In 2021, Kristen Timmerman was studying agriculture in university when she set out to develop an ag-tech tool she says she believes was long overdue.
The tool is InputsPro (inputspro.ca), a mobile app and website that provides farmers, agronomists, ag retailers and crop specialists with essential data culled from the government-issued crop protection guides for Manitoba and Saskatchewan as well as the Blue Book put out by Alberta Canola, Alberta Grains and Alberta Pulse Growers.
“I took a small business and entrepreneurship elective course when I was at the University of Manitoba. I was interested in the entrepreneurship side of things, and that’s how I started the project,” says Timmerman, who launched InputsPro in 2022 after earning a diploma in agriculture and a bachelor of science (agronomy) from the University of Manitoba.
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Agronomy and entrepreneurship come naturally to 26-year-old Timmerman, who says she has received lots of encouragement over the years to think about building a business of her own.
Timmerman has been helping out for years at the family business Circle T Agra-Services, an independent crop input retailer in Treherne, Man., that also performs custom application services and has a receiving station for edible beans as well. She still works there full time alongside her father, Len Timmerman, and brother Bryn Timmerman.
While at university, Timmerman was able to expand her ag knowledge through summer sales jobs at Bayer and BASF, which involved lots of calls with farmers to discuss the agronomic benefits of various products. This is when she began brainstorming ways to make crop data more accessible.
Timmerman’s idea was to make all of the information in Manitoba’s lengthy Guide to Field Crop Protection — which she says seems to get thicker and thicker each year — available in an app that would allow users to filter data so they could make informed crop protection decisions more quickly and efficiently.
“I just figured there has to be a better way to do this than to rely on this paperback copy, especially since everyone has their phone in their back pocket,” she says.
Timmerman, who developed InputsPro with the help of app developers Freebird Digital Partners and Levis Tech, says she’s grateful for all of the support she has received from her family and friends as well as people within the ag industry.
Go-to resource
Timmerman considers her app a go-to resource for pesticide information for western Canadian farmers, since it covers Manitoba’s Guide to Field Crop Protection, Saskatchewan’s Guide to Crop Protection and Alberta’s Blue Book crop protection manual.
InputsPro costs $24.99 for a one-year subscription. In it, you can find pesticides by searching product names, active ingredients and group numbers, and weeds, pests and crop types are searchable as well.
“Say you’re going in and searching the timing for a herbicide that is going into a wheat crop and there are weeds X, Y and Z. The app helps filter out what products you can apply to target those weeds,” says Timmerman.
“You can find staging for your weeds and crops, rates, tank mix information and all of the pesticide restrictions. That includes things like your cropping intervals, your re-entry intervals, buffer zones, rainfastness, grazing restrictions and such.”
Timmerman says InputsPro also has a handy notes function that allows users to track things like pesticide field trial results, product effectiveness or expanded label information farmers receive from ag retailers or sales reps.
She sees her tool as a great fit for the younger generation of growers but also for older farmers who may not be as tech savvy. For this reason, the app was designed to be “so easy and friendly to use that even my dad could figure it out,” she jokes.
“Farming is a lot different than it used to be. You’re not going out and growing the same three crops and spraying the same herbicide over and over again. Crop rotations are now up to four or five years long and people are growing all sorts of different commodities. We’re also trying to manage challenges like weed resistance,” says Timmerman.
“On the farm, I think it’s very important that we have resources that allow us to do things more easily and efficiently, so that you’re spending less time making decisions and more time in the sprayer and other equipment getting the job done,” she adds.
“I see a lot of changes with technology in our world, and it’s an exciting time to see a lot of young people of my generation starting to step up and make their footprint in this industry.”
EMILI Emergence Grant
Timmerman’s innovation is getting noticed. In May, InputsPro received a $10,000 Emergence Grant from Enterprise Machine Intelligence and Learning Initiative (EMILI), a Manitoba non-profit that provides small- and medium-sized businesses with financial support and guidance to increase digital agriculture innovation in Western Canada.
The team at EMILI’s Innovation Farms in Grosse Isle, Man., also used Timmerman’s app this past growing season to retrieve information on application rates, water volume, tank mix options and more for the safe and effective application of crop inputs.
InputsPro has won a number of awards as well, including first prize in the agribusiness services category in the Innovation Showcase at Manitoba Ag Days in Brandon, Man., last January. The app won a similar award at the Innovation Showcase at Canada’s Farm Show in Regina in June.
Timmerman says based on reactions she receives at trade shows, InputsPro is definitely an idea whose time has come.
“I have a lot of retail agronomists and farmers saying how handy it is to just have all of this information right there on your phone,” she says. “The initial reaction of people is, ‘Oh my gosh, we’ve been waiting for this to be done.’”
