Dan talks with Ag Twitter guru Jeff Bennett about social media, Superbowl commercials, and the benefits (or not) of benchmarking.
Jeff Bennett farms 4,500 acres north of Kinnersley, Saskatchewan, with his wife Shiloh and his father, in what turned out to be his dad's last year on the operation. He has a clear, often contrarian view on where a farmer's energy should go: not toward winning over a grocery store customer who will never see the dozen steps between seed and shelf, but toward running the business in front of him.
This conversation moves from the Ag Twitter meetup Jeff and Shiloh built at their farm, to precision agriculture and variable rate fertility, to a genuine back-and-forth with Dan over whether data benchmarking actually tells a producer anything useful. Jeff does not soften his answers, and the conversation is better for it.
What's Inside
Topics and Timestamps
0:00 -- Cold open: how Dan and Jeff connected through the Ag Twitter meetup
7:30 -- Eventbrite ticketing and tiered sponsorship for the meetup
11:00 -- Why Twitter is "reverse isolation" for a farmer who works mostly alone
15:00 -- 13,000 followers, and why accountability changes once a conversation could be said to someone's face
19:45 -- Generational gap: co-host Alyssa on why her generation barely touches Twitter
23:00 -- Tangent into the Bud Light Super Bowl ad and "virtue signaling" marketing
28:00 -- Why boycotts do not work and what going positive looks like instead
42:00 -- "I don't trust the customer to make the right decision anyway" -- Jeff's case against consumer-facing advocacy
51:00 -- What separates top producers, and why Jeff checks his cash flow spreadsheet almost daily
59:00 -- Farm structure: Shiloh's VP of Operations role, and dad's last year farming
1:05:00 -- Cash management, the family accountant, and why cash is "my number one precious resource"
1:09:00 -- 4,500 acres, half owned and half rented -- equipment strategy: lease-to-buy and buying used
1:14:00 -- Precision ag: Farmers Edge and Crop Pro variable rate, plus a side project using soil moisture probes
1:24:00 -- The benchmarking debate with Dan: does aggregated yield data actually tell a producer anything?
1:56:00 -- Wrap and sign-off
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