John Fielding built a technology that works. Getting farmers to trust it is the real challenge — and the real lesson for every entrepreneur selling something new.
GROWTH PILLAR: Sales & Revenue
WHO THIS IS FOR: SMB owners, solopreneurs, corporate escapees, leaders building systems — and anyone selling innovation into a slow-moving market.
WHAT THEY'LL GAIN: A clear-eyed look at what it actually takes to move a resistant buyer — patience, proof, hero projects, and the power of showing up in the right rooms.
What happens when your technology works — but your market doesn't trust it yet?
John Fielding knows that story from the inside. He's the founder of NanoBubble Control Systems, a company bringing advanced water technology to Canadian agriculture. After 40 years in high tech — semiconductors, optical components, startups, mergers and acquisitions — John launched into one of the most risk-averse markets around. The result has been a masterclass in patience, proof, and persistence.
In this episode of Knack 4 Business, John breaks down what nanobubbles are, how ozone disinfection compares to chlorine, and why a chicken farmer in Canada is now seeing a 70% reduction in liver and respiratory disease in his flock. He also gets real about the harder side of commercializing new technology — skeptical farmers, cautious government agencies, and investors who don't yet understand the agricultural space.
One of the most powerful moments in this conversation is simple: John's best lead didn't come from cold outreach or a marketing funnel. It came from a stranger at an investment event whose university friend happened to run one of the largest egg farms in the region. Network beats cold outreach. Every time.
Topics covered in this episode:
Connect with John Fielding on LinkedIn or visit NanoBubble Control Systems to learn more.
Sponsors supporting this episode:
Join Canada Growth Network — full GHL CRM + membership community. $1 CAD first month. $47 CAD/month after. No contract, no lock-in.
Try Web Indexer — the smart chatbot for the Knack 4 Business website. Find episodes faster, discover related content, and book a meeting — all from the K4B site.
Listen to Property Wizard — the podcast by Gentry Learning, built to teach real estate investing with clarity and confidence. Explore Gentry Learning.
Questions? Reach us at info@kreativinsight.com
Join Canada Growth Network — full GHL CRM + community. $1 CAD first month. $47 CAD/month. No lock-in.
Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.
Bernie (00:05)
Question to the audience, are you struggling to get customers to trust and adopt your new technology? And that's what John will talk about.
how to break through resistance in slow to change industries, earn trust when your innovation is unproven and move from doubt to adoption. If you're bringing a breakthrough idea to a skeptical market, listen in and discover how patience, proof and persistence can turn reluctant buyers into believers. Our guest today is John Fielding from NanoBubble Control Systems. He's a veteran technology executive with more than 40 years of leadership experience across high tech industries
including operations, business development, strategic partnerships, mergers and acquisitions. In 2020, He launched NanoBubble Control Systems to bring transformative solutions to agriculture and disinfectant markets. A passionate supporter of entrepreneurship, John has mentored and guided hundreds of startups over the last 16 years.
and teaches executive MBA students about entrepreneurship at the Telfer School of Management at the University of Ottawa. John, welcome, sir. Do you have a favorite quote or saying?
John (01:10)
⁓ jeez. I think my favorite thing is you gotta have fun in life. You really do have to have fun. lot of people, I mean, I'm not saying you need to be joking around all day long, but you really do have to have fun. You gotta have fun at your job. Once again, not every day. There's gonna be terrible things that happen, but all in all, you just have to have fun in life. It's far too short.
Bernie (01:36)
and give a business tagline that you work with.
John (01:40)
⁓ Yeah, so right now I'm involved in biosecurity for farms. So the tagline is next level biosecurity, healthier flocks, stronger farms. And I'm sure we'll get into that a little bit later on.
Bernie (01:54)
So high tech and nanobubble control. I have from our past conversations and understanding what nanobubbles are. But what brought you from high tech to nanobubbles? How did those lanes converge? Because one actually deals with a technology, but it's working with water and bubbles and ozone. And high tech usually means something in the cloud like SAS.
John (02:20)
Yeah, so my background was in, it was in high tech. So I started many years ago at Mitel Semiconductors. I went to Nortel Semiconductors. I got involved in optical components, which is, you know, just about as high tech as you can get. And then I kind of switched careers a little bit and I got involved into ⁓ working with startups. And so I,
I was part of an association called Ontario Centres of Excellence. It's now called Ontario Centres of Innovation. And we helped fund academic research to bring it out into the real world and as well fund startups. So that's my linkage with startups. So the amazing part about working with the startups and academic community is I got exposed to just
unbelievable amounts of technology from A to Z, right? Really it was all aspects of all businesses that I got exposed to and had a chance to delve into a little bit if we were gonna support either emerging research or a startup company. And that's where I first learned about Nanobubbles. There was a small startup based on a Cornwall actually that was dabbling in
in nanobubble technology itself, the use of nanobubble technology. And it was just one of these technologies that grabbed my attention, right? And because of its potential. So that's kind of how I made the leap is, is I had heard about this technology. And I, as I, as I went into retirement mode, I thought it would be interesting to start to play in that.
Bernie (04:01)
So, okay, that begs the question, what's a nanobubble?
John (04:05)
Very good, very good question. Yeah. So a nanobubble, as the name implies, is a very, very, very small bubble of gas. And when I say very small, the true definition of a nanobubble is it's less than 200 nanometers in diameter. So it's hard to imagine things that small. But to give you an idea,
in one milliliter of water, if you have generated nanobubbles properly, you get about, I don't know, two to three billion bubbles in that amount of water. So these are very small bubbles. And when you get that small, as in with all, most nanotechnologies, they start to have very interesting characteristics. So a nanobubble is about the smallest that you can get
before not really becoming a bubble. And when you get down that small, the surface area that a nanobubble presents to water or any liquid for that matter is about the maximum. So when you're trying, and one of the goals of nanobubbles is to infuse a gas into a liquid form. And so the surface area of a nanobubble is such that it allows gas to be exposed to the most amount of water possible.
The second aspect of a nano bubble that's really interesting is that it's negatively charged and it repels the other bubbles. So typically when you look at bubbles and here again with the goal of introducing a gas into a water efficiently, if you look at your fish tank, right? You have bubbles coming out of your aerator. Where do all the bubbles go? Well, they go to the top of the tank and they burst and they...
push the air out in the atmosphere. So it doesn't really go into the water. So what happens with nano bubbles is that the bubbles don't want to recombine and float to the surface. So one, can supersaturate the water. And then with all the nano bubbles there, they kind of have a little, make up a little battery of the gas that's in the water. And so you can actually have bubbles that stay in suspension in water for weeks, even months at a time.
And then the last thing that is cool about nanobubbles is that when they do burst, they actually create a little explosion, which is called the hydroxy radical. And that's the fundamentals of disinfection, right? So ⁓ chlorine and hydrogen peroxide and all those disinfections, the actual chemical reaction that happens is hydroxy radicals. So the nanobubbles have this little disinfection.
So I'm sorry, that was a really long-winded answer of what nanobubbles are, but they're kind of complex little things.
Bernie (06:53)
Is that something you drink or is that something you just pour into your local water supply or or do I come up to my fish tank where I have a kind of a prehistoric it's called a pleco it's a prehistoric looking catfish it's got spines and everything is that something I use inside my fish tank or is that something I would use in my livestock if I were a farmer.
John (07:15)
So you know what? Nanobubbles is this emerging technology that is finding very interesting uses in a whole bunch of industries, right? So, you I guess it's that you could use it in your fish tank. You could use it in livestock. There's even studies that people have been using nanobubbles in the water to make cement.
and it actually makes a stronger cement. So it has a whole bunch of applications, right? So, but the, and I'll back up a bit. This isn't really for residential use. I mean, you can have residential applications. This is more for commercial use. So when you talked about a fish, right? One of the things is if you have fish in your tank, the reason you put air in there is so that the fish can breathe the oxygen. So if you decided to have a tank,
full of fish, you would need to put a lot of oxygen in. So think if you can saturate it with oxygen, you can now have more fish in the tank because they there is oxygen to breathe. But one of the technology, the technologies that I'm using it for is targeted at livestock. Right? Because when when any livestock drinks water,
that has increased levels of oxygen in it, it helps their bio, it helps their guts. And you actually have a bird or a cow or a pig that is more relaxed. I know that sounds a bit weird, a relaxed pig, but if you can imagine a chicken farm where, or a pig
Bernie (08:46)
If the pigs chase you around the yard, want them to be relaxed.
John (08:50)
want
them to be relaxed, right? But you know, we usually think of a couple pigs out in a pasture or we think of, you know, a couple chickens or hens running around. But in the commercial world, for chickens, for example, you have a farm which is maybe, I don't know, half the length of a football field, and it has 20,000 chickens in it. So it's a very stressful environment. They're packed in there like sardines. Same thing with
commercial pig farming is you have pens with lots of pigs in it and you actually end up having very stressed out animals. And the more stressed they are, just like humans, the more stressed you are, the more your immune system is under attack and you are subject to being ill. And so that's what happens when you have this very stressful environment. So one of the aspects that I'm working with us actually is
know, working with chicken farmers to introduce the little increased oxygen level in their drinking water. And it actually makes for a lot healthier animals that actually will be bigger, stronger and more resistant to diseases.
Bernie (10:00)
Obviously, question. Are you going to be promoting our energy drinks in two years? Are you the next Pepsi bubbles?
John (10:09)
Well, so well, that's, that's an interesting thing. And the answer, the answer is, is possibly right. So, you know, the first question people do ask is, does this work on humans, right? And the answer is, yes, it does. The challenge is, there hasn't been a lot of studies with it yet. Right? In a first, the first naysayers will say, you know, humans, they
breathe oxygen. So what difference does it make if there's a little bit more oxygen in their digestive system? And you're right, it's the same thing with chickens. They breathe oxygen just like we do. But with the nanobubbles, what happens is it actually, as I mentioned, it actually affects their guts, it affects the bio in their stomachs.
breaking down enzymes, breaking down any pathogens that might be in there, and just making them a lot healthier. So could this have an application for humans? Absolutely, right? The challenge when you're trying to do things with humans is that you got to test it to the nth degree before you can market it. So it's just a lot longer time to market.
Bernie (11:16)
Maybe bigger than Kabocha.
John (11:19)
Absolutely, absolutely.
Bernie (11:21)
If you make this product, is it something that has to be ingested? Is it surfaced? Is it clean surfaces? Like when you're talking about biosecurity, right? And I'm thinking for the poultry livestock, the big issue sometimes is if you're a poultry farmer, when you walk through with your boots, you have to go through a disinfectant solution.
And you're always mindful of whatever you bring in. A good example would be the ostrich farm out in British Columbia, where they're looking to cull the herd, right? And they're kind of going back and forth on that one. Is this something that applies then to the air around them too, or what's the scoop in that?
John (11:59)
So great question. It doesn't actually apply to the air, if you directly to the air, right? But if you go back to the premise that I'm going to introduce a gas into a liquid, right? So for the chickens drinking water, I'm introducing oxygen into the liquid and it increases what's called the dissolved oxygen in the water, right? Just to give you an idea dissolved oxygen
from a city tap is about eight parts per million, right? And that's the average tap water for houses in North America. If you pull your water from a well, it has almost zero oxygen because there's no ability for the oxygen to get in there, right? But going back to what you can do with nanobulbs, so if you put oxygen in, you can increase the levels of dissolved oxygen.
But if I was to turn around and put ozone in the water, I now can increase the level of dissolved ozone in the water. So, and why would that be important? Well, ozone is the strongest disinfectant available on the market period, right? It is hundreds of times more powerful than chlorine, right? And it reacts about 3000 times faster than chlorine.
So I don't know if you remember during the COVID peak where everybody was buying Lysol wipes, right? And we would, you know, take them out of the thing and wipe down our counter and then we're done, right? Well, if you actually read the side of the box in a very fine print, it says you need to apply this, wait for 10 minutes and then rinse, right? Because chlorine is very effective at killing pathogens, but it takes in the
killing time, it takes actually a long time to kill the pathogens properly. Whereas ozone, it's almost instantaneous that it kills the pathogens. And the other thing with ozone is it leaves no residue. Whereas things like chlorine, you actually have to go in there and clean off the chlorine residue, because it actually leaves goop on whatever surface you've cleaned. So it
it's just you end up creating this great ⁓ disinfectant. Now the problem with ozone is that ozone has a half life of about 12 minutes. So that's why you can't go buy a bottle of ozone. You actually have to make it on demand, right? And so ozone is actually used in water treatment plants, right? And they use it as a polishing technique for the last little cleaning up of water before it goes out to to,
your municipal delivery system. And because it can kill pathogens way better than any other way that they treat it. But they that's done at a very large scale in the hundreds of thousands of liters per minute that they generate dissolved ozone and water. So the challenge that I have come up with a solution for is how do I generate
⁓ a strong ozone solution on demand that a farmer or anybody for that matter could use to disinfect their systems. So what needs disinfecting on a farm? Just about everything. Their footwear, their clothing, the irrigation systems for the animals, the troughs, whenever I'll go back to the birds,
chickens have the life cycle of a chicken is that they usually buy in chickens that are a day old, they grow them for about six to eight weeks, and then they send them to be slaughtered. But then they have to shut down the barn and disinfect it from top to bottom. And they usually use chlorine to do this. But it takes a long time, it takes multiple applications.
and you get involved in having to transport chlorine into your farm and to do it's not good. There's all sorts of implications with that, right? So what my system does is I generate an on-demand 10 liters per minute, a variable strength, aqueous ozone solution, which is the strongest disinfectant available. So if you can imagine it sometimes if you go to a farm,
pig farms or chicken farms, they usually have this tray of water that people need to walk through in their rubber boots so that they can get contaminants off of their boots. And it's some farms use formaldehyde, if you can believe it, right? Just this ancient, ancient way of doing disinfection. And I actually just read an article this morning that they said pathogens like the avian flu virus can live
on a pair of rubber boots for three to four weeks, right? If it's not disinfectant properly. So that's kind of where I'm going with this. And if you look at my tagline of biosecurity, there's multiple aspects of biosecurity, right? If you go on to agriculture Canada, they tell farmers how to prepare themselves for biosecurity ⁓ threats, right?
to the elements that I'm tackling. One is disinfection. So I just explained that you can now use this disinfectant anywhere on the barn. If you wanna wash your cars with it, you can do that because it's on demand. And then the other side is making healthier animals, right? So you get the making a stronger animal so they're more resistant to biosecurity challenges and then having the strongest disinfectant possible to be able to
to protect them from those pathogens.
Bernie (17:47)
So I'm going assume that formaldehyde and chlorine are not healthy for humans per se. They provide use, but if you had your druthers, would never to be near it or inhale it. From the nanobubbles, especially that have been ozone, is there a risk or is that diminished because of the way it's constructed inside the water?
John (18:12)
Yeah, it is exactly that. It is what is the term generally recognized as CGSAR or something like that, the acronym, I should have the tip of my tongue. people tend to freak out about ozone because years ago, they flooded the market with ozone, ⁓ gas ozone generators. And that when it hits a certain level is actually very dangerous for humans, right?
When you supersaturate water with ozone, it becomes actually quite safe. You can put your hands in it. I've actually washed my hands in it. And actually one of the applications for ozonated water is like, if you can imagine the scrubbing down for medical procedures, right? Where they have to use harsh chemicals on their hands. Now, if you wash your hands with
ozone water, it's a lot safer. You can actually drink it. And I don't want to refer back to, I'm going to do it anyways, know, Trump with gargling with chlorine, right? You can actually use limited amounts and at lower concentrations of ozone water. As matter of fact, dentists are using it for pre dental surgeries, because you can clean the mouth out so well. So while you do have to be
careful with all sorts of cleaning and disinfecting. There is nowhere near the sorts of things that you have to take care of that you would if you're using things like hydrogen peroxide or chlorine or formaldehyde.
Bernie (19:45)
So here's a John question. You are invested very heavily your career in agriculture. Was that a back to the future thing? Did you start on that dairy farm somewhere in Eastern Ontario and come back? how did you find agriculture as a solution to the problem?
John (20:02)
So great question. So I mentioned that nano bubbles is this emerging technology. And as a matter of fact, for the longest time, it was a technology in search of a home, right? But one of the things I mentioned is that it increases the oxygen in the water. And this has a whole bunch of benefits. One of the first ones being on a farm for
growing crops, because if you increase the oxygen level in the water, plants are healthier and they're less disease prone. And so my first venture was to start to look at the agriculture side from a crops. That's a tough market to get into, right? It's there and which kind of is coming around to the whole resistant
marketplace, right? It is so but I started in trying to work with people to, to, to have them use it to increase their crop yields. And it was a real tough sell. But I kind of stayed around in the whole farm side of things. Trying to find the trying to find the
the customers that were going to be able to take the risks or willing to take the risks, right? And so I migrated from, and I still am involved in the agriculture and growing side. have a bunch of experiments going on at the area XO, which is a local smart farm where I'm working with some farmers there. So I'm continuing to work in that space. And then I migrated to the disinfectant side of
disinfecting fruit and vegetables from a supply management point of view, right? We throw out millions and millions and millions of dollars worth of food every year because it goes bad quickly, right? If you washed your vegetables and fruit, this is at the producer's end or at the supply chain end with ozone water, your fruits and vegetables will last longer, right? So in my entrepreneurial mind, I said,
wow, this is great. People are going to love this, right? Well, it turns out the people who would be buying it, I'm not going to say they don't care, but they have processes in place to deal with it. So a local grocery store, he deals with a certain amount of loss, right? So he kind of goes, yeah, I don't have the time to introduce this now, And so it wasn't as big a problem for them. I mean, it's a global problem.
but when you get it down to the person who's gonna buy the equipment, they didn't care as much. So this is where it kind of flipped over to the chickens. And I actually found a farmer who had kind of figured it out on his own. And he fed his chickens with well water, which again has almost zero oxygen.
and he wasn't getting enough out of his well. So he actually put rain gutters on his chicken barns and collected the water and mixed the two of them together. And the rainwater actually has a fair bit more oxygen in it. And he noticed when he fed them with the rainwater, the chickens were better. So he kind of went, hmm, this is really interesting. And then he kind of approached,
he approached the technology from saying, maybe I can do this manually, right? By myself, by introducing oxygen in the water. And that's where our company came on board. And we're actually sold him a system so that he could try it out. And he's had just amazing results, right? So he's actually had, you know, a 70, that's seven zero reduction in
liver disease and respiratory diseases in his chickens. So it's a huge success. So ⁓ that's how I kind of transitioned and went, hey, this is a very real problem that directly affects farmers. And then the disinfectant side of things is you might've heard of the little story of the avian flu. In Canada alone over the past, pardon me, over the past
three to four years, we've culled about 14 million chickens, which is a huge number. And it has a huge ripple on effect in the whole industry. And it all has to go down to how strong your farm is and how resistant your farm is to pathogens like the avian flu. So it,
I now turned something that was, you know, of potential interest that a, you know, a grocery store might or might not have vegetables go bad on them to a very real story of farmers losing their whole crops, their whole, you know, chickens or ostriches or whatever to, ⁓ to the, disease, right? So it became a very real problem that has a very real solution.
So that's how kind of, that's how I kind of locked onto that side of the business.
Bernie (24:59)
So do you match up the ROI? In other words, listen, use this system versus the chemicals or you know what, just run with it and ⁓ look, your flock's gone. So is there a cost per chicken? I care about my flocks, you. Sorry, these are bad puns. You can tell we're all dads. But is there a kind of a cost for every, we'll use chicken in this case.
for every bird that comes through, it costs so much to bring them out from one end to the other end of the cycle, farming cycle. Of that cost, there's just so much attributed to the biosecurity, ⁓ so do you kind of put an analysis together and saying, listen, you've just saved all this. And I thinking from the grocery store and knowing
John (25:37)
health. ⁓
Bernie (25:49)
what you speak of, well, you know, I'll just rinse it or whatever, you know, or I'll take the hit. Does money matter? Does it matter that you're providing something that's even a better value at the end? Because with the animal, it's healthier, right? So if you're eating healthier animal, then you you need fewer other remediations in there.
John (26:14)
Yeah, so this, so I'm trying to get data on this, right? And that's the biggest part of building the trust gap, right, with customers is I'm trying to get real data that says, this is what happens when you do this, right? On the supermarket thing of saying, well, you might lose some product.
with animals, it's a lot easier to detect. So the particular farmer that I'm working with, he is sharing real numbers with me on a day to day basis. And for a chicken farmer, and as I say, I use chickens, but this applies to any livestock animal is you invest a lot of time, right, into the actual production of these.
You you buy in the chickens, you have to feed them, you have to tend them. And so you, you know, it's a, and you only find out in the end, I mean, you have some mortality that happens during the eight week life cycle, but you don't find out that your chickens were diseased until you actually process them, right? And then when they're doing the processing of the chicken, they'll look up and go, hey, this one, this one's not good, right?
and you don't find out in the end. So you fed them and housed them for a long period of time, which costs you money. From the disease point of view, a lot of farmers have a baseline that says, I'm gonna lose a certain amount of my chickens to physical damaging. So when you imagine 20,000 chickens in a little tiny space, some of them break their legs, they break their wings,
then they become, you know, they're not sellable after that. And so there's a certain percentage that they kind of go, hey, this is the cost of doing business is I'm gonna lose some, right? Where I can impact directly is on the cost of diseases like respiratory illnesses and liver disease, And a typical chicken farmer in Canada will lose anywhere from
to 4 % of their crop to liver and respiratory disease. So that's actually, if you think, you know, the particular farmer that I'm working with, does 120,000 chickens every eight weeks. So 3 % is actually a lot, right? And so with him increasing the oxygen in the drinking water, that's now becoming the noise. He's had a significant reduction, right?
So I now have actual numbers that I'm going around and shopping to other farmers saying, hey, this is a real ROI for this technology, right? The disinfectant is another challenge, right? Because the disinfectant is an insurance policy, right? If you happen to be a lucky farm and you haven't been affected by
by the serious pathogen outbreaks, you kind of go, am I going to invest a lot of money in a solution for this? So that one is harder to get real numbers on. So my approach for that side of the market is to compare the cost of disinfection to something like supplying in chlorine or hydrogen peroxide and balancing it off for how cheap my system would be
versus doing it the conventional way.
Bernie (29:46)
it seems like when we watch the news now, some of the government agencies internationally seem to be quite adversarial. Are governments excited about what you're doing? Do they resist what you're doing? Do they see the breakthrough? Do they think you're a danger to the status quo? Where are you in that?
John (30:05)
⁓ so there's, there is a certain amount of interest, right? The governments tend to, there's a cautious interest, right? And the, and the caution comes in as really strong when they have to open up their pocketbooks to help support you. So, you know, I'm working,
I'm working with agencies and actually agencies is a big part of engaging with agencies is a big part of my business because a farmer is going to go to his government agency and go, do you know about this? Right? Are you aware of this technology? So I'm working very hard with agencies to show them the data and be able to prove to them.
that this is an acceptable technology or technologies so that when a farmer asks them a question, they can go, yes, we've heard of this, right? And so, yes, I would support this, right? They have programs for farmers for introducing new technologies, but you have to be an approved technology, right? So it's not a resistance, they're...
like anything else, saying, well, show me the proof, right? Show me the proof that this works. And so, you know, they're part of the reluctant market, right? You know, a farmer is going to be a reluctant buyer, right? Because there's risk aversion, right? They're not wanting to try anything new. There's...
cultural inertia, you know, we've been farming like this and our farm for the last 40 years, it's been generation to generation, we're doing good, right? And there's the trust gap of kind of, well, show me the data. And I'll tell you what, when you've done this in 10 farms, come back to me and I might possibly be your 11th farm, right? So there's a whole bunch of
things that make them very risk adverse. And I totally understand it. You're dealing with their livelihood, right? If all of a sudden my technology didn't work and they had a massive outbreak, they wouldn't want to take that risk, right? But that's where they're coming from is this very, you know, risk adverse to these sorts of things. The Canadian government is cautious when they go into these sorts of technologies as well.
And that's why I'm trying to work at both sides to be able to make sure that people are hearing about the technology, right? Because the biggest part about working with risk adverse clients is an element of education, right? To kind of go, hey, this is what's happening with this. Here's the data, right? So that's why it makes it good to tackle both.
government and the reluctance of the farmer at the same time.
Bernie (33:00)
that you seem to with the high tech and to be a fairly educated man. And the neat thing is some of the people you were talking to are less educated and maybe even less smart. And so no one wants to admit they're a dummy. So there's that pushback. And the second part of that, have you ever seen in your journey,
that some technology that was so brain dead brilliant that everyone ignored is now a Netflix special of how could it save billions that we didn't know about.
John (33:31)
Yeah. So, you know, it's interesting. think, I think the one thing that I've learned is, especially with the farming community, Very, very bright people, very resourceful people. Yes. Very, I, know, for, for the, we'll all understand it. Maybe some of the younger generation, but they're, they're very MacGyver, right? Yes. They have a problem. They have a problem.
they figure out how to solve it. And they will cobble stuff together in the backyard to make it happen, right? So they're very, very resourceful from that point of view, right? So I think part of the engagement with this sort of community is one is to educate them a little bit. And I actually, you know, I...
I wondering whether I was going to talk much about nanobubbles at the beginning. And I had to, because it's in the name of my company, but I used to lead with nanobubbles and people's eyes would glaze over and they kind of go, well, boy, I'm new at this. now I, you know, when I approach, my initial approach to farmers, I don't really talk about nanobubbles that much. I just talk about the concepts of increasing oxygen and water or generating a really strong disinfectant, right? Which is kind of on a.
are more of a layman's terms, right? And that helps ⁓ build the trust gap, right? So I think, and I think nanobubbles is one of those really interesting technologies that I think is going to emerge. The interesting thing is that it's actually used a lot in other parts of the world, right? Where the...
where the problems were big enough that they had to do something. My first exposure to that did this have an effect on chickens was very early on when I started the company. I was working with this gentleman from South America and they had elevation problems where this farm at very high elevation had a mortality rate of 50%.
their chickens. And they were trying everything and they really couldn't get up, get the mortality rate up a little bit. So they introduced nanobubble technology and the mortality rate went way down, right? And I kind of went, oh, that's interesting. And this was, you know, when you say educated farmers, this was a small farmer
at in, you know, ⁓ a very remote farm in South America with very little tech around them, who adopted this technology right away because he was in a dire need situation. In North America, we tend to be at this, this where you know, we've got a lot of tech, we've got a lot of things. So people are comfortable with their, you know, with where they are.
I relate it to back to my days when I was at Nortel and introduction of technology, right? When North America was very slow to adopt cell phone technology because our landlines were so good. We had these incredible systems that did, made landlines perfect, Whereas over in places in Europe, the landlines were
terrible and there was no way that they would have the infrastructure to do it. So cell phone adoption was very, very high. So we're kind of in the same situation in North America with respect to nanobubble technology. The problems are real and unfortunately there's not enough people out there pushing the solutions to be able to bridge that gap. So hopefully I'm going to become one of those.
Bernie (37:08)
As you describing this, I'm sitting there, you have the government side, right? And I get it. They're going to be slow. They want to make sure they're picking the right horse and they don't have, you know, don't have a surprise. Do insurance companies or other people or even investors? We didn't even touch on investors on this whole thing, but you know, you're going to pitch and you're going to pitch to the end user.
you have a need, you might not know it, or you know that you have a need, but this might be a solution that is less toxic to you and has a cheaper turnaround time, know, cost more cost effective. How do you pitch it to an investor or even insurance companies? Because at end of the day, you know, if they're covering the livestock getting cold, and I'm not quite sure that's set up in the farming community or the agricultural community.
That's a heavy loss. It might get covered by insurance. It might not.
John (38:01)
So I've been hesitant to go to the insurance companies yet because I don't have quite enough data. And that's what I'm really focusing on in the next little while is to get that data. I'm definitely getting more and more data now. I'm actually putting in a system, hopefully at the end of the month into a egg farmer, a local egg farm farmer in Limoges.
and we'll be getting even more data from them. So I think the government, from an investor viewpoint, I was thinking of changing my company name to Nanobubble AI, at least to kind of get some traction. Because for investors right now,
It's like the dot com era, once again, showing how old I am, right? If you had dot com at the end of your name, 30 years ago, you got investment like, no tomorrow, right? Right now, everybody's really interested in AI and still in SaaS and language learning models, et cetera. So my traction with investors has been really weak, right? They just either don't get it or they don't understand the problem or most of the investors are not.
in the agricultural space. So I'm still searching for that type of investor. But it was interesting because I have a couple angel investors who, when I told them about the biosecurity element, they kind of went, ⁓ that's of interest to me. They still said, hey, go get some data. But they switched from, OK, yeah, fine.
if you want to pitch, ahead and pitch, but I'm not really interested to, okay, this does sound like a problem that I can relate to and understand. So I think the biosecurity element is something that has a good traction. The thing with the government agencies that where I'm relying on them is to put me in front of the testing bodies that will validate the technology.
So, ⁓ Agricultural Canada has all sorts of test farms and testing facilities across the country where you can go in and test out your theories, right? And on real live animals. And so that's where my engagement with them is hopefully gonna pay off is be able to get access to that. And then once I get in there and get the data then I think the support will be even
even better. But from an investment point of view, it's been, you know, I've had to bootstrap my company just because it's just not there yet from an investment point of view.
Bernie (40:37)
How is a nano bubble generated? How much does it cost to generate? And how long can it store stable before you've lost the bubbles?
John (40:47)
Yeah, so great, great bunch of questions there. So the nanomobile technology is the most efficient way at increasing the levels of gas and water. You know, I mentioned the, you know, the stones in the bottom of a fish tank. Well, that's a very classical way at putting oxygen in water. And so you will have
you think of that on a lake size or a pond size, they have massive air diffusers and they have huge blowers that blow air or oxygen into the water, right? So typical aeration technology like that is three, maybe 4 % efficient at getting a gas into the water. Then you have some variations on the technology of, you know, specialized cone shaped aerators.
and fountain assisted aerators, right? Where they actually blow, you know, you're on your golf course, sorry, on little tangent here, you're on your golf course, your fancier golf courses, all of their ponds have wonderful fountains in them. They don't do that because it looks pretty. They do that because they're trying to get air into the water so they don't get mosquitoes growing everywhere, right? So that's why they do that. So, and usually if you go on a golf course where it goes by a pond,
that's kind of stagnant. That's where you get massive, know, mosquitoes and people don't like that golf course, right? So, you know, you can get some hero aeration technologies that can hit the 20, 30, even 40 % efficiency at getting oxygen in the water. Nanobubbles are 95 % efficient. So for very low power consumption, you can have very high oxygen transfer rates or gas transfer rates into water. So it's actually
the cheapest way of getting the increasing the level of gas, super saturating the water. But the cool part about the nanobubbles is that, know, once you've super saturated this and what happens when I say super saturated is when you're generating the bubbles, the water is receptive to getting the oxygen. So the bubbles are gonna burst and deliver the oxygen to the water, right? And that's what increases the dissolved oxygen level.
So you can supersaturate the water and it becomes harder and harder to saturate it after a certain point of time. But once you hit a certain level of saturation, then there's no demand for the bubbles to transfer their oxygen into the water. So they just actually stay there suspended in the water until the water goes, ⁓ I can accept some more now. So there are hero experiments where they've taken water and increased
⁓ the level of dissolved oxygen and they go back six months later and there are still nanobubbles of oxygen in the water. So it really is not only super efficient at getting gas into the water, but it actually will stay there as kind of a battery allowing you to maintain the bubbles. On the disinfectant side of things, the technology is a little bit
different. can't go against the physics of ozone. Ozone wants to revert to oxygen and water very quickly. But you still can with making nano bubble aqueous ozone with nano bubbles is you can actually extend for a short amount of time, the strength of the ozone water solution. Right? So it's not going to be months like the oxygen was, but you can actually extend it
beyond its normal shelf life.
Bernie (44:19)
What's a hero? You mentioned a hero project. What's that language mean?
John (44:24)
hero project. So, you know, a hero project is, I mean, are you are you thinking if if I was to call and make it a superhero or an actual hero project?
Bernie (44:37)
think that's great. I just heard the word and I didn't understand what was the metaphor. just...
John (44:42)
Well, so I think from a hero project, really what you want to do is find a farmer. And luckily, I've found a couple of them where they believe that they are willing to bridge the trust gap, right? And are willing to try to understand what's really going on and say, okay, I'm going to give this a try.
right? And be able to, you know, so one of the one of the farmers, I I'm actually having to subsidize putting the equipment in a farm because they were a bit reluctant, right? So I'm actually subsidizing it a bit. And but they're very clear. They're saying, hey, if this does work, don't worry, I'm going to buy this from you, right? And I'll go back and pay you for whatever your install. It's not for free. But you know, I am subsidizing it for them.
But the nice part about that is it allows me to actually trial it out with them, right? I'm doing a different type of install and about doing, you know, how does it work with their tanks and their well and their systems? So that's what I like to call those hero projects because you have a willing farmer who's willing to share the data and share his farm with you to help educate and
educate both them and myself, right? Because there's not someone who's done hundreds of installations at a chicken farm, right? So there's only a couple that I know of in Canada, right? And I'm one of them. So that's where that is, So yeah.
Bernie (46:19)
You've given us a couple of examples. Tell me who you want to phone you, who's your ideal customer, and how would they reach you?
John (46:27)
So my ideal customer right now,
I have two levels of idea. One is farmers who are willing to take a risk. They tend to be the mid-size farmer. The farmer I'm working with out west, he does that 120,000 chickens every eight weeks. He calls himself not a family farmer, but not a mega producer.
what happens in that marketplace is that they sell into a larger slaughterhouse, which would supply the Costco's of the world and supply that, you know, the Loblaws of the world with their chickens, right? So it's a, it's a network. So they're my, they're my entry level ideal customer. Right? The, the next level is actually the food producers, the people who
who, you know, sell processed chicken, right? Because they're the ones who want cheaper, better, healthier chickens for their products, right? And so I'm having a dual approach at trying to address them and as well as getting engaged with the local farmers. It's interesting the engagement
And I'm gonna go back to the whole entrepreneurship side of this, right? Is how do you engage with them? Getting your name out there is really hard in this marketplace, right? So, you know, I will be attending agricultural shows, I will be doing things like that. But right now, I'm relying very heavily on my network, right? And for the entrepreneurs in any type of business,
⁓ I think they often underestimate the power of their network. I'll give you a direct example. I've been trying to reach out to some farmers and was getting no traction at all. Who am I? They don't understand who I am and they don't understand the technology so they don't even answer my emails. I was at an investment event in Ottawa.
And it was an interesting event, right? I had sat and had a chat with a couple angel folks and I was in this room and we were talking about the challenges of investment. And I was saying, how tough it is. And people were going, yep, yep, I agree. It's tough. You know, so no real solutions to me. But there was this other gentleman there who was in looking for money and he was in, he was in medical biome stuff.
genetics, right? So nothing to do with nanobubbles, nothing to do with agriculture. But he was in the same room, talking to these angel groups who were helping out. And the session finished. And he came up to me afterwards. And he goes, because what you said was interesting. It just so happens that my best friend from university works on a chicken farm.
and they're one of the largest egg producers in the area. They want me to give them a call and I went, yes. And that's how I engaged with the company at Limoges, right? So it's very much tapping into your network of, who knows who, and you just have to be very persistent, right? And then, I mean, that's one of the, that's one of the toughest things to do in this marketplace is to expect that you're gonna make sales
big sales in the first couple of months, right? Is you have to be persistent. You have to get out there, network, talk to people and engage with people and then your network will come through for you, right?
Bernie (49:58)
I want to say thank you. This is fascinating. We both have talked about the nanobubbles before and the different uses, like where the tech came from, even using it off of a pier to clear the water in the immediate area. It has a host of uses. And I think we just scratched a couple of surfaces here. And I want to also thank my host, Wayne Pratt, and you, the Knack 4 Business Listeners.
Couple of things out of this folks that you might want to pay attention to. If you're doing innovation, what's the take? Well, you've actually heard a bit of the journey of what it takes. It's persistence. You want to know about nanobubbles? Well, then John is the man to reach out to. So like, know, if you're in the agricultural space, you know, whether you're chickens, your other type of livestock, your typical livestock, chickens are typical too, you know, the cows, the pigs.
But even if you're doing aqua farming, you know, there you go. And then you have crops and then you have cleaning your produce in the store. Reach out to John. He's the perfect connection And it's Canadian based.
John, should we be going to LinkedIn with you or your website?
John (51:08)
You can go to both, but LinkedIn is probably the best, the easiest way to connect with me.