Barn Talk - How to Build a Profitable Ranch When You Don't Inherit Land

Episode Date: July 13, 2026

Welcome back to Barn Talk! Today’s episode is all about Taylor Moyer, a guy who swapped the fast lane of NASCAR for the wide-open spaces of cattle ranching outside Charlotte, North Carolina. The conversation focused on Taylor’s wild ride from pit crews to pasture, where he’s doubled his ranch’s acreage, built his own family home, jumped into ag-tourism, dabbled in tech, gone viral on social media, and still found time to be a hands-on dad. A key theme that emerged was Taylor’s willingness to shake up the status quo. The discussion explored how he made his dream of running a profitable ranch come true from scratch, why he doesn’t stress about "the way it’s always been done," and how he leans on new ideas like artificial intelligence to make things easier. Several points were raised about building great relationships, finding the right mentors, and being super intentional about why and how you do things especially when it comes to business and family. If you’ve ever wondered how to carve your own path in agriculture, balance work and home, or just love a good story about reinventing yourself and making it stick, you’ll get plenty of laughs, encouragement, and real ideas from this episode. Taylor’s journey proves that with curiosity, hustle, and the right people around you, you can blaze your own trail and really enjoy the ride. JOIN THE BARN TALK NEWSLETTER & GET LIVE EVENT ACCESS: We're on a mission to get 10,000 subscribers, and once we do, we're hosting a live event at the barn! Sign up to get exclusive access to tickets and details.👇🏻 Help us get there: https://www.joinbarntalk.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👇🏻 ● Barn Talk Instagram ➱ https://www.instagram.com/barntalkshow  ● Barn Talk TikTok ➱ https://bit.ly/3qciekS    ● Sawyer’s Instagram  ➱ https://bit.ly/3BtX0n4    ● Tork’s Instagram ➱ https://bit.ly/3LGZJxS ● Sawyer’s X ➱ https://x.com/SawyerWhisler  ● Tork’s X ➱ https://x.com/TorkWhisler       00:00 Connecting Ag World and Society 20:29 Prioritizing family and values 28:34 Seasonal livestock migration strategy 35:14 Discussing AI and relationships in farming 51:24 Young ranchers calving first-time heifers 53:17 Managing cattle operations 01:06:10 Sell by marketing in agriculture 01:18:14 Improving cattle operations and market strategy 01:31:57 Using AI to simplify tasks 01:37:13 Using the master brief for systems 01:44:05 Tracking Rainfall and Grazing Data 02:03:20 Managing website and SEO tasks 02:14:32 Keeping in touch with people 02:16:07 Learning from Books and Podcasts 02:33:49 Understanding car downforce mechanics 02:36:09 Darn Tough Socks review ------------------------------- ⚠NO FINANCIAL ADVICE / DISCLAIMER⚠  The Information discussed and shared on Barn Talk is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or success for any particular purpose. The Information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice. The Information on this podcast and provided from or through our content is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional, professional broker or financial advisory. Understand that you are using any and all Information available on or through this website at your own risk. RISK STATEMENT– The trading of Bitcoins, alternative cryptocurrencies, NFTs, individual stocks, etc. has potential rewards, and it also has potential risks involved. Trading may not be suitable for all people. Anyone wishing to invest should seek his or her own independent financial or professional advice. #EP209 #iowacorn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Farms are different in type, in size, and even in name. Welcome to Barn Talk. What happens at the barn stays in the barn, but not today. We're going to let it all out for you guys. Today is going to be another fantastic guest episode. We have just been on a roll. It's a big credit to you guys for sharing the show, leaving interviews, doing all the things to help us out here at Barn Talk. And we just appreciate it a lot. I would just say the number of, one new thing you can do to help us out here at Barn Talk is to share the show with the people that you know. The more that you guys do that, the more this show grows, we found it's the best

way to grow a podcast organically. And we just appreciate it. It's kind of the ticket to admission to watch or listen to the show. Another thing you can do is leave a review on Spotify or Apple. All those reviews pile up and give our show a lot of credibility, which in turn allows us to have more guests coming to the barn, have great conversations with us. The last thing you can do to help us here at Barn Talk is sign up for our weekly newsletter. We're putting out a newsletter every single week about everything going on in rural America, dad and I's thoughts on it. It's basically just another way to kind of get some, get our opinions on things. And it's, we've, we've had to run a guess here where we just keep getting a guest after guest after guests, and we don't have a lot of time for

hot topics. So it's kind of a hot topic's in the written form side of things. We have a goal with that. if we get to 10,000 newsletter subscribers, we're going to throw a live event right here on the farm in the barn, drink some beer with you guys, have some great people that have been on the show that you guys love to listen to and watch to come and speak and have a good old time. I do like having a good old time.

And talking. Yeah, a little bit. And drinking. Pretty much all those things that you listed. Yeah, I'm good for. And I think we'll get a barbecue food truck or something. We got a good local barbecue food truck, flaming flips. How many times can I sign up?

I mean, you're not eligible. You're the boss, so as many times you want. I guess it wouldn't be that much fun if I signed up and we got to the thing and then we were the only ones here. I think, like you said, last time, if you want to come, I think you got to buy a ticket, but you also got to bring a hammer. Or a paintbrush or whatever. Yeah, Crowbar. Escavator. Yeah.

That'd be handy. Help us out with cleaning up the farm and making it look pristine. that's the goal. We want to make the farm like my wife likes to make the house and we have guests. Any of you guys know this? The goal is always to make the home look like nobody's ever lived there. That's always the goal. I'm not very good at it, but my wife, she does a hell of a job.

How are you doing today? You know, I'm great. I'm super excited. We didn't have a very good start, though. Our guest today, he showed up yesterday, and we had dinner together, and it was a good time. and we thought that we would teach him how to play pepper. Because in our household, we play pepper. Some of you might play euchre.

Some of you might play pitch. But Sawyer especially has fully embraced pepper. And like if he offers to teach you how to play pepper, that means you've been accepted into the fold. However, our guest today, I don't know, we might boot him back out of the fold because he picked up really quick and then he proceeded to just kick our ass.

so he was Corey's partner and I don't know Sawyer I'm sure blames it on me but I had the worst freaking cards and we just couldn't get it done. We weren't in a flow. We weren't in a flow and

not for lack of trying. I don't know. I think we're partners on a lot of other stuff so being partners in cards just doesn't work for us. Must not be. Because I have never had success with you as my partner.

I know. Lousy. I don't know. And I've known Pepper since high school but I love pepper. I love cards. Love them. Yeah, so anyway, we stayed up a little too late doing that, got up early, had some coffee, ate some breakfast, lots to talk about. Now we're going to strap some shit on. Yeah, and we are going to strap it on you today because our guest today is a fan favorite or we're bringing back to the barn. We've had him on the podcast before. He is a jack of all trades. He is, he's been in, he's a former NASCAR star who traded the fast. lane for the pasture. He runs Ridgeview, land, and cattle outside of Charlotte, North Carolina. Last time we was here, we talked about his transition into agriculture. Today, we're going deeper. You know, in the last year, Taylor has doubled his grazeable acres. Acridge, two years running,

built his own home as the general contractor while running the ranch and working in tech, integrated AI as his co-CEO and has gone viral twice. I mean, this guy, when I say is a jack-fall trades. He really is. I look up to him a lot. I ask for his advice a lot. And he's actually joined the Barn Talk team and helped us out a lot on the back end of what we're doing here this year. And a lot of the guests that you guys have seen on the show recently and the progress that we're making in 2026 is a big credit to this guy. He is an absolute hammer and it's a pleasure to have him. So Taylor Moyer, welcome to Barn Talk. Thank you. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. I Appreciate. Appreciate getting to come back.

One clarification there. I look up to you. I'm about 12 inches shorter. We're on the torque height spectrum than the Sawyer height spectrum. But we just stare at each other, pat each other on the back. Good job. And that's cool about you is you're kind of in between dad and I. So you're late 30s? 38.

38. I'm 26. Dad. I'm 43. Yeah. 55. Tork and I are high school together. You're 56. You turn 56. this year. No, 55. Oh, yeah, that's

true. Don't be putting me out to pasture yet. No, that's true. It was your 55th birthday. Yeah, I mean, I might act like I'm 12, but I've got wisdom. Yeah, I do, really. You're one of our favorite. So give you guys some backstory. I mean, we want to talk a little bit. If you haven't seen the

first episode we did with Taylor, we shot it two years ago. Was it 2024? Yeah, December of 2024. It was about zero degrees in this barn. It was, it was cold in here. We had the cancer cannon going. We had hay behind us. Lots of progress has happened in the barn.

A lot of progress has happened to the show. But after Taylor left that day, I think that his wheels got turning a little bit. Our wheels got turning a little bit. Well, you two stayed in touch and talked a lot. And then it finally just kind of came full circle. I think he just finally watched us from afar while pulling his hair out. And one day I think he was like, listen, boys,

you need some help. Just let me help you because it's too painful to watch you muddle through. Something like that. Something like that. I think it's more like I'm a chatty-cathy and I run into a lot of people in the ag world and wanted to make sure some of these people I run into

you guys found out about and put on the show because I think they have a lot of cool and interesting things to say. So I don't know. I also realized after I did my episode, I started hearing from people outside of agriculture that had listened to my episode. that I had no idea would be listening to agriculture podcasts.

And I think every sector of podcasting or any of us are guilty of sometimes just hanging out in an echo chamber. And I was like, man, I'm always the person that thinks more people need to know where their food comes from how it's produced and there needs to be more thoughtfulness and togetherness between like ag and the rest of society. Man, these are the one, this is the one group of guys that I think has a big head start on getting through to the suburban mom, getting through to the NGerman. engineer that works at a tire plant. I have a buddy, I have a buddy I raced with that I had no idea

to listen to barn talk. He works for Yokohama now. And he was like, man, I heard you on barn talk. What do you listen to barn talk for you? Oh, it's where I get all my news about agriculture. So like I told Sawyer, I'm not trying to, you know, I'm competitive. I'll beat your ass and pepper. But I wasn't trying to redo, which you guys already did. I just figured if there's any way I could help, I would, you know, strap my caboose to your train. Yeah. And we're going to get into all the specifics of Taylor's operation and how he kind of runs all the things he's got going. But he is super knowledgeable on being a startup ranch and being a first generation rancher. I mean, the knowledge that he has, the shit he's teaching me and dad and what he's done on

his own operation by himself, like in his wife Leah, is incredible. And I think there's a lot of lessons that we're going to touch on today. there's a lot of things that you guys can learn from. If you don't get value from this episode, you've been sleeping under a rock because I'm telling you that it's going to be jam-packed with it. And I just admire what you're doing, man. I think it's freaking awesome.

I want to... He's the kind of guy that makes me want to buy cattle. You know, you're one of the guys that makes me want to, like, say, piss on grain farm, and I want to see if I can get into cattle. So everybody at the party needs to bring postal diggers and some fencing pliers. Yeah, there you go.

Yeah, there you go. Well, so for like a recap, for people that don't know you, what are you doing? For people that don't know me, names is Taylor Moyer. I was raised in a big ag operation. I ran away from it and spent 15 years in the NASCAR world. Retired from that career in 2023.

Scaled my operation to head towards like a full-time operation for one salary, basically. Along the way, found out that we were going to have our first child. Malley, who's here now, she's awesome. When that happened, I decided I better build my wife a house. One of the important factors of getting my ag operation off the ground is we did a war on cost and lowered our cost to live as much as possible. I had restored an old hay barn like this one at my house and we built this nice studio apartment in it and that's where we lived where it was paid off and at as low of bills as possible so I could give myself the most runway to try to start an operation. Along the way, ran into a company called Land Trust that I was using their product at my farm to bring agritourism onto my farm.

Fell in love with the model. It's like the Airbnb for that. It just makes sense. I'm only an hour outside of Charlotte. Started doing some contract labor for them. I just cold called their CEO, Nick. I was like, I think I could help you guys. That turned into a like a full-time gig.

Even in my own cattle operation, I spend a lot of time my office running numbers. and I had enough time in the day. I could make myself busy all day in my cattle operation, but I try to only make myself busy doing things of value and not just being busy for busy's sake. So I had some free time throughout the day that I thought I could use to monetize that time. So I went to work for land trust.

I started out just as the landowner partnerships and marketing manager, basically running the landowner side and just walk in the walk and talking the talk with our landowners. We had a tragedy and our CFO passed away and we needed somebody to step up to that position and that's how my mind works anyway. So I asked and I mean something's better than nothing. So I'm now the head of finance and landowner partnerships manager and I really enjoy that role. But it is crazy when AI has come along and we have a we have a brilliant chief technology officer at land trust

who's always on the forefront of that stuff. And he started introducing our team to some of those models. And it made us so efficient in what we do. It actually freed up more time in my life, especially when I adopted some of the AI models into how I run my cattle operation. And it's really freed me up to work with you guys as well and work with some other clients.

And that's kind of how my brain works. I like to be busy. I like to set parameters. Like I work between when I send Malley to daycare, when I pick Malley up from daycare. Family is very important to me. And I like to go like hell in between. And my wife, she's a Ripper like me too. And that's kind of like we're the work hard family, work together, work together, and then play together, relax together.

So we both work for a couple of companies. And it's funny, we don't take on any other work that doesn't add value to our life. So like every company we work with, they're kind of intertwined. that companies know each other, they have overlapping audiences. Like, I'm sure people get tired of hearing from me, but people might have heard of me because Land Trust put me on a podcast with somebody else, some other Ag podcasts. But agriculture is such a small community, and I think your reputation and your net worth is everything. And I'm not going to tell anybody to how they're, how to run their operation.

But I will absolutely let anybody in to see my operation if it's advantageous. to them. You can't write a prescription. I can't write your prescription for how to run an ag operation in Iowa because you have a different climate, different market conditions, but the principles for how I run my operation or how I've been taught to run my operation by the schools of thought are the same. And if I can help you with those principles and if you have a successful operation, you never know. We might end up as business partners. I think there is a lot of mutually beneficial arrangements in agriculture that float all ships. I'm seeing those more and more. I'm doing some of those myself. I think working together brings communities back together. I think Earl butts can suck it. I don't think

neighbors should have to compete against each other. I think they should work together probably like they did 60, 80 years ago. And you'll see the revival of these small communities and you'll see kids want to come back and you'll see a place for kids at farms. And that's kind of the mission I'm on. And that mission very much parallels what you guys are doing here. So it's just kind of a natural fit to kind of help each other out. Hey, thanks for sticking with us. I've been in this business through enough trade fights to know that when you get a good deal, you want to do everything you can to protect it. The U.S.MCA is the trade agreement between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. It's a good deal. Mexico is our number one customer for corn. Canada is our top buyer for ethanol, over a billion

and a half dollars worth in 2024 alone. These are not small numbers. This is the market we've built and we need to make sure it stays intact. This agreement is up for review and the Iowa Corn Growers Association is working hard to make sure it gets renewed and strengthened, not weakened. This is about stability for our farms and it's about staying competitive

against Brazil and China who'd love nothing more than to come in and take market share. The ICGA has lobbyists on the ground working hard for all of us, but they need your voice behind them. So go to Iowa Corn. to become a member and let them know you're in the fight with them.

Now, let's get back to it. Yeah, what you and Leah both do, I told you at dinner last night, I think it's so awesome and unique. And I feel like this is what the world has presented us as far as like this new digital age, I think you two are taking full advantage of it, where you have the subset of skills and you are able to deploy your value and work spread out across multiple businesses,

helping people. You have your ranch that you're day to day with. It's running. And Leah and you are doing that. But then you're also both using your skill sets to help out these adjacent businesses that kind of, like you said, align with you and what you're doing. And you guys have freedom. And you're doing, I don't know.

It's like it's so cool. It's like a new wave of entrepreneurship that I think needs to be spoken about more. And I think you touched on it last night. Like there's no more pet. There's not going to be pensions. Social Security ain't going to be there. Like it's a new world and you guys have kind of adopted it. And I think you are doing it right.

Like the way you guys are doing it is like a modern way of running your house and working and using your skills in this in this era. And I think it's freaking awesome. Yeah, I appreciate that. we're like I was never allowed to whine growing up. Like, God, it makes my skin crawl. Like, hearing my dad yell at me about whining. Because, you know, every kid whines. You stacking hay bales in a hay barn, you get tired.

I've got terrible allergies. The first time that hay conveyor backed up and the bails were falling back on my dad, I remember him running up the steps to what my ass and he found me passed out because I wasn't allowed to whine, so I just worked until my allergies took over and I passed out, basically, you know? So I'm very intentional about if I,

get the points in life where I really hate what I do, I just make a change. Like, nobody's responsible for my happiness except for me. So at one point of my life, all I want to do was work on race cars, and I did that, and I gave it my full effort. But there came a time where that wasn't what my heart wanted to do anymore. So rather than whine about the position I was in, which who could whine about the position I was in? I had an amazing job given great opportunities by great people, but it wasn't fulfilling to me and it wasn't what I wanted. I tried to just engineer the life that I wanted. Now, did I have it all figured out? No. I'm a firm believer. You can only study so much. At some point, you just got a yanked rug out from underneath yourself

and a great, great woman along the way to give me support to do that. God, she's a, I can't imagine me coming. Like, looking back, I'm like, who the hell let me do that? But we made it work. And that's a lot about what building that house meant to me was she deserves every hammer swing. I swung to put her in the home she wanted because she stood beside me when I said, we're going to sell our nice townhouse. We're going to quit our fancy jobs. I want you to live in a barn with me that I can become a cattle farmer and think I'm John Wayne. And she said, all right, if that's what makes you happy, let's do it. Right. So I don't know. And then I'm proud of her for doing the same thing. She has a big balance of companies and clients she works for

that fulfill her and she gets to do fun work and meaningful work. And she, she's, He's intentional about it. And now that we have our family, we're very intentional about the time we get to spend with Malley and quality time. Like, God, this has been hit me so hard since I had a kid about the statistic. It's like by the time the kid's 12 years old, you've spent like 75% of the time you'll spend with your child in life. Like that's why what you guys have is special.

But a lot of people, the kid moves off and you spend most of your time with them. So, man, I'm going to soak up every second. And then the other hack that. that I didn't start thinking about until a year or two ago is, because I love community and I love rural communities of the hack. Now that Starlink's in and we have fiber at our house, there's a big hack of working from a remote town and importing those dollars from other companies and other time zones and then deploying them in your community. The only true voting strength you have is with the dollars you spend. So you spend them in local restaurants with

the people you care about, your dollars stay in those communities and you might have brought those dollars in from other places. So that's kind of a fun hack that if you're intentional about it, you could make your community better in a small way that we're trying to do. We eat at our local Mexican joint every Friday night and we love those people and that's where our dollars go. Nice. Well, so you kind of touched on a little bit about you became a father, you got Maui now, and how much has that changed your perspective on life, but on just what you're building on on on ridge view like has it did it was there a shift do you feel like there was a shift in your mindset do you feel like the legacy play is more in your brain than ever before

like describe that i don't think my perspective has changed a little bit in that i knew when i became a father i knew what i wanted my daughter to see me doing every day and it wasn't getting on an airplane and leaving here. It was the same thing I saw my father do and my grandfathers do. And I think any success I've had in life, which is not much, but I'm a decent human being, is because of like the morals and values that were instilled in me, right? So like there was a culture I wanted to raise my child in. So me and Leah made a very deliberate move to make sure we were back out in a rural community and we brought to this world. But I'm not the guy who thinks that my legacy is going to be that piece of dirt or ridgered land and cattle. One of my grandfathers never got connected to his dirt and had bought and sold a

bunch of farms and he was good at that. And I hope that I hope we just instill hard work and good values in Malley. And if she wants to be part of the operation someday, great. But if the boy that works for me now I hope he comes to me someday and wants to be part of the operation. I hope some kid does. I hope if nobody wants it, I can package it up and hand the next young couple we find a turnkey operation and be mentors to them and sell it. I'm not, my ground's too close to a major metropolitan area. Ridgerlyand and cattle, we formed it and we operate it so that operating company could work out of any state or place, really. It's an operating company that we could put our models in Argentina if we ran cattle there or something, right?

So I don't know, but being a dad, I've always wanted to be a dad for sure. And my poor wife, she got a little girl version of me. And we are like, two peas in a pot. And she gets pissed if I feed bulls without her. And, you know, she wants to get in the side by side after we get home from, I pick her up from daycare every day. She wants to go see the cows and just and be, and it ebbs and flows. There's some day she's a mama's girl.

And someday she's daddy's girl. but it's pretty awesome now with a little one running around after you. Yeah, for sure. You've had a busy time since you were here before. So since the last time you were here, you've basically doubled your land base, doubled it twice, maybe.

Yep. You build a house. Is your episode of Farms of America? Has that been out yet? No, it comes out July 7th. It comes out July 7th. And you went viral a couple of times. Yeah.

So your social media, you're dabbling in that. Was this, like, was this the plan? Or is this all just happened? Or how do you end up with all that? Some of it was planned and some of it was circumstances of things that happened. So the house built was we found out we're pregnant. The farm we bought in 2018 had been abandoned for 30 years before I bought it. So it was a sweat equity project that took me years.

And at the time I filmed before, we had restored the barn into a woodworking shop and a badass set of farm offices and a studio apartment where we were living. And, but we redid it very industrial, polished concrete, a lot of steel, hog panels, very industrial look, not the best environment for a small child.

So when we found out we were pregnant, I found out my wife was pregnant. I, we decided we were, I was going to build a house. We had a pre-1900s home at the front of the property in all these big, beautiful oak trees that had been condemned and abandoned for years. And I, I'm from Vermont originally where a lot of homes get restored.

And I worked with a contractor too, and we really evaluated whether we could restore that home. Then we looked at could we tear the back half off and keep the front half and keep some of the historical value. and it was pretty far gone. We have pretty high heat and humidity, and it was pretty rotten,

and then building codes got a lot. So when I put pencil to paper, oh, this is the other thing, I decided I was going to be the general contractor, which I've never done. But for me to GC, my own home in North Carolina,

which is legal, there's only about one loan package you can get, and we actually got ours through farm credit. Thank you very much. And they do this for the right reasons. They make you basically quote that thing top to bottom, before they ever approve it because they don't know if you've ever built a home and if you can

actually quote something and it's a very risky endeavor on their end I'm sure. So I realized I could build a replica of that historic home cheaper than I could restore the old one and then I could have a brand new home that looked old. And I'm reluctant in life to get into new ventures because I don't do anything halfway. And I went down the YouTube rabbit hole and I built a fully passive home. It's like R32 walls and R46 roof, fully encapsulated crawl space, exterior insulation, has a ERV. I built a, I built a Yeti cooler to live inside of wrapped in an 1800s farmhouse. And that was fun. Like it was a mind twister. It was a blast. And it also taught me that I probably

don't ever want to build custom homes for somebody else. Because I was my own customer and decisions I had to make. You know, we're talking about flooring thickness when we're, framing it up for where you put doors at. And you're like, man, you're asking somebody, if you were to build custom homes for somebody, you might be asking the wife, think of her dream. There's a lot of logistics you have to really do. So I loved it. I loved working with the group of guys that I put together to build it. I had to find guys that were open to learning new building trades, like these very high-end building trades. Because I wasn't building a million dollar home. I built a very nice little quaint farmhouse that fit the bill, but I built it very, very well.

Well, the million, two million, three million, six million dollar contractors that work over on Lake Norman, like they're not going to piddle with your stuff. So I got to find good, open-minded subs that wanted to learn along with me. Like we zip sheath this thing with zip tape, there's no house wrap on it, spray foam the whole thing. I did all my own ashtray calculations for the whole mechanical system. so it only has like 50% of the heating and air capacity because you don't have to, it's so tight. It's so tight. But then it's so tight. So you have to have, we have a big hole home dehumidifier. It's very humid where we live. So like comfort has a lot more to do with humidity than it does the temperature. So then you have to have an ERV to exchange air. See, there's a bunch of calculations for that. I just got to nerd out. And we spent our money in building quality bones of a house. I have no doubt that at some point when my kid's not dragging wet dogs and stray calves and cats in the house that will take out the engineered floor and put in hardwood someday or put in nicer custom cabinets. But for now, the bones that we can't rebuild in the mechanical systems,

plus I really don't like our power company. I was tired of writing them checks. So like we run a house all electric house except for a gas stove on about 120 bucks a month. And I'm okay with that. That'd pay off in the long run. So yeah, did all that. That was the plan. My goal was to get moved in before she could crawl, and I might have pushed her over a couple times so she couldn't crawl, but we, we hit that by one week, so I hit my goal. We have some amazing stories to go along with that. I knew on the cattle side of things that I needed to get to get bigger. Scaling by me generally doesn't mean you're going to go buy more land, so we were able to find another lease property right down the road. You know, it's not quite contiguous, but it's just a quick trailer ride down there.

enough that we move our herd as a whole generally. We don't usually have our herd split. So that first year, so 2025, that doubled our grazable acres locally. But I got to the end of last year, and I knew I needed more like resilience in my business model of getting some more pasture. In my mind, the perfect concept was, if you could go pre-1873 in the invention of barbed wire,

what would these animals do? Well, they would go to the foothills or the mountains of North Carolina when it's 100 degrees in the Piedmont region where I'm at. and then come back to the Piedmont region for fall and spring when the grass is high, you know, the animals migrate. Well, we love to go hang out in the foothills and the new river area when, when it's 100 and we're burning up, we go jump on a tube and float the new river. When it's 80 and perfect up there, we have, we have seasons and we have topography in North Carolina. And, you know, I wrote, I wrote that in my goals. I didn't think it happened so fast. I also wrote that, so I basically wanted to be in another climate zone to be able to,

move my cows to give them a break. And I also didn't, I thought that my opportunity would come maybe by putting my cows with somebody else in some former fashion where they were in charge of cattle care. That would also free me up in the summer to do some family vacationing or, or whatever. I realized 2025 and 2024, I was okay running my place on unsustainable effort, but that only lasts so long before you burn yourself out or your wife out. So like giving my business, some flexibility. And darn if I didn't buy a couple cows off a gentleman, a younger guy and delivered him and we got talking. And then he called me back like a couple weeks later. And he's like, hey, you said some things that like put wheels in my mind.

He's like, I just fell into this pretty big lease. But I don't, cattle market's extremely high. Like, I don't think I can stock it. What would you do or what are your options? So I talked about all the options I can think of lease cow models, custom cow models, buying cows, but doing it in a way that it's short-term cows and what really stuck with him. And I did my best not to lead him this way, but if it's your goal too, it's hard not to, was that he was like, well, that custom grazing option sounds pretty good. Like, I'm a young business. He's me five years ago trying to figure out how is he going to cash flow this thing. And like a check every month is what's important to that family. So we talked for a while. Then I drove up and visited him for a day. And he asked me any questions he had.

and I saw his operation and his cow herd and how he takes care of him and his facilities and obviously he has some cattle knowledge. And I had seen the quality of cattle I bought off him. So he knew a thing or two. And I'm like, this is a guy that I can mentor that I can also be my business partner and it can be mutually beneficial. And I believe everything's a people problem and people skills can solve a lot of things. And then we don't, we're in the 21st century and I, so then we drew up a big contract. And I gave it to him and his family, and they looked it over, and we asked questions, and we worked through it. And yeah, now we've got, this year, we doubled our grazable acres again, and we have cows in two states and in two climate zones, and we've given ourselves, it's only

two and a half hours away. I can check my cattle. I use a game camera, set on a 12-hour thing, so I have a camera on my cattle in the mountains under his care, so I get two pictures daily when they're at the mineral trough of proof of life. It's mutually beneficial. and the more grass he grows and the more days he can feed a cow, the more cows I can send him to feed, and the more money he can make and the more money I can make. Yeah, it's a win-win. Yeah, there is a such thing as a win-win.

Now, there's going to be bumps in the road. And I told him from the beginning, I'm like, this relationship is more important to me than every nickel and dime. So I want this to be a long-term thing that works for you and your family. So just be open and honest with me. And we try to talk through every situation. What if a cow dies?

what if a cow gets sick? Who's responsible for this expense? And we put it all in the contracts. So we've had a discussion. And then if he has a question, he's been really good about just calling and asking me. And what I hope is that I hope I help him build such a badass business that I, that someday he doesn't have any room for me. And we'll find the next guy. But he probably won't forget it. Or we might be business partner. Who knows? Maybe I'll sell my herd and custom grades for him. I don't know. but so that's where we ended up and then along the way my wife is an expert in social media and she's always making me flip you know not making me i enjoy doing i just forget to do it a lot just show the public what we're doing and we have one instance where we and we can get into this but we

have one instance where we saved a baby calf that with a method called the madigan squeeze method and it went pretty viral and then recently um we were joking around about fly spray and the old pump bottles that all my dad made me use and stuff. And we stole this from somebody else, but we had seen somebody use a super soaker. And we went to Target and bought a $20 battery operated super soaker and put our fly spray in that. And I can actually, it's more effective because I can just when I'm feeding protein, just coat the cows down. And yeah, it went crazy viral, like 13.5 million views. Yeah, you just sprayed them, sprayed them with the water. Yeah. And we said it to some funny, like, gangster rap or something. And I'm never too, I'm probably more serious here than I am.

in life. Like I usually have a smile in my face. I'm always having fun, always getting hurt, always dirty. I just try to enjoy. You know, God put seven days in a week so it's not an even number. So as long as you're enjoying four out of the seven, like, you're doing good. If you hate four out of the seven, make a switch till it's back to the majority. Yep. Yeah. But the first time going viral definitely got, we got some people noticed us. And Farms of America came and had heard about our operation and they were doing a season two and they asked if they could shoot. And Yeah, we had a full seven-man TV crew for four days and during the anniversary season last October and made a great relationship with those people.

And then, yeah, and along the way, we adopted, I adopted a bunch of AI tools to help me be more efficient to actually free up and buy back a lot of my time. I get a lot of anxiety if I don't get my office work done because that's the work that builds confidence within me to spend money. Like, I'm the guy who doesn't, I don't gamble. right so like i need to do the pre-work to give myself the confidence to go in the sail barn to make the smart buys to buy the more cattle to do my next turn whatever but what was happening was i was getting a little anxious because i was spending so much time in the office there wasn't a good balance balance

yeah now i've got it to where i've automated a lot of that stuff that i understand how it works i had to teach a i to do it which makes me even that much more strong in my beliefs about it but it can do it for me and hand me reports and then I've bought back time again. So yeah, I will say this. I talk about AI on here quite a bit and I know some people roll their eyes when I talk about it and some people are always and then there's some people that are curious and asking me, how do I use AI on the farm or for businesses? Taylor is one of those guys that I am constantly asking, picking his brain on about how he uses

AI because he's figuring out just like all of us, but he has, really built some amazing systems for him on his farming operation and all the other stuff that he does. And it's helped me tremendously. And so I know we're going to get into that and strap some shit on to people. But you said some things there that I want to touch on. Number one, I think something that is like the thing that I notice about you from the get go is just how how intentionally you are about relationships and how like you see the importance and the value of relationships

for the long run. Like that kid right there, what you just said about, he might get big enough someday that he doesn't even custom grace for you anymore and you guys might stop doing business together or whatever. But he's never going to forget that. You know,

and that might turn into something later down the road. I think, and you probably know this more with other relationships you've had, but touch on how important it is to think long term about

working with people and having relationships because I think a lot of times people will meet somebody and all they're thinking about is what can I get out of this deal right now? What can I do right now to get the most out of this person?

And they don't think about if you're just a good person, you don't know what could happen. And you've got so many people that I'm sure you've met on your journey that it's played out. Yeah, I think I'm very guilty of everything used to be a transactional relationship with me,

especially in the competitive environment that NASCAR was. And I had a mentor named Darian Grubb who was my first mentor, then was my crew chief and boss. But he treated us very, very well as employees. And like we'd go on Tuesdays, our whole team would go grab pizza for lunch.

we go together. And then one, one night a weekend, out on the race thing, he'd take us all the dinner. And the other two nights, he would purposely stay home as a crew chief, which can be a lonely, I've done this, it gets lonely. But he would do that to give us enough space because he was also our leader and our boss. But when we would go out, we all, the team of guys I was on in 2018, we all loved great food and great beer. We usually end up breweries because a lot of breweries had great food and great atmosphere, right? And I would watch Darien be generous, be very generous to people. And one time he said, I was, I'm blessed enough to have the ability to be this generous to people. And I have never forgot that. And I almost get emotional thinking about that because there was a time

where I was so frugal. I, I would tip for good service and stuff, but I was never over generous. And I remember we were at a, we were at a brewery and the waitress was working her tail off. and we're a bunch of rowdy race guys, and she deserved every penny. And, you know, he threw some $100 bills in the thing, and we walked out, and somebody was like, damn, man, that was nice. And he was like, that girl works her ass off.

And I have, I'm blessed enough to have the ability to reward her for that. And I've never thought that. And my mentors along the way in racing, I always, always like the guys I worked for that treated people well. There's another philosophy, which is more like the,

which is very effective. and has won a lot of championships, but it's treat your people more like robots and get every bit out of them. And, you know, there's big, Elon might be like that. There's, there's companies where you work your ass off for two, three years. You get paid very well, but you can only do it for so long.

And I just try to treat people how I want to be treated. But for sure, there was an inflection point in my life where I learned that everything doesn't have to be a transactional relationship because you don't, you have no control of what's coming in your life. You don't want to burn any bridges on the way. way out. Yeah, there's people that have done me wrong. Plenty of them. I forgive. I don't forget. I know better than to be fooled a second time. But along the way, I'm a social critter. Like, I like people. You guys know that. I love to talk. I don't want to farm the whole world.

I ranch the whole world. I don't want to be this huge operator that neighbor, that their neighbors hate. That's a lonely life. I got pretty lonely crew chief in the last couple years of like I would come home from the racetrack, grab my book, grab a glass of wine, and go eat steak by myself. Like, that wasn't how I wanted to live. I want to be, I want to get done work and we want to have friends over for dinner or go out to, you know. I also don't, because I'm naturally competitive, I like to make my friend group, like, there's only so much time in the day for other people in your life. So like iron sharpens iron, I want to surround myself with people that push me to be better. and help each other get better.

So I've tried to be intentional about that as there's less and less free time, I guess. But I don't know. I'm also, just because I'm a new, I'm a new ag operator, doesn't mean I can't, I'm still one year more experienced than somebody that started a year after than me. So if I can just help them not make,

if they want help, you can't force up upon people, but if I can help them not make a couple of mistakes I made and it saves them 10, 50,000 bucks in their first two years operating, that might be the difference in then making it or not. And I want more operators. I want more young operators.

I don't want my daughter, when you have a kid, you start thinking about what goes in their body. Like, I was pretty reckless with what I put in my body. You know, I would eat anything. Food, energy drinks, tobacco user for years, you know? But now you're feeding your daughter

and you want the best for them. And then I'm in ag and I'm like, I've never seen a year where we have more farmers. Who's going to, what food is she going to be? be eating. I want other young operators for a lot of reasons, but I want the best of the brightest and the smartest to produce my food. Like, I'm like you guys, I think food is your medicine. Junk in, junk out. So I'm intentional about all that. I love helping young guys, young people, females and males together. So yeah, I'm an open book and I've got a lot of help along the way,

and I'm not shy about telling people where I got it. You know, I've paid for a lot of education outside of the university system that I cannot recommend highly highly enough ranching for profit John Haskell and his team we work with I don't know I just try to try to play that what do they say pay it forward that's what I try to do so

well the other thing that you'll very quickly realize when you spend much time around Taylor is he is curious like you are a lifetime learner yeah and you also which is unique, I feel like, in agriculture,

but very unique in the cattle business, is you do not, you're not beholden to the way it's always been done. And you are, I mean, we've kind of gone down a rabbit hole, but you have been part of that in the fact that just the way you look at things as just because it is this way

doesn't mean that it can't be done another way. Yeah, so you know how like in ag, everybody likes to put labels on things and they like to polarize each other and stand on pillars? I run a, what some people would say is a regenerative business model and then I sell into a conventional system. But if I stand back, I don't even call it regenerative. I just call like economically responsible. This is what I can afford to do. This is the input costs with the market conditions. we have that my operation can afford to carry for the risk management structure I'm comfortable with. Yeah. Right. So like it makes sense for me to rotationally graze, uh, because land is my scaling factor. So if I can grow two times the forage on my same piece of land, only paying tax

basis on the same acre, I've essentially doubled my acreage, you know, without paying any more on a mortgage. Um, that's even getting easier and easier as technology goes on. but it's funny because I've I learned this at ranching for profit and I love it but I actually just added something to it so maybe this is the one thing I shouldn't say this is not a Taylor thing I'm the king I steal everything like I don't think I'm an innovator I think I'm an early adopter but I'm I'm really good at hearing something and believing I want to make it work and trying to make it work so ranching for profit made me understand that economics is what you should do and finance is what you can afford to do and then I just the one thing that leaves short sometimes

is that I think about a lot is that doesn't necessarily mean that it factors in the human element or emotions in your community. And then somebody said this. Maybe it was you guys or somebody talked about when the Amish are making a decision, they make a decision about how does this affect the community. So then I put in like, okay, economics is what you can afford to do. Sorry, economics is what you should do. Finance is what you can afford to do. And morality is what you choose to do. So all those things go to say and like that's my decision making matrix for my operation. Would I love to have some nice equipment? You bet you're ass. It is hot in North Carolina. I would love an air-conditioned cab on a tractor, but they're not giving those things away.

And until I have enough cows to support those overheads, it doesn't make any financial sense. I have a small truck and trailer. We were talking about this at breakfast. I have a small truck and trailer. I have a small truck and trailer. One, because our fields are, you can't get a semi in our fields, like field edges and stuff. You'd have to redo all your fencing to turn a semi in, really, unless you did like a California side loader style. But nowadays, cows are so expensive. If you're trucking many cows, you probably want, like a license and insured operation to be trucking those cows. We're around the Charlotte metro area. I can't imagine driving a semi around those. People just don't know how to act around farm vehicles or semis. So there's a pretty high risk. You could, you could, you could wreck

you could wreck your truck and trailer right so i got a trucker i've been using recently like to get my cows to the mountains the guy's mom happens to be an insurance agents like license bonded insured all that um those are things i think about uh to truly like there's nothing in our mission and vision of my business that's a that's like have the best cattle or that have this or that it's it's we wanted to make our land better, be profitable, and make our community better. And those are kind of the pillars we point towards. So if we can do things, we've done it all. We've custom grazed poultry in our first year.

We custom graze a lot of cattle in our first year because we needed cash flow every month to pay the bills. I'm not naive. The cattle market could flip tomorrow. And I don't think I'd be out of business, but I sure wouldn't be making the living I'm making today. We're one tweet away from chaos at all time. All times, right? So I think about that. I think about that a lot. I just LRPed a bunch of calves in the fall because of the New World's grew worm and misinformation. And I've seen a lot of the mass media not understand New World's grew worm and give a bunch of misinformation. And it's just like, last year I happened to be selling cows with the TV crew at the sale barn the day before our president tweeted about resilient or Uruguay and beef. And he slid the market $400 ahead on wean calves. And I got lucky boy. I mean, that.

That's 400 bucks ahead is a lot, a lot, a lot. Could be your profit. Yes, absolutely, to me. So I don't know. But I will say what I know is everything I do now, I give to my co-CEO AI model to keep me on my rails of thought when I'm bonging around and when I'm curious and how I do these experiments of pushing my business forward.

And I have a risk mitigation strategy of how much money I'm willing to gamble. I fail every day. man, I screw it up every single way. I just try to screw it up quickly. And I try to make my screw up small enough. They don't sink my business. Fail forward. Yeah, fail fast, fail forward.

Yeah. And whether that's like my physical body, it's funny as I get older, I realize I don't heal quite as much anymore. And there's things I do safer now because I realize I'm a pretty, I do have other, I have kids that work for me,

not full time. I can get them when I need them. And I have, we have enough, I have a young friend group that we really help each other out. like work cows and stuff because we can't afford, or we're not big enough for a full-time hired man. We can be each other's hired man. We even do things like split the vet visit. Like the vet will come, pre-check my herd, go over to Josh's, pre-check his herd, might end up at somebody else's and we just all work together.

So I don't know. It's a big fun logistics puzzle. Same as building the house, same as crew chief and race guy. Okay. I want to break down, like when you thought about, when you think about coming on here, you know, we had John Haskell on the pod and credit to Taylor for connecting John Haskell to be able to come on. I know that episode is absolutely crushing it. People loved it. Right. And John's philosophy on a lot of things. When you think about your operation and you're printing in the principles of how you run it and how you got it started and how you are doing things different, what are the things that you want to convey to people today, whether they have a, ranch or they want to be a first generation farmer like you like what do you want to tell them what value do you want to give them uh you can get as a specific as you want on your numbers i just feel like

i want to try my best to just like give people the reality of and and give them the scope of how you did it like how you're doing it because when people hear all first generation rancher that's impossible yeah and you can walk through it. I think the biggest thing that I've done, and this is important for people understand, and Torque, you said this at breakfast this morning, you have to understand why you have cattle. Because there's a lot of people who have cattle for different reasons. There's some people that have cattle, they can have a lot of cattle because that's the lifestyle they want to live and it might just be an expensive hobby. And they might need that expensive hobby as a tax write-off

and that is completely okay. But you just have to watch out. You have to make sure your business is modeled after the principles for what you're trying to achieve. I wanted to achieve, make a living with cattle, buy farm ground with cattle, which people say can't be done, but we're doing it. So to do that, that sets the, that sets the first, like, economic principles of, I need to. I want to actually has to be profitable. Yeah, it has to be economically profitable. And you have to be willing to do things. So then when I look at business models, if I do everything the exact same way as everybody else, I'm probably just going to, only be as good as them. So then I got to looking like, is there opportunity in doing the things

people other people are not willing to do? And I know a lot of young people, I'm not, I get this microphone in my face, but there's a lot of young people who are better at what they do than me that have made First Generation Ranch's work by doing things people are not in the season of life to do. I know some people that ran a huge re-sip cowherd and put in embryos for other people and and they carve out of their cows, a calf that is genetically different than the cow that calves it, and they raise that thing to weaning and they give it back. And they make good living doing that. I know young people that do nothing out west, but carve people's first calf heifers. Big ranch, established ranch, don't want to deal with calving first calf heifers,

which is the riskiest time of their life and takes a lot of care. And these young people have the time, the energy, and don't need sleep, and are willing to do what other people are not and put a price tag on. And it works for both parties because maybe that big grant, They can cav out their mama cows. They can send 400 heifers to these people in Nebraska, and they can cav out. I know people that specialize in developing replacement heifers, because if you can have your ranch fully stocked with an established cowherd,

and you don't have to have extra grass for the 200 other replacement heifers that you want to bring in, you can ship them somewhere for a year, have pay somebody to develop them, and then you can sell 200 of year old, you know. So you just need to look where there's opportunity and solve problems. for people. So like year one for us was the biggest problem that kills all young, young businesses was cash flow. Like how do I get paid every month? I can't just go on the standard cow model of one calf check. And we don't really raise East Coast cattle or not putting on the pounds that a good

like northern Montana calf is. We don't have the power in our grass. So I do love the D to C model. But when I looked at like direct consumer meat business, no offense, I just realized that is a whole separate business than a cowcalf ranch. We happened to find a D to C business in Charlotte who they needed to expand, but they couldn't afford to buy land. So that first year, we were able to custom graze their cattle for them so they could own more cattle, have more cattle on their balance sheet, have more cattle ready to finish in time to support their user group. They could do that cheaper and pay us at the market conditions back then, then they could go by ground, raise their own cattle and have the whole earning curve. So you're getting paid so much a day for so much ahead

to custom graze their cattle on our land. Yep. And to keep like overheads low, we just ran their cattle right along with ours. And actually what it turned into was then year two, they bought my wean calves from me. So I would straighten them out. So I'd make sure get through the weaning, which is the stressful time on the calf, castrate them, vaccinate them. And in fact, I had to buy more in. So I made it a requirement that if I was buying any outside cattle in, I had to have about 45 days to look through them, make sure they were healthy, weren't going to infect my cattle, give them a quarantine period, and then they could come by those things, and then all those cattle stayed in my place. And once they were good and wean, we actually just turned them back out

with the herd. So they got to grow the next. You'll never make a cow grow as easily as you can being raised next to their contemporary group, their little calf buddies they grew up with, next to their moms on the piece of ground they were born and raised on. But it is such a financial risk to have a calf for 24 months and never get paid. So we were able to get paid on the 12 month mark, turn that equity into cash flow for our business, and then get paid cash flow the next 12 months. And it still worked financially for them. But what happened is the market's gone so high. It doesn't financially make sense for them to buy calves at that stage of their life anymore. They have to hold them for way too long, right? So we still have a relationship with them. We just can't

do that model anymore. Funny enough, you know what that led to. It's the boy that works for me now that 17 would have been 14 back then and I love him to death and I want it. He's the next door neighbor and his parents real crop. But in the between, you know, everything's trying to double crop by us. So corn bean wheat, corn beans wheat. I'm like, man, I want enough work for Lane to be over here every day. But I don't have the work. I'm not going to, we can't just invent work or subsidize it. Right. So that same group of guys came to me and they're like, they do pastured poultry. They do pork, lamb, and beef. And they came to me and were like, we can't grow enough pastured poultry.

Would you, if we brought the infrastructure, the coops, the watering systems, and the feed, would you do the labor on these custom pastured poultry birds? And I was like, no. But I got a 14-year-old boy I'll check with. I will give him the whole enterprise at my house, his business at my farm. So now I've got like my teenage kids very invested in the farm because that's their thing. Lane made the money. I took,

so we even, like, I even showed him how I broke it down. I did it, we did a custom grazing rate for chickens. And it was like a little bit of land rent for the land they took up, a little bit of electricity bill for, because we actually daisy chained them all together

on a watering system. And then Lane got, Lane made the money. He made all, did all the labor in it. And then you got him when you needed him for the stuff that he was helping you with. He had a 15 minute,

you want to see a 14 year old get like really efficient with chores? I think I penciled it as you'd have an hour of chores a day. He had it down to about 12 minutes in the summer. And he was even in charge of hiring his own replacement labor when he went to the beach for a week. He hired his cousin Ryder and his poor rider. Lane left to go to the beach in great beach weather.

It was about 100. This was the Hurricane Helene summer. It was 110 degrees and we got six inches of rain. I had baby chicks in my wood shop because they were so wet. We had to dry them out. Ryder had the worst experience. But yeah, so that was a way to keep the help the farm, get them invested in what we were doing. Like his success just led to more money in his

pocket. Funny enough, we'll talk about the viral calf story, but that was Lane's calf. He came, I got the best phone call. Somebody who likes to mentor young men can get. I got a call with, hey, I got a business proposition for the kid that worked for me. And I was like, I'm rubbing off. Like, we're doing good things. Because I see Lane coming up and he's got his grandfather and father's farm. He also has a great uncle and another grandfather that all have farms. And Lane's like the only descendant. And you know what I hope happens? I hope I've woke him up to see that he can row crop with his other people. And I hope the grandfather that has the cattle that Lane helps too, I hope he can see that he's going to be like a fully integrated farm. And that's the opportunity

for him. Because I think it will be. And I hope he calls me and he's like, I got more acreage to graze than I can. You want to start me out. I'll custom graze some cattle for you. And we can all work together. I have no idea where the question started. I just ran it on. No, I mean, that's a good start. I think the question was just, what do you want people to leave with when it comes to how they got started? How you got started.

What are the principles that you embody in your operation? The biggest principle is knowing a plan, making a plan, knowing a plan. and work in the plan. And for that, it's knowing your numbers. There's no other business. I don't know why agriculture, I don't, I understand it completely. You guys have talked about it,

so I don't need to reiterate it. But on what all the generations of agriculture, what they have faced and how, what success, you know, there was the work hard generation, and there was the work more generation. Now we're to like the margins are so tight,

you have to run a real business. I had a great discussion with my uncle, who was a, my family owns Battle of the Orchards in Freehold, New Jersey. It's all pick your own produce mainly. And a big, big operation. And we were talking, we were up for my cousin's wedding. His generation's the same as my dad.

And, like, they were at the university. They all went to different schools. Actually, Uncle Scott didn't go to school. But my uncle Damon, my dad, everybody else went for Virginia Tech. And, like, they were of the generation that was taught to, like, dial in production. Like, you make your, you make your production as efficient as possible, and you're going to come out the other side. and that led to profitability.

Well, production doesn't necessarily lead to profitability anymore at all. You can have the most dialed system, and that's not like that in a lot of other businesses. Like a lot of other businesses, if you have, you know, reasonable overheads and the nicest and newest machines, you can produce the best product and you can get the most money. Like, Ag's not like that. No, because you can have the cheapest cost of production

because you're so efficient, except you produce a commodity where the price ends up being below everybody's cost production, in which case that efficiency doesn't help you at all. The other thing you said that really struck me was like his generation, they had their heads down working. And somewhere in there, there was a time where people didn't value farm real estate, farm ground. And he's like, and then you, you're on this family land that's always been worth whatever. And one day you wake up and the balance sheet makes you look like you're Uber wealthy. And like, you're supposed to be the CEO of this.

big thing and you're really more like the operations officer, but you might not have the financial background or like, you know, now the numbers you're talking about. If that was a regular company, you'd have a board of advisors that specialize in those things to go to and learn from. So then I feel like that's when we got to the age of everybody had a specialist and everything. You have, you know, you have your agronomist. You have a dealer, this and that. And then, I don't know, things go. Things go in revolution. I'm back to the, well, I don't trust anybody anyway. It's not that I don't trust people.

I love people, but trust but verify, I guess I would say. And I feel like I, I learned this, the heart, I'll never forget this lesson I learned. I had a co-crew chief who I know cared about me with tough love, but he was like a big older brother that was very hard on me. And I learned so much from that guy. In the middle of a race, we are teammates, middle of race, my driver wrecked the shit out of his driver. and his driver was in the uh it was noa gragston and my driver was jeb burton and and and jeb wrecked Noah while Noah was in the points championship and Dave came up on my pit box and cussed me and I was like it wasn't my fault or you know whatever and he said you're the crew chief everything is your

responsibility and that like I'm like damn you're right like I'm the business owner my name is on the note my name is on the sign like I don't have to be the specialist and everything but I have to know enough to keep this train on the tracks. So I think knowing my numbers or any business owner needs to have just a good solid set of business principles. And that's where we get into things like, I don't get too married to my cows. Now, we have a couple cows that probably will never leave. You got to have one or two for the wife to rub on and the kid to rub on. But you're trying to create value to other people.

So if somebody comes to you and they really like what you have, and it's going to very, very much benefit your business, sell those cows and replace them. So when I started to look at my business as a couple different, you know, there's like operations, there's HR, there is risk management, there's production. I try to work on all those different, I try to evaluate like where we're weak and work on those different things. Like that's what helps me feel better and sleep at night is knowing that I'm always working to make it better or more resilient.

So what are the key methods that you think are a little bit outside the box that have helped your operation the most? For example, sell by marketing. Not being like you already mentioned, not being too attached to your cows. And it's not, this is a profitable enterprise that you're working towards. Custom grazing. I think we should explain some things too. We're pitching around the custom grazing. Yeah.

So custom grazing or custom feeding is sending your animals to somebody else and paying them a daily rate or some type of rate for care of your cattle under a certain set of conditions. So it's very common out west where there's big feed yards. You might get your calves weaned and want to retain ownership of those calves,

have them on your balance sheet, but you don't have the room for them or you don't have the facilities to feed them. So you can send them to a feed yard, which those guys specialize in cattle nutrition. They specialize in what they do. They're very good at it. And you can custom feed them there.

So you still own them. You're paying a rate. You know your break-evens. For the feed yard, it's pretty good business. They might have owned cattle, which they have equity in, but then they can cash flow with all the customer cattle.

And they're getting to sell you feed. They're getting to sell you their expertise. So on a custom grazing thing, it's the same thing. People might send us the cattle. I love to grow grow. I love to grow forage, and I love to graze cattle.

you've never drank a beer in the evening in the sunset with a bunch of cattle that are grazing. Like, that is my happy place. That is really why I originally bought my farm when I had this 2018 making $80,000 a year as a race engineer. Really couldn't afford the farm, but I knew the chaos in my racing life. I needed to, and I lived out in the country, like, I could come home and I could de-stress on their ride home and grab a beer and sit with the cows or do a little manual labor and like calm my mind down and that was kind of my, that was my therapy, exactly. And I knew that it was a good,

I knew that it was a good financial investment. I did not know that I was going to end up running my own ranch. I just knew, I knew that much acreage outside of Charlotte an hour away is eventually going to appreciate. So on the custom grazing side of things, that's what custom grazing is. And custom grazing is a great option or custom anything is a great option because it reduces the risk on the business

because you don't have the money tied up in the capital of owning the thing. And it's cash flow. So that's what's great about it, is pure cash flow. And different businesses go through different seasons of life of what they need, right? We've moved to more of using the sell-by concepts. We have moved more towards owning a lot more of the cattle we've run. But we have a balance because the other thing that custom grazing is great about is like in the contract, you can put, it can be your drought mitigation plan, meaning like, I need a bunch more cattle in the

spring. And then when we start to get hot, I can't have as many cattle. We don't grow as much forage. So you could bring in somebody's cattle for 90 days. And it's written in there that like, they're only here for 90 days. So you make a bunch of money and, or you know, you make your cash fill in those 90 days. And then when you don't, you only have enough forage for your cattle, those cattle go back home. So like that's a concept. That's a principle. the sell-by marketing thing is oh, Bud Williams was a, he's passed away now, but he was known for,

he's kind of like a cattle savant, right? There's been some people that just naturally give with cattle. And he revolutionized some stockmanship things for how you handle cattle. And he also viewed the marketing side of your business is how you sell your product and how you get value out of that product. And that's where a lot of people, I think, struggle. Because the great thing about agriculture is that, and I'm stealing this straight from Will Harris, is that if you got 48,000 pounds of anything, you can generally call somebody and they'll come pick it up and the right to check for it or you just take it to the market. But that's almost so convenient that a lot of times people get lazy on the marketing. And like they don't think about with a little extra effort, could I get a lot more for this? Could I move this thing, grain, cattle? Could I just move it like four hours one way to a better market and upsell it for more money?

Or is there somebody else that would value more? You know, too often I see guys just dump their cattle at the sale barn and they just get what they can get and they've worked for a whole year. So sell-by marketing was something that Bud Williams and then another lady, and I'm blanking on her name, kind of, this is way before my time, taught a lot of people. And then there's been people along the way that teach the school. So Doug Ferguson, Wally Olson, they teach the modern schools.

And you can still find some of the old literature. and it is a concept that is easier to explain for people that have never been around cattle because they get it very simply. Like, you could explain it as like if you like to restore cars, you go buy something that's a diamond in the rough and is undervalued and you know what your cost is when you're buying it to make it into what it's going to be the sellable thing, right? and you sell it, and then you buy back something else that's undervalued, and the money between

is your cash flow. So you're really locking in your profit on the buy. You have to buy correctly, and you do a set of calculations to know what a good buy is. And then when you're selling that thing and buying back again, you never look backwards. You never look at what you paid for it. It doesn't matter. You're just always looking at market relationships between two classes of things. So in my case, it's cattle. What is the market overvalued right now? What is overvalued in the market, and what is the market undervalued? And can I sell that and then immediately buy back? It's also a great risk mitigation strategy

because your money's never out of the market. It doesn't really matter how high the market goes or how low the market goes because it's the relationship between classes of animals. The only days you carry about how high the market is and how low it is is the day you start and put capital in and the day you sell out. So it's a risk mitigation strategy.

And a lot of cattle feeders I've heard about have talked about that. Like the best risk mitigation strategy is never have your money out of the market. Yeah. And it wasn't until I went to a sell-by-marketing school that I was like, no, I can make enough money to make a living. Just ranching.

Just ranching. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I know my local markets and I studied them. The great thing is the USDA puts out a market report for your local market, your state report, the national report, every week. Bam, bam, bam. And I see what a guy like Doug Ferguson does, like on feeder cattle and trade.

and he was writing in Beef Magazine so you can follow along. And I went to Wally's school, and then I met other people, and through Ranch for Profit, I met some people. And I'm like, you can do this. A lot of people think you have to get agnostic and you have to sit in the sale barn. I've never in the sale barn.

When I do buy cattle, I don't really do a lot of feeder cattle stuff. I buy a lot of breeding stock, and I do sell by within the breeding herd. Because we have two calving seasons in North Carolina, which is kind of unique. We have a fall and a spring. But what I hear a lot of people say when I go speak or whatever is they're like, oh, we don't find undervalued cattle.

And what you learn is like, there's always something on the market report that's undervalued. So like when you talk about feeder cattle, and we're talking about this last night, every pound you put on a cow for some reason is generally worth less than less per pound. So you learn to run a cattle square, which is a quick calculation of like you're evaluating. If I sell this 700 pound steer for this amount of dollars and I buy back this 500 pound steer, what is the value of the gain? And if the value of the gain is higher than your cost of gain, it's a good buy. But if the value of gain is lower than your cost of gain, you're going to lose money

putting that weight on the cattle. So it's like an evaluation tool, which fits my personality so well. So before I ever go buy cattle, if it's breeding cattle, I run a big intrinsic value calculation based off of the lightest market report, or I run a cattle square if I'm buying feeder cattle. And then I know the numbers that work for me. And that only works for me in my operation because my cost to keep a cow or cost to put a pound on a cow is going to be different than yours. So that also means that you could, what is undervalue to you is different than me. So it's not like we're taking advantage of each other. It's a, it takes a really, it took me like a

year to wrap my mind around it. And I had to sit down and draw out a lot of cattle squares. And then with the advent of AI and what I've automated, I don't have to do them by hand anymore. But I still like doing them. Yeah. I love showing them people. But once I learned that, it unlocked the power of, like, I'm not going in there and gambling with my money. I'm going to go, if I put a bid card in with my order buyer, like those are the numbers. And he might call me and say, we didn't get any bought. And that's fine. I'd much rather not spend money and not lose it than waste it. And we might just have to go to another sale or just wait a couple weeks. I do my, I do my buying of my own breeding stock or, you know, cowcalf stuff. And I know when I walk in the barn, my barn card

is different than other people's. And that, I think it's fun. Like, I love that environment. It's competitive to me, like calling a NASCAR race. And, you know, there's been days. I come home and the trailer's empty, and there's been days where I'm calling the banker. Like, how much money you want to give me right now? I think you have. whatever. But yeah, I think that's the big thing. And then a big thing that John instilled in me or that whole team did was I didn't understand the set of a, I didn't understand the value of a good set of financials for the rest of the people on my team. And I haven't talked about that enough. But even though it's just me and my wife as the owners, and then we have, we love employing

high school kids. We got Ryder, Connor, Lane. Sometimes those guys work, like they're, I think they're all fencing right now with my buddy Josh, who's the fencing contractor I hired. And I just said, well, just hire the kids that usually work for me and you pay them. That's fine. Like, we want to keep them in our community. Um, but we have an accounting team. We have a bookkeeping team. I consider my banker, a partner. I consider my insurance agent a partner. Like, I have a, I feel like, am I my lawyer? I feel like I've assembled a badass team of people. They might not be on my payroll, but they are, and they're not above me. I don't get direction from my banker, but they sit beside me. And having, for the banker specifically,

having a solid set of financials that are always dialed in and she can call me and I can give her any number or I can go get her any number I need, I know that means a lot to those banks. And especially right now, Ag Banking is tough. So if I can make their job easier and I can be a better customer to them, like I'm only giving myself an advantage over the competition.

So before we get off of this, I want to throw something in there. one of the first things that you got to have if you're going to make any business work on your own and specifically what you talked about is you have to have discipline. Yeah. Because the analogy you gave of, you know, you buy, you're buying, you don't want to get attached to it. And a lot of people have a problem with that. And the easy analogy I can give to that is like everybody's had a neighbor that bought a dog

and they felt guilty buying the dog. So they got another dog and bred the dog. And then they were going to sell the puppies. And then you go over there and you wonder why they have five dogs running around because they got too attached to them and they couldn't sell them. And so now instead of having one dog, they have five. And, you know, well, that's the thing. you have to look at those cattle or those hogs or that crop that is a tool to turn your money

and the more times that you can turn that's the thing that really blew my mind when we had john on here because and i we talked about this last night in my mind the cattle business my entire adult life and growing up there's only two kind of people around here that I know of or that I knew of that raised cattle. And that is the guys that had cow calf and then they sold the calves or they finished them out or you had the guy that had the cattle lot and he bought feeder cattle and he finished them out. Now what I realize is there is an insane number of combinations that you can do but you have to be disciplined and that's the I think the mental side of the sell buy is it's a mind shift that when you buy something,

you already know that you're going to sell it. And the only thing that changes that time frame of when you're going to sell it is if you find a better, you find a better value that you can say, okay, I can sell these today and trade it for something else that has better profit potential and feed that instead. Yep. But you can't get attached. You also can't get, you also just, you can't get, you can't get, you can't get set in your ways because that's why like you have to live in today, meaning the market's going to, what you

buy right now, and you have to, you think you know what the end game is. And cattle are, they progress, meaning bread cows get more bread until they have calves. Then they get bread again, they have more calves. Feed your cattle, you want to put on weight, right? Um, so they, they have a flow to them. So you need to know where you're at on that, on that flow. But just because you think that you're going to buy a trimester one bread cow and you're hoping to sell her as a trimester three or a payer, well, the market might shift on you. And there's going to be times when it doesn't work out. Um, but hopefully you've bought well enough that most of your capital still there and you kind of going back to your virgin buys. Like you might run out of time like

on feeder cattle. You can't go backwards on them. You're not going to take weight off a cow. So you really just have to keep that open mind and the discipline has to be in that you're running the numbers for the market report today. And that is where the power of AI has been cool for me. Yeah. Let's get into that. But I want to just say one thing like we talked about this at breakfast. You know, you growing up, you said everybody, what was so, appealing to hogs was that you could get, you could turn them faster than cattle. What's appealing with chickens is you can turn them faster than pigs and cattle. But now you're kind of real, we're kind of realizing that, because you always said, well, cattle, you're lucky if you can turn

them, you know, it's going to take a year to turn them, year plus to do whatever. Two years, two years to turn them, right? But now we're kind of realizing, no, not if you play the game like this. Yeah. So, because there's so many classes. Yep. Of cattle. So, like, let's talk about some, I want to make sure that I'm not the guy who doesn't offer any solutions. So the custom grazing was one thing that really helped us out. That same year, when I'm looking at, I don't own very much. But I have a nice set of pens and, you know, head shoot and working facilities so I can properly handle. We didn't skimp on safety.

My wife's out there helping me run the head shoot. We bought a nice head shoot that restricts cattle that she can operate. We just bought her a new one, even better. That restricts them even more. And it's better for the cattle and there's lower stress. So one thing I looked at when I'm like, I only have so many grazable. acres and with the rain I get is beholden to how much forage I grow. So at the time a couple years ago, when I would look at a market report and I would look at a 500 pound number one black

steer and I would look at a 500 pound number one black bull, if there was enough money between those, meaning like the market was valuing a steer $250 more than the bull, there was a lot of times I could go buy what you would call cutter bulls, which means I could go buy a load of bulls, turn them in the steers in 45 days. My local sale barn has a program where if you'll sign an affidavit and put the serial numbers of the vaccinations down on there or have the vet write you a note,

you put a special tag in their ear, and then the buyers know, I mean, you're putting your name and your reputation in, and those order buyers know when those cattle come through the ring that what has been done to those cattle is what you say. So there was a long time where, without ever introducing those cattle to my herd, I could in 45 days,

I could do as many 45-day turns as I wanted when the market allowed. There has to be enough, there had to be enough margin to pay me for my time, pay me for my feed, and pay me for the risk of, that's a risky endeavor. Like, especially when it gets hot in the summer and you have flies and infection, like you're castrate in a cow. But you can turn that crank as fast as you want, if you're willing to do the labor and if you can find the feed resource, and I'm not taking away from my cow, calf herd out there.

I did that. The funny part was I was doing that, doing that, and that window was tightening until it wasn't worth doing that. But then we got to the fall. And when I sold a group, the most undervalued thing by far was there was in the fall, we talked about how a lot of the order buyers don't, they take off between Thanksgiving and Christmas, there was a lot of like flyweight heifers standing around, which a weaned heifer is not really a, you don't know yet if she's going to be a breeding heifer, like we're a placement heifer, or she might be a, feeder heifer, and you don't have to really decide yet. But I just knew that they were the

undervalued thing. And we do have a thing called grass fever around me. When people start cranking their lawnmowers, and the guys got some pasture sitting around, they go to the sale barn to buy cows. And the nice thing about heifers, and again, you have to actually look at the numbers and make sure, but a heifer generally will appreciate in value up until she's, you know, she goes from a weaned heifer to a replacement style heifer, which means she's mature enough to breed, and she's a bread heifer, then she's hopefully a, a first calf, cow calf pair. And then the big thing is if she breeds back on time the second time, then she's pretty proven breeding female. So you have a lot of time on that run.

And then you can talk about cow depreciation, all that stuff. But I would, I would buy, so that, that year I turned a big group of just rewined heifers through the winter, ran them back around. They don't look great through the winter on my feed program, but then when the grass greened up a little bit, we grazed them for a little while. They popped out. They looked great.

And we had grass fever. They were very overvalued when we took them to the sale barn. Took them to the sale barn. You know what I was able to buy? I was able to sell an open heifer. And I had made a goal for revenue reasons. I wanted to have enough revenue at the end of 2024, let's say. I was like, all right, to make that revenue,

need like 50 calves to sell. Did not have that many cows with, I did not have that many spring cows bred. So I was able to sell those heifers. Let's just throw some numbers out there. Sell the heifers for $2,700. And I was buying back cow calf pears at $2,000. So now I have the same amount of mouths to feed. But that cow has already done the work. She has the dividends check on her side. Yeah. That's just like a thing where I'm from that maybe people run out of hay. So come January and February, we're getting a little warm weather. A lot of guys have been feeding hay three, four, five months. Maybe they got some bills after Christmas. I'll start to notice what I call a skinny pair in the sail barn where you're not

sure why they're there. That's different than trash cattle. Like I've been burned on some trash cattle that never turn out. I'm the first one who's bought some junk. But some of these work out really well. And we'd come out of COVID and be open and honest of the tools I use. I bought an LRP contract for more and I owned. And I did that so I could go to my banker and say, like, if I have this many calves, I'm guaranteed this price. If the market falls in October, I have, that's my risk mitigation. And I was in there buying, I had my calves contracted at $1,900 on November or October. And I'm buying pairs for 2000. 2000. Run them all summer. We split the pairs. I sold the calves and sold the cows. in fact, some of those cows, they just needed some groceries, and I didn't even sell them.

That is kind of how I've built my herd. Like, by who does well, who breeds back, stays, sold the calves. I think I immediately turned around that. I think my next trade was I was basically selling number, I try to sell a number one calf if I can do it. I was selling number one calves that year, and I think I was buying back spring bread cows, which spring bread cows in the fall were the under. valued thing because a lot of people, there's not a lot of spring breeders around me. So a lot of those are people like out of time cows and they don't want to pay to feed them back around.

Taring those back around to the spring. And then the following summer, I was selling pairs in the spring because they were so overvalued, just the way the grass was growing on how much rain we got. And I was buying fall bread cows running them all summer when it's my cheapest time to run. And at all times keeping the same amount of, I was at scale and keeping the same amount of capacity. I was using all those inflection points throughout the year to sell what's overvalued, buy back what's undervalued, capture the appreciation or the money between, and still have livestock. That's the game.

Right. That's the game right there. If you back up, there is a whole lot of people. They would have been tickled pink. They would have been tickled pink if you, they would have only done the second step, where you sold, you sold those feeder calves that you got. and you were able to sell them as heifers, $2,700, and then you saw the bargain of buying cow-calf pairs,

and they would have said, heck, I got these cows, I'm going to sell these calves, and that's going to get me most of my money back, and I'm basically getting these cows for free. I'm going to build my herd. They would have never done anything else. Like that would have been, and not that that's wrong. It's not.

But if you have the mentality of turning your money, because we haven't really talked about this and if we need to go back. But this idea that your money, it's kind of like you're running your own investment fund. Yep. That's a great analogy. Yeah. So there's only three things you can do to be more profitable. You can lower your overheads, your input cost, which you can do that to a point until you hurt your business. The great thing was, I went to ranching for profit before I really started my business. So I just never strapped overheads on my business that they couldn't sustain, mainly because I'm a cheap ass, which is fine. It's funny.

Part of me hiring ranch right was to whip me to know when to spend more money to make more money, because if anything, I was bad about that. You're too conservative. Yep. Or you can raise your gross margins, which is get more for your product, which is kind of like adding value in some way. Like I was doing those steer calves when I was knocking the nuts off of them and vaccinating them and straighten them out.

or you can have more turnover, which means don't do either of those, but turn your money more times within a year. So when your business needs to make money to pay the bills and you don't subsidize it with another business, like you don't know how bad you want oxygen till you're under the water. So like that's for me how I had to play it. Yeah, I was going to say that.

One, I was going to say by listening to this, it's also, I think, really important. and to do what you're doing, you have to be versatile. You can't be boxed in. It's important to have your operation set up in a way that you can do multiple things or you can

have different types, different classes of cattle and be able to handle it. That way you can play that arbitrage of the market. But also I was going to ask, you've bootstrapped. I mean, have you, so this entire time for the most part when you started the ranch,

has this ranch paid its own way? And not been subsidized by any of the other stuff you've been doing? So Taylor Moyer bought the land. And the way I ran this operation from the beginning, again, I'm thankful for ranching for profit. It should be ranching for profit commercial. But I'm thankful that I started this way that Ridgeview Land and Cattle is the operating company.

They own the cattle. They own the facilities and a little bit of equipment we have. It's like its own package. But it pays Taylor Moyer. The cows pay Taylor Moyer lease on my place. the same way they pay my, the guy that I lease land from down the road, and the same way that pays our custom grazer now. But that, that makes it so clear as far as what the cows can afford to pay.

So, like, so if lease land comes available in my town, I know exactly what I can afford. And I know what I can't afford. Sometimes the easiest money to make is the money you don't spend and the government can't tax you on it again. I about jumped into a big property that was way too expensive, but I was like, man, I just need more ground. And I'm thankful I didn't.

but I did put in some initial seed money, but I am now paying myself back. So I put in some initial seed money, because you have to, to buy the first sets of cows. And that's when I didn't, I was a little scared of banks. Like, you know, I was a little bit Dave Ramsey until I learned a lot of fiscal responsibility, and then I was Robert Kiyosaki,

which is funny because as you learn the ranching for profit, people. I always say that ranching for profit is Dave Ramsey, teaches your responsibility, and then John Haskell is Robert Kiyosaki. That's a good analogy. Debt is different than leverage, and you have to understand the difference, and then you learn how to use them. So I put in some seed money. It was my money. I've skinned the game, forced myself while I was building my relationship with the bank. And actually, a big milestone that I hit last year that I don't mind sharing was, and it was in, we are very intentional about writing down our goals. And the reason I am, at the beginning, I thought it was hocus, pocus,

but now I keep hitting my goals and I'm like, maybe there's something to this. In December, I just wrote down the thing about another climate zone and get some cattle off of my care and all that. And we, gosh darn, darn it came true. So, like, I'm pretty focused on that. But I had written it in our goals that I wanted to, I wanted the ranch to stand on its own, meaning that I didn't want any of my personal collateral.

So I was able to accomplish that this year, make our operating company worth enough money that it had the collateral to cover everything. Whereas when I run this thing in the ground playing John Wayne or whatever, my wife and kid, we still have our home that I built and whatever. Like, I'm not a gambler, right? So I'm not going to put up the family home or whatever. So that was a big milestone for us last year,

and I was proud to hit that. But I had to have that relationship with the bank in a couple years of showing them. And I will say about the way that I operate, I think one of the biggest challenges, and this is why my banker is my partner, is there's a big education curve for them. You got underwriters that still approve that stuff. They're like, what is this kid doing? So, like, I had to have the paper trail. So, you know, when you got an operating line of credit or like a cow note, and it would be too easy for them at the end of the year to just be like, well, he looks like a traditional, whatever, he takes out the money and he puts it back in.

And no, I really like brought them in to show them the turns to show the ROI on each turn. And I'm like, hey, look at the bank accounts going up and I'm paying back the loans to elevate this. But it is, it's non-traditional enough that it behooves you to educate the bankers so they understand. And I have a fabulous banker, two of them. And that they, we just got lunch the other day. And I treat them as equals and they treat me as an equal. And that's the relationship that I appreciate. So, okay, let's go into AI.

Okay. And I want to go into AI for general business, but I want to, let's, since we're on your operation, let's talk about how you use AI for Ridgeview and cattle right now. I can just go get a snack. Yeah. I can just go to the snack bar. And for all you listening, you know, you aren't going to hear anything out of me for the next 20 minutes. These two, this is just like a bromance going.

Yeah. what I want to know is what are the what are the things like you said the USDA puts out this report and I know that you say that you have Claude go and read this and so I want to know what are the tools you're using for for your your farming business your ranching business but then what are the projects or the things that you have set up automated that help you as an operator yep So when I think of AI, I think there's plenty of fear mongering and all that. But I think of AI the same way I think of an Excel spreadsheet or a calculator on your phone. It's only as good as the inputs you put in it.

And if there was a skill that I had in life that I'm proud of, is like when I was a crew chief, I liked training young race engineers and like building them into the race engineer that I liked. So I got pretty good at putting complex terms into layman's terms to express things to people. which is different than like a really, really, really smart person of which I'm not, that just assumes people should know things. So I'm able to break things down. So I was like, man, anything that I'm doing calculation-wise over and over and over again, if I can just teach AI these concepts, then it can do it for me. So that is kind of what I did. I just spent some time with Claude teaching it things like intrinsic value calculation

or running a cattle square. Those are some of the marketing things that I have it do. So then what I was able to automate using Claude Co-work was, which is when you can schedule things to happen in AI without you having to give a command. Our local sale barn sells on Wednesday. So on Wednesday night, the USDA post a report of what my local market is.

Over here, as well as I keep my whole cattle inventory in, I keep a whole cattle inventory pipeline in Claude. So it knows every cow I have. It knows the age of the cow. Everything it needs to know about the cows, vaccinations, all that stuff. So every Thursday night, or sorry, every Thursday morning, it takes the local sale barn report and then it compares it to the cattle that I own every single one individually, or it breaks it into classes, but it can do it individually. And it on Thursday morning, it on Thursday morning, tells me right now what everything I own is worth. And I'm not like using that to change my balance sheet. I'm just using that to get a clear picture of these are the cows that I heard that the people at the sale barn are valuing right now. And these are the ones that they're not valuing. So if I wanted to sell something, I should look at selling these that are valuable. And look at buying these. Yeah, and look at buying this class of animal. Exactly. So it does an intrinsic value calculation on all my reading stock. It also does a cattle square on all of the upcoming calves. So for me, mainly,

it's cowcalf pairs or some replacement stuff that I've kept. It tells me, like, if you were to sell this right now, here's what you'd buy to buy back to make some money. It doesn't mean I go to the sail barn every week. In fact, I only probably make like two to four turns a year, depending on what it is. But it's keeping track of those relationships and it's doing it in real time to give me the ability to always know when you're standing out with your cows, what's worth the most? Because it's not, what's worth a lot to you is not worth,

might not be worth the same to you or your dad. The sale barn is where people, you have to go off of that. That's where people are willing to put their money and pay. Now, it's funny because I sell a lot of cattle private treaty, because I like relationships with people, and I like to try to build customer relations. The other thing I like is,

it doesn't lead to a lot of profitability, but the genetic side of things I really do enjoy. So one of the ways that I'm able to have more of the genetics that I enjoy around is I use my bulls to breed cows and then sell bread cows. Whenever I sell those bread cows to people, I always say, hey, I want first option to buy those calves back. So it's basically like buying my own calves back and having somebody else raise them. I don't always, I'm not always able to buy them if they're super overvalued. But sometimes I want them and I buy them back. So like my little big chief has got babies everywhere, you know.

He's happy because he gets to do the job he loves the most. And then my customers are happy because he raises good calves. So that's one of the big things is that AI is always constantly evaluating my herd. So it's helping you tremendously on the marketing side. It's keeping you informed on what your cattle are worth, where are the buying opportunities, where are the selling opportunities? and you're getting that every single week automated report handed to you automatically it's not like you've got so explain that so you use clod yeah clot is your would you say clod is your number one

tool right now that's your number one like that's your co-ceeo that's the one that knows what's going on and ridgeview and every other thing that you're involved in yep and it's helping you make decisions going and finding information keeping you organized keeping you on track yep what other tools are you using Um, really just Claude. And it's the tools I've built in Cloud. Now I do use, um, like I have cloud connected to other things. I use co-work within Cloud and I have it connected to other things. Like I have it connected to Google Sheets. So everything I do is making a good old spreadsheet in the background. My fear is always like, Anthropic, whatever happens to Anthropic tomorrow happens to Anthropic and some other, I need to go to some other AI model. So I like built

some AI architecture. I have like this thing called the Master Brief, which is me, and written out form. And to do that, I didn't sit down and write 20 pages. I told Claude, I'm writing a master brief for this business called Ridgey Landing Cattle. I need you to interview me as thoroughly as possible to get all the information out of me. That's the master brief. And then for every like system I build, like an intrinsic value calculator or a Cattle Square or my daily brief, which we should talk about, or what's my other big one? For each of those systems, there's like a little subset of instructions. And that's what Claude goes to every time you open it up. It reads those instructions on who is Taylor, what position does Cloud hold as co-CEO, what things are they

responsible for, and what tasks are they going to carry out. So I have Cloud connected to always be spitting out Google Sheets as like backup files and updating these system prompts and master prompts on Fridays and storing them locally. So I've always got those. My fear is if all this goes away, I need to be able to go back to my Excel spreadsheets and stuff. So the big one that I do daily with AI, which is great, is I stole this straight from Dan Martel. I get a news bulletin in the morning that is Taylor Moyer News. Taylor, Moire, Ridgeland, and Cattle News. It's your own New York Times, personalized to you. I ask it to give me local weather based off of all four weather models in its predictions. I ask it to give me any news on frontier AI models to make sure that I'm

in the top 1% of AI users in agriculture. I ask it to give me the local market report. state market report, regional market report, and national market report. Because all that stuff comes out on different days to tell me, I ask it to give me, it's keeping track of my like what's coming up in Ridgeview. So like everybody's got tasks they don't want to do. Claude's really good at telling you, reminding you like, hey, you need to get that paperwork done for that bull registration. Yeah. And I think that's a good point that you use it for too is it's also you have a task list, but it is going through and checking the boxes and then telling you what you didn't get done. Yeah, it's like a great executive assistant. Yeah. And I've tailored it

to be exactly the executive assistant. And it's ever changing every week. Like a big one lately has been, hey, give me everything I need to know about New World Screw Room. Like pull from all these places. Yeah. The thing is, as I keep teaching it, it knows more and more context about my business. I don't have financial information in there yet. Maybe I'll get there someday, but I'm not settled in that yet. No, I haven't run some calculations for me. But it doesn't know.

I mean, it doesn't have my banking information. It's not connected to my accounts. I don't have it sending emails for me. I do use it to help me draft some emails because it writes better than I do. Yeah. The daily brief is something that I really like. Because it's like, man, how do you keep up

with all the knowledge learning curves of all that stuff? well, have it give you a brief. The cool thing I asked it to do that, again, I stole this, was for every bit of news it gives me, it gives me a blurb and italics under it. That's like, why does this matter to you in your business? And it gives me context of why it gave it to me. And the other thing to know about AI is like, it's a junk in, junk out, and it will hallucinate. So you can't just, you can't just trust it arbitrarily.

Right. There's times where I'm like, did you lie to me? It doesn't want to disappoint you. Right. you need to treat it like a young kid you're trying to teach. Yeah. That doesn't want to disappoint its dad is how I feel about it. Yeah, one other thing.

When you're, people that are hearing this might think like, man, that's a lot, that's a lot of typing. Like when you're doing that master brief and all that, the setup, but you didn't actually have to type that. So what do you use to interface with? Yeah, sorry. Yeah, you guys know about that. I use Whisper. So it's a thing you, I like, hold two keys on my computer. and speak to it and it's transcribing.

It's a secondary app that transcribes a lot better than any of the AI models, but I'd like to get some exercise. I stand on a walking pad and I talk to my computer. My wife thinks I'm crazy, but I can do four hours worth of work in 45 minutes. It's amazing when you realize you can use whisper flow to basically chat with Claude and not type everything,

how much time you save. Oh my gosh, yeah. So this other great thing I use Cloud for, and I stole this right for my friend, uh, friend Garth Gadsden at a Missouri. What's up, Garth? He's a young producer that I think the world of. He's a lot like me. Um, and he has a, he did an internship with a guy named Luke Perman,

Rock Hills Rancher, who I think a lot of too. Luke does a lot of partnership deals and he's been a lot of podcast talking about it. And Luke, uh, Garth introduced me to Luke and Luke and I talk about AI, but something I heard that Garth did that I straight stole was he took, he took Warren Buffett's, Warren Buffett writes an annual letter. every year and he writes it as if he's writing to his sister. He doesn't write it like he's writing to technical people within his business. He puts his heart and soul in that thing. And as a guy who used to trade a lot of stocks, my grandpa taught me like, read those annual letters. Like everything you need to know about the businesses in there. If it's just a bunch of bullshit, maybe it's not

the best place to put your money. But I'm like, man, Warren Buffett's annual letters, like real big. I downloaded his last annual letter. I gave it to Claude and I said, look, Ridgerie's going to write an annual letter. And I stole this from Garth. So whatever. I said, Ridgey's going to write an annual letter. It doesn't need to be a million pages. It's going to be a 10-pager, but I want it written the same style. And I'm not going to write it. I want you to interview me based off of Warren Buffett's annual letter at the end of the year so I can write one. And I just need you to interview me. And I probably worked on it all December because I would let it interview me and then other thoughts would come up. I'm like, oh, crap, I need to put that in there and I go back. And at the

end of the year, I sent it to everybody on my team. Bankers, accounting, bookkeeping, gave it to my wife. I even sent it to other buddies that are entrepreneurs to inspire them and hopefully interest them in my business. And it's funny, one of my best friends is in construction. And him and I have so many high-level business conversations, and he deals in dump trucks and bulldozers and I dump deal in cows. And just to push each other. And what I actually came down to was, man, at this year, and John Haskell is the one who inspired me to do this. He said, well, great, you got this automatic system. You just talk to it.

Do it at the end every month. The information's a lot fresher on your mind. Man, I think this year's is going to be badass. And I hope what I can do is look back and it's like a roadmap or I hope I look forward and who knows how much we grow and I need to bring an investor or something somebody wants to know, but everything's documented now.

But it's documented because it's so easy. Like what I did last year would have taken me 20 hours to write by hand. That took me probably four. hours of all the times we went back. But this year, it's 15 minutes at the end every month. I mean, and then it asked me a couple, it asked me a couple standard questions, like, what was your rainfall for this month? It asked me a couple standard questions as well that also are like the monthly things that I backflow into my system. Like my rainfall,

I have this crazy grazing chart that tells me, I know this is going to surprise a shit out of you, but I know exactly what every one inch of rainfall is worth in dollars, because I know exactly what every one inch of rainfall is worth in stock days per acre on my farm. And then I know how many acres it takes to put a pound on a cow and then I can look at a market report and say that's worth that much money. It's also how I keep track of my soil health to know if is what I, if I'm gaining more stock days per acre when I annualize that and normalize it to one inch of rain, is my land getting healthier and it can support more cows? Or am I taking some deposits out of the nutrient bank account and it can't? So I've seen all my stock days per acre go up.

So anyway, to backfill that whole chart, it's got to ask me some standard questions like, you know, based off my grazing chart, how much rain did we get, how many stock days per acre, did you consume that month, stuff like that. Yeah, I think the biggest thing for people to wrap their head around, the AI can organize your life and your business. Like for me, the biggest uplift that I've seen from using it is

I do not miss a single to-do for what I need to do for the farm, the media business, any of it. Because Claude is plugged into all of the meetings that I have and all the notes that come from those meetings. It knows all the tasks that I have currently in my to-do list. It knows what tasks I need to do to push projects forward. It keeps me organized to know what I need to be doing. and where we're going on a week-to-week basis. Because I have an interview me to do a weekly review. I have a daily brief just like Taylor does to get my own New York Times specialized to me

so I can be a top 1% AI user. I think that is, if you're going to do nothing else, AI can be huge for you to get organized. The agentic letting AI go and do work for you, it's still, it's there. but it's still early stages and it's getting better and better and I'm playing around with that. I know you're playing around with that.

And I think if you can advance and get into that realm as well, that's just a plus. That's an add to your AI skill set. And I'm learning that. Taylor's learning that. But man, what it can do for you

if you just get in there and get a system of organization to document your processes, document what you're doing in your business, help you stay organized, you will see how much more productive you can be. And you won't miss anything. That for me is the biggest, biggest thing. It's like, when you got, and you know this, when you got a million, you got, what do you

always say? When you got 50 hamsters running in a three hamster cage, it's hard to keep it all straight. It's hard to know what all your to-dos are. But when you have this co-CEO running beside you that sees all the things that come on your plate and can organize it and tell you, hey, These are the things you got to watch out for. Hey, don't forget about this. It's huge.

Well, I'll give you one. I'll give you one. It's the value of the prompt, too. Like, the stuff that once you get comfortable using it, then there are all these things that you, like, you never even thought of. And I'll give you an example that you, I didn't think this up, but you did. I listened to a lot of podcasts.

and I'm recently been listening to a lot of John's podcasts. And the whole, I'm not going to lie, the whole cattle world is, it's kind of, it's kind of my thing right now. It's fascinating to me. I've done my job. And so I've been listening to a lot of different podcasts. You're placed Tesla. I'm telling Sawyer this, and I'm trying to tell him all the shit I've learned, you know, and I can't remember everything.

And Sawyer goes, what you need to do is you need to set up a file in your Google Drive, and you need to take the transcripts from all these podcasts and save the transcript and then tell Claude to analyze the transcripts and analyze it and then give you the high points of the themes and what you know what you're trying to learn from it and it'll spit you out a summary and I'm like damn that's smart because I listen to so much but how much of that you actually how is your retention yeah how much the nice thing about a podcast is like and I do this, I'll go back and listen to it, but

that is the value of the prompt. Once you get used to using it, you'll just use it more. You get smarter and you'll realize the power of it and you'll come up with new concepts and ideas that you didn't think of originally when you started because you understand the capability of what it can

do. And so it'll make you better at learning. It can make you more organized. You can create tools. I mean, shit, we, and this is a big kudos to Taylor and the rest of the guys on the here at Barn Talk, we have built a complete dashboard for our business regarding analytics, financials, organizing the guest pipeline of who's coming on to the show. You know, if we get sponsors organizing, you know, how are we going to make, give them, give them deliverables, you know,

think like all of it. How are we going to keep the lights on? How are we going to keep the lights on? We have, or we have literally organized and built something with AI to track all of that stuff. And that's just, I just want to, I'm saying all this to tell you, if you want to be a better operator, I can't say hi, I cannot recommend enough to get into AI and start using it. I mean, you, I mean, I know you probably can say the same thing. Like, yeah, it's insane. I would say that anybody that's reluctant to try it because they don't think they need one more thing to do, AI is only the second thing in business I've ever spent money on that's actually bought me more time. I don't use AI so I can do more shit. I use AI so I can do the things I have to do

so I can do the Yehaw Cowboy shit I want to do or spend more time with my daughter. That's really wouldn't. Yeah, I wish I was, I wish I had a horse and I rode and all that fun stuff. But, you know, the first one was like hiring teammates, like an accounting team. You know, I knew needed a solid set of numbers. I could, I could fumble my way through QuickBooks and probably have that, but it wasn't, there's value in paying for that. So that stuff is always tip top. And I just pay $200 a year for Claude. And I'm not willing to put any more tokens in the machine. My business is only so sophisticated. When I run out of usage, that's fine. It's time to go outside and work. Like that's, I don't, it doesn't need me to, I, you can't make cattle grow

any faster. You can't make the grass grow any faster. It just lets me get the office work done. and have confidence that the office work is done well and write how I want it in a more efficient matter of time so I can go do the other things in life I want to do. It's not like I'm not letting it make me get 100 times more work done in the office in the same amount of time. I guess if that makes sense. I'm being intentional about that. I want time back to spend on my daughter to read books.

I think I'm just at the point in my life where money has a value, but time is way more valuable. Freedom too. Well, I know that from the NASCAR world. Like, we talked about, we're talking about some heavy shit, but like, you know, we talked about how me and my wife go to concerts all the time because for 15 years, I didn't have freedom of schedule to see the people that I, music's very important to me. So me and Leah have made up a lot of time going to concerts all the time, all over the country, because we never had that freedom in our lives.

And that's something that's important to us. So, yeah, I'm not using it to cure cancer. I'm just using it to make me more efficient with the time. I spend working so I can do the things outside of work? And I think a lot of people just look at AI as a broad brush and say, well, I just don't support that because I don't want to turn into a cyborg. Like, we're not advocating for you to make this your, like I say this all the time. I'm not advocating for you to be pro AI 100% and that you're, just because you use AI means that you support every data center going up everywhere, that you want to integrate.

great AI and put a chip in your brain eventually. That's not what I'm saying. And I don't think that's what you're saying. What we're saying is these tools are available for you to use. You can learn them and you're going to be more efficient and you're going to be happy that you did it. And it's still so early. It's still so early. Like the amount of people that are actually using AI and no AI outside of chat GPT, that's a small percentage. And it's early and you can be one of those people, and I'm just telling you. Well, we didn't talk about this much, but one of the reasons I do work with guys like you when I work for land trust, a lot of people are like, why wouldn't you just, like, why wouldn't

you just go build fence or go run a tractor? I know how valuable, without land trust and without Rob, our CTO, and Nick, our CEO, um, they push us to learn these tools, which at first, you know, I don't really like change. I'm kind of old school in that. But man, once I learn the value, so now it's like, man, those companies that I work for, that pushes my personal business in life. Like, it's so beneficial to my personal business.

Like, that's where I'm learning. Like, kind of crazy they pay me because I learned so much, which I then employ in my personal business. And the tools we use AI for on that side of thing is crazy. You know, we got Cody, who's a product guy, and he is still a designer for sure, and he has an artistic touch, but he uses it. The whole team of engineers we have,

the ability they have to then, to iterate our stuff now because, and I don't even, I'm not going to lie to you that I even know how those guys write code, but I know all the models they're using the right code, and we are making progress on the land trust side to help landowners make more money,

like just that darn fast, with a very small, very robust group of people. And this is the, cool thing about land trust or even the way I operate is like time zones. Like we've got our engineers in Europe all the way to guys and girls in every single time, guys and girls in every single time in the U.S. Like we're working all the time and now with these AI tools we can pass tasks to each other. So when Jacob, sorry Jacob, I don't remember exactly where you live, wherever he's at in Europe, when he goes to bed and Erison picks it up, who's in Washington, like, we're almost working twice

as, almost working 24 hours a day on the same team. Like, you can, like, you can go fast. Yeah. Which is neat. You can be small and go fast and do a lot of shit quick. Yep. And do it well. Like, we don't,

we didn't have, we don't have to have 100 employees anymore. Not that we ever have, but yeah. You know. Yeah. Well, I think we should touch on land.

We should try, we should touch on, um, land trust. Yeah. Uh, a little bit. And,

and, and how that's evolved. And if you, like, talk about, talk about, talk about, a little bit on how you use it in your operation and what it is, because I know we talked about it a

little bit on your first episode, but we should touch on in a little bit. Well, yeah, I think the one thing I didn't say when you're asking about my operation specifically, number one was definitely know your numbers. And, but number two was like, my operations diverse under the same set of overheads, meaning like you guys have under, you understand how many classes of cattle I run with the same set of overheads, which is cattle overheads. The great thing is all those cattle overheads can also go to like agritourism overheads. I already own the land. I already have the pretty creeks and the big trees and the beautiful places. So land trust for me, letting people from the public come to my land and experience that was a no-brainer as long as I could be covered liability-wise.

I couldn't afford to have any liability. So like that's how I found land trust. How can I bring people to my ranch? For this specific case, it was to take photos. It was a friend that's a photographer. She was asking, can I meet clients there? I got no problem with it at first. And I'm like, I don't know any of these clients. And she's meeting them from Charlotte and, you know, you trust people. But electric fences, bulls, broken ankle, whatever. So land trust was just the easiest way to like turnkey, monetize the agritourism on your place.

And I don't do any hunting, but we have a lot of people throughout the U.S. And now, actually, Mexico, we have some properties down there who do very well with hunting and land trust. We just do the agritourism thing at my house. we have to market that, but that's where the social media thing comes in. We have a couple different photographers and we collaborate on photos and somebody sees like,

damn, that's a beautiful photo. Where'd you have that? Oh, at the Wildflower Patch at Ridgeview. What's Ridgeview? They share the link to the land trust. They book it. There could be stuff going on right now. At my house, I don't have to be there.

It is great. Yep. That was just like a no-brainer for adding a revenue source. That's easy. I mean, you can be as involved or as uninvolved as you want to be. Yeah.

We have, we, we, we, 90% of the land trust landowners are, you know, commercial ag operations. We don't do like pumpkin patches or, not there's anything wrong with that. We're just not set up to handle that. These commercial operators, there's guys that see their guests

and meet them at the front gate, and there's guys that never do. They, we've worked hard to give those guests a set of instructions to park at this gate. Here's the boundaries. We give them the on-X map. you know, maybe check out on their way out, whatever the landowner set of instructions are.

But the other thing that is great about that is all of that revenue goes, it's not top line revenue. There's no expense. It goes straight to the bottom line. So it's like this perfect little thing that is also scalable for whatever amount of effort you want to put into it,

which we all know in ag, you can't control the weather, you can't control the politicians, you can't control the Black Swan events, Can't control the markets, but the agritourism side, it's almost a linear correlation about, within reason, about how much effort you want to put in to use that as a tool to make that revenue source. Because that's what we have. We have examples of on the succession planning side, daughter-in-law, son-in-law, anti-uncle, retired person, like they make the agritourism their thing,

and sometimes they get real passionate about it and they pull that lever hard and it hammers down. Yeah. And some guys just have, hey, if people want to hunt here, and they find them organically on our site. That's great. And they'll make 10 grand, 20 grand a year and some turkey and white tail hunts or just a thing that sits beside and makes money. But the bankers certainly like it.

Yeah, people have gotten, I mean, there's everything on there from, like, what you talk about, people want to do photo shoots to people that set up, like, they have, some people have like a full hookup RV spot where you can rent the spot, park your RV to tent camping to tell us about the guy that's doing the ride-alongs.

Yeah. So last time I was here, we talked about like, I figured it be in the Midwest. I'm like, my daughter watches farming YouTube every Saturday morning. I'm like, dude, the guys on those farming YouTube are missing the boat. They should rent buddy seat rides and grain carts or combine rides. Kind of as a joke, but sure enough, we've got combine rides out outside of Bozeman, Montana now. We have a big ranch that offers a lot of things, but somebody finally listed it. I don't know if it's been whatever, but some little kid who loves farming YouTube wants to ride in a combine, they're out there where their family's passing through. He can go get an hour harvester ride with them when they're harvesting. He can get 10 minutes and then he'll be asleep.

Yeah, there you go. Spend the next 40 minutes asleep on the floor. Yeah, maybe mom and dad need, you know, get him to take a nap. So whatever. Easiest hour for that. Easiest amount of that farmer's ever made. Yeah. Farmer. Yeah. Man, it's just a tool. It's just a tool to stack more revenue on the acres you've got.

And you and I, we've been talking about cows here and cover crops and crop residue. And it's, I just think that's what we're going to have to go to is. You are going to have to start looking at profit per acre, not, not profit per whatever the other unit of production is. I don't look at weaning. I look at pounds wean per acre. I don't look at pounds wean per cow. Yeah. Because you can be raising pounds wean per cow and going broke very easily.

Right? You generally pay your banknote in acres, not cows. So, yeah, I don't know. The land trust thing's cool. And that company, I've been, I'm blessed to work with them. It's a super good group of guys and girls. And you've got to know some of the other employees. Like, you know, you guys have been in it with us and their heart's in the right place.

Yeah. Well, I just think it's cool that you actually, like, use it. You know, like, you not only work for the, for the... Well, I used it first. Yeah, used it first. Yeah. And then you got involved and, you know, you still use it. And it's a huge...

It helps your bottom line on your ranch. Yeah, and I mean, the hack at the beginning, we don't do this a lot anymore, but we used to go to a bunch of, like, shows and conventions. And those are, like, cool cattle shows I wanted to go to. Like, I went to the big... Oh, there's a big one in Fort Worthy. It went to, like, Southwestern Stock Grazer Association meeting.

And, I mean, every New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Cowboy is there. like the real deal boys. And dude, you get to lean on your booth and talk cows. Like, I'll talk cows to that wall over there. You know that. So I'm getting paid to do that to go to a cattle show I'd want to go to anyway. It was a great, it's a great job for me to do while I'll run my ranch.

Yeah, one more thing we should say about land trust, the advantage of that over just, you know, like when you talked about some photographer, you know, calls you and says, hey, can I come out and shoot? is the insurance side, the legality side, land trust handles all of that so that the landowner is protected from liability. Yes, you are more exposed. If you've ever had people on your land that don't have the same last name,

you are more exposed than if those people came through a land trust listing. We work very, very hard. We have all types of layers of insurance and actually are in the process of getting more voluntary insurance for everybody's different comfort level. Because what we've found is everybody's risk management as far as liability is different.

And some people want every single bit they can cover themselves with and some people want the bare minimum. And then the other thing is every state handles agritourism differently in their state, I don't know what you call it, state constitution or state bylaws. So we've had to get more flexible in that.

But we handle all of that. We handle all the financial transactions, meaning like it's no work to you, we build you a listing on our website and we work a ton on SEO and AEO optimization. So when somebody's at home using chat GPT or Claude, and they're asking, where can I go turkey hunt in Iowa

or where can I go have a photo shoot in North Carolina, we make darn sure that we're the first result they see. So to do what we do on your own, you would need to build a website, go get all the insurances, and then you have to have a ton of technical skills and work on it 24 hours a day to try to keep up with us.

Yeah, try to get it out where people actually find it. Yeah. And I guess the last thing to say, that was we always get this question is people always like, well, how do you make money? We're purely a revenue share. So like we believe in aligning interest, meaning you guys have a land trust listing.

We don't make any money off of you, which is kind of risky because we put all this effort up front to build your listing until you get a booking. Then it's purely an 80-20 split, right? So you get 80% of the booking value and we get 20. So that's how we operate. That's how we're able to. The company's called land trust,

because we're asking people to trust us with their land and have trust in us. So maybe we should list, maybe we should get on there. Maybe we should list like we could sell, people could come watch you and I load pigs. Because it'd be like a comedy, it'd be a tragedy, it'd be like borderline a felony with you and I hitting each other, whatever.

I mean, it could be a whole reality TV. Yeah, it is. That's what you bottle. I mean, that's basically reality TV at this point in the game. Uh-huh. You don't know what you're going to get. No, we don't even know what we're going to have. It's a train wreck.

You can't look away. Right. It's a car crash. You can't look away. Yeah, I think that'd be great. You just get that page made and we'll do her. We'll get on it. Easy, pizy.

All right, so let's shift gears a little bit. I want to ask you just what you think about, the state of agriculture today. You know, I think we talked about this with, we talked about this with like every guess we have on, but what are you optimistic about? What are you pessimistic about? What do you feel about, you know,

the labels of regenerative and conventional? Like, what do you, what's your philosophy on where we're at today in agriculture and what your thoughts are on it? Yeah, I don't think you have to put labels on things. I think there's room for it all. There's always going to be people that, need cheap food and there's always

going to be people that choose to pay for a premium product there's always going to be people in between I think and I think the business models for each have to match the operator and what they're willing to do and their personalities and their state of things which is fine I just don't think there needs

agriculture is small enough there doesn't need to be division within us like we can all give each other a hard time but supporting each other is great you know we talked about this at lunch the way I operate on my grass is way different than my buddy Malachi operates in Utah, right? Like much different practices. Same business principles.

Yeah. I'm optimistic. I think it's a great time. I think people willing to work hard and ag is a supply and demand thing. And when I was looking at getting out of racing, I noticed that farmers and ranchers are getting older and there's no young people to come. So, okay, they need me or somebody needs me. they need my youth, they need my joints that I haven't given up yet. Okay, what is the, what's the set of circumstances I'm under and how can I swing this thing?

I do feel for the guys that are in generational operations and feel a lot of pressure to operate the same way their dad and their grandpa did. I think what worries me is honestly the succession planning events that aren't happening. Yes. And because the one group of people that I don't need to see own the farmland is like the bankers and the lawyers and whatever. Like, I don't want to see families give away their generational wealth because it's uncomfortable to have hard conversations. I would highly recommend if family conversations are hard,

pay the money to bring in a mediator and at least try and do it when minds are sound. Man, I just thought. I don't want to see stuff get more parsed up. But I do have a little hope because I do love old cowboy books and historians. And as we went west, people lose fact. There's this great book called Cattle Kingdom. and the original big, big ranches out west

were not owned by Americans. They were owned by European oligarchs who sent their youngest son over here to raise cattle. And it was the cowboys that were hired and paid to drive them up from Texas and Mexico and then fill out these ranches.

So like this isn't a... The really wealthy people owning a bunch of land and another group of people operating is a problem as old as the U.S. And we've always overcome and endured. And that's the great thing about being Americans is we're pretty savvy folks. So, man, support each other, keep an open and sound mind.

We'll figure all this out. But you don't have to own the land to be an operator. I know people that own a ranching operation that don't own the land and they don't own the cattle and they have pretty big operations. There's a guy, Jim Howell, written a book. He operates on multiple continents under that business model. Yeah. It's pretty neat.

When you're that open-minded, and he's open-minded enough to do it. Yeah. Yeah. the state of agriculture today, or at any given time, really it is its own example of buy-sell economics because... Sell-buye. Yeah, sell-by. Sorry, back that up. It's its own version of sell-by economics because there has never been a time that there's

been more opportunity, but the opportunity, you have to look at things. differently. The opportunity's there if you're willing to do things differently than what kind of what the standard is. And there's guys doing it. Yeah. But it's really tough if you're going to just do it the same way it's always been done. Yeah, you have to be a realist about what marking conditions you're in. But if somebody's building the new Burger King down the road, like they have to do the same thing. Like, yeah, I don't know. It's tough because I've got family ties to a big dairy farm in Virginia and it would tear me apart if we ever lost that ground. So I very much understand that.

I like very much. So I don't know. That's something hard to wrestle with, but that is something truly that is very, that makes big operations very vulnerable. And I hope people can get that, get the help they need to get those things straight, to get through those things as smoothly as possible. That's the only thing I'm pessimistic about. You know, one thing you said to me that stuck with me, and I think we both agreed on this point, was just like, and it's what you just said.

It's there's more opportunity than ever before because there's so many people unwilling to change inside agriculture. There's so much opportunity to change, and the people that do will win and win big, or as big as they want to win because they adopt the change and do the things differently than what granddad did or whatever, right? but there are so many people unwilling to change. And that's where the opportunity lies. And it's constantly involving because I will tell you this. I remember when contract finishing started, and this is a true story. My father-in-law worked for Yoder feeds,

which was a legacy feed company that made its money selling concentrate. And concentrate, has nobody making it. concentrate. Everything is pre-mix, and people buy their own bean meal, and they buy a micro-pack, they make their own feed. So they, the guy that owned Yoder feeds, he saw the handwriting on the wall, and they took a piece of land, and the plan was they were going to build, I want to say, five or six, 1,200 head finishing buildings to custom feed pigs for one of their biggest

customers. And guess what? They built one building and all their other customers through a shit fit and threatened to quit buying their feed from them because they were now competing against them. Gotcha. Well, guess what happened? They stopped. They didn't do it. They in fact sold that piece of land off and some independent guy bought it and did exactly what they said they were going to do and fed for the integrator that they were going to feed for. And within 10 years, not even 10 years, probably five years, didn't matter because they were out of business because all those people that said, we aren't going to buy feed from you, they were all out of business. All that farrowing went away.

I remember when contract finishing was that new idea. And now then it's the standard. And now we have to find a new idea to get another generation started, whether that be in the hog business or the cattle business or grain farming. So what is a new idea today that everybody's like, oh, that'll never work? It's going to work and it's going to become the standard. and then at some point that standard becomes outdated

and the economics change and guess what? We have to find a whole other we have to find another thing. Now there's some things that always, always work. But imagine being the first person to spray Roundup on your Roundup Ready Beans.

What a crazy concept. Wait a minute, I just paid to put the seed in the ground. Now you're going to give me this chemical that kills the grass in the lawn and I'm going to spray it across my beans and it's not going to kill the beans but it's going to kill the weeds between. like, that had to seem like the most radical shit ever. But to you and me, that's normal. And like,

whatever, your opinion on glycophate, whatever it is. But that just, that's a great example, just like you said. Yeah. For sure. I want to get into you personally as an operator as far as just your mindset and your, or in your way of things. And, you know, two things that stand out to me about you, Taylor, is, well, three. One, you work incredibly hard and you work smart. You don't just work hard. You work smart. But the two things that stand out the most is you are extremely good at connecting to people and stay connected to people. That's something that I struggle with. We get connected a bunch with people, but staying connected to them and keeping a relationship with them and maintaining a relationship with them is another piece of that connection. And I think you do a good job with that. And number two

is you are a learner and all facets. And I'm just curious, do you have any tactics that you implement personally on keeping, connecting with people and keeping those connections, whether that's text messages, calls, handwritten letters, the cadence of that. And then number two, how do you learn? Is it books? Is it podcasts? Is there a certain way that you, you do that. So, break that down. My cadence with people, like, I'm a people person. My dad is the people-liest people-person you've ever met, and I get that from him. And I don't know with as much as I, I know we talked a bunch about AI, but I actually don't love technology. Funny enough, like, I would gladly go to a flip phone if I could operate with one. But the one thing phones have made,

and I don't mind text messaging. I like text messaging is it's easy to just keep up with people. and drop them a line once in a while. Hey man, I saw this. I was thinking about you. Whatever. When I, I definitely have like pulled my core group of people in real tight. So I would say I have some really good friends. Then I have a lot of acquaintances. And it's okay to have both. Like, you don't have to be best friends with everybody. You only have so much emotional time to give. And that level is different for everybody. I'm pretty outgoing person. Most people can't handle my, me talking so much anyway. So, you know, we'll just split that between a couple people. Yeah.

Yeah, that's just, I don't know, that's my personality. I get that from my dad. There's been times I've been really self-conscious of how much I talk, because it's like, what I do when I'm nervous, what I do when I'm excited. But at the end of the day, like, that's how God made me. So finding people that want to hear what I have to say and shoot the shit, like, that's my favorite thing to do is talk through complex situations with people, maybe over a beer or just enjoy life. Like interaction is a, is a blessing to. me and I enjoy that. So that is that. As far as learning, you got to remember I spent a lot of time in airplanes for 15 years. So books, dude, I love books. I'm even bad about, I'd have to make

myself read like a nonfiction or a cowboy book or a story in between all the business and learning books that I read or I just sometimes get bored or I'm not even comprehending. The other huge thing that probably I learn more from podcasts now. and I've been pretty good about, I read a book called America of the Beautiful that was written by Ben Carson, who Ben did run eventually for presidential candidate at some point. But he was a neurosurgeon,

he is a neurosurgeonant, John Hopkins, and he wrote a book called America of the Beautiful, and there was something in there that really changed my frame of reference, and it was about being close-minded. I was really close-minded. And it was like, when you're arguing about debating something with somebody, if you can understand your opponent's point of view, it makes your argument twice as strong.

So then I'm like, oh, that actually makes a ton of sense. Like be open-minded enough to have a conversation, unemotionally with somebody, learn where they're coming from, and it'll probably just make your argument that much stronger. So I spend as much time listening to things that I don't necessarily agree with just to try to get a good frame of reference. But you're always going to find me on the farm with my headphones on. Like, I have noise-canceling headphones. And then I have, like, the other ones that are.

are just outside my ear of like, I'm always consuming information to the point now where sometimes I will make myself not have my headphones to just go enjoy, slow down a little bit. But I think I'm a 16 hour a week podcast guy. Like I've got my ones I listen to long form, short form. I know what I like to listen to. Yeah, that's how I consume information. Are you reading every day? Yeah. So my life and I, well, do you annotate? How do you, do you, No, you just read. You're not, you're not trying to. I've got buddies.

I got buddies that annotate one who probably listen to this, that he's a highlighter and writing guy. And I'm like, man, he's dialed. But man, I just read. I just consume me and Leah are good about, or we've tried to be better about like going to bed a little bit earlier and get, I sleep a lot better if I read. Reading is the tool I used to shut my brain off to go to sleep.

So sometimes I can just go in there and go to sleep. And sometimes I'm like, crap, you know, I got to read for 15. minutes, no big deal. But it's been crunching through books. I've been reading some dad books, some kid books, still read plenty of ranching books. I have a library. I always buy real books. I can't get into the Kindle, but I have a huge library, brought you a book, right? Like, I like reading books and then finding somebody else wants to read it and talk about it. I get that from my mom. My mom's a big book reader. You're a successful guy. You know a lot of successful guys. Is there any traits that you find a common thread that it's

shared between all these people that you know. I appreciate you think that I'm successful. You are successful. Lifelong learners is the one thing. And I would say optimist maybe. I'm definitely an optimist. Sometimes to my own detriment, I'll get myself in trouble.

And that's where I know that Lord put Leah in my life to balance me out sometimes. Sometimes she's like, I don't think you're going to come out of that side of live. And I'm like, oh, maybe you're right. But you talk to like any really, really, really successful businessman, they've run one or two or three companies in the ground. And in fact, there was a time of my life I went through a hard time and basically went back to zero financially.

I actually went to negative financially. But what I learned was like, damn, now I know how money works. And I wasn't scared to use money to get back to where I was. And in three years, I had made enough on the side of working at Hendrick to go put the down payment on my ranch that I own. I had a buddy I just talked to about that. I'm like, man, I feel like those guys that run, that have a business that fails. Like, you learn. You learn. learn so much along the way, as long as it doesn't break your spirit, you've learned those lessons apply. Like, they're hungry to go again and apply them to the next business. That's why it's so common to find the guys that if they don't hit it on the first or second try, dude, I'm not,

cattle market could fall out and I could decide, well, I don't want to do the things necessary to still operate as a cattle operation. And we could sell it all. I don't think I'd be unsuccessful then. It'd be a, it'd be a season and chapter of my life. And I can take all the tasks and the principles that I've learned and apply them to something else. Or I'm like you. I really like building. I built another company once upon a time, 2015 to 2019, a product's company. What I found with that was I love the building of the company, getting all the systems going. That one was cool. It was e-commerce. It was completely remote. And then the company was up and operating in the black. And I was like, I am bored as shit. Like, it was profitable-ish. It needed a bunch more capital to

scale bigger. But I didn't even, just the day to day was not fun or run. So we just did away with it. But so I don't know. I don't know what's going to happen. But as long as I'm learning, like that's what I like in life is learning. Yeah. So you, well, I was just going to ask you, your next five years for Ridgeview, what's your vision? But honestly, you're, you have goals. But you also are adaptive to looking at how the world plays out. And if you need to make a pivot. Yep. You make a pivot. I will tell you that. I will tell you that. I want to use Ridgeview. It's a goal of mine, and I have a big idea.

I don't know when the right season of life or if I'll get the ability to do it. But there is a model. I'm going to give Jason Mock credit for it because I saw a sketch he did one time. I would like to find a way to integrate the public back into an agricultural model.

Like, hear me out. Sticking ball sports are, bitch. People want parks. Farmers markets are big. I want to somehow stick a open-air D2-C farmers market with baseball fields in a commercial ag operation where basically it's got scalable cold storage for D to C customers. The moms and dads are there because there's soccer fields and ball fields, but there's also food trucks and breweries that come. So, while junior's playing T-ball and little sisters playing soccer. Mom can also go right down the open-air market and do her grocery shopping.

Dad can grab a beer. You grab dinner off the food truck. You learn about ag on the way and then you go back. And you've reconnected the suburban. You've made their lives more efficient because now they've grocery shop, eating dinner, dad's got his beer, and the kids have played sports, which all that's very fragmented now. Hell, maybe there's a running trail.

Mom gets a run in. You've put fitness back in it. But you put it all in. under the umbrella of you put that back together next to ag operations. So those people can see that like we're not monsters like Amazon and Netflix paint us. We give a shit about our animals. Like you hit the, it's like the sandlot theory. You hit the ball over the fence and it's not the big mastiff that's standing there. It's my bull big chief standing there. Like, yeah, we can't have kids around bulls. But you put them right back beside each other. And you bring communities

back together. Like I actually think where I'm at, there's a possibility that could happen. That's going to take a lot of capital more beyond me, but, man, I think it could be a really cool concept of putting all those things. And those are all separate businesses. The top business just owns the facilities. And it rents scalable space to all the D to C people who have to need cold storage and need a place to market their product. Oh, and then you just, you don't own the restaurants and you don't own the brew trucks. You just give them, you're bringing the people in. So you bring them the customer base, so they want to come. You're bringing people together. Dude, I, I, I need to say this. You watch the news and you think we live in the worst country in the world.

I travel around a lot. What you see on the news is not how people act in real life. There is more, I talk to every race, creed, color, demographic, people love and care about each other. Lee and I were just in downtown Charlotte in a fancy part of South End, and then we were at a big concert and we drive around and we have great conversations with people. I always wear my Ridgewayland and cattle hat because I like people that want to ask me like, what's that? Oh, we own a ranch. Around here? Yeah, an hour or that way.

I've armed myself with all the facts and knowledge because I just want some vegan to debate me and I've never found it. I give a buddy of mine that owns a barbecue truck, he wears my hat,

and I'm always like, man, I can't wait. Like, we're gonna, somebody's gonna be mad that I, no, they can't. They don't care. Even the people that don't eat beef appreciate what we do.

So, like, there's so much more togetherness. And I think I could use agriculture to bring those people back together and that would be really cool. That sounds like an awesome idea. Jason's idea was a golf course, I believe, integrated into the thing. And maybe like a carnival too, but it was the same concept.

It was bring people back into ag for different reasons, but put them ag adjacent. So there's some understanding between people. So again, I stole that idea from him. I just put a Taylor spin on it. No, that's awesome. I love it. It's a great idea. We're getting close to the end here.

Lightning. Lightning round. Lightning around. We're going rapid fire round here. Yep. So first one to start off is, what's a what's a story you have on the house build that you want to tell what's a funny there's got to be some story that happened when you were building that house there's a funny story

they're both funny there's a funny one and a gory one we'll just go with a funny one so we got two barn cats Ronnie and kicks um they were about six months old I think when we started framing the floor and I was out there working on ceiling like the ledger board to the crawl space foundation and they were kittens and they'd be in your tool belt and everything and the crawl space crew was there on waterproof in the crawl space or doing something. And they had like a U-Haul type van with the door up. And those kittens were always with me. And at the end of the day, I couldn't find Rani.

And I'm like, I like knew, like, you know, like you have intuition. I'm a son of a bitch, that cat crawled in the waterproofer truck. And this is a big Hispanic crew of guys that I don't know. And I, there's a language barrier here. Give it that night, Leah's like, oh, he'll show up. They go off mousin. He's not there the next day. And it's funny, they're just barn cats.

But I love animals. and I'm like, the next night, she's like, she can see. I'm like sad and I'm like, it's my fault. I'm so sorry. Like, we love these cats. Ronnie's not around. And so she gets on social media and posts a picture of Ronnie in like the lost pets group in our county.

And I call the waterproofing leader guy who I talk to and he calls his guys and they're like, no, we haven't seen a cat. But granted it's like an old U-Haul truck. So the cab's not connected to the box. The next day, some lady in that group posts a picture of a cat inside a house that's Ronnie. But it's a screenshot of another app like the next door app. So we don't have the information to find that lady.

And all we can see is the block of Charlotte. The cat's an hour away. We're like, shit, we're going. Dude, I am covered in mud from the farm. Leah's like eight and a half months pregnant. Like we look like ponytail messy bun. She's like, we're going. We just jump in the car.

We pull into the busiest neighborhood in Charlotte. I mean, gated communities, middle of the week, and all the women are home. And it's like real housewives of something. And we pull up and first we're scaring people because we look like a little rough. I'm covered in mud. And we show the, we're showing the ladies.

Like I'm on the front doorstep and I'm like, we know that he's on this road and we're showing and they don't know the lady. We play like house tag. Like she'll call a friend and she'll call a friend and we just go house to house, showing them the picture of this cat until finally the one house

that nobody knew who this lady was that live there, we find out that the cat is in that house. And the door is open and the recreational drug smoke rolls out of the house and my cat is higher than a kite. And this lady, the reason nobody knew her is because she's a little bit different burrow on the block and he's been taking to Petco overnight and he slept in the bed inside and she was just going to keep him. And she made us like made a show like that we had whatever.

But yeah, Ronnie took a road trip to downtown Charlotte. Holy God. He got higher than a cat, a carer than a dog. We got back in our other cat and our dog wouldn't go near him, but he's, you think he learned his lesson, but I don't know how many times I pulled him out of contractor's truck, eating old lunches and stuff, like building the house. But yeah, we got him back three days later and he's still kicking around. But yeah, old runny took a road trip to Charlotte. That's pretty good. All right. We would be remiss if we didn't at least have one good question about your NASCAR days. And I've told you this story. One of my favorite, aspects of NASCAR is the cheating. And I love the story. I don't know whose car it is, but there's a story about how they had to make weight, and they loaded the frame rails of the car with lead shot. And then when they pitted the first time, they pulled the plug out, and then they got caught because there's lead beavis rolling all over the... Yeah, lead babies work, because most of the tracks are banks, so if you do it right, and the hole is small enough they come out of, they roll to the inside of

the track. Yeah. But now you've got to make weight out. That's that was before my time. But I know that But so my question is, is there any way left to cheat in NASCAR? And if there is, not that that ever happened on your crew, but was it ever, did that ever, did you ever do anything like that? It did. So, and there's probably still ways, but the rulebook has gotten tighter and tighter and tighter. And I will now tell this story because I'm retired from the sport. And the guy that ran the Xfinity series at the time is now also retired.

And we can use names. It's fine. But I got hired in 2019 to go to junior motorsports, and I had nine drivers that first year. And I was, one of those drivers was Dale and her Jr. So NASCAR Jesus, the most popular driver in the sport. And he owns the company. He's my boss.

Not only that is he's going to run Darlington, the Southern 500, which that's the Cup race. But Darlington is still like the most southern roots race. And when people found out that Dale was going to run that race, we sold out the Xfinity. race, which never happens. Not only that, Darlington is the throwback scheme. And we're throwing it back to his grandfather, the baby blue car, the yellow number eight. I mean, it's like, just keep putting the pressure on me. I'm a first year crew chief. I have a one-year contract. All I can think is,

like, this is the make-it-or-break-it moment. This is when Dale decides he, like, we knew each other, but this is when he decides, as my contract gets signed and I get to stay at his company, or whatever. well Dale loves Dale wants you to try and the way that works in racing is there is there's things you don't do and the fines are huge

and there's things you do as a calculated gamble for an advantage and as long as the team owners give you their blessing or plausible deniability that they didn't know anything about. But you know what?

Dale's the team owner and he's driving and we talked about it and I'm like I need this guy to enjoy himself So I pulled out every trick I knew, every trick. And Dale hadn't been in a race car in a long time. He started, we started mid-pack.

He about put it in the wall and turned one in qualifying. And I'm like, oh, I'm fired. And then we get in the driver's meets. This is back when he's still a driver's meeting. And he was so nice. He was like telling somebody else, he made sure I could hear it. And he's like, oh, I really, you know, I really F that up. I about powder in there.

I haven't driven in so long. That wasn't his fault. Cars good. We get in their race start like 17th, I think. Never get past. We always move forward. Finish top five. Dale is so excited.

Granted you, my now wife, which is my girlfriend at the time, is his social media person. It's also a throwback weekend. So we're in white Levi's. We've all grown mustaches. We got the retro aviators on. My team went all in. Dale gets out of the car and is so excited about running fifth, but just so happy that he can do it. And he was running very politely.

Darlington's a track. and use other guys up, and he doesn't ever want to get in the way of the championship race. He's so excited. He grabs his wife and kids and goes to get in the Darlington parade, and we can't go home because me and Leah

have to go get in the Darlington parade. So hold on. I am so relieved after the race. It's like six months of weight has been lifted off my shoulders. I take a leak from going from the track to the garage, and generally they tech the winner,

they tech second place, and they take a random in the top five. And generally, just the same tech inspection you go through before the race. And I passed all that. And there's a lot of orchestration and tricks we use to pass. And I'm like, I'm top five. I won't be the random. I won't tear down. And I come out of the bathroom and I turn to where my car should be and it's not there. And it's not there. And I turn to the tent and I'm like, well, my car's not there either. And I look and there's always an all black NASCAR hauler that has no, and my truck's going,

my car is going up on the lift gate, going in the box. And I threw up. I'm not. really, but I'm like, oh my God. And they just said, hey, we'll see you Tuesday. You have to go in there. They ratchet strap it, but you don't get to touch your car. They push it in. They said, we'll see you Tuesday. I was like, oh, God, I'm dead. So now I can't enjoy Sunday. I can't enjoy Monday. Tuesday, I take my road crew down there, and it wasn't going bad. They're just pulling the car apart piece by piece. And it was, it was an audit for like the, they had one of every manufacturer. and Dale had done such a good job, not right side in the car. At Darlington, our car was in pretty good shape.

Couldn't have been a worse situation for me. I almost got away with everything. And we had put some, those cars are an upside-down airplane wing. Downforce is how the air pushes the car down and makes mechanical grip. With those cars, the more you could leak the underbody, the more you could lower the pressure under the car, and then there's a bigger differential and it pushes you in. So we had all these things that are meant to break and leak,

and you're meant to break after tech inspection when you're pushing out and you're meant to kick in the side of the car when the fireworks go off from the National Anthem and the driver's supposed to pull this and tug this and you're supposed to hold your fingers right. I mean, all the stops

and we almost made it. And the now, the guy who's in charge of it all now at the time was like the tech guy and he pulls one piece of tape and he sees this gaping opening and the trunk and he's like, what is this?

And then it said every bolt came out of that car and they just kept finding it all. and it got worse and worse and worse until I had like a Lego set the car was just strung across the NASCAR shop and the big big boss Wayne Otton is this jolly old guy that loves me and he is just reading me the riot act chewing my ass and when he when he and I'm just like this fine's going to be a quarter million dollars like they're going to make an example they might run me out of the sport I just think in worst case at the very end Wayne comes to me and puts his arm around me and he says I would have done the same thing clean up your shit and get out of here they didn't charge me

penny but they made sure that I died for six hours. I was like, oh my, I've never felt so relieved in my entire life. Oh man, I get chills because every crew chief, I remember before the race, there was a guy who's now a cup crew chief and he looked at me and he said, I'd put that spoiler at 45 degrees. Like, everybody would have done it. You had to do it. My hand was thing and that was me proving my worth. And it all worked out. But I thought I was gone from the sport, boy. Oh, man. Damn, that's a good one. And Wayne's now retired as well, and we still keep up with each other, and he never

lets me live that down. I bet not. I bet not. Back in the glory days there, that's awesome, man. Well, I feel like those two stories took up the rapid fire out, so we're going to end the show with our segment that we do. It's tip of the hat. So who's somebody in your life?

What's a brand you use? A podcast you listen to, a product that you use on the daily that you want to say, man, they're doing it right. I want to tip my hat. It doesn't have to be all of those things. Yeah, no. One of those things. Brandon product I want to tip my hat to is a company called darn tough socks out of Vermont. They're American-made socks from I pretty sure all Vermont or Northeastern sheep and their lifetime guaranteed socks. And I've been wearing them 15 years. Yeah, they're like 20 something bucks a pair. I'm now on like my third turn-in. It's like I just every five years, I gather up every sock that's got a hole. You go right on their website. They give you the return

label. Anything that's got a hole, you put the pair, you ship them, you get a credit, you pick out the one's website, they send, I haven't bought socks in 15 years. The same $120 investment in socks is what I've been wearing. And I've done it two or three times, like turned them in. And I love that they're American-made socks out of where I was born and raised. And it's funny because you can wear wool socks, like super micro-thin wool socks. They keep your feet dry. They don't stink. And I won't wear anything but I just think they're doing it right. And I love American brands. That's awesome.

Damn. It's a good answer. You're even calculated on your fucking socks, man. Yeah, man. You're just a hammer. Well, man, it was an absolute pleasure to have you on again. I know Barn Talk has gotten better with you being a part of the team. I know that you just dropped a shitload of value on everybody on this on the show today.

If people want to reach out to you, connect with you, follow what you're doing, support what you're doing, where can they find you? Yeah. Ridgeview Landing Cattle. on Instagram, Facebook, Ridgevielandandandcattle.com. If you're interested in the Landtrust side of things, landtrust.com, you can get a hold of me any of those ways. Send us a DM, talk to the guys at land trust, holler at me. We do. There's a lot of crossover between all of it.

I don't know. You can send a message to Barn Talk maybe, and we have a community manager that will get a hold of us or whatever. So I'm more than willing to help anybody in any way I can if time allows. Well, even though you kicked our ass at Pepper, which was unforeseen. We did not think that was going to happen. It was still well worth having you here. It was a true pleasure to have you on the show again.

Yeah, I appreciate that. I love what you guys. Love what you guys. Awesome. Well, guys, if you got 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. And we'll see you back here next week for another episode.