Thank you very much.
I'm Daniel McCann. I am the founder and CEO of Precision AI. We are a Canadian artificial intelligence company that's focused very specifically on building artificial intelligence models for the agricultural sector. We're doing a lot of work in applied agricultural models. We're building them into machinery that also operates on the farm to be able to provide quantifiable reductions in pesticide use and reductions in fertilizer use, and to improve farming economics.
My background is that I was raised in a farming family in Saskatchewan, Canada. Obviously, I'm a very proud Saskatchewanite. I was raised there for about 20 years and then ran off and became a tech entrepreneur. I started a few companies in technology, and I ended up coming back to the farm. The reason is that I saw a generational opportunity, something that comes along once in a lifetime. The application of artificial intelligence to agriculture has the ability to be not just a step change in agriculture but also, profoundly, one of the most important innovations and important step changes in global agriculture that we've ever seen. It's probably equivalent, if not greater in potential, to moving from the horse to the tractor, for example.
The reason I make such a bold claim is that the amount of waste in agriculture is absolutely significant. We over-fertilize. We overspray. We do a lot of things that are bad for farm sustainability and bad for farm economics. Through artificial intelligence, we actually have the ability to take our farming decisions from really inefficient field skills, where we don't really know what's going on, down to individual plant-level decision-making. The amount of economic gain you can get from that is staggering.
I like giving case studies to put things in context. We developed an artificial intelligence model that can recognize and isolate weeds from crops and allow crop-spraying to just weeds instead of spraying the entire field. Through field trials, we were able to quantifiably reduce the use of pesticide by 83% and fertilizer by 60% while improving yield by 2%. In farm economics terms, that's well over $100 an acre—very, very significant economics.
We built this technology into swarms of crop-spraying drones that can use artificial intelligence to scan fields and apply pesticides just to the places where they need to be applied. We can't sell it in Canada. That's a problem. It's largely because of the regulatory environment. A variety of regulatory policies were put in place long before artificial intelligence was even conceptualized as a possibility on the farm, and they don't allow for progress in this area. We desperately need to modernize that in order to be competitive.
I think we have four pillars where we can modernize. The first one is to create a regulatory sandbox where such innovators as Precision AI and other companies can actually go and test these new technologies on very, very limited-scale fields so that we can collect the data we need in order to prove the safety and efficacy of the systems.
The second one, in addition to a regulatory sandbox, is predictable timelines for approvals. As you all well know, when you're dealing with modern agricultural technology, the ability to fund it and see it through to commercialization is very important. With no certainty on timelines, there's no certainty for the investors who invest into these capital solutions. There's a dearth of capital in Canada as well.
As Mr. Anderson said, the other one is to allow research from other regions. With the PMRA right now, you cannot look at research. With drone spraying, for example, there's a variety of data from all over the world that we can't look at. We have to recreate those research studies ourselves domestically. That doesn't make any sense.
The last one is to consolidate approvals. For drone spraying, you have multiple regulatory agencies, such as Transport Canada and the PMRA, that all sort of work together and create multiples of uncertainty. If you could have a regulatory concierge, as an example, it would allow innovators like us to move quickly through these processes.
In conclusion, let me say this: We have the science, we have the technology and we have the talent. Agriculture is one of the most important industries in Canada. We can be a world leader again in this space if we let our racehorses run domestically here, in Canada, instead of having them go down to Kentucky, literally and figuratively, to run in the Kentucky Derby.
Thank you.