Farm succession starts with better communication

Shay

Foulk: Welcome everybody to another episode of the Ag View Pitch. Today we are here live at the Ag View Executive Business Conference. Probably not live while you're watching this, but live as we record this at the conference. The first speaker we had here at the conference did a phenomenal job, and I'd like to introduce Vance Crowe. How's it going, Vance?

Vance

Crowe: Hey, I'm glad to be here.

Shay

Foulk: Yeah, it's awesome to have you here, and it was, it was Funny, yesterday when we had our welcome reception, I first saw you and then I heard your voice. I'm just so used to like hearing your voice on the podcast. I don't watch it because I do a lot of traveling. And so it was interesting. I heard your voice. I'm like, yep, that's Vance. I know him anywhere. So before we kind of dive into some questions and some things I have for you, do a little introduction about yourself, what you're up to, what you're doing, and about your podcast.

Vance

Crowe: Sure, so the way I got involved in agriculture was that I was the Director of Millennial Engagement for Monsanto. Then after Bayer bought Monsanto, I went off on my own and continued to give talks, but then started a business called Legacy Interviews where I record families telling their stories so that the future generations can know their family history, where they came from. And so now I run a podcast just called the Vance Crowe Podcast., and then conduct legacy interviews.

Shay

Foulk: Awesome. So basically, you, you had a little bit in with the corporate world, and then you kind of got away from the corporate world. And in your mind, what are the challenges and the opportunities and the difference between what you're up to now versus the challenges in the corporate world?

Vance

Crowe: Well, in the corporate world, there's so much security. You know, like you have a job, as long as you show up, you get some of that work done, you generally have a pretty strong security for as long as you do. That can all end. In the entrepreneurial world, you've gotta make it every single day. If you can't go to work, something happens, you're not making money. And so in the corporate world, you don't have that much freedom. You're really just a cog as a part of a larger machine.

Shay

Foulk: You get a check every 2 weeks or every week or something, right?

Vance

Crowe: That's right. You know, so the trade-off for being part of a larger machine is you've got consistency. Entrepreneurship, you've gotta make it work, but you have all the freedom in the world. And I think anybody that's ever moved from corporate to entrepreneurial figures out real fast, like, I gotta have discipline, and nothing is going to happen unless I make it happen. And that requires a real, I think, mind shift change.

Shay

Foulk: Mm-hmm, for sure. So I guess what kind of what I wanted to do is just ask you a question around the idea of, You talk about legacy interviews and we've done a lot of podcasts, which we call Dad's Wisdom, which are similar. We don't go quite as deep as what you do with your discussions. But what I want to ask you is there's always been some common themes, and I'll tell you mine in a minute, but I want to know yours. What are some common themes that you hear from the senior partners of the operation in terms of wisdom and things that they bring back to the business and back to the family?

Vance

Crowe: Well, as I'm sure you've probably seen, a lot of times, if you ask somebody, "What's the wisdom you've learned?" It's very hard for somebody to really go back and gather that. They, you know, like, "Well, I don't know," because they've integrated into their lives. So for me, one of the things I've learned is if you really ask somebody about, "Hey, how did you overcome this problem? How did you get yourself into this problem?" People look back on these experiences that they had, And even though they integrated it into their lives, that wisdom, being able to dig it out requires going back and revisiting that thing to really understand themselves.

So I think there's so much wisdom that resides in people's minds that's very difficult for them to get out unless somebody says, "Hey, tell me the story about this." A lot of times, I suppose that's pretty emotional too, you know, as you relive the opportunities and the challenges of life that we go through, I suppose too. Oh yeah. I mean, Because what happens in life is you go through one crisis and you're just getting through with that one and you move on to the next one. And so people don't revisit it. So 40, 50, 60 years later, you go back and revisit these things. And all of a sudden, memories that people have kind of avoided, 'cause it was a painful thing, they trusted the wrong person, they were arrogant and got in a fight, to go back to that memory and realize actually something really good came from that, But I just didn't realize what it was until I came back to revisit it.

And people have those experiences and it does get emotional.

Shay

Foulk: Yeah, I always think of that as sometimes, you know, what is the worst mistake you made that was the best lesson, right? I mean, I suppose you saw a lot or have seen a lot of that too.

Vance

Crowe: Yeah, one of my favorite questions to ask people is, what was the hardest lesson to learn that was the most valuable to know? And that's when you hear, you know, For me, though, one of the big things, there's a big distinction between men and women in these. And one of the similarities I've seen among women is they say, you know, "I wish it hadn't taken me so long to not worry about what other people think of me." Right. And, you know, at first you could be kind of dismissive of that, but oftentimes the women in the operation, they're the PR agent. They're the one that knows, hey, your reputation in the community matters. How people perceive us matters. And so they did need to have that skill., but you can over-index for that skill. Yeah, exactly.

And for men, like, the common thing that I hear is many times it took 'em a long time to realize like, hey, my spouse is actually my partner. I really can trust her. I wish I hadn't gone so long carrying this burden on my own because my wife was waiting there the whole time. I just didn't know.

Shay

Foulk: Yeah, yeah, didn't use that resource that's right at your fingertips.

Vance

Crowe: That's right, yeah.

Shay

Foulk: Interesting. At our conference, in your conversation, I had a couple questions that I didn't have time to ask. So I'll preface, you know, a little bit of what you talked about first with the idea of communication. I was telling you before we started recording that, you know, communication is one of those things that is always the biggest challenge as we work with farm operations, as we work through, you know, essentially legacy planning, transition, succession, collaboration, all those types of things. It seems like, you know, we gotta get the communication right. I mean, we can get the numbers right, and I learned that years ago. We could sit down and we could do budgets and we could calculate stuff and get the numbers right, and it didn't take long and people can screw stuff up.

So talk a little bit about, you know, just in a summary, kind of the message you had today was just around better communication. What are some of the, you know, bullet points of things that you think would be helpful to the listeners that maybe weren't able to attend the conference or a refresher from the conference around the idea of just better communication within the family and the business.

Vance

Crowe: You know, family communication is the hardest, right? And it's because, you know, mom and dad, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, they watched you grow up, and it's very easy for them to create mental shortcuts and say they should already know this, they should understand why I think—

Shay

Foulk: you don't know this, you should have known that 10 years ago, what the hell.

Vance

Crowe: Exactly. And, and one of the biggest points I try to make in my talk is most of what we think of as thinking isn't really thinking. Most of the time, people are just inhabiting emotions. They're reliving something they were frustrated about, they're angry about something, they're afraid of something. And so by getting somebody to tell you what they're thinking about is not just for your own benefit, it's actually for theirs. And if a person is talking with you and they feel like you're really listening, they will begin to unwind some of the things that they're thinking about. And if they don't feel like you're gonna respond with your answer to whatever problem they're describing, or your defensive nature about whatever they're saying, and instead you just encourage them, "Well, tell me more about this.

What I'm understanding that you're concerned about is this." "Can you tell me more about that?" You watch people begin to articulate this stuff, and what they're actually doing is thinking. And so giving people an opportunity to talk is actually giving them an opportunity to think, where they actually work through these emotions that they're living within and turn them into logical thoughts that can eventually get to the point where you can deal with whatever it is that they're trying to communicate.

Shay

Foulk: Yeah, and you're kind of describing, I mean, there's books on critical communication or having constructive conversations and those types of things. And one of the things you pointed out that I thought was interesting is how important listening is, because I think that's something that I've always struggled with forever is, and you pointed out how we also, how we think we know stuff that we probably don't know. And I'm as guilty as anybody of that. I think we all are, but we just gotta be self-aware and admit it and then step back back and say, how can we better communicate? Any thoughts on our conversation on that too?

Vance

Crowe: Yeah, you know, when I was director of Millennial Engagement, I would go out and interact with people that were way, uh, overestimating how much they knew about the food system or about farming. If you go to point that out, well, you don't really know what you're talking about, uh, people will become defensive and they won't go anywhere. If instead you give somebody an opportunity to explore how little they know about something, they will come to the conclusion that they don't know very much. And so, I often will, when I'm disagreeing with somebody, I'll ask them, "How will that work? How about this situation?" And make people have to explain something beyond that millimeter of depth.

And then they start to realize like, "Ah, I don't exactly know how that works," or, "Oh, there's some parts of this that I'm not really sure about." And then, because you haven't been fighting them right away, they're far more open to you filling in those blanks for them. So it's why I always encourage people, how questions are some of the most valuable questions you can ask. And they're hard to ask because you're really opening it up that this person may go on and on and on and on, but let them do it because eventually they will discover the gaps in their own knowledge, and there is where you can find a way to fill it in.

Shay

Foulk: Sometimes that's, we see that generationally, either it's the young generation or the senior generation, one or the other has an idea, And a lot of times it just goes in one ear and out the other. They don't even listen in the first place. And the point is to back up and actually listen and then to increase that argument, right? Is kind of was your message.

Vance

Crowe: Yeah, exactly. And you know, one of the things we talked about during the Q&A, your attention is the most valuable thing that you own. Your attention is your bandwidth for changing the world. It is what you have to, do in this world. If you give somebody your full attention and you aren't distracted by the phone and you aren't trying to hurry them, you are giving them the most valuable thing that they— that you own. Even if they don't consciously understand it, they will intuitively understand it. And it, it causes a reaction that really creates that sort of warmth, that sort of space where electricity can flow between two people and you can discover new things and you can overcome problems.

Shay

Foulk: 100%. Interesting, yeah. I think I'm gonna bounce to my question that I had after you talked. We've kind of hit on some of the messages and messaging that you had. And one of the questions I had is, you know, you talked a lot about, you know, just conversation that might be a bit adversarial, right? Where somebody's got an idea, they pose the idea, and then there's resistance on the other side. My question is a little different in the sense that, What happens if you have somebody that has a great idea and they're not getting it out? Because a lot of times we see this with operations. You might have siblings that are farming together and you have one that's the driver and one that's the quiet one. And the parents or the leadership team is listening to the loudest one, right? You know, that's the squeaky wheel. That's the one that's getting the attention.

But sometimes, I always tell people it this way, sometimes when the quietest person speaks, everybody needs to shut up and listen, 'cause that's probably the most important thing that we can hear. Talk a little bit about that. What's your perspective on that? And how do we navigate those personality types?

Vance

Crowe: Well, there's always somebody that's like much more willing and open to begin the dialogue. And you're right, they end up dominating. One of the techniques that I use When I was in corporate America, I would always carry around dry erase markers so that when you'd have a dry erase board, and if I noticed that there was somebody that I thought was being quiet, but you could tell there's thinking going on, I'd pass them the marker and I'd be like, "Hey, would you draw what you think the conversation is about here?" And oftentimes the quiet person, by giving them that extra channel and giving them the opportunity to draw the idea, you're now slowing down the whole conversation.

You're making it so the speed of thought can be mediated or moderated, and you're allowing a person to not be so worried that they're gonna get shot at because the idea is being put up on the whiteboard or on a piece of paper. And this is a technique that works in, in almost miraculous ways. You watch a quiet person be able to articulate something you watch the talkative person now have to find, well, we're not attacking the whole thing, which thing do we want to talk about next? And it really focuses conversations. Even if you're not a great drawer, even if you're not good at diagramming, just the very act of taking your complex cloud of ideas and drawing it has a profound impact on conversations.

Shay

Foulk: Yeah, and you'd kind of mentioned that in your talk a little bit, and that's one thing we do in our consulting is We tell people, you know, everybody, you can talk about the business structure of the operation or the, you know, the accountability structure or whatever and how things are set up. And if you just talk about it and you never have it in a picture form, everybody has a different picture, right? Absolutely. Everybody sees it differently. And the second you put it up there, I've had young people say, I've never seen that, I never thought of it that way before, you know? And so I think, yeah, picture's worth,— you know, a million words.

Vance

Crowe: Yeah, I one time was working with a family that was describing how they passed down their grain elevator. And I talked about this in the talk. And they were trying to choose who's gonna be the CEO. And they were deciding, should we choose the first son that's great at marketing? Should we choose the other one that's great at business? And when they gave their daughter a chance to draw out how does this business make money, they realized she actually understands the game better than everybody.

Shay

Foulk: Yeah, she's the 30,000-foot view.

Vance

Crowe: That's right. And I think that that really opened up their eyes and, you know, it's giving people an opportunity to take this cloud of complexity that's in our minds. You know, it's a funny thing because our thoughts are not actually words. They're a combination of emotions and imagery and experiences. And so giving people additional channels to be able to take those ideas and put them in a format that somebody else can understand It's a super powerful thing. And a leader that can hand over the pen and say, "You draw it," man, they are bringing a lot more to bear to that conversation.

Shay

Foulk: Yeah, that's super. That's awesome. I love it. I guess, is there anything else that you would like to say from a communication standpoint as we get close to wrapping up here that you think like our listeners, our farmers that are in transition, that are, working on business development and bringing that next generation into the fold and trying to transition, especially the senior members trying to transition from that leadership role to a mentorship role, 'cause that's a completely different mindset. Any thoughts or comments on things you'd like to leave the listeners with around that communication element?

Vance

Crowe: Yeah, an idea that I have been playing with, and actually this talk was the first time I've ever shared it publicly, is this concept I call switching the observer. So much when we're in a conversation, is I am talking to you and I'm feeling my emotions. I'm frustrated with you, I'm worried, I'm thinking about 100 different things. And I'm sitting there trying to think, how are you hearing my argument and how can I persuade you? So I'm spending a lot of my time thinking about what's going on in your mind. But if you catch yourself being caught up in the emotion and you can say, all right, now I'm going to actually project my thinking so that I'm a third person there and I'm gonna watch myself. Talking to you. Now you start to observe, oh, I'm getting angry, or, oh, I'm starting to get tense. And you start seeing, hey, Vance should be changing what he's doing.

And it gives you this kind of omniscient perspective and allows you to actually observe how you are processing information. It is one of those things that the more you practice it, the more you get a hold of it, you start to to control your emotions, realize what's driving you, and then it allows you to overcome those things, overcome the ego that keeps us from making the right decision or stepping on other people. So trying to figure out a way to be that third-person omniscient observer of yourself, very, very powerful.

Shay

Foulk: You're going down the path of being self-aware, right? You know, and I think that's something that, I think some of us struggle with is, in certain aspects of communication, and I always bring up 3 emotions that we see anyway, and we all have them, just to different degrees, but ego, insecurity, and control have a tendency, at least in our observation, as we work with operations, those are the 3 emotions that tend to have to be navigated, right?

Vance

Crowe: Absolutely. I was talking to a guy one time who I really respected, thought like, this guy's always got himself under control, And I asked him about it and he said, "You know, I figured out a long time ago that anytime I get angry, it's actually a signal that I'm afraid of something. And so I try anytime I start to feel anger to ask myself, what am I afraid of? And when I can confront what I'm afraid of," 'cause it's a lot easier to be angry than it is to be afraid, particularly for men, right? Like, "Hey, I wanna be in control of that." opened up the door to me to start trying to explore that, you know, self-observing. What do these emotions really mean? And the man that can be in, is able to observe and name what he's feeling is in control of those things. If you can't name what you're feeling, it's controlling you, you're not controlling it.

Shay

Foulk: Interesting. Yeah, that's really cool. So I guess what I'd like to do as we wrap up is, I'm a fan of your podcast, and one of the things you do is you ask that Peter Thiel question of, you know, and so I'd like you to just give a little example of what that is and why that is in your podcast and the importance of that.

Vance

Crowe: Sure, so you're describing the Peter Thiel paradox, which is where I ask, what is one thing that you believe that almost nobody you know agrees with you on? And this is a, a technique that Peter Thiel used to use to test, am I talking with a person that's a free thinker? Because our natural disposition is to think what other people think so we can be a part of the tribe. We don't think that that's why we think what we think, but we really do. Right. And so the one that I've been using lately, although I've converted people, so I probably have to come up with a new one, is I have been saying, I believe Bitcoin is going to completely demonetize agriculture. And by that, I mean, we all know there is a huge monetary premium on buying land because it's a way to stop the infinite money printing, right? If I'm gonna have my dollars—

Shay

Foulk: You're carrying the inflation.

Vance

Crowe: Yes. And I believe that Bitcoin has an opportunity to do something very positive for ag in the long term, but it's gonna be painful over the short term. 'Cause the value of land in terms of dollars is gonna keep going up. It's gonna go up and up and up, and people are gonna feel like they're wealthier and wealthier. What you can do with those dollars is actually going down, down, down, down, down. Right. And what Bitcoin is going to do is it's going to say you don't have to put money into land in order to be able to preserve your wealth. And so the people that don't want to work it, the people that are parking their money in, in land in order to be able to stop inflation, they're going to realize, hey, if I put it in Bitcoin, I don't have to pay property taxes. I don't have to worry about city, county, state, federal, EPA, all these people coming in and telling me what to do.

And so they're going to move their money away from land and put it into Bitcoin. Now, at first, this is going to hurt because it's going to be like, well, the value of my land is going down. But the truth is it's going to bring land back to its utility value, meaning what can you produce on that land? And are you actually able to create something more valuable there than another farmer, as opposed to just doing all the pencil and the financing work to make it work.

Shay

Foulk: How do you get farmers to transfer land over to Bitcoin though?

Vance

Crowe: Well, I don't know that you're going to need to. I think what you're going to find is the 80-year-old woman that is holding on to land because it was passed down and she's just trying to keep it because her financial planners are saying, "We don't want to put any more money in the stock market." Eventually Bitcoin's volatility will level out and they're going to start saying, "It's more valuable for you to do it here." And you're also going to find that people are going to say, Hey, by having Bitcoin, my money there, if something goes wrong in my state, they start making wild changes, with Bitcoin, you can just pick it up and move. With land, if you don't like what the state's doing, your only option is to sell. And so I think farmers are ultimately, the ones that are gonna hold onto it are the ones that wanna farm it.

And the ones that are using it as a hedge against inflation are gonna move out. I think over the long-term, it'll be very positive.

Shay

Foulk: So that slows down the demand, 'cause the demand's still pretty high. That's the, you know, and the supply is tight, you know, 'cause you don't have the sellers, like you said. So it's a supply and demand thing driving it.

Vance

Crowe: People often compare Bitcoin to gold. And I think the better analogy is to land. 'Cause with gold, like right now, the price of gold's shooting up. What does that mean? Well, every mining company in the world now can go out and buy more steam shovels and trucks and miners and all of those things. So gold actually inflates at least 2% a year. Land, that's not the case. In fact, we're losing land to people building more houses and land coming out of production. That's the same thing with Bitcoin. There is a capped supply, but I think that as an investment vehicle, it's far better if the people that own the land are the ones that are trying to produce something on it rather than the people trying to own it because they're trying to avoid inflation.

Shay

Foulk: Well, and the cap rate on land's not real good either.

Vance

Crowe: Yeah.

Shay

Foulk: For the investor right now. You know, I mean, with what, where land costs and then what the, like you said, the productivity of what you can pay for the rent isn't even close. I mean, it's not even close to cash flow.

Vance

Crowe: Yeah, and as long as we are in this high commodity, let's, anytime the commodity prices aren't what we want them, we're either gonna import, you know, from other countries or we're gonna, you know, do land payout. We're gonna do payouts to farmers. Like, this is not a sustainable system. Everybody knows that it's not sustainable. But until Bitcoin, we didn't have a way out. And to me, this is a path and it is almost an inevitable path. I think whether people like what I'm saying or not—

Shay

Foulk: Probably more not than do.

Vance

Crowe: But I mean, I think—

Shay

Foulk: But I'm trying to buy into your, into your, to agree with you. Like you said in the talk is, if you disagree with somebody, you got to try to understand where they're coming from first, right? So that's what I'm trying to do. Is understand, you know, where you're coming from. Because I think, you know, a farmer's reaction is gonna be, well, you know, like you said, there'll be some short-term pain for the long-term gain. And sometimes people don't like the short-term pain, you know, or, you know, as I always say, you know, some people would rather be in, you know, be happy than informed too. So, you know, if that's coming, it's like, I don't know if I want that. You know, it's uncomfortable.

Vance

Crowe: Yeah, but I'm totally with you. Look at how much money you make on land right now, right? I sometimes like will generously say 8%, and then people go, ah, and then you say 6%, 3%. Are you making more than the money is being inflated? Usually not, not right now.

Shay

Foulk: Yeah, it's gonna be hard. I mean, the way inflation's been the last few years, it's hard to keep anything to keep up with.

Vance

Crowe: Well, and that's never gonna end because the amount of debt that we have and, you know, money printing is actually just a form of taxation. Right. It's a hidden tax.

Shay

Foulk: Yeah, exactly.

Vance

Crowe: And they don't wanna tax people 'cause they don't wanna get voted out of office. So what they do is they just print money, which steals it right out of your bank account. And it makes you feel richer when you watch the price of your house or your land go up. But what you can do with those dollars is less every single year.

Shay

Foulk: And you can be happy instead of informed. And you know, that's just how that works.

Vance

Crowe: I love that. I'm gonna use that. That's great.

Shay

Foulk: Yeah, take it. It's a good one. I stole it from one of my partners. So it's a good one to use. Hey Vance, this has been a great conversation. I think what we need to do is I need to have Shay sit down sometime and you two debate and discuss that land Bitcoin conversation. I think that's probably a whole nother podcast that probably we need to do. And I might put Shay on that one with you. I would love that. Tell him to sit down and have that conversation. If people want to, what's the best way to look your podcast up? I've been a big fan of it. I think you do a great job. Explain it real quick again, how best people can get ahold of you.

Vance

Crowe: Best way to find the podcast is just the Vance Crowe Podcast. And it's a mixture of me doing interviews like this. And I do some, what I call the Ag Tribes Report, where I'm talking to ag producers. And then if you want to look up Legacy Interviews, that's just legacyinterviews.com. And if you're interested, I have a, communications class that's actually based in negotiations. I call it Interest-Based Communication. If you go to advancecrow.com, you can look that up, and it's a 5-part class on learning how to negotiate and communicate at a much more effective level.

Shay

Foulk: That's really awesome. And, and is that just an online class, or how does that work?

Vance

Crowe: Well, I've never done it online. It's always been in person. I've been hired by companies, but I'm going to start putting some online and doing some individual classes.

Shay

Foulk: And so you show up and work with an operation on just helping them work through communication issues.

Vance

Crowe: Exactly. We do. We start off talking about negotiations, then we talk about storytelling, having better conversations, dealing with conflict, and then presenting— how do you take your ideas and share them with more than one person.

Shay

Foulk: That's awesome. Great. Well, definitely to check this guy out. I've been a big fan and really appreciate you being here, so thanks a lot.

Vance

Crowe: It's been an honor.

Shay

Foulk: Thank you.

Vance

Crowe: Thank you. Just as a note, I was telling you on the way up, there is something tangibly different about the audience at this conference. They are engaged in a way that you don't see at conferences. And so anybody that's thinking, ah, should I go to that next year? I would say I could, as a presenter that's presented hundreds of times, I could tell from the very moment I got on the stage, hey, this audience is electric. They are here to learn and interact. It's true. It's a great conference.

Shay

Foulk: Yeah, thank you very much. Yeah, we're super proud of everything Alyssa's done to put this together. And we've got a great, great group of people here. The conference continues to grow. So thank you for that. Appreciate that.

Vance

Crowe: Thank you. It was an honor to be here.

Shay

Foulk: So, all right, well, uh, great conversation here with Vance Crowe. Check him out, great stuff there with everything there. Uh, keep in touch, and we'll catch you again next time on the AgVie Pitch.