This venture aims to connect each piece of the ag value chain
By Diego Flammini
Staff Writer
Farms.com
A Canadian telecommunications company is expanding its reach to include agriculture.
TELUS launched TELUS Agriculture on Thursday.
Through acquisitions and other relationships over the last year, TELUS has brought multiple industry businesses from around the world together under one umbrella.
“It’s a new line of business within TELUS dedicated to the agriculture ecosystem,” Chris Terris, vice-president of strategy, planning and enablement at TELUS Business Solutions, told Farms.com. “We want to take data from the digitization of activity from within the food value chain to increase efficiency, production, yield and have better food outcomes.”
TELUS has acquired seven industry assets from Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom.
Decisive Farming of Irricana, Alta., for example, provides precision agronomy and farm management expertise.
Muddy Boots from Ross-on-Wye, U.K., provides farm-to-food traceability and supply chain management, and Agrian of Clovis, Calif., is a unified management platform for precision, agronomy, sustainability, analytics and compliance.
This combination of organizations working together is designed to help farmers increase yields and improve food traceability, Terris said.
“We’ve got the capacity to look at what was sold from an input perspective, to what was seeded, what nutrients went on, what the yield was, and where the (crop or livestock) went downstream,” he said. “We’ve got assets in the agri-food space that can track things like processing, packaging, distribution, grocers and retail.”
For the ag industry to make proper use of these companies and technologies, farmers will need reliable broadband and connectivity infrastructure.
TELUS has been making necessary investments to ensure users have the connectivity they need, Terris said.
“We understand the critical role we play in connecting Canadians,” he said. “From 2015 to 2019, we’ve invested about $396 million into infrastructure. And over the next five years we’re planning to deploy the 600-megahertz wireless service to cover an additional 3.5 million rural Canadians across 596,000 square kilometres (238,400 square miles).”
Farmers or members of the agri-food industry interested in learning more can email agriculture@telus.com.