The Full Story

Both of my parents were trained in tropical botany. In the 1970s they travelled through Southeast Asia collecting novel species of pitcher plants — serious plant science exploration. My mother went on to run the variety verification lab at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, federal-level crop genetics quality control.

Growing things is the family trade. It just took me a while to come back to it.

The Builder

Self-taught programmer from childhood. I was more interested in exploiting game glitches and imagining how games could be different than actually playing them. By high school I was building screensavers, MIDI sequencers, and 3D rendering engines — running tutorial carousels instead of doing assignments.

I studied audio engineering in Ottawa, then won a business plan competition at Carleton University that opened doors to the Wes Nicol Fellowship and Invest Ottawa's GrindSpaceXL program.

That led to Aurora Corals — a marine aquaculture operation growing anemones, coral, and invertebrates in a 1,500 square foot warehouse. It wasn't a random venture. My mother had already purchased the farm, and I was thinking about how “growing stuff” works as a general problem. Marine aquaculture was a deliberate lab for learning controlled-environment growth processes.

The venture didn't last, but the lessons did. I moved into project management, then delivery leadership at Gigster, where I earned my PMP and was exposed to the go-to-market side of software delivery for the first time. That was the missing piece.

The Farm

About twenty years ago, the Douma family — who owned the farm — had a daughter who became seriously ill during harvest season. An all-call went out to friends-of-friends-of-family for help. My mother was among those who showed up. That became a long friendship.

When the Doumas retired, my mother purchased the farm. Her motivation was conservation, not agriculture. A botanist at heart, she wanted to protect the forest from urban sprawl. She had a cabin in the woods on the property where she spent much of her last years while completing a Master's in Science Policy Integration.

When the farm passed to me, it came with an obligation: protect it from subdivision and preserve the forest. No legal covenant — a personal mission.

Building the Software

Turnbull AgriTech, incorporated around 2015, started building farm management software on day one of owning the land. Task management, recursive location mapping, experimental GPS-to-timesheet tracking. Roughly a decade of prototypes, tested across real growing seasons.

The name reverses into Canada's anthem: “thee-for-gard-en” → “en-gard-for-thee” → “on guard for thee.”

The technical ability was never the gap. Commercial confidence — sales, marketing, go-to-market — was the missing piece, filled by years of delivery leadership and now active CTO work at lilAgents.

Year One

I've owned the land for about ten years and built software for it, but the farming was always aspirational. 2026 is different. It's the first serious farming season.

It's a wilding year — spreading seeds widely and chaotically to see what survives the microclimate. Frost-prone, low rainfall, sandy soil, short summers. Not about food production. About identifying genetics that can handle the conditions. A/B testing via natural selection.

I'm not a farming guru teaching from experience. I'm a programmer documenting the leap in real time, six months ahead of anyone considering the same jump.

From the workbench, not the mountaintop.