Improving agriculture traceability through blockchain firm’s aim

Jan 17, 2023

A Manitoba software company uses blockchain technology to connect the dots between producer and consumer in the agriculture sector.

TheoryMesh is the brainchild of Manitoba software developer Chris Bunio. He spent 18 years in business development at Microsoft before returning to Winnipeg during the pandemic to launch TheoryMesh. He spoke at the recent Fields on Wheels conference at the University of Manitoba.

“TheoryMesh is attempting to bring the agriculture and food supply chains together,” says Bunio. “When you buy a food product in the store, if you don’t understand what’s happening behind the scenes, you see the package and the label and that’s your view of what’s happening with food. But it’s a little bit more complex than that. There are a lot of gaps in this process.”

As a gluten allergy sufferer, Bunio knows a thing or two about those gaps.

“Gluten finds its way into so many different things and as you start sort of digging and trying to understand what is actually a safe food product, you learn very quickly that it’s difficult to get that information across the supply chain.”

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids