Get a Real Job

What I actually do and why it matters

“Must be nice. All you do is drive around and go to games and out to eat? Maybe you should get a real job, or at least text me and tell me how this is done.”

That was from a Snapchat follower a few weeks ago, while I was at my son’s hockey game in Austin. It was a charity night. They raise serious money for cancer research. And yeah, it bugged me. The way things do when they land on a nerve you thought you’d already killed.

Then something flipped.

You know what? Yeah. I do get to go to hockey games. I do get to fly to conferences and ride around in trucks talking about dirt. I’m grateful as hell for it, because five years ago I was borrowing money from my mom to make rent, and ten years ago I got fired from a farm I’d run for over a decade on the same day I found out I had a baby on the way.

So if it looks like I’m just driving around, good. That means the system is working.

Here’s what nobody sees.

I spent the better part of a decade bouncing through farm jobs and car dealerships. Every boss told me I was the best help they’d ever had. Every one of them found a way to keep me on the line without ever letting me off it.

Promised the farm. Didn’t get it.

Promised commissions. Got cut out.

Promised a future. Got a pink slip.

But somewhere in that mess, I started learning the thing I actually do now.

One of those jobs had me drawing zone maps and writing variable-rate prescriptions across 100,000 acres.

Training was basically: you’ve farmed your whole life, figure it out. So I did. The maps looked professional. Farmers were happy. But the dirty secret of variable-rate mapping is that a good zone map should last forever. Soil doesn’t move.

The underlying characteristics that drive yield, variability, texture, organic matter, and drainage patterns are all baked in.

If your map changes every year, it means you never actually found the foundation. You were just repainting the house and calling it a renovation.

I didn’t know that was a problem because I didn’t know there was another way. Neither did anybody else.

Then I got out of the system long enough to start asking questions nobody inside it was asking.

The first year, we cut 25 pounds of nitrogen and 25 pounds of phosphorus on a couple of 20-acre chunks and watched the yield monitor. Flat. Good enough to keep going.

Year two, we ran a block trial with five nitrogen rates from 110 to 230 pounds per acre. Dry year. Rain-limited.

At $3.75 cash corn and $550 urea, 110 pounds was the most economical rate. The yield plateau came at 140. We raised a hell of a crop on a lot less than conventional wisdom says you need.

Is this enough data to blow up 30 years of recommendations? Of course not. But it’s enough to make you ask whether those recommendations were ever actually proven on your ground.

That’s when I stopped being a seed salesman and started being whatever the hell I am now.

And what I am now doesn’t have much patience for the way things have always been done.

What I actually do is call BS.

I call BS on fertilizer rates that haven’t been questioned in 30 years.

I call BS on zone maps that rearrange themselves every spring because nobody wants to admit the foundation is made of sand.

I call BS on retailers who show up at your kitchen table to scare you out of trying something new, because they’re afraid of what happens when you realize you’ve been overpaying for a product or service that never really served you.

I can do that because I’ve been on every side of this thing.

Hired man. Zone mapper. Crop scout. Elevator man. Seed salesman. Guy getting screamed at across a counter about a problem he didn’t create. Fired, broke, lost, and starting over more times than any one person should have to.

And I’ll be damned if I’m going to get to the other side of all that and not tell the truth about what I see.

What I actually do now is help farmers figure out what their dirt is doing. And whether the money they’re spending on it is doing anything back.

I scan it. I test the biology. I write a plan based on what the data says, not what the sales rep hopes. And then we measure whether it worked.

That’s it. That’s the whole job.

Turns out getting fired was the best thing that ever happened to me. 

I got pushed out into open water and had to learn to swim.

So yeah. Maybe it looks like all I do is drive around and go to hockey games and out to eat.

Brainwork is invisible. Results aren’t.

If you’ve got dirt and you’ve got questions, I’m not hard to find.

Adam Kuznia | True Grit Agronomy | Follow the Data, Not Dogma