An Ontario start-up with technology that gives fruit growers accurate, real-time crop data is one step closer to full commercialization.
Why it matters: Accurate data helps growers bring more efficiency to the farm and greater transparency to the fruit supply chain.
Vivid Machines Inc. has just closed a $5.8 million funding round to further develop its system and expand into more fruit crops.
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Founded in 2020, Vivid Machines has developed the Vivid X system, which uses a real-time spectral sensor and computer vision system mounted onto farm equipment to automate the prediction and automation of yield and quality. These tasks are traditionally done manually by growers in the orchard.
“In the last two years, we’ve gone from a prototype to a minimal viable commercial product,” says co-founder and CEO Jenny Lemieux.
“We are really excited about continuing to improve accuracy, starting to build out capabilities around making things more actionable for growers, and expanding research into other fruit.”
From three cameras two years ago, Vivid now has close to 30 cameras operating in orchards in Washington, Michigan, New York, Ontario and Nova Scotia.
For Lemieux, one of the most exciting evolutions has been the growth of prediction capacity. At the end of the last growing season, Vivid’s yield prediction accuracy averaged about 90 per cent, which made paying customers out of some growers who participated in early orchard trials.
“We’re especially excited about building additional ability to predict yield early so growers can alert packhouses and marketers on what their crop will look like,” she says, adding the team is also doing research in kiwi fruit and grapes, and is collaborating on research with Cornell University into early detection of downy mildew in grapes.
The most current version of Vivid X can now count blossom clusters and count and size apples from fruitlet all the way through harvest. Further fine-tuning is underway to enable bud counts.
Growers use bud and blossom counts to prune trees to the right crop load for each apple variety. Once a tree is pruned, it starts putting its energy into the remaining fruit.
Vivid’s seed funding round was led by the Business Development Bank of Canada Capital Thrive Venture Fund, with StandUp Ventures, Algoma Orchards, Tall Grass Ventures, Entrepreneur First, BoxOne Ventures, Conexus Venture Capital (Emmertech), the W Fund, Cornell, Freycinet Ventures, N49P and MaRS IAF also participating.
Algoma Orchards of Newcastle was one of the first commercial apple growers to work with Vivid and its early prototypes, following a cold call by Lemieux to Algoma president Kirk Kemp during her search for collaborators. Kemp was immediately intrigued.
“The camera and technology get better every few months and we’re able to detect smaller things in the tree each year,” he says.
“As growers, we think we’re good at counting, but we’re not really, so the beauty of her system is that it is live and with an iPad, we know by the end of the (tree) row how many apples on a tree on average so we can make all the adjustments in real time.”
Kemp believes the system will evolve to provide information on each tree’s nutrition levels and be able to detect pests and diseases in the orchard. That will let growers adjust spray rates to only target hot spots instead of whole orchards, for example, benefiting business profitability and the environment.
“It’s a complex thing, but I see it coming as the ultimate (application),” he says. “We’re an investor, we’ve been in for a year and a half and I’m enjoying it. I’m not doing it for the money, I just like to be on the ground floor of things that are cool. If you sit still, you get behind.”
Previous Vivid Machines funders include the Canadian Food Innovation Network, the Agri-Tech Innovation Program, the Bioenterprise Canada SmartGrowth program, Sustainable Development Technology Canada Seed Funding, Entrepreneur First, and the Canadian government’s Food Waste Reduction Challenge.
