Growing the Future

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 ha...

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 Fu...

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,...

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 ti...

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 windo...

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 la...

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 wh...

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 weigh...

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...

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 burde...

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 scal...

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,...

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...

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,...

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 cover...

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 sal...

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. Ti...

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 buyin...

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...

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...

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 thr...

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 ge...

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 Producti...

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 c...

2,333 days ago, Jeff Bennett was the second guest I ever had on this show. Different world. Different market. Different men. Since then we've lived through bull markets, bear markets, a pandemic, and all kinds of crazy in our personal lives. Jeff runs a grain farm in Saskatchewan while quietly building a parallel business out of his garage — custom laser engraved glass and wood pieces, high-end 3D...