Protein Industries Canada will put up to $2.2 million into two artificial intelligence projects aimed at Prairie farms, the Regina-based innovation cluster said Sept. 2, in partnerships worth $4.9 million in total that are meant to tell pulse growers when a fungicide pass is actually worth making.
The first project is led by TerraVision360 — the new public-facing brand of Toronto’s Ukko Agro — in partnership with Metos Canada and Rocky Mountain Equipment. According to Protein Industries Canada, the partners will build a tool that combines crop and disease data with localized weather to forecast Ascochyta blight risk at both the regional and individual-field level, so growers can time scouting and spraying rather than spraying on a schedule.
“Every fungicide pass a grower doesn’t need to make is money back in their pocket,” TerraVision360 chief executive Avi Bhargava said in the announcement.
The second project pairs Super GeoAI Technology Inc. with Southview Farms to develop a drone carrying LiDAR — a laser-based 3D scanning system — to measure grain volumes inside on-farm bins. Super GeoAI founder Weiping Zeng said the aim is to replace manual bin climbing, which he described as time-consuming, labour-intensive and potentially hazardous, with faster and audit-ready measurements.
Industry Minister Mélanie Joly said in the release that the investments back “made-in-Canada AI solutions” to help producers protect yields and manage inventory. The cluster’s AI stream is funded under the federal Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy; Ottawa added $8 million to that stream in May 2025 as part of a $15-million genomics and AI package, which means this single announcement commits a meaningful share of the money on the table.
What the announcement does not spell out is why spray timing has become more consequential on Prairie pulse acres than spray volume. Saskatchewan Pulse Growers has documented that Ascochyta rabiei, the pathogen behind chickpea blight, is now broadly insensitive to Group 11 strobilurin fungicides after years of repeated single-mode-of-action applications. In a 2019 survey of commercial chickpea fields in southern Saskatchewan, insensitive isolates turned up in all 33 fields where the pathogen was detected. Growers consequently have fewer effective chemistries left to rotate through, and a mistimed pass spends one of them for little return. Lentils are attacked by a different and generally less aggressive species, Ascochyta lentis, but the same stewardship logic applies.
The acreage at stake is not marginal. Roughly 8.3 million acres of pulses are grown in Canada each year, overwhelmingly in Saskatchewan and Alberta, and Canada exported about 5.1 million tonnes of pulses in 2024, worth roughly $3.4 billion. Statistics Canada’s model-based estimates released in August 2025 projected lentil production at a five-year high and chickpea production at an eight-year high for the 2025-26 crop year, meaning more acres than usual are exposed to a disease decision each summer.
The cluster money also lands in a thin market for early-stage capital. Ukko Agro previously closed a $5.1-million seed round led by Saskatchewan’s Emmertech, with TELUS Ventures and Whitecap Venture Partners among the participants, according to BetaKit. But RBCx reported in June that Canadian pre-seed and seed funding has been in sustained decline since the start of 2025, with 61 startups raising close to $190 million in the first quarter of 2026, down about 40 per cent year over year, and the country’s five largest funds absorbing nearly 80 per cent of all capital raised in 2025. Cluster dollars are increasingly the bridge Canadian agtech companies cross while private rounds stay scarce.
Neither tool is in growers’ hands yet. Both are development-and-validation projects, with the drone system to be tested in working farm conditions before any commercial release. The test for both will be whether the output arrives early enough, and proves accurate enough, that a farmer trusts a forecast over a sprayer already hitched up.
