Steve Webb sees the Global Institute for Food Security as a bridge between good ideas and marketable products.
The chief executive officer of GIFS said Canada hasn’t done a good job of innovating in the ag tech space.
“One of the challenges that we face before we can realize our vision of Canada as an ag and food tech powerhouse is Canada’s innovation performance is less than stellar,” he said. “Canada invests ninth in terms of research dollars spent, which is in the top half of the G20 but our outcomes achieved are 30th and our innovation efficiency is 60th.”
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The reason for this is similar to other industries, he said during a virtual presentation at Canada’s Farm Show.
“We tend to be very dispersed, we tend to work in silos and each area works semi-independently,” he said.
The institute’s first priority is to help break down the silos. Webb said an organization that can connect and catalyze partners is needed and GIFS has technical expertise along with specialized equipment to drive innovation that focuses on the big challenges of climate change, nutrition and carbon sequestration.
The second priority is to optimize the innovation pipeline, which Webb said falters in the middle or “the valley of death.”
The pipeline begins with an idea and ends with a product, but barriers in the middle can block the process.
“It’s a combination of skills, capability, infrastructure and expertise, not just funding,” Webb said. “Challenges in the gap are much more than technical. They can include markets, scale-up, process, research and regulatory.”
Business incubators and accelerators work for other sectors but not always in ag tech because of inherent challenges, he said.
“You cannot rush two years of field data,” he explained. “Funding levels as a result are higher given the timelines. There’s really no pre-competitive space in the ag tech industry when we compare it to the pharmaceutical industry. The regulatory bottlenecks, public acceptance and even customer acceptance are issues, not just late stage but even early stage in the product development process.”
Webb also said there is a tendency to focus on technology but consumer and market acceptance and regulatory issues make ag tech more complex. Comparing it to the pharmaceutical industry again, he said pharma moves from preclinical to Phase 1 and 2 trials and companies’ valuation jumps are predictable and understood as that occurs. In ag tech, the valuations aren’t well defined.
Sustained and effective support systems to accelerate innovation and bridge the gap are required and GIFS is working on that through its not-for-profit development side. Its recently announced Global Agri-Food Advancement Partnership is tailored for ag tech, offering longer relationships, larger investments and scale-up opportunities.
The third priority is to build scale, Webb said. GIFS and several partners also this year launched the Omics and Precision Agriculture Lab, or OPAL, as one platform to help accelerate research and development and add scale.
OPAL combines genomics, phenomics and bioinformatics and can be used by clients, national laboratories, universities and others around the world to improve crops and microbes and other activities.
“The scale OPAL runs at dwarfs what exists in other business verticals like the health care industry,” Web said. “During the COVID-19 pandemic we were happy to lend equipment to the Saskatchewan Health Authority to help scale up COVID testing early in the pandemic.”
He said an engineering biology platform that uses automation, biology and computation will produce materials for a market expected to be between $2 and $4 trillion in the next 10 to 20 years.
“It’s as easy as a, b and c to produce reagents, peptides, enzymes and other materials industry needs to produce products on a much larger scale,” he said.
“It’s a platform technology that is important for where we’re going with ag and food and it’s part of Canada’s overall technology roadmap. We will be the ag and food node in Canada’s engineering biology network.”
