Ep #25: From Farm to Marketing: Storytelling in Ag with Jeff Caldwell
What role does storytelling play in the future of agriculture? In this episode of The Land Ledger, Brian Kearney welcomes Jeff Caldwell, Vice President of Strategy and Content at Stratovation Group. Jeff shares his journey from growing up on a Kansas family farm to building a career in agricultural journalism and marketing. He discusses the balance of art and science in ag marketing, the role of storytelling in connecting with farmers, and how research drives effective strategies.
Listen in as they explore the evolution of ag media, the rise of ag tech and AI, and the importance of bridging divides between farmers, landowners, and consumers. Jeff also highlights why marketing matters for farmers competing for land and building trust, along with advice for the next generation entering the ag industry.
What You’ll Hear About in This Episode:
Jeff’s transition to journalism and agricultural media.
The shift from journalism to marketing and how storytelling bridges both worlds.
Ag tech adoption from practical tools to AI applications in agriculture.
Why effective marketing matters for farmers.
Examples of successful farmer storytelling and community impact.
Advice for young professionals entering the agriculture industry.
Ideas Worth Sharing:
“Marketing is largely a storytelling business, but to tell the right story, that's where that science comes in.” - Jeff Caldwell
“I love the idea of sharing someone's story in a way that they want it to be shared and being very respectful to them.” - Jeff Caldwell
“If I can get one person to read this and think about making a change to improve their farm, improve their business, then I'm doing something right.” - Jeff Caldwell
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Read the Transcript:
Jeff Caldwell: Marketing is largely a storytelling business, but to tell the right story, that's where that science comes in. The storytelling is the art, but to tell the right story and to resonate with the right people, that's where the research comes in and really validates that yes, we are doing what our clients need to accomplish that objective, and yes, it does require both art and science all the time.
Welcome to The Land Ledger podcast, where investing in farmland meets the future of finance. I’m your host, Brian Kearney, here to guide you through the untapped potential of farmland as an asset.
Whether you’re already investing in farmland, want to invest in farmland, or you’re just curious about safe alternatives to stocks and bonds, this is your space to learn, explore, and be inspired.
Your journey to farmland investing starts now.
Brian Kearney: Alright. Welcome to The Land Ledger. Today, we have Jeff Caldwell and I am excited to dive into his background. He grew up in ag and he's been in ag marketing in a lot of different places. So it'll be really fun to dive into that kinda side that most of us don't know about, the business marketing side, not the commodity marketing side, which is sometimes confusing in this industry.
Jeff, welcome to the show.
Jeff Caldwell: Hey, man. Thank you, Brian. Appreciate it. It’ll be fun.
Brian Kearney: Yeah, I'm excited to dive in. Let's start with where you were born and raised, and let's go from there.
Jeff Caldwell: Yeah, absolutely. So I was born and raised in a small town called Oxy, Kansas. It's out in the northwest part of the state. We were, it's about a thousand people, I think 1,200 people now. There's a big boom there.
Brian Kearney: Oh, there you go.
Jeff Caldwell: But grew up, father was an ag lender my entire upbringing. And also we farmed as a family farm. My father and my two uncles, actually. It was my mother's side of the family, the farm there. And so we had the family farm and we sold out, sold everything off in about 1998 when I was in college.
We still retained, we still have some land in a couple of different business units now, but yeah, we raised primarily cattle and wheat and so that's the sort of the areas where I grew up working calves and running a…on weed acres all summer for years. So yeah.
Brian Kearney: Easy, fun jobs that you like at 12, right?
Jeff Caldwell: Yes, indeed.
Brian Kearney: Yeah. That's awesome. That's awesome. And what do you do today?
Jeff Caldwell: So today I am Vice President of Strategy and Content for Stratavation Group, we're based in Columbus, Ohio. I'm actually based in central Iowa, and we're a research and consulting and marketing company working with agricultural companies.
We're ranging from early stage companies. We focus on innovation and sustainability. Those are two pillars of specifically the specific sectors in which we were, we have a flywheel model. We see research as the foundation. We're really well-informed, well-informed, go-to-market strategies, and just a lot of the, that it unfolds into sort of the marketing strategies, tactics, but it's really rooted in good, solid, well-researched information.
Brian Kearney: That's nice. That is not always typical in marketing, where sometimes it's more art than science. So tell me a little bit about that process.
Jeff Caldwell: Yeah. Yes. And that's a great, I say that exact phrase all the time, and it is. And I'm relatively new to the real formal research process and the methodologies that contains and how that all works.
And so it's been a pretty interesting few months for me. I've been with Stratovation since early this year, and so it is, marketing is an art and we, I like to use the term storytelling. It's really all about, I'm a journalist by trade, was working in the agricultural media, including about 10 years at Successful Farming Magazine.
So I was a writer and I think in terms of stories and so marketing is largely a storytelling business, but to tell the right story, that's where that science comes in. But storytelling is the art, but to tell the right story and to resonate with the right people, and we have customers who want market awareness, marketplace awareness if they're just getting in, and some of them want good old fashioned, just more customers, more sales, and depending on what that specific outcome or objective is, that's where the science, that's where the research comes in and really validates that yes, we are doing what our customers, our clients need to accomplish that objective. And yes, it does require both art and science all the time.
Brian Kearney: Yeah, that makes sense. If you look at the ag industry, there's a lot of areas you can go into. What initially made you look at journalism and then marketing?
Jeff Caldwell: I started college in pre-vet med. I wanted to be a veterinarian. And I walked out of my chemistry, no, my biology final, my first semester, and I walked over to the dean's office and changed my major to English Lit.
Loved writing. Yeah, I like, I grew up writing, it was always something I enjoyed going way back early in my life and I didn't really want to be in agriculture early on at that stage in my life. I grew up on the farm, working the farm, and I thought, “I want to do something else. I want to get somewhere else.” I wanted to be like a small town, like newspaper editor, like in the mountains or something like that. I had this weird, this idea. And then just by dumb luck, my senior year of college, as part of a class, I had to cover an event, community journalism event, and one of the sessions that I was assigned to cover was the job fair.
And there just happened to be, who was later, my coworker for several years, was there at the job fair and they had a job opening and it was with the High Plains Journal in Dodge City, Kansas. And I thought, “Oh, hey, this is handy.” And that's when kind of the light bulb flipped on is, “Hey, this is my life. This has been my life up at this point.”
Agriculture wasn't like, didn't have the sizzle back then that I think it hacked a lot more of now. And I was like, “Eh, I dunno.” But then I got, I had this opportunity just laid out in front of me and it was, it was almost dumb luck, but, and I got into the business that way and I just found out that was a great, for me with what I enjoyed and what I was good at, at that point, that was a really good first step for me. And I look back on that time fondly, like I loved it, like I would drive, we had an old Chevy Cheyenne pickup that was my company vehicle, and I'd drive across the Texas panhandle…and cattle feeder and farmers and stuff.
So like it was awesome and I'm blessed in that I've had great, I had fantastic early career experiences in leadership and mentorship, and when I moved on to Successful Farming in 2006, I was the young guy with, and that was a big title, big name, very experienced, respected editors. And I remember when I first walked in there being like absolutely mortified because it was like, here are these legends.
And here I have to contribute…way to this. And so it was trial by fire. Like my boss there, John Walter, he is like a second father to me. He told me when he retired, he said, “I always gave you enough rope to hang yourself and you never quite did it.” So it was like I had a lot of freedom to do things there that were larger corporate environment, bigger company, but we had a lot of freedom.
So that was the early days of social media. And so I got in on the ground level of that, was one of the, like we were just talking this week about the ag chat thing, the early days of ag Twitter, I was one of like the first few people in that and so we're really lucky in that way. And then also the mentorship from those guys was invaluable to me at that stage in my career. To also stumbled by dumb luck, that was when the ag tech sector was born, 2011, 2013, around there, when ag tech started becoming a thing, really, in the public eye. And so I was able to start in that with as first as a reporter covering it, and then also then later on, and now I'm a mentor for some startups and early stage companies here in our central Iowa startup ecosystem, primarily through Iowa State University.
So a lot of just dumb luck.That's how it's been. And got some experience on the marketing side after being in the media for about 15 years. And that's where we are today, man.
Brian Kearney: Yeah. Oh, that's awesome. Your story's super interesting. So my family actually has the small town local newspaper here in El Paso, Illinois.
So the news and journalism's close to my heart. It's a tough business right now. I think if it's run well, it's still good. Small town newspapers are still super profitable. I think specialty newspapers are still super profitable. But yeah, it's a different world than it was in the sixties, seventies, eighties for journalism. I think to the detriment of the country, actually, I think journalism's way more important than people like to think. But yeah, that's interesting. So tell me about the transition from the pure journalism world to more of the ag media consulting world. Tell me a little bit about that.
Jeff Caldwell: It wasn't easy. I was, well, marvelously early on in the process and because I was always rooted in my, the whole basis for what, how I worked as an editor is I'm gonna go to somebody's farm, and I'm going to talk to him or her. And this is, and I've recently had some conversations with some old ag media buddies that like the ability to go to someone's farm, have a conversation with them, and sometimes have them tell you things that they might not tell their neighbor, but really showing interest, showing real interest.
And I'm a farm boy. I love, that's my favorite thing in the world is going, sitting in somebody's kitchen or sitting in their shop and like hearing their stories and stuff, and that's what drives me. I love the idea of sharing someone's story in a way that they want it to be shared and being very respectful to them.
Also, sometimes challenging them. We want, we're in a business of constant evolution and constant innovation to stay ahead. And it's a business first and foremost. And so I always operated in the media is if I can get one person to read this and think about making a change to improve their farm, improve their business, then I'm doing something right.
And that's what's always the lens through which I saw that. Switching to the marketing world, it became, first of all, the person who I was working for was different for a company, and there's that difference in reporting structure and what have you, but the longer I've been in on the marketing side, it's really fundamentally the same.
It's about telling a story that's going to be of value and hey, agriculture, man, farmers. They're selling something or being sold something every day. That's just the nature of our lives and our business in this, in agriculture. So people get it. Farmers understand that, and so it's all about resonating with them, meeting them where they are and not–had an old boss that even would tell me, “Don't offer a solution. Look for a problem, always be practical and grounded and making a difference.” And sometimes I always, I was at a technology trade show this week and talking with some connectivity folk and some connectivity and devices and sensors and things like that.
And the mind always goes to, “Okay, what's like the holy grail that I can reach?” What? Let's deploy a bunch of sensors that can tell us all this about our soil and we can make all these decisions. They also, this company also has an IOT rat trap, so it can tell you when that rat trap has been thrown.
And they have device tracking and stuff like this and asset tracking, and so the farmer, I was, a large farmer stopped by and we were talking and he was more interested in those little things because the rat trap we were just joking about. He was like, “Hey, man, if I have an employee whose responsibility is to spend 30 minutes a day going around to all of our shops and all of our abilities and checking rat traps, and if he doesn't have to do that, then that's 30 minutes a day that he's freed up to do something else.” And so it's fun and it's, man, you hear things like that and you, and it requires some, and I can vouch for that, man. I've swept out grain bids, but I've done all that, so I understand how much that sucks, first of all.
But also being able to take time out and if you're saving five minutes a day doing something, that time adds up and time is the most precious commodity in our lives, so sometimes the right solution isn't kinda what we think it's gonna be. And it's about, I think the most effective marketing, it touches people where they are and what their needs are.
And so let's, “Hey, maybe let's sell some IOT rat traps. Maybe that's gonna, the big deal.” And so that's the challenge sometimes. And that requires the ability to talk, the ability to communicate before the ability to tell that story and the ability to turn that story into something that's gonna reach more people.
Because for every one person that you talk to that has that issue, there's probably a hundred or 500 or a thousand people that have the same thing. And so to where kind of that gut feeling being a farmer at Wharton, being raised on the farm and having my hand in our farm now, that's where that I think really pays off and helps me in helping connect with these guys. So the IOT rat trap is to understand the why, the IOT rat trap is a..
Brian Kearney: That is interesting about the IOT rat trap, 'cause right when you said it, it made complete sense especially and that could bring some of the harder ag early adopters into it. Thinking of my father-in-law's farm, he still has corn cribs, and man, that would be really nice, 'cause every time we shell corn, it's like there's 300 rats just going everywhere. So if we could cut that back, that'd be worth it.
Jeff Caldwell: And it's funny because in the startup space, the ag startup space is pretty hill. The technology companies come in despite not the brightest outlook for the ag sector in the next, in the crop side at least, in the next year or so.
But that's the challenge that I see all the time. It is, again, like coming back to my old boss, there are a lot of solutions looking for problems out there, and it's like they're the ones who don't go. And then there are also people who are brilliant and who can't, I've worked with startups that these guys are some of the smartest people I've ever worked with in my career.
And it's really hard for them to translate to agriculture because, and sometimes it boils down to just that identification thing. And also when we talk about storytelling, being able to tell, being able to use the language, you know this, you know better than I do, like being able to talk the talk. And the example I always use is, again, I grew up in cattle business.
If you are talking to a cattle person and a feeder or whatever and you used the term a pot of cattle. That is a perfect example of very specific industry terminology that you understand. I know our pot of cattle's 44, 45 calves, and it's a trailer loaded. And that's what, and that will say very common language.
So being able to understand, we have an issue in our businesses that we have people with agricultural backgrounds, and that's–we need people with agricultural backgrounds, but it's like we grew up on a farm. And then you went and did something else, and that's the desired career trajectory. I hear farmers all the time say, “My son, I made him go to college. I made him go work somewhere for five years before he came back to the farm.” And the most successful farmers I've talked to say that. And I think that's great. I think it still requires really profound understanding of our business in some ways that kind of requires having maybe having a hand in a farm business, you guys are a great example of that.
You still farm, you're still involved in the farm and you have connections all over the place and that's like immensely valuable. And I preach that all the time.
Brian Kearney: Yeah. Yeah. It is. Sometimes you see that in the ag tech world as well. When you said sometimes there's solutions looking for problems, that feels very true in all startups, I think, particularly ag tech though, because a lot of the people here about the big ag tech rounds or the, there haven't been a lot of big ag tech exits, but there've been some, there've been a lot of acquisitions where people did well, but a lot of the people diving into it might not have that farm background, and their immediate thought is just, “Oh, I was at a conference Monday, Tuesday this week.”
That was really cool. It was AI and ag at Grand Farm and it was awesome. There were some really cool startups presenting, but I think the general theme from the industry, people who are speaking. So they're like, “Look, AI will be really good if it can solve our problem of different systems that don't talk to each other.”
If you look at the large companies, their problem is just gonna be compounded by AI in some ways. If you build your model on Claude, or you build your model on GR, or you build your model on chatGPT, they can't speak to each other perfectly and that compounds the systems that already don't speak to each other.
And you could almost see some of the funded startups from Silicon Valley, “Oh crap. This will be kinda interesting to dive into.”
Jeff Caldwell: And that's interesting. That's a great, that's such a great example. And I get asked about, we talk about AI all the time. We get asked about it all the time. And I've talked to, I've just talked to a developer yesterday and it is, I and I'm a challenger and I, so I kind of challenge everything.
And so it's like I have called AI a bigger shovel. Sometimes people like, “Why are you…” And I'm not, and I'm not like, see it's bad. I love it and I use it all the time and it is immensely valuable. Some of the stuff that we're able to do now and what we will be able to do six months from now or a year from now, it's pretty amazing. And honestly like bring revolutionary for our business. It still needs, I'd say, gets about 80% of the way there. It still needs, right now, it still needs our hand, it still needs what we can do to really frame that up the right way. And that's where with storytelling thing and kind of the marketing, whether it's a person or a company or whatever it's like.
I can spot an AI written article that hasn't had a human tech hand on it from a mile away. And like I said, it might get you, like, thinking back to my days as a reporter, like the hours and hours I spent, like recording stuff, transcribing it, going through pages of notes as I was writing something.
That for me, AI is like aces for that. But it still needs my hand. It still needs human touch, at least in our business. And I think the people who are figuring out how to apply that human touch, where that sweet spot is between artificial intelligence and human intelligence, I think the people who are winning are finding out like exactly how to do that and how to deploy it.
Brian Kearney: Oh yeah. And there's a couple things that brings up. The one is I'm big nerd for sales copy. Like I love it. Like the all the Ogilvy books, all that stuff. The Boron Letters are just fascinating to me. And it seems like every piece of sales copy that chatGPT just launches out, has this in it. It is two words statements and three of them right next to each other.
And I'm like, oh, it drives me crazy 'cause is it useful? Yeah, it was good a year ago when it wasn't in every single piece of writing like that. That was a valid way to get people's attention. But it overuses things and it doesn't have that, when you go back to the art and the science, it's, yeah, the science says that works really well.
The art says you use it too much and people stop paying attention. So that's the issue with AI that I see right now. But I like what you're saying, where it gets you 80% of the way there. I was listening to an interview of one of the founders of HubSpot and he was talking about AI and he said, you have to think of it like the world's smartest intern.
Like they know everything. They know everything on earth, but they're still an intern. Like you still don't want them producing the end copy. They can get you a lot of the way there, but they cannot put that last polish on it. And I think that kind of encapsulates exactly what you're saying.
Jeff Caldwell: That's exactly right. Yeah. And I think about, too, like, hey, we lost Ozzy Osborne this week. I'm an old Frog guy. And it's like, what made his music so popular? All that for so long and it's not only because of how it sounds, it's because of who he was, where he came from. The attitude and like the, he embodied something that connected with people.
All these like metal head dirt bags like me, they love that. And it was, it instilled this like feeling. I saw something the other day, somebody writing some like homage and it was like, oh, as a high school guy, like getting out of football practice and going and drinking beer with my friends or something like that.
And Ozzy was always playing. And that's what AI can't do. It can't make that, it can't revive memories like that, that forge that connection. Just something like a song or like an artist and make you sad when that person leaves us, like this week with Ozzy. And so that's where we still can't, will AI get there? Maybe. Fundamentally, everything is binary and there is a binary decision to be made at each point in that whole thing, but I think we're a long ways from getting there.
Brian Kearney: Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And I might even push back. I don't think it will get there, 'cause it can't, it doesn't have its own experiences and it never will.
So if you look at, I don't know, I think story, getting back to what you're saying is going to be important and building that brand and story around your company or around your farm, 'cause it's probably gonna be like a bifurcated economy where, we'll have books that are written by AI, like we will.
They're not good right now because it's a little too long. The longer it gets, the worse it gets. But in five years, we're gonna be able to write a 50,000 word book. That's pretty good with AI, would be my guess. I bet it still won't sell as well as when people know the author. You look at the kind of thriller space, and Jack Carr is a good example.
He's been a really big guy in the thriller world right now because he was a Navy Seal captain. People are gonna like that, sorry commander, but people like that and AI could write the exact same book and people are gonna buy his 'cause he has the actual experiences, even if it's the same quality. I don't know.
So what that kind of brings me to is a question I wanted to dive into with you, and that is for farmer looking at marketing, the average farmers’s probably going to say, “I don't need that in my operation. I'm building a commodity product. Why do I need marketing? It doesn't make sense.” I'd love to hear your thoughts on that type of statement.
Jeff Caldwell: And it gets to your business right away. And especially in today's competitive environment, and I've got firsthand experience with this 'cause we're working on the transition, thinking about the transition for my families or for our farm. And talking to my dad and my family about it the other day, we rented from about late 1940s to the 90s when we sold off, we had a handshake agreement rental deal.
We never owned a farmstead where my grandparents, my aunt and uncle, and my parents all at one point lived. We rented. And it was a handshake deal for 50 something years, which is like absolutely the most ridiculous thing in the world.
Brian Kearney: And the norm. And the norm kinda.
Jeff Caldwell: And so we were able to do that and we owned ground and everything. And now I'm in the position where we rent what's left of our farm out to the local guy. And we've been really lucky to have great farmers, a great farmer who retired a couple years ago, and a great young farmer now who's just like taking wonderful care of the land, and so we know, my folks are still local there, and so that connection was already loosely there, and so it was able to have more easily.
We also had a landowner from Seattle and Seattle, Washington to Hoxie, Kansas. And so it was always our, we always were very attentive over the years to take really good care of that ground because we knew they were, and being an absentee landowner today versus 30 years ago is a whole different ball game 'cause of the ways we can communicate and share and stuff like that and make decisions differently.
And I think in today's environment, especially. You know, where you and I are, the value of farmland now and the competition and competitiveness out there, and what's the stat, people are throwing around 370 million acres. Is that what it is? That's gonna, all these millions of acres that are going to exchange hands as this baby boomer generation that retires from farming.
And so we have this land on the market. It already is super competitive and we hear the stories of the $20,000 and $30,000 an acre ground, and those are the outliers, I guess, in terms of market. But that gets all the attention. And so we're, I think we're going to see the competition for this ground as more and more starts coming up.
Competition is gonna get easier. I don't think there's young farmers waiting in the wings to rent and buy it, and I think in that environment, it's just like when somebody's out looking for a job, you get your resume fixed up and you get, you present yourself professionally to companies, and it's the same way here.
You've gotta market yourself as a farmer. You've got to show, thinking in terms of one day, if I'm in charge of the farm, like how am I gonna decide and I'm gonna decide who's gonna do the best job on my ground? Who's going to, again, going back to that art and science thing with storytelling, is he gonna have, is he or she gonna have the equipment, the machinery, the agronomic knowhow, the management acumen, all those things to run the farm and isn't gonna be somebody that I'm gonna wanna work with?
Is it somebody that I'm gonna have a passion to continue working with to see that farm continue to thrive? And so that's the same thing. And so I think that the more farmers can represent themselves and it is marketing, it may not be, people might not think of it as the same as marketing per se.
But it really is about connecting with a group that you want to connect with and sharing a message that you want to share so they can make a decision that works for you. And I think that, so it's all about, I think, showing who you are. Showing you got the skill to do it and showing that you are the person that they're going to want to do it with.
Brian Kearney: Yeah, no, absolutely, and I think this might get a little too pie in the sky thought process with it too, but I think that farmers have a really unique opportunity to reach people that are generally pretty well off. If you own farm ground, generally you're pretty well off. A lot of it is going more and more to the coasts, and right now everyone knows the kind of divide between the two sides of the political aisle, and it's pretty geographically based as well.
To be honest, I think farmers are in a really unique place to be able to bridge that divide in a way you wouldn't be able to most of the time, but you have to think through that. Some of the issues I see with farmers is they think it's these yuppies from the coast that all they hear about is organic and they don't care about the local farmer.
There's a little truth to that, but it's not quite true. It's not quite fair to them. And on the other side, the people from the coast think, “Oh, it's these farmers who don't care at all about their ground and all, they’re for the money and higher yield.” That's also not true. They do care about the ground and bridging that, if you are able to bridge that, you're going to compete. If you're a farmer who's just saying, “You know what, I don't need it. I don't wanna work with those people.” You're not gonna compete in the next 20, 30 years. You just won't. 'Cause we'd all like to see as much of the ground in farmers' hands as we can.
That's why I started the company I started, but at the end of the day, it's too much money. It's not possible. When you're talking about the acres that are changing hands, it's $770 billion of ground. In 10 years, that's $1.4 trillion of ground. That's not on balance sheets. We don't want that much debt, that's for sure.
So we have to bridge it somehow. And I think branding is an interesting way. Do you have a couple examples? Of farmers you've seen that have done that well?
Jeff Caldwell: I do. There's a farmer in the Chesapeake Bay one, the guy that kind of comes to mind first, farmer in the Chesapeake Bay region, up in Maryland, John by the name of Trey Hill, and he's a, so it's that Del Marva peninsula area, which like, I don't think of, people don't think of big production agriculture there. But there's the most gorgeous wheat and corn that I've seen really in the last decade out there. Yeah. It's beautiful. And he is, Trey is very, farming there is a lot different than farming in the Midwest because of the screwing meat on water qualities and around the Chesapeake Bay.
He does some very progressive things and he's very vocal about it. And he's very vocal about how he does it. And he will talk to, I've written articles with him, I've talked to him over the years about it, and he's very good at telling his story in ways that really resonate, kind of bridge, like you said, kind of bridge a divide.
He is in an area of intense environmental scrutiny and he's really good at having the conversation with someone from the Sierra Club just as much as he would from the Corn Horse Association. He's good at talking to everybody. Another example that's closer to home for me is the family who bought the feed bellard, feed yard outside my hometown.
It's been 20 some years ago now since then. But they went in with growth aspirations. They now have…he is a old friend of mine and his family operates it and they have a lot of grass in, in a different part of the state there. And they like background calves and they are. They've expanded the feedlot, they've bought other yards, and they are telling the story of, it's a large entity, it's a large agricultural entity, but it's family and they have a lot of employees and they feed a lot of cattle and they play a role in the food supply chain, the beef supply chain.
And so they do a really nice job of what they do. Showing the people, showing the faces and showing the impact that they have on the community. My hometown would, the detrimental effect, if they were just gone tomorrow, it would really, it would devastate my hometown. And so there they, that kind of connecting with the community aspect, not just the business aspect, but the community.
And that's like in places like that, that's a, I was just having a conversation the other day that, “Do we think about our farms as businesses first and then secondarily members of the community? Or do we consider our farms members of the community first and then business?” And to somebody, to a lot of people, that doesn't really make sense, I think, but we're far, small town farm boys. That, to me, knowing the importance of community. That's a big deal and I think a lot of examples, there are a lot of other examples, but people who know how to connect both their business to their communities, that's really important today.
Brian Kearney: Yeah, it is. It is what's gonna set you apart, we're getting close on time. What I'd like to do is end with a question for that guy or girl who's graduating college right now and they're thinking about going into the ag industry, what advice would you give them?
Jeff Caldwell: That's a hard question.
Brian Kearney: Yeah, I didn't prep you, so sorry about that.
Jeff Caldwell: I, to me, it goes back to my own thing. It's when I graduated from college, I had a job doing something from that, again, find some, I think it's about finding something you're good at and that you love doing. And that's the greatest thing about agriculture from a marketplace and job marketplace standpoint is there's so many different things people can do in our business, like from shoveling manure to doing what we in some, it's about what do you want to do?
Because if you find what you wanna do, it's gonna be easy. It's gonna be hard sometimes, obviously, you're gonna love it. And I think finding that is the biggest thing. And then always, I'm from western Kansas. I moved to Iowa 20 years ago. I had to learn a lot and I had to learn going from the, like we talked about earlier, going from the media to marketing.
I had to learn a lot, and start from square one in some ways. And so not only finding what you love to do, but then also be willing to learn, always be learning like this Ag Tech stuff, some of this stuff, some of these guys, I don't even know what you're talking about, like it's a waste far over my head, but like I do know how to connect it to what's gonna matter on a farm.
Because of my first experience with it and my ability to always be learning about stuff that I know nothing about. And I think as long as you do those two things, that's my only advice. And just keep working. Like, man, I've had a job since I was 14 years old. I've worked too hard, many people say, but I think being able to be the person who will show up and do the work, especially in agriculture farmers, man, like farmers that value that so much like whenever I'm going to interview a farmer, I am on time every time and stuff like that. So having those stop skills to go with that broader sort of commitment to doing what you love and always getting better. I think that's the picture to me. Yeah.
Brian Kearney: No. Absolutely. That's great advice. Jeff, thanks for jumping on the show. This has been a great conversation. Had a lot of fun. We'll definitely have to do it again.
Jeff Caldwell: Absolutely, man. Thank you.
Brian Kearney: Thank you.
And that’s a wrap on this episode of The Land Ledger.
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