This article appears in the 2026 BetaKit Most Ambitious issue. Read more stories of the Canadian tech innovators strengthening our autonomy, security, and prosperity here.
If you take Alberta’s Highway 2 south from Edmonton toward Calgary, the landscape is pure prairie. The highway bisects fields that unfold endlessly toward a horizon that most evenings is a pastel blend of mauve and sherbet orange.
There’s little else along this stretch of rural paradise, save for rest stops and the occasional lonely highway casino, their parking lots full of F-150s. Driving this route between Alberta’s major cities can become so routine that the only way to tell you’re actually moving is to count the passing farms that dot the landscape.
One of those farms is distinctly not like the others.
Just 45 minutes shy of Red Deer, in Olds, Alta., sits the Olds College Smart Farm. The 3,300 acres on which this part of a century-old post-secondary institution sits look like most other farms in the area. The fields rotate with the seasons between green, canola yellow, and gold. Its herd of purebred Red Angus cattle and flocks of sheep graze leisurely in the feedlot.
But looks can be deceiving. This farm—and a network of others like it across Canada—is growing the next generation of agricultural innovation.
IP farming
The Olds College Smart Farm officially began in 2018 with the idea of finding a way to support technology development in the Canadian agriculture industry. Today, it leads the Pan-Canadian Smart Farm Network, a $2.9-million coalition of farms focused on research and development. With members throughout Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Southern Ontario, the network of smart farms tests and refines R&D projects across the agricultural sector, serving as vital proving grounds for IP, and refining innovations so they are adoption-ready for industry professionals.
“As companies come out with different technology, they want to have that validated or evaluated for their own use. They can come to Olds College, and we can help them create a project where we are validating or demonstrating their product, which they can then use for their own purposes going forward,” said Herman Simons, the manager of smart agriculture applied research at Olds College Smart Farm.
“It’s definitely that last step between product development and actually showing off what [a piece of tech] does so that producers can see and have confidence in it,” he added.
The types of projects being carried out at the Smart Farm run the gamut, touching all aspects of the agricultural industry. Over its tenure, the farm has worked with more than 400 organizations on projects as distinct as turning biofuel emissions into fertilizers, using drones to survey hail damage to crop fields, and floating plants to purify water contaminated by feedlot runoff, to name just a few.
The stakes are too high not to focus on being more competitive and productive.
Justine Hendricks, CEO Farm Credit Canada
Simons is quick to point out that while Olds College Smart Farm doesn’t own the resulting IP, it helps fine-tune it. The applied research the college carries out is a critical step in moving the needle on which AgTech actually makes its way into the fields and feedlots of the country.
“From the perspective of a producer, to have confidence in what’s being presented to you as a product because it’s been tested and validated by an independent organization…is extremely valuable,” Simons said. “From the other side—the innovator’s perspective—who has a new product or idea and wants to figure out ‘would that work? How would it work within a farming scenario?’ I think we play a huge part in that area as well.”
Ask people across this country what our economic driver is and you’ll receive all manner of answers, from Alberta’s oil sands to Southern Ontario’s automotive manufacturing. All play their part, but the Canadian ag sector plays an outsized role, contributing more to Canada’s gross domestic product (GDP) than oil and gas and automotive combined.
Accounting for roughly seven percent—nearly $150 billion—of the national GDP, agriculture supports around 2.3 million jobs across the various sectors and branches that make up the industry. The Canadian agriculture sector is also a global force, ranking seventh among G20 and European nations. That’s just six slots below our southern neighbour, whose economy dwarfs ours by a ratio of 13:1. That comparison slims, however, when you look at our two countries’ shares of the global ag market, where the American advantage shrinks to just 2.5:1, according to Farm Credit Canada (FCC), a Crown corporation that finances the agriculture sector.
This means that, relative to our size and output, the Canadian agriculture sector punches far above its weight on the world stage. But our positioning isn’t foregranted, and in recent years the industry has risked losing influence. Forecasts have predicted that Canada could drop to ninth place in global rankings by 2035, citing a variety of factors, from overreliance on the US at the expense of emerging markets like Africa and Southeast Asia to dwindling capital funding.
That’s not news to Todd Ormann, Olds College’s vice-president of external relations and research. A lifelong farmer who holds a master’s degree in agricultural economics, Ormann said Canada’s market share has been decreasing alongside a lack of investment in R&D.
“The relevance of agriculture to the average consumer is starting to drop, and that scares a lot of aggies because the investment in genetics and technology that keeps this industry very successful for us is not happening today. We are down about 21 percent since 1985 in our investment in agricultural research,” Ormann said.
Sovereign yield
The level of reliance Canada has on its agriculture sector means that any weakening translates to a weaker Canada overall. The industry and the country are waking up to that fact. As recently as last September, FCC began to outline road maps for diversification away from the US, buttressing the sector against a turbulent administration’s trade policy. But CEO Justine Hendricks told BetaKit that technology and innovation remain the biggest inflection point to keep Canada’s place as a dominant player.
“What matters for our future is competitiveness,” she said. “One of the most important drivers of competitiveness is innovation, and we need to be more competitive than the US over time. The stakes are too high not to focus on being more competitive and productive.”
Over the decades, farming has changed in this country. While the number of farms has fallen, their average size has increased, representing a shift toward a more industrialized way of operating. That same shift has happened in innovation, according to Ormann, who said much research is now consolidated in global companies that view Canada as a relatively small consumer market for precision agriculture technology. That makes the work happening at Olds College Smart Farm all the more salient.
“For Canada to be sovereign and competitive, you’ve got to start sometimes with just what’s needed right here,” Ormann said. “That’s where sometimes I think we miss out by having too much dependence on the global players. We really do need to think about how we develop technology for local markets and then scale it outside of Canada instead of taking technologies from outside of Canada and bringing them in.”
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BetaKit’s Prairies reporting is funded in part by YEGAF, a not-for-profit dedicated to amplifying business stories in Alberta.