Guacamole Logic

The Delusional Thinking That Got Farmers Demonized

Some people eat guacamole like it’ll resurrect their marriage and absolve them of their sins.

They spread it on everything—avocado toast for breakfast, guac burgers for lunch, and midnight fridge raids, spooning in that green gold while the fridge light flickers like a half-assed confessional booth.

The wellness influencers nod approvingly. It’s a “good fat,” after all. Nature’s perfect food.

Fast forward five years. They’re sixty pounds heavier, clothes fitting like sausage casings, blaming everything but the five pounds of “healthy” fat they’ve been driving into their bellies every week.

That’s guacamole logic.

It’s the human tendency to take one good thing, ignore every boundary around it, and then act surprised when it stops working, or worse, works against you.

And I see that same numbskull thinking play out across farm country every damn day.

Just swap the guac for nitrogen, and you’ve got farming’s favorite delusion.

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There’s a farmer I know. Fourth generation. Swears by high rates and treats biology like it’s a vegan cult conspiracy.

One day, he told me about a strip of corn he couldn’t stop thinking about.

Said it ran twenty-some bushels better than the rest of the field.

Same hybrid. Same planting date. Same everything, except that one stretch just exploded.

“Looked like a different field,” he said, eyes wide like he’d just seen Jesus in the yield monitor.

Turns out the fertilizer spreader overlapped there. Instead of 300 pounds of urea, it dumped 600.

He didn’t even hesitate, said it like he was explaining gravity to a toddler:

“Well, obviously. More nitrogen, more yield.”

And that was it. Case closed. Double the N, get bigger corn.

That was the moment I realized: guacamole logic isn’t just alive. It’s thriving in our fields.

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That strip? It did yield better. That part’s true.

But what happens next is the problem, because most guys don’t question it.

They don’t run the numbers. They don’t consider the biology.

They just start building a story around it. A story that goes:

“If 300 pounds gave me 220 bushels, then 600 must be the ticket to 260. Or 280. Or hell, 300.”

But farming doesn’t work like that. And neither does guacamole.

So let’s slow down and run the math.

Say urea’s running $500 a ton. That’s 25 cents a pound. So 300 extra pounds? That’s $75.

Tack on $12 an acre to spread it, and you’re at $87 per acre.

That yield bump everyone’s drooling over?

Twenty extra bushels at $3.85 = $77.

Congrats. You just lost $10 an acre chasing a story your fertilizer guy would love to tell.

And that’s before you even touch the real costs that don’t show up until it’s too late:

• Nutrient tie-up that starves your crop of calcium, potassium, and boron like a chemical bouncer shutting down the party

• Salt stress that weakens roots and makes plants more vulnerable

• Microbial suppression that kills the biology you’re pretending to farm with

• A wrecked Carbon:Nitrogen ratio that slows residue breakdown and nutrient flow

• And nitrogen losses that either gas off or wash out, right before the regulators come sniffing

Overapplying fertilizer doesn’t just burn money.

It breaks the very system you’re trying to make money in.

And the next time you show up in a Netflix documentary, it won’t be because you’re doing something right.

But worst of all?

It wires your brain.

It builds a loop that says, “This is what winning looks like.”

One accidental yield bump becomes gospel.

And just like that, you’re hooked on the juice.

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It’s this kind of thinking that got farmers demonized in the first place.

When the public looks at our fields through drone shots, nitrate reports, or headline soundbites, they don’t see stewardship. They see big iron parked like trophies and fertilizer flung like confetti: a circus of excess dressed up as progress.

To them, we’re just out here playing chemical roulette and praying something grows.

And when you’re broadcasting 600 pounds of urea because a yield monitor twitched in 2019?

Suddenly, their outrage sounds a little less irrational.

Because the truth is, this “more is more” model we’ve built our margins around?

It’s running on borrowed time. And when enough guys start chasing fluke yield bumps with 600-pound nitrogen passes? It adds up in runoff, public opinion, and policy backlash.

Regulators are circling.

Chesapeake Bay. Parts of Wisconsin. Southern Minnesota.

And it won’t stop there.

The next wave of ag policy is already being drafted:

• Nutrient caps

• Runoff restrictions

• Carbon intensity scores

• Field-level traceability

Give it another season or two, and you’ll need a permission slip and a pastoral blessing just to apply Ammonium Sulfate. And while that might sound extreme, the direction is real, and the consequences aren’t funny.

Meanwhile, the RFK Jr. crowd sees us as cartoon villains poisoning the land, inflating grocery bills, and jacking up the price of their kids’ organic Lunchables.

They’re wrong on most counts. But they’re gaining ground because we’ve handed them just enough bullet points to build a slideshow.

So what’s your plan when the nitrogen gets pulled out from under you like a tablecloth trick?

What do you do when you can’t guac your way to good corn anymore?

Because I’ve been there, chasing yield with the best of intentions and the worst of inputs.

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Here’s mine. I don’t have every answer. But I’m done pretending the old ones are working. By 2030, I want to cut my synthetic fertilizer use in half.

Yeah … I know how that sounds. It’s a ballsy-assed call. Especially in a world that still thinks “more” means “better.”

But I’m not doing it because I have to. I’m doing it because I can.

We saw it last fall—cut back the nitrogen and phosphorus, ran Source, and it held its own against our full-load fertility program—no yield loss. Better root mass. Healthier plants.

That’s not a fluke. It’s a signpost.

I’m building a system using technology that works with biology, not against it.

I use Source to flip on microbial nutrient cycling, mimicking strigolactones, a natural plant signal telling the crop to trade sugar for nutrients.

I place Blueprint, a potent AMF fungi, right on or near the seed to build a deeper, hungrier root system.

I experiment with fulvic acids, nanotech, and other microbe-supporters to bridge availability and unlock what’s already in the soil, not just dump more on top.

And we don’t just trust the gut. We run plots, pull tissue samples, track yield data.

We test what’s working, not just what looks good in mid-June.

Is it perfect? Hell no.

Does it make me the oddball at the Cenex? You bet.

But I’d rather look weird now than be the guy who watched everything shift and realized too late he never learned to pivot.

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Wendell Berry once said:

“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all.”

That line hits different when you’ve burned out the microbial network chasing a number, and the ground starts going quiet on you.

I’m not saying fertilizer is evil.

I’m not saying you need to become a barefoot, compost-breathing dirt whisperer.

But if your whole plan is to just keep adding guacamole until the crop looks sexy on the drone footage?

Eventually, the pants won’t fit.

And when the nitrogen gets capped, the soil stops responding, or the economics crumble? What then?

The good news?

There’s a better way.

A smarter way.

A way to farm with biology, with intention, with systems that build, not just burn.

I’m building that system now, trial by trial, acre by acre.

And I’m betting the future belongs to the ones who figure it out before they’re forced to.

So yeah. Eat your guacamole. Just don’t confuse it for the whole damn diet.

Nitrogen isn’t the enemy. But it’s not the hero either.

The real work?

That starts below the surface.

Because while the old guard keeps dumping more urea on yesterday’s problems, the smart money’s building systems that won’t fold like a dollar-store lawn chair when the rules change.

Ten years from now, there’ll be two kinds of farmers: Those who adapted and those who got adapted.

The ones who treated biology like a partner, not a punchline.

The ones who realized soil isn’t just dirt, but a bank account that compounds interest if you know how to invest.

Me? I’d rather be the guy who jumped before he got pushed.

The one who built strength while others built dependency.

The land doesn’t care who owns it, but remembers who respected it.

Because guacamole logic might taste good going down.

But knowing how to farm without it?

That’s how you survive the next ten years.