A ballroom in Omaha, September 10. My name was called, I walked up front, and a trophy with my company’s name on it was put in my hands.
I’ve been chewing on it ever since, mostly because the name on the trophy is the least accurate part of it.
The trust part is the part I can’t take credit for
The Mid America CropLife Association handed out its first-ever Industry Impact of the Year Award, and it was presented to Farm4Profit Media by MACA President Aaron Deardorff. The award was created this year and we’re the first ones to get it. The criteria are about sustained impact on Midwest agriculture, and about being, in their words, a trusted and influential voice.
That second one is what I keep circling back to. Trust can’t be manufactured by a podcast. It gets handed to you one person at a time, and it’ll get taken back just as fast.
If you want the formal version, the official announcement is here.
Hundreds of farmers said yes to an uncomfortable question
So here’s the honest version of how this happened.
Seven years ago we started asking producers to sit down on the record and talk about money. What an acre actually cost them. What the lender said no to. Which decision they’d take back if they could.
Money is the last thing anybody in this business volunteers. Equipment and yields come easy. The number at the bottom of the page takes trust.
Hundreds of people said yes anyway. More than 700 episodes’ worth. Every one of them took a real risk being that candid in public, and every one of them made the next farmer’s decision a little better informed. 7.5 downloads, 59 million YouTube views and 111 million social impressions later, MACA noticed.
They were noticing those conversations. I was the guy holding the microphone.
And then there’s whoever’s on the other end of the earbuds
You listened in tractor cabs and grain trucks and hospital parking lots. You emailed when we got something wrong, which was more often than I’d like. You told your neighbor.
There’s no version of this award without you. I mean that in the plainest way I know how to say it.
Corey told me my delivery was terrible, and he was right
He’s been covering that gap ever since. David Whitaker rounds out the trio and does more off-mic than most listeners will ever see. ? Rachel, Cody and team keep the whole operation upright, which is a polite way of saying they keep me on schedule.
Then there’s the room itself. We record out of a former Casey’s General Store in Slater, Iowa, a town of about 1,400 people. Studio 205 got gutted and rebuilt because we wanted the work to look and sound like it was worth somebody’s time. Plenty of folks helped make that happen who’ll never get a trophy for it.
Most of 2026 was spent on the road anyway. Custom Harvesters. New York Corn and Soybean Growers. CattleCon in Nashville. The National Farm Machinery Show. Commodity Classic in San Antonio. That’s a lot of airports and a lot of early calls, and the team ran all of it without complaining to me once.
My wife Allie has absorbed more of those weeks away than anybody. She gets one line in this post, which isn’t close to even.
Somebody has to fund this before the numbers justify it
John Deere, Brandt, Corteva, Onshore, Performance Livestock Analytics and the rest of our partners did exactly that. They backed a show out of a small Iowa town when the reasonable move was to buy traditional ad space and go home.
They’ve also let us keep editorial control, which is rarer than it ought to be. I’ll take that trade every time.
The real scoreboard is Tuesday
The thing I keep coming back to is 2024, when this audience put together $48,412 for tornado relief across Iowa and Nebraska in a matter of days. Nobody voted on it. People just moved.
An award is a nice confirmation that somebody outside the room is paying attention. The scoreboard I actually care about is whether a producer makes a better call on Tuesday because of something he heard on Monday.
So thank you. Sincerely.
The trophy’s going up in the studio, where everybody who earned it can see it on the way in.
Tanner