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Professional practice

Farmers & food producers

Seasonal judgment, stewardship, uncertainty, technology, price, labour, and succession.

12 questions, 148 answers on the record, from 117 members. Every question is asked in FLAPSS wording — nobody answers as anybody else.

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Worth reading

What makes you want to keep learning?

Steve Jobs

Co-founder and chief executive of Apple; co-founder of NeXT; chief executive of Pixar

One of the saints in my life is this woman named Imogene Hill, who was a fourth-grade teacher who taught this advanced class.

Recorded · Playboy · 1985

Shinya Yamanaka

Stem cell biologist; Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, 2012

I got very interested in so-called “knockout mouse” technology. Knockout mouse is a way to study the function of genes. You know, both human and mouse have approximately 20,000 genes.

Recorded · Academy of Achievement · 2008

Richard Feynman

Theoretical physicist; Nobel laureate in Physics, 1965

The questions of the students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I’ve thought about at times and then given up on, so to speak, for a while.

Recorded · Engineering and Science / Caltech Magazine · 1985

Read all 9 →

Every question in this questionnaire

  1. What does a season teach that cannot be learned from a plan or a spreadsheet? —
  2. What responsibility do you have to leave the land, water, or herd better than you received it? —
  3. How do you make a high-stakes decision when weather, biology, and markets are all uncertain? —
  4. What are you best at that nobody watching would notice? 26
  5. Which technology improved the work, and which traditional knowledge should it not replace? —
  6. What makes you want to keep learning? 9
  7. What do consumers misunderstand about the price of producing food well? —
  8. Which problem are you still chipping away at? 12
  9. Who makes your work possible behind the scenes? 2
  10. How has a setback or failure set you up for later success? 69
  11. What are you unwilling to optimise? 30
  12. What makes a farm or food business possible for the next generation to continue? —

Who has answered

Members with enough answers in this questionnaire to be worth arriving at — listed A–Z, not ranked by count.

  • Barack Obama

    44th President of the United States, 2009–2017; United States Senator from Illinois 2005–2008

    2 answers United States b. 1961

  • Bill Clinton

    42nd President of the United States, 1993–2001

    2 answers United States b. 1946

  • Charlie Munger

    Vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, 1978–2023

    2 answers United States b. 1924

  • Chris Hoy

    British track cyclist, 1994–2013

    2 answers United Kingdom b. 1976

  • David Vélez

    Co-founder and chief executive of Nubank

    2 answers Colombia

  • DS
    Derek Sivers

    Founder of CD Baby; author of Anything You Want

    2 answers United States

  • Desmond Tutu

    Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town; chair of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission; Nobel Peace Prize, 1984

    2 answers South Africa 1931–2021

  • Edmund Hillary

    Mountaineer and explorer; first ascent of Everest, 1953

    3 answers New Zealand 1919–2008

  • Jensen Huang

    Co-founder, president and chief executive of NVIDIA

    2 answers United States b. 1963

  • John Lewis

    U.S. Representative from Georgia, 1987–2020; Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee 1963–1966

    3 answers United States 1940–2020

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