Hi, friends, this is John. Welcome to the regenerative agriculture podcast. I have all kinds of

fun conversations here, usually related to agronomy, but today we're going to talk about

communications and how we communicate effectively with each other and with the stakeholders that

are around us because the reality is that farmers are the foundational stewards of our ecosystems

and communicating the scope of the work that we are doing is fundamental to being as a society.

Our culture and our society collectively here in North America has drifted so far from understanding and appreciating what's happening and what's going on.

Last week, I was at an

event where a speaker said that 80% of six graders today don't know where hamburger comes from.

And that is pretty surprising. That's pretty surprising. I'm just laughing at man's reaction here.

And so communication is a piece that's going to become really important.

So I've had several really awesome conversations with Vance Crow.

And Vance, I'm delighted to have you here in the podcast.

I'm really looking forward to getting into this conversation.

You are a very articulate communicator.

One of the best that I've had the privilege of having conversations

with. How did that all come about? Oh, man. It's great to be here, John. I, you know, when you are

articulate, which people tell me that I am, you don't really know that you are. It's just the way that

you think. But I will say this. I grew up in a family of seven kids and my siblings were way better athletes.

They were way better, you know, better looking, stronger. I think in a lot of ways, the only way I was ever going to get anybody to pay attention to me was if I was able to take that very small amount of time that I had and say it in a way that would make other people understand. I think that, you know, almost all of our skills are developed painfully. And I think that was the pain I was dealing with. How did that reflect itself in your professional career? What is what is your journey and pathway been like? Tell us a little bit about your story and how you got to the scope of the work you're doing today. Well, I grew up in small town central Illinois and the only thing I wanted to do in the whole world was to get out of small town central Illinois and I couldn't see its value. And I went away to school and as I was trying to get away to school, I would always ask people like, what do you think I should study? Because I wasn't an engineer and I didn't like singing and I didn't want to do these other things that were a clear path. And people are like, well, you seem to like talking to people. You should go into communications. And so I went and studied this thing that colleges have abstracted to a level that it's almost not valuable at all.

It's like, you know, here it's the three pillars of great communication or the, you know,

the four concentric triangles or whatever it is.

And I go all the way through school and I kind of have this mentality of like, I'm just

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