The Crew-12 mission, SpaceX’s 20th human spaceflight, launched at 5:15 AM Eastern on February 13 from Cape Canaveral in Florida. It’s expected to dock with the International Space Station today, February 14, at 3:15 PM, and you can watch the event below as it happens. By the time the mission’s Dragon capsule docks with the ISS, it will have traveled approximately 34 hours since lift off. Inside are NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, European Space Agency’s Sophie Adenot and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.
The four spacefarers are joining the three remaining passengers onboard the ISS after Crew-11 flew back to Earth a month earlier than planned. If you’ll recall, NASA made the decision to cut their mission short after one of the crew members had a medical issue that instruments on the ISS aren’t capable of diagnosing. While the crew member was stable, the agency decided to bring the whole mission home out of an abundance of caution.
Crew-12 will be staying on the ISS for eight months and will conduct a number of scientific experiments, including ones related to human health and ones meant to advance technologies for future missions to the moon and Mars. They will study how pneumonia-causing bacteria can lead to long-term heart damage, for instance, and will also look into how a person’s physical characteristics can affect blood flow during spaceflight. NASA’s live coverage for the docking starts at 1:15 PM.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/watch-the-nasa-spacex-crew-12-mission-dock-with-the-iss-180000450.html?src=rss
Doom scrolling is doomed, if the EU gets its way. From a report: The European Commission is for the first time tackling the addictiveness of social media in a fight against TikTok that may set new design standards for the world’s most popular apps. Brussels has told the company to change several key features, including disabling infinite scrolling, setting strict screen time breaks and changing its recommender systems. The demand follows the Commission’s declaration that TikTok’s design is addictive to users — especially children.
The fact that the Commission said TikTok should change the basic design of its service is “ground-breaking for the business model fueled by surveillance and advertising,” said Katarzyna Szymielewicz, president of the Panoptykon Foundation, a Polish civil society group. That doesn’t bode well for other platforms, particularly Meta’s Facebook and Instagram. The two social media giants are also under investigation over the addictiveness of their design.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The HID subsystem changes were merged this week for the ongoing Linux 7.0 kernel merge window. Among the Human Interface Devices (HID) work this cycle were supporting more guitars while also adding more device IDs and different laptop quirks…
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Register:
Telcos likely received advance warning about January’s critical Telnet vulnerability before its public disclosure, according to threat intelligence biz GreyNoise. Global Telnet traffic “fell off a cliff” on January 14, six days before security advisories for CVE-2026-24061 went public on January 20. The flaw, a decade-old bug in GNU InetUtils telnetd with a 9.8 CVSS score, allows trivial root access exploitation. GreyNoise data shows Telnet sessions dropped 65 percent within one hour on January 14, then 83 percent within two hours. Daily sessions fell from an average 914,000 (December 1 to January 14) to around 373,000, equating to a 59 percent decrease that persists today.
“That kind of step function — propagating within a single hour window — reads as a configuration change on routing infrastructure, not behavioral drift in scanning populations,” said GreyNoise’s Bob Rudis and “Orbie,” in a recent blog [post]. The researchers unverified theory is that infrastructure operators may have received information about the make-me-root flaw before advisories went to the masses…
18 operators, including BT, Cox Communications, and Vultr went from hundreds of thousands of Telnet sessions to zero by January 15… All of this points to one or more Tier 1 transit providers in North America implementing port 23 filtering. US residential ISP Telnet traffic dropped within the US maintenance window hours, and the same occurred at those relying on transatlantic or transpacific backbone routes, all while European peering was relatively unaffected, they added.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Vim 9.2 brings significant” Also included is a new
enhancements to the Vim9 scripting language, improved diff mode,
comprehensive completion features, and platform-specific improvements
including experimental Wayland support.
KDE Frameworks 6.23 is out with stability updates, memory leak fixes, and broad improvements across the KDE libraries and developer platform.
Anthropic saw visits to its site jump 6.5% after Sunday’s Super Bowl ad mocking ChatGPT’s advertising, reports CNBC (citing data analyzed by French financial services company BNP Paribas).
The Claude gain, which took it into the top 10 free apps on the Apple App Store, beat out chatbot and AI competitors OpenAI, Google Gemini and Meta. Daily active users also saw an 11% jump post-game, the most significant within the firm’s AI coverage. [Just in the U.S., 125 million people were watching Sunday’s Super Bowl.]
OpenAI’s ChatGPT had a 2.7% bump in daily active users after the Super Bowl and Gemini added 1.4%. Claude’s user base is still much smaller than ChatGPT and Gemini…
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attacked Anthropic’s Super Bowl ad campaign. In a post to social media platform X, Altman called the commercials “deceptive” and “clearly dishonest.”
OpenAI’s Altman admitted in his social media post (February 4) that Anthropic’s ads “are funny, and I laughed.” But in several paragraphs he made his own OpenAI-Anthropic comparisons:
“We believe everyone deserves to use AI and are committed to free access, because we believe access creates agency. More Texans use ChatGPT for free than total people use Claude in the U.S… Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people. We are glad they do that and we are doing that too, but we also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to billions of people who can’t pay for subscriptions.
“If you want to pay for ChatGPT Plus or Pro, we don’t show you ads.”
“Anthropic wants to control what people do with AI — they block companies they don’t like from using their coding product (including us), they want to write the rules themselves for what people can and can’t use AI for, and now they also want to tell other companies what their business models can be.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Following Intel recently discontinuing a number of open-source projects, this week they formally discontinued their Quantum Passes open-source project that was intended to provide additional passes for their LLVM-based compiler in the Intel Quantum SDK…
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has reportedly been asking tech companies for information on accounts posting anti-ICE sentiments. According to The New York Times, DHS has sent hundreds of administrative subpoenas to Google, Reddit, Discord and Meta over the past few months. Homeland Security asked the companies for names, email addresses, telephone numbers and any other identifying detail for accounts that have criticized the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency or have reported the location of its agents. Google, Meta and Reddit have complied with some of the requests
Administrative subpoenas are different from warrants and are issued by the DHS. The Times says they were rarely used in the past and were mostly sent to companies for the investigation of serious crimes, such as child trafficking. Apparently, though, the government has ramped up its use in the past year. “It’s a whole other level of frequency and lack of accountability,” Steve Loney, a senior supervising attorney for ACLU, told the publication.
Companies can choose whether to comply with the authorities or not, and some of them give the subject of a subpoena up to 14 days to fight it in court. Google told The Times that its review process for government requests is “ designed to protect user privacy while meeting [its] legal obligations” and that it informs users when their accounts have been subpoenaed unless it has been legally ordered not to or in exceptional circumstances. “We review every legal demand and push back against those that are overbroad,” the company said.
Some of the accounts that were subpoenaed belong to users posting ICE activity in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania on Facebook and Instagram in English and Spanish. The DHS asked Meta for their names and details on September 11, and the users were notified about it on October 3. They were told that if Meta didn’t receive documentation that they were fighting the subpoena in court within 10 days, Meta will give Homeland Security the information it was asking for. The ACLU filed a motion for the users in court, arguing that the DHS is using administrative subpoenas as a tool to suppress speech of people it didn’t agree with.
In late January, Meta started blocking links to ICE List, a website that lists thousands of ICE and Border Patrol agents’ names. A few days ago, House Judiciary Committee member Jamie Raskin (D-MD) also asked Apple and Google to turn over all their communication with the US Department of Justice to investigate the removal of ICE-tracking apps from their respective app stores.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/homeland-security-has-reportedly-sent-out-hundreds-of-subpoenas-to-identify-ice-critics-online-135245457.html?src=rss
By partnering with CodePath, AI biz aims to modernize how people learn to programCan using AI teach you to code more quickly than traditional methods? Anthropic certainly thinks so. The AI outfit has partnered with computer science education org CodePath to get Claude and Claude Code into the hands of students, a time-tested strategy for seeding product interest and building brand loyalty.…
Apple has steadily expanded home screen customization on the iPhone over the past few years, and iOS 26 continues that trend with more visual control over app icons. Building on the changes introduced in iOS 18, the latest update lets you resize icons, remove app labels, apply system-wide color tints and make icons translucent using Apple’s new Liquid Glass design language.
Most of these options live in one place: the Customize menu, which appears after entering edit mode on the home screen. While iOS still doesn’t allow total freeform icon placement or third-party icon packs without shortcuts, the tools Apple provides are now flexible enough to dramatically change how an iPhone looks and feels. This guide walks through how to customize app icons and layouts using the options available in iOS 26, with a focus on icon size, color, appearance and arrangement.
All home screen customization starts the same way.
Go to the Home Screen.
Touch and hold an empty area of the Home Screen background until the apps begin to jiggle.
Tap Edit in the top left corner, then select Customize from the menu.
A customization panel appears along the bottom of the screen. Changes made here apply across all home screen pages at once, rather than on a per-page basis.
From the Customize menu, you can:
Adjust icon size
Change appearance (e.g., Dark)
Make icons translucent with a clear look
Add a color tint to icons and widgets
One of the simplest changes in iOS 26 is also one of the most visually impactful. From the Customize menu, tap the icon showing two app squares of different sizes. This switches the home screen to Large App Icons mode.
When large icons are enabled, app labels disappear entirely and the icons themselves expand to fill more of the grid. This creates a cleaner look and makes apps easier to tap, particularly on iPhone models with larger screens. The tradeoff is that fewer icons fit on each screen and spacing between rows becomes more pronounced.
To revert to standard icons with labels, repeat the steps and tap the same button again.
iOS 26 offers four icon appearance styles: Default, Dark, Clear and Tinted. These options are available from the top row of the Customize panel. From the Customize panel, you can tap the sun icon across all options in the top left-hand corner to toggle wallpaper dimming. This generally makes app icons and labels easier to read.
The Default option keeps icons looking as the developers intended, with no system-wide color or transparency applied.
Selecting Dark applies a darker background to supported app icons and widgets. Apple’s own apps fully support this mode, and some third-party apps do as well, though many retain their original colors. When Dark is enabled, iOS can also dim the wallpaper slightly, which may help reduce power usage on OLED displays.
The Clear option enables translucency across all apps on the Home Screen. This removes all color but retains app labels. The layered, frosted-glass effect changes depending on the background image. Clear icons can be paired with Light, Dark or Auto styles using the options along the bottom of the Customize panel.
Tinted mode allows all supported app icons and widgets to take on a single color scheme. After selecting Tinted, color and saturation sliders appear at the bottom of the screen. Adjusting these changes the hue applied across icons, creating a uniform look that can range from subtle pastels to high-contrast monochrome themes.
If you want a specific color from your iPhone’s wallpaper, select the eyedropper tool, then tap and hold while dragging the cursor across the screen until you land on your chosen color. Like the Clear option, you’ll be able to select from Light, Dark or Auto when adjusting the Tinted settings.
The Auto option allows icons to switch between light and dark appearances based on system-wide light or dark mode.
App placement works the same way it did before iOS 26, but the visual changes introduced by larger icons and spacing make layout choices more noticeable.
Apps can be rearranged by accessing an empty space on the Home Screen, then tapping and holding until the apps start jiggling. From here you can drag icons to new positions. The grid remains fixed, meaning icons cannot overlap or be placed freely, but there is more flexibility in how empty space is used.
Icons can be clustered toward the bottom of the screen, aligned to one side or arranged to frame a wallpaper. With large icons enabled, the gap between the dock and the first row of apps becomes more pronounced, but it cannot be filled with additional icons.
Changes apply across all home screen pages, so reorganizing one page does not affect icon size or appearance on another.
Despite expanded customization, some long-standing limitations remain. iOS 26 does not support per-app icon color selection, custom icon packs without shortcuts or freeform icon placement outside the grid. Icon appearance settings apply globally, not per page or per app.
Widgets, lock screen customization and focus mode filters add additional layers of personalization, but those tools sit outside the scope of the home screen Edit menu.
iOS 26 gives iPhone users more control over the look of their home screen than ever before, even if Apple’s approach remains structured. By combining icon resizing, appearance modes and careful app arrangement, it’s possible to create a layout that feels cleaner, more personal and easier to use without relying on workarounds.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/how-to-customize-your-iphone-home-screen-with-ios-26-130000798.html?src=rss
In addition to this week’s GNOME 50 beta release, there were also other exciting developments in the GNOME ecosystem…
An anonymous reader shares a report: Israel has arrested several people, including army reservists, for allegedly using classified information to place bets on Israeli military operations on Polymarket. Shin Bet, the country’s internal security agency, said Thursday the suspects used information they had come across during their military service to inform their bets.
One of the reservists and a civilian were indicted on a charge of committing serious security offenses, bribery and obstruction of justice, Shin Bet said, without naming the people who were arrested. Polymarket is what is called a prediction market that lets people place bets to forecast the direction of events. Users wager on everything from the size of any interest-rate cut by the Federal Reserve in March to the winner of League of Legends videogame tournaments to the number of times Elon Musk will tweet in the third week of February.
The arrests followed reports in Israeli media that Shin Bet was investigating a series of Polymarket bets last year related to when Israel would launch an attack on Iran, including which day or month the attack would take place and when Israel would declare the operation over. Last year, a user who went by the name ricosuave666 correctly predicted the timeline around the 12-day war between Israel and Iran. The bets drew attention from other traders who suspected the account holder had access to nonpublic information. The account in question raked in more than $150,000 in winnings before going dormant for six months. It resumed trading last month, betting on when Israel would strike Iran, Polymarket data shows.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Welcome to our latest roundup of what’s going on in the indie game space. A whole bunch of compelling games arrived this week, and Sony dropped some news about more that are on the way to PS5 and other platforms during its State of Play stream on Thursday.
For one thing, I didn’t have a prequel for Neva, one of my favorite games of the last few years on my bingo card. I’m very much looking forward to checking out that DLC next week.
It’s really neat that Motion Twin and Evil Empire — the studios behind Dead Cells and its expansions, respectively — are getting to make a proper Castlevania game. While it might not be developing many games in-house anymore, giving external studios the chance to run with its franchises is a very smart move on Konami’s part. Not least because we’re getting a Silent Hill game set in Scotland as well.
I’ve had Big Walk on my radar since the game was first shown off at The Game Awards a couple of years back. This is a co-op multiplayer game from Untitled Goose Game studio House House and publisher Panic in which you’ll go on adventures with your friends and help each other through puzzles and other challenges using voice, text chat and gestures. You can just hang out with your buds and watch the sunset or put their binoculars into the ocean too.
Expect Big Walk to arrive later this year on PS5 (including as a Monthly Game for all PS Plus members), Steam and Epic Games Store. There will be support for cross-platform play between PS5 and PC.
Also, Remedy Entertainment is technically an indie studio. As such, I can mention here that I cannot wait for Control Resonant, which is probably going to break my brain with all the perspective shifting Remedy showed off in the gameplay trailer.
As with any successful heist, planning and execution are equally paramount in Relooted. Setting things up properly before hightailing it out of a museum with artifacts reminds me a bit of Teardown albeit without all the voxel destruction. But Relooted is a lot more than that.
It’s an anti-colonialist story in which parkour enthusiast Nomali and her crew take back African artifacts (all of which exist in real life) from Western museums. I did encounter some performance issues while playing on PC, but that didn’t take too much away from the enjoyable, in-the-moment action and having to adjust escape routes on the fly when things go awry. Nor did the framerate drops detract one bit from the important story that South African studio Nyamakop is telling here.
Relooted is out now on Steam, Epic Games Store and Xbox Series X/S. It typically costs $15, but there’s a 10 percent discount on Steam until February 24. It’s available on Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass.
Little Nightmares and Little Nightmares 2 developer Tarsier Studios is back with another slice of atmospheric horror. In Reanimal, two siblings set out to save their missing friends and escape from an island they once called home. However, they’ll have to face a litany of dangers, including a lot of creepy creatures.
I haven’t played Reanimal yet, but the various trailers have have always grabbed my attention. It’s out now on Steam, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch 2 for $40.
Reanimal has single-player, couch co-op and online co-op modes. A friend pass that allows you to invite a pal to play with you online at no extra cost should be available soon.
Mewgenics had been in the works for a very long time before it arrived this week. It was initially announced in 2012 when co-developer Edmund McMillen was still part of Super Meat Boy studio Team Meat. After years of Mewgenics being in development hell amid McMillen focusing on projects such as The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, he’s finally seen the game through with the help of longtime collaborator Tyler Glaiel.
This is a turn-based strategy roguelike in which players breed cats and then take kitties with wild mutations and blends of powers into combat. There’s a lot to explore and discover here. McMillen and Glaiel claim the main campaign runs for over 200 hours. Having more than 10 character classes (each with 75 unique abilities), more than 900 items and hundreds of bosses and enemies could well ensure that things stay fresh enough to justify that run time.
Reviews have largely been positive for this one, though the humor didn’t click for some critics. Mewgenics is out now on Steam. It usually costs $30, but you can save $3 if you buy it by February 24.
Rogue Point is a co-op shooter for up to four players that’s worth paying attention to, in large part because it’s from the team behind Black Mesa, the fan remake of Half-Life. It’s now available in early access on Steam, typically for $20, though there’s a 15 percent discount until February 26.
This appears to be in the vein of tactical shooters like Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy games. There are objective-based missions and a Counter-Strike-style economy for unlocking and upgrading gear. While there are only four maps as things stand, Crowbar Collective has implemented a system that randomizes the layouts to keep things fresh.
Steam Next Fest is almost upon us. Many developers and publishers are preparing to release demos for their games, but some are arriving ahead of the event, such as one for Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War! The demo is a blast and it feels like the kind of retro Starship Troopers shooter I wish we’d had in the late ’90s.
I really enjoy Helldivers 2, which takes a lot of inspiration from Starship Troopers. In turn, this game draws from Helldivers 2, with features like tossing a flare to tell a support craft to send gear down to the planet’s surface. I just wish the mech was a bit more fun and effective to use.
If you would like to know more about this game from Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun developer Auroch Digital and publisher Dotemu, you can check out the demo on Steam. Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War! is coming to Steam, GOG, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch 2 on March 16.
A demo for a line-based puzzle title called Rope popped up on Steam this week ahead of the full game’s arrival in April for about $3.50. The aim is to connect ropes of the same color to clear them. More rules will be introduced over time to make the game more challenging.
While Rope looks charming enough, I mainly wanted to include it in this week’s roundup because I thought developer Ikuo’s comments in the press release were quite lovely.
“My games are neither flashy nor extravagant. Instead, I focus on preserving the essence of play. Like hide‑and‑seek or tag — simple rules that draw you in until you forget the time,” Ikuo said. “Rope brings that timeless spirit of play into a modern puzzle game. It is intuitive, endlessly replayable and quietly absorbing. I aimed to create a small, understated experience that stays with players long after they put it down. I hope this game leaves even a small impression on someone’s heart.”
The Mermaid Mask is a project that SFB Games put on the backburner after another one of their games became a hit (that would be Crow Country, which was one of our favorite games of 2024).
This point-and-click puzzle game is the latest installment in the long-running Detective Grimoire series. A teaser trailer doesn’t give away too much, but I do enjoy what we see of the hand-drawn 2D animation here.
Here’s hoping this is a worthy follow-up to Tangle Tower, an Apple Arcade game we enjoyed very much. We’ll find out for sure when The Mermaid Mask lands on PC and consoles this summer. In the meantime, you can check out an updated demo that just hit Steam ahead of Next Fest.
The premise of The Stairwell is practically identical to that of The Exit 8. You walk through a small, contained scene multiple times. If everything looks okay, keep walking forward. If something is out of the ordinary, you turn around. Just try not to miss many anomalies. Rather than walk through corridors as in The Exit 8 (the film adaptation of which looks pretty promising), The Stairwell sees you going up or down a seemingly infinite tower as you try to reach the goal.
This anomaly game, which is from Hidden Palace, has been on Steam since last year. It’s coming to PS5 on February 19. Expect jump scares.
Let’s wrap things up for this week with an arcade game that requires just two inputs: one button to turn left, and another to veer right. You can’t control the speed of your craft in Ship v Maze. All you can do to avoid crashing and ending your run is to react quickly enough to steer your ship through various obstacles. It’s all about putting your reflexes to the test.
Ship v Maze is from Cosmic Droplet (aka solo developer Frederic Vanmol), It’ll hit Steam on April 2 for $4. A demo is available now.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/relooted-reanimal-and-other-new-indie-games-worth-checking-out-120000234.html?src=rss
Beyond all of the exciting Intel/AMD x86_64 changes and improvements to enjoy with the upcoming Linux 7.0, there is one notable ARM64 feature addition this kernel cycle…
Out beyond the orbit of Neptune lies an expansive ring of ancient relics, dynamical enigmas, and possibly a hidden planet—or two.
The Kuiper Belt, a region of frozen debris about 30 to 50 times farther from the sun than the Earth is—and perhaps farther, though nobody knows—has been shrouded in mystery since it first came into view in the 1990s.
Over the past 30 years, astronomers have cataloged about 4,000 Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs), including a smattering of dwarf worlds, icy comets, and leftover planet parts. But that number is expected to increase tenfold in the coming years as observations from more advanced telescopes pour in. In particular, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile will illuminate this murky region with its flagship project, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which began operating last year. Other next-generation observatories, such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), will also help to bring the belt into focus.
The Linux Memory Technology Device (MTD) subsystem updates have been merged for the Linux 7.0 kernel and include introducing Octal DTR “8D-8D-8D” support in SPI NAND for better performance…
Tanner Winterhof spent 15 years in the banking profession before dedicating himself full-time to Farm4Profit Media. During that time, he sat across the desk from hundreds of farm families—reviewing their financials, running loan scenarios, and watching some operations thrive while others struggled to stay afloat. The difference, he observed, rarely came down to who had the best ground or the newest equipment. It came down to who treated their farm like a business.
Growing up on a farrow-to-finish hog operation in northwest Iowa, Tanner Winterhof saw the ups and downs of commodity markets firsthand. That volatility is actually what pushed him toward a career in finance—he wanted that stable paycheck. But marrying into a cattle feedlot and row crop operation brought him right back to agriculture, this time with a banker’s perspective on what separates profitable farms from those just getting by.
The mission at Farm4Profit has always been helping farmers achieve higher levels of profitability. And after interviewing hundreds of experts—accountants, agronomists, succession planners, successful operators—a consistent theme emerges: the farms that run like businesses are the ones still standing when times get tough.
One of the most valuable lessons Winterhof learned in banking was that farmers shouldn’t go it alone when it comes to financial decisions. He consistently advises ag professionals to put together a team of advisors—people who know their stuff about finance, crops, marketing, and whatever else matters to the operation.
At minimum, an advisory circle should include a CPA who understands agriculture, an attorney familiar with farm estates and business structures, a banker who genuinely knows the operation, and ideally a facilitator who can help coordinate the bigger conversations—especially around succession. This isn’t about having more meetings for the sake of meetings. It’s about having the right expertise in the room when decisions need to be made.
Winterhof recommends setting an annual agenda with this advisory team. Review the financial roadmap, stress-test assumptions, and make sure everyone is aligned on where the operation is headed. The farms that do this consistently are the ones that avoid surprises and make better decisions under pressure.
One thing that separates business-minded farms from the rest, according to Winterhof, is a predictable meeting rhythm. Weekly operations meetings to address immediate issues. Monthly financial reviews to track cash flow and performance against budget. Quarterly strategy sessions to step back and look at the bigger picture.
The farms that implement this kind of structure report less conflict, clearer decision-making, and fewer surprises. When everyone knows there’s a regular time to discuss finances and strategy, problems get addressed before they become crises.
This becomes especially critical when multiple generations are involved. Process beats personality. Meeting charters, agendas, and clear decision rules reduce the kind of conflict that tears farm families apart. The structure creates space for the hard conversations that need to happen.
When Winterhof was building his loan portfolio, he developed an approach he called “Banker on the Bench.” Anytime there was a land auction coming up, he’d run scenarios for farmers before they ever asked. If 40 acres was hitting the market, he’d calculate what their down payment and annual payment would look like at $10,000 an acre all the way up to $15,000 an acre. That way, they walked into the auction knowing exactly what they could afford.
Every farm operator should be doing this kind of analysis—not just for land purchases, but for any major capital decision. What happens to cash flow if corn drops below $4? What if interest rates climb another percent? What does retirement look like under different scenarios? Stress-test financing and retirement needs under multiple market conditions. The farms that do this aren’t caught off guard when markets shift.
One piece of advice that comes up repeatedly from the experts Winterhof interviews: write it down. Start a living “Farm Playbook” that captures processes, goals, and the reasoning behind decisions. Post the big goals where everyone can see them. Make the invisible visible.
This isn’t just about operational efficiency—though that matters too. Documentation is what makes succession possible. When processes live only in one person’s head, it creates what business consultants call “key-person risk.” If something happens to that person, the knowledge walks out the door with them.
Visible goals and playbooks align behavior across the operation. When the next generation can see what the targets are and how decisions get made, they can actually contribute to hitting those targets. It builds confidence and makes the eventual transfer of decision-making authority much smoother.
The message Winterhof hears consistently from guests on Farm4Profit applies to farms of any size: don’t just run your farm the way your grandpa or dad did. Treat it like a business to ensure it thrives for future generations. That means looking at diversification opportunities, whether that’s alternative crops, value-added enterprises, or off-farm income streams. It means adopting technology and data-driven strategies that improve decision-making. And it means thinking about sustainability—not as a buzzword, but as a strategic business decision that affects the bottom line.
As Winterhof points out, so many of the topics covered in Farm4Profit interviews apply to anybody with a business, whether it’s accounting software, tax strategy, or the ability to build resiliency through diversification. The principles are universal. The application is what makes it specific to agriculture.
Winterhof’s challenge to farm operators is simple: do one thing this month to treat your farm more like a business. Schedule a meeting with a banker or CPA. Write down goals for the operation. Start documenting a process that currently lives only in someone’s head. Have that conversation with the next generation that’s been put off too long.
Think beyond acres and assets—focus on people, purpose, and peace. Because as Winterhof puts it: if you aren’t farming for the future, you won’t be farming for long.
Tanner Winterhof is CEO of Farm4Profit Media and co-host of the Farm4Profit podcast. He spent 15 years in the banking industry before transitioning to agricultural media full-time. Growing up on a swine and row-crop farm in Aurelia, Iowa, Winterhof combines his financial expertise with firsthand farming experience to help agricultural professionals run their operations more profitably. Learn more at farm4profit.com.