This is part one of the second conversation in our IWCA Conversation Series. This segment is taken from a digital roundtable held July 2026 with four honourees from the 2026 Influential Women in Canadian Agriculture program and moderated by agriculture editor Kaitlin Berger. For information on the honourees and the background of the Influential Women in Canadian Agriculture program, click here.
The honourees featured in this conversation are:
- Coreen Franke, Nutrien Ag Solutions
- Wen Chen, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
- Margaret Hudson, Burnbrae Farms
- Andria Jones, University of Guelph
This transcription has been edited for clarity and length.
On educating the public about Canadian agriculture
Kaitlin Berger: With the different pathways that you’ve all taken to get into agriculture, how do you think your backgrounds have supported you in your career? Or have they made you look at things differently or in a unique way. How have they made you look at agriculture? Have they contributed to the way you approach things?
Margaret Hudson: I’ll start if everyone else is thinking. Just to say that, you know, our business started…we were farmers. My great-grandfather came in 1891 and then my grandfather, and he was a stonemason and a dairy farmer. And then my grandfather carried on dairy farming. My dad introduced chickens in 1943 to our farm because he took an agricultural class and they were starting to differentiate all the genetics and it was a new breed of bird that was a more efficient layer.
I guess my main message that I was going to make is that the Canadian economy, it survives. I think one in seven is employed by food and agriculture. It’s like the largest employer in Canada, and I feel like there’s a lot of misinformation about agriculture. Like I would love to talk about, I get asked questions around GMOs and, I’m sure, you know, those on this call can help demystify some of the things that I don’t understand. Because I come from agriculture, I think that I’m positioned to want to learn, I want to understand. I don’t just want to judge, but I feel like, with a lack of understanding, comes judgment.
And when you have something that’s so important to the Canadian economy, I feel like having grown up on the farm, I’m privileged to kind of be open to farming and people who come from the city, not everyone’s as open as everyone on this call, right?
And I just feel like education around farming, it should be embedded back into our school system, like the project that launched our family farm into the egg business back in 1943. Like, if there was more education, there would be less people questioning agriculture and more interest in jobs in agriculture and actually educating people from our school system to fill the jobs that we have available. Because you often can’t match what you need with the people being educated.
Because I come from agriculture, I think that I’m positioned to want to learn, I want to understand. I don’t just want to judge, but I feel like, with a lack of understanding, comes judgment.
So I just feel like embedding agriculture education back into primary, secondary school and encouraging people to actually pursue jobs in agriculture for their post-secondary and making sure they understand what those jobs are, like, we have jobs. We have robots that help pack our eggs or de-palletize our eggs. We have complex equipment. We’ve got really interesting jobs. We do sales and marketing. We do TV commercials, all kinds of really cool jobs and the research that you guys do would be so interesting. So, I just think we need to spend more time educating our kids and demystifying agriculture, so people aren’t suspicious about what we do, and they understand the food and they eat healthier, and then also seek out jobs in agriculture.
Andria Jones: My answer aligns very closely with that, and I think, in coming into agriculture as somebody from a city and not having that early life experience with agriculture, again, it came when I learned about it in veterinary school.
When I was teaching a course, an undergraduate course at the university on foodborne disease, one of the assignments we had students do was keep a journal for a week on everything they ate for seven days, and then we would have them research where those foods came from, what are like the global implications, what are the potential health implications, for example, like cross contamination or undercooked chicken or something like that. And we’d have them do that for a week and then write a paper on the health implications, but also global implications of our food and our food system, and students learned a lot through that process.
I’ll never forget, it was a fourth-year course, so a graduating level course, and somebody talked about the bananas that they’d eaten for breakfast that morning, and the bananas came, they were local bananas, because it came from the Guelph farmer’s market. And thinking like, do we have many banana farms around here? And so I think for so many people, you know, food is just in the grocery store. And there’s very little thought as to how it gets onto those shelves or into those fridges or freezers.
I can tie that to the research I do on mental health, where there’s a whole host of stressors that farmers experience and, for many farmers, part of that is public scrutiny, right? And anti-agriculture activism or animal activism, where stories are being portrayed that are either completely false, like I remember one group put forward an anti-fur and wool campaign and they showed like dismembered sheep saying this is where your wool comes from. And it’s like, no, that’s just completely wrong. And then others where they’ll show huge factory farms or something from the U.S. that like, we don’t have the same scale of agriculture here, and some of the comments and some of the directed activist attacks, whatever the word might be, can also carry a significant weight on farmers’ mental health, as well.
And then on the flip side, I think it can cause a lot of undue stress for the public, if you’re constantly worried about your food quality and your food source. I have great faith and trust in Canada’s food system. We’ve got like the safest food in the world, right? And so, I think if we were able to bridge that divide between agriculture and the public, we could make great headways in a whole bunch of different things, including the ones Margaret spoke to, but then also like public trust and reducing our stress and mental health as well.
Coreen Franke: Alongside educating on where food comes from and agriculture in general, and I think there is a disconnect, I think that that’s very, very important that kids grow up knowing where their food come from and how much agriculture plays a role in that. But I think that the education has to go a little further and teach them what to believe or how to sort out what to believe and what not to believe on the internet, and some of those skills, I think, and that’s true not just for agriculture, but everything these days. And that’s really, I think, probably a big, big challenge is there’s just so much information out there, so much, and you know, what of it is real and what is not?
So, yeah, as far as my background goes, again just loving nature and loving science. And being on the research side, like Wen said, you know, in biology, all of those skills are transferable, whether you’re in agriculture or horticulture or animal science or any of that. So for me, I just love the science. That’s what I want to do. And the fact that I can do the science and that it helps make an impact for Canadian agriculture is really just bonus for me, and being able to see that on the real stage.
Obviously, in a plant breeding program in private industry, you know, we’re about improving varieties and they don’t stay on the shelf for very long. The farmers are always looking for the next improved thing, as well as changing pathogens out there, changing climate. I mean, that’s probably a big thing that will probably, I’m assuming it’s going to be one of your questions going further about climate change, but addressing those issues and being able to address them in the short term, I guess, relatively short term, and actually see the fruits of our labour play out for Canadian farmers, is very rewarding for me.
Wen Chen: I agree with all the ladies regarding education. I actually want to bring a point about educating the general public, as well as the policy makers or the politicians. I want to give a story about what is happening on the central experimental farm. Currently, there’s a lot of discussion and debate on our central experimental farm in Ottawa, which is the oasis set in a big city, that it’s quite unique. It’s not, you don’t find it everywhere, right. This central experimental farm was established in 1886, so it’s over 140 years. And there are the most elite varieties in agriculture building was developed on this farm. And then now the developers are going to build those high-rise towers and they’re going to block the sun and they’re going to cast the shading on the farm. Our senior management had serious discussions with the city, and what I’m trying to say is that the general public needs to know what’s on their table shouldn’t be taken for granted.
On the other side, my lab is often open to the school students, they come to tour our labs and also AAFC has open house events almost every year, every other year. And we will show the biggest insect collections to the public and we show them the farm. And actually there are tours, regular tours, come to the farm to see the perennial garden, to see the Museum of Agriculture. And all those things are just to bring the agriculture closer to the city, the people living in the city and the school kids. I think that all of that is very important for outreach and education.
But nonetheless, I just feel that I often think how I can do more to pass this message to them. I think there’s another, the society seems afraid of agricultural practices. Often there are negative things about if we apply fertilizers, we apply fungicide, that are caused to the spreading of the chemicals. But lots of farmers, they’re so knowledgeable. They want to protect their farms more than anybody else.
I think, my research, when we’re writing our papers, we’re trying to tell both. Some of the practices, they’re not that harmful as the general public thinks. So, I think Margaret, you know, these are the messages we want to give, the positive ones about agriculture. It really is feeding the people and, at the same time, we are also being cautious about protecting the environment, and that’s what the scientists and the farmers are doing right now. I think that that’s really important, these messages.
CF: Yeah, I agree. Sustainability is a big part of their mandate, and that’s super important.
On battling misinformation and building public trust
MH: I would jump in and say, first of all, I think it’s less than one in 50 Canadians that farm – so, it’s like less than two per cent of the population. It’s very small. And you think about, I mean, you talk about farming scaled. Well, okay, if we want to do jobs other than farm, we should be thankful that farmers are able to scale their operations in such a way that they can produce enough food for the many, right? And so the idea of farming scaling and getting bigger is something that I think we need to be accepting of as a general population if we want to eat.
I know what it’s like to be targeted by a special interest group, and I’ll just leave it at that; go Google my name. And it is very stressful, I can tell you, and you can spend a lot of non-value-added time trying to figure out how to respond to that. And it is very stressful.
And I do think that there are people, other companies look at large agricultural commodities and trying to figure out how they can get a piece of that business, whether it’s eggs or pork or beef. I just think that demonizing an aspect of that agricultural commodity is a way to kind of shift that volume away from it into yours. And I will use the rise of the cholesterol myth as a classic example, right? Where cholesterol got demonized: eggs have cholesterol, don’t eat eggs, and then the world gets raised on eating sugary cereal for breakfast. As a society, we need to educate around proper nutrition so that we don’t get diverted into these things.
But I’ve been on the research farm in Ottawa. It’s beautiful. I’m a bit surprised that the city would allow condos to block some. It’s shocking.
WC: It’s shocking. We already lost a big chunk to the hospital they are currently constructing.
MH: But at the end of the day, I think we’re all violently agreeing that we need to provide more education to the general population and credible sources that they can believe. Because the problem is, when you have special interest groups poking at you, they will try to discredit you as an information source, and then building up that credibility is really important. And how you do that, right? So that your information can be seen as non-biased.
I think farmers are in a great place to tell their story – but they’re too busy farming – and really encouraged to get out there and tell their stories, and from a place of extraordinary authenticity, which you can do from a farm, right?
I believe farmers are professional farmers. If you’ve survived this consolidation of farming over the course of the last 50 years, you are farming today because you’ve adopted, you’re bringing in new technologies, you’ve been able to scale, for the most part, I mean there are still some small hobby farmers, but they’re not supplying the majority of the food.
I think the point being made around farmers actually know what they’re doing and they care and they care about the land and they’re working to try to do things properly. And they want to make sure that if they’re out there – we also do some crop farming – you want your soil to be good. You want to sustain the soil. You want to develop the soil. You want it to be nutritious for the plants and work with it in ways that are going to hold on to the soil. And if you’re raising animals, that they’re going to be healthy, because an unhealthy chicken does not lay eggs, right? So, we fundamentally care for our soil, care for our animals, and trying to use the latest and greatest technology to be able to do so on a larger scale so the few can feed the many.
WC: Maybe I could just comment on Margaret’s story about the programs on the farm. Recently, we just submitted a paper on broilers. They’re not layers, they’re the broiler microbiome study. One of the things we found really interesting is currently people are so scared about AMR, antimicrobial resistance, spreading dispersal. And then that’s the farms are, I’m not very familiar with the layers, I don’t know if they’re starting to use the reduced antibiotics for the birds, but for the layers that they do, they already apply that and then there is a higher risk of mortality, the flock loss in our study and also reduced body weight. So, our conclusion is that you really have to see the programs at a production level. You have to think about the animal welfare, as well as the environmental health. So I think, the science gave some evidence, science evidence, but eventually it would be the farmer’s decision on what would be the best to balance the both sides. So, I think this is a really interesting discussion that I really enjoy.
CF: And you’re right, it is about balance, right? There’s that balance. It can’t be too heavily swayed one side or the other. It’s integration of all the components of, and there are many, to make a successful product in the end or have a successful operation in the end.
Special thanks to Farm Credit Canada, gold sponsor of 2026 Influential Women in Canadian Agriculture.
