Farm Finance: The Fractional CFO Strategy Every Farm Needs

Tim Hammond of Hammond Realty, 30 years in farmland, returns six months after he told the room the market was splitting. His read now is that the Saskatchewan farmland market is not weakening, it is maturing. Listings are fewer but bigger, the dollar value of farmland listed is at a ten-year high, and affordability and access to capital are the real limits. With Dan Aberhart, a live poll and a few questions from the room, he covers how families can get a transfer done, and the meeting he now holds for himself, with his accountants, lawyer, lender and wealth advisors at one table.

Dan Aberhart opens a GTF Productions live session on a farm’s busy-season paperwork and the question he hears most: what can I take off my plate first? The session then follows the room. Audience members ask about tracking grain basis behind a company login and reconciling soil test lab reports. Dan builds a basis tracker demo, a soil test tracker and a personal morning dashboard by voice while they watch. He is open that the basis numbers in the demo were fictional, and that on data security he is a visionary, not a security expert. The takeaway for people in agriculture is that the starting point is context and one small job, not a tool.

Dan Aberhart talks with Patti Durand, author of The Future Leader, and Chris Corbett of Brightrack about why working hard and waiting is not a succession plan. They ask three questions: how well you know yourself, your farm business and your farm family. The tension is that operationally strong successors and founders who are doing their best are both missing the conversations that would prepare them for the handoff. The takeaway for people in agriculture is to start the conversation early, say what you don’t know, and agree on the outcome you want before you ask advisors for options.

Dan Aberhart opens by pointing out that every grain farmer already has millions of dollars riding on prices, whether or not they trade, and asks who is teaching them to manage it. Ryan Bonnett explains that dealerships train farmers to run machines but nobody trains them to use the marketing tools, so many people stumble in, get burned, and write the whole thing off. He tells his own story of early wins followed by a long losing streak and a coach who asked what his system was. The rest of the hour covers why discipline matters more than the choice of strategy, how options act as price insurance, how to think about crops that can't be hedged, and what he teaches in the course. Producers leave with a better question to ask about every sale they make.

Dan Aberhart opens this Productions session with a reframe: the hardest problems on a farm, or in any business, usually aren't mechanical, they're the ones between people, and most operators have never actually diagnosed them. He walks through his own results on three personality assessments, Kolbe, CliftonStrengths, and the Enneagram, treating them the way a farm already treats a soil test, a tissue test, and a soil map, three signals pointing at the same underlying truth. Robert Woolf joins partway through to describe using AI to negotiate his own return to the program, both of them let an AI interview them for hours, then let the two AI agents handle most of the actual deal-making before either person read a final draft. Stefano Zanotto adds a newer cohort member's perspective on what the same diagnostics revealed about his own blind spots. Producers walk away with a concrete way to stop guessing at why people, including themselves, keep running into the same friction, and a real example of AI handling a negotiation that would normally require an uncomfortable conversation.