He's All About 'Net Profit Per Acre'

Field Work

Documentary, Society & Culture

5 • 652 Ratings

🗓️ 13 July 2022

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As a college professor, Allen Williams had a fancy degree and tenure. In 2000, he quit that job-for-life to become a farmer. But he knew he couldn’t do it the conventional way. So Allen minimized inputs and focused on “net profit per acre,” which he says is more important than yield or “net profit per head.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, everybody. Welcome to the field work. I'm Tara Vaynerdison. And I'm Zach Johnson.
0:07.5	Do we have a different script? I think we may because there was this kind of an awkward pause here last time as well.
0:15.5	You're supposed to say, by the way, thank you. Somebody's supposed to say, take the Walton Family Foundation.
0:20.6	Oh, okay. I don't Family Foundation. Oh, okay.
0:21.2	I don't have that.
0:22.2	Oh, maybe I can.
0:23.0	Oh, I think the deal is you printed it and I added it in later.
0:26.7	Sorry about that.
0:27.5	Ah, yes.
0:28.1	Okay.
0:28.7	Zach is killing those trees by printing everything.
0:32.5	Sound bite that, Todd.
0:37.2	You know, I'm going to be a little. Todd.
0:47.3	Today we are talking with Alan Williams, a farmer with a PhD.
0:49.2	His story is kind of complicated.
0:54.1	He grew up on a farm in South Carolina, then went to college for like a really long time. He got a BA, an MS, and a big
0:58.0	old PhD. He worked as a college professor, then he up and quit. So he worked as a college professor,
1:05.7	and then he just up and quit. I imagine that's not very common. I mean, I'm trying to summarize a bit. So how about we welcome Alan Williams onto the show to tell us more about his story?
1:17.9	Well, I'll be very happy to share that story with you. Okay, let's jump back here, Alan. My understanding is that you grew up on a farm. Can you give us a little bit of that history where that was
1:27.9	and what was happening on your family farm when you grew up? Yep, grew up on my family's farm in
1:32.5	South Carolina in the Piedmont region. So that's the region between the coastal plains of the East
1:41.5	Coast and the Blue Ridge Mountains. And my family farm has been there since 1840,
	...

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