By 8:30 on Sunday morning at the Illinois Beef Expo, we’d been awake five hours and already showed one heifer, basically a half day’s work.
It was the kind of cold where the sunshine coaxes you into thinking it was decent out, but then you can’t feel your face. My daughter and I walked back to the barn with her heifer, and I thought of the breakfast sandwiches I’d brought in an hour before, uneaten.
It’s a fact of life that warm biscuits are indeed better than cold ones.
Turns out, my husband was a step ahead. There he was, standing in the barn in front of a roaring diesel infrared heater with those sandwiches balanced on a pitchfork grill, semi-carefully protected by paper wrapping. The Grill Master at work.
Farm boys passed by and told their parents of the ingenuity. John Sandidge, fellow farmer and tired show dad from Chandlerville, Ill., stopped and laughed: “There’s a farmer at work!”
Where there’s a will (for a warm breakfast), there’s a way, no?
Dollars and sense
I reflected on that scene last week as I made my way through the trade show at the 2026 Commodity Classic. It was a lot warmer in San Antonio than in that cattle barn. I could feel my face the whole time.
Not surprisingly, nearly every conversation there centered on one main idea: farm profitability and lack thereof.
Still, Commodity Classic was a massive trade show with 400 exhibitors, including every major and minor equipment, seed, chemical, fertility and financing company you can think of. Plus major national commodity organizations and their members. Fleets of staff, all good ag people. A record-breaking 12,000 people in attendance.
The reality? A bazillion dollars sitting in a single place, and a bunch of farmers who might not break even this year.
And yes, that’s rich coming from the pages of the company that puts on the Farm Progress Show. I get it. But putting on my farmer hat, it was impossible not to consider how equipment costs have risen, and how input costs continue to rise — despite claims by U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins that farm input costs are declining.
Farmers beg to differ.
But a conversation with Eric Snodgrass held a glimmer of hope, as they often do. Snodgrass is a meteorologist formerly with the University of Illinois, then Agrible, now Nutrien. He spends the winter speaking at farm events all over the Midwest, and he told me of an Arkansas farmer who’s sat in the epicenter of agricultural production problems for the past year.
“I refuse to let myself lose sleep over this,” that farmer told Snodgrass. His problems forced him to innovate.
“I’ve had to look at new ways to generate revenue through my farm. Sometimes, the bad times push you to find new and great things.”
Innovate or fail
That’s not rocket science, of course. But it’s truth on the farm and beyond.
In “How to Lead” by David Rubenstein, the author asked leading CEOs when they knew their business would be successful. Without fail, they said it was when their assets were cut in half — maybe in the oil embargo, or the dot com burst, or the 2008 housing crash. Farmers of a certain age would point back to the 1980s. They had to figure out how to become efficient. And better.
Down the road, today’s farmers may well look back on the mid-2020s and recall how they used trade wars and terrifically high input costs to get better.
The good news from Rubenstein’s book? Those CEOs reported that when their companies came out on the other side of the down cycle, they were phenomenally successful — because they were forced to become lean, gain perspective and seek out different technology. In the hard season, they did all the thinking they didn’t do when times were fat and all was well.
It’s a good reason to lean into a trade show or farm show, because it’s prime time to ask hard questions and get better ideas. Talk to your farmer friends and find out what’s working for them.
And that Arkansas farmer who refuses to lose sleep? He’d tell you the 2026 crop year is a time for ingenuity. It’s a time for efficiency.
It’s time to flip the biscuits and keep cooking.