At Ashfount, we believe the ability to think long-term is essential for success. That means more than planning for the next five years. Farms and food businesses that want to make a real difference to our health and our communities have to ask where their work will lead in a lifetime, and beyond.
We live in a quick-fix society, where convenience and short-term solutions encourage a "live for the moment" mindset. How is that shaping our lives and our businesses? And how can farms take a different approach while still building businesses that last?
Short-term thinking, long-term problems
The pace of life has sped up over the last few decades, and many of us work harder than ever. In a 2014 Gallup survey, nearly four in 10 full-time workers said they log a massive 50 hours or more each week. Time off is scarce too: U.S. private industry workers receive on average 11 days of paid vacation after one year of service, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Hard work with little downtime feeds a quick-fix culture. Patience is in short supply, and we expect goods and services to be easy, cheap and convenient. We want a fast fix for every problem, and we expect technology and industry to deliver it. With next-day and even same-day delivery, our expectations of immediacy have never been higher.
Trade and industry have grown enormously over the same decades. But has all that expansion made us healthier, or our land any better off? The UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) reports that some 77.6% of Earth's land experienced drier conditions during the three decades leading up to 2020.
Many of the problems we face, as individuals and together, come from an instant gratification mindset that puts short-term benefits first. Nowhere is this clearer than in agriculture.
Ashfount is in it for the long haul. We do not chase high-risk moves with big rewards, and we do not recommend them to the farms and food businesses we work with. Consistent, slow, healthy growth is the framework we bring to every engagement: no shortcuts, and no gambling away years of hard work.
Agriculture and short-term thinking
Farmer and author Joel Salatin puts it bluntly: in industrial agriculture, "the only thing that matters is to grow it faster, fatter, bigger, and cheaper." The industrial system was built to make food as cheap and efficient as possible. On the surface that works: profits are maximized, and the system produces more than enough food for everyone.
For all its short-term efficiency, the system carries long-term costs. Large-scale corn and soybean production has flooded the market with foods high in ingredients like high fructose corn syrup, and monoculture is depleting our topsoil.
In livestock, intensification has led to the overuse of antibiotics, serious welfare concerns and meat that is cheap to produce but lower in beneficial nutrients such as omega-3. Cheap, nutritionally poorer food also encourages overconsumption, which is linked to type 2 diabetes, cancer and obesity.
A profit-first mindset has also brought heavy use of chemical inputs. They raise yields and profits, but we keep learning more about what many of them mean for the health of people and wildlife.
Roundup is the best-known example. U.S. juries sided with plaintiffs who linked the herbicide, made by Monsanto (now Bayer), to their cancer. According to PBS NewsHour, about 200,000 Roundup-related claims have been made against Bayer, and the company has proposed a $7.25 billion class-action settlement. In June 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that federal law preempts the state-law failure-to-warn claims.
Author Carey Gillam points to a deeper worry: many farmers now believe they cannot farm without products like these. That is what it looks like when short-term profits take root ahead of long-term benefits. How do we challenge that, and build solid businesses that think differently?
Journeys, not life hacks
Markets only change when demand changes. To create that change, we need to look at how we measure achievement and progress, alone and together.
In 2014, ultra-endurance athlete Rich Roll wrote about why "life hacking" has become a damaging idea. He called the hack ethos "emblematic of our obsessive modern imperative for immediacy." Investing in ourselves and finding efficient ways to reach our goals is fine, he argued, but the hack has become the destination instead of a tool for the journey. What he offers in its place is unglamorous: hard work, patience and the value of experience over shortcuts.
Many of us share that mindset: only the result counts, not the process and the journey. In business, it means trading the long-term future for short-term profit. The decisions we make when we take a longer view, and value experience over quick "wins", look very different.
Zig Ziglar tells the story of the Chinese bamboo tree to show the value of patience. The farmer waters and fertilizes the seed for four years with nothing to show for it. Then, in the fifth year, the tree grows eighty feet in just six weeks. It was never idle: all along it was building a strong unseen foundation of roots that could carry that growth.
The story asks what kind of roots we put down with our choices. Now that we know many industrial practices damage our health and soil, are we ready to build businesses that regenerate the land, even if it costs short-term gains? And will regenerative businesses take the time to show customers why food that may cost more at the point of purchase brings longer-term benefits?
Our legacy: what kind of future do we want to build?
The field of epigenetics shows that we are even more sensitive to our environment than once thought. Our genes can switch on and off in response to triggers around us and within our bodies. One of those triggers is the food we eat, and its effects can reach our children and even our grandchildren.
Just as we pass on our genes, we pass on our soil, our health systems and our farming practices. Every farm should ask how it wants its land to look for its children, its grandchildren and beyond. With that long-lens view, the choices we make each day become part of a long-term plan.
New Zealand offers one example of this thinking at a national scale. In 2019, then Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern released a national budget, the Wellbeing Budget published by the New Zealand Treasury, that for the first time made citizen wellbeing the priority of public spending. Its guidance tied spending to goals such as reducing child poverty and building a sustainable economy.
Change at that scale starts with people who are used to thinking about the future. The more of us who reflect on the long term, the more we can expect from the businesses we buy from and work with.
Farming and long-term thinking
Regenerative agriculture takes a long-term view out of necessity. It takes time to heal the damage done by industrial farming and to learn how to read a landscape. Farmers who make the switch soon find they need a whole new set of skills, and they face new challenges.
One of those challenges is facing up to the harm that short-term methods have caused. Charles Massy, a regenerative farmer in Australia, realized that the methods he first used had badly damaged the paddocks and soil on his land. Allan Savory came to understand, as he described in a TED talk, that a program in Zimbabwe he was involved with, shooting over 40,000 elephants to prevent desertification, made the problem worse. Both learned from their failures and found ways to farm that work with the land.
In the U.S., market conditions do not favor smaller farmers, so long-term goals have to be weighed against market pressure. Will a farm be tempted to give up its regenerative values for a quick return? Is it ready to take the time to heal its soil and build a holistic system that fits its own situation?
Answering those questions takes a plan: how the farm should look in 5, 10 and 20 years, and in the next generation. A plan like that makes the hard seasons easier to carry, because every decision is measured against where the farm wants to be, not against this month's numbers.
Long-term thinking with Ashfount
We believe long-term thinking leads to business decisions that create real value for the farms, ranches and food businesses we work with. It shapes the questions we ask before we take on work and what we recommend once we do.
When we realign our values away from the quick-fix, instant gratification model, we can improve our mental and physical health. Farms that grow healthy, nutritious food help heal our bodies, our soil and our ecology.
Sustainable, regenerative practices are the key to the future of farming and to long-term food security, for our generation and the ones to come. They take hold only when we shift to a long-term view, and that is the view we bring to every story we tell and every client we advise.