OPERATION GROUND TRUTH: A Gonzo Journey Through Agriculture's Digital Wasteland
Field Notes From the Front Lines of Agriculture's Digital Revolution
Note: This story runs long. Click through to read the full version on Substack to avoid email truncation. Trust me, you'll want to read this one in its entirety.
A virus from a kindergartener's hug wasn't part of Operation Ground Truth's battle plan. But then again, neither was trading craft beer recommendations with a Nazi or defending farmer mental health to someone who thinks suicide is just efficient market forces at work.
There I was at 3 AM, staring at a screen brighter than November harvest moons, watching agriculture's digital civil war unfold — farmers, critics, dreamers, and trolls duking it out across a battlefield where algorithms matter more than authenticity.
My throat was raw as wheat stubble, my mind racing faster than commodity futures in the heat of a geopolitical crisis.
How the fuck do you follow last week’s Dan Leffelman piece?
It's like going on stage after Carlin... basically, you're screwed no matter what you say.
I thought I had something big but had to call an audible. The legal department was breathing down my neck about particular stories, certain truths that needed to simmer.
“Not the time to pick fights,” they said. “No, no. Let the new audience get comfortable first.”
I shot up in bed like I'd just realized I'd boarded a flight to Dubai and left my suitcase on the tarmac.
Sometimes, the stories that need telling most are the ones you've got to let age, like corn drying in the autumn sun.
I was somewhere around Crookston on the valley's edge when the gratitude began to take hold.
Not the Instagram kind with tractor-cab glamour shots, but the type of gratitude that hits like grain dust in your lungs — when you realize you’ve got friends who’ll pull you back from the edge as the numbers blur and the weight of it all feels heavier than wet corn in December.
The morning sun painted the abandoned bins gold, making them look almost dignified in their slow decay.
Meanwhile, on Substack, the chaos was just warming up.
Odd memories of this nervous journey...
I'd spent the last month trying to tell this story on every digital platform that would have me.
Want a taste of that chaos?
Try defending farm mental health to someone who thinks suicide is ‘nature’s way of practicing sustainable agriculture’ — all while Sheri Oteri and I scavenged local liquor stores for a craft beer, only to find out later it came recommended by a Nazi.
Not exactly what I expected when I asked for an agriculture category between 'Cryptocurrencies' and 'Dating Advice.’
The whole thing started as a simple request for a designated ag category on Substack — a digital home for farmer voices.
Simple stuff.
But that's the thing about pulling threads in modern agriculture — you never know if you're going to unravel a sweater or expose a whole damn corporate tapestry...
Welcome to Operation Ground Truth, where asking for a simple Substack category somehow turned into a fear-and-loathing style adventure through agriculture’s digital underground.
It started simple enough — just asking for our own room in this digital mansion.
Surely, somewhere between ‘Culture’ and ‘Fashion and Beauty,’ there was space for the stories that feed the world.
Some came looking for genuine discussion but couldn't help wrapping their questions in sarcasm pricklier than Canadian thistle. “Innovation—there it is, the magic word!” They'd sneer like we were trying to sell snake oil instead of growing food.
You want to talk about innovation?
About sustainability?
About feeding the world while saving it?
Brother, we've been having those conversations in tractor cabs and coffee shops since before Silicon Valley knew what a farmer looked like. But now we've got folks who couldn't tell a disk from a dinner plate trying to redesign the entire food system between Twitter posts.
While some folks are out here calling farmers ‘prehensile morons’ and treating farmer suicide like it's just nature's way of improving efficiency, something unexpected happened.
“Can't wait to hear what this beautiful bastard has to say,” one reader wrote.
That shit hits harder than finding bonus bushels in the back bin when you thought you were running empty.
Because that's what keeps us going, isn't it?
Not the algorithms or analytics or corporate PowerPoints, but those moments of genuine connection breaking through the digital static.
And that's the thing - the positive connections outnumber the negative noise like a healthy plant-to-pigweed ratio. But just like that one weed breaking through your beans always catches your eye faster than the thousand good plants around it, the critics and the cynics seem to grab all the attention.
Then
dropped a truth I wasn't ready for:“Maybe it's a blessing there's no ag section. If there were, you guys would be sequestered to it, and I would never get to see you. The lack of an ag section may actually be boosting your visibility.”
Sometimes, truth finds you in the strangest places — not where you planned it, but exactly where it needed to land.
Like finding clarity in chaos and strength in scattered voices.
Everyone's got a solution, don't they?
Each one more perfect than the last.
Permaculture!
No, regenerative!
Wait — blockchain agriculture will save us all!
While they argue like kids fighting over the last cookie, we're living the reality they're theorizing about.
You can study agriculture from behind a screen, but that's like trying to understand a storm by looking at radar — you miss the smell of rain, the weight of the clouds, and the way the wind moves through standing corn.
When I started Operation Ground Truth 35 days ago, I thought I was asking for a simple category on a website.
It turns out I was unknowingly stepping into agriculture's digital civil war — a battle over who gets to tell farming's story in an age where everyone has an opinion, but few have ever felt grain kernels ticking their arches inside their boots.
While the digital battlefield rages, farming misconceptions pile up faster than snowdrifts in a Dakota winter.
Even well-meaning voices, like Joe Rogan, often miss the mark.
Let me explain.
Rogan’s podcast has gotten me through more tractor hours than I can count, and his curiosity about agriculture is genuine. But even good intentions can lead you down the wrong rows when farming is filtered through corporate PR and activist agendas. That’s why our voices need to be part of the conversation.
The truth about farming doesn’t fit neatly between ads for AG1 and elk meat.
You can’t understand the weight of generations from behind a microphone or feel the pressure of operating loans in a studio chair. Even with the best intentions, Joe’s getting agriculture through secondhand narratives — like trying to judge a crop’s health from satellite images without touching the soil.
It’s not Rogan’s fault.
When agriculture doesn’t have a voice in these spaces, others fill the silence with whatever sounds good over morning coffee.
Look at what we're up against.
While good folks like Wanda at Minnesota Farm Living and Farm Babe fight the good fight, breaking down reality about glyphosate and farming practices, we're still swimming upstream against a flood of misinformation deeper than a Red River Valley spring melt.
But here’s the thing about truth in the digital age—it grows like noxious weeds in abandoned fields, stubborn and unplanned, breaking through polished narratives like morning glory through cracked concrete.
Three hundred and ninety-one pairs of eyes now, knocking on 400's door.
Not just an audience but an army of witnesses breaking down the wall between polished corporate narratives and dirt-level truth.
This isn't just about a website category anymore. It's about agriculture finding its voice in a digital world that ignores or gets us wrong.
Whether it's Joe Rogan's well-meaning but off-target takes, Silicon Valley's deafening silence, or keyboard warriors who think farmer suicide is a business strategy — we're fighting a war for agriculture's soul in a battlefield made of pixels and prejudice.
But something's changing, like weather before a storm that could either save or destroy the crop.
These witnesses?
They're proof that people are hungry for authentic agricultural voices, for stories that smell like fresh-turned dirt instead of corporate New Car Scent.
The revolution won't start in a corporate boardroom or a podcast studio. It'll start in this digital field we're cultivating together.
One story at a time, one truth at a time, one voice joining another until the chorus grows louder than a grain vac on a subzero January afternoon.
So here I sit, voice blunted by a kindergartener's biological warfare, watching this digital agricultural revolution unfold.
The Nazi's been blocked, the death-wish troll's been reported, and through all this chaos, we've built something real.
Some days, the seed company numbers blur together, the YouTube analytics mock you, and the pamphlet feels like you're shouting into a digital void.
That's when you need people like Sheri Oteri, Leffelman, and John Boy (J.B), as well as nearly 400 friends and allies who can remind you why we started this journey in the first place.
Because maybe that's what all these scattered agricultural voices are really searching for — not just a category on a website, but proof we're not alone in this clusterfuck.
For every troll wishing us dead, there are a hundred 'beautiful bastard' comments reminding us why we keep pushing through.
Because somebody's got to tell these stories, and it might as well be us — the folks with dirt under our fingernails and calluses that tell tales no corporate report ever could.
Now, who's ready to plant something real?
Once I can talk again without sounding like I've been gargling with disk blades...
I can't tell you how happy I was to read this real post as a new subscriber, after watching the whole gonzo notes quest unfold this past month. I see it as a blueprint for others to follow. Go all in on a subject close to your heart and watch the chaos and the beauty unfold. I think you have started something special Adam, and I am here for it.
“This isn't just about a website category anymore. It's about agriculture finding its voice in a digital world that ignores or gets us wrong. …..
Because somebody's got to tell these stories, and it might as well be us — the folks with dirt under our fingernails and calluses that tell tales no corporate report ever could.”
God bless you.