Built in Dryden, for the North

AgriTech North began with a return home.

In 2021, Benjamin Feagin Jr. and Fabian Velez moved to Dryden, Ontario, to be closer to Ben’s family and to consider what kind of future they could build in the place that helped raise him. Ben brought a background in engineering, research and development, manufacturing, sensor systems, building science, and commercialization. Fabian brought a lifelong relationship with growing, food, operations, social contribution, and practical implementation. Together, they had the kind of cross-disciplinary skill set usually found in large urban innovation centres, but they were asking a different question: what would it look like to use those skills in a rural Northern community?

The answer did not come from a branding exercise. It came from listening, researching, and confronting the food system around them.

During the pandemic, the weaknesses in Northwestern Ontario’s food system became harder to ignore. Fresh food is too often treated as a luxury, especially in rural, remote, Northern, and Indigenous communities. Ben had grown up with food insecurity in Dryden, and was disturbed that the same issues continued to be pervasive in his home region. Transportation costs, distance, seasonality, energy costs, and fragile distribution networks all shape what people can buy, what communities can access, and what families can afford. In many places, the problem is not only that food is expensive; the problem is that the infrastructure required to make fresh food available year-round had never been built at the scale, cost, or reliability the region needed.

Ben and Fabian spent roughly a year researching the market, studying the bottlenecks, speaking with local and regional partners, and asking where their combined skills could create the greatest social impact. What began as a small high-tech agriculture concept became something more ambitious: an Indigenous-led food-sovereignty enterprise designed to make fresh, nutritious food more available, more affordable, and more locally controlled throughout the world.

That work became AgriTech North.

The company’s early mission was direct: grow high-quality fresh produce year-round in Northwestern Ontario, keep it competitively priced, and use the Dryden operation as a practical model for communities that face even greater food access barriers. From the beginning, the goal was not simply to sell greens. The goal was to help prove that fresh food infrastructure could work in places where conventional systems had failed or never arrived.

The first major physical step was 250 Duke Street in Dryden. AgriTech North acquired and transformed surplus municipal property into an indoor farm, food business, and research site. A building that had sat underused became a working food security facility. Inside, AgriTech North began growing leafy greens, herbs, and fruiting crops year-round, serving households, restaurants, schools, institutions, and community partners across the region.

The early years were not easy. Post-pandemic supply chains were unstable, equipment arrived late, defective, or did not perform as promised, and off-the-shelf indoor growing systems did not meet the practical demands of Northern operation. Instead of treating those failures as reasons to stop, AgriTech North treated them as design problems. The company modified systems, repaired and modified equipment, improved processes, and began developing its own technologies to address the two operating cost barriers that determine whether year-round food production can survive in cold climates: labour and energy.

That is how AgriTech North evolved from an indoor farm into a Living Lab.

The Dryden facility became a place to grow food now, while testing the infrastructure needed for the future. AgriTech North began developing and protecting technologies for rugged climate food production, including greenhous envelope systems, hydronic microclimate-control systems, vertical growing improvements, and energy integration strategies. These inventions were not imported concepts looking for a market. They were developed inside a working Northern food business that had to solve its own cost, climate, maintenance, and reliability problems in real time.

As the company grew, its original mission inspiration became more clearly tied to Indigenous food sovereignty. AgriTech North’s work is grounded in the understanding that food security is not only about emergency relief or cheaper products. It is about the ability of communities to grow, process, distribute, sell, and govern food systems on fair terms. For rural, remote, Northern, and Indigenous communities, that means food infrastructure must be practical, maintainable, energy-conscious, culturally relevant, and economically durable.

That principle shaped the company’s broader community work. AgriTech North contributed to regional food sovereignty planning, supported educational grow units and food literacy programming, worked with First Nation and Métis partners, donated fresh food locally, supported school-based growing education, and began building aggregation and market access pathways for other producers and vendors. The company’s storefront, delivery, B2B supply, vendor network, and food infrastructure work are all part of the same idea: local food systems need shared capacity, not isolated projects.

AgriTech North’s origin story is therefore not a story about two people moving home to start a farm. It is a story about returning to a region, recognizing that food insecurity was an infrastructure problem, and building a company capable of addressing it from multiple directions at once.

Today, AgriTech North remains rooted in Dryden. It is shaped by the same commitments that defined its beginning: food sovereignty, education, sustainability, and workplace inclusion. But the work has expanded from local production into regional distribution, research and development, clean-energy integration, Indigenous-owned intellectual property, vendor aggregation, school and community engagement, and commercialization of technologies designed for the climates and communities conventional systems too often overlook.

The reason for the work remains simple. Fresh food should not become unaffordable because of a postal code, a winter road, a broken supply chain, or the absence of infrastructure. Communities should not have to choose between emergency food relief and long-term food sovereignty. Northern, rural, remote, and Indigenous communities deserve food systems designed for their realities.

AgriTech North was built to invent and deliver on those infrastructure systems.

It began with a return home. It continues as a commitment to build the infrastructure that makes year-round fresh food possible wherever it is needed most.