Why Canada’s food-security strategy barely sees ecological farming—and what the agroecological field must build next

Dr. Thorsten Arnold

Abstract

In publishing its new National Food Security Strategy, the Government of Canada has shown what it thinks food security requires: processing capacity, logistics, controlled environments, technology and stronger domestic control.

Agroecology is almost absent. And so is a long-term view on soil health and climate resilience.

My new essay argues that this is not only a failure of government understanding. Agroecology has strong evidence, committed organizations and successful farms—but too little shared strategic capacity to turn them into a national investment proposition.

The essay examines:

• what Canada’s food-security strategy is designed to fund;
• why industrial agriculture is more politically legible;
• what Sustain Ontario and Farmers for Climate Solutions teach us;
• how agroecology could build coordination without creating another self-preserving NGO.

The central proposal is a thin coordinating “membrane” that strengthens the field rather than replacing it.

Canada has shown us what it thinks food security requires

Canada’s first National Food Security Strategy gives a fairly direct answer to a basic question: what does the federal government believe a secure food system needs?

Its answer is stronger grocery competition, more domestic processing, new terminals and regional hubs, faster approval of farm inputs, and major investment in greenhouses, vertical farms and automation. Its governing ambition is summed up as “more choice, more control, and more Canada.” (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, 2026; Prime Minister of Canada, 2026)

The strategy responds to real problems. Food prices have climbed, processing and retail are concentrated, and farmers face high costs for land, fuel, fertilizer and machinery. Regional producers lack aggregation, slaughter, processing and distribution. Several proposed investments could help smaller farms reach larger markets.

Yet one omission is hard to miss. The strategy discusses climate disruption, drought, fertilizer dependence and resilience, but it does not mention agroecology or soil. Biodiversity is absent too. Ecological productive capacity does not appear in its main account of food security. (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, 2026)

Ecological farmers and their allies see living soils, biological diversity, water retention, lower input dependence, regional knowledge and functioning farm communities as conditions for continued production. Land that holds water, cycles nutrients and supports diverse life is better able to produce through drought, flooding, volatile input prices and erratic seasons.

I use agroecology here as shorthand for a wider field connecting ecological farming, organic agriculture, food sovereignty, farmer-led knowledge, regional food systems and working-landscape stewardship. These traditions are not identical. Indigenous food systems carry distinct rights, jurisdictions and governance traditions; they are not a constituency to be absorbed into a settler-defined movement.

I write as someone who has worked with ecological farmers, food-system organizations, conservation groups and policy processes—and who has participated in some of the institutional patterns examined here.

The easiest response is to say that government still does not understand ecological agriculture. The complaint has merit. It is incomplete.

Most organizations are doing what their members, mandates and grants require. Organic organizations defend standards. Food-sovereignty organizations address ownership and power. Local-food groups build markets. Conservation bodies protect habitat. Indigenous Nations advance their own priorities. What is missing is more specific: no durable cross-field function currently carries shared strategic intelligence, narrative coordination and investment design at national scale while remaining accountable to regional and sectoral organizations.

Corporate capital, ownership of processing and retail, lobbying access and research influence create the hostile terrain. The internal coordination gap may not be the largest cause of agroecology’s weakness. It is the constraint over which the field has the greatest agency, and one whose removal would improve its ability to confront those larger concentrations of power.

The title does not suggest that a federal agroecology budget line once existed and was cancelled. Agroecology first lost the contest over what food security would mean. It then lost access to much of the new investment flowing from that definition.

The strategy funds the constraints it can see

Theory of Constraints begins with a simple question: what is preventing a system from achieving its goal? Governments direct money toward the limitations they believe are blocking progress. The critical issue is therefore what model of food security makes particular investments appear necessary.

The strategy defines success mainly through affordability, dependable supply and domestic control. It aims to expand domestic processing, reduce import exposure, strengthen independent retail and lower the cost of moving food from producers to consumers. (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, 2026)

Its bottlenecks are recognizable: concentrated grocery retail, weak wholesale access, costly regional logistics, insufficient processing, barriers to controlled-environment production, and dependence on imported inputs. The response follows the diagnosis. A ten-year Food-Link Fund will support terminals and hubs; financing will expand processing; capital will flow to controlled environments; and regulatory changes will speed access to inputs and technologies. (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, 2026)

These measures sit under one broad diagnosis:

Canada does not control enough of the throughput in its food system.

Food is grown elsewhere, processed abroad or moved through infrastructure controlled by a few firms. Small producers struggle to reach large buyers, winter restricts domestic production, and important inputs come from other countries. The strategy responds with capital, infrastructure, regulation and technology intended to bring more of this flow under Canadian control. (Prime Minister of Canada, 2026)

There is merit in that diagnosis. Ecological farms cannot feed communities when abattoirs are gone, institutional contracts are inaccessible and small-volume logistics are prohibitively expensive. Diversified farming needs aggregation, storage, processing and committed buyers.

But consider the coordination problem on the ground.

A sheep producer will not expand without dependable slaughter, shearing, veterinary support and a viable price. A processor will not invest without predictable volume. A food hub cannot promise supply to a hospital without commitments from enough farms. Farmers cannot reorganize production around a contract that may disappear after one budget year. Each actor waits for the others to commit. A grant may purchase a truck or renovate a building while leaving production planning, margin agreements and reciprocal commitments unfunded.

Physical infrastructure matters. Yet it is not enough.

The federal strategy treats food security mainly as the movement of food through production, processing, logistics and retail. Soil function, water retention, biodiversity, farmer knowledge, biological nutrient cycling and viable rural communities do not appear as central forms of productive infrastructure.

Three contrasts make the boundary visible.

Securing fertilizer supply or reducing fertilizer dependence?

The strategy recognizes that imported fertilizer creates vulnerability. Its remedies emphasize access, domestic supply and faster approvals. Agroecology asks how much purchased fertility the farming system requires in the first place. Biological nutrient cycling, rotations, manure management, perennial systems and soil microbial function remain secondary when input access is assumed to be the solution.

Controlled environments or resilient landscapes?

Greenhouses and protected production have a legitimate place in Canada. The concern is the hierarchy of seriousness. Major capital is directed toward technically controlled spaces, while the ability of soils and landscapes to keep producing through heat, drought and intense rainfall remains peripheral. Climate change appears mainly as an external shock rather than evidence that landscape function has become a production constraint.

Building hubs or building the value chains that sustain them?

A hub does not create ecological farmers, rebuild soil, coordinate production, guarantee demand or decide how margins are divided. Infrastructure can sit underused when farms lack labour, transition support, credible buyers or viable prices. New processing can reinforce existing commodity chains if ownership and purchasing power remain concentrated.

Relieving one bottleneck can simply move the constraint. Canada can build terminals without creating a diversified production base, speed input approvals while deepening input dependence, or expand procurement while retaining specifications and prices that exclude ecological farms.

Within its chosen boundary, the strategy is reasonably coherent. It uses present-day throughput as the measure of future food security. The machinery that moves and processes food receives investment; the regenerative ability of farms and landscapes remains largely off the books.

Agroecology was not weighed and rejected. The strategy’s system boundary made it difficult to see.

Why our field remains politically illegible

The federal system’s blind spot explains the policy result, but not the harder question: why have decades of agroecological work failed to change the model?

Evidence of AE benefits is plentiful. Farmers, local organizations, researchers, Indigenous knowledge holders and conservation partners can show how diverse rotations reduce risk, how soil structure shapes drought response, how grazing supports grassland ecology, and how farmer-to-farmer learning enables complex transitions.

Government rarely encounters these assets as parts of one coherent strategic system. They arrive through separate doors: organic standards, soil practices, local distribution, habitat, food sovereignty, emissions, nutrition and Indigenous governance.

Diversity is not the weakness. Agroecology should remain diverse because landscapes, cultures and political traditions differ. The weakness is the absence of a durable function that can make this diversity strategically intelligible without pretending disagreement has disappeared.

Some differences can coexist under a shared proposition. Others require negotiation. Disputes over corporate partnerships, land reform, certification, pesticide policy, livestock, carbon markets and technology are political conflicts, not communication glitches. A coordinating function should identify where joint action is possible, where dissent must remain visible and where no common position should be attempted.

At present, regional experience has no dependable route into a small number of national propositions. A call for consultation or funding appears; organizations assemble partnerships and compete for a limited pool. Successful applicants deliver worthwhile projects, but knowledge remains fragmented in reports, relationships fade and the next policy cycle begins.

This is a predictable result of today’s funding architecture. Organizations are rewarded for outputs within their mandates. Coordination across mandates appears as overhead or unpaid work placed on stretched executive directors.

The policy system therefore receives evidence from individual projects without receiving a common delivery architecture. A cover-crop incentive is easy to administer. Funding agroecology raises harder questions: who delivers, how success is measured, how regional differences are handled and how the systems logic is protected.

Evidence remains necessary. Government also needs an operating model to turn this evidence into action.

Policy then takes the parts it can administer. Cover crops, grazing, pollinator strips and local-food projects receive separate funding. The relationships among them disappear.

The field’s strategic leverage point is a coordinating function able to turn distributed knowledge into shared intelligence, public meaning and credible propositions.

I use the term coordinating membrane for a paid but deliberately limited function that reads policy changes, moves knowledge between organizations, assembles joint propositions and helps the field act together without taking over members’ work.

The biological metaphor is useful because a membrane does not replace the organs around it. It regulates exchange and protects distinct functions. Its success is measured by what the larger body can do.

Paid staff and projects also create organizational needs. Fundraising, payroll and reporting pull a coordinating body toward program delivery. Members can become audiences, grantees or subcontractors. The body develops a metabolism of its own.

Coordination therefore requires distributed authority, a narrow mandate and program ownership that remains with capable regional and sectoral organizations. Agroecology can keep many voices and still learn to act as a field.

Industrial agriculture did not merely lobby—it organized reality

The ecological blind spot in the federal strategy has a history. Industrial agriculture has spent decades shaping the language in which food security is discussed.

This influence is broader than lobbying or public relations. Lobbying seeks access to a decision. Narrative power shapes the mental model through which officials recognize problems, judge explanations and decide which interventions look practical. Once the model becomes common sense, its political origins fade.

Corporations compete for market share and still cooperate when the production model itself is challenged. As a result, today’s commodity groups, input companies, lenders, research institutions, aligned educational charities, communications firms and public-trust organizations carry acompatible messages through different policy channels. Schools, farm media, university partnerships and publicly funded educational materials reproduce many of the same assumptions in settings that do not look promotional. (Arnold, 2023)

No central office needs to approve every sentence. Participants share a causal grammar.

Productivity is treated mainly as yield and throughput. Greater technical control is associated with security. Scale is assumed to create efficiency. Standardization improves reliability. External inputs protect production. Innovation is identified with commercial technology. Environmental damage can be corrected through better equipment and more precise inputs without disturbing ownership, market power or the structure of production.

Machinery companies celebrate precision, pesticide firms speak of protecting yields, commodity organizations invoke the duty to feed cities, and universities announce innovation partnerships. Different stories reinforce the same worldview.

The Pop Culture Collaborative calls this surrounding field of assumptions a “narrative ocean.” It is carried by many stories, institutions and communities rather than one campaign. Changing it requires leadership, intelligence, networks and long-term relationships, not simply better messaging. (Pop Culture Collaborative, 2022)

Narrative organization does not explain industrial agriculture’s dominance by itself. The sector also commands capital, owns infrastructure, shapes research agendas and enters government as an established delivery partner. Narrative power helps these material advantages appear practical, inevitable and politically neutral.

The National Food Security Strategy speaks much of this grammar. Vulnerability appears wherever technical control is weak: imported fertilizer, limited processing, seasonal production, slow approvals and constrained wholesale access. The remedies are more domestic control, capital, regulatory speed, expanded processing and controlled environments.

Industry lobbyists did not need to write every line for industry to shape the strategy. Officials were already working inside a model that defined what a serious food-security response should look like.

Agroecology has compelling stories: farms recovering degraded soil, communities rebuilding markets, livestock supporting grassland ecology, Indigenous Nations renewing food sovereignty, and growers producing abundant vegetables through biological intensity. Yet these stories usually travel through separate institutions, grants and professional languages. Most public and policy audiences are given no institutional reason to connect the pieces.

A successful ecological farm can therefore be treated as a charming exception, a premium market, a lifestyle choice or a source of useful practices. Cover crops can be extracted. Rotational grazing can be funded. Pollinator habitat can be placed at the edge of the field. Questions about input dependence, scale, ownership, value-chain power and technical control recede.

Industry institutions can absorb criticism by separating a practice from the relationships around it. “Regenerative” practices can be folded into business as usual. Precision spraying becomes stewardship. A cover crop becomes evidence that an input-intensive commodity system is now ecological. Language changes faster than relationships.

Our problem is not that agroecology communicates too little. The field has not organized the conditions under which many different stories can accumulate into shared public judgement and political leverage.

Two institutional lessons from our own field

Canadian and Ontario food movements have built alliances and coalitions that offer valuable lessons. These are lessons from achievement, not case studies of failure. Both Sustain Ontario and Farmers for Climate Solutions became influential because they solved genuine problems. Their success exposed tensions that future field infrastructure must confront.

Sustain Ontario: when an alliance acquired a metabolism

My reading of Sustain Ontario comes from public organizational histories and long engagement with Ontario food-system networks, not from service as Sustain Ontario staff.

Sustain Ontario emerged when many organizations were doing valuable work but none could represent the food system as a whole. It was incorporated in 2008, hired its first director in 2009 and soon convened Bring Food Home conferences and shared policy work. (Sustain Ontario, n.d.)

Its early value came from connection. Organizations kept their identities while contributing to a provincial voice. Working groups formed around particular issues, and local experience travelled into provincial policy.

In the terminology used here, Sustain Ontario was performing a membrane function. Its influence exceeded its staff and budget because it drew on the legitimacy and knowledge of its members.

The role changed gradually. Education networks, farm-to-school work, research and other funded programs required management, fundraising, staff time and a distinct organizational identity.

The alliance acquired a metabolism of its own.

This is not an accusation. An organization with payroll and grant obligations must secure revenue, demonstrate outputs and protect staff positions. Other organizations then encounter it as a project lead, funding partner and sometimes competitor.

A coordination body must be constitutionally prevented from making routine program ownership its path to survival.

That requires enforceable limits on projects, competition and conflicts of interest, plus recurring review of whether surrounding organizations are becoming more capable. Performance should be visible in stronger members and resources moving into the field—not in the growth of the secretariat’s portfolio.

Farmers for Climate Solutions: the power and price of policy legibility

Farmers for Climate Solutions shows how a diffuse concern can become a proposition government understands. Farmer-led task forces bring producers together with climate scientists, economists and other specialists, translating farm experience into language governments can administer. (Farmers for Climate Solutions, n.d.)

Its 2021 federal-budget proposal requested $300 million and linked the investment to an estimated ten-megatonne reduction in agricultural emissions. The public problem, intended result, interventions and cost were visible. (Farmers for Climate Solutions, 2021)

The On-Farm Climate Action Fund illustrates why this approach gained traction. It funded nitrogen management, cover cropping and rotational grazing—defined practices that could be costed, delivered and measured. (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, 2025)

The narrowing also leaves much of the system behind. A cover crop can sit inside a large monoculture that continues relying heavily on purchased inputs. On a diversified farm, the same practice may be part of a wider reorganization of fertility, livestock, water, habitat, labour and markets. The funding category sees the practice more readily than the system around it.

Farmers for Climate Solutions has expanded into farmer learning through the Farm Resilience Mentorship Program, while its 2026 Resilient Agriculture Initiative is developing producer-led policy for the next Agricultural Policy Framework. Professional capacity has made it a credible national counterpart. It also sharpens the question: where does strengthening the field end and growing the organization begin? (Farmers for Climate Solutions, 2024, 2026)

Agroecology needs policy discipline without allowing itself to be permanently disassembled into fundable fragments.

Together, the cases point toward a demanding balance: the breadth of an alliance, the discipline of a policy coalition, and decision rules that stop coordination or delivery from swallowing the wider field.

Some safeguards

Coordination does not require one national organization, one brand or one approved vocabulary. The following checklist offers safeguards that maintain a membrane’s effectiveness:

• Diversity as an asset: Ecological farming depends on place-based judgement, diverse traditions and distributed authority. Shared narrative and governance infrastructure should make cooperation possible where it adds power, not erase difference.
• Nor can coordination resolve substantive political conflict. A field-level function should distinguish among differences that can coexist, disputes that require negotiation, conflicts that should remain public and positions on which no joint statement is warranted. It should not manufacture consensus by excluding dissent.
• Fundability is not proof of ecological truth. Governments regularly fund damaging activities, and many indispensable forms of care remain economically invisible. The argument is narrower: a field seeking public investment must be able to define an actionable public proposition, identify who can deliver it and show how the intervention changes system performance.
• Administrative legibility carries a serious risk of co-optation. The policy system tends to separate practices from the relationships that give them meaning. A field can gain funding while losing its transformative intent. Agroecological actors must therefore maintain the larger causal model rather than allowing government program categories to define the ambition.
• Narrative power cannot substitute for political, organizational and economic power. Stories do not replace constituency-building, ownership, bargaining power, legal change, budgets or capable delivery institutions. Narrative infrastructure helps determine which problems become visible and which solutions gain legitimacy. It must connect to organized people and material capacity.
• None of this places Indigenous Nations inside a national agroecological structure designed by others. The coordination body should not claim to represent Indigenous Nations or reserve a generic “Indigenous seat” as though one person could speak for distinct governments and treaty relationships. Partnerships must be Nation-specific, voluntary and based on rights, jurisdiction and consent. A Nation may choose a parallel agreement, a co-governance relationship around a particular program, or no participation at all. Knowledge-sharing requires explicit safeguards against extraction. No agroecological position should be described as an Indigenous position without authorization from the Nation concerned.

The problem is how to build enough coherence for collective power without creating a command centre.

Build the membrane—and give it work to do

Canada already has organizations for organic agriculture, ecological farming, soil health, food sovereignty, local food, conservation, climate action and farm livelihoods. Many operate with too little money. A new national body with a broad mandate would likely become another applicant for the same grants and another staff team required to demonstrate its own growth.

What is missing lies between the organizations: shared strategic capacity that helps the existing field perceive, decide and act together.

Start with a design table, not a new organization

The first step should be a time-limited national design table, not immediate incorporation. A fiscal host could employ a small team for eighteen to twenty-four months to map existing functions, test two joint propositions, establish decision rules and draft a constitution for whatever permanent function—if any—is needed.

Participation should be weighted toward farmer-led and regional bodies rather than national brands. Relationships with Indigenous Nations would be developed separately and only where specific Nations choose to engage. At the end, participants could continue through a fiscal host, distribute functions among existing organizations, establish a small secretariat or end the experiment. Incorporation should follow demonstrated need.

Give the coordination function a narrow constitution

Its mandate should be limited to:

• mapping organizations, funders, policy windows and delivery capacity;
• tracking how government and industry define food security and innovation;
• convening around specific decisions;
• translating between ecological practice, public purpose and program design;
• helping members assemble joint propositions, budgets and evidence;
• connecting regional experience to national advocacy;
• coordinating rapid responses and assessing field-level power.

The body should not become the default national delivery organization, claim collective achievements, expand to protect staff, or use shared intelligence to compete against members.

Its constitution should include:

1. Distributed authority. Rotating leadership and supermajority approval for national positions.
2. Visible dissent. Members may opt out, publish dissent and remain in the system.
3. Program limits. A cap on internally administered project revenue and a minimum flow-through to regional delivery bodies.
4. Conflict safeguards. Public declarations and a ban on using privileged field information to compete.
5. Transparency. Publication of funders, budgets, decisions and resource distribution.
6. Recurring authorization. Fixed-term renewal rather than automatic continuity.
7. Independent review. Power to recommend restructuring or dissolution.
8. Nation-specific relationships. No generic claim to Indigenous representation.

Success should be visible elsewhere: stronger organizations, coordinated policy interventions, durable regional partnerships and more public resources reaching ecological farming.

Build three strategic prototypes

Governments rarely fund a worldview by name. They fund interventions tied to public outcomes. The concepts below are strategic prototypes, not investment-ready programs. Each requires design work on jurisdiction, budgets, eligibility, pilot regions, governance, equity safeguards and evaluation.

1. Regional Agroecological Resilience Networks

Constraint: Farmers attempting complex transitions lack permanent, trusted and place-based support.

Intervention: Long-term regional networks for farmer-led learning, whole-farm planning, trials, mentorship, monitoring and production coordination.

Delivery bodies: Existing farm organizations, universities, conservation bodies, regional businesses, extension specialists and experienced farmers. Specific Indigenous institutions may participate through agreements they initiate or accept.

Public value: Lower input exposure, better drought and flood response, stronger farm businesses and more diverse regional production.

Evidence of success: Farmer retention; changes maintained after incentives end; reduced input dependence; improved soil and water function; new mentorship capacity.

Equity safeguards: Paid participation and dedicated access for tenants, new entrants, small farms and regions with weak infrastructure.

Next step: Cost a five-year model in several contrasting pilot regions.

2. A Working Landscapes Resilience Program

Constraint: Markets rarely pay for public ecological benefits, while government programs divide soil, water, habitat and farm productivity into separate files.

Intervention: Public payments for verified gains in soil function, water retention, biodiversity, habitat connectivity and reduced input dependence.

Delivery bodies: Regional conservation institutions, farm organizations and qualified technical providers. Indigenous participation would require a distinct agreement.

Public value: Better flood and drought buffering, biodiversity recovery, reduced pollution and steadier production.

Evidence of success: Improved soil structure and infiltration, habitat indicators, reduced nutrient loss, lower input dependence and continued stewardship.

Equity safeguards: Payment caps; access for tenants; recognition of different baselines; coverage of monitoring costs; and a ban on using payments as offsets for unrelated damage elsewhere.

Next step: Compare payment models and pilot a small indicator set for ecological integrity and distributional fairness.

3. Regional food infrastructure tied to committed procurement

Constraint: Producers, processors, hubs and institutional buyers each need evidence that the others will commit before investing.

Intervention: Tie infrastructure funding to multi-year purchasing agreements, production planning, farm transition support, fair-margin rules and ecological procurement criteria.

Delivery bodies: Producer groups, hubs, processors, municipalities, schools, hospitals, universities and other public purchasers.

Public value: Stronger regional food security, viable ecological markets and fairer sharing of risk and margins.

Evidence of success: Stable farm participation, rising institutional purchases, viable margins, contract retention and infrastructure operating at sustainable capacity.

Equity safeguards: Transparent margins, accessible contract sizes, labour standards, limits on dominant-buyer control and public oversight of publicly funded assets.

Next step: Map supply and demand for one or two product categories and negotiate prototype contracts before major capital is committed.

These prototypes force discipline. Current funding and consultation processes encourage organizations to bring forward ideas from their own mandates. A shared design process would select interventions that release key constraints, assemble delivery partners and develop credible budgets.

Five decisions existing organizations and funders can begin now

1. Convene a process to test a shared public proposition.

Canada’s food security depends on the living productive capacity of farms, landscapes and farming communities, and on reducing dependence on vulnerable external inputs. It also depends on fair livelihoods, equitable access to food, democratic control of value chains and respect for Indigenous jurisdiction. Participants should identify what they can carry together and where positions remain distinct.

2. Fund coordination as infrastructure.

Support strategic intelligence, relationship maintenance, policy translation and joint planning over multiple years.

3. Select two or three joint prototypes.

Use explicit criteria—public value, delivery readiness, equity, political opportunity and capacity to shift the wider system.

4. Set limits before creating an institution.

Establish revenue caps, flow-through requirements, dissent rules, reauthorization and dissolution provisions before organizational survival creates pressure for growth.

5. Build alliances beyond agricultural advocacy.

Develop working relationships with conservation, public health, education, labour, culture and regional economic development. Relationships with Indigenous Nations must remain Nation-specific and voluntary.

This work needs patient funding. Strategic intelligence, trust and collective power do not develop through six-month communications grants. Narrative infrastructure requires multi-year support. (Pop Culture Collaborative, 2022)

Industrial agriculture already combines narrative coordination with material delivery capacity. The agroecological field must build enough shared power to contest that advantage without reproducing centralization, professional capture or program-driven mission drift.

Conclusion: the next Food Security Strategy will not discover agroecology by accident

The National Food Security Strategy represents a serious failure to account for the biological and human foundations of long-term production. It is also a warning to the agroecological field.

Federal officials built the strategy from institutions, metrics and causal explanations already at hand. Industrial agriculture arrived with recognizable bottlenecks, investment vehicles, delivery organizations and measures of success. Processing capacity can be financed. Terminals can be built. Greenhouse acreage can be counted. Product approvals can be accelerated. Someone had already made these interventions legible to the machinery of government.

Agroecology arrived through evidence about soil, biodiversity and resilience; successful farms; climate practices; conservation projects; local-food initiatives; Indigenous food priorities; and arguments about justice. The parts were present, but the political system was expected to assemble them.

It did not.

Evidence has no automatic path into budgets. Scientific validity does not specify which department acts, which organizations deliver, how programs fit regional conditions or what public finance should count. Corporate power, ownership and ideological hostility matter profoundly. The internal coordination gap is not the whole explanation. It is the strategic limitation the field can address directly in order to contest those larger forces more effectively.

The response should not be a single national brand, another broadly mandated NGO or a communications campaign detached from program design. The field needs a permanent but constitutionally limited coordination function that gathers intelligence, connects actors, protects systems logic and develops a few serious investment propositions with the organizations capable of delivery.

The next federal strategy will not include agroecology because another report proves its benefits. It will include agroecology when a coordinated field can define the constraint, demonstrate who can act, shape public judgement and bring forward propositions that government cannot easily dismiss.

Agroecology lost the contest over what food security means before it lost access to the new budget. The work now is to rebuild the capacity that links one to the other.

References

Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. (2025). On-Farm Climate Action Fund.https://agriculture.canada.ca/en/programs/agricultural-climate-solutions-farm-climate-action-fund

Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. (2026). National Food Security Strategy.https://agriculture.canada.ca/en/department/initiatives/national-food-security-strategy

Arnold, T. (2023, June 7). Narrative networks in the Canadian industrial food system.https://thorstenarnold.com/narrative-networks/

Farmers for Climate Solutions. (n.d.). About us.https://farmersforclimatesolutions.ca/about-us

Farmers for Climate Solutions. (2021). A down payment for a resilient farm future: Budget 2021 recommendation.https://farmersforclimatesolutions.ca/budget-2021-recommendation

Farmers for Climate Solutions. (2024). Request for proposals: Supporting farmer and rancher adoption of low-emissions, high-resilience beneficial management practices through knowledge transfer.https://farmersforclimatesolutions.ca/news-and-stories/request-for-proposals

Farmers for Climate Solutions. (2026). Resilient Agriculture Initiative.https://farmersforclimatesolutions.ca/rai

Pop Culture Collaborative. (2022). Narrative infrastructure for narrative immersion: A strategic grantmaking framework.

Prime Minister of Canada. (2026, June 11). Prime Minister Carney launches National Food Security Strategy to build a more affordable and resilient food system in Canada.https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2026/06/11/prime-minister-carney-launches-national-food-security-strategy

Sustain Ontario. (n.d.). About us.https://sustainontario.com/about/