The University of the Fraser Valley (UFV) is set to co-lead an agri-tech project to mentor entrepreneurs thanks to federal government funding announced this morning.
Lenore Newman, director of the UFV's Food and Agriculture Institute, told BIV that Ottawa is providing $16.2 million to fund the initiative, dubbed Sustainable Food Systems for Canada (SFSC).
She expects the UFV's share of that money to be around $3 million because it is a co-lead with the University of Guelph. In all, 13 universities across the country are expected to take part in the project.
"It's a huge coup for UFV," said Newman, who is the chair of SFSC. "This dwarfs anything we've done before, for the university as a whole."
She said her institute, based at the university's Chilliwack campus, employs four people and that the new money should enable her to hire another four people.
"This isn't a research grant," she said. "We will be mentoring early stage entrepreneurs, and companies, to help them get good ideas to market."
As the Western Canadian project co-lead, UFV will work closely with the University of Alberta and Vancouver Island University. Newman said Simon Fraser University is an informal partner because the university was not on the original grant.
"We'll train entrepreneurs in how to do things like pitch to get venture capital and how to navigate early stage troubles in a company and we'll be directly mentoring them," she said. "We'll connect them with experts in the field and successful entrepreneurs."
The project aims to nurture business-minded research while developing a Canadian base of educated innovators who bring solutions to market,” she added.
“The world is facing significant challenges with food security, much of that due to climate change, and we need to be looking at new ways of doing things,” Newman said. “We need to support agri-food entrepreneurs and encourage the development of technologies with the goal of increasing Canada’s food production and resiliency. That is the [project's] mission.”
Newman said competition for the project funding was fierce and involved proposals from other technology niches.
Funding is through a program called Lab to Market grants and is administered by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada in collaboration with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
Newman has long been attentive to technology shifts in food production. In 2022, for example, she told BIV that there was a global shift toward having robots pick fruit because of a worldwide farm-worker shortage.
She has also been an advocate for food manufacturing to be able to take place on Agricultural Land Reserve land.
