What The 'Lentil King of Saskatchewan' Knows About World Trade
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Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal. And I'm Tracey Alloway. Tracey, Canadian elections last night. Yes. Big event. I think...

A lot of people are talking about it in the context of U.S. politics, right? Yeah, of course. So we just saw Mark Carney and the liberals win. And in a lot of ways, I think people would agree that Mark Carney is sort of the antithesis of Trump, right? He's the sort of globalization, Davos, former central banker guy. And the funny thing is, or the slightly ironic thing is, it seems like Trump...

Trump might have swung the election in the direction of the liberals. Well, yeah, you go back like three months ago or four months ago or something, and it just seemed guaranteed that the Conservatives, Pierre Polyev, was going to win. And then Trump started talking about making Canada the 51st state. And suddenly, fortunes turned very quickly. But that was just a news hook. We're not really doing a Canadian politics interview.

episode today, per se. We're doing something better. We're doing something better. The real reason that we're doing this episode, this just happened to be good timing for the hook. The real reason we're doing this episode is that several weeks ago, I was reading an article and I saw a title about a man named the Lentil King of Saskatchewan or not named, but titled as such,

And I thought to myself, the lentil king of Saskatchewan sounds like a great Oblotz character. Someone that we should talk to to learn about a very specific business and how it works. The lentil king of Saskatchewan. The sultan of split peas. The grand poobah of pulses. The baron of beans. Monarch of multigrains. I can keep going. You did your prep. That's really good. Anyway, we have...

the lentil king of Saskatchewan on the podcast today. And we're going to really learn about how the international pulses and grains trade actually work. What does it mean? How does trading work with the U.S.? How does it work with the rest of the world? How do you build that supply chain? I'm also just incredibly surprised that Canada is such a big player in this market. I think it exports like a third of the world's lentil crop, something like that. That's kind of crazy. There you go.

That is a lot of lentils, but they have a lot of land in Canada for this type of thing. Not a ton of people, a lot of land. Anyway, let's learn all about lentils.

the lentil trade, the pulse trade, the grain trade and so forth. Are we going to take the pulse of the pulse trade? We are going to take the pulse of the pulse trade. We are speaking with Murad Al-Khatib. He is the president and CEO of AGT Food and Ingredients, credited with turning Saskatchewan into such a powerhouse of trade from lentils. So, Murad, thank you so much for coming on Outlawed. Well, thanks for having me.

Why don't you start with what does the lentil king of Saskatchewan do? Tell us about the business of AGT food and ingredients. Is it good to be the lentil king? It's definitely been an interesting career for me to...

kind of contribute to the transformation of agriculture out in Western Canada. So, you know, coming up on 25 years since I made a decision to quit my job in government at the Government of Saskatchewan and move to the basement of my house and drive the transformation of a cropping system that

You know, when I was a kid growing up in a little town called Davidson, Saskatchewan, we grew wheat and we grew canola. And then the farmers had to leave their soil to summer follow because the nitrogen fertilizer that they used in canola and the oil seed was so heavy that the soil needed to replenish naturally.

The alternative to that was to plant a nitrogen fixing legume. So lentils, chickpeas, peas, beans, these crops actually fix nitrogen. They don't require nitrogen fertilizer. And so, you know, that was my bet. I mean, I was a 27 year old young entrepreneur who kind of looked at this situation and said, look, agronomically, if we can grow these things, the world demands them. They're protein crops, right?

If we could intersect, you know, taking our summer follow into protein and reaching global markets, I could create a business. And that was kind of the premise. So it's been quite exciting to build a multi-billion dollar company based right out of Regina, Saskatchewan.

you know, to kind of reach the world, drive the Canadian trade and participate in growing and consolidating a global supply chain in this business. So how big a player is Canada nowadays in pulses and grains and lentils and all those things? I mentioned earlier

earlier that I think it produces like a third of the world's lentil crop. I did see an estimate that said 60% of the world's lentil crops. So I went with the third, trying to be conservative here, but like, give us some context around where Canada sits in this space.

Yeah, we would be more, depend on the crop year, but somewhere around 50% or more of the world trade. So, you know, you have to recognize that the traditional growth of these crops were in areas where they consume them, right? Turkey, Middle East, India. India is the biggest giant in this business.

You know, with all of the vegetarians, you know, you look at 1.3 billion people, 450 million vegetarians. Vegetable protein is essential for the diet of countries, you know, in the emerging markets. So, you know, they grow them and they consume them. Well, what was missing was global supply in nations that could grow them, but not consume them, but export them.

And so that's where, you know, Canada came into the play, Australia, the United States. Now we have emerging origins like Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine. You know, the global consumption of these crops are over 100 million tons now, you know, because, you know, you're talking about

The traditional crops that we consume, let's talk about the traditional diet of the world. Let's do it. Rice. You know, rice is 6% protein. Corn, 8% protein. Lentils, 22% protein. Faba beans, 34% protein. Chickpeas, 26% protein. I mean, these crops are not in the same class when it comes to protein availability. And the world is in a global protein deficit. So, you know, we always forget one thing. We talk a lot about energy.

and energy security, we talk about oil and gas, but we have to recognize that protein and diets are human energy. And so when we look at that, there's a protein deficit in the world, it's causing major socioeconomic problems. Let's look at a country like India, 18% of children in India are stunted due to protein deficiency.

The world has 800 million people who are malnourished on a daily basis, over 2 billion people who are food insecure on a daily basis.

So this has become one of society's global challenges. 10 billion people by 2050 quantifies into a statistic where in the next 40 years, we have to produce the same amount of food that the world produced in the last 10,000 years of civilization. Just wrap your head around that. Go back 10,000 years, go ahead 40 years, you got to equal food production. And that's only if we curb food waste and we actually can store the crops that we harvest.

So, you know, when you look at it, it's a global challenge and land and water are not being created. So those are the scarcest resources in the world. And Canada is blessed with a northern hemisphere, you know, that ultimately is more resilient on climate change. We have arable land and water and we have the best farmers in the world with technology and innovation driving our sector. Those are all recipes for what I would call a generational economic driver for this country. Yeah.

Joe, could you say that Canada has been blessed in growing grains? Do you get it? Bean? Okay, I'm going to stop. I get it. I won't do that anymore. I'm going to have a few of those over the course of this interview, I think. I'm sure you've heard them all, Murad, over the years. I'm glad you brought that up, actually, though, about the calorie as the original unit of energy that was important. You know, we've never had him on the podcast, but Vaclav Smil talks about that when he talks about the history of energy.

And just these calculations in the beginning, okay, how many calories did a farmer have to expend to produce this much land and then so forth and how many calories were produced?

and so forth. So just even thinking about it from that equation is a very like sort of important, I think, lens. Why don't you just describe the actual role of AGT Foods? Where do you sit in the supply chain and distribution? Do you have farms yourself? Do you work with farmers? Do you contract with them? Like talk about where you sit and how a lentil grown in Saskatchewan gets to a consumer in, say, India.

Well, the entire business plan was set up modern state-of-the-art processing infrastructure in the areas where we grow these crops. So we contract directly with farmers. We are the ones who transform their products into saleable human consumption products. So we own factories in Canada, the US, Australia, South Africa, Turkey. So I started with one small little factory in Regina.

We now have 46 manufacturing and processing facilities in five continents around the world. I started in the basement of my house. There's now 3,600 employees. Wow. So, you know, what we do is we take those crops, we clean them, we size them, we peel them, we split them, we can them.

We package them, we put them out and we fraction them into protein, starch, fiber, flours. I mean, we put them into food products. We do the full range of value adding. And in the scale of our business now, you know, with let's say around 3.2 billion in revenue this year, we've become a major global supply chain in this particular segment of the business. In fact, if I look at, you know, containerized agricultural shipments,

AGT would be among the two or three largest containerized shippers of agri-products in the entire world. So, you know, we ship to 110 countries actively. And how does it get there? Like, what is the, okay, so from a farmer in Saskatchewan, how many links are there on that chain? So we'll take it into, let's say a farmer in Eston, Saskatchewan, will deliver to our location at Eston. Okay. We will then take that grain, we'll put it into a rail car that we own. Hmm.

So those owned rail cars then go into the CN Rail system. They get transported to a port facility. Let's say, I just did one as an example. And on May the 6th, we're going to ship a vessel of lentils to Turkey. So those Eston farmers would have filled the rail cars. We're shipping it to Thunder Bay. At Thunder Bay, we have an ocean terminal where we'll load a vessel. That vessel will transport 21,000 tons of lentils that will go to Turkey.

They will be offloaded in the port of Mersin, Turkey, which is in the southern Mediterranean. We have factory seven kilometers from the port.

We'll peel them, split them, polish them, package them, and then they'll be shipped to Iraq. They'll be shipped into the Gaza refugees. They'll be shipped into the Middle East region, and they'll be consumed locally in that entire region on the food side. Wow. So, you know, where we play is in the entire supply chain, taking it right from the farmer, right through to the distribution, directly onto the consumer shelf.

And, you know, that was the strategy that we wanted to build out. It gives us resiliency. I was going to ask, is it normal for agricultural companies to actually own their own, like, transportation capital? You mentioned train cars just then. That seems extremely vertically integrated. Well, yeah, actually, I was definitely not, you know, the normal thought in that. In 2015, I decided to build a transportation business that

And so we bought 650 kilometers of short line railway. We bought the Saskatchewan government grain car fleet. So when the Canadian Wheat Board was dismantled, the Saskatchewan flagged grain cars, I bought them. We bought 13 locomotives. We set up our own transportation infrastructure, linked it in a long-term agreement to CN Rail. And, you know, we're able to access it through ocean port infrastructure.

We actually took that business in 2025 in January and we sold it for $192 million to an infrastructure fund in the United States. And then we contracted them back to provide a service for the next 20 years. So you are correct. We actually built out a transportation infrastructure that didn't exist to handle these kinds of commodities. And then we found a partner to run it for the long term. And it gives us a competitive advantage to get our products to market.

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I have a question. You know, you mentioned that the only scarce resources are land and water. Can you talk about yields on an acre or yields on a given farm today versus when you got started in the industry and how what you've seen in terms of technology and productivity growth at the land level? Massive, massive transformation. So precision agriculture, digital infrastructure has transformed the productivity of Canada.

And, you know, when I was a kid growing up in that little village of Davidson, 1200 people in the middle of Saskatchewan, you know, as an immigrant Turkish family, the farmer would go out and kick the dirt. He would put his hand into the soil. He'd have his wife with him and say, what do you think? Should we go? And she'd say, yeah, let's go. And they would go and start seeding. Today, we're soil sampling. We're analyzing the soil and the nitrogen in the soil. There's, you know, precision weather stations that are measuring moisture.

We have zero minimum tillage where GPS systems are giving the farmer the exact placement of seed fertilizer in a single pass without breaking the soil using air channels. We're putting the seed in a precision basis to maximize the yield.

to lower the amount of nitrogen fertilizer being used in all crop rotations, which ultimately saves inputs and lowers the carbon intensity of our agriculture, our yield curves have been massively increasing, you know, to a point where if I look at the next decade ahead in Saskatchewan, I'm forecasting 7 to 10 million additional tons of grain from the same amount of acres that are being seeded.

You know, that is a massive. Wait, what's the baseline? What's the base? Seven to 10 million on top of how many? We're growing about 30 million tons. And we're going to have another seven to 10 million. I mean, you're talking about 20 to 30% yield increase over the next seven years. I mean, when I chaired the National Strategy Table for Agriculture and Food for the Government of Canada,

We set a target in 2019 that the agriculture sector in our country would grow from $45 billion to $85 billion of exports in a five-year cycle, and domestic agricultural output would grow from $120 billion to $145 billion. And we reached that target in three years. I mean, what sector of our economy...

can deliver 65 billion of growth in three years. Agriculture did that in this country. So the tangibility of that opportunity of global food insecurity, the productivity of precision agriculture in our country, and the ability to get our products to market, this is the recipe that I believe is gonna be a big part

of the government economic agenda going forward. So, you know, we talk a lot about natural resources that are in, you know, conflict in certain mindsets, whether it be oil and gas or mining. There's very little controversy on the growth of the natural resource sector in agriculture. So from that perspective, I see that as being a key opportunity for this country, you know, and one that I'm very excited about for the next 20 years of my career. Sure.

So I take the point about yields having been improved, but at the same time, there's a lot of talk about soil exhaustion, right? And one of the reasons this is on my mind is because I was gardening over the weekend on an old farm property and the soil is just

Terrible. It's basically dust. Like there's no tilth. I think I found one earthworm in like six hours of digging. How big a problem is soil depletion? And you touched on this earlier, but what role can lentils and beans play in that?

Well, that's actually the key. The key is that farmers in Western Canada are now practicing a sustainable three crop rotation. So one year they'll grow that wheat like when I was a kid. The next year they'll grow an oil seed like canola. And then the year after that, they'll plant the legume that will fix the nitrogen. By using zero minimum tillage, we're conserving soil moisture. We're managing pests and the health of the soil.

And we're actually using farming practices where without tilling, we're returning biomass into the soil. So from that perspective, when I look at the sustainability of soil health, the farmers in Western Canada have got it. And, you know, this is something that bothers me is people talk about how regenerative agriculture is such a key part.

Well, in Western Canada, we've been doing regenerative agriculture for the last 40 years. This is something that is actually foundational to the success of the Western Canadian and I mean the Canadian agriculture sector in general. So, you know, I think that when I look at soil depletion and soil health,

It's about farmers pushing the wrong rotations, growing crops on top of crops, the same crops. You know, ultimately, if you don't rotate, you have pests that multiply. You have diseases that ultimately get resistant to any type of management. So, you know, this kind of diversity of our agricultural system is one that not only has to be celebrated, but it's actually yielding that yield gain.

So, you know, not only is our soil health at a peak, but it's also something I want to be clear we can't take for granted. We have to be continuously innovating to make sure that we maintain that. I mean, I say the canola fields of Saskatchewan are the same as the oil fields of Saudi Arabia.

Only every year it replenishes naturally. So we can take crops, we can produce renewable fuels, we can take crops, extract protein and feed the world. But we have to make sure foundationally that soil health is at the forefront. And I think it is in our farmers' minds and in the practices that they do.

So, you know, you've described this global supply chain that exists and the fact that you can get the lentil product from a farmer in Saskatchewan all the way to a consumer in India or Iraq or Turkey, etc. Obviously, we're having this conversation, at least on the U.S. side, with this turn against globalized supply chains, globalized trade and so forth.

Talk to us a little bit about how you see the state of U.S.-Canada ag trade or give us the sort of the short history of the various turns of the dial there and how some of these conversations are affecting your business. Look, I think we've got to recognize one thing. We have a president in the United States today who's just very loud and using tariffs as the mechanism to not only provoke conversation, but to drive policy.

protectionist agricultural policies in the United States are not something new. You know, I always have to remind people that country of origin labeling was a Barack Obama policy that, you know, continued through the Trump administration and into the Biden administration. So, you know, every government in the world

Agriculture is the most political business in the entire globe because farmers have to be protected by governments that are elected. Yet food inflation and food security are paramount considerations in the health, wealth and security of every nation in the world. So when we look at it, let's not forget one thing. When a baby is hungry, they cry. When an 18-year-old man is unemployed and hungry, they protest.

So, you know, ultimately, a big part of civil obedience in the world is available food. And that growing food insecurity is one that I think, you know, is going to be paramount. So when I look at even U.S. policy, look, food security is a foundational part of U.S. intelligence and foreign policy. And so from that perspective, you know, I believe that agricultural trade will have to be preserved as a part of the overall policy framework.

So, you know, we're going to see tariffs. We're going to see protectionist measures being more prevalent in the world. But I do think that ultimately food are going to be concessionary items. Governments are going to allow them to flow. Governments will use tariffs to protect their farmers when they need to at times when they harvest their crops.

but they need food available. And, you know, the COVID post-supply chain disruptions and food lines and food inflation and, you know, food being a big driver of that inflationary environment in the world is something that everybody recognizes can't continue. On the U.S. policy side, domestic agriculture in the U.S. and Canada are very integrated.

So if I look at, you know, the pasta on the shelves of the U.S. consumer come largely from Durham wheat in Western Canada. The overall integration of our livestock sectors, cropping sectors are there. And ultimately, I think we're going to see further integration. We're going to see, you know, getting over this current protectionist conflict-laden dialogue to recognizing that the Americas integration is

and more reliance on each other as nations in the Americas is going to be part of economic prosperity. And, you know, I think that, you know, if I look at the Trump administration, you know, kind of policy on Canada, we have to just remind everybody very clearly to have calm heads. 31 U.S. states have Canada as their largest trading partner. The ultimate availability of food in the United States is, you know, not completely reliant, but we certainly have a big influence on food prices.

And so, you know, I'm a very strong optimist that agriculture will continue its integration and that, you know, ultimately food and I believe energy are going to be the two sectors. And the third one from a Saskatchewan perspective is potash. I mean, 80% of the potash in the United States, which is a necessary nitrogen element, you know, comes from Canadian mines.

So, you know, from that perspective, you know, there's certain sectors that I think are mutually beneficial that are going to enjoy heightened access in some sort of resolution. Okay, so agriculture might be special in one way or another, but just to drill down a little bit into specifics.

If the U.S. slaps tariffs on Canadian lentils, what is the first thing that happens in your supply chain? And I guess maybe we could go back in history and talk a little bit about the tariffs from India on lentils, because you have experience with this, right? Like you have gone through this process. So what exactly happens? Agriculture is no different than any other sector except

that our markets are already a lot more diversified than, you know, other sectors. So, you know, when I look at the crop sectors in particular, wheat, canola and pulses, we do have shipments into the U.S. on a regular basis, but it's still making up a relatively small percentage when you look at it compared to other sectors reliance on the U.S.,

So, you know, one of the key things to having strength in a tariff or a trade protectionist environment is to have alternative markets. Now, for us, I worry more about the reciprocal tariffs in places like China, India and other large markets than I do only the U.S. market. I mean, it's one of the considerations. We want that resolution. But, you know, what we do is we pivot.

When we were facing the tariffs on the March deadline, then the April deadline, as a company, we already prepared for this. We have a North Dakota manufacturing facility that was going to manufacture more for the U.S. market. We were going to switch our supply chain to reliance on North Dakota and Montana. And we were going to take the Western Canadian product and we were going to go out to the Middle East, into other markets in Asia. We're going to put a heightened focus on South America and we're going to ship into Europe.

So, you know, that's where you have to be. And I think that this is ultimately, you know, my dialogues with Prime Minister Carney prior to the election and my dialogues after with Prime Minister Carney are going to be trade diversification agenda is not something that we can blink at, no matter how quickly or how comprehensively the resolution is with the U.S.,

We need to finally execute trade diversification in this country. We need to recognize that our industries have become overly reliant. We've been complacent. You know what? This has to be a wake-up call to my colleagues in every industry in this country. Wake up. Over-reliance, eggs in one basket, is a dangerous remedy for long-term sustainable health of your business.

And, you know, ultimately, that's where we have to go. We need bilateral trade agreements. We need to resolve India and China as powerhouses that balance our reliance on the U.S. And we need to monetize the European Union trade agreement that we've already signed. We need to ensure that we get relevance with these countries. And agri-food, energy and potash and uranium are four things that get us relevance with these nations.

We need to parlay that into free trade agreements, bilateral exchange agreements, and we need to get ourselves market access. And here we have a specimen from the early 2000s, a legacy investing platform.

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Obviously, negotiating free trade or bilateral trade agreements with different counterparts is an important element. There's also a physical element, right? The quality of rail infrastructure, the quality of export terminal, and I guess on the other side, import terminal infrastructure, that's an important element.

In the context of energy, we hear a lot about this. And are we building export terminals fast enough? And is it cheap enough? Is it economical? Talk to us about the sort of like the physical things that need to get built to, as you put it, monetize these relationships. And like, I don't know, in the U.S., I know that building everything is crazy expensive these days. What is the state of this physical trade infrastructure look like in Canada right now? Yeah, we have to acknowledge that we've got, you know, major challenges. I mean, we've got

large geographic land base. We have mountains between production regions in Western Canada,

and the coast in Vancouver. And we have minus 40 degree temperatures. So, you know, these are all constraints that we have to live with. And, you know, one of the things I, you know, I've become a little bit known for in this country is my adage that if I was prime minister for one day, I would invest $100 billion in trade infrastructure because that ultimately would pay dividends for generations to come.

So, you know, we need to revive the gateway strategies. If I look back at the 2005-2011 period, the Asia-Pacific Gateway Initiative was one of the most successful in recent times in Canada, where you had, you know, municipal governments, provincial governments, private sector players, class one railways, port authorities, port infrastructure, private sector players working on first mile and last mile. And we made major progress on developing the Asia-Pacific Gateway.

We need to acknowledge that we need to build a trade infrastructure for 30 and 40 and 50 years from now, not just for 30 and 40 and 50 weeks from now. We need to relocate rail lines out of the center of communities across our nation to plan for development of industrial and residential developments and allow for the trade infrastructure to have room to scale.

As we continue to build out, I mean, Saskatchewan is a perfect example. As I said, 7 to 10 million more tons of agri with the BHP investment of $12 billion in potash, K plus S mine expansion, and the expansions that are on for nutrient and mosaic.

You have roughly about 12 million additional tons of potash that will come online over the next decade. And, you know, if we get oil in pipelines and we get the dry bulk commodities on rail, we have some capacity. But we've got to think about what we're going to be 30 years from now. If we continue on these yield trends, we're going to reach 100 million tons of production one day. Today, our average is 55 million tons in this country in agri.

So from that perspective, the economic benefit is there as well, which ultimately funds the Canadian way of life, social programs like health care, education, the things that we as Canadians value in terms of being Canadian versus living in another nation around the world. So that's the opportunity and trade infrastructure. I have a level of optimism

that, you know, our newly elected Liberal government, and frankly, it would have been the same if the Conservatives were elected. Trade infrastructure is recognized as an essential element of that trade diversification strategy. We focused a lot on North-South infrastructure, and not that we should diminish that, because I think people got to recognize, we're not saying trade less with the US. We're saying trade our growth with new countries. Over time, we will diversify.

Trade diversification could not happen in one day, one year, or even in 10 years. You know, we have created an economy that's reliant over decades. We need to diversify over the next decades.

So I know it's early days, but just on this point, farming is clearly a very capital intensive business and you want to be investing in trade infrastructure and things like that. Have you noticed any changes in capital availability post-pandemic?

Trump's win. So are people maybe they feel more cautious because there's all this policy uncertainty or maybe people are directing capital away from the U.S. and towards Canada now? I don't know. Have you noticed any shifts in the pattern?

I think that, you know, certainly short-term disruptions like this, you know, cause capital to be nervous. You know, there's no doubt about it. But, you know, if I look at, you know, my partners in AGT are, you know, Fairfax Financial is a 60% owner of my company. So PremWatts believed in the long-term growth of an agri-food champion from Canada, along with Homer's pension program. You know, those two companies own 72% of my shares along with myself. And

That kind of capital source is recognizing Canada's role to build billions of growth in this sector. In the trade infrastructure side, I think that there's a recognition that we're not building this only to talk about, oh, we got great infrastructure. There's a large economic benefit that will come along with it that can allow the tax base to be directed into the things that need to be done in this country. So when I look at that recognition,

Again, not looking with rose-colored glasses, I believe capital will flow. We need to do a better job of figuring out how to monetize trade infrastructure into projects that could be funded in more traditional project finance. So, you know, it's easy on a toll road, you have an income stream and someone will finance that.

How do you finance the growth of class one railway infrastructure or bridges that go to the ports or port infrastructure? You need to come up with economic models that create cash. And I remind people that extra revenue is cash and cost savings in the supply chain are also cash. So from that perspective, you know, I think that we're going to see a capital attraction

Because Canada has such a fundamental competitive advantage in the natural resources sector that capital will come here, get our products to the places that demand them. So speaking of cost savings in the supply chain, one of the things we've seen since the tariffs announcement is a slowdown in global shipping or a slowdown, at least in shipping between China and the U.S.,

Does that affect you at all? Because I imagine on the one hand, maybe container rates start coming down, which would be good for you. But on the other hand, my understanding is that a lot of your produce is shipped via backhaul. So the ships come over carrying, I don't know, toys or whatever, and then they're loaded with all the agricultural products and they're sent out into the world wherever those are going to be processed or sold.

So are you experiencing any changes in terms of the actual flow of ships here? That's a great question. And you are absolutely correct. The trade flow in the world is dependent on balance. We can only fill what comes in full. We send it back full. So, you know, ultimately it has been an Asia trade into North America and a North American trade back out to Asia.

So far, you know, the disruption time period has been small enough that we haven't felt it yet, but it's something we're watching very, very closely. Now, what I think we have to recognize is that

Although President Trump would like to have manufacturing at the snap of a finger in the U.S., it's going to take time if they do succeed in building out domestic capacity for a number of these consumer goods that they want to produce. And then we have to also be realistic that the cost of manufacturing and the cost of production in the U.S. is going to be a lot higher on a number of these items. So, you know, I still have a view that

that, you know, there will be some sort of a balanced resolution where there will be some tariffs, but there ultimately will still be production around the world coming into North America. So, you know, I think that, you know, no matter what, if it doesn't come from China, it may have to come from Korea or it might come from, you know, Indonesia, or it may come from, you know, another nation that is set up to manufacture.

If you look at Apple as an example is saying now, well, we're gonna stop shipping out of China, we're gonna start shipping out of India. There's ultimately gonna be trade flows that are gonna come in. So we're watching it carefully. We are definitely concerned, but we ultimately know the consumption's not going away. So that consumption has to be filled somehow. And ultimately it will ultimately be through a combination long-term of more domestic manufacturing. But at the end of the day,

That's not going to happen in the near term. Next five to seven years are going to be transition years. And, you know, again, our supply chains will have to also transition. If we don't have container availability, what you'll see is bulk supply chains getting bigger, like we're shipping those lentils in a vessel to Turkey, and we'll have to be manufacturing elsewhere as well.

So we'll have to be a part of global value chains as they settle in this new geopolitical and trade regime in the world.

I just want to get back to the politics of farming for a second. And you mentioned, you know, this is one of the most politically sensitive topics because every government feels some impulse to take care of their local farmers. And also every citizen in the world of every country eats and is sensitive to food inflation. And Tracy asked about India earlier, and they've had an

on again, off again, lentil import tariff. Can you talk a little bit more about what you saw there specifically? Like both, I guess, the domestic politics of lentil tariffs and

and then again, like how it affected your business specifically as they've toggled that on and off. Look, you know, I've been a very vocal advocate over the last couple of years to have the Canadian industry recognize that the domestic agricultural policy of India is actually a sensible policy that the Modi government has no choice but to do it. You know, ultimately nations in the world

have to build local production to insulate themselves from food security issues. So, you know, the view that 22 million tons of production of pulses in India should become 35 million one day will still not even keep pace with their domestic consumption. So there's still going to be a net importer at that. So how can we as a nation, you know, fault another nation from trying to encourage local production?

We've shifted our dialogue with India to say, look, we are the reliable partner to fill your gaps. We're going to see in countries like India, Turkey, Turkey has been doing this for decades. From May until September of every year, when they harvest their crop in June, Turkey has a lentil tariff on. So if you're bringing in lentils from Canada, they put a tariff on to protect their domestic price of lentils for their farmers.

And September, they take it off to protect against food inflation. So these are the ways that tariffs are used to build local prices, farm receipts, and yet not sacrifice the domestic prices for affordability. India is going to do the same thing. And I think ultimately, it's a sensible policy. We've got to recognize that trade relationships are no longer going to be, how do we drive by and sell? Nations in the world are looking for two-way trade.

investment and innovation and technology development and transfer.

So, you know, we as a company, AGT, are taking that view. We're building a new processing plant near Mumbai where we're going to be, you know, taking Canadian materials. We're going to be processing them in India and we're going to be playing in the local market. And we're also going to be exporting out of India to nations in Asia where they have a competitive advantage. So, you know, that's the way that you build the long term trade relationship, you know, recognizing that

We can't sit here and say we want tariff-free access to all markets around the world. We have supply management in our country. We're restricting the access to our agricultural sector for nations around the world. So you know what? You want to be free traders? Let's concentrate on the things that we need to do in this country. Interprovincial trade barriers have to come down. We have to open up our domestic agricultural markets, and we have to recognize that we're going to have more to gain from free trade than we are to lose from free trade.

So, you know, I see this as a transitional time where, you know, ultimately, you know, deals are going to get done and trade is going to happen. It has to because economies can't transition quick enough to fill the gaps. That's what's ultimately going to drive it.

So everything you've outlined sounds very sensible, boosting production in North Dakota, setting up more bilateral trade relationships, maybe moving some processing capacity elsewhere in the world. But it also sounds very expensive and very difficult to do if you are a smaller scale farmer.

And I guess one of the concerns with the rise in trade protectionism in general is that you are going to get even more consolidation in agriculture. And we know that small scale farmers have been suffering for a while. It's difficult to compete against giants in the agricultural business. Is that going to become even more of a trend in the current circumstances? Like, is scale going to be essential, basically, to surviving?

Scale today is essential to surviving, but that doesn't mean that small and medium enterprises don't have a role to play in scale. You know, I always counsel entrepreneurs. There are, you know, different ways in which to achieve scale. You can build scale, you can buy scale, or you can partner scale, right? That's it. That's the key. And, you know, what we have not had enough of in our economy in Canada is

It's a recognition. You know, I call it the dinner-diner phenomenon. Do you want to be dinner or do you want to be a diner? I want to be a diner. I want to eat other businesses and grow my scale. I don't want to build myself to be eaten by somebody else. So ultimately, you know, what we encourage is companies have to build themselves into a link in the global value chain.

They have to recognize what role they do play and they have to link themselves into a supply chain that makes a lot of sense. You know, I was in Turkey three days ago. In fact, I was there on the earthquake day in Istanbul. So scary day that day. But, you know, ultimately,

I was in Turkey meeting with, you know, customers from Japan. You know, we've linked with the major Japanese trading houses on the development of our pasta manufacturing business because the large Japanese trading houses have strong linkages into the Japanese retail and the Asian distribution side of things.

So, you know, we've recognized even as a relatively large company that we don't have the scale and we're partnering with companies that have $100 billion in revenue because we can't solve that distribution. Or in India, we're in discussions with the large majors like Tata or Reliance or, you know, those types, Wilmar, Adani Group. I mean, these are the type of companies that dominate revenue.

you know, the distribution in those nations. So consolidation, you know, at the farm gate is already happening. I mean, can you imagine when I was a kid growing up again, you know, we as a family had 4,000 acres of farmland. That was a big farm in 1978.

Today at 4,000 acres, a family can't farm full time. You know, they ultimately will need to have a second job. You know, you basically say today a mother, father and a daughter who are farming would have to be 12,000 acres in order to sustain a family. So from that perspective, you know, again, scale is actually part of our advantage in our agricultural system. We're a low cost, high quality producer.

We're competing against nations that have one acre and two acre and five acre farms that are very manual and not mechanized.

So ultimately, you know, we have to recognize I don't think it's a bad word. I think it's transition. But I do think that SMEs are key. Small and medium enterprises are key because they're nimble. They can innovate. They can deliver a product that is fitting. You know, sometimes bigger companies aren't good at doing things like that. We're not nimble enough to do it. We need SMEs to make us competitive.

We've got to build the ecosystem and the linkages. We haven't done that in this country. I just have one last question, and it sort of relates to the productivity gains that you've seen over the years in farming from all kinds of like sensors and maybe there's drones involved and stuff like that or lower cost of...

tractors or whatever, there's obviously a lot of anxiety about how much technological products come from China. When you look at the farming business in Canada, how much of that tech stack that drives productivity gains these days comes from Chinese tech, basically, or Chinese manufacturing in the form of farm equipment? I would say, you know, from my experience, there'd be a lot more reliance on the overall Asian manufacturing, not just China. And I think that's an advantage for us.

Again, a lot of the sensors and things that we use are now manufactured in so many nations around the world that we can kind of dodge that. The key is on the manufacturing side, a lot of the farm equipment is still very much dominated by U.S. manufacturers. But a lot of the core technologies like zero minimum tillage, the center of manufacturing for that technology is Western Canada. We're the ones who developed it.

Companies like Borgo Industries and Flexicoil and Morris Industries, these are industries that were here for the last four decades, developing out these zero minimum tillage seeding systems. All we've done is add on the technology to that, GPS, sensors, decision support systems. The big guys, the John Deere's, the Case IH, I mean, these are, again, large global companies who are ultimately driving it.

Data is something that is going to be a key advantage for us. I don't see, you know, vulnerability. Maybe I'm overstating. Yes, there's always vulnerability when you have a tech stack. But, you know, ultimately, we're using so many different technologies and we're stacking them together that I think that ultimately we have something that is not only unique, but it's something that you can only implement at scale. You can't digitize one acre farms. It's not cost viable.

You know, we have single farm families, you know, in West Central Saskatchewan who are seeding 300,000 acres of farmland this year. 300,000 acres. You know, these farm families have, you know, two generations. They're four generations on the farm and they have full time IT departments on their farm.

So these are not corporate farms in the mindset. Don't forget, we still have foreign ownership guidelines that prevent foreign ownership of farmland in Saskatchewan, as an example.

So these are still family farms. They've just scaled to be something that is very large and very competitive. Murad Al-Khatib, the lentil king of Saskatchewan. The legumary lentil king. The legumary. Of Saskatchewan. With his pulse on the pulses. That was fantastic. I learned a lot in that conversation. Thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots. Thank you. Thank you.

That was a lot of fun. There are a lot of very interesting strands to pull out from that conversation. I do think like the politics of food is definitely one of them. And this idea that every government basically around the world is trying to balance the distinct demands of their local constituency, food security, which can kind of only be ensured by having some sort of local production. And then the fact that everyone has to eat.

Are there any countries or governments out there that don't sort of idealize agriculture? Yeah, it's a great question. I don't know. Like in Singapore, did they? I don't know. There's got to be some, you know, Singapore, I guess some Middle East countries. But even there, I know they're doing stuff with like hydroponics. Anyway, a couple of things that stood out to me. So Murad's comment about trade being a balance, especially in global shipping, I

I think is really important. So even if Canada wasn't directly affected by something like U.S. tariffs, there would still be that knock-on effect from ships being rerouted around the world. And this is something that we saw in the pandemic, of course, you know, like ships coming over full and then returning empty and that being a pretty big problem for a bunch of companies and American consumers. So that's one thing. And then the other thing is,

The consolidation aspect. It just seems to me like the only I mean, we said it right. The only way to survive, especially in a world where trade restrictions are becoming more popular, really is scale. And it's going to be near impossible, I think, for the smaller guys to compete.

I'm glad you asked that question about the backhaul, because this is one of the things that has been worrying me. It's like, you know, people talk about the sort of tariffs and from a sort of strictly fiscal standpoint, like this is going to raise the cost of X. And so there's going to be less. But as we recently saw, like there's another knock on effect. And I'm glad you brought that up about the fact that the ships just might not be there.

Yeah.

is pretty extraordinary. And the fact that there's still more yield expected. And then the question is, do you have the rail capacity? Do you have the export terminal capacity to actually monetize these agreements and increased yield?

I'm just going to say lentils are amazing. They're great. And I am really, really hungry and I'm craving like a bunch of dahl. Yes, I know. I haven't eaten today. And so I've had the exact same thought during the entire conversation. So good. And good for the soil. Good for the soil. All right. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Odd Thoughts Podcast. I'm Traci Alloway. You can follow me at Traci Alloway. And I'm Joe Wiesenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow our guest. He's at

Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Arment, Dashiell Bennett at Dashbot, and Cale Brooks at Cale Brooks. For more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash Odd Lots, where we have all of our episodes and a daily newsletter. And you can chat about all of these topics, including supply chains 24-7 in our Discord, discord.gg slash Odd Lots.

And if you enjoy Allbots, if you like it when we speak to the lentil king of Saskatchewan, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening. ♪

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