Newly Founded Presia to Better Evaluate and Predict Potato Crop Yields
McCain Foods is pleased to announce the debut of Presia Ag Insights (Presia), continuing its commitment to promoting innovation and innovative technology in agriculture. Presia is a recently established business unit that is fully owned by McCain. It is the outcome of ten years of cooperation to create digital solutions that help farmers strengthen the resilience of their businesses.
Farmers and crop-sourcing partners can improve on-farm sustainability practices, optimize harvest timing, and assess and forecast crop yields more accurately with Presia. Presia, a leader in satellite-based, data-driven intelligence that has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of crop growth, will speed up farming’s future and encourage the monitoring and uptake of regenerative agricultural methods by industry participants.
“Launching Presia advances McCain’s innovative agriculture agenda, providing an opportunity to build off the expertise we have developed in potatoes to offer leading capabilities to other food businesses and farmers. It is driving data intelligence that is helping us change the way we grow a potato,” Peter Dawe, Chief Growth and Strategy Officer at McCain Foods, declared.
McCain’s 2022 acquisition of Resson’s predictive crop portfolio led to the development of Presia. Among the technologies in this portfolio are vision-intelligence-based ones that more effectively use satellite imagery and field data to determine the condition of a potato crop. The Resson team that oversaw the portfolio of predictive crop intelligence joined McCain in June 2022; in the past year, the team and product have developed further, and they are eager to debut under the Presia brand.
“Presia supports our farmer and crop-sourcing partners in building resiliency within their operations and strengthening decision-making capabilities through the use of satellite imaging and machine learning. We are proud to offer existing and new customers more frequent and accurate readings on their in-season crop performance within and across entire fields and regions,” Tyler Hennick, Managing Director of Presia, added.
The Presia team, which is based in Ontario and Eastern Canada, is mainly made up of software developers and data scientists. They have almost ten years of expertise working with crop-monitoring systems on potatoes.
Customers of Presia will benefit from enhanced crop management, more accurate support for previous production projections, and more effective crop monitoring and sampling thanks to the insights derived from the company’s data and models. Although potatoes are the main emphasis at the moment, Presia’s data and models may eventually be extended to other crops.
“We are focused initially on measuring plant health, supporting crop quality, and tracking regenerative agriculture practices. This expertise has been built within potatoes with plans to support similar insights in other specialty crops. We are getting more data on the region and variety-specific nuances to inform our modeling and can work with our partners to measure the indicators that matter to them most,” Mr. Hennick concluded.
