An INFJ man’s read arrives before the evidence for it does, and comes out of his mouth dressed as worry. Rooms grade the dress. He gets called the best mind in the building by people who have already settled that he is not the one who will decide.
The first year I rode with him I could not work out why we kept stopping at the ends of fields.
We’d get out, and I’d walk in twenty rows and start pulling plants, because that is how I was taught, and when I came back out Oren Kolstad would be standing where the gravel meets the headland looking at the ditch.
“What are we looking at.”
“Last year’s stalks are still standing in the waterway,” he said. “And Dewey put the whole quarter to corn again.”
I said the stand looked good.
“The stand’s fine.”
I asked him what he wanted me to write down.
He thought about it long enough that I got in the truck. Then he came around and got in his side and said, “Write down that we should talk to him about splitting that quarter.”
I asked him what I should put for the reason.
“Put that the residue’s not breaking down.”
That was the reason he gave and it was true and it was not the reason. Two years later Dewey Yost had a disease problem across three hundred acres of that farm that cost him more than my salary, and Oren had known it in the truck in a way he could not put on a scouting sheet, and the sheet I turned in that afternoon said heavy residue, monitor.
Oren came to Sundeen Ag Service in 1994 out of a state agronomy program and stayed thirty years. He is a tall, slow-moving man who apologizes when he has to interrupt somebody, which he does about twice a year. He does not carry a tablet in the field. He grew a beard the year his mother died and shaved it off two years later and nobody in the company remarked on either event, which tells you as much about us as about him. He is the only person I have ever known who will stop talking in the middle of a sentence, wait, and then finish a different one, and the second one is always the one worth hearing. Farmers who liked him would drive past two other retailers to have him look at something. Farmers who did not like him found him vague.
Ryeland is nine hundred people at the north end of Wexler County. Sundeen’s elevator went up in 1948 and the leg still has the original name on it under two coats of somebody else’s paint. Anvil Ag bought us in 2013 along with five other retailers and put us all on one brand and one platform, and there are people in this county who still say Sundeen’s when they mean us and always will. Sig Sundeen sold at seventy-one and lived nine more years and came in for coffee most mornings and never once said anything about how we were running it, which I have decided was a kind of restraint and not indifference.
Here is what this company thought about Oren Kolstad, and I did not make it up, and I said it aloud in a pickup on a gravel road, at a moment I had picked, and it changed a man’s life.
Everything he ever told us turned out to be true and none of it was ever actionable.
You can defend that. I defended it for years and I could still get most of a room to nod. He would come into a winter planning meeting and say he was worried about the seed treatment on the eastern accounts, and somebody would ask what he was seeing, and he would give you three things that were not evidence — how a dealer’s rep had answered a question, what a field’s edge had looked like the previous fall, a hunch about a hybrid’s genetics that he could not source. Nobody in that room could do anything with that. You cannot take I’m worried to a grower and ask him for eleven dollars an acre.
So I took it, and I turned it into a recommendation with a number on it, and I sold it, and it worked, and it worked again, and my book went from six hundred thousand to a little over three million between 2006 and 2019.
Bo Nieland ran the region for most of that and had one response to anything anybody said in a meeting that did not come with arithmetic attached.
“Great. Now bring me the number.”
Prepay
The thing an outsider never gets about this business is that the entire year is bought before anybody can see it.
Prepay season runs from about the end of harvest through the thaw. A grower sits down with you in a shop with a space heater going and commits money — real money, six figures on a decent-sized operation — for seed, chemistry, fertility, and a program that will not be tested until the following summer. The decisions that matter most are made at the greatest possible distance from the evidence. That is not a flaw in the business; that is the business. Everybody in it is buying a year they have not seen.
Which means the whole trade runs on a claim about the future, and the claim has to be defensible in a shop in winter, with a spreadsheet, in front of a man who has a banker.
I have watched agronomists get very rich being confidently wrong and I have watched one get pushed out of the industry being unshowably right, and if you want to know what this piece is about, it is about the fact that those two outcomes are produced by the same instrument.
Coffee at the scale house is at six and has been at six since before I was hired. It is the same five or six farmers and whichever of us is around, and the entire content of it is weather, basis, and an argument about seed-plot signs that has been running since at least 2011, when a company put a plot sign a quarter mile from the plot, on ground belonging to a man who was not running their seed, and the sign stayed up all season, and there are people at that table who consider this the defining scandal of the decade. Sig used to sit at the end and not participate. I have not missed many of those mornings in twenty years and I have never learned one useful thing at that table, and I would not give it up.
I judge market swine at the county fair, which I take far more seriously than anybody has ever wanted me to. I have done it since 2011. There is a right way to do it, which is that you handle every animal and you say your reasons out loud over the microphone so the kid who placed fourth knows exactly what he is looking at next year, and there is a wrong way, which is to go fast because it is hot and the ring is full of flies and everybody’s people are waiting on the grandstand for the auction. I go slow. In 2018 I placed a barrow eighth that had won its class at two other fairs and I said why into the microphone for a solid minute and a man came down off the rail afterward to tell me what he thought of that, and I would do it again tomorrow. My wife has stopped attending.
Edges
Nothing Oren did in a field was mysterious once you knew to watch for it. He simply never went where you go.
You scout a field by walking a pattern in it. He walked the boundary. He looked at waterways, at the tile outlet, at what the neighbor had done, at the six rows nearest the road where the drift and the compaction and the last three years of a man’s decisions are all visible at once. He’d look at the ditch on the road side and the fenceline on the far side, and by the time he came back to the truck he had a picture of the whole operation, and he could not tell you which piece of it had produced the picture, because it had not come to him in pieces.
That is the part that killed him in this company. Not the reads. The reads were extraordinary. It was that when a room asked him how he got there, he could not lay it out in order, because there had been no order.
He also never, in thirty years, said I recommend. It came out as worry. I’m concerned about the eastern accounts. I don’t feel good about the way that rep answered you. I’d hate to see Dewey put that quarter to corn again. Every one of those sentences was a conclusion he was certain of, and every one of them arrived in the grammar of a man asking you to be careful.
Marit Braddock came to us in 2015 and does something close to what he does — different, worse in some places, better in others — and delivers it the same way, and has now been told twice that she needs to be more assertive in front of growers. When Oren hedged, this company was disappointed in him: he had it, he just wouldn’t drive it home. Nobody has ever been disappointed in Marit, because nobody ever put her in the running to be disappointed about. Those two failures are not the same failure and the second one runs on different arithmetic, and it belongs to a different account than mine.
We were in Dewey Yost’s shop in 2016 with the space heater going, doing his prepay, and I watched the two halves of this happen inside three minutes.
Dewey wanted to go with a cheaper fungicide program across the whole farm. I had the sheet. Oren said, “I’d think hard about that on the home place.”
“What’s wrong with the home place.”
“Nothing’s wrong with it.”
Dewey looked at me. I said that on the home place we were seeing enough pressure historically that the return on the full program had been running about three to one and I’d rather protect the yield we’d already paid for, and I put the sheet in front of him with the number circled, and he signed.
In the truck afterward I asked Oren what he’d actually been going to say.
“That’s the field his dad had,” Oren said. “He’ll farm it after he quits farming everything else. He’s not going to make a money decision on that one and he shouldn’t have to hear one.”
I wrote the call up that night. Under recommendation I put: full program, home place, return three to one.
The Truck
In the winter of 2019 Anvil created a director of agronomy services position for the group.
There were two of us it could go to. Bo Nieland drove me from Ryeland out to a bin site on the county line for a reason neither of us pretended was the reason, and somewhere on that gravel he asked me straight out what I thought about Oren for it.
I said what I said. I said that Oren was the best technical mind any of us would ever work with and that in twenty-five years he had never once brought a decision into a room finished, and that the job was a decision job.
Bo said that was more or less where he’d landed.
I want to be accurate about my own state in that truck, because I have had six years to make it prettier. I was not conflicted. I had wanted the job for a long time. I had a sentence ready and it was a true sentence, and I have spent six years on the question of how much harm gets done in the world by true sentences released at moments the speaker chose.
I got it in the spring. Oren was made technical services specialist, which was a real title with a real raise attached, and which had no accounts on it. The reasoning, which I helped write, was that his expertise should be leveraged across the whole group instead of being tied up in one territory.
Between 2013 and 2023, Anvil moved nineteen people from a field or store role into a management role with a budget. Fourteen were men, and I counted that on a plane in 2024 and it did not tell me what I wanted it to tell me, which was that I was in a different category from the people who do that. What it told me was that I was in the fourteen.
What leveraging his expertise across the group turned out to mean, in practice, was that he had a truck, a phone, and no reason to be anywhere. The territory managers had their own agronomists and did not need his and were not evaluated on using him. He got pulled into the hard calls — a lawsuit-shaped drift complaint, a bin of grain nobody wanted to own, the two or three times a year an operation is falling apart and somebody has to go sit in the kitchen. I would defend every one of those assignments. What I would not defend is the shape they make when you put three years of them on one page, which is a man who is called when it has already gone wrong and is not called when it is being decided.
Six months in, Oren asked me in the parking lot whether he was going to get ground back.
I said we’d look at it after the season.
“That’s fine,” he said, and then he stood there for a second the way he does, and I got in my truck, and that is the whole of that conversation, and I have carried the second half of it — the part where he waited, and I did not ask what he was waiting to say — for six years.
Nine Thousand Acres
He gave notice in the winter of 2022.
There was no meeting about it. He told me in the hallway by the chemical room and asked me not to make a thing of it. What I did was write an email to the branch that said Oren was transitioning to pursue independent consulting after a distinguished career, and I wrote that sentence myself, at my desk, knowing that he had been transitioned by us over three years in a series of small decisions I had signed, and he came by my office the next morning and thanked me for how I’d put it.
At the winter meetings that year I had three beers at a table of managers from the other branches and told them that Oren was the most talented person I’d ever worked with and that he had simply never wanted it badly enough. That got repeated. It got back to Ryeland inside of a month. It got back to Marit, who worked for me, and who said nothing about it for two years and then said it once, in my office, on her way out to a farm call.
“You know he told me to take the eastern accounts,” she said. “When they were his. He walked me around all of them.”
I said I hadn’t known that.
“He wanted it badly enough to give it to somebody,” she said, and put her hat on.
Then last year happened.
I sold a program across about nine thousand acres in the eastern part of the county, and it was a good program, and I built it the way I have always built it, off the platform’s prescriptions and the trial data and twelve years of what has worked on that ground. It failed. Not spectacularly — nothing burned down — it just quietly did not perform, on eleven operations, and three of them have moved their business, and one of the three is a family that has bought from this location since 1971.
I have gone through it forty ways. Weather explains part of it. A hybrid explains part of it. What is left over is the part I cannot explain, and the shape of what is left over is exactly the shape of a thing somebody should have said in a shop in the winter and nobody did.
I have his cell number. I have not called it, and I have a reason, which is that it would be obscene to call a man for free what we would not pay him to stay for. That is a good reason. I have examined it maybe thirty times and it holds up every time, and I notice that it also happens to be the reason that requires me to do nothing.
Yost’s Ground
Dewey Yost had a stroke in 2023 and his daughter Nadeen came back to run the farm, and she retained Oren directly, and this spring she asked me out to look at a drainage question I had no business being asked about, which I took as a courtesy and which I now think was something else.
He was already there. We stood on the headland of the same quarter I had walked into on my first day, and Nadeen asked him, straight, whether she should split it.
And he laid it out.
He started with what her father had done with that ground for thirty years and why, and then he told her what the residue in the waterway had been doing since 2009, and then he gave her the disease history with the years on it, and then he told her what he thought the next four years looked like on that farm given what she’d said about her brother’s intentions, and he did all of it in order, and every step was checkable, and it took him maybe six minutes, and at the end of it he said, “So I’d split it, and I’d do the north half first so you can quit if you hate it.”
Nadeen said okay.
I stood on that headland holding a coffee.
I had spent fifteen years believing that I was the part of the machine that made Oren usable. That the reads came out of him unformed and I gave them a shape and a number so they could be acted on, and that this was a partnership, and that my half was the half that was scarce.
He had just done it himself, cold, in front of a customer, at a level I have never operated at.
Neither of us said anything about it in the truck. He asked about my daughter’s volleyball. I told him she’d quit.
The Binder
Anvil finally emptied the old Sundeen office over the winter, and I spent two evenings out there with a dumpster and a work light.
The sales training binders were in a cabinet under the stairs. There are nine of them, from a course this company ran in 1998, and the third section is on communication styles, and it has the grid in it — sixteen boxes, four letters each, with a paragraph under every one.
The worksheets are still in the binders. Everybody’s, in their own handwriting, from 1998.
Oren’s is in the fifth binder. Four letters at the top in his small square capitals — INFJ — and under it a paragraph about insight and quiet conviction and caring deeply about people, which is the sort of thing that gets a page like that dismissed by exactly the people who most need the rest of it.
The rest of it is in the back, in a section nobody in that course would have read. The habits are not a list; they are a sequence, strongest first, and the last two are ones a person can only produce on purpose, slowly, with effort, and usually badly under pressure. The full run of it, top to bottom, sits on the page that handles this type by itself, one of the sixteen the grid was cut from.
What sits first in his sequence does not gather. It resolves. Everything coming in gets run forward to where it is going, continuously, underneath, and what surfaces into the man’s actual attention is the destination — arriving whole, arriving early, and arriving without the road that got there. He is not withholding the derivation when a room asks for it. There is no derivation to withhold. There was never a first step, a second step, and a third.
The second one in the sequence is what does the delivering, and it delivers to the person, not to the room. The conclusion comes out shaped for whoever has to live with it. That is why I’d hate to see Dewey put that quarter to corn and I’d think hard about that on the home place are the same sentence in two registers, and it is why a man with total certainty sounds, in a conference room, like a man asking permission. From the far end of a conference table that sounds like hedging. What it actually is, is an address — aimed at whoever is going to have to live with the thing, in the only register he owns. A room that has already decided is not going to be handed a conclusion by that man, because handing it over would be pointless and he can see that it would be pointless.
And the last two in the sequence, the ones the page said come slowly and at cost, are these. Producing a chain of reasoning on demand, in public, under a hostile question. And working the concrete thing in front of you in the present tense — the number on the sheet, the room as it actually is, the close.
Those two are the whole of what a company like this one grades on. They are also, more or less, all I have. I have a modest version of the first faculty and a good version of the last two, and that combination is worth a director title and three million dollars a year in a book, and the man who had the first faculty at a level I have never seen in anyone got a role with no accounts on it and a nice email.
The binder has one more thing in it that I want on the page. Two sections later there is a page instructing the salesperson to identify the customer’s four letters from their office and their handshake and to mirror the type back at them to shorten the sale. That is what this company bought the vocabulary for in 1998. It was in the same binder, twenty pages apart, the whole time.
While I am on it: if your read keeps turning up inside decisions that do not have your name on them, and the reason you are given for where you have landed is always about how you come across rather than about what you were right about, you have a question about who gets credited and how a company records it, and questions like that come with rules and with people attached — a rep, an employment lawyer, whoever fields that kind of complaint where you work. A page of sixteen boxes belongs nowhere near it and cannot be made to serve.
I asked Marit about it, because she’d done the instrument again in a leadership program a couple of years ago. She said the version she took came with a note on it: sit the thing again a month on and roughly one person in three lands somewhere different on at least one of the letters, while the continuous scales underneath hold considerably firmer than the letters they collapse into.
“So it’s a conversation,” she said. “Not a slate.”
I said that we had used it as a slate anyway, without ever once opening it, which is worse.
Booking Season
Prepay opens in six weeks and I have to write next year.
I have the platform and the trial data and the same twelve years of history I had before, and I have been out three times to the eastern ground since harvest and stood on it, and I do not know what I am looking at. I have never once written that sentence down before and I am forty-nine years old.
Two things came apart on me out there, and they are not the two I would have picked.
The residue in Dewey’s waterway, first, which I had put on a sheet in 2009 as heavy residue, monitor and had carried ever since as the day I watched a man have a hunch. I had it filed as a hunch for fifteen years. What he was doing on that headland was reading four years forward off a stalk that had not broken down, and I put the stalk on the sheet and threw the four years away, and I have been throwing that part away every working day since, on every sheet, for fifteen years.
Then the parking lot in 2019, where he asked about ground and I said we’d look after the season and he said that’s fine and then stood there. I have always heard that pause as him having nothing more. He had something more. He was doing what he had done for thirty years, which was decline to hand a conclusion to a person who had already decided.
I do not know what to do about Marit and I am aware that this is the live question and not the historical one. I have her on the slate for next year and I have written the words needs to project more conviction with growers on a form, this year, since all of this, and I looked at the sentence for a while before I saved it and I saved it, because I could not think of the true thing to put in that box, and the box has to have something in it.
Sig Sundeen’s stool at the scale house is still there and nobody sits on it, which I think is ridiculous, and which I also would not be the one to change.
I saw Oren in the parking lot at the co-op in Ryeland last week. He looks the same. He is doing scouting and sampling for eight or nine operations out of a truck he bought used, and he is on his wife’s insurance, and he was buying a filter.
I said I’d been out to Yost’s and that Nadeen seemed to have a handle on it.
“She does,” he said.
I said I might call him sometime about the eastern accounts.
He said, “Sure,” and put the filter in the truck, and then he looked past me at the sky over the elevator for a second in a way I have watched him do a thousand times, and I stood there and waited for him to tell me what he saw, and he said it was good to see me.
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.