The research behind the gathering
We have been looking across Canadian agrifood and beyond, following the tools and institutions that can make knowledge more useful and adaptable.
This is not a catalogue of projects. It is a way into the questions that brought us to the event.
Open-source agrifood is not one thing. It appears in software, hardware, public data, scientific instruments, and shared rules. Sometimes it gives people more room to act. Sometimes it makes a system easier to inspect without changing who controls it. Sometimes it is not present at all—and that absence tells us something.
Our landscape now includes 79 verified records across production, water, livestock, post-harvest work, diagnostics, processing, logistics, markets, and agroforestry. Taken together, they show an emerging field with real achievements, serious limits, and room to grow.
In this context, “open” is practical rather than absolute: it describes how much people can inspect, use, adapt, and share. The significance is what that access makes possible—more capacity to work with systems, more room to respond to local needs, and potentially more benefit beyond the original provider.
Open tools are most durable when people can understand and adapt what they use. Irrigation, crop-water modelling, forest monitoring, diagnostics, and logistics all show open approaches moving beyond experiment into sustained use.
As systems become more expensive and dependent on large industrial or biological infrastructures, openness becomes harder to sustain. Farm automation, greenhouse control, livestock fencing, elevators, and bulk logistics remain places where access to a tool does not necessarily mean control of the system around it.
The landscape is not a story of one movement or one model. It is a collection of capacities: people adapting equipment, institutions building shared infrastructure, cooperatives changing platform rules, and researchers opening instruments and datasets.
Three viability questions followed all the way into the open record — each with evidence labelled by provenance, an honesty clause, and a plain statement of what the case does not demonstrate.
A viability case for an open milking robot against a quota-capped Ontario dairy farm, where supply management means the value case reduces to labour, service, data and capital cost — exactly where openness changes the picture.
What openness would change in Canada’s most closed farming sector, followed across a three-rung ladder: a backyard unit, a northern community greenhouse where the vendor service model fails outright, and the commercial facility where no open layer exists at any price.
Data-center waste heat as an energy input for controlled environment agriculture: what actually operates today, what the physics allows, what is only announced — and where an open layer could still enter a pairing that is forming entirely closed.
“The open agrifood layer has achieved robust, peer-reviewed, and production-proven viability across decentralized small-scale interventions, scientific simulation engines, and cooperative logistics, but hits a hard capital and biological enclosure wall at broad-acre industrial control.”
— Open-source agrifood landscape synthesis, v3
That boundary is where the interesting work begins. How might new intelligence increase the capacity of the people and institutions that feed us? Where could openness create real benefit—and what would it take to carry it further?
Read the landscape synthesis, browse the records, and bring your own experience to the conversation. The event is an opportunity to put this knowledge in motion.