How Are You Spending Your "40 Chances"?

Neva Roenne
Oct 3
7 min read

I can’t stop thinking about the fact that most farmers only get 40 growing seasons in their lifetime. Forty. That’s it. And when you really let that sink in, it feels both terrifying and motivating. You don’t have endless tries. You have a set number of chances to plant, to tend, to harvest, to try again.

That idea sits at the heart of Howard G. Buffett’s book 40 Chances: Finding Hope in a Hungry World. But it’s not just about farming. It’s about life. If you only had 40 chances to get it right, how would you spend them?

This book is at the top of my list, by far. I have never read, watched, heard, or seen anything so moving, raw, real, and pertinent to the world we live in. Every chapter in my copy of the book is tear-stained. Seriously. Every story brought me to tears; some happy, some sad, some proud, and some desperately heartbroken. The book is a collection of 40 stories about H. Buffet's experiences, travels, and philanthropy around the globe... the things I would do to get to go on a trip with him...

He talks about what he has seen, what he knows to be true and why, what he still questions, foreign aid, international trade and economics, farming, human dignity, and so much more. Reading it changed the way I see philanthropy, patience, culture, the interconnectedness of the globe, and systems thinking. It reshaped how I think about our food system, wicked problems, war-torn countries, gender roles around the world, healthy soil, economies, and even basic human empathy. It reminded me that we really can make a difference, but only if we want to — and if we’re willing to fail along the way.

The point of this blog? To encourage you to read 40 Chances: Finding Hope in a Hungry World. If not read it, at least to expand your thinking in more ways than one.

The 40 Chances Mindset

Early in the book, Buffett writes:

“You have 40 chances to get it right. Not 41. Not 50. Forty.”

The way he sees it, farmers have about 40 growing seasons to work with. It is easy to fall into a "just get by another year" mindset, especially for the folks in agriculture. But to do something with your time, to leave a legacy, to leave the land better than you found it, you will see that you may just need all of your chances to "get it right."

That line reframed how I think about my own work and dreams. Instead of waiting for the “perfect” time or being paralyzed by fear of failure, I started seeing each year as one of my chances. Not to get it perfect, but to try. To experiment. To fail forward if I have to.

This isn’t just about farming. It’s about how we invest in people, how we give, how we build communities, how we spend our time.

Hunger Has a Human Face

This book hits you right in your face with the stats and the reality of hunger. How it is in sub-Saharan Africa, the small villages in remote Asia and South America, the violent Middle East, but also in your community. Hunger is caused by a multitude of things: government corruption, cyclical poverty, drought, lack of education, flooded local economic markets, short or non-existent growing seasons, intertwining cultures, civil war, food waste, poor health and nutrition, disease, poor infrastructure, gender inequality, and so much more. As you can see, these aren't small things to fix, if they were easy to fix, it would've be done by now. These are what are known as wicked problems which can always be described as the symptom of other problems. Thus, a system is born.

One chapter that still lingers in my mind is Sex and Hunger in Timbuktu. Timbuktu is often used in American lingo as almost an imaginary place that is forever away and may not even actually exist. Mali is one of the poorest countries on Earth and is plagued with corruption and instability. It is a real place. Buffett describes the heartbreaking reality faced by women in Mali. In a place where poverty and hunger dictates daily choices, many women were forced to trade their bodies for survival — for food, for safety, for a chance to get by another day.

Reading that shook me. It’s one thing to think about “global hunger” as an abstract issue. It’s another to realize that hunger isn’t just about empty stomachs. It drives people into situations that rob them of dignity and safety. That chapter stripped away my comfortable distance from the issue. It reminded me that hunger is personal, and the solutions must be too.

Buffet's stories don’t let you keep problems at arm’s length. They force you to see the faces and stories behind the statistics.

Buffet is a photographer and in this chapter, this is a photo of the specific young girl he tells this story about. Seeing her eyes and learning her reality was agonizing.

Hope in a Hungry World

It’s easy to read about the realities of hunger and walk away feeling overwhelmed and like the problem is too big, too tangled, too impossible to fix. But one thing Buffett does so well in 40 Chances is showing that there is real hope, even in the hardest places.

He tells stories of farmers who learned new techniques and saw their fields produce more food than they thought possible. He writes about communities where women were given access to land or microloans, and suddenly had the ability to feed their families with dignity. (Women lift up these economies.) He highlights organizations that resisted corruption and still found ways to get resources directly into the hands of people who needed them most.

Hope isn’t naive optimism. It’s gritty. It’s built on small wins, stubborn persistence, and the courage to plant seeds even when the last harvest failed.

And that’s what struck me: hunger doesn’t erase hope. In fact, hope is what allows people to keep fighting against it. From Argentinian farmers experimenting with new crops to communities rebuilding after war, 40 Chances is full of reminders that while the challenges are real, so is the resilience of people.

That gives me hope, too. Even in our small corners of the world, what we plant matters. Change is slow, but it is possible.

Changing My Thinking

This book reached into so many areas of my life and reshaped how I think:

Philanthropy: It showed me philanthropy isn’t just writing checks. It’s about long-term systems change: empowering people, building dignity, and taking risks that might fail.
Patience: Farming teaches patience. So does real transformation. This book reminded me that meaningful impact rarely happens fast. It takes showing up again and again.
Systems Thinking: I studied global food systems in college, but this book brought it to life. Soil, water, policy, culture, economics — it’s all connected. You can’t fix one without touching the rest.
Food Systems: It revealed just how fragile and uneven the global food system really is. What feels like abundance in one part of the world often means scarcity somewhere else.
Different Cultures: Buffett’s stories of farmers across the globe reminded me that solutions have to begin with listening. What works in Nebraska won’t always work in Sierra Leone.
Wicked Problems: Hunger and poverty don’t have simple fixes. This book made me accept the complexity without giving up on hope.
War-Torn Countries: Farming in conflict zones showed me resilience I can hardly comprehend. For many, food isn’t just survival, it’s security, dignity, and peace.
Gender Roles: Women grow much of the world’s food but are often overlooked and under-resourced. That truth challenged me to see just how much potential is wasted when we ignore them.
Healthy Soil: I’ll never see soil the same again. It’s the basis of life. Without it, nothing else stands.
Economies: Food and economics are intertwined. What happens on a farm is shaped by markets, trade, and policies far beyond a farmer’s control.
Human Empathy: Most of all, it taught me to see people. To remember that every farmer, mother, and child in these stories has a life as complex and valuable as mine.

Urgency Without Fear

I also learned more about Non-Governmental Organizations. Buffet challenges NGO's by saying that their goal should be to put themselves out of business. Which didn't make sense at first... then by the end of the book, it did. He means that these groups should work so hard and be so outwardly invested that they are able to solve the problems they were created to deal with so they don't have anymore work to do. Of course that reality seems far-fetched but it is definitely a very interesting consideration to make of NGO's, philanthropists, and charities for that matter. One of Buffett’s central challenges hit me hard: “If everybody thought they had to put themselves out of business in 40 years… you would probably be more urgent and you would be forced to change quicker.”

Forty chances isn’t a lot. That thought should scare us a little but also push us to live with more urgency, more clarity, and more courage.

This book turned everything I learned in my global food systems major into perspective. It shifted it from head knowledge into heart urgency. It made me realize that systems don’t change unless people are willing to do the hard, slow, messy work.