Working at the intersection of technology, biology, and infrastructure.
COO at Intravision, focused on controlled-environment agriculture, photobiology, and water-efficient food systems.
Interested in where scale breaks, resilience holds, and applied science outperforms hype.
#AgTech #FoodSystems #ControlledEnvironmentAgriculture
| Writing | https://neaptide.substack.com/ |
| Working | http://intravision.ca |
| Living | Canada |
Canadian policy has no category for the controlled-environment production of specification-grade biological inputs — pharmaceutical starting materials, strategic feed and protein, specialty ingredients. It falls between every department that might fund it.
The argument: category determines fundability. A facility filed as agriculture loses on cost; filed as strategic infrastructure, it is judged on supply chain resilience.
12 pesticide residues on conventional US strawberries. 8 linked to PFAS compounds. Within EPA limits, but exceeding international standards.
These chemicals don't break down in your body. You can't wash them off.
This is what a food system built on chemical inputs delivers at the consumer end.
Clean food shouldn't be the exception. CEA exists for exactly this reason.
Athens imported a third of its grain through the Bosporus. Constantinople sat on that chokepoint and extracted rent from the dependency.
The Strait of Hormuz is the same pattern. 2,500 years later.
Chokepoints aren't anomalies. They're a structural feature of every food system that depends on distant supply.
The only durable fix isn't managing the chokepoint. It's reducing the dependency that made it powerful.
Found a piece on stewardship vs ownership at the heart of Canada's resource strategy.
The framing is about oil. But the argument travels.
"Ownership asks what can I take. Stewardship asks what must I leave stronger."
Canada's food and water are a national trust in exactly the same sense.
Food sovereignty is a stewardship question, not just a supply chain one.
Kearney, BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, and BCG all published 2026 outlooks this cycle. Read together they describe one capital environment, not four. New piece on what they actually point toward for controlled environment agriculture, and where the value-add posture worth defending actually lives.
Kearney, BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, and BCG all published 2026 outlooks this cycle. Read together they describe one capital environment, not four. New piece on what they actually point toward for controlled environment agriculture, and where the value-add posture worth defending actually lives.
This piece tracks three converging pressures on global food buffers: a 50% urea price spike hitting smallholder farmers at planting season, the worst US Midwest spring drought on record, and a forecast below-normal Indian monsoon.
2009-2011? 👀 Thin reserves, economic stress, and energy shocks converging — food riots pending?
Mother nature still has a vote. But the structural conditions are already baked in.
Good news out of McGill.
$23.8 million in federal and provincial funding for a new teaching greenhouse and a Plant Phenotyping Platform — built in partnership with Université de Sherbrooke.
CEA, tissue culture facilities, and a research platform focused on climate-resilient crops. Hands-on training for the next generation of agricultural researchers.
This is the kind of long-horizon investment in food research infrastructure that the Canadian CEA ecosystem needs.
Came across a profile of Deborah Walliser today — 25 years building hydroponic solutions in food-insecure communities across Africa and desert regions globally.
Her framing: food security can't be a government burden alone. It must become a sustainable business model built on local ownership.
That's a position worth amplifying.
#CEA #FoodSovereignty #FoodSecurity #HydroponicFarming
https://www.pressreader.com/switzerland/global-trends-magazine/20260415/281771340760081
While global ag tech funding cooled, China stayed concentrated. More than half of its ag tech investment in 2025 went to agricultural biotechnology — state-backed, patient capital with a 20-year horizon.
It moved from selling capacity to selling innovation in pharma. The argument is ag biotech is next.
For those watching food sovereignty in Canada, the strategic intent gap is real.
Helen Freeman flags a Soil Association report that deserves more attention.
The core point: resilience isn't about surviving one bad season. It's about whole farm systems that can absorb shocks — soil that holds water, crops that aren't locked into synthetic input chains, markets that don't punish long-term thinking.
The slow-moving risks are always the ones that catch us unprepared.
