Agtech Accelerator: Ukko Agro
Colliding plant science and data science together is the name of the game for agtech company Ukko Agro – one of 16 companies to take part in the Agtech Accelerator.
Ukko Agro, put simply, offers crop growth and disease models for farm and retail clients. It aims to make farming more profitable and sustainable with the vision to link every action on the farm to its economic outcome, enabling farmers to make more informed and data-driven decisions.
Through its plug-and-play predictive analytics platform, Ukko aims to help farmers and other agriculture sector players determine when to apply water, nutrients, and pesticides to certain crops and geographies by leveraging IoT tech machine learning and data science.
“We leverage data on the farm or on the field level to drive predications on how your crop is supposed to grow and what kind of crop inputs you should be applying in the season, so when and where but everything is forecasted. With the idea being that now you can take the field level information and drive operations and engagement by looking at that on a much larger scale,” said co-founder Ketan Kaushish during his time at the Agtech Accelerator in Regina.
Ketan Kaushish working at the Agtech Accelerator in Regina. March 2022.
What better place to use this technology than in the Greater Regina Area (GRA), the heart of Canada’s farmland? This technology will positively impact, support and improve Saskatchewan’s agricultural sector, especially in the GRA.
Speaking with Kaushish at the Accelerator, you could easily see the passion for his company and the ag sector. He boasted that ag is all he knows; not only through his own work experience but his father’s, who also worked in ag for 50 years.
“Everything in the world can stop but one thing that will never stop eating, so we need solve some challenges,” he said.
Looking to the future, Kaushish believes in 20 years ag will be very much data-driven, which will bring a lot of efficiencies. No doubt, he plans to be a part of that vision.
Ukko Agro has several key objectives for the future:
- Broaden its customer base
- Improve its data science capabilities
- Add more crops and geographies
- Integrate further with other agricultural platforms
Securing $7.9M to date, including government grants, Ukko Agro is a company to watch, and we hope Regina will a part of its story.
“One thing that you can get in Saskatchewan that I think you can’t get in a lot of other parts of the world is you could have someone who joins you and she grew up on a farm and she knows exactly what happens on a farm and is now coding and building a product. You don’t get that connection in a lot of places.”
