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Founded in 1909, UFA Co-operative Limited is an Alberta-based agricultural co-operative with more than 120,000 member-owners. UFA’s network comprises more than 114 bulk fuel and Cardlock Petroleum locations, 34 Farm & Ranch Supply stores and a support office in Calgary, AB. Independent Petroleum Agents and over 1,000 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 agriculture 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 Schaefer and this is Digging In with UFA.
Season over season.
Part of a successful crop yield is being able to predict, in some form, what weather those
seasons will bring.
A streamlined and measurable expectation of the forecast is as much a farmer's friend as
their combine, or the soil itself.
With the realities of ever-changing and unpredictable weather patterns, how do producers
reckon with the pressures of an unpredictable climate?
Is this something new, or a previously trodden path?
Today, we dig in on weather and agriculture.
On the farm, you get to see the nuances of a nurturing landscape over and over again.
The richness of a bountiful harvest, a calf growing up before your eyes, seeing your
family expand and appreciating the intricacies of a hard day's work.
When we look at Ag from a bigger picture perspective, our guest is instrumental in making
sure that the future of agriculture is as bright as the prairie sunrise itself.
This is Janis Tranberg.
I am the CEO with both the National and the Alberta Cattle Feeders Associations and I work
out of Calgary, Alberta.
I started out as a horticulturist, if you can believe it, and then got a master's degree
in molecular biology, so started as a scientist, but then worked my way through
communications and regulatory and government affairs.
I've worked with
grains and oil seeds, biotech obviously, and now working with livestock.
So it's been quite the journey.
I really enjoy agriculture and I think the reason why I chose to stay there and just sort
of work my way through truly was the people.
They're just, they're down to earth.
They're hardworking and they're passionate about what they do.
Just great people to work with.
Stats Canada says that about a third of all farmers are now women.
So it's changing.
When I started in this industry, I would often go to meetings and I had a little bit of a
game I would play.
I would count the number of women in the room.
And typically, you know, in a room of 50 people, there would be maybe two women.
Now I go in and it's pretty 50-50.
So I would say that's really important and to be able to work and mentor and bring young
women in is really important.
And I think that the next steps is going to be how do we pull those very bright women up
into the leadership roles.
Adaptability.
It's a skill many of us try to refine the older we get.
It's a skill that comes from a foundation built on empathy.
and a readiness to understand where other people are coming from.
As a storyteller and comedian, our guest is somebody whose familiarity with meeting his
audience at their foundational base is a skill in and of itself.
Pair that with his firsthand experience as a farmer, and you're off to the races.
This is Dixon DeLorme.
My name's Dixon DeLorme.
Otherwise known on social media as Quick Dick McDick.
I am a farmer rancher.
just north of Tufnall, Saskatchewan.
Small cash crop operation, small cattle operation, also farm with slash work for our
ranch, larger operation.
And together we plant around 4,200 acres of crop and cab out around 400 head of cattle.
So grain cow-calf operation.
And we just do our best to keep beef on the shelves and keep flour and oats on the shelves
and keep some canola oil rolling around.
And that's that.
We just love farming out here in central Saskatchewan.
I love livestock, I love cattle.
I grew up on a community pasture.
My dad worked for the PFA for 30 years, like a real cowboy, you know, ride a horse every
day, rope, treat cattle, like all the stuff.
And I was very lucky.
I grew up on that pasture as a kid.
And so my summer vacations right up until I was 13, 14 years old, just consisted of being
on a horse in nature out with cattle all day, every day.
I didn't know it at the time, but I was just growing up as just the luckiest guy on the
planet, you know.
My passion for what we do, it stems from cattle.
mean, I do like farming grain.
I love the science behind it and I love what happens.
But I mean, you have an attachment to something that's alive, like how people would be
attached to their cat or their dog or something.
That's kind of my feeling towards my cattle.
Just to see them grow and see them raise a calf every year and to see what they can do to
help your land, improve your land and just how they can be used in so many different.
aspects of agriculture, especially how we incorporate them with the grain side of things.
That's where my passion comes from.
Quick Dick, Big Dick coming to you from Saskatchewan here.
We're talking about capital gains taxes.
For those of you that don't know Canada's second largest country in the world, we move a
lot of products by rail here.
We just couldn't pass by what's happening with our federal government right now without
saying something about it.
And everybody's like, Quick Dick, what does this mean?
I guess I never really looked at myself as an educator.
I try and be more a comedian, but at the same time, we just try and talk about some maybe
important things just in a lighter manner.
I don't really worry too much about what people think of me or how people see me.
I think that's what makes the Quick-Dit character who he is.
Like, I mean, I'm just unabashedly me and people are either going to like it or hate it,
you know?
I try and make it so that it's interesting to watch and that people can enjoy it and if
they don't even...
want to talk about or don't like the topic that we're covering, maybe they can get a
couple of the jokes and still have a laugh out of it, right?
Just try and educate a little bit more about what was happening.
was flying into Calgary and I wound up sitting next to a guy that was from Metro Vancouver
and I just noticed that he was eating a vegan meat stick kind of thing, which is fine.
Whatever you want to eat is fine.
And I was having a conversation with the guy next to me.
I'm wearing a cowboy hat and we were just talking a little bit about environmental impacts
of cattle and what he'd heard.
This guy from Metro Vancouver sitting next to me was almost in tears and he's like, I've
been told all my life that cattle are bad.
And he's like, that's why I eat these sticks.
He's like, what can I do to help?
And I was like, we'll just have a burger every now and then, man.
It's that easy.
know what I mean?
But like after that interaction, I was like, well, you know, it goes a lot better if you
can just kind of state your claim and just be positive about it.
You're not going to change everybody, but that's okay too.
So that flight kind of changed how I did a lot of things.
And I just tried to change some of my uploads a little bit and just show the lighter side
of it and having fun.
And you know, if you watch it, great.
And if not, hopefully you just went away with a better feeling about what the beef
industry is and what you had coming into it.
A lot of people specifically on that flight was like cattle are one of the biggest
contributors to climate change.
was like, realize we're flying on a commercial passenger jet right now that's burning more
fuel than you could humanly imagine.
So just quickly, we just went through, you know, the 10 year life cycle of methane in our
atmosphere and how photosynthesis works and how, long as our cattle herd doesn't increase,
we're not increasing methane emissions and how there's going to be some different
feedstocks that we use to try and lower that a little bit.
It's at top of mind, but we've got to remember that it's natural.
And we had millions of buffalo that roamed the earth years ago that were also responsible
for interior emissions.
It's just a matter of having a balance.
It's that balance that's what's going to keep the world going.
There are no shortages of challenges for those in agriculture.
And while some of the variables are in our control, many are out of the hands of the
farmer.
If mother nature decides to throw a curve ball, it can change the outcome of the whole
ball game very quickly.
Farmers may be required to switch seed varieties, adjust fertilizer application, or take
out extra crop insurance at a moment's notice.
But are changing weather patterns anything new?
How do the ones who grow our food manage what they can't control?
From my perspective, farmers are risk managers.
They always have been risk managers.
So they'll do whatever they can to manage that risk.
you know, genetics, input, technology, all of those things.
But it still is mother nature.
That's still, in my mind, the biggest issue.
I did a little bit of research last night because I wanted to know
Like how good are weathermen?
How well can they predict the weather?
So short term, they're pretty precise actually, right up to 10 days.
They can be 80, 90 % accurate.
But when you start going long term, the accuracy rate is 50%.
That's pretty low.
So how do you, when you're thinking about putting your crop in the field or how many
cattle are you gonna purchase?
You're risking, you're taking a chance and you're doing everything you can to manage that
risk.
And I still think that's going to be the biggest issue that farmers have to deal with.
Unless we get better technology on weather accuracy, I don't know how that's going to
change.
Like think about the dirty thirties, right?
Where dirt used to just blow everywhere.
And now with, you know, minimum till and other technologies, that's not happening.
So
Farmers are constantly learning and adapting and getting better at what they do.
Weather patterns always have changed and they always will change.
And I think there's a few things we do very poorly as humans, we're control freaks and we
think that we can control absolutely everything, which we can't, right?
What we can do is we can react to the environment around us.
And I think that's where we're strong as humans.
We can react and we can adapt.
You know, some of the best advice that I get for how I manage my path.
and how we manage crop rotations is from guys that have done it for years.
You know, we saw this in the 60s here and then we saw it again in the 80s.
It came back 20 years later and in between that we went through 10 years of some of the
wettest conditions that we've seen and we had to adapt.
I think we need to spend less time trying to control weather and making sure that we're
ready to adapt to what it is and adjust our practices accordingly and work with what we've
got, with what Mother Nature gives us.
And that's what we do as producers, right?
I'd say that anybody that says climate change isn't real hasn't been looking very far back
in the history of planet Earth as it exists.
We have mountains, we have rivers, we have everything that we have, rocks.
We have it because of climate change, right?
I don't say that climate change isn't real.
Is our effect as humans on planet Earth as drastic as some people would say it is on
climate change?
I don't know if I'd jump on that bandwagon or not, but it just goes back to kind of what I
said before.
It's just the notion that we can control what it does.
What we can do is we can ensure that we're using technology and best practices to continue
to ensure that our footprint is low as possible to look at our operation.
I've done a few uploads on how cattle are a very important part of our agricultural
cropping side of the farm.
How we use manure and how we use cattle for green stemming and rotational grazing and how
we make sure that our marginal lands are managed so that there's not an extraordinary risk
of wildfire.
There's so many different things that we do to try and ensure if we want to say that our
carbon footprint is as low as possible.
But we see that in all aspects of agriculture.
It's not just happening in the animal side of things.
It happens on the grain side of things too.
Like Janice was saying, no to low till.
We're using different technologies with precise GPS, sectional control, variable rate
fertilizer and seeding, detailed soil testing.
There's a million things that we do to ensure that we are having the least.
amount of impact on our environment and any impact that we do have on our environment is
positive and not a negative, right?
So I think when we look very deep into who funds a lot of the narrative of what needs to
happen with climate and different climate change topics that kick around out there, I
think we're getting a little bit lost in where we're headed with it and how we just need
to be good stewards of planet earth.
It's safe to say that the sharpest and most resilient tool from anyone's tool belt is
knowledge, the power of knowing, being open to learning at any age and instilling in our
future leaders of tomorrow this very truth.
Though it's been stated many times before, knowledge is in fact power.
How do we reinforce this truth for the agricultural industry and beyond?
You know, farmers have a lot on their plate.
I think the bigger challenge is that
It's just not super well understood and a lot of the people that do the regulations and
the policy and build all of those things quite often are from the city.
And a lot of them honestly have never been on a farm.
And I would say that's probably the biggest challenge is how do you build a policy when
you don't understand what you're building or who you're building it for?
I think there's that general.
feeling that, you know, the overalls and the pitchfork, that's still the image that's out
there.
And a lot of them are real business people.
And then, you know, social media and the internet, like now everybody's an expert.
Everybody knows better than anybody else on what they should be doing.
like these guys have been on the farm multiple generations.
They know what they're doing.
So I think that's one of the biggest misconceptions.
I mean, just think about it.
They have to be an HR person, a business person, a production person.
Now they have to be an environmentalist as well.
I was listening to a podcast that was talking about different climate change topics and
whatnot, because I like to try and hear both sides of the argument, obviously.
And there was a young lady that was talking and she found out that she was pregnant with
her third child.
and she was immediately concerned of the carbon footprint that that child was going to
bring onto the earth and whether she was actually helping the environment or not by having
another child.
And I thought to myself, are we terrified to the point where we want to stop having
children because we're concerned about the carbon footprint that this child is going to
bring onto the planet?
What if this child invents the next thing that's going to be one of the best environmental
inventions to ever happen to the planet, you know?
We need to think positively, not that us bringing another human on the planet Earth is
slowly going to drive our planet into a burning fiery bit of hell.
You know what I mean?
Like that's the unhealthy way to think as humans.
We can't be afraid to have kids or to go outside, you know?
Well, you know, there's two comments I'll make to that.
One is the other thing is as we're panicking and developing and trying to do better, let's
not make it so difficult.
We still have to put it into perspective.
We still need food.
Farmers still need to be able to survive and make money, right?
So as we're trying to make all these changes, let's not keep adding taxes and just
overburdening a farmer so they really can't compete with their competitor in, let's say,
even Europe or other places like that.
We do see that going down that road a little bit.
So I just wanted to say that.
How come we don't have agriculture in the education system?
Years ago, everybody was linked to a farmer.
Maybe you didn't need it then, right?
We all understood we came from a farm or a grandpa did or whatever.
Now you go into a city and some people, they have no idea.
You even ask, where does their food come from?
And they're going to tell you, you know, the grocery store down the street.
So I think it's time that we have to start thinking about how do we put agriculture back
into the education system and help people to understand what it is and where their food
really does come from.
But like, generationally speaking,
I think we're in one of the most magnificent times that's ever existed in agriculture
because we're in a point here right now where technology is really getting combined with
an environmental mindset like we've never seen before.
And there's some great things that are coming out of it.
And we have a generation coming up that is so dialed into technology and we can see the
difference that technology can make in not only the cost of what it takes to plant a crop
versus what you're going to get back off of it, how we can market our grain.
how we're connected to different dealers on what we're using for inputs, but also like
specifically, scientifically, a detailed soil analysis and how we can run prescriptions
through a lot of different variable rate things that we have on our drills.
And it's just, we're weighing by the absolute kilogram what's coming off our fields on
carts and building the next year before the harvest is even done.
We can use technology to our advantage to make sure that we're profitable.
and to use less and reduce our footprint of what we have in the environment.
And that's the goal of agriculture is to continue farming for next year, to improve our
business, to make sure that the business can be sustainable, which in my mind means that
it'll be here for years and years and years when we need to feed people.
But also we have a new generation coming up that is very, very in touch and has their
finger on the pulse of the environment.
So when we can use all these things to work together, we're going to get better on our own
without a government coming in and trying to tax us on things.
We're going to do it.
and our next generation is already doing it without anybody telling them they need to.
To recognize these oftentimes critical issues, it takes a bold stance to state clearly the
realities of what we're experiencing.
Regardless of buzzworthy language or heightened sensitivities to these growing stressors,
how do we get down to the root and shift gears in keeping our future safe?
I'm a glass half full kind of person.
So I think that whenever we come up with an issue or a problem, that just...
gives us more room to innovate and figure out how we're going to solve those problems.
And that's the things that we've been doing.
And we've seen that over and over and will continue to do.
know, beef production in the last 30 years, it uses about 20 % less feed than it did 30
years ago, you know.
So we now have feed additives that are going to reduce methane production.
So all of those things, we're going to continue to do that.
And the only thing I might say is that, you know, there's a lot of anxiety out there.
And there's a lot of angst that this is gonna be the end of the earth.
So I would just say, let's work on it.
Let's not panic, but let's continue to work on it.
And I'm pretty positive we're gonna find solutions and be able to deal with it and keep
going.
You talk about corporate farms, but they still are family farms.
Even if they're large, they're still family owned.
They have been doing this.
It's been passed down.
There are some new farmers and I think we need more of that, but a lot of it is really
generational.
They know what they're doing.
This is their livelihood.
It's like any other job that's out there.
You would want to be the very best you could and bring in the best technology.
And so I think
that the main thing I would like to leave people is just, like I said earlier, you know,
don't believe that celebrity who's scaremongering on social media.
If you really want to go out, visit a farmer.
I don't know many that wouldn't invite you onto their farm.
There's lots of good videos.
Take some time, learn about it.
And just, I think maybe gloss half full, you know, as was said earlier, we're going to get
through it.
We're going to adapt.
We're going to use technology.
And I mean, food is so important that we're going to make sure that we're still able to
produce and produce good, healthy food for generations to come.
can't control the weather.
We never have been able to.
We probably never will be able to.
And instead of worrying about focusing on trying to control the environment that we live
in, let's manage it and let's continue to change as humans as we've done right up until
this point in time.
We're all still here and living and breathing, so we must be doing something right.
So let's continue to do it and let's make sure that some of the changes that we're making
aren't actually making things worse for us than better.
We need to live here, it needs to be affordable for us to do it and so let's keep doing
that and work together and not try and work against each other.
If you're consuming information and you just agree with it all the time, it's maybe not
the healthiest thing.
You might have yourself in a silo where an algorithm is unintentionally put you in on
social media.
It's just, it's important to try and listen to all different walks of life and all
different opinions and make sure that you
Draw your own opinion, don't get it from somebody else, and make sure that you can be
challenged on that opinion and defend that opinion because if you can't, then maybe you
should consider where your opinions come from.
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 really 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.
We'd like to thank our guests for sharing their insight into the future of agriculture and
for being with us today.
For more information and a new episode every month, visit ufa.com.
With listeners like you, we'll continue to dig a little deeper here on Digging In with
UFA.
I'm Don Schaefer.
Thanks for listening.
Another Everything Podcast production.
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The views expressed in this podcast reflect opinions and perspectives from participating
guests and not necessarily those of UFA, UFA Cooperatives membership, elected officials or
stakeholders.