Aug 7, 2026 · 18 min · 11 segments
*"Every bed here should generate $1,000 of value."* That's Ben Hartman, standing on 15,000 square feet...a third of an acre. Twenty years ago, he started on a 1,000-acre corn and soybean operation…
It's a book that changed how a lot of people on this channel think about farming as a business.
Well, his farm grew in terms of success and revenue, but the area he was farming, it got smaller, and he made more money doing it.
The whole cultural script says, "Add land, add tractors, add crops, add accounts, add staff.
It's in the milieu, it's in the cultural milieu that you have to get bigger every year and do more, especially in farming.
Where I grew up, you had to buy a bigger tractor every year, put up more grain bins, expand the amount of land, rent more land or buy more land, put more seeds in the ground and sell more, and that's how you stay in business.
And I think that mindset continues and trickles down even to the small-scale grower.
You go back two years, we had probably double the amount of products for sale that we do now, and we made less total money doing it.
Over the past two years, I've removed a lot of products from our product catalog, and we've become a more profitable business as a result.
It's a book that changed how a lot of people on this channel think about farming as a business.
Well, his farm grew in terms of success and revenue, but the area he was farming, it got smaller, and he made more money doing it.
The whole cultural script says, "Add land, add tractors, add crops, add accounts, add staff.
It's in the milieu, it's in the cultural milieu that you have to get bigger every year and do more, especially in farming.
Where I grew up, you had to buy a bigger tractor every year, put up more grain bins, expand the amount of land, rent more land or buy more land, put more seeds in the ground and sell more, and that's how you stay in business.
And I think that mindset continues and trickles down even to the small-scale grower.
You go back two years, we had probably double the amount of products for sale that we do now, and we made less total money doing it.
Over the past two years, I've removed a lot of products from our product catalog, and we've become a more profitable business as a result.
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