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.
The Commons
The Future Herd is the starting point for a larger project: open participation infrastructure for food-system decisions. The Commons is an early-stage pilot where producers, eaters, workers, policy people, and anyone who cares about food can submit perspectives, respond to others, and help surface where common ground exists.
The first topic is food security. No institutional affiliation required.
Latest episode
Elaine Power, associate professor at Queen's University, joins Jesse Hirsh for a conversation that refuses to soften the contradictions at the heart of Canada's food system. Power argues that the agri-food sector systematically renders invisible the labour that sustains it — from racialized farmworkers and underpaid grocery workers to the domestic kitchen — and that this invisibility is not incidental but structural. The episode names what many in the sector sense but rarely say plainly: that a food system built on the logic of capital cannot also be built on the logic of care.
Latest knowledge
When the agri-food sector excludes its critics, it doesn't protect the status quo — it guarantees its own blind spots.
Latest intelligence
Federal infrastructure investments and competition reviews collide with deepening trade fractures over Mercosur and CUSMA, exposing structural imbalances between retail pricing and producer returns....
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.