Benjamin Feagin Jr. is an Indigenous scientific engineer, inventor, and entrepreneur, and the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of AgriTech North. As co-founder and the primary inventor behind the organization’s technologies that show promise for ending Canadian Food Insecurity; he leads the company’s research and development (R&D), commercialization strategy, and long-range technical vision. His work is centred on bringing practical, climate-adapted food-production technologies to market for Northern, rural, remote, Indigenous, and underserved communities, with a particular focus on reducing food insecurity, improving resilience, and building systems that are designed for the environmental realities in which they are expected to operate.
With more than 16 years of experience across manufacturing, agritech, lighting, engineering, and technology commercialization, Benjamin has built a career around turning complex, multi-variable and multi-faceted concepts into deployable systems. At AgriTech North, he leads a multidisciplinary organization spanning R&D, AI-driven agriculture, advanced manufacturing, and commercialization. His work includes the development and commercialization of controlled-environment agriculture (CEA) technologies, sensor-integrated systems, automation frameworks, and scalable infrastructure intended to lower operating costs, strengthen supply-chain resilience, and enable year-round production in extreme and rugged climates.
Before founding AgriTech North, Benjamin served as a Scientific Engineer at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), where he worked in advanced research roles involving sensor performance characterization, test-method development, apparatus invention, environmental sensor networks, and engineering analysis, which yielded scientific publications on OSTI.gov. In that role, he led and supported scientific, technical, and systems-engineering initiatives tied to research delivery, testing capabilities, infrastructure improvement, documentation, budgets, risk management, and safety compliance. This research foundation was complemented by his later work in manufacturing leadership as Director of Business Technology at Optic Arts, where he managed software infrastructure across sales, production, logistics, and accounting, led software developers and external contractors, and oversaw the deployment of new digital systems and integrations inside a manufacturing environment.
Benjamin’s career also includes graduate research at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he worked on carbon sequestration, air quality, lighting, environmental sensing, and remediation technologies. During that period, he developed an award-winning Internet of Things sensor network and secured a provisional patent, further establishing the applied research and invention background that continues to define his work today. Across patents, publications, scientific engineering, manufacturing systems, and entrepreneurship, Benjamin has developed a reputation for bridging invention and execution. At AgriTech North, that combination of Indigenous leadership, research depth, and commercialization discipline underpins the company’s mission to create technologies that are not only innovative, but viable, scalable, and rooted in the needs of the communities they are meant to serve.
