Barn Talk - Revolutionizing Farming: Unveiling Soil Secrets for Mega Yields w/Gaji Balakaneshan

Episode Date: December 16, 2023

Welcome to Barn Talk What happens at the barn, Stays in the barn, But not today! We’re letting it all out! In today’s episode we’re diggin’ in the dirt. Soil health, Regenerative Ag, Biologics. These and a whole lot of others are the hot lingo at just about every farm conference these days. New products and new companies are popping up with the promise of fixing all of your grain farming ills. Well, Today we are going to talk to the president of Midwestern BioAg. A company that has been beating the drum on soil health for more than 30 years. We’ll get his take on the industry today and where he thinks we’re headed. Use BARNTALK for 10% OFF your next order https://farmergrade.com  SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST ➱ https://bit.ly/3a7r3nR   SUBSCRIBE TO THIS’LL DO FARM ➱ https://bit.ly/2X8g45c  SUBSCRIBE TO BARN TALK CLIPS ➱ https://bit.ly/3BlZnqq   LISTEN ON: SPOTIFY ➱ https://open.spotify.com/show/3icVr4KWq4eUDl7Oy60YMY  ITUNES ➱ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/barn-talk/id1574395049 Follow Behind The Scenes👇🏻 ● This’ll Do Farm Instagram ➱ https://bit.ly/30KPBNk   ● Barn Talk TikTok ➱ https://bit.ly/3qciekS   ● Sawyer’s Instagram  ➱ https://bit.ly/3BtX0n4   ● Tork’s Instagram ➱ https://bit.ly/3LGZJxS    ------------------------------- ***PLEASE NOTE*** Barn Talk is a significant break from the typical content viewers have come to expect from This’ll Do Farm. Please be advised that we will be exploring a wide variety of topics (some adult-themed) and our younger viewers (and their parents) should be advised that some topics will be for mature audiences only. ⚠NO FINANCIAL ADVICE / DISCLAIMER⚠  The Information discussed and shared on Barn Talk is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or success for any particular purpose. The Information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice. The Information on this podcast and provided from or through our content is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional, professional broker or financial advisory. Understand that you are using any and all Information available on or through this website at your own risk. RISK STATEMENT– The trading of Bitcoins, alternative cryptocurrencies, NFTs, individual stocks, etc. has potential rewards, and it also has potential risks involved. Trading may not be suitable for all people. Anyone wishing to invest should seek his or her own independent financial or professional advice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All of the food we eat and much of the clothing we wear comes from plants and animals that are raised on farms. Farms are different in type, in size, and even in name. Before we dive in today's episode, I want to thank you for tuning in and supporting the brand. Over the last few years, I spent a lot of time starting Farmer Grade. We offer meat that you and your family can trust by strictly sourcing our cuts from farmers who share their story and processes online through social media. We provide high-quality beef and pork that is 100% born, raised, and harvested in the United States. If you want to support the content in the message we share online, I would appreciate it.

If you went over to pharmaGraight.com and you can use the code Barn Talk to save 10% off your next order. Thank you guys so much. We appreciate you. We love you. Now, let's get into the episode. Welcome to Barn Talk. What happens at the barn? Stays in the barn, but not today.

we're going to let it all out for you guys today is going to be a guest episode we got a good guest coming on the show but before we get into all that you guys know the show with who you know it's kind of the ticket to admission to watch or listen to the show the more that you guys do that the more the show grows the better guests we can get on the more podcasts we can make feel free to also leave a review on spotify or apple uh the more that you guys do that just gives our show more credibility for people that and it gets gets it out further on spotify and apple for people to discover it so we appreciate it you can follow us on youtube you can follow us on tic talk you can follow us on instagram at barn talk show and uh if you have any questions that you want to submit for our q and a

episodes you can email us your questions at barn talk show at gmail dot com so today we're digging in the dirt, regenerative ag and biologics and soil health. Those and a whole lot of other ones are the hot lingo that is floating around in agriculture today. It seems like just about everybody that's peddling anything is using those taglines when it comes to fertility, when it comes to seed, chemicals, all that stuff. pretty much every farm conference you go to, that's the project. There's a lot of new products, a lot of new companies popping up with a promise that we've been doing it all wrong and they got what you need to fix it.

But today we're going to talk to the president of Midwest BioAG and they started that company, I think, in 1983. So they've been beating the drum on soil health for about 30 years. So we figured we'd go to somebody that's been doing this for a while. So we're going to get his take on the industry today and where he thinks that we're headed. So without any further ado, let's dive in. Gaji Balakonnesian, welcome to Barn Talk. Thank you. We'll make that sound so much better if we can get some of it.

So, yeah, we appreciate you coming on. How was the drive? How is the little time to get here? Oh, I had some windshields time. It went pretty well. Didn't hit anything. That's good. Yeah, no.

I appreciate it. I like the drive down here, actually. What part of Wisconsin do you make home? Just outside Madison. Okay, sure. Yep. I was just there for the World Dairy Expo. Oh, yeah.

And I've never been. And that is, to me, insanity, that that goes on that long, and there's that many people there. Like, I think World Pork Expo is a big deal. and I walked in there and I was like, holy mother Mary. And they're everywhere. That whole town is taken over by dairy farmers and a lot of hooterites. So there's a lot of people walking around that look completely out of place. But anyway, it was a good time.

What's your favorite thing about Wisconsin? Oh, man. I care deeply about beer, beef, and cheese. There you go. You are. Those things can be found in Wisconsin. Yeah. Perfect place.

Yeah. It works really well. Yeah, that's right. So I'm originally from Philly, and I don't want to give away my kind of secret, long-term ambition here, but my wife is from Wisconsin, and I know it's going to end up there at some point in time. And I always thought there is a huge market opportunity for cheese steaks in Wisconsin. Yep. And you don't find a lot of cheese stakes out there, but they got the most important ingredients. Yeah. We just got to work on the bread. The bread's not where it needs to be, to be honest. No offense to Wisconsin. Yeah. You would know better than anybody. It's a Philly special. I feel like I can bring that to the table. Yeah. Absolutely. Bring my life. I tell you what, that's people, you see a need. You see a need. So is that in your future then? Are you going to open up a food truck or? I'm all talk. That's exactly what I was trying to do though. Yeah. I've been talking about this for literally, I don't know, 13 years at this point.

Yep. So maybe at some point, you know, not like I'm too busy with the day job or anything. Right. That's the, right. That's the, that is the. That is the. tug is the balance between the work and the and the private life and trying to juggle all that but i think you're on to something we uh we would be interested oh yeah great we could add we could add cheese sticks some slice steak yep well you know something it might be even more relevant to you guys is that the secret uh this secret kind of favorite sandwich of philly is not the cheese steak it's the roast pork now you're talking around language. Yes. There we go. I was going to bring that up later on, but as long as we're on the topic.

Yeah. So are you an Eagles fan then? Gigantic. We're Cowboys fans. So this Sunday, it's going to go down, man. We're going to get our revenge. I do that beforehand. Yeah. That's why I didn't tell you. There was just, I had this feeling that I didn't want to give too much away. And now, now I know. Now it all makes sense. Well, thanks for coming. That was a good while lasted. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So you grew up in Philly. So, just kind of give us a little bit about your story and how you're now today at Midwestern BioAG doing what you're doing. Oh yeah, it's just the classic chemical engineer to Wall Street Ag Executive that everybody knows about. My whole life is random and it feels like it's a lot of luck.

But I majored in chemical engineering. It's because I was good at chemistry and engineering and I figured to put the two together and do something with that. And I actually planned on doing, you know, getting a PhD, doing research and I got a scholarship to do research at some point undergrad, and I realized I hated it. You kind of sit in a lab, you mix dangerous chemicals together, you wait around for a dozen hours, reading terrible academic literature, and then you do it again the next day. That was awful to me. So I decided, let's not do that, and I graduated with no job, and I was majored in, you know, one of the highest paying majors you could at the time, and I decided I have a whole lot of debt from this whole experience.

What pays more than chemical engineering? Wall Street does. And to be honest, it was more than that. I kind of figured I had a bunch of friends going in to work for Wall Street companies, and I was deeply anti-corporate when I was younger. And then I decided, all right, if I'm going to learn anything about how life works, I should probably understand business. And so I decided I'm going to go be a stock analyst.

And I had no in, I had no internship. I never took econ or accounting or finance, nothing, just pure engineering to that point. And then dumb luck, I end up getting an opportunity to work at a Wall Street company to work for a chemical engineer from my school covering chemical and ag companies. Oh, perfect. So just they figured I can learn the math. I know the math, I'll learn the rest, and they gave me a job.

And so then I go into the wacky world of Wall Street and it's wacky. I learned a lot about the economy and business and how things work on that side of the world. And then I did that for a number of years, decided I didn't want to stick with that. They made life easy by laying me off. So I had to find something else. My wife out there, we wanted to go to the Midwest, and I ended up locking into a job for a renewable chemical company outside of Chicago. Okay. Move to Chicago.

I did that for a couple of years. That didn't really make a lot of sense. Found a job opportunity with a fertilizer company based around Chicago. And it was a chemical company, a nitrogen producer, you guys know, CF Industries. And it's just this big chemical manufacturing plants, a lot like an oil refinery. And they were looking to buy another fertilizer company for $8 billion. They needed another person to do that, to do the finances. So went there to model out the finances.

That fell through when the U.S. Treasury changed the tax inversion rules, if you remember that. Yep. And then they said, hey, go work in corporate development. So I said, sure. And then I looked at a whole bunch of things. Nothing happened. And they say, hey, there's something called UAN. Go help manage that.

So I went to work on the commercial team, moving 7 million tons of UAN around the world. My boss there is one of the top fertilizer marketers in the world. learned a whole lot from him. And it was kind of funny because he would always complain about the co-ops we would sell to. And kind of the way the industry works and some of the old personalities. And I always thought, all right, if it's that bad, somebody's got to be able to do better pretty easily, right? And I never intended to try and do that, right? But I ended up getting a random opportunity to join Midwestern Bioag on the finance side.

And then things kind of transpired and here I am. Yeah, lots of luck. So what's your role today at Midwestern BioAW? I'm the president of Midwestern Bioag. Cool, cool. Yeah, it sounds like you're from just listening to your journey. It's like you just seized opportunity and you just learn every place you went. You learned something new and it's all served you so well.

I mean, to where you are today. Effectively, like two lessons I've picked up from other people who know more than I do, which is you can either make it in this world by knowing exactly what you want to do and always driving to that or otherwise just take what other opportunities present themselves. Biggest thing is taking action, I feel like. I mean, sitting on the sidelines and doing nothing isn't going to move you forward or grow you or make you learn something new.

But season opportunities, you'll figure out if it's for you or not, you'll move on and you'll probably learn something from it. Yeah, if you're not happy doing what you're doing, you're probably not going to get any happier keeping up with the same thing. I guess full disclosure for everybody. So we're actually customers of Midwest BioAgg. So the way that this kind of transpired

and what shot out to me to reach out to you was, we started using BioCal, which is a product of Midwest BioAG about, I don't know, 10 years ago maybe, something like that. And I hate to give credit. Actually, I don't mind. but any of you that have been listening, you might remember the podcast.

We had Rob Brennamen on here. So Rob was one of the first guys that I knew of that was using BioCal. And I actually, my father-in-law worked for Furman. Oh, no kidding. Hirschberger. Okay. And Furman would call me and be like, you got to go up to Rob.

You got to see what Rob's doing. You know, he's doing this on all of his corn on corn. Because our acres, we plan a third of our acres corn on corn every year. We do corn on bean ground, beans, and then a third on. And Furman was just like, you know, you got to see what he's doing. You got to see what he's doing. Anyway, we finally tried it. We finally tried it.

I think I tried it on one field. And we did it for about three years, I think. And I always tell people that it's really hard to point. part of the problem with any product that you're selling in ag is it's so there's so many variables that yes you change one thing you use this product but the seed the weather the timing of the of the rain whether you got rain all those things change to where it's so difficult to get good data as to whether something is working or not but in our case you know we went three years and while we were doing that, we were changing all kinds of things because when we started,

we were maximum tillage people. You know, my dad grew up in the generation that you, you literally, when you were done combine and corn, you plowed everything. And if you drove by somebody's farm and there were any stock showing, they were a piss poor farmer. Because if you didn't do a good enough job plowing them under, you know, you were, and plow and herogate and colivate and all that. And we had gradually gotten away from all of that and transitioned to no-telling. But at the same time we did that, we also started having hog manure because we'd build hog buildings. And so we started getting better quality fertilizer. And we also started soil sampling more than once a decade. So that made a little bit of difference. But we also started

using BioCal and we're still using it today. And I tried to get, I tried to get like sponsorship money out of Midwest BioA. I tried to threaten them a little bit. So this is not a paid. This is not a paid podcast. We just thought it would be, I reached out because I thought it'd be really interesting to kind of talk about with everything going on in ag and regenerative ag and biologics and all of all of the things that go along with it they're kind of the hot the hot topic right now however Midwest Bioag started in 1983 it's been around a long time so maybe for people that don't know talk a little bit about what Midwest BioAG is what your core products are and kind of how the story of how we get to where we are today.

Yeah, so first off, I'm starting to pay more attention with the second possible sneak attack with the sponsored podcast here. First was the Cowboys, now that. You're really hitting my hot talk. If I were not known that he was an Eagles fan, we would not have opened that bottle of Mickner's. Okay. All right.

So Midwestern BioWag, as you said, started in 1983, and we've always been focused on soil health. and soil health and regenerative farming. I want to talk about those topics later on, but the genesis of the company, why it started was about how do you feed animals better? And I think that's a really important kind of topic to think about because then I think all this stuff starts to make a little bit more sense.

So Gary Zimmer is the founder of the company, the guy who's been the face behind the brand for the entire time. He had a background in dairy nutrition. And I think he just kind of came across, you know, there are just better ways to feed animals through forage as opposed through mineral supplementation, right? And if you think about it, there's another guy at the company, Ron Mason, our head of procurement, who has made the comment before that, you know, mineral feeds a lot like feeding rocks, right? You know, feeding rocks as opposed to eating plants.

And it feels a little bit like a hard analogy to make, but it kind of makes sense in a lot of ways. And so when you change how you feed the plants that you're feeding to the animals, you can change what's going to show up in the plants. And then it's more digestible by the animals. And it changes what you have to feed them. That's the entire premise of everything. Right. So started in Wisconsin, you know, dairy capital, right? Lots of small dairy farmers.

And a lot of them, you know, started kind of picking up on this process and they saw the results. And something I keep on hearing over and over when I, I talked to farmers is that they're kind of shocked. The people who've been with us for a long time. They're shocked. More people don't farm this way, right? And, you know, there are various reasons why they may, you know, other farmers may or may not want to. But, you know, it kind of speaks to the fact that their practices have been impacted so much by this approach.

But, you know, back then, you know, getting back to the point, Gary realized that, uh, the biological function of the soil mattered, right? That kind of determined what would make its way up into the plants. And the things that he wanted to bring to the table to change the soils to improve the crops or farmers weren't available. So he started selling fertilizer. Right. So that was kind of the way the company evolved. And it was SOP and MAP and AMS.

And we were the first ones to put SOP on the map, you know, not really pun intended. in the Midwest, to the point of the manufacturer asks us, how do we sell it? They didn't understand how it made any sort of sense. And I've heard here recently, you know, 16 million acres across the Midwest of SOP usage all directly traces back to Midwestern Biwag. And it's kind of funny because the people who know us really know us. And then there are so many people, even just down the road from our stores,

who don't know us. And it's just such a hard line. and it just doesn't really make sense, but you think back to who is listening to soil health back then. A whole lot less farmers than now, right? Right. So we had to travel far and wide to find these people, and we're one of the top 100 retailers in the country, and we have a massive footprint because we don't just go 30 miles away from our stores.

We'll go 300 because we're the only game in town for what we do in a lot of cases. And so we've reached a lot of ground, cover a lot of acres, a lot of different crop types, a lot of different soil types. So we have this kind of breadth of knowledge about farming, or agronomy at least, and we can leverage that, right? So Gary, he and his original co-founders, you know, they sold out to investors back in the day. And then we've had some management changes, different initiatives. And so I came in 21, March 21.

and try to learn what it's all about and figure out, all right, well, if this is what we have and we know it works, how do we do it differently so that we've reached more farmers? So how do you do that? How have you tried to figure that out? That's where the language part comes to play. I think language is super important because you guys have listened to Gary, right? What's Gary like?

High energy. High energy. And what's you talk about? Soil. All soil all the time. Soil health. He's a soil expert and he's so passionate and he can be really confrontational, right? And that's great for reaching the core group of audience, right?

The people who care about soil health. And then that's not a great way to reach people who don't want to hear about that. Right. And I think that dovetails into regenerative farming. So Torque, you reached out to me on LinkedIn. Yes. So I have a LinkedIn as a professional and now in the world of agriculture. I have a lot of ag people in my feed.

A lot of them about soul health and regenerative farming, and it's annoying. I don't even like to use LinkedIn anymore because I don't like seeing all that pop up in my feed. It's like everybody's got this mission and they got it all figured out and they're just talking to each other. They're not talking to farmers.

And the ones who are talking to farmers just are talking to the sort of farmers we always talk to. Right? Like any, the majority of farmers aren't in it for soil health. Right. They're in it because it's a business, right? Everyone's trying to get better, make more money. Yeah, I see, I see a real division, even in my county where we live.

Washington County is a very progressive county. And if you just, I have no idea of the statistics, but I would be willing to bet you that across the state of Iowa, it's probably one of the highest counties for cover crops. It's probably one of the highest counties for no-till. No-till. But on that regenerative side, some of the people that are very into that, they kind of get into a frame of mind,

and it's an all-or-nothing. It's an all-or-nothing deal where you are either 100% and you're, that's all, you know, you're the true believer, or you're a greedy-ass farmer that don't care about any of that. Exactly. And the problem is that it's a lot of topics that goes on in the world. It's one or the other. And there's no in between when most people probably fall in the in between there. Yeah. And I think that where some of that comes from is there really is two different worlds because there's people that have farmed, same farm their entire life and there's people that are farming and they rent a farm and they don't know if they're going to have that farm for more than the three-year lease that they negotiated. Hell, there's some of them that don't know if they're going to have it next year.

And a lot of what we're doing as far as regenerative ag, it's just like we talked about when we started. It's an investment like anything else. but you can't it's really hard to make that investment if you don't know you're going to control that piece of dirt long enough to see the benefit and I would say also just like

yeah sustainability matters like obviously this ground we're trying to pass it on in the next generation and like if anything we can do to improve the soil make things better that kind of thing that is a topic that matters to us but the same time the ultimate sustainable

thing that we got to focus on is, is this going to profit? Can we even get it to the next generation? And like, I think you're exactly right. For farmers, that's the number one concern. Is this going to profit? Can we pass this on? Okay, then now, if it is, let's try to also work on sustainability with our soil health and fertility and all that too. So it's just this hard balance you have to find with being a farmer on that kind of thing. But yeah, you got to sustainability. It's got to pass on in the next generation. It's got to make money. At the end of the day, you're just, you're just, you're just, exactly right. I think you, you know, you know kind of what you guys have fallen, I guess, short of as far as marketing. And that's, that's cool that you understand, you know, you're kind of

with that and get that. Yeah. So, so to me, soil health is just a way of getting at, I call it resource efficiency. It's just be more efficient, right? Let's just call it that. It's about efficiency. So if you're able to increase your soil health, you know, what I've heard from farmers is, you know, maybe they're, we've actually had guys who are producing so much more hay, they had to build more storage, or they can cut back, right? They can run less acres. Then there's the fact, you know, row crop farmers, they can either push top end yields or they can cut back to do the same, you know, hit their same yield goals with less input. Yeah, with less input. So that's, that's kind of been the big idea that we've been driving at. And so, you know, you guys probably understand,

you need to have data to get people to believe things. You know, there's been a lot of snake oil in this industry, and because of all the variables, frankly, I think even the manufacturers, the people that should know, they don't know enough because they're not going through, they're not going to run all the traps on everything

to control for all the variables to really figure out what's going on because then they'd be able to explain why something worked or something didn't. They could tell you ahead of time, like here's what you look out for. You know, it's not going to work on that ground, just that one over that field over there, right?

And how many different companies are going to say, don't sell everything, right? Right. Right. So to me, there's a, there was a big initiative when I got here to prove it, right? Data. Get the data, prove it.

And it's kind of the irony. One of the many ironies of me being here is that it's a lot about going back to the research and doing kind of the hard science. And I brought in a guy, our director of agronomy, or director of research, and he's kind of championed this and he's managed all of this for us, Chris Neffin,

and we've got all this amazing trial data has come out when you can prove using some of these products, you can, without applying the nutrients, you're seeing a 20% increase in soil test levels. Yep. Right. So it's not that it's adding it. It's that it was there before

and it wasn't accessible. Right. Because if you think about it, again, kind of the chemistry side of me, this is how I look at everything. If you took a soil sample, you could run one kind of test that would show you everything that's in there.

But that's not what we look at when we look at kind of the standard soil testing, right? So you see a snapshot of what should be sort of plant available. Like you could run a test on what's in this table in front of us and look at all the minerals, right? That's not a plant available. It's got a breakdown. And so the thing that I think the industry trips up on

is that when you look at the standard soil test, usually like a Malik 3 test, everyone assumes that's going to be representative of what's available to the plant, and it's not. And let's talk about BioCal, right? So BioCal, it's registered as a liming agent. We sell it on soluble calcium. And that's something nobody else really talks about.

And calcium impacts your soil structure, which changes what's available to the plant over time. And we've shown through this trial protocol that we can increase potassium, even phosphorus levels, 20% in some cases, based on an application. And this is, you know, you apply it in the fall and you see it kind of summertime. Right. So proving that out with data is the way, the easiest way to reach the mainstream besides changing the language, right? It literally works. We can show you no matter what.

This is what happens. We can do it over and over again at this point. I've kind of set it all up. We understand it now. Now we can scale it up with everybody else. Because before it was a lot of salesmanship, right? You know, this sounds good to me. I'm going to try it.

Let's throw it on that field. Let's see what happens. It worked. Okay, I'm a customer now. If it didn't work, I'm never talking to you again. Yeah. Right, that's how it works. Yeah, yeah, that's right.

So, yeah, so there's a lot more, you know, on the nutrient efficiency side and some kind of exciting things. But I think that's where regenerative ag, ag, all these kind of initiatives, all these groups out there that are talking about these things are kind of dancing around the subject. They're focusing on the feel good as opposed to what really matter

is what's tangible. Yeah, the data, the actual tangible data. Yeah. How's it changed farming for you? Yeah. That should be the goal of what everybody's talking about it, but it's not actually. Yeah, and that's the thing about farmers too. It's exactly what you said. I mean, when you try something,

it's just like with the manure. Like, it takes years to build up, you know, and see that, see that product of applying whatever you apply. You can't just throw something on one year. It's not like liquid nitrogen, you know, where you can just put it in the ground and you're going to see some yield benefit there. I mean, a lot of those microbes and all that stuff, it takes a little bit of time to build it up. Well, you know, it's funny about that is that I would tell you that, my opinion, we have enough test technologies that somebody just chose to spend enough money. If somebody out there wants to give me money, we can figure this out. We could run lots of tests over a year or two

and come up with kind of all the calibration curves needed to say, here's your soul type, here's what you have right now. You take these actions, this is what you will see. Because otherwise, soil health has always been kind of a shot in the dark. Like, you do this for three to five years, and then you'll see results. Not a lot of guys want to wait three to five years to see if something's going to work. Right. In reality, especially if they're renting land for less than three years.

Yeah, that's exactly right. It's interesting because I feel like we as a, I don't think farmers are any different than our society in general in the fact that you are right. We want to buy a product and we want to see results. and as soon as you start talking about building over time, people get, I mean, we're all TikTokers, you know, we want our dopamine hit, get us that, get us that. But, you know, for me, I think that, I think that this last year in our situation in Southeast Iowa, probably was the most eye-opening experience as far as our own farm goes

that I've had as long as I've been farming. Because literally, I would get up every morning for two or three weeks, probably, and be like, yeah, today's probably the day that this corn is going to turn gray because it hasn't rained in a month, you know? And if you got up early enough, Like maybe some days you had to get up like at 4 a.m. And you'd go, oh, look at that. The corn's unrolled.

Oh, it's going to be all right for another day. And then, you know, by noon it's rolled up tight and it looks terrible. But people, family members that aren't involved in farming and people that I, people that I know, friends of mine that aren't involved in farming, when we started harvest this year and people would say, well, you know, how are your yields? And I was about dumbfounded because our yields this year were the best corn wise, best corn I've ever raised. And I don't know how that's possible. And last year was a dry year. And my yields were the best, the best that I had raised. And we have done this long. Everything that we have done, we still tweak things.

a little bit, but we haven't made any drastic changes for the last five years. But it does keep getting better. And our inputs, we're not applying any more than what we have. We haven't changed anything on that side. It's just seed and mother nature. I mean, you could argue that our manure, the quantity of manure we've had to apply, it took us a while before we got to where, with building your building, where we had the quantity that we needed.

But other than that, it's been, and I think the most interesting comment that I get from people is once in a while I'll get somebody that will stop by, and when we're in harvest, whether that be a seed guy or a co-op guy or chemical guy, and they'll walk in the field, and they'll make the comment, what do you what do you guys do what do you do in this what do you do in this field for tillage or for

whatever and i'll say we other than drag line in the manure it's no till and they're like hmm because it just feels different right and i don't think about it i don't think about it but i don't go anybody else i don't walk around on anybody else's ground but it's the it's the culmination of what we've been doing for so long and i really can't explain it people like how's that all work? I'm like, I don't really know how it works. All I know is that I had the driest year that I've had as long as I've been farming and I had the best yield cornwise. And it's because that crop was one able to utilize what was there. And two, I think it was able to root down better than what it could have. The soil structure is way better than what it used to be. And I have no,

I don't have the data for that. I just, all I know is I look at my yield maps and I'm impressed. And and now I'm telling everybody all I know is I don't want to wait year. Well, another thing is you don't really want to change anything because if it, year after year, it just gets better and better. Yeah, and that's like, there you go. It's like, we must be doing something, right? And so then that's the, that's the hard part, you know, when you're the, when you're the sales guy and you get somebody like that, and it's like, I'm not changing anything.

Yeah. I'm just doing this. So, but you should. Like, we should be, we're very happy with where we're at. So now the question you got to ask yourself is where do you go from here? And what's the next level? What's the next thing? Yeah.

So, I mean, that's where it comes down to personality, right? Like, how do you fit the farm? Because everybody's got different goals. A lot of farmers just want to maintain because maybe they're towards the end and they want to, you know, they don't want to do anything to screw up the farm before they hand it over to the next generation. Some guys want to, you know, they get ambitious. They decide, all right, well, this seems to be great. Let's try and do more.

or maybe it's diversifying the business and spending time on something else because that's kind of set it and forget it mode. Yeah. So it really kind of depends, but there's a lot of opportunity kind of around that. I know certainly we saw some pretty incredible results because any sort of stress here is going to highlight soil health, right? Or taking this kind of more holistic approach because generally speaking, it's just addressing the problems that show up in the worst conditions and make a more resilient crop. And that's 100% what we saw, kind of across our whole footprint. Everybody's practices look good in a good year.

Well, I mean, we're in Iowa, right? So there are a lot of not-so-great farmers who can grow over 200 bushel corn because precipitation and lots of good, rich soil, right? You don't have to learn that much. The farmers we work with out in North Dakota and some of the guys in Kansas, they have neither. Right. So it's kind of funny. Somebody made a comment to me once that it's ironic we're Midwestern biwag because our approach would make the biggest difference down the plains.

Yeah. And we actually are working with those farmers now. And yeah, it's showing up big time. Like we had a bunch of product trials where across corn, bean, small grains, they saw 10 bushel increases, everything. Yeah, I think your point on just like utilizing your crops not utilizing the nutrients or, you know, that perspective, that look on things. I think it's back to everybody wants to put in a product like nitrogen and they want to see it, like increase the yield right away instead of like, hey, you need to put maybe this product in there and it's going to help bring more nutrients to the crop. Like I think farmers don't think about that all the time. I'm like, it's just like if you have a deficiency in your body, you know, if you can't take in vitamin D3 because you have a deficiency. Like, you got to find something to supplement to help you with that. And I don't know.

I think that's, everybody thinks about what can I do this year to increase the yield and not think about what, what are the deficiency inside my soil that's going to bring more nutrients to the crop, which hopefully increases the yield, you know? It's just a different way looking at it. So I used to work at GNC when I was in college, right? So had access to vitamins galore, right? And I started taking vitamins. I stopped getting sick. I was like, all right, this is great. I feel like a superhuman, right?

And, you know, I was taking one of those way over the top multivitamins where your P turns neon yellow. Like, all right, I'm probably overdoing it to some degree. But then you start looking at the different types of vitamins. I don't know if you guys have ever bothered looking at, like, different types of vitamins. I have, yeah. Have you looked at, like, the different forms of, like, a magnesium or something like that? I just bought a magnesium supplement. There's like seven different forms of magnesium we can buy.

Yeah. The cheapest one is magnesium oxide. Mm-hmm. And you'll find lots of supplements where they have really high levels and it's dirt cheap and those are the most popular. But they're not the best. They're not the best. You can look at magnesium glycinate or magnesium torrate and those are far more available

to the human body. Yep. Right. It's like I have an iron deficiency. Like here, let me take a chunk out of this cast iron skillet. Like it's almost literally that. That's iron oxide. Yep.

Yeah, and magnesium is a really interesting one in the fact that you guys will correct me if I'm wrong. But I think I remember this right, that for different people, for different people, if you're looking for that, you kind of have to try and find what is right for you. Like what works for your body? because some people get response from different forms. Different forms of it. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's,

this is where it kind of relates to soil health. There's just a lot of guesswork. You could figure it out if you wanted to get a bunch of blood testing done. You, like, there's lots of different kinds of testing you could do for the human body that just don't make any kind of sense realistically. Going back to the story Midwestern BioWagon, what Gary's always preached is,

a keep it simple, stupid approach that will always work. Yep. You know, is it the most optimum approach for everybody? No. But if you do it, you'll definitely see an improvement in soil health. And then we assume all the rest of the things fall from there, and they typically do. Right. So I think at this point, farmers really expect to hear more than that, right?

They don't want to take that leap of faith that we talked about. They want to, they want something more personalized. right like this applies here right and so you know a question to you guys do you feel like you're agronomists no how many farmers do you think feel like they are agronomists yeah i think it's a different profile for i think some people get their ego tied up in it and they think they are but they're not really and then there are some really great farmers that get in the soil you know they are they love it dig into it deep but then there's a lot of guys that they're They're very opinionated about what they're doing on their farm and they paint the world with that brush that what I'm doing, that's the best.

And if you're not doing that, then you don't know shit about farming. You don't know anything. Yeah. I mean, it's like everything. Yeah. Yeah, but no, I'd say no. Yeah, I mean, some guys like to focus on marketing. Some guys like to just work the tractors, right?

And it's funny, it took me a couple years to actually figure out. what people mean when they talk about agronomy. Like, what's an agronomist? And I had some, like, debates with people in Midwestern Bioag and talked about, you know, changing people's titles and got some heated opinions about that. Yeah. And, you know, to me, kind of the farmer mentality, the average farmer mentality on agronomy is a lot like the average person's mentality on taxes.

I'm a finance guy. I don't do my own taxes because I hate it. Yep. I choose not to spend my... time on it. I give over my documents to somebody else and I say, you take care of this for me, so I don't have to think about it, right? So you can't blame lots of farmers for not being agronomist because there are other people who should be doing that. They have that title. They get paid for that. They're just not necessarily doing good enough. Something else that I heard a guy

talk about this the other day. It's also interesting, and I'm guilty of this to a point. I feel like I'm a lot more educated day in the fact that I can read my soil test, where when I started, I just, so the person that takes my soil samples is my chemical dealer. He's my agronomist, only he's not an agronomist. Yeah. He's a fertilizer salesman. And that might not be, this guy's point was that might not be the best, it might be worth it to you to actually have somebody doing your soil testing that is a third party because we have a little vested interest

and I'm not going to throw I'm not going to throw them down the throw the bus over them and play that clip of me of when Brad says you need it yeah need it oh you're there's never there's never a bad situation where you don't need fertilizer if it's a bad year you need fertilizer if it's a good year you need fertilizer because you got to take advantage of that extra bushley you can get But if it's in a bad year, you still need every bushel you can get to get by. So he's always got you. There's no better gig in the world. Yeah, that's probably a good idea.

You should probably write that down. Maybe we should get a third party and get an agronomist on board. And that's right. But I also, I also, you get to a point where you kind of have to learn for yourself and you have to question and not take, it's no different than anything, follow the money. when somebody gives you an answer and says their recommendation is to put on, you know, this many pounds of map, okay, well, do I really need that? Is that why am I doing that? Because if I'm only deficient in this one thing, then why am I throwing all this out there?

So it's really, it's very important to be able to do your own. It's like we say about everything on your, do your own research. If you're paying somebody to do your soil testing, Be able to read your maps. You know, be able to look at your maps and know what that means. And I think that's a great place to start because there's a lot of people that whoever's doing it is reading their map to them and then making their recommendation and they don't have any idea whether that's what they really need or not. Well, it's kind of a hard subject to learn, to be honest.

Yeah. Right? It's a lot like, agronomy is a lot like when back in the 70s, people, decided that if you stop eating fat, you won't get fat. Right? That's effectively what it comes down to. It's like cause and effect, you know, A equals B. And that's not true. Unfortunately, it's just not true. No. There's some, some of the farmers we work with in North Dakota, right, they've been struggling with phosphorus. All right. So they, they have decades of putting down phosphorus, dapper map, and not seeing their soil test levels change. We have a product, Teranew, and they started using

it out there. And for a variety of different reasons, you know, they start to see the soil test levels go up. And that's what's kind of driving their yields. They've been limited on phosphorus. Yep. And this is with a 45% reduction in phosphorus. That's kind of a big deal. Yeah, because it's not tied up now. It's not tied up. And it's not leaching away, right? It's, it's, it's plant available. As Gary says, phosphorus is a lot driven by biology. And, but at the same time, it's not common sense to most people, right? Because common sense would dictate, I don't have phosphorus, add more phosphorus. Yep. But it's just not that simple. That's right. So that's kind of the battle that we face where changing the language and how do you explain these concepts simply? That's not easy, right? There's a,

there's a famous politician, I think out of Chicago who said the moment you start explaining, you start losing. Yeah. Keep it simple, stupid. Yeah. Yeah. Because you lose people's attention. Yeah. Yeah. I want to listen to all that. Hey, thanks for sticking with us. We appreciate every single one of you guys. Let's keep this ball rolling. Leave a review on Spotify or Apple. Follow us on YouTube. Pay the fee. Share it out with who you know. It all helps, guys. We appreciate every single one of you. We love you. Now, let's get back to the podcast. I might be jumping ahead, but I feel like this is, I guess I want to get your take on this. So that, when you said, you know, I'm short, people have the mentality. I'm short on phosphorus. so put more phosphorus out there. How do you think going forward the carbon intensity scoring, the carbon sequestration? And I guess the way I'll frame that is we were talking to Mitchell Hora from Continuumag and he's talking a lot lately about the 45Z credit that is in the Inflation Reduction Act

and that these biofuel producers are going to have to have a carbon intensity score for every bushel of corn that they bring in. And how that relates to whether or not they're actually going to pay more money for it, whether it will incentivize people to adopt practices to lower their score. I don't know how that'll work. But in what we're doing, in our farm here, we're working on, taking all the water out of a manure. And there's a carbon part of that too, but it also saves a lot of trips over the ground,

burn a lot less fuel, higher quality fertilizer, all that. And the conversation that we had with him was if you take that idea to its logical conclusion, I think you're going to get to the point that end users for whatever it is, and in our situation, the end user being the packer, they want to lower their carbon score. So they're going back to their suppliers, which is the integrator, the people that we feed pigs for, and they say, we want the feed and that we want to know how many miles from the feed mill those pigs are,

how many miles from the packing plant those pigs are. The bushels of corn you're buying, what's the carbon intensity score on those bushels that are being fed to those animals that are coming to our plant? because that's all going to go into what our carbon footprint is because we made all these lofty provinces that we're going to be carbon neutral by 2020 whatever and we're almost halfway through that 20 number oh shit what are we going to do so do you think that that is going to have an impact on farmers the way the way we're fertilizing today do you think it's going to change that conversation because people are going to be more,

it's going to be more front of mind of how can I lower my inputs to lower that score. I think it potentially could in the way that I think it's going to happen, it will. The single best way to try and change behaviors to pay somebody for, right? Yep. And what's the easiest way for you as farmers to get paid for something? Higher price for the bushels. Yeah. Right.

So if you do that, which I 100% believe is the right way to do it, yeah, it can be done. I think it's not without its challenges. It's a lot more straightforward than the whole carbon sequestration angle, though. Yeah. And I think it's a better long-term solution for the industry. I think it, the little bit that we've talked about what we're doing, it's so funny because the opinions come out pretty fast. Because, yeah, the whole carbon world is so polarizing because you have people.

on the one side of it. They go to the extreme. Yeah, because, and I'll be the first to tell you that my just off the cuff, gut feeling on this is that there's a hell of a lot of fufu dust in all of this. Now, then you have people that are true believers that, you know, they're hook, line, and sinker. But then you have people that the idea that you're talking about anything that has anything to do with climate makes you un-American.

Yeah, right. So you, you, and farmers, you have that whole. Well, it doesn't help what's happening in Europe, because that's,

you know, that whole thing going on over there. I think a lot of farmers look at that and they go, when somebody brings up the word carbon, it's like, okay, nope, nope, shutting down,

not doing it, because we can't let have, happen in Europe, come here and happen here, which I agree with. We don't, I think you, what you said,

we got to incentivize the farmer, We got to understand that they're a solution to the problem and they got a profit from it and not demonize the farmer. And I hope that that's the direction it ultimately goes. But farmers got to be open-minded about it too. Well, I think there's a huge opportunity because ag, that's the one thing that we have going in our favor is of all of the industries around the world, Ag actually has the ability to be part of the answer whereas most industries are looking at ways that they can implement something,

change something in their process to lower their carbon footprint. Ag actually has, like our carbon footprint can be negative to where we can help other industries. And there's not very many people. people that are, I don't know of any, that can really do that. What, so what's, like, what's your overall thoughts on just the whole carbon market and just the whole movement? I mean, yeah, we kind of gave you what about the credit and what the

biofuel, you know, what they're doing, but like, what's your overall thoughts of it, just the whole thing? Yeah, I think that, uh, if anybody trusted the, the carbon markets, we could have seen some more movement on a lot of things because I could easily see, I, I've, I had a presentation, to our board where I laid out kind of how I thought everything could work for how we operate today as Midwestern Bioag and how these things can help pay the farmer to make some changes. The guys who are on the fence, who wouldn't otherwise want to do it necessarily? They need that incentive to change their behavior, right? I think this is, like I said before, this is a much better way to do it if that's actually

how it's going to play out. And I think that this is secondary to how. we are going to act to change the industry, right? This is a way to help incentivize the stuff that we want to happen anyway. Yeah. Effectively. You know, fertilizer reductions and, you know, everything that comes about that efficiency story. Again, right?

Like, it's hard to break the mentality that if I don't add more, I'm not handicapping my crop because you guys know the economics of the business, right? If you miss the one year, you're going to love it. look a lot different and your bank account's going to look a lot different for the next 10 years, right? So nobody ever wants to risk that. But it never really pays that way. It's not, it's almost like everybody's treating fertilizer as insurance, right? And all these practices, all these agronomic practices are insurance for being able to hit that top end yield. But nobody really necessarily is looking at the things that are limiting them. Right. So if we,

we could easily get to the point of everybody. starts looking at that because now they have a different way to get paid. Right. Mm-hmm. Right. And those numbers add up. You know, the numbers that I heard about, they, they pay for quite a bit pretty fast. And, you know, you could run the economics or somebody could run the economics on over 10 years. If you do it this way, you could probably end up skipping out on the top end year and still be ahead. And you're probably going to have a lot more hair left on your head at the end of that 10 years, too. Yeah. It's going to be a lot less stressful. That's a good, that is a good point. That gives you a little bit of breathing room because it's all about efficiency when you're playing the commodity game, you know, you got to be more efficient,

bring your costs down. That's what you're focusing on. And yeah, that's, that's a good point. I see, I see what you're thinking there. You got anything else to add on just the whole, you got any rabbit holes you want to go down on this? Because I kind of want to get into just asking him about your role and kind of what the biggest challenge was of, you know, stepping into the role that you have today, you know, but if you got something you want to segue in with the whole soil and carbon and all that. I guess I'm going to ask you about, you correct me if I wrong, but are you guys, you have a product that you're at least sourcing part of the ingredients going into it that's coming out of like dairy digesters. Is that

right. That's correct. You want to talk about that a little bit because I think that's pretty interesting. Yep. Yep. So we have a product called Teraneau. And what it is, is we're taking a dairy manure that's been processed through an anaerobic digester. So you get that natural gas off. And then you're left with something that's a lot like manure. And it's got to go somewhere, right? So what we're doing is we're turning that into a homogenized fertilizer granule. So effectively, you know, you don't have the water. You know, you can ship it a farther distance. but the magic of it is as opposed to kind of organic matter that has to be broken down like manure.

This has already kind of been pre-processed. And then the special manufacturing process we go through, you know, we're adding in some nutrients and then we're seeing kind of this step change in the efficiency of it. And there's, you know, there are reasons behind it, but effectively it's making the ingredients more efficient. Yeah.

Yeah. The reason I brought that up, so we're very close. We're very close to starting the journey where we are, we're not doing a methane digester. What we're doing with our hog manure is we're running it through a separating process where we pull the moisture, we pull the water out, which stops the manure from breaking down. So our hope is by doing that, because today we haul all our manure once a year. So most of the fertilizer value that's in that is actually from the newest manure that's in the pit. The oldest manure, the manure that went in the week after you pump the pit, arguably there's almost no fertilizer value to it. Now, you may still have the organic matter, obviously, but very low actual fertility. value. So by processing it in real time, we're thinking that we're going to have a lot higher quality and actually more fertilizer value out of the volume manure we got today. But you take the

water out of that and then out of the water we take the salts. So we'll have a pile of the potash basically. And it's all got to get figured out. But that product, that that that dry manure product, you know, we drag line all our manure today and it pretty much all stays here or I have one neighbor that takes it. But when you do that, now then that product can be trucked a long ways because you're taking 80% of the weight out of it. Is that right? 80%? Something like that. Sounds right. And I think there's a lot of opportunities. I mean, I thought that was very interesting what you guys are doing, but when you think about the scale of the dairy industry, man, there is a lot of fertilizer out there that could be utilized a lot better than the way it is today.

And I don't know, it would be interesting to see how that all plays out. Yeah, there's, I think there's a lot of opportunity for the industry to rethink manure in general. Because if you think about it, with the amount of applications, kind of on average, we're used to like 10,000 gallons of manure going up per acre. Yeah. Right, and everybody kind of knows that you don't get the full fertilizer value year one, right? It takes some time. It kind of depends.

Nitrogen's different from P&K. P&K is not going to leave nitrogen will. But regardless, let's just go with that. The amount of manure you have to put out in a lot of times, a lot of cases kind of suffocates the soil, right? So you get anaerobic conditions, you get compaction, you lose the efficiency of everything. So now the manure you're putting on is not as effective as what you expect it to be. Right. Right.

So, like, that's effectively the story of bio-Cal and that you've got to have seen. Yes. And, you know, Rob Brennaman, right? Like, that's how it, the shortest way to put it, that's how it works. Yep. By kind of combating that factor. So I think that, you know, in general, right, regenerative ag, the way people have talked about it with, you know, the movie Kiss the Ground. I'm sure you guys are heard of it, right?

Yep. That whole movement, it's all about rotational grazing. and that's just not going to work for most farmers. Right. Right. So how do you take the value of that manure and get it to the places that they need it? Right?

Like there are lots of different strategies and between this, the whole carbon tax or carbon credit idea, there doesn't have to be a silver bullet. Right. Like I think that's the, again, it's the problem that everybody is suffering but they don't really think about.

And it's because we're just all human and that's just how humans have to operate to make life simple enough to understand. Because it's like not just electric cars versus fuel cells. Like when I was a chemical engineer, I was going to make catalysts for making hydrogen for fuel cells. And I realized that was a terrible idea for a lot of different reasons. But, you know, I see online battles about, you know,

fuel cells and hydrogen and how that's dumb, and EV is the only way to go. And then somebody brings up the limited amount of resources to make EVs. And it doesn't have to be. one thing. Everybody acts like it always has to be one thing. In what area of the world do we operate right now where we just have one way to do everything. Yep. Yeah. That is, there are so many topics that we get asked, so many things out there that it just gets painted with a broad brush. This is the only way you should raise pigs. This is the only way you should raise cattle. This is the only way you should farm your

acres. It doesn't matter about your geographical location. It's human nature or the other night. financials, it doesn't matter. Old fashions. I made an old fashion. And I'm lazy. So I make, I saw, I'm a, I'm a TikTok guy. I saw a guy. TikTok boomer.

I am a TikTok boomer. Fuck you. No comments. Anyway, I make a whole bottle. I make a freezer old fashion. That's the greatest damn thing that I've ever found. You make a bottle up, you got it whenever you want it, you know? So anyway, I made.

one and I had a picture of it because my wife got these napkins that are all quotes out of Christmas story and it was the one about nobody's leaving this family Christmas you know and anyway I took a picture of that and some guys like how how'd you make it and I didn't give it a second thought and I know the recipe because I'd made the bottle that night so I gave the recipe it's comment as soon as I said it was well that's stupid I was like Oh yeah, I forgot. I forgot. There's only one way to do it and it's the way that you do it. And you're not going to tell anybody, but everybody else's way of doing it stupid. Yeah. I mean, go back to the idea of you start explaining, you start losing, right?

Yeah. Exactly right. How do you get all these different ways to do things across the page? You don't. That's not how information travels. That's not how people change. Yeah. So that's just an unfortunate reality we have to deal with. And I think about this all the time because that's kind of been the main issue at this company. for a long time, like kind of into the question you're going to ask. Yeah, so yeah, what was the biggest challenge when you stepped into this role that you were committed to right off the bat of being in the position you're in at Midwestern Biwag? Well, so the first thing I do, the reason I got to where I am in my career is I'm good at listening to people and asking them questions.

And I just find people who know a lot more than me and I just let them talk to me until they're tired. And then I do it again and again and again until I know what they know. And so I just try to figure out who can I learn from. And obviously there's Gary. And there's no end to him talking. There's no end to his knowledge. So that's a bad example. But then I tried to do the same thing with everybody else to try and get a picture of

what works at the company, what doesn't. Effectively, that's what it came down to. And then understanding what are the gaps between how they operate in the past and where the industry is right now. Those are the key questions. That's what I spent the last two and a half years on. What's been your biggest struggle as far as building, like building the culture with the crew that you got there?

That's a great question. Getting everybody to buy in has been so difficult. Because you think about it, we have a lot of like fiercely independent individuals. You think about the sort of people we're going to work at a Midwestern Biwagon. It's sort of people who follow Gary into the company. They're fiercely independent.

Salesmen. Yeah, those guys. But also the fact that there have been, you know, not so great managers and kind of some bad decisions in the past. And, you know, people get jaded. They get burned and a lot like farmers with bad products, right? It's the same exact idea. And how many salespeople you'll talk to and they'll say you get one chance and then you screw over a farmer or it doesn't work.

And they'll say, I will never try this again or I will never talk to you again and I'll never do business with your company again. Yep. Right. So it's kind of ironic that I've kind of, I felt like I faced the same thing with the company, but it's understandable, right? Everybody's human. So how do you get people to buy in? And honestly, the whole data angle, again, ironic to me, there's so many ironies in my experience here, has made a huge change in what I've seen out of our team.

because as soon as everybody saw the data and the testimonial start rolling in this year from the various products and the things we set up, it was like a light switch went off. In what way? They just believed in how you were reframing things as far as just the results of what farmers were getting and then that lit a fire in the team that they're like, okay, this is working and that's kind of what did it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there are certainly cases of,

People who have joined the company, again, on the back of listening to Gary and kind of buying in and still would think, I don't believe in this bio-cow product until I see it. Everybody's got to see it. And the unfortunate reality is seeing it in a growing season means a year, at least, right? Right. And then everything's a three-year process in this industry. Yep. Right? You got to try it, and then you scale it up, and then you're like full bore, right?

and then you go to a farmer and you try it and you scale it and you know off you go right it's always three years how do you shorten that nobody figured out all these venture capital companies venture capital back companies have been trying to figure out how to scale up how to grow fast you know we were venture capital back company we try to figure out how to scale fast it's hard to do in the industry yeah so they're we figured out how to kind of shortcut that by proving what's happening in the soil and what's happening in the plant. It doesn't matter what happens at the end of the year. This product accomplished X in the soil.

Like the phosphorus levels are up 20 to 30 percent. Potassium's up 20 percent. The micros could be up 60 percent, right? That happened. That absolutely happened. And all the variables that nobody's controlling for that can impact a crop at the end of the year, you know, we can, we don't actually have to account for all of them.

Right. Right, because we can figure it out after the fact why something did or did not work. Maybe it was, you know, the boron levels were too low, something like that. But we for sure understand that our products did what we've always talked about them doing, but never really showed that they do. Yeah. So, I mean, it just, it speaks. It speaks to everybody.

I know one of our guys was at a meeting and we got some of this data back and our director of research spun it up. and sent it over to him while he was at the meeting, and then he talked about it, instant sales, right? Because that's interesting. That's not a story. That's real hard data. That stuff worked. Like, all right, now I will give this a shot.

And so I think a lot of the sales team, other people, they just kind of, it resonated. Like, it's just a truism of people. Results talk, no doubt. Results do talk. And the hard part is, you're not getting paid unless, you know, you're getting the yield at the end of the year, right?

So everybody's focused on yield, but yield doesn't tell the story. Right. Like, what if you're limited by the thing you never paid attention to in the past? Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it's a, you know, this year,

good swath of the Midwest, you could have fixed, you could have fixed a lot, you could fix a lot of things in your fertility program, and if it doesn't rain, like you know i sit here and talk about how we had great yields you go just south me you go south of the town we live in didn't matter because they missed a rain we got made all the difference their yields weren't weren't anywhere near what they were on this side of the i mean that's that's the whole deal and

you know they could have fixed a whole lot of things but still not seen that that yield bump and that's just out of your control. You just can't do anything about it. I mean, again, we were kind of lucky that it was this kind of El Nino drought year, put a lot of stress on crops. And it's kind of hard to say that. But it showcases things that we talk about. And if you're in a perfect year, you think about it, you know,

when you're pushing top end yields, you're lucky to get three bushel, right? Yeah. But when you're not in that sort of scenario, this past year, you know, you can be looking at a 10 to 30 bushel different. depending on the case. We actually have a new product we have out, we call BioGel that works in water retention. And I just literally heard about this last night.

There was a grower in Kansas who, you know, dry land production, had 10708 bushel of corn on his control. And it was 140 with the test. Wow. Because it was about water, right? And, you know, if it was a perfect year, we have enough evidence to know that it would have made a difference still, but not a 30 bushel difference.

Yeah, right. And then, you know, you don't farm for the worst year. Like, that's not a good way to farm. No. Right? You farm for, you know, the average year, a lot of guys will actually try and farm for the best year every year, which you could also say is not the best way to farm.

Yep. But reframing, like, what's possible, I think is pretty important. And it's something we should be able to do as an industry. Like, right now, I bet you, again, we put in enough money to do the testing. We could characterize every, everything about your fields right now. And then if we knew, if we had a good idea of the weather,

we could exactly predict what your yields were going to be. Now, we can't predict the weather, but we can also do enough to show that in certain conditions, what you're probably going to get to. Yeah. And if we know that,

then we could probably say, this is the way to optimize your production. All right, and then it kind of comes down to personal preference. Gosh, that sounds pretty easy. I know. Let's get on that program.

We'll do it right after the buck. I actually try to push initiative on doing that, but it's, it's kind of hard to comprehend. So don't want to fight that battle right now. You kind of mentioned that in the beginning. Personalization maybe is what farmers really looking for, is that,

yeah, they just need somebody to come and say, this is what you can expect in these conditions if you do these things. Yeah, it's like a personal trainer. Yeah, right. Yeah. Like, tell me what to do, help me through it.

That's what I think most farmers are really hoping for if they're not just, you know, best friends with their co-op agronomist. Right. Which is a lot of farmers. lot of that. Absolutely. So what do you think?

What is the largest opportunity in Bioax future? If you had to think. Yeah, I think it's it's got to be the products that we're working on now that we're getting the test results for because, A, we've proven out how they work, they can scale up. You know, you go back to the history of the company, you know, selling SOP and MAP was great at the beginning because nobody else had it. we brought those products to the Midwest, at least kind of in our neck of the woods. Yeah.

Everybody's got it. Again, 16 million acres have SOP because of Midwestern Biwag. Yeah. So, all right, we got to do something different. And we're going to lead with agronomy because that's who we are. That's what we care about. And I came up with the term bridge products. Because if you've ever been to Gary Zimmer's farm up in Wisconsin, he has,

got kind of the perfect soils fully mineralized well balanced you know it just kind of amazing and he does he farms in a way nobody would ever farm it's literally never going to happen outside of gary zimmer yeah and his family so everybody else is somewhere on a spectrum and we like we call it the regenerative spectrum like chisel plow on one side and then gary's on the other and then everybody's in between yeah how do you fit those farms yeah and again i'm an engineer and I was really good at optimization ideas, right? You know, I could come up with a program in my mind about you tell me what you want to do with your farm and then we will tell you the most economical way to achieve your goals.

Like, it's complicated, but it's definitely possible right now. Yeah. I think that's pretty interesting. Yeah, but, you know, until that happens, it's how do you give people solutions that they can adopt now, right? Like if they don't care about soil health, but they care about paying next year's rent. Like, how do you help them do that? Yeah. And usually you have to give them something that can fit into what they're doing now. Right. So you figure out what they're doing. You find the solution that best fits them to make an improvement and help them see that this isn't foo

dust. Yeah. That's, that's the goal. And we're doing that now and we've got a lot of momentum behind that. So I feel very confident that we're going to continue to scale up those initiatives. Yeah. They're going to be like the 10X. Yeah. You're going to be like the 10X. You just send them a sample their soil. They run their test on it.

Then they get your. That's their movement. The Grant Cardone 10X. 10X or soil. They send you a big bag of oxygen. Yeah. Take every morning. Oh, Gary Breka.

Yeah. Gary Breka. Yeah. I was just thinking about this. You know, you've mentioned the word regenerative. regenerative ag many times you know there's a lot of you there's a lot of definitions people bring up of what regenerative ag means to them what what what's your definition of it i don't have one yeah i really don't yeah i mean it comes down to kind of improving your soil that's kind of the the broadest brush that i'd

paint with but there's too many uh there's too many evangelists or dogmatic people uh who have very strict definitions of what it needs to be yeah that aren't going to work yeah i talked to one of those people before that everybody knows. I'm not going to say who it is. And, you know, there's a battle about does anything other than no-till count. Right. I've got on what you said, no-tilling cover crop. No-tilling cover crop. The problem is a lot of problems can occur out of no-tilling. And there's places in this country that you can't do that. That's right. I mean, you can do it, but you'll never get your soil to warm up fast enough that you can get a crop planted. That's right. And cover crops, right? You don't terminate.

it and you start seeing bad effects. You know, like you're going to have issues on the planner. Yeah. Right. And, you know, you could lose nitrogen to the cover crop potentially. Like lots of different nuances again. It's not simple enough. Yeah.

It's not simple enough. But that's just the unfortunate nature of farming. So I think regenerative is still annoying. Unfortunately, we call it biological farming. We got the six rules of biological farming. farming and they're a lot more flexible because you have to have some flexibility depending on who you are, where you're at, and what you're trying to do. But everybody who's talking about regenerative doesn't see things the way we do. Well, that's refreshing to hear, to be honest with you,

because it is, I just, I feel like it is kind of a war going on inside ag. And there's just so many, so much noise. But I think it's, I think you're right on the money. You need flexibility. Not every farms the same. Do you think that's the, do you think that's the biggest, I had the question of what do you think is the biggest blind spot in ag? And I feel like we may have just answered it in the fact that a lot of rigid thinking on whatever corner you're in may be, that may be the biggest challenge that we have. So, um, if you're, if you're somebody out there listening and you're, you're, you're not, not a, you're not a bioag customer, but you're, you're not happy with what you're doing right now. As a farmer, what, what's the first step? Like, what do you think is the first thing that somebody

needs to do if they're going to take, like, take ownership of where they're at and try to move that needle? Practically speaking, you have to have somebody who can help you fill in the gaps, right? Like, if you don't know where to start, like the problem with do your own research is what if you read, what if you read the wrong articles, right? Right. Like what if you go to one of the fertilizer manufacturers or, you know, one of their sponsored entities. Stop your co-op. Go, hey. Right. And, you know, you read that and that's your research and you're going to get to the wrong conclusion. Yeah. It, I've always had a problem with that because it's so easy to put in a lot of time and, you know,

come from a really good place and get the exact wrong answer. and for most things, right? Because you got somebody on the opposite side who's got a vested interest in seeing you do the opposite of what you really should be doing for yourself because they're going to make some money off that. Right.

So there's no real easy answer to that. There's all the information is out there in reality. I've seen things that have blown my mind that these answers have been solved already. Just nobody knows about it. And so for ag, I would say a lot of the answers come from the places that struggle that aren't blessed with the precipitation and the soils that we have here in the Midwest. South Africa, Australia, you know, even the West Coast, California,

Arizona, the issues they deal with make them really hone in on the things that matter. And it's funny because you talk to people here in the Midwest and they'll say it's foo-food dust. It's not, you know, there's a large part of the world that's already figured this out. It's just you don't have to figure it out to, you know, pay your bills. You're blessed with deep black soil. We've just gotten cocky at the end of the day. Us Midwesterns, especially the, especially the Nebraska. You know, the people from Nebraska, they're the most cocky.

But we're just so damn cocky. We're just blessed with this soil and we just, we don't, we don't critically think and we don't, yeah. No, it's getting up in the morning. You don't have to, right? You don't have to. Yeah. Like, not necessarily worth the time. Yeah.

To be honest with you, again, the irony of Midwestern Bioag. Like we started in northern Illinois. We had to move up to Wisconsin because it just, you know, it was too hard to make a difference in northern and Illinois. Yeah. Right? If you're just, soil health doesn't matter in places where soil health is going to be there for next hundred years no matter what I do.

Yeah, you have to try really hard to mess it up. Yeah, but there are other things that do start showing up. Maybe it's, you know, for example, if you're putting out 300 pounds of potash and you decide, I'm going to strip till now, and I'm going to put all of that in the row. That's not going to work so well. No. And it's amazing to me, again, the answer's already out there.

You know, concentrating a salty fertilizer in the row and putting the seed there is not a great approach. Yeah. Right? And, you know, we've talked to some of the strip tool machine manufacturers and thought, all right, we have a product, our tereneu product, works perfect for strip till. And they should be thrilled with that.

because it's going to improve the returns on their equipment. Yep. And they're like, eh, you don't really care about it. We're going to sell the equipment either way. Yeah, yeah. I don't get that. That doesn't make sense to me. But, you know, it's just, it's dependent on, again, who you are, what you're doing.

What's your soil look like? Right? Start with that. So go, go get some soil tests done and find some experts that can help you fill in the gaps. Just like anything in your life, taxes, attorney, personal trainer. You need experts. You need people to make it work. I'd like to say Midwestern Bioag might be those people.

Yeah. You might be a little biased. I don't know. You might be a little biased. It could be, potentially. Yeah. No, I think that's good. Do you have a score prediction for Sunday? For the Eagles game?

I don't think Dak's going to step out of balance this time, so that might help. No, potentially not. I don't. I'm not going to have it to guess. I'm not going to answer to guess. I don't want to jigs anything. Well, I don't. You know, the one thing we can safely say is the Nyinger's kicks did steamroll both of us.

Yeah, that factually happened. That did happen, so we can come to agreeance on that. Yeah, I'll give you that. I'll give you that. Sunday will make up for it, though, but if you're, if the one thing about being a Cowboys fan, really the regular season doesn't even matter. Yeah, it's pretty much pointless.

The only thing that matters is whether or not you're going to get, if we can get one win in the playoff. If we can just make it to the NFC championship, that'd be nice, you know. It's been a few years. It's been, yeah, and, you know, when I tell people I'm a Cowboys fan, they, they kind of look at me,

and I think the whole idea of the bandwagon has, that's gone now. I lived, I lived the Romo years. I was the generation that it was easy to be a Cowboys fan. Early 2000, I mean, I've seen it all. I've seen all, every eight and eight season. I've seen every, every playoff fail, every fumble on a PAT or field goal Romo, you know.

Not to name names. Yeah, not to name names. But yeah, I've gotten to the point now that I'm regular season really don't matter. Let's see what we can do in the playoffs. And I'm hoping this year we can maybe get past the Eagles, but we'll see. We'll see. He's hoping that you can. I know.

And I would never say that. I would never say that in the Eagles Stadium because, man, you guys, I'll give you credit. You're pretty ruthless in there. Yeah, anyway. Yeah, yeah, I've, I've, I've been to two football games in my life, both Eagles versus Packers fans with my wife. And let's see, in Lambo, I was walking around my jersey, and somebody just kind of went, boo. I turned around and looked at him and just kind of looked at me and stopped. When we were in Philly, somebody threw like a cup at my wife.

Oh, yeah, I believe it. To be fair, it was empty and it was plastic. Yeah. I thought it was pretty funny too. You just looked at her and said you got off easy. Welcome to, yeah, welcome to Philly. Yeah, welcome to Philly. That's what's going to happen. There's a hard-nosed group of people.

The Cowboys fans have had such a rough time. How many years ago, we went to the Seahawks Cowboys Playoff game. That was pretty young. And they actually won that. Yeah, that was nice. And when they won that, I think I got hugged by every person in that section that I never met before because it was literally like we won the Super Bowl. I mean, it was like a, and then when it was over, you know, that stadium was amazing, but it was, we walked out. It was like Christmas Day. Everybody was so happy. You'd think they'd won the whole ball of wax. So anyway, so if anybody's interested in kind of what you guys are doing, where can they, where can they find out more? Yep, there's Midwestern Bioag.com. We reached out to our local stores, you know, Wisconsin and Blue Mounds, Utica, Minnesota, Monticello, Iowa, Washington, Iowa.

uh, Kendi, Michigan. Um, but we do have kind of a breath of reach. Again, we've reached a lot further than everybody else does. So we're happy to kind of work with everybody, give solutions, or refer them to our dealers where, where it makes sense. Well, Gaggie, this was a really refreshing episode. I think your perspective on things and just kind of the whole regenerative movement. It's been refreshing, honestly. I, I, I do appreciate it. And I think a lot of farmers can appreciate your perspective on it. You know, I feel like you're very like, thinking, like the farmer, which is cool, you know, from a farmer. But anyway, if you guys got any value from this, share it out with who you know, pay the fee,

leave a review on Spotify or Apple, and we'll see you back here next week for another episode.