Growing the Future

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.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.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 live poll of the room found only about a third had grain inventory and working capital numbers that were current and checked. Craig explains why the numbers are always an estimate, and what it takes to build the finance side of an operation on a solid base. What's Inside• Why a lender's "coffee" is really an interview, and what they read across the table• Why grain inventory is always an estimate, and why the adjustment more often hurts next year's profitability than helps• The building blocks of farm finance: strategy and risk first, then transactions, bookkeeping, reporting, forecasting and the bank• How to get bookkeeping current when decisions are being made on information months old• Cash flow lending versus asset-based lending, and the production reconciliation inside AgriStability• How the Entrepreneurial Operating System gives a farm a simple structure for strategy, a scorecard and meetingsResources Mentioned• Traction (the book behind the Entrepreneurial Operating System)• Good to Great, by Jim Collins Connect• springcfo.comConnect with Growing the FutureWebsite: growingthefuture.caYouTube: Growing the FutureInstagram: @growingthefuturepodcastLinkedIn: Growing the FutureSubscribe to the Growing the Future Podcast wherever you listen, and register for Convergence Conference 2027 at convergence.ag.  Register for the Convergence Conference at convergence.ag and stay updated by subscribing to the Growing the Future Podcast at growingthefuturepodcast.ca.

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.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 have rules for getting in and a point where you know you're wrong, and how a farm can think about protecting the bottom end of its price. Live questions from the audience cover cross-hedging, technical analysis and how much time to give the markets each week.What's InsideWhy most farmers never learn the tools their grain buyers use every dayThe question that exposes whether you have a system for selling or only a feelingWhat "bullish" and "bearish" mean once you have to say how far and whyWhy call and put options work like insurance on a farm, and what makes them expensive or cheapWhat to do about crops with no futures marketWhy even a competent trader needs someone who will disagree with themConnect with Growing the FutureWebsite: growingthefuture.caYouTube: Growing the FutureInstagram: @growingthefuturepodcastLinkedIn: Growing the FutureSubscribe to the Growing the Future Podcast wherever you listen, and register for Convergence Conference 2027 at convergence.ag. Register for the Convergence Conference at convergence.ag and stay updated by subscribing to the Growing the Future Podcast at growingthefuturepodcast.ca.

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.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, then let the two AI agents work out 90 percent of the deal before either of them read a final draft. Stefano Zanotto, early in his own cohort, joins to talk about what the same diagnostics surfaced for him.What's InsideWhy Dan treats three personality assessments like a soil test, a tissue test, and a soil map, and what happens when all three point the same directionHow a multi-hour AI interview replaced a negotiation neither party wanted to have in personWhat actually went wrong when Dan tried to run things the way he's wired, instead of how the work needed to be doneWhy a team's energy breaks down into five types, initiating, investigating, organizing, executing, finishing, and what happens when a team is short on oneWhat a farm succession handover looks like when everyone's real motivations are on the table before the hard conversation startsConnect with Growing the FutureWebsite: growingthefuture.caYouTube: Growing the FutureInstagram: @growingthefuturepodcastLinkedIn: Growing the FutureSubscribe to the Growing the Future Podcast wherever you listen, and register for Convergence Conference 2027 at convergence.ag. Register for the Convergence Conference at convergence.ag and stay updated by subscribing to the Growing the Future Podcast at growingthefuturepodcast.ca.

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.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.What's InsideGrowing up on the family farm, twelve years at a John Deere dealership, and how sales and shop work shaped the way he thinks about a client relationshipThe precision ag coaching network that taught him more about why farming works than farming itself did, and the culture of open collaboration he says he has never found anywhere elseTwelve years of independent coaching, more than a hundred irrigation pivots under his management, and a body that finally told him to slow downWhy his own grandchildren were raised to think AI would ruin the world, and what changed their mindsA full walkthrough of his agent hierarchy: sixteen scattered projects reorganized into a single reporting structure, one integrator directing the restWhat a client question that used to take hours to verify now takes minutes to answer, and whyHis stated reason for doing any of this at 67: sixty years and more than sixty harvests of accumulated judgment that does not have to end with himWhy he will not touch a free AI tool, and what he tells anyone thinking about walking away from this entirelyRelated EpisodesGYFOS Cohort 2 Session 8, where this same agent structure gets built live in front of the roomConnect with Robert WoolfAvailable through the Growing Your Future Operating System cohortConnect with Growing the FutureWebsite: growingthefuture.caYouTube: Growing the FutureInstagram: @growingthefuturepodcastLinkedIn: Growing the FutureSubscribe to the Growing the Future Podcast wherever you listen, and register for Convergence Conference 2027 at convergence.ag. Register for the Convergence Conference at convergence.ag and stay updated by subscribing to the Growing the Future Podcast at growingthefuturepodcast.ca.

A farm and its neighbour, same region, same growing conditions, can sit $187 an acre apart in what actually gets made. That gap decides what gets paid down, what gets replaced, and eventually what gets passed on.This is the third session in MNP's Know Your Numbers series. The first two took the conversation from the books to the whole-farm benchmark. This one goes past the fence line and into the field.What's InsideWhat a profit map actually is: gross margin minus labour, power and machinery, deliberately stripped of capital structure so it is not just a proxy for farm sizeThe Soil Intellect Map, MNP's own layering of electrical conductivity and topography, and what it is built to findWhy the spread in crop input spending between top producers and average ones turned out small, and why the real gap sits somewhere else entirelyWhat gross margin by seeding date actually shows, and why canola punishes a late start harder than wheat doesA live guess from the room on what share of farms know their gross margin field by field, and how far off the real number wasRansom land: the term for the acres you keep farming only because they came bundled with the ground you actually wantWhy some of the most successful farms are also the most likely to let a weak field coast, simply because it is easy to ignore when the rest of the operation is carrying itRelated EpisodesFive Numbers Every Farm Should Know: Get Your Books in OrderKnow Your Numbers: See Where You Stack UpConnect with Dean Klippenstine:MNP: mnp.ca/en/personnel/dean-klippenstineLinkedIn: Dean KlippenstineConnect with Mike Palmier:MNP: mnp.caConnect with Growing the FutureWebsite: growingthefuture.caYouTube: Growing the FutureInstagram: @growingthefuturepodcastLinkedIn: Growing the FutureSubscribe to the Growing the Future Podcast wherever you listen, and register for Convergence Conference 2027 at convergence.ag. Register for the Convergence Conference at convergence.ag and stay updated by subscribing to the Growing the Future Podcast at growingthefuturepodcast.ca.