Wade Barnes founds Ronin Agronomy

Aug 17, 2023

Barnes previously co-founded Farmers Edge and was its CEO until 2021

By Diego Flammini
Staff Writer
Farms.com

A familiar name in the precision ag community has founded another company.

Wade Barnes, who co-founded Manitoba-based Farmers Edge in 2005 and served as its CEO until his resignation in March 2022 following poor financial performance, is the founder of Ronin Agronomy.

The company gets its name from a type of Japanese samurai that had no master, but travelled the land offering his service to anyone who needed it.

“Just as the Ronin warriors embraced new techniques and strategies to achieve victory, we continuously seek out innovative solutions and stay at the forefront of precision agronomic advancements to deliver results to our farm partners,” the company’s website says.

Wade Barnes

Multiple kinds of services are listed on Ronin’s site for farmers in Western Canada.

Farmers can receive support for variable rate applications, nutrient management, crop scouting, and sustainability solutions, with textural soil mapping coming soon.

“In my view there will be (an) immense amount of pressure on farmers to do nutrient management,” Barnes told the Winnipeg Free Press. “That means they are going to have to be highly efficient with fertilizer application.”

And the company is already in crop fields.

Ronin completed its first day of soil sampling on Aug. 15.

“Very appreciative of the folks at Pitura Seeds for putting their trust in us!” Barnes said in a tweet. “Very excited about the start of a new chapter and looking forward to fall sampling and getting composite VR Rxmaps out for fall Fert season!”

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids