Speaker Profiles

Marvin Slingerland is a Business Advisor with MNP in Lethbridge. Marvin works with owner-managers of dairy farms and feedlots as well as with other agri-businesses, delivering advice and solutions tailored to help them succeed.

Marvin is particularly adept at advising on the use of the DHI benchmarking tool that gives producers a combined view of their financial and production information. He also collects data for the Canadian Dairy Commission in Alberta and assists with tax reporting and financial statement preparation.

Having spent 16 years managing a dairy farm and with close ties to a feedlot operation, Marvin has unique insight into the challenges his clients face. He attends industry conferences in order to keep clients up-to-date on industry changes and opportunities and explains complex ideas so they are easy to understand. Marvin takes pride in helping clients improve and grow their operations to their full potential.

Designated a Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA) and a Chartered Accountant (CA) in 2013, Marvin has a Bachelor of Management degree from the University of Lethbridge. He is an elected councillor for the Town of Coalhurst and sits on the board
of directors of Community Futures Lethbridge.

Michelle Miller, better known as the Farm Babe, is an internationally recognized speaker; published writer & columnist, and an online influencer as a full time advocate for agriculture.  She started her social media outreach over nine years ago as a way to better bridge the gap between farmers and consumers, making a name for herself as a dedicated “mythbuster” in food and farming.  Farm Babe has hundreds of thousands of followers and an average social media reach of 5+ million monthly. She’s been featured in Forbes & has caught the attention of the Today Show, Inside Edition, CNN, People magazine, and more… a guest on Dr Drew, has influenced corporations as powerful as Burger King, and has proudly spoken alongside some of the biggest names in food and farming today.

https://youtu.be/-Mg9MAUWW9A?si=pMvam88EUrOpMI8e

You may remember Alvin Law from a previous Beef Industry Convention. He is definitely hard to forget.

Alvin’s story of being born without arms and written off by medical and rehabilitation experts in 1960 has even been the subject of several television documentaries. One for ABC-TV in the United States even won an actual Emmy Award! He is in not one, but two Canadian Halls of Fame and is a best selling author of his own book, “Alvin’s Laws of Life…5 Steps To Successfully Overcome Anything”!

Alvin knows how to overcome challenges and 2024 finds our industry facing our own huge obstacles. Some days, it’s difficult to not just give up. So, we are thrilled that Alvin will be back to share his inspiring story, play some music…with his feet, and remind everyone he may appear to be “amazing”, but he didn’t achieve his success all alone. He will remind all of us that membership in our association matters and together, we can achieve the impossible. We only get one life.

What we do with it is everything!

With more than 30 years of experience in food retail in Canada, Brad Porter, VP Market Merchandising Meat, Seafood, Produce, Floral and Garden Centre has extensive knowledge and experience of retail operations and store support merchandising.

Having started part-time in fresh produce operations during school and running meat operations previous to joining Loblaws.

In his 15 years with Loblaw, Brad has journeyed from category management in meat to Senior Director of Merchandising Operations to VP of Fresh Merchandising, while also getting an opportunity to learn Centre of Store merchandising. Brad is passionate about true customer service and building great store programs that our customers love and is always searching for new ideas in great food experience.

Jerry Klassen grew up on a grain, sugar beet and feedlot operation near Coaldale Alberta. After graduating from the University of Alberta with an Ag Business degree, he started with Cargill and worked at various trading positions. Jerry has always been involved in the international grain trade; most recently, from 2010 through 2019, he was Manager of the Canadian Operations for a Swiss based grain trading company.

Jerry has over 25 years of commodity market analysis and commodity trading experience. From 2017 to 2021 he was Chairman of the
Canadian Grain and Oilseed Exporters Association. Jerry has travelled to over 36 countries, many of them more than once, visiting farms, flour millers and traders. Jerry is also considered a farmer with land in Saskatchewan and Manitoba while the family farm is in Southern Alberta.

The cattle market has always been a passion for Jerry. He has written cattle market comments for the Cattleman Magazine and Grainews for over 25 years. Since 2009, he has provided market consulting for major feedlots in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario. Since 2020, he has written grain and oilseed comments for Farmtario website. Resilient Capital is commodity market analysis and proprietary futures trading.