Growing the Future

Robert Andjelic, Canada's largest private farmland owner, returns to defend three years of public predictions and lay out a new one. After tracking his own record on Saskatchewan land values, interest rates, and credit tightening, the conversation turns to his current thesis: a convergence of the Strait of Hormuz closure, a developing super El Nino, and global aquifer depletion that he believes makes Canada and Russia the two biggest beneficiaries of the next several years. He puts the odds of a genuine agricultural super cycle between 2026 and 2028 at 65 to 75 percent. The live audience pushes back throughout, and Robert answers without softening.

Dan Aberhart hosts David Widmar (Agricultural Economic Insights) and Eric Olsen (MNP Farm Management) for a 75-minute live briefing on the financial math facing farm operators in 2026. The conversation moves through US and Canadian interest rate environments, government support program structures, a side-by-side farmland affordability calculator, lender behavior shifts, and the barriers facing the next generation of producers. The central tension: farmland values still reflect the low-interest-rate world of 2008-2021, but cash rents and operating costs have adjusted to today's reality -- leaving producers squeezed between an asset base that hasn't corrected and an operating business that can't carry it.

Dan Aberhart opened this session from a hard place -- a company erased to zero with an email, a new start, and somewhere in that stretch, the inner work that changed what he measures himself by. Corliss Rassyle, founder of Lead Conference Canada and keynote speaker, joined him to do what Dan called the conversation agriculture is not having out loud. The session moved from Corliss's mother standing at an Easter griddle saying "I've done nothing with my life" -- despite raising eight kids and building a farm family -- through the Five A's framework Corliss has used in rooms of 200+ to interrupt the belief systems that chain people to external scoreboards. What listeners take away is not a strategy for the balance sheet. It is a set of tools for the person carrying it.

Dennis Bulani is a fourth-generation Saskatchewan farmer and CEO of The Rack, an independent ag retailer based in Bigger, Saskatchewan, who spent 40 years farming, built a $600,000-per-year in-house research division, and wrote a fact-checked book about food safety after sitting in a room full of Arizona entrepreneurs while a speaker told everyone that modern farming was poisoning the world. The conversation moves from the agronomics of his own farm (single-crop rotation, 75-bushel peas, 96-bushel canola attempts) through the research that built The Rack's competitive moat (phomyces root rot solutions, the Rogue manganese-zinc product, phosphate threshold studies), to the trust gap that drove the book: nine in ten people trust farmers, but only one in five trust modern farming practices. Dennis's argument is that Western Canadian farmers are the most advanced, educated producers in the world, shaped by adversity, the crow rate, and the absence of the brown envelope and the only thing missing is their willingness to tell Aunt Nancy from Vancouver she is wrong.

Jeff Bennett is a fourth-generation grain farmer from the Dodsland area of Saskatchewan, farming 4,500 acres with his dad's operation 800 feet from his door. In this Father's Day episode -- the first in the On the Bone Trail series -- Jeff talks through the generational weight of farming, five consecutive hard crop years including a 2021 that nearly wiped him out, and what it actually costs a man to be a farmer and a father at the same time. The conversation is direct and unhurried: Jeff talks about debt with no shame, about planning for his three young sons with no certainty, and about the four years he went dark -- deleted social media, talked to no one, came back slowly -- before he found his footing again. The close is the Bennett Code piece, a custom Bone Trail Originals engraving he built for his family, and the final line: "Pick that rock. You'll never be closer to it."