Picketa's American Summer: LENS Lands in 13 U.S. States

Picketa Systems spent this growing season somewhere new: American farm country. The Fredericton startup expanded into 13 U.S. states, bringing its real-time plant-tissue analysis to the market that matters most in North American agriculture.

The product, briefly

Picketa's LENS (Leaf Evaluated Nutrient System) reads the nutrient status of a crop from leaf samples in under a minute, in the field — macro and micronutrients that traditionally required mailing samples to a lab and waiting through days or weeks that a growing season doesn't give back. Growers use the readings to fine-tune fertilizer programs while adjustments can still change the harvest.

Who actually buys it

The expansion is a channel story as much as a geography story. Picketa names the thirteen states — California, Utah, Wisconsin, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Mississippi — and the buyers behind them are not only individual farms. Agronomists, crop consultants, agricultural retailers, co-ops, and input and seed companies all show up in the company's own account.

That matters for how fast this can move. An agronomist or retailer already writes fertilizer recommendations for many farms and gets paid for the advice; selling one of them changes practice across a whole book of growers. It is also the harder sale, because a retailer is staking its own agronomic credibility on the instrument.

One of the named users is an agronomist at McCain Foods — the Florenceville-born potato giant that is the reason New Brunswick has a potato research ecosystem at all. The company quotes that agronomist saying LENS is “a game changer on how we develop management strategies.” An agronomist at retailer William Houde Ltée framed it commercially: “Growers are impressed with the speed at which the results are available, we have been able to show the effectiveness of our products.” A grower at Taber Home and Farms put it more bluntly — “this product acts as a lie detector, helping us stay in check and ensuring accuracy.”

Those are customer testimonials on a company page, so read them as such. The pattern in them is still informative: the value being described is speed and verification, not novel agronomy.

What the instrument is actually doing

LENS does not run a chemical assay in the field. It reads the tissue and compares the result against what Picketa describes as a global database of crop conditions built from thousands of plants at different growth stages — which means accuracy is a function of how well that reference set covers the crop, variety, and growth stage in front of it.

That is the honest limit on the thirteen-state expansion, and it doubles as the reason for it. Corn support was new in 2024, and every additional geography and growing condition feeds the database that makes the next reading better. Lab tissue analysis remains the reference standard; the pitch is not that LENS beats it on accuracy, but that a good reading today beats a better reading after the application window has closed. Agronomists will run both in parallel before they trust one — which is exactly the trust-building that thirteen states compresses into a single season.

Fertilizer costs and tightening nutrient-runoff regulation both push toward applying less, more precisely, which is only possible if you can measure well enough to be confident about cutting. The UNB-born company — out of the student pipeline, backed early by the Fraser Student Venture Fund, NBIF, and East Valley Ventures — went on to close an oversubscribed $2.1-million round as those relationships accumulated.

Sources

• Picketa Systems' LENS Expands into 13 States — company expansion announcement
• Picketa Launches in 13 States — Entrevestor coverage
• Picketa Systems' LENS Expands into 13 US States — PotatoPro — trade-press carry of the same announcement