Day: September 17, 2025

• Dix and Ruth Roberts continue to run their Utah farm in their 80s with their family.
• They still sell produce at two markets a week and help out around the farm.
• Though they could retire and travel, they have no desire to do so.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Dix Roberts, 88, and Ruth Roberts, 82, a married couple who run Roberts Family Farms in Utah with their family, including their son, Tyson, who joined them for the interview. Both still do some physical labor, though they’ve slowed down somewhat. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Dix: Our farm started with my second great-grandfather, Levi. My family farmed dairy until the 1930s, and then they grew vegetable crops that they sold to markets.

My first memories of the farm are when I was four or five. We brought in hay to our big red barn, and my job was to help move the horse.

Ruth: When we got married, he was in the Army. He served for two years, and we farmed after that.

I was not raised on a farm, so that first year was difficult because I didn’t understand things. I became the main truck driver for onions, potatoes, corn, and any other crops. I loved the farm and the way of life.

We still help run the farm with our son, Tyson, and the rest of our family because we enjoy it, and we don’t plan on retiring.

Taking over the farm

Dix: In 1970, we purchased the farm that had been in the family since the homestead times but was lost during the Depression. My dad died in his 70s. It was then, in the early 1980s, that Ruth and I took full control.

There was a time when the farm was up to 400 acres of vegetable crops. My father would buy 300 to 400 calves, and we would feed them during the winter. When my father died, my brother and I decided we would just focus on the crops.

In 10 years, we had it paid for, so we had some backing that we could use if we needed to borrow money, but we couldn’t afford life or medical insurance at some points.

Ruth: When we had all seven of our children home, it was pretty frugal at times. We’ve always tried to have the philosophy that when a bill comes, you pay your bill, and you pay it in full. You try not to put things on credit. When they were in school, we shopped at secondhand stores a lot, and they still do.

We can do what we want now, and if we wanted to take a trip, we could probably do so. We’ve never been ones to spend a lot of money on vacations, and we’re happy doing what we’re doing.

Technology has changed drastically

Dix: Over the years, we’ve tried drip irrigation, which uses less water. It’s been a blessing to see the changes. I saw the first tractor come onto the farm.

Ruth: The biggest change I’ve seen in my lifetime is the cellphone. If I had a phone back then, when he was out in all these different fields, life would’ve been much easier.

Tyson: One of dad’s roles has been and continues to be product development. We’ll put an idea in his head of a piece of machinery that we need, and he’ll lose sleep a few nights over it.

He’ll design it during the night and start implementing it when he wakes up in the morning. He’s got a very keen mind for solving problems and developing equipment that makes farming easy for us.

Taking on less work

Dix: I’m slowing down now. I’m doing the amount of work that I can do while feeling safe doing it. My sons are doing most of the work, and I’m able to choose the jobs I like to do.

I help control the weeds, which is an easy job. I ride a four-wheeler with a 15-gallon tank on the side and a 100-foot hose. My grandkids help us with some projects. We have 24 grandchildren and 25 great-grandchildren.

We spend more than 15 hours working on the farm, as we attend two markets every weekend.

Tyson: Our average income varies but is between $50,000 and $150,000 a year. We only earn revenue from mid-July until the end of October.

My parents built a beautiful home about an hour away 25 years ago, but they still drive here often, especially during farming season. We built a bunkhouse in my backyard on the farm so they have a place to stay when they’re down here.

Ruth: We still go to farmers’ markets and sell Tyson’s crops. We enjoy being able to tell people about the crops we grow. We’ve been selling in Murray, Utah, for over 30 years. Our customers are like family.

We did sell part of the farm. We told people that we didn’t have a lot of money, and to live, we would sell one acre one year and two acres the next. Our farm is now about 30 acres.

Dix: Between my brother and me, we’ve also got almost 500 acres in Box Elder County that we lease out. That investment has tripled in value in about 20 years. That’s where our retirement is based — buying low and selling high.

No plans to retire

Ruth: We’ve always said you need to keep your mind and body active. When we get up every day, we’re just glad we can do the things we want to do, but you have to have a reason.

Tyson got all of my siblings and their kids to help harvest the garlic once, which would take him two or three weeks on his own. We had four generations on the farm harvesting garlic. We got the entire patch done in three hours. Our other son taught them how to braid garlic. We were amazed at the turnout.

Dix: It’s hard to say what’s going to happen with the last piece of land. We made the best choices we could, and the next generation will have challenges. Our children will divide the farm equally, and it’ll be up to them how that will work.

I’m still enjoying watching things grow and flourish. Developers keep hounding us and saying we could make $1M if we sold, but I don’t want to be the one to do so.

I like challenges and working toward goals. One of my motivations now is finding things that need to be fixed.

Ruth: People ask in the market, “When is he going to retire?” I say, “Why do I want him to retire when he loves doing what he’s doing?”

I don’t think you plan for retirement. Healthwise, we try to do the best we can, and then we’ll just see what the future brings. As long as we can keep working on the farm, we will, because that’s where our love is.

• Trump urged the SEC to reduce earnings requirements to benefit companies.
• Companies have complained that such reports are costly and time-consuming.
• Here’s how fewer reports could impact white-collar jobs, from legal and accounting to communications.

The debate over quarterly earnings usually centers on companies and investors — but any disruption to the status quo could rattle an ecosystem full of white-collar workers plying their trade as lawyers, communications pros, and data providers.

On Monday, President Donald Trump asked the SEC to investigate whether fewer earnings reports might benefit companies. “This will save money and allow managers to focus on properly running their companies,” he wrote on Truth Social.

Unlike the administration’s whiplash-inducing trade policies, corporate America agrees with the president. In 2019, after Trump first asked the SEC to explore this issue, the Nasdaq found that three-quarters of the 180 companies it surveyed favored a switch to semi-annual reporting, according to the survey results posted to the SEC’s website.

For companies, the costs of quarterly earnings can feel steep. Preparing a single release can take weeks and pull in dozens of people across legal, accounting, and communications teams. But the money spent on earnings doesn’t just disappear. It underwrites thousands of white-collar jobs — roles now under pressure from artificial intelligence and a slowing economy.

If companies — and Trump — were to get their way, what would it mean for the legions of white-collar professionals helping prop up the earnings ecosystem, from investor relations professionals to finance data providers?

To answer this question, Business Insider spoke to people with knowledge of the process and reviewed comments made by companies and professional associations in response to the SEC’s 2019 request for comment on the pros and cons of fewer earnings reports.

Here is what we learned:

Less reporting doesn’t mean less work

Investor relations and communications professionals play a key role in quarterly earnings by making sure a company’s story — financial results, growth prospects, risks, and strategy — is clearly conveyed to investors, analysts, regulators, and the media.

Reducing earnings, however, might not ease their jobs, said Matthew Brusch, president and CEO of NIRI, an association for investor relations professionals.

“Investors won’t simply just stop asking for the information,” said Brusch, who previously worked in IR. “In my experience, investors never want less information,” he said, adding that he expects many companies would continue to report earnings quarterly even if given the opportunity to report just twice a year.

Indeed, a change might even add value to people whose job it is to break into companies, such as Wall Street equity research analysts, who make stock recommendations. A 2018 survey by the CFA Institute found that 82% of investor respondents strongly agreed that they would “struggle to locate information” if earnings reporting requirements were reduced.

Most investors surveyed also agreed that the benefits of quarterly earnings outweighed the costs.

Quarterly earnings could be here to stay

Theoretically, the biggest beneficiaries of fewer earnings reports would be C-Suite executives, like the CEO and CFO, who would have more time to focus on operations, capital raising, and other big-picture initiatives.

Nasdaq’s 2019 survey showed that the average company said it spent about 852.95 hours a quarter on earnings. That’s more than two weeks per person per quarter, assuming a 10-person team. Reducing corporate earnings to just twice a year would therefore give the average executive an entire month back in time that could be spent on other things.

Experts who spoke to Business Insider said they don’t see it playing out this way, however. They pointed to the EU and other regions where many companies continue to report earnings quarterly despite twice-a-year reporting requirements.

“Do you really think management’s going to say, ‘Hey, just because we don’t have to report to the outside, I only want to look at my business every six months?'” Sandy Peters, senior head of global advocacy at the CFA Institute, said. “Probably not.”

Most at risk

The biggest losers, people said, may be for-hire professionals called in on an ad-hoc basis to help pull quarterly earnings together, including corporate lawyers and auditors.

In response to the SEC’s 2019 request for comment on this issue, the Society for Corporate Governance filed a report showing that the costs associated with lawyers and accountants were among the most common concerns.

“Significant diversion of legal and finance/accounting team resources, plus expense of lawyers and accountants,” the organization’s SEC filing said, quoting a member.

“Audit firm fees” ranked as a top cost of preparing earnings reports among the 146 members who responded to the organization’s survey.

The Nasdaq survey said that companies reported paying an average of $334,697.63 a quarter on earnings, with at least one respondent citing quarterly costs as high as $7 million.

Ripple effects for data providers

Reducing earnings requirements could also impact professionals who make money off them, including financial services data providers.

On LinkedIn, Daniel Goldberg asked colleagues in the alternative data world if a potential change would be good or bad for their industry. A vast majority of the dozens of respondents thought the fewer corporate reports would mean more business for them.

“With semi-annual reporting, the unmatched transparency of real-time data could spark a surge in alternative data adoption,” said Goldberg, the former chief data strategy officer at Coresight Research who now works as an independent consultant.

But there is a downside for an industry that’s reliant on hedge funds for a sizeable chunk of its revenues, he said

“Fewer earnings events would mean fewer trading catalysts — a potential challenge for hedge funds chasing alpha,” said Goldberg.

Rado Lipus, the founder of data consultancy Neudata, said “hedge funds are still very reliant on traditional products such as consensus estimates data,” and plenty of alternative datasets use “earnings calls as the input to create their product.” Ravenpack, an alternative data provider, has an earnings call analytics product that uses natural language processing tools to judge the sentiment of the executives speaking on a call, for example.

But the biggest immediate impact of changing quarterly earnings could be to hedge funds themselves, said Marc Greenberg, a former executive at Steve Cohen’s Point72 who now runs a training firm called Greener Pastures.

“It’s the best time of the year to make money as a hedge fund,” he said.