29: Throwing Out the Business Textbook to Save the Family Farm

Overview

RJ Taylor grew up hauling fish before school on his family's land-based trout farm in Ontario — and then, like his sister Arlen, left with every intention of never coming back. A sociology and business degree, a career in science communication, and a decade of distance later, both siblings returned with a much larger vision for what the farm could become. In this episode of The Future Herd, RJ joins Jesse Hirsh to make a counterintuitive argument: that the very business-school thinking he brought back with him — focus on core competencies, streamline, scale — nearly left the family operation dangerously exposed, and that the path forward required throwing that textbook out entirely.

The clearest illustration of that argument is what happened when Taylor Aquaculture narrowed its focus to rainbow trout fingerlings. The logic was sound: high-value product, clear market, strong margins. But as consolidation swept through Ontario's net-pen farms, a customer list of fifteen gradually compressed toward one, and the vulnerability became undeniable. RJ and Arlen responded by reversing course — adding Arctic char, coho salmon, and lake whitefish alongside the trout, layering in a home-delivery programme serving 1,500 to 1,700 Ontario households monthly, maintaining a presence at farmers' markets and independent retailers, and simultaneously supplying large-scale retail partners like Loblaws through their net-pen operation on Manitoulin Island. RJ is direct about the lesson: no single revenue stream could carry the business through the volatility the sector is experiencing, and it is the willingness to do everything at once that provides real resilience.

A second and equally important thread in the conversation is the role of First Nations communities in making Ontario aquaculture viable at all. RJ points out that over 75% of the province's net-pen farms operate on First Nations territory through some form of partnership — a fact that sits awkwardly against the broader agricultural sector's habit of treating Indigenous inclusion as an aspirational goal rather than a present reality. Provincial licensing for cage aquaculture has effectively been frozen for at least two decades, leaving the Great Lakes Aquaculture Law and band council resolutions issued through First Nations as the functional pathway for new farm development. RJ argues this isn't a workaround but a genuine improvement: the science underpinning those permits is current, adaptive to climate change, and informed by partners like the Wabateck Business Development Corporation in ways that provincial frameworks — still relying on studies from the 1970s and 80s — simply are not.

For listeners trying to understand Canada's food system, this episode fills in a significant blind spot. Aquaculture already accounts for somewhere between 60 and 65% of global fish and seafood consumption, a threshold the world quietly crossed around 2020, and that share is only growing. Yet Ontario's fish farms remain largely invisible to the people who live closest to them. RJ's story — of a family business that survived by unlearning what it thought it knew, and of a sector that has quietly built one of the more substantive models of Indigenous economic partnership in Canadian agriculture — is exactly the kind of grounded, specific, and forward-looking conversation The Future Herd exists to amplify.

Key themes

• Aquaculture
• Business Diversification
• Family Farm Succession
• Indigenous Partnerships
• Ontario Food Systems
• Fish Farm Licensing