Growing the Future

Yield Farmer vs. ROI Farmer: Which One Are You?

Episode Summary

Brennan Turner, CEO and co-founder of FarmLead, traces his path from junior hockey and pro sports through Wall Street commodity trading to building North America's largest online grain marketplace in the wake of the Canadian Wheat Board's dissolution. He draws a hard line between yield farmers and ROI farmers, argues that Canada's status as a high cost grain producer makes cost of production the number that actually matters, and unpacks the loss aversion psychology that drives so many marketing decisions on the farm. The conversation closes on digital disruption in agriculture, from blockchain traceability to his own prediction for how long full farm automation actually takes to arrive.

Episode Notes

Brennan Turner played junior hockey at Notre Dame in Wilcox, got drafted by the Chicago Blackhawks, studied economics at Yale, traded commodities on Wall Street, and then came home to Saskatchewan to build FarmLead, North America's largest online grain marketplace, right as the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly was dismantled.

The conversation is really about one distinction: are you a yield farmer or an ROI farmer? Brennan makes the case that Canada is a high cost grain producer compared to Western Australia or the Black Sea region, which means bragging about a 100 bushel wheat crop means nothing without knowing the actual profit per bushel behind it. He also breaks down the psychology of loss aversion in grain marketing, why farmers often feel worse about selling early into a rising market than watching prices fall on unsold grain, and why so few producers actually know their own cost of production.

What's Inside

• The real difference between a yield farmer and an ROI farmer, and why Canada's high production costs make that distinction matter more here than almost anywhere else
• Why loss aversion makes selling grain early into a rising market feel worse than watching prices fall on grain you never sold
• Why only 5 to 10 percent of farmers actually know their true cost of production, and what that gap costs them at contract time
• The three sides of a successful farm operation Brennan sees in his own family and clients: the crop grower, the mechanic, and the person obsessed with the numbers
• What building FarmLead into North America's largest grain marketplace taught him about digitizing an industry still run on phone calls and text messages
• His prediction for how fast farm automation actually arrives, and why he thinks equipment costs should be following Moore's Law instead of just getting bigger and more expensive
  
  
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