Vance Crowe
Appearances
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
The only real wealth you have in life is your family. That's it. It's not the money in your bank account that's going to make you – I mean, you need a certain amount to be stable and to be able to provide as a father or as parents.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Louis made it so when Monsanto was looking around, they were like, hey, somebody sent me it and said, hey, put in an application. And I said, wow, there's a way for me to get a tour inside of North Korea. Who doesn't want to take that opportunity?
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Yeah, it's all an indoor. It never goes out.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
No, they didn't. In fact, at the time, they almost didn't hire me because I had an HR person come and say, we red flagged your application because we had looked you up and it had this. And then the person that hired me, who's actually a really visionary woman, her name is Holly Butka, she said, that's exactly what we need is somebody that's willing to push the envelope.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Because I got hired there at the time when Monsanto was being totally under assault. You're the evil most terrible thing in the world. And so they were trying to find somebody that would go out and talk with, you know, college kids and young people about GMOs and pesticides. So that was my job. What are you guys writing down here?
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Well, the end essentially is when Bear bought Monsanto, I had a mentor, a guy that had really taught me a lot. He said, stay there for a year. Because I was like, look, I only came to Monsanto. I didn't want to be in corporate America. This is not for me. I don't want to do PR.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
I was here because this is the most interesting communications problem in the face of the earth, which is we're growing food more bountifully than we ever have in the history of time. And all these people are angry and worried about where their food is coming from. So that's interesting. Bear came to me and said, hey, what you did here was awesome. We'd like to put you on the executive track.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
They got me an executive coach. They were like, we want you to do something, but we're not going to keep going in this communications project. We're going to kind of put that aside. Do you want to go to supply chain or finance? And I was like, I'm not going to supply chain or finance. And so I ended up jumping out.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And one of the things that I did was start a podcast because I was getting asked by ag groups all over the country, hey, you're out talking to critics. Can you come help us talk with critics? And if you're going to go on the speaking circuit, you have to have new ideas. And the only way to get as many new ideas as I needed was to start a podcast.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And the podcast led me to what I'm doing now, which are legacy interviews. So now what I'm spending most of my time doing, about 80%, is people come to my studio and we sit down together and I ask them questions about their lives so we can record them talking about their family story so that future generations can know their family history.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And kind of all of those things that I did along the way helped me meet all different kinds of people and realize, like, I don't have any judgment. All I want to do is be interested in what you have to say and get you to open up and share these things. And so I spend most of my time listening to people tell their stories.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
But the wealth that you're going to have when you're 60 or 70 is how many grandkids sit around and want to talk with you or want to hear you or want you to fix some toy that they have or show you how to run the tractor. That's wealth. Right.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And when I'm not doing that, then I get to travel around and give talks to ag about having better conversations, starting the succession conversation, negotiating, things like that.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Well, in negotiations, in my view, is that it's a philosophy or interest-based negotiations. It's a way of thinking about how do I make it so you get what you need, so you're willing to give me what I need. And it's going to help you in every situation, every single one across. Not that everything flows perfectly for me, but I find that I have a lot less conflicts.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Now it's just like, oh, let's figure out how to work out this problem.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Yeah, except for, you know, the wife's like, I know these tricks. I see what you're doing here.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
I don't even know, 2006 or something.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Yeah, I mean, right at the edge. So I was born in 1981, and it just depends on who's categorizing it.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
I always talked about, like, why do you care about millennials? What you really are saying is there's a new wave of culture coming, and that's what Monsanto wanted to surf on was that new wave. But, yeah, I probably was a little old. I was probably almost a Gen Xer.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Oh, I'm working for an NPR station. And then, yeah, of course. And everybody in the Peace Corps... You go to graduate school. This is like on the East Coast at Seton Hall. This is – yes. And I was the poster child liberal kid, right?
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
No. I mean the experience of being at the World Bank was a deeply formative experience because – So the World Bank, the way that it works is the UN is the voting body that says, hey, we want to cut illiteracy in half in Rwanda. So what are we going to do? Well, we don't have any expertise here. So let's say, what's the problem? Why aren't people in Rwanda getting better educated?
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Well, it's because they don't have electricity. Well, so what are we going to do? Well, we better build a hydroelectric dam. So we're going to give them money for the hydroelectric dam, but it turns out they don't have any hydroelectric engineers. So we're also going to send the engineers there.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And the whole time they're doing this, every amount of money they're giving, they've got to pay out all these other people that are connected to every aspect of it, just like all government spending. Plus, they're locking these countries in to debt that they're never going to be able to pay off.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And then with that debt, they now start saying, hey, we'd like you to make these governmental changes to the way you govern your people. And they don't really care about the sovereignty of those people. And so a group in Washington, D.C., the World Bank is literally, you can see it from the White House. And it is a mechanism of the United States, really Western powers to have a lot of control over
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
So the World Bank was started after World War II. And they're called the Brentwoods Institutions. And what they were was a group of people that came together. It depends on who you ask what their intents were. But essentially, it said, Europe is totally annihilated. They don't have any industry here. And the last time, when World War I happened, we left Germany in shambles. And then what happened?
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Well, if you let an inflation run wild, a country's going to have a fanatical leader. You're going to have this over and over again. So why don't we take money, pool it together, rebuild Europe, and then work from that. But once they did that and Europe got rebuilt, they were like, well, why stop now? Why don't we go to Africa, go to Central America?
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
But I can't say whether the mission at the beginning was a good one or not. They did rebuild Europe. Europe became a powerhouse of economic. But the mission afterwards became so diffuse and so corrupted that I have no problem saying that's the most corrupt place on Earth.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Well, from the U.S. 's perspective, this is an awesome deal because they control that, right? So the U.S. gets to appoint the president through tradition of the World Bank. And Europe gets to appoint the head of the IMF. So Christine Longard that you see talked about in the news. They're the ones that do the currency controls that you have to have in place before you get this World Bank loan.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
The U.S. is the largest donor, but they're also the one that gets to control who's doing what. It's really, it's a political body. And I went in there incredibly naive, thinking, oh, politics is about, like, let's resolve the problem, when the reality is politics is about how do I help my small tribe of people survive?
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
benefit the most so when i think of world bank i think of a bank like is this doing anything with money they're not setting interest rates or who the hell is doing that who's controlling the that's the fed the fed well so they are a bank but it's just not they don't have depositors in the same way like they don't have to make their deposits work it's that countries donate money into this pool and they're supposed to make a return on that
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
But when a country wants to build a new highway system, if they're not going to go out and buy U.S. treasuries or if they're not going to use the regular system, they use the World Bank.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
I haven't talked about that in years. I haven't talked about the World Bank, so this is fun.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. When I worked at a camp for inner city kids. Yeah.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
In between the summer, the summer between when I graduated college and when I went to work as a deckhand. And then, of course, you're going to be cool with all the other counselors. So you got to grow your hair out long.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
No. I mean, maybe down to my eyes. I was never ponytail long.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Yeah, I couldn't do a ponytail. Yeah, I would be like this. Moving out of the way. Part your hair like this.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
That's mine. Extremely straight. But could you grow a beard from the time you were, like, seven?
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
I mean, I felt for that kid. I was like, this could have happened to me if Monsanto had decided that they were going to make publicity about this role.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
My job, when I came in there, I never intended to take that job. I just wanted to go in and get a tour of Monsanto and be able to be like, I got to see inside of North Korea.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
The money was actually not – it was good, but it wasn't anything wild. But the thing that it was for me was like – they are literally going to let me run around here and ask anyone anything that I want. And they don't understand that if I get to stop and ask people questions, I'm going to find out what's really happening here. And I don't give a if they don't like it. I don't know.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Am I, am I allowed to, you're great. Um, and, uh, and so I, so I was like, if I find out that they're evil, I'm going to go do that. And then that's actually one of the pivotal moments of my life because this thing that I thought, I thought I was going to get to run around and uncover something. And what I uncovered was, Hey, all this stuff that you thought you knew, uh,
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
you were wrong about and what does that change in your whole world view if you if you thought like well modern ag everybody kind of already knows that's bad and that they do these terrible things and you have that flipped on its head now all of a sudden everything that you thought you knew you're open to looking at and it made me a much much more open person made you an open okay so you thought you were going to have get paid to basically go in and unearth
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Yeah. I mean, I thought they were insane. Yeah, I thought they were totally insane for hiring me. It was actually a really brilliant move. Because then when I went out to do stuff, I was not interested in doing the PR-ish things, right? We had a PR firm that was like Vance. We're so glad you're here. We've been waiting. We have a budget for you.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And now what we want you to do with this budget is you get to choose. Should we sponsor this conference or this one or this group of college kids? And then we'll get a banner and you can have five minutes on the stage. And I was like, look, If the world views you as North Korea, it doesn't matter how beautiful the beaches look on your billboards. Nobody's coming there.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
So I gave them all the money back and said, I'm not going to spend any money on this. What I'm going to do instead is I'm going to say if there's a group out there that wants me to come talk to you. Then if you buy my plane ticket, I'll fly and go talk to any group that's out there.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And so I started getting invited to all kinds of places and talking to activists and talking to people that were scared. And this is what made a huge difference, that for the first time in their lives, Monsanto wasn't something they saw in a documentary. It was a person. It was a person. It was a person that had the same problems, the same questions that they did.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And I approached it with the feeling of, look, if you know something that I don't know about what they're doing, that's evil. I want to know, but let me tell you a bunch of the questions that I thought I had. They actually have pretty good answers for. So why don't I share with you what I know? And you tell me if you know something different.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And I got to travel all over the U S and Canada and Europe talking about it.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Yeah, I mean, so what I did, so the reason I took the job was the woman that hired me, Holly, said, we got all the way to this end of interviews, and she comes back into the room and she says, do you have any questions for me? I'm like, how are you going to train a person to be the director of millennial engagement? It's the most hated company in the world.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Mr. Vance Crowe. Yes. That's the best opening I have ever heard.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
How are you going to teach somebody how to do that? And the whole time I had been doing the interviews, I had seven panels of interviews. The whole time, they would ask me, what's your preferred management style? And I'd be like, I like to show up to work early. Why are you guys dumping all these pesticides into the Gulf of Mexico? And then I'd make them answer, right?
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And then they'd ask me another question, you know, like... you know, how, how do you improve on your work process? And I'd give him an answer. And then I'd be like, why are you guys causing Indian farmers to commit suicide? You know? And so I get, so they're impressed.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
It's, I don't know if you've ever done a job interview for a job you don't want. It's as much fun as you can possibly have.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Because you're like, I don't care what, you know, what you think of this, you're stuck with me for an hour. And so I got all the way done. And I think they were like, whoa, this guy asked all kinds of questions. So Holly, when, when I asked her, how are you going to train this person?
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
She said, well, since you've been so curious, what I think I do is write a list of 50 people from throughout the company. Can a
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
geneticists breeders farmers attorneys have you sit down and talk with them and then when you're done with that list of 50 people then you and I'll sit down and we'll talk again and I'll figure out what you do and don't know and I'll write another list of 50 people and so a light bulb went off in my head I'm like now I'm really going to get to discover what they're doing that's evil this is what I wanted
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And then really what I found out was the difference of opinion. And then when I went to go speak about it, now I had to figure out if I view something completely differently than you, how do I at least get you to loosen your grip on things? And I was never there like, I'm going to change your mind. I was like, I'm going to find out if you know something I don't.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Just a little bit of fluffing before the show.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
So if there's a question I should be asking these guys and I just want to make it so you're not hostile, right? You like sit here and view it as an honest opportunity to talk. And it went great. How did you do that? Well, your mug's making me think about the time when I failed at the very first time I ever did it, which was – I maybe have told you guys this story before, so stop me if I have.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
But the first talk I ever got invited to was an ag program at Iowa State. Really? They were like, yeah, we have a sustainable program. It's in the graduate school. Will you come and talk? And I was like, sure. So I get the presentation that the PR firm has given me that's all been approved and they've message tested and everything.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And I'm just about to go into this program, and I talked to the buddy of mine before I had gotten the job who I had known for a long time. And he was like, look, if you can't win over the ag kids at Iowa State, you should quit your job.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
That should be a chip shot, yeah. And so I walk in there, and it's a stadium-style room. And I walk in, and I'm like, you kids don't look like the ag kids that I know, but maybe they're different. I don't know. So I go through this presentation, and it's a two-hour class. And so I'm thinking, all I want to do is get to Q&A. This is going to be so fun. I'm playing with the home team, right?
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Yeah, I got to go down and see Tork at Barn Talk on my way up to the Stat Cropper. And then Tanner and I got to record the Ag Tribes Report. Amazing. Amazing.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
So I go through this presentation. We know we're all here to feed the world, and we've got to do GMOs, and we all know that it's bing, bing, bing, bing. So I get through this 45-minute, hour-long presentation in 15 minutes. So I have an hour and 45 minutes of Q&A. So I think. Here we go. This is going to be fun. And I say, are there any questions?
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And a woman all the way at the top, back row, raises her arms straight up in the air like this. You're like, I knew it. Yes, you there. Do you have a question? And she goes, I don't believe a word out of your mouth.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And the whole room starts clapping and cheering.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And I was like, oh, what do you do now? And what I learned from that experience was
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
was if you come in there with something flashy and shiny and it's not authentic and it's all the message tested stuff people smell that out immediately so from then on i i after that shellacking i ended up just starting to come in and be like hey guys this is what i thought about modern ag this is what i've learned so far and now if you guys know something i don't know tell me about it and it's it would always start a dialogue that went really really well do you remember what
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Well, it turns out... NRAM. It was one of the programs at Ag that broke away from the Ag school and floated to the left side of campus.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
national natural resources ecology and management something probably i was at it i was at a uh farm managers conference thing and one time i told this story and a guy was in there he's like i was in that room i saw that that happened and i don't remember the name of the program but it was a special program that was clearly all the people that hate modern ag and it was i'm glad it happened it was the best thing that could have happened to me right
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Well, and when I would be there, I had spent hours upon hours studying this, learning this, trying things out. And a person that had really strong feelings about Monsanto, they had those strong feelings because they watched a documentary and maybe they read a book. And they, the reason they feel so strongly is the exact same thing that makes them think I am the devil himself in front of them.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
So when they take that microphone, they're going like this, they're shaking, you know, like they're, And so if somebody, if the devil doesn't treat you, you know, like, rah, I'm going to get you. And is like, no, go ahead. And I think what you're trying to say is this. And is this your complaint? And you open up their argument and you make it better.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Suddenly they're like, all right, now I'm more open to whatever it is that you had to say.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
No, I mean, so... Was it Food Inc.? So what happened, in my opinion, is that GMOs came on the market and nobody really knew very much about them. And Monsanto and the other ag companies said, we're not selling these to consumers. Why would we go talk about it? We're just selling them to producers. And when that happened, there were certain businesses that became threatened by that, right?
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
If you are, for example, using now chemistry to be able to knock out all that weed pressure, well, now you don't need to drive a giant stake into the ground and rip your ground open, which means you're not burning as much fuel. You don't need as big of a tractor. And so one system, that chemical system, started winning.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
The other side, whatever that other side is, decided like, you know, no, we don't like that very much. This is really hurting us. So they started donating to groups that I think were closer aligned to the Joker, like that they didn't fully understand that once you fund these groups, they're going to do things that you couldn't possibly understand to agriculture.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And so the anti-GMO movement built up. But once that money went away, once the activists, for example, found out that they couldn't make money off of fighting GMOs anymore because the non-GMO label had become ubiquitous, they moved to going to glyphosate. And now do you hear anybody being worried about GMOs? Virtually none, right? It's because those people didn't tell people what to think.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
They told people what to think about. And so people were like, there's something to know because there's something hidden in here. And just like if I handed you that drink and kept looking at it and then looking up at you and then looking down at the drink and then looking at you, you'd be like, is there something in here? Well, I'm just not going to take a chance.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
I'm just going to not drink that. And all that fear is something that's very easy to fund and made it so –
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
monsanto was caught off guard and their enemies made money off the fact that i will say that's i will echo i have not seen a thing about gmos for a long time but i have seen paid ads on tiktok and instagram for roundup it's because that's so in my opinion people should should know this there are groups that get together in in conference centers in las vegas in new york
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And what they're doing is they hold a conference just for class action lawsuits. So just like you walk up and down at a Farm Progress show or a Commodity Classic and you can see all these booths, what the people in these booths are doing is, hey, if you put in $100,000 or $1 million, you can buy shares into my class action lawsuit about asbestos or glyphosate or pick your whatever.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
This is what we have as evidence. This is how many people we've signed up for the case. But if we get your money, we're going to buy billboards and late-night ads, and we're going to go get more clients. And your $100,000 could turn into a billion-dollar settlement of which you'll now quadruple your money. And people should be aware that this is what's going on.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And all those late-night ads and stuff like that, that's all a part of this system that picked apart.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Just depends on which one. I mean, I I'm with you because the truth of the matter is large corporations have a lot of money and their lawyers can just bombard you. And if you're just a regular, it's not even David and Goliath, it's Goliath and the gnat. And so you need to have a mechanism that makes it so you can be on equal footing with a corporation.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
So you can't get rid of that, that, that ability to fight that way. But at the same time, as soon as you build something into the system, there's parasites that come along.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
I feel like I should say this, but like, I've been around long enough in a bunch of these different positions to know that the people at the World Bank, that the people doing this class action lawsuit, 99% of them are doing it because they have a righteous belief about it. They have an understanding, Hey, what I am doing is good.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And there's just a small, it just takes a small number of people to be pulling the value out of that by, by cheating. And so, but the, the baddies are out there. The baddies will take advantage of the people that think they're doing good.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Yeah, I mean, the whole goal of having it as a tribes report is to say, what is the news that your people care about in your ag tribe? Because the outside world thinks that ag is one big tribe, but the reality is, no, there's dairy guys, there's cattle guys that are down in the southwest, there's grain people. What do you guys care about? And then, like, what are your people thinking about this?
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
That's a great question. So what happened was I started saying, look, we need to find a way to say, how do we know if you are getting ideas out into culture? And whatever metrics they were using, I was not interested in. What I decided was a good metric was minutes of attention.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And so what we would do is say like, if, you know, let's say, you know, you're on a podcast for 30 minutes and it's watched by a hundred people. Well, that's, you know, just, just do the math on it. So what this gave me a great advantage because you could also then take that number and divide it by how much did it cost for you to get those minutes of attention?
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
So the PR firm said, Hey, the way that we're going to get lots and lots of attention is we're going to, write and produce an ad, and we're going to run it on the Super Bowl. And that's expensive, right? And you're only hitting somebody that's kind of half-watching, and if it's not a funny commercial, everybody's going to get their buffalo dip, right? Yeah, yeah.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
So they did like a 30-second ad and they could multiply it. I instead went out and said, all right, I think Reddit is awesome. And this is way before corporations got on Reddit. And I found a scientist way down deep in the company that was one of those grumpy guys that was like not a corporate guy but had been – who actually had invented BT Cotton. His name was Fred Perlack.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And I worked with him and I was like, hey, let me show you Reddit. He studied it for a couple weeks and then we did a practice Reddit where I had a bunch of other millennials chatting him questions and having him type out answers. And then we put him in there and he did a science AMA.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
It was the second highest rated AMA in the history of Reddit on the science thread, second only to Stephen Hawking. And we beat the Super Bowl ad in minutes of attention because we could see what was the average amount of time people spent on this and how many people watched it. And I more than tripled what they had done on the Super Bowl ad. Only my cost was $0.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And so once I did that – Monsanto is a national tragedy that the company is no longer here. But once I did that, they were like, okay, we want to see what else this experiment can do. And so that's when I started doing – All kinds of very different out there things and trying to push the envelope.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
So you guys now have both gone through this, and you guys are aces, though, so it's not really fair. For most people... it is a high pressure thing where they're like, if you look closely on camera, they're sweating. Cause it's like, While you get to banter, it's still fast-paced, and I try and ask people questions that make them uncomfortable.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
You know, that makes me think I heard a line the other day. It's definitely not mine. Most conflict is over unmet expectations. And that's what happened there. People had expectations, and they were unmet on a whole bunch of different sides. And so it's like, if they had managed that expectation, then they wouldn't have had that, and he wouldn't have had an uphill climb. But he clearly has talent.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
He clearly has something to add to the whole paradigm. Who knows? The people that get stuck in a position like that, that probably changed his life. But even if it was painful, it probably made him go like, ah, this is a live wire. Actually, what I am doing has the potential to matter.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
I mean, it was a great campaign. I don't have any John Deere implements or anything at my house, and I'm sitting there. Fanning the flames for Corey, like, go, go, go, which is spreading it out to thousands and thousands of people to hear about John Deere. It was brilliant.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And a finance company, right? And a finance company.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Not for other companies. At Monsanto, like, I was one of several people that were hired. I had a counterpart named Val Bays who was the STEM outreach person, and she was literally the most creative teacher-oriented person. So her job was to go work with teachers to teach them how to do lessons and, like – You know how people do ag in the classroom? Oh, yeah.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
This was like ag in the classroom turned up to an 11. And that was a very, very effective way of getting your message out to teachers. And I think the most important way that ag can get ideas out into the broader public is definitely through the schools and supporting ag teachers.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Well, I was saying I like to push the envelope like, oh, you guys want to push the envelope. So the president of the American Farm Bureau, the story I was referencing was Zippy Duvall when I was in the last year and a half of being director of millennial engagement. And he and I had gotten to know each other over a couple of different times. And at one point he says to me,
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Hey, I'm here to be president because I want to change things, right? Like I'm not here because I need the salary. I don't really want to live in Washington, D.C. So you've been pushing the envelope. What do you think? If I wanted to have something kind of edgy at the American Farm Bureau conference, what should I do? Now, when I say this name, everyone's going to know the name.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
But at the time, no one knew who this was. But I said, yeah, I got an idea of somebody you can bring. Have you ever heard of Jordan Peterson? And so he was like, no. So I sent him some videos. Now, at the same time, I had been sending executives at Monsanto Jordan Peterson videos, and they loved it too.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
So when this came together and I said, hey, guys, I got to talk to the president of the American Farm Bureau. He wants us to sponsor a thing. You guys have been seeing this Jordan Peterson guy. What if we see if he can do it? And at the time, it cost literally nothing to bring him.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And I got to fly up to Toronto and go meet him at his house and say, hey, Farm Bureau wants to have something that's on the edge. And the thing that I see is that people are sending their kids away to college. And those kids leave the farm and they come back. And farmers would tell me this all the time. My kids either come back and say one of two things. They either say...
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
My kid was pushed back to the ag school and he could never leave because every time he went to literature or history, he was told how bad family farming was. So he just stayed on the ag campus or they leave the farm, go to school. They come back and they hate me and they hate everything that we do and they hate everything that we stand for. So what should we do?
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And I was like, you know, this world. Why don't you come tell the farmers what they should do with their kids about college in this thing? Well, he came, and the day before, Slate Magazine and a bunch of people found out we were doing this, and it went everywhere. Like, why is Monsanto courting the bell of the alt-right, the Nazi sympathizers, da-da-da-da? So it was this huge deal.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And Monsanto, to its credit, was like, ah, we've gone this far. Let's go the rest of the way. But he came and gave a talk, and he, like –
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
he just he just used the most acidic you know volatile things that he possibly could it was really interesting but it it made for a very very like people in my own company were like why are you bringing this person why'd you bring us all this heat so i i pushed the envelope a little too far there so do you still have access to jordan peterson
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
uh when i i've gone to like like the in-person things and we like know each other and i have his email i don't i don't use it yeah like he kind of moved on to a different thing i'm not as interested in anymore i think he's still pretty interesting i mean he's got some great opinions i guess on i mean the whole covid thing and all that you hear him on freaking joe rogan all the time yeah yeah i mean i don't think he's like waiting for my phone call i think he'd be like yeah i vaguely remember this guy from monsanto once but i got to go to his house it was pretty cool
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
What was I going to call it?
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
I got out of the role because the opportunity was, do you want to go to supply chain or finance? And I said, no. And they said, okay, well, here's what you should do. Apply for this job. And if you don't get it, then we can give you a severance package. And I was like, well, if I take the severance package, what do I have to sign? Do I have to sign something?
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Oh, well, that's something somebody gave me as a name. So whenever I do a Vance Crow podcast where it's just me talking, then I call that as the crow flies. So I just recently did one where I talk about how the term demons is now being thrown around a lot. Have I told you guys this? So like in popular culture, really kind of on maybe more like
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Because everybody I knew that took one said they signed a thing that said you'll never say anything negative about Monsanto or Bayer. Because if you do, you'll get all that money clawed back and sued. And so I was like, I'm not going to sign anything. So if that means I can't take any money... so be it. But that way for the rest of my life, if I'm on a podcast right now, nobody has any questions.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Yeah. About like, if this guy agrees with Monsanto or not, it's totally up to me. So that's how I ended up leaving. We left on a great relationship. I still talk to a lot of people at bear. They've, they've done work with me. Like no, no issues, no problem. Good company.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Well, that was one of the most innovative companies in the United States. Not just glyphosate, but how they came up with how to sell it and how they structured different research and innovation programs. And so when Bayer bought Monsanto...
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
one of the contingencies that all these countries around the world, because it wasn't just the United States that said, is this a collusion or is this a trust? You know, is this a monopoly? So they had to go around to all over Europe, Russia, China, all these places. And these countries, what they would say is, yeah, we'll let it go through.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
If you will build a GMO site in our country and give us, you know, the genetic engineering that you've been doing, give us access to germplasm that we've never had. Now, the people selling the company had a whole bunch of stock. And so they said, great, I'm going to get paid really well for this. I don't mind giving that away.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
But as a national strategy for making sure you have food sovereignty, I don't think that was a good thing. And I think when we look around at how many companies are now in agriculture, nobody benefits from there being fewer seed companies. And I think that we lost the innovation.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Well, and Mike, you know, the other side of me says, well, maybe it's good because, you know, more food is better for everyone if you can feed the world. But the reality is if you're always in a competitive market and are like, we're seeing the consequence of having everybody be able to grow food. A lot of corn, a lot of soy.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Yeah, I think a lot of that has to do with just blatant corruption. I think that the countries that are not able to grow food, they could. They have people that want to grow it. They have the desire, the work ethic, everything. It's just that the people at the top are sucking so much out. I'll tell you one of the things. I'll see what you guys think of this.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
I want to see who is the first ag company that finally comes around and acknowledges feed the world not only isn't going to work as a slogan, it's because our population is collapsing. It's not, oh, we're going to have Huge numbers of people. Like, we're actually going to have way fewer people.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
the Joe Rogans and the Tucker Carlsons and these kinds of places, you're hearing them talk about the other side as demons. And I am making the point like, hey, be careful because the language that you use about the other side makes it so you don't have to look at them like people. You can look at them like somebody other.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
It's because, I mean, we're having a population collapse, right? We're not doing replacement rate. But what is the new ag thing going to be for why we need to grow, you know, just keep increasing yield?
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Right. Artificially decrease yield by, you know, it's... I mean, the oil companies have benefited the most by making our cars less fuel efficient by having all these catalytic converters and things.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Well, you know, I do these legacy interviews and I get to hear people talking about their lives and what they think about what happened and how they did things. And one thing that I hear a lot and it actually kind of like, you know, pierces into my heart where it's like, they're like, yeah. you say you can't afford kids because you want a lifestyle that's at this level.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
But when we had kids, we didn't have that. We did a lot more shopping at Goodwill. We did a lot more of this thing and that thing. And I hear it a lot with people that had five kids or six kids. And now that I have two kids and how hard it was to get them, I realize the only real wealth you have in life is your family. That's it. It's not the money in your bank account that's going to make you
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
I mean, you need a certain amount to be stable and to be able to provide as a father or as parents. But the wealth that you're going to have when you're 60 or 70 is how many grandkids sit around and want to talk with you or want to hear you or want you to fix some toy that they have or show you how to run the tractor. That's wealth.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
We had to do IVF to have our two kids. And, uh, Man, that was the thing that I always tell young kids now, young guys, particularly when they get married, like, hey, I waited 10 years. My wife and I are having a great time. We go on trips. We do all this stuff. And I didn't realize, like, oh, wait, you could get to a point where you say the clock is running out and this may not happen.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And so I didn't want to bring it up on a podcast that I was having to guess because it would really just be me monologuing at somebody. So every once in a while when I see something going on in culture, I do one where I talk about something I see or think.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
I was just – I mean, I had the Peter Pan ideology of a lefty kid.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
But I think this has to do with the culture. When I talk to these people about legacy interviews and you say, Hey, to the, to the woman, you know, What did you want to be when you grew up? She was like, I didn't care. There were three options. I could be a teacher, a nurse, or a secretary. And what I really wanted to be was a mom.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And even the women that were going to school to get a law degree or to go on and get higher education, they would basically say, like, I was doing this, but I wanted to be a mom. But we went through – remember when we were in school, how much anti-pregnancy stuff there was in school? Like you got to carry around this baby and, oh, God, if you get pregnant in high school, life over.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
I mean that is straight-up indoctrination to say, hey, what we'd rather you do as a country is – I heard it said the other day. This is not my line. But like, hey – Women, they're almost magical. They can produce another human being inside of them, but you can only do it for these years. These very short years, like 18, maybe a little younger than that, till 35.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And then the magic goes away and you can't do it anymore. But what you really should be doing during those years is coming in and working 50 weeks a year and get two weeks off for vacation and we're going to give you this great salary instead of doing magic. And the reality is what we should have been telling women is like, This is the most magical thing you can do. Let's try and do this.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
But the consequence in our economy when we added all these women to telling them they needed to get jobs and they needed to – this would be the only way they'd be satisfied is we doubled the workforce and lowered the value of labor. And this has been bad for all of us.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Everybody at this table to make ends meet. That's right.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Yeah, home ec is something people in legacy interviews talk about a lot. And if you want to hear a good conversation, ask your mom what home ec was all about. Because you got the tail end. They used to do hardcore. Like, hey, you had to learn how to sew a dress. And you had to learn how to do all like actual canning where they're doing real pressure.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Like they had to do legit hard things because we weren't outsourcing all of this, you know, domestic chores to the grocery store or to the laundry, you know, whatever that is. People had to do it in their home. They had to teach them.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
I did. I did a little bit of that. Yeah.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Oh, every single genocide that's ever happened in history, you don't see them as humans. You see them as vermin. or devils, or diseased. And so to me, I always say this on my podcast, the most dangerous thing in the entire world is a human mob. And so you don't want to allow yourself to become a part of a mob.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Yeah. I mean the podcast. So the legacy interviews, what I came to realize is it's very difficult for me to be like, I'm going to go advertise to talk about legacy interviews because it's a, it's a, it's an expensive thing for people to get. And so the only way they're going to get it is if they know me and they trust me and they get to, to find out more about me.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And so the way that happens is people either hear me give talks or, Or they learned about me on the Vance Crowe podcast. And so I was like, look, I looked at the numbers very clear. 80% of my clients are from ag. And so if I can reach out and get to know more people in ag by producing a podcast that they find valuable, then more people get to know what I'm doing and what Legacy Interviews is.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And Legacy Interviews is the work that I'm doing that's been you know, the most deeply valuable that I'm adding because helping families pass down those family stories is of deep importance.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And I think it's the thing that allows agriculture to preserve probably the most valuable thing that it has, which is like that is agriculture is the part of our country that still holds the values that make us, made us who we were. And there's a lot that those people tell me in legacy interviews about being involved in the community, about raising kids, about,
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
how to handle stressful, bad situations, they're passing on to their family that if it doesn't get passed on, it won't get passed on and we'll lose that part of our culture. And I think so this work has been really, something really meaningful to me.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
People in, a lot of my friends, my neighbors, like a lot of people in St. Louis.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
careers that kind of go along you said like morticians are like a very well so that's it's a good point so a lot of times the families that do this are often when they have multi-generational businesses so i did a bunch of people that were grain elevator owners i also did a series of people that were floor installers because there were a couple of family businesses they all heard about it they all knew about it so they wanted to do it
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
But I mean, outside of that, it's, it's, you know, my neighbors find out and they're like, Hey, my dad's not going to be around forever. My kids aren't going to know him. If I want my kids to understand me, they got to understand my dad. So will you do this interview? And that's been really neat to interview the parents of my neighbors. Now you know your neighbor so much better.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And, like, you just have a much better relationship.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
He's just doing it to try to impress his father after all that.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And one of the ways you do that is by not looking at individuals in their crowd, by just seeing them as all bad. And maybe they are doing bad things, but be very careful not to label all of them, because really all that's doing is giving power to a leader that's whipping you up.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
I can't lean back. This studio is amazing, guys.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Tork is a great interviewer, and... So you guys know, I think Bitcoin is a deeply important technology. But normally I'm the one pushing that conversation on to other people that are like, all right, I guess we're going to talk about Bitcoin again because Vance wants to. But Torque had some very interesting questions about Bitcoin.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And what I loved about them was that they were very simple questions. And I think people oftentimes when they start talking about Bitcoin, they have like, let me ask you this complicated question. And his was just like very down to earth. And I thought like it takes a humble person. You guys are really good at it. It takes a humble person to ask a simple question.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And a simple question is going to get you the most beautiful answer. Complicated questions are often way more about the host than they are about the guest. And I was really impressed with the way. Also, I don't know if you guys met Sawyer.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
So he's this hulking dude, right? Oh, yeah. He's a freaking beast. I really wish I was that healthy.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
The fruit of the loins of Tork. Well, so Sawyer was, like, also very, like, listening, listening, listening, and then he'd ask you some very simple but deep question. I really felt like those two guys, for being a father-son duo, had something really good going on there.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And that they're both better podcasters because of the other one. Oh, my God. Yeah.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
This is different than Farm for Profit. Here we go. This is very different.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Well, I mean... They didn't know that he was a deckhand. Nobody ever asks me about the World Bank. And that's something that I think if more people knew or understood what that was all about, they would be like, wait, what are you talking about? And so you guys hit on that. But I mean, to your credit, literally no one has asked me about that.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
um what do you do when you're not podcasting i mean i have a two-year-old and a four-year-old so hobbies are like a long long right but eventually they're gonna be 10 and you know whatever like you gotta go do something yeah i mean i don't know like probably podcasting i could probably do legacy interviews as long as i i have breath in my lungs and i can keep the see like a farmer like
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
That, I think, is true, the passing down. In fact, I talk about this all the time. At Legacy Interviews, a few weeks after somebody gets done with an interview, I'll get a call from their son and they'll be like, you are not going to believe this.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Dad just took his first vacation in 40 years or mom finally said she's going to move off the farm and finally move in with her sister that she's always wanted to do. And for a long time I thought about this, like what is going on? And I realized when people get a chance to reflect on their lives and When they get a chance to be like, hey, this is the bolt that we went through.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
This is the hardship we did. Oh, and we did it. They look back and they say, remember that pregnancy? Remember how hard that was? Remember that when we had the family and all this drama was going on? But when you're living it, you get done with one crisis and you move to the next crisis and the next one and the next one and the next one.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
So I think one of the big reasons people don't let go of the reins is is because they haven't had a chance to sit down and tell their stories, which is the role of a grandchild is to ask granddad or grandma all these questions so that way they can be like, oh, I'm going to go from being this productive to-do person to being the wise person, and I don't need to be in charge.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
But that's why I'm always telling people, if you don't do it with legacy interviews, do it yourself. The first step towards succession planning isn't about, hey, how are you going to hand down the farm? It's going to be, how did you do this? What should we know? Tell me about a time when you got hurt. What was the way you handled this problem?
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And people will... You'll watch the magic as they let it go because they've never actually sat down and thought about it. Just like I hadn't thought about the World Bank until you guys asked me about it.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Or if you're only seeing the grandkids on FaceTime. Right.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
But the way grandma tells you about, you know, the thing that happened to her when she was a little kid is you're shaving carrots and she cuts her hand and now we got to go handle this. And now we're telling about, oh, I don't worry. I did that too. And it's not happening. And so if it's not going to happen, you've got to find a way to make it happen.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
I think there's like an orientation issue, and without that, granddad sits there and he never leaves. The thing that you and I, all three of us are in right now, is the to-do years of our lives where we're just like, I've got to get this thing done and this thing done and this thing. We don't have any hobbies. But the reason we don't have any hobbies is because we're so wound tight.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Well, when you're 65 or so, when you reflect and you let that go, all of a sudden you're like, Actually, I did always want to take a vacation. Well, why didn't we take it? Well, we couldn't take a vacation because we had crises, but now we don't have crises.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Well, you want to talk about the family business. It's even more of a family business than ag even. Like, almost nobody goes into the mortician world from outside. But if you grew up where, like, the lower floors in your house were where they did the funerals, like, You're probably going into that business.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Wait, let me just say this real quick about your wife. Tanner's got one of those wives that when you're like flicking through on Twitter, you're like, wait, that's a beautiful woman standing next to Tanner.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
This is changing though now because – and I've seen it firsthand. I mistakenly said none of my employees went to college. One of my employees went to college. The rest of them didn't. And like there's no shame about it. There's like – it's not – like when they get together with other kids that are in college now, they don't have to worry about like when I was in school –
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
If you weren't in college, it was kind of like, oh, he didn't go to college.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
I didn't bring this up during the Ag Tribes report, but you said, I think people in ag should go to college. The point that I think is the turning point in our university system, we were probably all in college about the same time, was when they said you can no longer discharge your student loan debt in bankruptcy.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
At that moment, they created an instantaneous bubble because it meant that the borrower for college was a zero-risk loan. If you can get that kid to go to college and take out a loan, you 100% are going to get paid back on that. They can garnish your wages. It's stronger than even child support. And once that happened, now you watch the ballooning of the administrative group. Right.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
I think if you could take a year or two years and just work some job and then figure out what is it that I need to learn and what is the most cost-effective way to learn it, you're going to be better off.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
So that started, your audience probably knows about Jason Mock, who's this guy that does a bunch of weird farming, right?
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And so Zach asked me during COVID, hey, I'm going to do this field day, and I want you to come talk. And I was like, all right, that'd be fun. I know this guy, Jason, a little bit, and a couple of my buddies, the Ring Brothers, were going to go. And so we all hopped in a car and drove there and did it. And I met Zach there. And, and we were just joking about it today. He was wholly unimpressive.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
I didn't even, I didn't know his name. I didn't know anything after meeting him. But another one of our joint friends, this guy named Keaton Kruger, who's the great, we call him a node runner. He just connects with everybody, talks with everybody. He was like, I think, Zach, you need to meet Vance. And he just kept poking us until we had a phone call.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Little Vance was the middle child of seven in small town central Illinois. And I had very little connection to agriculture. We were about a block away from a dairy farm. And then when I was in high school, maybe middle school, the best way to make money was to go bale hay or detassel. So I had that kind of connection with it.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And that phone call led to me inviting Zach to do a podcast. And that podcast led to Zach having his dad do a legacy interview. And that legacy interview led to me going to his field day last year. And he may not even be on any of this stuff.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
He's the least interested in social media you could possibly be.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
He works for Trutera. That's his right there.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
He's a fascinating guy. Yeah, and Keaton and I, I don't even know how we met, but he's one of those people, he might hate to hear me say this, but on the spectrum, cannot help but tell you, no, that idea is wrong. That is incorrect. So I love being around Keaton, and if Keaton ever says, you should meet this person, then I'm like, all right, there's signal there.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
that's cool keaton kruger is one of the most interesting and so will he be there he will be he'll be yeah yeah yeah there's so many people that are going to be at this this uh stockcropper field day it's going to be awesome we should take business cards what yeah you think you think there's going to be a guy there named wes carney who used to work for john deary as an engineer and he's got all these ideas on uh the design process and how do you create new equipment and just neat neat guys
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
So I am, this is something I think about all the time. I hear people in legacy interviews talk about did they miss too much time with their kids or were they happy with how much they worked? And it's not what you see on TV. There are a lot of people that sit with me in a legacy interview and say, no, I am happy with how much I worked. I needed to work. The family needed it.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And so that makes me feel better when I'm away from my kids. But that is right now the highest pressure thing in my life. I have a two-year-old and a four-year-old. And like yesterday, I had to leave work at three o'clock to try and take my daughter to gymnastics and then afterwards make dinner and then play with them and do all these things. And I sit there and wonder,
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Is it better for me to be playing with them or is it better for me to be able to secure their future? You know, and I don't, I don't know the answer to that, but I can tell you that my four year old, when I go to bed, when she goes to bed at night, she asked me to tell her stories about when I was a little boy and she's not going to ask that question forever.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And so I guess I'm trying to front load as much as I can time with them now because the time with them later, they're not going to want as much or won't be as valuable.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
The only thing I wanted in the whole world was to get out of my small town. So I went away to school. I went to Marquette University. And like every kid that doesn't really know what they want to do, but they want to go away to school, I would ask people, what do you think I should study? And I was always like, well, I like talking with people. I'll go study communications.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Yeah, that's a weird. I've heard it before said that all boys and their fathers go through the same three transitions. You idolize your father, then you resent your father, and then you understand your father. And I think like, If I can get to that, that understanding.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
I mean, I know once I had kids, there were a whole lot of things about my dad that I was like, oh, you don't need my forgiveness for that. I get it now. You were not in the wrong. I was the one in the wrong. And I wonder if that's a phase that you go through with your daughters or not.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And so I got a degree in public relations, and I got all the way to the end of my degree, and I take an internship. And I do this internship, and I was like, wait, what in the hell are you talking about? This is what we're going to do every day for the rest of our lives? Like, I don't want anything to do with this. Yeah. So I left it.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
You guys, this podcast is a blast. I wish I was this relaxed on my podcast. I'm not. I think I'm going to take away a lesson of, like, hey, there's a way to get this sort of relaxed. You guys made me feel totally at ease. It was a lot of fun.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
This has been a wild good time, yes. Thank you.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Well, and I got to just eat the cheese off of it.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
You can find me on X at VanceCrow or LegacyInterviews.com or, of course, the Ag Tribes Report, which you can find on the Vance Crow podcast.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
I went off and became a deckhand on a ship and started traveling around the Western Hemisphere.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And this makes me feel good. I like that. I'm afraid I tell my story too much, so that's good. No. So I became a deckhand on this ecotourism ship, which traveled from, I got on in Vancouver and took it all the way down to the Panama Canal and through the canal. But what we would do is stop in one area and do a bunch of tours for like, you know, three or four weeks in Costa Rica and Panama.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And then on the other side, we'd go through the Caribbean and the islands. But this was a special ship because it was only 200 feet long, but it had a flat bottom. So it was the space between giant cruise ships and a private yacht was this thing because it only held about 140 passengers.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
It was like that, yeah. But this was for ocean-going ship. But because it was flat-bottomed, when you repositioned the ship, you got all the passengers off it because if you hit even a little wave – This thing was like a rubber ducky and things. So you'd like fly around, stuff would be flying around the ship. So I did that for about a year.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And then, uh, a buddy that I worked on the ship with said, Hey, you want to make some real money flipping houses. So this is before the housing crisis. So we bought a house and, and renovated it and sold it. And then I was like, you know, this isn't for me. So I, I ended up joining the U S peace corps and, uh, I moved to Kenya and
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
My mom's always fond of telling people that the Peace Corps tested my Spanish skills that I studied so hard in college. And then they're like, you know, I think we're going to send you to Kenya. Because I didn't study that hard. And then I did that for a while. And I ended up getting a terrible allergy. My dream was to be here in the Peace Corps. When I got told I was going to Kenya...
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
I was so dumb and so naive. I was like, oh, I wanted to go to a place that had real poverty. Because in my mind, Kenya was like the Switzerland of Africa. That's where people went on safari.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And then you get there and you're like, oh, these people are, you know, they have to pull a bucket of water out of a well. And that's if they're wealthy and they have dirt floors. Well, I was there for less than a year, actually quite a bit less than a year. And I ended up getting really sick. And it turned out I had an allergy. So broken out from head to toe in a complete rash.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And it turns out I'm a good Midwestern kid, totally allergic to poison ivy. And mangoes are in the same plant family as poison ivy. So they produce urashol in the peel of the skin. And so I was sitting there, terrible allergy, and I was like, man, this would be awful if I didn't have all these mangoes to eat. Because I didn't know.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
So I came home early, ended up, the buddy that I bought a house with had bought an old wooden yacht that had a fire on it. So we took it up in Northern California and pulled it out of the water to fix it. And I took a job in public radio. So that's where I learned how to do radio and then decided I didn't want to be up in Mendocino anymore. And so I went to graduate school.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
I'm trying to accelerate this because it's too slow.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
So Mendocino was a wild place. Do you guys know anything about Mendocino? No. So Mendocino is like true Northern California. People oftentimes will say, oh, San Francisco is Northern California. Bullshit. Like that's Central California.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Mendocino is the place that, you know, the people that think Berkeley, California is too conservative, they move to Mendocino, right?
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And then they're living among all the loggers.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Well, Bakersfield would be on the internal side of the state, so you'd be in the agriculture.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Yeah, but this would be the opposite. So the people that think Berkeley is too conservative, they're like, oh, I want to go be where my real liberal hippies are. Oh, I got you.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And so, but like, that's the Emerald Triangle. That's where all the weed was grown before legalization happened all over. And I ended up, you know, I liked it there, but I knew that there's not much there. It was like going, moving to small town, middle of nowhere. So I went to graduate school, studied negotiations, and then went to work at the World Bank.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And the World Bank was, what I was thinking was, this is where I'm finally going to get to be at a place where you can make a difference in the world. Because I had always thought, you know, the Peace Corps, the reason they weren't able to save the world is because they didn't have enough money or public radio. They could, you know, do great things.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And I get to the World Bank and I'm like, oh, these guys have all the money. So we're going to finally be able to solve the world's problems. And that was when I came crashing into the reality that giant bureaucracies are actually pits of corruption. And it was the worst place on earth. And so I... Not to sugarcoat it. Not to sugarcoat it.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
But I want to say that as emphatically as possible, because like... And later when I went to work at Monsanto, people thought terrible things about that place, but they thought great things about the World Bank. And I can tell you that it was actually the inverse was true. The World Bank was a terrible place. Nice people, great, great people.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
But the core mission of the World Bank, I want nothing to do with. And so I ended up meeting my wife, getting married. And I said, well, my dreams are all shattered. What are your dreams? So she had been an aerospace engineer. And she said, I don't want to do this. I want to be a physical therapist. And one of the best physical therapy programs in the country is in St. Louis.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And so I said, let's move to St. Louis. So we moved there.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
Well, it makes sense when you think about aerospace is all about movement through fluids, and so is physical therapy. It's about how does your body move? Why is it that you're injured? It's because your body isn't moving in the proper way. And so she studied a very specific kind of physical therapy called movement systems integration and became very, very good at that.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
She's one of the best physical therapists in the country. People fly in from all over the U.S. to when nothing else will work, they come see her. And then that's when I was living in St. Louis and Monsanto knocked on my door and said, would you like to interview for this job, director of millennial engagement? And I thought that was the funniest thing I'd ever heard in my life.
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And I said, sure, I'll come interview because who doesn't want to see inside of North Korea?
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
I had done some things that had made some waves there. So I was running a communications company and I found a company that was like, we want to get on the map. We want to make a splash. And I'm always like, oh, really? Well, I've got an idea for you. That becomes a theme in my life later. But I said, well, hey, Bitcoin's becoming a thing. How about you pay my whole contract in Bitcoin?
Farm4Profit Podcast
F4F - Vance Crowe - Agriculture Through Storytelling
And so the work that I did for them was accept payment in Bitcoin for work, and it got them huge amount of publicity because nobody was dealing in Bitcoin. So we went on radio stations, and it was written in the business journal. And so that kind of stuff that I was doing in St.