Disruptors

Feeding the Future: How Saskatchewan is Seeding Canada’s Ag-Tech Revolution 

John Stackhouse: Hi, it’s John here. If you’ve ever stood on the prairies, you know there’s a quiet ambition on those endless horizons. Generations of farmers and land keepers have looked at these horizons and also seen endless possibilities. They’ve learned to read the soil and spot opportunity in the earth itself. Now in the data flowing from it.

Murad Al-Katib: The future of agriculture will be those sensors and that data collection put to use to generate billions of dollars of economic output. And you know, there’s a ready market for our product, the emerging markets of the world. Population growth to 10 billion by 2050, and middle incomes rising in Asia to $33 trillion by 2030. Those are the drivers of the Canadian agricultural commercialization opportunity, and I believe it’s a generational opportunity, one that we must seize for the benefit of all Canadians.  So, we’ll feed food security of the world, and we’ll create economic wealth and benefits.

John Stackhouse: That’s Murad Al-Katib President and CEO of a AGT Food and Ingredients. It’s a homegrown Canadian success story and one of the world’s largest suppliers of pulses. If you’ve ever made lentil stew or split pea soup, you’ve probably tasted his work.

John Stackhouse: Murad keeps close tabs on the overall health of Canada’s agribusiness. Today we’re going to show you why we all should do.

Murad Al-Katib: I want Canadians to recognize that food systems are not something to take for granted, and that we have a responsibility to the world to provide quality food. So, we can alleviate 735 million people who are undernourished every day, and at the same time, we create wealth in our communities.

John Stackhouse: The opportunity here is enormous. As global agriculture shifts and new markets open, Canada is competing alongside major players like Brazil, Argentina, and Kazakhstan. The danger isn’t that we can’t meet this moment, it’s that we won’t, if we stop innovating, we’re not just falling behind on feeding the world, we’re leaving money on the table.

John Stackhouse: I’m John Stackhouse. Welcome to Disruptors the Canada Project. This season we’re taking you on a journey across the country to meet some of the visionaries who are using technology to tackle our most urgent challenges, and in the process, create a blueprint for a stronger, more competitive Canada.

John Stackhouse: Today’s destination, Saskatchewan. Whether it’s automated elevators or GPS guided tractors or climate-controlled storage facilities, or those incredible three kilometer long trains that you see on the Saskatchewan landscape, this sort of ag tech is what we’re going to need a lot more of in the years ahead. If Canada is going to produce more food for a growing and increasingly divided world. For all the technology that is helping farmers and AgriFood companies do so much more in this age. Here’s something that might shock you. We’re still grading grain the way our great-grandfathers did by hand, sample by sample.

John Stackhouse: As every Saskatchewan farmer knows, the global marketplace for their crops is getting well more rough and tumble. Whether it’s the United States or China or India, our trading partners are becoming more demanding and in some ways less reliable, which means we’re going to have to be more sophisticated and competitive than ever, like in so many other sectors.

John Stackhouse: Canada’s competitive edge in agriculture is going to require even more automation. In this episode, we meet Kyle Folk. He’s the CEO of ground truth Ag. To discover how our province that has helped feed the world for a century or more is building AI powered computer vision that can grade grain in minutes instead of hours.

John Stackhouse: Giving Canada the automated edge, we need to stay competitive in global food markets. I can’t think of anyone better to kick off this conversation than Murad. He’s based in Regina, where over the past two decades, he’s built a AGT from a startup to a global exporter to more than 120 countries. He served on multiple boards as well as the UN World Food Program’s Innovation Advisory Council.

John Stackhouse: Morad is a passionate advocate for AgriFood innovation, value added processing, and sustainability. He grew up in Saskatchewan, so I started by asking him what it’s been like to watch the Saskatchewan farmers of his youth change and innovate.

Murad Al-Katib: The transition and the transformation of agriculture. It’s been a, a very fascinating thing to watch over a lifetime.  Growing up in Davidson, Saskatchewan, a small, uh, rural community of 1200 people, every farmer would grow wheat. If I go back to my childhood in the late seventies and eighties, you know, we were predominantly known as the breadbasket of the world.

John Stackhouse: Of course, that breadbasket looks very different today, more diversity of crops for starters. Also, a lot more automation and technologies, helping farmers maximize yield and get their cross to market more efficiently. I asked Marad if there was a turning point, a moment when farmers began to think about data technology as central to how they work.

Murad Al-Katib: Farmers have been early adopters of technology. You know, I look at the stacking of technologies and that’s where we get to the kind of the precision farming innovation that we’re now implementing. It started with technologies on soil conservation, moisture conservation that really date back 40 and 50 years. I mean, remember, we’re growing these crops in soil conditions that are receiving less than 400 millimeters of annual rainfall and precipitation.

Murad Al-Katib: This is what in the world they would call desert agriculture. The technologies that have been developed over the last 20 and 30 years, leading up to things like precision farming, the use of sensors, data collection, decision support systems, all of that led to a dramatic improvement of the cropping systems and the yield while providing a carbon footprint that’s lower than any broad acre cropping system in the world.

John Stackhouse: Murad is talking about decades of evolution, but the next generation of farmers are taking that data-driven approach even further. I want you to meet Kyle Folk. He’s the CEO of Ground Truth Ag, and he’s here to talk about how Saskatchewan is transforming brain handling, giving Canada the automated edge. We need to stay competitive in global food markets.

John Stackhouse: Kyle, you and I were together a number of years ago, uh, I think before the pandemic in Regina, and I was always fascinated at your transition from, uh, farm kid to Ag Tech. Tell us what got you first interested in digital technology.

Kyle Folk: I left the farm after high school, became an electrician, and then in about 2009 or 10, John, I was back at the farm one weekend visiting and dad needed a hand, he wanted to get help setting up for a truck that was coming to haul, some canola way.  So we went to throw the auger in the bin and this wasn’t, uh, hopper bottom, it was the old flat bottom type and went to slide the auger in and it wouldn’t go in ’cause the grain had spoiled. And so that. Got me down this path of my first venture into Ag Tech and it was, uh, building a system that would be able to show farmers what their temperature moisture was in their bins so they could detect grain spoilage ahead of time.

Kyle Folk: And so that was pre-ground truth days, but that was my first foray into, into Ag Tech.

John Stackhouse: Tell us a bit about ground truth and what the ambition is.

Kyle Folk: Ground truth is really focused on automating the grain grading process. Growing up around the farm, the way that we were sampling grain and having it sent away to be graded was the same way that it is today and the same way it was 115 years ago. It’s a manual process. Grain graders take up to eight years to be fully trained, John. That’s because weather patterns or weather cycles just don’t even show up for up to eight years.

John Stackhouse: Grain grading is something that’s done, uh, around the world. What’s the advantage that you’re developing in Saskatchewan?

Kyle Folk: Grain grading. Yes, you’re right. It is done around the world since the early ninteen hundreds. The only thing that’s really changed when it comes to grain grading is the ability to do some non-visual assessments like protein, moisture, test weight, those kinds of things. There’s machines that can do that, but the large part of grain grading is visual.

Kyle Folk: And so it’s a human that has to make a judgment call on subjective elements. And so, you know, hard Red Spring wheat is one of the hardest, if not the hardest grains to grade in the world. Humans are expected to be able to determine that in a very short time period because as you know, the scale of farming is changing drastically, and the window for being able to make these assessments keeps closing, getting shorter and shorter.

John Stackhouse: Kyle’s story captures what’s happening across the prairies, a quiet revolution where people who grew up on farms are now using sophisticated data systems to solve problems, they’ve seen firsthand. They’re taking gaps in the system like spoiled grain or inconsistent grading and fusing them with capabilities like AI and computer vision. The result, agricultural tradition meets digital precision, and the opportunity isn’t just local, it’s national, and Saskatchewan innovators are already proving they’re up to the challenge.

Murad Al-Katib: When I chaired the national strategy table for agriculture and food for the government of Canada in 2019, we filed our recommendation saying that we believe that the ag sector in Canada can go from 45 billions of exports to 85 billion in exports.

Murad Al-Katib: We met that in the third year of the target. How many sectors of our economy can deliver $65 billion of tangible economic growth in a three year period while agriculture did that?

John Stackhouse: When you look at how quickly those targets were reached, you gotta wonder what’s changed. Was it innovation on the farm, new global demand, or something cultural in how we think about AgriFood as a high tech sector.

Murad Al-Katib: We’re doing more with less, which is ultimately the aim of technology and innovation commercialization. We, you know, are taking the same land base, the same seeded acres, and we’re dramatically increasing the production efficiency of that land. Your increasing competitiveness and productivity. We’ve been always viewed as a sleepy sector, one that is more traditional. Yet when I look at it, it’s leading in tech innovation. Agriculture is no longer the family farm. It is a technology innovation centric industry that is not only steady and reliable, but it’s growing and dynamic. Data and analytics will make us able to make better decisions. What we need to do is ensure that technology and innovation and the applications of those are gonna allow us to meet that consumer demand for clean, safe, reliable, trustworthy food.  So it’s an opportunity for a career. It’s an opportunity that is very, very exciting. And could it be more bullish on the agriculture sector in this country? It’s gonna be exciting over the next couple of decades.

John Stackhouse: Murad is talking about transformation at a national scale. Billions in growth as technology reshapes the entire sector. But that transformation starts with innovations like Kyle’s. Let’s see how ground truth works. Kyle, maybe paint a picture for us of what your technology looks like and how it operates.

Kyle Folk: Yeah, so grain samples we’ve talked about, you can pour ’em into Our bench top unit runs through, we utilize machine vision, so computer vision, and we utilize near infrared spectroscopy.  Combined with machine learning models, deep learning models, to be able to then assess that sample visually and non-visually, to be able to identify 50 plus visual characteristics in a matter of like sub five minutes for a human trained, just to identify what is the worst characteristic in that sample.

Kyle Folk: It takes about eight minutes on average. If you’re going to assess a sample for all the characteristics, it’s going to take you days, if not a week, to do that.

John Stackhouse: You’ve been at this for a while now. What have been the biggest breakthroughs and also what are you most up against right now?

Kyle Folk: Coming from the farm aspect, we always felt that we were subjected to all the risk and nobody else took on any risk in the process.

Kyle Folk: And you know, our grain buyers, although we had good relationships with them, they were doing what was best for them. And really, we’d wear all that risk. The biggest shocker for me was understanding and realization that the grain buyers are just doing the best that they can with all of the shortcomings that are in place.

Kyle Folk: As soon as I started talking to them and exploring this idea of ground truth and automating the grain grading process, it was very exciting to me and how interested they were in having something like this for themselves. Once we started building these models to grade the grain in a comprehensive way, John, not just a handful of characteristics, but all of them, it was a big, exciting milestone for us to hit to see this starting to work.

John Stackhouse: Kyle, maybe we can step back and better understand what this can mean for Canada.

Kyle Folk: The reason we can grow more today, John, is because we understand it. You can’t manage what you can’t measure. So with quality aspects, this has been relatively unmeasurable, inconsistent, at the field level, but once this technology becomes mainstream, John and farmers are able to understand in great detail what their quality is.

Kyle Folk: Then they can start to manage it better. The quality of grain that’s going to come out of Canada. Is only going to increase and be better. And so that will only position us better on a world stage. And to be honest, yes, I would say our supply chain is a little fragile from this perspective right now, but we still are one of the best in the world, if not the best.

John Stackhouse: How does that change the economics for, for the farmer?

Kyle Folk: When you harvest, you send one kg samples to two kg samples to your prospective buyers and they grade it. And this is a human making a judgment call. You send three samples to three different prospective buyers and you get three different results.

Kyle Folk: So what do you do with that as a farmer, if you had our unit at your yard and you could grade it immediately, you’d know what you could sell that for. You’d know what contract you could pick up. You’d know what premiums would be available to you. That’s a different mindset.

John Stackhouse: You’ve developed all of this in Saskatchewan, which is frankly one of the world’s leaders in so many aspects of ag tech, but you’re also up against a world that is getting better and better at this. What does Saskatchewan have as an ag tech leader, and what does it need to maintain or improve that position going into the 2030s?

Kyle Folk: You go to Silicon Valley, you go out for a coffee or a tea at a local coffee shop, you’ll see or hear people having conversations about tech startups. That same thing applies to Saskatchewan.

Kyle Folk: I can’t go to a rink without overhearing two farmers talking about the weather or talking about how their crop looks, or talking about pricing, talking about a contract. You are immersed when you’re in Saskatchewan. You’re completely exposed to agriculture, whether you like it or not. We definitely have an advantage when it comes to Ag Tech.

Kyle Folk: You know, five to 10 years down the line that we will be the powerhouse in technology for agriculture as much as we are just for agriculture as a whole. Because there’s no question I could see us being at the top.

John Stackhouse: What a great ambition, Kyle, thanks for being on disruptors.

Kyle Folk: Thanks for having me, John.

John Stackhouse: For these innovations to truly scale, they need to be part of something bigger. A resilient food system that feeds both ourselves and the world. I asked Murad what it’s going to take to keep Canadian Ag Tech at the front of the pack.

Murad Al-Katib: We still have hangovers from what I would call the old Canadian Wheat Board bulk grain handling economy that we had for so many years. We have to be planning for what the trade infrastructure looks like in 2050 and 2060, not in 2026.

Murad Al-Katib: If I was Prime Minister for a day, I would spend a hundred billion on trade infrastructure. It will pay for generations to come. Supply chains are all about connectivity. Each link must be efficient. Data and technology will also make that more efficient. So let’s seize that opportunity.

John Stackhouse: That’s the long game infrastructure that lasts half a century, not half a season. But Murad also sees shifts in global demand that are forcing us to think differently about what we produce. How we add value to it.

Murad Al-Katib: We have an opportunity to have a consumer base that’s completely different than the consumer base we have today. We continue to ship commodities around the world.

Murad Al-Katib: We’re not doing as good of a job on value added. We need to ensure the regulatory system allows, allows and encourages the development of food and food products. We have to remind people you don’t get more prosperity from redistributing the current wealth that you have. You get more prosperity in a nation by creating new wealth.

Murad Al-Katib: And new wealth is largely created by a customer abroad who is willing to purchase our product for a price and economics that make us able to not only compete, but to make a profit.

John Stackhouse: To meet the demands of global markets and complete agriculture’s transformation, we’re going to need more people like Kyle, who are looking at our systems with a critical eye and finding ways to make them more competitive. But as Murad Al-Katib reminds us, this isn’t just about gadgets and growth. It’s about building the infrastructure and intelligence that will feed the world and fuel Canada’s prosperity. We simply can’t keep planning our trade strategy one crop year at a time. We need to think like builders, not just producers, because the next frontier of agriculture isn’t just in the soil, it’s in the systems that connect us with a fast changing and increasingly fragmented world. The question now isn’t whether the technology works. The question is whether we can scale up fast enough to stay ahead. Canada has a unique advantage. A prairie culture that fuses innovation with practical farming experience. That’s what helps global ambition grow straight outta the soil. I’m John Stackhouse and you’ve been listening to Disruptors, the Canada Project, an RBC podcast. If you wanna hear the whole series, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and better yet, give us a five star rating that will help others hear these stories and share them. And if you wanna learn more about The Canada Project. Go to rbc.com/thoughtleadership. Join us next time as we continue our journey across the country in search of the innovators and leaders who are helping Canada meet this moment boldly with their eyes fixed on the future.