Four Generations of Iteration: Innovation Culture at VXV Farms

VXV Farms | Regenerative Alberta Living Lab

Innovation has been part of VXV Farms since 1956, when Gerald Vandervalk's grandfather established the operation. Gerald's father was 17 at the time, pulled out of grade 11 to work the land. He's 88 and hasn't left. Now Gerald's children are also part of the operation.

Four generations into the same piece of ground, the instinct to try things, watch carefully, and adjust has become part of how the operation runs. Water systems, fencing, grazing patterns, species selection - each has been rebuilt and refined over decades of close observation. Not because a program asked for it, but because that's how the Vandervalks operate.

“Before there were GHGs and fossil fuels to worry about, there was innovation happening,” says Kimberly Cornish, RA-LL Project Manager. “And that has remained, and then just been built on. It feels like a super reactor for innovation.”

From anecdotal to evidence

Gerald already shares what he knows. He sells tire troughs, fiberglass posts, and pipe to other producers. People come to VXV and stay for hours. “I like to share,” Gerald says. “A lot of people come and they're here usually for a long time because they're asking questions, and so I just enjoy sharing what we're doing and what's working.”

That informal network has real reach. But there is a limit to what one producer's experience can do on its own when it comes to shifting how others manage their land. Without data behind it, even compelling results remain anecdotal. Other producers weighing the cost and risk of changing how they graze or what they plant need more than a neighbor's word to act with confidence.

That's part of what the Living Lab is built to provide. The soil maps, the Ranch Ops grazing records, the repeated sampling rounds - these don't just document what Gerald is doing. They generate evidence precise enough to close the knowledge gaps that slow adoption. A result on one farm, captured and compared across a network of operations, gives other producers something concrete to consider when they're deciding whether to try something new on their own ground.

A feedback loop, not a snapshot

The RA-LL isn't designed to take a picture of where VXV is today and file it away. It's designed as a feedback loop - data informing decisions, decisions generating new data, each cycle building on the last toward practices that are more refined, more transferable, and more likely to be adopted by producers who didn't have the benefit of four generations of iteration to get there.

The six soil health principles at the centre of the project - Living Roots, Diversity, Reduced Synthetic Nutrients, Manage Livestock, Soil Armor, and Reduced/No Tillage - weren't developed in a research institution and handed to producers. They came out of co-development sessions with producers across Alberta and function as an integrated system. The unit of innovation is the farm system, not any single practice. At VXV, as this series has shown, those principles are already working together - each one supporting the others across water, grazing, and plant diversity decisions that have been layered and refined over years.

The project is also tracking the economics alongside the ecology - through conversations with producers about what these practices cost, what they return, and what it would take for more operations to move in a similar direction. Soil health outcomes matter. So does whether the numbers work at the farm level.

What Gerald is building

Gerald's kids are involved and active at VXV now. “I want something for them, too,” he says.

That continuity matters for the Living Lab. A five-year project tracking how a whole-farm system evolves needs operations genuinely committed to the long arc - producers asking the same questions Gerald is asking, curious about what the data will show in two years, in five years, and beyond.

VXV is that kind of operation. Not because it fits a profile or checks boxes, but because the instinct to keep learning and keep sharing has been part of how it runs for nearly 70 years.