Grainswest - Tech 2023

Tech 2023 Grains West 20 BETTER ON-FARMGRAINQUALITY ASSESSMENT If the quality of harvested grain is lacking, the payday will likewise come up short. The questions of quality and grain grading frustrated Kyle Folk enough to start Ground Truth Ag, a brand new agtech company developing an upgrade to an outdated process that he suggests has largely been the same since 1912 when the Canada Grain Act became law. Folk is experienced in the development of agtech and harvest solutions. Ground Truth Ag is Folk’s second company. He founded IntraGrain Technologies, which marketed Bin-Sense monitoring cables to read temperature and moisture levels. That company was later acquired by Calian Agriculture. Today, he focuses on grain before it even gets to the bin. Growing up, Folk saw first-hand how inconsistent sampling and quality determination played out on his family’s farm at Holdfast, SK. “This has become one of those parts of agriculture that is just accepted,” said Folk, adding that virtually all aspects of farming have been upgraded with various tech, but not quality determination. Folk said it’s more than a bit antiquated to harvest thousands of acres yet only take a one-kilogram sample and consider it a true representation of a harvest area equivalent to 75-plus football fields. “Where is the precision in that?” he asked. Ground Truth Ag touts itself as a digital harvest solution that will give farmers unheard of grain quality assessment in real time. Now at the prototype stage, it is straightforward tech with huge upside. If a farmer is combining CWRS, a mounted unit would continuously pull grain samples through itself. The kernels will pass by a machine vision camera and near-infrared spectrometer. This device will alert a farmer to Fusarium damage and other quality issues. From there, a farmer can determine whether, for instance, a load of harvested grain should be segregated from other clean, higher- grade wheat. Such information also gives the farmer confidence in their own quality assessment prior to delivery of the product. Gathering this information in the field rather than entering the marketing process on a best guess will change everything, asserted Folk. “When a farmer is unloading their grain out of the truck to put it in the bin, they’re taking a scoop every once in a while, maybe a couple scoops per truckload, if they’re doing a good job” he said. “Think of that sample set versus if you were scanning the grain even, let’s just say, every minute on the combine. You would get a lot of information. All of it would be correlated to GPS locations and provide in-field maps, which could be tied back to precision ag inputs.” This is where the tech really shines. With geo-referenced data points, farmers could overlay various maps— fertilizer, variable rate and yield—overtop of typical field maps to help with winter seeding or spring seeding the following year. “Everybody refers to yield and bushels per acre, but we’d like to say, ‘How about quality per acre?’” said Folk. Many have put their trust in Folk and his team. Recently, Ground Truth Now at the prototype stage, Ground Truth Ag has developed a sample system the new ag tech company claims will give farmers unheard of grain quality assessment in real time. FEATURE