Another Character Who Deserves a Long Introduction ...

What I Learned In Conversation With Franck Groeneweg , The Agricultural Adventurer ...

What would you hear/feel if I were to summarize your life to date in an introduction?

For Franck Groeneweg, it was an exhausting experience.

He gets tired just thinking about it all.

Although, surely it's a satisfied sort of tired.

A childhood on the farm in France.

The wide open fields and big equipment of Iowa.

Purchasing a farm in Saskatchewan.

Helping folks better their lives through farming practices in Haiti.

Selling the Saskatchewan farm and purchasing a farm in Montana.

A custom harvester.

An importer/exporter of farm equipment globally.

A salesman for grain burning stoves.

A volunteer with the Indian Head Agricultural Research Foundation, the Sask Farm Stewardship Association, SaskCanola Board, Grain Growers of Canada, Canadian Canola Grower Association.

An international envoy.

A recipient of the Outstanding Young Farmer.

A pilot.

A husband, a father of 4, and a Christian.

Franck has been walking the path, nay charging down the path with abandon all his life, driven by his passions.

"In some ways you can look at that journey and you say, 'Well .. even from a spiritual standpoint ... I guess we take steps. You go forward, you make leaps of faith. You look ahead and say 'Is there going to be a road under my feet? Am I going to be free falling?' You can be assured that if you go free falling, there'll still be a net somewhere.?You don't want to go carelessly. You can take stock of your environment, look forward and say, 'Alright, what's the worst thing could happen here?' Most of the best opportunities comes from the worst setbacks. There's opportunity in chaos. And I guess when you've tasted that, sometimes you wanna go create some chaos, so you can find opportunity, right? Maybe sometimes I'm a little too good at that."

One of the biggest leaps of faith I personally saw Franck take was selling the farm he had built up near Regina, SK to move to Three Forks, Montana to take over a completely different operation.

"We had built our farm. We were trying to improve and then all at once we just felt ... 'What is this all about?' Land prices had escalated to a point where they just didn't seem to make sense. Then my sister-in-law passed away from a very stupid freak accident in their backyard, leaving my brother and three kids that were six, four and two. And it was 'Wow. Life can change that quickly.' Instinctively, you know it, but until you're reminded by an event really close ... there was something in the back of my mind nagging at me that maybe that it would be time for a change, but how would we do that? Just before that we were planning to go on an agriculture education development project in Haiti. We had planned that before that event happened. After that event happened, I came back from France, from that funeral, and went to the Agribition in Regina with a friend of mine. We walked into a booth of a realtor. I started to talk about the macroeconomics that land prices were going up, that interest rates had been down for a long time, and sooner or later it had to escalate and thought, how would we do this? We could see some of the bigger farms that weren't there 10 years before that that were really aggressive at that time. You think, 'Why weren't they aggressive when it was all available?'?There's a saying ... 'When everybody walks just run, and when everybody runs, walk.'?I felt like they were walking when I was running, we were walking and now they are running. Maybe it's time to walk. And we walked. Literally, we walked."?

The farm in Montana was a brand new adventure.

"It's a wheat farm in Montana. I didn't know much about it, but I looked it up and the owner had a video of his life story online. When I saw that it gave me goosebumps, I said, 'That's it.' I showed it to the family. They rolled their eyes and they said, 'Oh yeah, dad.' When we got on the yard, our family was all in and that's what it takes. It takes buy in from the whole clan. They really thought I had gone off the deep end by deciding?we should sell. It was not an easy thing at all. Everything kind of worked out on that side, much like our tractor parts business from 18 years before that it all worked out in Saskatchewan, it worked out excellent. We had an auction. We bought this farm which is right beside the headwaters of the Missouri river, where Lewis and Clark claimed victory over their voyage. They had found the headwaters of the Missouri and that little tidbit was interesting. It overlooks the whole valley of Three Forks, with the three rivers coming together. That's why it's called Three forks. The Gallatin, the Jefferson, and the Madison come together. It's a gorgeous area. From here, you can't see a whole lot of development. It's probably a vantage point that Lewis and Clark saw. And she is so beautiful. I said, 'Isn't that something that the U.S. bought the Louisiana purchase, that huge piece of land from Louisiana up into Montana. They bought that from France. Do you realize what price Louisiana was purchased for? Our farm price is about as much. And then they sell it back to a French man."?

Franck's vision is loftier than most would care to strive for ... nothing less than positively affecting folks mental through the nutritive quality of the food he produces.

"That's the goal. You always have to put a fairly high goal. At least get somewhere in the middle, but hopefully you catch that goal. If you don't make it, you made it a long ways toward it. It's looking at farming in a natural way. I didn't say an organic way, I said a natural way. Somebody like the Wright brothers .. they were bicycle shop owners that are said to have invented the airplane. They looked at birds and they looked at nature and said, 'Hey, how does this thing fly?' Science looked at what is from nature, and this is how we come up with science. Now we've got our own version of science that we've gone and invented. We hardly look at nature anymore because we've got it figured out and nature is stupid, right? Until you start to really delve into it. As farmers, we've been a little more of the recipe of ... you put so much seed in the ground, you put so much fertilizer and then you go take care of the weeds. You have this recipe that which works wonderful. That's been a wonderful producer of quantities of food and safe quantities of food. I'll take nothing away from that. I think we can go back and find a place in the middle. Where we foster nature, foster biology, and there's plenty of evidence and research from the past that has been somewhat forgotten that shows we could produce food with much less. Not only that we could use less fertilizer, quite a bit less pesticides and have a product that possibly has more nutrient density. That's the quest that I'm on for that. And it's just not that elusive. I think some people have looked at me in the past and plenty of times said, 'This guy's a dreamer.' I sometimes come out as idealistic and rightfully so that people could say that. But there is so much evidence. So many people right now have done some incredible things. Boosting biology, looking at the plant roots, looking at the right varieties, maybe lowering some of our seeding rates. Some people have pretty much gone away from fertilizers and are able to grow some great crops. They're not organic people, they are regenerative. Somebody says, 'Oh, we have to define that. We have to make sure this is a set of practices that we can certify.' Why would we do this? It's not working on the organic side of it! All you do, is when you put rules out there, is you have somebody that's gonna say, 'Hey, how can I just go around the rules?' And even on the spiritual side of it, it's the same thing ... when you put rules, then people are going to try to find a way to look like they're doing the rules without doing them. How about we go to the spot where you want to do the rules of nature? This is what nature is showing me that it does. When you have a certain amount of microbe and fungi around your roots, this is what your plants are. The plant expresses itself. You don't have to put it to a certain level that you should have should have so many grams of biomass and at that point, you are regenerative. No. The point is ... let's try to always do better. In the end, there's also plenty of evidence now that some of the produce can have more nutrient density. One person will say, well, that's complete BS. That can't be. All you have to do is give him a tomato grown from a garden versus one a store bought one. There's a taste difference. Well, why is there a taste difference??It's extra nutrients. It's what's defined as plant secondary metabolites and you see it, if you eat healthy yourself and you take care of what you eat and do a little bit of exercise, you're going to look good and feel good. You look healthy. I think that's the difference right there."

Franck believes his actions and the actions of others could have a domino effect on people and the environment.

"Environmental sustainability starts with financial sustainability. That's where it starts. If you're gonna do something solely for it's virtue signaling, it's bound to fail. It just has to start with people taking care of their really basic needs. After that, they will take on the rest of it."

We look forward to many more of Franck's adventures.

You can hear all of my conversation with Franck at growingthefuturepodcast.ca , or wherever you listen to podcasts.