The Future Herd is built as a collaborative media project: a place where sector leaders can think out loud, compare notes across the value chain, and make long-range resilience feel practical.
Partnerships matter because the future of agri-food won’t be “delivered” by a single organization, technology, or policy lever. It will be shaped by networks that can hold complexity, learn in public, and translate foresight into action.
Our founding partner: Agricultural Adaptation Council (AAC)
The Agricultural Adaptation Council (AAC) is an industry-led, not-for-profit organization that supports innovation and collaboration across Ontario’s agri-food sector through program delivery, connections, and strategic partnerships.
AAC is our founding partner because they sit in a rare position: they work across the full value chain, they’re already trusted as a sector convenor, and they have deep experience turning ideas into real-world programs. In other words: The Future Herd can host the conversation, but AAC helps ensure the conversation stays connected to the institutions, funding pathways, and implementation realities that shape what’s possible.
The Agri-Food 2050 process
Agri-Food 2050 is AAC’s sector-wide foresight initiative to help Ontario’s agri-food value chain adapt and thrive in a rapidly changing world. The process is designed to catalyze connections across the sector, build shared understanding through learning and knowledge-sharing, and support action by informing priorities for policy, programming, and investment.
The Future Herd exists as a public-facing extension of this work: a living record of how leaders reason together—across uncertainty—while pressure-testing assumptions and surfacing tradeoffs.
What partners do (practically)
- Nominate and connect guests across the value chain (including perspectives that rarely get airtime).
- Bring applied research and field insights into the conversation.
- Help translate episodes into supplementary briefs, reading lists, and action prompts.
- Extend reach through cross-promotion and distribution.
- Support event programming (live salons, roundtables, workshops).
- Sponsor production so episodes can be released faster and more frequently.
Why we welcome additional partners and sponsors
Agri-food resilience is a shared challenge that crosses institutions. Additional partners and sponsors let us do three things better:
- Increase representation: more voices, more regions, more commodities, more roles—especially those closest to operational realities.
- Improve usefulness: better prep, better follow-up, better supporting materials, and tighter links between conversation and action.
- Build foresight literacy: not hype, not prediction—practical shared capacity for anticipating change together.
If your organization is aligned with collaboration, resilience, and real-world problem-solving, we’d love to talk.