Growing the Future

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...

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....

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...

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 nitroge...

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...

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...

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 b...

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...

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 ye...

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...

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 Enneag...

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...

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...

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 ma...

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...

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 DoubleTre...

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 Pr...

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...

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 to...

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 op...

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 starte...

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 w...

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, an...

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 runnin...

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-sea...