Thirty Shots at Survival: Betting the Farm on Tomorrow

Finding truth between suits and soil

A Note from the Cab:

Before we plow into today's dispatch, I should probably thank my fiancée Sheri for not smothering me in my sleep.

Between my 3 AM writing epiphanies and endless requests for ‘just one more read-through,’ she's shown the patience of a farmer watching corn try to grow in April. You know you've found the right one when ‘Can you snap a picture of my boot on a John Deere at sunset?’ gets a camera click instead of a door slam.

Yet here she is, still supporting this crazy dream while 700-plus souls climb aboard our rust-bucket writing rig.

Welcome to the field's edge, folks - you're either crazy or onto something.

What you're about to read isn't your typical ag journalism — it's the kind that grows wild where marketing teams fear to plant. For those considering paid subscriptions, you're not just backing another farmer with a keyboard. You're investing in truth that sprouts defiantly between the neat rows of corporate storytelling.

Now, grab your coffee, settle in, and let's talk about what happens when California wisdom meets Midwest dirt...

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There's something about sitting in a room full of suits that makes a farmer feel like a raccoon at a black-tie dinner.

The room’s split personality bleeds Dior Sauvage against Carhartt sweat while pissed-off farmers stuff streets with tractors like angry sardines in a tin can somewhere across the ocean.

The contrast hits harder than the December wind — here we are, playing corporate kumbaya while real farmers fight for their lives.

Fluorescent lights buzz like tired honeybees, casting a pall over the room as we sit circled around rectangular tables like wagons around a prairie fire: farmers in coffee-stained flannels on one side, suits in thousand-dollar Italian loafers on the other.

Then this kid from Washington stands up, fresh-faced as spring wheat and about as worldly as a barn cat that never left the yard. He’s here to “clarify” a twelve-word sentence and somehow turn simple English into something that sounds like a repair manual translated from Russian to Chinese and back to English.

Seven minutes later, we're all sitting there wondering if we've forgotten how to speak our native tongue.

You can hear the footsteps before you see who's making them.

Whether it's Red Wings that have seen every mud hole in three counties or those fancy Costico loafers polished brighter than a new combine, they all make the same hollow sound on the conference room carpet.

Like muffled thunder before rain, you can tell something's coming, but you're never sure if it will nourish or destroy.

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Enter Sound Agricuture’s Ian Harper. Here’s a California kid who grew up thinking corn only came in bags labeled “Orville Redenbacher.” Not the kind of guy you'd expect to school farmers about farming, but wisdom's funny that way.

Sometimes, it takes an outsider to hold up the mirror we've been avoiding.

"Thirty crops," he says. "That's all you get in this game." The words hit me like a grain cart backing into a pole — not because they're new, but because they're valid in a way that makes your marrow ache.

It reminded me of that scene in Good Will Hunting when Robin Williams tells Matt Damon:

"You can probably tell me everything there is to know about Michelangelo, but you can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel."

That’s Ian. He didn’t just talk about farming; he made it feel real, tangible, almost like he lived it in a way the rest of us had forgotten.

Thirty tries. That's it.

In a world where tech companies get thousands of attempts to fail upward, farmers get thirty swings at perfection.

Miss one, and you're that much closer to being the generation that lost the farm.

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While the suits down the hall wear out their shoulders, patting themselves on the back, I find myself in the bar’s Arctic microclimate, where truth crystallizes faster than bullshit.

Down here, the real titans of agriculture don’t wear name tags or give PowerPoints. They read next season’s story in a handful of dirt and judge character by how long someone lets their tractor warm up in February.

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Take Carl.

Carl from the Minnesota Crop Improvement Association sits nearby, nursing a Grain Belt as if it holds the secrets to next year’s wheat prices. Carl’s been reading this pamphlet generator’s ramblings for almost a year, probably wondering what chemicals I’ve been spraying on my brain to come up with half this stuff.

He’s the kind of guy that makes the rest of us look like we got dressed in the dark. Always sharp, put-together, and sporting seven months running as Best Mustache in the Wide World of Seed — a title more prestigious than any plaque or trophy.

But then, Carl did the unthinkable this summer: he cut his hair.

And not just a trim — he scalped the look that was practically a Midwest landmark. It might go down as 2024’s third-greatest tragedy, right behind my failure to load up on Bitcoin at $49,000 and that rotten third inch of June rain that slashed 20 bushels off the corn crop.

These losses make you question everything you knew about timing, whether you're talking about haircuts or herbicide applications.

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But guys like Carl understand what those suits upstairs don't — farming isn't just about policy papers and platitudes.

In this game, it's about thirty chances, thirty seasons, thirty shots at getting it right.

Down here in the bar's artificial winter, Carl and the real-deal farmers trade wisdom like grain futures.

Meanwhile, the climate itself is up for debate as Daryl Ritchison, our resident weather prophet, takes the stage.

State climatologist, NDAWN wizard, and the kind of guy who’d tell you the sun controls the weather, even if it meant pissing off every climate-change keyboard warrior in North Dakota.

"None of my stations can run on solar alone," he says, and suddenly, agriculture’s struggle sharpens into focus.

We're all trying to run on tomorrow's promises while wrestling with today's realities, like gambling addicts betting next month's mortgage on last year's lucky numbers.

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Ritchison is trying to power weather stations in a state where winter sunshine is about as reliable as a politician's promise, and somehow, that feels like every farmer's story condensed into a solar panel, like trying to generate tomorrow's solutions with yesterday's technology.

I glance around the room at faces weathered by decades of early mornings and late nights, each wrinkle a topographic map of choices that kept them awake past midnight.

These folks carry more stress than a rusty beet harvester in October, juggling operating loans that could choke a banker, shrinking college funds, and tractors held together with baling wire, duct tape, and prayers that only get whispered in machine sheds at 3 AM.

Each wrinkle on their faces maps decisions that kept them awake past midnight, each gray hair earned watching markets swing like a gate in a tornado.

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Then there's Jay Debertin, CHS kingpin and corporate ag’s frontman, singing hymns about global exports while British farmers stuff London streets with tractors across the pond. He's preaching the gospel of globalization from a pulpit while the very farmers he claims to champion fight tooth and nail just to grow food for their people.

The irony is thicker than wet clay soil.

Here's a man celebrating our ability to force-feed the world American crops while European farmers are literally blocking ports to protest being force-fed imports they never asked for.

He talks about global markets as if they were monopoly squares while real farmers measure success in generations preserved and families fed.

It's like watching someone brag about their irrigation system while their neighbor's farm drowns in unwanted rain.

The message might as well be written in Sanskrit for all it connects with reality — corporate agriculture's version of ‘let them eat cake,’ served with a side of soybean oil and a garnish of market projections.

Yet here we are, farmers and suits, separated by a gap as wide as the Red River Valley and twice as deep as farmer debt.

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But watch closely; with the right pair of eyes, you can see cracks in their crumbling certainty, almost feel something real growing, as stubborn as field pennycress in April.

Young farmers aren't inheriting operations.

They're inheriting possibilities.

There’s still time to fix this.

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But here's the thing about evolution in agriculture — it doesn't ask permission to happen.

While suits strategize tomorrow’s farming in boardrooms, the revolution sprouts in our fields.

We’re pulling 180-bushel corn on 130 nitrogen units, watching microbes thrive in soil that corporate high-rises declared dead, proving that true wisdom grows in the spaces between polished projections and gritty farm-gate reality.

That's not some marketing pitch.

That's mud-on-the-boots, grease-in-the-knuckles truth, as real as dawn and donuts.

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Each of those thirty seasons isn't just a countdown; it's a chance to rewrite everything we thought we knew about agriculture.

We're not just growing food anymore — we're growing possibility, cultivating change in soil corporate America wrote off as exhausted, watching hope take root in the ground they said would never bloom again.

Maybe that's why more people than a small farm town now follow a misfit farmer writing gonzo journalism from tractor cabs and conference centers.

Maybe they've caught a glimpse of something growing between these rows that won't fit in a quarterly report or appear on any marketing slide.

After all, we've only got thirty chances to write our names in this soil.

Might as well make them stories worth telling.

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P.S. - Since next Tuesday's dispatch would land on Christmas Eve, I figure we all could use a breather to focus on what matters most — family, faith, and maybe that last-minute dash to clean those nooks and crannies that haven’t been touched since the last time your Grandma came over.

I'll be back New Year's Eve with something special brewing, probably scribbled between seed meetings and whatever resolutions I'm pretending to consider.

Until then, may your holidays be filled with more peace than a January field under fresh snow.

Bye for now. 🌱