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Founded in 1909, UFA Co-operative Limited is an Alberta-based agricultural co-operative with more than 125,000 member-owners. UFA’s network comprises more than 121 bulk fuel and Cardlock Petroleum locations, 35 Farm & Ranch Supply stores and a support office in Calgary, AB. Independent Petroleum Agents and over 1,200 UFA employees provide products, services and agricultural solutions to farmers, ranchers, members and commercial customers in Alberta, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan.
takes a certain kind of ambition to do what farmers do. Between the hours and the hard labor, to the public scrutiny and bureaucratic maze running, it's not an easy task. While the agricultural industry feeds millions, quietly tilling and producing behind the scenes, many forget that our food comes from the hands of real people with real stories.
Join us as we share stories from those with boots on the ground and unearth unique perspectives on agriculture's biggest conversations. It's time to grab your shovel and get to work. I'm Don Schaffer and this is Digging In with UFA.
Today, we're opening the ground beneath our feet to understand why soil health matters to all of us, even those far from the farm. Isn't it time we had a conversation about the quiet and complex world beneath every footstep and why it's essential to the future of farming, communities everywhere, and most importantly, the food on our tables? Grab your shovels. It's time to take a deeper look at soil and dig into the ground truth.
Part of what makes life so great is our ability to learn, to see things through a new light and understand the beautiful nature of things we once thought mundane. Our first guest today is someone whose shift in perspective has brought them closer to the land through regenerative practices and a care for the soil that inspires and enlightens. Co-owner of Exton Farms, the first Canadian farm to earn Regenfield certification.
whose curiosity and intuition is changing the way we think about soil. This is Tana Saxton. I'm Tana Saxton. I farm with my family at Mid-Siscatchewan. We're a grain farm. We farm about 10,000 acres, highly diverse bunch of different crops, oilseeds, legumes, cereals. And then on our farm, we also have a seed cleaning plant and the flour mill. We live in a very dry area.
So whenever we get rain, it's very important. And it's very disheartening when you finally get that rain and you see it run off your soil. So we knew things weren't functioning properly. And this is almost 20 years ago. And of course, the first thing you need is obviously you need some different iron. So in our researching, we went to a distrill and just by a lot of luck, we met Duane Beck at Dakota Research Farm, ended up meeting Gabe Brown.
started going to lot of soil health conferences. And once we learned how soil was supposed to function and that there was actually supposed to be life in the soil, that really was pivotal. And for me personally, taking Dr. Elaine Ingham's Life in the Soils classes and learning how to look at the actual biology in the soil and seeing the life, that was huge for me. You know, as...
very traditional conventional farmers. were very focused on everything above ground. So once we learned how things were supposed to be functioning underneath the ground, it did it changed the way we look at everything. And I've kind of, I mean our farm model loyal to the soil because every everything we do, we really think about how it will affect the soil and the life within it. And that being said, we know we do things that are detrimental. So we try to think, you know, what can we do to give back?
you know, whether it's biological foods or disturbing even less or a cover crop to give it protection. What can we do to help make the soil biology have a good environment for it to thrive?
It takes a concerted and intentional effort to know how to care for your land. Between the post-harvest winter soil to the hybridization that comes from interspecies cropping, treating the soil like the living, breathing entity it is, yields harmony and trust, knowing the soil takes care of you when you take care of the soil. What does this kind of care and cultivation look like? Are there any surprising elements discovered when treating and maintaining the land in these ways?
Okay, so it may have different terms for different people. For us, a cover crop is a crop that we put in generally either a full season that is grown and not harvested at all as a cash crop, or most, the majority of our cover crops though are seeded after harvest, just because a lot of times we've harvested, you know, late August or early September and there's some growing days left. So we'll get a cover crop put in so that we have something growing.
Companion crops we played around with a lot of it. When I think companion crop, think of a crop that we seed with the crop, but let it grow and don't harvest it, which is sometimes a little bit more tricky. We have sometimes trouble with establishment and also it has to be a companion that works a lot of times as it grows. If it doesn't terminate, then we need to swath. And then we also do some intercropping where we grow two crops together.
but then we actually harvest both of those crops. know, cover crops would probably be the most common for us over companion, other than we do really want to start doing more of that. But the cover crops have been huge. I mean, for us to keep that soil covered, it's a priority to be able to protect the soil, feed the soil and really retain moisture. With intercropping, it's always quite a surprise that two crops on their own, you know, would a lot of times have a lot different maturity rate.
But somehow when they're together, there seems to be some plant signaling that let each other know, you know, it's time to call it quits. So that generally isn't a problem. And a lot of times just the over yielding, you know, their ability to share nutrients and some years, you know, it always varies. You never know which crop is really going to thrive. It depends on the conditions, but having more diversity out there, you just have better odds anyways.
For us, was seeing, because you don't with the naked eye see a lot of the biological changes in diversity, but we have seen, especially on years where we have moisture, an increase in earthworms, which is a great indicator that you have soil life. Another really neat indicator is just walking on the soil and seeing how it feels. You when you walk across a mellow field versus one that's quite compacted, it's amazing. Yeah.
Until you do it, you really don't understand, but you know there's been a huge impact there. agriculture, even though we utilize science and metrics to predict what we hope to see in any given season, a big part of what makes farmers so successful is a keen intuition and understanding of the land. How does that eye and instinct come to play when analyzing and preparing for the well-being of the soil? Yeah, well,
If there's a plant growing, a lot of times the health of a plant will indicate what's actually going on in your soil. But before that, mean, a shovel is your best friend. You can do all the guessing you want, but having a look and like you say, the smell tells you a lot. Or even if you have a plant growing, seeing what that root's doing, you know, is it going a couple inches and then going to the side because it's hitting compaction, their aggregates in the soil.
you holes for life to be coming in and out of. There's so much you can see once you dig into the soil. It's fun to compare too. Sometimes we always kind of compare it to, you know, watching your kids grow up. You don't notice the little changes, but we had, we had a photographer here a few years ago and she encouraged us to, she wanted a picture of some soil. So we dug a soil sample in a field that we've, you know, it's right by the yard. We've managed it, you know, under.
regenerative management for years and then a piece of land that we had just bought a couple years prior. And so we dug them up and held them beside each other and the difference was amazing. I mean, they were not even, you know, they're only 400 feet apart, but you know, the colour, the aggregation, yeah, it's quite amazing, but yeah, you don't know if you don't look. So early in the crop year about, you know, three, four leaf when the plant is actively growing, we'll take plant samples.
and have that test done. So it's kind of, you the equivalent to having a blood test done so that we can see what nutrients are there and what's lacking. And then once we know that, we'll build that fertility into our next year's spring plan. If we have time and something's really depleted, we'll maybe go out and put a full year on and try to top it up. But we try to, it's just finding that balance and making sure that there's enough of everything. Cause some soils are naturally lower in certain
nutrients and some are higher. But we've kind of learned, you know, it doesn't change a lot now year to year for us, but we still sap test just to make sure our plants are getting the nutrients that they need. For reference, SAP testing is used to measure the nutrient density and health of the tissues of the plants. Some folks like to consider sap testing similar to how we do blood testing for an array of different biometrics. In short, it's simply a way to view and track the health of your plants.
I like to kind of compare it to using say a synthetic fertilizer versus the biology in the soil, giving the plant what it needs when it needs. So us, you know, as humans, you can eat whole foods, healthy foods, and get your nutrients from your food, and maybe don't need to take a lot of vitamins. Whereas if you aren't and you're depending on, I mean, that's what a lot of our, you know, our synthetic fertilizers, you're adding them because it's maybe lacking.
the plant isn't getting it from the biology. So you're adding it to the soil so that the plant is taking vitamins versus more of a natural way of having them produced. And the nice part about having healthy soil providing nutrients is it'll give the plants the nutrients they need when they need them because they communicate versus trying to guess what your plant needs and feeding it at that time. I think the challenge and the, you know, we never do the same thing.
twice ever. try to see what's going on and decide what the soil needs. And I mean, sometimes we end up planting a crop that we think the soil needs ahead of maybe what we can market, which is maybe a downfall sometimes for us, which is part of the reason that we have the seed cleaning plant so we can try to market, hit some different markets, because a lot of times we just need the diversity, whether it's a field that
has low residue, we just know a high carbon crop has to be seeded, whether it's the high value crop that needs to be sold or not. So it's really looking at the long game, not year to year, but investing in that soil long-term. We're made up of so many microscopic components that work together to maintain our unique lived experiences day after day. In the macro, the earth and its interwoven species operate in just the same way, connected.
and in constant communication. Our next guest understands the importance of holistic perspectives and why this understanding not only improves the soil of the earth, but the food that makes it to the tables the world over. A Saskatchewan rancher, educator, regenerative agriculture consultant with understanding ag, this is Blaine Jertis. On Blaine Jertis, I farm in deep southeastern Saskatchewan about
two hours straight east of where Tanis and Derek farm, almost to the Manitoba border. My wife and I farmed there for quite some time. In fact, this is my 51st year of farming. About six years ago, we moved off the farm. Our son and daughter-in-law run the show now. We still have some ownership and I still own a few cows yet, but as far as day-to-day, my son and daughter do that type of work.
The last few years as I became more retired, I started doing some consulting work. I worked for a company called Understanding Egg and I've been involved in a project with General Mills here in the Eastern Prairies. Also do some private consulting. Also I have been trained in...
teaching holistic management, so I'm a certified holistic management educator and occasionally I will teach a holistic management course. So that's kind of what I've been up to for the last few years. We have four grandchildren and that's kind of fun too. When I was probably 14, 15 years old, I remember helping my father take soil samples and he was curious at that time, this would be in the early 60s, he was wondering what 2,4-D did to the soil.
he was asking those questions. I don't remember anything about if he ever sent them away or not. I lost that memory for probably 20, 25 years. So when I started farming, I was a high tech industrial farmer and you couldn't give me enough technology. I went down that road using lots and lots of inputs. But after a number of years, I realized that, you know, was sort of like being on a wheel and you're just running faster and faster and faster. And I started to
I guess I've always fed birds ever since I was a little guy. I was always interested in birds and watching nature. So I was watching my soil too as I was down this industrial path and I realized, I'm a slow learner, but eventually I realized that hey, my soil is getting worse. It's getting harder. It doesn't smell the same. You know, in the spring, if you look closely, you'd see dirt in the ditch from erosion, you know, the snow going. Have a hard rain and you'd see rills.
gullies and little things like that. And I said, this can't go on long term. I have to get better at what I'm doing. At that point, this is back in the mid nineties, there wasn't the knowledge of regenerative agriculture as we have today. And so the only thing that I found is I was a fairly avid reader and I learned about Alan Savory's work in Zimbabwe with using cattle to heal land and constant movement across the landscape. So
In 1997, I started to seed good grain land in Saskatchewan back to grass. Now, if you want to get the community excited, that's how you do it. But never owned a cow in my life. So there was a wee bit of a learning curve for Blaine, but I actually got pretty good at doing that after a few years. As I began to observe the soil under this new regime that I was running, it was incredible how it began to change.
Almost immediately I had a strong pungent odor of the Actinium mycetes, which I never had before on my cultivated land. You know, we started to see way more earthworms. You know, the aggregates were going deeper. All those good things. We didn't see moving soil after a rain or after, you know, a windy winter.
For reference, actinoma seeds is a group of bacteria found in soil that act as natural decomposers, bio-fertilizers, and biological control agents, often referred to as ray fungi. They're responsible for the earthy smell of healthy soil when it's tilled or turned. I looked at the neighbor's side of the road and it still black in the ditch. Mine was crystal clear. The snow melted and there was no dirt.
Those were all little symptoms that were telling me that, this is moving down the right direction. Now, if I would know some of the things that I do today, I might not have went this route. I might have tried to, you know, use intercropping and no-till and stripper headers, those kind of things. And I think maybe I could have accomplished the same thing. But when I think about it, our soils were formed under animals moving across the landscape. And so the closer you can get to the original historical context, I believe, the better off you're going to be.
I'm not saying everybody should be cow farmers, but it is easier than trying to use a grain system which is somewhat unnatural. Definitely, I think peer pressure is huge in a farm community and it is very, very difficult as an individual to maintain the course. And I think what helped me was that very shortly after I went down this route, I did get exposed to holistic management.
And so I took a holistic management course which opened a lot more doors and made light bulbs come on quicker for me. We took the course in 2003. We still meet to this day every month. So 22 years we have been meeting monthly. So that is a powerful tool to have in your toolbox. It doesn't matter what issue I run into. I have absolute complete trust in this group of people. I can tell them anything I want or my wife can tell them anything that she wants.
trust their opinions and we know it's not going to be blabbed around the community. It's going to stay in that group. And that is really powerful. And I think that's what kept me going on track. I knew in my heart maybe it was right, but the community around me wasn't supporting. Part of experiencing life altering change and the way you see the world is surrounding yourself with people who can follow you through to the other side. Learning and growing from the communal experience of
shifting perspectives. But it's not only the smaller community sects tapping into this holistic approach to agriculture. When we change together, the systems we are part of respond to that change, and hopefully for the better. So in 2019, Understanding Ag put on two soil health workshops, one in Brandon and one in Yorkton. We were oversubscribed by about twice what we thought. But out of that,
process, there was over 100 farmers that attended. An application form was given to every attendee and then General Mills took that back and with their scientific team they selected the farmers that they wished. And we were given 45 names, everything from large-scale grain farms down to small mixed farms or fewer organic, the whole gamut of farms. These farms were located from Foam Lake, which is roughly an hour
west of Yorkton right through to both an hour north of Winnipeg and an hour south of Winnipeg and the Red River Valley. And myself and Michael Tealy, who lives in Manitoba, we were hired to make these farms regenerative. Nobody told us what that meant. I don't think anybody knew. So we started out and I guess the first thing that we did is we sat down at their table and drank coffee and got to know them. And then we went to the field.
and we talked about soil health principles and the first thing that came out was the shovel. And I was absolutely astounded at how few farms had ever actually looked at soil. That just blew me away. And so we started to teach what an aggregate is, what is a compaction layer, what should soil smell like? You know, can we see fuzzy roots? Can we see the interaction of the microbes in the soil?
all that good stuff. And so we started to teach people how soil should function. And then we had a lot of science done on this project. We had ornithologists doing bird counts. We had entomologists coming and doing insect counts, things like that. They were all benchmarked, plus all of the soil work that we did was all benchmarked so we could keep going back to those spots. It's now been six years. The other thing that we did that I believe was important was what I learned in holistic management.
So we created small groups of these people only. We'd have a field day with only our people at it. So they got to know each other and started to have that trust in each other. And after a couple of years, we'd do three or four or five field days each year. And of course we have a pretty big geographic area. So the guys from, you know, Gimli obviously didn't go to Foam Lake, but
You know, we tried to do them across our region and over the next few years, most of them got to know each other. We set up a WhatsApp application on all of their phones so that they could start to communicate. And today it's rare that Michael or I will ever say a word. They're answering each other's questions. And so that's kind of how we got our community going. And now our job is basically, I call it pollination. We buzz around to every farm once or twice a year, pick up all the good ideas that they've learned.
and share them with everyone else. In growing through the process of holistic management and intuitive agriculture techniques, there's a lot to be said for knowing when something works. Yes, we analyze and hear what the soil has to say about what it needs, but sometimes a farmer just knows. You can tell an awful lot by walking on it. Just your feet tell you an awful lot. Use your eyes.
Use your ears. Am I hearing insects? You know, is it sterile? I've been in fields where you can't hear a sound. It's absolutely sterile. I've been in other fields where it's almost loud. The noise of the insects talking and the birds singing is so incredible. It's awesome. And so that tells you a lot before you ever do anything. But, you know, as I said earlier, I use the shovel an awful lot. I use my eyes. But if I'm seeing after a rain, I see water ponding. That tells me that we don't have a lot of aggregation.
there isn't the pores in the soil created by aggregates. Well, that's telling me there's very few, it's very compacted. So, you know, that would tell me that we need to figure that one out and get more life, more green plants growing to pump more sugar down there to get more microbes fed to get more aggregates formed. That's the formula to do it. So what can we do to get more diversity in that system, you know, keep it greener, longer, all the principles of soil health. The example that pops to my mind is just
an hour east of me in Manitoba in very saline areas. And this picture is taken from a drone approximately 200 feet up. And on the left-hand side is conventional agriculture. And you see the huge white patches around every low area. know, 100 meters, 200 out from the ring of the slough is salty. It's white. There's virtually zero production, maybe a little bit of kosher and Foxdale barley. That's all that grows.
On the other side of the road, which is identical land, the producer sowed it back to grass 10, 12 years earlier and then started to practice managed grazing or adaptive grazing, whatever you want to call it. I don't like the word rotational very much, but he was moving cattle across it and he was also using the concept of bale grazing. So wherever it was very, very salty, he would place bales in the winter.
And it's absolutely night and day when you look at those two photographs from the air. On the right hand side where the cattle were and grass was grown, it was probably 95 % of the areas were covered over. You could still see tinges of white. We don't fix problems like that real quick. It takes time. But it was improving and you could see that there was more production happening. Whereas on the left side,
the management was in the fall we go out and we burn the kosher off and we get the big double disc out and we make it black again and we feel really good and it's going to be even worse again next year because we're just making the problem worse. We aren't fixing it. Whereas on the right hand side he was making the water cycle function properly. He was using his water by transpiration instead of evaporation.
There tends to be a lot of debate and conversation between the reintroduction of holistic modalities in an industry dominated by machinery and the increased inclusion of new technologies. We look at cattle and their ability to impact and cultivate the land in a way that no machine could. Cattle are mobile composters cycling nutrients and waking up soil biology if timing and density are right.
On the other hand, we see the speed and precision of iron and physical mechanisms that increase output significantly. However, when it comes to the land, the gritty truth is you can't grow anything without healthy soil. So when we first started farming, we were a mixed farm. We had cattle and grain and we were to the point where we either needed more cattle because it wasn't
you know, profitable or we needed to get out. If we would have known what we know now, we would have known that we could have done a lot with those 200 cattle and didn't need all the equipment we had to feed those cattle. And we would love to own our own cattle again, but we've got a few enterprises and don't have time. So we luckily work with a neighbor that brings cattle onto our land because we had cattle. We've got a lot of the, you know, the fencing, the perimeter is already done.
So it's great to have a partnership because any chance we can have to get livestock, it's always beneficial. it's the only way we try to mimic getting that biology back is doing some composting and applying some compost and compost extracts. But yeah, you can't beat a cow. But as far as green farming, we do need some equipment. That being said, less is more. We're really excited about some, like we've just started to seeded kernza, which is a perennial wheatgrass.
As we always say, if we could just seed without disturbing the soil. So this is a perennial that is a crop that we harvest every year, but it comes back. So we don't have to seed it. We don't have to go in and disturb the soil. So finding more things like that is really exciting because it's, yeah, letting biology do the work is always the easier method. I guess what Tana said is absolutely critical, and I think we need to really be encouraging more partnerships between cow people.
and grain people. You know, you get to a certain scale and you do not have enough time to manage another enterprise, but there's likely cow guys that are looking for, hey, I need a place to run cows for a month here or a month here. I got a hole in my system right now. You know, I want to rest my perennials for July and August. Well, man, here's a cover crop to graze. And I think there's huge benefits for
both parties, both can gain big time by working out relationships between the two different enterprises. What I will see on well-managed grass perennials will be healthier plants. If you just look at how a grass plant grows, if it's not grazed, you know, if I pick up, I'll pick on one of the environmental groups, let's say Nature Conservancy land that has set aside totally with absolutely nothing happening.
Well, we have an awful lot of dead grass in there that isn't cycling. So the nutrients are tied up in the vegetative matter. Plus when the new grass emerges in the spring, it's emerging in shade, not sunshine. And so it becomes very, very difficult. If you go to a place like Arizona or Nevada, which is desertifying big time, it's because of that. That's the cancer that causes desertification. So you need to get animals onto that land once in a while to remove that vegetation.
Vegetation in a dry, brittle environment cannot cycle on its own. That's why the good Lord, the creator, invented ruminants. Decomposition happens in the rumen of the animal. So that's how the system is meant to function, is that cycling going through the rumen. And that doesn't happen in a very dry environment like we live without either mechanical intervention or with animals doing it. Yeah, and I think
There is huge benefits to health both for the plants and the animals. But we found, especially when we don't own the cattle, is having good communication with the owner of the cattle and making sure it's well managed too and the right amount being grazed, you know, not overgrazing and making sure they're moved at the right times. And we're, you know, we're getting the benefit on the land and the cows getting the benefit. But that's where we found.
communication really is key. We actually had a, it wasn't an experiment, but it ended up kind of being one. We have our home farm, which we have farmed, you know, with regenerative practices around 15 plus years. And then three years ago, we bought another farm just 12 miles away, you know, seeded with the same seeds, same fertilizer, chemical, everything the same. And
Then after two years of drought, it was really interesting to compare the crops at the home farm and the new farm because a lot of the variables, you you can always argue one maybe got a little bit more rain here and there, but overall the crops did so much better on the land that we had managed with regenerative practices for all the years. And we're working on the other farm, but it doesn't happen overnight. takes a lot of time, but you know, we just...
I guess we maybe should have expected it, but we didn't. And yeah, when we went to harvest, you know, using that as a measure, even as yield, there was huge differences. My two cents worth would be that the biggest loss of moisture, which is our most critical element is a lack of rain usually, is evapotranspiration, meaning that the sun hitting the bare soil causes evaporation. We want the water to be used by transpiration, not evaporation.
And so if we can keep litter, you know, either dead plant material or live plant material on the surface to prevent that is a huge, huge win. And by using things like stripper headers, I've got a number of producers I work with now will grow something like say winter triticale with.
you know, spring weed or Durham weed or something like that, just to have those green leaves. It's a very basilar type plant. We'll cover the soil between the rows to reduce the evapotranspiration. You know, all of those things and using no-till as much as possible. All of those things will keep that land covered. And then the other thing that we need to remember is the more aggregates that we can create down underneath that gives more holes in the soil space, if you like, which then we'll be able to store more
water. And so when we get into a severe drought, you know, it will hold more water than the less healthy soil. Dirt is displaced soil. Soil is alive. Roots, microbes, fungi, tiny workers turning residue into plant food. Understanding that difference is a key piece in changing the way the public views soil and its properties. Especially when folks far from the soil of the farm rarely consider
the importance of the earth that grows their food. What do people tend to overlook when considering something they see as simply dirt? Probably that it is a living ecosystem and the importance of the health of soil. It's this healthy soil that can produce healthy plants, which produces healthy food, which ultimately can produce healthy people. if you eat food, soil is important.
And we as regenerative farmers, need to be rewarded a little bit more for producing nutrient density. And I think that's coming. We're not there yet, but hopefully it will come because food is a medicine that, you know, that was taught to us about 3000 years ago by famous Greeks. What surprised, I think, me the most is to learn that less is more. You know, we always think if we want to get more, we have to give more. But the more we try to control situations,
A lot of times the more damage we do. So if we really watch nature and listen to it, it'll help us out. It's when we try to, you know, whether it's spray insecticides and kill things that are killing the beneficials, not just the bad guys, or over applying synthetic fertilizers, you know, trying to get a yield, but not looking at the damage that it's doing to the soil biology that's no longer than cycling the nutrients.
But yeah, think that'd be my less is more. I think we get profit and yield mixed up quite readily as farmers and it kind of goes with what Tanis just said. You know, less is more. And, you know, we've got to start thinking about the biggest yield in the country doesn't make you the most money.
It's your net that matters. I think the word that I would use is fun. And many, many farmers are not having fun. Whereas I've worked with enough regenerative farmers now and they say, you know, thank you, Blaine. We are having fun again. In my own case, my son and daughter-in-law came back to the farm and I don't believe they would have if we would have been farming in the conventional way. And so that's pretty powerful stuff.
In agriculture, most folks are not just raising crop and cattle. They're raising the next generation of farmers, ranchers, and inhabitants on this big beautiful world. With regenerative farming and holistic strategy, finding a more grounded space in the industry, it's important to remind ourselves to have hope. Hope for a brighter future and hope that the world we leave for our kids nourishes them in the same way we've been nourished by the land left by the generation.
before us. Yeah, I think it all starts with the soil and the land and it really snowballs from there. And for us, it's really about creating opportunity and a legacy and a future built. You know, when you're really excited about your soil and the crops you're producing and the food, to dump that into the commodity market isn't fun. So that's where we invested back in our farm.
building the seed cleaning facility, and then the flower mill. Not only to be able to offer those, but create more opportunities in our community. I we come from a town, there's 50 people, like five zero, and there's getting to be less and less, and people need a reason to stay. There needs to be industry, there needs to be hope, there needs to be fun, so that people want to be here. So for us,
It's creating community that starts with building communities in the soil to our farm and ultimately to our community and being able to give back to that. And we do have two kids, which our son, he's done some studies in mechanics. So he's home helping in the farm this summer. And this winter he's at a John Deere dealership working as a mechanic to keep learning. And so he really loves the farm and the farm side.
Our daughter is studying international food business at Dalhousie. She loves agriculture, but she loves the food aspect. So it's not only what we can create for them, but it's what can they bring back to the farm and make us even better. That's the best part when you get to do some of this direct marketing and you get to talk to the people that are using your products and, you know, people who haven't eaten any flour forever because they were gluten insensitive. Now eating our flour, you know,
whether it's the way it's grown or the way it's processed, it's exciting to hear people's of them eating the food that we've grown. Well, guess that's part of what motivates me to keep doing this at my age is that if we don't change relatively quickly, I don't think there's going to be a whole lot to inherit. You know, from what I see and what we're learning, the regenerative agriculture has huge potential to solve an awful lot of problems.
world, especially as far as climate and various things like that. So that's what keeps me going every day. got four small young grandkids that I hope have a future here. And so that's what keeps me motivated. I am the type of person that probably could be OK just doing the same thing. But once you start learning, you can't unsee things and see how much better things can be and how different. And luckily for me, my husband
He is a visionary and loves to push the boundaries and working together to be able to do that has made it a lot of fun and you know we're inspired by what we're doing and learning from others. No two years are ever the same.
And, you know, my education, I was a teacher, but now I'm a farmer. am a quality assurance technician. I am a marketer. You know, it's just pushing me to become all of these things. And it's a lot of fun. It's never the same day to day. And there are days that we wonder why don't we just do what everyone else always does or do the same thing year after year. then you talk to people.
like Blaine said, to other people and to peers and they also kind of inspire you and yeah, it makes it fun even though it's a challenge and yeah, you hope you are maybe making the world a better place.
At the end of the day, we look to our resiliency within ourselves and our communities to make our collective futures as bright as possible. All it will take is conversations like these, some vulnerability and a little digging.
Thanks to the support of UFA Cooperative, we're able to share stories from those who live and breathe agriculture. Thanks to Blaine and Tannis for giving us a deeper look into just how important soil is both on the farm and the world over. For more information on today's episode, please visit ufa.com. And with listeners like you, we'll continue to dig a little deeper here on Digging In with UFA. I'm Don Schaffer. Thanks for listening.
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