Avsnitt
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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 actually builds resilience. In this episode, RJ walks Jesse through the geography and culture of Ontario aquaculture, explains why over 75% of the province's net-pen farms operate on First Nations territory, and argues that Indigenous partnerships aren't a policy aspiration but the structural backbone that has allowed the sector to grow when provincial licensing effectively stalled. Listeners will come away with a richer, more grounded picture of a food system hiding in plain sight on Georgian Bay and across Canada's coastlines.
Show notes:
RJ Taylor grew up hauling fish before school on his family's land-based trout farm in Ontario — and then, like his sister Arlen, left with every intention of never coming back. A sociology and business degree, a career in science communication, and a decade of distance later, both siblings returned with a much larger vision for what the farm could become. In this episode of The Future Herd, RJ joins Jesse Hirsh to make a counterintuitive argument: that the very business-school thinking he brought back with him — focus on core competencies, streamline, scale — nearly left the family operation dangerously exposed, and that the path forward required throwing that textbook out entirely.
The clearest illustration of that argument is what happened when Taylor Aquaculture narrowed its focus to rainbow trout fingerlings. The logic was sound: high-value product, clear market, strong margins. But as consolidation swept through Ontario's net-pen farms, a customer list of fifteen gradually compressed toward one, and the vulnerability became undeniable. RJ and Arlen responded by reversing course — adding Arctic char, coho salmon, and lake whitefish alongside the trout, layering in a home-delivery programme serving 1,500 to 1,700 Ontario households monthly, maintaining a presence at farmers' markets and independent retailers, and simultaneously supplying large-scale retail partners like Loblaws through their net-pen operation on Manitoulin Island. RJ is direct about the lesson: no single revenue stream could carry the business through the volatility the sector is experiencing, and it is the willingness to do everything at once that provides real resilience.
A second and equally important thread in the conversation is the role of First Nations communities in making Ontario aquaculture viable at all. RJ points out that over 75% of the province's net-pen farms operate on First Nations territory through some form of partnership — a fact that sits awkwardly against the broader agricultural sector's habit of treating Indigenous inclusion as an aspirational goal rather than a present reality. Provincial licensing for cage aquaculture has effectively been frozen for at least two decades, leaving the Great Lakes Aquaculture Law and band council resolutions issued through First Nations as the functional pathway for new farm development. RJ argues this isn't a workaround but a genuine improvement: the science underpinning those permits is current, adaptive to climate change, and informed by partners like the Wabateck Business Development Corporation in ways that provincial frameworks — still relying on studies from the 1970s and 80s — simply are not.
For listeners trying to understand Canada's food system, this episode fills in a significant blind spot. Aquaculture already accounts for somewhere between 60 and 65% of global fish and seafood consumption, a threshold the world quietly crossed around 2020, and that share is only growing. Yet Ontario's fish farms remain largely invisible to the people who live closest to them. RJ's story — of a family business that survived by unlearning what it thought it knew, and of a sector that has quietly built one of the more substantive models of Indigenous economic partnership in Canadian agriculture — is exactly the kind of grounded, specific, and forward-looking conversation The Future Herd exists to amplify.
Topics: Aquaculture, Business Diversification, Family Farm Succession, Indigenous Partnerships, Ontario Food Systems, Fish Farm Licensing, Direct-to-Consumer Sales, Sustainable Seafood
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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 John Barlow, Member of Parliament for Foothills and a long-time voice on agricultural issues in Ottawa, about what it means to stand up for farmers in Canadian politics.
The conversation explores the gap between consultation and actually listening, the growing disconnect between food literacy and farm literacy, and why food security depends on treating producers as partners rather than obstacles. Barlow discusses regulatory burden, the CFIA traceability debate, the role of research and innovation, the importance of stronger agricultural advocacy, and why governments need to understand the practical realities of farming before making rules that affect the people closest to the land.
At its core, this episode is about respect: for farmers, ranchers, rural communities, practical knowledge, and the people who feed the country.
Because food security starts long before food reaches the grocery store. It starts with listening to farmers.
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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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-stakeholder partnership-building are the core competencies for navigating an era of climate volatility, trade disruption, and accelerating technological change. This episode unpacks how Killorn applies that lens to one of Canada's most agriculturally dense provinces, where potatoes, dairy, and a cooperative food culture make PEI a surprisingly rich laboratory for the future of the sector.
Show notes:
Donald Killorn came to the PEI Federation of Agriculture not through a lifetime in fields and barns but through coral reefs, rainforests, and two decades of applied ecology across the Caribbean and Atlantic Canada. In this episode, Donald joins Jesse Hirsh to explore a provocative central argument: that the leadership skills most urgently needed in agriculture right now are not primarily agronomic, but ecological — the capacity to read complex systems, anticipate where pressure is building, and position an organisation ahead of where government funding and policy will eventually land. For an island province where agriculture makes up roughly 40 percent of land use and 25 percent of the emissions profile, that argument carries serious weight.
Killorn traces how a third-year undergraduate encounter with ecology became a lifelong operating system. Working as an ecotourism guide in Costa Rica, managing barrier reef ecosystems in Belize and the Turks and Caicos, and later leading underwater noise research to protect whale populations in the Bay of Fundy, he developed what he calls a resilience framework built around four capital buckets — governance, ecological, economic, and social — and four stakeholder types: academic, industrial, NGO, and government. He applies that same framework to agricultural leadership, arguing that an NGO executive must consistently anticipate where public investment is heading and be visibly established in that space before the funding announcement arrives. The strategy, he explains, is the only sustainable model for a small team trying to punch above its weight against well-resourced government and private-sector actors.
The episode turns to a concrete test of that philosophy: the federal export restrictions on PEI potatoes that came into force just five days after Killorn started his job. With CFIA drawing a containment boundary around the entire province over a handful of fields with known potato wart, a billion-dollar industry was effectively shuttered — and Killorn found himself as a new executive director with no deep agronomic background suddenly having to be the public voice of an industry in crisis. He is candid about the limits of his expertise in that moment and equally candid about the structural tensions between federal trade risk management and the lived reality of island farmers. The story illuminates a broader tension running through Canadian agriculture: how governance decisions made at a national scale land unevenly on regional economies, and what it takes to build enough credibility — locally rooted through family networks, nationally credible through systems-thinking fluency — to be heard in both rooms.
Listeners will come away with a richer picture of PEI's agricultural complexity — from its outsized share of Canadian potato production to a cooperative dairy model that Killorn describes as one of the most holistically integrated in the country — and a set of leadership principles that translate well beyond the island. At a moment when Canadian agriculture faces simultaneous pressure from climate volatility, trade instability, and the accelerating arrival of data-intensive technologies including AI, Killorn's argument that ecological literacy belongs at the executive table feels less like a personal biography and more like a prescription for the sector as a whole.
Topics: Applied Ecology, NGO Leadership, PEI Agriculture, Systems Thinking, Potato Trade Policy, Climate Resilience, Governance Capital, Stakeholder Partnerships
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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 agroecological farmer, nonprofit practitioner, and academic, Levkoe argues that isolating any single dimension of the food system — whether soil science, policy, or indigenous knowledge — guarantees worse outcomes than thinking through their interconnection. The conversation challenges listeners to move beyond individual consumer choices and reckon with the structural, historical, and political forces that shape what kind of food system is even possible.
Show notes:
Charles Levkoe is a food systems researcher at Lakehead University whose path runs through agroecological farming in Nova Scotia, frontline community food work at The Stop Community Food Centre in Toronto, and years of activist scholarship aimed at understanding food as a lens onto power, economics, and social justice. The central argument of this episode is one Levkoe traces back to the gatherings of peasant and farming movements worldwide: that food sovereignty — the democratic control of food systems by the people who produce and harvest food — needs agroecology as its operational counterpart. Agroecology, in his framing, is the how-to of food sovereignty, and the two concepts only make full sense when held together.
Levkoe unpacks agroecology through three interlocking pillars. The first is rigorous science and research — not a retreat from modern knowledge about soil microbes or climate, but a commitment to using that knowledge ethically. The second, and equally weighted, is experiential and traditional knowledge: the accumulated wisdom of farmers, harvesters, and indigenous communities that gets systematically sidelined when technical standards become the only legitimate voice in the room. He draws a pointed contrast with the history of organic certification, arguing that what began as a social movement grounded in values was gradually flattened into a checklist of inputs and prohibitions — a cautionary tale about what is lost when systems thinking gives way to narrow standardisation. The third pillar is movement-building and governance: the recognition that local practise cannot transform food systems without also changing the policy environments at provincial, national, and international scales.
A significant thread running through the conversation is the relationship between indigenous knowledge and the future of Canadian agriculture. Levkoe is careful to speak from his own position — a second-generation Canadian, non-indigenous, and relatively new to Northern Ontario — rather than to speak for indigenous communities. But he names the tension directly: Canada's agricultural sector is demographically ageing, and First Nations communities across the country are comparatively young, land-connected, and holders of deep ecological knowledge that mainstream food systems research continues to undervalue. He argues that any honest reckoning with the food system's future has to confront the colonial history that shaped whose knowledge counts, whose land relationships are recognised, and who gets to define what sustainable agriculture actually looks like in a given place and climate.
Listeners will come away with a sharper vocabulary for thinking about food systems — and a provocation to use it. Levkoe's insistence that food is an entry point into conversations about capitalism, settler colonialism, and ecological crisis is not rhetorical; it is methodological. For Canada's agri-food sector, where policy silos, competing jurisdictions, and an increasingly concentrated supply chain are real and pressing problems, his systems-level thinking offers both a critique and a direction. This episode is essential listening for anyone who wants to understand not just what a better food system might look like, but where the leverage points for building one actually are.
Topics: Agroecology, Food Sovereignty, Indigenous Knowledge, Organic Farming, Food Systems Policy, Settler Colonialism, Community Food Work, Systems Thinking
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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 community, Kaitlyn makes the case that the foundation of great leadership is not ambition alone but the habits, values, and emotional intelligence cultivated from childhood. In this conversation with Jesse Hirsh, she offers a candid, grounded look at what it actually costs — and what it gives back — to lead in Canada's agri-food sector today.
Show notes:
Kaitlyn Kitzan grew up on a Saskatchewan farm forty miles from the nearest city, and that distance shaped everything: her work ethic, her entrepreneurial instincts, and her conviction that a leader's job is to leave every organisation better than she found it. That guiding principle, borrowed from a phrase she heard growing up under Premier Wall, runs through this entire conversation — from how she approaches board work and farm succession to how she thinks about stress, sleep, and the volunteers who hold rural communities together. Jesse Hirsh invites Kaitlyn to unpack what that commitment actually looks like in practice for someone managing a seven-person business, sitting on multiple boards, and navigating the emotional complexity of a family farming operation all at once.
One of the most striking threads in the conversation is Kaitlyn's reframing of mental health and stress in the agricultural sector. Rather than asking people where they're at emotionally — a question that still carries stigma in many farm communities — she asks them about their battery level. Are you at fifty percent? Seventy-five? And crucially, what do you need to do to recharge? She applies the same framework to herself, describing the discipline she has built around sleep, her deliberate practice of leaving weekends unscheduled when event season piles up, and her ongoing struggle to say no to opportunities she genuinely wants to take. The honesty here is notable: she is not offering a tidy wellness program but describing an active, imperfect negotiation between her drive and her limits.
Kaitlyn is equally direct about the cultural divide she sees among her peers when it comes to volunteerism and community contribution. She traces her own volunteer ethic back to selling chocolate bars at a hockey canteen at age three, and to parents who modelled the idea that you give back to the community that raised you. What frustrates her is watching friends and new employees ask what's in it for them before committing even an hour of their time — a mindset she connects not to geography or generation but to how people were raised. That argument cuts against easy rural-urban or east-west narratives and lands somewhere more uncomfortable and more specific: that the values transmitted in childhood are the single biggest determinant of whether someone grows into a leader who builds things up or someone who waits for things to be handed to them.
Listeners will come away with a clearer picture of what it actually takes to sustain leadership in Canada's agri-food sector over the long run — not the highlight-reel version, but the daily arithmetic of energy management, emotional intelligence, community investment, and knowing when to walk away and go for a walk. For anyone working in Saskatchewan agriculture, in rural entrepreneurship, or in the volunteer and board structures that hold the sector together, Kaitlyn's perspective is both a practical resource and a reminder that the future of the herd depends on people who are committed to leaving things better than they found them.
Topics: Farm Leadership, Mental Health & Stress, Rural Entrepreneurship, Volunteerism, Farm Succession, Saskatchewan Agriculture, Emotional Intelligence, Work-Life Balance
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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 research into undiagnosed illness, food politics, and media, Overend shows how industry, advertising, and cultural norms work together to define what counts as healthy, who gets to eat well, and whose knowledge about food gets taken seriously. This episode makes the case that understanding food requires more than biochemistry — it requires a sociological lens.
Show notes:
Alissa Overend is a health sociologist at MacEwan University in Edmonton whose research sits at the intersection of food, media, power, and identity. She came to food studies not by design but by following her evidence: when she was interviewing people with undiagnosed chronic illnesses for her PhD, nearly every subject spontaneously described using food to manage their condition — a pattern that redirected her entire research focus. In this episode, Overend makes a compelling case that the agri-food sector needs to reckon with sociology's core insight: food is never just biochemical. It is social, political, cultural, and deeply personal, and the stories told about it — by industry, by media, by the grocery store itself — quietly determine what Canadians believe is true about what they eat.
One of Overend's sharpest contributions to this conversation is her argument that the grocery store is itself a media environment. Far from a neutral space, the modern box store is a carefully engineered experience: oversized carts designed to be filled, produce placed at the entrance to trigger a sense of healthy intent before shoppers move into the processed-food aisles, eye-level shelving calibrated to catch children's attention, and end-cap pairings that nudge complementary purchases. Overend extends this analysis to packaging, arguing that front-of-box health claims — 'made with whole grain oats,' 'nature's valley,' 'honey and oats' — function as advertising that exploits consumer trust. Her rule of thumb is pointed: when a product is working that hard to convince you it's healthy, that effort itself should raise a flag.
A second distinct tension Overend surfaces is the gap between how food is officially understood — through a narrow scientific and nutritional lens — and how people actually experience and use it. Her chronic illness research revealed that ordinary people were developing sophisticated, embodied knowledge about food and health that had no place in a medical system oriented toward diagnosis and biochemical markers. This epistemological gap matters for the agri-food sector because it means that consumer behaviour around food is far more complex than price sensitivity or label-reading. Food carries identity — cultural pride, gender assumptions, class position, and memory — and those meanings shape purchasing decisions in ways that market research built on nutritional categories will consistently miss. Overend also flags the blurring of Canadian and American food culture, noting that Canada's heavy consumption of American television and the post-NAFTA entry of American products has made the boundary between the two food landscapes much thinner than most Canadians assume.
For leaders and practitioners in Canada's agri-food sector, this episode offers something genuinely difficult to find: a critical outside perspective that names the structural forces shaping the food system from the consumer's side. Overend's work is a reminder that food security, consolidation, and the trust between producers and eaters are not only economic or logistical problems — they are social ones. Understanding why people eat what they eat, and what the system is quietly doing to their choices, is not a soft concern at the margins of the industry. It is central to building a food future that actually serves Canadians.
Topics: food sociology, grocery store design, food media and advertising, food politics, food and identity, chronic illness and food, Canadian food culture, food security
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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 shape Canada’s agri-food future.
The discussion features Camden Lawrence of First Nations Agriculture & Finance Ontario, Lori Nikkel, CEO of Second Harvest, and Tyler McCann, Managing Director of the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute. Together, they explore the gap between producing food and building a system capable of feeding people reliably, affordably, and with less waste.
The conversation begins with a deceptively simple question: what does resilience mean in agri-food? For Camden, resilience means producing more food closer to home, while also building the processing, storage, transportation, and community infrastructure needed to keep value local. For Lori, resilience requires confronting the scale of food waste in Canada and treating prevention as central to any serious food strategy. For Tyler, resilience means a system that can absorb shocks, maintain its core function, and recover without losing sight of the people it is meant to serve.
From there, the panel moves into the “messy middle” of the food system: cold storage, logistics, transportation, data, processing, and the infrastructure that often determines whether food reaches people or becomes waste. The conversation also wrestles with capital access, especially for First Nations communities and new farmers, and asks whether Canada’s food policy frameworks are ready to support the kinds of experimentation and risk-taking the moment demands.
A recurring theme throughout the episode is measurement. What we measure determines what we see. Food waste was long treated as a cost of doing business until organizations like Second Harvest helped make it visible. Once waste can be measured, it can be managed, prevented, redirected, and understood as an economic, environmental, and social problem. But the panel also warns that measurement must be consistent, useful, and tied to action.
The episode closes with a practical challenge for the sector: stop waiting for perfect conditions. Some problems need study, but others need movement. Policy, business, and community leaders may need to become more willing to try, learn, correct, and continue.
GuestsJen MacTavish
Guest host for this Future Herd panel discussion.
Camden Lawrence
First Nations Agriculture & Finance Ontario. Camden brings a perspective rooted in First Nations agriculture, access to capital, community food systems, and the opportunity to build food production capacity in Indigenous communities.
Lori Nikkel
CEO of Second Harvest, Canada’s largest food rescue organization. Lori speaks to the scale of food waste, the importance of food rescue and prevention, and the need for better data across the food system.
Tyler McCann
Managing Director of the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute. Tyler brings a policy lens to resilience, infrastructure, food affordability, and the challenge of designing systems that can respond to shocks.
Key ThemesResilience requires more than emergency response
The panel explores resilience as the capacity to prepare, respond, recover, and adapt. In agri-food, that means thinking beyond crisis management toward systems that can keep functioning through climate disruption, trade volatility, disease outbreaks, supply chain shocks, and affordability pressures.
Food waste is a resilience issue
Lori argues that Canada cannot build a resilient food system while wasting so much food. Food waste prevention, rescue, redistribution, and measurement need to be part of any serious food security strategy.
The “messy middle” matters
Cold storage, transportation, processing, warehousing, data systems, and logistics often determine whether food stays in the system or falls out of it. These less visible parts of the supply chain are essential to resilience.
Capital shapes who gets to farm
Camden highlights the challenge of financing farms and agri-food infrastructure, especially when startup costs can reach millions of dollars and agricultural lending does not behave like ordinary commercial borrowing. Longer amortization, lower interest rates, and better capital access could help more people and communities enter the sector.
Land ownership is not the only path
The conversation points to emerging models where farmers rent land, build local agreements, or focus on equipment and market relationships rather than land ownership. This opens up new ways to think about farm entry, especially for younger and first-generation farmers.
Food systems need better knowledge transfer
Agriculture faces a generational knowledge gap. Camden describes communities where older farmers hold practical knowledge that younger people urgently need. The question becomes how to move expertise from elders and experienced producers into the hands of new entrants.
Policy needs more courage
Tyler challenges the tendency to over-study problems or pilot every change before acting. Sometimes the sector can move, test, adjust, and correct course without waiting for perfect certainty.
The farm gate is too narrow a boundary
The episode pushes against the idea that agri-food policy ends at production. Food has to move through many hands, systems, and institutions before it reaches people. A stronger food system requires collaboration across agriculture, food rescue, processing, retail, policy, community organizations, and consumers.
Episode Flow / Approximate Chapters00:00 — Introduction
Jen McTavish introduces the panel and frames the conversation around resilience in Canada’s agri-food system.
00:51 — What does a resilient agri-food sector look like?
Camden, Lori, and Tyler offer different definitions of resilience, from local production and processing to waste prevention and shock recovery.
05:22 — Food waste as an urgent gap
Lori’s work at Second Harvest anchors a discussion about how waste prevention belongs at the centre of food resilience.
08:27 — The messy middle of the supply chain
The panel turns to infrastructure, cold storage, transportation, data, and the practical systems needed to move food effectively.
11:18 — National food security strategy and policy gaps
The conversation looks at government commitments and asks whether current strategies are enough to move the needle.
15:05 — Capital, lending, and farm viability
Camden explains why access to capital is one of the biggest barriers to building farms, infrastructure, and food production capacity.
17:42 — Rethinking the economics of farming
The panel explores whether there are different ways to finance food production and support people who want to farm.
24:55 — Diversity in agriculture
The conversation turns to diversified farming, changing business models, and whether the current system can support more nimble forms of production.
27:34 — Measuring complexity
Jesse joins the conversation to reflect on measurement, chaos, complexity, and the double-edged nature of quantifying food systems.
36:44 — Policy frameworks and risk
The panel discusses Canada’s agricultural policy process and the need to bring more voices and more creativity into policy design.
49:33 — “We can just fix things”
Tyler argues that some problems require action more than another pilot project.
51:52 — What should policymakers just do?
Each guest identifies practical priorities, from First Nations agricultural capital to logistics, food waste prevention, and policy courage.
Listener TakeawaysA resilient food system is built through infrastructure, capital, knowledge, and coordination — not production alone.
Food waste is one of Canada’s clearest opportunities for immediate improvement, especially when prevention and redistribution are treated as economic tools rather than charitable afterthoughts.
First Nations agriculture deserves greater investment, not only as community food security, but as a major opportunity for leadership, production, and economic development.
Better measurement can reveal hidden problems, but measurement only matters when it leads to action.
Canada’s agri-food future will require more collaboration across sectors, more comfort with experimentation, and a stronger willingness to act before every answer is perfectly settled.
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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 insecurity that is both deeply local and structurally political.
The conversation explores why rural food insecurity is often harder to see than urban poverty, even when the need is just as urgent. Food access in rural communities is shaped by transportation, housing, income, isolation, aging, volunteer capacity, and the absence of services that larger cities may take for granted.
Rob explains how organizations like The Table are doing more than distributing food. They are creating spaces of dignity, connection, learning, and mutual support. A meal can become a social lifeline. A food bank can become a community hub. A conversation about hunger can open into a larger discussion about income security, public policy, climate resilience, and what rural communities need to thrive.
This episode continues The Future Herd’s exploration of food insecurity by asking a deeper question: what kind of infrastructure do communities need when food is the visible symptom, but poverty, isolation, and inequality are the underlying conditions?
Guest: Rob Rainer
Episode title: Where Food Becomes Community
Subtitle: Rethinking Rural Food Security with Rob Rainer
Themes: rural food insecurity, community food centres, poverty, dignity, transportation, social isolation, basic income, rural resilience, public policy, food as care.
https://thefutureherd.ca
https://commons.thefutureherd.ca
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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 resilience. His work at Farm Credit Canada's innovation hub focuses on developing solutions that directly address farmer needs, particularly around knowledge transfer and operational complexity. By leveraging extensive agricultural data and user insights, Mohamad and his team are creating tools that help farmers navigate increasingly complex technological landscapes.
Topics: Agricultural Technology, AI Innovation, Farm Management, Rural Technology, Technological Democratization, Data-Driven Agriculture
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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 allow young professionals to develop leadership skills without fear of failure.
Currently serving as the interim executive director of the Agricultural Adaptation Council, MacTavish is deeply committed to addressing generational challenges in the agricultural workforce. She emphasizes the need for mentorship, flexible work arrangements, and creating career pathways that retain talented individuals within the broader agricultural ecosystem. Her approach focuses on valuing employees beyond financial compensation and recognizing the unique skills developed in agricultural work.
MacTavish's leadership philosophy centers on adaptation, resilience, and curiosity. She sees organizational transitions not as obstacles but as exciting opportunities for innovation. By maintaining enthusiasm during periods of change and keeping a forward-looking perspective, she believes agricultural organizations can attract and nurture the next generation of leaders who are passionate about the sector's future.
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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 logistics, and increasingly using data to understand how food insecurity moves through the city. The result is a system that works—efficient, adaptive, and deeply embedded.
And that’s the tension.
Because the more effective food banks become, the easier it is for the broader system to depend on them. Housing costs rise, incomes stagnate, disability supports fall short—and the pressure flows downstream. Food banks absorb it. Quietly. Reliably. Permanently.
But beneath the operations is something less visible and more essential: care as culture. Not sentiment, but structure. The deliberate design of dignity, choice, and respect in how people access food and how communities participate in meeting that need. In a landscape defined by scarcity, culture becomes the operating system that keeps everything functioning.
This episode treats the food bank not as a solution, but as a signal. A lens into how policy failure is lived, managed, and, in some ways, normalized. It raises a harder question for anyone paying attention: if this is infrastructure now, what does that say about the system that made it necessary—and what would it take to build something different?
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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 artificial intelligence.
Grounded in his work on dry beans, Mohsen walks through how breeding is evolving from a largely intuitive, experience-driven practice into a high-dimensional process shaped by genomics, phenomics, and multi-omics data. But this isn’t a story of replacement. It’s a story of integration—where traditional knowledge and computational tools begin to inform one another in new ways.
The conversation traces the shift from predictive models to generative and hybrid AI systems, including Mohsen’s development of BeanGPT, a tool designed to make complex agricultural knowledge more accessible to researchers, students, and practitioners alike. Along the way, they examine what it means to translate advanced research into real-world farming decisions—and why accessibility may be as important as innovation itself.
As climate pressures intensify and the demand for resilient crops grows, plant breeding is becoming one of the most critical—and least visible—sites of transformation in the food system. This episode offers a grounded look at how that transformation is unfolding, and who it’s ultimately for.
This is a conversation about seeds, systems, and the emerging intelligence shaping how we grow food.
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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 left behind.
What emerges is a picture of food rescue not as charity, but as infrastructure. Second Harvest operates a parallel supply chain, using data, logistics, and coordination to redirect surplus food to communities across the country. It is precise, efficient, and increasingly scalable. And yet, its very success raises a harder question: if we can move this much food, why does the need persist?
Lori draws a clear line between feeding people and solving food insecurity. Redistribution can address immediate need, but it does not resolve the structural conditions—poverty, policy gaps, market incentives—that produce both waste and hunger at the same time. The absence of a national strategy on food waste in Canada only deepens that contradiction.
This episode sits in that tension. It explores what becomes possible when waste is made visible and measurable, and what remains unchanged even as systems improve. The result is not a simple answer to the question of elimination, but a clearer understanding of what that question demands.
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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 looks at how policy travels from Ottawa into the province, and where it begins to lose coherence on the ground.
At its core, this is a conversation about representation: what it means to advocate for a diverse sector, how alignment is built (or strained), and what it takes to hold agriculture together as conditions keep shifting.
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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 recruitment, and instead examines the everyday conditions that shape participation. The informal exposures, early invitations, and small acts of recognition that determine whether someone is brought in—or never considers agriculture at all.
What emerges is a quieter but more consequential reality: the future of the sector isn’t waiting to be filled. It’s already being shaped by who is allowed to get close.
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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 being part of something—by showing up, contributing, and gradually taking on more responsibility. It wasn’t formalized, and it didn’t need to be. It worked because it was shared.
Barb reflects on that world with clarity and precision, not as nostalgia, but as a way of understanding what has changed. Institutions once played a close, grounded role in translating knowledge into practice, helping people adapt to new tools, new techniques, and new realities. Today, those same processes feel more fragmented. Knowledge exists, but it doesn’t always travel. Innovation happens, but it doesn’t always land.
At the heart of this episode is a deeper question: how does a system reproduce itself? Not just economically, but socially—how it passes on knowledge, builds capacity, and creates the conditions for people to lead.
This is a conversation about culture as infrastructure. About informal learning as a form of coordination. About trust as something built over time, through proximity and shared experience.
And it’s about what happens when those systems thin out.
Because the future of agriculture will depend on more than technology or policy. It will depend on whether we can rebuild the environments where people learn together, take responsibility, and carry knowledge forward across generations.
In this episode:
How informal learning shaped agricultural knowledge and leadershipThe role of community-based institutions in translating change into practiceWhy innovation often fails to land without shared context and trustLeadership as something grown through participation, not assignedWhat it means to rebuild the “hidden infrastructure” of farming todayIf this episode resonates, share it with someone who is thinking about the future of agriculture—not just what we produce, but how we learn, adapt, and lead together.
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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 year alone. But this isn't just a story about logistics—it's about dignity, collaboration, and reimagining what a food system rooted in hope could look like.
We unpack the paradox of abundance and hunger, explore why "best-before" dates are more suggestion than law (yes, that yogurt is probably fine), and dive into the innovative "Viewfield" food hub model where multiple organizations co-locate to share resources and ideas. Treska shares why she believes humans are "pack animals" who need each other, and why a choice-based food bank model changes everything for the communities they serve.
In this conversation, we cover:
The Hope vs. Fear Framework: How to lead with hope even when the data is daunting.Food Rescue at Scale: The logistics of moving 3.1 million pounds of food to 65+ agencies.Dignity Over Charity: Why the "choice model" matters more than pre-packed hampers.Food Literacy: The truth about expiration dates, packaging waste, and consumer education.Collaboration as Leadership: How the Viewfield warehouse became a collision point for innovation.Resources & Links:
The Mustard Seed Street Church: mustardseed.caThe Future Herd: thefutureherd.caFlourish School Food Society (mentioned in episode)South Island Farm Hub (mentioned in episode)A Note on Sharing: If this conversation sparked something, don't keep it to yourself. Share this episode with someone who needs to hear it. You don't have to rescue 3.1 million pounds to make a difference—you just have to stay curious and pass it on.
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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 belongs. When people recognize it, understand it, and know how to work with it in their own lives.
Her work sits inside that process. Through recipes, storytelling, and education, she translates between cultures and contexts—connecting Punjabi traditions with local ingredients and contemporary Canadian realities. In doing so, she’s not just sharing food. She’s shaping how culture adapts, and how agriculture finds relevance within it.
What emerges is a shift in how we think about the system itself. Culture is not downstream from agriculture. It is one of the primary forces that determines whether agriculture succeeds, scales, or stagnates.
This episode reframes food literacy as cultural participation, and leadership as the ability to shape meaning, not just output.
Key themes
Culture as a driver of demand and adoptionWhy food has to “belong” to moveDiaspora cuisine as a bridge between local and globalCooking as a form of cultural infrastructureRethinking leadership through culture, not just productionAbout the guest
Raj Thandhi is a chef, recipe developer, and food educator behind Pink Chai Living. Her work focuses on making Punjabi cooking accessible while integrating local ingredients and contemporary contexts. Through her recipes, writing, and digital platforms, she explores how food, culture, and place shape one another in everyday life.
https://pinkchailiving.com/
https://www.instagram.com/pinkchai/
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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 unpacks the infrastructure behind real progress. Todd offers a grounded perspective on validation, trust, workforce development, and the institutions needed to translate ideas into practice.
This is a conversation about the work that happens after the breakthrough—and why it matters more than ever.
Key Themes
The gap between innovation and adoption in agricultureThe role of applied research institutions like Olds CollegeSmart Farms, data, and real-world validationWorkforce development and the future of agricultural skillsRethinking Canada’s agri-food innovation systemGuest
Todd Ormann
Vice-President, External Relations & Research
Olds College of Agriculture & Technology
Host
Jesse Hirsh
The Future Herd
Links
Olds College of Agriculture & Technology: https://www.oldscollege.ca/Learn more about The Future Herd: https://thefutureherd.ca/
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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 on what that vantage point has taught him: why certain debates in the sector never seem to move forward, how institutional culture shapes decision-making, and why independent thinking remains essential if agriculture is going to navigate the decades ahead.
Early in the conversation Jamie describes himself plainly: a rebel, a radical, and a free thinker. That perspective drives a wide-ranging discussion about leadership, honesty inside the sector, and the tension between supporting agriculture and challenging the assumptions that hold it back.
This episode explores:
• Why dissent matters inside the agri-food sector
• The institutional habits that slow change in agriculture
• Leadership, independence, and the future of sector dialogue
• What it means to fight for a food system that is fair and resilient
If the Future Herd is about imagining leadership toward 2050, then voices like Jamie’s are essential — people willing to speak plainly about the path ahead.
- Visa fler
