Ep. 039 - Third-Generation Farmer Jake Leguee on Technology, Risk, and Feeding the World
Managing Partner of Leguee Farms
In this episode of the Bites and Bytes Podcast, host Kristin Demoranville sits down with Jake Leguee, a third-generation farmer from Saskatchewan, Canada to explore the intersection of tradition, technology, and risk in modern agriculture.
From “tractor naps” as a kid to operating GPS-guided combines, Jake reveals how precision agriculture has transformed every aspect of farm life. But with increased connectivity comes new vulnerability; cyber threats that farmers know exist but don’t yet know how to defend against. Jake’s message is clear: agriculture needs the cybersecurity community’s help, but farmers don’t know where to start.
Whether you work in cybersecurity, food systems, or simply want to understand the human side of modern farming, this episode offers hard-won lessons on resilience, risk, and why securing our food supply has never mattered more.
Jake’s Links:
Leguee Farms Website: https://legueefarms.com/
LinkedIn: Jake Leguee
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Episode Key Highlights
00:01:18 – Favorite Foods & Global Connections
00:05:08 – From Straight Rows to GPS Precision
00:12:40 – Technology and the Modern Farm
00:18:15 – Right-to-Repair and Ownership Challenges
00:23:42 – Cyber Risks on the Farm
00:30:10 – The Human Side of Technology
00:35:56 – Feeding the World and Future Generations
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🛡️ About AnzenSage & AnzenOT
AnzenSage is a cybersecurity advisory firm specializing in security resilience for the food, agriculture, zoo, and aquarium industries. AnzenSage offers practical, strategic guidance to help organizations anticipate risks and build resilience. Learn more about their offerings at anzensage.com.
AnzenOT: Industrial Cyber Risk — Simple. Smart. Swift.
AnzenOT is the SaaS risk management platform built to bring clarity and control to Operational Technology (OT) cybersecurity. Designed for critical infrastructure sectors, AnzenOT translates technical risk into clear, actionable insight for decision-makers. Explore the platform at anzenot.com.
For demo requests or inquiries, email stuart@anzenot.com or kristin@anzenot.com
Listen to full episode :
Episode Guide:
00:00:00 – Intro
00:01:18 – Favorite Foods & Global Connections
00:05:08 – From Straight Rows to GPS Precision
00:08:54 – Generational Changes in Farming
00:12:40 – Technology and the Modern Farm
00:18:15 – Right-to-Repair and Ownership Challenges
00:23:42 – Cyber Risks on the Farm
00:30:10 – The Human Side of Technology
00:33:48 – Why Farmers Need Cybersecurity Help
00:35:56 – Feeding the World and Future Generations
00:38:24 – Outro
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00:00:21 Kristin Demoranville
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Bytes and Bites podcast.
00:00:24 Kristin Demoranville
Today I am joined by Jake Leguee, a third generation farmer from Skakatchewan, Canada, who's seen firsthand how farming has changed and how much it still depends on the people behind it.
00:00:35 Kristin Demoranville
Jake and I talk about what modern farming really looks like now, from GPS-guided equipment and connecting machines to the realities of running a business that feeds people around the world.
00:00:46 Kristin Demoranville
We also get into what happens when technology stops working and how farmers are adapting in a system that's becoming more digital every season.
00:00:53 Kristin Demoranville
It's A grounded, honest look at the future of food from someone who lives and works with it every day.
00:00:58 Kristin Demoranville
Let's get started.
00:01:03 Kristin Demoranville
We're really lucky to have this guest today because the weather gods, if you will, have allowed him to step out of the field, which is amazing.
00:01:09 Kristin Demoranville
And we can have a conversation.
00:01:10 Kristin Demoranville
So before we go into intros and everything, Jake, I really want to know what is your favorite food and your favorite food memory?
00:01:16 Kristin Demoranville
They do not need to be the same thing.
00:01:18 Jake Leguee
Well, for most of my younger years, we had cattle on our farm.
00:01:21 Jake Leguee
So favorite food is an easy pick.
00:01:23 Jake Leguee
That's steak.
00:01:24 Jake Leguee
Favorite food memory, I'm going to say 2 I've got.
00:01:28 Jake Leguee
So as a kid,
00:01:29 Jake Leguee
My favorite place to go was pizza.
00:01:32 Jake Leguee
We used to have pizza buffets here in Canada everywhere.
00:01:34 Jake Leguee
And just the smell when you walked in was always so wonderful.
00:01:37 Jake Leguee
And my second pick is durum is one of the main crops on our farm.
00:01:42 Jake Leguee
Now, most of the durum that we grow gets shipped off to North Africa and Italy.
00:01:47 Jake Leguee
So I went on, they're called new crop missions a few years ago, back in 2019.
00:01:51 Jake Leguee
So I traveled to these countries with a group of Canadian representatives and I actually got to see what the products look like after their
00:01:59 Jake Leguee
taken over there and manufactured.
00:02:01 Jake Leguee
And I didn't know that durum gets made into a type of bread that's very specific to Southern Italy and Altamira.
00:02:06 Jake Leguee
They call it Altamira bread.
00:02:08 Jake Leguee
It's a yellow bread with a really hard crust and it is fantastic, but unfortunately it only lasts a couple of days before it gets too hard to eat.
00:02:16 Jake Leguee
So I only was able to have it there and I've never been able to have it since, but it was quite spectacular.
00:02:21 Kristin Demoranville
That's amazing that they have those kind of, I want to say like exchange programs, if you will, to understand where your crop is going.
00:02:28 Kristin Demoranville
That's brilliant.
00:02:29 Kristin Demoranville
I didn't even know they did that.
00:02:30 Kristin Demoranville
That's amazing.
00:02:30 Kristin Demoranville
What a great idea.
00:02:31 Kristin Demoranville
And it's durum wheat for those who aren't familiar with what durum means.
00:02:35 Kristin Demoranville
And durum wheat is normally made into a pasta, right?
00:02:37 Kristin Demoranville
Is the primary thing it's made into.
00:02:38 Kristin Demoranville
And bread.
00:02:39 Kristin Demoranville
Those are the two main functions for it, right?
00:02:41 Jake Leguee
That's right.
00:02:42 Jake Leguee
Yeah.
00:02:42 Jake Leguee
And couscous actually in North Africa.
00:02:44 Kristin Demoranville
Really.
00:02:45 Jake Leguee
Another main dish.
00:02:47 Jake Leguee
So that was also pretty cool to try for the first time in Morocco and Tunisia.
00:02:51 Jake Leguee
The reason we do those trips is because it's basically a marketing ploy.
00:02:56 Jake Leguee
We go over there with Canadian representatives to speak
00:02:59 Jake Leguee
to buyers and processors and everybody else to make sure that they're happy with the product and to make sure that they know the best ways to utilize it when they're mixing it with products from other countries and that sort of thing.
00:03:10 Jake Leguee
So a farmer goes along to answer questions because farmers have the on-the-ground knowledge that buyers are really interested in finding out about how it's grown, right?
00:03:18 Jake Leguee
So they're going to get that information anywhere else.
00:03:21 Kristin Demoranville
That's fantastic.
00:03:22 Kristin Demoranville
I know we're kind of jumping ahead here, but is durum your only crop that you have on your farm primarily, or is that legitimate?
00:03:29 Kristin Demoranville
It's the largest portion of it.
00:03:30 Jake Leguee
It's one of the larger crops.
00:03:32 Jake Leguee
In Western Canada, we tend to grow at least two crops.
00:03:34 Jake Leguee
On our farm in southern Saskatchewan, we grow quite a few more.
00:03:38 Jake Leguee
Canola, durum, hard red spring wheat, which is, you know, that's for bread.
00:03:42 Jake Leguee
Large green lentils and phlox would be our primary crops here.
00:03:45 Kristin Demoranville
That's great.
00:03:46 Kristin Demoranville
And go ahead, Jake, and introduce yourself since you kind of already started on that road.
00:03:49 Jake Leguee
Sure.
00:03:49 Jake Leguee
So yeah, my name is Jake Lagui.
00:03:51 Jake Leguee
I'm a third generation farmer here in southern Saskatchewan.
00:03:55 Jake Leguee
Farm here with several family members.
00:03:57 Jake Leguee
We grow several crops, as I mentioned.
00:03:59 Jake Leguee
And yeah, our goal is just to try to build this into an operation that can stand the test of time and make it to the 4th generation.
00:04:07 Kristin Demoranville
That's amazing.
00:04:08 Kristin Demoranville
What's your earliest memory of being on the farm since you are
00:04:12 Kristin Demoranville
third generation.
00:04:12 Kristin Demoranville
So you've been around it, obviously.
00:04:14 Kristin Demoranville
And why did you decide to continue to farm when you could have, you had other options?
00:04:19 Jake Leguee
Yeah, that's actually a hard question because I've been here my whole life, obviously.
00:04:23 Jake Leguee
It's hard to remember specific memories, but certainly, I mean, I remember, like I mentioned, we had cattle, so I remember helping dad open gates and feed them and everything else.
00:04:32 Jake Leguee
And I remember tractor naps behind the scene.
00:04:35 Kristin Demoranville
Tractor naps, I love it.
00:04:36 Jake Leguee
Yeah, behind the scene of a couple of our tractors, I remember there was a bit of a little plot forum there and remember you
00:04:42 Jake Leguee
used to have naps up on there while dad was going back and forth in the field.
00:04:46 Kristin Demoranville
Yeah, that's, you just made me smile too, because I had a memory of my dad used to plow when he was in a fireman.
00:04:52 Kristin Demoranville
And sometimes it would be in the middle of a snowstorm and you'd be driving between jobs and you'd take like the plow cab nap, if you will, when we were younger, because we'd just go to hang out.
00:05:02 Kristin Demoranville
But yeah, you just made me smile because I remember that.
00:05:04 Kristin Demoranville
That's great.
00:05:04 Kristin Demoranville
So
00:05:05 Kristin Demoranville
Farming's changed a lot over these three generations, right?
00:05:08 Kristin Demoranville
What's stayed the same and what feels like science fiction compared to what your grandparents were dealing with?
00:05:13 Jake Leguee
I guess in some sense, you know, we are still doing the same basic task.
00:05:17 Jake Leguee
We're still putting seeds in the ground and controlling weeds and harvesting them at the end of the season.
00:05:23 Jake Leguee
You know, generally speaking, we're growing some of the same crops like wheat and flax, for example.
00:05:30 Jake Leguee
We have some new ones over the course of the last generation or two, like canola and lentils.
00:05:35 Jake Leguee
But, the general principle of farming is really the same as it's been for the past 10,000 years, but the process of how we get there has certainly changed A lot.
00:05:45 Jake Leguee
I mean, it was when I was still in...
00:05:48 Jake Leguee
I don't know, not high school yet.
00:05:50 Jake Leguee
Dad bought our first auto steer kit for a tractor.
00:05:53 Jake Leguee
I remember driving down the road and you could see the farmers that had invested in auto steer, you could see how straight their lines were.
00:06:00 Jake Leguee
Like it was very noticeable.
00:06:02 Jake Leguee
So even the best operators couldn't run a perfectly straight line down the field, right?
00:06:07 Jake Leguee
You just, you get fatigued and there's only so much you can do to be perfect all day.
00:06:11 Jake Leguee
So those were very obvious.
00:06:12 Jake Leguee
And I just remember dad saying like,
00:06:15 Jake Leguee
we really need to get this.
00:06:16 Jake Leguee
But it was so expensive, of course, at the time that it was hard to make that leap.
00:06:21 Jake Leguee
But at that time, there was lots of companies coming out with their own versions of auto steer.
00:06:26 Jake Leguee
Some of them were more accurate than others.
00:06:28 Jake Leguee
But the reality is that any type of auto steer was more accurate than hand steering.
00:06:33 Jake Leguee
So the first one dad got, I think, was AccuSteer.
00:06:36 Jake Leguee
And it would move a foot to two feet side to side, up and down the pass.
00:06:41 Jake Leguee
But again, still so much better than hand steering.
00:06:45 Jake Leguee
So that seemed like space age technology at the time, of course.
00:06:49 Jake Leguee
And the other thing I remember transitioning was the first time dad got an actual screen in our sprayer.
00:06:57 Jake Leguee
So previously, at the end of the boom, it would just drop out a little piece of foam every few feet.
00:07:03 Jake Leguee
So when you're driving down the next pass of the sprayer, because there's, you're not, you can't see what you've done with the sprayer, right?
00:07:08 Jake Leguee
It's not like you're seeding or tilling or anything like that.
00:07:11 Jake Leguee
You can't see what you've done.
00:07:14 Jake Leguee
So you have to have some way of marking your path.
00:07:17 Jake Leguee
So it would drop foam and you just try to line up your boom with the foam.
00:07:21 Jake Leguee
But on a hot day, that foam would vanish very quickly.
00:07:24 Jake Leguee
So it was quite difficult.
00:07:26 Jake Leguee
The next step was a light bar.
00:07:27 Jake Leguee
So there was a little bar on the windshield with some lights that would,
00:07:32 Jake Leguee
If they were in the green, right in the middle, you were in the middle of the pass.
00:07:35 Jake Leguee
But once dad got a screen that had a color image of where you'd been, suddenly you didn't miss anything anymore because you knew exactly where the sprayer had been.
00:07:47 Jake Leguee
If you went around a slew and there was a spot that needed to get filled in, you knew it was there.
00:07:51 Jake Leguee
So that was pretty cool.
00:07:53 Jake Leguee
Everything since then has been just sort of iterative progress, one step at a time.
00:07:59 Jake Leguee
to the point now where so much of it is automated.
00:08:02 Jake Leguee
We can't do very much anymore without GPS and auto steer and all of these things.
00:08:06 Jake Leguee
But the job that we're doing is just so much better than it ever was in those days.
00:08:12 Jake Leguee
Our precision, the precision of our operations has substantially improved.
00:08:17 Jake Leguee
I remember a few years ago asking my grandmother who passed away a couple of years ago now what she thought of all the changes and she was just blown away by it.
00:08:24 Jake Leguee
She just thought it was so cool that we could do all this stuff that they couldn't even dream of.
00:08:28 Jake Leguee
it wasn't even a thought, right?
00:08:30 Jake Leguee
So yeah, it's pretty remarkable.
00:08:32 Kristin Demoranville
That's amazing.
00:08:33 Kristin Demoranville
I really appreciate that.
00:08:34 Kristin Demoranville
It's such an interesting world we live in where we can create this kind of technology to be able to do what we do.
00:08:41 Kristin Demoranville
Because otherwise, I would assume if you oversprayed or overseeded in certain areas, you always expect a loss in that regard for that field in certain sections and you knew that was going to happen.
00:08:50 Kristin Demoranville
And now you don't have to do that because the machines are so efficient and you know exactly what your yield's going to look like.
00:08:56 Kristin Demoranville
I mean, other than like weather and other,
00:08:58 Kristin Demoranville
things that are going to affect the field.
00:09:00 Kristin Demoranville
I really am excited to have you on the show because I really want to walk through what a typical day looks like for you.
00:09:05 Kristin Demoranville
Can you highlight where the technology is being used all the way from, if you want to take it from seed to harvest, you can do that as well.
00:09:11 Kristin Demoranville
But what's a typical day for you, Jake?
00:09:13 Jake Leguee
I would say that there is no typical day.
00:09:15 Jake Leguee
So I think the best way would be to just kind of walk through the season.
00:09:20 Kristin Demoranville
Pick your favorite season because that will be easy for you to talk about.
00:09:23 Kristin Demoranville
I don't want you to talk about your least favorite.
00:09:25 Jake Leguee
Yeah, well, I mean, I like them all in their own ways.
00:09:27 Jake Leguee
I do like Harvest a lot because that's where you get to see the results of all the work that you've put in.
00:09:32 Jake Leguee
They aren't always good results.
00:09:33 Jake Leguee
Sometimes they're disappointing.
00:09:35 Jake Leguee
Sometimes you go into harvest knowing that it's not going to be good.
00:09:38 Jake Leguee
Sometimes you go in and are disappointed by what you get.
00:09:41 Jake Leguee
But it's always enlightening to see it, right?
00:09:44 Jake Leguee
To just finally be able to see, okay, this is what we got.
00:09:49 Jake Leguee
So at harvest time, our days are a lot more structured.
00:09:52 Jake Leguee
You know, it'll typically go on for four to six weeks of relatively steady, get up in the morning, go to the combines, get them ready.
00:10:00 Jake Leguee
You know, they need fuel, they need all the, I guess all the moving parts, need lubrication every, you know,
00:10:05 Jake Leguee
So many days, I clean the windows, clean the cabs, and you get in, and once the crop is sort of dried down, because we have to get some humidity overnight to make it kind of dampen.
00:10:15 Jake Leguee
Once we're past that, you get in the cab and away you go.
00:10:18 Jake Leguee
We're a larger farm in the sense that there's several people here, so we don't always run the same things.
00:10:24 Jake Leguee
We have a couple of guys that have their jobs, but those of us that are, I guess, the family team, we do jump from job to job.
00:10:30 Jake Leguee
So one day I might be running one of those combines, another day I might be hauling grain away from the field
00:10:35 Jake Leguee
semi.
00:10:36 Jake Leguee
Another day I might be running the, we have a grain cart in the field that collects the grain from the combine and takes it to the edge of the field where it puts it into the semi so we aren't driving fully loaded semis around in our fields.
00:10:47 Jake Leguee
Those would be kind of the three main jobs, but there's also a lot of other things to do.
00:10:51 Jake Leguee
I mean, some of our crops like lentils, they'll just stay green forever unless you desiccate them.
00:10:57 Jake Leguee
So that's just a contact herbicide that you go in and just spray them to finish them off.
00:11:02 Jake Leguee
Usually they're pretty well dead, but there's some spots that just won't
00:11:05 Jake Leguee
finish or there's some weeds that you need to deal with.
00:11:08 Jake Leguee
So there's jobs like that to do.
00:11:09 Jake Leguee
Sometimes there's the post-harvest jobs that need to be done.
00:11:13 Jake Leguee
Like sometimes we get a big crop and there's a lot of straw left behind.
00:11:17 Jake Leguee
So we go in with something called a harrow and drag that through the field to sort of spread the straw around a bit better.
00:11:22 Jake Leguee
And so that's sort of what harvest looks like for that four to six weeks.
00:11:26 Jake Leguee
In some years, you get in the combine and you go every single day until you're done and you're exhausted.
00:11:31 Jake Leguee
And there's other years where it rains every three days and it ruins the crop.
00:11:35 Jake Leguee
And it's just an absolute fight to get it off.
00:11:38 Jake Leguee
So you never really know which of those is going to be.
00:11:41 Kristin Demoranville
And you can't take if it's a certain type of moisture level, right?
00:11:44 Kristin Demoranville
It has to stay in the ground unless it's a certain, it has to be a certain dryness or a certain moist level or whatever.
00:11:51 Kristin Demoranville
That must be really disheartening when it's been raining forever and you just need, you know you need to pull it and it needs to go.
00:11:57 Kristin Demoranville
I would assume that would be probably one of the lowest points of farming in general is knowing you'd put all this effort in and you can't take it.
00:12:04 Kristin Demoranville
Or if you do, it's going to
00:12:05 Kristin Demoranville
be a less than desirable crop that year and it might be chicken feed instead of pasta, or whatever ends up happening to it.
00:12:13 Kristin Demoranville
I'm sure that it's sort of the high-low game, right?
00:12:16 Kristin Demoranville
Like you're really high because you're like, yeah, we did this.
00:12:19 Kristin Demoranville
It's awesome.
00:12:19 Kristin Demoranville
We're going to totally take it out of the ground now.
00:12:21 Kristin Demoranville
And then you're like, oh, great.
00:12:22 Kristin Demoranville
Well, I guess this year is just sort of what it is.
00:12:24 Kristin Demoranville
And then you move on.
00:12:25 Kristin Demoranville
And I would assume that the adrenaline spikes are pretty good throughout the whole process in general.
00:12:30 Kristin Demoranville
I've had other farmers describe it as almost like a child.
00:12:32 Kristin Demoranville
Their field becomes almost like a child because they've been rearing it and raising it and all these things.
00:12:37 Kristin Demoranville
And then at the end of it, they want it to be the best it can possibly be before it goes to wherever it needs to go.
00:12:42 Kristin Demoranville
And you basically just describe that.
00:12:53 Kristin Demoranville
Quick break.
00:12:55 Kristin Demoranville
And before we get back to Jake and our conversation, I just wanted to say thank you.
00:12:59 Kristin Demoranville
The Sites and Bites podcast has just turned two years old.
00:13:02 Kristin Demoranville
Happy birthday! And we're sitting at nearly 13,000 downloads.
00:13:06 Kristin Demoranville
That's because of you, the people who listen, share, and keep these conversations going.
00:13:11 Kristin Demoranville
As we head into year three, I'm really excited about where we're going next.
00:13:15 Kristin Demoranville
We're going to explore more of the sectors that make up our food system, from farms and oceans to labs, logistics, and everything in between.
00:13:23 Kristin Demoranville
You'll hear more global voices, more people working hands-on with the products that feed us, and more conversations about how data and technology are reshaping the way food gets to our table, and maybe even a few topics you never even thought about before.
00:13:38 Kristin Demoranville
Thank you for being part of this community.
00:13:41 Kristin Demoranville
If you're enjoying the show, take a second to like, comment, and share it.
00:13:44 Kristin Demoranville
It really does help more people find the show.
00:13:47 Kristin Demoranville
All right, back to our conversation with Jake.
00:13:53 Kristin Demoranville
Columbines are basically like little moving computers, aren't they, for the most part nowadays?
00:13:58 Kristin Demoranville
They actually have connection.
00:14:00 Kristin Demoranville
They're connected to satellites and things like that.
00:14:02 Kristin Demoranville
And the GPS, obviously, for more precision-based.
00:14:05 Kristin Demoranville
When I look at Columbines, and I think they're so complicated, I'm sure you probably get into them, and it's just second nature to you now.
00:14:10 Kristin Demoranville
How was the learning curve for that for you?
00:14:13 Kristin Demoranville
Did you, I mean, did you take a course?
00:14:15 Kristin Demoranville
Are you continually learning?
00:14:16 Kristin Demoranville
What does it look like, Jake?
00:14:18 Jake Leguee
Well, the course I took was running a Columbine when I was 12 years old.
00:14:22 Jake Leguee
So, I mean, there are actually clinics and stuff that you can go to that the dealerships will put on, but that's not the same as being in the cabin running it.
00:14:29 Jake Leguee
So when we get somebody new on the farm, it's very rare that we hire somebody that hasn't run something.
00:14:34 Jake Leguee
Running a combine is not super complicated as long as...
00:14:38 Jake Leguee
There's other combines in the field, like we run four.
00:14:41 Jake Leguee
So if one of them is a novice operator, we've got radios in the cab that we can talk to each other.
00:14:45 Jake Leguee
It's more about just getting the settings right.
00:14:47 Jake Leguee
They're trying to automate some of that.
00:14:48 Jake Leguee
Some of that has worked well.
00:14:50 Jake Leguee
Some of it hasn't.
00:14:51 Jake Leguee
On the specialty crops, it's still much the same as it has been for a long time.
00:14:55 Jake Leguee
We're setting combines ourselves.
00:14:58 Jake Leguee
It's all from the cab, of course, but looking at the sample that's in the hopper, in the grain tank, how much trash is in there?
00:15:04 Jake Leguee
Are we cracking seeds?
00:15:07 Jake Leguee
are we doing a good job?
00:15:09 Jake Leguee
That's still something that we have to monitor.
00:15:12 Jake Leguee
And there is a certain feel that you get running a machine like that, sitting in a cab.
00:15:18 Jake Leguee
You can hear it, you can feel it when you're pushing it hard enough.
00:15:22 Jake Leguee
Now, one of the things that has greatly improved is automated speed management.
00:15:27 Jake Leguee
So you can tell it, I want to load the combine to
00:15:32 Jake Leguee
X percentage of engine load.
00:15:34 Jake Leguee
So basically, how hard is the engine working?
00:15:37 Jake Leguee
And that works pretty well.
00:15:38 Jake Leguee
You do still have to be paying attention, though, because if you happen to hit a heavy spot, it's measuring on engine load.
00:15:44 Jake Leguee
So if you hit that spot going too fast, it'll bring that combine down real fast if it's too heavy and it's moving too quickly.
00:15:51 Jake Leguee
So there's still a lot of responsibility that comes with running these very large, very expensive.
00:15:58 Jake Leguee
And
00:15:59 Jake Leguee
like you said, very complicated machines.
00:16:02 Jake Leguee
We understand how they work here because we've been around them for so long and we've been inside of them and, pulled things apart and all that sort of stuff.
00:16:12 Jake Leguee
But they are complicated machines.
00:16:13 Jake Leguee
There's a lot of bearings, there's a lot of moving parts and a lot of computers these days.
00:16:18 Jake Leguee
I don't know how many ECMs there are.
00:16:20 Jake Leguee
in a combine today, but there's a lot.
00:16:22 Jake Leguee
And yeah, it's connected to the internet, it's connected to satellites, it's uploading data all the time.
00:16:27 Jake Leguee
It's pretty cool stuff that we can actually see what it's doing in real time.
00:16:31 Kristin Demoranville
It's really fascinating too, because it's gathering the crop and it holds it in storage, and then you have to obviously offload it in real time while the columnine's moving.
00:16:38 Kristin Demoranville
And I think that
00:16:40 Kristin Demoranville
in itself is such an interesting, I guess, I don't want to use the term game, but you can miss the shoot if you overshoot or undershoot.
00:16:48 Kristin Demoranville
So I think it's really interesting the dance that has to be done with it.
00:16:51 Kristin Demoranville
And I have such respect for it because it also requires a bit of precision driving.
00:16:55 Kristin Demoranville
And not just from the Columbine, but for the people that are coming alongside to grab the crop.
00:16:59 Kristin Demoranville
Because like you said, it will put too much strain on it if it's not taken out.
00:17:02 Kristin Demoranville
I find that really fascinating.
00:17:03 Kristin Demoranville
What do you listen to while you're harvesting in the Columbine?
00:17:07 Kristin Demoranville
Do you tend to listen to music or podcast on?
00:17:10 Kristin Demoranville
Do you not listen?
00:17:11 Kristin Demoranville
Do you stay in silence because you don't know if the radio is going to go off?
00:17:14 Kristin Demoranville
Is there something that's part of your ritual of harvest?
00:17:17 Jake Leguee
I guess all of the above.
00:17:18 Jake Leguee
Yeah, some days it's podcasts or audiobooks.
00:17:21 Jake Leguee
Some days it's just music.
00:17:24 Jake Leguee
Some days, yeah, I just turn the radio off.
00:17:25 Jake Leguee
And it's not really because of anything other than sometimes you just, in this job, there's so many things calling on you all the time.
00:17:33 Jake Leguee
Because for those of us operating farms, it isn't just operating the machine that we're doing.
00:17:38 Jake Leguee
It's also the 12 phone calls you get that day from suppliers and marketing organizations and you're trying to sell grain and you're trying to organize all the logistics of getting that grain from those combines into a bin at home.
00:17:55 Jake Leguee
Which bin is it going into?
00:17:56 Jake Leguee
Which bin are we going to next?
00:17:58 Jake Leguee
What's the moisture percentage?
00:17:59 Jake Leguee
Do we need to think about potentially drying it?
00:18:03 Jake Leguee
There's a lot of things to figure out in a day.
00:18:05 Jake Leguee
So yeah, sometimes sitting in silence is just
00:18:07 Jake Leguee
the best thing?
00:18:08 Kristin Demoranville
The amount of multitasking that you're doing is pretty incredible.
00:18:11 Kristin Demoranville
And I don't think that people associate multitasking with farming, but you are multitasking heavily, like you just said.
00:18:17 Kristin Demoranville
And that's not even considering maybe just the thoughts running in your own subconscious that generally just kind of coming up, like thinking about, oh, what's happening with the kids or what's going on with family or what's going on with the weather or whatever.
00:18:30 Kristin Demoranville
It's really quite the game that happens in your head as well while you're doing this.
00:18:35 Kristin Demoranville
I applaud you because
00:18:36 Kristin Demoranville
I mean, most people can't multitask past three things, and you've got a lot of moving parts literally going on.
00:18:41 Kristin Demoranville
And also you're dealing with the natural world, so there's definitely a lot of curveballs, if you will, thrown into that situation at times.
00:18:48 Kristin Demoranville
So let's get into a little bit more of the nitty-gritty of the tech and things like that.
00:18:52 Kristin Demoranville
Have you or anyone you know experienced a technology failure, a hack, or any issues that have happened?
00:18:57 Kristin Demoranville
And what do you think about the vulnerabilities of the equipment and systems that you use?
00:19:01 Kristin Demoranville
And it doesn't necessarily have to be the Columbine, it could be anything you have on the farm.
00:19:04 Jake Leguee
Yeah, I mean, there's always the risk
00:19:06 Jake Leguee
of things failing, and those things do happen, breakdowns and whatever.
00:19:10 Jake Leguee
We don't just have mechanical breakdowns today.
00:19:12 Jake Leguee
We also have electronic problems that can stop our machines.
00:19:15 Jake Leguee
And then we have to get the dealership to come out and try to deal with it.
00:19:19 Jake Leguee
That is a challenge.
00:19:21 Jake Leguee
There's a lot less that we can do now because the machines are so managed by their internal software.
00:19:28 Jake Leguee
And most of that we aren't really permitted to do anything with.
00:19:31 Jake Leguee
We do depend on our dealers to handle that.
00:19:34 Jake Leguee
That's where a lot of the right to repair stuff has really come into agriculture as well, not just electronics, consumer electronics and that.
00:19:43 Jake Leguee
It's also an important conversation in agriculture because we...
00:19:46 Jake Leguee
we do need to talk about how much control farmers that own these machines should have or the operations of them.
00:19:53 Jake Leguee
Because on the one hand, these are our machines.
00:19:56 Jake Leguee
We have spent a lot of money to buy them.
00:19:59 Jake Leguee
But on the other hand, these are very sophisticated software programs that are running these engines and all of the other things that go into these machines.
00:20:07 Jake Leguee
If we play with them too much, we could cause ourselves a lot of grief.
00:20:11 Jake Leguee
But I think there needs to be some trust put in place for a lot of the staff that we have.
00:20:16 Jake Leguee
Like my brother-in-law, for example, that's a journeyman mechanic that worked at the John Deere dealership for a lot of years.
00:20:21 Jake Leguee
He knows how to look after these machines.
00:20:23 Jake Leguee
And granting him the tools to be able to do that, even if we have to pay for them, I think would help us keep our machines moving when we have some of these very small issues that it'll shut the combine down for or the sprayer.
00:20:34 Jake Leguee
But yeah, there is a bit of a delicate balance there.
00:20:37 Jake Leguee
As far as external threats from cybersecurity or those types of things, I don't know anybody who's had anything happen to their machines in the field or to their data on places like John Deere Operations Center.
00:20:51 Jake Leguee
But we all have become more aware that it's a threat.
00:20:55 Jake Leguee
And none of us really know what to do about it.
00:20:57 Jake Leguee
We don't really have a lot of good tools.
00:20:58 Jake Leguee
Most of our businesses are small enough.
00:21:00 Jake Leguee
We don't have a bunch of LinkedIn computers in an office.
00:21:04 Jake Leguee
We have an office in our farm, but I have one staff
00:21:07 Jake Leguee
member who works there full-time, but otherwise, it's just me and my sister that are in and out of there a bit.
00:21:13 Jake Leguee
So we don't have the kind of network that a lot of businesses have where we have a company that manages it.
00:21:19 Jake Leguee
So I think us and a lot of other farmers are really in the dark about how to manage a lot of this stuff.
00:21:24 Jake Leguee
We just don't have the time, the knowledge, or the resources to know where to go to try to safeguard some of our systems.
00:21:31 Kristin Demoranville
Yeah, that's a common theme I've heard from many people in agriculture in various different parts of it.
00:21:37 Kristin Demoranville
Essentially, you are running a small business or a potentially medium to large business, depending on how big your operation is.
00:21:43 Kristin Demoranville
The thing that I've noticed the most is the touch points.
00:21:45 Kristin Demoranville
Where does technology intersect and where do you have access to it?
00:21:49 Kristin Demoranville
Because a lot of people are like, oh, we're not a target.
00:21:51 Kristin Demoranville
We wouldn't be important.
00:21:52 Kristin Demoranville
We don't have, and you just said it, we don't have network computers.
00:21:55 Kristin Demoranville
I think about mobile devices.
00:21:57 Kristin Demoranville
You probably have your e-mail on there.
00:21:59 Kristin Demoranville
I think about the fact that you are very much in public with your leadership roles and your blog and things like that.
00:22:04 Kristin Demoranville
That puts you in a different bracket for people
00:22:07 Kristin Demoranville
to potentially exploit because people, you're known.
00:22:10 Kristin Demoranville
I'm not telling you not to be known, Jake.
00:22:12 Kristin Demoranville
Don't, please don't read that like that.
00:22:13 Kristin Demoranville
But there is, there's different places where social engineering could come into play.
00:22:17 Kristin Demoranville
Agroterrorism and ecoterrorism is something that it's becoming more predominant in the agricultural field, unfortunately.
00:22:23 Kristin Demoranville
And I'm not talking just about relevant news.
00:22:25 Kristin Demoranville
I'm talking about like radical extremists and that are going after farms and really just nasty ways that are really targeting the mental health even more than the mental health issues that are happening.
00:22:37 Kristin Demoranville
within agriculture, they're using technical and digital ways of doing that, whether that's bullying or harassing online and things like that on top of other really nasty tactics that are just gross.
00:22:47 Kristin Demoranville
We don't need to get into that in this episode.
00:22:49 Kristin Demoranville
However, the thing that scares me is those groups are being enabled by nation states.
00:22:54 Kristin Demoranville
Fortunately, Canada, as an example, and parts of the United States, the dairy industry has been really targeted heavily recently, things like that.
00:23:00 Kristin Demoranville
So I'm worried about how do we empower a farmer without burdening, right?
00:23:06 Kristin Demoranville
That's the trick for
00:23:07 Kristin Demoranville
or what I think about.
00:23:08 Kristin Demoranville
How do I make you feel encouraged that you understand how to keep yourself safe if something did happen without adding just more to your multitasking list?
00:23:16 Kristin Demoranville
It really shouldn't be something you think about because you just need to be about the business of farming, right?
00:23:20 Kristin Demoranville
That's what your occupation is, that's what your lifestyle is, that's what you want to do.
00:23:24 Kristin Demoranville
You shouldn't have to be worried about all of this potential movie and certain movie-ness here of weirdness that could potentially happen because of technology running amok.
00:23:31 Kristin Demoranville
Ultimately, I do think that there will be probably regulations and policies that will come down to try to help, but ultimately...
00:23:39 Kristin Demoranville
it's going to still fall onto you and yours, Jake, because like you said, the right to repair is a great example.
00:23:45 Kristin Demoranville
It's going to be that kind of feeling where we know it's there, we know it's bad, we know the vendors know, we know the dealers know, we know that's happening.
00:23:52 Kristin Demoranville
But because they don't design their products with security in mind, whose responsibility does it end up being the farmer?
00:23:57 Kristin Demoranville
And that's the thing that kind of ticks me off is I feel like there should be responsibility taken on the people who create the products that you use in order to farm and sustain your farm.
00:24:06 Kristin Demoranville
Again, I could get on a soapbox for quite a while about this because
00:24:09 Kristin Demoranville
really frustrates me, the people who ultimately need the most assistance and the most understanding about this.
00:24:14 Kristin Demoranville
And empathy would be the farming community, not the people that are creating the tech.
00:24:19 Kristin Demoranville
AgTech is what it is.
00:24:20 Kristin Demoranville
So thank you for that.
00:24:21 Kristin Demoranville
I really...
00:24:22 Kristin Demoranville
I really do struggle with not getting too emotionally upset about it when I talk about it, because it really, it's a disservice to you.
00:24:29 Kristin Demoranville
And that's what makes me upset.
00:24:30 Kristin Demoranville
You feed the world.
00:24:31 Kristin Demoranville
Obviously, you've already said that you feed the world.
00:24:33 Kristin Demoranville
And it bothers me when I have to sit here and say, hey, there's no good answers right now.
00:24:38 Kristin Demoranville
However, maybe someday something will happen.
00:24:41 Kristin Demoranville
And that's not good enough.
00:24:42 Kristin Demoranville
That's not good enough, because we're just going to keep adding more and more tech, and we're going to keep making the tech more sophisticated and more challenging to repair.
00:24:49 Kristin Demoranville
And that means the hackers are going to have a way in and out and exploit for our abilities.
00:24:52 Kristin Demoranville
And we've already seen that happen with different pashings of systems and things like that.
00:24:56 Kristin Demoranville
CrashDripe, Microsoft is a really great example.
00:24:58 Kristin Demoranville
It was like a Jenga pig got popped out and everything fell down.
00:25:02 Kristin Demoranville
We don't need that for the farming community.
00:25:03 Kristin Demoranville
We definitely don't need that for the farming community.
00:25:05 Kristin Demoranville
That's way too much stress.
00:25:08 Kristin Demoranville
I guess within all this conversation, I kind of want to know a few things about farming a little bit more.
00:25:12 Kristin Demoranville
Let's get into this a little bit more.
00:25:13 Kristin Demoranville
Let's get away from this gloom and doom.
00:25:15 Kristin Demoranville
We'll go back to it in a little bit, but let's get away for a moment.
00:25:17 Kristin Demoranville
What keeps you farming, Jake?
00:25:19 Kristin Demoranville
Why do you keep farming?
00:25:21 Kristin Demoranville
And I know that this is kind of a strange question in some ways to listeners who are like, well, he's a farmer.
00:25:26 Kristin Demoranville
Of course, he's going to keep farming.
00:25:27 Kristin Demoranville
You could have done something else, Jake.
00:25:28 Kristin Demoranville
Why did you continue on with this generation?
00:25:30 Kristin Demoranville
And what do you hope to have your family continue with this generational farming?
00:25:34 Jake Leguee
Yeah, well, certainly I did consider doing other things.
00:25:37 Jake Leguee
When I graduated high school in 2006, farming was not a great industry to be in.
00:25:44 Jake Leguee
I mean, there was a lot of people leaving the industry.
00:25:47 Jake Leguee
Land prices hadn't moved in 25 years.
00:25:50 Jake Leguee
Banks weren't interested in lending against it.
00:25:52 Jake Leguee
It was a difficult time in the industry and dad had had a series of just poor crops in a row, poor grain prices.
00:26:00 Jake Leguee
So there wasn't a lot of equity and there wasn't a lot of, I guess, optimism for the future.
00:26:05 Jake Leguee
So when I went to university, I went into agriculture, but I intended to do something else.
00:26:11 Jake Leguee
But things changed quite rapidly in the late 2000s and what we kind of call now the great commodity boom, oil and grain prices and everything else really, really exploded.
00:26:20 Jake Leguee
And finally, land prices started to change, which was a great signal of the industry finally finding some optimism.
00:26:28 Jake Leguee
Now, that won't necessarily last forever.
00:26:30 Jake Leguee
Nothing goes up forever, and land prices have been going up for a long time.
00:26:33 Jake Leguee
So there is, of course, the risk that we turn over into that type of pessimism again.
00:26:38 Jake Leguee
But the thing about farming, and this is actually what I struggled with when I was trying to decide what to do, is I was interested in a lot of different things.
00:26:46 Jake Leguee
But what's amazing about agriculture is you get to do all of these different things throughout the growing season, right?
00:26:51 Jake Leguee
You can be an agronomist, you can be a mechanic, you can be a truck driver, a combine operator, a sprayer operator, truck driver, business, logistics, marketing.
00:27:00 Jake Leguee
All of these things are within the manner of farming, even just side interests like meteorology and watching weather and those types of things.
00:27:09 Jake Leguee
We get to do all of them.
00:27:10 Jake Leguee
Now, as farms grow larger and get more staffing, our roles become more differentiated.
00:27:17 Jake Leguee
And I do have much more specific roles now than I had when I first started.
00:27:21 Jake Leguee
But I've been able to divert my role into what I'm most interested in, which is agronomy and finance.
00:27:28 Jake Leguee
And I wouldn't have it any other way than to do this.
00:27:32 Jake Leguee
I had a financial advisor ask a little while ago, you know, what would you do if, you know, if you got a big enough offer on your farm, would you, what would you do after that?
00:27:40 Jake Leguee
And I said,
00:27:40 Jake Leguee
I just wouldn't take it.
00:27:42 Jake Leguee
Like there really isn't an amount of money that would convince me to stop doing this because if that ever happened, I'd probably just end up buying another farm somewhere else.
00:27:50 Jake Leguee
Like it's just, there's something about this industry that you mentioned a little while ago about the adrenaline that comes in different parts of the season.
00:27:59 Jake Leguee
It's a very interesting business because we take millions of dollars, we go sink it into the ground.
00:28:04 Jake Leguee
And, we just try our best to get the best crop that we can, given the weather that we get.
00:28:11 Jake Leguee
And every week, there's another clue that comes along to tell us what we might end up with.
00:28:16 Jake Leguee
But tomorrow, we could get a severe storm that wipes out half the crop.
00:28:20 Jake Leguee
You just don't know what tomorrow is going to bring.
00:28:22 Jake Leguee
No 2 days are the same.
00:28:24 Jake Leguee
No 2 years are the same.
00:28:26 Jake Leguee
And we also get to work with our families.
00:28:29 Jake Leguee
I mean, if my four-year-old wants to come join me for a day, he can come join me for a day.
00:28:33 Jake Leguee
There's nothing to stop him from doing that, and that's pretty wonderful.
00:28:36 Jake Leguee
There's such a generational legacy that comes with this business because it isn't just it isn't just me and my siblings.
00:28:43 Jake Leguee
that made this farm what it is, right?
00:28:45 Jake Leguee
It was also the work that my dad did and mom and the work that my grandparents did.
00:28:50 Jake Leguee
So you're living off of the work and the energy that was put in by previous generations.
00:28:57 Jake Leguee
And it's our job to honor that and continue to move it forward.
00:29:01 Jake Leguee
Now, if none of my kids want to go farming, that's fine.
00:29:04 Jake Leguee
I'm not going to push them to do something they don't want to do.
00:29:06 Jake Leguee
There's a million great things that they could do with their lives.
00:29:09 Jake Leguee
But if they do want to go farming, I want there to be an opportunity here
00:29:13 Jake Leguee
that is at least as interesting to them as going to aerospace engineering or pick your field.
00:29:20 Jake Leguee
I want this to be an opportunity for them that's just as interesting as any of those.
00:29:25 Jake Leguee
So that's kind of what drives us, I think.
00:29:28 Kristin Demoranville
That's great.
00:29:28 Kristin Demoranville
There's something also too, and this is me putting my environmentalist hat on for the moment, you're stewards of the land, right?
00:29:35 Kristin Demoranville
You're taking care of that land, whether that means the surrounding land, the watershed, all the things that are around it, the wildlife, you really are contributing to the betterment of that area.
00:29:43 Kristin Demoranville
area.
00:29:44 Kristin Demoranville
Because you actually care more about the soil and the water and the wildlife in your area because it's going to impact what you do.
00:29:50 Kristin Demoranville
And I think that's also something really special because not many people can say that nowadays because we live in and around cities.
00:29:55 Kristin Demoranville
Wildlife might be for us a squirrel, you know, maybe we get exciting and see a deer, you know, like that.
00:30:01 Kristin Demoranville
But that's a different kind of mentality.
00:30:03 Kristin Demoranville
Those are urban adapters.
00:30:04 Kristin Demoranville
you're actually seeing it in real time around you and the beauty of the land that you're working and the generations that have poured into that.
00:30:11 Kristin Demoranville
So I would think that sunrises and sunsets for you hit differently than they would for somebody who's just going to visit a farm because it's a vineyard or they're going to go take pictures at a, I don't know, lavender field or whatever.
00:30:24 Kristin Demoranville
I think that must just hit differently for you.
00:30:26 Kristin Demoranville
And to have your kids grow up on that is such an interesting perspective on the world.
00:30:31 Kristin Demoranville
You're not coming from an inner city situation and seeing soil for the first time.
00:30:35 Kristin Demoranville
You are actually raising these kids just as much as you're raising these crops around us.
00:30:45 Kristin Demoranville
Hi, we're Ans and Sage.
00:30:48 Kristin Demoranville
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00:30:54 Kristin Demoranville
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00:31:00 Kristin Demoranville
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00:31:10 Kristin Demoranville
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00:31:17 Kristin Demoranville
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00:31:19 Kristin Demoranville
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00:31:30 Kristin Demoranville
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00:31:36 Kristin Demoranville
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00:31:39 Kristin Demoranville
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00:32:13 Kristin Demoranville
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00:32:22 Kristin Demoranville
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00:32:30 Kristin Demoranville
While you were talking, I was thinking about what about farming has changed you as a person, meaning and how you lead today, because you are, you have some leadership roles as well.
00:32:39 Kristin Demoranville
How has farming really informed your perception of the world around you and helped you go out and be able to advocate as well as you do?
00:32:45 Kristin Demoranville
Because you are definitely our voice.
00:32:46 Kristin Demoranville
I have read your material.
00:32:48 Kristin Demoranville
I'll leave some in the show notes for the listeners as well.
00:32:51 Kristin Demoranville
But what has really driven you to that aspect of being an advocate?
00:32:55 Jake Leguee
I think before I answer that, I'm just going to go back to what you said earlier.
00:32:58 Jake Leguee
Farmers are, in some sense, the original environmentalists.
00:33:01 Jake Leguee
They are.
00:33:02 Jake Leguee
We don't think about it in the same way that it's sort of done today, of course, because somebody gets a little extreme.
00:33:08 Jake Leguee
But you know, the definition of sustainability is what we're trying to do, is to have multi-generational businesses.
00:33:13 Jake Leguee
And something you said earlier was
00:33:16 Jake Leguee
our fields are sort of like our children and they kind of are in a sense.
00:33:19 Jake Leguee
I mean, I have four sons, but in some way I kind of have 16,000 additional children, right?
00:33:24 Jake Leguee
A lot of kids.
00:33:26 Jake Leguee
Yeah, because you want all of them to improve over time.
00:33:29 Jake Leguee
I mean, really what we're trying to do in our business and whether we own the land or rent the land, it doesn't matter too much as long as there's some prospect we're going to continue to rent it for the long term, I guess, is we just want to see those acres improve over time.
00:33:41 Jake Leguee
And over the years of farming pieces of land, they really do, you do develop an
00:33:46 Jake Leguee
an emotional attachment to them.
00:33:47 Jake Leguee
You shouldn't, especially the ones that you rent, because there's always the risk that you can lose them.
00:33:50 Jake Leguee
But there is something very, very deep about managing those pieces of land for a long enough period of time and the hope that your kids are also going to be able to do so.
00:34:01 Jake Leguee
So there is a very strong connection that comes with that.
00:34:05 Jake Leguee
And I think that leads me to answer the question that you asked.
00:34:08 Jake Leguee
The thing about farming is that it forces you to be humble.
00:34:12 Jake Leguee
Because we get it wrong all the time, right?
00:34:14 Jake Leguee
I mean, when we decide what we're going to grow on a specific piece of land this year, because we do grow a variety of crops, whether we're going to, in this time of the year is when we, or I guess in June when we're recording this, is the time of the year when we make those decisions, whether we're going to invest
00:34:32 Jake Leguee
additional dollars into those crops or not.
00:34:34 Jake Leguee
And we often get that wrong because we have no idea what the forecast is going to bring.
00:34:38 Jake Leguee
We have no idea if it's going to rain this week or next week.
00:34:40 Jake Leguee
And we have no idea if a hailstorm is going to come along and wipe it out or if it's going to freeze in August and ruin it.
00:34:46 Jake Leguee
Or if we're going to have a really wet harvest and we're in it, there's all kinds of things that can take it away from us and show us that the decisions we made ended up being wrong.
00:34:54 Jake Leguee
But we make them anyway with the best information that we have.
00:34:58 Jake Leguee
Some of it's a little bit of a gut feel.
00:35:01 Jake Leguee
As much as we can, we try to strip the emotion out of it, but we can't entirely because we just don't know what the weather's going to be tomorrow.
00:35:10 Jake Leguee
So there is a little bit of a gut feel to whether we
00:35:14 Jake Leguee
invest those extra dollars or whether we put those lentils on that field that's a little bit lower ground this year, maybe there's a risk there that they might flood out or something like that.
00:35:24 Jake Leguee
The fact that we're often getting it wrong means that in anything else that we do in our lives, we're reminded of that, luck does drive a significant amount of our success in this business, luck and timing.
00:35:38 Jake Leguee
We can do our best to improve our odds.
00:35:41 Jake Leguee
We can, in a sense, make your own luck, but at the end of the day, regardless of how good of a job we do, we can get every single step right of the growing season.
00:35:52 Jake Leguee
and we can still be wrong.
00:35:53 Kristin Demoranville
I would think that that's really what people have a misunderstanding about with farming, is that what you just described.
00:35:59 Kristin Demoranville
People just think that it sort of just happens, or they don't think about it at all, because we live in a very privileged modern world where people don't know where their food comes from.
00:36:07 Kristin Demoranville
They just go to the grocery store and they get whatever they want.
00:36:09 Kristin Demoranville
Since there's no seasons in the grocery store, they just assume strawberries are available all the time.
00:36:13 Kristin Demoranville
which is not true.
00:36:14 Kristin Demoranville
I mean, yes and no at the same time.
00:36:16 Kristin Demoranville
I really think that this delicate, it's a delicate balance ultimately.
00:36:20 Kristin Demoranville
And you're right, it's not foolproof all the time.
00:36:22 Kristin Demoranville
It's not 100%.
00:36:23 Kristin Demoranville
That's something really important that people need to hear, especially those that are working with critical infrastructure and around it.
00:36:29 Kristin Demoranville
And dealing with food systems is, it varies.
00:36:32 Kristin Demoranville
I think this is why I love wine so much.
00:36:34 Kristin Demoranville
The reason why I love wine, and I've said this on air before, but I'll continue to say it, and you're going to resonate with this, Jake, greatly.
00:36:40 Kristin Demoranville
Every vintage year is different.
00:36:42 Kristin Demoranville
The soil, the climate,
00:36:43 Kristin Demoranville
the people who work it, it's different.
00:36:45 Kristin Demoranville
It changes.
00:36:46 Kristin Demoranville
So every glass that you have is special and will never be the same again.
00:36:50 Kristin Demoranville
Yeah, sure, you can buy the whole vintage year out and it would be the same for those bottles, of course, but the longer you leave it, the more that it develops.
00:36:56 Kristin Demoranville
I really look back and that's how I think about agriculture.
00:36:58 Kristin Demoranville
It's never going to be the same every year.
00:37:00 Kristin Demoranville
You're never going to have the same exact yield.
00:37:03 Kristin Demoranville
You're not going to have that you hope, but you don't necessarily know what's going to go down and what's going to happen.
00:37:07 Kristin Demoranville
The winters will affect what happens, how much rain you get in the spring, that kind of thing.
00:37:11 Kristin Demoranville
To me, it's almost a privilege
00:37:13 Kristin Demoranville
to have that moment, to know where your food is coming from and to know what went into making your food is what's really important.
00:37:20 Kristin Demoranville
And that's why I wish more people understood where their food comes from and the food system because it's so misunderstood and we've only lost that over the last few generations where people have just can go in and get whatever a box of pasta and not understand where that wheat came from and how it was made.
00:37:36 Kristin Demoranville
And I guess in some ways, I'm just letting you know that there are some of us that are out there, Jake, that actually really do appreciate the work that you do and understand what it takes
00:37:43 Kristin Demoranville
to get to the food to our table.
00:37:44 Kristin Demoranville
And every time I sit down to eat, no matter if it's a quick sack or not, the thought goes to thank you very much to the farmer who did this and to the family, you know, the sweat and blood and the tears and the mental health and everything else that goes into it.
00:37:56 Kristin Demoranville
But like I was saying, you know, I really think that it's a privilege that people, it's a privilege to know.
00:38:00 Kristin Demoranville
And it's also a modern privilege to not know at the same time, because you don't have to slaughter your own chickens.
00:38:05 Kristin Demoranville
You could just go buy a chicken.
00:38:06 Kristin Demoranville
You don't have to go, you know, harvest your own wheat.
00:38:10 Kristin Demoranville
You can just go get it in whatever form it needs to be in bread,
00:38:13 Kristin Demoranville
a step beyond couscous, which now I'm going to consistently bring that up.
00:38:17 Kristin Demoranville
So you've actually written A blog and you do a lot of media, Jake.
00:38:20 Kristin Demoranville
Why did you choose to do that?
00:38:22 Kristin Demoranville
Because you have so many other things going on, right?
00:38:24 Kristin Demoranville
You're busy.
00:38:25 Kristin Demoranville
So what drove you to start doing that and start speaking up and being more of that advocate again?
00:38:30 Jake Leguee
Yeah, I think it goes to what you've just been talking about, which is that there's so few of us left that are still actually farming.
00:38:38 Jake Leguee
Most people have moved off the farm into the city, I think in the 1800s.
00:38:43 Jake Leguee
the late 1800s here in Saskatchewan, something like 90% of people were farmers, right?
00:38:48 Jake Leguee
No, that's a good thing that that's changed because it was a tough life at that time.
00:38:52 Jake Leguee
People moved off to find things that they were good at.
00:38:54 Jake Leguee
And that's what's given us modern medicine and education.
00:38:59 Jake Leguee
And so many of the things that we all take for granted happened because people were able to move off of the farm.
00:39:05 Jake Leguee
And it's enabled those of us who like farming to be able to get pretty good at it.
00:39:09 Jake Leguee
So these are positive things, but it does come with a downside.
00:39:12 Jake Leguee
People don't know where their food comes from.
00:39:14 Jake Leguee
People don't know who's actually growing their food.
00:39:17 Jake Leguee
That these are human beings.
00:39:18 Jake Leguee
These aren't just faceless corporations that are doing it.
00:39:21 Jake Leguee
These are, for the most part, family farms.
00:39:23 Jake Leguee
Even most of the very large ones are family farms, essentially.
00:39:27 Jake Leguee
So I thought that maybe I could help people just put a face to a name a little bit and see that, oh yeah, this is a human being that's
00:39:35 Jake Leguee
that's growing my food and thought maybe I could dispel some myths around that and just kind of share what it's like doing this.
00:39:42 Jake Leguee
just try to talk about some of the things that we deal with and think about on our farms.
00:39:46 Jake Leguee
It's created a lot of opportunities for me.
00:39:48 Jake Leguee
I've been able to talk to people from all walks of life about agriculture and...
00:39:53 Jake Leguee
what they think of it.
00:39:53 Jake Leguee
Some people, it doesn't matter what you say or share.
00:39:56 Jake Leguee
Their opinion has been influenced by what they saw in a documentary on Netflix or Google search or something like that, which is frustrating because most of those are quite heavily biased and there's a lot more dollars that go into writing those sorts of narratives and filming those sorts of narratives than we have on our farm to be able to share anything.
00:40:15 Jake Leguee
But if in some small way I've been able to move the needle, then it's absolutely worth it.
00:40:20 Jake Leguee
And I would also say that the process of
00:40:23 Jake Leguee
writing is one of the very best ways to develop an idea in your head anyway.
00:40:27 Jake Leguee
So if nothing else, the benefit of doing that has been worth it.
00:40:31 Kristin Demoranville
Absolutely.
00:40:32 Kristin Demoranville
And what do you think is actually the biggest misconception of farming?
00:40:36 Kristin Demoranville
Since you kind of alluded a little bit, so now I'm going to pull on that thread a little bit.
00:40:39 Kristin Demoranville
What do you think people completely get wrong about farming?
00:40:43 Jake Leguee
Farmers have choices.
00:40:44 Jake Leguee
We aren't forced to do anything.
00:40:46 Jake Leguee
There aren't these big companies that are making us grow GMOs, that are forcing us to use glyphosate, that are
00:40:53 Jake Leguee
forcing farmers off the land to make room for big corporations to take over.
00:40:58 Jake Leguee
That absolutely has not happened.
00:41:00 Jake Leguee
We make our own choices about what we decide to grow.
00:41:02 Jake Leguee
I choose to grow crops like canola, which are a genetically modified organism because it gives me the opportunity for better weed control.
00:41:10 Jake Leguee
Simple as that.
00:41:11 Jake Leguee
If it wasn't for the herbicide tolerant trait in canola,
00:41:15 Jake Leguee
we would have a real hard time growing it.
00:41:16 Jake Leguee
And that would be a real shame because it's a good, healthy oil and it has a lot of benefits.
00:41:21 Jake Leguee
that's just one example of a choice that we made on our own farm to better our business and the livelihoods of our family because there's an opportunity there to do so.
00:41:32 Jake Leguee
You know, nobody, and the other thing too that I think people get wrong along the same vein is, you know, farmers aren't being forced out of the industry because somebody's literally forcing them out.
00:41:43 Jake Leguee
This process has been going on for
00:41:45 Jake Leguee
centuries of people leaving the farm to do other things since the beginning of the industrial revolution.
00:41:50 Jake Leguee
People have been leaving farms to go and seek opportunities elsewhere.
00:41:54 Jake Leguee
And I am sure that I would imagine some of our kids will probably do the same because not everybody is interested in this lifestyle.
00:42:01 Jake Leguee
And it's a positive thing that those of us that are with some farmers deciding to retire and not have anybody to pass it on to, well, there is an opportunity there for us to grow our business and be able to bring in more
00:42:15 Jake Leguee
more of the next generation that is interested.
00:42:18 Jake Leguee
So while our farms are growing, there's still a lot of people on these farms, and we're all working to build our communities and do a lot of the same things our parents and grandparents did in our small towns to try to keep them alive.
00:42:30 Kristin Demoranville
And it really, it's about community and in so many ways, sharing the burdens and helping each other out.
00:42:37 Kristin Demoranville
A community is so strong, and I think that's something that the rest of the world misses a lot.
00:42:41 Kristin Demoranville
That's part of the reason why I really love the agriculture community in general, because it's a
00:42:45 Kristin Demoranville
community of helpers.
00:42:46 Kristin Demoranville
Everybody wants to see everybody succeed.
00:42:48 Kristin Demoranville
Everybody's going through the same things because it's about the weather.
00:42:51 Kristin Demoranville
It's about what's going on, what you planted, what the risks that you took at the beginning of the year, like you said, as in the stages of planning.
00:42:57 Kristin Demoranville
Everybody feels that sense of and understands it.
00:42:59 Kristin Demoranville
That's something that it's hard to translate into the technology cybersecurity side of the house because they don't, risk is different for us.
00:43:06 Kristin Demoranville
We look at risk differently.
00:43:08 Kristin Demoranville
The risk mindset is different.
00:43:09 Kristin Demoranville
Your risks
00:43:10 Kristin Demoranville
are legitimately potentially going to cause strife and issues with your family, whether that's crop failed and you've had a bad year.
00:43:17 Kristin Demoranville
What does that mean financially?
00:43:19 Kristin Demoranville
Some people have, they might have to give up their farm because of it.
00:43:22 Kristin Demoranville
Those kind of conversations are real and obviously mental health and things like that.
00:43:27 Kristin Demoranville
I guess for me and moving forward, is there a time when you're using the tech that you are wondering about cybersecurity?
00:43:33 Kristin Demoranville
When does that cross the mind?
00:43:35 Kristin Demoranville
Speaking of risk, farmers in general are starting to talk about it.
00:43:38 Kristin Demoranville
I've been in those circles.
00:43:39 Kristin Demoranville
I'm around those people.
00:43:40 Kristin Demoranville
When was it kind of like, hey, maybe we should start to be concerned about this, or hey, maybe this is a risk factor that we need to include in our annual forecast?
00:43:48 Kristin Demoranville
Or is it one of those, we'll deal with that next year kind of feeling?
00:43:52 Kristin Demoranville
Or it's something we'll just put in the back of our head, we know it's there, it's potentially a risk, but you know, we're not going to be able to do anything about it.
00:43:58 Kristin Demoranville
We're not necessarily going to be a target.
00:44:00 Kristin Demoranville
And is it something that you do think about at all, Jake, or in general, the farming community?
00:44:04 Jake Leguee
Yeah, I would say probably the latter two things that you mentioned are probably the most likely.
00:44:10 Jake Leguee
scenarios for farmers like myself.
00:44:12 Jake Leguee
We've read the stories, we've heard that we need to do something, but it's sort of that uneasy sort of feeling that sits in the back of our minds that, oh, we should do something about this, but we're busy right now, so we'll do it next.
00:44:26 Jake Leguee
We'll do it after seeding, or we'll do it after in-crop spraying, or we'll do it after harvest.
00:44:29 Jake Leguee
We'll do it during the winter when things are quieter.
00:44:31 Jake Leguee
But then winter's gone and we haven't done it.
00:44:34 Jake Leguee
So yeah, we know that we need to do something about it, but for the most part,
00:44:40 Jake Leguee
We just don't know what to do or where to start.
00:44:42 Jake Leguee
So it's easy to put it off.
00:44:44 Kristin Demoranville
And since you have a lot of listeners that are in that space right now, the cybersecurity side of the space, is there something you want to say?
00:44:50 Kristin Demoranville
Is there anything that you can echo to that, to this particular community?
00:44:54 Jake Leguee
Yeah, well, I mean, I think we as farmers have to take our own, we have to take responsibility for our own actions and inactions.
00:45:01 Jake Leguee
And we are, like you said, running small to medium sized businesses.
00:45:04 Jake Leguee
And
00:45:04 Jake Leguee
If this is a risk that we don't do something about and we get hit by it, then we also have to take responsibility for those decisions.
00:45:12 Jake Leguee
Because a lack of a decision is still a decision.
00:45:15 Jake Leguee
But I would say that to the cybersecurity industry that there is an opportunity here for you.
00:45:19 Jake Leguee
Farmers.
00:45:21 Jake Leguee
need access to these types of services.
00:45:23 Jake Leguee
We don't know who to talk to.
00:45:24 Jake Leguee
We don't really know where to start.
00:45:25 Jake Leguee
This is not our area of expertise for the most part.
00:45:28 Jake Leguee
So reach out.
00:45:30 Jake Leguee
You know, there's lots of farm stuff websites these days with contact information.
00:45:33 Jake Leguee
There's probably an opportunity there for you to find a few more clients because yeah, most farmers could use some help on this.
00:45:40 Kristin Demoranville
Thank you for that.
00:45:41 Kristin Demoranville
As we're going to close up in a second, I would like you to give a message out to the next generation or people that are thinking about joining farming because we obviously need some more first Gen.
00:45:50 Kristin Demoranville
farmers to start
00:45:51 Kristin Demoranville
are filling in the gaps, if you will.
00:45:52 Kristin Demoranville
And this is a global problem.
00:45:53 Kristin Demoranville
This isn't just isolated to Canada or the United States.
00:45:56 Kristin Demoranville
What is the message you would give out to people who are thinking about getting into farming or are moving into the next generation of farming?
00:46:02 Jake Leguee
I would say first, for anybody interested in farming, agriculture is much bigger than just farming.
00:46:07 Jake Leguee
And we need people in all aspects of agriculture.
00:46:10 Jake Leguee
And so many kids leave high school thinking, well, I'm not going farming.
00:46:13 Jake Leguee
I don't need to take egg.
00:46:14 Jake Leguee
But there's more opportunity in agriculture than in a lot of other industries.
00:46:19 Jake Leguee
And there's going to be for a long time.
00:46:21 Jake Leguee
There's thousands of very, very cool and very interesting careers that you can have within this business and plant breeding and chemistry and sales and marketing and all manners of different things.
00:46:32 Jake Leguee
So consider it as an option because I don't think you're ever going to be short of work.
00:46:37 Jake Leguee
Anybody interested in going farming, there is no other lifestyle that you can have where business and lifestyle are so intricately tied together.
00:46:47 Jake Leguee
But having said that, if you treat farming
00:46:51 Jake Leguee
as a lifestyle.
00:46:52 Jake Leguee
It can be a very poor business, but if you treat farming as a business, it can be a really great life.
00:46:59 Jake Leguee
That's a quote from a friend of mine, Jared, and I think it resonates very well.
00:47:03 Jake Leguee
We have to put the first things first in managing our businesses, because if we don't, it won't last.
00:47:08 Jake Leguee
So yeah, I would just say that it's absolutely worth the risk and the stress and everything else, but make sure that you make it a business first.
00:47:17 Kristin Demoranville
Thank you for that, Jake.
00:47:18 Kristin Demoranville
That's really great.
00:47:19 Kristin Demoranville
You have so many quotable moments in this particular episode.
00:47:22 Kristin Demoranville
It's fantastic.
00:47:23 Kristin Demoranville
Thank you for what you do.
00:47:24 Kristin Demoranville
Thank you for feeding the world.
00:47:26 Kristin Demoranville
Really appreciate it.
00:47:26 Kristin Demoranville
And I hope that the cybersecurity and operational technology people that are listening to this particular episode hear you, that they know, you know, and we're all available as well.
00:47:36 Kristin Demoranville
So thank you very much for being here.
00:47:38 Jake Leguee
Yeah, thank you for the opportunity.
00:47:39 Jake Leguee
I enjoyed the opportunity to speak with you today.
00:47:48 Kristin Demoranville
That's it.
00:47:49 Kristin Demoranville
for today's episode of the Bites and Bites podcast.
00:47:51 Kristin Demoranville
Thank you to Jake for giving us a clear look at how farming has evolved and how modern farms actually operate.
00:47:58 Kristin Demoranville
It's a reminder that people growing our food are running some of the most complex operations out there, and they deserve the same support and security as any other critical sector.
00:48:09 Kristin Demoranville
If you enjoyed this episode, share it, leave a comment, or tell someone who's interested in agriculture food and the systems that connect them.
00:48:17 Kristin Demoranville
And while you're at it, please do thank a farmer.
00:48:20 Kristin Demoranville
As always, stay safe, stay curious, and we'll see you on the next one.
00:48:25 Kristin Demoranville
Bye for now.
