New Brunswick agtech company CropMind has closed a $500,000 funding round, led by the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation and BKR Capital.

CropMind was co-founded by Damilare O. Odumosu and Rilwan Shokunbi, both of whom are graduates of the Masters of Technology, Management and Entrepreneurship program at University of New Brunswick. They’ve developed a company that helps farmers of such crops as apples and grapes to predict early in the growing season what their total crop will be.

It means that harvesters and other players in the food supply chain have a good idea of what to expect in the autumn. The goal is to allow them to line up the proper staff and ensure they have the right capacity for shipping, packaging or bottling.

“This is a huge milestone for us,” said Odumosu in a LinkedIn post announcing the funding round. “We’re using this investment to scale our operations in New Brunswick, and launch pilot projects in Quebec and B.C.”

He added the company’s goal is simple: to give specialty crop growers the insights they need to grow more, lose less, and make smarter decisions.

Said NBIF in a post: “This funding will help the Fredericton-based company grow its NB operations, support local apple growers, launch pilot projects in Quebec and B.C., and bring new AI-powered tools—like disease detection and grape cluster estimation—to market.”

In an interview, Odumosu said the company has developed technology that lets growers use their cellphones to video their orchards or vineyards in the spring, when the plants are blossoming. This records the abundance of flowers on their trees or vines, which is an accurate predicter of the quantity of fruit they’ll have to harvest months later.

In a good-sized orchard, he said it can take a grower weeks to develop the needed data on blossoms early in the season. CropMind can complete the task in two days, said Odumosu.

As an example, he said one farmer in New Brunswick last year used the system by mounting his cell phone on a tractor, taking 200 photos in ten minutes. “We achieved a 90-percent-plus accuracy rates,” said Odumosu.

Now that the company has completed successful pilots, it intends to expand by holding other programs at 24 Canadian growing sites, hoping to convert them to paying customers once they witness the power of the technology.

As well as direct sales, CropMind is expanding through partnerships. For example, it signed a partnership in late December with Costa Mesa, Calif.-based AgTechLogic, a leader in precision spraying.

Through their time working in agtech, Odumosu and Shokunbi have noticed how few young people are running farms in Canada. So one mission of CropMind is to create digital tools that young people are comfortable using.

“We hope to encourage young farmers to find farming more attractive by using digital tools,” he said. “But also we want to help the older farmers to make their job easier.”