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Strange Tales From the Corporate Wellness Circuit

Vancouver’s coastal clouds filter sunshine the way corporations filter truth—relentlessly, with polished precision. But truth, like weeds through concrete, refuses to stay buried.

Strange things happen when a farmer leaves Minnesota.

Stepping onto Bowen Island, with salt-laced air tingling against my skin and Rattlesnake Milk screaming through the speakers, I feel it—something raw that strips away pretense faster than bankruptcy erases ego, like watching topsoil blow away until there's nothing left but honest dirt.

In a seaside sauna, the revolution takes hold.

Steam rolls off the cedar in thick, almost tactile waves, the wood's earthy, damp scent mingling with the salt air that slips in whenever someone cracks the door. It smells like spring tillage, if spring tillage cost $200 an hour and came with fancy towels.

Out here, the salt air and cedar steam feel like nature’s way of peeling back the filters, leaving only what’s real.

Back home, meditation takes a different form—the hum of a tractor cab, its vibrations thrumming through my bones, a far cry from the cedar steam wrapping around me here.

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Diesel, Drought, and Deception

Truth doesn't come easy when inhaling the scent of diesel and drought. But at least diesel and drought don't pretend to be something they're not.

In the field, dust coats your skin like sandpaper, and sweat and soil blend until you feel like just another raw and honest part of the land.

No filters needed when you're that close to the ground.

Connections materialize like morning frost on alfalfa, like fresh snow on Whistler's peaks. You don't grasp agricultural authenticity until you've watched winter's first snow dust a mountain while trust fund babies in Patagonia sip $15 lattes.

Back home, farmers drink gas station coffee between equipment breakdowns.

Both are bitter pills to swallow, but at least one is honest about what it is.

The other comes with a sustainability pledge printed on the cup.

Three weeks after poking the

Substack

bear about agricultural categories, somehow, the revolution followed us here. Like prairie fire sparked by one stray ember, truth spreads faster than anyone expects.

Three hundred subscribers—a grain of sand in the digital desert. But it's enough to start something real.

That's the thing about farmers—we're like those microbes everyone's suddenly talking about. Give us the right conditions, and we multiply. Like waterhemp after a rain, like ideas after enough people say, "I thought I was the only one."

If Pop-Tarts and salad toppings can claim their corner of the internet, why not agriculture?

Hell, even “productivity hacks” have their moment in the Substack spotlight. Meanwhile, we’re out here in the digital ether, sowing content between the rows of what’s permitted and what’s better left unsaid—truth sprouting in the cracks of what they’d rather keep buried.

Every revolution starts small.

One voice becomes two, then twenty, all asking: Why are we so afraid to tell our own stories? Maybe because truth spreads faster than palmer amaranth, and it's just as hard to control.

The answer floats somewhere between harvest dust and British Columbia mountain air, between Rattlesnake Milk's raw lyrics and ag media's carefully sanitized sentences.

Between what we know in our bones and what we're allowed to say out loud.

Two weeks ago, I was just another farmer in a tractor cab, mind warped by endless harvest hours, when I unintentionally ignited a movement while dodging combine dust and content marketing gurus.

Funny how the best ideas come when you're too tired to overthink them.

Revolutions don't care about optimal posting times. They follow their own rhythms, like tides, weeds, and truth itself. Voices grow stronger, finding each other between algorithm adjustments and sponsored content.

Nature doesn't consult focus groups. Neither does truth.

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Data Don’t Lie

The spreadsheet's numbers stared back, unblinking and bare, as if daring me to pretend they meant something other than what they clearly showed. Numbers don't care about marketing meetings or quarterly projections. They sit there, stubborn as volunteer corn.

Reality hits like a fuel bill in March - no filter strong enough to make that look pretty.

When I posted plot results showing our varieties coming second, they told me to take it down. Truth is acceptable if it doesn't reach the "wrong hands,” as if farmers can't handle seeing what they already know.

Bankruptcy doesn't just strip away your assets; it removes your fear, making truth-telling a lifestyle choice rather than a risk.

So, I didn't just keep the data up—I made a video about it—doubling down on honesty as if it were the last trait worth breeding, like selecting for resistant genes in a world full of corporate Roundup.

A week later, the same company did a 180. My "dangerous" honesty became the clever new marketing angle. They wanted more content, more of that voice they'd tried to silence only a week earlier.

Funny how a little truth can turn corporate boardrooms into Damascus Road.

Integrity becomes permissible once it moves product — like calling weeds "cover crops" — same garbage, better marketing.

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Ego, Mice, and $200 Plates

The Ryan Holiday talk was a perfect Vancouver metaphor—finance bros in Hugo Boss suits bragging about crypto gains, influencers treating wisdom like another product to optimize, and mice scurrying under $200 seafood plates.

“Government banned the pesticides,” the waiter shrugged as I nodded in agricultural solidarity.

Pest problems are pest problems, whether it’s wheat or wine lists.

The same crowd that paid to hear Holiday preach about ego was now squirming at the sight of reality scurrying across their pates.

Ten years ago, nobody talked about stoicism in Vancouver theaters. Hardly anybody talked about it at all. Now, they're packed with people paying three figures to hear ancient wisdom about living truthfully.

The irony isn't lost on me — a farmer who lost everything finding clarity in a city built on a facade.

We're all searching for something real.

You see it in the eyes of trust fund kids hanging on Holiday's every word, in the guy who looks prepared to tackle seven bouncers to pester Ryan just one more time about that podcast “opportunity.”

You see it in farmers tired of sanitized ag media.

You see it in that waiter who told us about the mice without corporate sugar-coating.

Truth's gotten so rare that people will pay premium prices to hear someone speak it out loud.

Stubborn Truths and Carrier Pigeons

That's agriculture in 2024. Everyone's got a mask tighter than a bearing seal on a combine.

Farmers are afraid to upset dealers, dealers are scared to upset corporations, and corporations are afraid to upset shareholders.

We're locked in a game of "don't rock the commodity boat," passing sanitized messages up and down the supply chain like a telephone game where everyone already knows the truth but pretends not to hear it.

It's like being seven years old again, acting as a carrier pigeon for parents who refuse to speak to one another.

I saw it firsthand when a magazine article I wrote came back butchered. The raw honesty of what farmers live every day had been stripped away like chaff in high-wind threshing. “Too heavy for the audience,” they said, as though farmers who navigate million-dollar equipment and volatile markets can’t handle a few compound sentences.

Each red pen stroke was another little death of authenticity. What made it real was sanitized until it was palatable—smooth, sterile, and soulless. Like processed white flour, it looked fine but left you hollow inside.

And here I am, 4200 words into this shitty first draft, writing about authenticity from a sauna, stressing about what to wear to meet Ryan Holiday. The irony hits harder than a Canadian winter—I'm doing the same Vancouver nightclub dance I criticized, worrying about appearance while preaching authenticity.

Holiday would probably appreciate the irony. Maybe he'd write a book about it. "Ego is the Enemy: Agriculture Edition."

Maybe that’s the real story here—truth finds a way, like forgotten seeds breaking ground, mice in high-end restaurants, and agricultural voices breaking through corporate static.

You can spray it, plow it, deny it exists, but it keeps coming back, stubborn as common ragweed in August.

Between the Pacific's salt air and harvest's dust, between Vancouver's glass towers and Minnesota's grain bins, this is where I remember how to be real.

No corporate sponsorships.

No filters.

No perfectly timed posts at 8:17 AM.

In the end, truth doesn’t need a sauna, a stage, or a sustainability pledge. It needs space to grow—wild, stubborn, and unfiltered, like volunteer corn in a bean field.

You can try to root it out, but truth has deeper roots than you’ll ever know.

As that old saying goes, you can take the farmer out of the field, but you can't take the truth out of the farmer.

Or maybe I just made that up. Either way, it's true enough.