Fact or Fiction? Dennis Bulani’s Book Sets the Record Straight on Farming and Food

Dennis Bulani has a passion for agriculture. He’s a fourth-generation Saskatchewan farmer and founder/CEO of The Rack, an ag retail chain selling fertilizer, fuel, and crop protection products.

His new book, ‘What A Farmer Wants You To Know About Food,” aims to educate consumers and provide farmers with a tool to share the truth about agriculture and food.

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Meet Dennis Bulani

Bulani grew up on a Saskatchewan cattle and wheat farm near Biggar, earned a degree in animal science and ag economics, then entered the corporate world. When his father was ready to retire, Bulani moved back home and became the fourth generation to run the farm.

When he realized his town was lacking a local option for purchasing fertilizer, fuel, and crop protection products, Bulani opened a retail outlet, The Rack. The store now has 13 locations in rural communities in Saskatchewan and Alberta.

Bulani created an app through The Rack called Hedgehog, which allows customers to lock in a futures price for diesel, hedge their price risk by monitoring the fuel market, and book future deliveries with a guaranteed price. This and his other achievements landed him in the Canadian Association of Agri-Retailers Hall of Fame in 2019. 

After attending a conference where speakers shared misinformation about agriculture and demonized farmers and farm practices, Bulani put pen to paper to try and dispel those myths and untruths.

The result was his book, “What a Farmer Wants You to Know About Food,” which provides straightforward, science-based answers to questions about food and farming. He tackles issues like GMO labeling, the misportrayal of seed oils, whether organic food is worth the cost, and more.

Episode Highlights

• Bulani wasn’t sure at first if he wanted to farm full-time, but when his father offered him the chance to take over, he knew he had to give it a try.
• Before taking over the farm, Bulani worked for Farm Credit, Eli Lilly, and Elanco.
• When he couldn’t buy fuel and other inputs locally, he opened his own retail outlet.
• Bulani’s book, “What a Farmer Wants you to Know About Food,” started as his response to a conference speaker spreading untruths about food and agriculture.
• He wants the book to answer consumers’ questions, and to be a tool for farmers who want to share the facts about ag.

Links and Resources

• Order Bulani’s book, “What a Farmer Wants You to Know About Food,” on Amazon.
• Learn more about Trust Your Plate, an online resource and community Bulani founded as a partner project to his book.
• Visit Bulani’s store, The Rack, and learn about his Hedgehog app.

Transcript

Please note: This transcript has not been edited.

Lisa Foust Prater: Welcome to the 15 Minutes with a Farmer Podcast from Successful Farming, I’m your host, Lisa Foust Prater

My guest today is Dennis Bulani, a fourth-generation Saskatchewan farmer and CEO of Rack Petroleum. He joined me in the Successful Farming booth at Commodity Classic to talk about farming, business, and his new book, What A Farmer Wants You To Know About Food. 

In each episode, I have a quick 15 minute conversation with a farmer to hear their story and share their experience, expertise, and life lessons. Dennis, thank you so much for joining me on 15 minutes with a Farmer.

Dennis Bulani: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Lisa Foust Prater: I learned about your book a while ago and we will get into all of that. Um, but I’m very excited that you’re here at Commodity Classic, so I could actually talk to you in person. This is so fun. Yeah,

Dennis Bulani: It’s great. It’s great to come down here. I drove down.

Lisa Foust Prater: You did? 

Dennis Bulani: Yeah, 16 hours. 

Lisa Foust Prater: Oh my goodness. So you are in Saskatchewan. Tell us about your background in agriculture.

Dennis Bulani: I was raised on a family farm. We were a mixed farm of beef cattle, primarily wheat back then. And then I went to the University of Saskatchewan and took my degree in animal science and ag economics. And then I had a job with Farm Credit, so I learned how to appraise and assess land. I worked for Eli Lilly, Elanco, the animal health company out of Manitoba for five years, and learned how to sell a deal in the feed industry with feed additives and animal health. And that was really a learning experience. Loved working there. 

And then, uh, and then I moved back home and had the opportunity to, uh, take over the farm. And I wasn’t sure if I wanted to farm or not, but my dad said, “I’m out.” So I said, “Well, I’m not gonna pass the opportunity to see how that goes.” And while I was doing that, I couldn’t buy the right kind of fertilizer to feed my crops. So I saw an opportunity. So I opened up a fertilizer in chemical fuel retail in Biggar, Saskatchewan. And it grew from there. So I farm and I’m also an ag retailer,

Lisa Foust Prater: And so you’ve got, you said like 13 locations for your retail stores. 

Dennis Bulani: We’re now about 13 locations across Western Saskatchewan, and we have one in Alberta as well. And usually what I do is chase the coattails of large companies that pull out of our small towns. I’m a real believer in small town America.

I love my local community and I believe in supporting it and  I get a lot of support from all the farmers in those small communities because they recognize that number one, we’re independent, but number two, that, that, that our staff are local and we have, uh, a vested interest in those communities.

Lisa Foust Prater: Right. That I love that you just noticed a need on your own operation and then turned that into a business. That’s fantastic. Yeah.

Dennis Bulani: That’s pretty crazy. Well, like, I’ve always been infatuated with nutrition. So, right off the get go in 1984, it would’ve been, I did soil testing and said, “Well, you know, my dad was thought to be a good farmer back then, but he certainly wasn’t replacing the nutrients like he should have been.” So I went on a mission of soil building.

My dad entrenched in me even back growing up and all, most farmers have come from family farmers. He said, “Whatever you do, you take care of this soil. That tops six inches is our livelihood. You pass it on, you need to take care of it.” And that the amazing part to me is how most of society doesn’t really understand how critical of a red line that is for a farmer that I take care of my soil, by golly.

Lisa Foust Prater: Yeah. I mean, because if you don’t, you have no livelihood. That’s right. I mean, you just have to do it. Um, and, and that’s, that’s one of the many things that I feel like people do not understand about farming.

Dennis Bulani: It’s really interesting, when I was writing the book and and designing the cover, my book helper lady, she said we’d use AI and see if we can generate the cover. I wanted a table with a meal on it for the cover. But she typed in the title, “What a Farmer Wants You to Know About Food,” and 90% of the time AI generated a picture of a guy in coveralls with a pitchfork.

Lisa Foust Prater: Of course. Yeah. It’s Grant Wood <laugh>.

Dennis Bulani: And I think to this day, a lot of people have this vision of a farmer being in this bucolic scene on the back 40 somehow picking strawberries.

And, uh, you know, you know, it’s just certainly not the case. Most farmers I deal with have a degree in plant science or soil science, and they’re well educated and very smart people.

Lisa Foust Prater: Oh, absolutely. It’s amazing how the general public either feels like farmers are, like you said, a pitchfork and overalls, or that farms are owned by massive corporations with no human face. And of course, I mean, you know, both of those things are true in some cases, but for most of us we’re just people.

Dennis Bulani: And here’s the amazing part of it. Uh, well, even to this day, I believe the stat is about 88% of all the farms in North America — Canada, and US — are family legacy farmers. Yeah. And the, the morals of family values and soil health and everything carry from generation to generation, and they’re very proud of that. 

Just because some of the farms are getting larger doesn’t mean that they give up their moral values to care for the environment and the land. It amazes me how some urbanites say, “Well, big farming, that’s bad.” And I say, “Well, why is it okay for you to own two rental properties and a house? And it’s okay for you to get big. But it’s somehow sacrilege for me to get bigger as a farmer.” And of course, consolidation is, is a part of most industries nowadays.

And we’re so efficient that we can, we can actually get larger and, uh, be more efficient at the same time

Lisa Foust Prater: So why don’t you tell us a little bit about the history of your family farm and your ancestors?

Dennis Bulani: So I’m really proud of our family farm. Both sides of my family. We did my DNA test, we DNAd, the soil. We did that before we did my DNA <laugh>.

So we do my DNA and we discovered that I’m actually 89% Russian. My grandfathers both immigrated from right on the border of Ukraine and Russia, and they came to Canada. And back then, you could go settle anywhere you found a chunk of land, and you could stake it. And if you could break 22 acres in three years, then the government would give you that land. 

Lisa Foust Prater: Yeah, can you imagine having to plant 22 acres like they were doing it:

Dennis Bulani: With an oxen and plow.

And actually when you look at the evolution of that whole thing, farmers in Western Canada, at least, what they did was they went and selected the land that was the easiest to break with the least amount of rocks. So a lot of the first land to get broke was actually sand dunes.

Lisa Foust Prater: Oh, no. Because it was easy to break. Yeah.

Dennis Bulani: It was obviously non-productive. 

Lisa Foust Prater: Right. Easy to break, hard to do anything with <laugh>.

Dennis Bulani: My great grandfather had enough farming experience from Russia that he knew black soil when he saw it. Yeah. My farm’s in the thin block soil zone of Canada and we have quite productive soil, although we do have the rocks as well.

Lisa Foust Prater: It’s so interesting to me how, um, when people, you know, came to this country or even still come to this country and, um, or, you know, the United States and Canada, how they often will settle in a place that reminds them of their homeland. I just think about pioneers all the time and how they just don’t make people like that anymore.

Dennis Bulani: Actually, I write about that in the final chapter of my book about how sentimental it is to, to most, most family farms. Yeah.

I have a hill where there’s native prairie, it’s never been broken, pasture. And on top of that hill my father’s ashes are spread there. Sometimes our family goes there and it overlooks the lake. And, and, uh, it’s kind of a sentimental place that we celebrate our family legacy there.

And sometimes I take my relatives from Vancouver or or Toronto there that don’t understand farming, and I tell ’em, “Can you believe how pretty and how clear the air is here?” What a privilege it is to live in such an area.

Lisa Foust Prater: Oh, it is. I love that. I mean, what a great way to honor your dad and to think about him being in that beautiful place. 

So let’s talk about your book, “What a Farmer Wants You to Know About Food.” What inspired you to undertake this project?

Dennis Bulani: You know, what’s amazing is if you’d asked me a year ago today, will you have a book published by today, I’d have said I don’t know <laugh>, but I was at a conference in Phoenix, Arizona, and the host and the guest speaker got up and they literally bashed farming and seed oils and GMOs and everything for an hour. And I was almost ready to cry. I was so disappointed to hear that these people that had never even been to a farm were acting like they were farm experts. 

I got so upset, but I didn’t have all the information with me to challenge them publicly. I thought, well, I’m not gonna die on that hill. So I waited till after they were done, and I went up afterwards and I said, “Look, guys, I’m a farmer and everything you said has demonized everything I’ve done all my life. I know that this is not correct information. And here you are spewing falsities about how we really do grow safe food.”. And they, they said to me, “Well, then, how about you prove it?” So I went home, took two months, and I researched their talk, and I wrote a 45-page letter with references to disarm what it said. 

Well, that’s when my friend says, “Gee, you’re halfway done with a book, why don’t you write a book about it?”

Lisa Foust Prater: Yeah. No kidding.

Dennis Bulani: I realized that I was actually conglomerating all the information I’ve gathered over my 40 year career about all these questions that are good questions consumers ask, but I never, ever had all the information in one spot. So I was kind of avoiding the discussion. I thought, well, I’m gonna put everything into one spot in this book, and I’m ready to have a good conversation with any consumer about legitimate questions. Yeah. And here I am today, way more confident to carry on the conversation. 

Any consumer, any grocery shop that has a question. You know what, they’re good questions. They just don’t know. Yeah. And it’s our job, my job in particular, I feel an obligation to have the conversation and answer those questions and convince people there’s no question that we’ve got the safest food we’ve ever had on the planet today. We live longer than ever before, and yes, there are other health issues and so on, but I’m so proud of the advancement agriculture’s made to get us there.

Lisa Foust Prater: Yeah. Absolutely. Um, so I’m curious, what arethe top two or three things that you as a farmer want people to know about food?

Dennis Bulani: Well, number one I would say is 90% of the information they’re getting is coming on social media. A lot of it is probably coming from the wellness industry. God bless the wellness industry. But I have to say the wellness industry is a $998 billion. Industry. So if you follow the money every time, I know the seed oil thing is kind of interesting to me because you’ll get somebody saying, well, we gotta get rid of these seed oils because they’re bad, which they are not. And then you dig in and they say, by the way, uh, I’ll sell you a detox for your liver for 30 bucks a month, and we’ll get rid of those seed oil problems. And, uh, by the way, if you go on my nutrition program and I have supplements to make your brain remember stuff.

So there’s always a thing behind it. And I feel somewhat offended to that. I don’t mind anybody that spouts accurate information. Right. But when it’s inaccurate, it’s easier to read on Twitter or Facebook.

Lisa Foust Prater: Oh, yes. People believe anything they read. And, and just looking at the, looking at the source, you know, following the money, following the source, I think is so important. And people just do not do it. 

Dennis Bulani: So, the real cool thing is, what I’ve really discovered is that you need to be a critical thinker. Even the consumer asking the question should  look up how to be a critical thinker, because Twitter and Facebook and some of these social media things are giving us one sentence blurbs, and we’re accepting those blurbs.

A critical thinker would say, “Why? Where’s the evidence? Is it accurate? Is it a correlation or a causation?” And when you ask all those questions and walk through these questions logically, we all end up at the same spot. A logical thinker will probably conclude similar results.

Lisa Foust Prater: And you know, the thing I love about your book is, um, you know, not only is it good for consumers who aren’t farm folks or don’t have connections to agriculture and there are so many of those people now, but just people who have no idea what happens on a farm, but also for farmers, because like you said, it gives you sort of the ammunition to have that conversation. And, it’s a great resource. So, you know, for those folks to be able to confidently and accurately speak the truth about what’s happening.

Dennis Bulani: So the farmer, I wrote the book so he can use it as a tool to have the conversation with his friends.

For the consumer, the average grocery shopper, whoever that is buying the groceries, if they read the book, they are gonna feel better. You know what? It’s amazing. My book’s the number one bestseller in Canada now on Amazon. 

Lisa Foust Prater: Oh, congratulations. 

Dennis Bulani: I have had some remarks from a particular lady in Toronto wrote me and said, “Dennis, I read your book. I’m a single mother with two children, and I used to hate going to the grocery store, and since I read your book, I actually feel good about it.”

Lisa Foust Prater: Oh, that’s great. 

Dennis Bulani: People should feel good about going to the grocery store. Because 99.9% of the food there, I don’t care which food it is. It’s safe right now. How much you eat of each one, that’s a whole nother issue.

Lisa Foust Prater: Yeah. Oh, sure, sure. That is fantastic. What a wonderful thing, just to be able to make those consumers feel some more confidence in the food system and feel better about it. 

Dennis Bulani: Yeah. The other interesting one, the other one that has come out of the book that I thought everybody knew was people asking me about GMOs.

Lisa Foust Prater: Oh Goodness. 

Dennis Bulani: Genetically modified organisms. And, I don’t know if you know this or not, but we are becoming more efficient. We want to become more environmentally friendly. So we developed GMO technology, which was changing a plant trait instead of spraying pesticides. 

We thought we made a major advancement, but most people don’t know that we learned it from mother nature. People don’t realize that the sweet potato, the sweet potato is A GMO crop made this exact same way that we do it in the lab, but by a freak of mother nature, the sweet potato is the GMO crop. 

Lisa Foust Prater: The GMO thing, that’s probably one of my number one things that I wish people knew about food and about farming is that, you know, when you go in the grocery store that many, many times, the non GMO label is just a PR stunt and for many of these fruits and vegetables, there isn’t a GMO option. So them calling it non GMO, it’s just ridiculous.

Dennis Bulani:  I was in a grocery store the other day, and I thought just for sport, I looked at some of the food items and that GMO stamp on there, and I found rye bread. And there was rye bread non GMO, and it was, I forget, five bucks. And then there was like just normal rye bread, it was like three bucks. Well, guess what? There’s no such thing as, there is non GMO cereal, so it’s just a false label. 

Lisa Foust Prater:  I’m gonna, um, include links to all of your  stuff in our show notes so that our listeners can pop over there and find your book, and then they’ll have a tool too. 

Dennis Bulani: And our website we created is called TrustYourPlate.com. It’s a place you can go that highlights some of the book, but it’s going to be a gathering place for farmers to tell their stories.

Lisa Foust Prater: Oh, I love that. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today and just wishing you the best of luck, um, going forward, and I’m, I’m excited to follow you and see what’s next. So thank you. I appreciate it.

Dennis Bulani: It’s a pleasure being here at the show.

Lisa Foust Prater: Thank you for listening. Please subscribe, rate, and review us wherever you listen to your podcasts. Open the latest issue of Successful Farming and visit us online at agriculture.com for more interesting features and news for your farm and Join me next week for another episode of 15 Minutes With a Farmer.