AgriFood and Food Security: Can Canada Feed the World?

John Stackhouse: [00:00:00] Hi, it’s John here,

Sonia Sennik: Along with Sonia Sennik.

John Stackhouse: Welcome back to Disruptors x CDL: The Innovation Era.

Sonia, today we’re talking about ag tech, which is short for agriculture technology, but that’s a mouthful, speaking of food. And ag tech has never been more important. We’re a big food producer as a country, and most of us as consumers don’t really appreciate how much technology, especially cutting edge new technologies, go into our food system.

Sonia Sennik: Thinking about the term AgriFood, we have a CDL stream called AgriFood, and what I learned over the last few years of running it is it means everything, from the seed planted for something to grow, all the way through to the system to consume it, and then manage the waste. It is everything. So I love systems design, as we’ve chatted about in our various episodes.

The concept of the AgriFood system in Canada is really exciting.

John Stackhouse: And yet, as much as Canada [00:01:00] is a leader in food production, I think we’re one of the top five food producers in the world. But we’re a bit of a laggard when it comes to ag tech. In fact, ag tech, even in the rankings of tech, is lagging. And we need to change that.

Canadians have had a wake up call this winter with the trade war now underway with the United States and the message from President Trump that maybe the United States doesn’t need anything that we produce. That’s actually not true. Americans do need a lot of our food. They need a lot of other things too, but would be in dire straits if they didn’t have our food and potash and fertilizer and lots of other things.

As we come to grips with perhaps a bit more of a harsher world and not just here in North America, we really need to up our game in all sectors, but particularly agriculture, where in some ways we have the most opportunity. But we’re going to need a lot more of that ag tech to do it more efficiently, to do it with more innovation, and to increase the value of what we produce for the world.

But Sonia, before [00:02:00] we get deeper into some of these questions, let’s start with a food question and the one that we’ve often used on this podcast, known as the breakfast question. How did you start your day?

Sonia Sennik: With Starbucks, John.

John Stackhouse: So you weren’t boycotting American Starbucks?

Sonia Sennik: Oh no, with Tim Hortons, John, can I take it back?

John Stackhouse: You can take it back. Although I heard of someone who boycotted Starbucks on Sunday and then when Canada got the 30 day extension on Monday said, look at the effect we had.

Sonia Sennik: Yeah, really impactful with that one latte. But I did enjoy a breakfast sandwich and a latte this morning. And do

John Stackhouse: you know

Sonia Sennik: where those came from?

A barista named Todd.

John Stackhouse: Oh, I mean, who grew them? And you probably don’t, because none of us know where we got our food

Sonia Sennik: from. What about you, John? What did you have for breakfast? And please, I mean, is it going to be muesli and something very healthy? And that’s fine if it is. No,

John Stackhouse: no, but I did have berries. Not really sure where they came from though.

And that’s a really interesting question in [00:03:00] ag tech and agriculture generally, because berries, a lot of them come from Peru and California, but as Canada thinks about what we can produce for the world and how we do this more efficiently. We actually can grow a lot more berries if we use more of the technologies that we’re going to hear about on this episode.

Sonia Sennik: John, did you catch any of the Grammys last weekend?

John Stackhouse: I actually got clips of it on YouTube, but I didn’t watch it beginning to end.

Sonia Sennik: So I think AgriFood and food is on the top of everyone’s mind because in Trevor Noah’s opening monologue, he made a joke about the increasing cost of maple syrup. So. John, how can Canada feed the

John Stackhouse: world?

That’s actually one of the great opportunities for the next quarter century. The rock star of the Canadian economy has been agriculture. In terms of the amount that we produce and sell to the world, it’s grown 5x and we’re doing it with fewer people because we’re using more technology. But we also have to realize that the rest of the world is getting better [00:04:00] at all of this.

I’ve always been impressed with how much Canada exports in agriculture. But when my colleague, Lisa Ashton, who’s going to join us shortly, started to dig into the numbers, it was startling to see how much market share Canada’s losing in different parts of the world. So it’s more competitive out there, which is a good thing.

And we, in turn, have to take that as a market signal that we need to up our game too. And we’re going to hear from two other guests, Evan Fraser and Alison Sunstrum, on the role that technology and innovation can play in getting us back to the front of the pack.

Sonia Sennik: But first, in the coming weeks, RBC will publish a new report on this topic.

And we asked Agriculture Policy Lead, Lisa Ashton, what are the key takeaways from this report?

Lisa Ashton: What I found most surprising is that Canada, while it’s still a leader in agriculture and food exports, it’s actually fallen from 5th to 7th place from the early 2000s to 2023. This has actually brought material losses to Canada’s [00:05:00] economy.

Equaling 23 billion if we didn’t lose share in some of our key agricultural food products globally. But there is lots of potential within the sector as someone that grew up on a farm in southwestern ontario I was exposed to the innovation that is coming out of Canada’s agricultural sector that really led to the mechanization And the improvements in productivity in the early 2000s but now that productivity is It’s slowing on an annual growth basis, and we’re seeing emerging economies like Brazil or Argentina start to eat up our share of global AgriFood exports.

But if we were to focus on one key thing moving forward, it would really come from the infrastructure development in our rural IT. When you look at farmers in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, they have less than 50 percent of 5G coverage within the province, and that is truly holding them back from participating in the [00:06:00] digital economy.

So moving that forward would really unlock Canada’s potential to grow as an AgriFood export powerhouse.

John Stackhouse: You can find more of Lisa’s work at rbc. com slash Thought Leadership or follow us on LinkedIn. We’re now excited to have on the podcast two of Canada’s top thinkers on ag tech, Evan Fraser and Alison Sunstrum.

I’ve known Evan for at least a decade. In fact, long time listeners will remember him. on the pod talking about his book, Dinner on Mars. He’s a well known policy influencer and Canadian researcher at the University of Guelph and the director of the Aral Food Institute.

Sonia Sennik: And we’re joined by Alison Sunstrum.

She started our AgriFood stream at CDL-Rockies in Calgary. She had a vision for the importance of driving innovators and tech towards the agriculture industry in Canada. And she has been central to expanding it around the world. Also, John, Alison started in as an innovator herself, [00:07:00] building grow safe systems out of her garage, where she started with this idea of, could we start using data to track cows?

John Stackhouse: So we’ve got dinner on Mars and farming in the garage. Be a great conversation. Evan and Alison, welcome to the podcast. Hey, thanks, John. Thanks, John. Evan, you and I were just together at a food summit that the Aral Food Institute put on with ag leaders from Mexico, the United States, and Canada, scheduled before the Trump tariff announcements, but very, very timely.

And you and I did a keynote conversation on what we’re up against in this brave and scary new world. I wonder if you can give our listeners a sense of the role of innovation for ag producers in taking on this challenging, but also exciting new world.

Evan Fraser: My feeling is very strong that, Ag is on the cusp of a massive technological transformation that the same technologies that gave us internet are changing what [00:08:00] we eat and how we produce what we eat, how the food that we eat gets to us, and that that is about to go through a major change.

Technologies such as controlled environment agriculture that allows farmers to produce more food year round closer to the consumer I mean, we’re not there yet, but the potential is there to be quite transformative and to be honest the threat of a less integrated north america The threat of border tariffs, the threat of it being harder, not easier to move food across borders, I think just increases the temple at which innovation is going to happen in this space and is going to push investors like Alison, it’s going to push policymakers like the people we interact with, John, on a daily basis, it’s going to push them to be really interested in doing whatever they can to bring food closer to home.

Evan, where would you say Canada’s at on the global table? Super question. I mean, Canada is a net food exporter. We have a food trade surplus. Most of that is prairie related products. Beef, canola, wheat, crops that come from big farms in the [00:09:00] prairies are what we mostly export. What we mostly import, however, is the fruits and vegetables.

And because of Winter. I mean, we have winter, which means we can’t do fruits and vegetables close at home most of the year. So I think where innovation is going to perhaps play the biggest role in terms of the issues kicked up by the trade tariff war or the potential of a trade tariff war is really the fruits and vegetables and the broad area of perhaps controlled environment agriculture.

So when you think back, Ontario didn’t really have a big greenhouse sector 25 or 30 years ago. Now we have one of the world’s largest producing year round tomatoes and cucumbers, peppers, and increasing strawberries, which is really interesting for someone who grew up on a traditional strawberry farm, quite close to consumers.

Still embedded in international supply chains, of course, but still much more local.

Sonia Sennik: To go with a positivity sandwich approach, can we maybe learn a little bit, Allison, from you about what does Canada do really well?

Alison Sunstrum: One of the things that I think that we can do is think differently. [00:10:00] There’s a lot of things that we can do internally that many, many folks are talking about, like removing the restrictions between interprovincial borders and a number of things, but I’m going to give you examples from the CDL lab.

One of the packaging solutions that we saw in the lab a few years ago was a company called Ixon. And Ixon’s technology allows perishable foods like meat to be stored at room temperature for up to two years. This cuts refrigeration costs, makes distribution to remote or underserved areas more viable. I didn’t invest in this one, but if you think about it, if you could actually disrupt the cold chain, keep products on the shelf longer, this would enable us to react to a number of different trade issues, a number of different barriers.

And that’s the kind of technology that I really love. I love those things that think about how we can do differently [00:11:00] rather than responding to really counterproductive trade. Idiocy, and think about technology as a way to solve some of our problems.

John Stackhouse: Allison, that sounds all well and good, but I think as we all know, finding capital for ag tech has been a bit of a challenge.

Sonja, you and I were talking about this before the recording. I don’t quite get it. What, Sonja, are you seeing as the kind of frictions?

Sonia Sennik: I see incredible innovators in our stream, but the bar to invest in our early stage AgriFood companies seems to be higher than in some of our other streams. Is that a lack of a familiarity from our investor community with ag tech?

Why might there be a bit of a higher bar or a longer cycle before an investment is made?

Alison Sunstrum: You know, I’m actually going to take a bit of exception to that. I would say that the majority of people who invest look for really, really quick wins. And those people that look and like their capital preserved, but understand [00:12:00] that good solutions take a little longer.

I think those are our investors. I also think that we don’t understand the huge opportunity that Canada has in agriculture and technology to drive the industry. I did a quick back of the napkin, uh, calculation when I was speaking on a panel with John recently. And I looked at the fact that the Netherlands, which is a country that you can put into Nova Scotia, is four times more productive than we are.

Economically productive, output productive, you name it. So that’s a bit of challenge. The other thing that I would say is, you know, there’s a bit of correctness to what you say. Agriculture is driven by a number of things that are challenging. We’re hit by climate, we’re hit by a number of things that we can’t control.

So the risk in agriculture is high. I think that if investors understood this and we looked at new strategies, you’re [00:13:00] right, we’ve got to find a way to fund investment in agriculture.

Evan Fraser: If I could jump in here, I mean, one of the things that Netherlands does, I think, and Allison, you and I have talked about this at length, first of all, an agricultural product or two key components of agriculture are two of the top tier priority areas of the economy for the Dutch government.

So it is extremely high on the, on the radar of the government in the Netherlands. They have explicitly brought that triple helix together and the triple helix that they talk about is business, the academy and government together to focus on agriculture. They’ve done that. operationally, things like creating data sharing pools in order to make sure that they make better use than say Canada does of its data sharing environment.

So there’s a whole bunch of sort of tactical things and also cultural things that the Dutch do remember winters after World War II where there was hunger and starvation in that country. So from a cultural level through a policy level. They have seriously prioritized agriculture, and as a result, they way punch above their weight, whereas Canada, [00:14:00] alas, we don’t have those characteristics, perhaps, I would argue that we punch probably below our weight.

John Stackhouse: What should Canada choose, or at least think about choosing, if we could only focus on a few areas of ag tech?

Alison Sunstrum: We would focus on a bias to act, to deploy, and to take on new technology. I say that first and foremost because, um, picking a technology, the big enchilada in every technology is AI, robotics and AI, automation and AI, analytics and AI.

We as a country. We researched AI, we developed AI in our institutions. So let’s not lose this opportunity in agriculture. Let’s make sure that we can deploy AI to be more productive. So that’s the big one. [00:15:00] But the second one is let’s also think about actually taking up our technology. That’s the most important.

We have a tech debt in this country across all our industries. If you want to see where we’re winning, go to the Conference Board of Canada, look at the Innovation Report Card for Canada. It’s a better one. It’s still a D rating. But you take a look at that report card and you’ll see we must be spending more on bringing technology into our businesses.

Sonia Sennik: Evan, do you agree that adoption is critical here?

Evan Fraser: To John’s point, normally when someone says, what kind of tech do you want us to choose? The expected answer is something like, oh, we should double down on row crops or double down on some sort of commodity. And I think Allison’s Completely right in that.

She’s saying there is underlying sort of foundational technologies, robotics, data and artificial intelligence. And I would say genomics are the sort of the three and we should be as a country embracing the application [00:16:00] of those three foundational technologies in as wide a range of applications across Canada’s AgriFood sector as possible.

A commodity specific approach is not the right approach. We want to take a foundational technology approach of genomics AI data and robotics and drive those and I’m not going to presuppose what great idea some Third year computer science student in waterloo is going to have like I just want them to work and use those tools in agriculture And that’s where I think we’ll see the strengths

Sonia Sennik: We’re hearing the term precision farming a lot.

Would you say that the items that you listed there and the technological advances, is that the umbrella of precision farming? And do you have any examples of where companies are doing precision farming really well?

Alison Sunstrum: So precision farming is a term that came out of the internet of things, and it’s really looking at sensors connected to the internet, bringing information back, and then trying to optimize production through a precision format.

[00:17:00] That’s old tech. And so what I want to see is I want to see us pushing that envelope, next generation Predictive farming. I want to be predictive and I want to be automated. You cannot be automated if you are not able to predict when you should be going out in the field, when you should be responding with new products.

So from my sort of theorem, as I looked at the original days of data was kind of historical benchmarking data. Then we moved into a kind of real time data format. Then we started thinking about how could we mitigate risk and how could we increase profitability if we could actually predict, mitigate that risk very quickly before it happened, hopefully.

And so we’re now in this phase with AI and all types of technology that we can be predicting and responding sometimes before an occurrence.

Sonia Sennik: Evan, you co-authored [00:18:00] the book Dinner on Mars, which I learned was not, in fact, a dinner of Mars bars. It’s difficult to talk about the AgriFood industry without thinking about climate change.

Assuming that the atmosphere on Mars would be very different than this one on Earth, what do you think is the most pressing problem we need to solve related to agriculture and climate change?

Evan Fraser: There’s two ways of answering that question, and you asked me for one, I’m going to give you two. One is the, what’s called mitigation.

So, developing farming systems that don’t emit very many greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, I think agriculture and forestry, as the two biological based parts of the economy we’ve got, have the potential to not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but also ultimately absorb them and be what we might call net negative.

As things grow carbon dioxide is pulled out of the atmosphere and ultimately can be transferred into the soil where it can be stored A lot of complicated science there But whatever we can do to reduce carbon emissions or greenhouse gas emissions and [00:19:00] tie them up in biological matter such as the soil Is I would say one of the two key priorities and we can do that using ranges of technologies often called regenerative farming, better livestock management, all sorts of things.

The other thing is we need to adapt to climate change. We’re not going to be able to mitigate our way out of this problem. We are going to have to adapt to changing environmental conditions and that means investing in agricultural systems such as drought tolerant seeds or heat tolerant cattle, dairy cows.

That will allow us to continue to produce as the earth warms up. So there’s a strong mitigation agenda and a strong adaptation agenda and technology is going to play a role in both.

Alison Sunstrum: I’m going to act as devil’s advocate here if I can to Evan, please. I think we only started talking about adaptation because we couldn’t figure out how to mitigate.

And so from my perspective, I really want us to focus on those technologies. That have the potential to change this [00:20:00] crisis point we’re in, and I generally don’t talk about crisis, but I have to tell you the economic cost of climate change is massive. If we look at what happened in Canada in 2024, by September, we had already had 7.

7 billion in insured damages from climate impact. It’s affecting our food supply, it’s affecting everything. So, we have to be looking at those technologies that can transform food systems sustainably. And we got to think about it really seriously. It’s not something that we can leave off the shelf.

John Stackhouse: And Evan, you’re trying to do something about this.

You’ve got a pretty ambitious new initiative out of the University of Guelph that’s aimed at helping, especially the next gen of innovators and entrepreneurs in ag tech, do something about this. Can you tell us more about it?

Evan Fraser: So, very happy that the federal government has awarded a national network that is led by the [00:21:00] University of Guelph but also includes Dr.

Lenore Newman from the University of Fraser Valley as co-chair to stand up something called Sustainable Food Systems for Canada. And the logic there is that many great innovation ideas, great entrepreneurs, whether they’re social innovators or have a commercial idea, they crash out because they’re not quite ready for something like Creative Destruction Lab.

They’re even too early for that. So what Lenore and I brainstormed was that there is a gap in Canada’s innovation landscape, specifically with regard to ag and food innovation, where really, really early stage pre incubator, pre accelerator stage ideas need some help and mentoring to get. Further along the pathway towards launching a viable company so that they can then stand up at a creative destruction lab session and have the right kind of pitch and the right kind of narrative.

So what we’ve created is sustainable food systems for Canada. It involves all of Canada’s ag and veterinary medicine schools, a number of colleges, a number of indigenous communities from the north. And we’re going to try to [00:22:00] create a training program based on micro credentials around ag and innovation.

A mentorship program specifically geared to help feed into the creative destruction lab and the bio enterprise type incubator accelerators. And what we’re calling a collision space, basically a place for a community to form around AgriFood at a national scale. Because unlike aerospace or automotive, we don’t sort of have a club or a place to gather as a community as often as we’d like.

And so we’re going to try to address that as well.

Sonia Sennik: Farming for Creative Destruction Lab. I love it, Evan. That’s a good point. I like that.

Allison, when people think of food technologies or agriculture, they may have a very dated view of what this looks like. In an effort to attract and continue to build world class talent in the AgriFood industry in Canada, what do you think Canadians need to know about the exciting opportunity here?

Alison Sunstrum: [00:23:00] Sonia, I love the farming for CDL Ag. I think that’s great, but I also like the thought that the farm team is not just from a traditional agricultural university background. Some of the best companies we get in CDL Ag come from every other stream, space stream, ocean stream, you name it, because agriculture really crosses the border of every type of technology.

And so the initiative that Evan and Lenore have started, I’ve just been their best cheerleader as they’ve gone through to get started. But I also think that we have to look at the fact that even within our own academic institutions, we have to say, Hey, do you know what a big opportunity that agriculture actually is?

And there’s some companies who were pivots from the energy stream and pivots from the space stream that are just driving massive change. One’s [00:24:00] actually creating phycocyanin through cyanobacteria. Which was a big part of dinner on Mars. So, we’re looking at future foods and future technologies and although we all think of agriculture like my granddad on a tractor plowing up a field, it’s not like that.

It’s in the lab. It’s in space. It’s in the soil.

Sonia Sennik: Evan, what should we get excited about in the opportunity to innovate in our AgriFood industry?

Evan Fraser: To pick up on what Allison just said. The farmer of the future is as likely to wear a lab coat, live in a city, work in a group that includes data scientists and marketers and whatnot, as they are likely to drive a tractor on their own in a rural countryside.

And we also need to do a better job of linking our conversations with technology back into the lived experiences of the producers. Both things are true. On one hand, we have this extraordinarily exciting explosion of innovation that is touching down [00:25:00] on all these different disciplines and these different departments and these different ways of life.

And as a university professor, I spend a lot of time connecting with young people to try to get them excited about this. And we also have to be doing a better job of grounding our innovations in the lived experiences of farmers. In other words, solving problems that today’s farmers already have. And so there has to be both approaches.

There has to be a innovator to farmer and farmer to innovator kind of emphasis. And there has to be a outreach into new disciplines in order to get young people from all walks of life excited about feeding the future and making money at the same time.

John Stackhouse: Evan, you’re reminding me of a report we did a number of years ago called Farmer 4.0 that looked at the digital farmer of the future and you and your team at Guelph were really helpful in putting that together and also communicating that across the country. How do you think we’ve done over the last few years on getting to Farmer 4.0? And what do you think would be the key changes and investments that we can make?

Evan Fraser: One of the things that I really like that I took [00:26:00] away from Farmer 4.0 is that the farmer of the future needs a good grounding in traditional ag science disciplines. So we’re not going to neglect soil science and animal husbandry and all that sort of traditional agronomic work. And they need a really good grounding in the STEM disciplines.

And we need to do a better job, a much better job of teaching young people the foundational skills, active listening, project management, group work, conflict resolution, oral and written communication. And that’s a lot to pile into a curriculum for an undergraduate, if we’re talking about a formal undergraduate, but we have to be doing those things.

I think we’re doing better, but we’re not doing anywhere near as good as we should be trying to do those three things simultaneously at the same time as we’re reaching out to the traditional farm community.

Alison Sunstrum: Actually, Evan, I think we’re doing good as it relates to the farm. I don’t think we’re doing as well in terms of policy, financing, driving that change.

So what you’re talking about on the farm can actually happen. I think we need [00:27:00] innovation to create transformative solutions. We need investment to scale and deploy the solutions. We need a robust climate policy to guide and incentivize change and collaboration to ensure equity and shared opportunity.

So. These are the elements that needed to draw systemic shifts on farm. Sure. But also, we have to be driving that change everywhere.

Sonia Sennik: So well said. Allison and Evan, thank you so much for joining the podcast. This was a delicious conversation.

John Stackhouse: Thank you.

Sonia Sennik: Thanks.

John Stackhouse: Sonia, this conversation has been a great reminder of how so much in our world always comes down to food.

Without food, we don’t survive. And it’s important to realize that technology and innovation, which often are described in non earthy terms. really can make a difference to the earth and the food that it produces, as well as the water and so many other ingredients, quite literally, that go [00:28:00] into what helps us all thrive.

My mind’s going back to one of our first questions. What did you have for breakfast? And the berries that I got to eat. And thinking to Evan’s point about how we can grow those berries in our country, in winter, in controlled environments. Yes, we already do. But we can do that at scale, not just to feed ourselves, but if we do it well, help feed a lot of the world as well.

Sonia Sennik: I was struck by how Evan and Alison were so aligned on the farmer of the future, John. So that farmer who’s making those breakfasts we’re eating or food that’s coming to our table. Being an interdisciplinary spread of data scientists, folks with soils background, agriculture background, AI and robotics that the future of agriculture and farming is really at a transition point and Canada has an opportunity to capture this inflection point and grow our agriculture industry.

John Stackhouse: I think the message is let’s make farmer 4.0 a national hero. As well as a national ambition for future generations. [00:29:00] This has been Disruptors and CDL, the Innovation Era. I’m John Stackhouse.

Sonia Sennik: And I’m Sonia Sennik.

John Stackhouse: Be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and join us next time as we continue exploring the groundbreaking ideas shaping Canada’s economy and beyond.

Talk to you soon.

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