All high schools are eligible to apply
A new competition for Ontario high school students is looking for innovative ways to solve challenges in the ag sector.
The AgRobotics Ontario Challenge launched at the end of September.
The competition is a collaboration between the Western Fair District, the Ontario Council for Technology Education, Innovation Farms Ontario, FCC AgExpert, Haggerty AgRobotics, and RHA Ventures.
Students in tech education programs are encouraged to participate.
“Specialist High Skills Major (SHSM) students are our main target,” Dan Woods, the competition’s coordinator, told Farms.com.
The SHSM program is a specialized high school program allowing Ontario students to earn their diplomas and focus their learning on a specific economic sector at the same time.
The contest occurs in three phases.
The first phase is when teams identify a challenge in Ontario ag.
During this time, teams work with an ag community partner to identify a pertinent agricultural issue and use it as inspiration to create a robot capable of addressing the problem.
After the submission window closes in late November, only six teams will move onto the second stage of the competition.
These six schools will each receive a robot kit from Studica, and a design and build timeline from December to February 2026.
The final showcase will take place at the 2026 London Farm Show, scheduled for March 4 – 6.
“Ideally the teams will have already built and tested their solution to the problem they’ve identified,” Woods said. “We’ll have an area where the robots can move around and operate as intended. Then our judges will decide the ultimate winner.”
Some companies are already creating robotics solutions for Ontario ag.
Korechi Innovations in Oshawa, for example, makes robots to automate simple, repetitive, and even unsafe tasks.
And technology from Toronto’s Vivid Machines can help fruit growers know when to remove inner branches that produce a smaller fruit.
Ontario is home to multiple agtech companies.
Out of 261 companies included in a 2021 study from the Information and Communications Technology Council, 79 are headquartered in Ontario. B.C. had the second most with 44.