Abbotsford Agtech Platform Empowers UFV Students with Access to Winery Industry Data & Insights

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: (January 12, 2021)

Abbotsford, BC – BC’s leading agriculture data analytics and AI portal for precision agriculture, Agrilyze, is partnering with the University of the Fraser Valley to provide students with industry knowledge, hands-on learning and exposure to the suite of smart farming applications. Agrilyze is a leading-edge, innovative platform that helps farmers and industry players with operational efficiency, profitability, land use management, compliance, traceability, sustainability, and more. The partnership will impact group learning as students work together to familiarize themselves with the web-based, map-based interface – and how to navigate it, utilize the functions, enter data into the system, and leverage many of the other noted components and functionalities.

With the growing demand for a high-tech workforce, the class project had students collaboratively examine wineries in BC to look at indicators around and relationships between the size of the business, varieties of wine, geography, vineyard soil types, local climate/weather conditions, and the potential risks to their local environment. Overall, the class activity provided an opportunity to gather notes on the platform’s potential uses. Students learned how high-tech agriculture technology conforms to precision agriculture equipment resulting in profitability, efficiency, and sustainability on the farm.

Robert Newell, Associate Director of the UFV Food and Agriculture Institute, states,

“One of the aspects of Agrilyze that the students really enjoyed was how it contains vast amounts of data collected from private and public sources that would typically be scattered all over the web, in a unified and central repository; they enjoyed exploring and learning about the environmental features of different areas in BC. The platform could be beneficial for organizations that aim to engage, support, and/or network with farmers and also a useful platform for collaborating and discussing farm-related issues occurring in a particular region or perhaps a specific domain within the agriculture sector, such as wineries or dairy etc.”

The Food and Agriculture Institute (FAI) and Agrilyze are exploring research applications of the platform, and they have discussed plans for using it to examine the potential for developing and expanding different forms of agriculture in the Fraser Valley, such as rice agriculture. With the introduction of more educational collaborations like this, Agrilyze aims to reveal new opportunities in the classroom while helping farmers predict future trends, optimize current operational efforts, and, most importantly, produce actionable insights that matter to their business.

Sr. VP, Product Management Jonathon McIntyre adds,

“The Agrilyze-UFV partnership is an ongoing venture supporting Agrilyze’s vision – to give students exposure to precision ag technology through education while empowering the next generation of agriculture technology workforce locally, and become highly versed in the automation of industry processes early in their careers to improve outcomes for farms, consumers and the environment.”

Future endeavours will show students why agriculture operations of all sizes are tapping into the emerging potential of drones, sensors, geo-mapping and big data. With the industry being in crisis mode, Agrilyze and the local team are very excited to work in this new momentum, locally and globally.