eKonomics: The Dirt PodKast

Podcasts

2025 CAMA Award - First Place

The Dirt PodKast features down-and-dirty agronomic science to help grow crops and bottom lines. Inspired by nutrien-eKonomics.com, farming’s go-to information resource, this podcast breaks down the latest crop nutrition research and news. Hosted by Nutrien Senior Agronomist Mike Howell, The Dirt helps farmers make better business decisions through actionable insights.  

After an extremely successful three seasons, the Nutrien eKonomics team wanted to take The Dirt even further and grow its Canadian listener base and promote eKonomics as a well-established thought leadership platform. AdFarm went to work to launch season four and strategize different ways to push engagement and gain listeners.  Our overarching goal for the year was to increase listens by 10% organically.  

Podcast listens grew by 66% year-over-year, rising from 21.79K between September 1, 2023 and August 31, 2024, to 36.25K during the same period this year. 

The aim was to increase awareness of the podcast and eKonomics as a thought leadership platform in general. 

We created a strategy plan to push more engagement to our audience with a wider variety of guests, content and events. These tactics and episodes brought more relevance to our listeners. 

• Created unique and dynamic companion video programming for all episodes  

• Featured episodes around events with high visibility – brought Mike Howell to Calgary Stampede to record specific Canadian ag content 

• Elevated brand recognition by including well-known guests 

• Partnered with ag media influencers, research institutions and brand ambassadors 

• Improved the presence on social media, including shorts, reels and engaging posts 

• Ran a suite of digital ads to promote the podcast, including social media ads, google responsive display, retargeting ads and vendor media ads. 

For season four, we elevated the program, inviting new guests and bringing fresh content. We created new promotional graphics featuring high-quality images of our guests, live quotes pulled from each episode and more colour. We pulled short clips from each episode to tease each episode on social media before it dropped and after it was published. This year we added full video episodes on our YouTube channel.