The Future Herd
A podcast exploring how collective wisdom and adaptive leadership can help us navigate the profound transformations reshaping our food and agriculture systems.
The Future Herd is a podcast about leadership, adaptation, and collective intelligence in an age of uncertainty.
Each episode is a conversation with people working inside food systems, agriculture, policy, technology, and community—people navigating long-term change without a script. Rather than focusing on prediction, the show explores how futures are shaped through collaboration, negotiation, and lived experience.
The name reflects the premise: the future is not led by a single authority, but by many independent actors adapting together.
Future Herd salon
The Serviceberry
A live salon on Robin Wall Kimmerer's The Serviceberry — gift economies, abundance, and what it would mean to organize a food system around them.
Tuesday, September 29, 2026 · 2:00 p.m. Eastern · Facilitated by Jesse Hirsh · On the Future Herd Discord server
Latest episode
In this episode, host Jesse Hirsh speaks with Chris Hildreth, founder of Agrikit.ca, about decentralizing agri-food infrastructure through modular, custom-built facilities. Drawing on his background as a social entrepreneur and urban farmer, Hildreth argues that small- and medium-scale producers need better on-the-ground support to foster genuine food sovereignty. Together, they explore how moving away from centralized mass production toward community-driven processing can build a more resilient Canadian food system.
Latest knowledge
By replacing centralized monoculture with adaptable, community-anchored processing units, regional food producers can bypass the logistical choke points of the industrial food supply chain.
Latest intelligence
Simultaneous outbreaks of avian disease and advancing climate litigation are testing operational resilience across production networks. Meanwhile, expanding biofuel mandates and proposed labour code...
The Commons
The Future Herd is the starting point for a larger project: open participation infrastructure for food-system decisions. The Commons is an early-stage pilot where producers, eaters, workers, policy people, and anyone who cares about food can submit perspectives, respond to others, and help surface where common ground exists.
The first topic is food security. No institutional affiliation required.
As food systems, institutions, and communities face accelerating disruption, simple narratives and centralized solutions increasingly fail. The Future Herd creates space for slower thinking, critical reflection, and dialogue across disciplines—grounded in practice rather than hype.
If you are interested in how decisions are made under pressure, how authority is earned rather than assumed, and how collaboration becomes a form of leadership, this podcast is for you.
Many independent actors. Adapting together.