By providing innovators with unbiased feedback on how their innovation performs on a full-scale commercial farm, EMILI helps de-risk it for farmers. This is a vital first step toward advancing the development and adoption of digital agriculture in Canada, and one of the recommended actions in a recent report published by CAPI (Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute) in collaboration with EMILI: At a Digital Crossroads: 5 Actions Canada needs for progress in Digital Agri-Food.
(Report published May 2026)
“Digital tools are already revolutionizing the way food is being produced worldwide, including here at home,” said EMILI Manager, Public Policy and Stakeholder Engagement Kyle Volpi Hiebert. “That leaves Canada with a stark choice: actively shape and accelerate this transition, or risk falling behind peers who move more decisively.”
At a Digital Crossroads follows a 2025 report produced by CAPI and EMILI undertaken to assess the state of digital agriculture in Canada and common barriers to on-farm adoption of new technologies. This new report builds off that work by expanding its scope to identify how gains in primary production will only translate into stronger performance if they are matched by increased digital capacity in processing and throughout the broader supply chain.
“Global and regional uncertainty are now an entrenched feature of the operating environment for the Canadian agri-food industry,” said Volpi Hiebert. “We hope this work can contribute insights to inform important policy conversations taking place right now related to the next agricultural policy framework (2028-2033) that will replace the current Sustainable Canadian Agriculture Partnership (S-CAP).”
Watch CAPI’s Policy Pop-up: Canadian agri-food is at a digital crossroads
Improving on-farm adoption rates is absolutely critical. But on its own, it’s an insufficient means to successfully transition Canada’s agri-food sector to where it needs to be to maintain competitiveness and resilience in the twenty-first century.
“Canada already has the ideas. Our next step is building the pathways that help those ideas work on the ground,” adds EMILI Policy Research Associate Anjolaoluwa Bamgbala, who helped co-author the report. “That means moving beyond pilots and making sure digital tools are practical, scalable, and responsive to the realities of producers and agri-food businesses.”
Five actions Canada can take to drive agtech innovation
According to the report– which was drawn from synthesizing views expressed in more than a dozen interviews with producers, technologists, industry groups and government officials – five actions that Canada can take to drive agtech innovation toward full-scale adoption are:
- Prove what works;
- Fund scaling;
- Make regulations predictable;
- Build trust in data;
- Treat digital as systemic.
With $4.1 billion invested in agrifood tech from 2014-2024 including $263 million in agri-food tech funding in 2024, the innovation ecosystem is shifting. But despite this progress, adoption at full-scale continues to lag.
According to the report, this is because the same constraints identified in 2025 also continue to shape farm-level decision-making by producers: rural connectivity gaps, high upfront capital costs, integration complexity, uneven returns on investment, and unresolved concerns around data ownership and governance, interoperability and the right to repair. Their persistence points to a clear diagnosis. It is not a shortage of proven digital tools available on the market to producers that is suppressing adoption rates. Rather, the need to collaboratively deliver conditions that make adoption low-risk, economically rational, and operationally workable across enterprises.
Cultivating partnerships with producers, industry, investors, and innovators to grow a sustainable, economically resilient digital agriculture industry is vital. EMILI sees this firsthand in its work on Innovation Farms powered by AgExpert and in its collaborations with partners such as CAPI that engage stakeholders in important conversations to advance public policy.
As the report says, “Canada is full of smart ideas—it just needs the right setup to help them grow, scale, and actually stick.”
Volpi-Hiebert co-wrote the report alongside EMILI Policy Research Associate Anjolaoluwa Bamgbala, CAPI Senior Research Fellow Lauren Martin and CAPI Research Associate Elisabeta Lika.