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Growing the Future

Dan Aberhart , Terry Aberhart

CONVERSATIONS THAT MATTER.   

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

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22 episodes
Avg 1 hr 3 min
English

Episodes 22

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S8 · E56
Yesterday · 58 min
Farm Succession: Work Hard and Wait Is Not a Plan
Dan Aberhart talks with Patti Durand, author of The Future Leader, and Chris Corbett of Brightrack about why working hard and waiting is not a succession plan. They ask three questions: how well you know yourself, your farm business and your farm family. The tension is that operationally strong successors and founders who are doing their best are both missing the conversations that would prepare them for the handoff. The takeaway for people in agriculture is to start the conversation early, say
S8 · E55
October 8 · 1 hr
Farm Finance: The Fractional CFO Strategy Every Farm Needs
Dan Aberhart talks with Craig Macfie, a CPA, P.Ag. and founder of Spring CFO, about why so many farm owners make next year’s decisions on bookkeeping that is months behind. Craig, a fractional CFO who works alongside farm owners, walks through the building blocks of farm finance. They run from strategy and risk, through bookkeeping, reporting and forecasting, to the conversation with the bank. The tension is that the numbers lenders and advisors rely on are estimates, and they are often not curr
S8 · E54
October 6 · 1 hr 3 min
Learn To Hedge: No Body Showed You
Dan Aberhart opens by pointing out that every grain farmer already has millions of dollars riding on prices, whether or not they trade, and asks who is teaching them to manage it. Ryan Bonnett explains that dealerships train farmers to run machines but nobody trains them to use the marketing tools, so many people stumble in, get burned, and write the whole thing off. He tells his own story of early wins followed by a long losing streak and a coach who asked what his system was. The rest of the h
S8 · E53
October 1 · 1 hr 1 min
The WD-40 AI Workshop: Lubricate Life's Squeaky Wheels
Dan Aberhart opens this Productions session with a reframe: the hardest problems on a farm, or in any business, usually aren't mechanical, they're the ones between people, and most operators have never actually diagnosed them. He walks through his own results on three personality assessments, Kolbe, CliftonStrengths, and the Enneagram, treating them the way a farm already treats a soil test, a tissue test, and a soil map, three signals pointing at the same underlying truth. Robert Woolf joins pa
S8 · E52
September 25 · 59 min
The AI Agronomist Transformation
Robert Woolf is 67, an independent agronomist, and not a programmer. He spent twelve years building a coaching practice after leaving a career in farm equipment sales and mechanics, scouting fields fourteen to sixteen hours a day through the growing season and often forgetting half of what he found by the time he got home. Dan sits down with him to trace that career, from working a family farm as a kid through the precision-ag coaching network that shaped how he thinks about agronomy, to the mom
S8 · E51
September 22 · 1 hr 20 min
Know Your Numbers: Down To The Field
Dean Klippenstine and Mike Palmier of MNP return for the third session in the Know Your Numbers benchmarking series, moving the lens from the whole farm down to the individual field. Drawing on an agronomy benchmark covering 318,000 acres across 57 farms in west central Saskatchewan, they walk through what a real profit map looks like, why the gap in crop input spending between top producers and average ones is small compared to the gap in decision quality, and what happens to gross margin the l
S8 · E50
September 17 · 1 hr 13 min
Canola Prices and the Washington Policy Fight
Susan Stroud of No Bull Ag spent more than fifteen years merchandising physical grain on the Mississippi river system before going out on her own, and now reads US biofuel regulation so producers do not have to. She joins Dan and co-host Ryan Bonnett of ABB Solutions to trace how a California carbon rule turned canola oil from a food crop into an energy crop, what happened when the small refinery exemption calculation changed in September, and why an amendment to the production tax credit put ca
S8 · E49
September 15 · 1 hr 6 min
Farm Finances to Decisions
David Sullivan, a farm business consultant of more than twenty years and now with Global Ag Risk Solutions, joins Dan to take apart a set of farm financial statements and rebuild them into something an operator can make a decision with. He walks through the five-bucket framework two advisors taught him at his family's kitchen table in 1999, defines the terms the industry uses without ever explaining them, and shows why the statements an accountant prepares are built for compliance rather than ma
S8 · E48
August 28 · 1 hr 1 min
Convergence Is Back. Here Is What We Are Building.
Dan Aberhart hosts the public launch of Convergence Conference 2027 with Terry Aberhart (founder), Warren Bills (MNP), Laura Shoemaker (repeat attendee, farmer), and Courtney Thevenot (Scotiabank). The conversation covers the origins of the conference, what the room actually produces in people who attend, and what is being built for 2027 -- including the Journey Track, the Ag Rocks for Charity opening-night fundraiser, and a banquet anchored by family business improv. Warren Bills makes a live m
S8 · E47
August 25 · 1 hr 4 min
Know Your Numbers: See Where You Stack Up
Travis Girard, a farm management consultant with MNP, and Dean Klippenstine, also with MNP, join Dan for the second session in the Know Your Numbers benchmarking series, drawing on a database of roughly 1,500 farms and 8.5 million acres across the Prairies. They walk through seven years of regional profitability data and reveal that the production expense gap between top performing farms and average ones is far smaller than most operators assume, just seven dollars an acre. The tension is that m
S8 · E46
August 20 · 1 hr 3 min
The Crop Is Ready. Is Your Yard?
Dan Aberhart opens with the episode's central claim: a combine is only as fast as the yard behind it, and most farms have never measured where that bottleneck actually lives. He brings together three operators solving it at different price points and scales. Brennan McArthur walks through the fully automated grain-handling system he built at his Watrous yard, which can unload a legal Super B in about eight minutes and gives him live inventory from his phone. Vince Pawluski describes a lower-cost
S8 · E45
August 12 · 1 hr 4 min
Sell High or Sell Wrong - A Pre-Harvest Market Briefing
Dave Norris of Norris Crop Consulting and Todd Rowan of IXL Innovations join Darren Sander, a Rosetown, Saskatchewan producer and Crop Aid Nutrition client, to read where the 2026 canola crop actually stands heading into harvest. The panel walks through why two bushels an acre off the provincial average works out to roughly a million tons, why record crush and export demand could leave the market rationed if the crop lands under 21 million tons, and why China stepping back into the canola market
S8 · E44
August 11 · 1 hr
Farm Succession Planning Canada: Are You Prepared?
Jace Young, founder and CEO of Legacy Farmer, joins Jolene Bolding of Farm Credit Canada and Wade Berlinic of Hammond Realty for a conversation built around one question: could your farm run tomorrow if you weren't there? Jace traces his own family's story, a 55 year operation his grandfather built from nothing in Tribune, Kansas that collapsed into bankruptcy in 2005, and the toll it took on the family afterward. The panel breaks down why only 12 percent of Canadian farms have a written transit
S8 · E43
August 10 · 59 min
Independent Agronomist Jaeda Hoppe: Going Out on Your Own at 24
Dan Aberhart sits down with Jaeda Hoppe, an independent agronomist who runs Hoppe Agronomy out of Biggar, Saskatchewan. She went out on her own at 24 after two farmers tracked her down through her mother's hair salon, and four years later she still has the same original clients. The conversation works through what an independent agronomist actually gets paid for — not secret products or magic bushels, but timing, follow-through, and the discipline to keep a producer's decisions on schedule — and
S8 · E42
August 7 · 1 hr 32 min
Cover Crops Western Canada: Does It Pay on Prairie Acres?
Dan Aberhart hosts three specialists — John Kempf of Advancing Eco Agriculture, Melissa Werkema of Future Analytics, and Kevin Elmy of Cover Crops Canada — for a 90-minute briefing built around one question: does regenerative practice actually pay on a Western Canadian grain farm. Framed by a national survey showing 89% of enrolled producers have already adopted cover cropping, nitrogen management, or grazing practices, the panel works through the real mechanics of each: John's protocol for cutt
S8 · E41
July 28 · 1 hr
Five Numbers Every Farm Should Know: Get Your Books in Order
Dan Aberhart hosts Richelle Boyd, MNP's National Leader for Crop Services, and Dean Klippenstine, a senior partner in MNP's agriculture practice, for the first session of a three-part series on farm financial literacy. Richelle walks through five numbers every farm operation should track — gross margin, cost of production, cash flow, debt servicing, and working capital — in plain language, using her own farm at Kindersley, Saskatchewan as the working example. Dean adds the advisor's view from a
S8 · E40
July 20 · 59 min
What AI Changed for Them: Four Operators, 30 Days In
A GTF Productions live briefing recorded Friday, July 17, 2026, one month into Dan Aberhart's GYFOS AI cohort. Four Cohort 1 co-creators -- agronomist Robert Woolf, farmer Joe Larre, entrepreneur Chris Nykolaishen, and farmland realtor Tim Hammond -- go around the horn on what they were trying to fix, what their personal operating diagnostics revealed about how they're wired, and the specific moments AI-built agents changed a real decision: a satellite-corrected reseed call, a walked-away combin
S8 · E39
July 17 · 54 min
Late Crop Right Call Greg Patterson & Darren Fisher
Dan Aberhart hosts Greg Patterson (A&L Canada Laboratories) and Darren Fischer (Crop-Aid Nutrition) for a live panel on in-crop nutrition decisions in a split-season year. Dan opens by framing the season: half of Saskatchewan cereals and canola have caught up due to recent heat; the other half is sitting in moisture-surplus conditions where flooding is the number-one source of crop damage. The episode covers practical in-season decisions in both scenarios -- foliar timing, tissue testing protoco
S8 · E37
July 15 · 1 hr 5 min
State of Iron: Who Owns Your Tractor?
Dan Aberhart hosts Cory Doctorow -- author, journalist, and special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation -- for a State of Iron live briefing on right-to-repair and digital sovereignty in agriculture. The anchor event is the John Deere $99 million right-to-repair settlement, but Doctorow's central argument is that the settlement addresses a symptom, not the cause. The cause is Canada's Copyright Modernization Act (Bill C-11, 2012), which makes it illegal to bypass digital locks on any d
S8 · E36
July 9 · 45 min
Why Aren't You Doing It All?
Dan Aberhart sits down with Kate Sauser, a 25-year-old fifth-generation grain farmer from Churchbridge, Saskatchewan who is simultaneously Policy Manager at Grain Growers of Canada, a national-level hockey referee, a university instructor, and a master's student who submitted her thesis half an hour before this recording. Kate has ADHD, was diagnosed at 23, and has built a time management system around how her brain actually works rather than against it. The conversation covers the time block st

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