Episode: 17

Scott Day

Transcript

SPEAKERS

Scott Day, Toban Dyck, Jay Whetter

Toban Dyck  00:03

This is the extensionist conversations with great thinkers in agriculture. I’m Toban Dyck and I’m Jay wetter. Hey, Jay. Hey, Toban. How’s it going? Good. So I’m really excited about today’s guest. I’ve heard a lot about him. You know? I know you know him. I know people I know. Know my friend, Darrell knows him and speaks highly of him, and he’s a huge fan of the podcast. Also, that’s, that’s massive, yeah, and I know that he spends some of his time farming in Manitoba and some of his time working in ag tech for a venture capital firm, more than just ag tech in San Francisco. Yeah. And have you ever been to San Francisco? I have. So my wife and I went. I mean, we went as part of a road trip that we took in just sort of University, one of those road trips that you take, but you can’t afford to take them because you’re just out of university. It was an old VW TDI, you know, it’s a Jetta, right? So it cost nothing to drive this thing, like 1000 kilometers per tank. So we drove this thing. Air conditioning didn’t work. Taking it in summer, we drove it West Coast Canada. And then we took the kind of the Pacific Coast Highway down and we we spent some time in San Francisco. And what we loved about San Francisco, and what we learned there that we still apply today, is we did a city bus tour. So like one of those, like those, hop on, hop off busses. And to this day, if there’s an opportunity to do that in a new city, we do it because you learn so

Jay Whetter  01:40

much, right? And then you can go over background and do your own thing once you’ve seen the city totally so you

Toban Dyck  01:44

learn these kind of core areas, and you kind of, you get a kind of lay of the land, and then, yeah, then you, then you’re set loose, and then you feel you have some some purpose, or a framework to to explore further. But great, great memories, and for the brief time we spent in San

Jay Whetter  01:59

Francisco. The last time I was in San Francisco, I was with Scott, and so he drove me around to show me the city and and I had been there a couple of times before, but you know that law, I don’t know whether you saw it Lombard Street. It’s famous because it’s this windy, narrow, very steep Street. And so when Scott and I were there, a moving truck was actually, like, wedged in, like, I do not know, like, so, like, even if you had to back that thing out, like, it’s, I don’t know what the like, the grade is, probably 30 degrees or something insane like that, or get a helicopter or something. But yeah, it was the Lombard Street was blocked off because this moving truck was stuck down in there. And I have no idea how they ever got it out. Maybe it’s still there.

Toban Dyck  02:47

I do remember the street, the bus, you know, of course, goes there, yeah. And I have a, I have a photo from an old camera on on that street. I remember thinking, like, the logistics of actually a part, like living on that street and parking and like, you know, oh, I know. Just be insane, yeah? But no, I’m looking I’m very much looking forward to, yeah, today’s discussion. So

Jay Whetter  03:07

what we will touch on San Francisco, but we’re not talking, but Scott does live in the area in the winters, which is so, so cool. Should we get on with it? Let’s do it right on. But before we start today’s interview, we want to thank our episode sponsor, Manitoba, Holson, soybean. And soybean growers.

Toban Dyck  03:32

With the 2025 growing season kicking off, Manitoba Pulse and Soybean Growers wants to encourage you to sign up to receive the bean report. This bi weekly newsletter shares independent up to date information on soybean and pulse crop agronomy and research throughout the growing season, straight from MPS, G’s agronomists visit Manitoba, pulse.ca to sign up for the bean report.

Jay Whetter  04:00

All right, I’m here with my old friend Scott day. Scott is an agronomist and director with Fall Line capital, which is based out of California. Scott also farms near Dan to Manitoba, and Scott was my babysitter for a while, which I always like to tell people, yeah. And he also just recently thought, revealed that he thought we would be more polished at podcasting. And should we also talk about the socks before we

04:26

go anymore, you have to now. So

Jay Whetter  04:29

apparently our socks are a very prominent feature in the podcast. And and Scott was wondering about the particular lighting we had first for the socks, and I put a

Scott Day  04:39

lot of choice into my socks, and now I see them in this lighting. Yeah, and I maybe should have chose better than one. Maybe you could have

Jay Whetter  04:45

had some socks that matched your shirt. That’s true or mine. Mine don’t match my shirt either. Yeah, next time.

Scott Day  04:52

And yes, I did. Used to babysit Jay, but I don’t want that to be held against me, so

Jay Whetter  04:56

I feel like that’s why I’m so weird. Anybody

Toban Dyck  04:58

who’s listening to this and. Knows Jay and those Scott, I think we want to want a story related to that. Like, do you have a Do you believe you want a babysitting story? I would love a, like, a little anecdote about you babysitting Jay.

Scott Day  05:11

Well, I was the three wedder boys, and they were always so active. I, you know, I just had fun babysitting them, because they were kind of feral kids. Anyway, I like that. And we just let them out in the pasture, and then I go get them at the end of the day, them in for milk, and then I take the check and go home. It was the easiest you ended up baby. I babysit a lot of kids in the community because we were a small community, but I always like babysitting the Witter boys, because they were always so active and fun. But there’s specific stories that I won’t share,

Jay Whetter  05:48

like me beating out my brother. Yeah,

Scott Day  05:52

I just remember your dog always being center of things, and we went out into the pasture, and you guys were pretty little, and the dog ran, caught a rabbit, brought it back and ate it in front of you. Yeah, and you’re a little bit traumatized by all but it’s all the part growing up on the farm for sure. Yeah,

Toban Dyck  06:10

yes. So Scott, I’ve heard a lot about you. Oh no, right, right. So like my friend Darryl Jay talks about you, so lots of people actually, right, right? And how you’re from Delaware, you’re from the area Manitoba, center of the universe, of course, naturally and but yet, you also spend time in San Francisco, and you do some very interesting work. And so I’ve heard snapshots or little snippets of what that work is. And I just, I find it very fascinating, and I think our listeners would would like to hear that as well, just that kind of,

Scott Day  06:44

well, yeah, I’ll maybe share a little story from way back as to how I ended up with kind of always having two careers. So I, I was a U of M grad, and I don’t know if I was even would qualify for post graduate, but my friends were going to do their masters or whatever, and I decided to go on one of these, AG, exchange work experiences, which was fantastic, like I was so lucky that I got to do that. So I went to Australia for almost a year, and then Ireland for almost a year, and I came home and I didn’t know what I was going to do. Didn’t have any money, and our farm isn’t very big, so it’s not a lot of room to just all sudden be part of the farm. So I, I interviewed for the Ag rep job in Killarney, and then my neighbor was kind of retiring from his farm, and so I, I put an offer on this half section, and on the same day, on May 5, 1989 I got the the land loan in the morning and the Ag rep job in the afternoon, and and I’ve essentially been doing both ever since. And you know, there’s a lot of people that allow that to happen for me, like my family and the people I work with have been very accommodating for me to be schizophrenic, or whatever you want to say. But there was a few years into being an ag rep in Kearney. I was living on the farm, and you remember Terry McLeod from CBC. I stay in touch with him. So he I somehow got this gig where I, once a week, he would phone me about the crop conditions, and it was like five they had CBC had some crazy idea that all the farmers were up at 5am or whatever it was, but I do this interview in complete dark in the trailer so my wife wouldn’t wake up. And this one morning, it’s just for a short period of time during harvest. I did this. And this one, one morning, I decided to go to work rather than going back to bed. And I get to the Killarney office after doing this interview about how harvest was going, and my my phone was ringing in the office, and it was completely dark, you know, I remember going through the dark, finding the phone, answering the phone, and this woman from the Interlake was phoning me, and she said, like, you have the perfect mix of pathos and positivity to be in agriculture. Like I this was one of these moments you always remember. And she says, I can tell you have the soul of a farmer. And it was like, and then she hung up, and I remember sitting there in my office in the dark, thinking, Well, I’m going to be both then, you know, I’m going to try and make this work as long as possible. I’ll be compromising one or the other at times, but in the long run, I think it’s, it’s going to be complimentary. So I’ve been, I remember that moment in particular that I I thought, Okay, I’ll try, and I’ll try and be in both worlds here, because I kind of looks like I have a place there.

Jay Whetter  09:47

So some random woman from the Interlake Jones here at the office in Killarney. And,

Scott Day  09:52

yeah. And it was changed, really. It was one of those things where the hair stands up on the neck, and you kind of sit there and and then you. Know, I don’t remember what happened for the rest of the week, but I remember that very distinctly. So when I ended up, you know, I was 23 when I became an ag rep. And I was really lucky to be in that in the clarney community, the next, the next youngest egg rep was twice my age, and and so I wasn’t expecting to be an extension specialist that early. I’d always wanted to be because my one of my dad’s good friends was our local egg rep, and I always had a great deal of respect for him, and thought he was just a real professional. So I thought at some point in my future I’d like to be an ag rep. And when I was offered that at 23 I thought that I’m too young, you know. But the community was very patient and accommodating, and the people I worked with were kind of like mentors that I, you know, and I just had, you know, was far enough away from home in Deloraine that I could drive, but, you know, not too close that I was, I was people that babysit me would be judging

11:04

me, right, right? So

Scott Day  11:06

that was lucky. And then I ended up being the egg rep in boys Maine, and then then running the the research program in Melitta. So I got to kind of cover all the bases in the southwest part of the province, while working for the provincial government and still farming with my family full time. Wow. So I had 2023, years with Manitoba. AG, okay, and then while I was on a speaking tour of Australia. I know that sounds kind of grandiose, but I was asked, while I was doing my world tour between the farm, those are

11:43

the best socks you have.

Scott Day  11:47

Well, you know, we’ll see how we can do but I ended up because of those early work experiences that I had, you know, in Australia, I had friends there, and they asked me to come and speak about why I grow genetically modified crops in a Conservation Act system. So i i This became a much bigger thing than I ever imagined. I was there on a holiday with my family doing these presentations as a as a favor to a friend. But you know, looking back, I was pretty dangerous to the anti GMO movement because I didn’t have an agenda. I wasn’t working for a company. I wasn’t representing anyone but myself. And you know, at the time Roseanne woke was the Ag minister who I really enjoyed working with her and for her, and she said, Don’t get any trouble down there, and don’t get any arguments with anybody, even though you’re my holiday. So she had a point, like, they’ll go around stirring things up because you’re going to it’s going to come back to the government anyways. So I gave this presentation in West Australia, and there was a woman in the audience that there was a small group, but she got up and walked to the front and start pushing me around. And Anne, my wife, stood up as if to take her out, like I’m not the fighter. And so, because we didn’t know what was going on here, she was the head of the anti GMO movement in Australia. Oh, wow. And she left the building, and everybody calmed down. I didn’t know what had happened, and she wrote this letter to the editor that went in all the major papers in Australia. And it was a sad day for agriculture in Australia. My play on my last name, yeah, and she pointed out all these things that were that I would have answered if she stayed and heard my presentation. One of her points was that we we saw a massive increase in farmer suicide in Western Canada since the adoption of GMOs. I’m like, that’s not true, but then where’s my data to back, you know? Anyways, this ended up in all the major papers in Australia. I’d go to the next meeting in South Australia. There’s like 300 people there, television cameras and so on. Wow. And I’m thinking, I promised Roseanne I wasn’t going to get any trouble. I’m from the government of Manitoba, and I’m here to help you guys, the ignorant masses of Australia. So, so this became a much bigger thing than anticipated, and then I got invited back to speak at the no till conferences in Australia about the same thing a couple years later, and there was this precision ag expert that was part of those same meetings. Well, I never met him before. He was brilliant. He was the first farmer to ever use auto steer. He was the first farmer to ever develop or use sectional control on a sprayer. And we became friends. That farmer was clay Mitchell, or is clay Mitchell? So a few years later, Clay decides to create this company with his friend from. University, and I got the call as the first employee. So,

Jay Whetter  15:04

and these aren’t friends from the University of North Dakota, like this was, I mean, this clay was a farmer. What’s the other guy’s name, Eric Orion, so, but they were, is it Harvard or what? Yeah, they were at Harvard together on

Scott Day  15:17

the ski team, on the ski that’s where our name Fall Line comes from. It’s kind of hard to explain kind of a pretentious skiing term to farmers for your What does fall line mean? Skier it? I’m not exactly certain myself, but I think it’s the fastest, most efficient way down, fastest way to your goal, the most efficient way to go. Okay, so that’s a long I’m not going to be long winded about everything, but that kind of cover encompasses how a farmer from Dan Manitoba now works for a venture firm in San Francisco. But So

Jay Whetter  15:50

yeah, it just goes to show that, you know, striking up a conversation with some not to say Clay was random, but some guy you meet halfway around the world, you never know where that that might lead.

Scott Day  16:00

That’s a great point, you know, because agriculture and food production is a common language no matter where you are. And even going back to that work experiences in those countries, there’s just so many people that you meet that you become friends with for life because you share common concerns and goals and issues, even though you’re in the middle of Australia or, you know, in the Wicklow Mountains of Ireland, and, and I’m always, I’m always up for a conversation, you know, if the other person is on a plane or a train or whatever, because those always lead to something fascinating. And you’re

Jay Whetter  16:35

a good storyteller. So do you think clay connected with you because, and maybe it’s a combination of all three, but, but that you, you were farmer, an extension person, or was it just that you, he enjoyed talking to you. I didn’t make a headline.

Scott Day  16:51

I, I, I guess you’d have to ask Clay What he saw me. But I think in some ways we needed to have a person with the company, because we’re in farmland acquisition and management. And then, you know, at that time, at the beginning, we weren’t that focused on ag tech, so I was going to be part of, you know, the how we found farms worked with farmers. And that was, you know, a big part of what I did, I also know that clay, where he farms in Iowa, he’s never really had a crop failure, and he’s only grown corn and soybeans. And I was coming from a place where we have some sort of a disaster every other year, and have all this experience with other crops and other environments. So I was bringing a completely different perspective to the company. And we very fortunate. We have a great team, and we have employees from, you know, from Argentina, France, other countries as well. And it just makes it, you know, always great to have those diverse perspectives in something like what we’re doing.

Jay Whetter  18:01

So ball line, what you said, That’s it was farmland acquisition. And now you’re, you’re, well, you’re in and out of tech, I guess, which we’ll get to. But what was the, what was the purpose of the company?

Scott Day  18:12

So the the two founders, these two friends from university, they, uh, Eric O’Brien, our CEO. He was a tech fund, tech fund manager in Silicon Valley, and that’s his home, is the Bay Area. And 15 years ago, 20 years ago, they were making a lot of money in tech. You know, there had been the bubble burst in 2000 and then things were coming back again, and a lot of people were looking to farmland as a stable, consistent investment against all this stuff that has incredible valuations but exists in the ether. You know, it could go to zero tomorrow. And so Eric was contacting his one farmer friend from Harvard about farmland investment. And between the two of them, they they thought, Well, why don’t we just do this ourselves? There’s some distinct advantages, and in each you know, network and perspectives to create a farmland Investment Fund. And our initial focus was farms that, in general, needed fixing up that we put in tile drainage, or we put in irrigation systems, we introduced new crops, tried to create more diverse rotations, all that sort of stuff, but with a focus on soil and water conservation and then our the Investors we we attracted for the for the most part, also put value on soil and water conservation. They they didn’t know a lot about farming, and they were going to maybe get distracted with some of the other terms that are used in sustainable farming, right? But, you know, we were, we’re able to convince them that topsoil is the asset. So. Asset Preservation is reducing erosion, right? 10 years from now, 15 years ago, 10 or 15 years from now, that asset preservation is where your appreciation is going to come from, and and so we were very fortunate to attract and institutional investors to use us as their vehicle to invest in farmland. So in the US, we’re a real estate investment trust, which means we can only buy in the United States. But also within that, there are several states where we can’t buy because they do not allow an LLC, a corporation. So North Dakota’s off limits, Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota is kind of iffy. Kansas is a little iffy. Oklahoma’s off the table. Those are places we can’t invest. We could create a different vehicle. We could to do the investment, but that that would, I don’t know, that’d be kind of risky or take a lot of effort. And so we found the states we could work in, and we started focusing on there, and we found some really great opportunities. We ended up in an area of Mississippi, for instance, called the black belt, where there had been farming around the Civil War, but there hadn’t been a lot of farming since the Civil War, and this is near the Alabama border. We bought this large farm, developed it, and most of the community are Haldimand Mennonites, connected to Manitoba. And so they’ve like the one farmer we work with. His grand, great grandfather had been the mayor of Steinbeck. You know, they’re asking me questions. Do you know where Sinclair Manitoba is, or Cartwright, or, you know these places that you wouldn’t expect from a farmer from Mississippi. That’s amazing. That was fantastic working with those people. Some of them have come back, you know, driven up here looking to visit with family, have ended up at my farm and Dan as well. So we couldn’t operate the farms ourselves. We had to rent them out to neighbors, and not neighbors, but local farmers. And that that was also very gratifying as well being

Jay Whetter  22:01

you couldn’t based on the rules, or you just didn’t get the

Scott Day  22:04

Yeah, this is this was all so foreign to me. But because you’re a real estate investment trust, and you own the asset, if you operate it, that’s a conflict of interest, and it exists in in other forms of real estate as well. So what was

Jay Whetter  22:22

your job in, in either the purchasing or the or the maintenance or the operation of these farms?

Scott Day  22:30

Well, so maybe just one step back in that, I took a sabbatical for a winter. I was working for the research group, and Daryl was my Daryl demetric was my boss. Oh, yeah, and so he granted, let’s say, a sabbatical, because that was 2011 I don’t know if you remember, everything was flooded. We couldn’t even get our plot seated, and I didn’t get my farm seated. Neither did my neighbors. So we had a bit of time on our hands. So that’s when I went in this first winter to be a part of this and and then I came back to the department, thinking that would be it. And then that summer of 2012 they kept working on me to quit the government and go full time. And I said, I don’t. I don’t. I don’t really want to do this. Live in San Francisco all the time. So it was their idea to allow me to come back to Manitoban farm in the summer and live there in the winter. So I, I’m really more of a support person to the team that manages the farms, or at the beginning, I was involved in a lot of the diligence of finding farms and and, and, you know, we never did things alone, but there was usually two or three of us that would travel to an area, and we were probably the only land invest farmland investment group that always used the extension service in the local area. Like that was certainly one of my roles, was to talk to the local Extension people, let them know what we’re doing. You know, we don’t want to do things in secret. We we don’t want to be anything like that. And that was part of Clay’s pitch to me, and getting me to quit the government is he says, You’ll never have to compromise your values. I don’t, I won’t expect that of you at all. And I feel that’s been very true in the 14 years since I’ve been a part of this. So we would go to a community, after finding out parcels for sale, and you talk to local Extension people about, okay, what sort of issues are with that area? Who do you think we should work with in the area? You know, which sort of contractors, and they were always very least, in my experience, were great resources for us that I don’t think anybody else was using in our line of work, yeah, so I was helping with diligence, and then you would be part of picking the tenants, because we need tenants that want to work with us, right? Because we do want them to pay attention to soil and water conservation, and that’s not easy in certain areas. So you want to. Right? You want to make them feel comfortable working with us, because they’re going to be making some concessions and and so I played that role as well of tenant relations farm acquisition. Then I eventually ended up managing our farms in Montana and Wisconsin, because I could drive to them, right? Yeah, right.

Toban Dyck  25:22

So you’re on these farms, you are implementing kind of new, new practices, or or, what does that? What does that look like? So

Scott Day  25:31

it depends on every farm in every situation. So the one in Mississippi that I referred to like it hadn’t been farmed for over whatever there’s 150 years, or whatever, your first gotta it’s, there’s, it’s like grazing with some trees, you clear it. And then we built some really large dams. We found out we built the largest down in the state of Mississippi, outside of government. When we were done building the dam, we didn’t think it was that but then we found out we were doing some pretty major projects in relation to what the state had normally experienced and that particular area, the county agent wrote me a thank you note for coming to the area and bringing this development like I thought that was kind of cool. That’s kind of cool. And the dam was for irrigation water. Yeah. This is the, you know, every every area has its kind of interesting quirkiness when it comes to agronomy. But you’re in an area that has 60 to 70 inch rainfall, but if you don’t have irrigation for let’s say, six to eight inches of rain and or six to eight inches of water in July, you’ll have half a crop. So you gotta have tile drainage, service, drainage and irrigation in order to be top production in a lot of areas of the South. And one thing you’ll you know when, when we’re in the delta. Now the Mississippi Delta, if there’s a farm that’s got pivots on it, you’ll discount it. You’re going to move back to flood irrigation, depending on where you are, whereas obviously other areas, pivot irrigation is a real asset, but there on the flat Delta, it’s actually a deterrent. So You quickly learn all those sort of things as well.

Jay Whetter  27:12

Why is it a deterrent? Because they just get stuck, or they’re not as efficient, they’re

Scott Day  27:15

not as efficient. And you also have this ability now with new technology, with Lidar and all that, to do precision leveling of field really accurately and little terraces, as opposed to simply having a field leveling action. That’s that’s a straight gradient. So for less money, you can level a field and flood irrigate from corner to corner really effectively.

Jay Whetter  27:39

So the terraces, so, I mean, there might be many and not noticeable, but that the just the water kind of sinks in and then flows. So rather than this, this kind of the steady running off the

Scott Day  27:49

field, that’s right? And also you need less. You don’t have to move as much soil to level a field if you do it in these little terraces, okay? And you’ll flood irrigate, obviously, rice, but you’ll maybe want to plant corn on that field the next year, and you need to have it drain as well as flood. So these there’s little you know, advancements in technology that really kind of change how you’re going to manage and and develop those farms. How do

Toban Dyck  28:22

you I can imagine, with all the farms, all the land, all the different scenarios, which are probably kind of infinite, like as many different farms as, yeah, how do you stay kind of up to date with all the possibilities for these lands in terms of how to improve? I

Scott Day  28:36

don’t know if I do. How do you think it’s what really it is is, is you develop a network in an area, and then there they really, you know, once this comes up, always, I guess, always comes back to kind of relationships. So if our tenants are like working with us and trust us, they’re going to be bringing us other farms to buy. And if you’re in a community and you’re not, you’re part of the community, you’re not being kind of disruptive. The local Extension Service, the university, the companies, they’re kind of like, Hey, would you like to do this? So we’re doing a project with our new farms in Arkansas, with the University of Arkansas, because they see in us, probably a good collaborator in trying new things. Now this will be specifically in relation to biochar and compost. We do some we’re doing some projects in the Pacific Northwest as well with local university, and that’s probably what’s keeping us at work. We’re not doing new things for the sake of new things, right? We’re doing new things that might be not all that innovative for the area, but have just not been widely adopted, because we still got to make money on these farms. Sure, sure,

Jay Whetter  29:50

is the compost manure compost, or is it some other compost? Well,

Scott Day  29:54

the US, I think it’s the climate smart program has significant. That grants right maybe right now, I don’t know if they’re still in place, but you can’t apply biochar to get the money on its own. It has to be mixed with a compost or a manure to provide the microorganisms to create the permanent carbon storage possibility for the biochar. So the biochar itself, right now, you can get it in many places for free, because people made it in the lumber industry or whatever, and then they can’t get rid of it. So we’re not a huge proponent of this. We’re just going to see how it works out. We don’t think there’s a negative downside, but that’s just an example of one of the things we work with. But with your

Jay Whetter  30:41

extension career before you came into this, how does what you learned as an ag rap translate into what you’re doing? This

Scott Day  30:53

is, I think that’s, that’s a great question, because I think in particular, working with Darryl and the diversification groups I’m there’s probably not a day goes, certainly not a week goes by where I’m not referencing something I did at the research group way to still, you know, that’s awesome, yeah, because we tried ancient grains. Well, you know, I got ex. I have experience with spelt and camelina and all these crazy ideas that come up from entrepreneurs in San Francisco. I, you know, I had a person that very wealthy in San Francisco phone me wanting to buy a half a million acres in Saskatchewan to grow quinoa and and I’m like, That’s the stupidest idea ever heard. Just pay farmers to grow quinoa. You don’t need to own the land. And then he was surprised I even knew about quinoa. And I’m like, Well, I, you know, I used to grow it in this demonstration plot. Well, then I got a call from another guy who knew, this guy that wanted to talk about camelina. I’m like, Yeah, I dried, you know. So even though I don’t have extensive experience, I know about the crop they’re talking about that’s one thing, and then on the other side of it, you have so many, I guess, other companies that are trying to implement like products that aren’t going to succeed, that never, fundamentally had a chance, but they Get a lot of attention. Yeah, and, and I have experienced a lot of experience with that through working for Manitoba, ag and so John, heard John gibowski, Daryl Dimitri, those people remain important resources. Don flayton, important resources for me in the US, because, you know, it’s important to have that neutral third party verification of things. That’s amazing. We’ve, I’ve actually hired Ross McKenzie to do work for us in the US, the former soils guy out of Alberta, yeah, Dr Karen beauchamin, former research scientist at Lethbridge. She’s been a great resource for us in methane mitigation technology, and so all those connections I made have been incredibly important for us making decisions on the farm and also in ag tech. I

Jay Whetter  33:15

want to get to AG tech, but just with the farms. So yeah, you want to obviously make money be successful. You’re implementing a lot of new ideas. You’re investing in irrigation, like you said, and drainage. Are there things that you’ve learned in running those farms in the states that you think any farm should consider?

Scott Day  33:42

Oh, that’s a great question as well. I this is maybe a low ball, but, you know, I’ve done tile drainage on my farm in Manitoba because of what we learned with the tile drainage in the Deep South, in Wisconsin, some of those other areas. And I, you know, I’m not sure it’s going to pay on my farm in Manitoba, but I know there was nothing else I could do. And I got comfortable with how it was an important part of how we improve farms in the south. So that’s, that’s a tangible one, right off the bat. I think the other thing in our line of work, what’s happened is we’ve fixed up and built some really beautiful farms in areas where we don’t have a big tenant pool and they do not make money, you know, if we could move that farm? So it comes back to location, location, okay, location, right? And if, if we could move those farms, you know, even 100 miles somewhere else, they’d be worth a fortune. But, of course, they were a deal. We developed this beautiful irrigation property, but there’s not a big ag infrastructure in the area. It’s mostly branching. There’s a few examples of that, and we’re not going to do that again. And. You

Jay Whetter  35:00

so when you finally do exit or sell, yeah, I learned that way from you, yeah. So like, are you looking for other institutional investors? Are you trying to sell it back into the well, you know,

Scott Day  35:16

we have a fiduciary responsibility to get the most for, yeah, the farms. So we, we did have an unsolicited offer for many of our farms, which we we sold to that entity. But then we sold a lot of farms to our tenants or our neighbors, and that was gratifying, because, you know, they obviously saw the were the highest value bidder on the property. Yeah, and we sold our farms in Wisconsin to 19 different buyers right on and in Montana, they’ve all sold to the to the neighbors or the tenants. But it isn’t necessarily we made a lot of money on this, you know, is it’s but it is that they saw the highest value, and even though they’re the, you know, the closest to the property. So that gave that was very gratifying, yeah, for sure. And I know those other farms we sold to a single entity that made things quite efficient, and I think we did well. But if we had had the time and the effort to go through selling it to the neighbors and the tenants, we probably would have done well there too, like that.

Jay Whetter  36:17

Can we pivot to tech? Yeah, yeah, sure. So, so last, last year,

36:23

because your producer is telling you to pivot to

Jay Whetter  36:28

tech jazz, I’m

36:31

surprised he’s not using a later laser pointer

36:39

spools down your mic.

Jay Whetter  36:41

So last year, I spent five days with you in March at your house in Palo Alto, San Francisco area, and I went to the World agritech Innovation Summit in San Francisco. And I never saw you because you were in a million meetings. I mean, I saw you at night and but, but during the event, you’re so, so busy. But I just, I remember that I just, you invited me on a couple of these pitches from these people. And I was thinking that was really nice of Scott to let me come and hang out, and I did all kinds of talking. Of course, Scott’s probably talked out, and he’s like, let’s just nice to have you there to take over. Let’s just let Jay ask questions, because I can’t talk anymore. I’ve been in 100 meetings already today. This is Scott talking anyway, so I just I, because this is about extension and communication. Yeah, and there’s so many new ideas out there, right? So I want to get your thoughts on how someone with a new idea pitches it in a way that’s effective, like, what? What works from your perspective?

Scott Day  37:47

Yeah. Well, like I said, we started out as a farmland company. We kind of became invited into the Ag tech world based on where we were. So this wasn’t the essence of our existence. This just became something we got invited into, and then we kind of had a knack for it. And part of it was, a lot of it is because we had farms in that perspective already that we other investment firms and technology wanted us involved, you know, to give that validation or whatever. And then, you know, we’re probably talking to 700 to 800 companies a year, and there’s only five or six of us. You know, I had two calls on the way here, and you don’t you want to keep the network open all the time, because you things change, priorities change, we might have an opening for certain investments in an area where we didn’t have that a week ago. So we always want to keep that going. And that’s one thing I tell startups, is, if we reject you don’t, you know, don’t burn bridges, because and that happens sometimes, you know, these people that are put their life’s work into a startup, and then you don’t finance them, they sometimes react very poorly, and I can understand that, but don’t do that, because we will come back at some point there. We could come back at some point and finance you so valuable. You know, kind of last week I was at this past week, or this past few days, I’ve been at an event, I had five requests from startups to review their pitch deck, even though I they know I’m not going to or we’re not going to invest in them, because they want this same sort of insight into how do we get the attention of a venture capital firm? And I’m a little you know, I know what I like to see, but we’re a different firm than the other firm, than the other firm. The big thing right now is there’s no money in the system. There’s we’re losing companies that we’ve invested in that we were very happy with, and they’ve shut down because there’s no money to get them to commercial success, and there’s no monies, in some cases, on the consumer side either. We’ve been really lucky in the 35 Companies we invested in, 35 or so, almost all of them achieved the technical goals that you put forth or you expected from them, which is really the big risk when you’re an early stage tech investor, is, are they going to create their thing that they said they were going to do? And then you hope that other money comes into the system to get them to that next stage. So when you’re trying to capture the attention of somebody like our company, you it always pays to do a little bit of work ahead of time on who we are. And so many startups waste half of the time explaining that the world’s going to collapse and they’re going to save it. You know that there’s 2050, 10 billion we’re not going to be able to be able to feed everybody the you know, the climate’s collapsing, the world’s going to be destroyed. That’s something that, if you’re an experienced ag tech company, you’ve heard this a million times already. Get past that some way. You can acknowledge it, but get past it quickly and get to what is unique about your technology and what’s protected, because you we’re not going to invest in something that somebody else is going to come along. And you know, if you don’t have the patents in place or the protection in place, that’s that’s really important, trade secrets, we are taking a big risk if your only protection is trade secrets, right? And then you want to have you, when you’re have that first visit with a founder that’s created this amazing thing, you want, if you have some sort of signal that that person is willing to step aside. That’s good, because very rarely, that person’s going to be the person that makes it a commercial success. So if they’re, if they’re going to be, you know, stubborn and obstinate, that they’re, they’re going to, if you get that impression that they’re not going to give up any control, then that’s going to be hard for us to to be confident that it’ll get to some commercial success, because the chances of that happening is extremely rare, right? Yeah, and we’re dealing right now with a company exactly like that early stage. There’s no way this is going to be the person that keep and and, you know, just we have so much going on in managing, finding out new companies and so on. We need these seamless changes in how they work.

Jay Whetter  42:24

How do you know a person’s not the right person? This is how it’s kind

Scott Day  42:29

of like, in a lot of ways, when you’re in it for a while, you get certain signals about, you know, how they talk about, you know, at this point in the future, I’m going to do this, and I’m going to do that and and you have, I guess a little your intuition grows as to, okay, this person’s going to be a little bit of a megalomaniac here.

Jay Whetter  42:50

No, it’s going to be a bit of a problem. So it’s not so much that they’re, that they’re, they’re super smart and they’ve created an amazing thing, but they just don’t have the personality to sell it. It’s more that they, they’re just, they’re actually, you know,

Scott Day  43:03

we would, so you actually wants that sort of, you know, eccentric, mad genius at the beginning, yeah, but you, you don’t want that person, well, you don’t want that person managing other people, you know, if they’re working 24 hours a day, there can be a huge backlash, and then the consumer facing that, that that marketing phase, that’s a different person as well. So I don’t want to say that this is something we would dwell on. I just thought that would be an interesting point. Really interesting.

Jay Whetter  43:34

You know, it goes back to almost running any business, yeah, is that, you know, you know, you recognize your own strengths. Yeah. I mean, it takes some self reflection and then to say, How can I, can I grow the business? Or do I need to bring in someone else to grow the business? Yeah, and

Scott Day  43:51

so if that person too close to home, if that person brings that up early on, then you’re gonna, you’re, we’re gonna have a lot of confidence in that person, so

Jay Whetter  44:00

a little bit of humility right off the bat. Yes,

Scott Day  44:04

well, they can still be as eccentric and boastful as they want about what they’re able to do. Yeah, right, but don’t think that you’re going to be able to do everything, because that’s probably not going to succeed.

Toban Dyck  44:15

So do you have a similar kind of gut about the products themselves, that they’re that they’re selling? So you have the person, and there’s a judge, there’s a judgment. I mean, judgment sounds, sounds $10 solutions

Jay Whetter  44:25

for $1 problem.

Toban Dyck  44:28

So then you have the pitch of the actual product, piece of tech, or whatever. You kind of have a similar kind of intuition to, is that a data driven thing? It’s,

Scott Day  44:38

it’s funny with us having companies that are not going to make it right now, we’re a lot more humility than we had a few months ago, where we this is going to work out well. A lot of the time in early stage, your bet, you’re betting on the team as much as anything. You don’t want to invest in a widget. That’s a one trick pony. You’re often looking for a platform that could expand to other uses and other markets and and then you’re always coming back to the to the ability of the team and their credentials. We We’ve invested in a company last year that is protein design, and we just thought the team’s really cool, and the founder won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. And so we look kind of like, yeah, with our investors.

Jay Whetter  45:30

So you invested before? Yeah, we won the prize. Yeah,

Scott Day  45:33

before the co founder won nice actually, the little story here is we, we’re having our annual meeting with our investors, and we the new companies, give a presentation, and the CEO of this company, he missed his cue on the Zoom to join us. And we were like, Oh, this is not going to work out that well, because we were kind of proud of them. We wanted him to speak and and then a few minutes later, he comes on, and he stressed, formally, he’s at the Nobel Prize a ceremony in Stockholm. We didn’t even know that. And he’s he’s not the one getting the award, the founder that’s not with the company more was getting the award, but he’s connected to him, so he was part of the award ceremony at the Nobel Prize event. And we’re like, like our investors. We didn’t tell them this because we didn’t know it was happening. If you want to have a good, you know, annual meeting, have a spontaneous Nobel Prize ceremony during the meeting

46:33

from the awards ceremony. That’s amazing.

Scott Day  46:37

So, you know, I guess that’s a bit of a tangent, but it comes back to you. You obviously expect the technology to be unique and useful and potential. But when you look at some of our investments, people are like, Well, that was pretty specific, but we were expecting a much bigger play from that technology, like robotic weeding to move into sea and spray automations of all other equipment, because there’s a whole bunch of things that make that work that could be applied to many other pieces of equipment, right? But if you don’t have the team that you think you know if, if they peaked at that point that they’ve talked to you, that’s not great. Yeah, they got to have a whole bunch of other potential there, but that does sometimes happen. Yeah, it’s hard to predict, yeah. And we, you know, we were not 100% but we’ve been fortunate that most of the companies have achieved their technical goals. What

Jay Whetter  47:32

happened to the money? Why is there no money?

Scott Day  47:36

Is there no money? We want to get into a political discussion,

47:41

if we have to, but

Scott Day  47:42

I’m, you know, this is one of, like, this panel I was on this week. I’m the agronomist, and the other guys were CEOs of investment firms. They know this stuff much more than I do. I just have this farmer perspective on things. So this is my opinion. This isn’t anything expert or whatever. But you look at some of the AG, tech lately that has failed miserably, like billion dollar losses in the last few weeks on companies that we didn’t invest in because we didn’t think, you know, if we could have made money on on tech that we thought wasn’t going to succeed, we would be very wealthy right now because we were doing a we’re doing a pretty good job of picking the ones that are going to fail. And so when you have all that attention and money leaving the system to follow, you know, to chase a fantasy that really takes the winds out of the sale, the wind sails for everything that’s a specific thing, then you have an overall just collapse of tech investing in general. So in right now, there’s three startups that I know of. I don’t know them. I haven’t talked to them specifically, but I’m aware of them that their entire business model is shutting down other startups, and they’re raising money and they’re and so one in particular I was reading about closed down 500 startups in Silicon Valley last year. So the big business in startups shutting down startups? Yeah, it’s the

Jay Whetter  49:05

number one stock on NASDAQ, yeah,

Scott Day  49:09

inevitable, yeah. So it’s, it’s not just, you know, it’s Tech in general. Yeah, it was a, I don’t, I don’t call it a bubble or whatever. But you also have this transfer of attention to artificial intelligence, where there’s so much money going into that, and there is a finite amount of money, and so you’ve had, you know, a change of attention. You’ve had mistakes being made, and and then you have uncertainty about what’s going on.

Jay Whetter  49:42

So just on the this, this repeated notion that their world population is going to hit 10 billion by 2015, 2050, and we’re going to run out of food. You still like? Does that still drive or I think the population projections are maybe pulling back a little. Bit is there is the need to feed the world still a driving factor in agriculture? Well,

Scott Day  50:07

you know, I, I, I’ve heard a couple of presentations. What was the guy from the Toronto and the Globe and Mail that wrote the book ingebrigts?

Jay Whetter  50:16

Iverson,

Scott Day  50:18

yes, so, yeah, not John Anderson. John Iverson. Iverson, yeah, John Anderson does the Rock and Roll tours or something, yeah. So he, I think he was like, we’re gonna peak right about now or something like that. Anyways, this aspect that we’re gonna run out of food, yeah?

Jay Whetter  50:36

Ibbitson, yeah, okay. It was anger britson,

Scott Day  50:43

but you look at, okay, yeah, 2025, grain prices aren’t so great. We got over supply. There’s still vast potential in other parts of the world. Canada isn’t dealing with you know, you know, we’re able to produce at point. That keeps grain prices from going up higher than they should be because of oversupply. And I look, I don’t know if I’m wording that well, but we’re not dealing with food crisises on an ongoing basis. We’re dealing with distribution and inputs. And some of these actually a lot of political issues, but not not an overall climate induced catastrophe or concern right now we’re growing soybeans from the, you know, the edge of the tree row to the bottom, or the tree line to the tip of South America now, and that’s conventional plant breeding. That’s not GM or CRISPR, right? That could take it to another level now, we got a vast area that we can grow these crops just with a little bit of tweaking. So So I was

Jay Whetter  51:45

wondering about like that. So sometimes I feel like the base agronomy, we still have a ways to go and just getting people to do that, and maybe tech, like, is tech gonna save the world? Or do just need to, like, coming back to being extension people, yeah, do we just need to extend what we already know and already have?

Scott Day  52:06

Well, those are kind of like two big general things. It’s like, of course, we think tech is going to do some things, but not all tech is going to do some things. And we’re looking at technology right now, you know that will replace conventional pesticides, yeah, that are very effective, very inexpensive, very safe. You know, the RNA based products that that we’ve invested in, a company that makes pesticides out of RNA, and their first year, last year, with controlling Colorado potato beetle was great. They’re sold out for 2025 they now have a new product that really improves all insecticides. And these are, these are products that are just made from proteins, yeah. So when you use them, there may be effective for a few days, and then they degrade into only nitrogen. There’s no residual issue of anything. And they can make a pesticide, a herbicide, they can make an insecticide, a fungicide and a herbicide from this. And we’re invested in another company in France that’s making the same suite of pesticides out of peptides, rather than RNA based stuff. And that’s going to be, I think that’s going to be profound, right?

Jay Whetter  53:20

Yeah, so maybe from the farm level, you’re still spraying a product, so nothing changes in terms of your practices, but the product itself is technically much better than, yeah,

Scott Day  53:30

it’s like, you know, show me the money, show me the return on investment. Yeah, I don’t care. It’s RNA, unless it’s going to do a better job for less money or more efficiently. And I think that’s gonna that’s gonna be the case at least the few products we they have going forward. But as far as I don’t know, autonomous tractors and that sort of thing, there will be specific uses for that, but widespread will be a long ways down the road, if, if at all in my generation. But these other aspects that are more related to platforms on even plant breeding, continuing to make leaps after kind of a long period of not necessarily making big leaps. I think that’s still there.

Toban Dyck  54:10

I think when you mentioned that you want these people who are pitching to kind of get over that the population is growing too fast, and we need to kind of have tech to save, save the day, because it’s just like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m with you. I’ve heard that a lot in speeches at conferences and stuff. They’re like, that’s how they anchor interest. I what I what I read into that a little bit. And I think, like, I would want them to get past that, because I don’t really buy it, or I feel like it’s just too Pat. It’s just not getting anything of substance. So is there a pitch that stands out to you that got right into it, like, right into something that was a bit unique and didn’t, didn’t rely on those kind of conveniences? It was

Scott Day  54:52

those, I think, those that go rate rate to a return on investment in. Clear on what the market is and what their cost is and what their margin is like. They’ve done their homework that this has to succeed at the farm level in order for it to to scale or persevere. You know, at this conference on Wednesday was an animal tech conference. It was asked of the audience, do you think the consumer will pay more for methane mitigation? Methane mitigated, milk or beef? No one put their hand up. And then one person in the industry stood up and said, we have data now that will show if you claim that you’ll have a negative response in the marketplace. And yet, on the tech side, you know, there’s so many companies looking to address that issue, which is something that maybe should be addressed, but if you’re going to rely on that market to pay for the technology that doesn’t seem to have any support, on this other side, like you’re not going to get a farmer to mitigate methane and compromise productivity if you’re not showing a significant return on investment for that risk. So rather than something specific, I would say that it is definitely those, those those tech pitches, that understand how they’re going to improve efficiency and return on investment right off the bat.

Toban Dyck  56:21

So to take this back to extension, in your years of working with Manitoba, AG, and then also in your role, now, what have you have you kind of zeroed in on some really good, effective extension techniques.

Scott Day  56:38

There’s one pet peeve of mine that’s I’m known now. I’m known for with our company, it’s when they give a pitch and they use stock images or print photos backwards, like where the Combine unloading argon is on the right side, right. I just gloss over at that moment like you did not put an effort into that. And a few weeks ago, I was really kind of, I guess this, these two guys that had raised a company that was worth a billion dollars that had gone bankrupt, of one of the ones, they contacted me about their next issue or their next technology because they’d remembered me as a farmer, kind of tearing them apart when they did their raise, and I we never gave them any money, and they raised a billion dollars, and then they went bankrupt, and they have this new technology, and I was going to be the first to hear their pitch, and they wanted me to tear it apart, and had been built entirely from an AI agent this pitch, it was the worst presentation I’d ever seen. There was, there was implements in it that I had no idea what they were. They didn’t either the robot or the agent had created these mythical, mythical pieces of equipment. And the weird thing was, is one of the pieces was attached to a 4440 John Deere, like a legitimate photo. It got scrubbed off the internet, and then it attached this alien mutated thing on the back of it. Limb, yeah, yeah. So in extension and pitch, be very sincere, and, and, and I don’t care if it’s quality photos or quality graphs, have some sort of connection to it, rather than just grabbing something off the internet, yeah, and then we’re always seeing data that doesn’t have context, you know, right? Your hockey stick things, and they’ll, they’ll give the axis or whatever, but they won’t give your coefficient of variance or whatever. Not that, I’m a stats expert, but if I don’t see the context of the data, you know, I’m gonna, I’m, we’re gonna want to see it. So if you’re brave, and if you, if you have the ability to give the context to your data that really backs up that you’re doing something that’s significant, then that definitely do that, rather than vague things like 50% increase in yield, but no context with that, right, right? So you’re looking at a little bit of humility, yeah, certainly sincerity and authenticity and and try and make sure it’s relevant to your your technology, what you’re presenting, you know, a lot of them. There was a company that gave a pitch about, let’s say, peas, and how this was, this was going to save the world their pea meal. And it’s a picture of a young girl running through a field of soybeans in southern Manitoba, because I recognized the hog barns and they, and this is a California company, so they’d obviously scrub that off some website, amazing. And they’re bragging about what they’re going to saving the world with peas. And I said, you know, that’s a field of soybeans from Manitoba. You obviously, if you’re going to ask for ten million put some homework. Do some homework on that. Yeah,

Toban Dyck  59:55

certainly preaching to the choir on that. I have, like, dozens.

Scott Day  59:59

Of examples, but I don’t want to embarrass those companies,

1:00:04

the safe space. I’m just kidding. Yeah, nobody

Scott Day  1:00:06

listens to this. Don’t worry. But I think I’m the 12th follower. We’re

1:00:11

not even recording. I

1:00:16

noticed it was unplugged. You’re watching the hockey game, curling, yeah, curling, yeah, it’s over,

Jay Whetter  1:00:24

Scott, when you think of changes you’ve made on your own farm, or things you’ve adopted, so you’ve got a bit of a leg up on, I think, just with all your experience with with like, yeah, it was observing and critiquing new, new ideas. So as any of this stuff, you mentioned the tile drainage, yeah? But as like, Yeah, what else have you how do people get through to you now on terms of an actual farm, right? Input?

Scott Day  1:00:53

Well, it’s, you know, this was even more important when I was in ag rep, because we farm like three, three miles of highway footage. So farmers didn’t care what I said. They want to know what I do, right? Yeah, I don’t care what you say. I want to see what you do in your farm. And I was, you know, I guess another going back into how I ended up here, I was really fortunate to be asked to be part of the no till Association when I was a new ag rep. And I remember they were all these older people that I had an immense amount of respect for. When they asked me to be part of the man deck Noto group, I was like, so honored. And then I said, I’m not a I’m not a zero tiller. And they said, That doesn’t matter, because you will be, I remember they it wasn’t like, but you will be and, and I did get to, you know, switch in the early 90s. Then I, then I was awarded the no till Canadian no till Farmer of the Year in 1999

1:01:46

oh my gosh. And I’ve actually, that’s still

Scott Day  1:01:49

on my bio, even though, and that was the that same year. This is where we’re getting into story time. That is this the year my grandmother’s Christmas letter had how proud she was of her grandson for winning Canadian rototiller. I could just imagine grandma’s friends thinking, Scott’s not much of an athlete. How did he win the rototiller of the Year award? Anyways, that was actually became a part of my like how I ended up at those other events in Australia, so no till was a big all of us were early adopters, but I was an early adopter of no till dry beans. I remember speaking in Altona and people getting upset because we were destroying their their method of growing dry beans. You know, I did sunflowers, no till and that sort of thing. But I think it it, you know, I’m a terrible example of a research farm. Now, because I don’t have any time, I’m just managing the farm to be as efficient as possible. You know, all of us that have jobs off the farm, we have different motivation and priorities. So it doesn’t, it doesn’t, you know, it doesn’t mean we, we don’t want to do those things. It just doesn’t fit in and and I’m very fortunate, my dad had remained, has remained active the whole time, so he worries while I jet around the world. Yeah. So it partly was, you know, his cooperation that loud. But I would say there are a million things that I would be doing today, if I didn’t have, if I had the time to do that, I would be growing corn right now, you know. And we were the first to bring the sampco planter into us with the biodegradable plastic. They use them in northern Ontario and in Newfoundland. We got tremendous yield advantages in Wisconsin, but it’s not worth the hassle or the effort in relation to that climate. What does that do? It’s a planting system out of Ireland that’s been around for a while, and you just simply plant the corn with biodegradable plastic over it, and creates probably about 500 680 or heat units, corn heat units. It’s not a slam dunk, but it’d be something I would be trying. Yeah, you know, I would definitely be doing some longer season crops and maybe more diverse rotation, but the tile drainage, the surface drainage and and my approach to fertility and prescription mapping is certainly been encouraged by my work in the US. Yeah.

Toban Dyck  1:04:24

Do you think there’s a, there’s a bit of a vacuum with, you know, think of all the tech that’s available to farmers, myself, yourself, and kind of the level of adoption, say, Southern Manitoba, because that’s where we’re sitting right now. Is that, is that kind of a is that a failure of extension? Like, for like to Yeah,

Scott Day  1:04:46

well, you know, I obviously have a soft spot for extension, and I think we’re at this period of time where, you know, AI is going to be doing all this stuff, where’s the data going to come from? You know, it’s, it could just be kicking out even more inaccurate stuff if there’s not good third party verification of data. And so I don’t think the, I’m not sure about the lack of extension and the adoption of new technology, but we, because we’ve been pretty lucky in Manitoba to have these titans of extension, even though they’re overworked. And, you know, we don’t have enough of them. But are they going to get replaced as we have these changes in, you know, career, or people retiring and so on. So I think for the industry to continue to move forward and be successful. We need to have a good extension base. It may change. We may need to AI extension specialists, you know, we may need some sort of, I don’t know, new biotech extension specialists. When you look at how we’ve evolved into having meteorologists and and other fields of science and extension, that’s still, I think, needed to have an independent source of information and and maybe a clearinghouse for the data that’s being generated on farms. You know that we’ve seen no, no reduction in snake oil claims, right, right. It’s still and you can almost create, create these mythical situations easier now, yeah, right, with all the technologies out there, yeah, hence startups ending other startups, yeah, I would say virtually none of the startups that I’ve encountered are setting out to be dishonest. Sure, you know that’s not part of it, but there is, there is a way to manipulate data now and presentations using AI to create mutated implements that you never knew. What you know it’s not that that concern or risk is going away. It’s it’s still there. Does

Jay Whetter  1:07:05

tech need venture capital to come to market like without So, without that money? Are we? Are we in a tech desert? Yeah, now for a while?

Scott Day  1:07:18

Yeah. Well, of course, I’m biased there as well, because we are definitely bringing more to each company than just the money. So, you know, to be really clear, venture we we take ownership of we take equity in a company early on. So we’re, we’re a part of it, but we’re bringing more to the table than money. It’s our connections, our experience, our network. I think if you were to talk to any of our portfolio companies, they won’t, they won’t save money is the most important thing. Right off the bat, they’ll say, it’s, you know, I, I, and we’re answering the phone from them seven days a week. We have a company. I on Sunday night, I was helping them find buyers for their products in Europe, just through connections that I had that they don’t have, and bankers or the banking industry, that’s debt financing. So you have to have your model all in place, and then you get, you know, get funding against the debt, and they won’t have the capacity in the network that we do, right? So it works great when we work together. But if you, if you take venture capital of the startup world. First of all, it’s going to slow things down. Public grants are going to be that much more important and and maybe some scrutiny will be taken out of the system as well. Because we’re, you know, we’re, we’re responsible to our investors, so we’re not going to be financing things that shouldn’t get attention. Sure,

Toban Dyck  1:08:38

yeah, yeah. Like a gatekeeper role on some of these, some of these things, yeah, yeah. I

Scott Day  1:08:42

can be very noble about true, yeah. I think it’s true. And I agree we, you know, we’re we become kind of a fraternity of venture AG, tech investing. And I was with a bunch of them last, this past few days. And I have a lot of respect for all of our contemporaries as well. Those are the those of us that are left are definitely, you know, trying to, to work together to, you know, this isn’t our area field, but would you be interested in this? Or would you like to join us in this opportunity? I think that’s making it for that was necessary in this environment. But I think it’s making it a better all overall ecosystem for

1:09:20

it. We do. We do have to wrap up. But

Jay Whetter  1:09:22

I have another question too. But what is yours about? Just

Toban Dyck  1:09:26

so I don’t forget it. Do you find that, you find that there are people coming up in the system similar to yourself who will be able to kind of bring that perspective? Do you feel confident in the next generation coming up to fill your shoes.

Scott Day  1:09:44

I, you know, I, I don’t. I look at what I do and think there’s probably 1000 farmers from Western Canada that could do what I do right if they had the fortunate network and support that I did. And and you. You know, part of your success is, is staying to what you know and not trying to be to somehow understanding things that you’re well beyond your your scope of understanding. So I think so you know, but I just don’t, I don’t know people specific I know friends of mine that would do a great job in what I’m doing, but they can’t afford living or taking away from what they’re doing, right,

Jay Whetter  1:10:24

right? So, I mean, Scott, one of part of your success is that you’re very good at talking to people and meeting to people and finding people. So you found clay. You also found Catherine Zita Jones, which we’ll get to in a second. You want to get into that stuff? Yeah? But no, it’s a good, it’s a fairly quick, sir, but, but I do want to ask one more serious question. So you’re, you’re like, you’re not my brother, but you’re like, my big brother, okay? And, and you’re, you’re pressured. You’re my mentor, you’re my mentor, and you’re our biggest fan, and you’re a sock aficionado, yeah, so what would what advice would you have for Toban and I, as we, as we build on this extensionist mission that we’re on. Oh man, yeah,

1:11:07

for venture. Well, it

Scott Day  1:11:09

depends on what you’re looking for. But I, I’ve met a lot of great extension people in the in the US and from other countries as well, that are kind of, that’s who they are. Is I mentioned this before. It’s been a hard transition for me into venture, because when I was in extension, I shared everything I knew the moment I knew it. You know, I had a weekly column or whatever. I was just, Oh, great. I got something to talk about. And you move over into venture, and you got to be discreet. You know, I probably shared too much today and so, but it doesn’t change that you can be effective in venture as well. It’s, you know, comes back to networks and networking, and I try, like, even when I first started with in Killarney, I always had this goal of giving you a call back, even if I didn’t know, like I remember one time I got invited to the chinchilla growers barbecue, and they and I know, thank you, but I didn’t know you barbecued. I thought they caught on fire. And the woman was quite perturbed, and then she phoned me back later about something, and I phoned her back, and she really appreciated that, because nobody ever took them seriously after I had not taken them seriously. And so I think whatever you’re doing, as long as you fulfill your promises or expectations, you’re going to be effective. And so you’re continuing to find these extension people in other locations, I think will still have a lot of relevance to your listeners. You know, there’s people that are as passionate about not quite as passionate, but there’s people that are passionate about soil as John heard, and they know John heard, and they’re from Mississippi or Kentucky or whatever, and they’d be fun to visit with as well. Yeah, yeah, no,

Jay Whetter  1:13:03

that’s true. Can you tell the Catherine? I just love that. That story, my

Scott Day  1:13:08

wife will be upset that I share this one, because, you know, I got Catherine. There’s two stories I’ll share. I know we’re over time, but I just too Yeah, so the first one I’m at, I’m living in Ireland. I’m in this I’m working on the on the dairy in the wicks, and I go to a Bruce Springsteen concert. This is in 1988 and Bruce Springsteen was doing this. Ton of love to her. And I’m at the RDS, which is the royal Dublin show. And the biggest event to occur at that venue in the generation, and not generation, was the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Musical Ride. A quarter of a million people in Ireland went to see the Royal Canadian Musical Ride, which is, that’s kind of a side thing, but over a course of five days, a quarter of a million people in a country that has less population than Toronto went to see them. Yeah. And they were always asking me, how do they fight crime on their horses? Anyways, the Bruce Springsteen concert was the second largest venue that year, behind the Mounties. Yeah. And leaving the concert, people are kind of drunk and and I had a leather jacket on or whatever, and this guy stops me, and he goes, Jesus, you’re Donny Osmond. And I’m like, No, I’m not Donnie Osmond. Of course, with my accent, they were certain I was Johnny Osmond, Donny Osmond, so he calls all these people over, everybody’s drunk. And I was, remember, I had my back up against the stadium. There’s like 50 or 100 people there thinking I’m Donnie Osmond, and I had to, they said, I said, What do you want me to do? Sing like puppy love. Jesus, that’d be great if you sing so puppy love. So I sang a chorus.

Jay Whetter  1:14:53

The police came over

Scott Day  1:14:55

and broke it up and I left. Was it the RCMP, yeah. Last mounted on his horse. It’s okay. Break it up, guys, yeah, but I bet you those guys in Ireland are still telling the story about that time they met Donnie Osmond at the RTS rds. So these are one of many stories from what I was traveling and then the next one was, I don’t know if it works that well, because it’s quite intimate, but so this story starts with him, my friend, and I are in Rome, and I wake up that morning and I said, we’re gonna go see the pope today. And he goes, the pope, Pope in Rome. And I said, Are you Catholic? Because he was Catholic, but he thought the Pope was in the Vatican, but he didn’t know the Vatican was part of Rome. And I thought, okay, no, we’re gonna go see the Pope. So we go down to we walk down to the Vatican, and the it’s that Wednesday, or whatever, we has a private audience. This is John Paul the Second, so he’s having the private audience in the auditorium, and it’s booked out. We can’t get in. And this guy’s saying, well, we gotta see it like I didn’t realize we’d have an opportunity. So we pretended to be part of a British group of tourists. They were banking a pilgrimage. And so we just get in their group, where they’re the last ones walking in, and we just stand in the middle and walk with them. And those Swiss Guards are waving us with the fancy. They wave us in. They wave us right to the front of the auditorium, we sit down, and John Paul comes out right in front of us and goes like this, and my friend leans over, he says, oh my god, we just lied to see the Pope. He was going to get struck by lightning. And there’s these three girls that were there as well, and and we ended up on the bus going back to the hostel, and we ended up playing cards with them or whatever. But I had this kind of stick where I had pulled all the hair on the side of my head on an accident in Ireland, and all my hair was over on a weave like a comb over. And so whenever there was a dull moment, I’d just go like this, and I was bald on one side of my head. This girl thought it was so funny, and so we became kind of talking a bit, and so on. And her name was Catherine, and she was 18, and she was traveling with her two friends from Wales on an after school trip. She was beautiful, and years later, I’m watching like Letterman or whatever. And she said the happiest moment in her life was when her Catherine Zeta Jones her and her two friends backpack across Italy and Rome, and they she didn’t mention me specifically, but

Toban Dyck  1:17:37

that’s amazing. But Donnie Osmond, yeah,

Scott Day  1:17:44

so yeah, I get to say in my fantasy world that I may have kissed Catherine Zeta Jones, amazing, but I didn’t know it at the time, amazing. That’s why I said it was a little hard. Gets intimate. There’s a little bit of swearing there and stuff like that. But, yeah, I actually had scanned my diaries last year from traveling and thinking. Man, I was so glad I took a diary or did a diary, because there’s lots of little stories like that in there. Yeah, that’s amazing. That’s putting yourself out there and visiting with people while you’re going, you’re going to have some sort of

Jay Whetter  1:18:20

fun experience, exactly. That’s a great closing line. Thanks a lot. Scott, so much amazing. Yeah, thank you.

Toban Dyck  1:18:31

Well, that was, that was fantastic. I learned a bit about you because he sat you, yeah, just always, that’s like a, that’s a fairly, you know, the close relationship, or interesting one. Scott’s

Jay Whetter  1:18:44

sister Kathy, and Scott were our two favorite babysitters, and we had this one other guy who also is from the neighborhood. Scott’s Scott’s age, and he babysat us once. And my brothers and I built a lot of Lego, and this guy came, and he just smashed all of our Lego creations because he was, like, pretending to fly them around with us, and then he just dropped them and they’d break into 1000 pieces. So we told Mom and Dad we didn’t want him to come back ever. Anyway, we don’t need to talk about me and my like a baby sitting experience is what, what did you Where did he go? So,

Toban Dyck  1:19:21

I mean, it is just phenomenal that a guy just lives not too far from my farm, but just has this collection of experiences and continues to have them. And is a very is my first time, you know, meeting Scott face to face, which is, which was a complete honor. What a great, what a great and also want a great storyteller. So one of the things that I really like it’s one thing to have this collection of experiences, right? So you can go and, I mean, I I talk to basically everybody who’s around me also, so I get it, but he has a very great way of remembers all these things. Yeah, like, and so, like, that’s such a huge element to it. Like, to be able to recall these stories and piece things together and, like, build your world from them in a in a way, and then, and then recall them in an environment like this. Like, he doesn’t, you know, he’s probably quite comfortable, because he’s used to being in a multitude of different contexts. But I always love that when he can recall, he’s recalling specifics from events like the Donny Osmond story, or these things, right, where it’s like, it’s not general, he remembers the details, yeah, like that that matters. That really stands out. So I loved his ability to share and tell these stories that was great.

Jay Whetter  1:20:41

I know, yeah, yeah, I’ve been hearing Great Scott stories for a long time. Once again, thank you to our episode sponsor, Manitoba Pulse and Soybean Growers who want you to follow along with this year’s regional variety trials. There will be opportunities for you to visit the Variety Trial sites throughout Manitoba this summer and watch for a list of trial sites in the bean report@manitobapulse.ca This has been the extensionists. I’m Jay

Toban Dyck  1:21:11

and I’m Toban till next time. Are you curious about what Jay and I get up to behind the scenes at the extensionists, the extensionist

Jay Whetter  1:21:20

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Toban Dyck  1:21:28

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Jay Whetter  1:21:31

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Toban Dyck  1:21:41

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. Ryan sanche is our director. Ashley Robinson is the coordinator, and Abby wall is our producer and editor. Thank You.