Rodney and Gabe chatted with Ben Brame ( https://www.contango.live/ ) in this episode. Ben dropped on us the unique combination of insightful and funny nuggets, and we ended up in place we didn't expect where Ben asks us to think about "what information did you have access to" when a given price, like the contract high, trades. It's a far kinder and reasonable filter on how to asses pricing performance - a great idea, still some work left on execution building out that benchmark. We may have ultimately stumbled on the secret benchmarking sauce - how did I perform against my own sense of procrastination. While the crew briefly touch on the expected failure of SNAP funding's impact on commodity prices - we just wanted to share a bit more on our thoughts with regards to SNAP: A desire approaching a sense of duty to keep our friends, neighbors, communities, and ultimately fellow humans well fed is something Rodney & Gabe believe is and should be shared beyond beliefs, political or otherwise. Seeing this critical service, SNAP, fail to be funded through legislation or emergency action is incredibly frustrating and disappointing to see. If you're lucky enough to have extra resources, if you haven't already we strongly encourage you to reach out to your local foodbanks and lend a hand.

Gabe and Rodney talk with Rob Huston, co-founder of Innovative Grain about the challenges small businesses face in extracting actionable insights from their data, even when they're doing everything "right".

As harvest fast approaches in northern Illinois Rodney & Gabe catchup the weekend after their respective town fall celebrations. If that's not enough for you, they go back to the well covering some fundamental and tricky parts of understanding volatility and option pricing.

Here's to wishing you dry (but not to dry) weather and a safe harvest!

On this episode Rodney & Gabe are joined by Heather Gieseke of BounceAg. Heather, a long time on and off again co-worker of Rodney and Gabe shares some surprising insights from the carbon/sustainability side of ag in that it looks like the demand for increases in sustainably in the supply chain continue to grow. However, figuring out how to engage with that demand from the farm still remains tricky, for which we're grateful for Heather 's advice on how to approach things.

This episode Rodney & Gabe are joined by Dean Durdan of Orchard Point commodities. Dean shares his current view of the market, and goes quite deep into how he thinks of managing risk as a merchandiser (get that flat futures price risk outta' here!) and how to put that hat on when managing farm income.

In this episode Kathryn Glowinski helps the team lean into the drift theme pretty hard - answering questions about how companies approach information security in a world where AI enables almost anyone take a reasonable shot at accessing information they have no right to. While AI in its current state allows people to skip developing expertise, the group considers how effective this actually is today. Unsurprisingly the conversation goes a bit down the nerd mine with some strong analogies using world of warcraft - so approach with caution.

Rodney & Gabe convince Jake Mower to join this episode to have a talk about benchmarking pricing performance. Jake is the top of the call sheet when Gabe and Rodney face problems they're not sure how to approach, and he didn't disappoint. Jake brings his usual thoughtful approach to how one might realistically think about benchmarking someone's pricing performance and some common pitfalls.

Rodney & Gabe caught up with long time friend, Nate Brabec. Nate is a row crop farmer in Central NE and runs a modest cow-calf operation as well. Our excuse to get him on was to chat about Cattle markets (they're still going up!) but Nate, with his typical humility dropped some gems on his approach to grain marketing and accepting the inevitable frustration of missing the highest prices.

This episode Rodney and Gabe are joined by Marcel Artal, CEO of Hedgit.  Marcelo has built a solution, incorporating AI that helps identify key moments to make pricing decisions.  Topics are across the board in this one from reconciliation of pro-capitalist orientations with guaranteed minimum incomes, understanding the difference in how commercial operators and traders have to look at the market, and giving your brain a brake in a painful price environment 

Rodney and Gabe are joined by Kevin Bauer to talk a bit more about current market volatility. While this year certainly stands out at a bit of a surprise at its historically low levels we do touch on that the temporal relationships hold true. Next episode Rodney and Gabe expect to chat with Marcelo Artal CEO of hedgit.ai about how the world looks from Argentina these days, and how Marcelo uses AI to significantly cut down on how many decisions he needs to make when helping Argentine farmers manage price risk.