Saskatoon (Rural Roots Canada) – Inspiration can come from anywhere. For Bill Rimmer, managing partner of Rimmer Technology Partners, it arrived in the form of his neighbour’s wonky laptop.

“He asked us to take a look at his laptop because it wasn’t working right,” says Rimmer. “I said we don’t really do hardware. We just do software.”

The neighbour, who runs a pedigreed seed operation a couple of miles down the road from Rimmer, convinced him to give it the once-over. That’s when Rimmer discovered something interesting: an old software program critical to his neighbour’s business.

“A bunch of seed producers had got together and paid someone to create this program, but that person was long gone. No one was supporting it anymore, and it kept crashing. It was 20 years old. It barely ran, but the functionality of it was important to his business and other businesses.”

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A seed had been planted in Rimmer’s mind. He realized he and his team could build a similar program that was more modern, built in the cloud, scalable, and accessible from anywhere.

From that seed of inspiration, Seedtrakr was born.

Seedtrakr is a software tool that helps seed growers track and manage their seed inventory, sales, processing, and logistics. It allows seed producers, regardless of the size of the operation, to input and access data on seed stock, create and track orders, and give an overview of seed sales and performance.

“It was developed specifically for the Canadian pedigreed seed industry,” notes Rimmer. “It’s highly specific to Canadian rules and regulations, compliance, and traceability requirements.”

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Because it’s cloud-based, it leaves no IT footprint. All you need is a web browser and an internet connection. As for protecting user data, Rimmer says the company relies on Google to handle the back end of the program, with users generating a unique user ID, and implementing two-factor authorization to further enhance security measures.

Rimmer says software like Seedtrakr is becoming invaluable to the agriculture industry. 

“We are rural, and we love working with our agriculture clients and our seed producers. Everyone has a unique aspect to their business that isn’t the same as everyone else’s. We work really hard to capture those requirements and add them to the platform so that it’s evolving to meet the needs of the smallest producer to the largest.”