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 |
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.
There's a irony in academia spending decades and sophisticated fiber optic technology to confirm what regenerative farmers have known through practice for generations.
Harper Adams 20-year field study concludes no-till preserves soil structure, reduces agrochemical dependence, and retains carbon. Farmers practicing regenerative agriculture didn't need a paper for that.
Tim Connolly puts it well: science deserves a participation trophy at least
67 to 1.
That's venture capital into AI versus all of AgriFoodTech in Q1 2026. $242 billion versus $3.6 billion.
Arlene Dickinson's point isn't anti-AI. It's that investors are all watching the same pitch deck while the sector responsible for feeding the planet competes for scraps.
By 2050 we need 60% more food for 10 billion people. The capital exists. It's just not pointed there.
This is the environment CEA operates in every day.
Norway's most valuable export runs on imported Brazilian soy, traded in a market China dominates. That's a sovereignty problem dressed as a supply chain question.
Maple syrup fraud? In Canada? That's not a food safety violation. That's treason!
Charlebois has a sharp piece out on the Quebec maple syrup investigation — and his real point is the one underneath the headline: this probably isn't the first time it's happened. Just the first time it's been caught.
Food fraud doesn't happen despite our food system. It happens because of how it's built — long supply chains, too many hands, labels nobody adequately verifies.
I came across a piece this week on the slow erosion of small farming — the consolidation, the industrialization, the quiet disappearance of local growing capacity.
It sent me back to Evan Fraser's Empires of Food. His argument is uncomfortable but hard to dismiss: the civilizations that lost control of their food supply didn't survive it.
That's not ancient history. It's a pattern worth paying attention to right now.
#FoodSovereignty #CEA #VerticalFarming #EmpiresOfFood #FoodSecurity
"Canada became a commodity and ingredient country. We handed the commercialization value away to other nations in exchange for what felt like easier returns."
— Arlene Dickinson
That framing is worth sitting with. It wasn't just an economic miscalculation — it was a sovereignty one.
The answer she's pointing at isn't only policy. It's domestic production capacity. Year-round. Local. Decoupled from the supply chains now under strain.
#FoodSovereignty #VerticalFarming #BuyCanadian #FoodSecurity
