Ladies and gentlemen, Jesse Hirsch.

All farmers are futurists, because if you don't think of the future as a farmer, you're not going to be a very successful farmer, whether anticipating your crops, your livestock.

But to Renee's tease, I also quickly realized that every single farmer is a hacker.

Because when that tractor breaks down, when any system breaks down, you're not going to wait for a clean fix.

You're going to fix it by any means necessary.

So my remarks today are not just those of a futurist, it's those of a hacker who believes that technology needs to be understood, needs to be taken apart, put together, so that we can best understand how that technology can serve us instead of us serving the technology.

Now, part of the reason we have gathered here today is we acknowledge that the future is almost certainly going to be radically different than the present.

Historically, this is actually novel phenomenon.

Most human institutions have existed to make sure that the future was exactly identical to the present.

That was ultimately the power of the Catholic Church for centuries, right?

To make sure that nothing changes, that it remains the same, that it is predictable, versus I can tell you right now, the only constant that we will deal with in our life is change.

Everything is now variable.

If you don't recognize that everything is a variable, you're gonna have a very difficult life.

I just had a very heated argument with my 25 year old when I tried to explain to him he was variable.

Everything he wanted was variable.

If he didn't embrace the idea that life was about change, he was not going to enjoy it very much.

So, thankfully, that's why we're all here today, because we want to make the change.

We don't want the change to happen to us.

We want to be the ones making that change.

That's partly why I became a farmer as a futurist.

I kept showing up at all these different conferences and credit the Farm, Credit Canada, that it was a bunch of their young farmer events that connected me with a lot of young farmers, that made me realize this is where I ought to be, this is where I should be, applying my expertise, my principles, but most importantly, because I love to disrupt and I love disruption, and I perversely enough, am kind of excited by growing climate change.

The idea that the heat, the water, the wind, the earth is all going to become volatile and unpredictable.

That sounds like an interesting challenge.

Yes.

I want to harvest the sun, I want to harvest water, I want to harvest wind.

I want to grow the most microbial, diverse soil imaginable and then have my crops and animals flow from that too.

So this is why I think it's an exciting time to be here.

Because not only can we make change, we can make futures.

Because anyone can be a futurist, right?

Futurists have about the same predictability rate as weather people.

At best maybe 20%.

I personally like to argue that there is no such thing as the future.

We only ever experience a series of todays.

You know, it's today time to do the chores again.

Oh, it's today I gotta do the chores again.

But at the same time, we like to imagine futures.

Part of what I'm gonna do today is fantasize and offer you some crazy visions of a future that I'd like to see.

But of course, the power is when we align those futures, when we collaborate on those futures, when we iterate on those futures in a way that actually not only gives us the confidence and leadership and optimism to tackle the unknown, but actually gives us a responsiveness, a resilience, if not a capacity to make our dreams come true.

Because that is kind of what the future is.

And thankfully our friends at AAC recognize that imagining the future is not a one off exercise.

It's something you have to keep coming back to repeatedly and repeatedly.

And here's the irony, that's what church used to be.

People used to come together every Sunday and imagine the future heaven as a way to alleviate the toils of the everyday here on earth.

Granted, I am a secular individual, we live in a secular society.

But guess what?

We're engaged in a similar philosophical, spiritual exercise.

And when done right, it is transcendent.

It feels great, it connects us to our fellow human beings, it enlightens our soul and brings the spirit around us.

So again, that's kind of why I'm excited about today and why I think there's an incredible opportunity to not just face uncertainty, but thrive.

Right?

Create systems that are based on variables, not constants.

To create systems that are dynamic and resilient, that can handle any change that comes at us.

Because lo and behold, our society is enraptured by a story that I happen to actually find kind of religious, unfortunately.

But it suggests that great change is upon us.

That AI will transform every profession, every role at work.

And here's where I'm going to take the liberties throughout this presentation to not only talk about the agri food sector, but give us some glimpse as to actually what's going on in our society so we can make sense of it.

Because I personally think that artificial intelligence is a whole bunch of nonsense.

Don't get me wrong, there is very real, profound, even, dare I say it, magical technology that is transforming every industry as we know it.

But the stories we are telling about these tools are misguided at best, if not delusional.

For example, the idea that we are about to launch some super intelligence that will be smarter than humans and take away all our jobs, that is 100% bullshit.

I'm sorry to say.

If you actually look at the science, whether computer science, cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, sociology, it will all tell you no, these machines do not think.

They will never think.

They're phenomenal at pattern recognition.

Oh my God, can they find the needle in the haystack?

But here's Jesse's number one tip for how to use a large language model with prowess and precision.

You have to do the thinking.

It does not think for you.

But if you come to it with lots of thoughts and you use it as a kind of mirror to work on those thoughts, wow.

Just about anything is possible because it's your brain, it's your thinking, it's your capacity as an intellectual, a professional, a laborer, a leader.

That is the true power of AI.

Not for control, but for collaboration.

Right?

Not for mindless automation, but hyper intelligent responsive systems.

Now, the paradox of course is we have this magical marketing AI bubble.

I just heard a quick podcast recommendation decoder by the publication The Verge interviews CEOs from the tech sector in the AI sector.

It is excellent.

It's some of the best investigative journalism out there.

Their most recent episode, or second most recent episode, is an interview with the chairman of OpenAI, not Sam Altman, but a friend of Sam Altman, and he details why he believes that AI is a bubble, why that AI bubble is going to burst.

And I found this to be a very insightful conversation.

That the web all of a sudden would break the information monopolies.

John Perry Barlow wrote the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace.

And at the time everyone believed it.

Yeah, governments would fall.

Of course, that didn't happen.

Then there was social media, what they call Web 2.0, right?

Facebook and Twitter.

And then they said it would be democracy all around the world.

Yeah, that didn't happen.

And so now here we are at the age of AI and they're making equally ludicrous predictions.

And I can guarantee none of them are going to happen.

In particular, massive unemployment.

But nonetheless, a lot of things will happen, things we weren't expecting, because that's what happened with the web.

The web did transform business as we know it.

That's what happened with social media.

Social media transformed marketing, transformed politics, transformed news completely, just not as anyone had predicted.

And that is why collaborative futures, collaborative storytelling, collaborative sense making is so crucial.

Because whatever we think is going to happen is probably not going to happen.

But if we prepare for what we think is going to happen, then no matter what happens, we're good.

Because we're thinking about it, we're preparing about it, we're mobilizing towards it.

And that's where AI is a paradox.

On the one hand, legitimately, a lot of people are going, that's nonsense.

And they're right.

And on the other hand, a lot of people are going, this is the most powerful tool humanity has ever invented.

And they're right.

The question comes down to when, where and why.

And that is context.

And that's why agriculture is one of the leading areas when it comes to AI application and adultery.

Partly because agricultural environments are highly controlled, as is the case in greenhouses, but in many agricultural operations, but also because the needs of agricultural operations are generally pretty narrow.

Right.

You're not having to deal with the chaos of traffic, of kids and pets and balls.

No.

You're going to assume that no one likely is going to run in front of your colony or it's going to run in front of a tractor.

So the potential for AI in agriculture and food production is profound.

It has tremendous opportunity.

Because that is the most obvious application of this stuff.

But I've been alluding to the idea that I think mass unemployment as a result of AI is a myth, that it ain't gonna happen.

Unfortunately, the nature of collaborative futures is if everyone believes it's gonna happen, they're gonna start laying people off before they realize maybe that wasn't such a good idea.

We might be in the midst of that little self fulfilling prophecy.

But what if I told you that work generally sucks and it doesn't have to?

What if I told you that with my degree in AI I could go and make a lot of money just about anywhere in the world?

I ended that event with 50 Bitcoin that I spent in the next six to 12 months.

So there's lots of reasons that I kind of followed the technology path.

But I chose agriculture because if I'm going to experience a tyranny of today's, I want that to be a learning curve that not only improves my health, not only supplies me with food, but allows my brain to be constantly growing.

So I actually think when we talk about the role of technology in agriculture, we can also talk about reversing the quote, unquote brain drain that went from rural communities to urban.

And I will self servingly present myself as exactly the kind of person you want to be attracting to the agricultural sector.

Although if my partner would hear, she would be a far better example because she is way smarter than me, right?

A far greater learner.

This is a woman with a PhD in the history of technology who is a certified teacher.

And she said, you know what?

Education is just not the industry I want to be in.

I want to be a farmer, right?

So there are a lot of people who might have been white collar workers who have post secondary education, who are workaholics who would love to enter the agricultural industry.

They just don't know how to.

Only reason I was able to do it, farm Credit Canada notwithstanding, because they brought me to lots of cool events was my early childhood was spent in the bush in northern Ontario.

So I already had connections to rural communities.

There wasn't a gap.

I realized how much fun it is.

I am now a preacher to urban communities as to why the future is rural and why agriculture is the place to be.

Unfortunately, I am a weirdo in a chorus of people trying to say the future is urban.

I wish I had more people adding to this, but this is something I would love to see y' all explore when you talk about the future of labor, that you recognize that these AI driven smart farms, they're gonna require people with a combination of skills.

A combination of skills that includes things like data literacy, includes things like basic software skills, right?

Includes things like being able to assess which infrastructure, which technology, which platforms work with their operations, or if we are to imagine a heavily concentrated agricultural sector, they're able to confer with their higher ups in a way that allow these systems to be adopted.

So I don't actually think that the current projections of labor in agriculture are accurate or reflect our needs.

And because I Don't think we have enough people participating in that conversation who recognize there's a lot of people living in the city who want out.

They don't know how to get out.

They don't have the capital to get out.

But oh boy, would they love to be engaged in farming, whether traditional or some of the emerging forms.

But let's take a moment to talk about open source because I am the kind of weirdo who loves to learn.

That's why I'm a farmer.

I've been studying agricultural robotics now for about three, four years.

But I've also been a proponent of open source software for 25 years.

Anyone who remembers dot.org I had authorship credit and code, the software that ran.

Now, I'm not actually that good a programmer.

I haven't done much over the last 10 years, but that's something that large language models do really well.

So I decided last winter I wanted to build my own farm robot.

I wanted this robot to have AI capabilities.

I wanted it to be a learning project for me, not only because I'm never going to be able to afford the kind of farm robotics that are out in the marketplace, but also because I feel that if I build it open source, I can cater to the needs of my agricultural operation and from that learn some really valuable skills.

Then of course, I had to learn welding because I needed to learn how to deal with metal in terms of building the robot.

And guess who helped me with both of those subjects?

Oh yeah, my friend ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini.

And granted, it doesn't understand what it's telling me, so it gave me a lot of bad advice.

But mistakes are part of the learning process and it was a great way to be able to ask dumb questions about welding without someone calling me an idiot or, you know, telling me I was messing it up.

And I did think, as an aside, that there's no way I would have been able to learn welding in the city because there would have been someone looking at me going, you're about to blow this place up.

But because I'm doing it on my own, I can make those mistakes.

I'm actually a pretty decent welder here.

Then of course, I get the raspberry PI, I get the camera, I order the motors off of Amazon.

There's already an open source kit for different types of agricultural robots.

There's open source software for mowing robots.

So I now have a reasonably functional farm robot.

It's my first.

This is the AI generated image.

My welding is so ugly, there's no way I'm going to show a photo of it here in front of people who probably know how to weld.

But it functions, it works.

It currently operates via remote control because I'm in the data collection phase where I'm teaching it about my pastures, I'm teaching it about my land, I'm learning how to recognize the goats or horses that it's moving amongst.

Right.

I'm then going to start adding AI capability.

I'm then going to start adding attachments.

The other side basically has gone to Amazon.

But it really wasn't that difficult for me to do.

And you don't need every farmer doing this.

You just need a Jesse in every community who helps people figure out they already know how to.

Well, they probably know basic electrical.

The software is actually pretty easy.

And if it's open source, the whole community can be adding and modifying.

What if we scale this up across the province?

What if we had a warehouse where we connected with factories in China, got those electric motors, got those controllers, got a whole bunch of Raspberry PI, some Arduino boards, had it, so it was available, maybe even subsidized.

So it was really cheap for people to get hands on this technology.

Then there's a video of Jesse showing how he did it.

Or maybe even better, our friends at the University of Guelph do their own prototype, make it available open source.

Boom.

All of a sudden, the cost of robotics goes low.

And because I built the robot, I understand how it works, I understand how the software interacts.

So I mostly built this first robot for pasture management, for harrowing, for dealing mowing with certain weeds.

But my partner, she's already starting to expand our crops and we've kind of got custom rows.

So next year I'm going to build her a robot custom made for her.

Rose and I will use an imaging application and start trying attempting to do weed detection, maybe put a little blade on it so it cuts the weeds.

This isn't rocket science.

This is really straightforward.

This is a whole lot easier than fixing your tractor.

It's a whole lot easier than keeping an old hay baler operation.

Right.

It just fundamentally requires literacy, right?

Because I understand how open source software works.

It's because I understand how to go on GitHub and compare different products.

I can't understand the code, but I understand the culture the same way that I have been studying food culture.

Because before I got into farming, I had a rather foolish idea of opening a restaurant.

Thank God I didn't do that.

But fundamentally, this notion of literacy is what makes a successful agricultural operation a successful food operation from an unsuccessful one.

But literacy is also what changes the sector, and literacy is what impacts the consumer, right?

Disinformation is a huge factor when it comes to agri food.

I was invited actually to invite only event at Massey College in the summer on disinformation.

And they invited me because of my political work and my hacking stuff.

But I was there talking about food and I was going over and over, we have to be looking at what disinformation is happening to food.

Because you better believe that if you were a hostile foreign country who had a specialized expertise in social media manipulation, the first thing you're going to do is go after your adversary's food supply.

And the best way to do that is to attack trust, right?

Is to attack perception, is to pit people eating the food against the people producing the food.

So I think literacy is at the heart of what we're doing today as futurists, right?

As people who want to create a resilient, vibrant, growing system.

And literacy is something we kind of take for granted, because if you have a high level of literacy, you often make the mistake of thinking that people see what you see.

I think most of us here in the room can recognize that we have a level of agricultural literacy, of maybe food literacy, of even rural literacy that the vast majority of Canadians do not at our peril, right?

The less they understand us, the less we are our priority in policy circles.

The less they understand us, the more they resent whatever funding, whatever supports, whatever programs.

So literacy is fundamentally the difference between the optimistic future, the status quo future, and the pessimistic future.

And literacy is the kind of each one teach, one education we all have to be doing as organizations, as professionals, as family members, because RFK Jr. Is in a position of power.

And my God, that guy's a monster, right?

An absolute monster when it comes to human health and disinformation.

And he is in a position as state power.

So the time is upon us.

And I think literacy is a huge, huge opportunity.

And TikTok cruising, quick show of hands here.

How many people like myself are addicted to TikTok?

All right, some of you, I'm glad you are honest.

If you are serious, as a professional in the agri food industry.

And you are not using TikTok as a research platform.

You're sleeping, you're behind.

Don't get me wrong.

If you don't want to use it as a personal platform, more power to you.

I get it.

It is dangerous.

It is 100% a vehicle for propaganda from the Chinese state for sure.

But their AI, their algorithm, in terms of its ability to organize information and connect audiences, is the best in the world by far.

The United States delayed and delayed and delayed a law banning it because they're happy to put military in the streets, they're happy to lock people up, but they're not gonna take away People's TikTok because that is how emotional and connecting it is.

And TikTok is revolutionizing the food industry.

The individual here on the left, his name is Logan.

It's based in Vancouver.

For a while, he was individually responsible for a shortage of cucumbers.

Cucumbers across North America just wouldn't stay on shelves.

People were getting angry at grocery stores because they couldn't get their cucumbers because Logan was teaching them how to make cucumber salad.

And he was doing so with such scale.

Like each of his videos was get what, 10 million and like, more.

And I certainly tried his recipe.

It's great.

But if I was a cucumber grower, if I was in the cucumber industry, I'd be like, oh, my God, what is happening?

I hope someone knows who Logan is.

I hope they're reaching out to him.

I mean, these kind of sins move on.

The nature of, you know, these viral moments, they come and they go.

So you kind of have to be there prepared.

But quite frankly, the cucumber industry didn't have to do anything.

They were just lucky that Logan liked cucumbers, and he happened to be a very charismatic individual.

Again, if you have no idea what I'm talking about, I highly recommend you look it up.

Logan cucumber phenomenal case example in food trends and the way in which these food trends are volatile, Right.

They move and go with the broader psychology.

Now, quick show of hands, because it's not just TikTok.

How many people here know who Keith Lee is or have heard of the Keith Lee effect?

A few hands.

Keith Lee is this individual on the right.

He started off as just some guy in Las Vegas who wanted to support local restaurants.

But now when Keith Lee shows up somewhere like Toronto, the buzz is right through the restaurant industry.

And any place he mentions will be sold out for months.

We'll have Lineups around the block.

Now he happens to specialize in family owned, usually either African American or Caribbean communities.

But his track record is top notch, right?

He is one of these authorities online who his sense of taste, his following is so powerful he just has to mention a brand, mention a dish, mention a restaurant and they are overwhelmed.

Another more popular example of this is Dave Portnoy in his one bite pizza reviews.

Basically he takes a bite of a pizza and if he gives it a 7.8 or later, that pizza place is overwhelmed again with business for months.

So this is why if you're in the agri food sector and you're not paying attention to TikTok as a source of data and intelligence, I implore you to do so.

I'm mentioning the food side partly because my presentation today is heavily agricultural, because that's where I'm largely coming from.

But farm talk, the extent to which farmers and people in the ag tac are all throughout the agricultural rainbow, they are on TikTok.

And it is far more valuable than any other social media platform because it connects people, it connects ideas, it connects interests.

It literally is the most powerful example of artificial intelligence that I can offer you today.

And the impact that it is having on agricultural and food is profound.

And I would use that as an argument to say we are missing a certain segment here in our collaborative future exercise.

And that's the consumer, that's the person eating.

Right.

We're still kind of assuming that they're at the end of the loop and they're not at the table with us mostly because I don't think they see themselves at the table as us.

But there are some tiktokers who would.

There are some tiktokers who are consumers, are eaters who if we invited them to this process, not only would they love it and feel honored, but they might bring us some attention as well.

They might help get more buy in and participation, certainly on a diversity and inclusive level.

So I offer that as a wild thought moving forward.

But I do think we have to think about the on ramps to our quote unquote value chain, the way in which we make this sector as accessible as possible.

Right.

Because I personally believe that agriculture and food kind of immune to competition.

Yes, there is competition, yes, there's a role for competition, but fundamentally people will always eat.

And so I think that our ecosystem, our marketplace should not resist competition, not resist new entrants, but embrace radical openness, even radical transparency.

But I'll get that in a bit.

But why do we not have the kind of incubators, the kind of startups, the kind of accelerators that say the tech industry has, right?

I mean, if you look at the tech industry, this is perhaps one of the more profitable.

So during the last couple of decades, the largest growing.

And yet they go out of their way to make it possible for new entrants to get in the market, right?

Even the largest, most dominant players allocate a significant amount of their resources to fuel potential new competitors.

Granted, it's because they think they'll just buy them out and they become a threat, but nonetheless, we need to be thinking about how to make it easier for someone to get into agriculture, for someone to get into the food business, for someone to get into the consulting aspect of these sectors.

That would require new regulations, that would require intra industry support.

But I raise it as a value, I raise it as an ethic.

And maybe it starts just by inviting consumers into the process, because the consumer today is the producer of tomorrow.

And it's a matter of helping people who are food curious helping people who are farm curious get access to the literacy that in spite of social media, we still gatekeep, right?

We still do not make it easy for people to get involved in our sector, involved in our industry, because the issue here is data.

One of the things I suspect would be a dominant thread, certainly in the automation part of today, but maybe even in the other streams, is we have a sore, I don't want to use the word deficit, obstacle.

I want to say handicap in the golf sense, not in the disability sense.

But we, Canada as a country are really in a difficult position when it comes to data.

Just about every single other industrialized nation is generating, collecting, understanding, facilitating the literacy of data better than we are.

First thing I did when I became a farmer six years ago was install cameras all across my operation so I could start collecting data in the form of video, knowing full well that I could analyze that video and use it for my own purposes, at the very least for pattern recognition.

The other point of building my robot is I want to collect more finite data about my soil, about my pastures are orchard.

Data literacy is something our sector sorely lacks.

And where the food aspect of this, they totally understand data, they sure don't want to share it.

And unfortunately, we as a society are operating under this dangerous myth that data is valuable.

And I'm here to tell you that data is not valuable, not at all.

In fact, I think data is worthless.

Attention is what's valuable.

Attention is the scarce resource.

The whole purpose that people use Data is to get our attention.

The whole reason we want agricultural data is to allocate attention.

Whether a robot's attention, whether a system's attention, whether a buyer's attention, whether a regulator's attention, we flipped it around.

Data is something we should be sharing.

Data is something that we should be making transparent.

Data is something we should be collecting at all times, not because it is valuable, but because it enables value, because it allows us to do other things.

And unfortunately, in our risk averse culture, we are too obsessed with protecting data, with hoarding data when we need to be sharing that data.

And I suspect our academic colleagues here today will be reinforcing that argument.

But I think those of us within industry need to be championing that argument.

It's the idea that it raises all boats, that we will all benefit if we can understand our system.

Because imagine this crazy fantasy.

Imagine there was a dashboard food ca, you go to that dashboard, anyone can go to that dashboard and you get a real live broadcast picture, a digital twin, as it were, of our entire value chain, of the entire agricultural food system.

Who would benefit from such radical transparency, from such a living system?

Well, the primary beneficiaries would be the largest players, the people with the most resources, the people with the ability to engage that market at scale.

But the other benefits would be the smallest players, right?

The people who are happy to scavenge, the people who are happy to look for opportunities.

You know, this is how I generally see the waste disposal business, including scrap metal recycling, and I'll get into that in a moment.

But the opportunity here, when it comes to data, when it comes to automation, when it comes to literacy, is profound.

And we are penny wise, pound foolish because we are thinking of data as some kind of asset when it is an innate right.

The World Wide Web was revolutionary because it was wide across the world, because anybod, nobody could set a website, anyone could look at a website.

So imagine the entire system was transparent.

I think we would have not only thriving, profitable, prosperous, diverse systems, but the rest of the world will be coming to learn from us and eat our food.

Now granted, that's a pretty crazy concept and I can elaborate on that concept in a moment, but that is the requirement for integrated systems, right?

If we want to have greater efficiency, if we want to have greater resources, if we want to have greater cooperation and collaboration, we kind of have to be reading off the same page because that is the consequence of social media is it got us all on our own page.

Before social media, maybe it was the Globe and Mail Right.

Maybe it was cbc, maybe it was the New York Times.

We literally all read the same page.

But I can tell you right now, for those of us who are on TikTok, we are on a completely different page than the rest of us.

Those of you who are on Facebook, for example.

And Facebook, of course, is where the Canadian agricultural ecosystem exists.

Like if you want to buy used agricultural equipment, if you want to buy livestock, it's on Facebook.

Boy, is that a problem with national sovereignty and national security.

But nonetheless, that's the page you're on.

So how do we get people on the same page?

How do we get people being able to collaborate and even speak the same language?

Now, Rene, personally, I don't believe there's such a thing as pronunciation.

Like language is a virus.

And I think the more we speak en francais, the more we use colloquial, the more we mispronounce words, the more human we are.

I mean, how many of you look at an email and ask yourself, did AI write this or did the person sending me write this?

I like to let the sender know because I do deliberate misspellings, I do all sorts of weird words and they know they're really getting jested.

But one of the things you're going to talk about today are integrated systems.

And I will challenge that.

Most of you actually have never experienced truly integrated systems.

And we as a collective still can't fully conceive them.

Because here's the other piece.

Not only do I think consumers need to be at our table, but I think dissidents need to as well.

And the reason I say this is the dissidents are empowered by very powerful technology.

And as we recently saw with the arrest of the so called Queen of Canada in Richmond, Saskatchewan, they can do a lot of damage to our societies, our communities, if we let them go unchecked.

So if we really are going to be on the same page, we actually need to find ways to bring in the people who hate us, I believe because they're misguided by disinformation.

And if, for example, they understood that without animals we wouldn't have crops, that soil is fundamentally the basis of human.

I digress.

But there are conversations that need to happen that aren't happening because we're yelling at each other.

And there needs to be a way to bring this in.

And that's where integrated systems.

You know, maybe I did resilient, regenerative and revolutionary.

Maybe I should have done resilient, regenerative and reconciliatory.

Right?

Because the Point about reconciliation, I think is crucial when it comes to the way in which as a country, we have a lot of work to do.

But I wanted to give another case example because Loop Resource, quick show of hands.

Anyone here knows what Loop Resource is or involved in.

Loop Resource, one hand in the back, two hands, three.

Loop Resource initially started out of British Columbia.

They are now actively growing in Ontario.

They match farmers with grocery stores to take away their food waste.

So my farm is gratefully a member of Loop Resource.

That's a picture of my truck as we were coming back from the Loblaws, picking up about 40 boxes of free food.

Food that legally we are not allowed to eat, but that our livestock certainly are able to.

And it's allowed our pigs to grow.

It's allowing our goats to grow.

Our livestock, guardian dogs are living their best lives ever.

And Loop Resource, on the one hand, is a great initiative where it's literal waste diversion.

And of course, I should say it is rather shocking how much a grocery store throws out on a daily basis, how much of it, in my view, is still totally edible.

But to their defense, it's stuff that consumers aren't gonna buy, because consumers have a certain culture and literacy of the food that they get versus me as a farmer.

I'm like, yeah, no problem.

We'll take that food.

But I wish I could be going even more often in terms of getting all this free food.

When I tell my friends about it, their mind is blown.

But here's the flip side.

I'm a researcher.

I'm a food researcher.

I'm a technology researcher.

I was already scoping out all the Loblaw stores that I go to, memorizing the prices, memorizing the shelving, memorizing the marketing in store.

I'm on the autism spectrum.

I got nothing better to do.

Now I get to see what they throw out.

So now I get to see how their pricing goes.

Now I get to see how their marketing goes.

Now I get to see how consumers react.

And of course, Loop's angle in all this is data collection.

They have each of us farmers recording data about all the waste that's being diverted.

I'm sure laws is also recording that data and getting that.

So here we are.

We're starting to close the Loop, right?

They've dramatically lowered my feed.

They're enabling the growth of my livestock, literally and in numbers.

And we are diverting a trip, tremendous amount of waste from landfills.

And we're reusing the cargo.

We're even reusing the plastic in terms of our greenhouse and our.

So these are the types of opportunities that happen when you have integrated systems.

And I do believe the only reason that loop is able to be agreeable to some of these grocery providers is because they're providing data.

Because this is fundamentally a data collection exercise above and beyond the environmental stuff.

Now I want to, as I close, use fermentation as a metaphor because a lot of the stuff I'm talking about today, like open source robotics, like fully transparent value chain, like complete and integrated systems, it is kind of science fiction.

Granted, that's our job today.

There's some maybe speculative fiction to imagine these worlds we desire and try to cultivate them.

But this is where I think patience is an important midwife to force that.

On the one hand, we are asking you to collaborate, we are asking you to participate ideally in a long term process.

But at the same time it's easy to get like I am excited, right?

Impatient, eager for these types of things we have.

So there's a value to fermenting, there's a value to waging, there's a value to taking some of the food that's not looking so great and put it in a salt water brine and then a few weeks later, oh my God, does it taste fantastic?

I mean, when I think about my current agricultural operations, I definitely don't want to be in the commodity business.

We definitely want to process.

I kind of think about fermented hot sauce.

But if I were to be honest, my farm fundamentally is a knowledge farm, right?

The primary product of our agricultural operations is knowledge.

Partly because I'm a voracious learner, partly because my partner is even a more voracious learner, but also because I think my skill, my prosperity as a farmer depends upon my ability to learn.

And that's where I'm patient, right?

This is our sixth year and we still have not generated sufficient revenue to be able to register with an agricultural organization here, Ontario.

But here's my wish.

Shouldn't what I'm doing right now count?

Right?

Like, am I not right now as a farmer, I've harvested knowledge.

I'm sharing with you that bounty.

Maybe a handful of you are going to find value in that bounty and put it to work.

So why should this knowledge application that I'm engaging in not count as agricultural activity?

How come the fee that I'm getting paid to present today cannot be reported so that I could join the Federation of Agriculture, for example, if we were to allow that, if we were to recognize the role of the intellectual, the role of the researcher, the role of the futurist within the framework of agriculture.

That's when you start to see the demographics, the archetypes, the ideas, the future collaboration start to change and we start to get different kinds of people engaged in the sector.

And to me, that's the notion of both fermentation and microbial innovation is our concepts of diversity are still not diverse enough.

And we need to be including and fostering even greater people in our ecosystem, because that'll make us all healthier, stronger and more capable.

Because here's kind of what I want to end with.

I think most people do not understand trust.

And I think if you would ask most people who use the word trust if you could say, well, define the word trust, they would struggle.

I would argue that trust is a byproduct of vulnerability, that if you want to earn trust with someone, you must be vulnerable.

Now, scholarly literature frames this as shared risk, that risk is the prerequisite to trust.

And if we want to foster trust within the agri food system, if we want to trust each other and increase collaboration, we need to embrace risk, we need to entertain risk, we need to embrace risk, we need to share risk.

That's part of what's done in sharing data.

That's part of the value of transparency.

That's why, personally, I think agrotourism, which is already a booming aspect of Ontario's agri food sector, is an area we could be doing even more.

Because every time people come to my farm, we feed them fantastic food, give them a phenomenal experience with our animals, and we basically have a walk through our forest, allowed to see our technology.

They leave with a huge literacy boost and a jar of pickles and hot sauce that allows them to feel connected with our operations with our sector.

Many farms are doing this very successfully.

The 360 video project is a great digital example of this.

But I think as a province, we could be radically upscaling this level of agritourism because it's where the literacy happens.

And then finally, I'm a big believer in podcasts.

So part of what I'm going to be doing today is walking around with my little microphone and spying, recording, asking questions of some of you.

Feel free to come up to me if you want to get something on the record.

But we don't always have the privilege to be in a room like this.

We don't always have the time, in my case, to leave a farm to go and have these conversations.

Podcasts are a great way to do that.

And the podcasts in the agricultural sector are already diverse and strong.

I would encourage those of you who have organizations, who have associations, who have a stake in the game, think of your own podcast, put your own voice out there.

Because I think there's a way to have a collaborative intelligence to the way in which we have these foresight, these futurist practices.

Because it is about feeding possibility.

That is the moral here.

We are not going to get the future we desire.

We're probably not even going to get the future we expect.

But if we're prepared, if we focus on possibility, if we spend time imagining futures we desire, no matter what happens, we'll be good.

We'll be eating good food, living a good life, smoking good cannabis, enjoying good maple syrup.

These fundamentally are the opportunities that we have together as a group.

We gotta make the most of it.

And so the last thing I would end with, we can't expect the Agricultural Adaptation Council to do all this.

That's why we're here, for us to work today.

But what if every single association, union, college here, present, organized their own foresight activity for your members?

Because if we were to have collaborative foresight, it can't just be us the leaders, it has to be a grassroots phenomenon.

So I'm adding an extra task for you today.

On the one hand, give us your thoughts.

On the other hand, imagine how you would do this with your group.

That's what will make this process not only more possible, not only more potential, but powerful when it comes to shifting the policy management.

So thank you very much.

Let's have a great day.