Barn Talk - Barn Talk Hot Topics: RFK Jr.'s Controversial Views on American Agriculture

Episode Date: August 7, 2023

Welcome to Barn Talk! What happens at the barn, stays in the barn, but not today! We’re letting it all out. In this episode we're tackling a controversial subject that has been making waves in the industry. Our discussion revolves around Smithfield Foods, the Chinese acquisition, and the implications it holds for American hog farmers. From the company's aggressive expansion strategies, we'll unpack the facts, examine the challenges faced by farmers, and explore potential solutions. But first, we want to address a thought-provoking video by Robert Kennedy Jr. that has stirred up emotions and raised concerns on his integrity as a presidential candidate.  Buy Our Pork From Our Farm ➱ https://farmergrade.com Barn Talk Merch! 👇🏻 https://www.thislldo.co/  SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST ➱ https://bit.ly/3a7r3nR   SUBSCRIBE TO THIS’LL DO FARM ➱ https://bit.ly/2X8g45c  SUBSCRIBE TO BARN TALK CLIPS ➱ https://bit.ly/3BlZnqq   LISTEN ON: SPOTIFY ➱ https://open.spotify.com/show/3icVr4KWq4eUDl7Oy60YMY  ITUNES ➱ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/barn-talk/id1574395049 Follow Behind The Scenes👇🏻 ● This’ll Do Farm Instagram ➱ https://bit.ly/30KPBNk   ● Barn Talk TikTok ➱ https://bit.ly/3qciekS   ● Sawyer’s Instagram  ➱ https://bit.ly/3BtX0n4   ● Tork’s Instagram ➱ https://bit.ly/3LGZJxS    ------------------------------- ***PLEASE NOTE*** Barn Talk is a significant break from the typical content viewers have come to expect from This’ll Do Farm. Please be advised that we will be exploring a wide variety of topics (some adult-themed) and our younger viewers (and their parents) should be advised that some topics will be for mature audiences only. ⚠NO FINANCIAL ADVICE / DISCLAIMER⚠  The Information discussed and shared on Barn Talk is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or success for any particular purpose. The Information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice. The Information on this podcast and provided from or through our content is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional, professional broker or financial advisory. Understand that you are using any and all Information available on or through this website at your own risk. RISK STATEMENT– The trading of Bitcoins, alternative cryptocurrencies, NFTs, individual stocks, etc. has potential rewards, and it also has potential risks involved. Trading may not be suitable for all people. Anyone wishing to invest should seek his or her own independent financial or professional advice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All of the food we eat and much of the clothing we wear comes from plants and animals that are raised on farms. Farms are different in type, in size, and even in name. Welcome to Barn Talk. What happens at the barn stays in the barn, but not today. We're going to let it all out for you guys. You know, barns have a smell. Hay, manure, fresh paint, sometimes a little damp and musty. Today's Hot Topics episode is about a smell that is never very appetizing. politicians run in their mouths about subjects that they might not have enough facts to speak intelligently about. But before we get into it, you guys know the drill.

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And that's where we'll come up with our answers for our next Q&A. Next week will probably be a Q&A. So be looking out for that. Dad's got a hot fresh market update that's hot off the press this morning. Hot. How's your morning going? Good. Real good.

I got up and got a little extra. exercise in and got me a got me a energy drink and you know I like our organic reach yeah yeah people ask me when they find out that we're farmers and they ask if I'm organic I say yeah organic organic organic content I'm not going to tell them what kind of organic your organic content baby cover we we we cut a wide swath yeah the Whistler family here on the farm is all kind of we're all kind of starting to walk. Get her 30 minutes of walking in the morning. And if you live in the country or if you don't,

I encourage anybody that's got the time to go outside and go for a walk. Helps you set up your day. It really does. It's a good peace, peaceful time to just have with yourself. You know, think about what you're going to do that day and maybe talk to the Lord a little bit. I don't know. And just kind of take it in.

So I've been doing that and I haven't, I've never, a walker but mom and dad started doing it and you know they say 30 minutes exercise a day keeps the doctor away so I started doing it and I actually went to the extreme of buying a ruck pack if any of you know what rucking is you get this it's like a bag you put on your it's like a weighted vest but on your back and you put a 20 pound 10 pound 40 pound plate in the back of it holds that plate and you walk with it and today was my first experience with it I wasn't out of breath but but But it's, I mean, shit, it's kind of heavy on your back.

But it's just a good, it's good. It helps, if you haven't done it, I encourage anybody to try it because I have seen that it kind of keeps me grounded in the morning, helps me set up my day, helps me talk to the Lord, and that's, feel good after I do it. Yeah, I was holding out for a cold plunge, but it looked like we probably weren't going to spend the money on that for a while. So I was like, damn, I'm going to have to start walking. And I don't need a ruck pack.

I got the weight of the world sitting on my chair. You will eventually. I think you could do it. If you just keep walking and if in a year's time, if you're still walking, you'll probably be like, well, this is too easy. Unless you want to start running. Then you could start running. I took off sprinting the other day.

Like a week ago, I was coming down the hill from Sawyer site. God, we should have got that on video and dubbed it in right now. That would have been something. It would have looked something like that scene in chariots of fire, I think. Probably something like that. At least that's how I pay. picture it in my mind. Not sure. But I will tell you that it doesn't quite feel the same as whenever the last time that I sprinted was, which has probably been maybe decades because I have

no wild animals have chased me in a long time. But I took off. I ran. I don't know how far I ran. And it was almost like I was afraid that when I went to stop, I was going to like fall into a heap. Just start rolling. Yeah, it wasn't. It wasn't. It wasn't. it wasn't a smooth transition let's just put it that way but the goal is for there to be less of torque less of torque yeah and i'm just doing it for a healthy heart and just healthy lungs and i think it's just a good good way to start your day it wakes you up too kind of like shooting a podcast in the morning does i know and i feel good today we're gonna have a great fucking day today oh okay i'll give you i'll give you the fast and hot market update uh so this is actually the close from yesterday because i didn't

when we started this morning. Corn on the board, 481, and so that's September. And corn locally, the best bid around, 556. And beans, 1325, 14.03 at Burlington, 1433, if you go across the river to Quincy. Wheat, 627, bean meal, $451 a pound, or, sorry, $451 a ton. hogs $101. I think we hit the high the day we hit the high the day we delivered the farmer-grade pigs. Yep, I think that was the high point.

Cattle 178, feeder cattle 248, crude oils bumped up a little bit, a lot of turmoil in the world, $81. I'm still surprised that it's as cheap as it is. Bitcoin has just been hanging out between $29 and $30,000, $29,000, $29,000. $292 right now, Ethereum 1800. Tesla 259. I guess buy the hype, sell the fact because they had their annual, or not their annual, but their second quarter report,

and they did excellent, and they're making money. They don't have any debt. Production's good. Stock's been down ever since, so figure it out. I don't know. I thought I'd throw in some good ag stocks today, John Deere, $423 a share. If you want to look at a real nice stock chart,

look at a 10-year chart of John Deere. It'll make you wish that 10 years ago you would have bought it when it was $70 because it's $400. They pay a dividend, don't they? You know, I was going to look at that. I feel like they would. That they are a dividend stock, but I can't remember for sure. But Deere has definitely been pretty consistent

about building their stock price. And when you control the margin, in the way they do on their equipment, love it or hate it, you can deliver a lot of value. Nice contrast. Case, New Holland, CNH, $14.29 a chair, and its stock chart does not look anything like Dears. But they're getting there. They've had a lot of reorganization. Agco, and Agco basically owns everything else. They got, I don't know. It's so funny in that, business because deer everything's dear and agco nope not so much any brand every brand you could possibly think of they are they just keep the brand they buy it and keep it 125 dollars and 40 cents

that is your hot and fast market update today was supposed to be a Q&A but this popped up and it really it just really grabbed me and then a couple people sent it to me. Claire Dunn actually sent it. Friend of the show, Claire Dunn, love her doing great, sent me this clip and was like, is this true? And it really struck a nerve with you. I think it struck any hog farmer, it probably struck a nerve with you.

Because, yeah. I mean, yeah, we'll get into it. But it's a perfect example. of a politician being a politician and spinning up a narrative that doesn't always align with the reality and the facts to make what they are running on better the solution for the American people. So Robert F. Kennedy Jr. put out this, and he put it out on all social media. He got a question from a woman about foreign landowners. And for some reason, he decided that that was a perfect jumping off point to go on a tangent about

factory farms and big food and specifically Smithfield. And Smithfield is a real good, they're a perfect company to bag on because they're not very popular with anybody, including people in the food business and including a hell of a lot of hog farmers, Smithfield got sold to the Chinese 2013. We'll get into it. And a lot of people upset about that. Yeah, I definitely don't love that. Yeah, nobody does. And he went off on that. And that's fine. I don't care. I think Smithfield has done a lot of things wrong, but they're paying the price for it. They sold a lot of sows. They're in the process of selling a lot of sows. They sold off, they closed some of the packing that they had. I feel like their culture is pretty crap. I mean, I just think on the show,

we've said it for years now. People want American businesses. They want American made goods. People want jobs and businesses back in America. And when everybody has figured out, which I think everybody in America has figured out, not just people working in the food industry, that Smithfield has sold to the Chinese. Yeah. Because I mean, yeah, they sold in 2013, but how many people actually knew? But now, 2023, 10 years later,

everybody kind of knows. Yeah, when that's shooting them in the foot. I remember when it happened. And in the hog industry, it was a real big deal. A lot of people, you know, it was talked about heavily and people were upset about it. But as far as in the national fray, it was there for a minute on major media.

and then it was pretty much gone. But the whole image of China and their ownership of land and all the stuff going down, that's really gotten. So this is a perfect, perfect spot. But like I said, the thing that didn't, it didn't bother me one bit that he was bagging on Smithfield, whatever.

But he made this weird, this weird connection in North Carolina. And it's not that weird, but this is a politician, and really this is kind of a lawyer. This is, to me, when I watched this, what disappointed me the most was, if you've heard us talk about it, you've heard us talk about Robert F. Kennedy earlier and how we were, I was really kind of excited that he was shaken up the Democratic Party. And he seemed like kind of a note of nonsense guy against the grain and he was talking about real issues and I was excited about it. But the way he went off on this, it was a real politician move because it like sprinkled just enough

fact in with the story was weaving that one, it all sounds believable, but we're going to show you the timeline and the connections and the reasoning, it just doesn't jive in my mind. Well, what pissed us off the most about it is, yeah, he went after Smithfield, but the overarching narrative of it is he kind of went after the hog industry and the people that are in the hog industry and insulted us kind of threw a little dig at us. and just made us feel like what we do isn't really that important or it's the wrong thing to do. And we don't like that. That's what pissed me off.

And we know a little bit more about that story than what he was telling the people. And it wasn't really the full truth or the truth at all. So that's what upsets us. But yeah, like Dad said, I think that we're not saying that big food. and the big packers are, I don't, I don't love the idea that there's these big packers that control most of the meat in this country. I don't love that. I think a lot of farmers can agree with that. But it's the kind of the way it had, it played out. It's the way that it's been, it's had to play out for us to be as plentiful in our food supply as we are. And I think that,

there's a middle ground to be found where, you know, we can look at the system that we do have in food and how can we make it better, but still not go to the extreme level of saying, let's go back to the fucking stone ages and all animals need to be raised outside, no matter where you're at as a farmer, no matter where you're living, no matter what generation of farm you are, no matter what your financial status. It's just like anything that they push on agriculture, like this whole carbon, the sequestration of carbon, right? Like, they don't even account for where you might live, what crops you might grow, the whole solar thing,

just the green thing in general. Like, they're telling people to put solar panels in states that it doesn't really make sense to put solar panels just for the sake of putting solar panels up for the green thing. It's the same thing with this regenerative agriculture thing. There's people that don't give a shit where you live, where your farm is located, where you're at financially at your farm, they believe you should raise all your animals outside and you should farm regeneratively. I don't believe that that's the

solution and that can work for everybody here in this country. But I also look at the system that we do have, and I think we can do better. We can have more independent farmers. We can work with family-owned butcher shops. We can work with family operations to really let the American consumer know where their food comes from and instill trust again and just make things better in that way. So I'm not saying that I'm for everything where we are in the meat industry now, but I'm also not for going back to the Stone Ages either. So I think there's a middle ground, just like there is with most topics and most subjects and most politicized issues. There's always a middle ground.

So we're going to roll the clip for you guys to watch. This is about a three-minute clip, maybe two minutes and 45 seconds. We're going to roll it for you if you haven't seen it. If you have seen it, go ahead and skip and you'll get our thoughts. But if you haven't seen it, I really encourage you to watch the whole thing, and then we'll give you our thoughts afterwards. Hey, everybody, here I am in Sherwood, Connecticut on Sherwood Island. Here's a little woodchuck hall.

Shirley Trubodore asked a question about why Gates and China are being allowed to buy up all the farmland in our country. And I'm going to tell you something that I had an experience with. I spent many years, about 20 years, suing the factory farms, the big hog farms and the big chicken producers like tight. and Bo Pilgrim and Frank Perdue. But Smithfield Foods was the biggest port producer. And Smithfield came to the state of North Carolina. They built a slaughterhouse that processed 30,000 pigs a day. And then they had a partner named Wendell Murphy,

who was in the state senate. And he passed 28 laws in the North Carolina State Senate, making it illegal to sue a factory farm. factory farm. He left and went into partnership with Smithfield, created a way to raise pigs. Instead of raising them on farms to raise them in warehouses called Murphy 1100s. And they dropped the price of pork from 60 cents a pound to two cents a pound. It put out of business all 28,000 independent hog farmers in the state of North Carolina. and it replaced them with 2,200 factories, all of them either owned by Smithfield or contracted to Smithfield.

The only farmers who could stay in business were farmers who signed that contract with Smithfield to mortgage their homes, to put those big hog sheds, the Murphy 1100s on their property, and then they lose all control. They become serfs on their own land. Smithfield dictates all their farming. practices. It gives them the food, it delivers the piglets, picks up the grown animals, and brings them to slaughter. They put out of business, 28,000 farmers, and it control now of 80% of the hog production in North Carolina. Because they dropped the price in North Carolina, Iowa had to adopt the same system, had to cave in to Smithfield. They ended up.

taking control of 80% of the hog production in our country, then they sold themselves to China. So now China owns all that hog production in America, and it controls our landscapes. And that's the end of Thomas Jefferson's vision of an American democracy rooted in tens of thousands of independent freeholds, each one owned by family farmers, each with a stake in our system of government. And that's why all of this industrial agriculture not only gives us substandard food, but they're also taking control of our landscapes, and that is a huge threat to American democracy. I hope you guys have a good day.

As you can see in there, I don't know, it's kind of weird. So he comes on, he talks about where he's at and shows you the hole where a woodchuck lives. And then the question was about foreign land ownership, Bill Gates, and Bill Gates and the Chinese, and then he just jumps into Smithfield, and he makes this comment that Smithfield built this huge packing plant in North Carolina and partnered with Wendell Murphy. And he's not right in that.

The reason he says that they partnered with Wendell Murphy is because eight years after they built their packing plant, North Carolina. They purchased Murphy Family Farms. Murphy's decided to exit the hog business. Windows business. Yep. They had built, they had built this huge fair to finish operation in North Carolina. They sold it to Smithfield. Smithfield paid them like $178 million and they gave them $3.3 million shares of Smithfield stock. So I think that's how he can make the connection and say that they partnered. That isn't, to me, that's just...

That's acquiring a business. Smithfield didn't have that much cash, so they gave them stock. And I have no idea whether Murphy still own any of that stock or not. My guess is they've probably liquidated a hell of a lot of it over the years since because Smithfield has not necessarily

been a very good investment right up until the time that the Chinese bought them and they bought it for a premium. But what I want to talk about is this idea that, he goes on and he paints this picture of of Wendell Murphy and Murphy Farms as just decimating

all the independent farmers in North Carolina and I got to look at my notes because when I was going through it last night it's a lot to get through. Well, yeah, and I would, I'm not going to go very long, but I would just say essentially what I got from that part of the video is he made it seem like that the big packers are what destroyed the independent hog farmer when in fact if you go back you lived it right you know what it was like that hog that that contract hog farming boom didn't happen that happened after everybody lost their ass as an

independent hog farmer that didn't happen because of that right right it was because the economy went to shit. Well, we, we as an industry overproduced and at the time, well, we'll just, we'll just go through it. So I'm going to start because he makes this connection between Smithfield, Wendell Murphy. And as I said, they bought Murphy Farms in 2000. They opened, Smithfield opened that packing plant that they built North Carolina in 1992. However, contract finishing and what he says about the Murphy 1100s, that was all done. That was already, they had built this whole business before that ever happened. So Wendell grew up, his dad was a tobacco farmer in North Carolina. And he ended up going to college at North Carolina

state because his dad made it very clear to him that there wasn't room on the farm. I mean, how many times this story has played out all over agriculture through that time period in the 70s where there was not enough there for the next generation to start farming and Wendell knew that so he went to college he went to college get an ag degree when he got out of college the only job offers he had was with a company that wanted to send him to South America and he didn't want to go to South America so he took a job teaching ag at like a high school, not too far away from where he grew up. And in 1962, he decided that there was money to be made in basically what we would call the day a toll mill, building a feed mill that milled corn and made feed custom for different people. So they might

make cattle feed, they might make chicken feed. Independent livestock producers. Yep, for people around. And he made 10 cents a bushel. His model was basically this. Back then, most all the farmers

harvested their corn in the ear. So the modern combine that we have today, most guys down there, most guys weren't using that. They were picking corn with an ear corn picker, And then they had a corn sheller, and they would shell it, but then they also would grind the corn for chicken feed or cattle feed or hog feed, whatever.

But the other side of it that made it profitable for them was there was a market for ground up corn cobs and the huss, both in cattle feed and for like bed and chickens and stuff like that. So they milled the corn, but they also milled the corn cobs. And they actually made more money. They made $20 a ton, or they got $20 a ton for the cob meal, and they got 10 cents a bushel for milling the corn. So it was a really good deal. But as the end of the 60s came, they saw people getting combines. And when you got a combine, you didn't eat anybody.

to shell it and then you didn't get the cops because the cops stayed in the field and Wendell was like this deal is going to end so what are we going to do well he decided let's go to the let's go to the sale barn we'll get feeder pigs and we'll start feeding our own pigs out and they started feeding pigs in dirt lots and that worked because they made the feed and they were able to buy feeder pigs and that's literally how he got started. And they just continue to do this. And by 1979 is when they built their first confinement hog building. So that was the start of putting pigs inside down in North Carolina.

So for a little bit of reference, when Robert Kennedy Jr. says that, you know, they started this whole thing of contract finishing, and made all these farmers serfs. My dad raised pigs outside. We ferrored him in 10-pen farrowing houses. He built his first finisher in 1971. He still farroed in a barn,

and he still kept his sows in barn lot. But the pigs that he got off those sows, he put him in a finishing building. He built that 1971. That was the year I was born. In 1975 is when we built our first hustles, Bilt Thrive Center. There was a company out of Monmouth, Illinois that made a panel wall building. So if you know Lesters, Lesters and EPS today make a panel wall building. Well, Husky built was,

they were kind of ahead of their time. They were a little too far ahead of their time because they went broke. But anyway, we built our first farrowing house nursery and we put all our sows inside in 1975. They did the same thing in 1979. So this wasn't some phenomena that they thought up and that they started. It just made sense because if you've ever seen a bunch of pigs

in a dirt lot, what happens? You're acting like you'd like to say something. Well, no, I was going to just say it's back to the point of him saying that Wendell Murphy and the Packer were the ones that made the decision to put

pigs inside. When it was the American independent hog farmer that decided to do it. Not the packer, not the integrator that was Wendell Murphy. He was independent at that time. Nobody was telling the independent hog farmer to do this. They did it out of their own logical sense. Right. Because they saw the problems with raisin pigs outside. They witnessed it every day. They saw the death loss. They saw the disease. They saw the parasites. They saw it all. therefore they made the decision so that's what pisses me off a lot and that's the that's the reoccurring theme he makes it seem like that it's the packer and that it's the um that it's the

integrator that made the independent hog farmer do it and they they didn't get big overnight they just gradually grew and their first sow units that they built were 200 head sow units okay so for reference our little farm in southeast Iowa that I grew up on we had 160 sows fairer to finish we had no hired labor it was my brothers my dad my mom and that's what we did so what they were doing down there was the exact same thing that we were doing here but they grew because they had they had access to corn they could get the pigs and Wendell made the comment that they made the decision that they were just going to put profit back into their business because they could hire more people, they could get more people growing, and they thought it was a good deal for the local community.

And they had people that wanted to build buildings for them and wanted to build sal farms for them because they liked that system of guaranteed income. Well, I'm just sitting here thinking and I'm just spitballing, but he probably had a lot of connections due to, having that feed mill or that toll mill. Yep. So he probably had a lot of people that saw what he was doing and said, you know, hey, you want to raise pigs for us or contract raise pigs for us. Yeah. And also, you got to just give the guy credit.

I mean, most people at that time probably, like you said, during that time, grandpa took hogs to the sale barn when you guys needed money. It wasn't like this. Most farmers at that time that were raising pigs, they weren't trying to take over the world. They weren't trying to swing for the fences and build this insane operation. They were just raising a family,

getting by, having enough money to sustain a farming, pay the bills. Wendell probably was a little more ambitious. He probably saw it. He probably had a knack for business. He probably was like, you know what? I can grow this thing. And he probably did.

Yeah. Well, he did do that, but I'm just saying. The other part of this that Kennedy leaves out, is they weren't alone in doing this. Down there in the Carolinas, the same time he was doing it, Carol Foods was doing it, Prestage was doing it, Goldsboro was doing it,

Goldsboro Milling. Those four companies were all doing the same thing. And they did not have an adversarial relationship. They all kind of worked together because the demand for what they were doing was growing and more people wanted to do the type of, raised pigs the way that they were doing it. And so they actually formed, I don't know what year they did this, but they formed a buying group to buy supplies, to buy feed additives, to buy the stuff they needed.

They formed this group called Ag Provisions and it was a purchasing co-op. So it wasn't just Wendell Murphy that built this whole hog industry in North Carolina. It was all those guys were growing at the same time. And then, then I give him a lot of credit because they pioneered the three-site production system, which today, some people still use that. Some people actually use a two-site production, and all that means is, like, we're part of a system that mostly uses two-part production, and by that, or two-site production, in the fact that the sows are housed on one site, and they pharaoh, and then when the pigs are weaned, they bring them to our wean to finish

building, and we finish them out. When they started down there, they went to a three, a three-site production where they had nurseries. So the pigs came from the sow unit to the nursery, from the nursery to the finishers. And it made their system very efficient because people could specialize. Because before that, they did it just the way we did it here, where we had all the sows here, all the pigs stayed here. And we had continuous flow finisher where whenever we had pigs big enough to sell, we loaded them up and the finishing building never got washed. You just ran, if we sold three pens worth of pigs, you went to the grower and you got three pens worth of pigs and you filled it up. And if we had extra pigs, we threw them outside because we didn't know what else to do with them.

But all this was going on. And that custom finishing model, it was already pretty dominant in North Carolina by the time that this whole relationship with Smithfield came, because what happened was before Smithfield built that packing plant, those pigs that were being raised down there were being hauled somewhere else to go to a packing plant. And then Smithfield built that packing plant in 92, and all these guys that I named above, they started selling pigs to Smithfield. Okay. So for their, again, Smithfield probably saw a need because all these North Carolina hog farmers are sending their pigs elsewhere, probably out of state to pack these, to process these pigs. So what Smithfield do? They build a packing plant in North Carolina because logistically,

it makes sense. Made sense. You had this huge supply of pigs down there. Why truck them? Just get them right there. And so then again, side note, so you talk about... And that's almost a decade of them doing the contract finishing model before. I know he probably didn't write at 79 when he put his pigs inside. He probably didn't start contract finishing then. Right. But what? Early 80s, mid-80s? By the mid-80s, they were doing it. And so the fact that Smithfield built that plant in 92, the first curtain-sided, what I call the standard buildings that we built, the first ones of those were built right right in the early 90s so even here in Iowa because later on he makes the he makes the comment I'll jump ahead a little bit because um he said that as they grew

I can't find it as they grew that Iowa had no choice but to adopt the same yep the same kind of operations that they were run in North Carolina. That's total bullshit. It was already going. We were already doing it. The first contract finishers were built in the early 90s. So by the time Smithfield purchased Murphys, and they didn't just purchase Murphys, they purchased Carol Foods at the same time that they purchased in the same year. In 2000, they bought both of those. And we'll go through all of the acquisitions that Smithfield did. And another, thing that he doesn't touch on is the reason they did that. But anyway, before I get, I won't, I won't just bullshit. They sold their operation to Smithfield in 2000. And then he makes the comment

that Wendell Murphy, Pat, this is his quote, I should have written down his exact quote, but he says, Wendell Murphy went to the state legislature, and he did, he became a state representative or a state senator. And he says, Wendell Murphy passed 27 laws protecting corporate farms from being sued. And I thought, wow, that's pretty impressive because the last time I checked, it takes more than one guy to pass a law in the legislature, and the governor needs to sign it.

So these laws that he's talking about, and I did not go through and find all the laws that, and he doesn't give footnotes in his thing. But my guess is, at the time that he's speaking of, production agriculture was very important to North Carolina. And the hog industry was one of the biggest employers in the state, and it brought millions of dollars of tax revenue to the state, both income tax and property tax. So to say that Wendell Murphy is the villain, that he is this evil guy that did all this stuff, that he built this industry, that he partnered with Smithfield, and then he passed all these laws, that is a real stretch for personal, probably for personal gain and greed is probably... This goes to the problem with politics and...

and lawyers becoming politicians, they are really good at taking something and having just enough facts sprinkled into their story that they can whip this up and it sounds pretty good. And the other thing is, people love a good villain,

and Smithfield is a good villain because they have screwed up a lot of shit in this country. And if you talk, like you said earlier, we're basically down to four packers. We have Smithfield, we have Tyson, we have JBS, and we have Seaboard, or triumph. In the hog industry. In the hog industry.

Now, Prestage built their own packing plant. Pipestone is trying to build their packing plant, Holstone, I think it's called Holstone or something like that. Prestage is up and going. So you could make the argument that, there's five because but Prestage is I think Prestige is fully vertically

integrated. I don't think that they buy they might buy other people's pigs. But anyway out of that group JBS is owned by the Brazilians. Smithfield's owned by the Chinese. The only two companies that are the major players is Triumph Foods

which is owned by a group and full disclosure one of the owners is the company that we feed pigs for and the other one is Tyson. nobody's happy about that nobody thinks that foreign companies should own packing here in the united states i agree with that and i think everybody can yeah so you know like i said in the beginning smithfield is what it is but to take all of us because when you're going after murfies and the idea of custom finishing and calling so i'm a surf if you go by we're both serfs yeah that's what i was going to say he talks pretty much tells anybody that's raising on a contract finishing

uh contract that you're a surf on your own land and that we have to bow down to everybody and do what they say and yada yada yada but we were talking about this yesterday uh or a couple days ago if contract hog farming wasn't prevalent here in our county there would be way less fucking family farms in this county, there would be hardly any because the biggest grain farmers, the farms that have sustained and grown are the ones that put up hog buildings. There's very few strictly grain farming operations here in this county that are growing and growing and growing just based off of their crop production. They most of the time have contract hog barns to go along with their crop production.

And you know what fucking pays the bills and makes the money? Those buildings. And that is what's given a lot of farms around here the opportunity to grow and bring back another generation and stay a family farm. So to say that we're serfs, if that wouldn't have happened, you think it's corporate now,

there'd probably be way more fucking corporate farms or very, there'd be way less independent American family farms in this country if that system did not exist. So that's what pisses me off. And this idea, the other thing, this goes back to what you said, and you brought this up too. Back in that day, like grandpa, and like a lot of people, pay the bills, take the hogs to the sale barn when you need the money, live a good life. How many people really want in the landscape that we're in to build a hog barn and raise their own pigs when they could just put somebody else's

pigs in there, get a check, don't have to provide the feed, don't have to pay for any vaccine, don't have to worry about more problems than they already have. It's kind of the same thing as back in that day where you just kind of simple life, you sold when you needed to, that's where contract, that's, that's, most people are not ambitious enough to want to take on independent hog farming and go to the moon with it. Like this idea, I think the people from outside of agriculture like to think that the, the, the American farmer wants to just, just fucking work themselves to death and own everything themselves and go and swing for the fences and just get as big as they possibly can. I don't think so. Yeah, I'll jump off of that. So I meant to share this when we were

talking about the growth down there. He makes a comment that after this partnership, when he says that they got this partnership between Murphy's and Smithfield. He said they drove the price, and he doesn't give a window, he doesn't give a time. He said they drove the price of pigs from 60 cents a pound to two cents a pound. So he doesn't give a time, but by that account, I'm assuming that he's talking about the mid to late 90s, which that's when I was raising pigs. So I bought, I, I went off on my own, my dad and I stayed farming together, but I went off on my own in 1992, and I bought a farm 120 sows, fair to finish. So we had 160 sows, about 200 sows here by the time I left, and I bought a farm, a little ways north of us, a guy that had 120 sows, fairer to finish. Started in 92.

By 98, I was losing, I don't know, I was probably losing $30 ahead. I might have been losing more than that. The hog market collapsed. Here, the hog market was maybe 15 cents a pound. I don't remember it ever getting down to two cents. That had nothing, absolutely nothing to do with Smithfield Foods. That had everything to do with, we had gone through a period of, want to say maybe 10 years of the hog business being very profitable. The year that I, the first year that I sold my

own pigs, hogs were over 70 cents a pound. When we did our cash flow on me buying that farm, my, my break even, it was like 38 cents. And I thought I had the world by the fucking tail. I was 21 years old. I was on my own. I was on my own. we got married. I mean, we could do no wrong. And then 95 came, or 96 came. And then 98 came. And I ended up exiting the hog business. We sold it all out, sold all the sows.

So we were losing our ass. Because what was the price per pound then? Well, so it had gotten down to 15 cents. And then it came back. 96, it got cheap. And then it came back and it got better. But then 98 came and 98 just decimated because it not only did it get low, and I don't know for sure how low it got, I can't remember, but it stayed bad long enough that when you're sitting there on an operating note and a mortgage and you can't make the payment for either one, and some guys couldn't pay the interest, it just piles up. And then the other thing was the other side of it that nobody talks about is at the same time this happened,

The guys that weren't doing three-site production, the diseases that you had, the problems with keeping sowsbred, and the strains and pneumonia that we had were, they got a lot worse than what they were. And there's a lot of reasons for that too, but part of it's just because, as we all know, viruses evolve, they change, and it happened in the hog industry. And so, you're a lot of your vet costs got up, your death loss was higher, it was harder to keep sow's bread. There was just a lot of problems. And I got out. And that's when I went, that's when I got into the construction business.

And I have told this to so many people, so many times, one of the greatest gifts that the good Lord can give you, if you're lucky enough to live long enough. some people call wisdom but i call it i mean it is i guess you can call wisdom but it's perspective because you can look backwards if you live long enough you can look backwards over your life and you can look at things that happen and you can say well i handled that right or i didn't handle that right or i'm glad that happened or that you know didn't happen the in my mind it was very painful when we had to exit the hog business and it was hard on my marriage it was hard on my family it was hard on my parents but the worst thing I think that could have happened in my life is if somehow we would have muddled through and we would have kept heroin picks and we would have

made it through that because today if I was still doing it and I I'm sure I would have gotten out because the margins have gotten thinner. I would be a miserable son of a bitch. And that's the point. There was a hell of a lot of people that could have stayed, could have kept pharaoh and pigs, and could have stayed independent. But they realized that change happens all the time.

The only constant life has changed. The world changed. The hog business. changed. The margins got thinner. You had to get bigger to have more snouts to sell to make the same amount of money that you used to make because more people were doing it. Feed costs were higher. Production expense was higher. A lot of people looked at that and said, I'd rather build, I'd rather build finishers and custom feed. And all I have to do is take care of the pigs. I get the manure to help my corn crop grow.

I can bring my son back and pay him to chore the hog building. The hog building will pay for itself. In seven years it'll be paid for. And then I'll have an asset and I can keep paying my son or my daughter, whoever. And if they want to go build a barn, we'll have the equity that they can do it and we can keep this family farm going. To your point, we, and we've said this before, we farm 400 acres, 400 acres, and that money goes to pay for the retirement home bill of my mother.

We don't really make any money grain farm. We make our living, the two of us. We're the serfs. We make our money finishing those pigs for our integrator. And it is a damn good life. And for it pisses. me off for anybody to come in here and say, oh, you know, these poor son of a bitches are, they're just pawns and they're just serfs. Well, you can call it whatever you want, but we have a great relationship with the people that we feed pigs for, and they need us, we need them, and I'm thankful every month when the check comes, and it's a great partnership because we get a check. We have this. great asset that we have equity in that we can use that equity to do other things and we've done it

we've purchased real estate that has nothing to do with agriculture from the equity from our hog billings and we get the manure that fertilizes our crop that makes our grain operations that much more profitable and cash flow they give good cash flow so it just it really bothered me that whole that whole slur about how they destroyed. And he made the comment that they put 28,000 independent hog farmers out of business. Independent hog farmers out of business. Well, I have no idea how many independent hog farmers went out of business in the state of Iowa through the 90s. But it wasn't just hog farmers. There again, though, there again, they aren't the reason that those people went under. Right. 98 was the reason a lot of people went under and that was before they even, that's before

Murphy sold the Smithfield. Right. Right. And Smithfield Foods building that packing plant in North Carolina was not the reason that the fucking market collapsed. That's what people don't get. Or that's what he obviously doesn't get or he does get it, but he doesn't fit well in his narrative and what he's running on.

Yeah. And again, like I said. everything that dad said I agree with but we're not here saying that we like the system we don't we're not in love with the system that we're in right now right we don't love everything about it but it is a damn good life and it is the way the industry went and it wasn't just because of Wendell Murphy

in Smithfield Foods and the Packer a lot of other shit happened competition happened it's capitalism it's business business got involved with agriculture it's always been a part of ag culture, but more people wanted to raise more pigs, and it got competitive. And that's any fucking industry.

That is how it's played. That's how the game is played. It just is like it or hate it. And so, like I said, we can find a middle ground. I think there's change that needs to happen in the food industry and in the meat industry. And I like to believe that what we're doing at Farmer Grade,

shameless plug, is kind of a little, it's a solution into that middle. bringing transparency into the food system in the meat industry, regardless of how the farmer wants to raise their animal, because I believe they know what the fuck they're doing, they can choose how they want to raise their animals because I believe they're doing what's best for them and in their operation and where they live and where their farms at.

So who am I to tell you how you should raise your animals? I just want to bring transparency in the food system that we have. I think that's what people want. They want truth. They want honesty. They want to know how their foods produce. And we can do that with the system, we have. And we still got to feed all the people that we got to feed. That's the other thing about

that's the other thing about the business that changed. More people were born. More people had to be fed. And less people were farming. So not only the hog business, cattle business, poultry business, there is a whole generation of people that left the farm because their parents were in the same situation as Wendell's parents, the farm was not big enough, could not grow big enough to support that next generation. And so we lost a whole bunch of people. And we continue to do that. The biggest issue in agriculture today, arguably, is lack of labor. So we've had to automate. And the beginning of that automation started in the 70s because you went from families that had five, six, seven kids. to families that had one or two kids.

And the size of farms got bigger because they had to because the margins were thinner, but you also had to automate, you had to buy bigger machinery. I mean, it's a vicious circle. And I don't have the answer for it. Yeah, because, you know, people are probably sitting here thinking,

well, if there's more people to feed, why wouldn't you make more money? Well, competition, people, like we were talking about, I don't think every farmer or every hog farmer, any livestock producer, wanted to just continually grow. There was a few guys that did. They looked at it and they wanted to do that. They wanted to build a hog business. And those guys did. And as a result, that's what happens. If you don't grow, you die. If you don't grow a little bit, you're going back. And that's what happened. I mean, that's what happened. And you can't blame. those guys. You can't blame

Wendell Murphy. You can't blame him for wanting to build a business and feed people. That's the other thing. It's a noble fucking business. I'm sure he looked at it and got a lot of fulfillment and the fact that you know what? We're raising a lot

of pigs and we're feeding a lot of people. Yeah, and he employed... Very noble. He employed a shitload of people and doing it. Yeah. I want to throw this in there. I don't want to go too long, but on the Smithfield deal, so before they purchased Murphy's, they were already on this idea that they were trying to grow. And when you read through everything that they bought, there is a kind of a common theme in it. At this period of time, the food production business had very poor margins. So a lot of the expansion. So a lot of the

expansion that they made, they bought distressed businesses, and they thought they could consume those and roll them into what they were doing, and eventually they would make a profit. And they went through some really hard times. But at the same time that they did that, they, so they had bought Carroll Foods at the same time that they bought Murphy. But then in 2003, they bought farmland foods. So if you're in the Midwest, you know farmland foods had packing plants around, and they went bankrupt. Because the margin the packers was making on processing animals very, very narrow, and they were losing their ass. They bought farmland in 2003. They bought Sarah Lee.

They bought ConAgra. They bought Butterball, the turkey brand, which they ended up having to divest of it because they got sued because of, you know, I don't know what you want to call it. They own too big a part of the market. And then they bought Browns in the Carolina. They bought Circle Four farms and they bought Premium Standard Farms. Okay, Circle Four Farms and Premium Standards were both, those are both hog operations.

And they grew and grew and they ended up being poorly run. They were losing money. Smithfield bought them, and they bought them cheap because they were distressed. That was how they grew because at the time that they were trying to expand, the economy and the environment in the food production business, the margins were really tight. And when they sold to the Chinese, there was nobody else, nobody else bidding on it. Nobody wanted it. That's part of the reason why the Chinese got it. Now, granted, they paid, I feel like they paid a premium, but nobody stood up and said

oh yeah no don't do that we'll buy it hell no nobody wanted nobody wanted smithfield foods and that's how this shit happens that's how it happens that's how we got here i would also say to any american consumer out there that doesn't like this

just as much as the american farmer doesn't love the system that we're in right now you vote with your fucking dollars and what has happened you could sit here and go, well, God, that's a shame that those businesses got to stress and they fell out and the margins were gone. Why do you think the margins were gone? Because nobody was willing to pay a premium or a penny more for bacon on the shelf, pork coin on the shelf, pork chips on the shelf. Nobody was willing to pay more. So everything had to get cheap because the American consumer was cheap. that you want to know what drives cost down and takes margin out of markets the american consumer

what they're willing to pay for a product and now we're here and some of you might not like where we're at so to combat that system support farms that are selling direct to consumer support restaurants that have actual farm to table relationships where you might have to pay a little more but that's what's going to keep family farms or those businesses or those direct-to-consumer meat businesses that are doing the right things and bringing transparency and that kind of thing that you want in the meat industry and the food system, you're going to have to pay a premium, dude, because we can't, people that are doing the direct-to-consumer thing, you can't compete with triumph, you can't compete with Tyson, you can't compete with Smithfield Foods. You don't

have the production line. You don't have the efficiencies that they do. Yeah, let's talk. So here's what we mean by that. So the pigs that we just got butchered, we can't sell everything out of that pig. So in other words, and I don't know whether this is too much or not, I don't think it is. So if you go to Asia, the head of the pig, everything that's in that head of that, pig. The tongue, the jowl, the snout, the ears, I don't know what else. Eyes. Yeah. That stuff is a delicacy. That's a premium product. They consume that over there because those, that culture. That culture, like they grew up using the whole pig. They still use the whole pig. So when we take a pig to the local locker. Family owned. American.

family owned, yep. There's no market for the head of that pig. I mean, I guess you could sell the ears for dog treats if you want to drive down. We would have to take the dog, the pig ears and make a dog ear treat company. Right, and we would have to take them somewhere and do it because they're not, obviously, they're not got to do it at the family locker. But Milo doesn't have foreign, they're not exporting. Yeah.

They're not exporting the whole pig. So therefore, like you said. So that head of that pig to a packer, to Smithfield, to Tyson, to triumph, to JBS, they're taking all that and they're exporting. That's worth like $15 a head. That's worth like literally, literally and figurative, it's like worth between $12 and $16 a head depending on what that market is. We don't get any of that.

Plus, we have to pay, when we're buying the pig, we have to pay for the weight of that, but it's not part of the yield. In other words, the amount of usable meat that we get, that we can sell to you, that's not part of it. So we pay for that animal, the whole thing, but it's that much less that we get to use. I'm not whining about it, but when you talk about the advantages, that's just one advantage. And when people are like, well, I don't know why you can't sell it the same price that I can get it at the grocery store. Well, that's part of the reason, because we don't have the efficiency. And that's not the only thing.

I mean, there's more to it than that. And that's just an example. I mean, Milo, they employ a lot of, they employ real, they employ people. They don't have all probably the fancy machines that these packing plants have with, I mean, what triumph have? They had a water. Most of their cutting is done with high pressure water. And it's automated. It's automated, both for safety, but it's also, you pay for that machine once, and you can run that a long time without having to have labor. So it saves you labor. And their biggest, they're like everybody else in this country. Their biggest struggle is their HR department, trying to get labor. And so anything they can

automate, they automate. And once that, once that piece of automation, you've paid the initial cost, your efficiency is way higher and your cost is way lower. So the American Family Butcher Shop, they don't have that luxury. Therefore, to get our pigs process there, they're going to have to pay their employees more.

They're going to have to pay labor by the hour. They're hand cutting. Their costs. Their costs are higher probably, you know. It's what it is. That is what it is. You can't, when you do this, this go down this route of a farm to table and going through an American family butcher shop

with real people cutting the meat and doing all that, people love the idea of it, but are you voting with your fucking dollars? Are you actually voting with your dollars? Because if you want change, real change in the food industry, not just the meat industry, but the food industry in general, you have got to vote with your dollars. And when you pick the grocery store meat, which I am not bagging on it, I'm very happy and glad that in America, we don't have the problem of starvation. And bear shells in the grocery store, right? We should all be thankful for that. But just think about that for a second. If you're somebody out there doesn't love the system that we're in, you can vote with your dollars and you can make the change and you can support

the American farmer that's doing the direct to consumer model or whatever. And I'm not saying this just because we're doing it. That's the reality of it. You can sit at home and think about, well, what can I do about it? How can I make a change to change this? That's what you can probably do about it. And I know that we're kind of all over the place and we're defending one side and we're fighting that same side that we're defending. But we're honestly just giving you the truth, the facts, and our opinions. I think there's good and bad in both sides of it. 1,000%.

I don't, like I said, I've said it many times on this show, on this specific episode. Don't love exactly where we're at. What can we do to make it better? What can we do to change it? We just kind of listed off what we can do to change it. Yeah. But Robert Kennedy's, uh, junior's whole video there, after listening to this podcast,

I hope that you can watch that video and, and hear what we had to say and go, yeah, he did kind of fabricate some shit. He did, he did kind of spice, sprinkle some stuff in, but didn't give a lot of context. And he kind of changed. Sounded like a politician? Sounded like a politician.

There you go. That's what disappointed me the most about it. I am all for more voices in the Democratic Party. And I, like I said, I'm really just disappointed because I had a lot of hope for him, and I'm not sure where I stand on that, because when he speaks on an issue, there's a lot of issues that he speaks on that I don't have a connection to, and I don't know anything about.

But when he spoke to this one, this is near and dear to my heart, and I actually know quite a bit about it, and I spent a lot of time digging through trying to find what I thought I remembered right and learning the facts of what there is. And you know what? I told you as far as dates or totals could be wrong because I had to go look them up and, you know, everything you find is true on the internet. I don't know. But I know a good part of this story and I know my own life experience. So when I heard that, it really set me off. But then that really makes you question. You also knew a lot of people that knew Wendell Murphy. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, yeah. I have some,

I have connections with people that literally knew Wendell, spent time with him, and actually, like, went through his operation and knew the man. So, you know, but when one of these politicians is talking about something I don't know anything about, and you take that at face value. When I take that at face value, I'm putting faith that they're not lying to me. Well, I can't do that. I can't do that now with him.

With him. And let's be honest, probably can't do it with any of these politicians. That's why there's politicians. And so at the end of the day, it kind of stinks. It does stink because he was, out of all of them, I was, you know, he's, he's seen the least crazy. And he's not crazy, okay?

I, he, I talked to dad about this the other day, and I know we're not, we're not going to go much longer, guys. We're going to, we're going to get close to wrapping up here. But it kind of sucks sometimes being the American farmer that is limited to having to take your livestock to packing plants. And then you are being told that you're a. surf and that you're owned by the Chinese or owned by that one. We know that's not true. And you're being told you're ruining the environment. Yeah. And you're ruining these,

pigs have a horrible life. The crazy part of it about it is most issues, you have one side that demonizes what you do, you know, and then the other side supports it, right? That's kind of how a lot of it goes. On this, I think the meat industry and the food industry has done a horrible job educating people on how what really went down and how it all works and all that. So there's been a lot of fabricated lies and a fabricated

narratives that have painted the American farmer to be this money hungry fuck that doesn't give a shit about anything but making money. And so you have the animal rights activists, the vegans, the fucking snowflakes of the world that hate us, hate us.

Environmentalists. hate us. Say we're the worst. We're not doing the right things. We're not doing good by the environment. We're not doing good for our communities. We don't give a shit. Then you also have what I'd like to say, the people that, which I somewhat fall in this category, that question everything and believe that there's some shady shit going on. But these people believe that they also believe the lie that were serfs that were owned by the Chinese and that were owned by you know these corporations right so you have these you have these two you have both sides of the aisle that look at what we do and say you're shit you're what you do does it doesn't matter and you're

you know it just it gets old it really does because you we see the comments on you know our this will do farming YouTube and Facebook of the videos we put out and I mean just people the questions all backgrounds, you know, all backgrounds that just come at you for what you do and it sucks. We're doing the best we can with what we got. Yeah. That's all there is to it. Yeah, we are. I don't know. Maybe that was, should I have kept that out of there? No, you're good. Yeah. You're good. I mean, it's, I'm not, and I'm not asking for sympathy or empathy. I'm not. We have a, we have a fantastic life. I am so fortunate to be raising pigs and farming with my dad and continuing the family legacy and continuing to farm here in America.

We made the decision. We made the decision that we were going to show people what we do on a day-to-day basement. If you go to our farm channel, if you go to this, I'll do. That's the purpose of that channel is to show our lives as everyday farmers, small farmers, raisin hogs, how we raise them, why we do what we do, to try to educate people. So when you make that decision, you're open yourself up, your fair game for whoever wants to comment about whatever. And pretty much every day, multiple people like to tell us that we're monsters and we're going to burn in hell or we should burn in hell, which that's fine. So you have signed up for it. Yeah. So you have those kind of people and then you have people to say, they own your ass. You're not, you're a fucking surf. You're not worth you fucking don't do shit. You're, yeah. So you have that. That's what's going on. And that's fine. Because, this platform, I feel like today is pretty severe. So we are usually fairly lighthearted and we like to have people on here. We like to have some fun. Today isn't so much fun because I feel like it really hit me

and I've kind of pissed off about it and take it for what it's worth. But I feel like it's an important subject, but it's important for more than just the context of this one issue. It's politicians in general and the fact that we just, anything you hear from somebody that wants your money or wants your vote, you just need to be really thoughtful and conscious and do, like we say all the time. You need to be your own advocate, you need to do your own research. And when somebody paints whatever with a wide brush and say, oh, they're all whatever, we need more people that are willing to educate themselves and know whatever is near and dear to them as far as the issues, know that issue, so they can go, well, that's not altogether right. Because if we don't keep these guys in check,

it's, it's, we're already headed down the path. And we need more people that when politicians talk about a certain subject. We need more people that, like, lived what they're talking about to actually speak up and say, you didn't live that, I lived that. This is how it actually played out, like we just did. Because you did. You live through the shit.

You live through the crash. You lived through the boom. You lived through grandpa. You saw it all. And you have talked to, I mean, you have talked to the integrators. You have talked to the people that built the buildings. You've talked to the growers. You have talked to every person inside,

of the hog business and what was and how it came to be where we are today. I haven't talked to all of them, but any of you out there, I'd like to talk to you. So, you know. You've talked to a lot, I should say. Brad Frecking, if you're listening from New Fashion, I'd love to have you on the podcast. Dave, a lot of people have said, you need to get Dave Eichelberger on. I have reached out to Dave. You know, a lot of these guys that built these businesses, they're private people,

and they're the generation of people that were not interested in showing off. They just wanted to show up every day, do their work, and let the work speak for itself. So it's not always easy to get people to open up about building the industry we're in. But I'd love to have any of them on that are willing to talk about it. When you're telling your story, I don't believe that's showing off. In my opinion, that's, because that's what we, last thing, that is what we need in this country more than anything, is to set the standard and show people what's possible. Because those guys are no different than any of us here.

They weren't born with some gift. If you listen to a lot of those guys, just like we had when we had Rob on here, he had a lot of tenacity, he had a lot of grit, he had a lot of hardworking traits. But he worked his ass off, didn't quit, and figured out solutions just kept going. He's not Elon Musk, and he'll be the first to tell you that.

He wasn't born with a gift. He just fucking worked his ass off. And he didn't quit. And he did not quit. And that's a, that is the truth for a lot of successful people in this country. And so it's not, it's not bragging. It's not showing off to tell your story. So we'd love to have anyone on that's done that to come on and tell it.

I was worried that we were going to have enough to fill up an episode. But I rambled just long enough. No, I thought it was fantastic. That was a good episode. So if you guys got any value, I hope you enjoyed it. if you did if you got any value you guys know the drill pay that fee share it out um leave a review on spotify or apple submit your questions at barn talk show at gmail.com and we love you guys we'll see it back here next week for another episode have a great week see you