Near the entrance to their booth they highlighted notable corn hybrids the firm has launched over the years under its Dekalb brand.

Kate Hyatt, marketing portfolio lead with the firm, said the idea came earlier this year when she and her colleagues were talking to growers, who spoke about why they chose a certain hybrid. After a while, the discussion morphed into hybrids they’ve used and liked over the years.

“The history makers campaign is about celebrating everything we’ve brought to the market in the past,” Hyatt said, while highlighting the display to Farmtario. “Just like in a music hall of fame, there’s platinum and gold levels. We’ve included those in showcases and captured some tidbits of information from our breeders that worked with them and the staff that have sold them in the field for many years.”

Hyatt noted the effort reflects the interactions farmers have with Dekalb in the field. It’s there that they put the hybrids to the test in real world conditions, and where winners emerge.

“It was about a particular soybean variety or corn hybrid, and what their experience was with that,” she said.

For more of our coverage of Canada’s Outdoor farm show, visit our landing page.

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Why it matters: The failure of some agriculture startup companies is tied to their inability to understand problems that farmers need to be solved.

Three companies with close connections to the agriculture sector answered questions about how they made sure their products met the needs of farmers during the AgTech Breakfast at Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show 2025.

Jesse Wiebe of Startup TNT, an organization that brings together investors in agriculture technology, hosted the panel discussion.

Colin Yates, who co-founded VETSon, a virtual veterinary app for farm animals, with his father, veterinarian Glen Yates, had a built-in connection to his major clients. Glen had years of experience in veterinary practice, so he understood the needs of animal healthcare providers.

“We didn’t have to go find a partner. We didn’t have to go find a business willing to do it,” said Colin Yates.

“It’s about having those relationships. And luckily, my relationship was with my father, who’s already had those 50 years of experience that we could develop and build upon that.”

Finding farmers to test and use VETSon’s service was easy, as a shortage of veterinarians created an unmet need for virtual veterinarians.

In fact, Yates found that farmers were pushing veterinarians to adopt the virtual veterinary technology.

“The farmers wanted this technology, the farmers wanted access and were willing to adopt it.”

Cattlytics founder Shari van de Pol invested time figuring out what help dairy farmers needed as she developed the numerous dairy data and programming services her company provides.

The computer engineer and large animal veterinarian developed trust with farmers, who then allowed her to analyze their dairy farm data. A revelation about a drop in milk production when cows were fed unfermented corn silage harvested in October was the first step, but the really valuable data showed the months it took for the cows to recover.

“That was the moment where I’m like, we can do so much here, we can do so much in such an interesting, complicated system,” she said.

Van de Pol developed trust with farmers with her technical expertise as a veterinarian, but she’s also a fiddler and played during dairy farmer gatherings, creating another level of connection to her future customers.

Matt Stevens of Finite Farms found another way to connect directly with farm-level demand and information for the apple thinning and harvesting machine — he bought an orchard.

Stevens called the orchard a “fixer-upper” based near Simcoe, Ont., but it enabled him to become a commercial apple grower. The investment in the game helped create relationships with other apple growers, including one of the leading apple growers in Ontario. That apple grower insisted that Stevens use their farms to test his machine, which he’s been developing through numerous iterations quickly.

The robot evolved from a first-generation idea to a functioning unit by the end of this past summer.

Wiebe said that the ability of company founders to have problems of their own to solve, such as Stevens needing more automation to run his orchard, is a test for those companies.

“If you’re a farmer here, and you’re looking for those technology companies that you may want to use on a farm, ask them, ‘are they from the industry?’”

For more coverage of Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show, visit Farmtario’s landing page.

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Versatile has introduced four new widths — a 15-foot, 18-foot, 21-foot and 24-foot — to its high-speed disc lineup for model year 2026.

One of the new units, the HS150, was on display at Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show 2025 in Woodstock, Ontario.

“What sets us apart is the tilt angle on the Fury HS,” said Leo Reznik, product manager with Versatile. “It has 20 degrees tilt angle, and in combination with the disk angle, creates more disturbance on the soil.”

Reznik added that the new design allows the Fury HS series to chop crop residue better and bury it more into the soil than its competitors.

The disc sizes are 22 and 24-inch on the new HS series of high-speed discs. Reznik said that the combination of disc size and disc orientation creates a very smooth seedbed.

Alongside the HS series, Versatile has also released the Fury R which has a 10-degree tilt angle and is comparable to other high-speed discs.

Reznik said that the Fury is one of the heaviest implements in its class, delivering a down-force of about 1,000 pounds per foot.

“This creates a situation that we don’t need to use a hydraulic pressure on the wings,” said Reznik. “The weight of the implement is enough to keep it engaged with the soil.”

Reznik added that the transport width is about three metres.

Versatile is accepting customer orders for the new Fury models now and will begin manufacturing the units in October 2025.

The Fury is designed and made at Versatile’s manufacturing facility in Winnipeg, Man.

See more Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show coverage on Farmtario’s landing page.

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The event brought together growers, livestock producers, researchers, policymakers, and industry partners in celebration of Ontario’s agri-food sector.

Jocelyn Smith, an assistant professor of field crop entomology at Guelph, shared ongoing challenges facing farmers as pest-resistant crops continue to emerge in Ontario.

“Pests keep changing, and new pests come into Ontario. We need to learn about them,” she said, adding that her department continues to develop monitoring programs to test and evaluate new pest control products.

She noted that there is also ongoing evaluation of old economic thresholds in an effort to develop more cost-effective treatment options.

As of 2006, she said that there has been an increase of insecticide-resistant corn, with the most common pest threat being the European corn borer.

She said that 85 per cent of corn grown in Ontario is genetically modified. As of 2018, she noted that there has been resistance discovered in Nova Scotia.

To help slow the spread of resistance, she added that her team is partnering with organizations across Canada and the United States to develop further prevention programs.

Maximizing Calf Health

Michael Steele, a professor with the department of animal biosciences, continued the discussion, sharing updates on his team’s research to enhance the quality of breeding calves in Ontario.

He noted that 40 per cent of calves in Ontario are crossbred beef animals, as producers are breeding more of their lower end dairy cows to beef cows.

He added that research is also being done to reduce the level of microbial use during the early stages of calving. Genetic markers are also being traced among bulls to select the best breeding options.

The next stage of research, he added, is post-weaning nutrition. He said many calves are given a high-starch diet and that new research will explore if this is an environmentally friendly and healthy option, versus other diet alternatives.

The overall objective is to develop a better understanding of how pre-weaning nutritional and management factors can impact gastrointestinal development and metabolism during the pre-weaning phase and later in life.

For more of our coverage of Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show 2025, visit the Farmtario landing page.

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The company which specializes in farm robots won first prize with its Monarch MK-V electric tractor in the Equipment category at the Innovation Program Awards ceremony on the eve of the 2025 Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show.

The Monarch is a 4WD, fully electric, 70 horsepower tractor that also offers autonomous features.

Jeff Pettit, sales manager with Haggerty AgRobotics, says with labour shortages on the farm and the rapid pace of technology it was a “no brainer” to introduce an electric tractor into the equipment market.

From an operator perspective, sitting in the seat of the Monarch is very similar to a conventional diesel-powered tractor, but with a catch.

“The biggest thing is that you don’t get the feedback that you would from a normal diesel tractor,” said Pettit. “It’s quite quiet and the feedback on the pedals is a little bit different. But overall, it feels and operates like a regular tractor.”

When it comes to battery life, Pettit said that operators can expect about eight hours of working time. The battery is rated for 14 hours, but battery life largely depends on what the tractor is pulling.

Pettit said it takes about five to six hours to fully charge the Monarch’s battery plugged into a 220 volt outlet and approximately eight to ten hours to charge the battery using a 110 volt outlet.

As far as what type of work the Monarch is suited for on the farm?

“We’ve got a bunch of different uses for it,” said Pettit. “We have a dairy case where it has a feed pusher on it and operates autonomously through the barn.”

Pettit also added that the Monarch is a good fit for use orchards and vineyards.

For more coverage of Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show 2025, visit Farmtario’s landing page.

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The ceremony, held Monday night at the show site outside Woodstock, honoured winners across five categories: agronomics, business solutions, environmental sustainability, equipment and livestock.

Find more coverage of Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show with Farmtario.

In the Agronomics category, Oxford MP Arpan Khanna presented the award to Spornado for the Spornado Sampler, an early alert system for crop disease which allows producers to apply their fungicides more effectively. The air sampler allows customers to detect disease in the air before it’s in the field.

Oxford MPP Ernie Hardeman awarded Lactanet Canada with the Business Solutions award for its Transition Management Index (TMI), marketed as the first tool in Ontario to provide a comprehensive assessment of the transition period in dairy cows, leading to improved milk production and profitability.

LaSalle Agri Inc’s AgroBoost fertilizer was the winner in the Environmental Sustainability category. It’s all-in-one fertilizer contains naturally-occurring ingredients harder to find in other fertilizer formats. The award was presented by Woodstock mayor Jerry Acchione.

In the crowded equipment category, the winner was Haggerty AgRobotics with the Monarch Electric Tractor, a fully-functional 70 hp machine which can operate over 10 hours per day on one charge. The electric capacity is one of the largest currently available for its size.

Finally, BioFerScience won its second straight Livestock Innovation award, this time for the ProFlora Post-Calving Calcium Bolus, “the first and only calcium bolus designed and manufactured in Ontario specifically to support calcium levels in fresh cows after calving.” Mayor of East Zorra-Tavistock Phil Schaefer presented BioFerScience with the award.

All award winners will be exhibiting at Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show.

Prior to the announcement of the Innovation Awards, Steve White of AgScape presented an award for Teaching Excellence in Agriculture and Food to Stratford elementary school teacher Hannah Anderson for integrating agriculture and food topics into her teaching, including workshops, virtual field trips and hands-on activities.

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Show director Rob O’Connor will take on COFS, which takes place Sept. 9 to 11 in Woodstock, for the second time after taking over the reins from former show director Doug Wagner last year. O’Connor is also show director for Ag in Motion (AIM) which took place in Langham, Sask. in mid-July. Both farm shows are owned and operated by Glacier FarmMedia.

To follow all our Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show coverage, visit Farmtario’s COFS page.

“I’m very fortunate because I’ve lived in both Ontario and Saskatchewan,” O’Connor said. “I actually went to University of Guelph, so I have a number of friends and connections in the east. So that’s been very helpful with this transition.”

O’Connor said Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show has a great brand and has a lot of loyal customers and farmers who come to the show. “There’s a lot of passion for the show, and a lot of people that are friends to the show. So, that’s been very helpful to keep things running very smoothly.”

The 2025 show will feature over 650 exhibitors and open with the Innovation in Agriculture awards, which O’Connor said will feature around 30 companies. There will also be a heavy focus on agtech programming for both livestock and crops.

In terms of returning features, O’Connor mentioned high-speed tillage demonstrations, baling demonstrations, drone demos and ride-and drives.

He said one of the events he is most excited for is the Beyond the Beaten Path tour of applied research projects happening at the site.

Plenty has changed in the world of Canadian agriculture since O’Connor took over the show in 2024. With concerns now on U.S. tariffs and international trade, he said to expect a strong international presence at the show.

“With the change in the international trade, especially between Canada and the U.S. or Canada and China, it’s not just happening with Canada. It’s happening with other countries that trade with those larger economic forces. They’re doing the same thing to their other trading partners.”

“What we found at the show in Saskatchewan was we had a lot more international people come for the purpose of trying to find new partners that they can trade with,” O’Connor said. “I fully believe that’ll happen at our show in Ontario as well.”

O’Connor said he’s still receiving requests for letters of invitation for people to come to Canada. “We do know there’s a large group of Australians coming this year, people from Czech Republic. So yeah, we’ll definitely have that international flavour at the show,” he said.

O’Connor offered the following advice for first-time COFS attendees: “The show is quite large,” he said. “Thirty-six thousand to 40,000 people come through the gate. So, it can be very busy, so take some time, maybe come back a second day. It’s too much, I think, to do in one full day.”

He also encouraged farmers to check out this year’s agtech programming at the Dairy Innovation Centre and the agtech tent.

“Those are the types of technology and businesses that are up-and-coming and will be not only looking for input for farmers, but also to let them know that these new opportunities to improve their business will be probably coming to the market in the next three to five years.”

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At Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show, Grober Nutrition Young Animal Specialist Pascal Bouilly told Farmtario that less work isn’t necessarily always the outcome. He said producers he works with who have installed automated feeders now take more time fine-tuning calf intake targets, monitoring calf wellbeing, and making sure the system is running at top effectiveness and cleanliness.

The difference, Bouilly suggested, is that the work surrounding calf feeding now doesn’t happen twice a day, every day, at exactly the same times.

“You now have more flexibility to manage your work day without having to fit in calf feeding at exactly those times.”

Two companies – one a relatively new entrant local to southwestern Ontario; the other a German company which started manufacturing less technologically advanced versions about 50 years ago – provided this year’s farm show visitors with information about their units.

In the Grober Nutrition Livestock Pavillion, a Forster Technik lamb-feeding automated unit was on display next to the Grober Nutrition booth. A short distance away, the company’s Cambridge-based North American CEO Jan Ziemerink had several of the newest features of the German company’s calf-feeding systems on display. Visitors to the Grober Pavillion during previous editions of the outdoor farm show in the 2010s will recall a live version of a Forster Technik system feeding calves, which no longer takes place.

Next door at the Dairy Innovation Pavilion, a live demo of the Uddermatic Milk Feeding System was available for the second year in a row. Company founder and designer Lester Martin was on hand to explain the features of the unit that was feeding several veal calves from his own Mildmay-area farm.

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The show offered a Career Crawl to connect companies with students looking for part-time or full-time employment.

Though young students and graduates often face prohibitive input costs and barriers to owning their own farms, other careers in the agriculture value chain remain open. Some exhibitors courted young jobseekers while others sought more insight.

Landyn Bowen, a recent graduate of the University of Guelph’s Bachelor of Commerce, Food and Agriculture Business program, said he would be interested in farming. However, he said many barriers prevent this from becoming a reality.

“Certainly, I think the biggest one probably would be cost,” he said. “Because obviously, you just graduated from school, so you don’t have that much money, if anything you could be in debt.”

“Trying to buy land, let alone equipment, all the input costs, like it’s just… you’ve really got to crunch the numbers to make it work, even on a large scale at a family operation.”

Bowen currently works part-time on a cousin’s farm while also working full-time as a Precision Ag Specialist for Premier Equipment Ltd. He said farming is something he would pursue, at least on a part-time basis, if startup costs were not so prohibitive.

“It’s always been in the back of my head, but I don’t think it’s ever going to happen,” he said, “because given the price of land and everything … I’d have to find someone good to partner with, I think.”

While some struggle to find a path into farming, others are attempting to fill non-farming agriculture jobs elsewhere in the value chain.

Janice LeBoeuf, the strategic initiative coordinator for the Arrell Food Institute, said one of the current goals for Arrell is to attract students in non-agricultural streams to careers in agriculture.

“We’ve also been trying to figure out how to adjust the educational programs at Guelph to integrate some of these other skills into the ag program,” she said, “but also to integrate information about agriculture into other programs.”

This could include disciplines like engineering or computer science.

“Not having taken computer science, but I assume when you’re taking it you’re like ‘oh, I know that … I could design a medical app or I could develop a social kind of app,” she said.

“I don’t think agriculture is the top thing that might come to the average computer science student’s mind.”

LeBoeuf explained that there are three factors that often keep young people from jobs in agriculture: lack of awareness about opportunities, negative perceptions of the industry and past negative experiences.

LeBoeuf and Ann Kraus, the project coordinator for the University of Guelph’s Food From Thought research program, both said that one of their main reasons for exhibiting at Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show was to get feedback via a poll on what they can do better, such as what kind of courses people are interested in and how to apply research practically.

AgCareers Talent Solutions Manager Katie Hunter spoke at the Career Crawl Lunch during the show on Thursday Sept. 12. She said she saw interest in a variety of agriculture careers across students in attendance.

“The students that are here, lots of them are open to the different opportunities,” Hunter said. She said this included a number of international students.

Like LeBoeuf, Hunter said she felt stigma around the industry often holds people back from pursuing ag careers.

“I think sometimes when people think about agriculture, they maybe are thinking of what you picture of a farmer, which is part of the industry and a very important part of the industry. But there’s also lots of technology, so having a technology background or interest is great.”

She said the jobs are out there if people are looking for them.

“If they’re open to what the opportunities are, I think they’ll be able to find a good path.”

As for those young people interested in farming in the future, her advice was to save up a lot of money and look into working alongside somebody with experience.

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His Toronto-based start-up company, UMA Systems Inc., was a first-time exhibitor inside the Dairy Innovation Centre at this year’s Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show. Lisouski noted that given Canada’s past experiences with Mad Cow Disease, the likelihood of protein ingredients derived from cattle hides being used in dairy feed is very low.

But he welcomed the opportunity to chat with farm show visitors involved in producing cattle who are concerned about the long-term environmental impacts of their operations.

Namely, his preliminary research indicates there’s virtually no domestic leather manufacturing sector in Canada, meaning hides from culled and slaughtered cattle are either disposed of entirely or possibly make their way into the U.S. or European value chains.

And even if hides do eventually get processed into leather, 50 per cent of that hide still typically goes to waste.

In Belarus, the company he helped start now has a proprietary process for turning that waste into protein supplements, with their main customer being a large operator of poultry production facilities.

Protein, says Lisouski, is often the most expensive ingredient in livestock rations. Aquaculture, which is growing in popularity around the world, also requires protein for feeds.

“We don’t have enough protein for livestock globally,” he said.

He believes converting waste from leather processing can be part of the solution to that shortage, along with eliminating a significant amount of waste that now goes to landfill or other (potentially less environmentally-conscious) methods.

“Canada is known worldwide as a leader for environmental solutions,” offered the UMA Systems entrepreneur. “But at the same time they have no way to deal with all these hides.”

“We need a solution here in Canada.”

UMA was one of companies invited to pitch at the Ag Tech Breakfast Sept. 11 at Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show

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