Potato storage issues drive significant losses for producers in North America each year. Cellar Insights, an agtech company that uses predictive analytics and smart storage monitoring to deliver early warnings on potato spoilage risk, is working with EMILI on Innovation Farms powered by AgExpert to demonstrate the ability of its technology to monitor the storage quality of potatoes remotely.
Cellar Insights’ smart storage monitoring technology is an AI-powered remote monitoring and decision-support platform for perishable crop storage. The technology fuses real-time Internet of Things (IoT) and ventilation data, including carbon dioxide, temperature and relative humidity with Cellar Insights’ rot gas sensors, and provides early warning alerts and insights to producers through a mobile app.
“One of our main value propositions was remote monitoring, especially for people with legacy systems, so that they didn’t have to physically go to their bins located across their area and walk through them all to check settings and sensor readings. We would drop in a set of sensors to monitor the typical managed storage parameters and provide them applications on their phone or desktop,” explained Ryan McDonald, vice president of business development with Cellar Insights.
“But then one of the first things that happened was we realized that people still wanted to visit their bin, because they wanted to check if there was any spoilage. So we went to work and came up with a spoilage indicator, so they don’t have to do that anymore.”
Sheldon Wiebe, owner of J.P. Wiebe Ltd. and Leanne Koroscil, manager of EMILI’s Innovation Farms in a potato bin at EMILI’s Innovation Farms MacGregor, where Cellar Insights is testing and validating its rot-risk alert system and key issue detection prototypes.
Earlier in 2025, Cellar Insights installed its technology in several areas of a potato storage bin at EMILI’s Innovation Farms MacGregor site in order to refine its rot-risk alert system and advance its shrink tracking, spoilage detail and other key issue detection prototypes such as sprout detection. This real-world testing at Innovation Farms allows Cellar Insights to obtain season-long data sets from a prairie environment to train and validate its models under real stress, including warm and cold snaps, ventilation regimes and mixed equipment. It also allows Cellar Insights to receive feedback from a research oriented grower.
“The opportunity to work with a grower in a real operation for developing and tuning our new capabilities is hugely beneficial,” said Terry Sydoryk, CEO of Cellar Insights.
“It’s the small things that you appreciate with your feet on the ground, the things you may not understand based on the operation itself that allows you to continue to evolve the product and address the requirements that the grower has, as well as the processor, because currently our focus is on process potatoes … Having the ability to work with a farm, understanding their relationship with the processor, so the consideration they have, but also the consideration the processor has on them, as well as what they are looking for for the technology that is being put in place on the operation.”
Terry Sydoryk, CEO of Cellar Insights, installs Cellar Insights technology at EMILI’s Innovation Farms MacGregor.
Cellar Insight’s current package is able to detect and predict spoilage in stored crops, benchmark storage, and integrate with common ventilation systems, giving producers the advantage of early spoilage detection before their eyes or nose can detect it in their bins.
“By the time you can detect it by traditional methods, it’s already a pretty big problem.” said McDonald. “By detecting it early, you’re able to use mitigation strategies, or send it to the processor before the problem becomes a bigger problem.
McDonald explained that the storage monitoring system can also prevent the overtreatment of spoilage.
“Before, if you did something to treat it – let’s say you dried out the pile a bit or used a chemical treatment – it’s very difficult to tell how successful you were. Did you get it all? Did you treat it enough? So you would have to overtreat it to ensure that you got it. By having dynamic tracking of the symptoms, then you can tell whether or not your mitigation strategy was effective enough, and then you could retain your potatoes for your full planned contract length and get your storage bonuses, rather than shipping it early and missing out on that value.”
Visit EMILI’s Innovation Farms to learn more about this project and other activities. EMILI hosts field tours and demonstrations on Innovation Farms throughout the season to showcase new agricultural technology, expand innovation opportunities, and increase understanding and adoption of digital tools.