Who we are

Ro-Main is before everything else a family business rooted in agriculture. Raised on a laying, crops, and maple farm, Robert and Germain Labrecque took over the family business and expanded it into swine production. Over time, two other brothers, Serge and Ghyslain, joined them as business partners.

It is still hard for us to realize the global impact that Contact-O-Max had on swine reproduction. This simple idea that we had to make our work more efficient in our own farm quickly showed the world a new way to manage reproduction. With this world’s first remote-controlled boar cart for sow sexual stimulation and estrus detection, large-scale artificial insemination was now possible, thus allowing to control the quality of the reproduction process and improving farm productivity by up to 10%.

The safety of our workers has always been very important for us. Hercules’ Arm, another innovation designed in and for our own farms, saves the back of thousands of farm workers around the world each year. Being promoted or even made mandatory by authorities in some countries, Hercule’s Arm has become the industry gold standard for removing dead animals safely. We all know how much losing an animal emotionally hurts, it does not have to be a physical hazard as well.

You read it right! We launched the world’s first artificial intelligence system for livestock farming before we even knew what artificial intelligence was. What we knew though is that computers and real-time data were about to change agriculture forever, allowing farmers to make better and faster decisions based on facts. PigWatch, by monitoring sow behaviour with distance sensors and analyzing it on a computer, was able to predict a proper moment for insemination. How was that for 2009?

Simple solutions are usually the hardest to design, and we had to learn to be good at it. No Backdraft may look just like any ventilation damper you have seen before, but its unique and carefully engineered dual-action mechanism is what makes it so simple to adjust to any type of fan and avoid any compromise on animal health. Who says we must make compromises? Just ask the owners of our tens of thousands No Backdraft units who decided not to compromise airtightness nor ventilation efficiency for the health and well-being of their animals. We believe in fully working solutions – without compromises – and we make them happen. Period.

A few years after the second generation of our family officially joined the company with new skills and ideas, we reinvented ourselves, literally. With the same mission and vision for livestock farming, we acknowledged that the most disruptive innovations of the next couple decades would take the form of software and robots. Without hesitation and driven by our fierce passion for the industry, we started a transition from a manufacturer of specialized farming equipment to a high-tech company. We became a startup within a mature company. Not an easy transition, you will say. But we did it, and succeeded.

After three years building a specialized computer vision and data science team to complement our animal science and engineering expertise, we launched smaRt Counting and smaRt Breeding, the world’s first commercial computer vision-powered technologies for the swine industry. We became the first Agtech globally to prove at the commercial level that computer vision and AI will unlock sustainability of livestock farming.

How not to be excited about the future? Imagine having the certainty that every single animal in your farm is healthy, happy, and growing well, even in a context of labour scarcity. Imagine having time to think about the future rather than being constantly running after time. Imagine having all the necessary information at your fingertip to make optimal decisions, all the time. That is our promise for the future. Are you ready to lead the herd?