Nathan Hoel didn’t grow up on a farm, and agriculture wasn’t where he started his career. But when the chance came up to find an effective solution to an outdated farming practice, he saw an opportunity and decided to switch gears into the field.
“Typically people try to solve problems that they experience every day but when we were faced with the problem of solving how much feed is in a farm feed bin, we felt this should have been solved a long time ago but it wasn’t,” said Nathan Hoel, Chief Technology Officer of BinSentry.
The Waterloo-based startup created a feed bin management system that gives mills and farmers real-time, accurate data. Traditional feed bins are essential for livestock farms, holding animal feed. Without this kind of technology, farmers have to climb to the top of the bins to check how much feed is left.
“Our solution helps farmers with efficiency, helps them feed their animals better, saves time, and saves people from injury or death from dangerously climbing to the top of these bins,” said Hoel.
BinSentry was founded in 2017 and began its journey with its first customer Wallenstein Feed & Supply. Nearly seven years later, Hoel says the startup now supports 25,000 feed bins across North America, using advanced technology to help farmers save both time and money.
With a background in high-tech, Hoel brought a fresh perspective and new insights to an industry he felt had been slow to adopt innovation.
“Agriculture has been adopting technologies for centuries,” said Hoel. “Some of the first technologies were agricultural technologies. But in the present day, agriculture has not adopted some of the most pressing tech that can impact the agricultural sector.”
Jasmin Hoffer, Founder and CEO of Energrow, an agtech startup that developed a grain pressing system to help farmers capture more value from their crops, shares this perspective.
“With the introduction of innovative agricultural technology, there can be a strong resistance from older generations or traditionalists who prefer conventional methods for selling and purchasing feed,” said Hoffer.
Hoel and Hoffer both agree that finding the right market fit is key when introducing innovative technology to the agriculture sector.
“Agriculture is a very close-knit community, everyone talks to each other so it can be difficult to gain trust. In that environment, everyone wants to see how someone else they know and trust is using that technology,” said Hoel. “It can be difficult, but the rewards are equally as great.”
Energrow overcame these challenges with its innovative vision and technology, making an impact in the agtech market by helping farmers reduce their highest expenses.
“Energrow exists to help farms literally and figuratively crush their feed costs,” said Hoffer. “We provide oilseed pressing and grain roasting systems that enable farms to add significant value to their crops directly on the farm. The average farm adds $185 per month to purchase soybeans by crushing them on the farm. That’s $20,000 more left in their pocket per year.”
Hoel said once companies earn the trust of the farming community and show that their technology makes a real difference, adoption can spread quickly.
“That is how farmers like to do business, based on trust and proven experience with technologies,” said Hoel. “It’s a culture that has existed in the industry and survived, feeding the world for centuries.”
Advancements are still being made in the sector, with high-tech projected to impact every facet of Ontario’s agricultural system in the coming years.
“Tech is driving modernization, sustainability, and efficiency in all farming practices,” said Hoffer.
In a study published by the Information and Communication Technology of Canada (ICTC), Canada was ranked seventh in the world in the total dollar value of new agri-food technology investments and sixth in the number of new agri-food technology deals. With significant labour shortages in the agricultural sector, Hoel said it has been difficult for farmers to find consistent and reliable labourers to employ. In the agriculture industry, the ratio of job opportunities to employment across the sector has been 11 per cent above the Canadian average since 2020.
“As agtech companies expand, they will generate employment in research and development, manufacturing and distribution,’ said Hoffer. “This shift from traditional farming to technology-driven agriculture opens new career paths in both rural and urban areas.”
Between 2023 and 2030 it’s anticipated that an average of 10,600 agricultural workers will retire, making up nearly 30 per cent of the industry’s current workforce. Despite these shortages, the introduction of innovative technologies in the sector provides renewed employment opportunities.
“We can take jobs that people do not want to apply for and turn them into jobs that people do want to apply for,” said Hoel. “By automating parts of the agricultural sector we can reduce the need for labour, impacting our customers' companies. Instead of walking around a barn and climbing bins, you are sitting at a desk and monitoring data, making the job safer and better.”
Matt Stevens, the co-founder of an electric vehicle company, left behind his career last year to focus on agriculture and sustainability. His new company Finite Farms, aims to revolutionize farming by combining innovative robotics with sustainable farming practices in the growing sector of tree crops.
“It’s been amazing,” said Stevens. “I genuinely love my days.”
His shift to agtech was driven by concerns about climate change. After researching climate models and their potential impacts in the future, Stevens said he became alarmed by the growing threat to food security, especially in regions like Ontario.
“If water is going to become less reliable, if we’re going to have more droughts and floods, tree crops are our best solution,” said Stevens. “Big root systems can handle droughts much better than other crops.”
Stevens also sees the future of farming in these resilient tree crops, but also in robotics.
“Half the cost of fruit is manual labour,” said Stevens. “Specifically for the three things to do in the orchard, pruning, thinning and harvesting. Those could be moved to robotics.”
Stevens envisions a future where robots take over labour-intensive tasks, making farming more efficient and reducing the costs and risks of production.
The challenge, he says, is gaining farmers’ trust in these new technologies. He points out that technology needs to be “ultra-proven” because there is so little room to fail in agriculture.
“It’s an incredibly hard job for the farmer. She has a tough job and she’s delivering it on ultra-thin margins, and she has very little room for tech to fail, because if she deploys new technology and it doesn’t work or it only works 60 per cent as well as it’s supposed to, the idea that this could bankrupt her is quite possible, more than a lot of other industries,” said Stevens. “So there’s little to no room to make bad decisions. So I think sometimes coming from the tech community where margins are very different, and the business model is very different, you kind of assume you can do things.”
Stevens still believes technology is set to drive agriculture into the future, improving practices, creating jobs and building a more resilient food system for years to come. His next step involves the deployment of robots that can automate tasks like thinning and pruning, which he believes will reduce labour costs and make farms more sustainable.
“We have to think long-term,” he said. “We can’t just rely on the traditional methods anymore if we want to ensure food security for future generations.”