Barn Talk - Looking Into Our Crystal Ball.. What The Future Holds

Episode Date: May 21, 2021

Welcome To Barn Talk! In today’s episode, the boys talk about the future of the world. From the hog business, to grain farming, to cryptocurrency, the banking system, electric cars, & much much more. SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST ➱https://bit.ly/3a7r3nR SUBSCRIBE TO THIS’LL DO FARM ➱ https://bit.ly/2X8g45c ADD US ON: INSTAGRAM ➱ https://bit.ly/3gaobdN TIKTOK ➱ https://bit.ly/3eJfftr ------------------------------- ***PLEASE NOTE*** Barn Talk is a significant break from the typical content viewers have come to expect from This’ll Do Farm. Please be advised that we will be exploring a wide variety of topics (some adult-themed) and our younger viewers (and their parents) should be advised that some topics will be for mature audiences only. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All of the food we eat and much of the clothing we wear comes from plants and animals that are raised on farms. Farms are different in type, in size, and even in name. Welcome to Barn Talk. What happens at the barn stays at the barn until us two knuckleheads came along. And it's just, we're going to let it all out for you guys now. It's all out there. All we ask for you guys to do if you get value from the show is just share it out. Share it with your family.

Share it with your friends. with your coworkers. We're trying to grow this thing. We're trying to reach as many people as possible. We're trying to give people some value. Do some good in this world. So you get some value. It's all we ask. And if you feel like you got some value, send some snacks. I always like snacks. I'm out. The bag of cookies is empty. I had a bag of cookies in the freezer. We need like a, we need like a trough. We need like a trough up here with a bunch of snacks. We got M&Ms, checks mix, all kinds of stuff. We need a. We like a bird. We like a burrower. We need a, we like a burrower. bird feet, you know, like a chicken feed. We need a rotary hog feeder. We need a big old round

hog feeder. I don't know. It'll mess up the camera. It might mess up the camera. It'll mess up the shot. I probably don't need any snacks. I'm trying to thin down. My brother's on a diet. My oldest brother's on a diet. He looks pretty good. Yeah, he's getting thin. I'm kind of getting nervous because I've always kind of been able to stay ahead of those two because I actually have to like, you know, move and do things. And he's a salesman. So, easy to get fat and sassy when you're a salesman. But I don't know. He's kind of upped his game. He's kicking your butt now. Yeah, he's eating healthy.

All I can do, I think... You just got to Matt feed some more pigs, I guess. Well, that and the wife has taken to walking. We've been going to the track and walking, and I think we're going to stick on that because I think she's feeling it, too, that there's some pressure. We've got to stay. Are you wanting to give the market update?

Yes. So the Friday edition, Market Update. sponsored by nobody courtesy of cat's grain shout out cat's grain um where we get our numbers so the the river getting screwed up and i don't know what all's going on you know it can only run so long and then they got to run it the other way but so the the top was in and i think we're working back off of that i don't know what we're supposed to get rain this weekend it looks like next week's going to be grainy, and I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. It depends on whether you need it. I feel like we've got plenty of moisture, but we're probably going to get more.

Rain makes grain, but we need some damn sun too. Well, that's right, because it has not been, I just told, we were just talking about that, that we've been complaining about how we're going to have to shoot this podcast early in the morning or late at night, and everybody's going to have to wear their swim trunks because it's going to be so hot, but here we are, and it's the middle of May, and we're still up here with our sweatshirts on, So we haven't hit the hot weather yet. I haven't hit the hot weather yet, but it's definitely been cold up here. The corn's up, and it looks better.

It's greened up, but it doesn't look like this week is going to have much heat. So I don't know, it's just going to hang out, I guess, until we start getting the heat units. But, yeah, one thing a little strange in our neck of the woods that doesn't usually happen is so the clothes today, you could get 683. for corn if you hauled it to the feed mill and only like six what's what I say six 68 hauling it to the river so that just tells you that um they're grinding a lot of feed for these pigs and uh so they got a better bid than they do at the river the bean the bean price though is 1557 um and that's that's at ADM and Burlington. And if you go across the river, it's 1617. What's new corn? What's, what's, uh, it's, uh, it's probably dropped back off. It's probably like five 65 or something like that.

Did you lock anything in? Uh, no, I didn't. Oh. It came close. I said you were getting itchy. Well, it was. It was, it was five, I think you got to like five ninety seven. You could deliver new crop corn to one of the hog feeders for five 97. Don't comment. I don't need, I don't need the abuse, but I didn't. I said, well, it'll get to six bucks. You know, you put those, you put those little ideas in your head. Well, if it just gets to this and then it didn't get there. Or if it did get there, it wasn't there long enough that when I checked it, it was. It's still kind of early, though. Yeah, I feel like, I feel like not much has changed. I just, it'll be, it's a demand deal because the ending stocks, I mean, it's not like we're going to find more corn before.

harvest. It's all just speculation on how much we're going to produce. Yeah, how we can outproduce ourselves, which we will. Yeah, we'll be able to do that. Um, hogs are high, $108, $100,000, um, cattle are still high. I think cattle are, um, what is that? That's a 5, 115 and feeder cattle are like 138. So commodities are high. Um, that game, not much has changed. Um, Bitcoin's in the shitter. Oh, man, Bitcoin. There's, so Bitcoin's about 48,000 right now. And I don't know. There's just a lot, there's a lot of people yapping that need to be quiet. And, um, I don't think people can decide what they're going to do. Elon just needs to shut up. Well, he keeps getting on Twitter talking about Doge and Bitcoin and I think he's in his Tesla stock. It's affecting Doge and it's affecting Bitcoin. He needs to

just shut up. I think he likes it a little bit. I think he does. He likes being able to, I don't know what his game is. I feel like he's got as an end game, but it's hard to see what his end game even is on that. I think on part of that stuff, I don't think that he really has,

I think there's a little, he works so much that I don't feel like he has much of a, he doesn't have much of a social life, I don't think. And Twitter is kind of like his out. And I think he just likes to throw stuff out there and see if it sticks. sometimes people read an awful lot into what he says and then it just it takes on a life of its own but um yeah and ethereum we haven't really talked much about ethereum ethereum's kind of like the

kind of like best well second most popular crypto yeah it's who you talk to it depends on who you talk to so ethereum is a whole different deal you know it's it's not if if bitcoin is the gold of crypto Ethereum is kind of like the... It's like the train tracks, all the other alt coins run on. Yeah, like the finance. It's like the internet. Yeah. It's literally like the internet of crypto. All these other coins are getting built on Ethereum.

Yeah. If you're a guy, if there's an NFT, and we won't go into NFTs because that will really send us off. Yeah, I still don't know. If you're wanting to buy digital art or digital anything, tokens or whatever. Ethereum is what that runs. runs on anyway aetherium has been on a big run it got up to like 4,000 and um i think it's about

3,800 or 3,600 or something like that so anyway that's about we got a lot of stuff done the last couple weeks we got all our got all our corn in got all our beans in everything's planted yeah so now if we get some sun and this corn will take off which i'm sure it will it'll be tied to side dress and one thing that we're doing different this year because you know I'd love to sell fertilizer because if you if you have a bad year you've got to use fertilizer because you need every bushel you can and if the markets are good well you better just give it everything it needs yeah you need every bushel you can so there's really no scenario that your fertilizer dealer isn't smiling so anyway they're they're they're putting the pitch on everybody this year but one thing

that we we struggle with and I think a lot of people struggle with is corn on corn. We grow a third of our acres, our beans. A third of it is corn on that bean ground and then a third of it is corn on corn. And the reason we do that is because we have all this hog manure that is really good fertilizer and we hate to just give it away to people. So we raise corn on corn. but corn on corn can be a struggle. And last year it really was a struggle.

We turned off dry, and it looked really good, but that dry weather it... Everybody last year, like first, I don't know what, month, two months, everyone was like, oh, yeah, this looks good. And then... Yeah, I just did not look it out. I kind of had my head in the sand because all my corn looked really good. And one day, my farm credit rep stopped by, and we were talking, and he's like, boy, This corn's tough, man. You know, it's really starting to, I got corn that's firing.

And I said, really? I said, man, my corn looks good, you know, it's really holding up good. And then like two days later, it just, then it just hit. I mean, it just hit. And it really took a toll. Everybody had that. But anyway, one of the things we're doing this year that we haven't done in the past is we're paying a lot more attention to micro. Soil health.

Yeah, well, I feel like we've always done that, but a lot of these micronutrients, so boron, zinc, manganese, I don't know what else, sulfur. And I mean, we've addressed the sulfur a little bit, but this year we're going to put what they call a micropack in with our side dress. And then we're probably going to split that side dress up. Typically, if we come back and spray fungicide, we don't go and do another nitrogen. We don't put any nitrogen on later. And this year, we may do that. I don't know. We haven't decided 100%.

But anyway. We put calcium in every time, bio-cow. But this time we're putting boron in. And what did you say? What else? Well, it's a micropack. Has boron, has manganes, has zan. Has everything, all the micros you need.

Yeah. All I had to say was too much. my to my fertilizer guy. I'm like, what about boron? He's like, oh, you need it. You're short. Guaranteed you're short. I just, nobody ever talks about it because nobody's got any money. But I do it this year. I got it. I got it.

Don't worry about it. Yep, I'll put it in there. That's the hardest thing about the soil health. And, you know, obviously, I think every farmer or a lot of farmers believe that, you know, if you get your soil health right, you get your micronutrients, right, you get the nitrine right, you get all that stuff right. Obviously, your yield's going to be great. But you've got to find the balance of how much you're going to

spend up front versus what are you going to get for it well and what's that's and people don't get that everybody wants all these farmers to be environmental friendly all the way through as much as they possibly can but they don't realize that that stuff's not very it's not cheap it's expensive well and what's what's right one year isn't right right next and we used to put on um part of our nitrogen with the planner beside the row and then we used pop up and we kind of got a from that one for the speed of planning because it'd have fell up all the time yeah you can get it on you can get everything planted quicker but then the other thing was it seemed like and this year be the same way you put that nitrogen out there and then we get rain and rain and rain and rain and rain

and you feel like you're losing it like it's if it's moving if it's moving in the soil faster than that corn's going down you feel like you're chasing your tail a little bit and so we went away from that and we don't put it on with the planner and then we come back and we side dress more and then we may we may put in we may give it a shot either when we put on fungicide or we may come back in between and do another application of nitrogen and so you know the goal is to get as much yield as you can with as little input as you can so spend the least amount of money and get the most yield and do the right practices that are good for the environment yeah it's like you got to balance all three of those things yeah it's not as easy as everybody

from the outside in if you're not a farmer they are they're like oh yep you got to do this because it's good for the environment but they're not in our shoes they don't get it yeah and a side note on that um anybody that points their fingers at farmers farmers about over implying fertilizer just take a drive Just take a drive around your neighborhood and see those vibrant yards. I will about guarantee you that there is more nitrogen runoff per acre from people over fertilizing their yards than there is from farmers. I mean, the amount of fertilizer that gets wasted to make grass green is, it's insane. But, you know, everybody's patch is, it's just tiny, and you're just putting on a half a bag here and a half a bag there. when you've got as many yards as there are across the United States,

it would boggle your mind to know how much nitrogen runoff comes from. And then that all goes into the city sewer and goes to the treatment plant. And then the treatment plant, they have to get all that out of there before they can discharge it. We've all got problems as far as that goes. It's not one answer. That's kind of a, you've had that take for a little, for a while. I remember, I haven't heard you say that in a long time.

But I don't think a lot of people even think about that, honestly. Well, here's another, here's another, perfect and this is a little bit off of that fertility but it's not you know for me to apply the manure out of my hog buildings which is a very as far as as far as manure goes pig manure is very pure the only thing that's in that is the the byproducts of the corn the bean meal the salt you put in the feed and whatever vitamin pack that you give the pigs and the water they drink. And all that manure that goes in the pit comes from that

constantly same diet. And let's just say that if I have to work on a piece of manure application equipment, I don't worry too much about that. But if I was the guy that was pumping the city sewer pond out, I think I'd probably have a hazmat suit on for doing that because Lord only knows what's in there. But, okay, I have to have a manure management plan that tells the state of Iowa where every gallon of that manure is going and what I'm going to apply it at and what my crop yield is. And basically, they wanted to account it for and they want to know who applied it, when they applied it. You're supposed to write down the weather conditions, and that's all on record.

And if it's too wet in the fall, and I can't apply that, then I wait and I apply it in the spring. And when I build that building, part of the reason that that pit is the size as it is, is you need to be able to go a year. You need to be able to store a year's worth of manure just in case weather conditions aren't fit that you can't get it all pumped, or you couldn't get any of it pumped. Okay. And I don't know whether other states are different than the state we live in, but every spring you get times where there's a lot of rain

and there's some rivers that flood and you know that if you are a small town or a big town and you get a massive amount of water and it inundates your municipal sewer treatment plant and you can't process that raw sewage fast enough, all you do is call up the DNR, and they just start pumping. They just start pumping right over the levee, right out of the pond, right in the river. And they do that because they don't have any choice.

That's what they have to do. Okay, if my pit got full and I had a broken water line, and I called the DNR, and I said, well, my pit's full, I'm just going to start pumping this. I'm not sure what would happen to me, but I'm pretty sure that I would get the book thrown at me. There is a huge amount of poor publicity. I feel like we're shown in a poor light for the way we use the resource we have

because we actually use that manure to fertilize our crops. That, what runs through a city, that's treated, and then the water is discharged in the river, but if they have a problem, they just, they can't do anything else. They just dump it in the river.

Yeah, they don't. I mean, they have to. And I realize that they have to. There's no repercussions for anybody. Right. There is a... They can't trace anything back. They can't trace it back to anybody.

But if it's a farmer, it's a single farmer, then it's your fault. They're going to do their best to trace it. Which I'm not, I'm not saying that we should be out dumping in the river, and we're not. And nobody is,

and we're trying to do our best. But it's like the, of fertilizer that gets put on people's yards that run off that ends up nitrates in the water that's in the river, the amount of raw sewage that comes from municipalities that goes in the rivers around the world versus the amount of pollution that comes from the American farmer, it's not even close. And yet, we have to do a better job of explaining what we do and why, and we have to defend ourselves. But I don't feel like, I don't feel like it's an even, even, yeah, I would totally.

Totally agree. That's an interesting take because, like, I just have not heard that from really anybody. I've heard you talk about that before, and I remember you, and I remember thinking, like, that's true, because everybody does. Everybody treats their, everybody looks at their yard. Yeah. Like, if you live in the city, and we live, I mean, our, we treat our yard the same way. It's like a, it's like a, I don't know, it's a pride thing. You want your yard to look good. And some people go all out. They fertilize it. They do all the things that they need to do to it. it and it's like we do not we do not fertilize ours no um i enjoy mowing in the spring and then i like it when it's green and um i actually don't even spray it there's some people that spray it you know spray their yard 2 4d to take care of the dandelions and everything we just mow tall and um i don't get too bent out i don't get too hyped up about there's so many there's so much for us to There is.

But I honestly, I had a guy call me from like a national lawn care service. And he was cold calling people. And he said, you know, do you want, you know, we're trying to sell me a service. And I said, I'm not interested. And he said, but, you know, this time of year he goes, don't you want that yard to stay green? And this is like July. And I'm already tired of mow. And I'm like, no, I want that thing to die.

I want it dead. I don't want to have to mow anything. I'm fine. Anyway, he didn't quite understand that, but anyway. So that's all the crop side of things on our farm. We sold some pigs. We're selling out of my barn right now. We're selling more pigs.

I think we're selling three more loads on next Friday, next Friday. And we've been working on cleaning up the home farm a little bit. Dad's been tearing down these old raggedy hog buildings that Grandpa Lawrence built back in 80s. Oh, no, 70s. 70s. And they are pretty much shot, and we just need to tear them down. They're not usable. Well, they're pretty well gone.

They're pretty well gone. There's one left that's still standing. But our first hog confinement was built in 1971, same year I was. Actually, I take that back. I think that one was built. I think that one might have built and built in 70. And built in 70, and then we built one in 74 and 75. and then we had one building that burnt in 83 maybe that we rebuilt.

But it's time for them to go. And we've had people tear them down, kind of tear them down. Then they left all the stuff they did. It took all the good stuff that they could use and left all the stuff that they couldn't use. So we're down to getting rid of the concrete and the junk that's left. We got a roll off dumpster out there, and we're going to get the stuff that we can't recycle, I guess. And then we're going to push all the concrete out. And I don't think we're going to grind it.

I think we're probably just going to bury it. And I bet money on that. We're going to have that whole process of us cleaning up the home farm on this will do farm YouTube channel if you want to watch it. Yeah, it will be out there. But that whole idea of cleaning up the home farm, we've been thinking about the few. future. We want to better our farm and we're thinking further down the line. And I think that's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to be talking about the future, what we see in our crystal ball as far as the ag economy or agriculture and just the rest of the world. Well, how we view it,

where do we see the world going? And we're going to start with the hog business first. Yeah. So, you know, when you look at so tear down these buildings, we had, I grew up and we had, first we had, 160 sows fairer to finish. I mean, when my dad started and built this barn, I think he had two, I think he had two groups of 40 sows that he farrowed. But anyway, then he built, first he had 120 sows, and then he had 160, and then we got to where we had about 240, and then we got out of the hog business, and then we ended up getting into custom feeding. And so these are the remnants of the past and as we sit today, if you would have asked me in 2010, when I built my first wean to finish barn for contract feeding, I would have never guessed that we'd have four of them today.

And I also probably wouldn't have thought that the business would be as consulate consolidated as it is, I guess I don't know that. There certainly has been a lot of consolidation, but I think one thing... What do you mean consolidation, just the amount of people in it? Fewer and fewer people that are actually farrow and sows. And the reason for that is just because the volatility, when we were, when back in the 80s and the 90s and even the 70s, you know, you grew your own corn and you ground it and you fed it. And basically the pigs, were a way to add value to that crop. You essentially were getting a better price for that corn crop.

And there's guys today that are still, you know, they own shares in a sow unit and then they feed their own pigs, and they're feeding their own corn, and they're adding value to that crop. But the swings that we've seen, and we talked about going through COVID, the amount of money that some of the money that some of these guys took in loss, there's just, there's some that have gotten out that are,

they're not coming back. That's not coming back. But the other thing is, as we talked about, there isn't a lot of expansion. And the reason is because the swings are too big. And the future is very uncertain. And it's, and it's not, it's not just market wise. I think it's, I think there's just a lot of uncertainty about what are we going to do as far as labor. Dear Canadian exporters, our ambitions, our ideas, and our potential were never meant to be boxed in. Nothing can contain us. With the support of export development Canada's market insights and financial solutions, you can turn obstacles into opportunities, discover new markets, and keep our nation front and center on the global stage.

The world needs more Canada. Together, let's give it to them. Visit edc.ca to learn more. yeah that's something that not a lot of people understand it's like in our in our business hog farming all this i mean just agriculture in general there's not a lot of young people like me that are coming up i mean fewer and fewer people uh fewer and fewer farmers farm kids i mean if you're a farm kid it's about a 50 50 shot if you're going to stay on the farm i mean i feel like fewer farm kids are staying back and actually working on the farm and then on top of that there's people

It's not required for people to take ag classes. I mean, you can't, you can't let, you can't get young people to want to farm if they know nothing about farming. And if you're not from Iowa, Nebraska, you know, the Midwest, you're probably not going to learn about farming. And you're probably not, if you're not even, if you're not even going to, willing to try it, it's not in your family. Why would you take an ad class anyway? I mean, farmers today, not all the way, but I feel like, a lot of times, we're a good punching back. for, you name it, we're not painted in a very good light. And I think there's a lot of misconceptions

because people perceive large farmers as somehow they are inherently evil. If you're a big farmer, well, you don't give a rat's tale about anything and you're just a greedy, you know, whatever. And everybody wants to think about, they've got this poetic picture of this small farmer standing out, hoe in his field, whatever. Well, the ag business is no different than the rest of the world economy

and the fact that whether you own a restaurant, whether you own a trucking company, whether you own a grocery store, whether you own a shoe store, dress store, candle shop, coffee shop, there's competition everywhere. But not only competition, but there's a lot of things that you can't control. And one of those is the cost of... Entry.

Yeah, the cost of entry, which keeps getting higher. Land prices, I don't know. It's hard to get in if you don't have a lot of money, and it's hard to stay in if you don't have a lot of money. Yeah, and the staying in, that's what's caused these farms to get bigger and bigger. And, I mean, let's just be honest. Our farm here, we farm roughly a little over. 400 acres is what we actually farm. I think we own about 480 or 500 acres, but of what is tillable,

it's about 420 acres. And there is no way that there's no way that I would have still been farming, and there's probably no way that my father would have been able to stay farming if it wasn't for the fact that I built that first hog building and then kept building them, because the income off those hog buildings gave me the ability. It gave us the fertilizer, but then it gave me the ability to have some extra income that I could help take care of my parents as they got older and be able to raise my kids and be able to patch up everything that needed to be fixed. And basically, those buildings are what has kept us going.

And now, fortunately, we're to the point where because I got those buildings, you can afford to build a building because you've got the income. And I had something to do. I wouldn't have came back if you wouldn't have built them. There wouldn't have been another generation if you wouldn't have built them. No. And that's a story because it hasn't been very long ago that you could build a hog building and the building would pay its own way, but it would also give the person.

That's chorn it. A decent income. A little bit of money that they'd probably have to have some part-time jobs, but they could make it work. Well, now then, the cost of entry on even that, and lumber hasn't helped and everything else, but it's so high that basically, unless you're... They don't cash flow like they used to.

Basically, if you're just not going to take, if you're going to take nothing out of it and work off farm or the farm's big enough that you can do that, the building will pay for itself, but it won't give you hardly any income. come the hog building for a long time was the it was the ticket it was the ticket to get into farming for a while i mean it really was i mean a bunch of young people were able to just build hog buildings because they cash flow so well or kind of part-time jobs or they could work on the farm that their you know their family

farm build the hog barn then they can do the hog barn chore and make a little bit of money there and make a little bit of money farming with their dad or whatever but now it's not it's not that way anymore The labor side of it, because that doesn't work, like in our situation, we're lucky that we're lucky that I'm not so feeble, but I can't still help, and you're here. But when we need extra help for us to load or to do different things, we really got two people. Yeah, we got two guys. There's two people that we can call. And other than that, we don't know.

There isn't anybody. There isn't anybody. And I mean, that's not to say there aren't other people doing it, but usually their schedules don't work, or if they're involved in the hog business and they're not working with the same pigs that we're working with, the whole biosecurity thing, you can't go back and forth. And so it makes it really, really hard. And that part of it's not going to get any easier. And if you go to the farrowing side, if you go to the guys that have the sows that are farrow and pigs, the labor is just, it's unbelievable. Immigration is a huge deal.

in the ag labor business because so much of the agricultural labor is seasonal. And you just can't find people that have the flexibility to work a month out of the year, two months out of the year. And that's where you get the TN visa program where basically you bring immigrants in to work for a couple months and then they go home. but then also in the hog business, they've used that TN visa program because so many of these towns in rural America,

there isn't people there that aren't working in a town further away. There's just not the population, and then the population that's there, they're not willing to work in those settings. The problem is not a lot of young people are learning about agriculture, and then on top of that, generation, my generation, they don't want to work. You don't know what farming is like. You don't know

what farm life is if you weren't born into it, I think. Yeah. I mean, if I didn't see you work as hard or grandpa's work as hard, I would have, I mean, you kind of get used to it. You know what it takes, but someone that does nothing about it and has been grown up in a suburb, and then they want to try to be a farmer, and they come and they go the first day and they're like, well, screw this. This is actually like hard. Yeah. This is actually hard. Yeah. This is actually hard. So then there's a lack of knowledge on even getting in and knowing what the hell you're doing. And then if you do get in, the people that get in and that have never been an ag before, I think a lot of them quit because they realize, shit, this isn't as what it's dreamed up to be.

Right. And the wage, the wages are driven up, but still you're competing against every other entry-level position, whether it be fast food or working in a warehouse or whatever. whatever. But when it comes to labor, that's been very slow. But I think you're going to see as much stuff automated as you can. Well, you got it. You have to. I mean, it's getting to the point where we're going to have to do that. Yeah. And I'll give you an example, like power washing. There are people, and they're already out, but I mean, you know, it's going to have to get refined more, but there's people that are selling programmable.

automatic power washers. Where you bring it in a room and you, you know, say you've got a farrowing house and you've got 16 rooms that you're farrowing. And so you're farrowing pigs every week. You're moving pigs out. Excuse me. You're moving pigs out every week. And then you're loading it every week, you know, somewhere in there.

They come in and they have somebody actually wash it with the wand that is the machine. And it learns. basically it's a very rudimentary AI, but it learns all those motions and then you set it and every room you take it in, which in the hog business, everything is pretty repetitive

as far as every room is going to be set up exactly the same. It's the same number of crates, the inlets are in the same place, the feed line runs in the same place, it's all the same. Featers are all the same. And then that machine basically does,

they just wheel it in there and they start it and they let it go. go. And then, you know, it may be a deal where somebody's coming in to... Check on it. To clean up afterwards. There may be some details. There may be some feeders that need to be flipped or something that needs to be flipped. Well, and the great thing with that, too, is you can probably run that thing as much as many times you need to be. As a one person, power washing, you wash it.

Like, for me, when we wash our barns, you wash down and you wash back. Yep. With that, you can have it wash down and back two or three times if you wanted to. If you needed it to. Yeah. That's the beautiful thing with it. If you have to come in five hours later and hit the button to do it again, do it again. But yeah, those advancements need to happen not only in the hog business, but probably the cattle business.

I don't know much about cattle, but like I'm sure there's some automations that need to happen there. Yeah. I mean, like you said, grain farming, I feel like they're pretty on top of things as far as automation. They're going at the rate that they need to be. Yeah. And I think when people think farming, that's what they think is, you know, big equipment running and all that stuff. but that's the other thing that I think is kind of on the come-up is dad and I have talked about this. We think that in the future as far as equipment goes, we don't necessarily know if it's going to get to be where it's bigger.

Like coming out with the new big old combine, big old tractor every year, maybe it gets to a point where you get four little small tractors that run on your iPad automatically with nobody in the cab. and they're just planting or they're tilling with what a two row four row planner four row planner and you just let them all go yeah well there's a company what's that called sabano i'm gonna slaughter their name i should we should i should reach out to them um and they've got i think they've got four or five are they cabotas i think they're cabotas and they've been going the last three or four years across the midwest in spring and in fall and they do tillage or they plant, I think they got four row planers and then, you know, small, small implements, but they're totally autonomous. They come and they set the, they, they geo-fence it, you know, and they load the maps

onto the software, onto the computer of the tractor, and they just, it just goes. And, you know, you've seen these, they call them like swarm drones that, spray. So instead of having a 90-foot boom on a big sprayer, maybe you're going to spray, maybe you got somebody that comes that's just got 25 of these drones that they fill them up and they just go and do a field. And the technology gets better to where they don't spray the whole field. You know, they're just looking. They're literally looking and they've got the photography so good and they're cross-referencing every frame that they take to see if there's anything there that doesn't look like a bean plant or a

corn plant and they're deciding if they're going to spray that or they're not going to spray it and then even a step further you've seen in a lot of these small these vegetable farms guys working on these robots that they go in and they um instead of instead of spraying they're actually tilling where there's a weed there it just goes in and it tills that one spot um so There's no limit, I don't think, as far as what the technology can achieve. I think the issue is going to be, where's the price point got to be that these farms can make it work financially? And then that gets to the idea, is there going to be anywhere, is there going to be any place for the small, small farmer as we go as we get on this road? I think ultimately the consumer wants the small family farm.

I mean, it's back to what you said. Everybody wants the farmer in the field plowing with the, you know, their hoe. And, you know, that's the picture of the American farmer. But, like, if this stuff keeps going, the way that it's going, you know, we got to have all this technology. We got to do all these practices this way and the inputs this much. It's like it's hard. They want that small farmer.

They want the small family farm. But. But they don't want to. They don't want to pay for it. Well, and the other side of that, I think the thing that may save these small farms is, well, a little bit of what we're doing in the fact that you, you're not, the smaller, the smaller farmers are not going to be able to just strictly row crop or even in our case, I don't think you're going to be able to just contract feed cattle hogs. turkeys, chickens, whatever, you're going to have to get creative. You're going to have to get creative and you're going to have to set yourself apart from the rest and you're going to have to find something, whether it be direct to consumer or one thing that

I've been really curious about is there's been a lot of talk about, you know, carbon credits and I'm pretty skeptical about that just because most of the programs that are out there, the way they're doing it, and we're not going to go into, if you don't know anything about what a carbon credit is, I'm not going to try to explain it to you other than basically you're doing the same thing as when Tesla comes out on their earnings, and they made this many hundred million dollars or billion dollars. I don't know how much they made from selling carbon credits to Chrysler. So in other words, Chrysler doesn't make hardly any electric cars, and when they sell them in Europe,

they have to somehow offset the amount of carbon that they're doing, so they buy carbon credits from Tesla because they're making electric vehicles, and they got oodles of carbon credits. Well, it's the same way for farmers. If you were tilling your ground, when you turn that soil over, it releases carbon. if you switch from tilling your ground to no tilling it, you've now eliminated the amount of carbon that you've dropped the amount of carbon that you're doing.

And somehow they measure that. And so it's not very much. So on an acre, best you could do, you might be able to sequester a ton or one carbon credit. I don't know if that's a ton. Let's just say that's a ton of carbon. And you get one credit for that. well most of the programs that are out there today they're going to pay you for that carbon credit

and it might be $15 an acre or a ton um 15 dollars a carbon credit that you and that's just i'm pulling that number out from underneath my hat i mean i don't know it might be 10 it might be 20 it's somewhere in there but what they're doing and i don't know if all of them are doing this but most of them they're taking that and all then they're not they're not turning around and selling that in the market they're speculating on it because they all think that in the future those carbon credits are going to be worth more money so they bought it from you for $15 they may not sell to anybody

for five years and five years maybe it's worth $40 maybe it's worth $80 maybe it's only worth $20 maybe the whole thing blows up in their face so they are taking some risk but you're you're getting, you're, you're not getting the option. Now, I think there's somebody out there that's starting a deal. I listen to a podcast. And it might be, it might be FBN that's doing it, where they split it with you, and then you hold the carbon credit,

you pay them the fees, you know, what it takes to get it on the exchange, and then you decide when you're going to solve it. Long story short, it's not a, it's not a get rich quick, thing. But it got me thinking, and I've thought this for a while, how long are we going to keep raising just generic number two yellow corn, and it all just gets dumped at the river or at the feed mill or whatever, and none of it's any different than any other? I wonder if we're going to get to the point where some of these end users want the traceability because of the social side of it. Consumers.

Quaker Oats wants to be able to go to their consumer and be able to show them that farmer with his pitchfork or his hoe and say that, you know, part of the oats that's in your oats came from this guy and so-and-so. And whether or not it'll go back to, or not go back, but whether we'll get to the point where you may, depending on the soil you have, depending on your tillage practices, depending on what you're doing, you may raise your soybean crop for this company and not raise it for... For generic the way it's been doing so far.

Yeah, I think that's something easy. I feel like that is on the rise. People, consumers want to know where their food comes from. Yeah. And it's a, it's a trend that just keeps going up and up and up. People want to know. People want to see that. And that's a big reason why we started this.

Yeah. You know, we've talked about it. We want, we want to show people our day-to-day lives as farmers and what we do in our practices because, I mean, this whole privacy thing, people want to be private, all this stuff. But they're taking everything you search online. Their companies are taking your data. There's no privacy. anymore. I mean, let's just be honest with ourselves. There's no privacy. So you might as well get on, get on it now while you still can. Show people what's going on. Show them the why and how they do things.

And if it does go that way, like we're going to be in, I would like to say, a pretty decent position. If somebody came to us, I don't know, Johnson, what is the sausage? Johnsonville. Johnsonville Brots came to us and was like, hey, we see what you're doing and, you know, we want you to be our, I don't know, our mascot for what we put on our box, you know, I definitely think that might be coming. Or they're going to come and go. We want to make sure that whoever we're getting it from, we don't want them to be anything like you two years. And we kind of skipped over that, but talking to that direct to consumer,

I think you're seeing that way more on the animal side. Well, I mean, yeah, that's... Because it's easier to do, but the meat producers, they're getting it from, they're getting it from all sides. There's a big push right now as far as they want to make sure the line speed stays slower in these packing plants because it's a labor issue. They don't, they think that it's, it all happened because of COVID. They slowed the line speed down and they spaced everything out. Well, now then they don't want, and when I say they, government, there's a bill, and I can't remember where it came from, but basically they don't want to

speed that speed back up, which basically hurts your capacity, which in turn hurts your amount of throughput, which in turn raises your cost, which lowers what the producer can get for his pork, and it raises the price that the consumer pays for it. It's always amazing to me how government can't seem to do basic math. They, it doesn't matter what it is, but they like to regulate things and tax things. And they can never, I don't care whether you're a Republican or a Democrat or an independent, because in my mind, if you take any politicians and you put them in a wash machine and you pull them out,

you can't tell one from the other because by the time you get to the federal government, if you tell me that you have my best interest in mind, I know that you're lying. because you don't. You're a career politician, and I change my mind. I don't know any of them, but... Amazon presents Jeff versus Taco Truck Salsa, whether it's Verde, Roja, or the orange one. For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids, ginger tea, and milk. Habiniero? more like Habinier Yes. Save the Everyday with Amazon.

Yeah, both, I think both, and especially the last two years. Yeah. I think everybody can someone agree with that. Everything's in degrees. There's some that are a few degrees better than others, but. It's back to what you said in one of our podcasts. Everybody wants a payday, and especially the politicians. They have some, someone's in their wallet. Someone's giving them a little bit of money to do something. But, you know, in that case, they're going to regulate something. and then because of the regulation,

the guy that produces the product that gets processed, he's going to get less for his money, or he's going to get less money for his product, or he's going to get less money for his raw material. The guy that produces the product is going to have a higher cost to produce that product. So his margin, as far as what he makes, is worse, and whatever he's paying people today,

he's going to try to pay them less or find a way to, to or or future he's going to automate so he needs fewer people to pay to pay so he's going to have less jobs available and then because he spent that money the price that he's willing to sell it for is going to be higher and the price you pay for it's going to be higher so i don't see how anybody wins in that situation because the worker didn't win because yes the line speed went down and that's probably safer and that's probably good for not spreading COVID or whatever, but all the repercussions that you just explained. You got less jobs. Yeah, and everything costs more. People are getting paid less. The people that produce the product get paid less. The consumer has to

pay more. Yeah. And that's just, you know, that's just a very tiny example of a lot of things that government does for us because they're here to help. An offshoot of that is, you know, you've seen a lot of people go direct to consumer. And if you go to, um, farmers markets have got to be huge around the country. And people like that direct to consumer. And it's because people, as you said, they want to know where their food came from. And when they do know where their food comes from. And I also just think it's not just knowing where it came from. It's knowing the person that produced it. Yeah. Knowing who the farmer is. If you, you can, when you meet somebody and if they say that they're a farmer and they're trying to sell you their food that they created, you'll be able to,

I mean, like you read that person. If you think they're a dick, you're probably not going to buy it. You know, if you think that they're a good person, they generally care. They probably take care of their animals the same way. I mean, that I think that's another big thing that people like to miss. They like to say, they want to know where their food comes from. But I think people also want to know who the farmer is that's producing the food. Yeah. So on our direct to consumer products, it's just going to be a picture of me because we're going to pay, we're going to play the pity card. We're hoping that whatever, they look at that package and they see me, they're going to be like, boy, he, he needs some help. He needs some help. We'll just buy, we'll buy this, try to help him out.

So anyway, we kind of jumped all over the place on ag. I am very optimistic. Oh, I don't think there's a better, I mean, I don't think there's a better time to be alive. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that's going around, going around the world as far as just this last couple years was just crazy. I think another big part of the reason that people think it's as bad it is is because we're constantly getting fed information every day, every second, every minute. You're constantly reading things. Back in the day, you didn't know if it was that bad or not. And it wasn't hyped up to be as bad as it was. Well, you only had an hour of news.

You had the news. So we came in and we listened to WMT over the noon hour. And most of that was the big show or before I, I don't know if it's always been the big show, but when I was a kid, you listened to WMT. And you had 10 minutes of news, and then at 530, you watched Walter Cronkite, and once in a great while if something was really bad, they would break in, you know, and you would have a special report, and you knew, boy, this is a big deal. But you didn't have the 24-hour news cycle, and the sad part about it is,

news is no different than social media. They're trying to feed you that dopamine hit. The crazy headlines, the crazy pictures, the crazy videos, everything. And news has figured out that feel good stories rarely get them ratings. And so it's all bad all the time. And I don't, it doesn't matter who it is. Every news outlet out there, it's all bad pretty much. and now there's different culprits.

If you're watching CNN or you're watching Fox, it can be the same bad thing, but the reason that it happened, it's two different bad guys, but it's all bad. And when you get spoon fed that every day, you're not going to be very positive about the future, and I just try to not,

I try not to go off of that. There's a few news sites and places that are trying to go completely opposite, because I think they're listening to people and saying, trust these fake news. I mean, call it fake news because both sides are just doing exactly that. And there's these news companies that just want to do unbiased media,

unbiased news like it used to be. And I think there's a lot of people that are starting to try to do that, which is good because I'll follow those people. I don't care. But as far as not to shit on everybody's parade there, make them feel crappy work, I still say that there's no better time to be alive because there's so much opportunity. The fact that I can do my day job,

as far as farming and then go home and work on a side hustle to produce more income for me and make an impact on the world. My grandpa didn't have that. You didn't have that growing up. There's so much opportunity. You can go on Amazon and sells things. You can go, you can create a product faster than you could ever create a product. You can reach more people than you've ever been able to reach. You can learn information than like you've never been able to learn information ever. You got to look on the bright side of things, but you just got to be a hustler nowadays. I think you've got to be resourceful. You've got to be a hustler. And there's never been more opportunity than there is right now. But I don't know, I don't even know how to, well, I'll just

give an example. When we're talking about the future, I saw a post somebody, somebody was going on a rant about electric vehicles. They were going off on, they were going off on Tesla. And Tesla's had some bad, bad publicity of late. You know, there was a crash in Texas that the first thing they said was that the autopilot was on and people like, well, you know, that shouldn't be legal. You shouldn't be able to do that. Well, come to find out the autopilot wasn't turned on, but there's another crash in California. I think they're investigating that I think autopilot may have been on in that one. And so they've kind of, they make the car becomes the villain and not only the car.

We saw the same thing when gas, when SUVs, when we thought that oil, we were going to run out of oil, you know, and the oil price got high, you would see stories where an SUV killed four people. It wasn't the person driving this car. It was the SUV killed four people because SUVs were the devil because they burned all this gas. Well, now you've kind of seen,

they talk about electric vehicles catching on fire. Electric vehicle, Tesla Model S kills through two people or whatever. But you can resist a technology and you can pull up articles about, I think I just saw it today on LinkedIn, an article, and I think it was in Newsweek or Time Magazine, and they literally said that a lot of people are turning their back on the Internet, and they thought the Internet was going to die, because it's just not what it was cracked up to be,

and people are turning away from it. They're not using it. Well, that didn't age very well. And we can say, and I've seen a lot of arguments about how dirty, how dirty the battery process is for building batteries for electric vehicles and how electric vehicles, if you figure in all of the stuff that goes into the battery, that they're not nearly as good for the environment as what people say they are. But usually when they quote those, they're talking about the batteries that went into the first version of the Chevy Bolt or the

first version of Tesla when they made the Roadster or when they first made the Model S. And they don't, they don't talk about the technology we have today or the technology that's coming with the next generation, the 4680 battery, and how much better it is and how exponentially fast it's getting more efficient and it's getting better for the environment. And I'm not, I'm, I'm going somewhere with this. I'm just using this as an example. You cannot stop the train of change. Change. Change is coming. And you, every single person, you need to decide if you are going to get on the train or get ran over. Yep. And that's 100% right because by 2030, it's 2021. I'll guarantee you by 2030, there won't be very many people left that are going, yeah, you know, these electric cars just aren't going to catch on. the ship has already sailed, and it's already a foregone conclusion that that is the way the world is going to go.

And it's not only going to affect cars, it's going to affect semis, and then it costs you roughly four cents a mile. I think, oh boy, somebody will correct me on these numbers. But if you're hauling freight on a train, I think you can haul freight on a train, somewhere around three and a half cents a loaded mile. It could be a little bit, just use these numbers for argument's sake. I think it's three and a half cents a loaded mile. And if you're trucking, if you're trucking, it costs about, I want to say it costs maybe six or eight cents a loaded mile. It's a healthy enough gap that if you're moving large amounts of stuff, coal, steel, lumber, it makes sense to run it on a train. The problem with that train is you've got to pick it up in Los Angeles, Omaha, Chicago, Baltimore, and then you've got to haul it at the last, how many miles to get it there? That's where if with a truck, it's a little more efficient because you don't have to offload it on the train. Okay, if you take and you put an electric semi, and electric semis are going to be there, and you put that semi in a tunnel, and you pressurize,

the tunnel and you take it from Los Angeles, California to Omaha, you can do it for about two cents, two or two and a half cents a loaded mile. You can't do that today. The technology is not there. The tunnel's not there. But the tunnel's perfected. Elon's boring the tunnels. They're going to make the tunnel. When that happens, the amount of people that are going to be displaced and the amount of money that is going to be made on one side and lost on the other side is huge. It's insane. And people, you know, if you just listen to this part, you're a boy, that kid, that guy, he is crazy. He really is crazy. That's just an example. Well, I mean, I think a lot of people, when they're, like, it's just like farmers when they hear electric cars, they automatically think, oh, no ethanol. We're not going to

sell our corn for ethanol because there's no need, there's not going to be such a demand for ethanol. It's like, what are you going to do about it? Right. You can't do anything about it. If the world goes that way, you better have a plan because it's going to happen regardless. Yeah. And so you can either sit there and say, screw electric cars, screw where the world's going, but the world doesn't care. The world doesn't care where you're at.

So you can either do something about it or stay there. And in nine, ten years, you're going to get hit in the face and you're going to be like, shit, I should have done something about it. Yeah. And all, all I'll say. about the ethanol deal is this. You are competing against, you're competing against oil, but you need the combustion engine to burn that ethanol to make it viable, but it's only viable at a price point if oil stays above a certain rate. It's just like fracking. Fracking is only viable as long as oil stays, I don't know, $60 a barrel, $40 a barrel, whatever it is, but the world is not going to go

entirely electric overnight, but here's what's going to happen. You're going to get enough consumer vehicles, passenger vehicles switched to electric, that if you erode two, three, four percent of the world's oil consumption, the price collapses. Because the margin that the Saudis are making on that oil, they can only sustain that if they're pumping it like they are pumping it. And if demand goes away, three, four percent, they're screwed. The price collapses because Russia, a lot of people that pump oil, they aren't very good fiscally. I mean, the whole world's not very good fiscally, but the only way they've got money to keep things going is keep pumping oil. The Russians are going to keep pumping all the oil they can. The Saudis are going to keep bumping

all the oil they can. Venezuela is going to keep pumping all the oil it can. So when it happens, when it gradually happens, there's no stop in that price. That price is going to collapse. when it does collapse. Yeah, and everybody thinks that they don't think that's going to happen because they don't realize it only needs to be 3 to 4%. Everyone wants the big picture. Oh, it's not going to all go away. The price is just going to drop, which it's not. You're going to burn jet fuel.

You're going to burn diesel. You're going to burn these ships in the ocean. They're going to burn diesel. All that's going to be there. But the thing is, the consumer market is going to push it. And the reason it is because you've got the present we have now. He wants to give everybody, what is it, $1,700 to buy an electric vehicle. and the price of a Tesla Model 3 versus a Toyota Corolla,

it's almost a wash right now. And we can argue about, we can argue about, you know, the cost of ownership and this and that. But the truth is the price is going to just keep going down, and I fully predict, you can come back and check this video, you know, check this video two years ago and send me a message, or two years from now, as the battery technology gets better,

because the battery is the biggest cost involved in building that car, As that technology gets better, the price drops exponentially. Because there's nothing else in the electric car. That's the most expensive part of an electric car. That's right. If the battery drops, it costs them to make it? So you're almost at parity now. And when that gets flipped to where you can buy an electric car,

cheaper you can buy a gas car, and the government's going to give you money to buy it, it's done. I'm a little passionate about that. The other thing I think that's going to change is, And COVID sped this up, but, you know, people working from home, I don't think we're ever going back. I think commercial real estate is in really bad shape, and I think it's going to get worse before it gets better. I think commercial real estate will probably be the Achilles heel that kills the real estate market.

I think it will finally drag down this ultra-hot real estate market, because these companies that have these big, office buildings, they figured out it is way cheaper. It is way cheaper to let everybody work from home. And then as we talked about the amount of knowledge that's out there that you can pick up, that you can learn, the amount of freelancing. Freelancing. Yeah, that's a big one. I mean, I was, as you guys know, we're doing the podcast, we're doing the YouTube and then we try to post-produce all the content we make on TikTok, Instagram, all that stuff. That's kind of our strategy as far as content creation goes. That's a lot. of editing for dad and I. We do a lot of editing. So I was looking up on Fiverr and Upwork because

these are some freelancing websites and I was just going through there and you know I'm I'm looking for someone to hire. So if you got video editing skills and you're a farm kid, which it's pretty, that's going to be a hard criteria to fill, but hopefully I can find someone sometime. Shoot me a message. But anyway, I was looking for work because I'm interested in finding someone and I remember just scrolling through there and over the past two years, all the stuff that I've learned because I used the internet to learn it, I was looking at these people and they were charging, shit, they were charging $500 a day for a 10 hour day. I'm like, holy shit, I can make probably $10,000 in a single month with the skills that I have right now. I threw the breaker in the garage for the

Starlink so that he could get off because I don't want him to get any funny ideas and wonder off the farm. I won't do that. We already got a good thing going. But that's touching on your subject. Freelancing is becoming a huge thing. I think people want it. people want to work for themselves. I think a lot more people are wanting to work for themselves. They want to work at home. They want to have time with their kids. And if you're not going to be an entrepreneur that starts a business, you can become a freelancer. You can learn skills to become a freelancer. And that's huge. Yeah. And so where I was going when I started before that ran, I was talking about how people are getting sold. Like, I feel like the government isn't telling you the whole story,

because these politicians all want to get up and kiss babies and tell you how all these all these great high-paying jobs, but it's going to be a lot different. It's going to be a lot different than what your parents were or your grandparents were. Now, I do feel like we figured out that there is a lot of stuff that we're not making here in America today that we need to be.

And we talked about, you know, just like the chip shortage, that needs to come back home. And there's a lot of that stuff that is. But so much of that, manufacturing, it's all going to be automated. 3D printing? Yeah, all that stuff. Everyone's trying to,

there's some companies out there that are trying to 3D print to live in crap out of everything. Yeah, and take the gigapress. You know, I'm sorry, I got to go back to Tesla again. But, you know, they're going from, they're making the back end of a model Y, and I think there was over 100 pieces of metal that were welded together,

and they cast that all in one piece. okay, not only is that eliminates some jobs, it eliminates a pile of machines that they were using to weld that. And that's just one example. That's what they call the Gigapress? Yeah. Did Tesla invent that?

No, there's a company in Italy that created it. And they made smaller ones, and Tesla went to them and said, We want to. Could you make one of these that presses six tons? And they were like, what? And they said, nobody's ever asked, but I think we can. And so the biggest one that they had ever made,

they made an eight ton that is going to make the under the chassis of the cyber truck, and it's in Austin in that plant. But they just got an order and nobody knows what it's for. Well, people are speculating that it is for the entire chassis and the body of the really cheap car that they're trying to perfect in China that they want to sell for like $20,000. Because if they can do that, everyone's going to buy it. They're going to make a killing. But anyway, they're building a nine-ton press, and nobody knows what it's for, because they built sixes.

But anyway, they took that process, and they went from making the back. When the two new factories come, they're going to make the back end of the car, the front end of the car, and then the chassis with the batteries integrated into that chassis in one box, and they're going to have three presses that make that. And instead of welding together what would basically be probably 400 pieces of metal, well, yeah, if there's a little, 150 or so in the back, 150 in the front, you know, that's 300 and whatever in the middle, it's literally going to be three pieces. You know how much money that's going to save them? It's not only... Well, and the efficiency. Yeah, it's just insane. But they're not the only ones doing this.

This is what technology is changing, 3D printing, the efficiency. And then on top of that, people are going to freelance. And these companies, they're going to be willing to pay you very well, but you're going to be responsible for your own retirement. You're going to be responsible for your own insurance. You're going to be responsible for all that stuff because they're going to offload that on you. They're willing to pay you very well, but the difference is the safety net where these people that grew up going to work for going to work for company and, you know, you work there, you put your 20 years in, you get your pension, all that, that's not coming back. That's not coming back. And I think that's why there's so much talk about universal basic income.

Yeah, that's right. And the reason they're talking about that is because they know, they aren't selling it this way, but they know. That's coming. Everything, yep, there's going to be a group of people that are going to get pushed out. Because they don't, and that's where, well, how long are we? Because we could go into the education side, because there's a group of people that are not going to have the skills that they need, for the jobs that are going to be available because the economy is going to change at such a rapid rate that they're just...

They're going to automate so much of the stuff that people, that they won't need the people. And then those people won't have the skills to level up and go get the jobs that are needed for humans to be doing. And then they're going to be sitting on their butt and not know what the hell they do. They either go to college,

they either learn some stuff online, and they become a freelancer. Right. So learn some skills. Learn some skills. And I'm not pretending to have the answer, And it's not going to be, this is not going to be a utopia. I guarantee it's not going to be a utopia.

Take your sunglasses off and you really look. If you just sit and you really think about the future and what technology, the way it's pointing, you start to come to some conclusions that you know it's not going to stay the same, which you knew that to star with. But there's going to be huge operations. opportunities, and there's going to be huge perils for certain industries and for a lot of individuals. And, you know, I'll be honest, when it comes to the ag side of things, I don't know where that's going to be. Like, do I think in, do I think in 10 years that I'm still going to have pigs in our hog buildings?

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Maybe we have three times of solar panels and we're just growing pot like it's going out of style. Yeah, everybody always asks us that and the YouTube comments. They're like, what are you going to do when these hog barns get outlawed and you're not going to be able to do anything? We're going to raise pot. And I said, you know what? You know what I say to them? I'm like, you know what? We'll probably figure it out, but worse comes to worse,

we'll probably turn it into a greenhouse. Yeah. Cannabis. Yeah. Cannabis greenhouse. I mean, a hog bar, literally is slats, walls, curtains, a roof. It's a big building that if the right opportunity is there, I guess what I'm saying is, I said 10 years, I think in 10 years we'll still be raising pigs in them.

Yeah. 20 years, 20 years from now. It's going to be my responsible. I have no idea what. what problems Sawyer will have, but I know it won't be my problem. He'll be calling me. Hopefully I'm on a small, small island somewhere. I'll have to be, I'll have to have come up with the solutions, but yeah. But the thing is, you got to keep your eyes open and you cannot dig in your heels and say, nope, not going to do it. Don't care. Not going to do it. Because if you have that attitude,

yeah, you won't be doing it. Another thing that I think is coming is, um, I think the banking system is going to be screwed. Oh gosh. We didn't touch on this. This is a big one for us. The way that I think, I truly think that the way we're going with this cryptocurrency, and some of you might be rolling your eyes, but this digital currency thing, it's faster. It's more efficient.

It is, it's safer. It's a, I mean, like, the data, all the data that they have on the blockchain. The blockchain, it's so, like, data driven. and so safe, like they have everything in one block and then every, I don't know how, I forget how it all works. Yeah, but that's the upside of it is the clarity and the security is excellent, but that's not what's going to change it. It's like everything.

The economics are what's going to change it. So today, you go to any big city, any small town, and one of the cornerstones of a community, what's the nicest buildings in a business, about any town you go to. Bank. They build these banks, and they're all very nice. And they get people to bring their money, and they pay them a little bit.

You know, when I was a kid, you used to be able to get, I don't know, 10% on your savings account. I remember my grandpa gave me a CD once, like a $2,000 CD, and I want to say that it had, it was like 14% interest or something like that when I was in grade school. but it was a terrible time to be farming, of course, but if you were a kid and you had, or if you were a retired person, you had money in the bank,

it was, wow, because the interest rate kept up with your cost of living. Maybe it did, maybe it didn't. I was only like seven or eight, so I don't know, but interest was high. But today, you know, you don't make anything, and I read somewhere that for a bank to, to get a customer.

So by the time they give them incentive to open an account there and the cost of building the bank in that town and the ATMs and all the stuff, that over their, I can't remember if this is over their lifetime or whether this is what they figure it costs them to get a customer. But it's like, it's like $1,500 or $3,000. Do you know what it costs PayPal or Square? Yeah, that's the other thing. I didn't even touch on that.

To get a customer? Not only digital currency, but these other platforms. So if you're not familiar with PayPal or Square, they're both digital mechanisms where you can pass money between people and you can pay for products. So PayPal, Elon Mess started PayPal, and then he sold it, and that's how he started Tesla. But anyway, PayPal was kind of the pioneer of this.

and aren't they owned by, is PayPal owned by Google now? It might be. I don't know if it is or not. But anyway, PayPal, they've been around longer, and so you can buy about anything on the internet, and you can pay for it with PayPal, which it's linked to a bank account or it's linked to a credit card, but it has really good security.

And so if somebody screws you, it's kind of like an in-between between your bank account and these people to where you've got a buffer, so they can, you're kind of protected. But then they've also gotten into, they have a service called Venmo, which is on your phone, where if we buy a pizza and we want to split the price,

excuse me, Sawyer pays. Or do you pay for it? And then I just Venmo. And they have any cash or, yeah, I don't have cash. And that's, and it's very popular with younger people. And then Square is the people that brought,

if you've ever been somewhere, that a flea marketer, you've been to a restaurant, And they'll iPad, you have that white thing plugged into their iPad, and you swipe the card on there. So that's square. And a lot of businesses use that, and it's convenient, and they handle all the transaction fees. And then all the money that you bring in, they, once a day or once a week, depending on how you set it up, then they slide that money into a brick and mortar bank account. Then they also have a card, and it's called Cash App. So Square owns the cash app.

Yep, and cash apps just like Venmo. Okay, their cost to get a customer is like $25. Like it's nothing compared to a bank. And they, if you're a, if you are a, so my other son, he has a business. He does real estate, but then he does real estate photography. And he uses cash app. He uses Square. Yeah, he uses Square.

We also use cash-knap, but he uses a square to run his business. So where both of these examples are a lot different than a brick-and-mortar bank, if you decide that you want to go borrow money from a bank, and I go into the bank and I say, I want to borrow, well, I want to buy this hog building. You know, it's, well, that's a poor example. I want to buy this way. I want to buy a house or I want to get a little. I want a business loan.

Yeah, I want a business loan. I want a $25,000, $30,000 line of credit. They're going to tell you, okay, I need the last three years tax returns. I need this, this, this, and this, fill this sheet out. I'm going to have to sit down with my supervisors, go over it for a week. The bank board meets next Tuesday. And if you're lucky, they meet next Tuesday. And that's if you're at a small town bank.

If you're at Citibank, you know, it's going to be 30 days. And if you're a Gen Zer like me, you don't got time for that. You want it now. It doesn't understand. Everybody wants it now. Okay. So my son, Sawyer's brother, that uses Square.

Because they have the info, all of the people that are paying him, all those transactions are going through their service. They see how much money he's making, and then he's buying stuff using his cash app card. All of those transactions are flowing through their system, and they're using machine learning. They're using AI.

They're using really powerful computing software. And they're looking at it. They already know. How much Clay's making? Yeah, they know what he's making. Yeah, that's my brother, Clay. Clay is my brother. Shout out to Clay.

Shout out to Whistler Studios. If you need a house sold or you need some photography done for a house you're trying to sell. Hit up Clay Whistler. Hit up Clay Whistler. Whistler Studios too. Yep. Anyway, they will literally reach out to him and they will offer him. They'll say, hey.

We see that you're profitable. Yeah, you're making money. Do you need any extra money? to run your business. And this isn't like one of those deals that you used to get in the mail that be like, how would you like a personal loan of up to this many thousand dollars and the fine print is it's 18.9%. No, this is like just like a bank loan where it's at, you know, whatever current rates are. But because they have the data and they're using it so efficiently, they already know the businesses that are out there that are profitable and that are making money and they want to

reach out to you. Right. They don't wait for you to go to them and ask for money. They're willing to email you and say, we see that you're making this money. We'll lend you this amount of money on this, on these terms or whatever. Yeah. Do you need money for, you know, for stock? Do you need money for equipment, whatever? And the reason they're doing that is they want to head them off at the past before they go to that brick and mortar bank. And today, that's kind of in its infancy, but you're going to see that just it is absolutely going to decimate. The thing, The thing with Squares, like they do the cash app thing where we can transfer money back and forth between friends. Then they own the lending side of the business. So they're lending people

money and having people use their software to help their business. And the biggest thing, and if you're older, you might not get this as much, but young kids, millennials, Gen Zers, we want it now because we've always had it now. We can have any information we want at our fingertips in a second. Yeah. That is becoming so important to people. We want it now. It's the same thing. That's why we're getting Alexis in everybody's house. Everybody wants an Alexa. Alexa is going to get to the point where it's going to become a chore to get on your phone and Google it and Google it and type using your fingertips to type something in when you can just go, Alexa, search this. It's going to, and it's all about time, time, time, time. And if you get to the point where Square can loan you that in a day, I don't have to wait for the bank to go have

their meeting next week. I don't have to give them, I don't have to go find my tax returns because they're already in the system. They already know. Yeah. They have it all there. So I can literally at the snap of my fingers probably have a loan that same day if I wanted it. Yeah. And that's super important to people. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, so if I was a young person and don't get mad of me if you work at a bank, but I don't know. I don't know how, I don't know what the future of banks will be, but they better get on their high horse and they need to get the data from the customers or the people that they're serving.

Because if they don't have the data and they don't start reaching out to people, hey, we'll loan you this X amount of money, it's always been banks is where you go get money. And that's just how it's been. But if somebody comes out and Square is coming out and they're saying, we'll give you money. Yeah.

We're going to give you money. It's like they're generating leads from themselves almost. Right. And banks haven't been doing that because they didn't need to, but they better start if they're going to make it. Along these lines, I had this very conversation with my ag lender. So my ag lender that I have my buildings finance through, my operating through, lands, you know, everything's through them.

They started a program where they were helping people with their farm financials. Farm financials with their record keeping. and I really liked their program. In fact, I'm still using the program. They were working with it through a third-party provider, and then they were subsidizing it and all that, and I really liked it, and they got rid of it. And the reason they got rid of it was because they had less than 30% adoption rate

of their customers, less than 30 out of 100 people, had any interest in it or stayed on it or did it, and you know they had the people in there to support it and do all that and they left it and I told them I thought that was a mistake because in my mind the 30 people out of 100 that probably were doing that those 30 people were going to be their customers for life and those other people may not they may not be in business well yeah and here's the other thing if those 30 people have kids like yeah I would probably use that service now right we're younger generations we're growing up with technology.

That's, I don't know, I think it's... When I explained to him that whole premise about offering to loan them money and having, owning the data. Having the data. They were just like, they were like, wow, that's really neat. Then they sat there and they thought about it for a minute and they were like, hmm, that doesn't, that doesn't bode well.

He asked you, oh, the interest has got to be just stupid on it. Right. Yeah, exactly. It's got to be just stupid on it if it's that. and you're like, no, it's basically prime plus. It's the same loan that you're given. Yep, it's the same one. Yeah. But that's, and that's the thing.

There's going to be winners and there's losers. And it's, you can take this back. Remember Kodak. And this example gets taught a lot in business school. You take Kodak and you take the digital camera. Kodak had the market. I mean, they owned, they owned the film market. And the idea, in their mind, you know,

the idea of taking images, that's never going away. That is guaranteed business. And they saw digital photography, and they thought, nah, that'll never catch on. And they didn't do it. They had the technology before anybody else. They could have been the dominant player in that if they would have played it right. And they chose to just pass on it. They're gone.

Like, sorry, you don't even hardly know it. Kodak doesn't mean anything. to him. I mean, I've seen, I mean, there's T-shirts. They say Kodak on them like retro t-shirts. Yeah, exactly. But there's not a camera out there. I use a damn Sony. Yeah. Team Sony. And so to think that there isn't there those businesses are here today. Those businesses are here today that believe that they are the, that it's never going to change. It's not going to change that they own it. Whatever it is. And you know what? Someday they'll be on a vintage t-shirt and somebody will see, oh, yeah, I remember them because...

Yeah, and it's the same way with individuals. Technology is brutal. Technology's brutal. The world's brutal. And it's not going to give you a pity party if you don't. Get on the train. Get on the train or get ran over. You've got to move with the times.

You've got to move with the times. You've got to adapt the technology. Keep your eyes out. We talked about a lot of stuff here. We kind of went on a ramble. This is kind of our... If you guys want to know about Dad and I, we're dreamers, we're schemers. We love.

thinking about the future and we love we love technology and innovation even if it obviously we we recognize that if electric cars became a thing that yep the ethanol market would probably be crap and you know we probably won't be able to sell our corn for whatever but you know what it goes back to if we if we do a good enough job marketing our product if so if if the the world of meat production if they all do a good enough job of knowing their customer and giving them a product that they feel good about and that they enjoy, and they work with content creators,

people on social media that own restaurants, that are backyard barbecue guys, that are competition barbecue guys, that are culinary chefs, and they work with those people we could sell so much meat, we couldn't grow enough corn. Well, and that too. And, I mean, 2050 are supposed to be 50 billion people on this planet.

Or 10 billion. I'm not... 10 billion, not 50. Yeah. 2050, 10 billion people got 50 billion. I am not worried at all about not having a market for... the crops that we grow. I'm not worried about that at all. You know, I, I, I, to me, um, ethanol may be here, it may not be, but it doesn't matter because if we all do a good

enough job of telling our story and the companies that we work with, if they do a good enough job of adapting what's happening and staying in touch with their consumer as far as what consumers want and working with the people that are catering to those consumers, consumers and showing them how to use the product that they have, it's, it ain't going away. It's going to be a good, it's going to be, it's going to be profitable for everybody. I'm very, I'm excited for the future of agriculture. It's a little scary, but I feel good about it. We're excited about the future ag, and I think we're excited about the future in general, as far as, I don't know, currency and, I mean, we didn't really touch on cryptocurrency, but the fact, I just always

think about this thing. The fact that there's a conversation that the currency that we currently use might not be the currency we use in 20, 30, 50 years. That is a, that's mind-blowing in itself. Your grandpa didn't have that opportunity. You don't get that every year. Not all generations get that opportunity. Yeah. The fact that the currency might change into something and you could get in on it early. That is like, that does not happen. I mean, how many years, hundreds of years does that happen? It doesn't. It doesn't happen. Well, and it, we, that is truly, we can't go off on this because that's a whole podcast. But when we say, we're, the world is running on fiat currency. And fiat currency isn't, it's not tied to anything. The world economy, as far as the value of

the paper money printed, that money has absolutely no value, except. that you know it came from the United States government, you know it came, whatever that paper is. But it's not tied. They went off the gold standard a long time ago. It's not tied to anything of value. It's only the value that is perceived. So that's Fiat.

And it creates a lot of problems and that we have a lot of problems. And cryptocurrency has the opportunity to change that. and make currency accountable and make governments accountable. And that too could be very painful. But it also may very well be one of the greatest opportunities that's ever been afforded to the common citizen of the world that there's ever been. And that's all I'm going to say about it because we could go another hour on that. Yeah.

This was a long one, guys. We understand that. I hope you got some value out of it. We kind of touched on a lot. But we are super optimistic and excited for the future. I mean, we talked about some doom and gloom stuff on here about, you know, the problems that we face right now in ag and in the world or whatever. But all I'll say is keep your eyes open and try to be innovative and look for opportunities because there's a lot of opportunity coming. There's a lot of opportunity to be coming.

And don't let don't let the media tell you that right now. now sucks to be a human being because right now it's really great to be a human being you have more opportunity than you've ever had you you have more opportunity than your granddad had than your dad had than your great grandpa had i mean yeah you have so much opportunity there's so many ways to learn there's so many new things coming out technology is going crazy so stay optimistic yeah and i'll say this um if as we said if you just if you watch if you watch too much news you kind of lose you don't have a lot of faith in your fellow man. One of the best things you can do, and this is easy for my generation and hard for Sawyer's generation, because I don't feel like they have as much, as many social,

they don't get out as much. They, they, everything is, you know, on here. But when I go out on, if I go to church on Sunday morning, or I go and drive down and stop at my neighbor's place, or I walk into, I walk into the gas station and two farmers that I know are in there, um, You spend enough time like that. It'll restore your faith in your fellow man. And it's good that we're all kind of getting out from underneath the COVID thing. And you know what? Just get out and walk around your block.

And if you don't know your neighbors, introduce yourself. And there's a lot of great people out there. And we were all meant to be together, not apart. And even if there's stuff that we disagree on, there's a hell of a lot we can agree on. and I think the future is bright. I do too. Way to unite them at the end here. You're raining it in, Dad.

That was a good American spirit talk right there. Yeah. No, that's true, though. It is. We need to become, I think the media likes to say that they're trying to make us divided. Don't let them do that. We're more alike than we're different. So no matter what skin color you are, you're freaking orange, black, brown, white,

no matter what, your sexual. is, I mean, you can find common ground with anybody. So just find the good in everybody and be looking for the future. Be optimistic. It doesn't do you any good to be negative. Share this with somebody if you got some value, guys. That's all we ask. And let us know in the comments if you want to see some guest on here. Because we're looking on it. We're working on finding guests. We're shooting some messages here and there. And if you want somebody on here that you enjoy listening to, we'll try to get them on. So that being said, guys, Have a great week.

Go find some opportunity. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time.