John

Why I chose agriculture

I kind of fell into place with Aaron, my older brother. We started our own operations, but work together. It’s exciting.

Our business approach

We’ve been trying to expand for years and have been doing so little by little and on a low equipment-need basis. We had been running a lot of older equipment. We didn’t ever want to tie up a lot of money in equipment. Now, we’re very confident in expanding this way.

We feel that each brother brings something different to the table and we appreciate each others’ qualities and skills, whether it’s work ethic, book-keeping or general knowledge.

Using FCSAmerica’s digital tools

I like that FCSAmerica has digital tools that can analyze our financial information to generate charts, pie graphs and balance sheets. We learn something about our balance sheet every time we look at it. The digital tools help us hone our positives, find our weaknesses and become more efficient.

Challenges and opportunities

Getting started was one of the biggest challenges: to build equity and earn the confidence of our lender. The markets have softened up, but we feel like there’s still opportunity. As a young producer, there’s opportunity with low interest rates.

How we make decisions

There’s a lot of communication involved. We can sit down and talk about what’s coming next, what we need to do and what we don’t need to do. We talk strategically about managing equipment, buying land and expanding other ways. When we look at expanding, we feel we’ve got an excellent team behind us.