“There’s a huge talent pool that agriculture needs to pay attention to” quips BDO’s Jim Synder as we visit on the plane. Jim leads the agriculture component of a Canada-wide accounting firm and has experience with chartered banks as well.

He spent a lot of time on the road last year at seminars with Leona Dargis, an Albertan ag producer and Canada’s youngest Nuffield scholar, who is under 30 and running a large operation with her sisters and their spouses.

A few weeks ago I read a summary of the 2011 Census of Agriculture from Statistics Canada, a report that gets released every five years.

It included some interesting findings. For example, the number of farms in Canada is actually declining but the size of the average farm is increasing – a fact that suggests consolidation continues to be a significant force in Canadian agriculture.

One of the cows from Ferme Gillette has recently made history by breaking the previous world record for lifetime milk production. Gillette Emperor Smurf has produced more than 217,000 litres of milk in now 11 lactations and is still going strong.

“I wasn’t able to talk for over two years about what happened with my grandfather,” a young farmer confides as he describes a bitter battle over the transition of land titles from his father’s father to him.

I am concerned about the many threads of conversations across farm audiences this winter that weave a sad tale of loss, grief and exasperation with those farmers who are over 80 and are not finishing their farming careers well.