a weekly basis. Some need to be packaged up and sent to a lab in another province, with a roughly 4-10 day wait for growers to get results back.
“The latency there makes it so that you can’t make decisions quickly,” Hébert-Couturier said. “You’re kind of always a week or two behind the information, so being able to give this information in real time–they can decide what to spray where, how much, and at what time.”
Award-winning pitch
Hébert-Couturier, along with co-founders Maxime Dumont, Dominic Levesque, and Zachary Anderson, developed Picketa Systems from a business plan that secured them first prize in the 2021 Apex Business Plan Competition’s undergraduate category.
Just fourteen months after their win, Picketa Systems has gained an initial investment that will help keep the company growing.
Throughout 2021, Picketa Systems worked closely with nine New Brunswick potato farms to collect the data needed to develop the technology. This year, the company is returning with its first product offering to enhance the plant sampling and nutrient analysis process.
Hébert-Couturier says Picketa started with potato farms in the Northwest region because the area was familiar to the company’s co-founding members and itself was a huge peer farming region.
“A lot of McDonald’s fries are made there, but we also have tons of experience there and it’s a good crop for our initial market,” he said.
Summer growing season a turning point
The recent pre-seed investment will allow Picketa to closely follow and support its early adopters through their first growing season with the system.
It will also fund research and development to improve the technology, incorporate customer feedback, and accelerate Picketa’s deployment of systems in different regions and with different crops.
“We do plan to expand into new crops, such as other cash crops, corn, soybeans, blueberries, as well as looking at indoor farming,” said Hébert-Couturier.
Picketa Systems’ expertise comes at a critical time for growers, as fertilizer prices are soaring. In Prince Edward Island, the potato board reported fertilizer prices increasing by 75 to 100 percent compared to last year’s growing season.
Hébert-Couturier says there’s been an increase in growers looking for more detailed crop nutrient information, not only to support the transition toward sustainable agriculture but also for food security through precision agriculture technologies.
“I think farmers are starting to see the value of being more lenient in their application and actually applying the minimum effective dose, especially when fertilizer prices are fluctuating and rising so much,” he says. “You don’t want to waste any product. It is top of mind to be more efficient and having better data can help farmers through that.”
Room to grow
With increased awareness and interest in sampling within the last few decades, Hébert-Couturier believes Picketa’s current service alone can’t literally cover all the ground.
“With our pricing this year, we’re offering twice as many samples for the same price and we think it’s a good step, but we’ll need much more data if we want to apply precision fertilizer application regenerative practices,” he said. “There needs to be a much greater access to data to actually know what’s going on.”
With its system advancements and case studies generated for the Summer 2022 growing season, Picketa plans to expand its service across the Americas next year and add support for different crops. Hébert-Couturier is planning for Picketa’s real-time plant analysis stations to be available in many key farming regions outside of Atlantic Canada in 2023.
“This funding round was really to validate our initial method and get that first season of results, case studies, and testimonials,” said Hébert-Couturier. “Once we have that, we want to expand to other regions and that would come with kind of a full seed round in the fall or beginning of next year.”
Tyler Mclean is a Huddle reporter based in Fredericton. Send him your feedback and story ideas: [email protected].