About the Podcast

The Future Herd is a podcast exploring how collective wisdom and adaptive leadership can help us navigate the profound transformations reshaping our food and agriculture systems. We host conversations with farmers, innovators, policymakers, and changemakers who are building resilient pathways forward.

Built around the themes of collaboration and leadership, the series explores how producers, processors, innovators, and policymakers learn to navigate disruption, build trust, and create the future of food—not in isolation, but as a herd with shared purpose and diverse perspectives.

Why “The Future Herd”?

The name draws on a practical image from pastoral agriculture: a working dog guiding a lively, independent-minded herd. It’s a model for coordination in complex, distributed systems.

The herd represents the many actors in food systems—farmers, researchers, policymakers, entrepreneurs, consumers, investors, activists. Each moves with different constraints, incentives, and perspectives. They won’t always agree on direction or pace.

The working dog symbolizes a kind of leadership that coordinates without coercion: sensing movement, working from the edges, creating conditions for alignment, and using minimal intervention to guide collective motion.

The Future Herd explores these dynamics—how we move together toward futures we can’t fully predict, how leadership shows up in unexpected forms, and how collaboration navigates the tension between individual agency and collective direction.

Host

Jesse Hirsh is a researcher, futurist, and farmer whose work sits at the intersection of technology, agriculture, and public dialogue. He has spent decades helping organizations understand how systems change, how power shifts, and how collaboration becomes a force for resilience.

Jesse brings both practical and analytical experience: running a working farm, building open-source technology, and speaking across the global agri-food sector. His focus is on making complex ideas clear, actionable, and grounded in the lived realities of producers, communities, and institutions.

This podcast is an invitation to think differently about collaboration, leadership, and the future we’re building together.

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