Login to access all Messages (including Syndicate-specific Messages) Some “public” messages will appear below without login.

January 2026 [Public]
Outlook for Our Investment in Ag Guard
As USDA’s Farmer Bridge Assistance Program payments reach producers in late February, early data provides a helpful window into how these funds will affect the environment in which Ag Guard operates.
How Farmers Are Using Bridge Payments
Surveys show the majority of this assistance will be used to stabilize farm finances—not to drive major new purchases. Producers report the following expected uses:
• Paying down debt
• Rebuilding working capital
• Limited investment in machinery
Economists estimate the payments represent roughly 5%–20% of annual farm revenue—a meaningful cushion, but not enough to shift purchasing behavior in a major way.
Impact on Dealer Sales and the Ag Guard Ecosystem
By the time payments arrive, up to 80% of seed and fertilizer decisions are already finalized. As a result, we expect:
• Minimal change in seed or fertilizer purchases
• A possible lift in mid season inputs (crop protection, repairs, add on needs)
• Continued hesitation around large equipment purchases
Producers remain focused on reducing debt and strengthening liquidity, a trend echoed by regional Federal Reserve surveys.
Short-Term Relief, Not a Spending Catalyst
The program will improve short term cash flow, but most dollars will pass directly through to existing obligations—operating loans, interest, and input bills already due. These payments function as financial support, not a stimulus.
USDA has also announced support for specialty crop growers, an industry under significant pressure, with more details forthcoming.
What This Means for Ag Guard
While farmers are not rushing to make large capital purchases, they are prioritizing risk management, cash flow stability, and cost predictability. This environment plays to Ag Guard’s strengths.
Dealers are adapting by shifting their focus toward:
• Recurring and after sale revenue
• Service, protection, and maintenance programs
• Smaller equipment categories that maintain steady service demand
• Higher attachment rates on secondary products
• Customer retention and long term relationship building
In each of these areas, Ag Guard is positioned as a core value driver—helping dealers maintain cash flow while delivering customers the protection and predictability they need in a risk averse market.
Why This Environment Favors Ag Guard’s Model
• Service contracts and extended protection are easier for customers to justify than capital purchases.
• Farmers placing greater emphasis on reliability and cost control align naturally with Ag Guard’s value proposition.
• Dealers can close more deals—and protect margins—by including Ag Guard coverage in quotes, especially on smaller equipment and used units.
• Slow seasons shift activity toward maintenance, repairs, and preventive service—channels where Ag Guard helps keep bays full and customers engaged.
Bottom Line: Bridge payments will help stabilize farmers’ finances, but will not trigger a surge in major equipment sales. Instead, the market is shifting toward:
• Stabilization over expansion
• Predictability over growth
• Protection over speculation
This shift strengthens the strategic importance of service contracts, maintenance programs, and extended protection—the very areas where Ag Guard delivers its highest value.
For Wild Jay stakeholders, this means Ag Guard remains well positioned to grow its relevance, support dealer profitability, and expand long term customer relationships—even in a cautious ag economy.

December 2017 [Public]
Thank you again for the strong participation in the Special Meeting held at the Argosy Resort in October. I was amazed at the productiveness of the meeting and the many initiatives it created. The significant sales growth in AgGuard (117% estimated) has led to a new tipping point for expansion and innovation that clearly had everyone’s interest peaked. It appears likely we can reproduce, or beat, that growth in 2018. As discussed during the meeting, we will delay the 2018 Annual Meeting to late February to coincide with the Western Farm Show. This will allow us extra time to update everyone on the new initiatives and allow some of our partners the chance to double-up on travel to Kansas City. It will also allow us time to report on the enhancements to employee compensation including the new Medical Coverage and 401(k) providers.

December 2016 [Public]
I regularly extol the accomplishments of our operating managers. They are truly All-Stars.

We expect Wild Jay’s normalized earning power per share to increase every year. Actual earnings, of course, will sometimes decline because of periodic weakness in the U.S. economy. Because we have only experienced geometric growth over the past 5 years, I am concerned that we may become so accustomed to that performance that we will begin to feel entitled to it. In addition, catastrophes or other industry-specific events may occasionally reduce our earnings, even when most American businesses are doing well.

It’s our job to deliver significant growth, bumpy or not. As stewards of your capital, we have opted to retain all earnings. Those reinvested dollars must earn their keep. Some years, the gains in underlying earning power we achieve will be minor; very occasionally, the cash register will ring loud. We have no magic plan to add earnings except to dream big and to be prepared mentally and financially to act fast when opportunities present themselves. Every decade or so, dark clouds will fill the economic skies, and they will briefly present golden opportunities. When that occurs, it’s imperative that we capitalize on them.

However, we endeavor to insulate our earnings from such market turbulence. We have carefully designed product strategies with Ag Guard that will benefit customers in both good times and bad. We also are working to expand Ag Guard’s demographics to minimize regional environmental changes to normalize revenue. This strategy begins with a focus on the customer’s needs that naturally leads to the diversification we desire.

Ag Guard, with its almost unlimited potential, quickly became the centerpiece of our endeavor. While we do not own Ag Guard, our largest owners also own the majority of Ag Guard. The tax advantages of keeping the two companies separate makes it unlikely we will ever seek a merger. However, we feel the ownership similarities will keep our priorities perfectly aligned. We anticipate that sometime in 2017 our letter of credit to Ag Guard will be fully repaid and Ag Guard will be debt free.

Our portfolio of bonds and stocks, de-emphasized though it is, has continued in the post-1998 period to grow and to deliver us hefty capital gains, interest, and dividends. (As an aside: We remain confident that petroleum prices will rebound significantly, therefore we will violate our typical investment discipline and continue to hold our petro-stock investments that are down 60% from their high.) Our portfolio earnings provide us the war chest to purchase of businesses. Though unconventional, our two-pronged approach to capital allocation gives us a real edge.

Our efforts to materially increase our normalized earnings will be aided by America’s economic dynamism. From a standing start 240 years ago, Americans have combined human ingenuity, a market system, a tide of talented and ambitious immigrants, and the rule of law to deliver abundance beyond any dreams of our forefathers. You need not be an economist to understand how well our system has worked. Just look around you. See the 75 million owner-occupied homes, the bountiful farmland, the 260 million vehicles, the hyper-productive factories, the great medical centers, the talent-filled universities, you name it – they all represent a net gain for Americans from the barren lands, primitive structures and meager output of 1776. Starting from scratch, America has amassed wealth totaling $90 trillion. It’s true, of course, that American owners of homes, autos and other assets have often borrowed heavily to finance their purchases. If an owner defaults, however, his or her asset does not disappear or lose its usefulness. Rather, ownership customarily passes to an American lending institution that then disposes of it to an American buyer. Our nation’s wealth remains intact. As Gertrude Stein put it, “Money is always there, but the pockets change.”

In the Ag world that “change” conjures terrible images of lost farms and suicides. While there are certainly federal policy changes and economic reforms that could make the market more fair for farmers, they will not change the unstoppable force of economics. Those images haunt me. Our job is to provide tools and leadership that will make farmers more competitive. Our goal is to make money, but we firmly believe the best way to do that is to facilitate the success of our customers and their customers. We believe it is never good business to purposefully take advantage of another’s misfortune and best when we can prevent that misfortune.

Our market system is like an economic traffic cop ably directing capital, brains and labor. It is what has created America’s abundance. This system has also been the primary factor in allocating rewards. Governmental redirection, through federal, state and local taxation, has in addition determined the distribution of a significant portion of the bounty. America has, for example, decided that those citizens in their productive years should help both the old and the young. Such forms of aid – sometimes enshrined as “entitlements” – are generally thought of as applying to the aged. But don’t forget that four million American babies are born each year with an entitlement to a public education. That societal commitment, largely financed at the local level, costs about $150,000 per baby. The annual cost totals more than $600 billion, which is about 3 1⁄2% of GDP. However our wealth may be divided, the mind-boggling amounts you see around you belong almost exclusively to Americans. Foreigners, of course, own or have claims on a modest portion of our wealth. Those holdings, however, are of little importance to our national balance sheet: Our citizens own assets abroad that are roughly comparable in value.

Early Americans, we should emphasize, were neither smarter nor more hard working than those people who toiled century after century before them. But those venturesome pioneers crafted a system that unleashed human potential, and their successors built upon it. This economic creation will deliver increasing wealth to our progeny far into the future. Yes, the build-up of wealth will be interrupted for short periods from time to time. It will not, however, be stopped. I’ll repeat what Warren Buffet said: “Babies born in America today are the luckiest crop in history.”

As for Wild Jay, returns will fall as assets increase. Nonetheless, our collection of good businesses, along with the company’s impregnable financial strength and owner-oriented culture, should deliver decent results. We won’t be satisfied with less.

December 2013 [Public]
Over the holiday I had the opportunity to chat with some friends and the subject of how the struggling economy and drought will affect the American farmer came up. As we talked, I imagined the same conversation playing out in countless small town diners amongst the actual farmers whose lives are directly affected by these hard times. My conversation was between a banker, a college professor and an attorney, and it seemed petty. While all of us have strong ties to farming, it is not our livelihoods. Our intellectual conversation was actually life and death for those farmers that I was imaging at the diner or around the counter at the CO-OP. What haunted me more is that I knew this same conversation was also probably happening 50-stories above Park Avenue in some New York skyscraper, but I imagined that those guys would lack whatever empathy we have—it is just numbers to them.

I shared this story and how it made me feel with my mother. It was my regular Sunday call, but she was at an event with her octogenarian posse. Of course she took the call anyway and put me on speaker. After hearing me out, I heard her turn to her friends and say, “we’ve been through worse than this, haven’t we?” And they all agreed. I just wonder if we have the same “stuff” that the Greatest Generation does.

What does not haunt me is the services Wild Jay provides to the American Farmer. For example, our guarantee of AgGuard extended service contracts on Ag equipment. AgGuard provides a risk mitigation tool that our actuaries estimate will absolutely benefit more than 60% of the customers who buy Ag machines. The figure is not 100% because the buyers differ in their financial conditions, with some holding such large cash reserves that they can cover the risk themselves. However, most would have to finance the repairs or they would rob Peter to pay Paul. And some will not trade their machines while they are under warranty (in most cases we find the trade-in value of the machine is increased by more than the cost of the coverage). From our investor perspective, that means AgGuard has tremendous market potential for Wild Jay.

We are at our best when we empathize with our end users, the farmers. Our lot is cast with theirs and we need to be sure our partnerships with them serves their interests. If we continue to put them at the center of our relationship, your returns at Wild Jay will be steady.

As we discussed at our last annual meeting, we will continue to maintain cash reserves at a much higher percentage to contingent liability than our peers in New York and London, because, unlike them, we understand the cyclical nature of agriculture. As a result, we will never seek to unfairly profit from our clients, kick them when their down, or throttle-back our claims approval based on increased claims volume. As always, thank you for your continued support.

Sincerely,

Dane A. Lee
President