Growing the Future

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 getting results? Closer to five percent. That gap is what this Growing the Future Productions live event is built to close. Dan Aberhart puts three of the most plugged-in AI power users in ag — Rob Saik, Tim Hammond, and Damon Johnson — in the same room for the first-ever episode of The AI Farm. No vendor pitches. No vague future-casting. Three people who are deep in this every single day. Audience vote at the end. Winner gets bragging rights. You get the ideas. Where AI Actually Disrupts Agriculture — And Where It Doesn't Rob Saik opens with a reframe: agriculture at the farm level ranks low on AI disruption — not because it's behind, but because farming is inherently hands-on and judgment-dependent. The bigger disruption is upstream, in realty, insurance, and the machinery sector. Prediction is where AI excels. Judgment still belongs to you. (00:07:40) — Rob walks through the tools he uses daily: Perplexity, Claude, Notebook LM, and a custom Dossier Builder that profiles anyone he's about to meet. His starter recommendation for producers new to AI: Perplexity. It's reference-based, cites its sources, and aggregates across multiple AI models. If you're perplexed about AI, that's your on-ramp. (00:21:07) — A Power Farm member built a complete grain marketing program by uploading his inventory and contracts into Claude. That's not a future possibility. That happened. Tim's Pick: A Custom GPT That Makes Decisions for Your Team Tim Hammond is in the top 1% of ChatGPT users globally — 26,500 messages, 800-plus threads in a single year. His big move: he fed 1,200 pages of regulatory knowledge into a custom GPT, locked it to that knowledge base only, and deployed it to his whole team. Now they ask the bot before they ask Tim. (00:23:14) — The framework from Jeff Woods' book The AI-Driven Leader: Context, Role, Interview, Task. Most people skip the Interview step. That's where AI surfaces your blind spots and assumptions before it gives you an answer. The farm application: 12,000 acres is the HR ceiling where most operations stall. AI helps you scale past it without adding headcount. Damon's Pick: A Full Farm Dashboard Built in 12 Minutes Damon Johnson — economist, active grain farmer, insurance builder — built a fully integrated farm management dashboard the night before this call. Six tabs. Google Maps field borders. Grain marketing scenarios. Input cost tracking. Seeding date calculator. Spray window tool. Twelve minutes. (00:38:00) — He uploaded years of historical farm data into a Claude project and prompted it to build what would previously have cost millions and years. His framing: Claude is now a prototype partner. Fail fast. Iterate. Build. (00:56:47) — He reads the exact prompt live: a grain marketing calculator for a 7,000-acre Saskatchewan farm, three marketing scenarios, net revenue comparison chart. Type it. Get it. The Poll Results — Where Producers Actually Are 19% haven't touched AI at all. 42% have played with ChatGPT but nothing on the operation. 27% use AI tools regularly for at least one part of their business. 10% have it built into multiple parts of the operation. (00:20:26) What's holding people back: a third don't know where to start. 17% don't trust the technology. 15% are worried about farm data being used. Also covered: Machine learning vs. AI explained without jargon (00:48:08). How to stop AI hallucinations (00:52:36). Drones, Starlink, and Goldman Sachs' $264 billion precision ag disruption number (00:54:24). Dan's live demo: using Claude inside Gmail to scrape 100-plus webinar registration emails and extract every question in seconds (00:46:20). And Whisper Flow — because typing is starting to feel like a fax machine. Final word from all three panelists: Start. Pick one pain point. Play with it. You'll find out what works. Featured in this episode: Dan Aberhart — Host, Growing the Future Productions Rob Saik — Founder and CEO, T1 Technology Corporation / Ag Advisor Pro Tim Hammond — Founder, Hammond Realty Damon Johnson — EVP, Global Ag Risk Solutions / Hub International Resources mentioned: Perplexity AI, Claude (claude.ai), Notebook LM, Whisper Flow, Grip farm management software, The AI-Driven Leader by Geoff Woods, Ag Advisor Pro More from Growing the Future: Podcast: growingthefuturepodcast.ca YouTube: Growing the Future Productions Ground Truth Daily: Available wherever you listen to podcasts Register for the Convergence Conference at convergence.ag and stay updated by subscribing to the Growing the Future Podcast at growingthefuturepodcast.ca.

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 Productions live event puts Dan Aberhart at the table with seven of the most plugged-in financial and business minds working in Canadian agriculture right now: Evan Shout (Maverick Ag / Farmer Coach), Brian Mack and Justin Simpkins (Grow Lytics), Travis Gerrard and Roxanne Olynick from MNP, and Courtney Thevenot and Tanner Gerwing from Scotiabank Agricultural Banking. The conversation runs nearly 90 minutes and covers the full spectrum — from bookkeeping basics to billion-dollar family legacy questions. Not a panel of polished talking points. A real room of real advisors who already work together behind closed doors, and now you get to hear it. What gets covered in this episode: The 2% / 18% / 80% Split — Where Does Your Farm Land? Evan Shout opens with a number that should stop people cold: over the last 20 years, as farm revenues have gone up and risk has increased, financial acumen in the industry has actually gotten worse. The top 2% aren't just profitable — they're operating with a completely different level of financial sophistication. The next 18% are closing the gap. The other 80% are still treating finance as a back-seat discipline. (00:07:00) — Evan breaks down what separates the top tier, and why building a team is the single most powerful thing an operation can do to move up that ladder. Access to Capital vs. Strategic Advice — They're Not the Same Thing Grow Lytics started by reverse-engineering the perfect credit deal. Not by handing out money — by working backward from what a lender actually needs to say yes, and building the farm's story from there. Brian Mack draws a clear line between knowing your costs and knowing what the bank is looking at when you walk through the door. (00:10:00) — The panel unpacks the difference between getting financed and being financially positioned. You don't want your banker to tell you it's a bad deal. You want to already know that before you show up. What Scotiabank Actually Looks For — And It's Not Just the Numbers Courtney Thevenot is direct: lending decisions aren't just financial. Management strength, character, who you've got in your corner, whether you're trying to do it all yourself — that all goes into the picture. A farm that walks in with a team behind them sends a completely different signal than one that shows up with a stack of paper and no story. (00:12:00) — Courtney makes the case for the banking relationship as an ongoing partnership, not a transactional event. Quarterly calls. Farm visits. The relationship should be built long before you need something. The Mental Health Moment Nobody Planned — But Everybody Needed An audience member, Harry Siemens, drops a question about the farm suicide rate — 3.5 times higher than any other industry. Dan opens the floor. What follows is one of the most honest conversations this panel has. Evan doesn't give the diplomatic answer. He gives the hard one: farming culture has tied identity and legacy to a business in a way that makes failure feel unsurvivable. That's not the truth. But it's the pressure people are carrying. (00:27:00) — Justin Simpkins adds context from time spent in Australia, where the numbers are even more stark. Courtney mentions the Canadian Centre for Agriculture Wellbeing as a real resource. Roxanne talks about peer groups as one of the most underrated tools for connection and permission to be honest. This segment wasn't on the agenda — but it might be the most important twelve minutes in the episode. Benchmarking, Peer Groups & the Trucker Who Blew Everyone's Mind Travis Gerrard talks about what happens when you put a trucking company's operational metrics in front of a room full of grain farmers. Nobody expected it. Everyone walked away wanting to know their numbers that much better. The benchmarking group MNP runs is covering 14% of Saskatchewan farmland — and the data is clear on what the best operations have in common. (00:19:00) — Travis and the panel dig into the power of cross-industry benchmarking, and why getting outside the agriculture bubble — like Dan's example of Strategic Coach — can be the jolt that resets how a producer sees their own operation. AI, Data & the Role of the Farm's Next Hire The panel lands on something the audience was clearly hungry for: the missing seat at the table isn't another accountant or banker. It's a CTO. A tech integrator. Someone who can get real-time data flowing — from grain cards, JD Ops, harvest profit, bookkeeping — so that the advisors in the room can do insight work instead of cleanup work. (00:44:00) — Evan lays out the vision clearly: AI isn't replac

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 conversation about what separates the producers clearing big margins from the ones leaving money on the table. The number? Somewhere between $50 and $100 per acre. Every single year. Compounded over a decade — it's not a number. It's a different life. What gets covered in this episode: Soil Health & the First 30 Days — Darren makes the case that the first 30 days of a crop dictates maximum yield potential. Not the last 30. The first. That reframe alone is worth your time. He also talks about how a soil health program let his operation move from a three-crop rotation to two — and pencil out better. Earthworms optional, but encouraged. (00:04:00) — Darren breaks down the incremental gains philosophy: fertilizer protection, stress reduction, nutrient use efficiency, and how every acre should be growing the crop it's best suited to grow. Grain Marketing & the Probability Game — Dave Norris and Todd Rowan don't predict the future. They work with probabilities. And when warships started heading toward the Strait of Hormuz, they texted their clients to fill their fuel tanks. Fuel was $1.02. The downside risk was 93 cents. The upside was $1.50. That's not a prediction. That's a risk-reward conversation — and the producers who had that conversation in advance came out a lot better than the ones who watched the news. (00:09:00) — The panel unpacks why so many producers make decisions after it feels urgent, and why the best time to act is almost always when it doesn't. Crop Insurance, In-Season Pricing & the 2025-26 Landscape — It's the worst crop insurance environment since before 2021. The panel digs into what that means for in-season pricing on canola, wheat, and durum, and how to think about layering agri-stability on top when the base numbers aren't what they used to be. (00:22:00) — Dave and Todd walk through the mechanics of in-season pricing, the cash flow timing issue with SCIC payments, and how to think about selling new crop canola when fertilizer costs are still wildly elevated. The Fertilizer Problem Nobody's Talking About Enough — An estimated 400,000-tonne shortage of urea in Saskatchewan this year. Producers who didn't pre-buy are scrambling. The panel discusses how this reshapes planting decisions, top-dressing options, foliar programs as a partial substitute, and why the supply-demand models for yield estimates may be fundamentally broken this season. (00:33:00) — Todd flags what this means for crop rotation flexibility. When the only crop penciling out is canola, what happens to everything else? Macroeconomics, Gold, Oil & the Commodity Supercycle — Dave Norris had a supercycle bias since November. He didn't have a war in March as the trigger — he thought it would be El Niño. He wasn't entirely wrong. The panel talks about money flowing into commodities, what governments printing money means for grain prices, and why canola at $700 a tonne may not be the ceiling. (00:40:00) — The canary in the coal mine: when gold and silver started ripping, the smart money was already watching inflation and currency hedges. Farmers paying attention to macros have a structural edge over those only watching local basis. The $70 Poll — What the Audience Said — Dan ran a live poll with over 150 producers on the call. The majority landed between $50 and $100 per acre as the value of strong management decisions. Todd shared a real-world example: in 2021-22, clients who didn't over-contract and took in-season crop insurance pricing pocketed $18/bushel versus $12. Clients who panicked after 2021 and froze in 2022 took $17 off the combine when $22 was on the board. The math on those decisions — compounded over 10 years — is a different farm. (00:56:00) — The close. Dan pulls together the final takeaways from the audience word cloud, and the panel leaves producers with the most important thing of all: knowing when to act, and not waiting until it's obvious. Featured in this episode: Dan Aberhart — Host, Growing the Future Productions Darren Sander — Crop-Aid Nutrition Dave Norris — Norris Crop Consulting Todd Rowan — IXL Innovations More from Growing the Future: Podcast: growingthefuturepodcast.ca YouTube: Growing the Future Productions Ground Truth Daily: Available wherever you listen to podcasts Register for the Convergence Conference at convergence.ag and stay updated by subscribing to the Growing the Future Podcast at growingthefuturepodcast.ca.