Barn Talk - From Watermelon Fields to NASCAR Glory: Ross Chastain's Journey Unveiled

Episode Date: October 7, 2025

Welcome to Barn Talk! In today’s episode, we’re bringing you a truly one-of-a-kind conversation with NASCAR star and proud watermelon farmer, Ross Chastain. Sawyer and Tork sit down with Ross to dig into everything—from his eighth-generation family farm roots in south Florida to his meteoric rise in the racing world. You’ll hear Ross share stories of growing up surrounded by watermelon fields, learning the grit and grind of farm life, and how that translated into his “just do it” mentality behind the wheel. We get a behind-the-scenes look at how his family moved from packing watermelons in the old-school way to becoming leaders in the specialty crop market, plus the ups and downs that come from farming land that moves every 10 years and the constant battle with disease, weather, and regulation. But don’t think it’s all about ag! Ross takes us on a ride through his NASCAR journey—how he hustled his way in, paid his dues, and made a name by staying true to his roots (plus the infamous “wall ride” at Martinsville and the birth of his watermelon-smashing victory celebration). The guys talk about the business side of racing, the pressure, the handshakes (and haymakers), and the crossover between competing in sports and in agriculture. And if that isn’t enough, Ross opens up about his mission to shine a spotlight on American farming through his “Ag to Asphalt” project, why he believes every farmer has a story worth telling, and how keeping it real has become his brand—on and off the track. So grab your favorite drink (maybe even a watermelon, if you’re inspired), and settle in for a fresh, fast-paced, and downright fun episode with the Melon Man himself. Let’s get into it! Shop Farmer Grade 👇🏻 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 "Ross Chastain's Social Media Presence" 20:55 Watermelon Industry: Tradition and Promotion 27:17 Seed Selection in Agribusiness 41:34 The High Cost of Racing 48:39 Focused NASCAR Car Customization Dynamics 01:02:12 Gen 7 NASCAR Car Insights 01:10:19 Overnight Car Rebuild for Race 01:18:10 Racing Success and Driver Management 01:29:46 Farm Life vs. College Ambitions 01:38:51 Promoting Farming's Positive Image 01:54:12 "Ensuring Sustainable Agriculture for Future" 01:59:19 Electric Trucks Transforming Farm Life ------------------------------- ⚠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. 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 names. 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. Today is going to be a hell of a good guest episode. Got a great guest coming to Southeast Iowa to have a great conversation with us. But before we get into the nitty-gritty, you guys know the drill. if you get any value from the show, which I think today you are,

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The more that you guys do that, the more it makes our show credible. So we can have more guests like we're having today. come on the show and have some damn good conversations. Last thing you can do to support us here at Barn Talk is support our direct-to-consumer meat business, farmergrade, farmaggrade.com. We got Wagyu, pork, beef, chicken, all from American family farms. And we have a pretty damn good subscription offer, 50% off your first box, 15% off your

every box after that first initial box, free ground beef for life, free shipping for life. So we think it's the best subscription offer out there in the meat space because we know it's pretty tough out there for people when it comes to their checkbook. So we wanted to do something about it. So check that out if you're interested in getting some meat. And I'm really pumped up for today's episode. Yeah. Today I'm trying to not let the cat out of the bag.

So if I told you that our guest today was a watermelon farmer, you really wouldn't know who I was talking about it. I told you he was from Florida, some of you would might start to get it. If I told you that he also is a race car driver, that would certainly narrow it down. But I think that if I told you that he has probably the most intimate relationship with the wall

at Martinsburg Speedway, I think that would probably seal the deal. This guy, I don't know how many people have this claim to fame, but I'm pretty sure that there is, a NASCAR rule written because of something that he did. So without any further ado, let's get into it. We're live, boys. So Ross. Castane, welcome to Barn Talk. Yeah. Thanks for Yeah, of course, man. Appreciate you making the trip. I know that, you know, we've got some good friends

that have came on from the NASCAR world and they couldn't recommend you enough and what, what you got going on. And I know you're a, your farm kids. and Farm Boy. So we thought, man, this is a perfect episode. So what, if people don't know where they can find you, how do they find you? What you got going on, your social media, all that stuff? Well, first you can find me at a NASCAR track. That's the easiest spot to actually find me.

But then, yeah, online is everything is my name, just Ross Chastain. So we've been fortunate that we grabbed all the accounts early on and got all that, which is easy if you do it. But if you don't, trying to get those, I've watched other people try. have to negotiate with people that grab the name. And luckily, getting into the sport of NASCAR in 2011, we were at the, I guess, at least the first half of social media. And I mean, it was all already up and running,

but I was able to grab all the accounts early. And, yeah, so it's just Ross Chastain. You know, we finally took the racing off of the Facebook account. You know, it was always Ross Chastain Racing to distinguish between my old personal account from, like, high school and stuff. And so yeah, it's all around my name and then anything Melan Man. So you're going to see a lot of ag focus and watermelon specifically with my brand called Melon Man brand and a lot of things that I tie into Ag that really don't have any business being

tied to it, but it's my stuff and I can do what I want to with it. That's the beautiful thing about it though, is you know what? You can kind of do what you want. And in this day and age, people want real. Yeah, they don't like the fluffy shit. Right. So being you is the best thing you can do. Yeah.

The whole reason I leaned into it so much was early on or when I was racing locally, so I started in 2005 at 12 years old racing. Like before that, I had done some, I drove at our farm. So I drove four-wheelers, golf carts, three-wheelers, the forklifts, There's a funny story about that and getting the packing house shut down one day by the state because I was definitely not old enough to be doing it.

Cars, trucks, tractors, you name it, I drove it and then raced competitively at our local short track, I say competitively with other kids at 12 but in a full-sized car. So, you know, it's pretty wild to look back at that and think about

where that started. So you were drawn to that. at a young age, just anything with wheels? Yeah, yes, sir, yeah. I don't remember when I got my first three-wheeler, but there's video of it, and the stories my family tells is what happened. Parents got me a three-wheeler, a little yellow Yamaha,

and it had a little pullstring, like a 10-foot cord on the back, and if you pulled that cord out, it would just shut it off. So the thought was, set the governor real low, let the kid learn, and, like, the parent walk or run along, behind it and could pull it to and shut the motor off. And my dad did that. Well, I didn't, it was too slow.

So he opened the governor up on it, a little set screw on the throttle. Well, then he was still trying to run and he did that for about, I don't know, 100 feet is what they said. And he just tied the string around the back bar and went, he'll be okay.

And I made it a couple minutes and I ran right in the side of my grandmother, my Mimi's Crown Vic. She still has that car today and I ran right in the side, put a big dent inside of it. My helmet actually put a dent in it. Grandparents weren't impressed, but I was fine and my dad and my mom were like, he's going to learn. He's going to crash it. He's however old I was. I don't know. But it's pretty cool. She still has that car and we still have

that three-wheeler in our barn. I thought you were going to say your dad got an ass chewing from your mom. No. No, mom was go. Go for it. Go. Good. Yeah, she always supported. That's awesome. So I guess tell us a little bit about the farm. So you guys are, eighth generation right yeah yep eighth generation watermelon farm we've never had a watermelon farmer on here before so there's a lot to unpack but tell us the legacy of the farm and just growing up how how how what was your favorite parts of it uh what were what were you the least what was your least favorite farm chore all that stuff so it's it's definitely a different farm life than out here and what i just see pulling up to y'all's operation here. We're not on any of the land that even my grandfather

worked at or really did ever grew a crop or packed anything. So in watermelons, it's a relatively short growing season, about 100 days for us. This time of, or in today's world, for transplanting plants from the greenhouse to harvest is about 100 days. We're in South Florida, but I do have to go back because my family only got to South Florida in the 50s, the 1950s. So my grandfather, Carl Echastain, he grew up in South Georgia. Thomasville, the Oclotany, is actually the little town. It's in like west of I-75, north of Tallahassee, say, I don't know, less than 100 miles. And so with that, the family keeps going back, Florida, Georgia, before the 50s,

and then before that was South Carolina in Virginia. Actually, all the way back to Pierre Chastain was the first one that came over from France in 1700. So we can follow it all the way back, which is really cool. My dad and I had a great Aunt Carolyn who was their big history buffs, and they've done deep dives into the history.

And when you get so many generations back, they're telling us, it gets real muddy. And the paperwork is so hard to understand and read and understand what was actually happening in the family. But we know that for eight generations, we've been growing watermelon. So it's really, it's different than out here

because there's no old barn that, like, my peepaw, you know, worked in or anything. There's nothing like that. So we're on land now. We own some land, but we lease the land that we farm. So we're having to move fields for our crop every year. So we have farmed fields since I, that I know of. that or when I was in high school and still working there,

we farmed it and my dad had farmed it 10 years before and then 10 years before that. So it's kind of a 10 year cycle moving around. On some large ranches, there's some large average of 10 to 15,000 acre ranches in our area that we can lease from that mainly run a lot of cattle, but there is a lot of other specialty veg and then citrus was the big thing in Florida.

Yeah. I'll say a long time ago. A couple of decades ago, it has definitely went down. They're attempting to bring it back, but the amount of acres planted in citrus and real producing groves is way down from what it was in the 80s, which is just wild because I've just grown up with these groves around, but they've been on a decline. Why is that? I don't know the science behind it, but it's a lot of disease pressure.

There's a greening, there's disease in the tree, and I don't know how it's, works. I have not in the citrus industry at all. But I know that there's, I mean, universities and government effort and a lot of farms putting a lot of funds and have been for decades trying to make citrus one profitable in Florida and sustainable for the tree to even just survive. So we get a lot of storms, hurricanes that are swirling everything around. We get no hard freezes. So the bad bugs don't die. And it just keep, they just keep. Oh, yeah, that's true. That's why we're down there. We are down there for the early crop. But that's wild about the, you know, every 10 years you're having to switch land because that's so different from, you know,

what we're used to, you know, it's like, I didn't, so is that like just the industry kind of standard for watermelons at least seven. I mean, try to go seven years at least. Yeah. I mean, there are, people that double crop and you save on your land prep because you don't have to go get a field ready. So South Florida right now is underwater, say. I mean, the fields are wet. It rains every day. So that's why we don't do a fall crop. There are some people that do it. And our sales group, Mellon 1 does a fall crop. But my dad has done it. Didn't make any money. A lot of effort. There's no time off if you do a spring and fall crop. So decided to not take the risk.

And there's no crop insurance for our area. We don't have crop insurance on our field. So yeah, right now, like, if you went down there, you would need a side by side to ride around or an airboat. Like, you've ever ridden on an airboat? Yeah. So that's how they're getting around the ranches down there is on airboats right now. And the roads there on will be dry roads in a couple of months once rainy season's over

and you'll be able to drive your truck down it. have a watermelon field right there. That's crazy. So when does your season start? Like when do you start getting into the fields to start planting? So you're transplanting these plants, right? Oh. So it's the 24th now.

I mean, they need to be in there within the next couple of weeks. Okay. My dad was talking to him today. They're getting a lot of the equipment, final things done that they worked on, serviced them over the offseason. My dad has a couple new hires, so he's showing them how to do stuff and how to how our farm operates. So yeah, we'll plant in January for us. We're some of the earliest domestic watermelons in the states. There is further south than a mockily and then homestead area over on the east coast, which I see some earlier watermelons by a few weeks.

But really March is the earliest domestic watermelons for our group that we see. We import from Guatemala in the offseason because you just can't grow a crop to have them here in the state. So we've got a great family down there that we buy from and they grow just for us. So they come across, truck them across Guatemala to their east coast and then freight them on a ship around to east coast of Florida and then bring them to our facility. in the Pantagorda area, southwest Florida, and then up into the country. Yeah, so you've got your,

are you part of a group of people that you market under one banner, but everybody has their own brand under that? Or is it all one brand? Yeah, it's all one brand. So back to your question, I guess I never really answered. Growing up at the farm wasn't actually, what I was getting at is we didn't have like the farm.

We had this packing shed and we had the barn and up there, but we lived closer to town. The farm was out, and we lived halfway to town, and now it's crazy, town has passed us. So you used to, when we came out of our road and turned right, there was one gas station and one blinking light, that was it. Now there's a whole housing development with tens of thousands of homes, the solar community called Babcock. It's got a Starbucks, it's got five guys, Publix, it's getting ready to have a second

Publix in it, and these are all, these are on fields and in dirt. that we farmed, that friends of ours farmed. That's crazy. I've hunted those fields like that it just was the middle of nowhere. It was a 90,000 acre ranch called the Babcock Ranch. And they sold off a piece of it on the south end. And it's being developed. And I love it.

I mean, it's, yes, it's land gone that we'll never be able to farm again. But my belief is we'll keep, we'll move further out. We'll do what we have to do to keep farming. But now on the way to the farm, you can get a coffee. It's awesome. Yeah. So growing up, we would go to the farm. So in school, like in elementary, middle school, before I was, could drive, my dad, he kind of used the farm both as, like, punishment.

If I did something wrong, I had to go to work. But also, it was a reward if I did something good. He would, I can remember being in, like, elementary school and getting to skip school with dad. And I was so excited when I got to skip school. But mom didn't know until later. I sometimes I look back and I'm like I bet she knew yeah but we get the stop sign and like turn right go to the farm turn left going to school so pulling up the stop sign it'd be like and I we probably didn't skip as much as I remember but as much as I think we did but it um yeah so he used it as both

and yeah we've got um so once you get up to the farm your thing your question um yes there's about 30 families all under one sales group. So it's called Melon 1. And that's the culmination of three families, the chastains, the dicks, and the Lopedes, who partnered together a little over 30 years ago. And basically before that, my dad came out of high school,

farmed a little bit with his dad, and then went out on his own. But they were field packing watermelons or just with conveyor belts, putting them straight into the semis on the ground, on hay and then shipping them to stores and unloading a couple at each store and the semi would drive store to store. Oh, wow. But the sales were just almost weekly. You might have a buyer come down and say, I'll buy three loads from you for the next three weeks or something like that.

And sometimes they'd buy through the season, but it was just, you just didn't know how many to plant, how many acres, how many watermelons were you going to be able to sell? All of a sudden it turns cold in the northeast and nobody has a contract. contract and all of a sudden the buyers won't answer their phone. And so the Lepid's were buying from us. They were buying from a lot of people. They were buyers out of New York and then the terminal market, New Jersey. So, yeah, the Lopides, Dix, and Chastain's partnered together to make Mellon 1.

And that gave confidence and contracts to farmers across the country that when they partnered with them, the farmer would know, okay. I know they're telling me how many they can sell. I can grow more and take that risk. They sell them, but they're definitely giving me. Yeah, a floor. Yes. Yeah.

So that's, yeah, so we work with families from Guatemala and then up into the states. Mainly the East Coast. We have crossed the Mississippi and Missouri this year, actually. One of our Florida farmers, Bob Stewart went up and grew a Missouri crop. He's got some family up there. And as far west is there in Owensburg. of Kentucky and then east to Maryland and Delaware out on the

peninsula. I was just going to say we had Shay Myers on and he's a onion farmer in California. It just seems like for the produce side you either got to be fully integrated or sales group like that to make it work versus like meat.

You know meat it's like you got the four big four and that's like everybody else. everybody else and like that's how it is you know and just it's just cool to hear the different sides because i feel like we don't have enough guys from your world to come on and really just share how the business works so it's just awesome to hear that because so do you feel like you guys spent more time at the packing house or more time like actually in the fields like where's most of the time spent growing up it was in the fields yeah um melon one handled The harvest, we were there, but they kind of took over once we grew the crop.

It was up to us, the farmer, my dad, Ralph, my uncle Doug, who worked with him, they were just locked at the hip, and they grew their crop. And delivered it to the packing house. And then, well, then Melon 1 would come harvest it and then pack it and ship it and have it sold. Now my role has definitely changed because I'm not there. So I moved to North Carolina in 2012. I was 19 years old. When I got my license, when I turned 16, my dad sold his three-quarter-ton truck, bought a half-ton,

and bought me a used three-quarter ton from my other uncle, Steve, and said, you're the one hauling everything. You can drive the big loud diesel because it's what I wanted, but you have to haul everything for the farm. You have to go get stuff. Like, you're riding in the rough truck now, and I got to lift it up a little bit, you know, make it my own. but it was for the farm to work. And my dad then bought his first half ton in a long time so he could have an easier ride and not have to jump up in it.

So being that I moved away, I haven't been hands-on at the farm since then. I've put my life into racing at 19 years old. And now I'm definitely more on the, how can I help sell watermelon? So really, I do it from a large, like 30,000-foot view for all watermelons. We entertain guests and buyers for other,

I mean, they're competitors of my family, but I'm here to promote all watermelons. I work with the National Watermelon Promotion Board, whose job, they're funded by USDA and all watermelon growers, shippers, and buyers. So we all kind of promote all watermelons. It's just the way it's always been. The National Watermelon Association,

which they're all members of, we all are, is over 100 years old. So used to, once a year you would get together at a convention and do your deals with your buyer, whoever your grocery store buyer was or wherever wholesale, the shippers would all get there and meet with the farmers and set up the logistics. Well, now we don't probably have to do it, but it's still great that the industry does it because it keeps us all closer together, I think, than if we didn't have conventions and associations and a promotion board promoting all watermelons and doing market research into,

you know, are we really selling more watermelons or are we selling less? Like actually doing the hard data mining out into this country to understand so that we all and try to know if we need to actually grow more acres or are we tapped out? Yeah. What's the what's the shelf life? From the time it's from the time it's harvested, how long do you have? How long can a watermelon be good. I guess I never thought about that. Yeah. Well, if you're eating them every day like you should be, you should never find out. Well played, sir, well played. I mean, I would say a month, like it depends on its life. It depends on when we harvested it. It was a little fresh or if it was a little overripe. But we're harvesting, we're trying to always be on the cutting, like the leading

edge of when they're ready. One, disease. It's, it's just. just a thing and it's coming from all directions. And we want it to, it's not going to continue to ripen like other produce. Some do. Like when you, when we cut the vine, it's done. It's just, you know, it starts dying right then. It's not going to continue to mature or anything. So if it has a somewhat leisure travel to your grocery store and then to your house,

I think the best place for it is on the counter, you know, whatever room temperature is, whatever people keep their houses at. I would say a number, but then I would get, like, raked over the cold. My house is at like 70 degrees. Yeah. And so some people think I'm crazy, like it's too cold. But anyway, I think it sits on the counter.

I think it can be there definitely three weeks, almost a month. Yeah. And we're live loading. So we say we start harvesting at 10 a.m. on a Monday. We're going to have that watermelon in a bin and on a semi after lunch. and it's going to be going up the road by 3 o'clock and it's going to drive through the night, whatever legal, get to a distribution center,

and it could be at your grocery store the next day. Damn, that's crazy. That's amazing. That's great, and that's something I don't think people probably know much about because, you know, there's a big notion around big food or just agriculture that, oh, how long has it been in the supply chain? Well, not that long. That's pretty impressive.

I was curious to know, because I see these videos all the time on like TikTok, how do you pick out the right watermelon? Everybody's like, you need to have the right spot on the bottom of it. And then people knock on it. Yeah. You got a knock on it. Yeah.

What's your method? What's the best, when you're at the grocery store picking, how do you pick the best damn melon? Yeah, well, it's nothing to do with the other end of the watermelon opposite of the vine. Have you seen those? Like, those are a recent one. Yeah. Yeah.

Talk, like, what the? No. The best thing, and it's approved by the National Watermelon Promotion Board. Okay, so they've done the research. They're the ones that are setting the tone here for this conversation. And some people can knock on them and smack them. My brother can. He can walk up one pat and he'll say,

And he knows. Yep, harvest it or leave it. I do it, and then I cut it open, and I'm, I may be right less than half. Less than 50% do I get it right. So I'm going to be better off looking at it just for symmetry, first of all. If it kind of comes to a point, if one end is a little narrower than the other, I don't want that one.

I want it to be heavy. So when I pick it up, I want it to feel heavier. If I pick up two that look similar, but one's heavier, but they're the same size. I'm going to go for the heavier one. They're 92% water, maybe almost 93. There's a bit of a discrepancy in the industry. right now about some testing shows a little bit more water than actually they've always said,

which only a watermelon farmer would care about. And then when I flip it over, I want the yellow spot. Yellow spot? So that's the ground spot. That's where it sat and grew its whole life. It's going to be white, say, for 90 days. And those last seven to 10 days, it'll turn yellow with age. And that's a sign that it's maturing.

The sugars are coming in. That's where your internal color comes from for. your internal meat, the red pigment comes in. All your lycopene, all the sugars kind of finalized that last 10 days. So if there's a storm coming like this fall crop right now, if all of a sudden a hurricane points our direction, there's going to be farmers in Georgia harvesting early. The fall crop is really starting in Georgia this coming end of this week and really this weekend.

So if a hurricane points their way, they're going to be early because they've got to get that crop out. but hopefully everything works out. It's a scary time right now for fall, veg, for fall, anything in the southeast because of hurricanes. That's the ultimate farm killer down there for fall crop. Yeah.

So yellow, heavy, symmetrical. Yeah, there you go. Okay. The spacing, I just want to, like the spacing doesn't matter of the stripes because you can customize your watermelon. They have genetics just like you and I do. So they have X and Y chromosome. That's how you get seedless,

called selective breeding. So as they're touching flowers, that's how we get seedless watermelons. Okay. And then you can have dark green on the outside, light green, thick stripes, thin stripes, internal can be different colors, orange, yellow, purple, whatever.

It's just all the genetics, just like there's different color people. We're all people. There's different color of watermelons are all watermelons. I'll be darn. I like it. Okay.

So go back to that. When you guys are, because I'm assuming that, in our business one of the biggest money makers yet competitive things and you know everybody's got an angle is seed corn because genetics are big money so in the watermelon business has genetics moved the same way is there different providers of seed and are they competing for that business or is it a much smaller group as far as you guys are

starting seeds in a greenhouse and then transplanting them. What goes in to deciding what variety you're going to plant? Is there different companies that do it and you're like deciding who's you're going to use or how does that work? Yeah. Well

being that I grabbed my Nza Zodin hat out of the Tahoe and not my Koboda hat which I almost grabbed. Inza Zodon that my hat, that's a seed company. Okay. So they're, they're big in watermelons, small and everything else.

Okay. And in the global sphere of ag, specialty seed like watermelons is a small drop in the bucket. Yeah. But yes, there are competitors. We do grow several varieties. And some varieties and some seed companies seed work better in areas that others don't. And it changes over time. and growing practices evolve, and that can change.

Are you going to grow on dry ground and use seepage irrigation, which my dad does, JDI Farms does. In South Florida, it's so sandy. You can pump water into a ditch, and it will travel horizontally over to the plant through the dirt. If you did that in a clay, heavy red clay, Carolina, it's going to stay in the ditch and run off. Right.

So we are so permeable with our dirt in South Florida. But it's, we're not there for the organic material. We're not there for the, you know, the biome of what the dirt is in South Florida. We're there for the warm air and that it doesn't freeze and we can plant in January where once you get up the road, you might have to grow on drip. You might grow with overhead pivot irrigation. So different varieties respond different to different things, whether the seed companies have focused on the strongest roots they can,

whether they focus on the strongest stem or, more leaves or they want the vines to grow, like whatever it is. And then it's back, and then it comes out. The final thing that really matters is what does your watermelon look like? Some buyers want dark. Some buyers want light. Some want seeded.

Some want seedless. Some want real big, real small, whatever that is. They want inside to be soft and juicy, I'll call it. They want it to be crisp. There's varieties out there that are as crisp as an apple.

Nobody sells them. Nobody sells them. There's crisp varieties. column and then there's like one I tried at a field trial I thought I broke a tooth I could not think I was like what is it and they're like yeah it's our it never made it no one ever I haven't ever seen it commercially grown but yes there are and Zazaden is my seed company of choice but we do grow others and we do trials in our fields we're always looking for the next variety part of the problem is anything that comes along that a scientist finds,

it takes so long to have it approved to where we can grow it. And we know there's better things, but we're years away from it getting to us. So some things just came online recently, and we're trying to ramp up into that after we trialed them. We believe in it.

So, yeah. And they come up with, like, cool names like Cracker Jack and Big Jack and stuff like that. Yeah, so like, do you, does, does your brand want different types of watermelons because they're selling it to different vendors and this vendor wants. So you might have a field that might have one that's going for this shape

or the inside is going to be this way or whatever. Like you're planting all different types for different things because they have a different market for each one. Yeah. Well, hey, it's a little easier than corn because all we think about is top in yield. That's everybody wants just, let's just yield this thing. let's get this, let's make this a bin buster. You know?

Yeah. And it's, it's sales, sales has a, has a seat at the table. Yeah. But the farmer ultimately decides what they want and what they're confident in what they, what they can grow, what they're comfortable with, um, who they, I mean, their seed salesmen or women is that relationship matters. Y'all know that. I mean, somebody leaves, a salesperson leaves one company goes to another.

There's a percentage of their customers that are going to, and go with them. Even if it's a different seed now, they trust that person to be there on the good days and also be there in the bad days. And that's what you get when you find a good company and what I found with it in Zazodin is they're focused on watermelons and that's what I like.

And look, it's no secret. I've worked with Bayer Seminus. So Bayer makes medicine, I don't know, but they also grow seed to try to feed people healthier stuff. So I worked with them and they were great. It was just time for me to grow into Inza Zodin. And it's just been a really good fit for me. So farmers navigate that constantly.

And it's just the cost of business in ag is you have to be where you feel like you're going to get the best product for yield. I mean, on the end of the day, we still are yield focused as well. That solves all problems. It's like on the racetrack. Speed solves all my problems. yield solves all my problems in the farm too. Is there a variety

along the genetics? Is there a variety called, I don't know, college day that has the, that will hold the most amount of ever clear if you try to spike it?

It's like, is anybody bred for that? Because I would sell that at every college town in America. Man. It's a good one. Yeah. Yeah, that would be.

Sure, I think you should try it. should trial some. I'm kind of past. I'm kind of, I'm getting long in the tooth for the spiked watermelon. But that was a, in my softball days, that was a, that was a staple. Somebody to bring the, bring the watermelon. We'll work on it. Yeah, we'll get on that.

Yeah, I think that's a great name. We should give that a go. Game day. Game day. Yeah. Tailgater. That is. Or the tailgater.

That could be your, that could be your thing. Man. Yep. Get to work on that. Party all right. How long until this episode comes out? out? Probably a week.

Probably a week. I've got a couple days to get to work on this before everybody hears about it. Let's turn around and get it, get it licensed, get it registered. That's all it matters. Then 10 years from now we'll have it. Yeah. There you go. Okay, well tell us a little bit about, you know, transitioning from growing up on the farm to, you know, talking about, you know, racing at a young age, but making that full change at

19 to be like, all right, I'm going racing. Because did you grow up thinking I'm going to the operation? Or did you always think I'm going to be out of here? I'm getting out of here. I want to race on the track. No, I want to be just like my dad, my granddaddy. Like my granddad retired from farming pretty early in life and helped my dad and my uncle and worked with them but didn't want to grow his own crop like he had back in the day.

and I wanted to be just like, I remember, I mentioned our fields are sand, and I remember walking behind my dad as a young kid. I don't know how old I was, but I was young. Young enough to think following in your dad's footsteps literally meant following in them, because you leave a boot print in the sand when you walk in our fields.

Everywhere, there's a print. So I would, his steps were bigger, so I would jump to make him. And I was in my head, I remember thinking I'm following in my dad's, footsteps. Yep. Okay.

Grew up, learn what that actually meant. But that's just what I wanted from as long as I can remember. And my best friend, Cody Singletary, his dad grew watermelons. His older brother Matthew was ahead of us by four or five years older than us. And he was already getting into it. And Cody and I just couldn't wait. Like that's all we wanted to do.

And our dads both grew watermelons. They both grew for melon one. We were always together. Our farms were only 10 miles apart. And we spent a lot of time together growing up. And what's all we wanted to do? And I started racing when I was 12. We tried to get Cody to do it.

He didn't want to drive. Like whatever I had as a kid to like push the gas, crash, get it running again and push the gas again. I mean, I've wrecked four-wheelers off mountains and the Carolinas when we would vacation. I've went through barbed wire fences on my four-wheeler. I've crashed. Actually, my cousin Rachel

crashed the car at the farm. I never actually broke. Like she completely bent an old car in half in the middle. We hit a bullhole. Like we were going across the field way too fast, bottomed it out and the frame bent. That's,

she is a big part, probably. She's six years older than me, and she's a big part of probably why I had the need for speed. Or an enabler. She was, she taught,

she was a big part of, she was always driving me when I was really young. and then would let me drive and my dad let me drive. So 12 years old started at the local track, small asphalt track. As a kid, you could do it. It was a Monte Carlo. But 12 years old, I've got 350 horsepower and a concrete wall.

And I crashed the first time, crashed the second time. Finally, over two years, started to figure it out. We bought our own race truck. We'd borrowed one to start. But my dad was honest with me. I remember before the first race, him sit me down and saying, this is not to get to NASCAR. We were casual NASCAR fans.

We were not going to go race in NASCAR. So that's 2005, kind of stepped through the years quickly, and you get to 2011, and we went and we ran, it's called the World Series of Asphalt Stock Car Racing. It's at New Sumerna Speedway, 15 miles from Daytona,

and you run the week leading up to Daytona to the Daytona 500. And we had ran a couple races a year before in the summer over there, local shows, and did okay, but I feel like we were okay in our late model, so it was kind of the top level, second level. At the time, there's three classes of late models,

and we were in the second or third level, however you wanted to look at it. We went for the speed weeks, and we won three of, like, the eight nights. We were fast all week, and we won the championship. And that was like our ceiling, and we realized it. And my dad said to me in Victory Lane, when we won it all at the last night,

I think we need to look at the NASCAR trucks. We need to like, this is it for us. To go to the next step is going to be a large investment. We really need to travel nationally if we wanted to go the next step. We needed to hire crew members to work on the car. We needed to spend a lot more money on a trailer, probably a toter home to travel in, have guys on salary to work on my race car.

And we were just like, oh my gosh, that does not sound. like we can do that. I don't think we can pull that off. Or what we were spending to race locally, what if we just don't race locally anymore? We feel like we've won what we can win, and we just do one NASCAR truck race for the same price. And that ended up being through conversations.

My dad grew up with Mike Greenwell, Boston Red Sox player, and he had done some NASCAR racing and hobby racing after his career. And he introduced us to Todd Bodine, truck series champion. and Todd introduced us to some team owners, Bobby Daughter, and then Stacey Compton.

And Stacey ended up having a truck. He had two trucks full-time in 2011. The second truck was coming available in July. The driver had paid half the season and then the sponsorship wasn't working out, so that driver was going to stop paying and get out of the truck. He's going to have open races. So we're like, wow, this is, yeah, let's go do Indianapolis.

It's a small track outside of Indie. like the smallest track you could get on in the truck series and maybe go have some fun. Say we did it. One race. Just, yeah, it's a lot of money, but let's kind of put it all into that. And then we could always say we race in NASCAR because that was something Mike talked about. He's like, man, I raced in the truck series. I raced in NASCAR.

It was like for a racer, it's just, you never think it's going to happen. And then when it was right there for us, let's do it. It's so crazy. Justin Marks, he owns Trackhouse, was a, the driver getting out of the truck. That's crazy. He had the GoPro sponsorship. It was running out. He got out and I got

in the next week. I sat in his seat. They left the seat in the truck. Justin and me are not the same size. And we were even more different then. He was larger. I was smaller. We kind of came together in the middle. It's just crazy to think back that I paid him cash for his seats to use them

and now he employs me to drive the cup car. But it was supposed to be one race. My dad was honest with me through all those years of local racing that we were not going to be NASCAR racing and it all came together for a bucket list race and then we just really never stopped. Did that ever, did him saying that to you? Did that ever light a fire and be like, you just watch or were you just like, yeah, but I'm just going to get my best and we'll see what happens? Like, were you just kind of like, yeah, we'll see about that? No, I heard him loud and clear because he had explained the business side to me.

Yeah, the cost, we learned together the cost of racing at the truck level, Exfinity level and cup level and what that would take. And what guys that were currently racing in those three series, as we talked to people, we would try to find them and then their families. And my dad would try to get in touch with their dad or mom or whoever had kind of steered them into the sport. Yep. And he would just ask, what did it take to get them there?

And the numbers we were hearing were just astronomical. Yeah. Unfathomable to us. Like, yeah, watermelon crop was good. Our farm was successful, but not at that level. Yeah. So he was just honest with me early on. And then even once I started, it was, this is fun, but not going to be able to sustain it long enough because you have to pay when you start.

And the goal is to get on the other side of the cash register. Yeah. Get paid to drive. Yeah. And for me, I mean, it took almost 10. years. I mean, it took, it took, it took, really it took three years of truly me funding myself with my family and with ag companies and people that we did business with and big companies didn't know who Ross Chastain was, but people in ag did. So I had all kinds of small sponsors

that would pitch in to help me early on. You had to like, you had to pay your way into a to start on the trip when you started doing trucks so you you did that first race and what happened that that you thought you could continue every driver in the sport pays to get in yeah just the matter of how long and how much per race you pay but it's the unspoken kind of don't want to talk about it but every driver pays to get in whether it's their money their family or somebody they know. It could be a legitimate sponsor, but that sponsor is only going to sponsor them because of their personal relationship, which that's in most businesses. You have to have a personal relationship to get into any kind of business in any industry, I believe. It's just business. No, it is.

So it's not bad. It's just part of it. It's the business. What happened, we practiced last in the first practice. I probably beat four trucks in the second practice. I then beat like 15, trucks and qualifying, and then we finished 10th. So we like progressively got faster throughout the weekend. And then when we finished 10th, we finished two spots behind my teammate, Cole Witt, at the time. He was the hot shot Red Bull guy, had the Red Bull sponsorship, which is so crazy because now that's at trackhouse with Connor and Shane, my two teammates. And yeah, we finished close to him. And then what did that do?

It kind of bought us the, the, the, the, option to buy more races. Yeah. So then we were able to go back to the sponsors and rent for more races. Yeah. Yeah. So you pretty much, you had to just perform. And the more you performed, you could go back to the sponsors.

And your, you know, your dream kept getting closer and closer. And then we did a full-time year the next year, but with like a slower team with a great friend of my and Bobby daughter, but we knew it was to get me laps. I hadn't been to these tracks before. and then the third year we went to Brad Kislauski's truck team, which was the up and they had won a little bit and they were starting a second team, and we thought it would be like a path to Team Penske and stuff.

It wasn't, but it still gave me fast trucks, and we almost won, but we still didn't. So I could go year by year, and then basically three years of building, and then I reset the fourth year with less funding, but I quit pulling from the farm. So the investment made by my family and people around me, I had to say, uncle, like we had to say stop. We had to.

We did things. We sacrificed. I believe I spent my inheritance. It's just the facts. My family invested in me. And then after three years, I said, I've either got to do this on my own, but I'm not taking another dollar from the farm. and from 2014 then slowly built and really in in 2009 2018 I got my big break um after starting in 2011 in 2018 I got my big break by a big sponsor and a big team hired to drive

yeah three races and I got like a three race tryout yeah we won and then it's been upwards ever since yeah well it is such a I mean I think racing we were talking about this I think yesterday. Racing is a lot like I think every sport today in the fact that when you look back, say you look back 15 years ago, there was probably on any given weekend,

there was a pretty wide gap between the best cars and the worst cars and also the best drivers and the worst drivers. and I say that in generality because I don't know dick about what it takes to drive. We all like, all men like to fast. We're all, we're all race car drivers and we all look at that, you know, when we're out on the interstate and we're, you know. It's like the Monday quarterback.

You know, the guy that watches Tom Brady on Sunday and then bitches at work about how he threw an interception. Yeah. But I think it's a little worse because the fact that you're in a vehicle, a lot of your talent is somewhat hidden to where the average guy looks at that and goes, oh yeah, I can do that. Yeah. I can do that.

But anyway, my point is, has that narrowed up? Like, I feel like the, I feel like the, it's so competitive. And everybody, so much money has been spent in finding every last half horsepower and drag. and then on the on the driver's side of it everybody that's coming up like there's not people just coming out of the woodwork that oh boy billy can drive and you put him in the car and so is it just like how difficult is it any given race to get to the front to actually win a race yeah indescribable i mean it's really i can't put it into words so track house we're a three car team in the Cup series.

We have about 200 employees. They put three cars on the track. One day, two days a week. We put three cars, you know, for one race. And we have specialists that are on every, every piece of the car. It's somebody's job to do it. And we don't have many people that kind of touch many parts. It's all pretty singularly focused.

And that's even in a world where we're buying the parts. So we don't manufacture them anymore. From 2021 to the very first NASCAR race, I guess you could say early on, they were buying real cars off the showroom floor, very early. But they were still customizing them instantly with roll cages, getting the glass out, beefing up some of the suspension.

And I believe that way back then, like you think about Richard Petty and the Petty's and how many championships Richard and his father had and how many decades that team has been around, They were good because they had the funding and the people to go do it and to do it better than everybody. Still that way today.

We buy the same chassis as Hendrick Motorsports or Team Penske or Joe Gibbs Racing. We buy the same body panels, Chevy Ford Toyota, little differences. And then we have the same options of bolting them together with all the suspension parts. We're not making them. But from 2021 and before,

round tubing, steel tubing, and square tubing came in and sheet metal and race cars went out. We were a manufacturing facility. And I was in Cup the last year of that in 2021 for Chip Ganassie racing. Then in 22 and since we've been basically ordering our cars through an online portal. Think of it like Amazon. I mean, now I can, what's crazy is I can order my groceries on there. It's a lot like it's how we do how the Cup series is laid out now.

So it's up to those nearly 200 people to find the right bolt hole or the right front upper control arm and find the right angle to put the floor at and bolt it together. The right angle to get the fender in. I mean, we're dealing in hundreds of thousands of an inch. The gold surface for what the cup car is supposed to be.

You only get a tolerance. My eye, I can't see it. I was just looking at the car yesterday. The difference in passing tech and failing, I watched them, we have a OSS scanner. It's a laser scanner. You roll the car in a tent, scans the car,

and it shows you with a color gradient, how far in or out of tolerance you are. And just to get it legal, we have to do that at the shop to then travel to the racetrack and go through NASCAR tech process. And we were illegal, just trying to get the fender right

because it just wasn't bolted together just right. They made some tweaks and go back. And I'm watching them, I cannot see the difference. But then it passed our scanner, and then we'll go to the track and hope that it stays in place, bouncing down the road and all that.

It's small tolerances. Very small, but it's all the difference in the world. When you're so tight of a tolerance, anything that's better shows itself. It's crazy. When you're out there, so when you're the driver,

like, how much of that is just, I guess you just have to say it's instinct. Like where you're going to move to, who you're going to try to follow, whether you can actually fit through that hole or not. Like, what's kind of, like, how many decisions are you making as you're driving?

Like, your mind's got to just be. Okay, when I sell my business, I want the best tax and investment advice. I want to help my kids. and I want to give back to the community. Ooh, then it's the vacation of a lifetime. I wonder if my head of office has a forever setting. An IG Private Wealth Advisor creates the clarity you need

with plans that harmonize your business, your family, and your dreams. Get financial advice that puts you at the center. Find your advisor at IGPrivatewealth.com. Yeah, a lot of it's natural. and everybody in the Cup series Exfinity and truck has the natural ability. Now how you refine that and how you're taught,

I see kids now coming into the three top series and they've been trained. You can see it. And they understand how to look at data and how to change their lines and how to manipulate their car. My dad told me go on the track. Our first time on the track

I had a Next Telwalkie talk earpiece in, like a wired earpiece, and he would beep in and tell me clear. And a big delay on that. It wasn't exactly live. And the main thing, he taught me how to go fast, but then he taught me how to race and protect my line and run the inside at our local short track. I see kids now, you know, going to the outside is just, they've ran at so many tracks. They've had so much instructing and schooling on it. Not that there's a professional, like, industry. There's not like a, there's no college for racing.

Right. There is for like the, for learning the simulation side of it and the how to bolt the cars together with your hands and then also to be an engineer in engineering schools, but not for driving. So, yeah, it's a lot of just natural stuff that has evolved through my racing since I was 12 years old. Yeah. But we also have live data in the cars that my crew can see. and they can see every driver where they turn the wheel live. They can see their throttle and brake inputs, GPS speed. So they're relaying that to me, and then right after practice, I can look at that when I get out of the car.

I can't see it when I'm in it, but I can see it when I get out. So I've had to learn, and at 32, I'm not the most technologically advanced person. For 32-year-old standards, I didn't put the work in. I guess I should say throughout my life to understand technology enough. But yeah, it's more for me, more natural, I'll call it like just automated things happening. My right foot hits the gas, my left foot hits the brake, my hands turn the wheel. It's just happening. Yeah.

And then I fine tune it with intentional like looking at a brake marker, looking at a spot on the track, where I'm going to lift, where I'm going to touch the gas. And then they coach me live throughout practice right before qualifying. And then throughout the race, they're coaching me with that to evolve. We've got hundreds of laps usually to do it. And you're coming right back around. And you've got another crack at that same corner. So my crew, my engineers are, we've got a good cadence for how they coach me.

Yeah. So you're just tweaking it lap by lap. Yeah, but the bulk of it, 90% of it is just natural. So when it lines up well and makes a car go fast, you feel like Superman. When you go out there and you're 30th and you naturally just can't figure it out, it is one of the most frustrating things I've ever experienced. Yeah, I can imagine. I would think so.

When did you decide to start smashing watermelons when you got that dub? When did that come to your head? Not as a kid. All the local racing, we won. a lot more races locally than we ever have in NASCAR. I wish we would have thought of it. We would have watermelons there. No one ever thought to like smash it open and make it a thing.

We wouldn't even really have it very public. A couple times a year we'd have our Florida watermelon queen come to the track. And she would pass out watermelons to a couple fans. But like we didn't embrace it because we were focused on racing. Once I got into the sport of NASCAR and moved to North Carolina, my dad was constantly on me to tell our story for me to tell my story. for me to tell my story, to stand out. Nobody's going to know who Ross Chastain is,

and most people won't remember who I am after a race because I wasn't winning. But if I have something, and that something is ag is the most natural, truest thing I can talk about, they'll probably remember the farmer. They'll probably remember the guy that would not stop talking about watermelons.

And so we would take watermelons to the track in those early years of the truck series, and we had lightly talked about making it the focal point, making it the focus when we ever did win. We believed we would. Once we got to the truck series, I think we can, once we had figured out the business side and had a little bit of sponsorship,

but I still didn't do it when I won my first race in the Xfinity series. That was 2018. But when all those years from 11 to 18, not winning, not winning a single race. And as a competitor, that's really, it's like not hitting your yield numbers not even close to hitting them like you're expecting to and then year after year and you're seeing these people

come in after you into the sport and just pass me right by win races and go on and get big contracts and move to the cup series and I'm like if I was driving their car I feel like I could win but I couldn't put the business side together so we went at Las Vegas 2018 I stand up hold the watermelon up over my head but I just sat it down and then I carried it to the media media center and was just like it was the focus but we hadn't come up with the smashing officially yet yeah and then somebody in the media asked what I was going to do with it and I said

something like I busted open and eat it and they asked that they could film it so then the media that was there our NASCAR media followed me back out of the front stretch a couple hours after the race and I stood on the wall and smashed it and it clicked right then like yeah this is a deal this is the thing yeah so it was long after all the fans were gone People only saw it online. The TV was already way off the air. And now it's the first thing people look for. And I believe some people are fans of mine just to see the watermelon smash.

As a watermelon farmer, that's fine by me. Yeah, I guarantee that. That's so cool. And that's awesome that you guys, you know, had that idea of, like, promoting your story from that early on, you know, of doing that. So, yeah, that's sick, dude. That's really cool. Well, I would be, I would be remiss if I,

didn't since we were talking about my question to you about you know reacting and how your decision making works when you're out there on the track i have to ask what what runs through your mind when you were at martinsville and you're like fucking i'm going to put this thing in the wall like that and it had to have been like that's like a that probably was nowhere like nowhere in your mind until you were right in that moment and then you were just like because that's now that's thinking outside the box guaranteed but what was that what was that moment like it was a crash it was like a five second long crash yeah four four seconds um the great part is that i didn't think about it ahead of time yeah people still don't believe

me but the truth is i thought about it coming off turn four starting the last lap i did it then that lap into turn three. So not a complete lap at Martinsville. It's only a half mile track. Say I thought about it for 15 seconds maybe. And I think that's why I couldn't think of a reason why not to do it. Why not's kind of a thing. Some buddies and I back home kind of a motto we live by of why not.

It's like YNOT and all I could keep thinking was why not, why not. And I couldn't think of a reason why not to do it. And my spotter said white flag, need two here. Needed two spots to make the championship for. I confirmed down another end in one and two that got to get them. My crew chief came on, Phil Surgeon, calm as could be. Yep, need two, got to get them. And I'm way behind the guys in front of me.

Yeah. It's only like Chase Briscoe was the next car, and he was several car lengths ahead, way out of the realm to go in there and catch him. And then the next cars were even up further ahead of him. and I was just out of turn four, I thought, run the wall in three and four. But I hadn't even looked at the wall with that intention. It was too late.

I was only going to get one shot and I didn't even get a visual, like look out to the right and see the wall. But I know the tracks. I've studied them. I look at them from an aerial view. I look at them from a, you know, topo view of like what is the surface? We get reports from Chevy and NASCAR. And we know every square inch of these places. I never looked at it thinking I would ever run the wall.

And it's kind of scary that I didn't think of a reason why not. But it held up just enough. The car did. It did destroy it. But we still have it in our lobby with a piece of the wall. Right in the center it says Martinsville. We have like Martins, I think, is a section we have. Oh, yeah, that's right.

So we were able to take a piece out and keep it. So, yeah, the reason I did it is because I didn't have enough time to think of why not to do it. Yeah. and you do you uh i i watched this or read this so um where you were at and the line you're in like how fast were you going as far as like if you were like all right i'm going to go for broke i'm going to try to pass this guy like how fast are you going versus how fast were you able to go when you went into the wall because that's what really surprised me because when i first saw that i thought well wouldn't that wall really slow you down but because the wall's

actually holding you, you could just put her to the wood. So it's a lot of unique variables and circumstances that lined up for it to work. That was the first year of that car, our Gen 7, our 7th Generation Cup car in NASCAR. And I'd hit the wall a couple times that year. And we had noticed that we weren't slowing down. The old car had a smaller rim, a wheel size, but larger sidewall. So it had more of a bubble to the sidewall of the tire. the fenders hung out more and were metal so they would cave in easier and then let that tire grab the wall

and it would slow you down. The suspension wasn't as strong on the old cars either and we'd noticed throughout that year in 22 that it would hit the wall and not slow down. Never thought about running into the wall in purpose. Couple of that together with it, Martinsville, we run third gear in the corners

where we get down to about 75 miles an hour. We get up to fourth gear on the straightaway and we're at 130, 135 miles an hour. So we accelerate to 130, we slow down to 75, and it's just full gas, full break, sharp turn. One of our smallest tracks, and flat, one of our slowest speeds in the corners

and then speeding back up. So I got up to 145 was my speed through the corner, and then it maintained. I just never, I sped up, passed where they all slowed down. So I talked about third gear in the corner, fourth gear on the straightaway. Those cars have five gears. Every other, almost every other track we run fifth.

Yep. But at Martin'sville, we run fourth and third. So I was able to grab fifth gear, which normally you would never, it was like need for speed. You know, there's movies, they're always shifting. Yeah, there's always another gear. And as I thought about it after, I'm like, I was like right out of the movie, like grab a gear, like days of thunder just shift and pass. So, yeah. Yeah, it's, it was very unique.

The pulling fifth gear was a total reaction, just a natural thing. Like I realized I was going to hit the rev limiter and it was going to stop my speed at that which would have been probably 10 miles an hour slower than what I got to by grabbing fifth and my arm reached over, my foot lifted off the gas, I shifted and went right back wide open

as I ran head on, you know, head on. I ran into the wall for it to turn me and go around. So that was just a natural instinct. I was on just autopilot almost at that point. What was the aftermath? of when you did that. Like, what did other drivers think?

Were they like, he shouldn't be able to do this? NASCAR obviously had their reaction. Social media exploded. Yeah. You know, all the aftermath. Explain that.

Yeah, I mean, social media went, it was the most watched NASCAR clip of all time. Yeah. By all measurable metrics. So you just,

everywhere you can find a metric on it, it went further and got viewed by more people, um, across the world. Internally in the sport. drivers that it affected honestly though Denny was pretty gracious in it like

he had legitimately beat me that day we had done a better job the previous two races to get an 18 point gap and points on him but that race he gained 20 points on me and we needed to at least tie to win the tiebreaker and

it was pretty good about it but other drivers were not and it was pretty crazy to me because I had watched two guys try it, not at Martinsville and not successfully, but Sheldon Creed had tried it in the Xfinity car at Darlington, and Kyle Larson had tried it in the cup car the year before in 21 at Darlington. And he finished second to Denny, but I was running in third, so I watched Larson driving to turn three. He like started to slow down,

and then he just like sped up and was hitting the wall and ran in the back of Denny, and then he still won the race, but I, and I was like, he like tried to video game it and just hit the the wall and go around. And then Larson was one of the vocal ones saying it was bad that I did it. And I'm like, brother, I watched you do it. I watched live. I was the first person. I had the best view of you doing it at Arlington.

And yeah, there you go. The game, the game day. Yeah. The game day seed. Yeah. So yeah, different drivers had different views or different views on it. I do think it was good that they outlawed it. I'll just be honest.

Yeah. We don't need all the cars. Yep. We would still be at the end of Martinsville. The leader would have to do it in second. And if you wanted to keep your spot, you'd have to do it. It destroyed the car. Yeah, yeah.

NASCAR allowed us to keep it and buy another one. Luckily, so we have it. It's our only car we've kept right as we raced it of the Gen 7 era. So, yeah, I caught some backlash internally in the sport. Drivers didn't want to have to do it themselves, and I honestly didn't want to. But we sat in meetings and I didn't say one word when NASCAR asked what what the vote was. I didn't have a vote. I just let everybody else do it and make their vote and their voices heard and they end up outlawed on it that offseason. Well, hey, that's a piece of

history and you're one of one. I mean, he can't take that away. I'm not because other drivers have tried it. Kyle and Sheldon both did it. Just not successfully. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you, hey, you got the successful part though. That's awesome. No, that's, that is, I remember watching that video and I was like, yeah, I think everybody that watches like, this guy's got some massive balls on them. For sure. For sure. Or just not, not thinking it through. Yeah. Hey, worked out.

I trust the safety gear. That's another piece of people ask you. Was I scared? I let go of the wheel going through the corner because it was shaking so much. I just let go and made sure I held the gas down. So, yeah. I trust the car. Let's go to another moment that's pretty freaking awesome.

So Coca-Cola 600 back in May. talk about that win and how, you know, dad was talking about the margin of error of how it's so hard to, to, you know, win in NASCAR. But from going last, starting in last, to ending up winning, describe that feeling. Yeah. Describe that feeling throughout the race.

I mean, you've got to feel like Superman. Yeah, so it starts on Saturday. That's post-COVID. We really only have two-day weekends. And so we practiced for 20 minutes on Saturday. We had four cars there that weekend, Connor Zillich, be my teammate next year. He was running the fourth car.

And so I'm in group two. The first group goes out and practices, and it's our turn. I roll on track. I'd ran the truck race the night before. So kind of setting the scene for you, so I'd ran second in the truck race, had a good feel for the track.

The trucks and cup cars right now are driving really similar. The way just it all works, the aerodynamics, the grip in the car for the driver, they're more similar than the Xfinity car. Now the Xfinity car is kind of the outlier. So rolled on track and the car felt good.

Like went in the first corner, it had grip. I bottomed out a little bit, but I was able to run really fast laps for the practice session and for a long time. For like of the 20 minutes, I ran fast laps for like 16 minutes. You know, say I ran, I don't know, 25 laps or something. And I'm going down the back stretch, late in the practice. I'm going to run a couple more laps, five, eight more laps maybe.

And the left-year-tire blows going 178 miles an hour. So I only went back and looked at this after with the data. I didn't know at the time. But I'm down the backstretch, full throttle. Left your tire just disintegrates. We had damaged it early in the run. We run really low air pressure, and we just, I guess we're too aggressive, hit a bump just wrong, and we don't know exactly what happens still.

We could have ran something over, but I'm going to say, I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt to Goodyear and say we'd probably damage the tire early on. You know, if you have a nail in your tire and you drive around with it low, it's going to damage the sidewall. You're going to put a line in it, and it's eventually going to shred and blow out on any tire on your vehicle. So we did that.

I spin around and trying to get stopped. I can. I hit the wall. Luckily, our shop's only five miles from that track. So we went over and grabbed another chassis out of our fleet, pulled it over to the setup area and built a complete car overnight. They worked from that afternoon all the way to two in the morning, and then my car chief, he was back at 5,

and they had a second shift that came in at 5 to work on it all Sunday. Luckily, it was a night race later evening. I think we went green at 7 p.m. So we had most of the day to work on it and build the car. But we built another car, like you said, started last. And we knew we were really good, and we thought we, in practice, I had the thought,

this is a winning car, but to race for 600 miles and win, how would you ever know? And then I blow a tire crash. We had to build another car. I'm like, I was at the shop that night. We brought in pizza, and I'm like, please just build it the same way.

If you can replicate it, every bolt, every setting, every decision, put it just, and they did. They did everything they could measure to put it just like that car. But you're starting last. aerodynamics are the name of the game. So I have the worst

air starting the race of anybody. My car is just in turbulent air. It doesn't want to handle right. So we had to work on it. We finally get up there. If that's a four or five hundred mile race, we don't win. Matter of fact, I could not get to the front. It took all 600 miles. At lap 394, we took the lead of 400. This is the first time we led the race, and we led

the last six laps. My buddy, Will Byron, had led a ton of A couple hundred. And we'll go up and beat him at the end. So it was great. That's one of the races that's a crown jewel. They give you a ring in Victory Lane. They give you a jacket right there in Victory Lane. There's a toast up in a suite with fans and people from the track.

We celebrated all the way into the morning. It saw the sun come up. A lot of bushlight. You had some game day watermelons going to. It was all bushlight. That was huge. A crown jewel for our team. We're relatively new.

Trackhouse started in 21. I got it. I got hired in 22 to drive the second car. We went to Gen 7 and we started winning races in 2022. So, you know, all of the drivers that have driven there that have any number of races have won. And Connor's probably the next guy up that he'll be full time next year. And fully, I mean, the speed that guy shows. I mean, the guy kid, I think he's 19.

But yeah, it was a big, big deal to get that win to beat the 24 car. grew up a 24 car fan. I was a Gordon fan. I don't know why. In the 90s, I was a kid. He was winning races and now I want to beat that car and that team so bad. They are the benchmark for Chevy and for a lot of race wins that they get. So for me as a kid, I got goosebumps driving by him and then taking the lead and then realizing

we'd beat the 24 car was really, really special. Yeah. What are the odds of that? Like, do you know? They had them, so we're not allowed to bet, and I don't get into really a lot of sports betting. I just, I don't know, doesn't do a lot for me. I gamble on the racetrack.

Yeah, no, you do 100%. You gamble in turn one. Somebody brought me, a guy brought me the next week, printout of his, he had bet on me on, say, like, Thursday. Odds were low. He had really good odds if I won, and he won, and he had put a good amount of money down, and he won a lot of money.

And he had it framed, and I signed it, and he was crying, he got me. I was like, oh, my gosh, it's like a lot. So that was cool that, like, I think he bets quite a bit, but it wasn't like he just won off, put a bet on me, and we didn't know each other. He just put a bet on me to win. And I had won since the year before.

Yeah. Since this time in September of 24. So to, to, no, I don't think many people had the one car winning that night, especially after going to the back. The odds went. The odds got, I guess, better after practice. The practice speeds when they come out,

then they kind of readjust them. Yeah. I think. So, yeah, he won a lot. So it was special. We had kind of a cool moment that next week. Yeah. How do you, like, how do you keep your,

how do you keep your sanity? I guess, because it's a, Your job is a pressure job when you're doing it, but also there's as a driver, there is so little that you control as far as, am I going to, you know, if you're winning, you know, you talk about speed trumps everything. Well, winning trumps everything. It's like if you're winning, you're probably things are whatever. But if you're not, or if you're in a slump or you wreck a car, like how do you keep

those voices out of your head of like, well, I'm screwed now, Rick, you know. The mental side of that profession has got to be, like, how do you cope with that? I found that if I surround myself with good people that's going to help me through, celebrate the good days and then get through the bad days. So, yeah, it starts with my family. So we've done it together. So my dad has been the single largest driving force of my life guiding me to this and then supporting me in it. And I still go to him for advice.

We talk almost every day. I talk to my brother every day. I got younger brother Chad. He's six years younger than me. So I'm 32. He's 27 now. Got a little girl on the way, little baby girl, him and Lacey. So he's married his lifetime sweetheart.

and yeah it's uh we're really close and then kind of branch out from there i got a cousin rachel who has helped and done like her and my other cousin tray have done a lot of like the behind the scenes business work setting up a website like doing it we did it together as a family tray like all the logins to my email i probably shouldn't say this stuff but like my website is still like all tray's stuff it's so funny um i don't really use the website i think it's all social media these days. I don't even want to spend a dollar on the website, but okay, we will. So it starts with the family. And then once I got to NASCAR, it was hard to know who to trust up in Moorsville and in the Charlotte area early on. But I met a group. It was called Spire Sports

and Entertainment. And through that group, David Erickson worked there. And Spire has now grown into a cup operation. They've won cup races. They've won truck races and even Exfinity, I guess, I think. But so for Jeff Dickerson and T.J. Puscher, they were the two guys, and they took a chance on me with David to promote me to some of their partners, sponsors that they knew, sponsors at big teams, and that's where my big break happened. So David and I have stayed in lockstep ever since. We had a general friendship before, but the friendship merged with the business opportunities,

and that's who y'all talked to a lot for me coming out here, right? and David helps handle everything else and lets me focus on going fast. Because at the end of the day, if I don't go fast on Sunday, nothing else matters. Nobody wants to sponsor me. Nobody, you know,

now we've built a brand, I think, but still, if we don't win, one, trackhouse isn't happy, Justin Marks isn't happy. Our sponsors aren't happy. And to think that we're going to be continue, if we don't go fast, I don't think we'll continue filming Cabotas at the watermelon farm

if we're not winning races on Sundays. So winning in the Cabota car last fall at Kansas in farm country out here in Kansas was huge. And continuing to go fast is what I focus on every day. David, the group at MMI now, which was the original, really one of the original driver agencies. A guy named Carrie Agaghanian came from California, was a lawyer, came east with Tony Stewart.

and some other drivers, and they started the driver agency. There were agents, but Kerry revolutionized the industry, I believe, is my story, at least. And now we've brought back that name with MMI and represent several other drivers, but me. And I wanted to surround myself with good people. It's what I've seen my uncle do with Melon One. It's what I've seen my dad do with JDI, what I've seen successful people that I've, look up to do is divide and conquer. Let's surround ourselves and hire the good people and then all go to work in the same direction. So I've done that with my career, which it's a tough balance

because you have to trust them. There's so many things that they can steer towards you or away from you. And sometimes they're going to steer good stuff towards you. And sometimes you want them to steer the bad stuff away before it ever gets to you. Because I don't want to have to take a call from somebody when I'm trying to have a meeting with my team to figure out how to go fast on Sunday, then those meetings could be any day of the week. This is a seven days a week, really a year-round job. I do try to take December, part of November and December, and kind of disconnect a bit, but I'm still looking through data throughout that time. I'm just at the farm. I could pull out into a field and pull my iPad up and click through some data

or some video from a race of past, trying to think about it in December so that when March comes and we're racing in Las Vegas, I've got good working knowledge of it. So yeah, it's all about the people, man. That's what I believe. Speaking of people, I have this point, this question written down.

Feel free to answer however you want. But you've got more post-race handshakes or haymakers than most drivers. So how's where does that where does that come from? Where does that spark? Is it that just the competitive nature of things just getting heated on the track? Is it, I mean, how much you want to go into that? Yeah, I can talk about it.

I mean, I hope my fighting days are behind me. I've been punched enough. I hope I don't ever get punched again. Yeah, look, growing up, I've held my uncle's watch, Uncle Ritchie. he held his watch for him before as he went off into a fight. Literally. I can remember holding it and it jingling, like the metal shaking. I was shaking so much.

It was clanking. Yeah. Not a fighter, but competitiveness comes in. Someone takes something from me. I don't react well. Somebody, if I take something from somebody, then they come at me outside of the car. I try to diffuse it, but I don't react well.

I've been beat up. I've never beaten anybody up by any means, but I've landed some punches. And yeah, I mean, look, the most notable one is Noah. What's so great about it is Sunday, we do that. And I had been building for a couple of weeks. Sunday, that happens. We fight.

Monday morning, we're in the gym together. We shake hands and we work out together. That's awesome. We're joking and having fun. And honestly, our relationship has never been better. Now, do I not think that one day if the opportunity presented itself and he had a chance and a real reason? Yeah, he'd probably swing on me. And then on Monday we'll probably shake hands.

We're not in the same gym anymore. He's with another manufacturer. But back then he drove a Chevy and we worked out together with Dan Jansen on Monday morning. So, yep. Just happens minor public. And that is a tough part because I do represent big brands. I hold myself to a high standard to be a good role model for somebody younger that wants to be like me. And I don't want people fighting.

But the competitive side comes in. And the NOAA example is somebody getting too close and then physically pushing me back. I took, I don't know, one or two steps back, trying to push his arms down. and I was kind of fight or flight. It was punch or be punched. The way he was pushing me and had a hold of my suit and pushing my chest

and the look in his eyes. The look in his eyes was not normal. I knew Noah well. It was not the normal Noah. And I've had that with other people and I've had been on the other side and had guys beat me up. I've been tossed across cars

and I just thought out beat up. So I can say it, and I feel like I could have the authority to do that with Noah because I had been on the other side of it, and I was like, you know what, I'm not waiting this time. I had told myself the other time, if that ever happens again, I'm at least going to get one in because I never got one in in a previous fight. You know, I've said this before, and this is, I don't know, this is something that some people would, some people would have this experience and some people wouldn't. But in my younger days, and this is not me personally,

but if you have ever been in a situation where you've gotten back and forth with somebody, I don't care what the movies portray and what people think, it's not enjoyable to get punched. And a lot of times it's not really that enjoyable. to actually punch somebody because I have two different friends that actually went fist to cuss and both broke their hands doing it just because they actually landed a punch wrong. However, there is a guy that a little younger than me and had it enjoyed. Let's just say he enjoyed getting into a fight in the wrong place.

And to me, I always thought to myself, what a horrible feeling. If you're the guy that decides that you're going to punch this SOB, and when you hit him, if you ever hit somebody and they smile at you because they're happy that you gave them an excuse to come after you, God, that's got to be a bad feeling. And this guy was one of those people. Like, if you hit him, he would literally, he'd smile

because he was going to mop the floor with you. And I would just think, oh, boy, that's a bad place, especially if you're like, man, I really got him. Yeah. Oh, wait, nope. I guess I didn't. A lot of those guys are in the UFC. Yeah.

Oh, gosh. Yeah. I've got a cousin, Kyler, who I swear growing up that was his hobby. Yeah. One,

I mean, and I'd be hanging out with him. He was, I don't know, a year or two older than me, go to a party with him. Makes the night entertain. It's like,

yep, Kyler's getting in a fight. What for? Don't know. Yeah. Okay, let's watch. All right.

Let's pull Kyler off the guy whenever, whenever it's done. Yep, okay. Or pull the guy off Kyler sometimes, but get up laughing about it. Just, he enjoyed it. It's a different, it's a different mindset. Not me. I hope. I mean, it's, it's not, I'm confident saying I've, knock on wood. I'm confident saying I'm done.

Well, it's a, it's a difficult, I mean, it's like there's so much passion there. And you have to be passionate about what you're doing. and it's also a lot of pressure. Yeah. And you're talking about a lot of really expensive equipment. And I mean, it's just all the things. Grown men want something. They're all going for something.

Tensions run high. The thing about it is, it's like you said, you know, you want to be a good role model. And I understand that. But I think, like even in other sports, us as fans, we enjoy a little bit of, you know. I like to watch somebody. I want to watch somebody like the rest of y'all.

There was somewhere recently, somebody was getting into it, and I just stood there and watched it. I was hoping I got to watch the show. Yeah, it's passion. You know, that makes the game. That's when we feel like, as fans, you give a shit.

Like, it's getting to that point or it's like, man, it's coming to that point. We want to see that. This isn't going to turn in another one of your rants about the NFL. Yeah, but no, it's, yeah, it's like with football. Like, don't outlaw that shit.

We want to see it. That's part of the game. You know, it's part of the game. Yeah. So how, so how do you feel, or do you feel like your life on the farm and that experience growing up, like, does that help ground you in all the chaos that goes on in your line of work? Like knowing that that's, that's kind of like your ace in your pocket, I guess you'd say. What, it's made me into who I am.

and the farm, as long as I can remember, has been named JDI. I said for Just Do It. My dad would say that when anybody, us, chat or I or anybody working for him, had a reason why they couldn't do something, he would say, just do it, and he would get in his truck and drive away, and it was up to you to figure out how. Or he'd say how to do it, and if you gave him a reason, why not, then he would say, they'd just do it.

Because he wanted it done, and he's the boss, and he owns the farm, and if you want to work there, that's what you're. what you have to do. And so that, yeah, that's molded me into who I am. I can tell you it's a whole lot easier being a race car driver than it is a farmer. For watermelons and for how we do it and what headwinds are, what we're up against, what they're up against. I really should say, you know, I'm not there farming every day.

I live in North Carolina and I travel this week, Wednesday to Sunday. You know, I'm gone off here, then over to Kansas City, got a lot of stuff going on around the track Thursday through Sunday. So while my brother's at a watermelon promotion board meeting, a two-day meeting today and tomorrow in Orlando, I got cousins there, got other people, other cousins and friends working at farms in Georgia and in Florida. They're just wrapping up in Delaware. I got family up there that are just finishing up that crop.

So I'm not the one boots on the ground, right, pun intended. I realize how good it is being a race car driver. It's motivated me through the bad years of race car driving or I wasn't as successful as I wanted to be. I wasn't making the money I wanted to make. I wasn't having the success. And my career wasn't progressing as quickly as I wanted it to. The alternative, really all I know is farming.

I had started college out of high school. me and a couple buddies we worked harder our senior year of high school so Shane and Cody a different Cody Cody Moran and Shane Lester they were working just to graduate

I was working hard senior year to get my GPA up to get some scholarships just to go to college at Florida Gulf Coast University FGCU down to Southwest Florida and wanted to do that for the farm I thought if I have a degree I will be better equipped

to handle whatever's going to come the farm's way. You don't need a college degree to run tractor or to lay out a field the way we do it, our grid style and with seepage irrigation, but to run some of the drip systems, you've got to have a better working knowledge than my dad does or that I... We could figure it out,

but if you go to school for something, you're going to have a way better robust knowledge of it. So started, did a semester, started my second semester right out of high school and then moved to North Carolina. So always knew I could go back, but also knew the more years I was gone, I was falling further and further out of touch with the reality of what was going on at the farm. And I was going to start at the bottom and work my way up. It was not going to be walking and be in ownership or anything.

I was going to have to work and understand on the farm side, on the real work side. Yeah. Yeah. So what do you want your legacy to be on the track and later down in life, later down in life on the farm? I mean, is the goal to win, win as much as you can, have a damn good racing career, come back and take this and take it to the next generation? What does it look like for you?

Yeah, Sundays race cars are the goal. They're the focus. 32, I got hired to drive in 2021 in the Cup series, and I'd always thought if I make it the cup, I want to stay there for 20 years. So that would be what, 2041, right? I want to make it and do that. Now, right now, things are going good. You think you're invincible, but I know it's not. There is a shelf life to a watermelon. There's a shelf life to a NASCAR driver. So whenever that is that'll be a decision down the line. But the goal and the focus and I wake up every day with the thought of,

how do I make my race car go faster? And then everything else comes second. So that's, I mean, I've built my life around this. That's why I've not started a family and all the other things that I could do. And I've rented houses in North Carolina for years. I have bought more recently once I made it the cup, bought my first house. So I just always put everything in dollars and cents and effort and every decision I made into the race car and what would make it go faster or what would get me more races early on. And the farm stuff, that's a fluid question.

I promote all watermelons. I want people to eat more watermelons. I want to talk about it. I want to teach people about it. that's why I do agd asphalt so I go to farms, watermelons and other, all types of farms and really I've used it as an excuse to go out and learn about other crops.

I didn't know the first thing about row crops. Watermelons is such a specialty, like small group. To me, they are giants, like men and women that are older than me that are large and empower, I'll call it. Like they control the, not control, but they do so much volume that chain stores work with them,

and I see them as my idols. I saw them as idols as my kid. Dang. I saw them as idols as a kid. Now as I've grown up, I can't be in their industry fully the way I thought I was, but I'm still going to find a way to. So yes, the family farm, family comes first.

I don't think anybody would disagree with that. but promoting all watermelon's still I have to navigate that constantly. So I do store appearances for competitors of Melon 1. But I'm promoting all watermelons as Ross Chastain, the NASCAR driver. So I'll put a Jones & Jones hat on and go to a Caputo store, you know, and I'll take pictures with all kinds of watermelons and put them on my social media and just trying to raise the tide for all watermelons.

and whatever comes down the road for me in family business it's kind of still, that part of the story is still waiting to be written. So let's talk about ag to asphalt. Where did the idea for that come from? So I met a guy named Pat Spinoza. So in the Florida Watermelon Association, they brought up about doing this podcast.

This guy knew a friend of mine, Jenny, brought it up and said, hey, I want you to maybe, this guy wants to reach out to you. He works with Ag America. They're an ag lending company. And go on his podcasts. Don't know much. That's all I kind of got told. I'm like, oh, okay, yeah, I do podcasts.

Fine, I'll go on. And talking to Pat, David starts talking to him. And we're like, it seems to be a little bit more here than just a podcast. So let's actually try to dig in here, not just, yeah, get on the table and move on. and it was something David and I had talked about my family with my dad and Uncle Richie and Rachel. We'd all talked about Brother Chad, how to kind of use this platform for more than just racing.

How can we tie it into ag? And Pat was doing an ag-focused podcast. That's what like a farmer was. And so I went on like a farmer on his podcast, and he interviewed me in a watermelon field in South Georgia, on my uncle's tailgate and a real crop of watermelons right before we were going to harvest them. And so it opened my eyes that I wasn't the only one that wanted to do that. I just didn't really know how to.

And I didn't have anybody around me at the time equipped to do this. What kind of microphone do you get? What kind of computer do you have to have? What kind of soundboard? Like, who does it? Who edits it? I, okay. So like a farmer, that's the media company.

side that Pat started, that's the media company started, we partnered together to do it. And so he's going off and focusing on people in, I'll just say, the world that are tied to ag. And a lot of you wouldn't realize. And then I'm staying more kind of in my lane of talking about NASCAR on agd asphalt. We do it every other week, kind of recap the previous race or two and talk ahead about the next race. And we just, I kind of stay in my lane. then I'm going in this year, visiting actually traveling to farms and letting a farmer tell their story.

If the dad wants to be on or mom wants to be on to tell the story or their kids, each farming family gets to tell us what their story is and however they want to present that. Last year, we kind of, we did it in a different way where we just, in one day, we told each family's story. We had them tell us and then we regurgitated it. Pat and I did on camera. and I felt like over the offseason as we looked at it, I wanted to let the actual farm tell the story.

And I think that there's so much value and actually getting there, like I mentioned earlier, I wanted it as a reason to go to some of these farms. If you call a farmer and you say, hey, I want to come by and you show me around for like four hours, they're like, no, I'm busy. But if you're going to tell their story

and amplify it out to the world, I mean, who knows how it goes. Yeah, it's the first year we're doing the podcast. low numbers. Definitely we want to grow it. But it has, at least the foundation is there that we're telling real American farming stories. Where's people's food coming from? I just milked a cow. I didn't know a lot of what I learned about the dairy industry. And we learned that. Go over to an apple orchard, learning about apples. Didn't know. I've been so focused my whole life and my family's lineage has been in watermelons and specialty.

veg they did grow a few other crops in south florida but definitely um even my dad he's like yeah watched watched last week's episode didn't know that so it's cool no yeah that's awesome i feel like like at your guys is at your core you know watermelon smashing thing and you know doing what you're doing on that side seems like at your core it you're always thinking about how to promote ag and a positive light which i think is awesome man i applaud you for that because that's you know i don't know i feel like there's there's more people like there's athletes out there that that are from farms that don't even let people know about it you know you don't even like realize that they're actually from a farm and they should wear as a you know promote that because

we need more of that in ag you know we need farmers to tell their own story and to represent that make farming cool again you know because it seems like a huge problem from farming we hear it all the time on here talking to farmers older we're just getting older we're not getting enough young people involved how do we get young people involved and you know i think just what you're doing it's freaking awesome so if farmers i'm sorry i think if a farmer's doing their job you never you never know them you never hear from them they're not loud people they don't right like especially the older generation if an older farmer's doing his job or her job at the farm nobody's ever going to see and feel like I'm trying to crack the door open a bit.

Never going to get to all the farms, never going to be able to tell all the stories, but half of the, you know, every other week we're telling somebody's story. So I got to ask you, did your dad give you any shit when the Bushlight Apple commercial came out where you're looking at the watermelons and then you pick up that apple? Did he call you and be like, what the rock were you doing with that apple? No. He likes Bushlight too. That's good.

That's good. Bushlight is the primary sponsor on the one car. You got half the season on our cup car. They are for the farmers in a lot of ways. Just so happens they like the flavors of apple this year. They did peach the last two years. They've done other varieties and other flavors. No, no.

Everybody in the industry understands how big Anheuser-Bush is. Yeah, and for the Bushlight brand. This all started because when I signed with Trackhouse, we had 10 races sold of 38. Justin had a shelf life himself of how long he could get us without funding. We felt like the runway was long enough, but still we started the year unsponsored basically at the first race and only had 10 of 38.

So we were already right out of the gate, not even, we were already behind. So they were, I remember his name's Andrew Lukinich, and he's our sales guy at Trackhouse, and he was kind of getting my dad and I up the speed on crypto. Eyes rolled back in the head. We're like, this is in 2022. It was still, I'd say, more, maybe, I don't know, it still might be. I've never gotten into it.

I'd be honest, tell the camera, I've not done my research enough to even understand it. But he's telling us this, and we're like, I'm going to say almost two hours in to him explaining crypto. He had to start at the beginning because my dad and I did not understand it. Meanwhile, we're in Los Angeles at the clash.

We're right in downtown L.A. at the racetrack at the Coliseum. And he finally looks at my dad and goes, Mr. Chas saying, well, you don't look interested in this. What would you like to talk about? And my dad said, I think we want

beer and tractors to sponsor the car. If you can find a beer company and a tractor company, that's going to be what's going to be good on the one car for my son for me. Yeah. And Andrew looks at me and I'm like, yeah, yeah, can we do that? And he's like, well, yeah, easier said than done guys. How, oh, you just snap my fingers and there you go. You got it. We have Bushlight and Cabota primary sponsors on the one car year after year, multi-year partnerships. That is. That's awesome.

Really cool. That is a nice fit for sure. So if it's going to be Bushlight Apple, that's fine with it. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. That's great. That is great. Yeah, we around here in Midwest, I don't know if you grew up. I don't know if you grew up that way, but Bush Light's like King out here. That's what people drink. Just surprised it wasn't a bottle. Yeah, I know. It would have been if I would have had more time. Yeah. We had to fit it in. Yeah. But no, that's, that is, that's awesome. And I drank it before they sponsored me. I told them that in our first meeting. I already drank it. I had switched years before. Yep. I'm going to, I told him. I'm going to, I told him. I'm going to. I told him. I'm going to. I'm going to. I told them. I'm to drink it, whether you sponsor me or not, and I'm going to drink it after you're done sponsor me one day. They told me verbally that the beer truck will always

come to my address that even back in the Ken Schrader Budweiser days, but heavy days, they still deliver beer to Ken Schrader who drove for them decades ago. Yeah, well, that's awesome. So it's like your first step on your retirement plan. You've got beer covered. Yeah, beer's covered. Check that

off the list. Yeah. Watermelons covered. Watermelons covered. Race tickets. Wouldn't you say that among the world of artificial flavors, watermelon is one of the worst. Terrible. It does suck. I always say blue raspberry is the greatest flavor God never invented, and then a close second

as far as artificial flavors is watermelon. Artificial anything watermelon doesn't taste like watermelon. Even just cold pressing watermelon juice, if you take a watermelon, just juice it, put it in a bottle, refrigerate it and then open that bottle the next day. That smell that comes off a real, just watermelon juice, I don't like. I got to cut it with like lemon or lime or like a, anytime they call it blood orange. I'm not sure if it's real orange juice or what they're mixing in, but cold pressed

watermelon with like a blood orange label on it, I'm all for. Fake artificial watermelons, I'll call it a Jolly Rancher. Yes, Jolly Rancher, yep. That is the worst. It is. against Jolly Rancher. Yep. But the watermelon specifically, so my advice, if, look, if Bushlight, if the Brewmasters

in St. Louis, they better call you down. Want to do it. No, look, we've talked about it. If they want to do it, and if they ever decide to do it, I believe they'll knock it out the park and they'll make it taste good. Yep. Great. You could also just wrap the can in a watermelon.

You could do something for the farmers and watermelon theme to make it a watermelon can. They've done a Harvick can before for Kevin Harvick. They've done a Daytona 500 can. They've done tractor cans that are, you know, They don't have tractor in there. They could just wrap the can watermelon. Still have the normal bushlight, the normal flavor. I'm good with that.

Yeah. I like the taste of beer. You're in a good spot with the watermelon because what you're saying basically is if you want good watermelon flavor, you just need to get an actual water. A real watermelon and eat it. Yeah. How many watermelons do you eat in a day? In a week.

Yeah, not a day. um i'd say if i buy it it's gone in a couple of days and it's usually buying it i buy at the grocery store just like everybody else unless like my dad brings some up um i'd say one a week yeah and it's usually i buy it and like cube it i'll juice some of it like blend it put it in like a shaker cup and have that for after the gym or something but um yeah nothing crazy um when we're harvesting and when I'm down there, that's lunch. That's just what, yeah, I mean, we eat good as well at the farm. But yeah, you just, there is nothing better than one cut out of the field.

Fresh. It's been in the sun all day. Maybe you miss lunch and it's 2 o'clock and you cut it off the vine, tailgate, right, slice it in half and eat the heart out of it. It's, there's nothing better. I don't even need it. I don't want it cold. I just want it, whatever the temperature is outside, it's hot.

but it's still got some coolness to it inside. So that's one thing we don't share between watermelon and hogs. You don't want to take a hog, cut it, throw it out in the sun, leave it there for a while. Whatever temperature it is. Yeah. And then eat the heart out of it. Yeah. That doesn't go over the way.

It doesn't work the same. At the end of harvest, I will say we get tired of it though. Oh, I'm sure. It's hard to make us eat it by the end. and we're still trying to pull one off the line or out in the field cut as you're, because remember we're not harvesting all at once. So that's why we still hand harvest.

We can't mechanically harvest because we pull one watermelon off a plant. We come back in a week, pull two more, come back in five, 10 days, full more. It's all variable and it's always evolving.

It's always shifting. We have scouts out in the field and people, that's their job is just to constantly handle, which fields were harvesting. We're planting over the course of six weeks so that we can harvest over the course of six weeks. Yeah, this is backtracking a little bit, but I was thinking about that.

So is the maturity of watermelons, as far as the varieties go, are the days, we say roughly 100 days or whatever. So for us, in corn, we plant here, we plant everything. Somebody might plant what they call 100 days. five-day hybrid clear up to 114 day, maybe a little longer than that. Obviously, the further north you go, the less maturity, the further south you go, the longer maturity.

In watermelons, are they pretty much determinant as far as the only thing that varies, you plan them over time to stretch out that harvest, or do they vary between variety as far as how many days to maturity? Yep. Varieties are different. Okay. All right. If you're planning your first, your first block,

so you're going to plant an 80-acre block or something, you're planting it as early as you can plant it and that you don't think you'll get another freeze or frost or that they're actually going to survive the cold. And then a lot of times farmers will plant their earliest ones with the earliest maturing variety. So they might be an 85-day plant. Yeah, so you're trying to stretch that harvest out.

You're trying to get those early. Yeah. I mean, every, every geographic area of the country, so South Florida, then you kind of jump to North Florida, South Georgia. Then, like, we go over to the Carolinas. And there's people, they grow watermelons all across this country, right? Yeah. I'm only one, I really only have view into the East Coast more. I've got great friends out in California, the Van Gronigans that grow watermelons from the southern end of California to the northern end.

They can do it all year out there. Yeah. I mean, that's what's so great about California is that they're weather. if they had more water and less regulations, we'd all be out there. I mean, the growing conditions out there. Maybe it's because it's out there and it's so far away and I only get out there a couple times a year,

but man, when I'm out there, I'm in love with the place. Just wish they didn't have to do some of the things they have to do. That's what we all say. We're like, oh, looks great. Yep. And they have their struggles. They have their struggles. But every area is trying to grow and get the earliest,

crop they can to get the price when the volume's down and then also have the longest so they can stretch it and harvest the highest yield out of a field. So yeah, every farmer gets to decide that and work with whoever their seed company is to pick their genetics. But it's just touching flowers and selected breeding to figure all this stuff out. There's thousands of varieties of watermelon available to any farmer. What is a misconception that you think consumers get wrong, whether it just be broad in ag, maybe it's just broad in produce or specific to watermelons. What do you think people get wrong? Biggest misconception you see. I think they're scared of where their food's coming from. In America in 2025, I don't know how I can look back in history

and find a point in time and say that the food was safer than it is today. The regulations we have to go through is incredible. The audits, the third party audits that were held to. you can't pee in the field. I mean, come on. Like, what? No, you can't do it. You know, it's just, it is incredible. And we have adapted,

and you have to either adapt or you will fail. You have to continue to navigate the modern world, you know, today's world of ag, or else you cannot sell your product. So I think they're scared. I think if they could come and see the operation, they would have a whole different understanding of where their food comes from.

The problem is the regulation say you can't let people in your field. We can't let, we can't even let animals in our field. We're open dirt with woods all around us. We're in South Florida, so there's every type of animal you can imagine. But by the book, you can't have people or animals in your field. So it is, I just think that because of that unknown

and that fear that then they think that we're not we're going to harm them when our whole business is built around growing a crop to feed people if we can't feed people then we all we all fail do you think that that on the flip side of that do you think the biggest challenge ag faces is regulation like how much is how much can we just keep given away and and because there's a certain point where it's like all right you got to let us farm you know and i think people get worried that it's just going to keep going it's going to put people out of business you know so what do you think's the biggest challenge you had it between what you see in your on your family's operation or what you've learned on

ag to asphalt talking to these farms what do you think is the biggest challenge well i want to start with i'm not the best person to answer it but i have an opinion like everybody else and We have a full disclaimer on here that this is not financial advice. No. So you don't have to worry. You can say anything and you can't be held like that. Yeah, that disclaimer just put that out there. You can say anything.

Believe me, we do most of the time. Yeah. I mean, I think there's been, there's a new reason for a farm to go out of business every day. And that's been true all the way back to the first farm in the world whenever that was. I view it more. I'd say, I don't think regulations are what would do us in or what I see. I mean, yes, is it frustrating when you have to do audits and the money you have to put in

and to meet the benchmarks they set? Yes, but okay, we're doing it for the right reasons. We're doing it so that nobody gets sick. The end of the day, we can't have anybody get sick from our product. So we will go above and beyond to do whatever we have to do for that watermelon to get somebody to get to them and feed them safely. That's ultimately what's going to continue us going to, further generations in the industry.

I view it more. They're not making any more land and we're developing more. The state of Florida is doing a lot of work in the governor's office and our commissioner of AG Wilton Simpson, too. You look at an aerial map of Florida, like a view from the space station

or something or a satellite at night. You're going to see a lot of lights around the perimeter of Florida. And that is where a lot of people vacation, where a lot of people retire or move to. I welcome them. Keep coming. Yes, Florida's open. We want you to live here. We want to be neighbors with you. It's great. I'm not there all the time anymore, but I still call Florida truly home. In the middle of that is darkness on that map, on that picture. If you take a picture from the satellite, and state of Florida and farmers and ranchers are trying to preserve that land to keep it, the Everglades. To open the Everglades back up is a big thing that I believe. We live on the, Hulosehatchie River, which Lake Okeechobe is like our big lake in the state. And then east and west, they dredged straight to the Gulf, our gulf on the west coast,

and then to the ocean on the east coast. And it needs to filter more, we believe. I think you need to filter that through the Everglades, how it was before the rivers were dredged and before I-75. And so I think that preserving that the dark spots is important. we're working through some of that right now on some of our land to preserve that and in the states investing in that.

They want that as well. They want to develop the developed land, the developable land, but some of the ag land they want to keep and earmark that and set that aside to keep it dark. Like when that satellite rolls over in space, look down,

that does still be dark in a couple generations from now. So just the fact that they're not making more land and we're developing more. I've seen at 32 fields, like fields of dirt that we used to farm that are now Starbucks, vibe guys, it's a Publix, it's a house. And that's fine. I'm good with that. We'll move and adapt, like I said, but water and land are going to be the, they're just not

making any more of it. And we're having to drill deeper wells. We're in the hundreds or up to over 1,000 feet deep wells for us trying to pump enough water to irrigate is, uh, it's tough and, and the price of everything's going up. That goes for every industry. Yeah. Yeah. I don't, I'm not telling anybody, I'm not telling anybody something they don't already know, but yeah, you know, we have to spend more to do the same thing we used to. And, and the price is not going up. Right. The price of a watermelon in the store has not went up, like other things. So, um, we're a high volume, low margin, kind of our motto. Yeah. That's the farmer way,

it seems. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's funny you say that because, I mean, even in our where we're at today, you know, just north of us, you know, like North Liberty, Tiffin, close to Iowa City, that was all farm ground. And now it is just booming and developing like crazy. And it just seems like that's happening everywhere. And it just does bring up the question of how far can we just allow more and more farmers to sell off their land? I mean, at some point, we got to keep enough land to keep all this agriculture. Yeah, to feed everybody. Yeah. And if people aren't aware of that problem, which I'm assuming hopefully somewhere,

somebody in the government or somebody that's got these satellite images that's going, yeah, this could be a problem if we don't. Well, one of the issues, though, has been traditionally we have just become more productive and more productive and more productive. And the question, the million dollar question is, how far can you take that? Or are we, is there a point where we cannot grow our productivity as farmers as fast as our population grows and as quickly as land is repurposed?

That's the million dollar question. I don't think the three of us probably have the answer for that. Probably not. It does, it's going to have to get figured out. Yeah. It makes me excited. my granddad remembers plowing in South Georgia with a mule. Oh, yeah.

And now when he pulls into the field, I was just there a few months ago with him, we pulled into the farm in an all-electric Chevy Silverado. Yeah. Completely electric. My dad pulled up in his 76 Chevy pickup. Yep. My brother pulls up in his 2025, 2,500 gas,

because we've all went to gas. Yep. We're off the emissions and all that, and we had lots of it. We're like, let's all go. gas, which is crazy to think that we've cycled back around. But to pull in with my granddaddy and look out and he looked at me and one, he was amazed at the truck and he wanted to drive it and feel the electric, all the instant torque and power. We actually use them on the farm, which is

pretty crazy to think that we've got fully electric trucks driving around. But he talked about what the field was at that point we were harvesting and he was just awing at it again. again like he does a lot of just look at this operation look what we've we've grown it into look at what his son ralph and then chad is really the one my brother who's boots on the ground who's growing the business and growing into a lot of different avenues in the family business into the sales side as well so just to look at my granddad and think about what he's seeing now yeah i'm excited for what we're going to see there's going to be more can it keep up i don't know.

Yeah, I don't know either. But we're going to be here for it. And we're not going to stop farming unless we have to. Right. I think getting up and knowing that we're not really giving ourselves another option. Yeah, we might try to diversify and I'm racing and but the goal is to farm. And when you, when you're born into ag, it's just different. It's what would be so challenging about coming into ag if you weren't.

And I applaud people that are first generation, had no experience and have grown, you know, beyond the hobby farm, which nothing against hobby farms. But when you grow into commercial farming, how you would do that as a first generation with no help, I don't know. I don't know how. I literally will clap to those people. I have a guy, I have a buddy that we've had on the podcast.

His name's Grant Hilbert, and there's a lot of people that know him. But he, his uncle, farmed. His dad was, I think his dad was a part of a farm, but he didn't go into farming, but his uncle always farmed. And he loved it as a kid. I always wanted to be a farmer. And he went to college and then started commentating, you know the game Farm Simulator, it's a video game.

He started commentating him playing that video game, created a YouTube channel, put out videos, all the money he made from YouTube, poured it into buying farm ground, started buying Farm Ground, his first generation guy, bought Bitcoin, started mining Bitcoin, and then all the,

also created his own farming game on mobile called American farming. But first generation farmer. Him and his brother are first generation farmers. No shit. Like he from nothing just grinding his face off. So like that, that's an example of just like the opportunities out there. You got to just go get it.

And it's hard. Don't get me wrong. But that guy, I mean, kudos to them, both those guys. And they're coming back. Yeah,

they are coming back. They'll be back on next month. Next month. We'll have them on. Yeah. But now, I'm with you. It's, it's never been harder to get into it and stay into it.

But there's also so much opportunity. It's so much stuff to be excited about. It's just balancing the two, you know. So, yeah, absolutely. But, man, it's been a pleasure. It's been a really, really great episode. I think people got a ton of value, had a few laughs. And we just appreciate you making the trip because it was a good one.

So where are you going to be this weekend? Yeah. the Speedway. So second race in our round of 12 for the NASCAR playoffs. So we're currently, we're trying to get to the round of eight is the next round. So there's 12 drivers going to get trimmed to eight in two weeks. We are currently ninth of the 12. So we're out by 12 points.

It's 12 positions on track. So through stage points or through the end of the race, we've got a game through the next two races. You know, we can do that. We won at Kansas a year ago, this race, one calendar year last fall. As a non-playoff driver, we did not make the playoffs last year,

but by winning the 600, we're in it this year, and we'll see. What car are you driving this weekend? Cabota. Cabota. Nice. Okay.

Yeah. So, I mean, I'll be looking out for a watermelon smash. We did it last year, so we can try again. Yeah, so right up the road, you guys have never been to the track. Nope, haven't been there.

Do you been by, why aren't you at the race? Well, shit, we might now. Shut the combine down. We just got to convince David, hey, we've got some other important things to do. I don't know how well that'll go. That's not going to happen. Probably not.

Maybe in spring. Maybe. We're back here in, I don't know, something. Yeah, we'd love to. Yeah, we'd love to. Yeah, well, yeah, guys, watch, watch what, we'll see how it plays out. Yeah. Show some sports.

Show some love. Go follow Ross, everything he's up to. Follow his races. Cheer them on. If you got any value from the show, share it out with the people that you know, leave a review on Spotify or Apple. We love you guys. We appreciate you.

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