Cover photo credit: Nicole Sheldon on behalf of Picketa Systems
In a release on September 8, 2025, a spokesperson from Global Grow-NY—an initiative that gathers agricultural startups for competition—announced that Picketa Systems will represent New Brunswick at the 2025 Global Grow-NY Business Competition. The competition seeks to promote innovation in agriculture and offers a 3 million dollar prize to the winner.
Picketa Systems is one of two Canadian companies from the 20 agriculture-based organizations worldwide pitching at this year’s competition. Grow-NY Director Jenn Smith described what makes Picketa Systems stand out against multitudes of other agriculture-focused tech companies:
“[Picketa Systems] offers novel crop management technology [that] meets a pressing consumer demand, offering plant tissue analysis in real time, [and] saving farms’ money while optimizing their output.”
By this, Smith is referring to Picketa Systems technology which allows farms to analyze the nutrient content of crops in seconds, rather than having to send them to far away laboratories for testing, which saves both time and money.
Smith also explained that finalists are selected based on several different metrics: team strength, the viability of commercialization and business model, customer value, growth potential, food and agriculture innovation, job creation, and participation.
Pickets Systems CEO Xavier Hébert-Couturier explained that the company had their start here at UNB:
“We started in 2020 in the [UNB] engineering program [through a] technology management and engineering capsule project.”
While Hébert-Couturier was a student, he and a few peers spotted a gaping hole in the market, which inspired them to develop their own revolutionary technology:
“It was a kind of lightbulb moment. We noticed all this technology coming onto farms from satellites to … self-driving tractors, but we were still mailing bags of leaves to Ontario [for crop management and quality testing] … and we thought there must be a better way of doing it.”
According to Smith, the Grow-NY Business Competition emerged in 2019 through several New York business councils:
“[The founding councils] saw an opportunity to use the energy of innovation and new ventures to bolster the region’s important agrifood sector.”
Smith claimed that competitions like this are a creative way of challenging issues which make the process of providing food to the consumer difficult. Smith explained that some of those difficulties include:
“[Cost of] labor, environment and sustainability, the climate crisis, [and] economic uncertainty.”
The news of Picketa Systems’ competition on the global stage thrilled Islay Hayward, a third-year forestry student and Co-President of the UNB Environmental Society. She touted the company for being an inspiration to the smaller maritime regions:
“[Picketa Systems’] success is a reminder that you don’t need to be from a big place to create big change.”
While competing on the global scale might seem unfathomable to some, Hébert-Couturier says:
“[Competing globally] has always been the goal.”
The Grow-NY judges will select the seven winners (first place $1 million, two $500,000 winners, and four $250,000 winners) of the 2025 Global Grow-NY Business competition on November 12th–13th in Canandaigua, New York.
