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.

I Promise to Not Be the Crew Leader

The day before our crew left base camp at Philmont, every adult advisor stood in a room and made a promise out loud. "I promise to not be the crew leader." Simple words. Eleven days on the trail would prove just how hard they are to keep.

During our trek I spoke with several rangers about it. Four young men and women, each of them watching crew after crew move through the backcountry all summer, season after season. I asked them the question that had been sitting with me since that room at base camp: what's the difference between a great crew and one that isn't?

Three of the four answered before I finished the sentence. "The adults."

I asked them to explain. The crews with the best chance of being great, they said, were the ones where the adults sat back and let the crew figure it out. The crews that struggled were the ones where the adults stepped in and did it for them.

I'll be honest, I stepped in a couple of times myself as Lead Adult Advisor. But when I look back at those moments now, I think the rangers weren't talking about mine at all.

There's a difference between stepping in because a mistake has become dangerous, and stepping in because a mistake has become inconvenient. Two times on our trek, I didn't hesitate. On our approach to Baldy, a wrong turn taken too early would have cost us the time we needed for a safe ascent. There wasn't room to let that one play out. Later, one of our crew started showing signs of altitude sickness, and we needed to get to camp fast. Neither of those was a close call. Both were about keeping kids safe, not about making sure nothing went wrong.

What the rangers were describing was something else entirely. The adult who corrects the knot before it's even been tried. The adult who says "I know better," or "let me just do it," or "here, do it this way." Not because anyone's safety is on the line, but because the adult can't stand to watch it be done imperfectly. That's not protecting a crew. That's protecting an outcome, at the expense of the very thing the crew came to Philmont to get.

We had a third moment on that trip that I think about more than the other two. Somewhere on the trail, our navigator made a wrong turn, and nobody caught it in time. By the time we realized, we'd already lost too much elevation to just turn around. It cost us five miles and five hundred feet of climbing back, on a trip where every mile and every foot matters.

Nobody chose to let that lesson happen. It just happened, the way mistakes do, faster than anyone could step in. But the crew learned something from it that no adult could have taught them in a briefing. From that point on, they started asking for clarification at every turn, every fork in the trail. Nobody told them to. The mountain taught them, and it charged full price for the lesson.

I told our crew before we ever left base camp that Philmont wasn't about being the fastest, or having a trip with no mistakes on it. It was about learning from the mistakes we made. Those five miles are one of the stories our crew will tell for years. Not despite the wrong turn. Because of it.

Resilience isn't something you can hand a kid, no matter how much you want to. It's not a badge you pin on somebody. It's the one they earn the hard way, on their own two feet, walking five miles and five hundred feet in the wrong direction before they figure out how to stop doing that. My job as Lead Adult Advisor was to keep my crew safe. It was never to protect them from the mistakes that were theirs to make.

I've watched this same pattern plenty of places besides a mountain in New Mexico. In 4-H rings, on work teams, in volunteer organizations I've been part of for years. Somebody wins the prize this time because an adult, or a manager, or a mentor quietly did the hard part for them. Sure, they won. But what happens next time, when that help isn't there?

My continual struggle, as a parent, a volunteer, a leader, and a consultant, is knowing exactly where that line sits between genuinely helping and quietly taking over. I don't think I'm alone in that. I suspect most of us who lead anybody, at home or at work, are still working out where that line is too.

Stop helping. Start watching. That's the promise.

Zoom out far enough, and you'll see it: is this the mountain teaching, or is this you needing to be needed?

I Cried, I Broke, I Couldn't Speak

I saw a post from my friend Jim Bishop this morning. About the night he was ten years old and his grandpa died, and his dad told him grandma would need him to be strong. About walking inside, grandma reaching out to hold him, and something in him going numb. About running that program for forty-two years. Strong on the outside. Nothing gets in, nothing gets out.

I read it twice. Then these words showed up.

I cried, I broke, I couldn't speak.

Those are weak words for a leader to say.

I almost broke when I first called the infirmary to get help for my scout at the top of Baldy. I could not get two words out until I gathered my composure.

I cried when that scout finally left Baldy Town, cried from the weight of caring for him and worrying about him.

I cried when I gave the crew their Arrow Patches at the end of our last meeting as a crew, Saturday night.

I cried, I broke, I couldn't speak.

Weak images for a leader.

Or are they?

Forty-two years ago, Jim was told to be strong. On top of Baldy, I had to be strong too. But I almost cracked.

To some, that's weakness. Weakness that I almost cracked. Weakness that I'll admit it.

But that thinking is wrong. Almost cracking is not cracking. Having to gather my composure is not losing it.

Another friend, Mark Voor, posted something else this same morning. A verse from 1 Corinthians: God has chosen what is weak in the world to shame the strong. Two friends, two different mornings, two different reasons for writing. Same truth waiting for me on the same day.

Maybe cracking isn't the opposite of strength. Maybe it's the proof of it.

What I Didn’t Do

I'm sitting here enjoying a hot cup of coffee on the patio after an over two-week absence. As I take in the sights and sounds around the patio, my thoughts are scrolling through the various lessons I took from my time as Lead Adult Crew Advisor for my group of scouts during our time at Philmont.  Lessons about over packing, lessons about mental and physical preparation, lessons about personalities. In all my thinking, I completely overlooked the biggest lesson of our trek.

Summiting Baldy at Philmont is the climactic event for many who attend. The individual lessons each scout and scouter learn during their ascent are life changing in many cases. Little did we know on that Saturday morning in July that we would take more than personal, unseen, unspoken lessons from the peak with us.

Our crew was made of the typical mix of hikers: the athletes, the wheel horses that put their head down and slogged forth, and the laggards taxed by the thin air at 10,000 feet.

I watched with amazement as one of our scouts ascended the steep, rocky path that was the ending portion of the climb to the summit. He was so agile and quick that I called him the crew Mountain Goat.

I was 10 yards from the crest of the last path to the summit, the final member of our crew, taxed by the thin air like the rest of the stragglers, when our crew leader, my son, came running, sliding down the path, saying we had a problem. I told him to get the other adult since he was closer, already on the summit.

When I finished the last few yards, I dropped my trekking poles and threw off my pack when I saw one of our scouts, the Mountain Goat, lying on the peak of Baldy surrounded by scouts. He was gasping for air.

Interestingly, the scene around the Mountain Goat was not panicking. The scouts, led by a crew member trained as an EMT, began to make him comfortable and address his cold body. They used packs as support to keep his torso upright and covered him with a space blanket over jackets. We even had a beanie on his head.

Then the unregistered EMT in our crew started treating him while I supervised and communicated with the infirmary at base camp.

As the scout lay on Baldy, as comfortable as we could make him, we waited. I called base camp with updates. Every time I spoke, they said we needed to walk him down. Every time, he was not stable enough to stand.

As this was unfolding, one of our younger scouts was sitting, watching the clouds form. I saw this and asked him to be our weatherman. His job was to let me know if those ominous dark rain clouds formed.

After an update call where my contact once again implored us to get him down, I looked at our weatherman, and our eyes met. Without words, he told me the afternoon storms typical of Mount Baldy were coming.

We couldn't wait any longer. I acted as incident commander, allowing the EMT-trained crew member to control the scout's care while I stayed in contact with the infirmary at base camp and coordinated our move down.

My other adult crew advisor descended ahead of us with the four scouts not needed for the evacuation, and waited for us. Two scouts held him under each arm, one in front and one behind to catch him if there was a fall. Another scout carried excess gear, while a second scouted obstacles in the path. I walked alongside, ready to help in case of a fall, encouraging as we moved.

We met Philmont staff part way down. The scout was wheezing, and their assessment on the trail confirmed some bronchial constraint. When they took his oxygen level, it was between 87 and 89 as we continued descending, and it remained that low when we reached the staff camp.

On the summit and the descent, no one panicked. Scouts jumped into their assigned roles, and we got him off the mountain to the staff camp.

There, treatment started with an albuterol inhaler, followed by an epinephrine shot. I remained with him until he was in the vehicle leaving for base camp. I never got a final diagnosis, since the scout's father arrived at base camp and took him home.

We did good.

Looking back, I realize I got the story wrong in my own head before I ever started writing it. I kept thinking about what everyone else did. The EMT who took control of his care. The weatherman who read the sky. The scouts who carried gear, cleared the path, and held him up on both sides. My fellow adult advisor who took four scouts ahead so we could move.

What I almost left out is what I didn't do.

I didn't treat him. I didn't carry him. I didn't clear the trail or read the clouds. When my son came running down that path, I sent him for the other adult instead of going myself. When base camp kept telling me to walk him down, I stayed on the phone and trusted what I was seeing instead. When Philmont staff met us on the trail, I handed him over without a fight.

That's not a list of things I failed to do. That's the job. An incident commander who tries to do everyone's task at once isn't leading, he's just another set of hands, and a crew only has so many of those.

After all, my job as lead advisor was not to do but to keep my boys safe. I did that by staying out of the way while orchestrating an impromptu symphony.

Be prepared is the scout motto, and I've written about the line between that motto and paranoia. In the case of our crew, everyone was Wilderness First Aid and CPR Certified, not just the three minimum required by Philmont. That preparation paid off in spades that Saturday at 12,441 feet.

That evening after supper, when we had a chance to finally catch our collective breath, we did not celebrate what we did. We didn't complain about missing our shower time. We didn't even complain about the added aches and pains. Instead, we worried about the Mountain Goat, and we were comforted that we were prepared. Comforted because we did good. 

Advise, Don't Lead

This morning there is no patio. No coffee steaming while the waterfall gurgles in the background, no wide array of flower colors to take in while my brain slowly comes online. Instead, I am writing today's Patio Pondering on a Bluebird bus, rolling through the familiar corn fields of rural Indiana, headed toward New Mexico with eleven other adults and twenty-four Scouts. In a couple of short days, everything our crew needs will be on our backs, and we'll be walking into the back country of Philmont Scout Ranch for twelve days.

Many people have written about the magic of Philmont, and with far more eloquence than I can muster. I'm not going to try to compete with that. I'm just trying to put words to how I feel on this bus, before I've even arrived, and honestly, my brain hasn't caught up yet. The roads look too familiar. It hasn't sunk in.

This is my second trip to Philmont. The first was in 2017, with my eldest son. That time, I was just another adult along for the ride. This time, I'm the Lead Crew Advisor, responsible for our crew's paperwork and the one who answers if something goes wrong.

I want to be clear about something first. Our Lead Adult Advisor has done a yeoman's job organizing, communicating, and preparing our contingent for this high adventure. My role is easier because of his work. This isn't about elevating my title. It's about the difference in what leading versus advising asks of you, and I've felt that difference on this bus in a way I couldn't have explained to you a week ago.

At Philmont, and in most worthwhile experiences, the adults are advisors, not leaders, once you hit the trail. I talk about this on next week's podcast: stepping back to let others lead is hard when you're wired to want the experience to go just right. But Philmont, and life generally, isn't about getting everything just right. The best lessons and the memories that stick come from things going sideways. An unplanned detour from a missed trail marker. A cooking mishap. A misstep that forces you to reallocate gear on the fly. The path from point A to point B is rarely a straight line, in the back country or anywhere else.

How we react to those imperfect moments is what shapes the memory and the lesson. Do we embrace the suck, as they say in military training, or do we lash out with the uncontrolled emotion of built-up stress?

In 2017, I carried too much of what I couldn't control with me on the trail. Two separate things happened that trek, unrelated to each other but connected in what they revealed. Early on, the Scouts lost a compass I had loaned them to navigate our climb up Baldy, and my reaction to it should have been a warning sign that I wasn't mentally prepared for what was ahead. I didn't heed it. Days later, after a long, hard push from the humidity of the north country into the dry desert of the south, the accumulated stress put me over the edge. I tripped over a Scout's water bottle, left in the exact spot we had just told him not to put it, and how I reacted to that fall is one of my life's regrets. I didn't understand it then, but I was carrying weight I hadn't packed on purpose, the same way unneeded gear finds its way into an Osprey pack and never gets used, just carried. Both kinds of weight add up. Both kinds break you if you let them.

This time, for reasons that took years to sort out, I'm in a different place. I'm asking questions instead of reacting quickly. I'm standing back to observe, looking for how I can help, instead of sitting there gathering up wrongs to criticize. Last time, I carried the weight of leading when my job was to advise. That weight is out of my pack and out of my head this time, and I notice the difference in both places.

With that weight gone, I'm looking forward to watching nine young men go through Form, Storm, Norm, and Perform, the way every group finds its footing before it finds its stride. My job isn't to get them there faster or smoother. My job is to watch, ask good questions, and keep them safe while they figure it out themselves.

The corn fields are still rolling by. I still don't quite believe I'll be on the trail in a few days. But I believe I'm walking into this trip lighter than I did in 2017, and that has nothing to do with what's in my pack.

I’m Just Tired

In those few moments of waking, when the brain is still reconnecting with the body, twelve hours folded back on themselves.

I stood there looking into the face. The moist eyes seemingly holding back tears. The face expressing both resignation and anger. Three words that transported me back to a kid in the eighties.

"I'm just tired."

Three words said to mask the brewing anger and frustration of a teenager who dare not say what he was really feeling.

The weight of those three words hit me because in that instant I was that young man. Simultaneously a budding adult full of know-it-all bravado, and a boy needing the guidance of an adult. Both pulling at the inner girders, trying to keep up a facade.

I am not the parent. Maybe that's why I could see the tension behind those eyes. Maybe that's why I got more of a response than a clenched jaw and moist eyes.

I said the only thing that came to mind. Not eloquent. Not helpful, in some eyes.

"You can tell me to fuck off, and we'll work through it."

That response revealed a snicker. But behind that snicker, a realization. An understanding that this young man was seen. I wasn't telling him to get over whatever was hurting him. In those crude words was reassurance that we would work through it.

The realization was seeing myself in him. Understanding why my own parents could not get through to me, back when Hair Bands and Aquanet ruled. Why my own parenting seemed to be a failure when my children could not share with me.

In that moment of connection with that young man, I understood so much about my own youth.

Maybe I'm projecting the hell out of this. Maybe he was just tired.

Have You Held the Nozzles?

The air is muggy and heavy on the patio this morning. I am taking a few extra minutes to enjoy my coffee as I walk through our backyard landscape. Some of the flowers are in full bloom and everything is lush and green thanks to the irrigation system one of our close friends installed for us. As I watched a bumblebee collect pollen, I thought back to a discussion about leadership I had last night with our irrigation expert friend.

Last night we had a cookout with our closest friends, since my son and I will be at Philmont the last two weeks of this month. As is typical, our conversations covered a lot of territory: school boards, upcoming wedding celebrations, work, and many other topics.

When the conversation moved to me, I shared about some of my recent writings and podcast discussions on leadership, specifically on how hard it is for many of us to sit back and let people do the things we asked them to complete. As I spoke, my irrigation expert friend, Irrigator Dude, had a twinkle in his eye. I knew he had something good to share, and I was not disappointed when I asked for his input.

Irrigator Dude employs a lot of young people, teens and twenty-somethings. It is easy to blame them for having worse work habits than those of us with more experience, but they haven't yet had the life experience to become better workers. Some of his workers are great, others good, and the work culls out the bad.

Irrigator Dude shared two events he recently experienced with his team.

First, a team of two was sent to finish backfilling a project, an easy job for someone with a strong back. As they were about to finish, they went back to measure the nozzles to ensure none were covered, and found a gap in the system. With a kick of a pile of dirt, they found a buried flag where a nozzle had yet to be installed. With a trip to the truck and a couple of shovels of dirt, they installed the nozzle and finished the project.

Now, Irrigator Dude and his superintendents would have found the missing nozzle without having to walk and measure. They have the "feel" of a system; their spidey senses would tingle and lead them to the missing nozzle. The two youngsters didn't have that yet, but they fixed the problem once they found it. No calls to the bosses. No sitting and waiting for someone to fix it. Just a little initiative to fix the problem, because of the environment built by Irrigator Dude.

The bigger story for me was about Ethan and Joe (fictitious names). Apparently there was a project that was all but done except for placing a couple of nozzles and adjusting spray patterns. A team had worked on the project to get it to the driveway; Ethan and Joe just had to turn the car into the garage and finish the trip.

During the morning planning meeting, Ethan and Joe were told to finish the project. When they heard this, they both loudly shared that neither one had adjusted nozzles before.

Irrigator Dude questioned them.

"Have you watched me and others?"

"Have you held the nozzles and looked at them?"

Irrigator Dude said, go finish the project.

As Irrigator Dude was sharing these questions, I realized these and similar questions are what a leader should ask instead of taking over the project or adding passive-aggressive comments about worker incompetence.

Later in the morning, the phone buzzed in Irrigator Dude's work shorts. When he put it to his ear, he had to immediately pull it away because Ethan and Joe were loudly shouting how they'd figured it out and had the project finished.

As Irrigator Dude was telling the story, much more dramatically and better than I am, you could see the way he knew those young men could do the job. All the discussion about how they saved him time, and allowed him to do other more valuable projects, was ancillary.

You see, Irrigator Dude is a leader, nay a facilitator. He's been around the yard enough to know what needs to happen, but more importantly, he knows his team and facilitates to get things done.

I've been on a leadership kick with my writings lately; there's a simple reason: our world lacks leaders. We have no lack of people in leadership positions; we have a lack of people who thrive and deserve to lead people.

How can you earn the title of Leader in your daily life, like Irrigator Dude?