AI in Vancouver is transforming small-scale agriculture

The first thing that Yuan Shi, currently an investor at The51, did upon leaving her finance career in the U.S. was co-found a farm in Langley.

“Have you been to the animal auction?” she asked me, as if it was a cafe on Main Street. I chuckled and said no, I hadn’t, although I’d love to. She proceeded to give me a crash course on what it entailed: purchasing from the auction, feeding her livestock, and setting up their heating for the winter. “It really taught me how small we are as human beings in front of nature.”

The type of farming that Shi pursued is a relationship with our food system shared with the thousands of small-scale livestock producers across Canada. But animal husbandry at a local level is a lifestyle that can be exhausting, often underpaid, and aging out. Across these systemic concerns, AI has emerged as a solution to remedy the industry’s symptoms. While other sectors speculate how the technology could eliminate jobs, AI may help farmers continue doing what they love.

How AI supports livestock farmers

“The majority of ranches in Canada have less than 125 animals, and [of] those producers, up to 84 percent of them work in an off-farm job to supplement their lifestyle,” said Mokah Shmigelsky, co-founder of OneCup AI, a Vancouver-based SaaS company for livestock farmers.“The thing about raising cattle is [that] it's more a lifestyle choice than it is a really high paying job. And so they have that job off-farm to supplement their lifestyle choice.”

These two careers often come at odds with each other, competing for time, energy, and resources. Traditionally, farmers have used pen and paper to track their animals, physically going out into the field and documenting their findings. But this becomes difficult when off-farm work takes up the majority of the day, especially for cattle producers during the seasons when cows give birth to calves.

“Producers get up day and night every two to three hours to check on their animals during calving time to make sure everybody is being born healthy and happy,” said Shmigelsky. This is where OneCup AI’s platform, Bovine Expert Tracking and Surveillance (BETSY), comes in. “We built into our system the ability to have proactive alerts that say — hey, this cow is in labor and you might want to check it, or hey, this cow is having challenges with the birth of the calf, and you probably need to go in to assist.”

BETSY uses computer vision to support animal care, with 85 percent of its current customer base being smaller producers. Helping farmers during calving time is only one aspect of the software — the platform can also support larger-scale producers with tracking animals during feeding at feedlots, for example, to detect illnesses. “We have the platform that covers all of the different use cases. So it's easy to translate that from the smaller producers that we have to the larger producers, so they don't have to buy a different product, or change the way that they operate. They can just use the same product.”

Agriculture is an open market for disruption

For rural animal producers, the lack of internet bandwidth on the farm has meant that the industry has been on the slower end of technological disruption. Broadband download and upload speeds have lagged behind urban standards, meaning that processing video footage such as those analyzed by BETSY has been difficult in the past.

But the introduction of rural broadband is opening up the market. Starlink, a satellite internet provider founded by Elon Musk, has allowed for farmers in the areas that once had poor internet speeds to suddenly improve their access. “These producers who previously had two megabytes upload speed on a good day are now experiencing 15 to 20 megabytes, and the download speeds are comparable in increases,” Shmigelsky said. “That allows for technologies to be integrated into a ranch, whereas they weren't available before.”

Although Shi left the farm business when her business partner moved to new pastures, she continues to be passionate about supporting innovation in the space as an investor focused on food and agtech. “I want to be able to have more people realize, especially in the province, there's so much potential [in agriculture],” she said. “It actually deserves more spotlight on what it will bring us, whether it's job creation, or impact-driven metrics such as capturing carbon sequestration, and also just having a stable and more reliable food supply.”

British Columbia could be an industry leader through AI

While many race to find applications for ChatGPT’s API in Web3 or e-commerce, there is a lot of innovation to unlock in industries such as agriculture. “What often happens in innovation ecosystems is everyone is trying to do the newest, greatest thing, rather than necessarily innovating the thing that we're already doing,” said Brenda Bailey, minister of jobs, economic development, and innovation. “I find that really important — innovating the thing that we're already doing.”

British Columbia’s natural resources sectors – forestry, mining, agri-food and energy – currently make up about half of B.C.’s economic base. “To think about the applications of AI in that space is really, really fascinating and important,” said Bailey. “And I think, done well, [it] will be a competitive advantage for us because we marry together this very strong technology innovation ecosystem, which still needs to continue to grow stronger with industry.”