Hi friends, this is John.
Welcome back to the Regenerative
Agriculture podcast, where we
have all kinds of fun
conversations related to
improving our
soil health and improving the
health of the things that we're
growing.
And in today's world, today's
macroeconomic climate,
perhaps one of the most
important conversations is how
do we maintain and improve the
financial health of our
operations? Because obviously
that is a foundational
prerequisite upon which
everything else rests.
Because if we don't have the
resources,
To be good stewards,
then we
all know what happens.
Stewardship suffers and declines
and the
things that we're responsible
for managing necessarily go into
decline.
And this has been a macro trend
for the last
century or more.
You could argue even longer that
there have been all kinds of
externalities in agriculture and
that
there has been this extractive,
this financial extraction that's
occurred from agriculture.
But this has really been
accelerated in the last 50 years
or so
and is continuing.
And so it's important for us as
stewards and as farmers to be
thinking about how do we put
ourself into a different
position.
How do we man and this is one of
the topics I'm going to be
speaking about next week here at
the acres conference.
But anyway,
too much of a monologue.
I'm delighted.
I'm joined here today by Matthew
Fitzgerald. Matthew, thank you
for joining me.
Tell us a little bit about your
story, your background, the
scope of the things that you're
working on on your farm in
Minnesota.
Yeah. Hey, John, thanks for
having me.
I
appreciate that opening comment
because
I'll tell our story and how it
connects to financial
stewardship and we'll see where
it goes from there.
I'm a second generation farmer.
My parents, Anna Jo,
moved to Minnesota from Iowa in
the year 2000, so 25 years ago.
We are a 100 % organic grain
farm.
I'll share a little bit about
the origin story of our farm and
how we as beginning farmers, I
would consider myself a 1 .5
generation because my folks
started in their 40s.
They were kind of a
midlife crisis, wanted to become
farmers, raise kids on a farm
context, but weren't
multi -generation.
So how did they get into it?
And really that was the organics
niche. And our farm has really
paralleled the growth of the
organic industry.
And now as a return to the farm,
thinking about this next
generation,
regenerative is kind of the next
thing that comes along, but
I'll, I'll give some more
background about our, our farm
and how it got started and what
we're up to today.
So
the farm was originally owned by
a woman named Mabel Brelia and
Mabel was an OBGYN doctor.
And she was really interested in
women and children's health.
from her practice.
And so in her retirement, she
moved back to her family's farm
and took over. And so in her
70s, she was farming
organically, like in 1996,
as an experimental,
creative,
pushing the edges of science,
thinking about the whole system
health.
So she had
converted her family's farm in
the late 90s to organic
production.
Met my parents at a farm
conference.
Sit down at lunch,
stand next to somebody and say,
who are you? What are you up to?
Hit off conversation.
Uh, and my, my dad had grown up
on a farm in Des Moines, Iowa,
big family, 10 kids, the farm
was lost in the seventies.
Parents said,
whatever you do, don't farm,
you know, stay away from it.
It's a tough way to live.
But there was sort of this
through line of, of being
connected to the land, wanting
to raise a family on the land.
And so my parents met me about
this conference and struck up a
conversation.
And she was in her eighties,
really young. to re -retire.
And everyone in the neighborhood
said, why don't I come by your
farm? And she said, that sounds
great.
It has to stay organic.
And nobody wanted to do that at
that time. So she was out
looking for somebody and met my
parents.
So we started,
we moved to the farm in the year
2000, 25 years ago,
very humble beginnings,
200 acres, borrowed money on a
4440.
and was really, really the early
days. And so that's the origin
story of our farm.
And I share that because getting
into farming is like the mafia.
You need to know somebody or
have a lot of money.
It's incredibly difficult.
And it's an issue that I'm
passionate about, thinking about
beginning farmers and
repopulating the land and
connecting communities to food.
And you just can't do it in
conventional commodity
agriculture.
And so that was the story of our
farm, is that how could you
support
a family.
And so we looked at the organic
niche. We're considering it for
environmental, ethical,
religious beliefs,
wanting to be stewards of the
land, but then also the
economics at that time.
A higher price for the
commodity,
niche markets, direct
relationships, all those things.
And so our family was able to
start
with basically nothing.
And over the last 25 years,
we've grown to about a 2 ,500
acre farm. So really parallel to
the growth of the industry.
Much of that growth has been
still in the grain world.
So we produce corn,
soybeans. Those often end up in
the feed grade market that end
up in feed for chickens and
livestock.
Some as food grade,
some distilling,
some food grade soybeans for end
users like
tofu, soy sauce,
wheat.
We have some canning crops
available to us.
So we do peas
and sweet corn and then edible
beans, black beans and kidney
beans, which are really fun.
And then some cover crops in
that rotation. But we're here on
the edge of the prairie.
So our ecosystem is really right
where the big woods hits prairie
pothole,
and it gets flat and wide.
And so both the landscape
changes and the type of farming
changes.
So
20 miles to the east of us, it's
rolling hills,
old dairies and silo harvesters
and 40 acre fields.
And 20 miles to the west is,
you know,
grain infrastructure that looks
like it could be a whole
cooperative and it's just one
individual farm and they're
20 ,000 acre farms.
So we're nestled kind of in this
geography,
cultural change, and we've
wiggled our way through it as
kind of a 1 .5 generation farm
with the organics.
So that financial stewardship
and really observing the
loss of the small family farm
and the
mega farms emerging over the
last 25 years.
So we've touched on the
financial management piece and
the need for kind of economic
independence in this very
challenged world.
You also touched on
the difficulty, the barriers to
entry, the difficulty of getting
in as something that you're
quite passionate about.
What's the intersection of those
two things and how are you
thinking about them in the
context of your operation today?
Well, we do a couple of things
on our farm. So we're trying to
create opportunities for other
farmers to pay that forward.
I think that's like a real
a real commitment that there was
a gift from Mabel to our family,
and we want to pay that forward.
So we've
dedicated ourselves to helping
other farmers get into it, and
especially folks making the
transition to organic.
So anytime somebody gives me a
call and says, hey, I'm thinking
about organics,
the door flies open.
We invite them in, start having
that conversation, talking about
strategies, transition,
market relationships,
My
father, Joe, has really mentored
dozens of folks over the years
and we've helped get folks
started and really try and
continue that opportunity
creation that was given to us
and pay that forward.
I think about grain farming
specifically as a more
sustainable way than the
the vegetable world.
A lot of my friends, other
idealistic millennials that were
out there trying to change the
world got into vegetable
farming.
What I see is a pretty
consistent pattern of folks
going to intern on a farm,
learning about farming.
Maybe they're 17, 18, 19,
into their early 20s.
They maybe figure out how to buy
20 acres of land in their early
20s. They hit 35.
They've got two kids.
their bodies start to break
down, they realize,
uh -oh, this isn't working out.
The economics aren't working
out. So at least here in the
Midwest context, I'm always
encouraging folks that are
beginning farmers or first
-generation farmers to think
about
pushing beyond just the quick
natural solution of being a CSA
vegetable farmer.
I think that's a really
important part of our food
system, but it's still
undervalued.
And so grain farming is a huge
opportunity for beginning
farmers because there are
systems in place, there's scale.
To a certain amount, there's
mechanization
helps protect your body over
time.
And economics are still a little
bit more robust and a little bit
more stable.
So at least start with grain and
think about maybe adding
livestock for diversification.
If you can complete the whole
cycle with vegetables or direct
-to -consumer stuff, that's kind
of the sweet spot, I think, for
a really sustainable economic
farm.
So when you think about grain
farming, of course, even organic
farming, there is still a
substantial barrier to entry
relative to a fruit and
vegetable farm, relative to the
size that is needed and the
acreage that is needed.
So how do you solve that barrier
to entry?
Good question. It's not easy.
I certainly don't want to
suggest that it's just,
you know, go buy a tractor and
get going.
We have an opportunity because
there's a huge generational
shift, right? I think half of
the land is going to change
hands over the next decade.
And so that changing of hands is
the opportunity, I think,
because just
going out and being able to buy
a farm is
darn near impossible,
given how expensive land is.
In our context here, Minnesota
land is $11 ,000 or $12 ,000 an
acre.
Tractors can be hundreds of
thousands of dollars, combines.
So I think we're
a beginning farmer can think
about,
partnering where they can maybe
offer their labor, their energy,
their human capital over their
financial capital in partnership
with farmers,
retiring folks, folks who are
aging out.
One of the things that we did
here in Minnesota is worked on a
beginning farmer tax credit.
So in 2017,
I worked with the National Young
Farmers Association and we've
worked on a beginning farmer tax
credit that incentivizes the
sale or lease of agricultural
assets. That's land and
equipment.
to beginning farmers.
So there's some kind of policy,
financial mechanisms you can try
and do.
One of my marketing techniques
is to find folks who are
retiring and mail them boxes of
our product.
So as an example, we have black
beans.
I literally mail people cans of
our black beans and say, hey,
I'm in the neighborhood.
We're a beginning farmer.
Here's our store.
We raise food and it's good and
it tastes good.
And this is what it looks like.
And if you're interested in
something different, I'd love to
talk.
Um,
so it still requires kind of
being scrappy and being creative
to get your way into them.
What you're describing is
particularly that your, your
last, um,
thing that you described or
reaching out to people, you, you
were already established.
You already have a foothold and,
I think there are, there are
many young people who want to
get in,
who want to get started, who've
become quite cynical about the
older generation.
Um, you had an exceptional
opportunity in connecting with
someone who cared more deeply
about mission than they cared
about money.
And,
um, the reality is many,
uh, and this is
not true for everyone, but
there's this cynical perspective
by the younger generation that
the older generation is just
going to cash out, sell out to
investors, get as much money as
they can that they.
They care more about the money
than they care about the next
generation.
So how do we navigate that
landscape?
I kind of partially agree with
the cynicism.
You know, it's not it's not just
made up.
We
operate within a capitalist
society that drives the
most return on investment, the
highest amount of money
possible. It's it's very
tempting.
So I can be empathetic with the
folks that make that choice
because that
that's very, very powerful.
And frankly, it's going to be
hard to beat. So I think you do
have to just place yourself in
spaces where people are mission
aligned.
The reason that meeting happened
between my parents and Mabel was
they were at a conference with
like -minded folks thinking
about organics.
So if it's the Acres Conference,
if it's Marble Seed, if it's a
community gathering, around
sustainable food, if it's going
to your farmer's market and
introducing yourself to the
folks that are at the farmer's
market,
I think placing yourself in
spaces where you maybe find
those like -minded folks is
probably the best way to do
that.
The cold calling that I
described is really difficult.
That's almost a used car
salesman gig.
That's an uphill battle.
I don't know if I would describe
it that way.
I've sent lots of cans of black
beans and I've only had
one or two opportunities come
out of that tactic.
It's not like a
perfect tool.
But yeah, your point's well
taken. It is incredibly
difficult, and I think it is OK
to be
realistic about that.
And so creating
opportunity, creating luck,
creating those connections,
you know, set yourself up in an
environment where that could
happen.
Yeah, we could have we could
have a lot more conversations
around that topic.
But I want to dig into
the
way that you set your farm up
for financial success, both
historically and now.
I think a critical part of this
story
particularly in today's
environment, although I would
argue it's been true for the
last couple of decades,
is the need to decommoditize
yourself by any one of dozens of
possible different mechanisms,
which I think you have done.
So let's
talk a bit about your
thought process.
How do you think about your
farm's economic viability and
sustainability?
You've also grown.
You've grown 10x over the last
couple of decades.
How were you able to accomplish
that?
There's probably two or three
key components.
I'd say one is the partnerships
in your team.
The second is that
decommodification.
Why don't we tackle those first
two things, and then I'll come
back to the third thing I'm
thinking about.
But the first thing is a
partnership and team.
And both, it's like your
internal team.
So that scale requires having
folks who are on the farm every
day who are bought in, who
believe in that mission, who are
willing to work, who are
bringing their whole selves.
And so we have a really, really
strong team on the farm.
I farm with my father, Joe.
We have one or two full -time
folks. We have some retired
farmers who help us out who are
excited about the organic
thing. It reminds them of how
they grew up.
And when we meet, we talk about
why we do what we do,
our care of stewardship of
the land.
our commitment to proving that
sustainable agriculture is
competitive.
We play the underdog card a
little bit. We motivate everyone
around that,
proving that we can do it.
And then it's the other partners
that we have. So it's financial
partners.
We bank with a group called MAD
Agriculture,
which is an organization that's
committed to organics and
regenerative agriculture.
So they share in that vision and
mission. So some of their
financial tools are more
built and designed for organic
and regenerative farms, as
opposed to just a conventional
commercial agricultural lender
that maybe doesn't have the
context, doesn't understand the
cash flows.
It's having peer
farmers.
So on my phone are the speed
dial numbers of farmers who are
like me that I can talk to and
work through problems,
questions.
I'd
like to say having a good
agronomist, but that's really
difficult.
So I'm excited to talk about it.
Let me translate that.
There's a myth that a farmer has
to be everything.
And we know that that's not true
with the plants that we raise,
that the crops we're raising are
whole systems. And we have to
treat ourselves and our
businesses as whole systems.
And we have to bring in all the
right elements and have them
complement and interact with
each other. So that's how I
think about the partnership that
allows that
growth, that financial
stability. Because we have
hiccups, we have droughts, we
have crop failures, we have
grain buyers that,
you know,
go broke.
We are not without problems,
challenges,
and things going sideways.
I think one of the things that
you said that stood
out to me was your discussion of
the team of people that you have
around you.
It's
one of the things that I see as
being so foundational.
Many farms have this to varying
degrees,
but
in
in understanding plant
communities and microbial
communities we're developing
this emerging understanding of
quorum sensing and how how the
entire system changes the
behavior of the entire system
changes when you have enough
diversity of perspectives to
establish quorum sensing and
it's kind of the same way in
human organizations or human
communities when you have enough
diversity of perspectives like
you need enough different points
of view if you only have
five or ten people and they all
share the identical point of
view, then you only have a much
more limited perspective.
You have much less resilience.
Yeah.
It's
hard to do it too.
I think that it's not an easy
thing.
And it's long, slow work, just
like stewardship or soil health.
It's long, slow work to build
that. And so I absolutely
personally benefit from the work
that my parents have done before
me. And I feel like the work I'm
doing today is for the next
generation or for the
next farmer. And if you just see
yourself as part of this larger
arc,
this larger ecosystem,
it brings joy to the work, too,
frankly.
Sometimes, this is just hard.
There's no way around it.
It's just hard.
It's stressful.
For me, at least, it's the
human element.
The community element is really
grounding
and life -giving.
Yeah.
I
want to not lose sight of the
third thing that you had in the
back of your mind.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So,
I talked about partnership
decommodification really
briefly.
So, I would say we're still
probably
60 to 70 % of our crops are what
you might consider an organic
commodity.
You know, they go to a broker
that we don't know personally
that gets
shipped on a rail car to the
East Coast or West Coast and
ends up...
We're slowly...
There are degrees of
decommoditization, obviously,
but I would argue that the fact
that you are growing a crop
that's organically certified
already to some degree has
removed you from the mainstream
commodity marketplace.
Yeah. Yeah, I would say so.
Certainly we're...
Our corn
is worth twice as much as a...
kernel corn sold on the Chicago
border trade.
And it has a lot more
nutritional value and love and
effort put into it.
So I think that's a fair price.
But yeah,
the third component,
I'd say,
for like, how do you manage the
scale? Or how do you
de -risk things?
Is this
concept of doing the right thing
at the right time and in the
right way.
And what I want to talk about
here a project that I've been
working on for the last three
years called Farm Flow.
And I think,
John, you'll share this insight,
which is like alternative
systems require intensive
management. It's not a passive
endeavor.
And I think that's often what
people think organic
or regenerative or permaculture
or something. It's sort of like,
well, you just let
nature do its thing and it's
going to work its way out.
And it's not that at all.
nature is absolutely doing its
thing, but you're an active part
of it.
Actually, I'd like to touch on
that in just just a moment for
just from a very hot, extremely
high level philosophical or
principles perspective.
As
I've been learning more about
quorum sensing and how
ecosystems function,
I think there is an it's
possible to
develop an ecosystem and develop
a landscape where nature just
does its thing.
And you there there is much less
management involved.
I think
One of the early inspirations of
this outside of the ranching and
grazing world was Masanobu
Fukuoka and his one straw
revolution in natural farming
and some of the work that he was
doing.
But it's becoming increasingly
clear to me as I understand
and look at different examples
of this, that in order for that
principle to
even possibly hold true
requires an abundance of
different species and requires
an abundance of diversity.
That doesn't happen in organic
grain cropping system.
It doesn't happen in most
farming systems.
So I think that principle can be
true, but isn't true in most
grain cropping environments, or
even all of them.
Yeah. Yeah.
And there's this transition
period from what you're
describing,
this quorum sensing that like
requires active participation,
active management, active.
Yeah.
So management entails
absolutely.
Most, most grain cropping to do
it really well,
to do regenerative management,
organic management really well
requires much more knowledge.
It's much more knowledge
intensive and much more
management intensive.
You've, you've taken away all
the easy buttons.
Yep.
So three
and a half years ago I had a
friend who's a data scientist
and I said, Hey,
I have a bunch of information
about my farm. And I'd like to
think about the question,
This is a natural farmer
question.
How could we raise more yields?
How could we raise a bigger
crop?
And what could we do?
How could we figure that out?
And so he was willing to help me
on this project.
And so we put together a data
set.
And this isn't a university
-level research with randomized
trials. It's just our own multi
-year,
large -scale farm.
And we looked at
planting date, variety,
crop fertility,
soil suitability,
a whole bunch of different
factors on our farm, including
we looked at the number of
passes.
So the number of times you were
in a field doing some kind of
operation or scouting or
intervention or cover crop or
whatever it might be, and the
frequency.
So how often were those passes
occurring?
We ran this multivariable
regression, which basically
helps us understand like which
of these variables has the
largest impact on that
yield.
And when we ran that regression,
the strongest variable was the
frequency of passes.
So if we were in a field every
four days versus every seven
days, there was a five bushel
increase in corn yield.
So the insight was,
the more often you're in your
field, the better your crops.
And you're going to go, yeah,
duh.
You talk to any good gardener
and they say, yeah, if you weed
your garden,
the more often you're weeding,
the better your tomatoes.
But that insight really made
clear to us the
active intentional management of
our farms
drove outcrops.
that we wanted, whether it was
weed control, whether it was
yield, whether it was like the
success of a cover crop,
whatever it was.
And despite being good farmers
and having 25 years of
experience, we weren't always
doing that ourselves.
We kind of knew this insight.
The regression proved something
we already intuitively
understood,
but we had a gap.
And so we came up with a
solution for that gap,
which is the farm flow concept.
I can share more about that.
Yeah,
I have a
couple of flags that ran up the
poll for me here.
So one of them is this...
When we look at
plant nutrition management from
a physiological development
perspective and
the phenological growth stages,
it's become
extremely clear that there are
windows of time where
we can do this.
Uh, if you get on the necessary
application, let's say I'm just
making things up here, but let's
say you get on a critical,
um, side dress application on
corn at V5. And if you miss
that, if you have like a three
to five day window, and if you
miss that window and you're a
week late,
then your yield response is down
disproportionately.
Like you can, that can cost you
10 bushels in yield and there
are all these various windows.
So on one hand, when you talk
about,
I understand the, the critical
need.
to get certain management
activities done within very well
-defined windows.
I understand how important that
is.
But that's not exactly what you
said. You said the
frequency of and the number of
times that you're in the field.
And so
if you take that all the way to
the extreme, you could say,
well, if you're in the field
every three days then for the
entire season, that should
produce the highest yield,
right?
But I don't think that's the
case. what you're saying.
No, it isn't. And, uh, you know,
that's a limit of a farmer, a
farmer run, uh,
data set and experiment, you
know, that there's, there's, uh,
an insight that can be clean,
but if you take it too far, it
falls apart, you know, or it's
limited in its utility.
So,
um,
From this insight, we created a
$300 idea.
I think it's worth a million
dollars.
We can give it to everybody for
free.
We basically took this insight
of like, okay, we need to
visualize the work that's being
done on the farm and catch those
gaps to get that side dress at
that right time.
We took a 4x8 whiteboard
and we took a tiny little tape
and we made a grid,
4x8 grid.
listed our fields, and from left
to right,
counted out days.
So individual squares equaled an
individual day on an individual
farm.
And then we just simply used
magnets.
And we placed a magnet with
a color code. So for example,
planting was green,
time weeding was blue,
manure application,
brown, so on and so forth.
And what we were able to do was
literally just chart out the
work that was happening on the
farm by placing magnets.
So you could walk into the
gathering shop,
and look at this giant
whiteboard, and without even
reading any details, you could
visualize,
here are these patterns of work
that's occurring from seeing the
colors,
and then the gaps in the colors.
And so really quickly,
that team, retired farmers, part
-time seasonal, full -time
folks, all could quickly
understand what was happening on
the farm,
what was going on,
what was getting behind.
And all of a sudden,
what changed was we
were able to respond, maybe a
three -inch range,
occurred and
projects were delayed, or a
piece of equipment broke, or a
farm that was maybe further away
or had a grumpy neighbor that we
had a subconscious bias, no one
wanted to go work at.
We could identify those things
and respond to them.
And so people had a sense of
their role, their participation,
their impact in the whole
system.
Folks that didn't, were new to
organics could start to
understand the sequence of these
interventions, these passes and
how they complemented each other
and how they built on each
other.
And as a result of just this
like
$300 whiteboard with magnets up
on it,
we changed the way that we were
thinking about the farm.
Everyone had a high level buy
-in, we were executing much
more quickly, we're catching
those gaps, that management gap,
and it changed the flow of
our farm. And so that was the
farm flow concept.
I want to talk about
the results that you
observed and what changed.
But before we go there,
let's dig into a bit more on
what
this chart actually looked like
on the wall. So I'm imagining
that over the course of a
season,
you have some gaps that are
three
days apart and you have some
that are 30 days apart.
Do
you deliberately try to bring
things closer together and have
greater frequency?
Or are you just trying to hit
those optimal time windows?
It's seasonally appropriate.
So, you know, the activities
that are happening in August and
September are much more spread
out than they might be in May
and June on our farm in a green
system.
So in May and June, I might
expect something to be every
three to five days.
And by the time we get to
September, it might be once
every 30
days. You know, we might be
applying fertility and seeding a
cover crop, and that might be
only activity within those 60
days.
So,
I
can, I don't know if you're,
it won't be helpful to the
listeners, but I could share an
image of it for your benefit,
John.
Just describe it visually, I
think.
Yeah, so there's a limit to a
four -by -eight whiteboard
because you can't fit 365 tiny
little squares on a four -by
-eight. I think that means a
second four -by -eight
whiteboard. Yeah, we just keep
stacking together or, you know,
take a photo, you wipe it off.
I also have a two -year -old, so
we have to be careful about how
high those magnets are because
she can come in and move them
around pretty quickly and the
whole plan's off.
So,
yeah,
the tool itself really became
a gathering point or a
conversation for you were
talking about the diversity of
opinions.
And so
we all knew what the reality
was, but then we could talk
about in the morning, like, hey,
what's going on?
What are people seeing?
What do we think we need to do?
And it gave us a reference point
that we could start to talk
about as a team of planning out,
because before really everything
lives in your head.
Or maybe if you're hyper
organized, maybe in a
spreadsheet or on a
piece of paper.
Even a spreadsheet, it's a
spreadsheet that one person
looks at instead of 10.
Yeah.
Yeah. And so it just totally
changed the dynamic, uh, of what
people's ownership was of the,
of the farm.
Um, and
it became a teaching tool.
And I think that's
part of part of our joy of our
farm is like the teaching
element.
So you've been working on this
now for the last three years.
How has this shifted and how
has,
how have things changed on your
operation as a result of it?
Yeah. So we
got to the end of the first
season and we realized that
everything up on that
whiteboard,
we were going to have to type
up.
for our organic certification.
And so previously what we were
doing was just having a giant
paper, an office supply paper
calendar where we're scribbling,
today we did this.
And then that was part of our
certification process.
Totally fine, totally legit,
works for record keeping, is
accepted by the USDA for that
process,
but kind of labor intensive.
And if
we wanted to go back and refer
like, hey, what did we do in
2012
when we had similar
circumstances?
How could we reference that?
It became clear like this
physical whiteboard
solved the initial problem, but
there was a natural evolution to
maybe a digital tool.
Could, could we build a piece of
software that functioned like
this whiteboard that could
assign tasks to team members?
We could pull in weather so we
could geotag it and have weather
pulled up automatically.
Could we have multi -year
references so we could look back
two or three years in similar
circumstances and see what
worked or what didn't?
Could we have details about who
did the work? So if it
looked
like the.
cultivator was set really well,
we could all learn from that.
And so I started the process of
developing FarmFluent, a piece
of software.
And that's been the last three
years journey.
I am a non -technical person.
I have no computer bones in my
body.
And so it's been a learning
process there.
The first year I hired a team on
Upworks, which is a
online gig economy tool.
I hired a team in India to build
the software. I thought, yeah,
10 grand, I can build this
thing. That's going to be
amazing.
It'll change the world.
How hard can it be?
Boy, was I wrong.
So between the barriers of like
language,
farming context, you know, the
farming context in India versus
a Midwest grain farmer, wildly
different.
And really just being non
-technical, just there's a whole
language that's spoken about how
do you develop software and what
I might visualize in my mind
communicating that to a team
was,
it was just amazing.
So I spent a year,
a chunk of money,
and I built a bicycle that
didn't have wheels or a seat on
it.
It kind of looked like the
thing, but it was not going to
work.
Yeah. And so we restarted the
process here in 2024 with
some grant funding.
So the project today has a grant
-funded software tool, and I'm
working with a team in
Minneapolis.
So a US -based team.
I have a product manager who
helped build a large
software tool that vegetable
farmers use.
And we're working with four or
five farmers here in the US to
kind of test it out, to learn
from what they need in their
farms. And so we're restarting,
we're relearning,
but we're building a tool that
takes that whiteboard concept
and starts applying it
to a digital world.
And eventually we're thinking
about AI.
So I'm excited to talk with you
about AI too.
Yeah, I want to dig into the AI
conversation, but I
want to not lose sight of my
original question quite yet,
which is what's changed on your
farm in the last three years
as what what in
terms of crop responses or crop
management, you spoke about this
being kind of the nexus point
for a conversation and for
facilitating discussion around
different points of view, which
is
which is awesome.
But has that has that
resulted in actually improving
yield, which was your original
question?
Yeah, it has improved yield.
The first year that we used the
FarmFill board, we had a
record yield up to that point.
Of course, weather,
fertility, and everything else
has a large role to play.
I would be very, very remiss to
say that if you put a 4x8
whiteboard in your farm shop,
you're going to have the best
yields ever.
That simply is not true.
true, folks. That will not
happen.
What has changed is that
the ownership of the operation
has changed. I think as a result
of that,
we have better execution day -to
-day. As a result of better
execution day -to -day, we have
more consistent yields.
What it is doing is reducing our
lived experience of stress.
What it is doing is taking the
record keeping process and
making that much simpler year to
year.
And
this
will be our third
season with the tool in place.
So I'd have to look at 25 years
and say, can I chart that out?
Hard to say exactly.
Again, weather,
fertility, crops, everything
else comes into play
significantly.
But it's changed the day -to
-day experience on our farm
significantly and helped our
team.
All right,
let's talk about AI.
You've mentioned FieldArk twice
now,
and I have
conversations with people all
the time who are using AI for a
variety of purposes and in
usually partially delighted and
partially terrified and
partially,
yeah, there's just a mix of
emotions about the results and
the performance that they're
getting from it.
There's delight and
occasional frustration in equal
measure, particularly from some
of the more mainstream tools.
What have you been playing
around with?
I did have an opportunity to use
Fieldark when it launched.
I was excited to see it.
We talked earlier about
agronomists. You were one of the
original beta users.
Maybe. Maybe I signed up, yeah.
We have a great,
long -time, conventional
agriculture agronomist who I
call the Hope Kitsuo
samples.
And if something seems really
confusing, I might call them or
send them a photo.
But beyond that,
we are on our own.
And so I uploaded all of our
soil test results into Fieldark,
and I started asking
questions like,
okay, let's, let's walk through
this. What can you do?
And I had a more robust
conversation with field lark
than I've had with my local
agronomist over the last six,
seven years, uh, in about 30
minutes.
So in this way, it was really
exciting.
Um,
Out of curiosity, what was the
nature of the questions that you
were asking and what was,
um,
what were the types of responses
that you were getting back?
Um, I started out, I've just
pointed up here.
I started out very generic.
So I said, attach it
to my soil samples.
What can you tell me about my
farm?
I got a long response, and then
we started digging into it.
So then I started saying,
on
our farm, we have some peat
soils, which are really high in
organic matter.
And so that was throwing off
some of the model.
And so I said, OK, remove the
fields with super, super high
organic matter.
Let's dig into some
of my target yield goals.
What can you tell about
micronutrients?
What suggestions would you have
for increasing these results?
I started asking about foliar
boron and zinc on corn.
And, you
know, got interesting answers
there.
So
it's
been fun. I think my experience
with AI has been,
I think about it maybe as like a
college intern, where it
has access to knowledge,
but not quite
the context to offer
original insights that it can
assemble
and answer
things
you maybe give a framework for,
but it's not generating, for me
at least,
totally
new and original concepts.
The temptation in my experience,
and this is, I'm talking about
chat GPT or other large language
models, not necessarily field
work, but
my experience with AI is this,
maybe this same sort of delight
and distrust that
initially it's really tempting
to interact with it and just
think that it's going to do the
thinking for you.
But where I found AI to be most
helpful is if you come to the
tool with a question,
with context,
and have done the work of
thinking before,
it's helpful.
If you're approaching the thing
with not much thought or without
much inquiry or kind of
context,
the
results you get back are
mediocre.
I think there's a fundamental
difference, obviously.
a great deal about the
development of AI and the work
that we've put into FieldArk.
And there's a fundamental
difference between the way
humans respond to answering
questions and
the way a machine responds.
And there are
two key ones that I'll focus on
for the moment.
One of them is,
OK, you're an expert organic
corn and soybean farmer.
And for your
local environment, you've got, I
mean, there's no question you
know way more about that than I
do.
And I ask you the question to
say, hey, I want to grow organic
corn.
How many cultivation
passes do I need to make for
effective weed control?
And you're going to say, well,
it depends on this and that.
And the other thing, it depends
on what you're doing.
It depends on there's there's a
whole bunch of variables like
you. You can't give an answer to
that question without knowing a
whole bunch of context.
So knowing the context is
important that any human is
going to say, well, I don't know
the answer to that.
It's like there is no cut and
dried answer.
Yeah. And we will respond.
Humans will respond by asking
for more context or describing
that more context is needed.
That's one
significant
And the other significant
difference is we'll ask about
one thing,
and for someone who is an expert
or has experience and knowledge
in a certain area,
they will say, well, actually,
while that might appear to be a
good question,
you're actually completely
missing this thing over here.
And what you should be thinking
about is you shouldn't be
thinking about X, you should be
thinking about Y.
The machine can't do that,
doesn't do that, or does it very
poorly at this point.
And so I
had this experience
I've
had some of these interviews,
both here on the podcast and in
person,
that
haven't been publicly released
yet,
where I interviewed people from
a military background about
research work that they did
decades ago on plant pathology
and so forth.
And when you get into some of
those conversations that have
national security implications,
the answers become very direct
and concise.
They become yes, no.
It's like they will only answer
the question that you asked and
they don't elaborate.
And so in order to have any type
of conversation or any type of
dialogue, you have to be smart
enough to
know what questions to ask.
Because if you don't know the
questions, they're not going to
volunteer the information.
And
think the same thing is so true
of these AI tools like
FieldLark,
is you have to, to some
extent, you have to be smart
enough to know the question to
ask. And this is one of the
things that I've tried to
develop in thinking about,
how do we develop these tools to
help people become better, to
help people ask better questions
and so forth?
is in field work we have this
these follow -up questions um
and as part of each response and
it is that is our
initial attempt
to to
inspire more of a dialogue and
to help all of us ask better
questions and remind us of
questions that we might perhaps
should be thinking about but
that we're not thinking about
right now
yep john
as you've been building this
tool
how do you how do you balance
the
what I might perceive as risks
of AI, you know, either energy
consumption or data privacy or
even
kind of intellectual, what
you're describing, kind of
intellectual risk of keeping
in the creativity of the human
element. How do you balance that
with the
opportunities or the
utility of the tools that you're
building?
Well,
there's
several questions within the
question that you've asked, but
I'd say broadly I've taken a
fairly pragmatic approach to
just say
AI is what we're currently
calling AI, which is largely
defined in terms of LLMs, these
large language models.
And this is obviously this whole
space is rapidly iterating and
evolving.
But there's a very pragmatic
element of saying, this is going
to exist whether we create
FieldArk or not.
This whole space is like,
the guardrails are off
and we don't have control of
this horse anymore.
So there is an element of
if you can't beat them, you
might as well join them and
let's create something that is
better than what currently
exists for
a specific use case.
Let's create something that is
better, that helps people
better, that helps farmers and
agronomists to be more effective
and
that has significantly more
powerful for a specific use case
than ChatGPT or Grok or Gemini
or any of these other tools that
are out there.
So that's the one consideration.
And then another aspect of the
question you asked about energy
consumption, this kind of
relates to my initial response,
is
we
are perfectly comfortable in
many domains of life using
significant energy
And you could argue using energy
wastefully for outcomes that we
perceive to be valuable.
So, for example,
I'm trying to forget or trying
to recall who did this analysis.
I want to say it was Wendell
Berry, but I don't think it was
Wendell Berry.
Wendell might have talked about
it, though, in Unsettling
America,
but something to the effect that
our modern agriculture today,
we use three to four calories of
petroleum energy to produce a
single calorie of food energy,
which is not sustainable on its
face.
It's working for a temporary
moment in history, but when you
look at overall human history in
terms of centuries or millennia,
then I think at some point we
will look backward and say that
was a very wasteful use of
energy.
And similarly,
so we have to look at these
LLMs have been created,
what are we going to use them
for?
How are we using that energy?
And so I would argue that using
that energy for
the purposes of facilitating a
more
a regenerative agriculture is a
valuable use of that energy,
much more valuable than what
it's probably most widely being
used for on a consumer audience
perspective.
Yeah. Yeah. Looking up a recipe
for spaghetti.
Exactly.
Probably not.
Not
helping the world.
Yeah.
Well, it's
one of the principles that I
find is true at our farm is that
we've we we have done well by
being early adopters,
by being willing to ask
questions, by being able to lean
into things, whether that was
organic or certain technologies,
say a GPS for
tractors being able to drive
straight so you could cultivate
better, whatever, whatever it
may be. We've, we've generally
leaned into being early
adopters. And so that's been my
approach to this
tool in question too, is that
there
needs to be a healthy amount of
skepticism. There are always
trade -offs.
And at the same time, it is, it
is a tool.
And
we,
we know that
commodity agriculture is going
to be using these things too.
And.
and it will be to
kind of perpetuate those
systems.
And if we're not thinking about
how we're going to participate
or respond, I think
those
conventional systems will
continue to dominate.
So yeah, I would say I kind of
take a similar perspective about
using the tools for,
you know, for good, for driving
change.
Well, in the way that we've
developed FieldLark, I'm
actually not thinking about it
in terms of conventional
systems versus organic or
regenerative systems.
We built it,
I built it very deliberately
to be
what's the word that I'm looking
for, to be practiced agnostic or
to be,
but to instead function from a
first principles perspective and
to function from an outcomes
perspective.
So, and when I say an outcomes
perspective,
FieldLark is directly,
is directed to take second and
third order consequences into
consideration as well to the
degree that they're understood
or known.
And so it's quite fascinating.
I spent quite some time thinking
about
in developing the
ethical framework
of what's the ethical framework
and what are the first
principles framework that
FieldLARC is to operate within
and
what are its foundational
directives.
And so when you,
and it's interesting because we
didn't give FieldLARC any
directives
to, for example, to say don't
make recommendations for
pesticides or don't make
recommendations for anhydrous
ammonia or a variety of
different things that I could
point out.
But what is intriguing is that
FieldLark will not make,
at least not readily on an
initial request, it will not
make recommendations for those
types of things because of its
ethical framework and its first
principles framework thinking
where it takes into
consideration second
and third order consequences.
Does all of a sudden say, well,
actually, yes, anhydrous ammonia
can be a very valuable, useful
form of nitrogen from a crop and
agronomy perspective,
but anhydrous ammonia also has
all of these other
externalities
that are perceived to be
unhealthy to the environment and
to the ecosystem.
And therefore,
FieldLark, without being
specifically told to,
it will selectively, it will
make preferential
recommendations for other forms
of nitrogen
other than anhydrous ammonia.
So it's not that it doesn't make
recommendations for nitrogen,
it's just it's it has it has
that first principles approach,
which is so intriguing because
we deliberately asked it,
directed Fieldmark to have no
biases, to remove all biases in
favor of any system.
It's not in favor of organic, or
not in favor of regenerative, or
not in favor of
of contemporary agricultural
systems, but instead to operate
exclusively from a first
principles perspective and not
take any biases into
consideration.
And that very fact makes it
appear to some people as if
though it were biased.
Yeah.
Challenging our own worldviews.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
When you reflect on
what you've learned in the last
couple of months of releasing
FieldArk, what's been
unexpected?
That's a good question.
I
would say
perhaps this
is a reflection of my own
biases.
As
you described, I tend to be a
technology early adopter.
I've leaned in very strongly
into
testing these various GPT
platforms when they were first
launched.
I've been thinking about them
for over a decade.
I had some early exposure to the
technology that became these
large language models long
before they were publicly
released.
And so I've been thinking about
this for some time, and I've
leaned heavily into using them
and building them to work for
me.
And the
piece that
I'm perhaps the most surprised
about
is that many people,
many users of FieldLark, and
based on what I can see, I'm
assuming other GPT models as
well,
are still using it as a
glorified Google search.
They're asking more specific
questions,
but they haven't
really understood the
implications of what this
technology can do for them once
it is trained for them.
And you mentioned this at the
beginning of the con, you
uploaded a bunch of
soil samples. But what you can
actually do is within FieldLark,
you have these different
projects.
So you can have a project be a
specific field or a farm or a
specific crop that you're
working on. Or let's just say
you use it for your whole farm.
So
you can write up a document or
even even better.
And this is the way that I this
is the way that I use FieldLark
and other tools as well.
When I'm building out an initial
profile, I won't build a
profile. I'll use the AI tool to
help me build a profile.
So I'll say,
hey, Fieldmark,
I am farming at this location
with these crops,
with these soil types, here are
my soil characteristics, here
are my dominant weed species.
Help me build a profile that
describes my context that I can
use to train an AI tool.
And you'll go back and forth,
you iterate half a dozen times,
and I end up with
usually as much as a 20 to a 30
-page document that describes my
context in detail.
These are the common weather
conditions,
here's the climate, here's the
USDA growing zones,
here's all this.
And let the AI actually help
build out that context rather
than you trying to do it
yourself. And then you take that
information and you upload it
into
a project, put it into a
document, put it into that
project,
and now it
will constantly reference back
to that training data set.
And you can constantly add to
that and build it.
And so what happens over time,
the information that you get
back becomes ever more
customized and focused on your
specific operation as you keep
building and as you keep
training it. And so the quality
of the answers and the quality
of the information you get back
out of it
becomes very valuable.
And the reality is what I'm
talking about in terms of
training these AIs to work for
you
is this can be as
simple as
30 minute exchange back and
forth. They are very good at
actually identifying what
information would be valuable
for them to understand your
context.
Yeah.
Where I've used that similarly
is with this FarmFlow project.
I mentioned it's been grant
funded.
I'm also not a grant writer.
So I've been using it to
apply for grants
by giving it context.
So like sharing previous grant
proposals or previous language,
previous
documents, the request for
proposals,
you know, pitch decks, kind of
all,
everything. And I've created a
project in Chattopadhyay.
And then that,
you know, when I get off the
farm and tuck
kiddos into bed, and then it's
time to start working on a grant
at night, and I've got two brain
cells left.
It's been really helpful to kind
of
be that partner,
to kind of take it to that next
level.
One of the projects that I did,
just to give you an example,
this is actually one of the
projects that I did that I then
refused to ever use again,
just from a principle to
perspective.
I trained
an instance
of Gemini
to sound like Jon Kempf, to talk
like Jon Kempf, and to write
like Jon Kempf.
I said, OK, here are
50, here are the transcripts
from 50 webinars and dozens of
podcasts.
Here are a long list of articles
that I've written and blog posts
that I've written.
And so I trained it on all this
and I said,
analyze all
of this
and write a, I forget what the
proper term is, but kind
of a brand tone document of how
does Jon's
language and his expressions and
write a document to train an AI
so that it speaks and writes
like John Kempf.
And it generated like a 50 -page
document with this extensive
detail about the tones and the
type of voice inflections.
It analyzed all of it, wrote up
this document,
and I provided the document as a
training tool, as a training
set.
And it came back and I said, all
right,
behave as John Kempf and write
an article on quorum sensing.
And I looked at that article
like, this is freaky.
It's done.
Well,
it's
not that
my
concern was not that it sounded
too much like me.
What I was concerned about is
that if you start using it,
tools, it's just very similar to
once
maps apps were prevalent on
every phone, people lost their
sense of navigation.
They can no longer,
people generally, there are
exceptions of course, but people
generally no longer have a good
sense of direction or a good
ability to navigate.
And you start using tools like
that for writing articles and so
forth, you'll start losing your
ability to think critically.
And so there are
ways I think
we need to think carefully about
how do we use these tools like
in the way that we've built
FieldArc, I've thought a lot
about how do we use this to not
replace people, but to make
people better.
And there's only so much of that
we can do as a tool designer.
Another part of that has to be
picked up by the tool user and
the tool user has to say, all
right,
I want this to help me do the
things that I'm not great at.
It can help really expedite
research, for example, or to
learn things that I didn't
already know.
But then when I learned those
things, there is still this
critical thought process that we
need to engage in personally,
because if we don't, we're going
to lose it.
Your comments are making me
think about one of the tools
we're building.
So for FarmFlow, we have the
whiteboard tool.
We call that Grow.
We have a tool that we call
Track, which is just managing
paperwork. So your bill of
lading is your grain inventory.
We use AI lightly there, just
image recognition.
You can take a photo of your
grain contract, extracts it.
can generate bill waiting
numbers. Pretty simple stuff.
The thing I'm excited about
is the feature we're calling
FarmFlow Guide,
which is basically a
SOP
generator, standard operating
procedure generator, or best
practice generator.
If I was to say, John, I want
you to go
plant corn,
and you would have a particular
way of planting corn at your
farm. Maybe it's based on your
soil type, maybe it's based on
the equipment you have,
maybe the variety you have.
And the way that I would plant
corn at my farm is going to be
wildly different, even if we
have the same piece of
equipment.
And every farm is unique in this
way.
And so what we want to do is
build a tool that partners with
the farmer to capture the
processes,
to document the on -farm best
practices.
And the purpose behind this is
to do a couple of things.
to capture and help retain the
knowledge of wisdom from
retiring farmers.
Farmers are like great
innovators, great thinkers.
They're not necessarily great
teachers, or they don't think
about themselves as great
teachers.
And so this tool can be kind of
the
partner to help the farmer
become a teacher,
to teach next generation.
It can help a farmer scale.
So to train employees,
interns,
whatever it might be, that you
can take your practices
and give these SOPs to your
employees or your team to help
them learn and they can interact
with it rather than just a
static document.
It's an SOP that you can
interact with.
But the part that I'm most
excited about for FarmFlow Guide
is that I think it could
actually be an unlock for
adoption.
So more
than an incentive payment,
more than an inspiring
video that you might watch,
if a farmer is going to adopt a
new practice, it's probably
because they see their neighbor
doing it. They see somebody that
they know or have contacts
that's similar to theirs doing
something different.
Farmers trust farmers.
When I think about adoption of
organic practices or gendered
practices on my own farm, it's
anything that we've adopted or
brought on to our farm.
It's probably because I've seen
another farmer do it
successfully,
or they've shared an idea or
concept.
Maybe it was leaning over the
back of a pickup truck at a
field day and we were swapping
ideas on cultivators.
But we want to use an AI model
that's trained to think like
a coach,
to think like an extension
educator,
and help document the
practices that are on that
individual's farm, and then
create these SOPs that can
either be used internally or
externally to
adapt and adopt new practices.
So we're calling this thing Farm
Flow Guide just in the early,
early stages. So we're working
with the same set of farmers.
We're really wrestling right now
with the
data protection.
That's an unanswered question
for me.
We're spending time talking with
experts in the field.
They kind of think about how we
protect
this data because we
don't want to just train a model
and then get that extracted,
that value in that process.
that's intimate and important,
and really the intellectual
property of that individual
farmer. So that's something that
I don't have good answers to
yet.
But we're thinking about that
SOP guide tool
as kind of an unlock
for farm flow and for adopting
new practices in our context.
So that's, to
your point about the tool and
the user of the tool, I think
this is like
the next level for us as we
think about AI.
Well,
it's certainly a very rapidly
evolving and rapidly iterating
space.
And simply entering into the AI
space means that you've entered
into a race and you'd better be
prepared to move very rapidly.
Because
the capabilities of these tools
are
already today,
it's
There's not a good way for me to
quantify it for a general
audience, a farming audience, of
how rapidly improving these
tools are in their mathematical
capabilities, in their logic
capabilities.
but there is
such rapid improvement.
What I can say is
you cannot look at a tool
such as, let's say, Gemini or
ChatGPT or Grok, you cannot look
at a tool six months ago and
have tested it,
say,
okay, I'm going to upload this
type of data into it and I'm
going to ask it to help me
analyze it and come up with a
set of recommendations.
You cannot evaluate that tool
six months ago and say, oh, that
failed to give me anything
useful and therefore it's
worthless and I'm not going to
bother using it again.
If you test it again today,
it is going to be substantially
better than it was six months
ago.
It's not not a little bit
better,
not five or 10 percent better.
I'm talking dramatically better.
And so the whole space is
iterating, evolving so rapidly
that even if you used it six
months ago or two months ago and
you said, oh, this thing wasn't
all that great,
you need to stay on top of it.
You need to look at it,
constantly be evaluating how you
are using it,
how to get the best results out
of it, because it is growing at
a rapid pace.
So that
means that all the users of
FieldLark are
going to be continually
delighted with all the new
things that they get out of it
from a month -to -month basis,
and from FarmFlow perhaps as
well.
Yeah,
the trick
I think is to stay grounded in
it too.
Be aware to interact and then to
stay
connected to the bigger version.
Absolutely.
The why.
And be very deliberate about
what you use it for and what you
don't use it for.
Wonderful. Well, Matthew, this
has been an awesome
conversation. We haven't gotten
to talk about the farming yet.
But I want to be conscious of
your time and of all of our
listeners' time.
So thank you for being here.
Thank you for the work that
you're doing. And let's stay
connected.
Thank you, John.
I hope you have a good winter.
Stay warm.
Thank you.
Bye.