Building The Missing Middle: How Claudius Thomas Is Using Agri-Tech to Connect Small Farms to Big Markets

On weekends and during harvest season, a quiet food economy moves through WhatsApp messages and group chats. Farmers post photos of freshly picked vegetables. Community members respond with short questions. Do you have more. How much. Can I pick up today. Sometimes delivery is possible. Often it is not.

This is how many Black and immigrant farmers in Canada sell their food. The transactions are steady and trusted, but they are largely invisible to formal markets. There are no shared systems for inventory, pricing, logistics, or scale. The food moves, but the businesses rarely grow.

“These farmers harvest and they put it on WhatsApp, and their people inquire: ‘Do you have this? How much? Can I pick up? Can you deliver?’” says Claudius Thomas. “I saw that behavior and thought, surely there’s an easier way to do this.”

Thomas noticed the pattern first while working with a social enterprise in Windsor, Ontario, then again after moving to Ottawa. Farmers in Gatineau were operating in the same way. The tools changed slightly, but the structure did not. Food was being grown and sold, but outside systems that support repeat sales, financing, or long-term planning.

What Thomas saw was not a lack of effort or demand. It was a lack of infrastructure.

Between small farms and large institutional buyers’ sits a gap that many producers never cross. Farms are too big to rely on family networks alone, but too small to meet the volume, consistency, and paperwork required by grocery chains and distributors. They are productive, but informal. That space is often described as the missing middle.

“That gap became the problem,” Thomas says. “The farmers are already there. The customers are already there. What’s missing is the system in between.”

Rather than building a grant program or a one-time intervention, Thomas chose to build infrastructure. That decision led to Farming Resource for Equitable Distribution (FRED), a digital marketplace designed to connect farmers directly to consumers within a defined local radius.

“The idea is simple,” he says. “You go on your phone, go to a marketplace, place an order, and either you pick it up or it gets delivered.”

The simplicity is deliberate. FRED was not designed to change how farmers farm, but to make what they already do visible and repeatable. The technology formalizes transactions that were already happening and places them inside a structure that can support growth.

Although Thomas works in artificial intelligence, agriculture was not an obvious choice on paper. It became one after he started thinking about risk.

During the pandemic, Thomas began mapping industries that could withstand disruption. Agriculture stood out. “No matter what the disaster, we need to eat,” he says. “No matter the disaster, we need medicine. Somebody needs to make it. Somebody needs to transport it.”

That certainty shaped how he thought about applying AI. Rather than using technology to automate labour or chase efficiency, Thomas focused on reducing guesswork in a sector where margins are thin and mistakes are costly.

For him, AI mattered less as innovation and more as infrastructure.

One of the clearest examples is the franchise model embedded in the FRED ecosystem. Experienced farmers use data, experimentation, and planning to determine which crops work on which land, and under what conditions. That knowledge is then packaged so new farmers can start without repeating the same trial and error.

“The franchise model allows us to do the preliminary work,” Thomas explains. “Securing the land, the financing, the planning. By the time a farmer starts, they’re not guessing.”

He is clear that this approach is not about replacing farmers with technology. It is about shortening learning curves. “It lowers the risk,” he says. “They don’t have to make mistakes in the ecosystem.”

That philosophy also explains why Thomas spends most of his time on farmers rather than customers.

“Since May, probably 80 to 90 percent of my effort has been focused on how we onboard farmers,” he says. “If we actually get more farmers farming, then that scales the business as well.”

The approach runs against common platform logic, which often prioritizes user growth. In this case, scale begins with production. Without farmers who can produce consistently and profitably, no amount of consumer demand can sustain the system.

Thomas’s work now extends well beyond software. He has built partnerships with realtors to identify agricultural land, with financiers to support acquisition or leasing, and with brokers who help translate farming plans into business cases lenders can accept.

“My work has pivoted to creating an ecosystem,” he says. “Realtors to source land. Financiers to help acquire it. Brokers to develop business plans that lenders and investors will actually approve.”

Land access is a central constraint. Many farmers do not have the capital to purchase property outright. Leasing land for three to five years allows them to enter farming, build experience, and generate income before taking on ownership risk.

“They don’t necessarily have to buy land,” Thomas says. “They can lease, get into the flow of farming, and build from there.”

Scale, in this model, does not mean consolidation. It means coordination.

If enough farmers are producing within a limited geographic area, the system can function like a larger supplier while keeping farms independent. FRED limits delivery to roughly 50 to 75 kilometres, a constraint that keeps logistics manageable and supports local supply chains.

“If we have enough farmers producing the crops people want to eat, then it makes sense,” Thomas says. “Multiple farm locations, delivering within that range.”

Success, as Thomas defines it, is not measured by downloads or valuations. It is measured by whether farmers can sustain themselves year-round.

“What I want to see is Black farmers able to produce profitably, sustainably, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year,” he says.