Coltrane's Farm
Wrestling With Agriculture's New Tune
I never thought I’d spend my Saturday flat on my back, icing a trapezoid, trying to make sense of a jazz album that sounds like a tornado tearing through a marching band.
But here I am, John Coltrane wailing through my AirPods like a whiskey-drunk preacher, speaking in tongues, untamed and electric.
Kinda like American agriculture today.
And here’s the thing—I’m not even sure if I should be the one saying this. Seems every LinkedIn expert and $300 conference panelist already has it all figured out.
Agriculture is shifting!
Change is here!
Get on board or get left behind!
Okay, sure—but what does it all mean for the real world?
Some guys talk about farming and food production like they’re reading from a damn instruction manual.
Me? I feel like I’m trying to translate sheet music while nursing a hangover.
We’re standing at the edge of our own free jazz moment, where the structure starts to break, the melody gets harder to follow, and old rules no longer apply.
The ‘get big or get out’ mentality that's been force-fed to us since before I could reach the clutch pedal?
That song is fading out, but nobody wants to admit it.
When Coltrane pushed jazz past its breaking point in ’64, they said he’d lost his mind—called it noise, disorder, the death of real music.
Critics called it career suicide.
History called it A Love Supreme.
Sound familiar?
Here's the thing nobody tells you about jazz until you're neck-deep in Coltrane's cosmic chaos—it only sounds like noise until you realize it's speaking a language you haven't yet learned.
The same thing's happening in agriculture right now, and half of us are still trying to dance to yesterday's tune while tomorrow's already kicking down the barn door.
Eight days of eating like a local in Puerto Rico turned my gut from a belching two-stroke Yamaha into a sewing machine.
No heartburn. No midnight Tums feasts.
Then I landed in Hotlanta, and within hours, my digestive system fired distress flares like a combine stuck in a wet spot.
That’s when it hit me—we’re not just facing a market shift. We’re staring down the barrel of a revolution. And it’s not being driven by the usual suspects in their corner offices. It’s being pushed by young folks and an unhealthy public tired of ‘food’ that reads like a high-school chemistry exam.
And now, you’ve got GLP-1 drugs rewriting appetites at the cellular level, making people crave real, nutrient-dense food. This isn’t some South Beach Diet fad—this is biology changing the market before our eyes.
Our agricultural system has gut rot—bloated, sluggish, and out of sync after decades of the same old diet and too little movement.
We keep force-feeding ourselves the same old solutions while the industry groans under the weight of rising costs and shrinking margins. Every market signal burns through our assumptions like a bad case of heartburn, but instead of changing our diet, we reach for the industrial agriculture equivalent of Rolaids—more technology, more inputs, more everything—wondering why we still can’t sleep at night.
Meanwhile, South America’s already digesting what we’re still choking on. We’re married to 400-horsepower tractors and five-year financing plans, while they’re running leaner, stretching every input, and turning out crops at a fraction of our costs.
Take Mato Grosso—bigger than Texas, churning out corn, soybeans, and cotton year-round while we struggle to justify a second planting.
They aren’t adjusting to the market—they’re dictating it.
They’ve got the land, the labor, and China’s appetite for whatever they can grow. Every year, they’re tightening the belt while we’re loosening ours, wondering why we keep getting squeezed.
And here’s the kicker: The ‘feed the world’ narrative we’ve clung to for decades? It’s on its last verse. The people we thought we were feeding are starting to feed themselves.
And the global population boom we've been promised since my grandfather's time?
It ain't coming.
People are swiping, not reproducing. Japan's already in decline, and in today’s America, dating means scrolling TikTok alone in the dark. Yet here we are, building grain bins for a baby boom that only exists in USDA spreadsheets.
When things start shifting this quickly, panic sets in. Nobody likes uncertainty, especially not in an industry built on routine. When the future starts looking unfamiliar, people do what they’ve always done—they look for someone to blame—the farmer, the suits, the chemical companies.
Hell, I’d love to pretend I’ve got the evildoer figured out, too. Maybe it’d help me sleep.
But the real villain? It’s fear. Fear rattling around in our skulls like beer cans in the back of an old Ford.
The fear that we’ve spent too many years chasing bushels.
That we don’t know how to pivot.
That we won’t know what to do when the world stops paying for quantity and starts demanding quality.
And let's be honest—I'm just as scared of all this as anybody. I feel it most at ag shows, standing between the shiny new planters and the precision ag displays, watching farmers nod to the same old tune while my gut churns with uncomfortable truths.
One minute, I’m selling seeds like everything’s normal. The next, I’m staring at cracks in the foundation—so vast you could drop a cultivator through and never hear it hit bottom.
Sometimes, I catch myself avoiding eye contact with people I used to know, worried they can see the doubt behind my sales pitch, wondering if they've figured out I'm hearing a different song than the one playing on the convention center speakers. The terrifying part isn't just that I might be wrong—it's that I might be right, and being right too soon in agriculture feels just as dangerous as being wrong.
I want to believe I’m ahead of the curve, that I see what’s coming, that I’m one of the smart ones. But then I wake up in a cold sweat, wondering if I’m just a clown in the crowd, another farmer clinging to a fading song because it’s easier than learning a new one.
Because learning a new one? That takes guts. It means admitting you’ve spent years chasing the wrong thing, questioning everything that got you this far.
Just look at guys like Kelly Garrett out in Iowa. He’s already playing the next song. He’s shifting his farm, his cattle, his soil—not just for survival, but because he sees where this is heading.
And me? I’m still standing at the edge of the dance floor, wondering if I’ve got the rhythm for it.
But then I had that steak.
The marbling was woven through the meat like veins in a masterpiece, laced with a richness that only patience and good soil can build.
The first bite wasn’t just food—it was proof. The fat didn’t just render; it dissolved, coating my tongue in something primal, something old. Sweet, earthy, buttery, with a whisper of the pasture still lingering on it, like it remembered where it came from.
I put my fork down. Stared at my plate. Thought about all the beef I’d eaten—good beef, bad beef, whatever was on sale at the grocery store.
But none of it had ever done this.
None of it had ever made me stop mid-bite, questioning everything I thought I knew.
That steak wasn’t just dinner—it was proof of concept. A eulogy. A tombstone for the old way of doing things.
We’ve been chasing the wrong damn thing.
I grew up thinking all steaks were the same. That beef was beef as long as it had a USDA stamp. But this? This was something else—something earned, not churned out.
We haven’t been feeding the world. We’ve been filling it.
Two years of farming differently, and it wasn’t just Garrett’s cattle that had changed. The land was different. The soil was healthier. The whole damn operation had shifted, and the proof wasn’t in a spreadsheet—it was on my plate.
The future of farming doesn’t just work.
It tastes better.
John Coltrane didn’t wait for permission. He played the new tune, let the critics call it madness, and let history sort it out.
They thought he was destroying jazz.
But he was reinventing it.
The farmers who see where this is going? They're already hearing the next melody.
They're getting called crazy too - regenerative this, biological that, working with nature instead of against it. The ag establishment looks at them like jazz purists looked at Coltrane—like they've tossed out the sheet music and started playing by feel.
And here I am, still flat on my back, ice melting into my trapezoid while Coltrane wails truth through my speakers.
Only now, the chaos doesn't sound like chaos anymore. It sounds like tomorrow—like Kelly Garrett's steak, like South America's efficiency, like young people's appetites for real food. Like change that's already here, whether we've got the ear to hear it or not.
The same album that started as noise has become a blueprint. A love supreme, indeed.
The world’s already shifting.
The song’s already playing.
Will you stand there, arms crossed, waiting for permission?
Or will you hear the music and move—before the rest even realize it’s time?
Author’s Note: Some of the ideas in this piece have been rattling around in my head for a while, but a recent episode of Damian Mason’s The Business of Agriculture podcast sharpened my thinking.
If you want to hear how these shifts are unfolding in real time, give it a listen.
Also … any Coltrane fans out there? Check out this piece from The Honest Broker. It led me to try something new and listen to something I wouldn’t have touched in eight lifetimes. Worth the ride.
And look—I ain’t here to sell you anything. But if I didn’t tell you where to get that beef, I’d be lying to both of us:
Yes, yes, yes! I was introduced to John Coltrane about the same time as healthy eating - during my time in the Bay Area in a commune of war resisters.
Synchronicity would have it that I would end up back in Iowa marrying a guy whose dream was not to raise corn and beans. Together we took the road less traveled and planted strawberries, raspberries, apple trees and asparagus and raised them organically before the O word was allowed in public.
Fifty years later we are downsizing and working with young farmers who continue to change our food system.
Coltrane was innovative and exciting. At your urging I will listen to him again with a new ear.
Ah…. I’m here for the writing. The agriculture is the icing on the cake. 😂
Seriously though, Adam, I’ve been called the crazy one for 20+ years now for saying that we need a local, market-driven food system.
But you’re right, everything that’s happening feels like you describe—a tornado tearing through a marching band.
There’s so much to dissect because we’ve built so many things that don’t work. Some of them will have to fail. It hurts to say it, but it’s true. It’s what Ron Paul has been saying for 60+ years.
On we go.
Curious to get your thoughts on a few things rattling around in my brain… 🤔