The Future Herd

Title: Meeting People Where Their Futures Already Are Summary: Foresight practitioner Tianna Brand argues that the single most important move a leader or organization can make is to resist arriving with pre-baked futures and instead start by uncovering the visions, assumptions, and lived experiences people already carry. Drawing on her work introducing futures thinking to the World Organisation fo...

Sarah Elton — journalist-turned-academic and author of Locavore — argues that genuine food security requires expanding our definition of 'all' to include not just every human being but every organism and ecosystem that sustains the food system. Drawing on posthumanist theory, microbiology, and years of empirical research, she makes the case that health is not a condition possessed by individual bo...

Summary: This episode brings together Canada's sharpest minds at the intersection of AI and agriculture to make a concrete case: the future of Canadian farm competitiveness will be decided not by whether producers adopt AI, but by how intelligently they manage, govern, and deploy the data they already have. Mohsen Yoosefzadeh Najafabadi introduces the concept of 'dark data'—the vast archive of unu...

Summary: Elaine Power, a food scholar at Queen's University, argues that the word "AgriFood" itself encodes a fundamental contradiction: the agri side serves corporate capital while the food side is rooted in care, community, and life. In this conversation with Jesse Hirsh, Power traces how invisible and undervalued labour—from racialized farmworkers to domestic cooks—holds the food system togethe...

Title: Throwing Out the Business Textbook to Save the Family Farm Summary: RJ Taylor, second-generation fish farmer and co-owner of a multi-site Ontario aquaculture operation, makes the case that the conventional business-school wisdom of focusing on core competencies nearly sank his family's business — and that deliberate diversification across species, markets, and sales channels is what actuall...

The Politics of Standing Up for Farmers Why governments need to actually listen before they regulate Canadian agriculture has enormous potential. The land, producers, knowledge, innovation, and markets are there. But too often, the people who grow and raise our food are treated as an afterthought in the decisions that shape their future. In this episode of The Future Herd , Jesse Hirsh speaks with...

Summary: Donald Killorn, Executive Director of the PEI Federation of Agriculture, makes the case that ecological thinking — not agronomic expertise — is exactly what Canada's food system needs from its leaders right now. Drawing on two decades spent working in rainforests, coral reefs, and Bay of Fundy fisheries before arriving in agriculture, Killorn argues that systems thinking and multi-stakeho...

Title: Agroecology Is the How-To of Food Sovereignty Summary: Charles Levkoe, food systems researcher at Lakehead University, makes the case that agroecology is not simply a set of farming techniques but the practical expression of food sovereignty — the means by which communities assert democratic control over how food is grown, harvested, and governed. Drawing on his background as an agroecologi...

Title: Leaving Every Organisation Better Than You Found It Summary: Kaitlyn Kitzan, Saskatchewan farmer, entrepreneur, and sectoral leader, argues that lasting leadership means improving every organisation you touch and passing it on stronger than you found it. Drawing on lessons from her family farm, her early entrepreneurial ventures, and the volunteer ethic instilled by her parents in a rural c...

Title: The Grocery Store Is a Media Environment: What Sociology Reveals About Food, Power, and Choice Summary: Alissa Overend of MacEwan University argues that the food choices Canadians make every day are shaped by forces most of us never consciously examine — from curated grocery store layouts and deceptive package labelling to the deep social meanings we attach to what we eat. Drawing on her re...

Measuring What Matters: Transforming Canada’s Agri-Food System What does a resilient agri-food system actually look like — and how would we know if we were building one? In this Future Herd panel episode, guest host Jen MacTavish brings three previous guests back to the table for a wide-ranging conversation on food resilience, food waste, infrastructure, capital, policy, and the measurements that...

Where Food Becomes Community Rethinking Rural Food Security with Rob Rainer In this episode of The Future Herd , Jesse Hirsh speaks with Rob Rainer about food insecurity from a rural perspective. Rob brings a rare combination of experience: he is the executive director of The Table Community Food Centre in Perth, Ontario, and the reeve of Tay Valley Township. That gives him a view of food insecuri...

Summary: Mohamad Yaghi from Farm Credit Canada explores how technology can democratize and transform the agricultural sector. He discusses the unique challenges farmers face and how innovative solutions can help address complex operational needs. Mohamad brings a unique perspective on technology in agriculture, rooted in his experiences growing up in Lebanon and understanding technological resilie...

Jennifer MacTavish's career path in agriculture demonstrates the power of curiosity and saying 'yes' to opportunities. Starting with an international development degree and transitioning through animal science, she discovered her passion for the agricultural sector by embracing diverse experiences and learning from her mistakes. Her journey highlights the importance of supportive environments that...

What happens when an emergency response becomes a permanent feature of the system? In this conversation, Neil Hetherington, CEO of Daily Bread Food Bank, offers a clear-eyed view from inside one of Canada’s most critical—yet least understood—institutions. What emerges is not a story about charity, but about infrastructure. Daily Bread operates at scale: forecasting demand, coordinating complex log...

The Rise of the Computational Breeder: Rethinking How We Grow Food What happens when crop science becomes computational In this episode, Jesse Hirsh sits down with Mohsen Yoosefzadeh Najafabadi, Assistant Professor at the University of Guelph, to explore the emergence of the computational breeder: a new kind of agricultural scientist working at the intersection of plant breeding, data science, and...

Can We Eliminate Food Waste Or are we just managing a system designed to waste Canada produces more than enough food to feed everyone, yet millions remain food insecure while enormous volumes of perfectly good food are lost. In this conversation, Lori Nikkel, CEO of Second Harvest, reframes the issue away from scarcity and toward systems failure—how food is produced, priced, moved, and ultimately...

Colin Hornby from Keystone Agricultural Producers joins The Future Herd for a conversation grounded in Manitoba, where agriculture operates with little insulation from volatility. We explore how risk is managed in real time—across weather, markets, and rising input costs—and how those pressures move through a system that depends on coordination but rarely speaks with one voice. The discussion also...

Jordyn Domio reframes a familiar concern in agriculture—the question of the “next generation”—by shifting attention to something more immediate and less discussed: proximity. Who gets close enough to the industry to understand it? To see themselves in it? To be taken seriously before they’ve earned it on paper? This episode moves away from abstract conversations about labour shortages and recruitm...

This conversation with Barb Scott-Cole explores something easy to overlook and difficult to rebuild: the social systems that make agriculture possible. Before innovation strategies, before policy frameworks, before the language of productivity and efficiency, there were communities that taught themselves. Learning was embedded in participation. People developed skills, judgment, and leadership by...

Canada feeds the world—so why are thousands of people in our own communities facing food insecurity every day? In this episode of The Future Herd , I sit down with Treska Watson, who leads food security initiatives at The Mustard Seed Street Church in Victoria, BC. Treska operates on the front lines of a broken system, managing a food rescue programme that diverted 3.1 million pounds of food last...

Raj Thandhi brings the conversation back to something the agri-food sector often treats as secondary, but that quietly determines everything: culture. This episode explores the space between what is grown and what is actually lived. Not in abstract terms, but in the practical realities of kitchens, habits, and identity. Raj makes a clear point—food doesn’t move because it exists. It moves when it...

Innovation in agriculture isn’t the problem—implementation is. In this episode of The Future Herd , Jesse Hirsh sits down with Todd Ormann of Olds College to explore why so many promising technologies struggle to reach the farm, and what it actually takes to close that gap. From the role of applied research and Smart Farms to the fragmentation of Canada’s innovation system, this conversation unpac...

Across Canada’s agri-food sector, leadership often happens inside institutions — boards, associations, policy tables. But some of the most important voices are the ones willing to challenge those institutions and ask harder questions about the future. Jamie Reaume has spent nearly three decades inside the conversations that shape Canadian agriculture. In this episode of Future Herd , he reflects o...

Indigenous agriculture in Canada is often discussed through the lens of food security and community food systems. But what happens when the conversation shifts toward scale, capital, and commercial participation in the broader agri-food economy? In this episode of Future Herd , Jesse Hirsh speaks with Camden Lawrence of First Nations Agriculture & Finance Ontario. Camden works at the intersect...