“Fearless Farm Finances” with Paul Dietmann and The Cutting Edge Podcast

Jacob Grace: One of the ways that people may have encountered you is that you’ve coauthored a book called Fearless Farm Finances, which is now around ten-years old, and I know there have been a couple different editions of it. Would you like to say a little bit about how that came together and what some of the things were that you changed in the in the updated version?

Paul Dietmann: The impetus behind the book: I was I was serving on the board of MOSES (Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service), which is now become Marbleseed and at the at the annual conference, the annual Organic Farming Conference, which is one of the biggest organic farmer conferences in the country. They have a bookstore and they sell a lot of books. I think I was on the board at the time… it was probably $40,000 or $50,000 worth of books they would sell during the course of a three-day conference. We had a board retreat shortly after the conference – one year we were talking about the bookstore and talking about the fact that there were really very few books about farm business management and even the ones that that were out there. It was a handful like maybe two or three is about all that were out there, and they only got about as deep as enterprise budgeting.

So a couple of us on the board and Jody Padam, who was the finance director and MOSES at the time, started talking about how we really need a publication or a book that covers every aspect of farm financial management from balance sheets, income statements, cash flows, investment analysis, record keeping, pretty much anything that any topic you can think of that pertains to farm financial management should be in one reference material. And that’s really what what led to us writing the book.

We got a grant from the USDA Beginning Farmer Rancher Development Program to write the first edition of Fearless Farm Finances, which, as you said, Jacob came out probably ten years ago. We we rewrote the book and came out with a second edition. That was maybe five years ago or so. We’ve talked a lot of workshops based on the content of the book. I don’t even know how many copies it sold at this point, but it’s it’s really been widely accepted, which I’m happy about.

We tried to write it in a way that it was technically accurate, that it followed the recommendations of the Farm Financial Standards Council, which is an organization that came out of the farm crisis in the eighties. It was an attempt to get lenders, accountants, and farm financial educators all on the same page, and agree on a set of standards that we that everyone follows: to look at balance sheets; analyze ratios; look at cash flows and income statements, all those sorts of things. So we wrote the book in a way that’s technically accurate, that follows the recommendations of our Financial Standards Council, but we wanted to write it in a way that it didn’t look like a textbook and didn’t feel like a textbook, but it was more farmer friendly and that a farmer could pick it up and read it and sort of see themselves in it and figure out easily how they can get a hold of the finances of their farm operation.