Dan Aberhart , Terry Aberhart

Growing the Future

A Entrepreneurship , Business and Technology podcast

About the show

CONVERSATIONS THAT MATTER.    The Growing the Future Podcast features conversations on innovation, entrepreneurship, and personal and professional growth in the agriculture community.

Newest episodes

Learn To Hedge: Grain Market Update

Nov 12, 2026 55 min

Dan opens with a farmer’s moment: grain in the bin, bills coming due, prices down. Ryan explains why growers are uneasy, how his market view has shifted over the last six weeks, and what changed the ground under corn when the USDA released two surprising reports. He walks through the topics he watches: weather in South America, the Black Sea, the StatsCan yield estimate on December 4, India demand, biodiesel policy and Canada’s export pace. On canola, Ryan shows how he builds a yield scenario from the five-year average, crush and exports, and explains why lower prices can draw in demand. He also shows how he reads trend, divergence and seasonal charts. In the second half, Dan and Ryan preview Learn to Hedge, a six-week Friday course on futures, basis, options and technical analysis, and Ryan explains why he thinks nobody should trade alone. Key Topics• How the USDA reports reshaped the corn market, and what followed in wheat• Canola yield, crush, exports and carryout in one worked scenario• Reading trend, divergence and seasonal charts• What Learn to Hedge covers and how it runs• Why discipline and a second opinion matter in grain marketing Resources Mentioned• USDA crop production and supply and demand reports• StatsCan yield estimate, December 4• Learn to Hedge courseConnect with Growing the Future Website: growingthefuture.ca YouTube: Growing the Future Instagram: @growingthefuturepodcast LinkedIn: Growing the Future Subscribe to the Growing the Future Podcast wherever you listen, and register for Convergence Conference 2027 at convergence.ag. Register for the Convergence Conference at convergence.ag and stay updated by subscribing to the Growing the Future Podcast at growingthefuturepodcast.ca.

Soil Health Triangle

Nov 4, 2026 1 hr 3 min

Dan opens with a thin patch in a field and the question of what the roots would say before more fertilizer goes on. Darren explains why he sees compaction in nearly every field he walks, and how his team checks with a shovel in late June. Kevin explains what happens below ground when pore space is lost, and how microbes, fungi and roots affect soil structure. Wayne walks through a soybean example. He reads a soil test and then a tissue test from compacted and less-compacted areas of the same field, and shows why leaf appearance and a single soil value can mislead. The audience asks about tillage, cover crops, crop choice, potatoes and how fast any response should show up. The panel is clear that its research is early. Key Topics• The shovel check: comparing a problem patch with a better area• How compaction limits roots, oxygen and water infiltration• Soil biology, aggregates and mycorrhizal fungi• Reading a soil test and a tissue test together• No-till, cover crops and living roots Resources Mentioned• A&L Canada Labs Vitalis soil health testing Connect With Crop Aid:Cropaidnutrition.comConnect with Growing the Future Website: growingthefuture.ca YouTube: Growing the Future Instagram: @growingthefuturepodcast LinkedIn: Growing the Future Subscribe to the Growing the Future Podcast wherever you listen, and register for Convergence Conference 2027 at convergence.ag. Register for the Convergence Conference at convergence.ag and stay updated by subscribing to the Growing the Future Podcast at growingthefuturepodcast.ca.

Farm Brain AI Portal | How Joe Larre Built $130K of Custom Software in 20 Hours

Oct 29, 2026 1 hr 13 min

Joe wanted his farm’s information out of his head and in one place, and eventually something he could hand to the next generation. Since this summer he has built it by talking to Claude Code, with no coding. Dan shares Joe’s portal on screen, so listeners on audio only will miss some of the visuals. The portal reads load check-ins from grain company portals and takes each load out of inventory. It also tracks budget against actuals, contract deliveries, equipment service and a daily crew report. Joe set it up so a son or a crew member sees only the pages they have been given. The second half covers the hard parts. The process that runs without a babysitter took the most training, and Joe went from eleven agents down to one main agent. A viewer asks who reviews AI-built code for security, and Joe says it has only been checked through the AI, so Dan points to the “doomsday file” idea and a security routine for the next cohort. Key Topics• Building a farm portal by talking to Claude Code, with no coding• Real-time grain inventory, budget against actuals, and contract tracking• Access by person, and a daily report that replaces chasing the crew• Why one main agent replaced eleven, and why automation drifts• Security and review of AI-built systems Resources Mentioned• Claude Code• John Deere Operations Center (the one connection Joe built through an API)Connect with Growing the Future Website: growingthefuture.ca YouTube: Growing the Future Instagram: @growingthefuturepodcast LinkedIn: Growing the Future Subscribe to the Growing the Future Podcast wherever you listen, and register for Convergence Conference 2027 at convergence.ag. Register for the Convergence Conference at convergence.ag and stay updated by subscribing to the Growing the Future Podcast at growingthefuturepodcast.ca.

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All episodes

The newest 50 of 201 episodes

Learn To Hedge: Grain Market Update

Nov 12, 2026 55 min

Soil Health Triangle

Nov 4, 2026 1 hr 3 min

Farm Brain AI Portal | How Joe Larre Built $130K of Custom Software in 20 Hours

Oct 29, 2026 1 hr 13 min

Made On Your Farm: Making Your Own Nitrogen: Who It's For and Who It Isn't

Oct 27, 2026 1 hr 5 min

Nitrogen is one of the biggest checks on the farm, and most of the air over the field is nitrogen the crop cannot use. Dan opens with Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch and Thomas Hager’s The Alchemy of Air, then asks the practical question. What would it take to make some of your own nitrogen where you use it? Chris explains how the system works. Cold plasma breaks the bond in air nitrogen, and the nitrogen is captured in water as nitrate. The product tests under 1 percent nitrate, so it is sold on an equivalent ratio and used to fill the gap in a fertility program. Chris is open about what the company has learned. Water quality decides results, uniform foliar coverage beats banding, and spoon-feeding across several passes works better than one. The cost stack and the daily work follow, and the conversation closes on who this suits and who should wait. The audience Q&A covers tank mixing, tissue tests, freezing, storage and 2027 capacity. Key Topics• How plasma-activated water turns air, water and electricity into plant-available nitrate• Why water quality (TDS, chlorine, metals) decides both results and machine life• Reading an equivalent ratio against a lab analysis of under 1 percent• Replacing part of the nitrogen program, spoon-feeding, and in-furrow support• Upfront cost, daily maintenance and who the system fits Resources Mentioned• The Alchemy of Air by Thomas Hager• Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch• Olds College trial work on the productConnect• Nytro AgConnect with Growing the Future Website: growingthefuture.ca YouTube: Growing the Future Instagram: @growingthefuturepodcast LinkedIn: Growing the Future Subscribe to the Growing the Future Podcast wherever you listen, and register for Convergence Conference 2027 at convergence.ag. Register for the Convergence Conference at convergence.ag and stay updated by subscribing to the Growing the Future Podcast at growingthefuturepodcast.ca.

Nitrogen Management and Soil Fertility Science: Engine of the Soil Season 2 with Greg Patterson

Oct 22, 2026 1 hr 29 min

You paid for the nitrogen and put it down the tube on the drill. How much of it did the crop actually use? And if you cannot say, what is next year’s rate based on? Greg Patterson of A&L Laboratories Canada has spent 35 years building nitrogen models for variable rate, starting in the mid-1990s with corn, tobacco and potatoes. In this first live session of Engine of the Soil Season 2, he shows how those models changed, from a heavy calculation to simpler indexes, and why the rate depends on more than a nitrate test. Trevor Thornton, who uses the models with growers in Manitoba, adds what he sees at the farm gate in a year when budgets are tight. Melissa Werkema joins for a frank exchange on boron, balance and what agronomists owe the people they advise. What’s Inside• Why Greg says a good year gets only about 45 to 50 percent of applied nitrogen into the crop, and about 15 percent of potassium• How potassium sets up nitrogen use, including his rule of thumb of about three pounds of potassium for each pound of nitrogen early in the season• The potassium to magnesium ratio he aims for, about 0.25 to 0.35, and the 10 to 30 percent more nitrogen his models call for when it falls below 0.15• Why liming without revisiting the nitrogen rate can hurt crop quality, because nitrogen use efficiency rises with calcium base saturation• Nitrogen holding capacity: why a sandy soil may hold only about 70 pounds of ammonium nitrogen from one application, and when to split it• Why estimated nitrogen release and soil moisture often matter more than temperature, and what a 2.5 acre grid shows that a bulk nitrate sample hides• How Trevor’s clients spend variable rate dollars, in his experience: about half the time the same money placed differently, a fifth to a quarter of the time more, and a quarter to 30 percent of the time less• Cutting costs in a tight year: Greg’s advice to pull back on marginal acres first, and Trevor’s flags-in-the-field method for variable rate without a million...

More Land, Strong Prices: Can Demand Keep Up?

Oct 20, 2026 1 hr 3 min

Fewer listings than last year. Bigger packages. The highest dollar value of farmland listed for sale in ten years. In April, Tim Hammond told the room the market was splitting, with good land still climbing and average land moving sideways. Six months later he is back with a different word for what he sees: not a weakening market so much as a maturing one, with supply and demand closer to balance than they have been in years. Tim, of Hammond Realty, has been in farmland for thirty years. In this live session with Dan Aberhart he takes the questions on people’s minds: what affordability does to the next decision, why access to capital came out on top when the room was polled, and how a transfer of around $50 billion in farmland, mostly inside families, actually gets done. What’s Inside• Why Tim calls this market maturing and not weakening, and what that looks like in practice: sideways, a little up, a little down• How listings can fall in number and still hit a ten-year high in dollar value, and why a September to August crop year is the fairer way to count• Why he takes technical analysis of land values seriously if it is read over a hundred years, and what a 20 percent pullback would mean for lenders in his view (he is not predicting one)• Land as an input or as an investment: how a producer buying to produce thinks differently from a buyer chasing an asset• Why a 5,000 acre package was easier to sell than a 500 acre one three years ago, and why that has reversed• What the room said in a live poll: more people looking to buy or transfer than to sell, and financing as the biggest obstacle• Why a succession plan is one thing and carrying it out is another, and the quarterback role an advisor can play• The Hammond Huddle: one meeting with the accountant, lawyer, lender, wealth advisor and insurance advisor, the dangers, opportunities and strengths exercise, and the risks no one had named, from digital passwords to an unfinished to-do list• When to list (off the combin...

GTF Podcast: Put AI To Work In Ag.

Oct 15, 2026 1 hr 24 min

Five invoices a day. That is what a CFO friend of Dan’s says a farm can see in a busy season, and each one has to be checked, categorized and matched to a receipt. Most people in agriculture have nobody to hand that to, which leads to the question Dan hears most: what can I take off my plate first? This live session starts there and then follows the room. Dan sets out to show one job and ends up building three things in front of the audience, answering a hard question about security, and being candid about what is still a demo. He is not a machine learning expert and says so. What he does offer is a working method. What’s Inside• Why the first step is context, not a tool, and why Dan says dictating to the machine beats typing to it• A grain basis tracker for a terminal that keeps its prices behind a password: ask the company for a supported connection first, then look at what browser and computer control can do• Why the basis numbers in the live demo were made up, and what a verified source for one specific terminal still has to prove• A soil test tracker built live from a few questions: matching lab shipment receipts to returned reports, then checking what the grower portal shows• A morning dashboard changed by voice while the room watched: weather, email summary, market news, futures report• Where to start with agents: one agent that does one job, then a small group, named and organized like staff• The privacy question, answered without a sales pitch: what goes to the cloud, what can stay local, and why computer control is the feature to be most careful with• The tire torque reminder: an assistant that read an invoice email and flagged a safety item nobody asked it to watch forDan opens with a problem every farm office knows: invoices, receipts and the people chasing them in a busy season. He says the real question people bring him is what to take off their plate first. He tells how he rebuilt his own business with a team of AI agents. He also tells how an assista...

Farm Succession: Work Hard and Wait Is Not a Plan

Oct 14, 2026 58 min

Working hard is how most farm successors earn their place. It is not the same as being prepared to lead. A successor can run the sprayer, raise the crop and know the ground, and still be missing the decision-making, the numbers and the family conversations that the founder has carried without ever naming them. Patti Durand, family business advisor and author of The Future Leader, and Chris Corbett, her partner at Brightrack, join Dan Aberhart for a live briefing built on three questions: How well do you know yourself? How well do you know your farm business? How well do you know your farm family? They explain why the successor's job is to prepare to lead and the founder's job is to prepare to leave, why "my parents have a plan" is an assumption worth checking, and what to do when a conversation gets hot. What's Inside • Why being operationally strong is not the same as being ready to lead, and which decision-making skills are usually missing • Why the founder's job is to prepare to leave, and why that is harder than it sounds • The assumption that parents have a plan they will reveal when the time comes, and the case for saying plainly that you don't have one yet • Why the family's general accountant or lawyer may not be the right specialist for succession, using a family doctor and a hip replacement as the comparison • How to notice when you are triggered, why a time-out of at least twenty minutes helps, and the safe word one family agreed on • Four prompts that open a hard conversation: help me understand, say more, tell me more, I'm curious • How to tell whether you have a transition question or a business sustainability question • Why you don't have to love the numbers, but you do need to read the dashboard • How to start family meetings: a meeting about meetings, a short agenda and a shared picture of the outcome you wantKey Topics • Successor preparation and founder letting go • Assumptions about a plan that may not exist • Choosing the right specialist advi...

Farm Finance: The Fractional CFO Strategy Every Farm Needs

Oct 8, 2026 1 hr 0 min

Your banker calls it coffee. In Craig Macfie's experience, it is an interview. They are reading your numbers, and they are reading how you manage. Harvest ends, Christmas comes, and twelve months of bookkeeping land on the accountant's desk with everyone else's. Reports can arrive in April, just as the field work starts again. Next year's decisions are already underway while the picture of last year is still missing. Dan Aberhart sits down with Craig, a CPA, P.Ag. and the founder of Spring CFO, who works alongside farm owners as their fractional CFO. A live poll of the room found only about a third had grain inventory and working capital numbers that were current and checked. Craig explains why the numbers are always an estimate, and what it takes to build the finance side of an operation on a solid base. What's Inside • Why a lender's "coffee" is really an interview, and what they read across the table • Why grain inventory is always an estimate, and why the adjustment more often hurts next year's profitability than helps • The building blocks of farm finance: strategy and risk first, then transactions, bookkeeping, reporting, forecasting and the bank • How to get bookkeeping current when decisions are being made on information months old • Cash flow lending versus asset-based lending, and the production reconciliation inside AgriStability • How the Entrepreneurial Operating System gives a farm a simple structure for strategy, a scorecard and meetingsResources Mentioned • Traction (the book behind the Entrepreneurial Operating System) • Good to Great, by Jim Collins Connect • springcfo.com Connect with Growing the Future Website: growingthefuture.ca YouTube: Growing the Future Instagram: @growingthefuturepodcast LinkedIn: Growing the Future Subscribe to the Growing the Future Podcast wherever you listen, and register for Convergence Conference 2027 at convergence.ag. Register for the Convergence Conference at convergence.ag and stay updated by subscribing to...

Learn To Hedge: No Body Showed You

Oct 6, 2026 1 hr 3 min

A grain farm carrying roughly $500 of crop per acre on 5,000 acres is carrying about two and a half million dollars of exposure to grain prices. It doesn't need an open trading account to be in the market. Ryan Bonnett started as a 21-year-old grain merchant and later began trading his own account. He won early, then lost ten or twelve trades in a row because, as he puts it, he was trading on feel and had no system. He joins Dan to explain why almost nobody is taught how to use hedging tools, what changes when you have rules for getting in and a point where you know you're wrong, and how a farm can think about protecting the bottom end of its price. Live questions from the audience cover cross-hedging, technical analysis and how much time to give the markets each week. What's Inside Why most farmers never learn the tools their grain buyers use every dayThe question that exposes whether you have a system for selling or only a feelingWhat "bullish" and "bearish" mean once you have to say how far and whyWhy call and put options work like insurance on a farm, and what makes them expensive or cheapWhat to do about crops with no futures marketWhy even a competent trader needs someone who will disagree with themConnect with Growing the FutureWebsite: growingthefuture.ca YouTube: Growing the Future Instagram: @growingthefuturepodcast LinkedIn: Growing the Future Subscribe to the Growing the Future Podcast wherever you listen, and register for Convergence Conference 2027 at convergence.ag. Register for the Convergence Conference at convergence.ag and stay updated by subscribing to the Growing the Future Podcast at growingthefuturepodcast.ca.

The WD-40 AI Workshop: Lubricate Life's Squeaky Wheels

Oct 1, 2026 1 hr 1 min

The hardest thing to fix on a farm doesn't have a part number. It's whatever went wrong between people, and unlike a tractor, you can't just order the replacement part. Dan built this session around an experiment: using the same diagnostic logic a farm already trusts, soil test, tissue test, soil map, applied to people instead of fields. He walks through his own Kolbe, CliftonStrengths, and Enneagram results live, then brings on Robert Woolf to tell a real story: when Dan and Robert negotiated Robert's return for Cohort 3, they each let an AI interview them for hours, then let the two AI agents work out 90 percent of the deal before either of them read a final draft. Stefano Zanotto, early in his own cohort, joins to talk about what the same diagnostics surfaced for him. What's Inside Why Dan treats three personality assessments like a soil test, a tissue test, and a soil map, and what happens when all three point the same directionHow a multi-hour AI interview replaced a negotiation neither party wanted to have in personWhat actually went wrong when Dan tried to run things the way he's wired, instead of how the work needed to be doneWhy a team's energy breaks down into five types, initiating, investigating, organizing, executing, finishing, and what happens when a team is short on oneWhat a farm succession handover looks like when everyone's real motivations are on the table before the hard conversation startsConnect with Growing the FutureWebsite: growingthefuture.caYouTube: Growing the FutureInstagram: @growingthefuturepodcastLinkedIn: Growing the FutureSubscribe to the Growing the Future Podcast wherever you listen, and register for Convergence Conference 2027 at convergence.ag. Register for the Convergence Conference at convergence.ag and stay updated by subscribing to the Growing the Future Podcast at growingthefuturepodcast.ca.

The AI Agronomist Transformation

Sep 25, 2026 59 min

Robert Woolf is 67. He is not a programmer. In season he is scouting fields fourteen to sixteen hours a day, and he used to get home and forget half of what he'd found before he could write it up. His grandson brought up AI at a rodeo. Robert's first thought was that he was too close to retirement to bother learning it. He didn't retire. He built thirteen AI agents instead, one of which checks the other twelve, and this conversation is him walking through exactly how. What's Inside Growing up on the family farm, twelve years at a John Deere dealership, and how sales and shop work shaped the way he thinks about a client relationshipThe precision ag coaching network that taught him more about why farming works than farming itself did, and the culture of open collaboration he says he has never found anywhere elseTwelve years of independent coaching, more than a hundred irrigation pivots under his management, and a body that finally told him to slow downWhy his own grandchildren were raised to think AI would ruin the world, and what changed their mindsA full walkthrough of his agent hierarchy: sixteen scattered projects reorganized into a single reporting structure, one integrator directing the restWhat a client question that used to take hours to verify now takes minutes to answer, and whyHis stated reason for doing any of this at 67: sixty years and more than sixty harvests of accumulated judgment that does not have to end with himWhy he will not touch a free AI tool, and what he tells anyone thinking about walking away from this entirelyRelated Episodes GYFOS Cohort 2 Session 8, where this same agent structure gets built live in front of the roomConnect with Robert WoolfAvailable through the Growing Your Future Operating System cohortConnect with Growing the Future Website: growingthefuture.ca YouTube: Growing the Future Instagram: @growingthefuturepodcast LinkedIn: Growing the Future Subscribe to the Growing the Future Podcast wherever you listen, and register for C...

Know Your Numbers: Down To The Field

Sep 22, 2026 1 hr 20 min

A farm and its neighbour, same region, same growing conditions, can sit $187 an acre apart in what actually gets made. That gap decides what gets paid down, what gets replaced, and eventually what gets passed on. This is the third session in MNP's Know Your Numbers series. The first two took the conversation from the books to the whole-farm benchmark. This one goes past the fence line and into the field. What's Inside What a profit map actually is: gross margin minus labour, power and machinery, deliberately stripped of capital structure so it is not just a proxy for farm sizeThe Soil Intellect Map, MNP's own layering of electrical conductivity and topography, and what it is built to findWhy the spread in crop input spending between top producers and average ones turned out small, and why the real gap sits somewhere else entirelyWhat gross margin by seeding date actually shows, and why canola punishes a late start harder than wheat doesA live guess from the room on what share of farms know their gross margin field by field, and how far off the real number wasRansom land: the term for the acres you keep farming only because they came bundled with the ground you actually wantWhy some of the most successful farms are also the most likely to let a weak field coast, simply because it is easy to ignore when the rest of the operation is carrying itRelated Episodes Five Numbers Every Farm Should Know: Get Your Books in OrderKnow Your Numbers: See Where You Stack UpConnect with Dean Klippenstine:MNP: mnp.ca/en/personnel/dean-klippenstineLinkedIn: Dean Klippenstine Connect with Mike Palmier:MNP: mnp.caConnect with Growing the Future Website: growingthefuture.ca YouTube: Growing the Future Instagram: @growingthefuturepodcast LinkedIn: Growing the Future Subscribe to the Growing the Future Podcast wherever you listen, and register for Convergence Conference 2027 at convergence.ag. Register for the Convergence Conference at convergence.ag and stay updated by subscribing to the...

Canola Prices and the Washington Policy Fight

Sep 17, 2026 1 hr 13 min

Canola is priced off documents written in another country, and most of the people growing it have never read one. Susan Stroud spent more than fifteen years in the cash grain business, buying by truck and rail and loading out on barge, before building No Bull Ag into a grain and oilseed analysis service. She joins Dan and co-host Ryan Bonnett of ABB Solutions for a working session on the policy machinery underneath the canola market. What's Inside How a California low carbon fuel standard, commissioned by a movie star governor, set off the renewable diesel boom that built Canada's crush capacityWhat a RIN actually is, what a small refinery exemption does, and what happened when the hardship calculation was quietly rewritten this SeptemberWhy canola oil fell off the tax credit map entirely in 2025, and the single amendment that brought it back for 2026Where canola meal goes, why meal has overtaken oil as the profit driver in crush, and what broiler chickens have to do with your basisHer read on why the risks are stacking bullish, and why she still tells producers to keep selling into strength rather than sitting on their handsResources MentionedNo Bull Ag market insights, with a two week previewAgVentures international tours Connect with Susan Stroud:No Bull Ag: nobullag.comX: @SusanNobull Connect with Ryan Bonnett:ABB SolutionsConnect with Growing the Future Website: growingthefuture.ca YouTube: Growing the Future Instagram: @growingthefuturepodcast LinkedIn: Growing the Future Subscribe to the Growing the Future Podcast wherever you listen, and register for Convergence Conference 2027 at convergence.ag. Register for the Convergence Conference at convergence.ag and stay updated by subscribing to the Growing the Future Podcast at growingthefuturepodcast.ca.

Farm Finances to Decisions

Sep 15, 2026 1 hr 6 min

Most producers pay an accountant every year, file the statements, and use them for the bank. David Sullivan's position is that this wastes information the farm has already bought. A consultant for over twenty years and now with Global Ag Risk Solutions, he joins Dan to take a set of farm financials apart and rebuild them into something you can make a decision with, using the five-bucket framework two advisors taught him at his own family's kitchen table in 1999. What's Inside Why the statements your accountant prepares are built for compliance, and what changes when you reorganize the same numbers for managementThe five buckets every farm fits into, and the one-line test for whether a cost belongs in your marginWhat LPM and LBF actually stand for, after years of being said out loud like everyone already knowsWhy net worth can climb for a decade on land appreciation while the operation itself is barely returning anythingThe case for benchmarking against your own last ten years before paying anyone to compare you to the neighboursResources Mentioned:Global Ag Risk SolutionsThe five-bucket worksheet, shared free Connect with David Sullivan:Global Ag Risk SolutionsLinkedIn: David SullivanConnect with Growing the Future Website: growingthefuture.ca YouTube: Growing the Future Instagram: @growingthefuturepodcast LinkedIn: Growing the Future Subscribe to the Growing the Future Podcast wherever you listen, and register for Convergence Conference 2027 at convergence.ag. Register for the Convergence Conference at convergence.ag and stay updated by subscribing to the Growing the Future Podcast at growingthefuturepodcast.ca.

Convergence Is Back. Here Is What We Are Building.

Aug 28, 2026 1 hr 1 min

Agriculture does not run along a single track. The agronomy decisions, the farm business pressures, the succession conversations, and the quiet health questions underneath all of it are connected -- and for most people in agriculture, they never land in the same room. Convergence Conference 2027 was built for that room. You are invited. Convergence Conference 2027 | February 2 to 4, 2027 DoubleTree by Hilton, Regina, Saskatchewan Theme: Cross Currents Four pillars. One room. A few hundred people who think the way you do -- or challenge the way you do. Agronomy. Farm Business Management. Health and Wellness. Agri-Food Production. Get your tickets now at: www.eventbrite.ca/e/convergence-conference-2027-tickets-1989958462329 In this briefing, Dan Aberhart sits down with Terry Aberhart (conference founder), Warren Bills (MNP), Laura Shoemaker (farmer and repeat attendee), and Courtney Thevenot (Scotiabank) to talk about what the room has produced over three years and what is being built for 2027. Warren Bills makes a live money-back guarantee on YouTube. Laura Shoemaker proposes a retirement workshop and is elected to chair the committee before the hour is out. We are also working on Ag Rocks for Charity, an opening-night live music and community fundraiser in support of STARS Air Ambulance. We will share more as that piece takes shape. Topics and Timestamps 0:00 -- Four pillars: agronomy, farm business management, health and wellness, agri-food production 1:00 -- Convergence Conference 2027 is open -- February 2 to 4, DoubleTree Regina 2:00 -- Platform partners and panel introductions: Terry Aberhart, Warren Bills, Laura Shoemaker, Courtney Thevenot 5:00 -- Terry Aberhart on the gap in agriculture that started the conference 8:00 -- Jessica Jansen keynote and the moment that defined what Convergence actually is 10:00 -- Warren Bills on the post-COVID case for in-person gatherings 12:00 -- Laura Shoemaker: the live-concert analogy for being in the...

Know Your Numbers: See Where You Stack Up

Aug 25, 2026 1 hr 4 min

Most operators assume the best farms in their region are spending a lot more to get a lot more out of their land. The data says otherwise. Travis Girard, a farm management consultant with MNP, and Dean Klippenstine, also with MNP, return for the second session in the Know Your Numbers benchmarking series, drawing on a database that now covers roughly 1,500 farms and 8.5 million acres across the Prairies. What's Inside - Why the production expense gap between top performing farms and average ones came in at just seven dollars an acre, not the twenty five to fifty most people guessed - Seven years of profitability data across the region, including the one year almost everyone assumes was the worst, and wasn't - The three things Dean Klippenstine says separate profitable farms from the rest, starting with crop selection - Why labor, power, and machinery costs come down to mindset more than acres under management - What bringing your three worst fields up to your own farm's average gross margin could be worth in a yearResources MentionedMNPMNP Know Your Numbers benchmarking seriesConnect with Travis Gerrard: Travis GerrardConnect with Dean Klippenstine: Dean Klippenstine Linked In: Dean KlippenstineConnect with Growing the Future Website: growingthefuture.ca YouTube: Growing the Future Instagram: @growingthefuturepodcast LinkedIn: Growing the Future Subscribe to the Growing the Future Podcast wherever you listen, and register for Convergence Conference 2027 at convergence.ag. Register for the Convergence Conference at convergence.ag and stay updated by subscribing to the Growing the Future Podcast at growingthefuturepodcast.ca.

The Crop Is Ready. Is Your Yard?

Aug 20, 2026 1 hr 3 min

A $1.2 million combine is only as fast as the slowest part of the yard behind it, and for most harvests, that slow part isn't the field. It's the space between the combine and the bin: the trucks, the augers, the dryer, and the person running between all three. Dan Aberhart brought three operators together who've each solved that bottleneck a different way, from a hundred-thousand-dollar retrofit to a fully automated grain-handling site eight months and one generation in the making. What's Inside • How Brennan McArthur built an automated grain-handling system near Watrous that dumps a legal Super B in about eight minutes, and what actually pushed him to build it • Vince Pawluski's remote-control retrofit kit that lets one operator run more than one machine, and the real dollar cost of an idling tractor • Trevor Scherman on why a magnetic drop pan is still the cheapest data-collection device on the farm, even as combine automation does more of the calibration itself • What each guest thinks won't be automated for years yet, and why the combine seat is the last one they expect to see empty • Where smaller automated units fit against Western Canada's big-iron reality, and why swarm technology hasn't earned trust yet If the data side of this conversation landed for you, look for the back-catalog episode with sprayer specialist Tom Wolf on calibration and coverage. It's the same instinct Trevor brings to a drop pan, applied to the boom instead of the header. Resources Mentioned • SureGain (Trevor Scherman's harvest data and drop pan work) • LV Control (Winnipeg-based grain handling automation) • John Deere Operations Center (JD Ops) • Agromatix Pro • STARS Air Ambulance Connect • Connect with Trevor Scherman: SureGain • Connect with Vince Pawluski • Connect with Brennan McArthurConnect with Growing the Future Website: growingthefuture.ca YouTube: Growing the Future Instagram: @growingthefuturepodcast LinkedIn: Growing the Future Subscribe to the Gr...

Sell High or Sell Wrong - A Pre-Harvest Market Briefing

Aug 12, 2026 1 hr 4 min

Canola's up on a good rally, fertilizer's down from its spring highs, and for the first time in a while, Western Canadian producers have a little swagger back. But every rally raises the same question: is this the one you lock in, or the one that convinces you to wait too long? Dave Norris of Norris Crop Consulting and Todd Rowan of IXL Innovations, two grain marketing advisors working with the top tier of Western Canadian producers, join Darren Sander of Crop Aid Nutrition, a working farmer near Rosetown, Saskatchewan, to read where this crop actually stands and what it means for pricing decisions this fall. The math is tight. Two bushels an acre off the Canadian canola average works out to about a million tons. With crush running at 14 million tons and exports near 9 million, a crop landing at 21 million tons instead of 23 leaves someone rationed. The panel breaks down the real story on crop size, why China stepping back into the market matters more than most producers realize, and what the fertilizer and fuel numbers actually tell you about locking in the 2026 crop now. What's Inside Why 2 bushels off the Canadian canola average works out to about a million tons, and what that means for pricing What it means when 14 million tons of crush and 9 million tons of exports meet a crop that might land at 21 million tons Why China stepping into the canola market in August is a signal worth watching, and what it tends to wake up in other buyers Why fertilizer at $850 a ton looks different once you compare it to what canola is actually worth right now The real reason most producers miss good pricing windows: they respond to a push notification, not a website they have to remember to check A live read on the August USDA report as it dropped, and what it changed in the room in real time If this conversation makes you think about who's actually watching your marketing decisions, go back in the catalog for our episode with Derek Squair on what a grain market coach a...

Farm Succession Planning Canada: Are You Prepared?

Aug 11, 2026 1 hr 0 min

Picture the one person your farm cannot run without. Now picture their chair empty tomorrow morning. Can someone else access the accounts, make payroll, or explain what the farm owes and why? If those answers only live in one person's head, the farm is not prepared, no matter how good the balance sheet looks. Jace Young grew up watching his grandfather's 55 year, multimillion dollar Kansas farm operation collapse into bankruptcy in 2005, then built Legacy Farmer to help other families get their financial house in order before the same thing happens to them. Jolene Bolding, Manager of Advisory Services at Farm Credit Canada, has her own story of a farm sale her family decided on before she ever got a seat at the table. Wade Berlinic, Associate Broker with Hammond Realty's Ag Exits and Acquisitions Strategies team, sees what happens when that conversation gets put off until the land is already on the market. Together they walk through why only 12 percent of Canadian farms have an actual transition plan, what it costs a family when nobody has one, and the five stage process Jace uses to move an operation from financial blind spots to a plan everyone in the family can actually see. What's Inside - Why a farm can look bulletproof on paper and still not be prepared for one empty chair - The story behind Jace Young's grandfather losing a 55 year, multimillion dollar Kansas operation, and what it did to the family afterward - Why only 12 percent of Canadian farms have a written transition plan, and what that gap actually costs - The five stage process Legacy Farmer uses to move a family from financial blind spots to a real plan: Position, Production, Profit, Protection, and Prosper - Why the conversation almost never starts with the numbers, it starts with pride, ego, and who is willing to ask for help - What $55 billion in Canadian farm assets transferring in the next decade means for every family still putting this conversation off If this conversation hits home...

Independent Agronomist Jaeda Hoppe: Going Out on Your Own at 24

Aug 10, 2026 59 min

Every farmer has somebody they call. The story we tell about that is a farmer who doesn't know what he's doing, hiring someone else to think for him. Jaeda Hoppe thinks that story is wrong. She went independent at 24, after two of her clients tracked her down through her mother's hair salon and asked her to work for them privately. Four years later, she still has the same five clients she started with. This conversation is about what she actually gets paid for, once the theory runs out. What's Inside - What a producer is actually paying an independent agronomist for, once the theory runs out - Why she recommends every young agronomist start in ag retail, even though almost nobody treats it as an end goal - The built-in objectivity problem when a retailer's margin depends on which product they recommend - Why she's seen close to zero measurable results from the biological products she's evaluated - Compartmentalizing stress: the skill she says separates the farmers and agronomists who last from the ones who don't - Her weekly Sunday text subscription sharing field observations, and why she built it Connect with Jaeda Hoppe Hoppe AgronomyConnect with Growing the Future Website: growingthefuture.ca YouTube: Growing the Future Instagram: @growingthefuturepodcast LinkedIn: Growing the Future Register for the Convergence Conference at convergence.ag and stay updated by subscribing to the Growing the Future Podcast at growingthefuturepodcast.ca.

Cover Crops Western Canada: Does It Pay on Prairie Acres?

Aug 7, 2026 1 hr 32 min

John Kempf, Melissa Werkema, and Kevin Elmy on Regenerative Economics GTF Productions Live Briefing, in partnership with Sask Soils | August 5, 2026 17,000 farmers registered for a national program teaching cover cropping, nitrogen management, and grazing. 10,000 are actively engaged. When surveyed, 89% said they had already implemented, expanded, or enhanced one of those practices. The holdup was never belief. It was cost, cash flow, and not knowing the ROI. This briefing puts three specialists on that exact question, with the economics front and center the whole way through. What's Inside - John Kempf's nitrogen protocol: ammonium and nitrate ratios, replacing 25% of your first 100 units of nitrogen with sulfur, and why foliar urea outperforms soil-applied nitrogen 4 to 1 - The trace minerals, boron, manganese, cobalt, and molybdenum, behind a claimed 25 to 30 percent yield bump - Why the form of a nutrient matters more than the amount on your soil test, and how sap analysis catches what a standard report misses - Cover cropping as functional plant groups, and the economics of building soil through custom grazing - Why ruminant manure, bison and cattle specifically, builds soil biology that cold-climate soils can't get any other way - What actually triggers a producer to change practices, and why it's rarely curiosity If you want more on tissue and sap testing, look for the Late Crop, Right Call and Tissue Testing episodes in the GTF Podcast back catalog. Resources Mentioned Advancing Eco Agriculture Cover Crops Canada -- Kevin Elmy's consulting practice, author of Not Just Dirt Sask Soils (Saskatchewan Soil Conservation Association) Farmers for Climate Solutions, FARM program -- funding partner behind this briefing Rangeland Bison -- Dean Andrus Connect with John Kempf Advancing Eco Agriculture Connect with Melissa Werkema Future Analytics -- Red Deer, Alberta Connect with Kevin Elmy Cover Crops Canada Conn...

Five Numbers Every Farm Should Know: Get Your Books in Order

Jul 28, 2026 1 hr 0 min

A drought area of Saskatchewan just got two weeks of standing water. Harvest is coming and margins are tight either way, but the numbers still have to work. Most farm finance advice arrives as a binder nobody opens. This conversation is five numbers, in plain language, from a CPA who goes home to a working grain and lentil farm at night. Richelle Boyd, MNP's National Leader for Crop Services, and Dean Klippenstine, a senior partner in MNP's agriculture practice, walk through what good looks like on a real operation and what to check first when something feels off. What's Inside - Gross margin: whether the crop is producing enough room for the rest of the farm - Cost of production: finding your real break-even number per acre - Cash flow: why a profitable year on paper doesn't mean the account is ready - Debt servicing: manageable debt versus debt that leaves no room for a bad crop - Working capital: the cushion between what you can turn into cash and what's coming due Resources Mentioned MNP -- "The Numbers Every Farm Business Should Know" -- mnp.ca/en/insights/directory/the-numbers-every-farm-business-should-know MNP Agriculture practice -- mnp.ca/en/industries/agriculture Connect with Richelle Boyd MNP -- mnp.ca/en/personnel/richelle-boyd Connect with Dean Klippenstine MNP Agriculture -- mnp.ca/en/industries/agriculture Connect with Growing the Future Website: growingthefuture.ca YouTube: Growing the Future Instagram: @growingthefuturepodcast LinkedIn: Growing the Future Register for the Convergence Conference at convergence.ag and stay updated by subscribing to the Growing the Future Podcast at growingthefuturepodcast.ca.

What AI Changed for Them: Four Operators, 30 Days In

Jul 20, 2026 59 min

Four operators in Western Canadian agriculture spent thirty days building with AI, then sat down to tell Dan Aberhart what actually changed. An independent agronomist carrying sixty-plus harvests of judgment, a six-thousand-acre farmer who calls himself a nine who never finishes anything, an entrepreneur scaling a plasma-activated-water nitrogen business, and a Saskatchewan farmland realtor running a team of thirteen all walked into the same AI cohort a month earlier. What they bring back: a satellite-imagery call that stopped an unnecessary reseed, a combine deal an AI advisor told them to walk away from, an agent built at four in the morning that caught financial red flags nobody assigned it to find, and a hard-conversation coach one of them didn't know he needed. Topics and Timestamps 0:00 -- Cold open: the AI cohort joke 2:51 -- Welcome to Growing the Future Productions Live 4:15 -- How this started: 60 days from signal to launch 7:08 -- Meet the panel: Robert, Joe, Chris, Tim 15:16 -- What business problem each of them was actually trying to solve 20:20 -- What the personal operating diagnostic revealed about each of them 30:00 -- Talking openly about AI skepticism and confidentiality 35:39 -- Robert: the gopher-field call satellite imagery corrected 40:34 -- Joe: the combine deal, the AI advisory board, and slowing down emotional decisions 42:51 -- Chris: building diagnostics and agents for the whole team 43:52 -- Tim: the AI tool built to help him have hard conversations 45:57 -- Tim: strategic blueprints and running land-value scenarios 48:24 -- Where each of them takes this next 55:06 -- Cohort 2 details: dates, seats, price, and the guarantee 56:02 -- The real vision: a course with a room, or a room with a course 57:53 -- Closing words from the panel 59:57 -- Sign-off Resources Mentioned GYFOS (Growing Your Future Operating System) Cohort 2 -- application at growingthefuture.ca Personal Operating Diagnostic (built from Kolbe, Cli...

Late Crop Right Call Greg Patterson & Darren Fisher

Jul 17, 2026 54 min

Half of Saskatchewan is watching the canola fill pods. The other half is still sitting in water. 30% of the cropland in the province rated moisture surplus at the time of this conversation, and the ministry's own word is that flooding is the number one source of crop damage in Saskatchewan this year. Yellowing fields, drowned-out low spots, pulses going backwards. The decision framework for in-season nutrition changes when you're not sure which half of the province you're in. Greg Patterson has been doing tissue analysis at A&L Canada Laboratories for decades. Darren Fischer is a technical advisor with Crop-Aid Nutrition who was in the fields in real time during this conversation. This is what they said on July 13, 2026, with the season in exactly the condition it was in. What's Inside - Two seasons on the prairies at once: what each one means for your in-crop nutrition decisions right now - A farm-walk report from Darren Sander at Sander Farms near Sovereign, Saskatchewan -- his fungicide and foliar strategy mid-season - Why you should never apply a fungicide without pairing a foliar with it, and why that's even more true in a wet year - Potassium as the yield driver in both wet and dry conditions: for every pound of nitrogen the crop needs early, it needs three of potassium - How to read a tissue report: the fuel-gauge analogy, what dropping levels actually mean, and why a great crop should drive you crazy - The phloem connection: how potassium and boron work together to move photosynthates through the plant, and what happens when boron is low - The nitrate accumulation trap: when it looks like a nitrogen problem but it's actually a potassium and boron imbalance - Boron in Western Canada: why we're afraid of it, why that's costing yield, and what the research on microbial activity actually says - Foliar selection by condition and crop stage: which product when, and how to think about tank mixing with herbicides and fungicides - Handheld tissue testers...

State of Iron: Who Owns Your Tractor?

Jul 15, 2026 1 hr 5 min

Cory Doctorow has spent 25 years at the Electronic Frontier Foundation watching the same story repeat across industries: a digital lock gets built in, a legal framework gets constructed around it, and the people who depend on the machine lose the right to fix it. He coined the word for how this happens. Enshittification is now in the Oxford English Dictionary. In agriculture, the mechanism is called parts pairing -- a chip that decides who is allowed to fix your equipment and what components can connect to it. The data your tractor generates is a second layer of the same argument. And the remote immobilization of stolen tractors in Ukraine is a third. Cory's position is that all three are the same issue, that the law enabling them passed in 2012 after 6,132 Canadians said no and 53 said yes, and that farmers are one of the most effective political forces in this country when they choose to use it. This is not Growing the Future's verdict on any equipment manufacturer. What's Inside - What enshittification means and why John Deere became Cory's clearest example of it outside tech platforms - Parts pairing: how a chip on your equipment determines who can fix it and what components can connect to it - How data generated by your tractor was being siphoned -- and why data ownership and right-to-repair are the same underlying issue - Honeybee, a Saskatchewan head-end manufacturer, cannot connect their products to Deere equipment because of digital locks, not any technical limitation - Canada's Bill C-11: the Copyright Modernization Act passed in 2012 after 6,132 Canadians opposed it and 53 supported it - Digital sovereignty: from Ukraine's remotely immobilized tractors to what happens if that switch gets turned toward Alberta - Why voting with your wallet does not work in a monopoly, and what the Grangers' fight with the railroads in 1890 has to do with where we are right now - A specific call to action: CCLA, Open Media, and the EFF -- and why farmers are one o...

Why Aren't You Doing It All?

Jul 9, 2026 45 min

In agriculture, being busy is practically a badge. Ask anybody how they're doing and you'll get some version of underwater. So how does a 25-year-old fifth-generation grain farmer from Churchbridge, Saskatchewan, who also writes federal grain policy, finishes a master's thesis, teaches university, and referees hockey across the country, have more room in her day than most people do? Kate Sauser has ADHD, a system she built around how her brain actually works, and a tattoo on her wrist that reads "everything in time." This is the episode where she explains it. Resources Mentioned Albert Einstein: "Time is relative, its only worth depends on what we do as it is passing" Billy Joel: "Vienna" -- "Slow down, you're doing fine. You can't be everything you want to be before your time." Google Calendar -- Kate's primary scheduling tool ChatGPT -- Kate uses it for daily task planning, meal planning, and workouts Connect with Growing the Future Website: growingthefuture.ca YouTube: Growing the Future Instagram: @growingthefuturepodcast LinkedIn: Growing the Future Register for the Convergence Conference at convergence.ag and stay updated by subscribing to the Growing the Future Podcast at growingthefuturepodcast.ca.

Renewable Diesel Is About to Eat 10% of the Canola Crop

Jul 7, 2026 56 min

One refinery south of Edmonton will process a million tonnes of canola feedstock this year, more than 10% of Canada's entire canola crop at a single facility. The US renewable fuel standard needs another 2.7 million tonnes on top of that, and Indonesia is moving toward a 50% biodiesel blend requirement. In the 2000s, corn ethanol turned a $2.50 crop into a $9 crop in under a decade. Growing the Future's foremost live briefing examines whether canola is about to run the same play, and what the structural demand shift already means for Prairie land values. Topics and Timestamps 0:00 -- Opening: the renewable diesel demand story and the canola-as-fuel structural shift 3:00 -- Sponsor acknowledgments and panelist introductions 5:00 -- Is canola food or fuel, and does the distinction matter? 6:00 -- Shaun Wildman: calorie analysis and why food affordability is not the argument 9:00 -- Quick Dick McDick: Saskatchewan's 24 million canola acres and the case for playing both markets 13:00 -- Ryan Bonnett: the corn ethanol parallel and how US biofuel policy drives domestic demand 14:00 -- RIN credits and the 12-cent-per-pound penalty for Canadian-sourced canola in US markets 16:00 -- Indonesia's B50 blend requirement and what global feedstock scale actually looks like 18:00 -- Local processing expansion: Cargill in Regina, LDC and Richardson in Yorkton doubling capacity 22:00 -- The bottleneck: crush capacity is the ceiling, not canola production 27:00 -- Scale check: the US diesel market and how much canola it would take to move the needle 28:00 -- EPA rates canola second-best vegetable oil for US renewable fuel programs 32:00 -- Saskatchewan's carbon advantage: 67% lower footprint through zero-till canola 36:00 -- US winter canola expansion as a future risk to Canadian market share 39:00 -- Could canola's price floor shift from $500 to $700 per tonne? 45:00 -- Prairie land values: what the renewable diesel demand shift means for buyers and holders 48:00...

Don't Follow the Flock

Jul 3, 2026 56 min

In April 2026 the United Nations revised its worst-case climate scenarios downward and declared the most catastrophic projections highly implausible. Almost no one in Canada covered it. Dr. Sylvain Charlebois, director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University and host of Canada's number one rated food podcast, has spent 25 years doing the work the room needs: holding science, policy, and politics to the same standard. In this conversation, he takes on three issues agriculture keeps being told what to think about, climate policy, gene editing, and the Canadian fear of failure, and gives the room the version it hasn't been getting. Topics and Timestamps 0:00 -- Dan's opening question: think of one issue in agriculture you've changed your mind on in the last five years 1:30 -- "Don't Follow the Flock" -- live intro and platform housekeeping 3:00 -- Dr. Sylvain Charlebois: The Food Professor Podcast, Dalhousie, Canada's number one food podcast with zero budget 4:00 -- Ireland, Brexit, and the economic lesson Canada keeps missing about CUSMA 10:00 -- Audience poll: when you hear a strong opinion from a non-farmer, what's your first instinct? 11:00 -- Why civic engagement in food systems makes farming stronger, not weaker 13:00 -- Demand chain management: build from the consumer back, not the farm gate forward 15:00 -- How Canadian media coverage became one-sided and why it keeps getting harder to correct 22:00 -- The GTF promotion ad that was rejected -- and what that reveals 23:00 -- Topics Sylvain is asked not to raise on Ottawa stages 25:00 -- The "mini-me" problem in academia: conform, or get canceled 33:00 -- MYTH 1: Climate change -- the UN revised its worst-case scenarios downward; almost no Canadian outlet covered it 40:00 -- Carbon pricing at $110 a tonne with emissions still rising: what the data actually shows 44:00 -- MYTH 2: Gene editing -- why transparency and consumer buy-in are the one thing the industry keeps skipping 46:...

Everything in Time with Kate Sauser

Jul 1, 2026 55 min

The person everyone asks how they do it all is usually the last person to have a tidy answer. Kate Sauser is a policy manager at Grain Growers of Canada, a fifth-generation farmer from Churchbridge, SK, a high-level hockey referee, a competitive softball player, and a master's student finishing her thesis, all at 25. In this conversation, she shares the three-part framework behind her course on time: the problem most operators carry but rarely name out loud, the single decision that changes how the whole calendar feels, and the practical moves that make it work week to week. Topics and Timestamps 0:00 -- Pre-registration responses: what does "I don't have time" actually mean? 1:00 -- Live intro: "How Does She Do It All?" and platform housekeeping 3:00 -- Kate's background: family farm near Churchbridge, Grain Growers, U of S, hockey, softball, 25 6:00 -- The over-committer's honest answer: time is relative to what you decide to do with it 9:00 -- Live poll: which of these sounds like your week? 11:00 -- Why technology makes the time problem worse before it makes it better 12:00 -- Kate's daily to-do list system: schedule blocks, high-priority vs. rolling low-priority tasks 14:00 -- Pen to paper: why writing it down works better than any app 15:00 -- "Everyone gets angry at time but doesn't work with it" -- the shift that started everything 16:00 -- The $86,400 analogy: if you had that many dollars to spend today, would you waste it? 18:00 -- The "Everything in Time" tattoo and the philosophy behind it 19:00 -- Modern myths about time and the scarcity loop they reinforce 21:00 -- Harry Siemens on day-timers, five priorities, and why four and five often disappear by noon 22:00 -- Hard stops and focused blocks: how Kate finished her master's thesis 25:00 -- ADHD, late diagnosis at 23, and the paralysis that comes before the system 31:00 -- Is ADHD a disability or a superpower? Kate's answer 34:00 -- Turning guilt into fuel: how a negative emotion b...

The Summer Selling Window

Jun 29, 2026 1 hr 5 min

Every July, Prairie operators make new-crop decisions that set their cash flow for the next twelve months, usually reading the same headlines as everyone else and reacting to the loudest one. In this conversation, grain marketing advisor Ryan Bonnett puts his daily client read on a stage: what is actually moving canola, wheat, corn, and soybean markets right now, and where the summer selling window sits inside the seasonal pattern. Colin Brisebois, VP of Products and Market Strategies at FCC, adds the lender's view, what disciplined marketing looks like once it shows up in an operation's cash flow. Topics and Timestamps 0:00 -- The spring everyone just lived, and why the marketing window opens at the worst possible time 3:30 -- Welcome to Ryan Bonnett and Colin Brisebois 6:00 -- Live poll: how much of your 2026 crop is still unpriced 10:00 -- Beat the average, not the top: Ryan's core marketing philosophy 13:00 -- Colin on discipline: know your cost of production before you build a plan 16:00 -- Seller's remorse, and the parameters that remove it 19:00 -- The 80/20 problem: why most operators miss the top of the market 21:00 -- Crop conditions across the Prairies and the US heading into summer 28:00 -- Know your unique ability: when to hire the discipline you don't have 31:00 -- Ryan's seasonal chart: why prices rally into seeding and fall after 34:00 -- The summer selling window, and put options as price insurance 39:00 -- Reading the charts: double tops, RSI, and shifting momentum 42:00 -- China, Iran, and the headlines that don't move price until money does 45:00 -- New biofuel regulation, the floor under canola, and the policy risk underneath it 49:00 -- Bullish or bearish, defend your answer: Ryan's discipline test 52:00 -- Domestic processing and the case for building crush capacity at home 55:00 -- Colin's three pillars at FCC: knowledge, advice, capital 58:00 -- The $50 billion wealth transfer, and who replaces the next generation of ag ta...

The Great Canadian Bull with Robert Andjelic

Jun 25, 2026 1 hr 30 min

Robert Andjelic has been bearish more often than not for three years. In January, he stood in front of a packed room and called a capital squeeze. This time he came back fired up about something different: three converging forces he believes put Canada in the strongest agricultural position in a generation. What follows is Robert defending three years of public predictions, line by line, before laying out the new one. Topics and Timestamps 0:00 -- Dan opens. Robert's backstory: escaping Croatia as a boy, building a commercial real estate empire, the Saskatchewan land bet that started at $400 an acre 5:00 -- Audience poll: who's bullish, neutral, or bearish right now 8:00 -- Why farmer suicide rates stay high even when the numbers look good 12:00 -- The fall 2023 call to lock in farm debt, revisited 18:00 -- Mark to market: the Saskatchewan farmland call, three years of FCC data 21:00 -- Why Robert owns zero acres of farmland in the United States 23:00 -- The eight early signs of credit tightening, in order 30:00 -- What a major operator's financial trouble this year means for the rest of the industry 41:00 -- Rent versus buy: the framework Robert actually uses on his own land 45:00 -- Why the smaller rural towns keep shrinking 52:00 -- Why Canada is technically in a recession as of mid-2026 59:00 -- The Hormuz oil shock compared to the 1979-81 shock 1:04:00 -- How the live audience rated Robert's three-year track record 1:06:00 -- The cattle herd rebuild that's still years from equilibrium 1:10:00 -- The bullish thesis: the Strait of Hormuz, a developing super El Nino, and the aquifers running dry 1:13:00 -- Robert's probability breakdown for an agricultural super cycle, 2026 to 2028 1:20:00 -- Why Robert doesn't trust AI to predict what happens next 1:21:00 -- Inside the Strait of Hormuz: vessels waiting, insurers pulling back, years to rebuild 1:29:00 -- Closing: investing by the numbers, not the narrative Resources Mentioned FCC Farmland...

The Math Broke: Who can Afford to Stay in?

Jun 21, 2026 1 hr 1 min

The math of buying in has changed. The math of staying in has too. David Widmar of Agricultural Economic Insights and Eric Olsen of MNP Farm Management bring the US and Canadian numbers together to examine what farmland affordability, cash rent pressure, and the post-ZIRP interest rate environment actually mean for producers running a farm in 2026. Two countries. One calculator. The gap between what land is worth and what it can earn has never been wider. Topics and Timestamps 0:00 -- Dan opens: the 16-year cash rent stat and what it signals about the moment we are in 0:07 -- David Widmar: how ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy) inflated asset values from 2008 onward 0:08 -- New Fed chair Kevin Warsh: five review areas, inflation as priority one, what it means for rates 0:09 -- Eric Olsen: Canadian interest rate outlook -- stable to slightly up, no major jumps expected 0:11 -- David: US row crop squeeze -- lower commodity prices, stubborn cost structure, Iran conflict pushing energy and fertilizer back up 0:12 -- US government ad hoc payments: second highest since the 1920s, and why that carries risk 0:14 -- Eric: Canadian farm support programs -- AgriStability, crop insurance (98% participation in Manitoba), GARS 0:17 -- David: How ARC and PLC work -- risk management programs with a built-in payment delay problem 0:19 -- David: "Musical chairs" -- why ad hoc programs create systemic risk rather than resolve it 0:20 -- Eric: AgriStability explained -- margin-based, plannable, based on your numbers not a county average 0:23 -- Eric: "Farmers are sophisticated businesspeople" -- the $2-3M floor that surprises people outside agriculture 0:24 -- David: The paradox of risk management -- tools that reduce short-term pain can build long-term fragility 0:30 -- Dan introduces the farmland affordability calculator David built for registrants 0:31 -- Metric 1: Down payment years -- Indiana at $15K/acre, $326 rent, 35% down = 16 years of cash rent saved (was 6 in th...

Farmer Mental Health: You Are Not Your Tractor

Jun 19, 2026 57 min

CONTENT WARNING: This episode discusses farm financial stress, identity, and mental health in agriculture, including reference to suicide rates in the farming community. If you or someone you know is struggling, support is available. Numbers are listed at the end of these notes. Three to one is the male-to-female suicide ratio in agriculture. Most of the people carrying the hardest financial weight in farming right now are also carrying it alone, measuring their worth by what they produce. Corliss Rassyle has spent decades working in the space between what a farm earns and what a farmer is worth. Dan built this room for those people. Topics and Timestamps 0:00 -- Cold open 1:30 -- Dan's disclosure: a company erased to zero and what the new start required 4:00 -- Welcome: who this room is built for and the three-to-one ratio in agriculture 5:00 -- Mom at the Easter griddle: "I've done nothing with my life" 6:30 -- Why we get the measure of success wrong and where it starts 9:00 -- Saskatchewan is resource-rich -- so why do so many people in agriculture feel unfulfilled? 10:00 -- Subconscious programming: the belief systems formed in childhood still running adult lives 13:00 -- The 1,111 vision: how Lead Conference Canada came to be 15:00 -- Sitting in the back row of the venue: the moment the number confirmed itself 17:00 -- Workshop begins: Corliss takes the room 22:00 -- The question to sit with: what belief are you holding about yourself right now? 23:00 -- Thoughts create emotions, emotions create actions, actions create results 27:00 -- The Five A's: Aware, Acknowledge, Assess, Affirm, Accept 29:00 -- The five most powerful sentences: I am, I can, I will, I release, I forgive 30:00 -- Acceptance: Corliss's brother and the question "Why won't you let me help you?" 33:00 -- Dan's experience: what happened when a room of men did this work together 37:00 -- Same rain, two different meanings: the drought and the wedding 38:00 -- Corliss's divor...

What a Farmer Wants You to Know About Food -- Dennis Bulani

Jun 17, 2026 2 hr 19 min

Somewhere between the farm and your plate, the story of how your food is grown got hijacked. Not by farmers. By people who have never touched a seed, never watched a crop fail, never had to explain to their banker why the weather won. Dennis Bulani is a fourth-generation Saskatchewan farmer, CEO of The Rack -- one of Western Canada's most respected independent ag retailers -- founder of the Trust Your Plate movement, and author of What a Farmer Wants You to Know About Food. He sat in a room full of entrepreneurs in Arizona while a speaker told everyone that modern farming was poisoning the world. He went home and wrote a book about it. Nine in ten people trust farmers. One in five trust modern farming practices. This is the conversation about how that gap happened -- and what to do with it. Topics and Timestamps 0:00 -- Dan's open: "Somewhere between the farm and your plate, the story got hijacked" 1:07 -- Dennis on the farm right now: wheat year, 1,000 acres, single-crop rotation 1:28 -- The one-crop-per-year strategy and why it works for a busy CEO-farmer 4:15 -- Pulse rotation research: 15% average yield lift across all other crops 5:52 -- Solving phomyces root rot: 5-year research taking peas from 25 to 75 bushels 7:37 -- Published in the American Journal of Plant Science 8:49 -- The Rack's research program: PhD scientist, 6 agronomists, 12 field trials annually 10:00 -- The 100-bushel canola goal and what the "kitchen sink" trial actually proved 13:06 -- How "Rogue" was born: Dr. Bill Brown, manganese-zinc surfactant, and 10-12% yield lift 17:10 -- Rogue in Liberty Canola and what glyphosate actually does to manganese and zinc 18:36 -- Dennis's animal science degree: balancing plant rations is the same science as balancing cattle rations 22:13 -- From Eli Lilly to building The Rack: how an animal nutritionist ended up selling gas 26:00 -- Strategic Coach and the size of the problems Dennis is now willing to take on 30:00 -- The Arizona room:...

On the Bone Trail Ep 1: What Farming Does to Fathers

Jun 15, 2026 58 min

On the Bone Trail: What Farming Does to Fathers -- Jeff Bennett, Unfiltered 12 days before Father's Day, Jeff Bennett -- a fourth-generation Saskatchewan farmer whose dad's farm sits 800 feet from his own door -- sat down to say the things most fathers in agriculture are thinking and nobody will say out loud. The debt. The legacy. The math that doesn't add up. Whether the farm is a gift or a burden. And whether he can pass it to his sons without crushing them. No panel. No slides. No consulting-speak. This is Episode 1 of On the Bone Trail -- Growing the Future's foremost live briefing series built around the farmers who are still standing, still building, and still trying to figure out how to hand something worth having to the next generation. Topics and Timestamps 0:00 -- "12 days from now, it's Father's Day." Dan's open on what the farm costs a father 0:57 -- Platform and partner acknowledgments: Bone Trail Originals, Crop-Aid, Hammond Realty, GRIPP, Convergence 2027 4:47 -- Jeff: "When you're a father, you're also a son. You're living in both worlds -- the past and the future." 6:12 -- How becoming a father changed everything: from "how do I expand" to "how do I pass this off" 7:05 -- The three-son plan: each gets a trade first -- mechanic, electrician, carpenter -- then comes back to the farm 12:46 -- The belt and the combine: two generational philosophies about when to call the dealer 18:44 -- "What did your dad envision for you?" Jeff: "I honestly don't know." 23:51 -- "The problem with farming now is it's not farming then, and I don't think that generation understands it" 26:48 -- 2021: "absolutely kicked my ass" -- the brutal math begins 28:56 -- Input costs tripling: UAN from $100 to $600+ per acre; rent from $35 to $90 per acre 30:05 -- The Manette situation and what it says about the farming model 31:17 -- "I hate owing people money. I'll pay all my bills. They're just not gonna be on time." 31:47 -- Why still want this life for your s...

Values Driven Leadership: Caring is a Competitive Advantage

Jun 11, 2026 1 hr 39 min

Content note: This episode includes open conversation about mental health, suicidal ideation, and personal crisis. If you are struggling, please know you are not alone. In the U.S., call or text 988. In Canada, call Talk Suicide Canada at 1-833-456-4566. A conversation with Trevor Muir -- leadership coach, keynote speaker, poet, and co-founder of SurePoint, the Alberta-based company he helped scale from $4 million to over $120 million in revenue while holding on to its people through a near-bankruptcy and a pandemic. This is not an episode about farming or fuel prices. It is a conversation about what happens when you get everything you thought you wanted and still feel empty on the bathroom floor of a condo you own. It is about terminal uniqueness -- the belief that nobody could possibly understand -- and the slow, expensive way most of us learn it isn't true. Trevor and I met earlier this year in a leadership course he was teaching with Corliss Russell. I broke down in the intro. A room full of oilfield and farm guys went there with me. This episode is the conversation I wanted to have with Trevor once the dust settled. Topics and Timestamps 0:00 -- Introduction: Trevor Muir, Lean In to Lead, and why this episode exists 6:57 -- SurePoint: how ten farm kids from Grand Prairie built a $92M company 8:17 -- The bathroom floor: Edmonton, 2011, the worst and best day of Trevor's life 10:44 -- Dr. Gons and the life coach: "I get it. I totally get it." 13:13 -- Terminal uniqueness: the belief that nobody could understand your pain 14:21 -- Mount Kilimanjaro and the billionaire: testing whether all humans feel the same 20:00 -- SurePoint near-bankruptcy: going full-vulnerable with team, vendors, and clients 23:00 -- Buying the company back in 2018 and the pandemic decision 25:43 -- The pandemic pay cuts: 10%-35%, keeping every employee 27:39 -- $30M to $98M to $125M: how caring became a competitive advantage 30:00 -- Scale Like You Give a Shit -- Trevor's...

Driving the Transition Train: The Acquisition

Jun 6, 2026 1 hr 2 min

Tim Hammond opens with one frame: most buyers are reactive. The phone rings, the land is available, they start figuring out whether they can buy it. Tim's position is that question should have been answered two years before the call. The prepared buyer already has the number. The unprepared buyer watches somebody else close it. Wade walks the Four Ds from the buyer's seat -- Define (kitchen table, ambitions, logistics), Discover (compile, blueprint), Design (three options, pros/cons, recommendation), Deliver (execute). Tim notes the process is not linear; in practice they cycle back to Define as new information surfaces. The container for all of it is the war room: accountant, lender, lawyer, and real estate advisor in the same room at the same time. Poll 2 found zero percent of the audience had done this. Tim was not surprised. The second half opens the capital question. Wade is working a live deal where a seller with a $70M holding is willing to retain $30M to make the transaction possible for a buyer who cannot finance the full amount. Tim names the industry horizon: not enough capital exists in the system to transition all the farms that need to move in the next two to three decades, and creative structures -- tranches, seller retention, equity partnerships -- will become the standard, not the exception. Two topics flagged for future episodes: right of first refusal (common, well-intentioned, six-figure exit consequences if set up wrong) and the young farmer entry question (Joshua from Lethbridge, land at $20K-$30K per acre -- Tim's answer: start the conversation before you think you need to). KEY TOPICS - Poll 1: 55% said biggest barrier is structure (no entity or plan); 33% said finding land; 9% financing; 0% timing - Poll 2: 0% have a war room with all advisors at the table; 40% partially; 30% no; 10% did not know that was the move - Poll 3: 33% actively looking or in a deal; 8% positioned and waiting; 17% thinking about it; 25% harvest mode; 17% adviso...

An Operating System Built for You

Jun 4, 2026 56 min

Dan opens in the water off Koh Lanta, Thailand. The science: a 133-foot tsunami wave registers as zero in deep water. Depth neutralizes force before it ever arrives. The wave only becomes a wave when the ocean floor rises to meet it. That is the operating principle for this session: the operators who get hurt in an AI-disrupted industry are not the ones who were too far away from the change. They are the ones who were too shallow when it arrived. Dan then goes personal. The company collapse. Ten years of revenue, one email in Thailand, zero in January. A leadership meeting where he broke down in front of his team. A vision board that had to be rebuilt around actual DNA rather than borrowed aspiration. Kolbe 7-2-9-2: Quick Start 9, Fact Finder 7 -- the profile that explains why he was always ahead of the room and always restless inside frameworks built for Follow-Thru operators. The session is a product launch, but the argument for the product is rooted in scar tissue, not pitch mechanics. The second half is live demos. Personal Operating Diagnostic: a multi-instrument synthesis agent that reads your personality assessments and outputs a build order for your first three AI agents, sequenced to how you actually work. Robert Andjelic GPT: asked where to buy farmland in Western Canada, it answered with the specificity of a researcher and the posture of a trusted advisor. Melissa the nutrition coach GPT. Then: a full website built in 35 minutes with Claude Code -- the same work that cost $5K and months with a contractor. Dan's own fleet of 50 agents, all running on a markdown brain. Agents include a completion system, a voice-lock drafting agent, and a decision brief agent. The demos are not proof of concept. They are the product, already running. The offer: GYFOS Cohort 1. $1,997 USD one-time. 90 days. 12-13 live sessions. 8-12 operators per cohort. 30-day money-back guarantee. $29/month continuation access after the cohort closes. The pitch is precise: this is not a...

Too Big to Farm

Jun 2, 2026 1 hr 39 min

Robert Andjelic, Canada's largest private farmland owner, sits down with a panel that includes a 2,500-acre farmer who has no plans to grow. Kevin Hursh, Tim Hammond, John Kotylak, and a rural fire chief all push back on Robert in different ways, and the conversation turns into a real debate about whether there is a right size for a farm at all. What's Inside The history of farm size in Canada, from 1925 to today, and why scale exploded after 2000 Robert Andjelic's case for why size has nothing to do with efficiency, safety,or agronomic stewardship Kevin Hursh's defense of staying small, and what he gave up to do it What the industry got wrong about the credit squeeze that put a billion-dollar operation into creditor protection The absentee landlord tax debate that became the most heated stretch of the show Related Episodes - Is There a Capital Squeeze in Ag? -- the credit story this conversation builds on - The Great Canadian Bull with Robert Andjelic -- the follow-up this episode was recorded to set up Connect Kevin Hursh -- Western Producer columns; hursh.ca Robert Andjelic -- farmland.ca Dallas LeDuc -- Bunnyhug Farmers Podcast; TikTok Connect with Growing the Future Website: growingthefuture.ca YouTube: Growing the Future Instagram: @growingthefuturepodcast LinkedIn: Growing the Future Register for the Convergence Conference at convergence.ag and stay updated by subscribing to the Growing the Future Podcast at growingthefuturepodcast.ca.

Before You Spray: 3 Things That Could Cost You Money This Season

May 28, 2026 1 hr 2 min

Tom Wolf opened with the frame that carried the session: doing the right thing at the right time. Take away the right time part and the right thing is irrelevant. Spraying has changed dramatically -- operators who used to make two passes a year now make three to five, and the equipment cost running at roughly $400 an hour means every minute away from spraying is measurable. The first section covered water quality, built around five numbers from a standard water test. Darren Sander opened with the operator's version of the lesson: Crop-Aid's farm pulls from a cold well at 1,200 TDS, so they tank it into black poly storage and spray from the warmest tank first. Cold water hurts efficacy -- especially glufosinate. Tom then walked through pH (most mixes fine; what matters is the final mix pH, not source pH), TDS and conductivity (under 500 is clean; most Prairie wells come in over 1,000; the number tells you whether to look further), bicarbonates (500 ppm is the threshold; above it, ammonium sulfate is the most versatile fix), total hardness (calcium carbonate equivalent; Jeff Bennett's water had very low hardness but elevated sodium, which still antagonizes glyphosate and glufosinate), and turbidity (aluminum sulfate as a flocculant for dugouts; stir and leave 24 to 48 hours). Jeff's live water test from Agvise became the worked example. Tom's verdict: low hardness, elevated sodium, ammonium sulfate recommended. The coverage section opened with a number that reframed the whole conversation: according to a Mesonet researcher in North Dakota, 100 percent of nights in the state experience thermal inversions. Some are worse than others, but the baseline is total. Under an inversion, fine droplets go where they want -- downhill if there is topography, anywhere if there is not. Tom's prescription: start on the downwind side of the field, spray perpendicular to the wind, turn into the headwind on every pass. Never spray down and then back against the wind. The droplet size d...

Who Has the Export Data?

May 27, 2026 1 hr 2 min

Dan opens with a Call of Duty analogy that lands: you keep getting smoked because they can see you, but you cannot see them. That is the position of a Canadian canola or wheat farmer every time they price grain. The buyers on the other side of the trade know what has been sold, where it is going, when it ships, and what it cleared for. The farmer does not. In the United States, any large grain sale must be reported to the USDA within 24 hours, and the weekly export sales report has been publicly available since 1973 - a direct response to the Great Grain Robbery, when U.S. grain companies oversold and nearly emptied the country's supply. Canada never built the equivalent. The port load data that used to come out of Vancouver every Friday - commodity, volume, destination - disappeared when the Wheat Board ended. The room has less data than it had 20 years ago. Marlene Boersch, who has spent her career studying the architecture of how Canadian grain moves, presented findings from two commissioned reports. The 2021 "Data Requirements for Transparent Markets" study mapped what data growers would find useful and found near-zero timely information on the export side - Stats Canada data runs 2-3 months behind execution, 4-6 months behind the farm decision. The 2024 supply chain impact study tried to put a number on the silence. Using U.S. data as a simulation proxy, it found that a 5% improvement in data availability translates to a minimum of 5 cents per acre in wheat, and that export sale announcements in the U.S. improve basis by 6-14 cents per bushel for 1-3 weeks following publication. Across Canada's export volumes, the conservative estimate is $56.5 million per year in foregone farm income. Boersch emphasized these were the most conservative assumptions possible - one variable, one commodity window. John De Pape, who was trading from a Vancouver Cargill desk in 1984 and watched the market explode past $700 per ton because no one knew what anyone else had sold, mad...

Driving the Transition Train The Farmland Exit

May 25, 2026 1 hr 2 min

The Prairie farmland market has changed in ways the traditional listing industry has not kept pace with. A quarter that traded at $300 an acre in 1967 now moves north of $5,000 to $15,000 in some areas. A 10-quarter farm that was worth $500,000 two decades ago may now carry a value of $5 million to $10 million. The advice infrastructure around those transactions has not scaled with the numbers. Tim Hammond and Wade Berlinic started Hammond Realty with a conviction that a $30 million event could not be managed with a sign at the end of the lane and a handshake at the elevator. In 2024, they moved a 15,000-acre operation in three months. The family's children did not know it was for sale until the family was ready to tell them. Neither did the staff. Neither did the neighbors. The Ag Exits and Acquisitions Advisory Framework is their answer to the gap. Four phases: Define, Discover, Design, Deliver. Define locks the agreement and expectations before any marketing begins. Discover maps every asset -- land title structures, yield history, landlord relationships, equipment, grain -- and identifies the tax and structural questions that need to be resolved before the farm is positioned. Design produces a blueprint with options, including a draft purchase and sale agreement built around what the seller needs, before any buyer has been approached. Deliver is the market phase -- and it is the only phase the traditional listing model touches. Wade and Tim bring in the lawyer, the accountant, the lender, and the wealth advisor together, often for the first time. They described sitting with a pair of brothers and watching the stress leave the room after that first coordinated meeting. The advisors who are in the room frequently say afterward that they have never done it that way before and should have been doing it all along. The live audience polls gave the conversation its sharpest moments. When asked what worries them most about a farm exit, tax exposure and family conflict...

AI Farm Episode 2

May 22, 2026 1 hr 0 min

The format is a pitch competition. Three operators come in cold, each shows the room exactly what they have built, and the audience votes. No PowerPoints about what AI could do. No vendor demos. Just a farmer, a coach, and an entrepreneur holding up real work. Trevor Muir went first. After leaving SurePoint Technologies - which he scaled from $4 million to over $120 million in revenue before buying it back from U.S. private equity and handing it to the employees who built it - he found himself without a team and without a system. He built one. He started by asking AI to construct a board of directors for his goals, then turned each board position into a persistent custom persona. The result is Serena - a named AI executive assistant and strategic thinking partner Trevor has used for more than a thousand hours, exclusively by voice. He has never typed into a chat window on a computer except twice, for demos. On the call, he introduced Serena live; she spoke, answered Dan's questions about hallucination and memory, and explained her own purpose more clearly than Trevor could. He has since deployed the board-of-directors framework inside ten companies and has a course in development, not yet public. His warning to the room: AI will validate you when it should push back, and information overload - not a lack of data - is the actual problem most operators face. Steve Langston pitched AI literacy, not AI tools. A Manitoba entrepreneur and video producer who has renovated 25-30 rural properties, cycled 35,000 kilometres, and written a book on rural community revival, Steve spent the first 45 minutes of an 8-hour AI consulting engagement delivering everything the client needed - then had to rethink what consulting even means. His practical framework: block an hour to be curious, not productive. Stop using AI like a search engine. Create an AI brief - a persistent context document about your business and yourself - so the tool knows who it is talking to. The example that r...

Three Questions: Unspoken Expectations, Silent Resentments

Apr 23, 2026 1 hr 4 min

Every farm family eventually needs a conversation about who inherits what, who doesn't, and why. Almost none of them finish it. Patti Durand — family business advisor and author of The Future Leader — has built her career on being in the room when those conversations happen. Her business partner Chris Corbett grew up as one of five kids on a Manitoba farm and left at sixteen. Between the three of us, every side of the non-farming sibling story shows up at this table. Patti's working claim is a plain one. Unspoken expectations become resentments. What gets left unsaid at a twenty-million-dollar kitchen table gets paid for later — in estate litigation, in family silence, in the farm that stops functioning. Across an hour, Patti walks through three questions she has carried into hundreds of family meetings. Each one is designed to bring heirs to the table without handing them the keys. What surfaces is harder than a will and more uncomfortable than most farming parents expect. Guests: Patti Durand and Chris Corbett of Bright Track Consulting — brighttrack.ca Subscribe to Growing the Future for new episodes. Register for the Convergence Conference at convergence.ag and stay updated by subscribing to the Growing the Future Podcast at growingthefuturepodcast.ca.

What the Weather Knows with Drew Lerner

Apr 17, 2026 1 hr 45 min

Weather is the one thing you cannot plan for. But you can plan around it. That difference — between being caught off guard and being positioned for whatever comes — is what this session is about. Drew Lerner has been reading the atmosphere for 47 years. Commodity markets, food companies, and producers worldwide rely on him. He is the kind of guy who can draw the jet stream on a whiteboard in real time and make it feel like a kitchen table conversation. That is exactly what happened here. Darren Sander runs a farm south of Rosetown, Saskatchewan. He has spent years figuring out how to reduce the damage weather does to his operation before the weather ever shows up. He opens the session by laying out the practical side — what farmers actually do to protect their crops from a season that has already made up its mind. Together, the three of them cover a lot of ground. Topics Covered How prairie farmers mitigate weather before it arrives Seed timing, variety selection, soil biology, compaction, and why the first 30 days dictate maximum yield potential. Darren explains the logic behind building resilient crops when the inputs are already fighting you. What the drought monitor is actually showing — and what it is missing The North American drought monitor does not capture long-term soil depletion well. For producers entering their eighth or ninth year of persistent dryness, the map looks more encouraging than it is. Drew explains why, and what to watch for as temperatures climb this spring. The ridge of high pressure problem — and why the US dryness matters to you When soil is dry, ridges of high pressure intensify and hold. When soil is wet, ridges collapse. Right now, the Rocky Mountain snowpack and the US Plains are running significantly below normal, which means any summer ridge could anchor itself, amplify, and push north into the prairies. This is not the official forecast. It is the official worry. What a Montana low means for the Southwest prairies Montana...

The Land Market Split

Apr 15, 2026 1 hr 8 min

FCC just dropped the 2025 farmland numbers. Canada up 9.3%. Manitoba leading at 12.2. Saskatchewan at 9.4. West Central Saskatchewan at 4.8 — roughly half the provincial move. That split is what this episode is about. Dan hosts a live panel with four guests who are in the data, closing deals, and financing purchases right now. Not forecasting from a distance. Actually in it. Together they work through what the headline number isn't telling you, why buyers are getting more selective, what lenders are seeing at Q1, and what comes next for a market that has run hard for twenty-five years. The honest answer from every person on the panel: the market is not the same everywhere, and it hasn't been for a while. Topics and timestamps: 0:00 — Introduction. The division forming between good land and everything else. FCC 2025 numbers across the prairies. 5:00 — Panel introductions: Tim Hammond (Hammond Realty), Bobby Montreuil (Hammond Realty / active producer), Courtney Thevenot (Scotiabank Ag), Conrad Olson (FCC, West Central Saskatchewan) 6:00 — What the market is telling the people actually closing deals — that the FCC report won't show until next year 8:00 — Why 30 pre-approvals per tender became 4 or 5. Less players. Not less land moving. 10:00 — West Central at 4.8% vs. the provincial 9.4%. What tighter margins and rougher crop years look like in the numbers, lagged. 13:00 — Live audience poll: where do you think farmland values are going in your area in the next 12 months? Results: 53% flat, 18% down, 24% up. 17:00 — How fortunes get made in land. The cap rate reality. Why the guy who paid $2,100 when everyone said $1,800 was the ceiling was right. 19:00 — Where are producers actually getting their local farmland values? Neighbors and coffee shop vs. realtor vs. lender vs. FCC. (Spoiler: coffee shop was first pick for 26%.) 23:00 — The Saskatchewan Comparable Farmland Reports and Farmland Security Board database as a tool for area-specific data. 28:00 —...

The AI Farm

Apr 8, 2026 1 hr 4 min

The steel-wheeled tractor was a fad once. So was the fax machine. Nobody's laughing at those now. AI is moving through agriculture whether the industry is ready or not. The global AI and agriculture market is approaching five billion dollars and growing at over 26% a year. Eighty percent of agribusinesses say they understand its potential. Only twenty percent have adopted it. And who's actually getting results? Closer to five percent. That gap is what this Growing the Future Productions live event is built to close. Dan Aberhart puts three of the most plugged-in AI power users in ag — Rob Saik, Tim Hammond, and Damon Johnson — in the same room for the first-ever episode of The AI Farm. No vendor pitches. No vague future-casting. Three people who are deep in this every single day. Audience vote at the end. Winner gets bragging rights. You get the ideas. Where AI Actually Disrupts Agriculture — And Where It Doesn't Rob Saik opens with a reframe: agriculture at the farm level ranks low on AI disruption — not because it's behind, but because farming is inherently hands-on and judgment-dependent. The bigger disruption is upstream, in realty, insurance, and the machinery sector. Prediction is where AI excels. Judgment still belongs to you. (00:07:40) — Rob walks through the tools he uses daily: Perplexity, Claude, Notebook LM, and a custom Dossier Builder that profiles anyone he's about to meet. His starter recommendation for producers new to AI: Perplexity. It's reference-based, cites its sources, and aggregates across multiple AI models. If you're perplexed about AI, that's your on-ramp. (00:21:07) — A Power Farm member built a complete grain marketing program by uploading his inventory and contracts into Claude. That's not a future possibility. That happened. Tim's Pick: A Custom GPT That Makes Decisions for Your Team Tim Hammond is in the top 1% of ChatGPT users globally — 26,500 messages, 800-plus threads in a single year. His big move: he fed 1,200 pages of...

Build Your AG Dream Team: Why the strongest operations never go it alone

Apr 3, 2026 1 hr 32 min

Somewhere on the prairies, there's a producer trying to do it all. The agronomy. The marketing. The books. The succession. The banking. The strategy. And they're wearing every hat at once — running hot, making decisions with incomplete information, and wondering why the numbers never quite tell the full story. The top farms? They stopped doing that a long time ago. This Growing the Future Productions live event puts Dan Aberhart at the table with seven of the most plugged-in financial and business minds working in Canadian agriculture right now: Evan Shout (Maverick Ag / Farmer Coach), Brian Mack and Justin Simpkins (Grow Lytics), Travis Gerrard and Roxanne Olynick from MNP, and Courtney Thevenot and Tanner Gerwing from Scotiabank Agricultural Banking. The conversation runs nearly 90 minutes and covers the full spectrum — from bookkeeping basics to billion-dollar family legacy questions. Not a panel of polished talking points. A real room of real advisors who already work together behind closed doors, and now you get to hear it. What gets covered in this episode: The 2% / 18% / 80% Split — Where Does Your Farm Land? Evan Shout opens with a number that should stop people cold: over the last 20 years, as farm revenues have gone up and risk has increased, financial acumen in the industry has actually gotten worse. The top 2% aren't just profitable — they're operating with a completely different level of financial sophistication. The next 18% are closing the gap. The other 80% are still treating finance as a back-seat discipline. (00:07:00) — Evan breaks down what separates the top tier, and why building a team is the single most powerful thing an operation can do to move up that ladder. Access to Capital vs. Strategic Advice — They're Not the Same Thing Grow Lytics started by reverse-engineering the perfect credit deal. Not by handing out money — by working backward from what a lender actually needs to say yes, and building the farm's story from there. Brian Ma...

The $70/Acre Gap: What Separates Good Farms from Great Ones

Apr 2, 2026 1 hr 5 min

The data is in. Farms that perform better... perform a lot better. And the gap isn't luck. In this live webinar event from Growing the Future Productions, host Dan Aberhart sits down with three of the sharpest minds working on Saskatchewan farms right now — Darren Sander of Crop-Aid Nutrition, Dave Norris of Norris Crop Consulting, and Todd Rowan of IXL Innovations — for a frank, no-sugarcoating conversation about what separates the producers clearing big margins from the ones leaving money on the table. The number? Somewhere between $50 and $100 per acre. Every single year. Compounded over a decade — it's not a number. It's a different life. What gets covered in this episode: Soil Health & the First 30 Days — Darren makes the case that the first 30 days of a crop dictates maximum yield potential. Not the last 30. The first. That reframe alone is worth your time. He also talks about how a soil health program let his operation move from a three-crop rotation to two — and pencil out better. Earthworms optional, but encouraged. (00:04:00) — Darren breaks down the incremental gains philosophy: fertilizer protection, stress reduction, nutrient use efficiency, and how every acre should be growing the crop it's best suited to grow. Grain Marketing & the Probability Game — Dave Norris and Todd Rowan don't predict the future. They work with probabilities. And when warships started heading toward the Strait of Hormuz, they texted their clients to fill their fuel tanks. Fuel was $1.02. The downside risk was 93 cents. The upside was $1.50. That's not a prediction. That's a risk-reward conversation — and the producers who had that conversation in advance came out a lot better than the ones who watched the news. (00:09:00) — The panel unpacks why so many producers make decisions after it feels urgent, and why the best time to act is almost always when it doesn't. Crop Insurance, In-Season Pricing & the 2025-26 Landscape — It's the worst crop insurance environment since be...

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Created by: Dan Aberhart , Terry Aberhart
Status: Active
Latest episode: Nov 12, 2026
Episodes: 201
Release period: Weekly
Avg. episode length: 1 hr 1 min
Explicit: No
Language: English

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