Jocelyn Velestuk is an agronomy consultant, a cattle and grain farmer, president of the Saskatchewan Soil Conservation Association, and a director on the Sask Wheat Development Commission. She joins Dan to make the case that soil health stopped being a practice and became a phrase, and that the gap between the two is where most farms lose ground they did not know they were losing. She walks through how she actually reads a field, from sampling decisions through to the conversation where a producer sees the economics of their own soil, and why she thinks that conversation can make or break a farm. Producers walk away with a clearer sense of what to ask their own agronomist and why averaging a field is the fastest way to learn nothing.
Dan and Jocelyn talk about the big picture in farming
Jocelyn's thoughts about soil health as a buzzword
The importance of a family farSoil health has become a phrase that gets said far more often than it gets measured. Jocelyn Velestuk works on both sides of that gap. She is an agronomy consultant, a cattle and grain farmer co-managing a family operation, president of the Saskatchewan Soil Conservation Association, and a director on the Sask Wheat Development Commission.
Her argument is that most of what a farm tries to correct downstream starts with something it has never actually looked at closely, and that the conversation between a producer and their agronomist is where that either gets found or gets missed.
What's Inside
- Why an averaged sample across a whole field can hide the exact thing you needed to see
- The move from environmental consulting into agronomy, and what that background changes about how she reads a field
- Why she believes an agronomist's job is to coach the decision rather than sell the input
- What a decade of changed practice did to soil on an operation that had visibly eroded
- Why fertility moves year over year, and what a single season's test can and cannot tell you
- The reason she took a seat on provincial boards, and what she thinks the industry gets wrong about talking to the people who eat what it growsm and sustainable ag
- Conversations Jocelyn has with farmers to advise on the future of their farms
- Will Millennials start to care about where their food comes from down to the soil?
Connect with Growing the Future
Website: growingthefuture.ca
YouTube: Growing the Future
Instagram: @growingthefuturepodcast
LinkedIn: Growing the Future
Subscribe to the Growing the Future Podcast wherever you listen, and register for Convergence Conference 2027 at convergence.ag.