Maybe It Isn’t the Price

Last week a beef industry leader commented on my “$5 a pig” clip. He wrote that the mindset across the pork industry has been a significant competitive advantage for the beef industry.

He’s right, and I cannot argue with him.

Last Wednesday I stopped at our local Meijer and photographed three signs in the pork case. Butt roast at $1.79 a pound, down from $2.99. Back ribs at $3.49, down from $4.99. Buy one boneless tenderloin or half loin, get the second for a dollar.

It’s Porktober. It should be a month when we celebrate pork. I looked for a Porktober display, a Pork Month sign, anything that marked the month, and found nothing. Just a price drop and a deadline. Had those ads been tied to a Porktober promotion, I’d see it differently. Instead, they read like an industry begging for sales.

Pork is the best value in the meat case. And we are still fighting demand. The cutout keeps dropping, exports have been weak, and the margin on the production side keeps getting more negative.

After I wrote the first draft of this, I heard Chip Flory, Shaun Haney, and Jim Wiesemeyer talk about this very topic on AgriTalk AM: pork futures falling, and domestic demand that hasn’t risen as hoped, even with beef prices this high. The discussion included growing concern among growers that “maybe we’ve cookie cuttered these pigs too much,” and that maybe the pork chop is a little too lean. When the people who have their finger on the pulse of this industry are talking about it, that tells you something. I’m not the only one seeing this problem.

So maybe it isn’t the price.

Maybe it’s taste. Maybe it’s marbling and quality. Maybe no one knows how to cook pork anymore, because we spent decades making it lean and then told people to cook it until it was dry. A few weeks ago I wrote that we got exactly what we asked for. Those signs tell me the shopper did too.

Here is the part that should get the attention of anyone running a pork operation. The latest reports show inventory flat to lower, but pigs per litter keep climbing, and the packing plants still need to run full. Every pig we raise needs a plate to land on. If we keep getting more pork from every sow without growing demand, the sale sign becomes the strategy. A discount gets someone to try pork once. Taste gets them to come back.

I see announcements about grants for the swine industry, and they are almost all producer focused. PRRS eradication. Biosecurity. The impact of death loss. Without a doubt, those matter, and I’m glad someone is funding them. But where are the projects to improve our product?

We are investing heavily in keeping more pigs alive and getting them to the plant. We are investing very little in what happens when someone sits down to eat one. If we continue with the attitude of “That’s the Checkoff’s job,” the pork industry will continue to fight for demand.

The National Pork Board has powerful wheel horses, good people and real dollars, but they can only do so much pulling a wagon with a broken axle. No matter how hard they pull, the progress is nil. The broken axle is the same old, same old: lean, pale, flavorless pork. That is not theirs to fix alone. It belongs to us, not just the people in Clive, Iowa. Until the rest of us fix what’s in the case, the best promotion in the world is pulling dead weight.

That is a problem, and it’s one this industry is built to solve. We wiped out pseudorabies. We built the lean pig in a generation. When we decide what matters, we line up genetics, nutrition, and processing behind it, and it happens.

I know the genetics exist. I saw it last week from a group in Minnesota. This was a commercial hog farm, not some niche, boutique homesteader promoting his few pigs. Someone has already built the pig, and the pilot I’m asking for doesn’t start from scratch.

Maybe I’m wrong about the answer. Maybe better pork chops are what moves pork. Maybe repackaging it as carnitas and pulled pork works. I don’t know. What I do know is that something has to change, or pork stays where it is.

So here is the ask, and I’m making it to the people who can act on it.

If you run a packing plant, an integrated system, a genetics program, or a retail meat department, pick a defined number of pigs and run a quality pilot. Select boars for eating quality. Pay for marbling in the grid. Put that pork in front of shoppers and measure whether they buy it again. Call it what it is, an investment of $5 a pig, and not a cost. If quality isn’t the answer, the pilot will tell us, and we’ll try something else. Either way, we stop guessing.

The checkoff can’t carry this alone. If you’re a producer, packer, or genetics company, ask what your piece of the eating experience is, and put someone on it.

The beef leader told us what the competition sees. That’s uncomfortable, but it’s also a gift, because it points right at the opportunity.

I’m looking out at the Patio this morning, trying to see through the fog. Maybe our job to promote pork is similar. We can picture what’s on the other side, but getting there is the hard part. If you’re someone who wants change, message me here. Let’s talk. 

The $50 Lie

Last week I lied to an Amish man so I could pay him more money.

Let me back up. Last cutting of hay, we went to make small square bales and the knotter wouldn’t work. Now, this isn’t a new baler. It’s a New Holland 273, built in the early ’70s, a machine that was on hundreds of thousands of farms across the Midwest and Northeast. I’m a lot of things, but I am not a knotter man.

We spent four hours on it. We measured. We compared everything to the owner’s manual. We scratched our heads. We greased, ran more hay through, and tied knots by hand, the typical untrained monkeys trying to fix a knotter.

The before knot, this isn’t hodling anything but a passing thought of a knot.

So I took it to our local expert, a 70-year-old Amish man named Sam who started working on balers fifty years ago. He called me and said, “I got her fixed. Only took me about 20 minutes.”

This morning I went to pick it up. He showed me what he did. He adjusted the needle and sharpened a knife. Two simple jobs, and I couldn’t find either one, even with the manual.

The fixed knot, not perfect but servicable.

I asked what I owed him. “How’s 20 bucks sound?”

I didn’t hide my surprise. I pulled out my wallet and told a little white lie, that I only had a fifty. He replied he would go in the house and get me change. I insisted he take the whole thing.

Driving away, I kept thinking about how people value their own expertise. Sam has seen more in fifty years of servicing balers than I will in my life, and he has a skill nobody else around here has. What I paid him fifty for, I’d have paid several times that to get this baler running.

The owner’s manual is back in the toolbox. It has the diagrams. It doesn’t have what Sam knows, and I’m not sure where that goes when he hangs it up.

Erntemond

Saturday night brought this year's Harvest Moon. In German, it's Erntemond. I know the word because it is the name of our Deutsch Kurzhaar kennel, registered in Germany with the Deutsch-Kurzhaar-Verband.

When I was searching for a kennel name many years ago, my mentor Steve Kohlmann suggested Erntemond. He knew I was a farm kid, and he told me a story about Charlemagne naming the months of the year in the old German tongue, words his people actually lived by. One of them belonged to the harvest. I don't remember every detail of how Steve told it, but I remember the point. Some things are important enough that people named time after them.

We are on the cusp of harvest,s the season when a year's worth of decisions finally shows up in the grain tank. The hybrid we chose last winter, the planting date we argued over in the spring, the side-dress pass, the rain that came or didn't. All of it gets settled in a few short weeks, and there's no revising it once the combine rolls.

After this many years, I've learned that harvest isn't really about the yield monitor. It's about what I'm carrying forward. My family has farmed in DeKalb County since 1855. I wonder what my ancestors thought when they harvested their first crop there. They couldn't have known how the story would turn out. They planted anyway. They harvested what came, took the lesson, and trusted the next generation to pick it up.

That's what the Harvest Moon means to me now. It didn't make the work any shorter. It gave farmers enough light to finish it. Nobody gets to see the whole field at once. You get enough light for the next few rows, and you keep going.

The dogs seem to understand this better than I do. A pointer doesn't worry about the whole field. She works the ground in front of her, trusts her nose, and holds steady when it matters.

Soon the combines will start rolling in earnest across Northeast Indiana. Saturday night, I watched the moon rise over the fields of Allen County while I took in my son's marching band competition. There was comfort in that view, knowing Erntemond was rising.

Whatever you're bringing in this season, I hope you have enough light to finish it. 

Bare Ground Isn't Blank Ground

I think it's fair to say Northeast Indiana is not happy about the proposed high voltage power lines for the Lulu-Sorenson Transmission Improvements Project.

I attended the open house in Angola. When I arrived at 4:35, I had a five-minute wait. By the time I left at 5:10, the line had grown to several hundred feet long. People don't stand in line on a weeknight for coffee and poster boards. They stand in line because something matters.

The few people I spoke with shared the same frustration I did. It appeared there was no value placed on bare farm ground. There was information about how you could still farm around the towers, but underneath it all, farm ground was still treated like a wasteland waiting to be capitalized on by something better than just farming.

The feeling that it's just farm ground isn't only shared by the people proposing these routes. It's shared by local officials too. Just this week, the City of Auburn published a letter from the mayor saying it would be so much better for the community if the power lines went to the east side of the county. You know what's on the east side of the county? Farm ground. And I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Whether you're talking about a solar farm, a data center, or another subdivision, everybody looks at it as just bare farm ground, something to be covered with a higher, better, more valuable purpose than raising a crop or raising livestock.

What's missed in the assumption that bare farm ground is just farm ground is not only the heritage behind it, but also its future use.

One of the farms on the proposed route was bought by my great-great-great-grandmother in 1855 and passed to her sons. Another was bought by my great-grandparents in 1902. From the road, both look like bare ground. They aren't blank. They carry generations of decisions behind them and plans for the generations ahead.

The assumption that bare farm ground is just farm ground, and that an easement can simply be laid across it, eliminates the possibility of any other type of agriculture beyond attempting to farm around it. No livestock buildings. No machinery storage. No grain bins. No houses. Just a 175-foot-tall hunk of steel transmitting electricity, permanently.

Looking out at the Patio this morning as a family of deer munched on dropped apples in our orchard, I kept coming back to one thought. Something being quiet doesn't mean it's empty. A field in September looks like it's just waiting. It isn't. It's holding a family's past and its options for the future, and those deserve to be counted.

There's another thing massively missing. Not once, at the open house or in anything I've read, have I seen a discussion of compensation. No compensation for the loss of future value. No compensation for a perpetual right-of-way. No conversation with the people who will be affected by whichever route is chosen. There was just a poster talking about how great this is for the community, bringing electricity to everyone. Here's what rubs me. If it goes through my farm and I lose that future value, I'm giving up more for the greater good than I'll ever be compensated for.

The other thing that struck me is how backwards this whole process is. I&M doesn't have to prove they have a good route. The landowners have to prove it's a bad one. One of the employees at the open house even told me this was a desktop exercise by their people, and that you can't expect them to know everything about each parcel. After I shared my frustrations on Facebook, a follower told me about their own conversation with I&M. When they mentioned there were already high voltage lines on their property, the employee was surprised and said, "That's good to know." I understand that nobody can know everything. But if they don't know what's on each parcel, then they don't know what they're asking us to give up.

If the line crosses your ground, or your neighbor's, make your comment. Put the heritage and the plans in writing. For my part, I sent my letters after last night's meeting. I&M is accepting feedback through October 9 at www.IndianaMichiganPower.com/Lulu-Sorenson or by email at IMoutreach@aeptransmission.com. And whether you farm or not, you know the feeling of someone looking at something you've built and seeing only what they can use it for.

Be Careful What You Wish For

Yesterday I read an article about the success of beef's push for quality and how it took decades to get there. I got fired up. I wrote a sharp critique of where pork is, called out an industry leader by name for complaining about the problem instead of using his own operation to fix it, and felt pretty good about what I'd written.

Then I read it back and realized I was doing the same thing. I was writing a book report. Diagnosing the problem, describing the failure, handing the assignment to everyone else. Which made me ask a harder question: if most in the industry know pork needs to change, why isn't anybody stepping forward to lead the change?

It does take decades. Look at beef's current position. Look at what Pork the Other White Meat accomplished. Both prove the point. An industry can move the needle when it commits to a direction for a generation.

But pork stayed on that course too long. What started as the right response to a real problem became the industry's permanent identity and an image we are still fighting 39 years later. In 1991, one of my Ag Econ professors made an observation about chicken that stuck with me: "Chicken is just a carrier for condiments." The class laughed. He wasn't wrong. Chicken had become so bland, so lean, so stripped of any distinctive eating quality that it needed a sauce, a seasoning, a recipe to be worth putting on a plate. Around the same time, I remember seeing a sticker at the feed mill where I purchased pig feed: "Support Pork. Run Over a Chicken." The whole industry was locked in on the same target.

Thirty-five years later, we caught the chicken. And catching it meant becoming exactly what my professor described. The Other White Meat campaign ran for over twenty years. It reshaped consumer perception, gave packers cover to reward leanness, and sent a clear signal back through the entire supply chain. Geneticists, nutritionists, producers, packers. Everyone optimized for the same target: take the fat out. I was in the middle of that, looking for leanness modifiers and optimizing amino acid levels using ultrasound and carcass checks to find the leanest solutions.

It worked. The campaign worked. The lean premiums worked. The genetics programs worked. The nutrition programs worked. The industry got exactly what it asked for. The difference is that beef committed to being the best version of beef. Pork committed to being a lean alternative to chicken, and cheap production came along for the ride.

In the push to be the least-cost producer—as if the consumer cares what it cost us to produce the pig—and in our determination to chase chicken, we got exactly what we paid for: bland, marbleless meat that needs a condiment to be palatable.

And now "it takes decades" has become the excuse, not the lesson. The industry uses it to justify standing still. Not pushing for quality pork. Not paying for quality pork. Not confronting the legacy of a campaign that taught an entire supply chain to breed, feed, and reward the flavor right out of the product.

Without a doubt, there is leadership happening. The checkoff's "Pork: Taste What It Can Do for You" campaign is a genuine effort to reposition pork with consumers. But leadership from the checkoff organization can only go so far when those making the real production decisions won't move. I heard a plant manager last winter bragging about the quality of the pigs coming through his plant. This was minutes after a presentation about promoting pork by repackaging it in flavored convenience meals. Those products appeal to real consumers, particularly Hispanic households and younger buyers who want convenience and bold flavors. There's nothing wrong with meeting them where they are. But in those products, pork is the carrier. And if the only growth strategy is building a better package around the same commodity meat, we haven't solved the problem. We've just confirmed what my professor said about chicken, except now he's describing us.

And that's the broader answer the industry has settled on. Pre-made lime-flavored carnitas in a heat-and-eat bag. Pre-packaged pulled pork. Promoting pulled pork sandwiches at a Cleveland Guardians game like that's a win for the industry. Technically, that's selling pork. But is hiding it inside a seasoning packet the path to real demand growth?

Beef doesn't need to disguise itself. A steak is a steak. A burger is a burger. The product carries the brand. Pork is leaning on the recipe to do the job the product used to do. We didn't just catch chicken. We became chicken.

I've been challenged before to offer solutions instead of criticism. Fair enough. I think the solutions are straightforward. Stop paying for leanness. Start using boars that are selected for meat quality. Produce pork loins with much more than 4% intramuscular fat. Make dark red, marbled pork the target instead of the exception.

The genetics exist. If a major operation called a breeding company tomorrow and said "I need a thousand boars that throw this kind of pig," it would take some time but they could fill the order. That call doesn't require new technology. It doesn't require a research breakthrough. It requires someone with enough volume to matter deciding that meat quality is worth selecting for. The breeding companies would respond. They always respond to demand. That's exactly how we got the lean, fast-growing, cheap-to-feed terminal sire that dominates the industry today. Someone asked for it. The genetics followed the money. They'll follow it again if anyone has the conviction to redirect it.

Nobody's placing that call. Not because it can't be done, but because we're still chasing leanness, still chasing cost of gain.

And we need to change how we talk about it. The industry frames every quality improvement as a cost. It costs us $5 a pig to add marbling. It costs us to slow growth rate. It costs us to change the grid. That language tells you everything about the mindset. Stop saying it costs us $5 a pig. Start saying we're investing $5 a pig to make quality. Cost is a complaint. Investment is a decision. And every decision the beef industry made to improve marbling, tighten quality grades, and build a product worth paying a premium for was framed as an investment, not a burden. Pork can make the same choice. It just has to decide the product is worth it.

The new "Pork: Taste What It Can Do for You" campaign is a fresh look at promoting pork consumption, and the intent is right. But until we change the meat itself, we're simply putting lipstick on a pig and telling you she's the prom queen.

The pork industry can do this. We got behind pseudorabies eradication in the '80s and wiped it out. We pushed leanness and consistency through the '90s with the same coordinated intensity. We have the people. We have the drive. We have the talent. But do we have the guts?

We brag about the talent coming into agriculture, the enthusiasm of young graduates entering the livestock industry. I think it's time we drop the reins and give them their head. Let the generation that hasn't spent a career being told lean is the only metric that matters show us what pork could be.

Under the Lights and the Microscope

It is just a football game, right? Just a bunch of teenagers on a field on a Friday night, a scene repeated across the country every weekend in the fall. The stands are full of fans, whether there to watch the football players, the cheerleaders, or the marching band. They are there to support with their presence, their cheers, their chants, their yells.

For many of us in the stands it is easy to second-guess what those young men did on the field. The missed tackle, the missed assignment, the trip that stymied a potential game-changing gain. But our glasses are shaded with our lifetime of experiences, experiences these young men don't have.

That is why it is so disappointing to me when the adults fail the students. I saw it again last night. I'm not disappointed by the loss. I am disappointed by what appeared to be a failure by the adults to prepare the student athletes for the moment.

My view on the playing field has changed a lot over the years. Many years ago, I would have criticized the quarterback for failing to throw the ball away or the running back for not hitting the right hole for the fourth-down conversion. Now I see the failure clearly. It is the adults that failed in some way.

I've heard Coach Matt Painter reply to criticism many times over the years with "I can't shoot or guard for them, all I can do is prepare them." And he's right. If a player misses a free throw or blows an assignment, that's on the player. But if Painter failed to give him reps at the free throw line or practice that right-hand move by the opponent's point guard, that's on Painter.

That's what I saw last night. The quarterback who took a twenty-yard sack instead of throwing the ball away didn't fail. He wasn't prepared enough for that moment, a moment that should have been expected against one of the best defenses in the state. The fourth-and-one call with the same play up the middle that hadn't worked for nearly four quarters? That wasn't a player failing to execute. That was an adult making the same decision and expecting a different result.

I've never walked the sidelines on a Friday night with thousands of eyes watching me, but I've been a leader with children under my care. Whether it was in the basement of Leo Methodist herding Webelos Scouts or at the top of Baldy in that tense medical emergency, I had young people in my care and all I could do was pray my preparations for them were enough.

Parents, coaches, teachers, mentors cannot do for the children, no matter what today's helicopter parents think. All we can do is prepare. When we fail to prepare the youth, we are doing more than failing that task. We are failing the children.

It is easy to see and criticize the football coach for play calling and time management, but the failures that hurt more are the ones we don't see from the sidelines. A teacher, a volunteer leader, an administrator... any adult that fails children through neglect, indifference, or worse yet, ill intentions.

Friday night under the lights looks different when you stop watching the kids and start watching the adults.

I've seen it my entire life, whether it is a coach, a referee, a teacher, or a scout leader. Adults failing the kids is sadder than the children failing.

Just Three Farmers

Yesterday I attended a field day at my local seed dealer. It's the typical end-of-season field day that occurs all across the Midwest where new technology, agronomic trends, and new hybrids and varieties are touted, the latest and greatest. I like it because it gives us an idea of what changes we might make to our hybrid and variety mix, and it also gives me a chance to sit and talk with other farmers in the area.

I sat down with Aaron Schaefer, a neighbor. We farm in the same neighborhood and use similar practices, and it's always nice to sit at those events with a friendly face. Throughout the evening we chatted a little bit about how our farms are doing, how our families were, all the normal catch up.

Aaron had some side conversations with another man at our table, a man that I knew by face but didn't know by introduction, his French accent solidifying who he was. After supper Aaron and this man, Benoit Delbecq, started talking about cover crops. As a cover cropper myself, my ears perked up.

It was interesting to hear Aaron's questioning about the ROI on cover crops because he's in an interesting position where he farms side by side with partners that use cover crops and he does not as extensively. His view was a natural, healthy skepticism, which I think we need around farming practices whether it's in crop fields or livestock pens. Benoit shared how they use cover crops in a rotation to utilize manure from a neighboring dairy. He showed some pictures of some mixes of cover crops, but he too was raising questions about the monetary value of the benefits we get from cover crops.

I threw in my observations about planting corn into living, standing cereal rye, my experience with the mat of cereal rye causing wet ground. It was one of those good conversations that farmers have where we were just talking. Nobody was trying to convince anybody of anything. We were just sharing observations and thoughts.

Later in the evening I was trying to find Benoit's contact information so I could send him a quick note. Hey, we didn't introduce ourselves, it was great talking with you, thank you for being honest and having a conversation. Little did I know what I'd find when I clicked on his LinkedIn profile.

What I found surprised me. We both attended Purdue and Kansas State. We also shared having PhDs. And that's when it hit me. At that table at that seed dealer meeting were three farmers talking about their experiences around cover crops. It was not two PhDs and a farmer. It was just three farmers.

This plays into a theme I've been exploring about finding expertise where you don't expect it and dropping the labels. Benoit has a PhD in Ag Economics. He could have jumped in talking about ROI, lecturing Aaron and me about the appropriate economic model, the theory behind calculations of intrinsic value versus real value. But he didn't. We just talked about planting cereal rye and cover crop mixes.

Thinking about the three of us sitting at that table last night, it was not Dr. Delbecq the Ag Economist, Dr. Jim Smith the Swine Nutritionist, and Aaron Schaefer the farmer. It was simply three farmers sharing, listening, questioning to learn, not convince or sell.

Gotcha, the Annual Review Legacy

I'm sitting here on a rainy morning in Northeast Indiana enjoying my cup of coffee, looking out at the wet Patio as the boys are getting ready for school. This morning I scrolled through some podcasts, listened to some clips, and what hit my podcast feed sparked some memories and actually got my gut wrenching.

One clip laid out three questions every manager should ask in a one-on-one. What's one thing that went really well since we last met? What's something you would have done differently? And what did you learn? Simple. Powerful.

Another clip featured a leader who said he no longer does annual reviews at all. His year is filled with regular one-on-ones, and when review paperwork is due, he copies and pastes from his notes. He said it removed all the angst and fear around annual review season.

And that's when my gut started wrenching. Because it is the beginning of annual review season, and I haven't had one in three years, yet I can still feel the dread of seeing that calendar invitation land in my Outlook. I hated my calendar every September.

I think back to the gotchas. The reminder about a missed email nine months ago. A mistake in a slide deck shared with a customer three months back that nobody mentioned until it showed up in my review as evidence. Even worse are the comments shared from other managers. The glossing over of everything that went well to justify a 2% cost-of-living adjustment that told me exactly what my year was worth.

But here's what I've come to realize sitting on the Patio. The annual review isn't the real problem. It's a symptom. The real problem is that we are terrible at communicating with each other, up and down the chain, in real time.

Think about it. What good does it do your company to wait nine months to tell someone about a missed phone call? What does the employee learn from that? Nothing, except that someone was keeping score.

And that's the deeper problem. Annual reviews flow in one direction. The boss evaluates the employee. The boss decides what goes in the file. The boss controls what gets addressed and what gets buried. The people at the bottom carry all the dread, all the angst, and none of the leverage.

This doesn't stop at the office door. I think about the consulting work I do helping pig farmers raise pigs better. I can design the best nutrition program in the world, but it all revolves around communication. If the farm manager doesn't tell the crew what changed, or the barn guy doesn't call when a feed bin goes empty, that program dies on the whiteboard. An empty feed bin that goes unreported costs the operation real money and real performance that you never get back.

I've written about annual reviews before and how broken they are, and I'll probably write about them every September. But this morning on the Patio, I'm not interested in complaining about the system. I'm interested in what replaces it.

Turn the fear into a positive. Make those regular one-on-ones a priority!

Turn those conversations into the place where you and your employee or your supervisor have open, honest discussions about how to get better at the job. Not once a year. All year. What went well. What would you change. What did you learn.

Do that, and there's no bear trap waiting in October. There's no gotcha file. There's no gut wrenching over a calendar invite. There's just two people who've been talking all along, and a review that writes itself.

Delayed communication helps nobody. Not the employee. Not the pigs. Not the bottom line. The best time to have the conversation is right now.

It Wasn't Suicide, It Was Work

It's three days past the twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11th, and I still have a lot of thoughts, more than in the past because I learned new things about that tragic day. I've been consuming a lot of media. Documentaries. Analysis of how the terrorists planned the attacks. Personal accounts from people who missed their train or changed their morning routine and lived because of it. The survivor stories that still, a quarter century later, make you hold your breath. I've encountered more information and different perspectives that we may not have been ready to absorb before.

I watched a video just this morning where the narrator described the firefighters climbing the stairwells as civilians rushed down. He said they were climbing on a suicide mission, knowing they would never return.

I had to set my coffee down.

I don't think that's what was happening. And I think calling it that, as reverent as it sounds, actually sells those firefighters short.

Now before you close this and write me off, hear me out. Because I'm not fighting the heroism. I'm fighting the narrative.

Here's what we've collectively forgotten, or maybe never knew. In 2001, the Twin Towers were understood to be overbuilt. The prevailing belief was that they could withstand the impact of a large aircraft. That wasn't some obscure engineering footnote. It was widely known. Building managers knew it. Emergency responders knew it. Complete collapse was not the working assumption inside those lobbies. The towers had absorbed the initial impacts and remained standing. FDNY commanders did not expect either structure to fall completely.

And the firefighters entering those stairwells were not beginning what they understood to be a march toward certain death.

They weren't walking toward death. They were walking toward work.

I know that sounds blunt. But think about what FDNY actually does, day in and day out. These are professionals who train relentlessly for high-rise fires. They understand how air moves through tall buildings. They know how office furniture, carpet, and ceiling tiles feed a fire and how to starve it. They know suppression strategy floor by floor. They are exceptionally good at what they do, and they had been doing it in the vertical landscape of Manhattan for decades.

What they had never done was face multiple floors of fire near the top of a skyscraper.

I think that's what we were seeing in those photographs. The footage of firefighters pausing in the lobby. The faces that have become iconic. That wasn't the look of firefighters resigned to death. That was the look of professionals staring down the sheer enormity of what was ahead of them. Seventy, eighty, ninety floors of stairwell in full gear before they could even begin the job they came to do. For many of them, no call had ever required a climb like this. The physical demand alone was almost beyond comprehension.

In the documentary 9/11: Escape From the Towers, survivor Neil Lucente, who worked on the 81st floor of the North Tower, describes meeting a firefighter who seemed to be in charge and was polling civilians as they descended. What floor were you on? Fifty-seven. The fire was above them. Sixty-seven. Still above them. When Lucente answered eighty-one, the firefighter's face went completely white.

Another survivor from the same floor, Charlie Ross, describes a separate encounter. Ross looked behind him and told a firefighter there was nobody left up there. Let it burn.

The firefighter's answer was simple: "It's my job."

Those are two different moments, but together they tell us something. One firefighter's face went white. Another explained why he was still climbing. Not because death was the mission. Because the work was.

Without a doubt, there were seasoned firefighters who had a gut feeling that this one was different. Years of experience build instincts you can't explain, and some of those veterans had to have felt something ominous they couldn't quite name. That gut feel, born from decades of doing the work, may have led some to wonder if this was their last call. I won't pretend otherwise.

But that instinct came from their training and their experience. It came from being professionals who had developed a sixth sense for when a situation was beyond the playbook. Even that gut feeling is a testament to their expertise, not evidence of a death march.

The suicide mission narrative sounds reverent. But it can flatten 343 highly trained FDNY members into symbols of sacrifice and obscure their expertise, judgment, and agency. They did not enter those buildings merely because someone told them to. They entered with assignments, plans, and a professional understanding of what they were there to accomplish.

The truth is harder to sit with because it doesn't wrap up neatly. Those firefighters were thinking. They were planning. They were strategizing. They were looking at a problem no one had ever faced and choosing to engage it with everything they had. They were going to climb those stairs, reach those floors, and fight that fire. That was the mission. Not death. The job.

That the buildings fell doesn't change what was in their hearts on the way up.

Their heroism does not require us to pretend they had accepted their deaths before they began climbing. What makes their actions extraordinary is that they believed there was still work to do, people to reach, and a fire to confront. They were not surrendering to an ending. They were trying to change it.

Twenty-five years is enough time for stories to harden into something that feels true because we've heard it so many times. But the firefighters of September 11th deserve better than a myth that accidentally diminishes them. They deserve to be remembered as what they were: professionals who faced something beyond imagination, committed to the work they had sworn to do, climbing toward a fire they fully intended to fight.

I'm fighting the narrative because the narrative isn't big enough to hold what they actually did.

Europe Already Did It, We Should Too!

I'm sitting on the patio this morning watching the fog burn off the fields around our backyard landscaping. We are framed in with two treelines and I've looked at them a thousand times, and most mornings I see them just fine. But in the fog, I only see what's closest. The rest disappears. Not gone, just hidden. And I don't even notice what I'm missing until the fog lifts.

I attended a swine nutrition conference yesterday. The topic of one presentation was eliminating a feed ingredient we use in young pig diets. An ingredient that is not an antibiotic, one we lean on specifically because it gives us a tool that isn't an antibiotic. Europe and China have already regulated it, and the presentation made the case that we should follow. Incidentally, this ingredient was the topic of my Masters Thesis.

I sat there and found myself rebutting every argument in my head. Not because I'm stubborn. Because the conclusion had arrived before the evidence did.

They started with a manure toxicity argument. This ingredient is used in nursery rations for a few weeks. That's a small slice of the total manure a farm produces. You could manage application rates the same way we already manage nitrogen and phosphorus. But more importantly, when someone ran an honest life cycle assessment across eight environmental categories, the difference between low and high inclusion was barely visible. For a 280-pound market pig, the environmental footprint of this ingredient is a rounding error.

Then came the antimicrobial resistance argument. And this is where things got interesting. The presenter used real science. Co-selection, gene mobilization, efflux pumps. All legitimate mechanisms worth studying. But then their own cited research said the quiet part. Twice. There is no definitive proof that reducing this ingredient lowers AMR prevalence. In the proceedings the data showed that pigs on the low inclusion program caught up to the high inclusion pigs in resistance gene detection by the end of the study. The treatment effect wasn't even statistically significant.

They presented evidence that contradicted their conclusion and kept driving toward it anyway.

The biggest piece they left off the ledger is the one that should keep you up at night. We use this ingredient because it is not an antibiotic. We've looked for replacements and nothing completely fills the gap. If you eliminate the non-antibiotic alternative, what's left? Antibiotics. The very thing the broader public health community is fighting to reduce. The presentation wrapped itself in "animal health is human health" language, borrowed the sustainability vocabulary, assigned a social cost to the ingredient, and never once assigned a social cost to the increased antibiotic use that follows its removal.

That's not holistic. That's selective. And selective analysis dressed up in holistic language is the most dangerous kind, because it makes you think you're seeing everything.

This isn't really about one ingredient in pig feed. This is about how we make decisions when we've already picked our answer. It happens in board rooms and school boards, township meetings and kitchen tables. Someone walks in with a conclusion and builds backward. The data that fits gets highlighted. The data that doesn't gets acknowledged just enough to look thorough, then set aside. The consequences of the proposal itself never make it onto the spreadsheet.

That's the blinder. Not ignorance. Agenda. And agenda isn't always bad intentions. Sometimes it's good people who care deeply about a problem and have narrowed their vision so much that they can't see the new problem forming right beside the one they're trying to solve.

The fog burned off an hour ago. I can see the whole tree line now. Funny how much you miss when you only look at what's closest.

Competence Doesn't Interrupt You Long Enough to Photograph It

A comment on my social media got me this weekend.

I had posted a picture of a 30-plus-year-old bearing that gave out on our hay mower, and somebody joked about my equipment choices and my apparent luck with things breaking.

I laughed. Then I wondered if he had a point.

So I started scrolling back through my own pictures, and sure enough, there were quite a few of things that had gone wrong.

Then I tried something different. I went looking for pictures of things going right, and those were surprisingly hard to find.

I've spoken in front of rooms full of people more times than I can count. Scientific meetings, customer meetings, technical presentations, industry events. I found exactly one picture of it, and it's not from any of the bigger presentations I've given over the years. It's me talking about show feeds to a room full of customers in north-central Ohio. Why that one survived and none of the others did, I have no idea. Apparently somebody happened to have a camera out.

We run into the same problem looking for pictures for my websites or ad campaigns. We have thousands of pictures between us, but finding good ones of people simply doing what they do every day is harder than it should be.

It's not just us. Companies run into this all the time, which is why they hire someone to come do it. When I was at Kent Feeds, we'd bring in a photographer or videographer to collect B-roll, conduct interviews, or get the right shot for a campaign. Think about that. Sometimes an entire company has to hire someone to document things going right. Nobody has to hire a photographer when something goes wrong. The cameras just come out on their own. A fire, an accident, a riot, something breaking, something stopping, something happening that wasn't supposed to happen.

That got me thinking about our old family photo albums. Most of the pictures in them are staged, not in the way we think of staged photos now, but in the sense that somebody decided a picture was worth taking. Stand over there. Get everybody together. Look at the camera. Film cost money, developing cost money, there were only so many exposures on a roll, and you didn't know if you'd gotten a good one until the prints came back. Taking a picture required a little intention.

That was still mostly true when I was growing up. Cameras were more common and film was cheaper, but somebody still had to bring the camera, there were still only so many shots on the roll, and somebody still had to pay to get them developed.

Now almost all of us carry a camera everywhere we go. We can take ten pictures when one would do. Delete the bad ones, keep the good ones, and taking another costs nothing. You'd think that would leave us with a better record of our lives. I'm not sure it does.

Somewhere along the way, I think the currency of documentation changed. When every click of the shutter cost something, the question was probably, "Is this worth a picture?" Now that a picture costs nothing, the question has become closer to, "Did this get my attention?"

And drama gets our attention. A fire gets our attention. An accident gets our attention. Traffic at a dead stop gets our attention. When something goes wrong, it interrupts us. We stop, we look, and somewhere in there somebody pulls out a phone.

Competence usually doesn't do that.

Nobody takes a picture because interstate traffic kept flowing. Nobody documents the thousands of flights that landed safely today. Nobody commemorates the presentation where the computer connected, the slides advanced, the microphone worked, and the speaker knew what he was talking about. That's what was supposed to happen. Nothing happened, and there isn't much drama in that.

Competence doesn't interrupt you long enough to photograph it.

Maybe that's why the photographic record we're all building isn't really a record of what happens most often. It's a record of what got our attention. We have more cameras, more pictures, and more ability to document our lives than any generation before us, and we may still be missing most of what actually makes those lives work: the things that quietly go right, the people who quietly know what they're doing, the thousands of ordinary moments when everything works exactly as it should.

Maybe competence isn't supposed to be noticed.

Its reward is that nothing happened. 

Pony Up!

I got into trouble this week responding to a post on Facebook.

The post was advertising a 4-H'er's pig for sale after the end of its show career. I did not have an issue with them selling the pig, my issue was with the use of the watermarked photo copied from the photographer commissioned by the show fair to capture images from the show.

Boy did I open a can of worms!

My comment was simple: Stop using the watermarked photo. Pony up a few bucks for the photo if you want to use it to sell the pig.

Many people took exception with my words. Some put the character of the family on a pedestal. Others said "what's the harm?" While others said I was a stick in the mud Boomer.

Maybe the original poster didn't realize they were stealing the photos, maybe they didn't care. Either way, why do we think it is acceptable to use these images without paying or at the very least giving credit to the creator?

I've seen this pattern my whole career. A professor talks about their graduate student's work as if they were the one in the barns weighing and bleeding pigs. A sales manager brags about a deal one of their team sweated to close. A CEO thanks "my vision" for what engineering and support actually built. It's always someone taking credit for labor they didn't do.

Using a photographer's watermarked image to sell your pig is the same move. You wouldn't want someone taking credit for the months you put into that animal. So don't take the photographer's work for free either.

Grandstands Should Stay at the Fairgrounds

I'm like just about everyone in 2026, I've hit "subscribe" on a lot of things over the years. One place I subscribe but don't really participate is YouTube. Now I get notifications of various videos and live sessions. One thing that seems to hit my feed is live streams on YouTube for meetings in an adjoining county where I own land and farm but do not reside. Some of the meetings are interesting, particularly the drainage board and plan commission.

Last week I had a notification that caught my attention: Special Meeting of County Council. Who can resist a "Special Meeting"?

I started listening, and the topic was approving a new county-wide wheel tax rate. The county roads in this county are not great, regardless of what the council members say in their discussions, especially the gravel roads. Years of minimal maintenance have led to roadways with berms along the sides that prevent water from entering the side ditches. That, coupled with a lack of gravel replacement, causes real challenges with road conditions.

Unfortunately, the wheel tax wasn't meant to add funds for road maintenance. It was meant to replace funds the county will be losing from both state and federal sources, a fact I learned from listening to the broadcast. Like many of these meetings, there were no hard numbers, just a lot of estimates: "We think we will lose this amount in the end" was said several times.

The meeting itself was narrowly focused, and rightly so, it was called specifically to approve the ordinance. I wouldn't expect a broader discussion of road maintenance in that setting. But the wheel tax exists because of a funding shortfall tied to the roads, and the conversation never made that connection. It stayed entirely about revenue replacement, disconnected from what the money is failing to fix.

The main topic of discussion was a $25 wheel tax for commercial vehicles. One council member was insistent that $25 would be a burden on taxpayers, especially in light of bonds already approved for a new jail. They were firm that they had a duty to help limit taxes. I understand and appreciate that position, but they were arguing over a $20 increase, and only for commercial vehicles. In the end, the council settled on $25 for commercial vehicles and $15 for farm commercial vehicles, a compromise that grew out of their original push to bring all commercial rates down to $15.

A couple of days after watching the meeting, I realized what was happening. It was grandstanding, an attempt to say to constituents, "Look, I'm fighting to keep your taxes low." But were they? They were fighting a wheel tax increase that applied to commercial vehicles only.

For comparison, my own farm semi runs $1,400 a year to register, so the extra $20 is the kind of thing I'd only notice while looking at the total, not the kind of thing that keeps anyone up at night. But it made for a good fight at the podium.

Watching this made me think about how easy it is to grandstand on the small, visible thing while the real problem sits untouched. Twenty dollars makes for a good fight at the podium. Pothole ridden, wash boarded, berm-choked gravel roads don't, because there's no single vote or number attached to them, just years of neglect.

It's a small thing, but it's made me pay closer attention to what gets fought over out loud versus what gets quietly ignored. 

Make Hay When The Sun Shines?

It is no secret that we in rural neighborhoods watch what goes on around us, especially farmers. I see the hay field to the east of our house and watch when it is cut and baled. This week I watched that newly cut hay get rained on several times.

Indiana received a lot of rain recently. We are on the edge of it, fortunate to get enough but not the bad weather. The day after the rain "ended," everyone was cutting hay in our neighborhood. The field to our east was no different.

I, on the other hand, looked at the forecast and did not cut our hay.

Yesterday we had one of those pop-up showers that dumped a quarter-inch of rain on our area. As that rain fell, I felt a bit of satisfaction that our hay was still growing, waiting to be cut.

This morning, as I enjoyed my coffee on the patio, I thought about that decision and wondered if my satisfaction was simply confirmation bias. Had I really made the best decision by not cutting, or would I be telling myself a different story right now if that pop-up shower had missed us entirely and my neighbor's gamble had paid off instead?

That is the trouble with confirmation bias. It does not wait around for good reasoning. It waits for the outcome, and then it hands you whatever story makes you look smart.

I did a podcast interview last night and challenged my guest on the difference between caution and complacency. Sitting here with coffee in hand, watching the rain and dew burn off, I feel vindicated that I did not cut hay. But I am asking myself the same question I asked my guest. This might be a bad example, but how do we guard against crossing the fine line between caution and complacency, aggressiveness and irresponsible exuberance, when the only evidence we have for which side we were on is how the dice happened to land?

On this Friday morning, his hay is cut, mine isn't. His hay got wet, mine didn't. In both cases, no hay is in a barn yet. 

Hot Mic Moment, Or Was It?

It is a foggy, damp morning on the patio, my coffee is steaming as I sip it and the moist air actually chills me. The misty morning resembles an October morning rather than August. As I enjoy the coffee, I am thinking about an experience I had many years ago that hit me while I was working yesterday.

I was part of a series of product and services planning meetings, the discussions were species specific, and the day I remember was all about beef cattle. Many people asked why I was there as the Swine Nutritionist, but I was able to offer an outsider's perspective on products and services, and some of my words may have been helpful. I don't remember the specifics of what I said, but I do have one big memory.

As we broke the meeting to allow people to use the restroom or check messages, everyone heard something that caused us to pause:

"Well, this is a waste of f****** time!"

One of our sales team had not muted their microphone, and we all heard their opinion of this meeting.

At the time, the discussion was about his break of social norms and business protocol, but when this memory hit me yesterday, I thought back to his words: waste of time.

I was not concerned about his breaking protocol. It hit me that it was a waste of time because of two things. First, the organizer and leader of the meeting, my boss, had not explained how powerful this meeting would be and how he would follow up with the suggestions. Second, this salesman felt powerless, his suggestions and time would result in no changes.

In the end this salesman was right, it was a waste of time, but that was not because of this meeting, it was because of ancient, well entrenched silos in that organization. I have carried that hot mic moment for years as a story about protocol. Yesterday I realized it was never about the microphone at all.

But what about similar situations in your world where you ask people to participate, offer ideas, or share what they see?

Every time someone speaks up, they are taking a risk. They are handing you something they thought about, maybe worried over, and trusting you will do something with it besides nod.

That salesman's hot mic gave us all a good laugh. An unfiltered, four-letter verdict on a meeting he did not choose to attend. But the joke is on the rest of us, because he was right, and it was not his fault.

It was not his job to make that meeting worth his time. That was my boss's job, the one running it. And he never explained why it mattered, never followed up on a single idea that came out of it, never gave anyone in that room a reason to believe their time was anything but spent.

People do not stop speaking up because they are shy. They stop because they have done the math. They have offered ideas before and watched them disappear into a folder nobody opened again. Eventually silence is not a personality trait, it is a rational response to a leader who never showed them it mattered.

So laugh at the microphone if you want. I still do. But if you are the one running the meeting, the room, the company, his words were not really about him.

They were a review of your leadership. And you were not in the room to hear it. 

Signal for the Noise

There's a week every August where my phone gets more interesting than usual, and it's not because of anything happening on my own farm.

This week the Pro Farmer Midwest Crop Tour runs from Ohio to Nebraska, walking fields through the heart of corn and soybean country. I look forward to it every year, especially on X. Opinions on the tour run the full range, from full support and promotion to the detractors who call it the "Trespass Tour."

I posted last night that I don't really care what the tour reports as yield. I'm watching for deviations from trend, and probably more important, the in-field observations, especially after the rains, winds, and derecho that hit Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio the past two weeks. There's also a real conversation to be had about the statistical validity of the sampling. That one's legitimate, but it's academic to me.

What I found more interesting than any of that was the discussion the tour kicked up. When I posted my thoughts, I got hit with "But Chip was wrong last year," "They just parrot USDA," and "They just want to screw the farmer," none of which engaged with anything I'd actually said. Just entrenched positions firing at each other.

Here's what gets lost in the potshots and the academic sampling debate: the tour offers real-time, in-field observations and shows its math against what they saw the past several years. That's the power of it. Not the absolute yield number, but the trend, the thing that tells us what kind of crop is actually cooking out there.

I'm sitting on the patio thinking about how this isn't really an ag problem. It's a business problem too. We latch onto the metric, the tracker, the touch-point count, and we miss the signal for the noise. I'm borrowing that phrase from the long-gone AgriTalk pairing of Chip Flory and Jim Wiesemeyer, but it applies well beyond the crop tour. We get so wrapped up in the minutiae that we lose the big picture sitting right in front of us.

Too often, in ag or in business or honestly in most of our disagreements, we skip straight to critiquing before we've actually sat with the information in front of us. Observe first. Assess second. Comment and plan after that. The nuance is almost always in the data we jumped past on our way to being right.

Knowing When You Know

I sat down with two different bankers this week, on two different days, and heard almost the same story twice.

Both were talking about how their customers land on an offer price for land. One example each, and the examples lined up close enough that it stopped me. One customer builds a spreadsheet: real numbers, real expectations, a defensible price they can explain line by line. Another customer works off a different kind of data: "It's what I've heard others are paying." A gut number, not a modeled one.

In both cases, the gut number won the bid.

The spreadsheet customer is the one everybody calls the "better" customer. More disciplined. More prudent. The banker would rather have that customer's business, and I understand why. But here's the part that stuck with me: that same discipline kept costing them the land. Good analysis, sound reasoning, and an empty result, again and again.

So were they really the better customer? I don't know. I still don't.

I've been on both sides of this myself, and I can't hand you a rule for when to use which. There have been times I ran the numbers and trusted them completely. There have been other times I felt something and went with it, no spreadsheet in sight. I can't draw you a line and tell you where the numbers stop being the right tool and the gut takes over. I just knew, when I knew.

For a while I thought the lesson here was about method. Pick the right tool for the moment, spreadsheet or gut, and you'll come out ahead. But I don't think that's it anymore. I don't think this is about which approach is correct, because both of these customers were being exactly who they were. One is careful by nature. One trusts instinct. Neither of them was wrong to be that way.

The lesson, I think, is smaller and harder than picking a method. It's whether you're comfortable enough with who you are to admit which one you are, and honest enough with yourself to look at your results and ask if it's working. And if it isn't, whether you've got the guts to change.

That's not a formula. It won't tell you, on your next bid, whether to trust the number or trust the pull in your gut. I can't give you that. What I can tell you is that the only thing that's ever worked for me is paying enough attention to myself, in the moment, to recognize which one I'm looking at.

I can't tell you the rule. I just know when I know. And maybe that's the only honest answer any of us can give.

I “Had” To

It is foggy off the patio this morning and I am grateful we missed the damaging winds and rains many people in Indiana are dealing with today. As I enjoy my coffee here on the patio I am thinking about another time in my work life where I put work ahead of family.

Yesterday I was surprised with an invitation to lunch by my Aunts. My four aunts have a tight bond and regularly have their "sister days" where they meet up and do Aunt things. Yesterday their Aunt Thing was having lunch with me and my wife.

Sitting at Harlan Café our conversations wound through a lot, from their flattery of my age (they thought I was younger than I am) to a surprising parking lot interaction by one of our 95 year old cousins, to lamentations of the challenges of aging, especially watching your friends leave their earthly fold.

As I sat there absorbing the conversation I was transported back to my Bonus Aunt Carol's funeral. Carol was my Aunt Martha's friend, confidant, and was a fixture in our family.

I remember that afternoon like it was a Memorex moment.

I "had" to leave the wake early on that Friday afternoon to participate in a sales team meeting for one of the teams I supported. This team had meetings every other week and I was invited to share about swine products and try to promote sales.

I "had" to attend because I was both asked and I really wanted to spark sales of swine products in this team that preferred to sell cattle, horse, and chicken feed.

I "had" to attend because it was my job to support this and the rest of my sales teams.

I "had" to attend to show this VP of Sales I was doing my job.

Sitting in Harlan Café almost four years after that meeting I "had" to attend, I realized I had not done anything to improve swine feed sales, did nothing to change this VP's impression of my work, and did nothing to impress my supervisor.

What I had done was turn my back on my family and celebrating my Bonus Aunt. Unfortunately this was not the only time in my career where I had done the same thing, there are two funerals I chose to not attend because I just "had" to make sales calls with my sales team.

Sitting here with a hot cup of coffee on the patio absorbing the humidity I realize that I had fallen into the trap of treating work as more important than me and my family. In the end, the sales VP I was trying to impress was one of the reasons my position was eliminated. My efforts that day did nothing to change their opinion of me and selling hog feed.

The coffee's gone cold and the fog's starting to lift off the patio. I don't get Carol's funeral back. I don't get those sales calls back either, and they weren't worth keeping anyway. Next time something asks me to choose, I already know which one I'm picking. 

The Power Seat

I woke up thinking about chairs.

Not comfortable chairs. Not the recliner in the living room. I was thinking about the chair I wasn't supposed to sit in, years ago, in a principal's office that smelled like floor wax and had furniture built for people three feet shorter than me.

My wife and I had a meeting scheduled about our son. The principal made us wait fifteen minutes in the lobby before he was ready. When we finally walked in, the only seats left were the little elementary school chairs, the ones that make a grown man fold up like a lawn chair to fit. I saw what was happening before I understood it. I grabbed the seat at the front of the room anyway.

"That's my seat," he said.

I looked at him the way that old bull looks at the men with the red cape in the story of Ferdinand, the one who'd rather sit under a tree than fight anybody, right up until somebody makes him. I told him no, I would sit here.

We had our meeting. It got loud. Two bulls in a pasture, snorting and pawing at the ground, and somewhere in the middle of it we actually landed on resolutions for my son. But it wasn't until later, sitting on my own patio thinking it over, that I understood what had actually happened in that room. He had built the whole thing on purpose. The wait, the small chairs, the assigned seat up front, all of it was staged to put us on the back foot before either of us said a word. And when I sat down where I wasn't supposed to, I didn't just take a chair. I ruined his plan.

I have thought about that morning more times than I can count since, mostly in rooms that had nothing to do with my kids. Sales meetings. Negotiations. Conference rooms with a long table and a door at one end.

Years ago in a training class, somebody introduced me to the idea of the power seat, the seat either reserved for the most powerful person in the room or taken by them. I remember not paying much attention to it. I think I assumed I already understood it, or maybe I just didn't think it applied to me.

It applies to everybody. It just shows up differently depending on where you are.

In China, the power seat is assigned out of respect. Somebody knows the hierarchy in the room before anyone sits down, and the seating reflects it on purpose, openly, as part of showing honor to who's there. Nobody fights over it. Fighting over it would be the insult.

In an average sales meeting back home, the power seat gets assigned too, but nobody says so out loud. It just happens. Head of the table. Corner chair. Closest to the door or farthest from it. Most people never notice it's happening, because it doesn't feel like a decision. It feels like where the empty chair happened to be.

And then there's the third kind, the kind I ran into in that principal's office. Not respect. Not default. Staged. Somebody built the room on purpose to put you at a disadvantage before the conversation even started.

The first two are just how rooms work. You can go your whole career barely noticing them. The third one is a trap, and it only works on you if you don't see it coming.

I didn't win that meeting by out-arguing anybody. I won it, if you can call it that, by refusing to sit where I'd been put. The room reset. And once it was level, we actually got somewhere for my son.

Next time you walk into a meeting, take a second before you sit down. Notice who's already seated, who's still standing, and which chair somebody clearly wants you to take. It won't always matter. But sometimes the whole meeting has already happened before anybody says a word, and the only move you have left is deciding where you're willing to sit.

The Flinch and the Catch

This morning my coffee is not sitting well on my stomach, and the beautiful flowers around the patio don't have their typical calming effect I really need right now. I'm struggling with how we in agriculture hide from tough issues.

You can't talk about that in public, we shouldn't let them see our dirty laundry.

I've been told something like that several times over the past two years, after an essay I wrote or a podcast I hosted. They were meant as cautionary comments, but they hide something deeper.

The easiest to address is the don't rock the boat sentiment. Well, sometimes we need to rock the boat to wake people up.

The other, more dishonest issue is hiding our faults, faults we don't talk about in polite society. Unfortunately, hiding our problems leads to not solving those problems.

I recently received a message from a respected colleague saying I should be careful talking about controversial topics in public. My first reaction was to consider pulling my post, but after a few moments of thinking, it hit me that hiding from controversy is why we get into these situations.

That is not a comfortable thing to notice about yourself. That your first instinct under a little pressure is the same instinct you have spent essays pushing back on in everybody else. Keep it in the family. Don't let them see. I have caught myself reaching for that instinct more than once this year, and every time, it has felt less like wisdom and more like reflex.

Here is what I keep coming back to. A boat that never rocks is not necessarily a calm boat. Sometimes it is just a boat where everyone on it has quietly agreed not to mention the leak. That agreement can feel like peace, and it will hold right up until the water is over your boots. Silence is not the same thing as solved.

I don't think the answer is to go looking for a fight, or to treat every hard topic like it needs a stage. Plenty of things really are better worked out quietly, one conversation at a time, between people who trust each other. But there is a real difference between choosing your moment on purpose and flinching on reflex and calling it wisdom afterward. This week I caught myself doing the second one.

So here is where I have landed, at least for today. Before I go quiet on something that matters, I am going to ask myself one question. Am I protecting a relationship, or am I protecting a comfortable version of the truth. Those are not the same thing, even though they can feel identical from the inside.

If you have ever gotten a version of that same warning, careful now, don't air that out, I would guess you have asked yourself that same question at least once and maybe talked yourself out of a real answer. Next time it comes up, sit with it a minute longer than usual before you decide. That extra minute is where the honest answer usually shows up.