Conference Date: April 21, 2026
AgriTech North participated in the Thunder Bay regional workshop of the Indigenous Agriculture and Food Systems (IAFS) engagement series, a national initiative developed through Farm Credit Canada (FCC) and Mokwateh to gather region-specific perspectives on land access and management, food security, economic and market opportunities, and capital solutions. For our team, this was not simply another event on the calendar. It was a meaningful opportunity to bring Northwestern Ontario’s realities into a room specifically intended to hear from Indigenous agriculture and food system leaders, and to ensure that the region’s structural barriers were not flattened into generic national talking points.
Why This Workshop Mattered
What made this workshop especially valuable was that the series is explicitly asking the right questions. The IAFS engagement materials do not stop at abstract encouragement about growth or participation. They ask about barriers to land use, barriers to capital, barriers to market access, barriers to processing, and what regionally grounded solutions might actually work. For Northern and Indigenous agriculture, the main challenges are rarely about willingness or imagination; they are usually about infrastructure, geography, policy design, and the persistence of Southern assumptions in Northern contexts. When a process is designed to surface those realities, the conversation becomes far more useful.
Northwestern Ontario’s Food Infrastructure Gap
For AgriTech North, one of the most important contributions we brought to the workshop was a clear insistence that Northwestern Ontario cannot be discussed as though it were operating within the same food-system conditions as Southern Ontario. The region continues to face exceptionally high food costs, long transport distances, difficult logistics, and fragmented procurement pathways. Public health data from the Northwestern Health Unit (NWHU) has repeatedly shown how severe these pressures are. In its reporting on the Ontario Nutritious Food Basket, NWHU noted that the cost of feeding a family of four in its catchment area reached $1,412.32 per month in 2023, and described food insecurity in Northwestern Ontario as being driven by higher transportation and fuel costs, greater risk of perishable loss in transit, and limited grocery competition. Those are not marginal issues, they are foundational.
That structural context is why we emphasized a point that has been central to our own thinking: Northwestern Ontario still lacks the kind of consolidated food terminal and distribution infrastructure that other parts of Ontario rely on, whether directly or indirectly, to stabilize procurement, lower handling inefficiencies, and improve access to food products. Ontario’s broader food economy has long included centralized wholesale produce infrastructure, most notably through the Ontario Food Terminal. Northwestern Ontario does not benefit from an equivalent regional backbone, and that absence affects everything from fresh food pricing to institutional procurement. In our view, this is one of the most important missing pieces in the North, and it must be addressed if the province is serious about food security, food sovereignty, and equitable agri-food development.
Why School Food Programs Cannot Simply Be Replicated in the North
This issue becomes even more visible when discussing school food. Across Ontario, school nutrition programs can often build on denser supply chains, lower procurement friction, and more consistent access to consolidated distribution. In Northwestern Ontario, that model does not translate neatly. Student Nutrition Ontario and the broader Ontario Student Nutrition Program do critically important work, and regional lead agencies are doing the best they can in difficult circumstances. However, where food prices are already among the highest in Ontario, where distribution is fragmented, and where institutions cannot easily procure through a nearby terminal or hub, replicating Southern school food successes becomes much more difficult. In other words, the constraint is not a lack of desire to feed children well, it is the regional food infrastructure underneath the program.
That point was central to what we wanted the room to understand. If Northwestern Ontario had better consolidated procurement and distribution infrastructure, then school food programming could operate very differently. It could be more repeatable, more efficient, and more affordable. It could also create more stable demand pathways for regional producers, processors, and Indigenous businesses and agri-food projects. Without that infrastructure, however, the burden falls back onto individual organizations, schools, or communities to piece together procurement under conditions that are already structurally expensive. We believe that is one reason the North cannot simply copy Southern models and expect identical outcomes. The starting conditions are not the same, so the policy instruments cannot be identical either.
Land Access, Geography, and Northern Agricultural Reality
Another major contribution we made at the workshop concerned land access. Too often, agriculture policy discussions treat land as though it were an abstract, interchangeable input. In Northwestern Ontario, land access is shaped by history, treaty realities, Indigenous community boundaries, geography, soil capability, transportation, and capital. We raised that many Indigenous people and organizations in the region were not left with access to broad expanses of arable land, and that for many communities, land access cannot be discussed without also discussing colonial displacement, constrained community boundaries, surrounding territorial realities, and the unfinished or unresolved character of broader land relationships. Even before one gets to financing or operations, the physical and political geography already looks very different from the assumptions built into mainstream agriculture programs. The fact that land access and management was one of the core themes of the IAFS series made this an especially important point to put on record.
Beyond "Grow in the Ground": The Limits of Southern Assumptions
We also found it necessary to challenge an assumption that appears frequently in agriculture conversations, namely that “real” or “proper” growing must happen in the ground, in soil, and preferably in the same conventional format that dominates Southern agricultural practice. One exchange at the workshop illustrated this problem clearly. A non-Indigenous participant strongly emphasized growing in the ground and appeared to regard non-soil systems with skepticism, if not condescension. From a Northwestern Ontario perspective, that position is often detached from the facts and reality our communities face every day. Much of Northern Ontario lies within the Canadian Shield, and Ontario’s own agricultural and geological resources make clear that soil depth, soil capability, bedrock exposure, and land suitability vary dramatically across the province. "The Canadian Shield, which covers much of eastern and Northern Canada, has thin, rocky soils that are not suitable for large-scale farming." In many Northern settings, productive agricultural land is limited, shallow, discontinuous, or difficult to access at economically viable scale.
From that perspective, simply instructing Northern or Indigenous communities to “grow in the dirt” is not a serious policy answer. In some contexts, productive soil would effectively need to be imported or significantly amended, which immediately raises cost and sustainability questions. It is not coherent to criticize alternatives to in-ground growing while also objecting to the fact that soil itself may need to be trucked in. That is precisely why place-based innovation matters. Controlled-environment agriculture (CEA), hydroponics, aeroponics, and other non-soil systems are not ideological departures from agriculture. In many Northern contexts, they are practical responses to environmental and infrastructural conditions that conventional assumptions fail to address. Ontario’s own soil capability resources, and broader research on Northern agriculture, support the basic point that Northern production conditions are materially different and cannot be reduced to Southern farming norms.
Structural Barriers to Indigenous Business Financing
This ties directly into another issue we raised at the workshop: the design of financing and business support programs for Indigenous enterprises. In our view, Indigenous businesses are too often treated as though formal equality were the same thing as equity. A business may be evaluated under the same eligibility criteria, the same collateral expectations, the same performance thresholds, and the same repayment logic as a non-Indigenous counterpart, while starting from profoundly unequal conditions. That inequality is not hypothetical; it is bound up with the historic denial of land access, interrupted wealth accumulation, exclusion from multigenerational business development opportunities, uneven access to private capital, and the simple fact that many Indigenous entrepreneurs are working in regions where the infrastructure deficits are much greater. Treating these businesses “the same” or similar can therefore produce deeply ineffective and unequal results.
We argued that funding and financing programs need to account for those structural realities much more honestly. Eligibility criteria and performance metrics should be relaxed or redesigned where necessary, not to lower standards arbitrarily, but to correct for the fact that the baseline conditions are not comparable. It is neither accurate nor fair to assess an Indigenous business in Northwestern Ontario as though it had inherited the same financial footing, geographic advantages, supplier density, market access, and collateral profile as a firm operating in a far more developed corridor. If economic reconciliation is to mean anything operationally, then it must appear in underwriting logic, program design, milestone expectations, and definitions of risk, not only in public-facing language.
We shared our own experience as a concrete example of this problem. In our case, AgriTech North was rejected for an Indigenous business financing opportunity, yet was able to secure a standard small business loan of the same amount on worse terms from the same agency. That experience illustrates a serious structural concern. A program designed to improve accessibility for Indigenous businesses should not, in practice, be harder to obtain than a conventional offering that does not carry the same stated mandate. We do not raise that point to disparage any one institution; we raise it because it reveals a wider problem in program architecture. Accessibility cannot be judged by branding alone. It has to be measured by actual outcomes and by whether businesses facing the greatest structural barriers can realistically qualify and succeed.
This is one reason we believe that performance metrics also need to be reconsidered. Many public and quasi-public programs still rely on metrics that make intuitive sense in mature Southern markets but can distort reality in Northern or Indigenous contexts. A business that is building community capacity, strengthening food security, lowering long-term regional costs, creating culturally grounded employment, or establishing foundational infrastructure may not fit neatly into the same short-horizon expectations used elsewhere. If the goal is to support transformative Indigenous agri-food development, then some programs need to evaluate not only immediate private return, but also regional systems impact, public benefit, infrastructure creation, resilience, and long-term sovereignty outcomes. Those are not secondary effects. In many Northern contexts, they are the real value proposition.
What We Hope Changes Next
This workshop also reaffirmed how closely these issues connect to arguments we have already been making in our own Red Papers. In “Food Charity Is Not Food Security,” we argue that emergency response has an essential role, but that long-term food security requires durable supply-side infrastructure, commercially viable local production, and policy designs that actually lower the cost of fresh food over time. In “AgriTech North for Commercialization,” we argue that Indigenous-led commercialization must not mean surrendering control to outside structures that are misaligned with Indigenous priorities, and that Canadian-made, Indigenous-led infrastructure matters if food sovereignty is to be real rather than symbolic. The Thunder Bay workshop showed, again, that these are not separate conversations. Infrastructure, commercialization, sovereignty, school food, and financing are all parts of the same system.
What we appreciated most about the workshop was that there was room to say these things plainly. Too often, Northern conversations are expected to remain polite at the expense of precision, or optimistic at the expense of structural honesty. This session gave space for directness. It was a fantastic opportunity, and we were genuinely honoured to participate. More importantly, we were grateful to be heard. When a room is willing to listen seriously to the lived realities of Indigenous businesses and Northern food system operators, the conversation immediately becomes more useful, more grounded, and more likely to lead somewhere productive.
We also left with a renewed sense that there is real appetite for structural change, even if much work remains. The IAFS series is asking substantive questions, and that alone is encouraging. If those questions are followed by equally substantive action, whether in land-access policy, infrastructure planning, procurement design, capital reform, or Indigenous business supports, then the process may contribute meaningfully to a better future for Indigenous agriculture and food systems across the country. In Northwestern Ontario, that future must include distribution infrastructure, regionally realistic program design, and a serious respect for the fact that Northern conditions are not a minor variation on Southern agriculture. They are their own reality, and they require their own solutions.
For AgriTech North, the workshop reinforced something we have known for a long time: the barriers facing current and future Indigenous agri-food businesses are not the result of insufficient effort or ambition; they are structural and systemic. That means the response must also be structural and systemic. We need capital frameworks that recognize unequal starting points. We need land conversations that recognize actual geography and actual history. We need food policy that understands logistics, not just aspiration. We need school food systems that are built on infrastructure, not patched together around its absence. And we need the province and the country to understand that the North cannot continue to be treated as an afterthought in food system design.
We are thankful to the organizers, participants, and to everyone who made space for these discussions in Thunder Bay. We left the workshop encouraged, not because the problems are small, but because the opportunity for change is real when people are willing to confront the more difficult issues honestly. We hope that the conversations begun there will support present and future Indigenous agri-food businesses more effectively, more equitably, and more practically than the status quo has allowed. If this process helps move even a few key systems, whether around distribution, financing, business supports, land access, or institutional procurement, then it was well worth the trip.
