Tough Talks
More than 150 farmers and ranchers crowded into the presentation building at Menoken Farm on July 30, filling every seat and lining the back wall. Toddlers wandered between rows of chairs, and producers with suncreased faces and widebrimmed hats stood shoulder to shoulder as people from nearly every corner of rural North Dakota settled in for a full day of soil health, grazing discussions and crop demonstrations. The Burleigh County Soil Conservation District’s “Crops, Covers and Cows” field day has always drawn interest, but this year’s turnout showed how eager producers are for conversations that reach beyond agronomy and into the future of agriculture itself.
That future, keynote speaker Dallas Mount told them, depends on something many producers would rather not talk about: profit.
Mount, CEO of Ranch Management Consultants and a farmer-rancher himself, stepped to the front of the room with the kind of energy that makes people sit forward. He introduced himself as being from Wheatland, Wyoming — “the center of the universe,” he joked — but quickly shifted into the kind of candor that has made his Ranching for Profit school one of the most influential business-management programs in agriculture.