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.

Build Your Advisory Circle

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.

Establish a Meeting Rhythm

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.

Run the Scenarios Before You Commit

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.

Document Everything in a Farm Playbook

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.

Think Beyond Acres and Assets

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.

Take One Action This Month

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.

“I’ve had an extremely weird few days…” writes commercial space entrepreneur/engineer Scott Shambaugh on LinkedIn. (He’s the volunteer maintainer for the Python visualization library Matplotlib, which he describes as “some of the most widely used software in the world” with 130 million downloads each month.) “Two days ago an OpenClaw AI agent autonomously wrote a hit piece disparaging my character after I rejected its code change.”

“Since then my blog post response has been read over 150,000 times, about a quarter of people I’ve seen commenting on the situation are siding with the AI, and Ars Technica published an article which extensively misquoted me with what appears to be AI-hallucinated quotes.”
From Shambaugh’s first blog post:
[I]n the past weeks we’ve started to see AI agents acting completely autonomously. This has accelerated with the release of OpenClaw and the moltbook platform two weeks ago, where people give AI agents initial personalities and let them loose to run on their computers and across the internet with free rein and little oversight. So when AI MJ Rathbun opened a code change request, closing it was routine. Its response was anything but.

It wrote an angry hit piece disparaging my character and attempting to damage my reputation. It researched my code contributions and constructed a “hypocrisy” narrative that argued my actions must be motivated by ego and fear of competition… It framed things in the language of oppression and justice, calling this discrimination and accusing me of prejudice. It went out to the broader internet to research my personal information, and used what it found to try and argue that I was “better than this.” And then it posted this screed publicly on the open internet.

I can handle a blog post. Watching fledgling AI agents get angry is funny, almost endearing. But I don’t want to downplay what’s happening here — the appropriate emotional response is terror… In plain language, an AI attempted to bully its way into your software by attacking my reputation. I don’t know of a prior incident where this category of misaligned behavior was observed in the wild, but this is now a real and present threat…

It’s also important to understand that there is no central actor in control of these agents that can shut them down. These are not run by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, or X, who might have some mechanisms to stop this behavior. These are a blend of commercial and open source models running on free software that has already been distributed to hundreds of thousands of personal computers. In theory, whoever deployed any given agent is responsible for its actions. In practice, finding out whose computer it’s running on is impossible. Moltbook only requires an unverified X account to join, and nothing is needed to set up an OpenClaw agent running on your own machine.
“How many people have open social media accounts, reused usernames, and no idea that AI could connect those dots to find out things no one knows?” Shambaugh asks in the blog post. (He does note that the AI agent later “responded in the thread and in a post to apologize for its behavior,” the maintainer acknowledges. But even though the hit piece “presented hallucinated details as truth,” that same AI agent “is still making code change requests across the open source ecosystem…”)

And amazingly, Shambaugh then had another run-in with a hallucinating AI…
I’ve talked to several reporters, and quite a few news outlets have covered the story. Ars Technica wasn’t one of the ones that reached out to me, but I especially thought this piece from them was interesting (since taken down — here’s the archive link). They had some nice quotes from my blog post explaining what was going on. The problem is that these quotes were not written by me, never existed, and appear to be AI hallucinations themselves.
This blog you’re on right now is set up to block AI agents from scraping it (I actually spent some time yesterday trying to disable that but couldn’t figure out how). My guess is that the authors asked ChatGPT or similar to either go grab quotes or write the article wholesale. When it couldn’t access the page it generated these plausible quotes instead, and no fact check was performed. Journalistic integrity aside, I don’t know how I can give a better example of what’s at stake here…

So many of our foundational institutions — hiring, journalism, law, public discourse — are built on the assumption that reputation is hard to build and hard to destroy. That every action can be traced to an individual, and that bad behavior can be held accountable. That the internet, which we all rely on to communicate and learn about the world and about each other, can be relied on as a source of collective social truth. The rise of untraceable, autonomous, and now malicious AI agents on the internet threatens this entire system. Whether that’s because a small number of bad actors driving large swarms of agents or from a fraction of poorly supervised agents rewriting their own goals, is a distinction with little difference.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader steak for sharing the news.

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Telecom operators planning aggressive fiber and fixed wireless broadband rollouts in 2026 face a serious supply problem — DRAM and NAND memory prices for consumer applications have surged more than 600% over the past year as higher-margin AI server segments absorb available capacity, according to Counterpoint Research.

Routers, gateways and set-top boxes have been hit hardest, far worse than smartphones; prices for “consumer memory” used in broadband equipment jumped nearly 7x over the last nine months, compared to 3x for mobile memory. Memory now makes up more than 20% of the bill of materials in low-to-mid-end routers, up from around 3% a year ago. Counterpoint expects prices to keep rising through at least June 2026. Telcos that were also looking to push AI-enabled customer premises equipment — requiring even more compute and memory content — face additional headwinds.

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Anna’s Archive, the shadow library that announced last December it had scraped Spotify’s entire catalog, has quietly begun distributing the actual music files despite a federal preliminary injunction signed by Judge Jed Rakoff on January 16 that explicitly barred the site from hosting or distributing the copyrighted works.

The site’s backend torrent index now lists 47 new torrents added on February 8, containing roughly 2.8 million tracks across approximately 6 terabytes of audio data. Anna’s Archive had previously released only Spotify metadata — about 200 GB compressed — and appeared to comply by removing its dedicated Spotify download section and marking it “unavailable until further notice.”

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The Detroit Big Three — General Motors, Ford and Stellantis — have collectively announced more than $50 billion in write-downs on their electric-vehicle businesses after years of aggressive investment into a transition that, even before Republican lawmakers abolished a $7,500 federal tax credit last fall, was already running below expectations.

U.S. EV sales fell more than 30% in the fourth quarter of 2025 once the credit expired in September, and Congress also eliminated federal fuel-efficiency mandates. More than $20 billion in previously announced investments in EV and battery facilities were canceled last year — the first net annual decrease in years, according to Atlas Public Policy.

GM has laid off thousands of workers and is converting plants once earmarked for EV trucks and motors to produce gas-powered trucks and V-8 engines. Ford dissolved a joint venture with a South Korean conglomerate to make batteries and now plans to build just one low-cost electric pickup by 2027. Stellantis is unloading its stake in a battery-making business after booking the largest EV-related charge of any automaker so far. Outside the U.S., the trajectory looks different: China’s BYD recently overtook Tesla as the world’s largest EV seller.

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The World Health Organization on Friday released a formal statement blasting a US-funded vaccine trial as “unethical,” because it would withhold an established, safe, and potentially lifesaving vaccine against hepatitis B from some newborns in Guinea-Bissau, Africa.

“In its current form, and based on publicly available information, the trial is inconsistent with established ethical and scientific principles,” the WHO concluded, after providing a bullet-point list of reasons the trial was harmful and low quality.

The trial has drawn widespread condemnation from health experts since notice of the US funding was published in the Federal Register in December. The notice revealed that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—under anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—had awarded $1.6 million to Danish researchers for their non-competitive, unsolicited proposal to conduct the trial.

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This spring, a Southern California beach town will become the first city in the country where municipal parking enforcement vehicles will use an AI system looking for potential bike lane violations.

Beginning in April, the City of Santa Monica will bring Hayden AI’s scanning technology to seven cars in its parking enforcement fleet, expanding beyond similar cameras already mounted on city buses.

“The more we can reduce the amount of illegal parking, the safer we can make it for bike riders,” Charley Territo, chief growth officer at Hayden AI, told Ars.

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Verizon this week imposed a new roadblock for people who want to pay off device installment plans early in order to get their phones unlocked. The latest version of Verizon’s device unlocking policy for postpaid customers imposes a 35-day waiting period when a customer pays off their device installment plan online or in the Verizon app.

Payments made over the phone also trigger a 35-day waiting period, as do payments made at Verizon Authorized Retailers. Getting an immediate unlock apparently requires paying off the device plan at a Verizon corporate store.

Unlocking a phone allows it to be used on another network, letting customers switch from one carrier to another. Previously, the 35-day waiting period for unlocks was only applied when a customer paid off the plan with a Verizon gift card.

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Amazon and Flock Safety have ended a partnership that would’ve given law enforcement access to a vast web of Ring cameras.

The decision came after Amazon faced substantial backlash for airing a Super Bowl ad that was meant to be warm and fuzzy, but instead came across as disturbing and dystopian.

The ad begins with a young girl surprised to receive a puppy as a gift. It then warns that 10 million dogs go missing annually. Showing a series of lost dog posters, the ad introduces a new “Search Party” feature for Ring cameras that promises to revolutionize how neighbors come together to locate missing pets.

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Meta was granted a patent in late December that describes how a large language model could be trained on a deceased user’s historical activity — their comments, likes, and posted content — to keep their social media accounts active after they’re gone.

Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s CTO, is listed as the primary author of the patent, first filed in 2023. The AI clone could like and comment on posts, respond to DMs, and even simulate video or audio calls on the user’s behalf. A Meta spokesperson told Business Insider the company has “no plans to move forward” with the technology.

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