UNB Names Its First Digital Agriculture Chair — and He Starts With Small Farms

The University of New Brunswick named Dr. Craig MacEachern today as its first Research Chair in Digital Agriculture — a seat funders have been stacking money into since 2024. His term began July 1. The news is who got it, and how narrowly he intends to aim it.

"My goal is to take the advances offered by precision agriculture, which is normally used for very large operations, and make them available and accessible to small- and medium-scale farmers," MacEachern said.

The chair is funded by McCain Foods, ResearchNB, the province's Department of Agriculture, Aquaculture and Fisheries, and Farm Credit Canada, and sits in UNB's Faculty of Forestry and Environmental Management. The McKenna Institute, which helped assemble the money, put the appointment on its own channel the same day, framing it as digital agriculture "built around the realities of farming in New Brunswick" rather than imported prairie-scale kit.

Why the off-the-shelf stack doesn't fit here

MacEachern was born into a farming family, studied at Dalhousie's Faculty of Agriculture in Truro, N.S., and completed his PhD in agricultural sciences there. Most recently he was a McCain Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Sustainable Agriculture at Dalhousie, where his applied work included evaluating harvesting technology with the world's leading maker of wild blueberry harvesters, building electrothermal systems for chemical-free cover-crop termination, and developing what UNB calls the world's first spot applicator for granular fertilizers and pesticides.

He met more than a dozen farmers, plus some of the province's leading companies in the sector, before setting a research agenda. What came back was a list of constraints precision agriculture was not designed around — and one of them drives two more.

"We have less heat unit accumulation, for example, and the bedrock is closer to the surface, which makes crops far less drought resistant," he said. "The makeup of this bedrock also produces highly acidic soils that need to be adjusted for."

Then the farm structure itself: "We also have a large number of small-scale farmers, who often have correspondingly limited resources, and a tremendous diversity of crops — most of which are grown on smaller and irregularly-shaped fields."

That combination is the opposite of the operating envelope commercial precision-ag gear assumes. Big rectangular fields, one crop, deep soil, a budget that amortizes over thousands of acres. "So, we are going to need to innovate within constraints — something, I think, New Brunswick's farmers are already accustomed to doing," MacEachern said.

The tools he wants to adapt are not speculative ones: aerial drones, GPS, connected sensors, and spot spraying, all established elsewhere and all currently sized and priced for someone else's farm. "There are a lot of innovative ideas and technologies out there," he said. "However, most of them are not tailored to our area's specific circumstances. They may be less effective because they are not adapted for our climate, for example, or they may be prohibitively expensive for family farmers."

The opportunity list is infrastructure, not software

The openings MacEachern names first are physical. He points to the continued build-out of Port Saint John — which now includes a cold-storage import-export hub — and to the province's class I railways, both of which change what a New Brunswick grower can profitably ship. He also sees room in reviving now-abandoned farmland and repurposing the large stock of vacant land in the province.

That is a notable framing for a digital chair: the constraint on New Brunswick agriculture, in his telling, is not only sensing and analytics but where the crop can go once it exists.

The money was waiting for a name

This is not a surprise chair. In June 2024 the McKenna Institute announced a $3.75-million digital-agriculture package led by McCain. McCain's own $2.76 million over five years is chiefly for a digital twin of its Farm of the Future in Florenceville — a simulation of regenerative potato practice. ResearchNB, the province's agriculture department, and the institute added $990,000. Of the combined total, $1.5 million was earmarked to establish the chair, including $500,000 from ResearchNB. Farm Credit Canada added another $500,000 for the same seat in September 2025.

The 2024 announcement described the chair's likely scope in fairly abstract terms — crop simulation modelling, GIS, sensor data, IoT. Two years on, the person hired to fill it is talking about drought resistance over shallow bedrock and the price of a sprayer.

UNB frames the hire as more than a faculty line. Vice-president research Dr. David MaGee said it makes academic expertise "more available to growers," and Dr. Michelle Gray, dean of forestry and environmental management, called the chair "a significant opportunity for UNB to provide leadership" in a sector "undergoing a major transformation."

UNB says the appointment tracks the Agricultural Alliance of New Brunswick's recently completed Digital Agriculture Strategy. The Alliance has not posted a standalone public copy of that strategy that we could open, and UNB's own page does not link one; the university is the source for that claim.

Beside the companies already in the field

New Brunswick already has product companies in this lane — Picketa's leaf-tissue sensors, SomaDetect's dairy optics — and a federal breeding program pairing genomes and drones at Benton Ridge. The chair is the campus counterpart: a person whose job is to make the generic toolkit fit farms that cannot buy a prairie-scale stack.

His own closer is modest, and it is a schedule as much as a strategy: "We're going to start with quick wins that help growers catch up, and then we'll go from there."

Sources

• New UNB research chair wants to help New Brunswick's growers feed the province and the world — UNB Newsroom, September 2, 2026: appointment, funders, July 1 start, Dalhousie background and postdoctoral work, farmer meetings, MacEachern quotes on bedrock, acidic soils, crop diversity, irregular fields and adapting precision agriculture, Port Saint John and abandoned farmland, MaGee and Gray quotes, Alliance strategy mention
• UNB's McKenna Institute announces investment in digital agriculture led by McCain Foods — June 11, 2024: $3.75 million package, McCain $2.76 million over five years, $990,000 from ResearchNB, DAAF and the institute, $1.5 million to establish the chair, ResearchNB $500,000, Farm of the Future digital twin, initial scope
• FCC invests in UNB's McKenna Institute to advance digital agriculture — September 8, 2025: FCC $500,000 for the chair, recap of the earlier $1.5 million
• The McKenna Institute — institute mandate
• Faculty of Forestry and Environmental Management — MacEachern's faculty
• McKenna Institute on MacEachern's appointment — September 2, 2026 institute post; NB-farm framing; partner list; link through to the UNB newsroom story