Barn Talk - Crafting a Legacy: Blake Albers on Beef, Business, and Balance

Episode Date: March 30, 2025

Welcome to Barn Talk! Today, we're diving deep into the world of meat businesses and innovative farming with our special guest, Blake Albers. Blake is a fifth-generation cattleman from Nebraska, who's bridging traditional farming with modern marketing tactics. From launching a direct-to-consumer meat business to navigating the complexities of building a USDA-inspected processing facility, Blake shares a wealth of insights. Join us as we unpack Blake's journey through the highs and lows of the meat industry, the challenges of running a family business, and the pursuit of creating a sustainable brand. Whether you're a farmer looking to diversify, someone intrigued by the meat processing industry, or you simply enjoy tales of entrepreneurship, this episode has something for you. So, listen in and let's learn how this Nebraska native is making his family's legacy thrive in today's marketplace.  Use code BARNTALK for 10% OFF your next order https://farmergrade.com/  SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST ➱ https://bit.ly/3a7r3nR   SUBSCRIBE TO THIS’LL DO FARM ➱ https://bit.ly/2X8g45c  LISTEN ON: SPOTIFY ➱ https://open.spotify.com/show/3icVr4KWq4eUDl7Oy60YMY  APPLE ➱ 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    00:00 USDA-Inspected Beef Processing Facility 13:12 Join Iowa Corn Growers Network 27:26 Generational Business Pressure 33:58 Warner Trucking's Global Expansion 43:06 Optimize Year-End Sales Strategy 01:00:31 Staffing and Workflow Challenges 01:13:28 Sustaining Family Farms: Challenges & Innovations 01:21:25 "Golden Era of Grain Farming" 01:34:16 Break-Even Strategy for Premium Meats 01:39:38 "Techies Discuss Modern Butcher Shop" 01:47:31 Agriculture Fuels Our Town's Economy 02:02:33 "Childhood Meals: Home-Cooked to TV Dinners" 02:16:10 "Seeking Beef Industry Mentorship" 02:19:20 Instagram Photo Sparks Marriage Rumors ------------------------------- ⚠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. I was informed that our intro is getting old, Dad. What? Our intro, it's getting old. People are getting tired of it. They skip through it.

So, blasphemy. I feel like we just got to go lightning round. Just go fast with it. We'll just do it the way we always do it. but have cat play it one one X, one and a half X. Like we're talking like rabbits. Yeah, we're just to keep it short. If you get any value from the show,

share it out the people that you know. That's how we can grow the show, guys. Best way to grow a podcast. If you love the show, let us know what you think. Leave a review on Spotify or Apple. Helps out the show tremendously. And got a direct-to-consumer meat business that we started. You can always use code Barn Talk to save 10% off your order.

I'd love to have your support on that. uh dad's holding up some some nice pork sticks there that yeah one uh bonus is our new packaging look at that sexy packaging nice uh it has this real easy open look at that you just pull it open and i had to go and get these are the ends uh because there are no more regular packs of pork sticks left but i don't know are you selling these on the site i'm not going to sell the ends because i think people would bitch that's awesome because torques can eat every last one of them yeah so we're not going to give people the ends just give them the regular stick But yeah, always you can use code Barn Talk to save 10% off.

We appreciate the hell out of you guys. And we got a really great guest coming to the barn today. So a guy that has been in the meat business, he's a fifth generation cattleman out of Nebraska, really doing some cool things out there when it comes to bringing a farm-raised, fresh, sustainable product to the marketplace in his local community, but also nationwide. He's also finding a lot of ways to help out other farmers that want to get into the direct-to-consumer space. And he's been doing it for a minute now. So I think there's a lot of value that we can gain, a lot of insight that we can gain on the directed consumer side of meat and just creating your own market and trying to bring value to your own operation. This guy knows a lot about it and I'm super stoked and I can't wait to get into it.

So without further ado, let's get into it. Blake Albers, welcome to Barn Talk. Thanks for coming, man. Yeah, I appreciate the invite. Yeah. So before we get started and get in the nitty-gritty, how do people find you? If they want to, if they get any value from the show,

they want to check out your stuff, see what you're up to. How do they find your stuff? For cattle and beef commentary and a little bit of family stuff, probably a lot more than some guys want. I'm on Twitter at Blake Albers or X, if you will. If we're alberscraftmeats.com on our website, And then I've got an Instagram, personal Instagram that's open. It's just Blake Albers. I feel like I could probably just get up, run to town, get a snack, because you two are both

meat business people. I don't think you really need me. I think I'm just going to be here as fringe. You're going to help fill in the gaps. Okay. I think you got a lot more to talk about than what you think. Okay. He's got a multitude of things, not just me. I mean, meat's his thing, but He does some other stuff too. So we're going to get into it. But I guess just tell us what you're up to today. You know, what do you got all going? We'll get into like the backstory and all that.

But like what's cooking in your world right now? So right now today we're a USDA inspected further processing facility, primarily focused on family beef brands, smaller projects. You know, if a distributor needs a portion or a cut and wrap for a limited line or something they're trying out. And we do a lot of smoked and value added products. But yeah, we're a USDA inspected facility with a pretty, you know, I would say, I put it this way. If it was sitting in a strip mall or in a singular building itself, our retail would be considered successful. I look at it a different way. I want retail to carry the entire weight of

the fixed cost of a very large facility. So I'm like, yeah, it could always be better. But independently of, you know, what's behind the retail wall, we're pretty happy with the way that's going. And it's just become, you know, something we're trying to make an extension of our family farm and a business that my wife and I own independently of our greater family. And that's kind of what we're working on. So let's go back to the beginning. Let's talk about the family business, the farm, you know, where did it start? What does your family do? And how did you kind of come back and do what you're doing today? Well, nobody romanticizes or falls in love with a meat grinder and a processing floor. I mean, that's, it's, there were a lot of doors, uh, in redirection,

uh, by God or markets or a combination of both. And, uh, so, but back at, up. My family has a farm in Wizzner, Nebraska, six miles north of town. We row crop, feed cattle, and then they've got some convenience stores, and just a lot of family. We've got a lot of family working together, and it's awesome. We can feed our one-time capacity. There's about 20,000 head, a lot of custom cattle feeding, and then kind of what we call inside cattle, which would be my dad and uncle and brothers, whatever family members end up feeding for their own agricultural participation, if you will. Yep. And so I came back in 2012 with an ag-e-econ degree, was working on the outside.

But at that point, I'd always, you know, I'd always been really interested in markets. And I think in 2000, 2011 was like Fukushima or something. Yeah. Yeah. So Fukushima, I was trading and then Fukushima happened. And I was like, this doesn't make any sense. And I ran the numbers.

And I was like, you know, this, you know, we really ought to be buying this. And that was my first big, all right, this works. This is fun. You know, I was a broke college student two years ago. And now we're moving. Yeah. And so, so I got in. into that work, did some internships, worked more in the futures industry, but it was always a hybrid.

I was still, you know, feed crew on weekends until, I think, 2016 and outside in the afternoons. And my brother joined shortly thereafter, and he's always been more row crop focused and on the outside management type things. And so as that kind of developed, we got into where, we had a complete divorce of livestock prices with the meat, right? And so my first foray into the meat business was essentially, you know, out of spite. We're going to make this work. You know, there's too much margin to be had there. Yeah. And of course, you quickly find out it's very hard to balance up the animal carcass. And it's very hard to scale. Yep. So we went to work on that and built a butcher shop.

I thought that would help alleviate some pain. That did not. It just gave us more and more of a reason that, you know, I kept pushing and kept pushing. We had some success on the e-commerce side. And it got to a point where are we going to do this and be in the meat business or not? Because I've got one foot in and one foot out. And it's not working for anybody.

it was working well enough to sustain itself, but I couldn't see where we were going to build equity or spin off somebody's wage, which is part of the family business ideas. Let's create some jobs first. And then if there's opportunity for people to create equity, that's the next step on and on. And so I felt like we either have to cease to do this

or we have to do it right. And it's when I started planning out a further processing facility. I felt pretty passionately about not doing kill, not becoming a locker. I like the idea of bringing in box beef. I like the idea of having maximum flexibility there. And long story short, that's how we ended up there. With this processing facility, we bought that building a couple years ago. And then we got the construction done and got moving through some product USDA inspected in October.

Okay. So when you, when you started the locker, you had a, you had a business as long as, as long as everybody in the family was involved wasn't taking a wage, it worked okay. It was that kind of deal. Well, when it was a butcher shop, when you say butcher shop, it was kind of just retail. Just retail. Okay. Yep, just retail. Okay.

And we, frankly, we put it in the wrong spot. Okay. It would have been more successful in our town of 1,200. It really would have been. We put it in a town of 26,000. We were one of the first, you know, everybody redid their downtown. Yep. You know, about 10 years ago, that was the big push.

And we were one of the first businesses to go in into the downtown Norfolk that was new, fresh. And we just didn't have the foot traffic. So what my wife and I did, and she was in dental school at this time, to her credit, she helped me manage all this. To make it work, we put in a tasting bar, and we would have these, you know, big taco nights and tequila. And we would cook for everybody. We had a single air fryer in the back for steak tips. That was the most profitable piece of equipment I've ever owned. And it was like 60 bucks, and we'd turn out thousands of dollars of these things.

but it was requiring us to live like a bar lifestyle yeah and she was in dental school so we would drive back and forth every day and then at night she would help me serve my sister would help and we would host people there until they had to leave and that actually worked great um so i take it back it wasn't that bad it was just not the perfect lifestyle right and then COVID hit, you couldn't do that. So shoulder to shoulder events and a butcher shop slash bar weren't, weren't allowed. So we went in and started doing delivery and more and more e-commerce. And that worked really pretty good for quite a while.

And then if you remember correctly, and I don't remember the exact dates, I kind of try and block this out. But the supply chain took a long time to actually break down. Yep. You know, it took a lot longer than any one of us would have thought. So as that consumer spending ramped up, all of a sudden FedEx and UPS could not deliver a box. Yep.

Yeah. I mean, it didn't matter if I put 30 pounds of dry ice in this thing. It wasn't going to get there on time. Yeah. And, of course, we were at peak. At that point, we were shipping about 60, I would say 60 or 70 boxes a day and had quite a few dollars out on the, out on the road. And then we had to reship because we didn't want to lose those customers. And we reshipped. And by the end of it, it ended up being about a six-figure

issue, you know, just into the six-figure. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, we decided to take more control, focus more on the retail. We're right at home, brick and mortar. And I'm glad we did that because it has built as a predictable base to now launch more of our processing for hire and to work more towards getting back to where we were e-commerce-wise. Hey, thanks for sticking with us. You know, as a member of Iowa Corn Growers Association, you'll gain access to valuable resources and exclusive industry insights and a powerful network of over 7,000 fellow corn farmers just like you. Whether you're seeking advocacy at the statehouse or strategies that boost your farm's bottom line,

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So now you have like a facility that you're, it's a cutting facility essentially. Yeah. Yeah. So we're cut and wrap, smoke, grind. We've got some vacuum tumblers that work really nice. And then, and kind of high end packaging, individual 10 pound cases. And then we actually fulfill for two of our customers as well. So you guys are doing e-commerce out of there and you have a retail front.

Yep. Part of it too. Yep. And then you're doing it for two other farms then that want their own brands. Yeah, it's interesting. They've been a really good example of what we can kind of do. We had one that's going to probably end up almost with $1,400 in animal and further processing. They're doing every little thing on these first few kills, you know, down to a beef bacon or snack sticks.

You know, every flavor of snack sticks. And then we had another one, a large ranch where the value of their middle meats are so high because they're a known quantity and known name. We only did $230 worth of further processing on those animals. And we've just been working through the rest of that product trying to help them move it. Yeah. Yeah. So do they, so you guys don't slaughter there. They get them slaughtered somewhere else and then bring them to you?

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, and I can add a little bit of cost, but it adds so much flexibility. Okay. It lets us focus on marketing. Yeah. And frankly, if nobody shows up to work, Jesse and I can run a knife and a grinder. Yeah.

I don't want to slaughter cattle too. Yeah, it takes a different kind of cat to do the fun end of. Kill floor is something different. It is. You know, I'll even go through these big plants and I'm just mesmerized on the fab side. and then we get over to the kill side and say there's a smell, there's a, I mean, they're clean, don't get me wrong. All the awful, you know.

And you don't have the market for those things that a larger plant can. And so that's the biggest issue. It's like, okay, then I already have to deal with 500 little packages off of this animal. Now I'm going to deal with another 10, 12 items on the front end. that are sometimes worth something, sometimes aren't. Yep. And so that was the choice we made. And it just fit my budget.

It fit, you know, my comfort level. And it fit the building we went into. So we actually, we didn't build a new building. We went into a 1981 Coors Light distributorship. Nice. Cool. Open space. Yes. It was just a big open space.

They had a big cooler because the Coors Light kegs and the cold chain. And that worked really awesome. It's been good. So we can actually build this plant out very modular. Yeah. You know, one by one. You know, our first cutting packaging room is in. We could double that up or we could add a ton of smokehouses.

We'll see how it goes. And then, and right now we're using that extra space for fulfillment, but we don't necessarily have to. We have another couple drive-thrus where they used to fill the trucks that we're renting out now. You could move. too. So, so it was a flexible space is the right building right time and it worked with our business

plan really well. That's awesome. That's really great, man. So when you were, so when you were a kid, well, I wanted to ask one more thing about the facility. All right. On the kill four, like, do you feel like the regulation from the USDA? Because what I've heard from people that do, you know, do it all is you can get shut down faster on the kill for than anywhere else because if you don't stun an animal the right way, they're going to shut you down real easy. Like, have you noticed not having a kill floor, it just limits your liability? Or is they still just up your butt? It's, it's again, I think it's just another thing to deal with. Yeah. You know, I've walked into, we use a co-packer that can kill up to 120 head a day. He could maybe do more.

I haven't asked lately, but I walked in there. This is the first time I ever walked into a kill floor. went in for a wagu customer of mine. And we were the only customer that day. They were just going to fab our 35 head. And it was so peaceful in there. And the cooler was beautiful, crisp clean. And the cattle all looked good hanging there. That was the only time I ever thought,

maybe I could do this. Yeah. Maybe I could do this. Because usually, you know, it's a pretty high stress, high stakes thing. And unfortunately, we've never had a lot of drama. I've killed a lot of cattle there. We've had one condemned. I don't

even know why. But it was, it was just something that wasn't broken that I had tried before. Yeah. And my wife was on board, right? We weren't even married. We probably were just engaged. And we toured a, a cut and wrap facility that did like, they do like 700,000 pounds now. And we were using them and we were just like, you know, this is the part we could do. Yeah. You know, and, and that became the path we set down. Now, I don't think we would have ever thought we would have built the one we have now as big as we did, but the building and the, it just all kind of fit. Felt into place. Yeah. Cool. Because what you could do, when you're, when you're, when you don't have kill, you're on a, uh, you have to have a USDA inspector there. Obviously.

but on the kill side, but on the further processing side, you're on a patrol. You're basically showing them your label claims. You're showing them your negative E. coli and Listeria tests. You're working through anything that they have jurisdiction over. And pre-op is a huge thing. You know, pre-op is they'll come through and kind of release the facility. so we go in in the morning and we say, did sanitation do their job?

If they didn't do their job, we fail ourselves. We clean again, and then we release the facility. So that's kind of the touch points of the USDA. And I will say this. I'm sure people have more or less trouble with that. It isn't as big of a hurdle as people might think. and they are they are just looking out

for the best interest of the consumer and in turn they're looking out for your best interest. So you can kind of look at them as a quality assurance a person that's kind of on staff, if you will. And one thing we did right out the gate

was hire a consultant. I'm not a big consultant guy, but we did on the food safety stuff and that has been the best money we spent. That's smart. Yeah. I hear I hear stories. Some people saying USDA is up their butt.

I don't want to go federal. You know, I'd rather stay CIS or, you know, just there's, there's different opinions out there. But that's probably a good way of looking at it because it's inevitable. They're going to, you got to have them be there.

So it's like, just do the right things. Yeah. And some of the things, you know, do seem to add a step or, or be counterintuitive. But for the most part, they're just like,

We've got to have a clean facility. Let's all agree on that. Yeah. It's like, okay, that's pretty easy to agree with. Yeah. And then the downstream things. And the other thing you got to remember is it's your food safety plan. They're there to enforce your food safety plan.

Now, they have temperature guidelines if you're cooking or guidelines if you are, you know, you have a product go out of temp. So let's say you're processing in here and this is a cold room and your refrigeration breaks down. and that thing goes over by a degree. Well, we have to document that, get it in the cooler, and cool it back down within X amount of time. They have guidelines for that kind of stuff.

But as far as everything else, you know, how you do your paperwork, they're there to enforce what you said you were going to do. And so if you work with a good consultant, a lot of that stuff can really kind of be alleviated. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, because you hear a lot of people also talk just like,

you hear the theory of, oh, they don't want small town or they don't want small plants. They don't want, they want, the big guys want to push the small guys out. And so the USDA is more, they're, they're putting regulations on the smaller guys and they're pushing the small guys out harder. And it's like, I don't know. Do you feel like that's true or you don't see that? Yeah, no, I, I think the USDA has made a concerted effort to try and make this more doable for small plants. Yeah. that's what we need yeah yeah so i i will go back just a little bit because um so growing up on the on your operation you're a when you were thinking about where life was going to take you

what what did you think you were going to do because like you said in the beginning it wasn't standing in front of a meageranger yeah i had this conversation with a friend of mine yesterday it is shocking how different my life is than what I thought, expected, wanted, but there's probably a little more opportunity at this point. And if there isn't, I feel very strongly about the generational thing. So if this makes that more robust, then I think it was a huge win. You know, I've got, so there's three families. in our business.

And then there's nine grandkids. So there's nine cousins, I guess, at some point. Yeah. And they're going to get married. And we have a lot of very capable people in my family. My brother is a really good livestock health guy. My brother Chase. The second oldest, my brother Perry, he's your row crop guy, manure management,

keeps the guys moving. He's great there. Obviously, I've got a smattering of 10. that I'm trying to execute on. And then I've got a cousin who's really great that's worked for some, some livestock advisor groups and then on to livestock banking now. Yep. So we're really lucky in a way.

But I always go back to like the fifth generation thing. We like to say that. Sounds cool. We've been around a long time. The marketing people that I do have, which are, you know, at a kind of a limited level. They like putting that out there. Absolutely.

And I remember I got this comment on X a few months ago and just boiled my blood. And a guy, I posted a video from our processing plant. It was just like, and probably subsidized by that fifth generation farm. It's like, number one, so what if it is, it isn't? Britt and I own it. But the fifth generation thing is, it's more. complicated. 100%.

It's not, it doesn't make it better. The cool thing is you have an established business with an established equity base, with established banking relationships, with all these systems in place. You know, that's one thing we're really struggling with,

besides food safety, is getting systems in place. How do I make all this work without people being stressed out or feeling like they're frenzied? At Herbalber's feedlot, everybody knows what needs to be done. And that is what's really cool about an established business.

But when you're talking about that much family, there has to be a lot of growth. And a lot of growth or diversification. And so my grandpa's first diversification, he probably did more for himself. He invested in banking. And then in the late 80s, I think it opened in 89, they started in, in convenience stores. And so that stuff strengthens that. But again, every generation, every time somebody has a kid, you have to come in there

and find a way to continue to grow if you want to give them the same opportunities you add. Yeah, I think generational businesses, whether it ag or otherwise, it's definitely, it's definitely harder on every generation. Yeah. because you think about when you start a business, the generations that started it, you know, they were just trying to survive.

They were just trying to make their way. And the pie is pretty small. And you've got, you know, a couple kids and you try to figure out how they can be included in the deal. But as that grows, and it creates a lot of pressure. Did you feel pressure? One, did you feel like when you got, when you were in high school and you're thinking about college, did you have the feeling, okay, I want to be part, I want to stay part of this,

or do I want to go blaze my own trail? And secondly, did you have a lot of angst about, like, we have a saying around here, the old timers around here, a guy that went to country school with my dad, long gone, but he would always complain about his boys because they were the third generation. And he would stop here and whined to my dad. And he would say, it takes two generations to make a fortune and one to piss it away. And these boys have it in fucking overdrive. That's what he would say. And so, and I felt that. I felt that, you know, like on the one hand, how do I, how do I be a good steward of what is, what is here, but two, how do I grow this without being the one that everybody in town talks about

how, well, he, that Whistler kid, boy, he fucked that up. Like, did you feel that? Well, at that age, I don't think I thought about second and third order consequences of my kids. Yep. And, you know, my, my brother's kids and all of that. So at that time, I thought, that I was just going to be the next Bob Gotts, and this was going to be a super fun ride. I was aggressive. I wanted to feed cattle. I loved cattle feeding.

I loved everything about it. I loved the risk of it. I liked driving up to the feed lot. I always joke, you know, the meat grinder versus the feed yard thing. If I were out in a vehicle driving past our place with somebody, I'd be much more proud to show them that, even though I'm not day-to-day involved in there right now, then I am at the plant.

And that's something that I've completely done on my own. So there's a lot of pride in it and a lot of romanticism. And my grandpa always used to joke that there's too much romanticism in the livestock industry. That's why people will do it for free. But no, I had thought that there would be ups and downs. But generally speaking, I will do. what my dad did and carry on. And my grandpa was probably wiser to that than I was at the time. I remember him sitting down and telling me, you know, it's just, don't worry about this too much.

You know, try and use it as a springboard, try and build something around it, try and do this or that. Well, at the time, before we had, I would say a really long span of very difficult markets. I don't know if anybody would disagree with me that 2015 through, you know, basically two years ago or 18 months ago, we're difficult to navigate markets for cattle. And but my thought was just, well, I'll just feed my own cattle and then we'll work for the company and this all be good. But you start looking around and independently wealthy cattle feeders under the, age of 50 are few and far between. And I've talked to friends. I've talked to friends' dads about this. You know, I've talked to a lot of people, and I know of a couple, and I'm not going to name

them. And I think what they've done is awesome. But it's difficult. And so those young people that have truly made it on their own and done it. Good kudos to them. I wasn't one of those who could make it work. There was just too many times you're buying a negative margin, trying to trade your way into the profit. It just didn't quite work. And I think we're going to have a lot more opportunity going forward. But we just had a period of time. It took forever for it to fix itself. Yep. You know, that slack was a lot longer than anybody dreamt. And that's why these plants took so long to build, in my opinion. Because everybody's like, oh, yeah, they're making $500 ahead right now, but next month,

this will write itself. And then we went years before we started to see us go back to normal industry margins for the packing sector, and we started to see profitability in the livestock side. So now, in my opinion, the opportunity is going to be every time this thing backs up, you better be prepared to get involved, but don't buy the highs because the risk is so insane. I mean, you're just high dollar figures for these animals.

Yeah. Did you, so then did you pivot, you pivoted to the meat? Like that was like, that was your pivot? I forgot a story. Yeah, essentially, but it was kind of forced.

At a certain point there, I couldn't stand the idea, and I hope this doesn't offend anybody, I couldn't stand the idea of getting stuck in that locker, hauling two or three to the locker model. And so I set out to export, and I thought I put together a dream team. I got, I had a bunch of meetings and presentations and went to companies I had probably no business talking.

talking to, but I just asked the right questions, getting the right meeting. Yep. And so we had Warner Global, which I don't even think exists anymore, but it was a, it was a spinoff company of Warner Trucking. And so we're there at Warner headquarters, and we've got the owner or pseudo owner of this food company in Shanghai that Warner had a vested interest in a trucking company that had a vested interest in this food company. So I thought, okay, everybody's going to try and do this as this Chinese market opens, but nobody's going to assemble a team like this. I mean, I've got the,

I've got the bankers, I've got the legal documents, we've got everything set up with XM on the banking side. We've got the logistics covered, and we have a partner that actually owns something there. Yeah. And so we started filling up a pipeline, an HTC cattle to hit this. This is my wife and I were engaged to get married. And I believe this is when Trump started getting a little more forceful. And so I was a little worried about it. But I thought these guys, we've been working on this for a long time.

We've both put money into this. And they're a serious company. We're a serious company. we'll figure this out. Yep. And my thought was at least we could export some of the cheaper cuts. I'll keep back the middle meats. And I get to create my own little Omaha steaks off of that production.

Yeah. So I had two models that we priced out. One was kind of the emergency. Like we'll give this stuff away cheaper if you'll take some volume. And then one where they got the entire animal. So we got these cattle up on feed. you know, 145 days later, whatever it was, they were kind of heavier cattle that we started with because we were trying to move it through pretty fast.

And we got them killed in the box, Chinese label at the cold storage facility ready for export. Wife and I are at a dance lesson because she wanted me to not look like a fool at her wedding. And so we're doing this ballroom dancing. I've got a crown royal in my hand. and I get a phone call from an odd number. I'm like, okay, I got to answer this. I pick up, it was one of the Warner reps from China. And he said, hey, you know, these tariffs, this is going to be a disaster.

And we can't do this. We have to, we have to reject those. It was like 25 head. It was just below a potload. And I'd never killed anything more than two or three at a time. Right. So to you, it was a much bigger. Yeah. And because immediately we went from our problem to my problem.

Yep. And I quickly did the math in my head and it was like $1,200. And I said, hey, buddy, we've got 1,500 head of livestock on feed for you. If you're going to welch on this thing over $1,200 bucks, I'm up shit creek. and I'm sorry, but you're done with my time tonight, and we're probably done with this deal. Hung up and went on to have a very nice, probably frustrated but fun night with my wife. Yep. You feigned happiness as best you could.

Dance it out. And then that's where we, so I kind of missed a step in that original introduction, but that's where we ended up going to that larger scale cut and wrap, facility said let's get this in some premium packaging let's start working through this yeah and necessity yeah out of necessity yeah and so but as i as i did that i kind of fell in love with the idea of doing it that way uh because it it there were so many levers you could pull you know and ultimately that's what i want to see happen with our farm and this operation is have this be another lever we can pull.

Yeah. If we ever do get to these crazy wide beef to livestock margins again, we can be the cattle feed yard for custom feeding that says, you know, we've got a processing facility. We can line these things up. We'll work through with the meat traders. And that was the big advantage I saw to doing this as box beef, doing these in bigger kills,

even if your yearly production is the same as hauling a couple to the last. locker. You now have the ability to trade some meat. Yeah. So you've got to hit a certain amount of volume so that you can talk to somebody. Um, and that was one thing, you know, our first big win of opening this facility. We, we traded, uh, 40,000 pounds of trim. And it's like, okay, now we're, now we're getting rid of a problem. They, you know, these heavy cattle make 135 pounds a piece, at least of this 50-50 fatty trim. And that's too many snack sticks. I hope someday, and maybe we'll work with Farmer grade,

we can make a snack stick. There you go. Brand that successful. But right now, you know, that's not the case. So you just traded it off. So you just put it on the market, somebody bid it on and took it. That's kind of the gist of it. It's not on the trim, what you can generally do is go off.

it five cents a dime below the sheet price, somebody will pick it off. As long as it's got an E. coli test on it, it's boxed appropriately. And if they've ever done business with that packer before, you're offering them enough incentive to come through and grab it. So today, are you taking cattle and having them process and boxed and selling that boxed meat? or is everything that you that you guys get done off your farm, are you trying to further process it and sell it in one of your channels? Or are you processing some just for you're doing both. Yep.

So we've got some, like we just did 15 head on a really small kill. I was going to try and split a kill with a guy and it didn't work out timing wise for him. So I did 15 head. We'll do that like a traditional value up everything. Everything gets put in a bag. Everything gets an individual label, and we may even sell it, quarters and halves. But mostly what we're doing is it's either going to hit cold storage, hit the freezer, get traded on a meat trade, or it's going to get further processed. Or once in a while we'll do, we've got a pretty good base.

You know, we're in an ag steel community. There's a lot of, there's new core. Yeah. So we'll get a lot of people that'll buy in bulk. So we'll even sell cases, like 50 pound cases of whole muscle cuts of our own product without running it through our processing facility. So it's kind of take every avenue we can. Yeah, you got a lot of flexibility.

Yeah. Yeah. Based on what. So you can kind of, if you, you know, if you're, your, if your demand on your, on your top end, on your total process part, if that demand warrants, you can take as much that way as you want versus if you have weakness, you have options to get rid of some of that meat if you need to. Yeah. Yeah. That's good to have options. And that's where you say with, when you're talking about, you know, custom feed and some cattle,

if markets went to crap or whatever, you could offer them the ability to be like, hey, we got a market to put this in a box and give it to people. Like, is that what you're kind of thinking? It is. And here's the thing, the way I think of it. Everybody has the same problem

if they've got kids coming back. And women are particularly adept at this. I've told people, what you can do is you can trade that meat. I've got a bid for some of it all grind. I'll run into a commercial paddy or something. Or we work with some meat traders and we'll get some of that gone. But keep those middle meats, stockpile them, and go in and sell once a year.

Go in and do the holiday run. Have a harvest, if you will. Now, you guys are going to be fulfilling all year. I'm going to be fulfilling all year. But we're making this a true blue commitment, right? This is a, but they don't have to, as long as they're honest with themselves about how much they want to commit. Yep.

If you want to just add a salary, it's probably easier to do it all right at the end of the year than it is to try and spend on Facebook ads or try and do this fulfillment throughout the year. And one day you've got 50 orders. One day you have five. And I don't know if your experience is this, but my opinion, it's easier to fill 50 than five because you get like, or two, you know, you'll get this random order. And it's like, I got to rearrange.

my day to go run and do that or I got to have one of the girls that's being really productive and organizing. Now she's got to go ship a couple boxes. So I think organizing around that holiday run, you could have a half million dollar business just on holiday stuff. Omaha Steaks isn't going to notice you're there. Yeah. I mean, the market for corporate gifting is so big. Yeah, it is. And more and more people, you know, everybody's got a phone in their pocket. I always say the power of Amazon isn't that their prices are good or anything. But when you're forgetful like me,

it's like, okay, I just thought of that. I'm going to get it on order right now. Otherwise, I'm going to forget. You know, it's like we,

other day, prime example. My kids are running around in the cul-de-sac with the neighbor's kids. I'm like, we need some children at play signs. Boom, it's done. I don't have to think about it.

I don't have to feel guilty that we didn't do that next Saturday. day. And so when you've got that kind of consumerism, I think that it's easy to just kind of fall back into, you know, we need to provide these products at a good price, but you got to make a margin on it. Yeah. I kind of lost my train of thought there. No, you're good. But you're doing majority. You're doing, you're putting it in box and selling on the market. And then you're really holding back a lot of your cuts for and marketing hard in Christmas the holiday season. That's the model I would suggest somebody come in. Yeah. So if you're a rancher that's got some retained ownership on the, feed yard, and you have a daughter or son that's mildly interested in this, that's where I'd say

you should start. Gotcha. And because if you don't commit to doing that year round, you're not going to get yourself into trouble. Right. If you just say, hey, we're going to kill 40 head and if it's not gone on January 15th, we get to have a discussion. Yeah. But I bet if you go in and I say, we're going to get rid of your trim. I'm going to buy your inside rounds and grind them. I've got another buyer for a couple of your chugs. And, you know, we're just going to try and take this problem from X down to here.

So you have a higher degree of stakes in the mix. And then we just go and get that done. and you know, you have a dollar figure you should hit or a number of boxes you should hit, you go out and start working on it until it's gone. Yeah. And when you're working on getting, you know, we have one corporate customer that'll ship 150. You know, that's a lot easier than individuals. And a lot of family members will come in four or five kids.

Like everybody's got everything, which is where I was going with the Amazon thing. I forgot about that. But everybody's got everything they need. So it becomes really popular just to send them a box of meat. Yep. And so that's where I'd start. Now I'm not saying you have to stay there forever. Yeah.

But if I'm looking at what made it more painful for me to start, had we just been a Christmas gift company for three or four years? Yep. We'd have a lot more fun. You have the advantage of learning a lot without the pain of building all the systems that you need and figuring out how to how to make that go every week. Yeah. Like you just kind of, you kind of get the trial by fire because when you start,

you have all those orders and you learn a lot, but you're not having to perfect that every week. Yeah. And having that huge fluctuation. Right. Yeah. Yeah. That's really good advice.

So it's back to what, you know, you said earlier of not having a kill for it. I get what you mean now. You could spend a lot of your time on marketing and getting. rid of this product and being smart about how you get rid of it and distribute it. Yeah. Yeah. And even with just the further processing floor, I'm super lucky. I hired a really competent guy and he's been able to manage that pretty well. I kind of just tell him what I need done. And I focus on compliance, finances, and marketing. And I don't think we would have made it very far without that separation of duties because these are you know everybody especially ag mentality

we want to do everything we want to have our hands and everything you know uh it it would be super difficult yeah to do all of those things yeah well let's talk about that for a minute how because i think that's something that's universal in all the people that we get on this podcast no matter what they're in. Most people start and they have they have skills like I have skills but I'm not good at everything but you start a business and it's much like it's much like agriculture today. There's all kinds of guys out there that are really good farmers but if you ask them their biggest pain they're not an HR director but today they're an HR director. Right. You know what they really want to do is they really want to get out and run the planner, but they're not. They're the HR director.

They're the HR director. They're the ocean inspector. They're the accountant. They're all these things. So when you, when you started and as you've grown, what's been the hardest, what's been the hardest like system that you've had to build or the hardest job that you've had to try to find somebody to offload on? or what have you realized that you thought was a strength of yourself that you realized not near as good at it as what you thought you were? Yeah, I am better at forecasting some things. You know, we were looking at our pro formas on this. And I had forecasted two and a half years ago within $35, which some of this is luck. but what our finances would look like for February of this year with the processing facility up

up and running. What I'm worse at than I ever dreamed of is I completely and fully expect people to understand what I am thinking. Yeah. And I don't think that you're alone on that at all. I expect everybody understands what I'm thinking, you know, including my wife. And I struggle, you know, I don't like being a boss. I don't.

I want to hire people that can be in charge of other people. You want to be a coach, not a boss. Coach at best, you know, I want to tell people what needs to be done and then have it happen. Yeah. You know, and that's, that's tough. That's tough. It just is. I am not as much of a old school boss, I guess, as you would, as maybe would be best.

But there's other strengths, and we just run with those. And I hope that some of those decisions I made like to hire my floor manager, Jesse, are paying dividends there. And they have been so far. I mean, he is completely in control of that crew. He's completely in control that floor. Um, you know, right when we started in October, uh, it was a little bit chaotic, a little bit too much, you know, time on his end. And I, I said, we've got to get you more people. You can't burn out.

Because if, you know, if I go back there, none of this stuff will happen. Right. You know, going back to we just, we've got to be focused on marketing. We've got to be focusing on, on, on, on all these other things. Um, so if I go back and help you, we're doomed. Right. And so I, I, I got to, more people hired and so far he's been really effective at managing those people and uh so that was the best decision i made and and other than that you know it's it's managing expectations again my sister works for me that's a whole another you know whole another thing when you're working with family and she's worked for us this entire time um she's worked alongside me from when we were doing zero to now where we're at today.

And so for years, and even for two years prior to this, it was, you know, Jesse Kelly Blake, one of us is handling it. And now we have to start changing roles. It's like, okay, you do these things. I do these things. You do these things. And that's always tough to get people, you know, out of the old ways and into the new. but as we've started to do that,

you know, I feel like she's got a better sense of accomplishment on some things, and I am freed up to, you know, get on the phone and work the network and talk to, I mean, we've got, like you said, one of our biggest customers, he and I have ideas for days.

And it's important to spend some time developing those. And he's a really wonderful guy and we probably spend a couple hours on the phone a week or on a Zoom working through those things. Then you add the next customer. Then you add the customer you want. Then you add the people you keep up with to see if they know anything. You know, kind of the old trader mentality. Like I got to make my round of phone calls. Yep. And all of a sudden, I look up and I've been on the phone for six hours, you know, and not a lot of meat getting cut by me. Right. But, once I kind of accept, and Jesse, to his credit, sat me down in these early days of opening the plan.

And he said, do not say, you can run back here and help if you do not have time. It's disheartening to your employees. I was like, oh, especially coming from somebody I trust so much and that I'm trusting with a big portion of my business. I was like, okay, you're right. We've got to fall into our holes here. or fall under our slot and just run with it. And, you know, those people that have supported me and that and made that a reality for me, I'm hoping we'd grow enough that I can reward them with good compensation and opportunity

and go from there. Yeah, absolutely. We had a guy on here named Jason Mock, and it was a great episode, but he got in the meat business of 2020. And he got, he bought a plant. And sales were doing really well. He was doing some fundraisers. Like that side of the business was humming. But all the problems that he had with keeping labor and the USDA and the consolidation of if a freezer unit goes down,

you think it's like, oh, 700 bucks, maybe $1,000. Nope, this person charges you $7,000 because they're the only one that can fix it. They're like the deer of the, they're like deer of the freezer business. and that side ended up sinking the business because just the labor, do you have any problems with keeping labor? And I've, when we talked about that on that episode, we had a bunch of people email us and say, man, I'm a skill, I'm a butcher and there's just less and less people out there that can do it. And the amount of people that say they want to do it and then they're backing out and quitting or saying, I'm done with this, it's tough. And I mean,

lockers that we work with with Farmer Grade, we see the same thing. So like, are you seeing that? What are some tips? Like what, what, what, what, what, what's your perspective on labor? Yeah. So, so, so first and foremost, you mentioned the freezer thing. I had a $10,000 that I bought, obviously it was used. It was a 15 by 22, uh, retail freezer. I bought it for 10,000 bucks. I have 76,000 in it. So, I mean, it just, I, it is, I, we, it just, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we could have bought a brand new box. Essentially was what it was. I think the brand new one was 60 plus install was going to be 14 or 15.

So we literally went up to the brand new box. So that is a challenge. And is that just because within that business, there is just no competition? Or is it just, it's specialized enough that the equipment is just, that's just what it is? That's a great question.

I know right during COVID, the panels and all of the components were really hard to get. Now you can order, I could have some 12-foot insulated panels for a freezer or cooler here by next week. I don't really know why that stuff costs so much, but it certainly does. Refrigeration equipment is expensive, and then it's expensive to run. You got that on top of it. There was a beautiful plant. Omaha steaks. They keep coming up.

But there's a beautiful plant a few miles away from us. And they wanted, in my estimation, next to nothing for it. But it had ammonia refrigeration. You couldn't turn it off, number one. And there was no retail there because the town, you know, and I depend on that to make, to take my overhead from something that's kind of insane for me down to manageable. and the reason they closed it was they couldn't get enough people, you know,

and they absorbed that steak packaging line into their Omaha location. Yeah. As far as our labor, we're right next to a hog plant, a Tyson hog plant there in Madison, and we haven't gotten to the level where we need enough people that we really have trouble with that. Now, we did it, we did just have to implement a very strict, 20-day unexcused absence policy. Yeah. Because we knew if we said it at four,

we wouldn't have anybody. Right. Yeah. And, you know, that's a, that is a challenge. We've got great guys,

and they do a very nice job portion cutting. I'm very picky about how things look in the package. And we've got an older gal named Deb, who's been wonderful. She kind of runs the past. packaging side and and everything's good there, but they're certainly not afraid to just not come one day. Yeah. That's a, that's a challenge. And I think that's pretty normal in the industry. You know, I think I think some of these big packing plants measure their turnover in quarters,

not years. Yeah. Yeah. I'll tell you a quick story. Just, I just, the way people, the way people perceive what's important to somebody versus someone else, I feel like when you're, when you, when you were hiring people, when you have people working for you, it's really easy to have a tendency to think of the way you compensate those people are the way that you would want to be compensated. And like a lot of people think that money is the motivator. like if I pay this guy more money if this guy isn't is really good at what he's doing but I want

another level you know money's the motivator and that's just not true for a lot of people and I'll give you a great example when I was in the when I was in the construction business before I started selling um I would fire up hog buildings when so when everything was done before they were ready to start using them. I would go there and I would take care of the checklist and I would set the controls and I would make sure everything worked and all that. And I was one guy. And there would always be this bullet list of stuff that the crew left because when they got down to the end and they had 16 guys there, the foreman, you know, like when only two people are left doing anything, he gets real nervous. And so he's like, all right, well, you know, Whistler could finish that. We're out of here.

what they didn't realize was when one guy walks in and you got to finish the entire plumbing manifold that's different than when you've got three people there that could be working on it and so then i would get this call of like why do you know are you going to fire up this one no i got two days here to finish this because there's this this and this and so my boss was like i'm gonna i'm gonna tell this guy that if he doesn't give me a list of everything that needs to be done and that he sends a guy back so that when you come all you got to do is set everything and fire it, I'm going to withhold his paycheck. And I told him, I said, I don't think that's going to work. He goes, why is that? And I said, because I don't think he needs a paycheck. I knew this guy and he lived in a little, he lived in a little

house they rented from a farmer that he probably worked off the rent and just helping him in the fall. He didn't have cable TV. He didn't have a cell phone. The only phone he had was his company phone. He had a variety of vehicles that, you know, if one quit running, you just parked it and let it season, and then the next time maybe it would run. And his biggest joy in life was like hunting and fishing and, you know, having a beer here or there. So, but that was the, what we, that was the road we went down. And when my boss got to the point that he had like five paychecks, which would be the equivalent of,

I think we got paid. No, that was every week. So five weeks worth of pay sitting on his desk. And he wasn't getting the, he wasn't getting the reaction that he wanted. He's like, yeah, I guess that's not. I'm like, he doesn't care. He doesn't actually need the money here. He's probably saving up for something. Anyway, I think that really, that made an impression on me, and I've always held on to that, that you really have to know when you're trying to manage employees, what you think is important to them may not be. And you got to try to put yourself in that person's shoes. So anyway, that's a little rambling.

What's your ultimate, if you could have this facility humming at your dream, like your dream scenario, would it be you create Albers Craft Beef brand so big that you guys could run all your large chunk of cattle through there get into retail stores having a big demand on the direct to consumer side wholesaling

or still do what you're doing with the hybrid method like do you want to grow this thing into like you're a household name you're in grocery stores across the nation or is it like you're because you're just doing so many different things

and I get why because you want you have to almost to run that facility. But like what's your end goal if you could have it go in a certain way? The ride that steals the spotlight every time it hits the road, that's the Volkswagen Tiguan. Its sleek exterior makes a first impression you can't ignore. Step inside to find available full leather seats and wood accents. Under the hood, the available 201 turbocharged horsepower engine

gives it a fun to drive edge. The refined Tigwan, You deserve more style. Visit vw.ca to learn more. SUVW, German engineered for all. That's a great question. And to a certain degree, I don't know. I will say this, you know,

our capacity to produce fed cattle and high-quality fed cattle is going to outrun this place no matter what I do. I cannot absorb, you know. And that's why I'm always very careful, especially when I get asked questions, about, you know, breed claims, hormone claims, how an animal was raised. I'm careful.

I don't like the people that will demonize traditional ag. And it's like you have a 2000, you've got two or three thousand head-on feed. And you're posting on Facebook talking about how this is the bad method to sell your 10 locker beef. You know, I mean, I don't like that. So I'm always careful about that, but I will say, I think that my goal would be to have this plant have a base level of contract work, whether that be for a snack stick company or whether that be cut and wrap for a distributor or patties. And then I'd like to have about a dozen families that we work really hard for and work on the value. you added side. I think that's about the right number, maybe even less. And so I want the facility to stand on its own with the contract in the retail. And then I want to add families as we can

and work on developing those brands with them, work on co-branding. I like a lot of what you guys are doing with Farmer grade where it's kind of under one umbrella. I feel very strongly we should have a ground beef brand that is co-mingled. Yep. to help solve a lot of these problems. And it may be a quote unquote loss leader initially, but as we get some traction, we could go more into a premium burger brick or box of patties at a retail locations across the country.

And then ultimately, I don't at this point have a desire to own a bigger plant. Yeah. where I think about, you know, where could this go beyond my wildest dreams? What avenue would that have to take? And I think it's small, branded retail, brick and mortars, serviced by this central further processing facility. And that's obviously my personal experience.

I know how to run a small, you know, 2,000 square, foot retail. I know those numbers, going back to what I said, it would be a successful company if it were sitting in a strip mall or in a small building on its own. And it's replicatable. You know, that's something you could scale. And so we've been developing that idea for a long time. Before we had the plant, I was working with a gentleman who has a big steak brand more on the value side. And we were, we were this close right before COVID to sticking unit one up in, in Lincoln, Nebraska.

And so that I always revisit, not because I'm super passionate or whatnot about it. I'm super passionate about making our facility work. Yeah. I'm super passionate about working with some fun families that want to figure this out. Yep. And if we get that cracked, then next steps would be, Oh, are you going to build or buy another plant? No.

I want to get single person or two employee retails pumping. Just put them everywhere, service them with this. Everything's case ready. Everything's ready to go. Barcoded. It's all in the system. Keep it simple. Yeah.

Well, you know, it's a great idea because you talked about Amazon in almost every small community, well, not even small community, big communities. Retail in general has been completely upended by the direct, well, the Amazon model. So in other words, the retail, the days of like retail knick-knack shops, that's a really hard business because there's a certain amount of people that they will literally walk into a store like that, see something, and then take a lot of, take a picture of it and see what they can buy it at Amazon because it's easier than having to load it up in the car and haul it home. They'll just have it delivered to their house. And so retail is changing and it's so much more, I feel like generations today, it's a lot more about

experiences and things that you can't just get online. And the idea of meat retail, but also your idea when you first started where along with that maybe you have events where you show people how to barbecue how to cook this steak and how this teabone cooks up versus this ribbi

and you get a sample like that experience I feel like that's kind of where retail can work. I just saw a TikTok the other day of Starbucks roasting houses and they have them in New York City London, major cities in the world. And you walk in and you're greeted by this guy and he gives you this lowdown.

It's literally this woman, POV of her walking into this roast in New York City, this roasting place. And it is literally just a Starbucks hub of, yep, we get this, we'll roast it right here for you, make your own coffee. It's a whole Starbucks brand experience. You walk in and it's like the best retail experience you could possibly have a Starbucks. and like that. You're right.

You need, that's, that's cool what you're talking about because I feel like, retail's dying, but if you do it a different way and you have that experience, people,

it's Instagramable. It's, you can, it's TikTokable. And retail's dying, so there's available space. Yeah. You know,

you can go in and try one of these. Um, and everything can get rolled back out. You know, you might be in it for a $20,000 worth of improvements. Um, but we're not, talking about a massive commitment. So I think that's a repeatable item with a with a central kind of

hub to it. And so that's that's my 10 year. You know, if I look at what could really blow up, that's where we're at. Now would it, would I be completely happy with getting this plant running, having snack stick contract, and then all of a sudden I find myself having some time to go back to the feed yard? That would also be yeah, a big goal. mind. Yeah. Yep. But we're going to just kind of see where it, where it takes us.

Every time I have my own very strict ideas about things, I seem to get shut down. Yeah. Yeah. I've got a good God story about that. I was going, I just moved my family to Norfolk, which was hard for me. I was Wissner, True Blue, you know, and my wife's a dentist there in town, and we're building this plant and we're on the road all the time. And, you know, we just felt like we had to do it for a minute.

And it was a difficult decision. And we moved in, and the high had kind of worn off of, like, we got a new house. You know, this is fun. It's like, oh, okay, we made a decision here. This is a decision that we made. And I kind of just shot off a quick prayer, I guess. And it's like, God, just if I'm doing the right thing here, just let me know.

And I was driving down the YMCA, walk in, and this old brand inspector who's always there is a big gold tooth. He's always got to show to you, tell you what the price of gold is. And, you know, he's kind of a gold bug. Yeah.

He goes, Albers, get over here. I said, okay, yeah, what's up? He goes, I need to take a picture with you. I'm like, okay, what's going on here? He goes, he holds up this 279. which is my processing company made out of like 1800s barbed wire he'd made it up and he put it in front of me he leaned over to my area he goes don't you worry god's got a plan eat beef i was like wow it was like four minutes of delay yeah yeah yeah that's pretty good i wish i could get an

answer i mean it that fueled me for a year yeah it really did and in and you know you can believe in that sort of thing not. But boy, that was, that was incredible for me because I, you know, it, it is. It was a tough decision to say, I'm going to step back or into this, step into this. And I don't know when I'll come out of it or if I'll come out of it, you know, what that looks like with, with the farm because, I mean, I just, I couldn't, I couldn't have a foot in both arenas at that time. Now, I still try and recruit customers for the feedlot and kind of, those kind of things. Yeah. But I'm not out there every day.

Yeah. So. Yeah. Does your family, like, man, that's so crazy. Like, your guys' whole dynamic is so cool that you've kept it going, that family farm going. are they supportive? Do they see the value of what you're doing? Because like we talk about on here all the time that

farming's getting harder. Margins are getting squeezed inputs are going up. We got to find a way to stop being a price taker and control our own destiny a little bit. And so like the meat thing, what we're doing with Farmer grade, like that was a way in the social media too. It's finding ways to control our own destiny a little bit.

And when you, you know, we're thinking about doing this, was your family like, yeah, man, that like this could be something that could bring value to the operation and sustain it long term. You know, if you, like, was that in your mind? Or was it always like. Oh, yeah, I thought about it constantly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And the answer is, uh, uh, no, but yes now. Yeah. You know, I mean, I, I, I think now that it's come to fruition, um, we've got. immense support. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Now, we had to see the reality of it. You know, it sat there in the planning phases and it's like, what's Blake really working

on? Yeah. There isn't really something tangible there. Mm-hmm. There's, uh, there's some losses on a beef company. Right. Yeah. That's, I mean, that's what there was to show for all my work.

And, and, um, you know, it, it's amazing how fast, too, as you get involved in other things, you lose that enthusiasm to have the farm talk, to have the market talk, to have these. And so, yeah, it kind of alienates you a little bit. And but now that we're, we're up and running, no, I mean, everybody's been super supportive. We're going to do a little, we're going to get a party bus together here in the next three weeks. Whenever we can make it work for everybody, we're going to ship everybody up and do a family tour. And, you know, Britt and I are passionate about making sure everybody knows, like, this is our project. But it's only our project because it had to be somebody's.

It had to be our financial responsibility. I don't think it would have worked. And people wouldn't have put the sacrifice in if it was a shared family project. If this was just like an Albers family enterprise item, I don't think we would have got it across the finish line. Yeah. Somebody had to have the buy-in. So, yeah, I had to have

enough skin in the game that it's like, it's got to work. It's got to work. But now that we're there, as we pay down some debt, we should prove this thing works. It's making everybody happy. I want to make sure that, you know,

everybody understands there's opportunities that surround this, try and make it come back full circle, and hopefully that doesn't take 10 years. That's where, I'm at. It's like if that takes two or three, I would be static. Static. Yeah. So what's like the vision for the farm then? Keep growing it. Find, find, find ways to diversify like you are with the, with other businesses. Like when you look at the future of ag in your guys's situation, what do you think? Where do you think

it's going? What do you do? What do I think is probably somewhat irrelevant for the moment? You know, these guys got their hands full. They're running a big custom feed yard or big as relative, you know. And what I think, though, if I'm looking at the future for what my brothers and I could work on, as we get into a normal, hopefully a more normal cycle, it's hard to say normal. The cattle market's never normal. Right. Yeah.

But I've assembled some of the best cattle traders on the future side. I've got great connections on the beef side. My brother Chase, like I said, is an excellent animal health guy. He's got a really good eye for livestock that I don't. I'm a numbers guy. I'm not as in love with the physical animal. He is. He's a true caretaker.

And we've got a great crew. The Mofald boys are kind of in charge of some things. We've got a great cowboy crew. We can handle high-risk cattle. We can handle a lot of things. and so my goal would be like let's assemble a cattle feeding group that's all encompassing. We're going to have a future trading, a futures trading arm, a risk, you know, a separate risk management policy because you have to in cattle. Yep.

And then really try and specialize in feeding some margin into these cattle. And if the opportunity presents itself, we run some of these cattle all the way through the box. Yeah. So that's my dream scenario. of pulling this all back together. Yeah. You know, but that's,

that's a big lift. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Right now, I think everybody's just focused on, like, let's keep the feed yard full, operations going well,

uh, grow the row crop if the opportunity presents itself. And, uh, just manage what's there. You know, it's a lot of work to manage what's there. We're,

uh, we're rooting for you because the cattle business is about the only thing left in animal livestock that hasn't gone. the vertical integration. I mean, it's one of the, what I heard that the average, you correct, and you may not know this either, but I just heard this this morning,

like the average cow herd is only like 40 head. Yeah, it's small. It's very small. Now the feedlot way is not that way, and there's just a, there's a brand new feedlot out. Is that in Nebraska? Yeah, black shirt feeders.

Yeah. That's a key gym project. And I think that's going to be a lot of dairy cross animals. I'm not totally familiar with it. But that gentleman has had a hell of a life. And that's a cool culmination of a project. If you get a chance to listen to his pod, he did a podcast. I can't remember who with.

But it was fantastic. Yeah. And one of the things he talked about, and I'm paraphrasing, and I'm probably going to butcher it because I haven't listened. into it in months. But one of the things that I think young people struggle with in livestock and probably obviously rocrop is getting that ball rolling with consecutive years or turns of cattle of profitability. You have to have some consecutive years, especially when cost of living. It doesn't matter how cheap you want to be. It's going to cost you some money to live. Right. But Key Jim had pointed out,

he goes, you know, he didn't say essentially, I'm a smart guy, but, you know, it's kind of like, I'm a smart guy. Yeah. But I had, in Western Canada, it was the perfect timing. He had, he had nearly 20 years of uninterrupted, you know, at least moderate success, compounding, compounding, compounding. And that was what catapulted him into where he's at now. So that's the unfortunate thing we have to accept an ag is sometimes a great,

deal of your success is just what year you were born. And that's tough. That's true too. That's 100% true. You look at the, you look at the grain, you look at grain farming. And if you were somebody that got started at the right time, you, you made, you built tremendous equity. Yeah.

But if you were unlucky enough to be one of these people younger than me, but older than you, that started at what I think people will look back as like the golden age of grain farming where we hit higher highs every year and yet we had no interest to where I mean you could just so many guys that started then or came back to the farm and took over like they're never going to see they'll never see success I shouldn't say that I should be an optimist but the chances of them having as many consecutive years of everything playing right to where your operating cost you almost nothing and your returns increased or stayed good for a big chunk of time. I mean, those guys are all standing around now going, gosh, I remember the good old days,

you know, and it is. It makes, it's a cyclical business. One thing I want to ask you about, well too i'll start i'll say this what i think is so great about the meat business is and we're amateurs at it and i'm more of an amateur than him because i just get a show up and be like oh this is cool got any meat sticks i can have um is just the size of it that there really is room for a lot of people in it

because you think that you're like moving a lot of meat or you yeah and it's yeah it's nothing it's nothing but to that point you know a lot of talk has been about the consolidation in the packer side of the of the cattle business and i mean obviously it went that way in the hog business um and poultry well yeah poultry's been gone for a long time um is there is there a lot of fear out there as a as a feeder Is there fear out there that it's going to consolidate further? Is there any optimism that there's a chance of getting it any less consolidated? There's something else here now. Something new.

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You've got some new plants coming online. It's going to be a tough time for them to come online. So if they survive the first year, they'll be there for good. Got a lot of investments in the industry because people saw that there is margin. where I think the opportunity lies is like you said, you can get, oh, yeah, we move some meat. It is literally zero. And I used to really guard myself, you know,

I came from the commodity trading zero-sum game kind of ideal ideology. And I wouldn't talk about what we were doing, who I co-packed with, how we did this, because I was like, oh, you know, I don't want anybody to get in on this. Now, number one, I'm like, I'm not sure you have the balls to get through this. Yeah.

To do this. So I'm not as worried about you stealing the playbook. And number two, it just doesn't matter. You could have, you know, the average consumer is, what, 59 pounds of red meat. They're eating what percentage of that at home? I don't actually know, but I would guess it's less than half for some people. Yeah. You know, a lot of the red meat they're eating.

is literally hamburger at the drive-thru. And so when you look at it like that, you've got a lot of people that don't need to buy a lot of meat, which is actually an advantage for a farmed or a ranch to table. Because if people, and they're doing this on the coast, the people in the Midwest all think they're meat traders. I mean, it's unbelievable. And that's why we've had to actually,

we do offer a value line for those people, and they are great. They come in and they spend the most money per pop, but they're the lowest dollar per pound. But on the coast, people are realizing that, oh, I can feed my family the better stuff, and it's not actually that impactful, because how much do we really eat at home? And, you know, the people that have the income to do that don't generally have six or seven kids. It's a family of four. We're eating 20 pounds each at home, you know, a year.

So I can go buy a couple boxes of meat and fulfill that. And I don't even notice it, right? And I can feel good about where it came from. Exactly. So that's the opportunity, I think. And then, you know, the other portion is you can have facilities like this pop up everywhere and still not. be making a dent. And that is just the one thing you have to say that you obviously have gotten

your head around and I've gotten my head around is just the insane size of it all. And that's always the problem with the cattle industry is we always think it's small enough to get your head around it and get an idea of how these markets should work. Yeah. Right. And then all of a sudden you realize, you know, there's a whole mechanism here of distributors and, and, uh, and, uh, and the food service and, you know, these, these packing plants. And it's just, it's a naval warship. And we're over here in a canoe. Inflatable. Yeah. Inflatable. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, and that's been one thing that's interesting is this is kind of off topic. But on the, in the time that I've been around, I've seen a big change in the aging and the stickiness of these food service distributors

to hang on to boxes or to go into a suspended fresh or, or into frozen programs. You know, right when I started this, or probably before, I was just on tours, I think, went to a packing plant, which this is still common. They've got two and a half days worth of kill, maybe. And they're turning those boxes out. Yep. Then I went to a large food distributor in Lincoln. I said, how often do you turn this meat cooler?

And the gal's like three, four days. So those distributors used to get the food service people, their meat as green as it was at the grocery store. Yeah. And what's happened is those guys said, hey, let's stop panicking. Let's stop selling this stuff down. So that's added a layer of stickiness to the beef price

because they've realized, we don't even think about putting it into the freezer until it's at 60 days. So why are we going to lose money on this? Yeah. We paid 12 and a quarter. We're going to get 13 in a quarter. I don't care how.

We'll get 13 and a quarter frozen next summer. Yeah. They don't care. And it actually is a good thing. Yeah. Because it makes our industry, or here's the way I look at it. The meat industry always has margin in it if you can get over the operational humps. Yep.

If you can get over the overhead. If you can get through the tunnel, if you will, you will have margin versus true true blue commodity, even though beef is commodity. But, you know, we're always buying cattle at a, cash to cash loss on paper the day we buy them. You know, row crop, it's, it's, you don't know. Yep. And so when you enter the meat business, you accept, I'm going to have overhead I didn't dream of.

And, but if I get past that, I'm running a boring old company with a set percentage margin. Yep. Yep. You know, that was one thing my father-in-law kind of taught me is they have a, they have a, they have office supplies. You can't get more boring than selling paper and copiers. But he made it fun. I mean, he's having a blast doing it because it's running a business that has a set margin. And if we sell more, we make more. And that's just how it works. Whereas we're not used to that in the ag side. We'd sell more and lose more.

That's exactly right. That's all it is. Yeah. You know. Yeah. Well, I like about the meat business is, It's a product that people, it's a need for most people. It's a freaking need. And you can diversify, you can do a lot, you can distribute it a lot of ways and not have to change your core product. And that, I like that. Because it's just, it's, it's complicated. It's complicated, like you said, all the logistic problems and the back end and operations and all that. But the product is simple.

It's meat. And people need it. Yeah. And that's. Well, and it's just a value add. And it takes time to learn how to capture that. Yeah. And, you know, especially on the beef side,

I feel like a lot of people price themselves kind of too low. And then they're spinning their wheels. They're like, where's this value ad we were looking for? Now, the hog side, I don't know a lot about your costs on processing a hog. but I would imagine the advantage of the hogs you're going to have a lot less wrapped up in inventory. You can ramp up very quickly and you're going to be less anchored

to that core cost of goods sold. So I think the pork thing is really interesting. I think you guys have got a lot of opportunity there for sure. The thing I like about a pig is because that's all I knew. And when we started doing cattle, I was like, you get 70, 75% of a pig.

Like, that pig weighs 320. Most of that pigs come back at meat. When he, the first group of cattle they got done, he's like, oh, we're going to get this much. And I was just like, what? Where the hell is the, what? Where's the rest of it? Yeah, I remember looking at it.

I was just like, that's terrible. I'm like, how can you make any money? Yeah. A hog is very efficient and it's quick, you know, it grows quick. Yeah, you do it twice. year get two groups yeah um i was going to ask you how do you price out like how do the big boys price out their products because i know that they don't look at ground beef the same way that they

they don't value ground beef the same way they value a rib buy right but like in our situation you know i'm i'm trying to like you know sell this product and oh cost of ground beef beef, we take our total cost of the carcass and the process and all that. And then, you know, however many pounds of ground beef we got. And we got this many pound of ribbyes. Well, the same pound of that beef isn't the same, right? Because we know the, this is, this steak is a lot more the value. The value, the steak is a lot higher than the ground beef. And I know like the big boys, they pretty much are like, we don't need to make shit on the ground beef. So like, how do you, how was the best way to value a carcass is are they looking at a carcass and going we just want to

extract this many dollars out of this carcass we don't care if we sell the ground beef at this margin because we know we're going to make it up here on this stuff yeah there's there's a bunch of different models there's there's the sell it as a balanced animal but to do that with volume you have to double your cost of goods sold and spend it all on marketing and facebook ads yeah and and that works and you find a good customer and they're willing to pay it more power to them. Then there's liquidate parts of the animal back into what your break-even is and figure out what the market will bear. That's kind of our mixed model that we're doing right now. And what I like to do is I put, I'll call up a sheet, a meat sheet from a food service company.

and I do enough business on, I buy some pork to grind, whatever, so they'll give me their prices. And you go prime delivered to your facility, plus the cost of portioning it, plus your yield loss, that's going to equal what you should at least be considering your break even on your middle meats. I don't care how you want to look at the rest of the animal. If you had to go out and replace a high quality piece of meat into a package and ship it out, that should at minimum be your cost of goods. So that level peak in December on a high-end prime-grade rib-eye with the processing fee on it, with a small yield loss,

you know, yeah, you might get some steak tips, but we're not going to count that. There's a really good meat trader out on the West Coast, Steve, and he told me one time, Blake, he goes, do not ever count any byproduct as a part of the price. Because if you get money out of it later, that's great. So I've really lived by that. But that cost got up to $29 was your cost in December on a prime grade ribai.

And so you just can't afford to do that. Same thing goes for we just went line item by line item through a 1650 pound carcass, Wagyu Animal. Okay. We priced it off of. full value off of Snake River farms. I think they have

gold or black. The lower grade one, whatever it is. Yeah, I think it's black as they're lower. And that animal would provide basically $7,000 worth of gross margin that could be used for shipping, marketing, you know, costs of doing business, storage on the frozen product. And

I like to tell people if ager beef, this monster, and Snake River Farms, the large, they've got to be the largest wagger producer in the country. If they're priced here, and this is what they think they need to be at, to move this product online, then, you know, who are you to think you can do it cheaper, right? Yeah, right. And now there's a degree of that, it's like, yeah, they earned that right to charge that.

Right. And that is true. But they also have the efficiency, because they're one of the biggest, of the smalls. Yep. Yep. And so what you can do is say, hey, we have to price here to get our online to work. If we can't move at all, we have a price B that we move locally where we don't have these costs involved. And that's always been a struggle and a solution is that we have to have two price points. Yeah. You know, we have to have the one that includes marketing this product. And it includes the shipping and the coolers and the logistics of it all.

And I think that, you know, that's the hardest thing to get people's head around as they enter the meat business. Number one is the yield loss on the, on the cattle. That's for certain. Number two, this animal will produce 75 pounds portioned of strips, rib-eyes, and tenderloin. Yep. That's it. Yeah, a 1500-pound animal.

there. You got eight cases of 10 pound beef. I mean, that's your, so how much pressure do you want to put on the middle meats? That's up to you. But generally, you have to put a lot of pressure on the middle meats. Yeah, you do. Absolutely. I mean, and one thing I've, the other little cheat, I guess, I've, I've told people along with the holiday box thing is if you can go into this developing a small, even a couple hundred pounds a week into a commercial patty and just sell it for what you've got just say hey I don't know what your distributor is charging but we'll try and get there you know we're going to have to be higher but we'll try and get there that will help pick that throughput up that helped us tremendously yeah we had 500 pounds a week of ground beef um into patties

doesn't sound like anything but that got us through a long time to now where we can develop the business, you know, where we've got a big thing, which again, ag mentality switching gears from production ag into this is really tough because the numbers get really small. Yeah. It's like, why am I messing with this? What am I doing? You know, you've got, you have to get excited about like $2,000 a day.

That's fantastic, you know, that's really good versus you've got guys that are used to $100,000 transactions coming and going, all of a sudden you're just grinding away at this. And it's a mentality thing that is, that was tough for me to switch. So I'm not saying it's tough for other people. It was tough for me to switch on to that and be like, no, we're killing it.

Yeah. I mean, this is good. We're getting along here. Yeah. How important, how important in your business is, has been your, just your brand. do you feel like that is how instrumental do you think that is in being able to grow your business having that brand to differentiate yourself from other people like i was listening to a podcast

is called uh my first million and they had a guy on there they were shooting off ideas and one of them and they're all from l.a so you know they're tech guys right and they talk about they got in talking about meat and how man somebody needs to come out and make this revolutionary butcher shop and make it this whole vibe that city people like us would just like love and all this stuff but then they talked about you know they don't buy grocery store meat but if they're going to buy it they buy Snake River because it sounds like a legitimate farm and they go in there they're like I was looking around the shelves and I see Snake River and I was like oh that like sounds like a legit place I'm going to buy that and it's like you do you go into a Walmart

or a high V or whatever your grocery store is and you're like, how many brands in here actually are doing any type of brand work at all? Like, and I know why, because they're owned by the Packer. Most of them are owned by Packers. But the brand play, there's no branding. There's no marketing. It's like, I just feel like there's this huge gap in meat where they're not, They haven't came to the plate and really got on social media and, like, hit the ball hard and really tried to build a brand that means something.

Yeah, the demand is so good. They do not have to. Yeah. And that is, that is, I mean, I know companies that move a million pounds a week and they have sales teams of like 10 or 11. Yeah. At that point, you are a logistics coordinator and an organization. order taker. And so it's tough and it's interesting, but the demand for high quality beef is there. Number one. Number two, I'll touch on that branding issue with them being able to, you know, we can laser or print or at chain, or not chain speed, but at a fast speed, any brand, they could have every single box come out of that plant if they wanted to.

have a different brand on it that could sound like your farm. And that is a challenge. The USDA really wants to regulate. They don't really want it. They do regulate breed claims so heavily. They do regulate some of these things that these trade organizations have came online. And then, of course, you've got ingredients, which we have to because allergens and whatnot. I really think that they ought to, and I'm not usually for more government regulation,

but they ought to think about, hey, if we're going to call this farms or ranch, or it actually has to have some tangible tie to a farmer ranch. Yeah, I'd agree with that. And that's why I think that the genius is in your farmer grade thing is right there. There's no question. Like, Albers Craft Meats, that could have been after John Albers, the senior VP. since 1895. Exactly.

We just pick a number. We found this tombstone in the cemetery. Sounds good. And so that craft labeling is super easy for them to replicate. And that's a bit of a challenge. And then what was your original question? No, my original question was just whether you thought that whether there was value in your brand, like your family farm.

And do you feel like you've been able to leverage that to where it's an asset? Or do you think that you, I guess your level of importance in what you think that is? So just starting, I would say it has just started to become more and more important. Because the only, we had some e-commerce success that I discussed. earlier in the podcast, but it was a kind of blanket company. We were marketing several different products and then Albers was just one of them. Okay. And now we're starting to see that more premium buyer that's like, okay, this is the Albers stuff, right? Like I don't want this product or that product. I want the stuff that's from you guys directly that you had something to do with

the entirety of the production process. Right. So just starting. On a personal level, though, I have, and I wouldn't consider anything that I've done, especially, you know, in the past as personal branding. Yeah. But I put myself out there as a person who does this long enough. That's been really helpful. I've gotten a lot of people, you know, have come to me, my two biggest processing customers, because somebody told me, oh, he handles this, you know.

And now we're getting to the point where I've got new, leads as they're seeing me bring bring on these other customers and kind of be full service turnkey for them. So from a personal level, that started working about a year and a half two years ago. But on a just steak branding, a branded box, I wouldn't say it was hugely important until recently. It was more like my sister Callie. She does it. She's great with people. So she'll she'll sell person to person in the retail or the corporate stuff. She doesn't. is really great with that. And so it was almost more like Callie's important. Yeah. Not like the Albers family brand. It's like Cali's important. The personal relationship.

Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yeah. I think I think the meat business is similar to what we talked about. I don't know whether we got this on. We were talking about just this like what we're doing with podcast, consistency. If you, if you are good enough that you can last, if you can outlast some people to where you're actually in business, people start give you a little more credit. Yeah. Well, and just purely being there, whether it's online or in person, we've been a meat retailer in Norfolk since 2018. And still people are like, where'd you guys come from? I'd have a lot of yield. Yeah. Ten year overnight success. Yeah, exactly. I heard at a Nebraska beef symposium before I never, I ever thought I was going to be in the beef business. I,

just thought he was going to be in the livestock business. A guy came up there and said, a success or a branded product success in the beef industry is 15 years. That's an overnight success. Yeah. And I was just like, as a person who's now, whatever, I'm into this, eight, nine years, I'm like, I've got a few years left. Yeah.

Yeah. For sure. Yep. 100% so touching on that just the people come into your retail side and they're like man where have you guys been

do you feel like what's your stance on rural America just I don't know I wrote this question down and it was you're out here building this business supporting small town Nebraska are rural communities like yours

actually thriving with you guys leading the charge or do you still feel like they're just hanging on by a thread. Because, you know, rural towns, like our town thrives on pork production. We didn't have pork production.

There would be no ace hardware. There would be no hogslat. There would be no bazooka. There would be no... Well, there wouldn't be, it wouldn't be... There wouldn't be... It wouldn't be anything. I get kind of snarky on this because

people like to fancy us as part of the economic corridor. because Iowa City is the University of Iowa and then Cedar Rapids is just north of it. And people, there's nothing sexy about production agriculture. So like the economic development people, they want to talk about, you know, the library or somebody that's got three people making a widget or something that, you know, that's, that's what makes our little town thrive. No, what makes our town thrive is there's more hog buildings in a 50s. mile radius than almost anywhere else in the world, basically. And we're damn lucky to have all those

people paying property taxes and paying people and buying the equipment to haul the manure and buying the semis and buying the fuel and all that. And if it wasn't for production agriculture, our little town would be in big trouble. And I feel if you're not lucky enough, you only have to drive a short distance in either direction to counties that don't have like some kind of a some kind of base of of animal agriculture and they're they're in bad shape they're hurting yeah animal agriculture pumps up those receipts yeah it really does and the the reason whizner um is is a cattle feeding community is Louis Dinklage was feeding cattle back when they needed more labor, more help.

There wasn't automation that we have now, and he would recruit these families to custom feed for him. And so we have the residual effects from that, you know, a long time afterwards. And Wisner is a great community. And it's really, they've invested a ton of money. The school's wonderful. There's new housing development going up. Everything's going really well.

And that was why it's hard to leave. But in then Norfolk, where we're at now, we're about, I would say, 25 minutes from the farm, 28 maybe. And they're investing in the community, and it's going really well. So we've seen some good rural success. And I do get a little snarky the other way in our Norfolk community. we have some people that just don't want to see anything change.

Oh, yeah, 10-4. Don't want to see anything change, no money spent, no nothing. You know, I want you to be careful with my property tax, they say, as it's like, not to be harsh, but you're not paying that much property tax. Yeah. And I tell these guys, the reason Britt and I have invested, we have two businesses, she works a dental job, and we brought our kids here is because you invested in your community. And right now, those dollars would add up to a pretty significant thing.

And then we've got, you know, we've got 15 employees. Yeah. So making communities attractive, I'm pro that, but the jobs have to be there first. Yeah, that's right. You do. And so you have to have the jobs. then you have to have an attractive community. And that's more just for the fringe people, right?

Like I was a fringe. It's like, okay, you shave an hour of time off of both of our days. We get a decent house at a decent price. And it's a really nice community. Things are easy. Okay, well, instead of me driving to Norfolk every day, I'll drive to Wisner a few days a week. So it attracted a fringe, you know,

in person, but I still think that's important. No, it is. Having pride in your communities, and that's the one thing that drives me nuts, and this is pro-small communities. I've been a part of the Norfolk community, which is 26, 27,000, whatever, I'd have to look it up. And then a part of Wisner, the amount of people that lead those communities, it's the same amount of people. It's the same amount of people that are going out to eat on the social settings, too. It's the same amount of people that are, it's wild. It's wild to me. You know, the people that

push on the fundraisers, the people that organize things for the community, it's the same size, no matter the size of the community. Yeah. You know, I would have thought, you know, there'd been, if we've got a hundred people, that's 10% of the population of Wisner. that are really pushing on on helping organize events and whatever and we've got more than that honestly because I mean when they do Thunder by the River they've got tons of volunteers yep yeah I mean probably 25% of the communities there yep uh not in attendance working it you know yeah whatever and maybe that's too high but and then in norfolk it's like the same hundred people yep you know yeah so it's kind of interesting shakers and movers man I mean I will tell you one of the

neatest towns I've ever been to is in Nebraska. We went out to Broken Bow. There's a guy out there that has probably the highest, most productive sow farm in the United States and PIC, yes, PIC genetics, and they bring people in there to see how they do stuff. And it's Broken Bow. And Broken Bo is, it is, to me, it's one of them towns that just luck of the draw, they never let, like, I don't know if there's a dollar general there. I don't think there is. And I'm not even sure if there's a Walmart there. And I think that's by design. And I think they're just far enough away from any big city, bigger city, that everything that people want, need is right there. And so they really support that. Because driving through that town and spending time there, you're like, wow, they got this and this. And it's all, mom and pop it's not like chains it's all mom and pop stuff for the most part and you're just like this is really cool but that doesn't happen very many places in america it's like the hermit kingdom model in the middle of nebraska yeah it's it's it's pretty neat so yeah western nebraska's

awesome i i i we go out to long pine if you ever get a chance okay it's a blast of a little town so i feel like we've talked a lot about the meat so we should probably talk in farmin but we should get a little personal are you doing the carnivore diet I did it. You did it. What's your experience with that? So I got to a very fluffy, 235 at one point. And I got, I was just like, and you know, we're guys, right?

So a pair of jeans has a 40 pound span. Yeah, you're going to wear them to matter what. It's just going to look better or worse. Yeah. I mean, you're not redoing the wardrobe. And I was like, gosh, I'm going to have to buy some new jeans. This is terrible. And I'd been following Sean Baker since he, when I started following Sean Baker,

I had more followers than him, which is wild. That's crazy. And so I'd been following him and I tried to start it like five times. And by, for some reason, I started it and I got a cold or something. And it made it easier to get through those first 10 days. because the first 10 days are hard. Just kind of, you don't want to feel restricted. Yeah.

It's not really that hard. You feel better already. I mean, um, for me, I got like a tiny bit of, uh, pain in my hand joints as I transitioned on to,

you know, no carbs. And then I felt better. Yeah. And so I lost 50 pounds on that pretty lickety split, 55, somewhere around there. And then a bunch of people in Wisner were doing it.

So, you know, everybody's like, this is easy, we love beef, you know? Yeah. And it worked really great. And then I went on a continuing ed, went to a continuing ed course in Seattle with my wife for her. And they just didn't have good beef.

And I was like, oh, I've been strict for a year. We'll have a, we'll eat the food of the people here. Yeah. Because I was trying, I kept trying to order just a hamburger and it was like grass fed and I don't, I don't particularly care for grass fed. Yeah. And I just couldn't, couldn't chow down on it. So kind of fell off the wagon a little bit. And I had gotten to the point where I was like, I wasn't working out.

I was just doing the diet. And I didn't, I didn't fully, you know, you take the slab of hat off, I guess. Yeah. It was like, oh, I'm not as half. happy with what I, what's underneath it as I thought. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I started, I started working out with with a, with a guy at the Y, a trainer there, still kind of half hazard, trickled into some carbs more and more because I was, you know, I kind of sullied my, my, my, my 12 years, or 12 month span. And put a little bit of the weight back on. And then now I just, I'm very,

cautious. I know what things make me feel like crap. I know what things fire off a little lower back pain. Yeah. I know what things, uh, don't work for me. And that carnivore thing's always there to lean on if you need to, to shed some weight. So I had great success with it. I tell people, it's good for everyone to do for six months. Just metabolic reset, find out what was bothering you. Because that was the thing. It's like, I just accepted, that, well, I'm tight because I'm stressed and it's cattle markets and, you know, whatever. Yeah. And it's like, no, a lot of it was just inflammation.

And so it's, it's been a great tool. Now it's a tool. It was a lifestyle. Now it's a tool. Yeah. And I think that's probably what would work best for most people. It's like you've got to go all in for a minute. But once you figure out, you know, how to maintain because you have a, you have a mental

picture of how you felt. You know what that baseline of health is once you're on carnivore. Now it's easier to figure out how to get back to it. It's like, okay, I screwed up last weekend. We're going to eliminate some carbs. We're going to not overindulge on beer. Yeah. And we're going to be a little more careful this week. Okay, we feel better now. Yeah. So if I had never done it, I wouldn't have known what that baseline was. Yeah. And now I know if I'm deviating from that baseline, how to get back. Yeah.

So it's, and it's great just discipline. Because anybody that tracks calories, it sucks. You know, I do it now, but before I was incapable, I do not have the discipline for that. So you get a reward because you feel like you've been disciplined when you aren't eating the carbs. So that's your mental reward. But in reality, it's easy because you don't have to count calories. You're constantly satiated.

It's like, oh, yeah, eat two pounds of ground beef a day. Feel full. Yeah. You're full all the time. Yeah. So I think it's amazing. And I think Sean Baker's done a lot for the industry and for demand. Yeah.

I think we're seeing, I, you know, we're five or six pounds per person off the low from, from a few years ago on per capita consumption. I would contribute a lot of that to keto carnivore. Yeah, big time. A lot of it. Well, you had that movement of, you know, red meat is bad. I mean, don't eat a lot of red meat. And now people are like, I'm going to eat red meat all the time, you know.

Fat's not bad. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, you've seen this shift now. What, steak and shake kind of started that. Animal fats. They're going back to frying and beef tallow. And I did not. know this buffalo wild wings they fry their stuff in beef tallow however it's shitty beef tallow it's

preserved preserved beef tallow but there are more and more restaurants that are coming around to that yeah is that is that a opportunity that excites you with with uh what you're doing it does tallow animal fats it does um we are going to probably this week invest in a little bit of equipment you know, limited runs. It's not going to be huge initially. But the way we're packaging it, you know, we're going to cater to people that want to fry in it. Yes.

Searing towel is awesome, and we're going to do some of that as well. You know, the little jar you keep to toss a spoonful of the pan. But we've carried a third-party towel in the store just to test the market. And everybody that walks through my door that wants tallots because they're frying. Yep. And they're either like, we're going to have some really good home style fries or they're carnivore. And that's how they're doing their chicken wings.

They're like, we're doing like a real low carb or zero carb fried chicken wing. So they want like a bucket. They want like a bucket. Yep. Boy, my face would look good on a bucket of. I don't think mine would look better. Like like character. Yeah.

Yeah. No, yeah, that's something that excites me too. I see it, you know, you just start seeing this trend of it happening more and more and it's, it's cool to see. And yeah, I think it's a shelf stable thing. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Exactly. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the whole idea that Cheerios are better for you than, you know, than a rib eye. I think that's kind of fleet. That's going away. I think people are waking up. Yeah. And even my dad, he mentioned that to me a few weeks ago, maybe a mother's, ago he goes boy my generation was sure sold a bill of goods weren't they we Trish and I just had this

conversation about like our childhoods because that that generation they were they had grown up where everything was cooked at home like you very rarely went out and had a meal out on the town but then I think like my mom and and Trish is my mother-in-law too. I think that generation of women, like they were tired. They were tired. And it was right at this when processed food was just starting.

So there was just all these opportunities of it was easier. Yeah. And like I remember having TV dinners. And it was kind of like a treat. We had the TV stands. And on Sunday night, now this, you got to remember my dad was a lot older than I was. But like watching Lawrence Well, can eat a TV dinner and we thought it was kind of cool.

Nobody gave any thought about, you know, all the stuff that was in there. And yeah, so it just started and it was out of convenience. And then all these food company was also cheaper. It was cheaper. It was faster. And then it made everything shelf stable. And there was all these advantages. And we were able to, there was no research done, I don't think.

Very poor research. And it's taken this long. for all of those, all those chickens to come home to roost and people are going, oh, shit. So now I think the pendulum is finally starting to swing back the other way, which is good.

Absolutely. And I was born in 1990, so I cut the tail end of the TV dinners. And I remember thinking as a kid, like, oh, this is so fun, but they were bad. Oh, terrible. They were really bad.

Then you wondered why you were like, just drinking, drinking a glass of water and then waking up in the morning and be like, hot, why am I so thirsty? Cardboard brownie in the corner.

Oh, man. Well, and the pop, like even pop consumption is like, you know, all these new, these new brands that are healthier pops. Ollie pop, you know. Yeah. It's like, geez,

we used to drink a 32 ounce Sprite, no problem. We would literally, we had a Pepsi distribution, Pepsi warehouse in our town. And my mom, we would go to the grocery store, and then on the way home, we would stop the Pepsi thing. And we would get a wooden crate that had three or four eight-pack bottles, Mountain Dew, Pepsi, and seven up, and bring them home, put them in the fridge. And on Saturday morning, I can remember on Saturday morning getting a giant bowl of cereal and a bottle of Mountain Dew and sit down and watch the Super Friends.

And my parents never said anything about it. Like today you would, no mother thinks that's a good. That's like child abuse. Yeah. Probably would. But, but I was also the youngest, you know. Yeah.

My parents were tired by the time I came by. My mom was probably just like, uh, whatever. He ain't going to make it. I've seen him. He ain't going to make it very far anyway. That's, that explains a lot now. That's probably why you are the way you are right now.

It is. It's been a tough. You're kind of a squirrel. Got that squirrel brain. So that sugar overload just, sent you down path. I definitely fit the bill because anyway. Okay, we'll keep going. We're pushing our limit here on time. So let's try to go through these semi-quick. You're juggling a meat empire, family, fitness, you know, getting back to the

farm as much as you can. How do you balance at all? How do you, what is your stance on balance? and how do you, because this is something that I think every entrepreneur struggles with. You know, you got to drive results and that to-do list is making you anxious, but you got to be present. How do you, how do you deal with that? Well, it goes back to hiring the right person, number one. I absolutely couldn't do it if it weren't for Kelly and Jesse. And then it's my wife. She forces the issue.

I mean, she absolutely forces the issue. She's, uh, she's a big girl. She's got a real job. She brings home real income. And she expects that we do things together and that we do some trips together. And, uh,

she floated the meat business with her tooth money for a while. So she's got some say. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I finally told her last year. I said, all right, babe, you can stop holding that over my head. I think I'm more important now. Yeah.

Yeah. But it took a while. And, no, it's purely, I, as much as probably both of my brothers would think they disagree with this statements, and I'm sure they'll listen to this, but I still have that kind of ag mentality. Like, I just get sick thinking about just, I need to get this done. I need to go work on this. If things didn't go as well as I wanted them to, my natural inclination.

is to want to go down to the office and even if I'm not doing anything. It's almost like putting myself in a corner. So when those thoughts happen, it is don't. Yeah. You know, and my wife will tell me that. She's like, anytime you have something that really needs done, just let me know. We'll work it out. I'll deal with the kids.

I'll do all that. But don't go down there just to just to stare at a screen and get 20% of what you thought you would get done done. Yeah. You know, or go down there and sweep floors that have been already swept just because you're trying to, you know, put that time into it. You know, now I look at it. My wife and I get up at 5.30.

The kids, we did an au pair, which is a whole other story. It's a great program. If anybody's interested, we have an op-air. She starts at 545. And at that point, I'm free to either go to pre-op, which I haven't had to. do in a while or we go do a morning workout, have a coffee, gather ourselves for the day, 7.30, off to work, and then, you know, removing myself from the situation too. Like, my employees might think I'm gone a lot. I will literally go drive around and make the phone

calls I need to make. Just remove myself from the situation. If I've got something I really need to focus on. I am driving around or I'm on a walk. I'm on that phone call. And after that, the USDA kind of helps too because you're set hours. So it's like, well, we can't do anything after 3.30. Yeah. You know. Right. So it's been a progression. I mean, we're really happy with where things are at now. But it's, it's expectations of people around me. I I don't know. I don't think that I've struck some perfect balance. But, yeah, just letting my wife be the driver on that and accepting that and getting up early

and accepting that you can toggle that two hours in the morning, either towards work or towards the fitness or towards just getting our head straight and getting ready for the day. That's been huge. Yeah. So that's been huge. What about flying? How did you get involved with flying and tell the story of that? Yeah, I wanted to fly out here.

Yeah, that was- Because I didn't want to be thinking about flying home when I was talking to you guys, which is what I would have been thinking about it. What altitude am I going to go? Is it windy and Norfolk? Is it, you know, what am I going to do here? But I got into it. My grandpa was into it.

He flew 26 or 700 hours before he kind of started bringing a pilot along with him. so he had probably lifetime private aviation like 3,500 hours. But at the end, he didn't fly that much. I sat back and realized I had inherited this passion from my grandpa. And I think we just talked about it most of the time. You know, we didn't really fly a lot together. He lost his medical when he got cancer for a short stint. Thank God he was fine for a while.

and then right when I got it back into flying my own airplane, he died. So I didn't really get to do a lot with him. But I got it right when I was, I started flying before I could drive, got my solo as soon as I could, got my pilot's license at 18 and been flying ever since. That's awesome. That's really cool. How often do you go fly? It's sporadic. So I'll fly a lot in a pocket of time and then not much.

So the airplane has an annual, so an annual inspection is. a pretty big deal, especially on these twin-engine airplanes. And that took about six weeks. And then we rolled into holiday season and whatnot. So I haven't flown. I've only flown twice since November, but then I've got a bunch of trips lined up that I'll really rack up some hours this spring. And what I do is when I'm not proficient, when I'm not flying every day, or sorry, every week, I just bring a safety pilot with me. Yeah. So that's been, a lot of fun. We keep the airplane moving, which is important with that, too. The airplane moving is just as important as pilot proficiency. So I've got another guy that's checked out on it,

and they still use the heck out of it. So cool. We're like, what do you, like, what trips do you use it for? When you go on vacation, do you use it? If it's going to be in the States, is it like for business? Yeah, both. Both. Both. Okay. Cool. Nothing is more satisfying than flying your kids and your wife somewhere. Like that is the coolest feeling. Yeah. It's also the most anxiety driven. You're like, holy crap,

I'm in charge of these people and this aircraft. Yep. But that is a total blast. And you get down on the ground and you walk out and you look back, you're like, okay, I've done something with my life.

Yeah. So that's really cool. And then we use it to go out to, you know, there's a couple different airplanes we use, but we'll use it for business, go out to cattle sales. And then I intend on, uh, lining up a bunch of trips to kind of go on a mission to, to recruit a few more really solid people. Cool. Uh, for the processing company. So that's kind of my next trips that are lined up. I've got one personal and then kind of a tour lined up that we're going to go get some, get some aviation in.

Oh, sweet. Uh, where's, where's like the best. trip. What's the best trip you ever been on or places that you've been that you recommend to anybody? To fly yourself? I just mean travel. Travel? Yeah, travel. Man, that is tough. I'm kind of a beach guy. I get a lot of crap on Twitter about it, but I like a good beach and a cocktail. Yeah. I do want to take my wife to Italy at some point. I want to go to Rome. I went there with my grandparents and I really enjoyed that, the history. But Florida is great. I like Florida.

And my wife and I got engaged in Mexico. We go back there once in a while. We had St. Lucia was amazing. We did that for our honeymoon. But economically, it just, it dwindles out of the picture for me right now. Yeah. You know, it's like, okay. Is it really four times better?

Yeah. than Mexico. Yeah. Is it seven times better than Florida? It's like, so, but no, it travels great.

I think traveling in the States is fun. Bahamas is fun. Who do you think has had the biggest impact on the direction of your life? Mentor, family, somebody you didn't expect. Who do you think? You know, mentality-wise,

my grandpa, I was really close with my grandpa. That's why my son is named Herb. And so he was always great. And he was kind of, he wasn't really a mentor, but he was a soft mentor. He would step in. Right when I first thought I was a hot shot and was really rolling, and I switched banks. I didn't switch banks.

I had a participating loan on some livestock. And, of course, he was on the bank board. And everybody was mad at me. And I was like, guys, you know, it's a lower rate. I mean, I'm trying to make money here, trying to be a capitalist. And the loan officer was younger and a good friend of mine. And he just sat me down. He goes, hey, I support you in whatever you do, but you're going to want to make a soft landing on this one.

Don't, you know, burn any bridges. And I took that to heart. Like, I think about that soft landing comment a lot of times when I'm mad, you know. and that's that's been great and then mentor wise unfortunately i didn't find one in the beef industry until i already learned all the hard lessons so i would say if anybody wants me to be their beef industry mentor you can get a lot out of me for not a lot because i don't want to see people fail at that number one a failed story there does not become a customer mine and number two it was it wasn't that fun to learn it

all on my own. And then cattle feeding wise, I got really lucky right at the end of kind of the golden era. I got to meet some of the greats like Bobfoot. And I got to meet, you know, a lot of cool people in the Gotch family and just some of these guys that were just legends. You know, Charlie McVane, the trader.

And that was incredible. and all those guys left me with a little piece. The only one that, and I, God rest his soul, he's passed, Jeff Biggert, I was sitting in a conversation like this. And I said, what is your biggest piece of advice, you know, for a young guy? And I don't know if you'll even want to put this in, but he just looked at me and started laughing. He goes, never waste an erection.

he was he just you know i think he's going through cancer and he's like yeah damn yeah well i think we can all agree that's that's a good that's a going to live by yeah would that be your biggest piece of advice you'd give somebody no no my biggest piece of advice is pick the right woman pick the right woman picked the right woman how do you find the right one what are the things that you look for oh i don't know somebody that wants to be your partner. Um, you know, Brittany certainly doesn't dote over me or like, you know, sometimes I give her crap. I'm like, gosh, you're kind of cold, babe. But she really wants to be my partner. She was supported me through ridiculous circumstances, through huge life changes. And, you know, we kind of knew

that going into it. A lot of these things had already started to happen as we were dating. And, uh, She was just ultra supportive. Her family was ultra supportive. And having somebody you can just be completely open with and work towards a solution together is huge. You know, Brittany, for example, though, I don't know how I got lucky enough to get her. I, my, do you remember,

you know how you have core memories from your childhood? Mm-hmm. I remember $1.80 being on our corn bid board in the office. for some reason. And then I remember her father coming in there to service office supplies, but I never knew he had a daughter. Well, he knew our family. I knew their family.

I didn't know him well enough to know he had a daughter. And I had dated a, or date, it would be a loose term. I had an Instagram photo on with a girl. And that I posted. And then her dad. went up to my mother in a restaurant randomly. He's like, hey, what's Blake up to? You know, mom said, oh, I think Blake's getting married soon.

I had no chance of getting married. I don't know why she said that. She was just riffing off. And Steve went back and told Brittany that. And she goes, no, he's not, who's he going to marry? He's not getting married. It was her. She's like, she's like, I'm going to step in and fix this.

She did. It was night and day. It was like, I had been chasing her for a year. I'd, you know, on and off. and finally she's just like, oh, you might get married. Well, now, now I'm, now I'm ready to go. So yeah, you got to, you got to have some, it's kind of like a good sales deal. You have to have some reason to get after it, I guess.

Yeah. But yeah, I would say pick, pick the right woman. Yeah, that's a good one. Well, Blake, we really appreciate you coming on the show, man. Yeah, no, this is great. I think people got a lot of value, especially cattle, meat, any of that stuff. So follow Blake on X. Yep.

Instagram. Yep. What's your handle again? At Blake Albers. Blake Albers. What's the website for your brand? Albers Craft Meets. Go, go check out Albers Crafts Meat.

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