Robert Saik's Food 5.0 Made Him a House of Commons Witness and Carried Him to Keynotes Around the World
“The book actually positioned me as a significant expert in agriculture, and I’ve appeared twice now to the Canadian House of Commons Standing Agriculture Policy Committee as a witness.”
Robert Saik, author of Food 5.0
Robert Saik grew up on a mixed family farm, the grandson of Ukrainian farmer immigrants. He built one of North America’s largest agriculture consulting firms and sold it in 2018, ran a robotics company and sold it 20 months later, and is now building an AI company for equipment dealerships. Food 5.0: How We Feed the Future, which he wrote with Scribe, became a Best of Amazon book and made him a witness on national agriculture policy.
A book that called it in 2019
Clip · Robert Saik on the predictions in Food 5.0 · 54s
Food 5.0 launched in August 2019. Robert opened it with three questions: did you worry about a plague when you woke up this morning, about war, about famine?
“So this was pre-COVID, pre-Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and pre-famine that happens because you have geopolitical instability.”
— Robert Saik
It was his second book. The first, The Agriculture Manifesto, was a short booklet from 2014 laying out the drivers he expected to shape agriculture through 2024. He says it was well received, and that gave him the confidence to write a full-length book.
Written for one reader
Clip · Robert Saik on writing for a 30-year-old single mom · 44s
The idea started at home, when one of his daughters would not let his granddaughter eat certain foods. Robert wanted a book that spoke directly to readers like her, people trying to feed a family without the facts about how food is grown.
“So my avatar or my target audience for the book was a 30-year-old single mom living in the city with a couple of kids trying to feed her family, trying to understand what was going on with food, and should she feel guilty about buying food?”
— Robert Saik
The book walks readers through the eras of agriculture, from muscle to machine to chemistry to biotechnology, and then into today’s convergence of satellites, sensors, biotech, and AI.
Walking the book into existence
Clip · Robert Saik on talking his book into existence with Scribe · 76s
Robert heard about Scribe through Strategic Coach, the program he has attended every 90 days for 33 years. His writer at Scribe worked from an organic olive farm in Italy, and he wrote the book by talking to her on the phone, often while walking.
“I talked it, I walked it into existence.”
— Robert Saik
When he went on a tangent, she called it a rant, and those passages became a recurring feature in the book called Rob’s Rants. One of them:
“I know two things. That kind of agriculture will not feed a 2050 population. And I know for sure they have never harvested half an acre of potatoes by hand.”
— Robert Saik
A platform around the world
Clip · Robert Saik on keynotes the books opened around the world · 32s
Both of Robert’s books became Best of Amazon books. He has always been a keynote speaker, and the books carried him to stages in Portugal, Spain, Florida, Australia, and South America, with more keynotes booked for the next two months. He has done TV interviews and many podcasts, and one company planning a two-day workshop with him in February intends to buy a copy of the book for every attendee.
“And I’ve always been a keynote speaker and the books really propelled me around the world.”
— Robert Saik
He is candid that royalties alone are modest. The value, he says, has been in his positioning.
A voice on national policy
Clip · Robert Saik on testifying before the House of Commons · 20s
Robert believes too much farm policy is written by people who have never set foot on a farm. Food 5.0 gave him a seat at that table.
“So I’ve appeared twice to the House of Commons to help formulate national policy.”
— Robert Saik
His favorite moment came at launch. As a committee member for Ag Smart, an agriculture event in Olds, Alberta, he launched the book in a full theater of about 300 people from his own community, with local politicians in attendance, and signed copies for them.
The human spark
Clip · Robert Saik on imagination and human-written books · 65s
Robert is already thinking about his third book, on how AI will reach the blue-collar sectors of agriculture and heavy equipment. His advice to anyone considering a book: start small, even with a booklet, and take the first step. He plans to write the next one himself, using AI for fact-checking rather than writing.
“So I think, you know, as much as you want to fall back on allowing AI to do the writing, I think you might lose a lot of your tone and your personality in that.”
— Robert Saik
“And I think that’s a tremendous opportunity for people who have imagination to get that down into the format where other people can gather it like a book.”
— Robert Saik
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