I reread your post and would like to comment on one other thing. While I don't worry about MY children s ability to compete I do worry about the next generations ability to think out side of the box. When I was young it was easy to quantify change, it was measured in dollars. Today it is measured in cents and much harder to identify. Today, mistakes are far more costly.

I think the fact that the changes were easy to identify made us look outward and our changes were rewarded immediately. Today's rewards for change will not be experienced for years.

Rewards for my generations change were efficiency, comfort or general ease of operation. For example changing from a beet lifter that needed to be cleaned every load vs on that could go for three loads. Or going from a 1066 with a bad cab to a 4240 to a 8220. Even more dramatic doing all projections on sheet paper took weeks to assemble, and looked like it. Now it is on a computer and it takes less than a day to make the appropriate changes and plug in new numbers.

Today we are assembling Lydar data and yield maps or petiole tests that will have an impact in 5yrs. Back to critical thinking, I don't value this stuff as I should, I am a results kind of guy. Yet, I know the farm needs this information in the future. I don't see the next generation stepping to the plate and telling me that additional change is so important to them that they are willing to pay for it themselves. I am not alone in this assessment, friends of mine see this in there operations as well. I believe the next generation needs to be better than us BUT you have to be able to identify and quantify your changes.