2026 Value Investing Conference: Murad Al-Katib On Building A Moat In Global Food Security

At the Ben Graham Centre’s 2026 Value Investing Conference, Murad Al-Katib closed out the day as the afternoon keynote, and opened by warning the audience that he was not the kind of speaker they were used to seeing at a value investing event. He is a founder, not a portfolio manager. His company, AGT Food and Ingredients Inc. (TO:AGTF), grows and processes lentils, chickpeas, peas, beans, pasta and other plant-based staples out of Regina, Saskatchewan, and ships them to 127 countries. The reason he was on the stage was that Prem Watsa and Fairfax are the majority shareholder, and Prem had apparently decided the room needed to hear the story from the operator’s side.

The story Al-Katib told was less about a single company and more about how to think about global food security as a long-duration investment thematic: what the drivers actually are, where the economic moats live in an industry most people write off as commodity, and why the next decade is going to reward investors who understand a sector that North American capital has largely ignored.

Starting in the basement with a blank sheet of paper

Al-Katib’s origin story is the kind of thing founders like to tell, and he told it without much polish. He’s a Turkish-Canadian, born in a 1,200-person town called Davidson, Saskatchewan, to parents who emigrated from Turkey in 1965. In the early 2000s, with his wife six months pregnant with twins, he quit his job in the Canadian government, moved to the basement of his own house to rent out the main floor, and wrote a business plan on a white sheet of paper for a lentil processing company. He was 27. The first question his wife asked was “what are lentils?” The second was “how are we going to put diapers on the babies?”

The thesis he put on that sheet of paper was simple. Global population is growing. Demand for protein is growing faster. The scarcest resources in the world are arable land and water. Canada grows a lot of both. And every third field around Davidson was in summer fallow, sitting black because the rotation of wheat and canola had burned through the nitrogen in the soil. Planting lentils and other nitrogen-fixing legumes in those fallow fields would do two things at once: generate income on otherwise idle acres and fix the soil without fertilizer. All he had to do was convince a few thousand Canadian farmers to try it.

Twenty-five years later, Canada grows 12 million acres of lentils, chickpeas, peas and beans, and roughly 20% of the world’s lentils pass through AGT’s facilities. The company has 40 manufacturing plants on five continents and shipped 97,000 ocean containers last year. Al-Katib believes AGT is one of the three largest container food exporters on the planet. It does about $3.5 billion in revenue.

Fairfax came in during 2018. Al-Katib’s description of the phone call is worth repeating more or less verbatim. It was a Saturday morning, 7am in Saskatchewan. His phone rang. “Murad, this is Prem Watsa.”