VANCOUVER – Telus announced the launch of Telus Agriculture today, a new business unit with which the company hopes to “digitally transform the global food system.”
The company has purchased a number of companies whose assets will give Telus a full suite of technology solutions which can “increase efficiency, production, and yields, delivering better food outcomes for businesses and the end consumer,” reads its press release.
Telus’s agriculture acquisitions (and what they do) include:
- AFS Technologies – Florida, USA – Comprised of AFS, Exceedra and Ignition. Supply chain management, and sales and distribution
- AGIntegrated – Pennsylvania, USA – Seamless API integration
- Agrian – California, USA – Unified management platform for precision, agronomy, sustainability, analytics, and compliance
- Decisive Farming – Alberta, Canada – Precision agronomy and farm management expertise
- Farm At Hand – British Columbia, Canada – Simplified farm management software
- Muddy Boots – Ross-on-Wye, United Kingdom – Farm-to-food traceability and supply chain management
- TKXS – North Carolina, USA – Custom data and program management
- Feedlot Health Management Solutions – Alberta, Canada – Critical insights and data-based knowledge (this acquisition is still pending certain closing conditions.
Telus Agriculture also has a partnership with Hummingbird a London, U.K.-company which provides advanced imagery analytics.
“Connecting each piece of the agriculture value chain empowers farmers and ranchers, the agri-business industry, and agri-food, consumer goods and retail companies to leverage advanced data systems and artificial intelligence to streamline operations, improve food traceability, and provide consumers with fresher and healthier food. Telus Agriculture currently supports more than 100 million acres of agricultural land, backed by a team of more than 1,200 experts across Canada, the USA, Mexico, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Slovakia, Armenia, Germany, China, and Australia,” reads the press release.
This new division will pursue business around the world, with the hopes of optimizing food production from field to fork, as they say in the food business. With all of the new acquisitions, Telus Agriculture is a 1,200-employee unit.
“By means of our technology innovation, artificial intelligence and human compassion, we will help farmers and ranchers produce food for the world’s ever-expanding population more efficiently, safely and in a more environmentally friendly manner,” said Darren Entwistle, president and CEO. “Our efforts to optimize food production will contribute to a better yield of food supply to meet the ever-growing requirements of our hungry planet.”
“(B)y digitizing the entire value chain and linking these technologies together for the first time, we will facilitate a secure exchange of information to allow farmers and ranchers, agri-business organizations, the agri-food industry and the consumer to make smarter decisions. Importantly, we are striving to provide innovative solutions to advance the agriculture sector on a worldwide basis, whilst positioning Canada as a preferred global supplier of safe, sustainable food,” added the CEO.
Telus Agriculture is the latest addition to the company’s portfolio of assets which are well beyond the Canadian telecom and wireless world (the two main ones are Telus International and Telus Health) and are meant to drive new growth for the company.
“Telus Agriculture is tackling agriculture and agri-food’s complex data management challenges by linking systems together in new ways. Connecting the value chain and building solutions that make it convenient and valuable to shift to digital will help our customers drive industry-wide profitability while delivering better, healthier products to the consumer,” added Francois Gratton, EVP and group president Telus and Chair Telus Health and Telus Agriculture (pictured in a screen cap from today’s virtual announcement).
“The agriculture industry has long waited for a solution that not only optimizes the food supply chain, but provides benefit to each contributor along the way, and we are confident that Telus Agriculture can provide these solutions. While we are humbled to be in a position to make such an impact, we are more driven than ever to deliver on that promise for the industry at-large,” said Thad Armbruster, CEO of TKXS.
Telus Agriculture only today announced the purchase of AFS Technologies and SaaS farm management platform Agrian. Tampa, Florida-based AFS Technologies offers purpose-built integrated business planning, trade promotion management, and supply-chain management technology that drives efficiency, improves agility, and increases profitability. Fresno, California-based Agrian combines “label resource with a holistic platform that manages precision agriculture, agronomy, sustainability, analytics, and compliance with striking ease and effectiveness. With the addition of AFS and Agrian, Telus Agriculture is now a global leader with customers in more than 50 countries,” reads the press release.
“2020 has been a year of uncertainty for most, and that holds especially true for the consumer goods and agri-food industry. The global pandemic has not only drastically impacted the supply chain, but highlighted the urgency to tackle existing challenges,” said Richard Nicholas CEO, AFS. “With Telus Agriculture, we are helping companies achieve improved continuity of supply, protect their brand, and drive efficiency and profitability, all while delivering better, healthier products in a sustainable way to the consumer.”
By bringing together all of this, Telus says it has built the only such company in global agriculture with this type of scale and scope, and it includes a billion acres of historical acre data and 170 million acres of real-time data across the most diverse crop markets in the world that can be leveraged to build industry leading AI and machine learning-based insights.
