McCain Foods Acquires Fredericton-Based Resson Aerospace Technology
FREDERICTON—McCain Foods Limited recently acquired Fredericton-based agriculture technology company Resson Aerospace’s predictive crop intelligence portfolio.
Jillian Moffatt, McCain’s chief technology officer, said the companies have worked together for more than nine years on several different technologies and products, including the development of the predictive crop intelligence portfolio.
“McCain and the people who have come before me in both the technology roles, as well as agriculture, [have] always very much believed in data-driven agriculture, which is why [McCain] started partnering with Resson over nine years ago,” said Moffatt.
Mike Morris, Resson’s chief executive officer, said the predictive crop intelligence portfolio is a technology that can gather satellite imagery of crops and other sources of remote-sensing data.
In the early days of Resson, the company started by capturing drone imagery of crops and interpreting the information into intelligence on the state of the crops.
“They were proving that there was valuable information in those images but they were also seeing just how costly it was to set up a drone, fly it around a field, capture a bunch of images, bring the drone back in, download the imagery, load all that imagery to the computer, and then process it,” said Morris.
Resson then tried aerial photography and different satellites. Around 2019, Resson started developing a computer system that received the satellite images, ran their algorithms and produced the results of the crop field.
In the years since, the system has been continuously refined.
“In 2021, we started feeding the output of your system directly into the McCain system,” said Morris.
The predictive crop intelligence portfolio takes the satellite imagery of the crop field, then uses proprietary algorithms to report things like how the crops are growing, how much moisture is present, how much stress the crop is enduring, if the field is over and under-watered, or if a section of the field needs fertilizer.
Morris said Resson’s algorithm is “very potato specific,” as they work with McCain Foods.
McCain uses this information to discover how much crop they will have at the end of the season. Because McCain is a food manufacturing business, they need to know how many tonnes of potatoes they are getting from the fields.
Morris said an example of this was last summer’s heat wave in the Pacific Northwest. The use of Resson’s technology gave McCain an indication of which potato fields were damaged versus which ones were not and how many potatoes they were going to receive.
Since the predictive crop intelligence portfolio uses remote-sensing technology to give farmers a view of their entire crop field, Moffatt said McCain can take the data and give farmers the tools they need to manage the different aspects of the crops.
“As we’re providing that, what it’s meant to be doing at the end is helping give the farmers better yield certainty, as well as helping them save time and money versus some of the methods that they would be using today, such as scouting or sampling approaches,” said Moffatt.
A farmer would only be able to see their field from where they can drive or be on machinery, so this technology is giving them an overall view of their land.
Moffatt said while the technology goes back nine years, the last two-to-three years have provided them with a better understanding of what they should be using the technology for. Since potato farmers are the centre of how the company operates, acquiring this technology will let them help their growers and figure out how to make agriculture more sustainable, both from an economical and environmental standpoint, said Moffatt.
Acquiring the predictive crop intelligence portfolio also allows McCain to use the technology to better understand and manage the crops that are coming into the facilities and allowing them to plan better.
“I would say it’s kind of like that efficiency, as well as making sure that it’s also helping us achieve our sustainability goals,” said Moffatt.
The employees who are currently working on this specific technology at Resson will be moving over to McCain but continue to work in Fredericton.
“We’re pretty excited about bringing the capabilities that we’ve built with Resson into McCain but given the fact that we’ve worked with them for nearly a decade, we’re pretty excited to continue to watch to see the other technology innovations that they’re going to be working with,” said Moffatt.
Jessica Saulnier is an intern with Huddle in Fredericton. Send her your feedback and story ideas: [email protected].