Sharp Pencils and a Smile
Two panels, two days, and the hubris of an industry that thinks it can wish away gravity
Day Two. 8:00 AM.
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.
There is no way to read this, to leave a ♥️ and not comment. Your writing is stunning. I will be reading every word from here on out. But more than that, this is so important. I am not a farmer, but I work with farmers. Small farmers mostly. I got a DM the other day from a farmer who I thought was recommending a podcast episode to me. She said "I cried through the first four minutes of xxx podcast." And then I realized it was an episode from my podcast. It was about what small farms need in 2026, a simple episode noting that we need a bit of a revolution. She went on to say this: "The exhastion from having to bend more, explain more is real. I did not realize until listening this morning how all of that on top of feed bills, frozen water buckets, and broken equipment really makes a farming family want to throw in the towel. Thank you for illustrating with words the emotions that bog us down." Anyway, I wanted to say that FWIW I see you and the rest of the farmers who are dealing with the fact that our food system is deeply flawed and that it's taking a real toll on the people we need so desperately to farm. Keep writing. I will be here hanging on every word. Thanks, Adam.
If no one was talking about farmer mental health 2 years ago, perhaps your writing about it made an impact.
Your words matter & things do take a long time.