Truth is, owing paid subscribers something was blocking me more than pushing me. So I’m pulling the paywall. Farming Full-Time goes back to free.

Still writing. Still erratic. Still honest.

None of this happens without you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Have a great spring.

We’ve had about everything go sideways on this thing that could. Rescheduled, weather tanked, the works. At some point, you just laugh and keep moving.

Drones will be there. Tacos will be there. Every vendor we work with will have a table. If the weather lets us fly, we will. If not, Jody walks you through a live demo on the controller.

Come if you can. Register at the link so I know how many tacos to order.

Drone Day Registration

See you Friday.

First stop: my parents’ place in Fargo. My dad had told me I was exactly the type of clown the Minnesota DOT funds its annual bazaar on, and that I needed to grab his floor jack before I left.

So I had mom leave the door unlocked, crept past Ollie, their little old-man Shih Tzu, noisy cranky bastard, grabbed the jack, and did that weird impossible leap where you’re ducking under the garage door and clearing the laser safety sensor at the same time.

The jack went into the trailer. Getting it there required wheeling that awkward bastard down the driveway, cast-iron wheels dragging, scraping concrete the whole way, waking half the neighborhood. I decided that was better than blowing my back out on the first leg of a 482-mile dry run. I flung it against the front wall of the trailer, tried to close the walk-in door quietly, which always makes it louder, flipped the seat heater to high, and headed southeast.

In and out of Fargo before dawn.

The sun came up somewhere near Breckenridge. A bit of hope welled up with it.

Trust that the machinery would not only hold, but deliver.

It did not hold. But that’s a longer story, and it’s almost written.

Eleven days later, I’m standing in a farm shop in Lake Park watching spray drones swarm a snow-covered field in April, when something clicked into place that I’ve been reaching for since my life blew to smithereens barely five years ago.

I am finding my tribe. Felt that in my gut.

The trailer’s fixed. The scanner works. There’s a potential whale on the horizon that I can’t talk about yet, but holy hell.

I haven’t forgotten you.

The writing is what built all of this.

I’ll be back when I surface.

— Adam

If you want to know who I am, where I’ve come from, and what I’m actually building, Trent Klarenbach had me on his podcast recently, and we got into all of it.

Urea (nitrogen) touched $1,100 a ton in my area. I posted a video and asked a simple question.

What are you guys doing about it? Not what product should I buy?

Just ... what are you doing?

But this isn’t really about fertilizer.

I’d had a rough Friday. One of those deals where you put months into something, only for it to fall apart in a single email. I texted a friend about it. She wrote back one word.

Bummer.

Monday morning, I posted the video.

Right out of the chute came the salespeople. Tripping over themselves to smash a product link in the comments. Completely oblivious to the fact that I asked a question at all.

Seven messages. I posted a question thirty minutes ago and already had seven messages. Not one of them answered it. Not one of them even heard it.

And that’s when you do the thing you always do. You go quiet inside. The kind of quiet where your brain starts folding in on itself. What did I think was going to happen? Why did I think this time would be different?

You start editing yourself retroactively. Maybe the question was stupid. Maybe I asked it wrong. Maybe I should just take the post down before it gets worse.

That’s the trapdoor. The moment you stop blaming them for not listening and start blaming yourself for speaking.

But then I saw something I wasn’t ready for.

You know how you can work a problem so long that you get too close to it to see clearly anymore, and then you walk away, and before long, the answer wallops you in the breadbasket?

Standing there scrolling through comment after comment, just about every one of them a product link or description, every one of them completely deaf to the question, I recognized that desperation immediately.

Because it was mine.

I’d been that guy. Scrounging forums for the perfect window to drop a link or testify to somebody about how my product will change their lives, spending years beating my head against the same wall.

I was so close to it I couldn’t see it until it was staring back at me from somebody else’s comment.

I almost pulled the whole thing down before my inbox overloaded and I had to snap my phone in half, change my name to Franklin, and move to that little beach town where Andy went after busting out of Shawshank.

There’s a reason farmers have the most sensitive bullshit meters of any industry.

The more exposed you are to something, the easier it is to sniff out.

The best salesmen I’ve ever known threw out the playbook and acted like human beings. When I was a kid, the John Deere salesman came out twice a month during the growing season, just to visit. Never a pitch. No product to hawk. Just there.

And when the farmer needed something, who do you think he called?.

There’s no sale at that point. It’s just one guy helping another guy get something he needed anyway.

But then the real comments started coming in.

Nathan Faleide said something about luck. How it played a part in his operation.

And I stopped. Thumb hovering over the screen. Read it again.

Then someone else running 0.4-0.5 pounds of nitrogen per bushel. Saying “Take care of your soils and they’ll take care of you.”

Now this was a guy who’d been in the dirt long enough to know something and was willing to say it out loud.

I don’t know how to describe what that feels like except to say: your feet come back. The self-talk shuts up. The room gets still. You remember that the question wasn’t stupid because somebody just answered it.

There are real people in here, actually trying to solve things. That’s all it takes.

One real answer, and you remember why you opened your mouth.

But it only takes one voice going the other direction to shut it again.

That’s when Dean showed up with his $100k truck.

I’ll be honest. I had a whole response drafted in my head. A full tour of the 1,300-square-foot rectangle I rent because I’m still in a rebuilding phase. I had about fourteen different versions of fuck you, Dean lined up and ready to go.

Then my phone buzzed. Same friend from Friday. Apologizing. Said she was sorry for the one-word answer. She'd spent that afternoon trying to talk a farmer out of killing himself.

And just like that, none of it mattered. Not Dean. Not the video. Not the fertilizer price.

The whole thing just went quiet.

But I couldn’t shake it. Because it all matters anyway.

The truck. The house. The appearance of doing fine.

It’s the oldest move in the book, deciding somebody’s got it good enough that their problems don’t count. And when that’s the response every time a farmer tries to say something true out loud, you learn to blame yourself for speaking.

So you stop.

That’s why hardly any of us say anything at all.

Ten years ago, I was pushing snow in the Porter Creek parking lot near midnight, broke and burning, watching the warm amber light through the windows and hating everybody inside it.

I’d lost my job on the farm I was supposed to take over, and learned on the same day that I had a third kid coming.

I needed money. Found it working nights, running a skidsteer with a snow pusher for a construction outfit that moved snow, apparently just for the haha's. I kept that parking lot spotless so the half-lit wine crowd could drive home to their white-collar hangovers in peace.

There were rotisserie chickens spinning in the window and the smell drifted out to the snowpile and I hated those too.

Last week, I was closer to the chickens, inside Porter Creek on my seventh oatmeal stout before the sun went down. Old timer I used to know always said you can’t fly on one wing, so I’d only planned to stay for two.

I was there because of a Champions Alliance and Sound Ag meeting at the Clubhouse Hotel next door, which I’d attended with the low-grade hostility I bring to anything that smells like industry self-congratulation.

The corner of the bar had filled up with a strange cross-section—metrosexual office guys, DNR officers in camo hoodies, farmers and ag businessmen talking drones and combine wiring and politics.

Al from Champion was telling anybody who’d listen about a farmer named Mike who’d been having combine fires in sunflowers out in the beach sands along old Lake Agassiz, the kind of ground that’s always trying to bankrupt you. Instead of calling a dealership, Mike just learned the wiring. Memorized the schematics.

Then he rebuilt entire machines. Fabricated his own sixty-foot strip till rig out of an old air seeder frame and built his own triple-bin fertilizer cart because why not.

Al said Mike should probably be in the engineering department down in Waterloo and not farming sand, and I thought, no, actually, he’s exactly where he needs to be.

Some of the most pungent brainpower hides in farmyards and old quonsets, and you only find it if you shut up long enough to listen.

Jake Lund leaned over somewhere in the middle of all this and said, "Man, I just love this industry. The way everybody talks openly and just says it. Much different from the insurance arena." He'd wandered into an ag meeting and come out the other side looking mildly stunned, which is funny because I'd walked into the same meeting, annoyed, and come home and written about my own website for twenty minutes before I caught myself.

True Grit Agronomy went live that same week. Felt like the right way to launch it.

Sitting there, I thought about the parking lot. About the chicken smell from the snowpile. About what the last decade actually looked like and how agriculture was the thread that pulled me back up through it.

The connections I'd never have dreamed about from out there in the cold.

The room full of people who'd pull up a chair for a stranger and tell you exactly what they knew without performing any of it.

I love this industry. I know how that sounds. Mike’s out there memorizing wiring schematics for the hell of it, and the DNR guy can’t help himself when he hears the word drone, and somehow I ended up inside instead of outside.

And the chicken smells the same either way.

Jake is right. That’s all.

That was one of the comments last week. And look, I sat with it for a minute. I did. Tried real hard to see it through that lens.

A 4-year-old kid, feet dangling off a dusty grey seat, driving a John Deere across 80 acres while his old man blows past him in a Ford and doesn’t look back.

I get it.

If you didn’t grow up like this, that story probably reads like a 911 call.

But every time I think about that day, I smile.

I didn’t drive a tractor again for five years after my freakout.

But that doesn’t mean I didn’t want to. I was probably back out there the next day, lumpy armrest beneath my butt, head bouncing off the door glass, dead asleep before the first pass.

When I take my boys with me now, they do the same thing. Headbobbing, mouths open, catching flies before the first round ends. Two generations of kids feeling safe enough to fall asleep in a tractor cab. Takes me back 35 years.

That's not what my trauma looked like. Trust me, I know the difference.

When I did get behind the wheel again, I was nine years old. Different tractor, same cab design. Pulling a six-bottom plow on another grey, misty day.

I was the proudest nine-year-old in the world. Prouder than when I caught the game-saving catch in extra innings at the now-defunct Kennedy Rockets baseball diamond.

And nobody was there to see it. No fanfare in the cab.

Just the smell of carbon discharge on a damp afternoon, Tracy Byrd or Soul Asylum or somebody crackling through the tissue paper Delphi speakers, and the business band lighting up all day because there were four machines working one field.

Hot damn, man. Goosebumps just thinking about it.

Five years after the plow, I’m fourteen. Standing in a machinery yard miles from the farm next to a scrap-heap Melroe harrow that needs to get hooked to a tractor with the wrong hydraulic ends.

No cell phone. No pickup. Just a crescent wrench, Channellock, and a prayer.

Nobody coming to save me. Only an unthinkable puzzle spread out in the dirt.

You figure it out.

I didn’t know it at the time, but those four words would become the most important thing I own.

Because I have needed it.

Through two divorces.

Four kids who’ve spent more time away from me than with me.

Somewhere between Regina and Saskatoon at midnight, when it was forty below, on my back under a trailer, patching mangled air lines while the wind tries to kill me.

Getting robbed in Minneapolis and left with nothing but a quarter tank of gas and a headache the size of Montana.

I need it every single week when I hit publish, and the crushing insecurity shows up right on schedule, whispering that nobody gives a shit about what some farm kid from Stephen has to say.

You figure it out. Every time.

Here’s what I’ll cop to: I’m a workaholic. No different from my old man.

That tractor seat is probably part of why. The engine installed in me doesn’t have an idle speed. It’s either full throttle or off, and I haven’t found the off switch yet.

I’m not proud of that piece, but I’m proud of seeing it.

I don’t put my boys on a tractor alone. I just don’t.

Every generation adjusts the dial.

But when they fall asleep against that glass, I see myself. And I’m trying to figure out how to give them what he gave me, that belief that you can handle whatever comes next, without handing them the keys to a metric ton of iron at four years old.

Different tractor. Same lesson. I haven’t figured it out yet.

That’s kind of the whole point.

Share Farming Full-Time

His hand is already on the doorknob. I must’ve nodded or something, cause then I look, and he’s halfway down the steps and about to make the dangerous leap from the step to the ground.

Slip or screw up, and you’re getting served under a maple syrup bath at the church pancake feed.

I’m four years old.

My feet don’t touch the floor.

And the tractor is moving.

Kenny’s 8640 wasn’t even our tractor. Big green elephant, just sitting at the opposite end of Mickelson’s field, like it was waiting at a watering hole. Half a mile from the approach, nowhere near any crossings.

I still don’t know why it was out there.

“Gonna have you drive it back to the south end by the granary,” Dad told me, as if it were something as simple as picking up my stuffed Bert and Ernie off the floor. He never wanted me bringing those guys into the Deere store for parts.

Must’ve embarrassed him.

The job wasn’t that difficult. Tractor wasn’t hooked to anything. And why were there forks on the floor of this thing? The faint caking of an old hotdish. Slightly bent like they’d been stepped on.

The day was grey, one of those soggy springs. Mid-morning but still only half night and half light. The kind of day that makes you wanna stay in bed all week.

My stomach dropped through the bench seat of Kenny's poop-brown 80-something F150. Old grey seat cover with red and brown stripes, like a wool blanket.

Dad climbed out and fired up the green elephant. It puffed out its signature cloud of unburned diesel smoke. Still one of the best smells in the world.

He climbed back down and got in next to me as the 8640 idled.

Always gotta let a diesel engine warm up, Dad told me a million times. Gotta cool ‘em down before killing the engine, too. It’s the only way to make them last.

My 4-year-old brain understood the logic. Drive it to the south end. It’s not even hooked up to anything.

But I’m 4. Dad was operating tractors and grain trucks when he was that age, tag-teaming with his older sister because he couldn’t reach the pedals.

He steered. She ran the clutch and foot-feet.

Standard behavior for a Kuznia kid in the 60’s.

So I guess that automatically means any old yo-yo can do it.

We climb up into the cab, me first with pops behind me in case I slip. The metal handrail is cold. Damp. I’m procrastinating now while my heart thumps against my chest wall.

The crescent-shaped quarter-moon door is still open from when Dad started the elephant. Narrow. Not for a small child like me, but for larger guys like dad. It takes a sort of circus contortion to round yourself through in a spin move and a plop in the seat.

“I’ll get er going for you.” Dad lets the clutch out, and we’re rolling.

B Range, slow and steady. 4, maybe 5 mph.

I’m sitting up as straight as I can to see over the steering wheel and around the smoke stack and air cleaner sticking up vertically from the hood, directly blocking the driver’s line of sight. Why it took Deere so long to move them to the side of the cab, I’ll never know.

“You good?”

And then he’s gone. Makes the jump, sticks the landing, uses the momentum to keep running back to the Ford while I make my way south toward the granary.

Dad whips the Ford around, and I think maybe he’s gonna drive beside me. See how I’m doing. Wrong. Guy blisters past me with the Wrangler Radials, flinging mudball roosters, dust, and straw. Blows right past and onto the end and just sits there, still facing south, not even looking back to see how it’s going for his boy.

He’s far more confident in his son than his son is in himself.

For the first quarter-mile, things went well. But when that Ford blew by me and began shrinking into the distance, my confidence trailed directly behind.

And then it hits me.

How the heck do I stop this thing?

Straight panic.

I’d watched the old man do this at least a thousand times. Clutch to start and stop. Quad Range shifter to neutral. Cool er down. Turn off the key. And then, the final step, which had become MY JOB. The knob. The orange-reddish one with the no-smoking slash that you had to pull out to kill the fuel flow to the engine. The only way to shut off those old Deeres. I’d get pissed if Dad was in a hurry and forgot to let me do it.

So I knew what to do, logically speaking. But as soon as that brown Ford was just a small dot in the distance, logic left the township.

I did what any preschooler would do. I cried. Hard. Opened the quarter-moon door, stuck my head out, and started screaming. Top of my lungs.

It didn’t dawn on me that I could just drive in circles until he saw me. Didn’t realize I could pull that knob to kill the engine. Stand on the clutch and put it in neutral? Forget about it.

The thing to do here was panic.

And if there’s anything I did right that day, it was the freakout. Perfected it. All this time, I’m in crisis while dad still sits at the south end. Not even sure he was watching, cause it felt like I screamed for a dozen years while the brown Ford still faced the opposite direction.

How will he hear me? A couple hundred Deere horsepower isn’t exactly quiet.

500 feet from the end now. Pleading with God and the grey air that the man look back.

400 feet. Still screaming. Face hot. Cherry red.

300 feet. He emerges from the pickup. Stretches. Maybe pulls a wedgie.

200 feet. Finally. Eye contact. He sees something’s wrong. Takes off running toward me.

And if it’s dangerous enough leaping out of a moving articulating 4WD tractor, getting back in is an entirely different animal. Instead of the wide landing platform of the earth, you’ve got a 6x10 inch grated steel step.

Nail the landing, or it’s pancakes for you. The guy didn’t even think about it. If he had, I’d have squashed him. And then what? Circles till the fuel ran out? Who knows.

Dad sticks the landing. Climbs in. Does the spin move plop in the seat and put me in his lap to calm me down. Pulls the tractor next to the Ford and the old granary with rats as big as cats and shuts er down.

He didn’t ask me to pull the cigarette knob.

Just kills the engine and says, “Adam... why didn’t you just push the clutch in? Or kill the motor?”

Calm as can be.

Like we’d just been learning how to ride a bike in the backyard.

I don’t know, Dad. I’m 41 now, and still trying to figure it out.

Maybe he’s not rude. Maybe he’s not shopping your competitor. Maybe he’s in a freeze response.

That’s what the woman on stage is saying about the farmer who won’t return your calls. The one who won't make a decision. Can’t even look you in the eye at the post office.

I look around the room. Half the chairs are empty.

Apparently, the freeze response is contagious.

Yesterday, this room was packed. Quarter-zips bumping elbows for the economics panel.

Today, the breakfast buffet sits mostly untouched, steam trays of scrambled eggs going rubbery, a mountain of link sausage nobody’s climbing.

The fluorescent lights hum their eternal hum.

A woman stands on stage talking about trauma, and the crowd has thinned like hair on a stressed farmer.

Michael Shutt is at my table again. We both made the Stillwater-to-Fargo hell run yesterday, but this morning we’re rested. Almost human. He says it doesn’t get better than this workshop, “the grand salami of winter ag meetings.”

I believe him.

TikTok psychology has officially chiseled its way into agriculture.

Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn. The four F's of trauma. The speaker walks through them like a flight attendant explaining exit rows. Calm, practiced, seeming slightly detached from the emergency she's describing.

I scan the half-empty room. Seed salesmen and crop consultants and agronomists, pushing eggs around their plates, learning about trauma responses. A guy two tables over checks his phone. Another one stares at the buffet, contemplating round two.

What a time to be alive. Sincerely.

Then she’s onto thoughts and behaviors. How producers let their thinking create patterns, and how those patterns reinforce the thinking. A feedback loop of self-destruction masked as work ethic.

Stay in touch with your thinking, she says.

Stop beating yourself up.

And for a minute, I feel like I’m the main exhibit.

I’m writing on my laptop when Angie from the U of M sits down next to me with the CEU sign-in sheet, and my gut drops through the floor. I’m not a Certified Crop Adviser. Not yet. I’m just studying for it, which means these credits are useless to me, which means I have no business being here, which means any second now someone’s going to ask why I’m taking notes on an event I’m not qualified to attend.

The sheet slides toward me. I feel my face getting hot.

And then Shutt grabs it. Scans the QR code. Passes it along. Doesn’t even look at me.

Angie moves on. My imposter syndrome stays mine for a little while longer.

Months ago, Angie asked whether I’d ever considered that I might have imposter syndrome. She put a name to the thing I’d been lugging around for years. And now she’s sitting right next to me while I write about this room, praying she doesn’t look at my screen.

The woman on stage is still talking about thoughts and behaviors. Negative feedback loops. The way we trap ourselves.

I am the lesson.

A woman in the back raises her hand. “How do we change our negative beliefs?”

I chuckle to myself. Quietly. I’ve spent the last fifteen years trying to do exactly this. Therapy. Books. Journaling. All the work. And still, this morning, I beat the hell out of myself on the drive here because I didn’t get up early enough to hit the weights before I left.

An hour on the road in the dark, and I spent most of it convinced that skipping a workout somehow diminishes my worth as a human being.

“A long time,” the speaker says. “It takes a long time.”

Long time, indeed.

Someone asks the obvious next question: so what do we do with a grower who’s shut down? How do you reach the guy who won’t engage?

And I watch his face as he asks it, and I realize: he’s already trying to figure out how to use this. How to overcome objections. How to close the frozen farmer.

Somewhere in his mind, this is a sales seminar, just dressed up in better vocabulary.

The speaker handles it gracefully. Says something about patience, about meeting people where they are.

But the question hangs in the air like a bad smell.

We can’t even sit with the suffering for one hour without someone asking how to monetize it.

A lender raises his hand. Wants to know how to get growers to stop avoiding the process and actually look at their numbers.

And I’m back at my kitchen counter. Late 2020. The stack of bills I wouldn’t touch. The job with AgServ had blown up. The divorce was fresh. I was a service advisor. A farmer in a polo shirt, learning to breathe recycled air. That stack just sat there, growing, while I found reasons to be anywhere else in the house.

I know exactly what he’s talking about. The avoidance. The freeze. The way you can convince yourself that if you don’t look at the numbers, they can’t hurt you.

The banker sees it in his clients.

I lived it.

Day One. The day before.

The coffee is Lutheran. Proper. You can see the bottom of your cup through it.

Does nothing for the pounding behind my eyes.

Four beers last night after six dry weeks, and my stomach has filed a formal complaint. The heartburn sits like a small coal in my chest, glowing quietly while I wait for someone to tell me something useful.

The room is puffy with the particular energy of farm professionals in January. Sixty-some men and a handful of women arranged at round tables like group therapy for an industry that doesn’t know it’s sick. Trucker caps and vests, every one of them stitched with a logo. Pioneer. Centrol. Betaseed. BASF. We are a room full of walking billboards, sponsored by the companies we’re here to learn how to depend on less.

The guy in front of me nods off. His head dips, catches, dips again.

Nobody says anything. We’ve all been there.

The panel is impressive. A banker who decides whether you farm next year or sell the equipment. An economist. A crop consultant. An entomologist. They sit at a row of chairs in the front of the room like a tribunal, and one by one they deliver their testimony on the state of the farm economy.

The consensus is careful optimism. Guarded. Reassuring. The kind of optimism that keeps its receipts.

“Equity is strong,” someone says. “Farmers are in a much better position than they were in the ‘80s.”

A man in a company pullover explains that fertilizer is my friend.

I write this down. Fertilizer is your friend.

Shutt catches my eye from across the table. Smirks. He can see my blood pressure redline. Doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t have to.

The worst-case scenario, according to the panel, is that land prices flatten. A soft landing. No pain.

And maybe they're right. Maybe I'm the one with the bias. But when your family got chewed up by the '80s, you don't trust soft landings.

The last session of the day is a breakout. Frayne Olson. NDSU economist, market guy. I grab a seat in the front row like the nerdy old guy who came back to college and finally knows what tuition actually costs.

Olson’s an animated speaker. Confident. Works the room, walking around while he talks. Half the time, he’s behind me, and I’m craning my neck like I’m at a tennis match. He’s been doing this for decades, but he didn’t start behind a podium. He bought his first farm in ‘87 and started farming in ‘88. He learned about crop insurance the old way. Doesn’t farm anymore, but you can tell the land’s still in him.

He told us that if he’d known where he’d end up, he’d have paid more attention in psychology classes and less in economics. Because one drives the other.

He puts up his slides, and the room gets quiet.

Prices, he says, are actually pretty average over the long term. We’ve been spoiled by the boom years. This is regression to the mean.

He doesn’t say it’ll be fine. He doesn’t say we’ll get through this. He just shows the charts and lets the silence do the work.

On the way out, I tell him that even though his talks are depressing as hell, I enjoy listening to him more than almost anyone.

He laughs. Guys who bought land in ‘87 don’t startle easily.

Earlier, I’d grabbed a mic during the panel. My voice cracked the way it always does.

“You say equity is strong,” I said. “But what happens if demand dries up? You just mentioned a 25-year downtrend in asset returns. An investor can get five, six percent risk-free right now. Where’s the incentive in farmland?”

The answer came back gentle. Measured. It’s not the ‘80s. Lending is more careful now. The worst case is a soft landing. Prices stagnate. No crash.

In March 2007, Ben Bernanke told Congress the subprime problems seemed “likely to be contained.” PhD economist. Former Princeton chair. Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Seventeen months later, Lehman collapsed.

The smartest guy in the room didn’t see it coming.

And I sat there thinking: maybe I’m the one seeing ghosts. Maybe the ‘80s broke something in my family that makes me flinch at shadows. Or maybe soft landings are what smart people promise right before the floor gives out.

The workshop wraps up. I flip through my notes.

Sharp pencils for 2026. Smile.

Lutheran advice. Modest, responsible, delivered without decoration.

But the storm coming?

That’s Old Testament.

Day Two. The Drive.

Halfway to Fargo, my phone buzzes. YouTube alert. Trent Klarenbach, grain markets guy out of Saskatoon I’ve been following since the early days of this pamphlet. New video.

I pull into a Casey’s parking lot and watch it in the dark, engine running, heat blasting.

He’s charting land prices. Historical data. And he’s saying what I couldn’t get anyone in that room to say yesterday: land prices can go down. Have gone down.

The data’s right there.

I sit in the parking lot longer than I need to.

Maybe I’m not crazy. Maybe the ghosts are real.

I put the Land Shark in gear and drive the rest of the way to Fargo, wondering if anyone in that conference room will ever see this video, or if it’ll just bounce around the algorithm while they sharpen their pencils and smile.

Day Two. Later.

The mental health speaker is wrapping up. She’s given us resources. Hotline numbers. Warning signs.

The crowd—what’s left of it—applauds politely.

I catch Shutt’s eye across the table. He probably knows what I’m writing.

The questions shift. Genuine ones now. People who truly want to help. Someone asks about suicidal ideation. How do you know when a producer has crossed the line from stressed to desperate?

And it hits me how serious this thing is.

Two years ago, I was the weird guy. Writing about mental health in agriculture when nobody wanted to talk about it. Sideways looks. Too dark. Too heavy. Guys telling me to grab a rifle and go hunt something. Manlier things.

Now there’s a whole session at the grand salami of winter ag meetings.

Half-empty, sure.

But it exists.

And for a second, I feel something that might be hope. Not for the economy. Not for land prices. But for the conversation.

Even if some guy in the back is still trying to figure out how to close the frozen farmer.

I look at my notebook. Two days of scribbles.

Fertilizer is your friend. Sharp pencils. Freeze response.

Meanwhile, somewhere out there, a farmer sits at a kitchen table with a calculator and a stack of bills, making snippy comments to his wife while trying to fit square pegs into oval holes for another growing season.

Another farmer is on the phone with a realtor, listing the quarter-section his grandfather bought in 1952.

Another one is staring at a bottle of something, wondering if it’s worth it.

Half the room came for the economics and left before the feelings.

That’s the story, isn’t it? We’ll show up to hear that equity is strong. We’ll stay for the sharp pencils and the smile.

But the moment someone tries to talk about what’s actually happening—the freeze, the shutdown, the slow drowning—we’ve got somewhere else to be.

Shutt’s right. This is the grand salami.

Everything the industry needs to hear, crammed into two days.

The empty chairs are the story.

Two years ago, that session didn’t exist.

A long time, she said. It takes a long time.

Maybe that’s the only honest thing anyone said all week.

His solution? Buy his own spreader.

Then he replied to himself. And again. Working it out in public. Talking himself into it, then maybe out of it, then back in. You could watch the internal negotiation happening in real time, right there in the comments.

I’m not mocking Spreader Guy. I’ve been him.

In my twenties, I traded currencies. Forex. The leverage is what hooks you. Control a hundred grand with a thousand bucks. I'd short the yen with positions that would make your eyes water. For a gambler like me, it was pure electricity.

I'd win just often enough to believe I had it figured out.

Then I'd blow up the account. And I always knew exactly what to buy.

A better charting package. Premium indicators. A new platform with faster execution.

If I just had better tools, I’d stop losing money.

I had nine monitors and a subscription to everything.

What I didn’t have was discipline. I was emotional. My risk management was rubbish.

But I kept buying platforms. Because admitting the problem was me?

That’s a hard door to walk through.

Spreader guy isn’t buying a spreader to save $16,000. He’s buying it so he doesn’t have to ask why he spent $16,000 in the first place. Maybe Dad would’ve bought the spreader, Grandpa too. The whole thing is baked into who he is now.

I almost bought another spreader this week. My last piece did well.

My solution?

Write a bigger follow-up. More words. More data. More industry callouts.

I had 1,400 words drafted before I realized I was buying a spreader.

The Alerus Center in Grand Forks is packed. Agronomists, consultants, salespeople. Coffee and caramel rolls. Everyone trying to figure out how to keep their growers from going under.

You can smell the desperation underneath the Folgers. That, and the guy behind me wearing far too much Aqua Velva.

Two years ago, this room buzzed with talk about biologicals, yield maximization, and the future of agriculture.

Today, the lunchroom was quiet as a church.

Chicken's still dry. Same as every year. So it's not the food.

Everybody’s searching for the silver bullet. Something to take home to the farmers sitting in their shop right now, staring at spreadsheets that don’t work, no matter how many times they run the numbers.

Meanwhile, down in Georgia, Alex Harrell just walked away from half his rented ground.

Chew on that for a second.

This is the guy who holds the world record for soybean yield. Back-to-back years. 206 bushels per acre in 2023. Then 218 bushels in 2024.

The man literally grows soybeans better than anyone on the planet, and he’s dropping 3,000 acres because the math doesn’t work. Notified twelve landlords in a three-week window. Tightened his circle from a 21-mile radius to 10 miles because he can’t afford to put a tractor on a highway.

“We are literally paying to farm, not getting paid to farm,” Harrell told AgWeb. “We’ve now got guys with all their land and equity burned up, and we’re seeing Chapter 12 bankruptcies every day.”

Irrigated land in Georgia sat idle in 2025.

More will sit in 2026.

And if you think this is just a Georgia problem, you’re not paying attention.

Around my area, three bucks an acre profit is winning.

Three dollars. That’s beating most of your neighbors. If you broke even, congratulations, you’re doing better than damn near everyone around you.

The bar is below ground, and we’re still tripping over it.

So here I am at this Agvise soil fertility seminar, surrounded by people I don’t recognize, watching Brad Carlson from University of Minnesota Extension put up a slide that makes my blood pressure spike.

The numbers from 2024:

The top 20% most profitable farms spent $170 per acre on fertilizer.

The bottom 20% spent $224 per acre.

That’s a 31% difference. Fifty-four dollars an acre.

The most profitable guys are spending less on fertility. Not more. Less.

And what are the bankers telling everyone? This is not the time to try anything different. Stay the course. Keep doing what you’re doing. Don’t rock the boat.

Which translates to: keep losing money the same way you have the last two seasons, because at least it’s familiar.

And that's before you get to the regulatory side.

Carlson mentioned he’s receiving letters from “The Friends of the Mississippi River” and other environmental groups urging a limit on nitrogen applications.

The world is telling us to use less fertilizer; the data shows the profitable guys already are, yet the industry response is to freeze. To do nothing. To wait for someone else to figure it out while the Chapter 12s pile up.

We run lean on fertility. Have for two years. Our nitrogen trials showed we could cut from 200 pounds to 140 pounds without losing a bushel. That’s $60 an acre. Real money. Maybe the difference between surviving and joining Harrell on the list of guys walking away.

But try telling that to a farmer whose agronomist has been pushing 200 units for twenty years because that’s what the book says. Or the co-op that makes its margin by selling more product, not less. Or the banker whose risk models don’t have a line item for soil biology.

The Alerus is full of people searching for something to save their growers. The answer is on the screen. Has been for years.

Spend less.

Not on everything. Seed cost isn’t where the separation happens. It’s fertility. The thing we’ve been overapplying for decades because more is always better, right?

More nitrogen, more yield, more profit.

Except that’s not what the numbers say.

This is the way it’s supposed to ebb and flow.

Marginal ground is coming out of production. Land rents are falling. In theory, this corrects over time. Commodity prices rise, equilibrium returns, agriculture stabilizes.

But who’s left when it does?

Harrell will survive. He’s smart, he’s tightening his circle, he’s cutting equipment. But when that land comes back into production, when rents hit a floor that makes sense, he’s probably not the one picking it back up.

It’ll be some operation with deep pockets that can afford to wait out the cycle. Some investors who bought the ground at the bottom from a family that couldn’t hang on.

More consolidation. More hollowing out of rural America. More empty main streets, shuttered implement dealers, and schools that can’t fill a team roster.

The market is working exactly as designed.

Here’s what nobody wants to say out loud: the only reason this hasn’t already collapsed is land values.

For more than a decade, guys have been losing money on operations while their net worth keeps climbing because the dirt is worth more every year. Cash flow negative, equity positive. Banks keep lending because the collateral is solid. On paper, everyone’s fine. In the checkbook, everyone’s drowning.

A couple of good years after the Russia/Ukraine thing gave some breathing room, but the underlying math has been broken for a long time. Equity gains made it possible to refinance, restructure, and keep going another year.

If land values go, watch out. It’s 1988 again. John Cougar Mellencamp and Rain on the Scarecrow and all that. The collateral vanishes. The lending tightens. The cash flow problems hiding behind appreciating assets suddenly have nowhere to hide.

That’s when the Chapter 12s turn into a wave. That’s when the auctions actually materialize. That’s when the real pain starts.

And the mental health repercussions of all this. God. That’s why I started writing in the first place. Because nobody talks about what it does to a person to watch everything they built, everything their family built, slip away while the banker tells them to stay the course.

The shame of it. The isolation. The way rural men, especially, have been trained to suffer in silence until they can’t anymore.

I’ve seen what that silence turns into.

And that’s what keeps me up more than any of the economics.

The tide is finally going out. We’re about to find out who’s been swimming naked, as Warren Buffett would say.

And it’s not just farmers exposed. How many banks have their asses on the line after years of overextending credit based on land values that only go up? How many ag lenders are sitting on loan portfolios that only make sense if the collateral holds?

In my last article, I talked about how the upcoming farm rescue package isn’t even for farmers. It’s for the whole system that’s been running on fumes for a dozen years.

Meanwhile, Deere stock is near an all-time high. The input providers are doing fine. I don’t blame them. They’re playing the game the way it’s designed to be played. They’ll get their piece of whatever assistance package comes through because they’ve got the lobby money to make sure of it.

Farmer gets a check that doesn’t cover his losses, and the money flows right back upstream to the companies that set the prices and the banks that fronted the credit.

And we haven’t even touched the real elephant in this stale-cookie conference room:

South America.

Brazil doesn’t give a shit if American farmers are struggling. They’re not slowing down. They’re not waiting for us to figure it out. They’ve added 50 million acres of soybean production in the last twenty years, while we’ve been arguing about whether to cut nitrogen rates.

They’re coming for our markets whether we adapt or not.

Most guys think this is just another cycle. It’ll bounce back. It always does. But the combination of interest rates normalizing, land values plateauing, global competition intensifying, and input costs staying stubbornly high doesn’t feel like a cycle.

It feels like a realignment. A structural shift.

Now look. I could be wrong. A war breaks out, geopolitics shift, trade policy changes overnight, a new farm bill rewrites the rules.

Any of that could make everything I’m saying obsolete by next week.

But as it stands right now, walking into 2026, this thing isn’t done yet. And the room at the Alerus Center knows it. You can feel it in the silence between presenters, the moments when people used to ask questions.

I know this is heavy. But I’m sitting in this room full of people searching for answers, and the answers are right there. On the screen. In the data.

The profitable farms are spending less on fertility. The regulatory pressure is coming whether we adapt or not. The world-record soybean grower just cut his operation in half because even being the best isn’t enough anymore.

And somewhere, a banker is telling a farmer that this isn’t the time to try anything different.

The crisis isn’t the prices or the inputs. It’s the paralysis.

The answers are on the screen. The room stays quiet.

The chicken was dry. Coffee burnt. And three dollars an acre is winning.

You want to see what consolidation looks like? Drive from Amarillo to Wichita Falls on US-287. A couple hundred miles of cotton and winter wheat. No farms.

I pulled off at a town halfway through. Empty town square. Storefronts boarded up. Looked like a set from The Walking Dead, except nobody was coming back to film another season.

Saw my hometown in thirty years. Knocked the Buc-ees banana creme pie down a couple pegs. Broke my damn heart.

There’s your peek into the future. That’s what happens when the land stays in production, but the people don’t.

Happy New Year. Welcome to 2026.

Carlson defended his methodology today because he catches hell about it all the time.

Here’s that link if you want to dig in:

Brad Carlson Fertilizer Article

Not a ladder out of the hole. A bridge.

Just enough to get you to next season, buy more inputs, and climb back onto the treadmill.

Here are the specs:

• $12 billion total.

• $11 billion for row crops—corn, soy, sorghum, cotton, etc.

• A billion for specialty crops.

• Payment cap of $155,000 per entity.

• Means-tested at $900,000 Adjusted Gross Income.

Checks cut by late February 2026. Just in time to pay your seed and chemical bills for spring planting.

That timing is not an accident. It’s the point.

I try to stay out of politics.

The entire system is rigged to run on our frustration.

But this one I can’t keep my mouth shut about.

The trade war didn’t start the breakup, but it sure as hell packed China’s bags so they could move in with Brazil.

We lost the market, so now we get a stipend.

And now the current administration is celebrating the “fix,” blaming high input costs on the last guy while bailing out the very monopolies that have us at knifepoint.

Maybe it’s four-dimensional chess, but all I see is a shell game.

The money flows up, the blame flows down, and the farmer is just a prop in their theater.

They keep us drunk on outrage and numb on the scroll.

Too busy fighting each other to notice they’re both cashing the same checks.

Both hands are in your pocket.

They just wear different colored gloves.

The American farmer is the political bullet sponge, while the real beneficiaries—the input cartels—stay in the shadows.

Companies like Bayer and Mosaic and Corteva lobby for the right to keep your margins at zero, and then Washington cuts a check to make sure you can still afford their invoice.

The press release says this covers rising input costs.

Read that again.

They’re using taxpayer money to pay the very bills that are bankrupting you. It’s a corporate subsidy laundered through your checking account.

Monopolies stay fat while the farmer takes the rap.

$155,000 sounds like a lot of money. But when you’re down $200 an acre on any meaningful acreage, it’s a band-aid on a bullet wound.

And the $900,000 AGI limit? That’s for headlines. It lets politicians say they aren’t funding corporate mega-farms.

In reality, $900k AGI is a guy moving millions through a checking account to keep the lights on, carrying enough debt to make a normal person vomit.

But it lets them call it help for the little guy while the machine keeps running.

And I’m in the machine too. I’m a seed dealer.

The margin on seed stinks as bad as it does for the person growing it. This bailout money passes through us in about thirteen seconds. Gone to the next level up before the deposit even clears.

We’re all playing hot potato with government crumbs.

The public thinks we’re rolling in subsidies and destroying the earth.

Meanwhile, we’re just sitting at the kitchen table doing math, wondering if it’s worth the gamble to let the health insurance lapse one more month to stay afloat.

The villain in the headlines is the guy who skips the doctor's appointment to keep the kids fed.

We’re all just gears in something too big to stop.

I don’t have a fix. I don’t even know if there is one.

I sat down this week to take a good look at our farm’s 2025 numbers.

Super lean operation.

Best wheat we ever grew.

Best beets.

Corn and beans took a drubbing.

Averaged out to a damn good year on paper. Barely made enough to buy a box of Twinkies and some gummy bears.

Big year.

And in February, they’ll send a check so we can do it all again.

This, from a buddy whose brain apparently came without an anxiety circuit.

I nearly jerked the pickup into the ditch trying to come up with an answer.

It started with a Snapchat ding a few hours after my last piece hit inboxes.

Another vulnerable one.

“Dipped the pen a little deep in the old emotional bucket this morning, did we old boy?”

Fair enough, I reply. Happens a lot with me.

Then he hit me with it. That question.

Problem was, my brain was already occupied.

One missed payment during harvest, and my health insurance evaporated.

Four days later, on a plane to Mesa, turbulence woke up the same tingling I had before Doc Eickman cut a hole next to my Adam’s apple and hammered in a cervical disc. He said it should be decades before it came back. Seven years later, here we are. Insurance restarts in January, assuming I can afford whatever deductible they invent next season.

So I did what any normal middle-aged man facing possible permanent nerve damage would do: I climbed South Mountain in shorts and tennis shoes.

Any rational person would say this is stupid—rocky hillsides in bad footwear when your neck’s already screaming—but that’s exactly why it works.

Counterintuitive. Forces focus.

When he asked what I’m afraid of, I gave the cheap answer.

“Failure, I guess.”

Him: “That’s it? Oh … well join the fucking club.”

Does everybody process fear like this? File it aside and keep going while it drains energy in the background?

Or is his wiring schematic just that different from mine?

A week later, Sheri and I are in a Scottsdale consignment store.

I wander off to the bathroom and emerge into a labyrinth of silver plates and art that only people with too many happy hours and time on the golf course can appreciate.

I can’t see Sheri through all the clutter, but I can hear her. She’s a magnet for good spirits and wandering souls. I’m convinced she could get an Aldi receipt to open up about its childhood.

Sure enough, when I round the corner, she’s three layers deep with an 86-year-old man consigning some of his overflow. Just a dude from Illinois who got tired of working for the man, realized he could start his own company, and did just that. Now he’s hanging out with his bride, tootling around Scottsdale peddling the reserves.

With my friend’s question still burning holes in my brain, all I could think to ask was:

“Did it scare you?”

He tilted his head. Scratched his chin. He removed his glasses and didn’t even get them down to his shirt to wipe the lenses when he looked back up and said, “Not really.”

Two words that felt like they came from a different planet.

The 86-year-old guy earned his answer. Fifteen years paying dues. Same work, same skills, same clients who followed him when he finally left. I’m not saying he didn’t work for it.

But he was consigning furniture because they’d accumulated too much and now only spend two weeks a year out there. That’s the shape of a life where things compounded the way they were supposed to.

He bought his house when houses were something you bought instead of something you qualified for. Built his business when a handshake transferred clients and a Yellow Pages ad was a marketing strategy. Rode four decades of falling interest rates while his equity grew and his 401(k) did the math for him.

By the time he jumped, there was a net.

For him, “Not really” was the only reasonable answer.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to convince the most stubborn farmers in America to trust a young guy with a different approach while my health insurance appeals drag on and my neck sends signals that the warranty’s about to expire.

No clients lined up. No 15-year runway. No economic tailwinds. Just trials, data, a few dozen videos, and a newsletter I launched months ago that I’m only now admitting exists.

He had overflow. I’m hoping something falls off the table.

Standing in front of a room of farmers in northwest Minnesota, trying to sell my brain instead of my back. And I don’t see the nitrogen data, the yield maps, or the years of trials.

I see the first question I can’t answer.

The pause that goes on too long.

The moment somebody in the crowd realizes I’ve been winging it.

So when my buddy asks what I’m afraid of …

Becoming obsolete before I prove I’m not. Running out of time before the consulting business replaces the physical work. My neck calling it quits before my brain catches up. Wheeling down to the liquor store for my government-sponsored fifth of Fireball because I waited too long for certainty that was never coming.

That’s the real answer. Not failure in the abstract. The specific fear that comes from trying to make a transition with no safety net, no warm-up period, and a body already sending invoices I can’t afford to pay.

But knowing the fear is structural doesn’t make it go away. And it doesn’t mean I get to stay stuck.

And even though it takes two weeks to answer a seemingly simple question, I still do it scared.

I publish the piece that loses readers. Promote the newsletter even though it feels like admitting I think I matter. Schedule the speaking gig before I feel ready. Ask a grower to trust me to handle the fertility plan for just 10% of his acres.

Not because the fear’s gone. Because the Fireball future’s still there, and I’d rather go out swinging than roll toward it.

When you jump a gravel road and nose-dive so hard you end up with gravel in your teeth.

That subtle shift from going up to going down.

That’s what it feels like when readers unsubscribe.

So I try to wait a day or two before opening the Substack app after I publish, because I know what’s coming.

Usually, it’s only two or three, and I claw my way back to even.

But those real emotional pieces, the open ones like “Terry” or“The Shackleton Harvest”?

Lost half a Greyhound bus after each of those. Like the back half couldn’t stand the crying coming from row 14.

Dan Leffelman says I have a whoopee cushion personality.

Inflate, pop, laugh about it later.

Except I don’t laugh right away. First comes the waiting. The checking. Refreshing the app one more time to see if anyone else bailed. The math in my head about how many pieces it’ll take to limp back to even.

Then the mind takes the wheel.

Idiot.

Why’d you publish that?

Nobody gives a shit that harvest was hard for you.

Why can’t you shut up and keep your head down and do your work like the rest of us?

Go back to the chisel plow.

Make yourself useful … but stay small.

Then, Angie from the University of Minnesota emails. Two hours after deflation.

Asks if I want help lining up some trial grants for next year.

I stare at the phone. Read it twice. Set it down.

Wait, what?

Here I just bled insanity onto the page about a deranged donut guy at the beet piler, and somebody says that’s the guy I want to work with.

Proof that shame is a liar.

Except I don’t respond.

Not that day. Not the next day either.

And it’s not because I’m busy. I’ve got my phone. I answer texts. Check yield maps. Coordinate with John about which field we’re hitting next.

I’m carrying a backpack with every piece of technology short of a desktop computer. Hell, I could run the entire operation from a tractor seat if I wanted to.

But not that email.

Because my brain is running a different program.

She feels sorry for you.

This is pity.

You’re not actually qualified for grant work.

You just write emotional shit on the internet.

She’s trying to be nice to the guy who had a public meltdown about harvest.

Don’t embarrass yourself by pretending this is real.

So I hide. Climb in the tractor for a 12-hour shift and tell myself I’m being productive. Except it’s not my farm. I just work for the guy. But I take it on like it’s mine and use it as an excuse to avoid the things that actually scare me.

Two days later, I finally replied.

I don’t remember what broke. Maybe I just got tired of the voice. Maybe I figured embarrassing myself was better than wondering what could’ve happened.

Either way, I hit send and immediately regretted it. Waited for the response that would confirm I’d misread the whole thing. That she was just being polite.

Except this isn’t about Angie’s email.

This is what I do. With everything.

I’ve got YouTube videos sitting in drafts. Some from months ago. Good technical content about nitrogen trials and Source applications. But I don’t publish them because what if nobody watches?

What if they do and decide I don’t know what I’m talking about?

I launched a second newsletter a couple months ago—True Grit Field Notes—for the technical farm content. Just data and recommendations and soil science. None of the meltdowns or therapy sessions.

And yet, I haven’t told most of you it exists.

I’d rather let people stumble on it like a rogue fart cloud in aisle nine at the grocery store than actually promote the thing.

Because promoting it means being seen. Means risking the moment someone says, “Who does this guy think he is?”

So I write the emails. Draft the videos. Build the content. Then let it rot in a folder somewhere while I convince myself I’m too busy in the field to hit publish.

This is what shame does. It convinces you that being different is dangerous, so you make yourself smaller. You find ways to stay busy that keep you from being seen.

Then you wonder why you’re lonely.

Why your business has stalled.

Why you’re stuck.

The ag industry’s got hotlines and LinkedIn coaches selling wellness. “My DMs are always open 🙏.”

Cool. Did it stop the voices? Or just give you another thing to perform?

Nobody’s calling the hotline. You think guys who won’t change their farming practices without getting dragged into it are gonna sign up for therapy?

The problem isn’t that farmers don’t know help exists. It’s that asking feels like admitting you’re different.

And different feels like death.

The cycle doesn’t break cleanly.

You don’t wake up one day, suddenly brave and unashamed. You just get better at recognizing when you’re in it. And you do the thing anyway.

You publish the piece that loses readers.

You send the email after two days of shame paralysis.

You tell people the newsletter exists even though it feels like admitting you think you actually matter.

You do it badly. You do it scared. You do it anyway.

Because that’s the only exposure therapy that works. Actually doing the thing that frightens you.

I’ve been writing openly and honestly for nearly three years in ag. You can step out, say what’s on your mind, and not die from it.

You can be honest about the hard parts and still be taken seriously when you talk about the data.

Both things can be true. The breakdown and the data. The shame and the doing it anyway.

Maybe ten years from now, we look back on high farmer suicide rates like they were a thing of the past. Not because of hotlines or coaches selling structure. But because some of us dared to stop hiding.

To say out loud: it’s hard out here, I’m struggling, I could use some help.

Being different won’t kill you.

Staying silent might.

Filed from a tractor cab that isn’t mine, making passes I don’t need to make, still carrying my whole damn house in a backpack, still hiding sometimes, but also, still hitting publish.

If you want the technical farm content without the therapy sessions, True Grit Field Notes exists. I’ve been too scared to tell you until now.

There’s your proof the cycle’s still running.

I was starting to wonder if the guy with the donut was some kind of scout—an undercover reporter, maybe—trying to bust us for hauling illegal beets.

Was the donut laced? Probably. Seven hours of sleep in three days.

That’s what harvest does to a man. It turns pastries into suspects.

Ernest Shackleton kept twenty-eight men alive for two years on the ice.

I nearly lost my mind parked beside a pile of sugar.

I don’t have the stones for this anymore.

Call me a pussy. You won’t be the first. Probably not the last.

The chickens mock me as I climb into the truck for what feels like the 1,857th day of this harvest. In truth, it’s only been twenty-six; most of them spent waiting for the ground to dry out.

Zero progress while winter waits for no man, corn cob, or sugar beet.

Two-day spurts followed by week-long rain delays. Enough to drive any man batshit, even those of us who’ve survived a quarter-century of these twisted rituals.

The mud lost its sweet microbial smell weeks ago. Now it’s like forgotten potatoes rotting in a pantry mixed with the ghost of other people’s cooking in an apartment hallway.

Sweet turned rancid in a way that clings to your clothes.

That smell follows you home.

DAY 13: THE GRIND

I walked in on John wearing a welding helmet and babbling about locking differentials and mud tires.

What can we do to make Turd Ferguson make it through the mud? There was a sad despair in his voice. A man grasping at straws to keep his mind from unraveling before the hunting opener.

This is the grind. The stretch where your mind starts testing you, whispering, Let’s see what you’re made of, kid. The ghost of Marcus Aurelius is laughing his ass off while piler number one breaks again.

To hell with this place. Did I pay my health insurance bill? You just put life on pause and hope it’s still there later.

Traction’s not the problem, I tell John. We’ve got enough to rent some out to the neighbors.

Power. That’s what Turd Ferguson needs. Reset the parameters and crank the pump. Not enough to twist driveshafts into Burning Man sculptures, but enough so it doesn’t lie down like a sick dog in the low holes.

Probably fuel filters, he says. Maybe so.

The beet piling station is where the road-scarred gather, marinated in diesel smoke, dried-out turkey sandwiches, and three-day crotch rot.

But somehow, it works. A thousand little moving parts. People from all over make this strange pilgrimage every fall, drawn here like it’s some vagabond’s gold rush.

When the piler breaks, nobody says a thing. The energy shifts through that line like weather.

The temp workers shuffle on the concrete in their reflective safety vests and steel-toed shoes.

Hardhats.

They move to stay warm, like wind-up zombies in a 1950s horror film.

They come from strange places you’ve never heard of. Donnellsonville, Iowa. Beach, North Dakota. Miami, Ohio. Good people, standing out in this crunchy air for twelve hours at a time with a couple of 15-minute tamale breaks and a 30 for lunch.

The next morning, John was wearing the welding helmet again, cursing at a broken topper knife. When he raised the helmet, his face looked like the harvest had aged him five years.

Don’t worry, I said. Michael Shutt called this morning. He’ll have pizza for us before dark.

Good, said John as he snapped his neck, flinging the helmet down at the same time, asking, Now where the hell are my gummy bears?

Drive-in movie night. The wait is 57 minutes per round.

How did Shackleton and his men do it? They didn’t have iPhones, cigarette lighter food warmers, or automatic transmissions.

Certainly didn’t have guys like Michael Shutt delivering pizza and restoring faith in humanity.

Jesus, Martha—Grant, local grower, just climbed on my step and damn near gave me a heart attack.

That’s when I realized the madness wasn’t temporary.

It was the job.

Out of the twenty-some harvests I’ve survived, I’ve only done this in November twice. This year makes number three. And probably my last.

I don’t have it in me anymore. Too many other things worth doing. Too many hours I’ll never get back.

The clocks fell back last night, and we’ve entered the dark time. It’s hard to keep going once the sun’s gone.

No sunshine to dry the fresh dirt behind the harvester.

With a bit of luck, we’ll finish by Tuesday.

Forty-two loads left.

Fourteen apiece.

I can make fourteen more, but the isolation is taking its toll.

25 OCTOBER: SHACKLETON WOULDN’T HAVE IT

Great idea, Adam. Let’s start timestamping our notes three weeks into harvest. Good grief, you are an incompetent son of a bitch sometimes.

Oh no ... not this negativity again.

Shackleton wouldn’t have it, and neither will you.

Good moods this harvest, even when there’s no reason for it. That’s the theme this year. Stick to it, me boy.

Fair weather for two days now.

A south wind rips moisture from the soil at an extraordinary rate for late October. At the same time, this devil breeze carries with it moisture for the next inch forecasted for Monday.

The lines? Still long, same as yesterday.

Second day with a three-hour nap, but you don’t really sleep when the schedule jerks you around like this. Probably not great for the organs. And all of it for sugar. Hard not to wonder what this looks like to someone who isn’t living it.

100 acres to go now.

The rounds tick by—14.6666667 feet at a pass.

Patience wears thin.

Got a Mr. Goodbar stashed away for a splash of 4th quarter energy. The diet you subject yourself to through one of these marathons is pure rubbish.

By the end of it, all hopes of clean eating are gone.

Barq’s Root Beer and Dr. Pepper straight to the veins.

If the truck next to me rattles any more, I’m bringing a hammer. No … stay calm. This is no time for violence. Not tonight. Not this close to the end.

Why doesn’t the guy shove some paper towels between the loose plastic panels?

Been my strategy for years.

26 OCTOBER: DONUT MAN

Another trucker just delivered a donut from across the aisle, an old-fashioned job. Kinda greasy, so you know it’s good. Homemade. The kind my dad always talks about, before they went and ruined it.

How much you guys got left, donut guy asks as he forks over the old bread bag repurposed as a traveling donut case.

His eyes said he’d seen what happens when guys run out of chances.

October 27 now. That’s when the paranoia kicked in. The thoughts that would keep me up all night. Scout? Reporter? Laced donut?

Seven hours of sleep in three days will do that to you.

But the donut guy turned out solid. Hauled for guys up north in 2012 when we battled till Thanksgiving. The mere mention of 2019 gave him a bent look.

Less than 80 acres to go. We’ll nap and reconvene in six hours, two of which I’ll spend driving home and back.

Prisoner of the highway. A real Ronnie Milsap.

The sky’s starting to sag again. You can feel it in the air before the first drop hits.

Raining now. A neighbor rolls in with a fourth truck, just as the mist begins. We could’ve used him three days ago.

Twenty-five acres left when we pulled the pin.

2 NOVEMBER: THE BREAKING

Minnesota is actually making a hell of a game out of it against the 5-2 Lions.

Nine minutes left in the first half, and I gotta go.

John says we’re gonna load some trucks, see how she goes.

Shit balls. Haven’t watched a full Vikings game all year. Not that I’ve missed much. The team’s mediocre at best, terrible at worst—and we’ve seen more of the latter.

Still, you hope to watch a game and feel like it’s Sunday again, even after four days spent recovering from the kind of exhaustion that shuts your body down entirely.

I could bounce back from this at twenty-six, maybe even thirty-three.

But at forty-one, the body keeps score.

Here we go. Fourteen loads each.

The stubbornness kicks in now. When guys get roped into month-long harvest battles like this, nobody wants to be the one to ask for help. You just keep proving you can handle it, even if it kills you and your crew.

Later that night, loading the trucks wasn’t the apocalyptic hellscape I’d imagined. An hour and a half. One pull.

The ground wasn’t half as bad as I’d feared. For getting six inches of rain in October, it held better than expected.

You can walk around like I’ve been for two weeks: slumped shoulders, loud sighs, total disaster.

Or you can think back to that dry August with 1.3 inches of rain that robbed the top end off beans and corn. If we’d gotten the rain when we wanted it and then this six-inch October dump on top of it, we’d be sliding straight up shit creek with busted paddles, and the beets would be locked in ice.

A wet year isn’t just a wet year.

Some years the dirt turns to sticky lumps—vibrations, broken shafts, seized bearings.

Other years it gets greasy like a hog pit, but the ground still holds firm. Depends on soil type, timing, and a thousand other variables the good Lord splattered across the map.

In 2019, the ground turned to pure mush. The devil’s porridge. It swallowed equipment whole and spit out repair bills that required therapy to process.

Forty-two loads left to haul, three of them already sitting in the yard waiting for dawn.

The fourth quarter’s here. The Vikings had what it took to snuff out the Lions today, but do we?

Prairie madness is real. The wind alone knocks something loose nine times out of ten.

Where’s that Mr. Goodbar?

NOVEMBER 3: THE EXPEDITION CONCLUDES

Between getting shut down at twenty-five acres on October 27 and this final push, I spent four days on the couch. Drained. Exhausted. My spleen wrinkled like an old basketball.

People say to keep your expectations low and you’ll never be disappointed. But it’s easy to fail that test when you get so close you can smell the end, and it vanishes like a fart in the wind.

It took four days of Liquid I.V., laxatives, and oatmeal to jump-start my system again. But I bounced back in time for Uncle Jackie’s funeral on Saturday.

I didn’t realize how much the isolation had gotten to me while I was in it. But then I spent some time with family I hadn’t seen since Moby Dick was a minnow.

Few beers. Few laughs. Even the introvert in me was happy to crawl out for a visit.

That’s when it clicked. Human interaction pulled me back from the edge. Not just at the funeral, either. A few loads from the end, I stopped to visit with an old classmate along the gravel road to swap sugar-war stories. Another buddy called with a ditching-software question.

Fifteen minutes of phone time gave me a jolt.

So that’s why my old man’s always on the frickin’ phone.

None of us slept well last night. Not Larry. Not Mike. Not John. Not me.

Oh yeah, Sheri says. Full moon ... obviously, I guess. Night before the last day jitters.

On the last day, nobody talks to each other. It’s like in baseball when a pitcher has a no-hitter going and nobody will speak to him in the dugout cause nobody wants to jinx the progress, the good vibes, cross the mojo, fuck with the frequency.

Holy shit, we wrapped it up.

Best 12-hour shift we had all year. I’m driving home from the field, window down, having a celebratory cig before I quit smoking for good again. The cool November air cuts through my hoodie like a blade.

320 acres of corn still wait for us, but that’s a cakewalk compared to this.

It’s a weight off your shoulders, and at the same time, it leaves a hollow pit of emptiness. The stuff gets in your bloodstream, and as soon as it’s done, you strangely miss it. It’s one of the seven delusions of harvest.

Third time in my life I’ve dug beets in November and this was the best of those three by far.

At the end, I saw a lot of trucks in a lot of different fields. Neighbors stepped up when their friends took the brunt of Mother Nature.

You can’t be afraid to lean on other people.

The Great Shackleton Beet Harvest of 2025.

Concluded.

The Rolling Stones had it right. We all need someone we can lean on. If you want it, well… you can lean on me.

Filed from the cab of Turd Ferguson, under the last full moon of sugar-beet harvest, 2025.

Softer angles. Shifts the vibe.

Look how that light hits the leaves, Sheri says as we round the curve into Hillsboro. Photographer’s dream. Sawyer Brown’s on the radio. That song about the farmer with no land to farm.

We don’t speak.

Off to the left, a combine chews through one of the first corn fields of the season. On a normal night, I’m wondering about the technicals: What’s it yielding? What hybrid is that? What’s his fertility program look like?

You know, stuff I assume everybody thinks about when passing farm machinery on a Sunday evening.

But not today. Tonight, I’m wondering how the operator is holding up in a down farm economy with a future that’s never looked so uncertain.

Won’t be long before these combines run themselves.

My buddy works for a guy who upgraded his machine this year, and we both marvel at the automation. It senses the crop’s density before it enters, adjusts speed and harvest settings accordingly, and does so far more efficiently than either of us could after 30 years of operating them.

It makes me wonder: what’ll be left for guys like us when there’s no longer room for us in the cabs?

Or when they no longer have cabs at all?

The last thing you wanna do is bring these things up at work. Quit worrying so much, ya pussy—a name you earn after a couple-three years of being the guy open to talking about feelings in rural Minnesota or Ohio or Kansas.

The scenery may change, but the toxic masculinity looks the same.

So we bury it. Pack it down where it can’t resurface.

You see it out here every day if you know where to look. The guy who sold out and now spends his mornings at the bar, or the one you see for the first time in months, and all he can talk about are the CB radios he’s dismantling to get rid of the squelch monsters in his head, or the guy who’s now convinced everything is a conspiracy.

Taxes. Chemtrails. Not even death is a real thing to some people anymore.

And all this points to the same thing: generations of men who have lost their purpose.

But some don’t take that route. No swimming in a morning bottle of rum or signing up for the meth program. Somehow, they keep on trucking.

Look at my dad. Farming kicked his ass so hard in the 90s, he doesn’t get to do it anymore. Thirty years later, I still haven’t met a man who lights up more when he gets a chance to run a tractor or combine, even for just a few hours. He can be in New Mexico, or Indiana, and if the mood strikes, he’ll pull his rig half into the ditch to stop and ask the farmer if he can go for a round.

No kidding. Seen him do it a half dozen times. He’d probably park that rig for good if it meant one more shot at running his own operation.

Or I think about Mark, one of my readers who emailed me a few weeks back after reading about my losing it all. He’d been there too, mutilated by an unforgiving cattle market that didn’t give a damn whether he got to farm next season. The divorce soon followed.

Yet somehow, Mark bounced back.

You lose your identity when things like this happen, when your purpose up and vanishes. Speaking from experience, it’s damn tough to get it all back, especially when the bottle’s easier.

After all, it’s right there.

And a hangover hurts less than feeling irrelevant, lost without a purpose.

So what is it that keeps men like my dad rolling after so many years of eating shit sandwiches? Why don’t the locals see Mark’s pickup parked outside the bar for the second hour of the Today Show? What did these guys find within themselves when the world sent them the message that their life’s work no longer mattered?

Community, maybe.

I’ve never seen dad drive ten minutes without talking to somebody on a CB or cell phone. I think back to when I rode everywhere with him as a kid. Think about the humor, mostly. Sitting around an eight-spot table at a truck stop in Edgerton, Wisconsin, listening to these guys tell stories and jokes until Big Al’s glasses would come off when he laughed himself to tears over something Earl said.

Listening to that laugh that sounded like a leaky set of air brakes was worth the price of admission alone.

Maybe that’s the answer right there. Community. People to talk to. People to laugh with.

But is that enough?

Maybe it’s something deeper. A primal urge to be necessary, to provide. Mother Nature wires some of us to thrive while others wilt and lie down on the tracks.

I don’t know what the hell it is, but we need to figure it out. We’ve got to if we want to save young men in this country from succumbing to pills and booze and OnlyFans and deaths of despair.

October was a bad month to give up drinking. I made it to the 18th before cracking a beer. So much for Sober October. But the point wasn’t perfection. It was an attempt to feel in control of something.

It’s been a brutal sugar beet harvest. Halfway through the month, and we’ve barely cracked the 50% completion mark. Just hooked another inch of rain—five inches this month.

We’ll be lucky to get the crop off by Thanksgiving. Before this rain hit, we were crawling at 1.7 acres per hour. Seems like we get one of these greasy harvests once every 6-7 years in this part of the world.

6-7. Still don’t know what the heck that means. Some new slang my kids say. Means I’m getting old. Losing connection with the younger generations.

Is this what the road to obsolescence looks like?

I couldn’t shake the question. Stuck in the beet truck all week, turning it over.

Then the answer showed up in my buddy Trent Klarenbach’s podcast. I’ve been meaning to listen for a while, but you know how that goes. A guy gets wrapped up in his own stuff and into music and other things until that gets old, and you rotate back to the pods or audiobooks, then linger there just long enough for your brain to swell up with too much info to absorb before tootling back over to Spotify. Then the cycle repeats all over again.

Life of a road warrior, I suppose.

I finally switched it on. Started with Trent’s interview of Ryan Denis. Grain marketing guy from Saskatchewan. Sharp as hell. Been hooked on the podcast ever since.

It was the passion these guys had when sharing their stories that got me. Not fiery obsessive types I am, but calm. Collected. Even Steven. They could talk about farming without spiraling into fertilizer-efficiency rants that require intervention.

I envy that.

But listening to how they connect with each other, with their work, that’s when it clicked.

The answer isn’t so different for me than it is for my dad pulling into ditches or Mark bouncing back from the cattle market.

What keeps me going—even after two divorces, a crippling job loss that destroyed my identity for almost a decade, and the constant battle of trying to make a name for myself in an industry full of people smarter and more interesting than me—is learning.

Seeking new perspectives.

Actually listening to people instead of waiting for my turn to speak.

But above all that? It’s connection.

The ones who have it find the courage and support to keep going when the world says they shouldn’t. That’s eye-opening for a shut-in introvert like me. I get my connection in ways different from guys like my old man.

Different modes of action. Same result.

I still don’t know if that’s the whole answer. Maybe there’s more to figure out. But right now, stuck in this truck at 1.7 acres per hour, connection feels like the thing keeping me from becoming another statistic.

And that’ll have to be good enough for now.

I’ve said it before. The change a person witnesses in a lifetime is staggering. I think about my grandpa. About Chuck, my old boss’s dad. Blows me away.

I can’t remember if it was my second or third year working for Jeff. Doesn’t matter; it was early on. A bunch of us stood around the old wooden Quonset that passed for a shop, barely big enough to fit a twin-screw Chevy inside. On windy days, you might get lucky and stick the beak of the tractor far enough in to keep oil from blowing all over your pants during a lube job.

I’ll be a monkey’s uncle if I can remember what we were talking about. Chuck leaned an elbow on the power washer’s hose reel, smiled, adjusted his glasses, and pointed beneath the short formica countertop. The thing was supposed to be a workbench, but it mostly collected leaking oil jugs, a couple of receiver hitches, and all the dead flies in Marshall County.

“Adam, if you can tell me what that is, I’ll sign the farm over to you today.”

Gee cripes. Usually Chuck said that, but this was one of the first times I ever muttered it, and I haven’t stopped saying it since.

I studied the object. Cast iron. Looked like a rusty donut. I leaned in for a closer look.

“The whole farm, you say?”

I was stalling. The farm’s pink slip slid through my young fingers. I had no idea what I was looking at.

“Beats me, Chuck. Looks like you’ll hang onto the farm another year.”

That’s when he told me about the combine that the donut was attached to, which led to stories about custom harvesting. Before long, pictures came out — I wish I’d asked for one. A convoy of grain trucks with the sidewalls removed, combines strapped on top. These crazy bastards went all the way to Texas and worked their way north.

Can you imagine? Barrelling down two-lane blacktops, no interstates yet. No air conditioning. Screaming banshees with unsecured loads, and if you’ve driven one of these old death traps, you know they handled like a drunken ox. The only control you had was how tight you gripped the wheel before you crashed into the rhubarb, because these trucks had no brakes. None.

The combines were no better. No cabs, just guys in the grain dust smoking Pall Malls under faded umbrellas with about as much UV protection as going shirtless. No power tools. Probably not even ratchets yet.

Hit some strange Midwestern town, thrash wheat all day, play cards and drink beer at the local watering hole, then get up and do it all again. Young and free and away from home, probably its own kind of heaven.

From there, it was 15-foot straight headers. Then 20. 30. Then cabs. Radios. Air conditioning. Air-suspension seats. And autosteer. I’ve always picked on the old timers for being slow to adopt new stuff, and my go-to story is always Chuck’s reaction to Jeff buying the farm’s first GPS.

“The hell do we need that for?” He waved his arm as Jeff went on about efficiency gains and how this was the future. Chuck refused to touch it that first year. Second year, he dabbled. In the third year, sometime in August, around 3:00 p.m., I received a call from Charlie.

“Yaaaaa, this damn thing isn’t working again. Can you come fix it?”

I could hear the frustration in his voice. But it was more than just the equipment. It was something deeper. The same edge I hear in my dad’s voice now when he’s trying to figure out his phone. The same feeling I get watching my boys stare at YouTube videos of OTHER kids playing video games.

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? Every generation reaches a point where the world stops making sense. Like it moved on without you. For Chuck, it was a computer steering his tractor. For my dad, it’s a smartphone. For me, it’s tractors that run themselves.

“Think I’ll just park it and head home. Getting to be too late in the day to drive.”

Fair enough. I told him I’d fix it when I got back and it’d be ready for him in the morning.

I spent my childhood steering tractors. Back then, it was a point of pride to keep the rows straight because every farmer driving by had a keen eye for screwups, skips, and crooked lines. Keeping a chisel plow straight for a half mile is harder than it looks.

I had more pride in those lines than most twelve-year-olds, but I was also the first to embrace the tractor steering itself. Couldn’t wait. My thing has always been looking back at the machine you’re pulling, keeping an eye on things, but more than that, watching the dirt fluff up as a cultivator shovel skids through, or how a disk scoops the earth and flings it backward.

I grew up on tillage. Grew up looking back.

And autosteer allowed me to do that the whole way. What a treat.

So, why was it so easy for me to adapt to new ag tech when Charlie’s generation resisted?

I’m starting to think I get it.

The talk about autonomous tractors scared me. Made me feel human, which is great until you’ve spent 30 years becoming one of the best equipment operators around, and now you’re watching a robot tractor spin circles around a quarter-section.

I’ve known this was coming for over a decade, but hearing the guys talk about it hollowed me out.

I don’t want it. It makes me feel obsolete.

Reminds me of that Twilight Zone episode —The Obsolete Man — where they put a guy on trial just for being unnecessary. Found him guilty of irrelevance, and that was that. I couldn’t wrap my head around that concept when I first saw it as a kid. How do you declare a human being obsolete? But here, at 41, hearing about a robot tractor doing circles in a field I used to work in, I finally understand. That’s the terror. Not that the work changes. That YOU become the thing that’s no longer needed.

But it’s more than just me. I think about our rural towns. Dad had 30 kids in his graduating class from one town. Mine had 30 from two. Soon it’ll be single digits from three.

Maybe every man reaches a point where change comes too fast, even for those like me who have every new gadget. Sometimes you just want to yell at the world to hold its horses for a damned minute.

But that isn’t an option. Steve Perry and the Wheel in the Sky and all that. Keeps on turning. The best a guy can do is grip the tow rope as it drags you along, stumbling and bumbling through a world that all of a sudden doesn’t look the same anymore.

As depressing as this sounds, there’s a strange comfort in it. The change won’t stop. Just the way it is. Just as it was for Chuck. For my grandpa. My dad. And now me.

It’s almost midnight on a Saturday. We were supposed to be harvesting sugar beets, but the heat shut us down until Monday. Feels like the universe handed me a little gift, an unexpected weekend with my boys after three weeks apart.

They’re glued to their iPads in a way that would’ve horrified me as a kid, but they’re also more empathetic than my generation ever was. More in tune with feelings. Less likely to be the assholes we were. The world they’re inheriting won’t need equipment operators, but maybe it’ll need something we can’t even imagine yet. Same way Chuck couldn’t have imagined a tractor steering itself, and I can’t imagine watching someone else play video games for entertainment.

The wheel keeps turning, and my boys are already adapted to speeds I’m just now feeling.

Harvest is the hardest time, but somehow the most rewarding. You appreciate these little doses more. You’re more present. The world doesn’t seem as frightening when you focus on what matters.

The pace of change keeps accelerating, faster with every pressing turn.

Hang on or get left behind, and enjoy the ride even when the throttle sticks and the vandals steal the brake handle.

The township’s buzzing about the robot tractor again. And here I am, less confused, more grateful, just along for the ride.

Mental health one week, fertilizer the next, whatever was in my head. That changes now.

For the next 8-12 weeks, I’m digging into technology, masculinity, and what it means to work the land when everything’s changing faster than we can adapt, starting Tuesday with a piece about autonomous tractors and becoming obsolete.

I’m also turning paid subscriptions back on. Some pieces will be free, while others will be behind a paywall. If the work resonates with you and you'd like to support it, I’d appreciate it. If not, no hard feelings. There’ll still be plenty to read either way.

Every other Tuesday from here on out.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, stick around.

Subscribe now

Usually I’d pile on. But today, with harvest pressing in, I don’t have it in me. The doom spiral can wait.

The despair feels like it’s everywhere, soaking your skin as you drive through town. Hunter Thompson said the great magnet pulls us all. Maybe it does. But today I’m resisting it.

I’m on the couch on one of the last mornings before beanies and layers become mandatory. Lewis hauls himself up beside me and sighs, almost as if he’s asking whether we’ll make it through this mess.

Of course we will, Lewis. We always do. Green shoots are invisible until they tiller out, but they’re there.

Since my life shit hit the fan a few years ago and I lost it all — family, money, dignity — I’ve been trying to train myself to accept the moment as it comes.

Kick and squirm and fight it, and the bad energy will eat you alive.

So none of that today. Just well-wishes for a safe harvest and a reminder to pause, wherever you are. For me, that’s grain dust. For you, it might be office deadlines, family milestones, or just making it to Friday. Depending on where you’re at in your journey, you may have five of these seasons left, or you might have thirty-five.

Either way, not that many. Make it count.

I’m expecting six straight weeks of work — soys to sugar beets to corn to winter prep. I may not hit this Tuesday-morning schedule, or I might write ten drafts in the grain cart and contradict myself entirely. Either way, I’ll be back.

Thanks for sticking with me from the messy beginning, when it took me six paragraphs to explain a cultivator shank, and to those of you who’ve just signed on. It’s a special thing to have people open your email out of the mountain in your inbox.

Means a lot. Love you. Bye for now. 🌱

Sun sets an hour earlier, dew settles in, and your boots feel like cement blocks dipped in Elmer's glue. Miss a step, and you're face down in the chaff.

First crop's in the bin. Poverty grass blessed with bushels and dry weather.

Now, back to what I’m best at ... calling bullshit.

I tuned out of politics sometime around 2018, when it became clear that trade policy was being driven more by campaign slogans and ego than economics.

Now we're living with the consequences, and everyone from trade war cheerleaders and skeptics alike is begging for government intervention to “fix” the markets those policies destroyed.

Case in point:

Last week, National Corn Growers Association CEO Neil Caskey published this op-ed calling for immediate government action to save corn farmers.

“Farmers selling their corn … are facing an average $0.85 per bushel loss. That’s $14.2 billion in production losses,” Caskey wrote, before urging Congress to authorize year-round E15.

---

Caskey even tossed in the old magic trick: “at no cost to the taxpayer.” Sure, Neil. Politicians love believing in free lunches, especially when someone else picks up the tab. The bill shows up later, hidden in rents, consolidation, or another bailout.

His solution? A 15% ethanol mandate and new trade deals to create artificial demand for the record corn surplus. That’s like asking the arsonist to put out the fire he started, then wondering why your house keeps burning down.

Corn prices spike on the news, maybe rally back to six bucks. Then what?

Grow more corn — fencerow to fencerow.

And then what? Our pile gets even bigger. Two years later, we’re right back in the same damn boat, only this time they’ll be crying for E20, E30.

Here’s the American farm tragedy in three acts: First, we vote for the guy promising to blow up trade deals and stick it to China. Second, we act shocked when China stops buying our soybeans and starts dating Brazil. Third, we run crying to Washington, begging for bailouts to save us from the mess we rooted for.

But Caskey’s ethanol solution does more than kick the can; it inflates the land bubble that’s already crushing farmers.

For twenty years, buying farmland was easier than grabbing a Slim Jim at the Cenex. Cheap money made a quarter section feel like a guaranteed annual check. Rent it out to some poor bastard who still believes in farming, cash the rent, and head north for the walleye.

But now? Wheat barely buys the fertilizer bill. You’d be better off planting scratch-off tickets. And when the math doesn’t pencil, the bubble wobbles.

Propping up corn prices with ethanol mandates only pumps more air into it.

And when it pops? It won't be the land barons eating Spam. It'll be farmers running 30-year notes on ground they swore would "pay for itself."

Spoiler alert: land never pays for itself.

“Don’t worry,” they say, “the government will bail us out.” And yeah, they probably will. They always do. You can already hear the whispers of relief checks turning into a chant.

I sat in a sugar beet convention listening to Jim Wiesemeyer turn tariffs into a "gift" for agriculture like a magician pulling rabbits from an empty hat.

And damned if people didn't want to believe him. Heads nodding, notes scribbled. It was like a tent revival — yes, brother, maybe this really is good news. Meanwhile, sugar checks were shrinking.

That's farm policy in America: slap lipstick on the pig, wheel it on stage, and hope nobody notices. The trick works because the pig wants to believe it's beautiful.

The game is rigged, no matter the party.

Agricultural policy gets written by the same lobbyists, R or D. The subsidies still fatten the mega-operations while family farms get thinned out like weeds.

Meanwhile, farmers get fed fairy tales about trade wars or climate initiatives saving agriculture, when both parties' donors profit from consolidation either way.

Let’s say the crash comes. Who wins? Not the guy begging the banker for another six months. Not the farm kid hustling seed on the side just to cover groceries. Not the widow renting out her husband’s ground to keep the lights on.

The reset is the same old game: bigger fish eating smaller fish until all that’s left are whales.

Consolidation is the one crop that always grows. The real family farm these days? A Delaware LLC with a Patagonia-vested hedge fund prick behind it, who show up long enough to bid, then fly out before the dust settles. To them, dirt is just an asset class, no different than a strip mall or a crypto coin.

We'll still see the postcards with red barns and kids in overalls, but those barns are props and the kids are models.

But here’s what it looks like from the cab: late August, yield monitor flickering in the dark.

Behind you, the machine groans through another endless row.

Somewhere out there, a match is lit, gasoline is pooled on the floor, and every farmer in America is standing around pretending not to smell it.

My Uncle David. Section 17. And why every acre matters.

I woke up in a panic. Where were my Sturgill Simpson tickets?

Back in the spring, I'd ordered physical tickets because I'm a sucker for nostalgia.

Three months later, we got booted from our place by some spoiled twenty-year-old with an investment property, and me being me, I never updated my address.

No tickets + no concert = the world ending.

Still, this was Sturgill Simpson. No way I was leaving anything to chance. So I did what any man in a spiral would do: I called the ticket office.

Thankfully, a fellow Sturgill fan in North Carolina saved me.

Two tickets waiting at will-call.

Crisis averted.

Just as I thought I could finally breathe, my phone buzzed, and what popped up knocked the wind back out of me.

An Instagram video from Uncle David.

Out on Section 17, tilling the land he'd worked since 1969 for the last time. The camera shook in his hand. The tractor rumbled in the background, kicking up dust, but this time felt different.

This was goodbye.

And for the first time in my life, I saw him cry.

Seeing stoic, unshakeable David brought to his knees by a piece of land hit me hard.

This wasn't just the end of a season.

It was the end of an era.

Section 17 isn't just land. It's been in our family since 1969 — my great-grandpa, grandpa, dad, and Uncle David.

Now that's ending.

This ground shaped the men in my family. David as a boy, my dad after him. I always thought I'd end up here, too, but nobody ever handed me the keys.

I got my closest taste of that legacy during harvest one year, riding with David in the sugarbeet harvester. Sitting next to him felt like stepping into fifty years of history on that ground.

I picture young David with my dad and their cousins, each in a tractor, Linda Ronstadt drifting on the wind.

Barely teenagers in a swamp, becoming men.

That's what Section 17 is — where my family learned hard work.

Growing up, I wanted to prove myself worthy of what my family had built on that land.

I spent years bitter about it, watching friends live the dream I thought was mine.

I thought I'd made peace working with John, helping him with his operation.

Then Ken reminded me what we were really losing.

Back in 1973, he, his brother Billy, my dad, and David were all in that same field, each in their own tractor with Hall & Oates on the radio, working the land and growing into the men they'd become.

That land holds those memories. It's not just dirt; it's alive with sweat, stories, and growth, tied to everyone who's ever worked it.

So if you wonder how a grown man can bawl over a piece of ground, you don't get it.

David's a hell of a leader. The quiet kind whose command comes from respect.

I remember one night about twelve years ago. November. Snow, mud, and absolute hell. That beet crop was impossible. Every machine broke. Every step forward felt like sinking deeper into the muck.

Most people would have lost it. I nearly did. But not David.

Machine breaks down? He's on it.

Crew getting antsy? One look from David says everything: we're finishing this.

And finish it we did.

But David wasn't done. We had breakfast and then hurried to a neighbor's farm, where we worked an eighteen-hour shift to help them finish. All told, more than sixty straight hours.

My uncle? Cool as the other side of the pillow. Sleep-deprived, but still unshaken.

Leadership isn't about volume. It's about showing up when everything's falling apart.

But even David had limits.

I saw him at his weakest in Tampa one winter. We were both running rigs over the road, killing time between seasons. After dumping a load, we wound up in a Motel 6 waiting for a reload, a real rathole next to a 24-hour Waffle House.

David was melting down. Fever, sweating buckets, but he wouldn't quit. Cranked the heater, determined to sweat it out.

So we sat in a 100-degree inferno for two days. This wasn't a fever — it was a siege. The room smelled like burnt despair, and the parking lot provided a soundtrack of late-night Florida chaos.

On day two, David sits up and says, "Adam, I think I'm ready for Arby's."

Roast beef. The cure for everything.

I didn't know it yet, but I was about to learn what my own version of sweating it out would look like.

I found Sturgill's music during my divorce. His voice carried a wisdom steeped in pain — the kind that says nobody out here has it easy.

At the concert, standing under that September sky, everything hit at once. David's farewell to Section 17, the weight of missed chances, years of bottled-up grief about paths not taken, all of it colliding with that voice.

It wasn't just music. Like David cranking the heat in that Motel 6, Sturgill was forcing me to sweat out everything I'd been holding onto.

And for the first time in a long time, I let it out.

When the lights came up, I was hollowed out, lighter than I’d felt in years. And somehow that led me to Arby’s with Sheri.

Roast beef has a way of dragging you back to earth. Just ask David, who came back to life at that Florida truck stop.

Sitting there, wiping Arby’s Sauce off my chin, eyes still red, I realized something. Maybe I've been farming all along, just in my own way.

Life isn't about following the path laid out for you. It's about finding your own way to work the land, even if it's not the quarter section you grew up dreaming about.

David never needed to spell that out.

It was in every quiet look and steady action.