Some 20 investment funds and firms said they are willing to inject $5 billion into Canada’s food industry by 2030, a sum that underscores the potential of the sector to be an economic engine. 

Agriculture Minister Heath MacDonald made the announcement Tuesday in Ottawa in a speech at the Future of Food conference hosted by Farm Credit Canada, the Crown corporation focused on lending and financing for the country’s agriculture sector. 

“We’re thrilled with the number who have stepped up and the dollar amount that came forward,” said Darren Baccus, the former PSP Investments executive who now leads Farm Credit Canada’s venture arm, FCC Capital. “Now it’s on all of us… to bring opportunities for this capital, to identify new opportunities, and to, frankly, work with policymakers to ensure that Canada continues to be open for business and continues to live up to that perception out there that we are [part of] an investable universe.”

Baccus wouldn’t name all the individual funds that made pledges, saying many of them either prefer discretion or have internal rules that require it. He said there’s interest in technology startups, existing businesses, infrastructure and farm land. 

“We have investors who are pledging to look across those opportunities, and like any asset class, as institutional capital comes in, starts to partner with operators, partners with other institutional capital, even more opportunities will arise,” Baccus said in an interview. “This is how the ball rolls.” 

The announcement capped a months-long sales effort. MacDonald has been pitching investors since the summer, when he made a point of asking Farm Credit to get him a meeting with some big investors in Toronto.

“The reception was, ‘Wow. We never had a minister from agriculture reach out to talk to us about capital investment,’” MacDonald told The Logic in July. “It was enlightening. When I left the room, I thought, ‘ We actually did something here that maybe has never been done before; maybe we’re going down a path to a new type of connection that’s never really been tapped into.” 

The pledges are non-binding, so there remains considerable work to do. MacDonald and his provincial counterparts might have to confront a regulatory thicket and tax structure that slows execution and makes opportunities elsewhere relatively more attractive. The potential beneficiaries of that money will have to present attractive proposals. Any number of events could change the math on the upside of investing in food production in Canada. 

Still, $5 billion is $5 billion. That rivals or exceeds similar top-down pledges in recent years connected to sexier industries such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing and electric vehicles. 

Farm Credit chief executive Justine Hendricks believes the industry she serves has a “generational opportunity” to level up because climate change, expanding middle classes and technological innovation will combine to lift the value of nutrition. Hendricks backed her conviction with money, creating FCC Capital a couple of years ago, and then last year giving it a green light to spend $2 billion on agtech companies by 2030. (By April, Baccus will have deployed about $325 million of those funds, which are separate from the $5 billion announced Tuesday.)

“Our money, our capital is worth a lot,” Hendricks told The Logic last year. “We can crowd in the extra, but I think where we’re trying to be… is we’re really trying to take that catalyst role to the next level.”

The announcement validates arguments that Canada’s food industry punches below its weight—and therefore has considerable scope to grow. Farmers have tended to prefer the economics of sending their produce abroad to taking the risk involved in building processing facilities to capture more value at home. Such a strategy works when tariffs are low and big importers refrain from using trade as a political weapon. That’s no longer the world in which we live, as canola farmers in particular have recently learned the hard way.   

“We have more opportunities than we have capital,” said Jonathan Belair, managing partner of Power Sustainable Lios, a food-focused private equity fund that signed the pledge drive. “To see a group like FCC create more awareness, and create momentum, is really exciting.”