Holistic Financial Planning Workshop Helps Ag Producers Plan for Profit

HMI Certified Educator Angela Boudro facilitated the Holistic Financial Planning Workshop at the 2025 REGENERATE Conference. PC: Marie Von Ancken.

Guest blog by Angela Boudro, Certified Educator, HMI

We had a GREAT Holistic Financial Planning Workshop at the 2025 REGENERATE Conference! Thank you to everyone who joined us and brought your energy, curiosity, and willingness to lean in. Your engagement makes all the difference and truly fuels us as instructors.

Here’s a quick recap of what we explored together:

Starting with Your Holistic Goal

We kicked things off by revisiting the importance of developing a Holistic Goal. It’s so easy to jump straight into action, but Holistic Management reminds us that clarity must come first. Truly knowing what we value, and discussing those values with the people we work with, is foundational. When we do that hard, honest work, our Holistic Goal/Context becomes both our compass and our North Star. It’s the base everything else rests on. Don’t skip this step!

Decision-Testing Questions

We then moved into a brief overview of the decision-testing questions. Even with limited time, participants got a sense of how these questions help ensure our decisions are aligned with the life and outcomes we described in our Holistic Goal/Context. Testing our actions keeps us on track and helps us avoid drifting toward habits or pressures that don’t serve us.

Identifying Logjams, Adverse Factors & Weak Links

Next, we explored how to identify what’s truly holding us back. Whether it’s a production bottleneck, a financial constraint, or a people/communication challenge (the most common challenge!), naming these limiting factors helps us focus our energy where it will create the most meaningful progress. Remember: “progress” isn’t always financial. Social weak links are often the most powerful to address.

Gross Profit Analysis

With regenerative agriculture trending everywhere, it can feel like we’re expected to “do it all.” But resources like time, money, energy, and land are finite. Gross Profit Analysis gives us a grounded, practical way to evaluate which enterprises we should keep, add, or drop. This is where clarity replaces overwhelm.

Planned Profit

One of the most unique features of Holistic Financial Planning is the way we treat profit. Instead of profit being “whatever’s left,” we plan for it first and make expenses fit what remains. For many people, this mindset shift is huge but it’s also empowering. It prioritizes financial resilience and forces us to be intentional about where our dollars go.

Sorting & Prioritizing Expenses

Finally, we practiced sorting expenses to see where costs can be avoided, delayed, or reduced. These adjustments may not be flashy, but they are the actions that move us closer to the Quality of Life we identified in our Holistic Goal/Context. Small, smart changes add up.

We covered a lot of material in under four hours, but I hope the biggest takeaways were these:

1. A strong Holistic Goal/Context paired with the discipline of decision testing keeps us aligned with the life we want to live, not just the life we fall into.

2. Holistic Financial Planning can be FUN, clarifying, and incredibly powerful. It gives us a way to plan for profit and reinvest in the Quality of Life we envision.

What a gift to be able to design and steer our lives with this tool.

Thanks to the Thornburg Foundation and MAD! Capital for their support of this workshop.