The Day I Realized It Was Never About Me

I was sitting on a podcast recently, walking someone through the history of Farm4Profit, and something clicked for me mid-sentence. I hadn’t planned to say it. I hadn’t really thought about it before that moment. But as I traced the timeline out loud, the pattern became impossible to ignore.

Every single time this thing grew—every meaningful leap, every moment the audience expanded, every time the show became something bigger than the week before—it happened when we stopped thinking about ourselves.

Every. Single. Time.

It Started With a Conference I Built for Myself

Let me be honest about how Farm4Profit really started. In 2014, I was an agricultural banker in central Iowa, newly married into a farming family, and I wanted to grow my loan portfolio. That’s it. That was the whole plan. I created the Ames Ag Summit as a way to get in front of farmers, position myself as a resource, and build relationships that would eventually turn into banking business.

It worked, in the narrow way I intended it to. The conference grew from a small room to over 400 attendees by year four. But if I’m being straight with you, the whole thing was about me building my career. The farmers in those seats were a means to an end.

I’m not proud of that framing, but it’s the truth. And I think it’s important to say it because of what came next.

The Derecho Changed Everything

In August of 2020, a derecho tore through Iowa. If you don’t know what that is, imagine a straight-line windstorm forty miles wide and one hundred eighty miles long, just moving across the landscape and taking everything with it. Crops, bins, barns, livelihoods. Farmers who had done everything right were suddenly facing losses they couldn’t calculate.

We were just a few months into recording the Farm4Profit podcast at that point. Corey Hillebo had recently joined as co-host. And without a lot of discussion, we just—reacted. We did a series of emergency shows. We brought on pastors. Mental health experts. Crop insurance adjusters. Property and casualty people. Agronomists who could talk through short-term grain storage and bagging options. We didn’t do it because we had a content strategy. We did it because farmers were hurting and they were asking us for help.

That’s when the mindset shifted. I remember saying it out loud later: it was no longer about me trying to look like the best banker in the area. It was, “what do farmers need right now?”

The show took off. Not because we were clever. Because we stopped performing and started serving.

Then Came the Swag Auction

The following spring, we saw a TikTok meetup happen around the Travis Burkhart Foundation—an organization built on the idea of helping farmers when insurance runs out. We weren’t there. We had major FOMO watching it from a distance. We loved what they were doing and loved Travis’s story. So we decided to do our own version.

I called it a swag auction. The idea was simple: ag content creators were all starting to build their own brand merchandise, and everybody needs clothes on the farm anyway. What if we pooled that merchandise, put it up for auction, and raised money for the foundation? Laura Farms, Larson Farms, and others donated their swag. Then things started to escalate. Cody Gayer donated a land plane. We started getting larger-ticket items we never expected. Whiskey, bourbon, a vehicle.

We raised over $41,000 for the Travis Burkhart Foundation.

And the Farm Talk community showed up in a way I still think about. That event became another growth moment for Farm4Profit—not because we promoted ourselves, but because we were trying to do something for someone else.

Spring Tornadoes, and What the Platform Had Become

Fast forward to the spring of 2024. Tornadoes tore through Iowa and Nebraska, and the devastation hit farm country hard. By then, Farm4Profit was a different organization than it had been in 2020—more team members, a larger audience, deeper sponsor relationships. And we used all of it.

Corey was in the middle of his campaign to become John Deere’s Chief Tractor Officer, and we channeled that momentum into a fundraiser for Go Serve Global, an organization that provides disaster relief both domestically and internationally. Sukup Manufacturing pledged a $25,000 matching donation. The Sukup Family Foundation came in with another $10,000. Maya America, GFY.AG, Boa Safra, and countless others answered the call.

We didn’t just meet our $50,000 goal. We exceeded it.

I look at that and I think: this is what the platform was always supposed to become. Not a vehicle for me to look good, or even to build a brand. Something that could mobilize real resources for real people when they needed it most.

The Thing I Keep Coming Back To

I’m not sharing all of this to say we’re special. I’m sharing it because I think there’s something in it that applies beyond podcasting or agriculture.

When I started, I was worried about my loan portfolio. My conference. My brand. My numbers. And the whole thing was fine—but just fine. It wasn’t until we responded to a storm, hosted an auction for a foundation we admired, and mobilized our community for tornado relief that things became something I’m genuinely proud of.

The growth followed the service. Every time. Not the other way around.

I don’t think that’s by accident. I think it’s just how it works—in farming, in media, in business, in life. As soon as you genuinely stop asking “what do I get out of this?” and start asking “what does someone else need right now?” things start to move.

I wish I’d understood that back in 2014. But I’m glad I figured it out somewhere along the way.

— Tanner Winterhof

Co-Host, Farm4Profit