Dr. Claudia Krywiak:  Farming is a huge part of Ontario’s economy. We have more farms than any other province, and lead the country in greenhouse production, soya beans and corn. But climate change is making it harder to grow food, and extreme weather is only adding to the challenge. At the same time, demand for fresh local food keeps rising.  

Welcome to Where Next Happens, a podcast about Ontario’s innovators and entrepreneurs. I’m Dr. Claudia Krywiak, President and CEO of the Ontario Center of Innovation. Today, we’re talking about agriculture technology and the future of food.  

Ontario has set a big goal: boosting food production by 30% by 2032. That’s going to take innovation, new technology, new strategies, and new ways of thinking. The federal and provincial governments recently invested $9 million to help farmers adopt sustainable practices, and researchers are warning that without adaptation, we could see major drops in crop yields or even total crop failures in some areas.  

One solution might be hiding beneath our feet, in the tiny but powerful world of microbes, and today’s guest is an expert in exactly that. One company leading this innovation is Ceragen. They’re using microbiology to help plants grow stronger, healthier and more resilient. Danielle Rose is the head grower at Ceragen and a scientist turned entrepreneur. She’s here to tell us how microbial inoculants are changing the way we grow food and what it takes to bring this kind of innovation to market.  

Welcome, Danielle, it is great to have you.  

Danielle Rose: Yeah, thanks for having me.  

Dr. Claudia: So, your origin story? Can you take us back to the beginning? How did the idea for Ceragen come about, and what problems were you trying to solve? 

Danielle: What would become Ceragen kind of started a few times throughout my work history, as well as my education. I did an undergrad at the University of Guelph, which is an agriculture focused university here in Ontario. One of the things that I got really, really interested in my undergrad was this concept we call the great plate count anomaly. 

In microbiology, we can culture about 1% of the world’s microbes in the lab using conventional techniques. That means 99% of the world’s microbes, and all the things that they could be used for, from an industrial perspective, are untapped.  

I thought this was crazy. We need to have access to this other 99% of resources. There’s so much stuff out there that could have beneficial traits for things like, drug development or for use in industrial applications or farming and agriculture. I got very interested in this concept of culturing novel microbes. That was something I was really interested in in my undergrad. When I graduated, I worked on kind of another, different startup idea with a friend. We tried a few different things. We could never really find a good product market idea. 

Then after a few iterations of that, I kind of came back to my roots. I was like, “You know what? I really want to focus on solving this concept and this problem of culturing the unculturable microbes.” But you can’t just like culture microbes and not have a reason why. I mean, you can, but then that’s more just fundamental research.  

It’s like, okay, I went to University of Guelph. I know microbes can help plants grow better. I learned about that in class. I want to go see if I can help find new microbes and use them to increase crop yields, and then market discovery and talking to growers and farmers and investigating the industry here in Ontario is how I ended up in controlled environment agriculture. We have a massive greenhouse sector here in Ontario most people are not aware of. In fact, in the Essex County, we have the largest concentration of greenhouses in all of North America.  

That’s kind of this little hidden gem here in Ontario. I started working on basically developing solutions for this greenhouse industry. Because most people don’t realise it exists, it does tend to get ignored in the grand scheme of agriculture. Even here in Canada, we’re — Canadians are considered second in the world in greenhouse technology. But most Canadians don’t know that.  

If you’re in the Netherlands, like you know that the Netherlands and the Dutch are good at growing in greenhouses, and they’re considered first in the world. But here in Canada, it’s kind of not known, even though we are considered second. 

Dr. Claudia: It sounds like right from the start during your studies, you knew you wanted to be an entrepreneur. Can you talk a little bit about that? When did you get that entrepreneurial bug and decide that, “No, I want to commercialise this science, this innovation that I’m working on”. As opposed to continuing down the research path? 

Danielle:  Yeah, so I’ve always just liked solving problems, and I’ve kind of always wanted to do my own thing, even since I was really young. That has been kind of a bent that I’ve had even since I was kid. I think that entrepreneurship was just kind of the continuation of where that was taking me. Plus, I’m not a big fan of a lot of the slower timeframes that we find in academia.  

So industry was definitely where I wanted to end up. And then, yeah, for companies like this, like this is what I would call Frontier Field. We are at the very beginning of this innovation. There aren’t massive companies that are leading the way, per se. We’re starting to see that in this industry. But it’s really like a very new, very blue ocean kind of technology. A startup was kind of one of the better ways to get into this and to start working on these products. 

Dr. Claudia: Was there a particular breakthrough or aha moment that made you realise Ceragen had the potential to become something big? 

Danielle: I think it was really understanding the scope of agriculture more so than the technology itself. Even going to the University of Guelph, I didn’t really understand how big agriculture is, and how much food we really produce. The more I learned about greenhouses, too, greenhouses are very interesting food production systems. We can actually produce 10 times more food per acre in a greenhouse than we can in field agriculture. It’s very concentrated, it’s very optimised, it’s very high tech in comparison to what people think of when they think about farming.  

Greenhouses are more and more becoming what we consider more like food factories than they are like traditional agriculture. Even when we talk about yield increases, most of the time in greenhouses, we’re talking small yield increases as far as optimisation, like a few percent. But what that means is millions of metric tons of produce, and when you’re dealing with commodities, industries like even very small improvements can have major ramifications. 

Dr. Claudia: Let’s talk a little bit about making science more accessible. The primary technology behind your solution is microbial inoculants, and to the average person, that sounds fairly complex. How did you craft a message that made this technology easy for farmers, investors and consumers to understand? 

Danielle: Yeah. So, partly trying to relate it back to things that people do understand. We like to call them probiotics for plants, relating it to some of the things that people would experience in their day to day life. The microbial world is a little hard for a lot of people to wrap their heads around when they first start, because we’re talking about things people can’t see. They’re hard to measure, they’re hard to see. It’s very complicated.  

There’s a lot of inference that we have to do in the sort of research where we do something and there’s a reaction, then we have to kind of figure out what happened based on all that, which is, we’re dealing with some of the most complicated communities and ecosystems on the planet. When we talk about the soil microbiome as, just like the sheer number of species and organisms involved, which is in the order of 10 to the nine or more. I’d actually have to go look up that number. But we were talking about wild complexity.  

And so it is a very hard system for a lot of people to start to understand, but more so, I would say that that’s more on the true deep understanding to get the general kind of gist of what’s going on. A layman’s term understanding of what’s happening is actually pretty easy. Most of what I would say, like a microbiology degree is it’s more like taking a French degree than it is like taking, say, a heavy math course.  

What you’re learning is a lot of terms, a lot of basically definitions of things. It’s a whole new language. It takes till like, second or third year before you can read a paper and not have to Google words. That is the part where we’re really focusing on, is how we can take this information that people can’t get access to because they can’t read the papers. They’d be having to Google like every fourth word, and it’s how do we take that and synthesise out the information they do need to know and all the kind of like, what it means and the implications without getting kind of lost in the jargon. You spend a lot of time translating Biology into English. 

Dr. Claudia: Agriculture is a field where trust is really key. So, what was the biggest challenge in getting farmers and greenhouse operators to adopt your technology? 

Danielle:  Existing for multiple years. No, actually, though, in farming you kind of need to be a known entity. You have to be around. You have to show up with things. You have to show your face. People need to see that you exist over time, so that they believe that you’re going to be here next year, that it’s worth spending time actually interacting with you. There was literally just the first couple of years, we’re just putting in our time, like showing up to everything. Really making ourselves and our presence known.  

Then the other side of things is you have to, you know, farmers are they’ll believe it when they see it kind of crowd. You’ve got to show them what you can do and you have to, like, they’re not going to believe you. Just because you say it, they have to see it on their own operations.  

Dr. Claudia: When you say showing up at everything, when you talk about the agriculture sector, what does that mean? Like, what are the networking events in agriculture? How do you engage with farmers? Because this might be a little bit different than from in some other sectors, like biotech, for example. 

Danielle:  Yeah, I’d say it is, and it isn’t. It’s conferences. This is a very old school industry still. We are in person. We are boots on the ground. We are basically talking to the farmers at these conferences, at networking events. We work with the industry associations and basically at their kind of Lunch-and-Learn events and things like that. We have the advantage that this industry is very highly concentrated, at least here in Ontario to Leamington, Kingsville, South Essex kind of area.  

I spend about a few days a month just in that area taking meetings with growers, and I actually-    now we have a number of trials. So I kind of do this milk run of delivering products, taking meetings with growers, visiting everyone, and then coming back to our R&D facilities here in Kitchener, Waterloo. 

Dr. Claudia: Taking an idea from the lab to the market isn’t easy. Can you talk a little bit about some of the hurdles in turning Ceragen into a viable business, and where you currently are in terms of your commercialisation journey? 

Danielle:  Yeah, we’re in, I would say, commercial pilots. We’re doing large scale trials with growers. We are on, I want to say over 30 acres. In fact, I think that number is more recently, much higher this season. We’re really picking up steam, getting a lot more traction with growers than we have in previous years, this year. That’s been really exciting development for the company, and partly that is just the being around long enough, everyone is now starting to actually take notice. That’s kind of like where we are.  

It’s hard. When I started this company, before, actually, I started this one, I was listening to a founder do a Fireside chat. His advice for new founders and kind of his reflection on the startup journey was, he was like, starting a company was the hardest thing he’d ever done. It just kept getting harder and the longer that we do this, the more I realise what that means. Because you hear those words and you just don’t really comprehend in the early days, because you run into this thing where, basically, like your problems level up the same way that you do.  

You overcome new problems, you figure out new things, and you overcome these challenges. But after those challenges are harder challenges, and then harder challenges after those. Every new success, and every new- like, you look back on stuff you did two years ago, and you’ll be like, that was child’s play. I could do that in my sleep today.  

But it’s in comparison to the challenges that we have now. As far as now, most of these, we call them good problems to have. These are scaling problems. They’re like, “Oh, how do I build a team? How do I manage people? How do I do all of these things?” Because most founders, unless you’re a second time founder, they don’t have any experience. It is the first time most people have ever done this sort of thing. That is actually one of the most challenging things about starting a company is like, there’s no one else to do it. You’ve just got to figure it out.  

Every single day is new challenges that you have never encountered before and don’t have any of the background to know how to solve. That’s your job, is to figure it out. 

Dr. Claudia: I have to ask you, what would you say to the people listening to this podcast, to the entrepreneurs and innovators that are thinking about starting up their own company or are in the process? What advice would you give them? 

Danielle: Do your market discovery. Actually, what would have made a huge difference to our trajectory of the company, and like if I’d gone and worked in the greenhouse industry for a year or two before we started this company. The amount of time and energy it would have saved us on making progress and connections; we wouldn’t have lost time. Even though, if I’d taken two years to go work in the industry and then start with the company, I’d say we’d still probably either be in the same position we are today, or in a better position with the same amount of time put in.  

That’s something that I didn’t really understand prior to coming into this industry. I’d say it’s not necessarily true for all industries, but especially older industries where, like, not software. So you’re talking about energy or construction or farming, or any of those sort of industries where it’s a lot more like relationship businesses. That network and building that trust and understanding your customers’ problems better than they understand it themselves and the whole ecosystem that you’re trying to integrate into is very, very difficult as an outsider. 

This year, we’ve started a two acre commercial demonstration site, which is where I’m actually at right now. And oh, boy, has it been a learning experience. We have been drinking from the fire hose, but there’s so much that we have learned in doing this exercise about our customers and how their world works, and like what they’re dealing with on a daily basis. When I have conversations with growers now, I ask wildly different questions than I asked a year ago. Because I understand the context of where they’re coming from. I understand what they’re dealing with in their daily life. 

Dr. Claudia: Startups often struggle with growth and specifically with scale up. Can you talk a little bit about some of the strategies that have been effective in scaling Ceragen up, and also the types of support that you think are important for companies that are scaling up? 

Danielle: Yeah, so I think that there’s a number. One of them is always financial. It is very difficult to get an early stage biotech company up off the ground because biology is very expensive. Having access to financial resources that can help get you through those early developmental years when you don’t have a lot of revenue or no revenue coming in, is really essential.  

The other thing is talent. Startups live and die by their people. If you have a good team, that is how you build a good company in the early days. Because all there is, is you and your little team. You need the best people you can get. So, as far as how you build that talent pipeline for like, again, what that turns into, scaling up wise, is you need to have a talent pipeline. If you need microbiologists and you need top tier microbiologists. It’s very difficult to just go out and hire those off the street. Everything still does work a lot through referrals or people that you’ve had experience with.  

We’d have a really strong co-op program at our lab. We’ve had co-ops that have gone on to do fourth year projects with us. We’ve had co-ops now that are doing their master’s degrees with us. That’s kind of our long term R&D talent pipeline is like having these people who’ve worked with us for multiple years that we can then draw on that talent pool as we start to scale up the company. Because it is very difficult to hire people just kind of out of the blue and know whether or not you’re going to get someone who’s good, someone who’s experienced. 

Our co-ops, they’ve, worked for us for multiple Co-p terms. If they were to say, Come on, full time as microbiologists, they can just hit the ground running. They know everything. They know everything is on the shelf. 

Dr. Claudia: In terms of that type of talent, that’s very highly skilled talent. Do you find yourself competing against the bigger companies, the incumbent firms, for that talent? And how do you kind of stay competitive and convince someone to come work for a startup company when they can go work for one of the large conglomerates, for example?  

Danielle: Yeah, I’m going to be honest with you. There’s a lot less jobs in biology than there is in, say, software. That’s not as big of an issue for us. It is very sector dependent. Yeah, that is something they don’t tell you when you talk about going into STEM is that there are very different levels of job availability in the different STEM degrees. 

Dr. Claudia: Let’s talk about that a little bit as someone who went into STEM and pursued kind of an entrepreneurial pathway — not everyone does. What advice would you give to someone who is either a post secondary student in STEM or considering graduate studies in STEM. Specifically in your area, what are the opportunities? What advice would you give them or advice that you wish you had when, when you were starting out?  

Danielle: Learn to code. Step one. 

Dr. Claudia:  Learn to code, okay, yes. So, even if you’re going into biology, learn to code. 

Danielle: Yes. In fact, it is probably easier to get a job in biology as a software developer than it is as a biologist, just based on job availability and the demand for those sorts of skills. So much of biology is bioinformatics and data analysis and things like that. If you know how to code, that makes you much better at that and much faster at it. So, like, I would say that anyone who’s considering going into biology needs to take Python.  

Otherwise, look for places where there are opportunities, I would say that are like very robust job markets. There are some in biology where we desperately need more people. Medical lab technician is definitely one right now in Canada. I have a friend who basically, a lot of people do an undergrad in biology and then go do their college technician degree in medical lab tech. All of our hospitals desperately need medical lab techs.  

You want to talk about job security, that’s a great profession to go into right now. Because a lot of people who were in those positions are all now retiring. We have this massive, basically, like, gaping hole in our job market. I think that there are certain areas in biology where there’s, really, really high demand for biologists, but you do need to know where those are. Go talk to people that have jobs in the field, figure out what their advice would be, and where they see the opportunities. 

Dr. Claudia:  That’s great advice, and really, I think it applies in general. Network, network, network. Meet new people, learn different, different perspectives, and that will bring opportunities. In the last few minutes, let’s talk a bit about the future, and specifically the future of agtech in Ontario. If you were to look ahead five or 10 years, where do you see the biggest opportunities for innovation in Ontario’s agricultural sector? 

Danielle: I would love to see people actually pay attention to the greenhouse industry, because up till now, they haven’t. Ontario and Canada could be a powerhouse in this industry, not just from our own internal production, where we do have, not a massive population. Our sector can only get so big, just even supporting our own internal production. Although if we do diversify into more crops, that will help, but we do service the US market as well, here from Ontario. So, there are export opportunities as well, but we have the opportunity to be a big technology exporter.  

Right now, the Netherlands is kind of like dominating that market. All the best technology comes from the Netherlands in this industry. Everyone looks to the Dutch as the key opinion leaders and the thought leaders in the space. Well, there’s no reason Ontario couldn’t be that. If we put resources into it, if we actually, like, you know, people in Ontario realise that that’s where their tomatoes come from, where their peppers come from, where their cucumbers come from, and increasingly, lettuce. 

We’re in the process of trying to figure out strawberries there. That one’s been a fickle little creature. I could do a whole 30 minute rant on strawberries, but there are more and more crops that we’re trying to start to bring into the greenhouse now. There are exercises that need to be done. We need to breed new seeds that were designed for greenhouse production, because it’s wildly different from field production. We grow vertical. We grow big crops.  

We need to develop new growing systems that are better for each crop type that we’re thinking about bringing in. If it’s like blackberries or blueberries or raspberries or melons or any of those sort of crops. Most of it, what we’re going to see from greenhouse production is fresh fruit and vegetables. But there a lot of the fresh fruit and vegetable aisle could translate into the greenhouse.  

We just need to kind of figure out some of these crops, which does take time. If you’re breeding new varieties, that’s going to take a decade. We have to kind of start now, though, if we want to have that technology available 10 years from now, when, say, we can’t produce it in field anymore. 

Dr. Claudia: In terms of accelerating that timeline, because 10 years sounds like a very, very long time. Especially if you look at other sectors where technology development and technology adoption are really accelerating timelines for commercialisation. Do you see an opportunity in the agriculture sector for technology to accelerate some of those timelines? Should we be looking at accelerating the adoption of certain types of technologies to further the sector along?  

Danielle: I think that there is, and there isn’t ways to accelerate it. There are, in the fact that there are certain things that are going to help with seed breeding, where we can do more rapid seed development. Unfortunately, in biology, this is one of the tough things about agriculture is and, just that people aren’t aware of, that we really do need to be aware of going forward into the future, is that plants take time. You have to run a full season of tomatoes to be able to get yield data. That’s 8 to 12 months.  

There’s no way to accelerate that, because you have to run it the whole season. We have to do a lot of these things in real time. The only way to accelerate the development is to do it at scale. So basically running as many things in parallel as possible. In that instance, we can do some things faster by running things in parallel and figuring out how to do that better. Now there are other technologies that will just make what we’re doing in agriculture a lot more efficient. Like what we’re working on trying to help make growers more efficient.  

There’s other things that we’re looking at implementing, like the beneficial insect industry is a great example of technology that’s been adopted by the greenhouse sector, where they’re transitioning away from pesticides and using basically bug on bug warfare so that we can have lower pesticide residues. Honestly, the pesticides are stopping working anyways. This was kind of an inevitable transition. They had no choice, because we are fighting an arms race.  

We’re banning very harmful pesticides for very valid reasons. But what it means is that we are losing opportunities, I mean, ways to combat pests with chemical warfare. So, we do need to have other options, which is, where we’re seeing now, the rise of biologicals. Some of that stuff is much faster. We can do that much sooner. But when we talk about climate change and how we’re going to deal with that, how are we going to feed people in the face of all these problems? It’s like, well, if you want, new varieties and new crops that we need to bring into agriculture, like we have to start today if you want this to be ready 5 to 10 years from now, otherwise, people are not going to eat. 

Dr. Claudia: What’s next? What excites you most about the future of sustainable food production and the role that Ceragen will play in that future? 

Danielle: I just want to help farmers continue to solve problems. Right now, we’re trying to help farmers basically optimise their yields. We’re working with growers on all of the largest crops grown in greenhouse agriculture. What that looks like next? I don’t exactly know. 

We’re solving this problem today, but I think that going forward, we’re going to continue to work with this sector to see how else we can help them continue to increase their yields. How else can we help them continue to be profitable while still keeping food prices affordable for consumers? Which is a big challenge because we are talking about the commodities industry. What that exactly looks like, I don’t know. All I know is I’m just going to keep going and talking to farmers and asking them what their problems are and seeing if we can help. 

Dr. Claudia: Awesome. Thank you, Danielle. Thank you for joining us and sharing your insights on what it takes to bring innovations to market in the agriculture sector and the exciting things that Ceragen is doing.  

Danielle: Yeah, thanks again for having me. 

Dr. Claudia: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Where Next Happens to learn more about Danielle Rose’s work and the future of sustainable farming. Visit ceragengrow.com  

Where Next Happens is produced by the Ontario Center of Innovation. This episode was produced by Jasmine Rach and edited by Gaytan Harris. Amanda Caputo is the executive producer, and I’m your host, Dr. Claudia Krywiak.  

Ready to take your idea to the next level? The Ontario Center of Innovation helps innovators access the funding, mentorship and resources they need to drive the future forward. Visit oc-innovation.ca to learn more. We are a newly launched podcast, and we’d love to scale. If you liked this episode, please share it with your peer who’s also inspired to innovate.