Episode 10:

Daryl Domitruk

Transcript

Toban Dyck  00:03

This is the extensionist conversations with great thinkers in agriculture. I’m Toban Dyck and I’m Jay weather.

Jay Whetter  00:14

Hey, Toban. Hey, how’s it going? So we’re starting to get some

Toban Dyck  00:18

doing great. I gave you a second and you didn’t take it in this fast paced world of podcast, take your opportunities

Jay Whetter  00:28

when you get them. If you don’t, I’m talking we were getting some good feedback, like you’ve encountered people who recognized your voice

Toban Dyck  00:40

in a coffee lineup. It’s like, tap on the shoulder. Anyway, are you Toban dick? Oh, my God, you’re famous.

Jay Whetter  00:45

That what it was like, it was, it was ended. You have to sign something. Yeah. Body Part 100% Yeah. This the the palm of the hand. Though, one of my colleagues at work asked us about the socks. What are watching the video? Yeah, what? What are you why are you guys wearing socks? I never thought anything of it. We’re actually in toban’s house, yeah? So I come into someone’s house, yeah, I take off my shoes or boots, and then I come into our living room. It’s like, Mr. Dress up, or no, Mr. Rogers, right? So that’s like putting on my cardigan and sitting down. But, yeah, no, that’s so we’re not in some fancy studio in downtown Winnipeg. We’re in toban’s living room. This is true. We should try our shoes. You want to just shake

01:33

things up a little bit, or slippers

Toban Dyck  01:37

that full, Mr. Rogers, cardigans and slippers every every episode.

Jay Whetter  01:42

Yeah, I like it. We’ll get there eventually. We

Toban Dyck  01:44

will. We will. I’m really excited about today’s guest. Yeah, you, you know this person, Daryl and I go way back. Darrell is the executive director of Manitoba Pulse and Soybean Growers. And I used to work there, full disclosure, I was their director of communications. And since starting birth forest group. We work with them. They’re a client of ours.

Jay Whetter  02:04

Yeah, good. And so, you know Daryl quite well. I do. Why do you think that he would make a good guess.

Toban Dyck  02:10

He is very passionate about extension. And him and I have had many, many conversations getting, getting pretty deep into it. And I think, I think he’s is a wealth of knowledge. And, I mean, he worked for Provincial Government for for a number of years in various capacity, zero

Jay Whetter  02:30

telephone, I think, didn’t he?

Toban Dyck  02:32

Yeah? He’s got, yeah, I think so he has experience with, with with, we’ll see. We’ll ask him. We will clarify. Let’s please, please do, yes, yeah, that sounds, that sounds right? No, no. He’s incredibly insightful on those issues. So I’m really excited about,

Jay Whetter  02:50

I have, I have met Daryl. He’s good guy, yeah, but I haven’t, I haven’t had, like, like, the actual professional connection with him, like you have, but, but I’ll still I’ll try to toss in a few questions here and there and let people know I’m still here.

Toban Dyck  03:07

Please, please, do, please do. Should we get on with it? Let’s do it. We’re doing extension because we we

Jay Whetter  03:18

value it. Farmers are still looking for information, even while governments have pulled away from the job of extension so that so, like you said, you have the needs there, and there’s fewer people actually doing extension. And so we thought we’d jump into that, and we hope that sponsors recognize that the service that we’re offering and give us some support.

Toban Dyck  03:37

As much as we are doing that because, because we see a need, and we have a passion for it. We’re also doing it because we see a need among some of the groups that could be sponsors, and we see that they are also looking for new ways to extend if

Jay Whetter  03:49

anybody else wants to step forward, we’d welcome their support as well. Welcome to the podcast. Our guest today is Daryl demetric, who’s the executive director of the Manitoba Pulse and Soybean Growers Association. And Daryl, you’ve got a long kind of history of involvement in extension and now Executive Director, but so I want to talk to you about various things kind of leading up to your current role. And I’ll let Toban talk about the pulses. So

Toban Dyck  04:25

thanks Jay for letting me talk. I might just interject here and there with no, that’s okay. Wait, okay, okay, okay, patiently wait.

Jay Whetter  04:35

Just Daryl and me. Darryl, you know last this is, this is round two. I think I can say that, right? So Daryl had been a very willing guinea pig for us, because as we were practicing becoming podcasters, Daryl came into the studio and we did a we did a big, long podcast that we didn’t end up using. So we had to bring you back for round two. So what? Welcome back, and thanks for doing

Toban Dyck  05:01

this again. Daryl, yeah, indulging us

Daryl Domitruk  05:03

My pleasure. Thanks for having me. The first one was that

Toban Dyck  05:08

bad. We were that bad, yeah. And

Jay Whetter  05:11

so one of the things that we talked about, that we will talk briefly about, is just, there’s the active extension. And so you’ve been involved with Manitoba Agriculture. Now you’re involved with the commodity Association. Do we? Do we need extension? And if yes, who should do it? So let’s start with with the need. Is it something that we actually need anymore in agriculture?

Daryl Domitruk  05:38

It’s a good question, and it depends, I think, how you you look at it in Canada. I think, as we know, extension was used as a tool of public policy to ensure that farmers are successful, and extending the nation of Canada from sea to sea, that’s gone now. So the you know, there will be people who perhaps think, and evidence would suggest that extension isn’t needed anymore, because it appears to have gone away, especially from the public space. Not saying nobody is practicing extension, but it’s certainly not the top line occupation of government agencies as it once was.

Jay Whetter  06:26

So this is assuming you take government decisions as evidence. It’s not like we’ve got some science that says, you know, farmers don’t need extension, but it’s this government policy of cutting extension. Well, it’s your evidence that

Daryl Domitruk  06:38

that’s a piece of evidence. But then I put it in the context of what’s the demand and supply? So the government was supplying extension in with, I guess, under in the context of there being some demand from farmers who were new to the land and trying to be successful, and the government wanted them to be successful. So if I, if we take that set of circumstances, I think we can update it to the 21st century, where there have been a series of demands, or if I could call them, expectations, put upon the farm community, primarily by government, but also a broader society, to not just be successful food producers, but to protect the land and the water to produce food that is safe, to produce food that doesn’t emit quantities of colorless, odorless gasses that affect our climate. And it seems like every few years, there’s a new expectation put upon the farm community. I would say that that are the conditions that that could use extension

Toban Dyck  08:02

the scope has changed. The scope, yeah, from the

Daryl Domitruk  08:05

farmer perspective, all these demands are coming at, at at an individual farmer. And remember, most of our farms are still one way or another, family farms. You know, people could only do so much, and on the gov, you know, public, whether it’s government or civil society or any other entity outside the farm, they have these expectations, and I think they’re learning that they just can’t snap their fingers and expect farmers to respond. So what? What is the, what is the mediating force there? What an extension could help both, both sides. I would say, so, so is there a need? I would say yes, but not in the traditional sense, but in some kind of updated, 21st century sense, you know, as to who should do it? Well, I think there’s two angles to that as well. Maybe the more cynical angle may be that you know anyone that that isn’t a farmer, but wants farmers to do something, they have the tools of extension at their disposal if they if they want to use them, I wouldn’t hope that that’s how it’s used. But I think anyone who sees that farmers and farming and earning a living from the land, it benefits all of us and has a contribution to make, ought to look at at the art and science of extension as a way to not convince or coax or pressure farmers to do anything but to find common ground. And the win wins that that will lead to success for both parties. Yeah, I’m.

Jay Whetter  09:59

And I’m just envisioning a mission statement for any of those objectives that you mentioned. The environmental one, the greenhouse gas either related the food quality, not just quantity, sustainability. I mean, yeah, and the mission statement and governments maybe need to keep this in mind. Should be, you know, the the financial well being of farmers, as well as coast, of course, the social and the environmental well being of the farm. But like, agriculture is such a huge part of our economy, let’s, let’s identify that we want to protect and enhance this industry, build the industry not put roadblocks in front of it, at least that’s my perspective from being heavily involved.

Daryl Domitruk  10:46

And many entities have ideas that they think ought to be adopted, and it’s a very crowded space, and I would say that again, the independent family farm has a right to be resistant, or at least to very carefully filter those requests or those demands or those expectations and and I would say that people that have these expectations, but they don’t act they haven’t actually constructed them. They’ve too many expectations are being constructed in cubicles in cities. And if that’s done, I they need to reduce their expectations. And part of extension. It’s, you know, we think of it as a one way thing, but it actually starts with an understanding of the context. And the context is the family business on the land, right? Yeah. And it doesn’t involve any cubicles or any, you know, any ideas that emerge from, you know, from cocktail parties in Ottawa, if I could say that, yeah, it’s about what’s happening online, and then you come back and say, Okay, what’s happening on the land, or what, you know, what’s my expectation as a economic development person, as a, you know, a social development person, as an environmental person, somebody who’s cared, who cares about something that agriculture is involved in. When you take it from the land out, as opposed to the cubicle in, you have a different understanding of it. And that’s the start of extension. Yeah.

Toban Dyck  12:35

I mean, that’s a good point too. Like the we’ve had people, we’ve had guests say something similar, where they’ll say, like, listening is an important part of extension, and there’s a way to interpret that, or this way that I have interpreted that as kind of a just, it’s quite a pat thing to say, like, but because listening is important? Well, of course it is, but it actually kind of, it genuinely is, like, that is a very important part of extension. Yeah, there

Daryl Domitruk  13:03

are volumes written on how to give a presentation there. When, when young people go to post secondary education, even in agriculture schools in Canada, they take courses in how to present, they don’t take courses in how to listen, right, and how to understand. And that’s critically important, because we have to remember this is all a human enterprise. Yeah, right. This is all human. None of this exists without the human aspect to it, and it’s not static. So it is a, really a skill to be able to listen and understand before you present.

Jay Whetter  13:50

Have you suggested you taken courses on listening Darryl? Or have you learned, just from experience? Is there could a person learn to listen formally.

Daryl Domitruk  14:02

You know, I’ve dreamt about courses and listening. I don’t. I’m assuming there are, there’s courses in everything. So there’s got to be a course on how to effectively listen. That might be, you know, the one that you take as a pre wet prerequisite for the course on how to effectively speak, but I don’t know of them, and in terms of what I’ve done, honestly, the only thing that I could claim to have at least tried to do is is have my occupation be as close to the people that I’m intended to work with and and so I’ve purposely shunned jobs and occupations that put me in a city and and I think so that that, I think is a very important and then I’m finally say that that’s another. Thing that’s, I think, kind of limited the use of extension is that a lot of the decisions now about those kinds of things, or the awareness of a tool like extension, it’s, it’s expected to come from the leadership, and the leadership, and increasingly, many of their advisors are not in farm and rural Canada. They’re in cities. So

Jay Whetter  15:26

having said that, do you think government is probably the wrong institution for extension? Like, in a way, we’ve kind of matured away from effective government extension like

Toban Dyck  15:45

or the need for it, or we’ve got some

Jay Whetter  15:47

great government extension people in Manitoba, so I don’t need to, I don’t want to say that they’re not doing great work. They are. But I just think just going forward with the government and its objectives, Is there perhaps a reason why maybe government extension doesn’t work anymore? I

Daryl Domitruk  16:09

think there are. It’s a choice that government will will make in adopting any tool it wants to use to affect change in the country, on the landscape, within the population. So, you know, a lot of people look at government as doing two things, either it’s there to create and initiate and move along its policies. So again, that you know, extension can be a tool to do that, but the other way in which people, at least have traditionally looked at government is acting in the public interest. And it’s interesting, because when you say the public interest amongst a farm group, it automatically gets interpreted as the farmers are the public whose interests the government ought to be taking care of. So if you stick with that definition, then I think government should be doing extension and helping farmers understand and act upon some of the very complex things where it does get dicey is if, if government uses extension for the sole purpose of imposing its policies on the population. And actually, I don’t think they’ve been doing that because they don’t have the capacity to do it. But you know, in kind of charting a future forward, you ask, should government be doing extension? And I think they should, because I think government still has a role in the public interest, which includes the farmer and the broader public so in that sense, I think government should be the other thing that government, I think can, can still claim, as as long as it wants to and puts the effort into being, is the objective third party. And this is what you’ll often hear from farmers. There’s no shortage of information coming to farmers about the things they do, whether it’s practices or products or techniques that they use, everybody’s selling something. Farmers often look at government as an objective, not selling anything. If that is, that role is taken seriously, and I’m not convinced it is, but I think a lot of people like you said, we do have great extension. People in Manitoba, they take it seriously. They see themselves as the objective party in the in the whole narrative. Why is that important today? Well, it’s important today, like it was in the past. But I think it’s even more important now, because whether you look at the technologies or the integrated markets we’re in, or just sort of the what’s at stake in doing things right or wrong is much more complex today, and so there needs to be an authoritative and objective party to to impart knowledge, to to people who, like farmers, who would not have the time to learn. You know what? What is, is gene editing. You know, yes, we can have people write about it in newspapers and whatnot, but, but if farmers are going to have a voice around policy, around policies like that, we’re talking some pretty complicated things. Climate change itself is extremely we. Mean, the biggest problem we have is not necessarily the problem. It’s not very political. It’s It’s physics, and it’s complex. So so to have that as a public resource, I still think has value, just the complexity of things now extended into another realm, in terms of, you know, markets and and there’s no shortage of market advisors. But you know, is there an objective assessment, the objective source of information on markets we’ve seen through various and recent reviews of, for example, the Canada grains act and and what kind of information can be made available about shipments and marketings and things like that, relative to what say the American farmer has access to it. And we see that there are constraints. And you know is that in the farmers interest? Is it in the public interest?

Toban Dyck  20:59

When you think of extension like, Do you have a sense of what? You know, there are these extension needs. The scope is only getting larger for what they should be covering, what effective extension looks like.

Daryl Domitruk  21:14

You know, it’s, again, I do think we’re in that period where we’ve, we’ve not had extension as an identifiable discipline for quite some time, at least amongst a broad segment of those of us in agriculture who aren’t actually farmers. It’s hard, hard to answer that a bit, but I do think effective extension is is demonstrated by some gage of attention. And I say that, and this is, this is kind of one of the almost sadder things about the way extension goes. But it’s a fact. It a lot of its personality driven. So we’ve always seen that that it’s the people that combine the smarts with with the personal, personal touch and the personality. They’re the people that garner the attention, and I still see that today. So we have very successful extension people, extension celebrities. So kind of celebrities? Yeah, and, and that’s people are metering out their time and their and their money and their attention pretty they keep a short, you know, pretty sharp pencil on it. And when, when a person has become known as a celebrity, they’ll draw a crowd, and they’ll have influence. And I do still think that that’s, that’s a mark of successful extension. Would

Jay Whetter  22:43

you consider an independent I thought

Toban Dyck  22:46

you’re gonna ask, do you consider me extension celebrity? Yeah, no, I was gonna ask about the

Jay Whetter  22:55

independent agronomists. They’re not selling products, they’re selling ideas, I guess they’re selling their knowledge information, yeah, like, maybe, mean, there’s a lot of them now, there’s some great ones. Is that our modern extension?

Daryl Domitruk  23:13

Absolutely, I think, I think this was a wonderful development. And you go, you know, every now and then, to regions where they’re not so common. And and farmers know about it like this, you know, we don’t have, you know, these experts that we can access as much here as you do over there, kind of thing. And, yeah, no, I think. And the thing about the the independent agronomist is that they’re part of that new supply demand dynamic. So the demand for knowledge isn’t simply from the farm, it’s from these, these independent agrologists and consulting agronomists and things like that. So and that’s a wonderful demand that any kind of public, especially agency. In fact, I There are groups of there are public agencies whose mission is to train the trainer. Yeah, and that’s not a bad, not a bad approach. It’s certainly effective, because these independent agronomists have such reach, yeah, and they obviously, you know, work on a trust basis too. So yeah, the farmer farmers trust their independent agronomists, or they don’t employ them any longer. And I think that’s a really great so they’re open to to to the objective information that the extension agent can provide. And

Jay Whetter  24:46

of course, from a farmer’s perspective, you’re paying seven, eight, $10 an acre, whereas the government extension would have been quote, unquote free, right, right, but somebody had to pay, but, but that also puts the pressure. Strong those agronomists to be as as smart as they possibly can be. I mean, they’ve, they’ve got to be a funnel for a lot of information and

Toban Dyck  25:10

effective at communicating with a wide range of people. No doubt. I do

Daryl Domitruk  25:14

think it’s a special Yeah, type of person that’s a really effective, independent agronomist, a they need to work hard and really long hours, but they so we have sort of accreditation agencies in place now, so like the certified crop advisor program, I think was an excellent addition, you know, to to our province anyway, and, and that’s sort of something, sort of the launch pad and and the and the technical, the place where agronomists can go and ensure that they’re they’re staying up to date, technically, combined with our agrologists Institute in here, it’s agrologist Manitoba that takes care of the professional side of that. I think it’s pretty good, pretty good infrastructure to help these independent negrologists stay relevant. And the other thing is their number, like, you know, we have one provincial entomologist in Manitoba, and very, very fewer provincial employees on the landscape. So these are, they’re an extension of those extension people. So I think the other thing I it really bears mentioning is even our own organization. We we have four acrologists on staff, but it’s the independent agrologists that are the ones that report on an emerging pest, sometimes because they don’t recognize it and they’ll send it to us, but we would not have seen it with, you know, have encountered it without, right? These agrologists, you know, literally combing fields. So all it says is that they get the context, because they’re literally in the field. Their their customer is the farmer, and so they grasp the context very well. And so I hope they are an industry that can continue,

Toban Dyck  27:28

yeah, build that network, yeah, the four

Jay Whetter  27:31

agrologists That Manitoba, Pulse and Soybean Growers have is that a growing number of staff in that role and what, what’s the need you’re filling? Well,

Daryl Domitruk  27:43

it is, it is an outcome of some of the things we’ve been talking about. Again, we’re, we’re an organization that literally is paid by the farmer. So we feel responsible for delivering something back to the farmer, you know, for their check off dollar. And mostly what we trade in is knowledge. We don’t trade in a physical asset. Some groups do because they fund plant breeding, and so the return to the farmers is something you can reach out and touch a new variety where us, it’s mostly knowledge, so that knowledge could be distributed through a network of extension agrologists. What, what has been happening is that in the public sphere, those are fewer and fewer. And so I think boards like ours have seen, well, if we’re going to deliver ROI to the farmer, and our stock and trade is knowledge. We need to have more people to deliver that knowledge. And you know, just to go back to what we were just talking about, it’s amplified by our relationship with independent agriculture, but, but, but if we didn’t have those people, we can’t, we can’t just assume that, you know, we’ll do a research project and post the results on a website, and that’s it. Which speaks to the other nature of things these days, it’s tremendously competitive, right? Yeah, you know, just fewer farmers, more knowledge. It we’re competing with with each other, actually, for, for the minds and eyeballs of farmers. And so if you’re a grower group and you don’t have that built in extension capacity, you’re, you’re probably not able to, to provide the ROI that that you would hope

Toban Dyck  29:39

is there a direction you’d like to see like extension go in general, like,

Daryl Domitruk  29:45

well, I’d like it to be played. I’d like it to be given broader importance and recognition, first, as a dis as a discipline. What that means is, I think our universities and colleges need. To need to look at it again as a discipline, and so I’d like it to be elevated to that that point again. And as you know more and more, as we said, earlier, ideas and thoughts and discoveries are made outside the context of the farm. I think extension as a discipline needs to be ingrained in people that are coming up through the system. But the other direction I think that it can go is is really to help sort out and and explain, you know, aspects of this complicated world. Yeah, yeah. I know in mpsg, what we’re trying to go is beyond our traditional role of taking knowledge generated through research and translating it into something that is usable on a farm. We’re also trying to go into into helping our producers understand some of these complex things like climate change and biotechnology and and and all these things that you know, they’re easy words and terms that come out of academic research and and and whatnot. But, but to the to the busy farmer whose expertise may be in something else, like marketing or machinery or something, some of these other things are that, you know, we have a role, I think, in explaining and it’s just an updated form of extension.

Toban Dyck  31:38

I think sometimes, because I can say this, because I do this personally, but some of the rejection that sometimes the ag community or farmers respond to new ideas with is a result of them is just because they don’t understand the issues well enough, right? So it’s kind of like if you understand this complex issue, you kind of naturally default to a kind of a negative state, or you kind of, you feel like anxious about it, because you don’t a, you don’t want to be an idiot like you don’t want to, you don’t want to come out and say you don’t understand something and B, you just kind of go with what. You go with the flow. And you kind of go to these base, base kind of reactions to things. So I often wonder, how much of, you know, we talk about sustainability or climate change, and you have groups of farmers who are just resistant to this and heels down that kind of thing, how much of it is a genuine, thoughtful kind of, you know, actual response to it, and how much of it is just they don’t understand. I mean, yeah, so I, I guess all that is to say is, I agree there’s a huge, a huge opportunity to to spend time kind of educating or passing down that information, diffusing it in better and better ways.

Daryl Domitruk  32:59

I think there is one thing that I think about some of the issues that good extension would help explain. There are probably issues that affect everybody, not just farmers. So again, it’s important to put that tailored farm relevant lens on an explanation of biotechnology. It’s interesting. Farmers have have, have encouraged their groups to work with consumers as much as possible to explain farm practice and and technologies that farmers use, and we’ve done that, but I think, almost at the expense of not doing enough to help explain some of these complicated things for farmers. Back to farmers, yes, right? And so, and interestingly, in my opinion, is, is that actually a lot of this knowledge is more useful to the farmer than it is to, you know, the urban consumer, for example, who, in my opinion, you know, kind of cares a little bit, but maybe not as much as we think. Yeah. So, yeah. So I think there’s a whole area of extension there that that can really help and and the thing about number one, I hate generalizing. I hate the term farmers, and because that’s so used so much, and farmers are as a diverse a population as anything, yeah, so, so, you know, farmers don’t do this, or farmers do don’t, you know, do that. Some farmers do this, and some farmers do that, and other farmers do that, right? And so I think there’ll be different levels of receptivity in within the farm population, just like there is, but there will be, you know, farmers, who, who, when? Things are explained in an understandable and useful way. Will actually, you know, they’ll thrive on that, and they’ll take it in directions that we couldn’t even imagine. And yeah, so and again, not all farmers, yeah, because they’re all different. But yeah,

Toban Dyck  35:17

same way we talk about consumers, too. We talk about consumers as other one. We

Daryl Domitruk  35:21

think they’re all homogeneous group city dwellers, one

Jay Whetter  35:25

thing and then they do another. Well, it’s a different group saying this group saying this out they’re doing this. This group says they don’t want, you know, X product. They want to only buy this. And this other group and their people think it’s all one well known cognitive

Toban Dyck  35:42

dissonance among the among the consumer set. In

Daryl Domitruk  35:45

fact, in our organization, we just released a new communications and extension strategy, and one of the foundations of it is that we recognize that that farmers are not all the same. And what we’re going to attempt to do is fashion extension messages that are consumable by farmers in difference, that have different state, they’re in a different stage in, you know, in farming, big farmers versus small farmers, you know, they consume and seek different kinds of information. Farmers that work off the farm, farmers that have 10 staff, farmers that just work with a relative, they all have different different roles. And have you sorted out how you’re going to do that? We haven’t, but, but we’ve retained some extremely intelligent and capable communications and extension consultant to help us through that.

Jay Whetter  36:44

And are these people from outside of agriculture who just know how to, you know, work with group dynamics or individuals within groups? You know, I’m glad

Toban Dyck  36:52

you mentioned, Oh, me too. Me too, Jay. I really, I’m really curious about how he’s gonna respond. Do you know what you’re doing right now.

Jay Whetter  37:01

I, you know, inadvertently putting in a plug for burr

Toban Dyck  37:05

forest. I feel like you are, yeah, you’re trying to get there all the same. I didn’t know I was doing. Well, did you? Did? You know, no, that’s funny. Full disclosure,

Daryl Domitruk  37:13

yeah, yeah. Well, and the bottom line is, they’re cheap, yeah, so you get what you but you know, I love it, Jay, your question is good, because the answer is, we, you know, whoever we actually team with, it’s essential that we reach beyond the bounds of the ag community and the Ag disciplines, because there are, You know, we find out all the time, like, take an area like strategy and strategic planning, that there’s, there’s all kinds of people who will help an ag group plan strategically. But, you know, they don’t all come from within Ag, and I think it’s important, most of the technologies, for example, we’re talking about, did not arise in ag, they arose in medicine, military, defense, yeah, exactly. Not even in Canada. So I was

Jay Whetter  38:09

at the World agrotech Innovation Summit in San Francisco in March, and there was this. There was a big venture capital investor named Vinod Khosla, if I got his name right anyway, he said the most important innovations in an industry come from people outside that industry, and it kind of fits perfectly with what you’re just saying, Daryl and I think within agriculture, I think it’s really exciting to bring in outside thinking in terms of, you know, making us looking looking at old problems in new ways. Yeah, I think that’s that’s critical. I agree.

Daryl Domitruk  38:52

I think there’s a particular usefulness to that approach now in the area of agricultural research, because for better or worse, most of our institutions that have traditionally conducted agricultural research, their gaze has turned to the upstream and so they are attempting to solve the big problems, and that has left vacuum, or a gap in who’s trying to solve the today problems behind the farm gate. We’ll get to that. But if, if you’re trying to figure out how to, you know, reduce emissions by making other crops fix nitrogen, or if you’re trying to make a crop Ultra nutrition, ultra nutritious. You know, for for a given population, you don’t necessarily need an agricultural you need you need a the best chemist and biochemist and and. And, yeah, bioinformatics person you can find wherever they come from. And I think that’s that’s important, and

Jay Whetter  40:07

I think we’re open to that, yeah, I mean, Toban is more into AI than I am. I think a revolution in AI as a tool to predict the weather, or, you know, just make general better farm decisions that, because it can, I mean, if the algorithm is written properly, can see things from the data that that we can’t see with the naked eye, so to speak. And I think that’s going to be a bigger part of our decision making. Oh, I think so, yeah, yeah,

Daryl Domitruk  40:37

you know. And I it’s a great topic to broach. Because, you know, the people that I talk with, I think there’s a bit of a consensus that maybe we haven’t paid enough attention, you know, to to what is, what AI is capable of. You know, I think we can say that, that an AI can basically replace what we’re doing here right now. Sure, yeah, yeah. And what does that mean? You know? So these independent agrologists, for example, they might be very interested in in what these tools can do, but there’s a whole kind of system that almost needs to be set up within the commercial realm for these things to come to market, be evaluated, be field tested, be adopted. And that is, that is complex, yeah, and that’ll be interesting to see. But I think, I think we do need to spend more time learning. And again, it’s a complex thing, and so far, what, what we see in our in our industry, in agriculture, are black boxes, and they come in with this. You push this button and it will do this for you. Trust us, and that’s where our culture says I don’t know. So some kind of more, better transparency and understanding. And again, that’s a role for extension.

Toban Dyck  42:14

It’s interesting. A couple things are interesting about that, one of them with AI? So you see a lot of, you see a lot of extension kind of being done in that sphere, right? A lot of conference speakers are talking about AI and, and, and, which is great it’s important now, because it’s a huge topic. But what? And it’s, I think it ties into what we’re talking about. Because, like, what are the thresholds of, you know what successful extension, because I’m not, no matter how many times I hear somebody talk about it, I’m not going to get it entirely right, like I’m not going to understand what those algorithms are really doing, or what, what kind of work went into creating them. So when we when we get even in the eggs, in the egg stuff. If you get someone talking about, say, gene editing or something really complicated for, say, for me or whoever else, what are the thresholds of success for something like that, like, I’m not going to get it, like he or she gets it. But what, you know, what is that passable kind of, you know, D, D grade level of,

Daryl Domitruk  43:23

you know, it it has to, it has to progress. The solution to the problem, noticeably, you know. And I think where things are now, like the cost structure is such that that the progress needs to be pretty substantial. No one wants

Jay Whetter  43:40

to pay $5 for a $5 solution. Yeah, exactly. I’ll pay you $5 but I want a $50

Daryl Domitruk  43:46

Yeah, yeah. So that that’s one thing and, and I think the marker of success too is that it’s also attending to, you know, some pretty critical problems, or, like, you know, the term wicked problem. Those are the best things for I think, if these, if AI, can help us sort through wicked problems. You know, if those can be solved, that’s, to me, what we really should be there

Jay Whetter  44:14

are other problems. For instance, matching, I’m just thinking a wicked problem. We talked about our this is before the podcast today, Darryl, but I’m going to come back to that. So we’ve got a growing growing season, lengthening growing season on the prairies, but we’re still using our old approaches. So how do I mean that’s we’re I think, are we missing an opportunity to work within this new, new growing season, and do we really need to totally rethink maybe it comes back to winter crops again, which we, by and large, are not using on the prairies. Is it planting earlier or planting later to take advantage of a long fall? Is it a completely different cropping mix and. And I mean, to me, that’s a wicked problem, like, are we not taking advantage of our, of our current growing situation?

Daryl Domitruk  45:09

You know, I think it, it’s something that will be in hindsight, we can, we can say, it’s always hard to say that that’s happening now, but I think it’s a you’re on pretty solid ground by saying there’s a potential for that to happen if we’re not open to some of the solutions and ideas that can be generated, recognizing the reality of an extended growing season and being open to change the you know, the word pivot is used a lot these days. But how do you gain the confidence to actually make that pivot when so much is at stake? If you’ve sown your crop on the 15th of may and had success over and over and over again, what what will actually make you pull the trigger and say, I’m waiting until June 1, because I know falls gonna go till, you know? Yeah, well, into October. It’s a, it’s a, I think we’re in that phase of just exploring that area. So it’s in the it’s in the realm of the hypothetical. Well, you know, to me, models are a great way to examine the hypothetical with low risk and say what would happen if we did that. And, you know, we’ve got the capability between the physiologists and the the computer people, the analytical tools that we have, we can, we can do a lot of that. And, you know, put it, put an extension person in there to interpret it. And we could probably start looking Jay at some of these alternative practices in a more, more meaningful way for and

Jay Whetter  46:59

I think, I think that coming back to that third party, because this is all so new, and there seems to be all these different people trying to tell us something, we need the trust to be there in order for this adoption to happen. So we need a trusted third party person. And I actually mentioned this a week ago to somebody and say, we almost need, maybe we have these crop advisors. We almost need tech. A tech advisor, a farmer can pay, you know, tell me what tech I need to use, because it’s becoming such a critically important part of the farming business well, and

Toban Dyck  47:39

it’s become, it’s become a very busy landscape as well, with everyone trying to sell you something, lots of pressure, yeah, right, lots of pressure to adopt tech at every turn. Well,

Daryl Domitruk  47:50

yeah, the the best agency or the best source of advice, you know, to grow winter canola because your, your the paradigm has shifted weather wise, on on the farm is probably not the winter canola seed company, yeah. I mean, they will try and do that, but their, their cause, and the farmer’s cause would be helped by an objective analysis of that opportunity. And it

Jay Whetter  48:20

has to. I mean, with any agronomy decision, it comes down to odds, right? So you’re gonna, you’re gonna grow winter canola and it’s going to fail and then give up, yeah? Whereas maybe you need to try it on a one field for three or five years, yeah, to get a true and then learn your skills along the ways. Anyway, I’m not saying winter Canola is the answer no, but, but mean, winter crops, winter wheat. I mean, we know it can work on the prairies. Winter kills an issue. But I just think, I mean, those are just examples. I know, Darryl, you’re just giving an example, but, yeah,

Daryl Domitruk  48:53

well, it’s, I think there that type of risk, that level of risk, is something that that, you know, a whole bunch of different kinds of farmers would are willing to, I mean, they do it all the time. It’s, the question is, is it informed risk? And I think there’s a public and a private interest in ensuring that it’s informed risk. Yeah,

Jay Whetter  49:17

Darrell, is there, is there anything that you when you sat down in that chair that you said I wanted the second time, I want to really get this point across to Toban and Jade today,

Toban Dyck  49:29

and maybe the audience just just us, like, what?

Daryl Domitruk  49:34

Well, you guys need a lot of points to be honest. But anyway, we’re talking to an audience here. Style, demeanor, anyway, fosters,

Toban Dyck  49:45

right?

Daryl Domitruk  49:48

You know, just that I think we’ve done this is that it would be a good idea for for a lot of reasons, to bring the notion. And the discipline of extension back and treat it seriously and develop it as a discipline, because so many entities inside and outside of agriculture have an interest in what’s happening on farms and and I think those outs, those agencies, those interests that are aren’t on the farm, but want the farm to do something, can further their cause by by starting by listening, learning how to listen, and then incorporate that into an extension program to work With. I think they’d find, they’d find, you know, welcoming, you know, farmers who are looking for opportunities to for win, wins. Which is, you know, which brings us to the pulse and soybean crop. It farmers don’t plant crop. Soybean crops to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, right? They plant it to make a living, yeah, and to grow a good crop, but they reduce emissions. When doing that, it’s a win, win. And it’s not because of anything that we did, or anything anybody. It’s just in the nature, nature of pulse crop. It’s in the nature, and we are short of these options that have that in their nature. And you know, so, so when you talk about changing scenarios, changing paradigms on the farm, we need all hands on deck to find these things that have them in their nature and make them real for a farm. And I think, I think if the discipline of extension is used, there’ll be receptivity, yeah, you know, there’s a demand side for it

Jay Whetter  51:51

sounds like the mean, there’s a bigger need than ever for extension. You’ve made a really good case for that down

Toban Dyck  51:58

so on that, on that note, you’re the one who showed me this. There all the that textbook from the University of Guelph. It was the black bird, yeah, something. It was the extension extension handbook, I think, or textbook handbook, yeah. And it like last published in mid 80s. I think, do you think there’s a Do you think there’d be an audience for it today? Well,

Daryl Domitruk  52:22

I think amongst students and people that are coming into the industry of agriculture and and I think it could go many different ways, even even farm groups like us could help remember these things were written back when things were a lot more institutionalized. So institutions had it in their mandate to take care of things like this, and so somebody wrote a handbook on extension. Well, that wouldn’t happen today, but groups like ours who have an interest in it could help inform the creation of that kind of material now. So, yeah, no, it would be a positive thing to do another edition of those kinds of things that’s updated and, yeah, and including all these new tools we’re talking about and how they play out, we know so much more. I mean, we know so much more about things, but the challenges in actually using that that knowledge

Jay Whetter  53:28

fascinating. Thank you. Daryl, yeah, thanks very talking to you twice.

Daryl Domitruk  53:32

Likewise, it’s been a pleasure. It’s always a treat being with Toban and Jay and and the burr forest group in their cozy studio here on a farm north of Winkler Manito, shoes off.

Jay Whetter  53:45

Shoes off, relaxing lane,

Daryl Domitruk  53:46

Lane full of snow, not even fully someone had a snow blower, tractor, not even plugged in, sitting back there in the snow drift. I

Toban Dyck  53:57

don’t have to leave. I don’t have to leave the yard, so I don’t worry about it. Oh, that’s awesome. Well, thanks. Thanks for your time. Yeah, I

Jay Whetter  54:23

I enjoyed talking with Darrell the second time,

Toban Dyck  54:25

yeah, me too, me too. I mean, I, I’m gonna, I’m gonna go, I’m gonna say that. I also enjoy talking to members, which I do you, you probably did as well, yeah, but yeah, I enjoyed that. I enjoyed, I think, but we were better, yeah, the second time, yeah,

Jay Whetter  54:42

we knew kind of what we wanted to do, and we had a better objective. Our

Toban Dyck  54:47

seating plan is different right now. We’re both in the coach, but I liked I also when he was talking about hiring a communications company, and then you started like, Drew. Like, I thought for sure you were, you knew I didn’t know. Yeah, it was, and you were trying to get him to say even though he was, like, intentionally not saying it right, but I, but I also appreciate it, because it should be, like, a full disclosure thing. Like, I don’t have to hide behind these things

Jay Whetter  55:14

anyway. So burr forest group, yes, you and your company, yes, the owner of this podcast also is doing some of that work for Manitoba pulses, soybean growers,

Toban Dyck  55:25

yeah. I mean, it’s like, you know, we it’s pitch time, but all that, like, that extension work is really, really close to our hearts, our hearts, our hearts, no, no, our our collective heart, our collective hearts, exactly. But you made a very good case for extension.

Jay Whetter  55:43

Yes, he did even, even to go back to some sort of government extension. But also, if not that, then at least, like that, third party extension is still quite critical to agriculture. Yeah,

Toban Dyck  55:58

it’s yeah, and then yeah, I agree. I agree. It’s really interesting talking to him about extension. And I mean, for some reason it really, I found it especially poignant him talking about listening. Yeah, which is interesting because lots of people on this podcast have talked about the importance of listening, and it’s not like I haven’t thought of it as important then, but really, I don’t know. For some reason, I don’t know time and place or whatever, it really stuck with me, and like, the whole idea of being comfortable with silence. I don’t know he didn’t say that, but that’s where my head went, like, because listening is being able to just stop and listen, right? I think we’re in a very high anxiety culture now, and I don’t want to make these, I don’t like these big cultural brushes, but where that’s really hard for a lot of people to be silent.

Jay Whetter  56:54

Did you like that? I did that is hard for me not to jump in. I mean,

Toban Dyck  56:59

we are doing a podcast, so we really shouldn’t embrace the silence too much. Those three seconds did seem really long. We lost people. Yeah, what happened? Dead air, but you like, in journalism, it’s one of those kind of outages where you do an interview and don’t try to feel the silence, because the other person likely will, and yet, that’s where you get good information. You get color, you get you know, that’s where the good stuff happens. Yeah.

Jay Whetter  57:32

And then if you’re advising people on how to talk to the media, I would tell them when you’re done talking, stop, and then it for as long as that silence is you kind of wait. It’s almost like a staring game, sure, you know between you and the journalist, yeah, anyway, but you’re totally right. People don’t like silence, at least not in in our in our Canadian culture. That’s true. Like I think they’re places like Finland. And I just bring up Finland because it’s the one because it’s the one that I know where they can, they can, they can, yeah, they can sit in silence, right? It’s, it’s accepted. And

Toban Dyck  58:11

I think that’s, I think that’s but I think it’s a critical part of my head always goes to teaching it like, I not that I’m a teacher of it, but I know that there’s a need. There’s I, you know, whatever, full disclosure before us groups been asked to teach or to put on classes for communications or, you know, extension and that sort of stuff. And you and I have you and I chatted about that too. I think incorporating listening and the importance of silence and some of these elements that haven’t been explicitly talked about a lot into that kind of curriculum, would be really important.

Jay Whetter  58:51

So one, I do think we should have a guest talking about listening skills. Oh,

Toban Dyck  58:56

I think that’d be great. And that’d be really interesting. That’d be very interesting. Yeah, well, we’ll save that for a future episode. But I know, I think, I think, yeah. But

Jay Whetter  59:05

for now, this has been the extensionists. I’m Jay and I’m Toban, till next time. This has been a burr forest group production. We also want to thank the people you don’t see.

Toban Dyck  59:24

We’re here. We’re chatting away with our guests, but there’s tons of people who work behind the scenes to make this podcast happen. Brian Sanchez, our director, Ashley Robinson, is the coordinator, and Abby wall is our producer and editor. You.