Growing the Future

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.

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.

Saskatchewan grain farmer Jeff Bennett returns to the show 2,333 days after his first appearance for an unfiltered conversation about what actually breaks when the money runs out, the industry stops caring, and the only person left to figure it out is you. Five rough crop years, an equipment deal that changed everything, and a man who still refuses to quit.

Most producers are long on grain the moment they put seed in the ground — and they know it. This session is about what you can actually do about it, using options and production insurance together to protect the downside without giving up the upside.

Saskatchewan farmland has been in overbought territory for over a decade according to a hundred years of technical analysis. This conversation asks what happens next.

When nothing you can grow in 2026 is projected to make money at average yields and average prices … what do you do? In this live workshop, Dan Aberhart sits down with Dave Sullivan from Global Ag Risk Solutions, Dean Klippenstine from MNP, and producer Jake Leguee to break down the farm financials, benchmark the best operators, and engineer a revenue floor before you seed a single acre. Dave walks through real spreadsheets showing break-even costs have more than doubled since 2010, why the largest crop in Canadian history barely generated a profit, and what the top 25% of managers are doing differently. The panel digs into how to stack crop insurance, AgriStability, and GARS products — including the brand new Yield Plus option — so you can farm with confidence even in a year where the math says you shouldn't be able to. If you only listen to one episode before spring, make it this one.