The Future Herd
A podcast exploring how collective wisdom and adaptive leadership can help us navigate the profound transformations reshaping our food and agriculture systems.
The Future Herd is a podcast about leadership, adaptation, and collective intelligence in an age of uncertainty.
Each episode is a conversation with people working inside food systems, agriculture, policy, technology, and community—people navigating long-term change without a script. Rather than focusing on prediction, the show explores how futures are shaped through collaboration, negotiation, and lived experience.
The name reflects the premise: the future is not led by a single authority, but by many independent actors adapting together.
Future Herd event
Building the Open-Source Future of Canadian Agrifood
Open source agriculture is the idea that the systems that feed us: tools, machinery, data, and seeds, should be open and available. This online event brings that question to Canadian agrifood in four sessions: who is here, what is happening, how might we respond, and what happens next.
Tuesday, November 24, 2026 · From 12 noon Eastern · On the Future Herd Discord server
Future Herd salon
Prodigal Summer
A live salon on Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer: three love stories set in one humid Appalachian summer, where people are only one piece of life on earth.
Tuesday, December 1, 2026 · 2:00 p.m. Eastern · On the Future Herd Discord server
Latest episode
Joshua Pearce argues that open source is a genuine competitive advantage: his lab at Western University finishes projects before competitors can get NDAs signed. The lab publishes roughly 50 papers a year, and lets an open community improve and re-share everything it releases. He connects that speed to concrete agri-food results, and to food sovereignty, warning that remotely disableable equipment and proprietary software leave Canada dangerously dependent. Open Source offers Canadian agriculture a model of adoption that fosters trust, security, and domestic control.
Latest knowledge
Canada has almost no agrivoltaic data, and the fastest way to generate it may be to give away the designs for the equipment that collects it.
Latest intelligence
Canada’s potential to expand agri-food manufacturing is constrained by rising input costs, regulatory friction, and infrastructure deficits, despite strong crop yields. Simultaneously, the integration...
AI in Canadian Agriculture
How can artificial intelligence support the people who grow our food? Explore seven Future Herd conversations on farm data, crop research, animal welfare, and producer autonomy—with human judgment at the centre. This listening guide connects practical uses of AI with the skills, infrastructure, and governance needed to shape its role in Canadian agriculture.
As food systems, institutions, and communities face accelerating disruption, simple narratives and centralized solutions increasingly fail. The Future Herd creates space for slower thinking, critical reflection, and dialogue across disciplines—grounded in practice rather than hype.
If you are interested in how decisions are made under pressure, how authority is earned rather than assumed, and how collaboration becomes a form of leadership, this podcast is for you.
Many independent actors. Adapting together.