Growing the Future

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. 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 business? How well do you know your farm family? They explain why the successor's job is to prepare to lead and the founder's job is to prepare to leave, why "my parents have a plan" is an assumption worth checking, and what to do when a conversation gets hot. What's Inside• Why being operationally strong is not the same as being ready to lead, and which decision-making skills are usually missing• Why the founder's job is to prepare to leave, and why that is harder than it sounds• The assumption that parents have a plan they will reveal when the time comes, and the case for saying plainly that you don't have one yet• Why the family's general accountant or lawyer may not be the right specialist for succession, using a family doctor and a hip replacement as the comparison• How to notice when you are triggered, why a time-out of at least twenty minutes helps, and the safe word one family agreed on• Four prompts that open a hard conversation: help me understand, say more, tell me more, I'm curious• How to tell whether you have a transition question or a business sustainability question• Why you don't have to love the numbers, but you do need to read the dashboard• How to start family meetings: a meeting about meetings, a short agenda and a shared picture of the outcome you wantKey Topics• Successor preparation and founder letting go• Assumptions about a plan that may not exist• Choosing the right specialist advisor for succession• Self-awareness, time-outs and repairing a hard conversation• Reading your farm's financial dashboard• Starting family meetings and agreeing on the outcome Resources Mentioned• The Future Leader, by Patti Durand• A successor assessment tool from Farm Credit Canada, mentioned by PattiConnect 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.

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.