The Story of Us

The Challenge

The Alberta potato industry contributes billions to the provincial economy, leads the country in seed production, and supplies raw material for global food brands. But most Albertans have never met a potato farmer.

The Potato Growers of Alberta needed to bridge that disconnect. Not with advertising. With real stories about real families doing real work.

The Solution

We spent six months embedded with five farming families across Southern Alberta. From April to September 2024, we followed the potato from laboratory propagation to field harvest to storage.

No scripts. No staged scenes. Just documentary-style filmmaking that let the farmers tell their own stories.

The result was a five-part series covering every segment of the industry:

• Episode 1: The Seed — Hoogland Farms, Haenni Farms, and the science of seed potato propagation
• Episode 2: Fresh to You — GV Ridges and the pivot to creamer potatoes
• Episode 3: The Water Journey — St. Mary River Irrigation District and water stewardship
• Episode 4: From the Ground Up — Miyanaga Farms and processing potatoes at scale
• Episode 5: Behind the Bag — Nakamura Farms and fourth-generation chipping potato expertise

We paired intimate ground-level cinematography with aerial footage from Lethbridge Drone to capture both the human scale and the landscape scale of Alberta potato farming.

The Result

The series was featured in Spud Smart magazine, distributed across YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, and presented at industry conferences.

But the most meaningful metric was organic sharing. The growers themselves became advocates, sharing the videos with neighbours, family, and customers. By the end of production, the families were treating our crew like their own.

That trust is what made the footage authentic. And that authenticity is what made the series resonate.