What The 'Lentil King of Saskatchewan' Knows About World Trade

Murad Al-Katib (0:02)

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Joe Weisenthal (0:18)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:23)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:25)

Tracy, Canadian elections last night.

Tracy Alloway (0:27)

Yes, big event. I think a lot of people are talking about it in the context of US 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. Yeah. The funny thing is, or the slightly ironic thing is, it seems like Trump might have swung the election in the direction of the liberals.

Joe Weisenthal (1:00)

Well, yeah, you go back like three months ago, or four months ago or something, and it just seemed guaranteed that the conservatives, Pierre Poliev, was going to win, and then Trump started talking about making Canada the 51st state, and suddenly fortune turned very quickly. But that was just a news hook. We are not really doing a Canadian politics episode today, per se.

Tracy Alloway (1:23)

We're doing something better.

Joe Weisenthal (1:24)

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 Odd Lots character, someone that we should talk to to learn about a very specific business and how it works.

Tracy Alloway (1:53)

The Lentil King of Saskatchewan, the Sultan of Split Peas, the Grand Puba of Pulses, the Baron of Beans, Monarch of Multi-Greens. I can keep going.

Joe Weisenthal (2:03)

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 greens trade actually work. What does it mean? How does trading work with the US? How does it work with the rest of the world? How do you build that supply chain?

Tracy Alloway (2:23)

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.

Joe Weisenthal (2:35)

That is a lot about 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 the lentil trade, the pulse trade, the grain trade and so forth.

Tracy Alloway (2:48)

Are we going to take the pulse of the pulse trade?

Joe Weisenthal (2:50)

We are going to take the pulse of the pulse trade. We are speaking with Murad Al-Katib. 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 Odd Lots.

Murad Al-Katib (3:06)

Well, thanks for having me.

Joe Weisenthal (3:08)

Why don't you start with, what does The Lentil King of Saskatchewan do? Tell us about the business of AGT Food and Ingredients.

Tracy Alloway (3:16)

Is it good to be The Lentil King?

Murad Al-Katib (3:19)

It's definitely been an interesting career for me to kind of contribute to the transformation of agriculture out in Western Canada. So 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, when I was a kid growing up in a little town called Davidson, Saskatchewan, we grew wheat and we grew canola. 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. Lentils, chickpeas, peas, beans, these crops actually fix nitrogen. They don't require nitrogen fertilizer.

That was my bet. I was a 27-year-old young entrepreneur who looked at this situation and said, agronomically, if we can grow these things, the world demands them. They're protein crops. If we could intersect 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 multibillion-dollar company based right out of Regina, Saskatchewan, to kind of reach the world, drive the Canadian trade, and participate in growing and consolidating a global supply chain in this business.