When UKKÖ Robotics built and shipped its 100th ROVA|BARN this summer, it marked nearly a decade of the company testing, learning, and improving its smart farming technology to help bring livestock back to pasture at scale.
Based in the small community of Notre Dame de Lourdes, Manitoba, UKKÖ Robotics designs and manufactures autonomous mobile livestock barns that move animals onto fresh pasture. Founded by Daniel Badiou & Katrina Jean-Laflamme, both engineering graduates, the company is working to make pasture-based livestock farming more practical on a larger scale. Dan is a fifth-generation dairy farmer who has always believed that birds should spend their lives on fresh grass with room to forage, but rather than moving the shelters by hand every day, he set out to build a machine that could do it for farmers automatically. Today, he handles the product design and mechanical engineering behind every ROVA|BARN.
Kat came to farming from a completely different background. Originally from Quebec with no agricultural experience, everything was new to her, and she questioned many of the things Dan had grown up taking for granted. She now splits her time between the business and the production floor, designing and testing the canvas systems for every ROVA|BARN before they go into production. In the early days of the company,
she even taught herself to sew so she could bring those designs to life. The 10-person team in Manitoba designs, builds, and tests every UKKÖ barn themselves, and before a new prototype reaches customers, it is tested on the family farm. The founders say that using the product every day gives them firsthand insights they wouldn’t find in a laboratory or office.
When UKKÖ first started selling the ROVA|BARN commercially in 2021, the team quickly realized that customer feedback would be one of their greatest sources of innovation. Farmers using the barns spotted opportunities for improvement that the builders never would have uncovered on their own, and each generation of the ROVA|BARN was able to grow stronger because of these real-world experiences. Today, the ROVA|BARN moves birds onto fresh pasture while also collecting valuable production data for farmers which helps improve animal welfare, support regenerative farming practices, and give small and medium-sized farms access to automation and data tools once reserved for much larger operations.
Although UKKÖ was proudly started in rural Manitoba, its ambitions have always reached beyond provincial borders. The founders realized early that Manitoba alone was too small a market, so they expanded across Canada before entering the United States, and today, UKKÖ is building partnerships with distributors in the Czech Republic and Norway while preparing to expand into Europe, Australia, and Japan. In fall 2026, the team travelled to EuroTier in Germany, one of the world’s largest livestock trade shows, to build new relationships and launch pilot projects in international markets.
This momentum is also driving significant investment at home. This winter, UKKÖ will more than quadruple the size of its manufacturing facility, increasing production capacity while continuing to design and build every machine in Manitoba.
UKKÖ has received support from federal and provincial export programs that have helped accelerate international growth and strengthen Its manufacturing capabilities, and the company has continued to prove that world-class agricultural technology doesn’t have to come from a major city; it can be designed, built, tested, and exported from a small rural community.
Ten years after two engineering graduates set out to solve a problem on their own farm, UKKÖ Robotics is helping farmers around the world rethink what pasture-based livestock production looks like, and their mission has stayed the same: to build the technology that gives more farmers the opportunity to raise healthy animals on healthy pasture.
Katrina Jean-Laflamme, Co-Founder & COO, Daniel Badiou, Co-Founder & CEO
