Shaun Wildman (Farmland Specialist, Hammond Realty), Quick Dick McDick (Saskatchewan farmer and one of Canada's largest agricultural media voices), and grain marketer Ryan Bonnett joined Dan Aberhart for Growing the Future's foremost live briefing on July 7, 2026. The conversation mapped the structural shift underway in canola demand: the Strathcona facility south of Edmonton processes over a million tonnes of canola feedstock per year, the US renewable fuel standard is drawing on global vegetable oil supply that domestic soybeans cannot meet, and Indonesia is pushing toward a 50% biodiesel blend requirement. The panelists traced what that demand curve means for canola economics (a potential price floor shift from $500 to $700 per tonne), the domestic crush capacity bottleneck limiting Canada's ability to capture that value, and what the shift is already doing to Prairie farmland prices.
One refinery south of Edmonton will process a million tonnes of canola feedstock this year, more than 10% of Canada's entire canola crop at a single facility. The US renewable fuel standard needs another 2.7 million tonnes on top of that, and Indonesia is moving toward a 50% biodiesel blend requirement. In the 2000s, corn ethanol turned a $2.50 crop into a $9 crop in under a decade. Growing the Future's foremost live briefing examines whether canola is about to run the same play, and what the structural demand shift already means for Prairie land values.
Topics and Timestamps
0:00 -- Opening: the renewable diesel demand story and the canola-as-fuel structural shift
3:00 -- Sponsor acknowledgments and panelist introductions
5:00 -- Is canola food or fuel, and does the distinction matter?
6:00 -- Shaun Wildman: calorie analysis and why food affordability is not the argument
9:00 -- Quick Dick McDick: Saskatchewan's 24 million canola acres and the case for playing both markets
13:00 -- Ryan Bonnett: the corn ethanol parallel and how US biofuel policy drives domestic demand
14:00 -- RIN credits and the 12-cent-per-pound penalty for Canadian-sourced canola in US markets
16:00 -- Indonesia's B50 blend requirement and what global feedstock scale actually looks like
18:00 -- Local processing expansion: Cargill in Regina, LDC and Richardson in Yorkton doubling capacity
22:00 -- The bottleneck: crush capacity is the ceiling, not canola production
27:00 -- Scale check: the US diesel market and how much canola it would take to move the needle
28:00 -- EPA rates canola second-best vegetable oil for US renewable fuel programs
32:00 -- Saskatchewan's carbon advantage: 67% lower footprint through zero-till canola
36:00 -- US winter canola expansion as a future risk to Canadian market share
39:00 -- Could canola's price floor shift from $500 to $700 per tonne?
45:00 -- Prairie land values: what the renewable diesel demand shift means for buyers and holders
48:00 -- Large land acquisitions, the Minette deal, and what it means for the next generation of operators
52:00 -- Closing round: one takeaway from each voice in the room
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