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: Seeing the Whole Season: How Continuous Crop Modeling Is Changing Breeding

Plant breeding has long been shaped by snapshots. A walk through a plot. A single set of notes. A yield check at the end of the season. But crops do not grow in moments. They change every day.

In this conversation, Gary Nijak of AerialPLOT explains how continuous crop modeling is changing the way breeders see, measure, and select plants by capturing growth, stress, and recovery across the entire season, not just at isolated points in time.

Nijak breaks down why point-in-time observations can miss critical performance signals, how repeated, season-long data collection removes the human bottleneck in breeding, and what becomes possible when every plot is treated as a living data set. He also explores how continuous modeling allows breeding programs to move beyond vague descriptors and toward measurable, repeatable insights that connect directly to on-farm outcomes.

This conversation explores:

• What continuous crop modeling is and how it works

• Why traditional field observations fall short over a full growing season

• How scale and repeated measurement change breeding decisions

• What “digital twins” of plots mean for selection and performance

• Why data, not hardware, is driving the next shift in breeding innovation As data-driven breeding moves from research into real-world programs, this discussion offers a clear look at how seeing the whole season is reshaping value for breeders, seed companies, and farmers, and why this may be only the beginning.