Two Atlantic Canadian resource giants on Monday outlined how they’ve been working with small locally owned innovation companies to bring their operations into the 21st century.
J.D. Irving Ltd. (the Irving family’s forestry company) and McCain Foods took to the stage at the Big Data Congress in Saint John to tell how they are working with innovators to improve efficiency and make better decisions. The Big Data Congress, now in its fourth year, is notable for the quality of thought leaders it brings to the region, but this session of home-grown technology experts showed how the East Coast tech community in the region has grown and is working with global businesses.
The relationship certainly benefits the smaller companies, which get paying clients with international reach. But the McCain and Irving executives stressed that access to new technology developed in the region has benefited their operations as well.
“We want to partner with startup companies in New Brunswick, and in Atlantic Canada, and eventually around the world,” said Nestor Gomez, Manager Global Information Services at McCains.
Gomez told how his company has partnered with Moncton-based Fiddlehead Technology, whose technology analyzes data to ensure a food producer puts out just the right amount of food demanded by the market. The tech community in New Brunswick frequently praises the McCain partnerships because they go beyond a sales deal; they involve “co-creation”, with the big and small company working together to perfect a product that could be sold around the world.
Gomez told of how McCain and Fiddlehead are now working with artificial intelligence so the technology can instantly respond in English to a range of supply chain queries from people throughout the organization.
McCain similarly worked with Resson, the Fredericton agricultural data company that this year announced a $14 million funding round led by Monsanto. Yves Leclerc, McCain’s Director of Agronomy, detailed how the two companies worked together over several years to learn how to collect and analyze data from a field of crops, from drones, tractors, soil samples and other sources. The challenges were many, given that the data can be impacted on such things as the soil chemistry in different fields, the weather – even taking drone readings on cloudy days as opposed to sunny days.
“One of our biggest challenges is actually managing the data,” said Leclerc. “What we learned is that data can be good or it can be bad or it can be very bad. … We’re at the point now where we can actually start to analyze this data.”
J.D. Irving, meanwhile, has been using technology developed by Fredericton-based Remsoft to analyze its 6 million acres of trees and make long-term decisions on how to manage them. Jason Limongelli, J.D.Irving’s Vice-President Woodlands, said data analysis is critical because the country has to balance industry factors like long-term demand for product and growing conditions with broader worries like wildlife habitat, urbanization and climate change. And the matter is all the more complicated considering how long it takes to grow a tree.
“I will not work long enough to see the impact of my decisions,” he said. “We’re talking about an 80-year time horizon.
Andrea Feunekes, CEO and Co-Founder of Remsoft, told how her company has worked with J.D. Irving to analyze its 14 million trees. With clients around the world (its most recent expansion was its new office in Brazil), she said planning in the forestry is critical and the long time lines compound the risks involved in each decision.
