Growing the Future
CONVERSATIONS THAT MATTER. The Growing the Future Podcast features conversations on innovation, entrepreneurship, and personal and professional growth in the agriculture community.
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Farm Brain AI Portal | How Joe Larre Built $130K of Custom Software in 20 Hours
<p>Joe wanted his farm’s information out of his head and in one place, and eventually something he could hand to the next generation. Since this summer he has built it by talking to Claude Code, with no coding. Dan shares Joe’s portal on screen, so listeners on audio only will miss some of the visuals.</p><p>The portal reads load check-ins from grain company portals and takes each load out of inventory. It also tracks budget against actuals, contract deliveries, equipment service and a daily crew report. Joe set it up so a son or a crew...
Made On Your Farm: Making Your Own Nitrogen: Who It's For and Who It Isn't
<p>Nitrogen is one of the biggest checks on the farm, and most of the air over the field is nitrogen the crop cannot use. Dan opens with Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch and Thomas Hager’s The Alchemy of Air, then asks the practical question. What would it take to make some of your own nitrogen where you use it?</p><p>Chris explains how the system works. Cold plasma breaks the bond in air nitrogen, and the nitrogen is captured in water as nitrate. The product tests under 1 percent nitrate, so it is sold on an equivalent ratio and us...
Nitrogen Management and Soil Fertility Science: Engine of the Soil Season 2 with Greg Patterson
<p>You paid for the nitrogen and put it down the tube on the drill. How much of it did the crop actually use? And if you cannot say, what is next year’s rate based on?</p><p>Greg Patterson of A&L Laboratories Canada has spent 35 years building nitrogen models for variable rate, starting in the mid-1990s with corn, tobacco and potatoes. In this first live session of Engine of the Soil Season 2, he shows how those models changed, from a heavy calculation to simpler indexes, and why the rate depends on more than a nitrate test. Tr...
More Land, Strong Prices: Can Demand Keep Up?
<p>Fewer listings than last year. Bigger packages. The highest dollar value of farmland listed for sale in ten years. In April, Tim Hammond told the room the market was splitting, with good land still climbing and average land moving sideways. Six months later he is back with a different word for what he sees: not a weakening market so much as a maturing one, with supply and demand closer to balance than they have been in years.</p><p>Tim, of Hammond Realty, has been in farmland for thirty years. In this live session with Dan Aberhart he takes...
GTF Podcast: Put AI To Work In Ag.
<p>Five invoices a day. That is what a CFO friend of Dan’s says a farm can see in a busy season, and each one has to be checked, categorized and matched to a receipt. Most people in agriculture have nobody to hand that to, which leads to the question Dan hears most: what can I take off my plate first?</p><p>This live session starts there and then follows the room. Dan sets out to show one job and ends up building three things in front of the audience, answering a hard question about security, and being ca...
Farm Succession: Work Hard and Wait Is Not a Plan
<p>Working hard is how most farm successors earn their place. It is not the same as being prepared to lead. A successor can run the sprayer, raise the crop and know the ground, and still be missing the decision-making, the numbers and the family conversations that the founder has carried without ever naming them.</p><p> </p><p>Patti Durand, family business advisor and author of The Future Leader, and Chris Corbett, her partner at Brightrack, join Dan Aberhart for a live briefing built on three questions: How well do you know yourself? How well do you know your...
Farm Finance: The Fractional CFO Strategy Every Farm Needs
<p>Your banker calls it coffee. In Craig Macfie's experience, it is an interview. They are reading your numbers, and they are reading how you manage.</p><p>Harvest ends, Christmas comes, and twelve months of bookkeeping land on the accountant's desk with everyone else's. Reports can arrive in April, just as the field work starts again. Next year's decisions are already underway while the picture of last year is still missing.</p><p>Dan Aberhart sits down with Craig, a CPA, P.Ag. and the founder of Spring CFO, who works alongside farm owners as their fractional CFO. A...
Learn To Hedge: No Body Showed You
<p>A grain farm carrying roughly $500 of crop per acre on 5,000 acres is carrying about two and a half million dollars of exposure to grain prices. It doesn't need an open trading account to be in the market.</p><p>Ryan Bonnett started as a 21-year-old grain merchant and later began trading his own account. He won early, then lost ten or twelve trades in a row because, as he puts it, he was trading on feel and had no system. He joins Dan to explain why almost nobody is taught how to use hedging tools, what changes when you...
The WD-40 AI Workshop: Lubricate Life's Squeaky Wheels
<p>The hardest thing to fix on a farm doesn't have a part number. It's whatever went wrong between people, and unlike a tractor, you can't just order the replacement part.</p><p>Dan built this session around an experiment: using the same diagnostic logic a farm already trusts, soil test, tissue test, soil map, applied to people instead of fields. He walks through his own Kolbe, CliftonStrengths, and Enneagram results live, then brings on Robert Woolf to tell a real story: when Dan and Robert negotiated Robert's return for Cohort 3, they each let an AI interview them for hours...
The AI Agronomist Transformation
<p>Robert Woolf is 67. He is not a programmer. In season he is scouting fields fourteen to sixteen hours a day, and he used to get home and forget half of what he'd found before he could write it up.</p><p>His grandson brought up AI at a rodeo. Robert's first thought was that he was too close to retirement to bother learning it. He didn't retire. He built thirteen AI agents instead, one of which checks the other twelve, and this conversation is him walking through exactly how.</p><p>What's Inside</p>Growing up on the family...
