Barn Talk - The Big 4 Stole The Only Market Small Farmers Ever Built

Starting point is 00:00:00 All of the food we eat and much of the clothing we wear comes from plants and animals that are raised on farms. Farms are different in type, in size, and even in name. Welcome to Barn Talk. What happens at the barn stays in the barn, but not today. We're going to let it all out for you guys. Today is going to be one hell of a good episode. I am really, really excited for you guys to tune into this one with the guests that we have coming to the barn. He's doing some really incredible things. He's got a lot of good things going on on his own operation, good for agriculture, good for rural America. I'm stoked. But before we get into it, you guys know the drill. If you get any value from the show, share it out with the people that you

Starting point is 00:00:52 know. The more that you guys do that, the more you help this show grow. We found the best way to grow a podcast is through word of mouth. Tell your family about it. Tell your friends about it. Tell your coworkers about it. It really does mean the world to us and it helps us out tremendously. Another thing you can do to help us out here in Barn Talk is leave a review on Spotify or Apple, the more of those reviews pile up, the more credible you make our show, which in turn allows us to have a great guest to come to the, come to the barn and have some amazing conversations with us. We appreciate all of you that do, do leave reviews. We love hearing your thoughts about the show and how we can improve it. Last thing you can do to help us out here at Barn Talk is you

Starting point is 00:01:33 can go sign up for our weekly newsletter. It's join barntalk.com. Join barn talk.com. We're just putting out a weekly newsletter about everything going on in rural America. Dad is perspective on it, my perspective on it, and just trying to really educate people on the world of or the America that we all love. So we have a goal with that right now. If we get to 10,000 newsletter subscribers, we want to throw an event, preferably here at the farm and have some beers with you guys, get to know you, meet you, have some great speakers that have been on the show before to come out and really just have a good old time. So those are the ways that you can help us. Yeah. That's excellent. Are you dressed for a funeral? It was clean. I was hanging up. I was in a hurry. I had to get a load of

Starting point is 00:02:24 pigs in this morning and then make myself look presentable for you to come over here. So this is what you got. He did a good job. I did offset it. I put on the white. Yeah, you did a good job. It is. Yeah. And, you know, when you read the newsletter or you see the clips or whatever, just know that, you know, that is our opinion. And we're not experts. I could be wrong. I doubt it, but it could be. So. That's a good one. Yeah. I want that hat off the... You got to boost yourself up every once in a while. Somebody's got to. Nobody, everybody else is just trying to beat my ass down. Yeah. Words of affirmation to yourself. It's always a good, good play. What are we going to do today? We're going to talk to a great guy and you're going to introduce him. Yeah. So our guest today is from the great state, Indiana.

Starting point is 00:03:12 And he and I have got a lot of shared experiences because we're both raising pigs through the 90s. What's really interesting is what he did in 98 versus what I did in 98. And we're going to talk about that. He today, he is a fourth generation pasture hog farmer. He runs about 400 sows outdoors and owns and operates. which is no small feet. He owns and operates a USDA inspected slaughterhouse right on their farm. And that's another good story that we're going to talk about. It's called brushy prairie packing. And his pork is on the menu by name at Disney World through Rick Bayless's restaurants.

Starting point is 00:03:52 He's a lot of upscale restaurants he has as customers. His son Evan runs their second company, traditional grazing solutions, and they run about 2,000 use on utility scale solar. So solar farms, they graze underneath them. Basically, they have the contract to mow all that. But instead of using machines, they do have to do a little mowing. They mow it with sheep. And that's a very profitable enterprise.

Starting point is 00:04:24 He's one of the most outspoken voices of American agriculture on X. And we don't agree on everything. But you know what? We had dinner with him last night and we agree with him on a lot. And he's got a very unique perspective and I think you'll find it very refreshing. So without any further, without any further ado,

Starting point is 00:04:43 let's get into it. Well, we're live, boys. So Greg Gunthorpe, welcome to Barn Talk. Thanks for having me, guys. We have been following you on X for some time now and you are one of the biggest voices on X when it comes to agriculture. you're doing a lot of great things on your own operation.

Starting point is 00:05:02 You're a huge advocate for agriculture in rural America. And I'm just really excited to have you here today. It's a pleasure to have you in the barn. This is cool. Cool opportunity. Thanks, guys. We're going to, we're going to get right into the nitty-gritty and open with. So your dad told you in 1994 that the hog business was over for the independent farmer.

Starting point is 00:05:24 30 years later, was he right? in some ways he's correct in some ways he's wrong you know there there's a bunch of consumers that want to know how their foods raised how it's processed how it's handled but to be able to easily and get that product to them in a convenient manner that the cost is acceptable is not simple and to some extent he was correct you know the what the stats now i think 40 entities owned 70% of the hogs, less than 100 entities, slaughter 99.7% of the pigs. Almost half of those are foreign owned. So in a way, we did wipe the independent hog farmer off from the map. But, you know, it's the United States. I think there's probably still some opportunities out there.

Starting point is 00:06:19 So growing up, what did your farm look like when you were a kid growing up? Growing up, we were a sizable operation. Dad and Grandpa had 600 acres, and I would say that we were one of those operations that were the ones to resist industrialization. We had 620 acres, I think Grandpa had. Wove and wire fence around all of it. Still a rotation, corn, soybeans, wheat, alfalfa, cover crops on all of the corn ground. pastured pigs, 100 to 150 sows, 100 in the winter in wood coops, 150 in the summer, in steel quonsets out in the woods, you know, made square bales of hay, 60 to 100 acres.

Starting point is 00:07:12 The market hogs went on the alfalfa the last year or two, and then it went back to corn. You know, it was kind of, I guess, dad and grandpa kind of resisted that urge. And nowadays, the regenerative movement would call it, you know, they didn't buy into anything that would rust, rot, or depreciate. They didn't word it that way in the time. Probably the neighbors thought they were cheap skates or thought they were crazy because they didn't know enough to put up a hog barn. But, you know, it worked. and it was, you know, Grandpa got the land paid for, partially because, you know, the toll road, he lived eight miles north of there. The toll road split the farm.

Starting point is 00:07:56 They would have had to go four miles to get the backside of the farm. Almost broke them because they bought the farm where we're at across the road from us now. They were making payments on two mortgages before they got the easement money from the government, but then that gave them a good start on 320. bought more land as it came up for sale. And it was basically a, to sum it up, a sizable, a diversified crop and livestock farm that with management and way too much work, they were able to get close to the same production as the guys that spent a bunch more money on equipment and a bunch more money on buildings. Yeah. So it was you and your brother. How many

Starting point is 00:08:40 siblings did you have? Got a younger brother and an older sister. Okay. Yep. And, and, And no off-farm labor on the farm growing up except for, you know, to wean pigs and to bail straw and hay. Yeah. I wanted to ask you because last night we talked about a little bit about the glory days of agriculture at that time. And like you had a story about grandpa when it came to his house and you had a story about just like how different agriculture was back then and the fact that it was simple. and like being able to buy new things and you just had to work and you would like that we'll talk about the nostalgia of what farming was back then because like my generation and in your son like you said it last night your son was like it's just crazy for us it's we can't even fathom how it all worked back then because it's just a totally different game now you know my son talks about that can't fathom the idea of how you could have got ahead so easily back in the pre-19 80s. My daughter talks about she can't really comprehend the fact that, you know, we could call 14 places and get a bid or we could drop pigs off at 14 places and actually get a price that

Starting point is 00:09:54 you can feed a family and make a living, you know, but during my dad and grandpa's time frame, one stockload of pigs or a semi two of corn would buy a new tractor. You know, nowadays, pot load or two of them will barely make the payment on a tractor, combine. So it's a completely different world, but I told you a couple stories. My grandpa, the land right across the road from our house, 102 acres, bought it at auction in 1968, paid $172 an acre. That same year, they put up the 20 by 70 foot sealed silo. They paid $17,000 for the sealed silo. So literally the same price. The one's worth in the high $1.7 something million. The other one, don't know what it costs to tear down.

Starting point is 00:10:43 Exactly. You know, but it's a completely, completely different world nowadays. And I feel like in lots of ways, you have to have the skill level. And that's why I feel sorry for the younger generation. And that's why I fight so hard for the independent family farmer and the small processor and local and regional food and people getting connected to their food. I feel sorry for the younger generation, because in lots of ways, I feel like there's no one niche through commodity.

Starting point is 00:11:12 even through the largest of commodity producers, that really feel completely secure about the place for the next generation of farmers. Yeah, I agree with that. That was an age where your leverage was really your labor, whether you wanted to work hard enough or not. Like we talked about when my parents redid their house, the way my dad figured out how he did that was he knew about what it was going to cost, and then he just held back that many extra gilts.

Starting point is 00:11:41 and ferroed extra sows, worked harder, and then every month he got the bill and he sold pigs, and that's how he did. It didn't get a mortgage or a home equity loan or any of that. It wasn't any of that stuff. And he would have felt too guilty borrowing money. A farmer back then would never borrow money to do work on a house.

Starting point is 00:12:03 You know, that would be a horrible deal. I think it was kind of rough on my dad because we borrowed money to get into the meat, processing business and I think I told you guys last night I did it entirely wrong and I've got a degree from the land grant university and ag econ farm business management I knew it was wrong but I knew it was the only option and I knew that I would kick myself in the ass someday if we didn't take the chance because I thought that you know farm to table would happen in the U.S. and I wanted to be a pig farmer and my route to be a pig farmer was to do farm to table and we got a sorry I'm I

Starting point is 00:12:41 I might get a little emotional about this whole thing because I get triggered by the whole 98 thing. I mean, it's still, you know Tork, it's still rough in a person's mind. But we took out home equity loan at Home Depot, didn't use it for what we said we did. We maxed all the credit cards out. And then I did it that same combination. In my mind, I had all of the numbers ran to the point that we sold the number of chickens that we need to. And we sold the number of pigs that we did. it would cash flow.

Starting point is 00:13:11 Yeah. Came close. Yeah. You know, we got foreclosure notice on a semi in the process. And we had, I took pennies from my daughter's piggy bank to pay for a field trip. Yeah. We made it, though. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:13:30 And eight short years later, we started on a path that if I had filled out the paperwork in 2011, we'd made the Inc. 5,000 list between 16,700 fastest grown companies in the country. That thing gained traction. Farmed a table was crazy. And I was there at the beginning. And it was a hell of a ride. Yeah. It was an amazing journey.

Starting point is 00:13:51 Yeah. Let's go back a little bit because you laid out the land of what your farming operation looked like a kid. So did you always know you wanted to be a farmer? Did you always have that in your blood? and then just kind of tell us the story of how you got to the point where you said, like the trip to the Europe, all of it, going to school, all of it, and how you started to go down the path of being independent and go and direct a table. I'd actually say that I, you know, I somewhat thought I wanted to be a farmer.

Starting point is 00:14:22 I think that I was probably 14, though, before I realized for sure that I wanted to be a farmer. You know, I started taking care of the sows when I was a freshman. in high school, ground all the feed from then on, and I really liked pigs. Before that, I don't know that it was really, you know, when I was younger, you know, I mean, I worked all the time on the farm, but I don't know that I knew that. But short version of my story is that, you know, grew up on a 600-acre diversified family farm and was highly involved in FFA, was a district officer, got my American farmer degree. state public speaking contest.

Starting point is 00:15:06 And I filled out an application and I was accepted. Got to spend the summer after I graduated in high school as an exchange student to the United Kingdom. So I stayed on 11 different family farms in Scotland and England. And two of them, and this will become relevant later, two of them had pasture lambing sheep operations, 1,000 to 2,000 ewes. I thought that was a crazy, huge number of sheep. Lo and behold, I could see the dad and the son took care of them fine. The sheep harvested the grass.

Starting point is 00:15:40 They moved them forward every day, rotational grazed them. It was no big deal. It was actually a really, really nice lifestyle for them, except for, you know, when they had to shear them. And they got help for that, share them or run them down to shoot. It wasn't a huge amount of work. And then I stayed at two farms that made their living in 1988 in Europe, direct marketing, selling at restaurants or pubs.

Starting point is 00:16:03 selling at little grocery stores and selling at a shop off from the farm. And I bet my mom still has the letter because I wrote home and said that was just the craziest thing in the world, the idea that you'd have to raise it, get it processed, and be able to sell it all, that it seemed crazy. Yeah, so did that seem like to you at that time was that like, why would you want to have to go through all that work? When we can just take a load of pigs and just sell them. Right. Hey, thanks for sticking with us.

Starting point is 00:16:31 We're at Farm Progress this week. look for the propane generators running the AC and the tents. Next, at Husker Harvest Days, you can get hands-on with propane irrigation engines and talk to the manufacturers. Trade an old diesel gear for propane saves real money on fuel and maintenance. The Propane Farm Research Program will even pay you up to $10,000 toward new propane equipment for sharing data on how it runs.

Starting point is 00:16:55 Save your bottom line at propane.com slash farm funding today. Now let's get back to it. Right. That was as wild as it. an idea to me as the first time that I went and visited Will Harris and seeing that he was going to graze sheep on solar. I'm like, this is just crazy. But after you start to think about it, it's like, you know, that, you know, 10 years later, that became relevant. You know, I went off to the land grant university, got a degree in agricultural economics at Purdue, come back home,

Starting point is 00:17:25 knew that I wanted to farm. A few short years later, the hog market dipped. 94 didn't dip anywhere near like it did in 98 but my dad said this thing's done for the little guy that doesn't raise a white lean pig that with the same amount of them year round we're never going to get a contract and this market's going to get silly and i'm like i can be a low-cost producer i can raise pigs i don't mind working um my wife and i bought my parents sow herd did your parents try to talk you out of it or they're like uh not really um you know my dad my dad i think at the time kind of thought i was crazy especially when we started by our own money thought it was really crazy um but i don't know that they really tried to talk us out of it um but you know i um and i don't think he talked tried

Starting point is 00:18:17 thought i was just crazy about the raising pigs as he thought it was crazy about the they were going to get them processed and we're going to sell them that's that's when in my mind in 1998 um i think there were two people on the planet that didn't think I was actually bad shit crazy. That was my wife and my sister. I think everyone else thought I'd just gone bonkers. And, you know, so we were going along fine. And I was literally the, probably the granola-crunching hippie farmer in the community that everybody thought was crazy because I wouldn't put up barns. We even had a, the farm that I'd bought, Amish guy had a, um, um, a, um, um, Amish guy had a, 300 head confinement finish barn on it, and I couldn't make it work.

Starting point is 00:19:05 The pigs for us did fine outside, but they did horrible inside there. We didn't use it. We ended up using it later for a chicken brooder barn, so it ended up being worthwhile. But, you know, we were seasonal, just feraled gilts, got rid of the gilts after, rotationally grazed the gilts, so hardly fed. the gilts. Iowa State was doing work showing that, believe it or not, a gestating sow has enough digestive capacity that if you put them on pasture, you know, they could eat, you know, what, 10, 12, 15 pounds of feed. They only really need four pounds of feed to grow. They got enough

Starting point is 00:19:45 space that if you give them good quality pasture, you can do that. So we cut our feed bill on the sows. We cut our feed bill on the pigs because we were growing corn. I was putting wires across it giving them daily amounts of corn. We were hogging down corn. I was a low cost producer. I thought we had the world by our ass in 1998 rolls around. Nobody was low. Nobody was low enough cost producer in 98. And it was, you know, it wasn't like the dairy guys, you know, they really didn't know when they were done. That was a long, slow squeeze. We knew when we were done. They shut the lights off and said, you guys can go home. And, you know, so. And at that time, you know, I told you guys this last night, at that time, I could pick up the magazines and I could see that Bill Nyman was selling to Alice Waters, Shapenese, John Jameson was selling into the Watergate into a few places in New York. And I was fortunate enough. I know those guys. I've met them since then, but I didn't know who they were. And I told my wife, I'm like, it's going to happen. And we're going to be part of it. And we, we,

Starting point is 00:20:56 coming off from losing every bit of equity that we had, we just levered her a little bit higher and said, we're going to do it. That was probably nuts. Yeah, I just think about that because kudos to you. Because, like, that experience of going to England gave you, like, that aha moment because I think about us sitting here in 98,

Starting point is 00:21:26 getting eight bucks for hogs, and knowing the jig was up, like it was up. But no, like, I don't know, I, no recollection of any other possible way to make it work. Like, I didn't have that experience, and I didn't know anybody that did have that experience. Yeah, I was fortunate.

Starting point is 00:21:50 I, you know, because I was doing the, rotational grazing and I was in the whole sustainable ag community and all that. I'd seen that there was definitely some people direct marketing. You know, there was a few groups of pig farmers selling some stuff. I think most of them are gone because I think it's that difficult and they didn't make it. But, you know, I seen that stuff happening. And I thought, you know, I still look back on it and if I hadn't tried, I would probably regret it the whole rest of my life, even if it hadn't worked.

Starting point is 00:22:21 Yeah. So what was the first, so you were like everybody else. I mean, you were marketing these pigs. The market crashed. What was your first step of like, okay, we got to find another place to move these pigs? I spent, I spent a bunch of time. I was trying to market pigs before the market crashed because we sold our first pig to a restaurant in Chicago in September of 98. And the market was low, but it wasn't down to, you know, and you talk about eight cent hog.

Starting point is 00:22:51 Our pigs probably went to some some of them went same place as yours. They went to Dubuque and we got eight cents minus trucking because when Thornapple in Detroit closed, ours had to go across the corn belt. But you know, I called everybody imaginable and I still think, you know, it's hard to look at this world without realizing that there's a higher power and without realizing that there's some kind of plan. And I think there's a lot of luck and fate and what happened to us because I spoke at a at a small farm sustainable ag conference in Columbia, Missouri. A friend of mine had got a USDA SAIR grant that had just started, ironically, probably because some of the work that we had done, I was on USDA Secretary of Ag Glickmans and President Clinton's Small Farm Commission, and we were trying to promote, along with several others, was trying to promote that there ought to be some technical guidance people that want to do something different than the typical commodity path.

Starting point is 00:23:53 And USDA gave a friend of mine a grant to do conferences on alternative pig production. And he asked me if I'd come speak in Columbia, Missouri. I almost turned him down because life was crazy. I didn't have time for a trip to Columbia, Missouri, but I made time. And I went. And I was speaking to a group of, it's probably 125, 150 people in the room. And afterwards, I was talking to three or four of them in the back of the room. one of them had a friend in Oregon that was raising milk-fed pigs getting them dressed and shipping them to a restaurant in Chicago.

Starting point is 00:24:26 And he's like, you should call him because the guy's going to quit raising pigs. His way source was gone, he was going to stop raising pigs. And I'm like, hell, I'll call him. I didn't know anything about the fine dining restaurant. But luckily, I called him on a Tuesday afternoon, about 2 o'clock in the afternoon. That's the ideal time to call a fine dining restaurant that only does dinner. I didn't know that. The Chef de Cuisine, Matthias Murgis, picked up the phone.

Starting point is 00:24:52 He never answered the phone. But he picked up the phone that day, and he never talked to anyone if he did because he didn't have time for it. He talked to me for about 15 minutes. And that, you know, 1998 was way before chefs in the U.S. were talking about pork quality. But he was talking about pork quality. You know, he'd been to Italy, he'd been to Japan, he'd been to places where pork quality was already a thing. and, you know, he's talking about the breed of pigs that we raised, you know, and we had du rock pigs and they're outside and we weren't feeding antibiotics already and we were doing

Starting point is 00:25:25 all of these kind of, you know, things that were not typical of the industry. And he was like, bring me a pig next week. I'm like, we didn't have a processing plant, but I told him, sure, we found a local processor that would kill and chill one for us. My wife was working as a registered nurse at the hospital across the state line and cold water at the time. drove a little Suzuki Swift. We put a stock tank in the back of the thing, filled it with ice.

Starting point is 00:25:52 You know, they'd wrapped the pig in plastic. We put a drop cloth down, covered it back up, covered the thing completely in ice in the back of the car. I'd never drove in downtown Chicago before. I'd been. In a Suzuki? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:26:06 You know, Geo Metro only would your bigger tires. Oh, man. And I can still picture looking over at my wife. When we got on the Skyway telling her that, oh, everybody says traffic in Chicago's bad. Well, nobody pays the toll still to go on the Skyway. When the Skyway dumps off on the Dan Ryan headed into downtown, it got real because I'd never been on anything before where there's four or five lanes of locals and five or six lanes of Express. And I was white knuckled by the time I got there. And, you know, because I'd been to Chicago.

Starting point is 00:26:38 We went for sixth grade to the museum and to the Sears Tower. and I flew through the airport quite a few times, but I'd never grove in Chicago. And it was just a little bit past downtown when Cabrini Green was still there. Go by Cabrini Green and go on up to Armitage off Halstead. And we pull in the back alley and the chef and his sous chefs are grabbing the pig.

Starting point is 00:27:01 They're starting to break it up and they're showing us around the restaurant. This farm boy that was not involved in the foodie scene at all figured out really quick. this was a really, really nice restaurant. And Wine Spectator Magazine that same month rated Charlie Trotter. It was Charlie Trotter. They rated him number one in the world.

Starting point is 00:27:21 So we literally started at the top. Yeah. And once you're selling pigs to Charlie Trotter, he was buying pig. Yeah. It's like you go and it's like people will listen. And it took us a couple years until we connected with chef Rick Bayliss. And he's our largest customer and his restaurant, I like call it, his restaurant empire. He's just amazing.

Starting point is 00:27:40 But, you know, he's got places at Disney. He's got places at Caesar's Palace. He's got places at O'Hare. And we do fully cooked product for him there. We do his raw pork for his downtown locations. And then, you know, you guys were just in Indiana, the Cunningham group. We sell tomahawk chops to them. And, you know, all within our, you know, a lot of it within our region.

Starting point is 00:28:02 Because if you look at a dot on the map, we're about centrally located between Detroit, Chicago, and Indianapolis. That would be about us. So we have a sizable portion of the population that within a one day delivery route we could deliver to. Yeah. And, you know, we, we sell, we used to sell primarily to upscale restaurants. We sell a fair, or a larger percentage of our product now goes to other farmers and other brands that they further process and are, you know, doing direct to consumer. I wanted to ask, what was the, like, did you, you said when you walked into the restaurant, you realized, okay, this is like, this is like. like this is bigger than maybe you thought at the time of like how grand this guy this chef was

Starting point is 00:28:44 or this restaurant was but like what was there a moment of relief when you got that pig there and you dropped it off did they give you a check and did you think because at that time you're in 98 sky's falling you went on this journey you drop off this pig was there a sense of like all right we got we got no if you if you sell to independent restaurants your check you don't get the check when you pick up. The check shows up. If you're lucky, you run about a 42, 44 day accounts receivable. So some of them aren't going to pay for 60 days. Some are, some are pretty good and they'll pay for 15 days. But there was definitely a moment of relief. And, you know, I knew it was someplace really, really special because I don't follow art,

Starting point is 00:29:27 but I recognize some of the names of the artists that they're talking about that's on the wall. And when they're talking, when they're showing you the bottles of wine and the wine list and it's, you know, There's no boxed wine there. It's $100 at the bottom and it's, you know, thousands of dollars. And there's no prices on the menu. It's like, yeah, you figure out pretty quick. When you were telling a story, something that I thought about that, you know, a lot of people listening of your generation, like you don't realize what you said about just the chance.

Starting point is 00:30:02 Whether life serves you an ace or an unexpected backhand, the high-protein yogurt, at OICOS Pro is there to feed your strength and help you turn every challenge into a smash. Oikos Pro helps build strong muscles and support muscle recovery with high protein and contains no added sugar because true strength isn't about being able to take the hits.

Starting point is 00:30:22 It's about being able to bounce back. Oikos Pro. Feed your strength. Visit oikos.ca for more details. That one, somebody answered the phone. Yeah. And two, that a decision maker answered the phone because when you started this, you weren't going to email anybody.

Starting point is 00:30:42 There was nobody had a website. Right. So you literally had to either hope somebody picked up the phone or go actually show up at these places and say, hi, I'm so-and-so. That was your only, like there was no email marketing. There was none of this stuff. And see, in a way I feel like that I'm at a disadvantage today

Starting point is 00:31:03 because I feel like the, I was quick to pick up on relationship marketing because I like to say what we did back then was relationship marketing. You know, you were building a brand, but you were also building a relationship with the customer. And we told people right off the bat, especially one of our sales guys that we had that, you know, was instrumental in building our business to that level. We're going to screw up at times. I don't care what business years, you're going to screw up at times. Well, we're going to make it right. And we're going to show up. And when we tell you we're going to something, we're going to do something. And if you do that, you know, the business grows. And

Starting point is 00:31:40 nowadays, it's more important of what's on Instagram, what's on website, what's on this and that. And I don't feel like in a way that relationship marketing is as big of a deal as it was. So I hit all of that stuff at exactly the right time, and you'll appreciate this talk. I'm convinced, completely convinced that if I'd have been born a year earlier or a few years earlier, a year later, this whole journey wouldn't have happened. Yeah. You know, if I'd have been born enough earlier to the point that I'd have got some wind in my sales, I'd have had 400, 500 sows when the market crashed.

Starting point is 00:32:18 We'd have went broke just quicker than shit. The burn, you couldn't have pivoted fast enough. No, couldn't have pivoted fast enough, you know. It all just worked out. Yeah. Yeah. So you do the restaurant, you drop that pig off. they're in get this network of restaurants you start to build it why did you why what made you make the

Starting point is 00:32:41 decision to get into the processing world what what made you go there it was really really quick that i figured out that if you're going to sell to upscale restaurants and chefs that are very demanding uh that you're not going to be able to control the product and you're not going to be able to control how many animals do you get processed unless you control the processing. It didn't take me very long to figure that out. You know, if you remember back in the late 90s, the small processors that would do animals for people were, you know, largely gone. And, you know, people talk about that there wasn't many USDA plants left. I try to explain it to people. there really wasn't many USDA processors left that were slaughtering animals and processing them

Starting point is 00:33:33 for restaurants, let alone nice restaurants. You know, Torque, you can remember. In our community, there was two of them that still ran a little wholesale distribution route. Those were the only processors left that would have actually known how to slaughter animals and cut things up. The only processors that were really left back then were the ones that were either harvesting the animals that the big guys didn't want, the culls, you know, they were or they were harvesting the animals for people to take back to their freezer. Some of those did that under inspection,

Starting point is 00:34:07 but that was really all that was left. There was not, there never really was a processor designed for farmers that wanted to sell at farmers markets or sell to restaurants. We had to completely build that as an industry. And I think people forget that. They are like, oh, the USDA processors were gone. We never had those processors. Yeah. And I would say today, it's still very difficult if you are a guy that you want to sell direct to a restaurant or direct to consumer. Because so many of the plants that have been built that are USDA inspected or they've got their got inspection. Like there's a lot of places in Iowa. I shouldn't say a lot. But the lockers that are, you know, they're, They're processing or they're killing maybe two days a week

Starting point is 00:35:01 and they're processing the rest of the week. But those guys, how many of those guys, their main moneymaker is deer in Iowa? They process a pile of deer. And then the rest of the time, they're just doing half beef, quarter beef, whatever. So when you walk in, that's not a big part of their business. And then if you want it custom labeled,

Starting point is 00:35:25 You might as well just turn out of walk out because they're like, we don't have time to mess with it. If you want to bring a flexible number of animals in, which is what you're going to have to have to be able to sell the restaurants, and you want them cut and package differently every single week because every restaurant wants them cut slightly different. Every restaurant wants them packaged slightly different. Every restaurant wants them labeled slightly different. You're going to do that. There's not a processor for that. I think it'd be easier to get a processor, especially if you're scaled, you know, if you're going to bring trailer loads in.

Starting point is 00:35:55 you know, stock trailer loads in, you can find a processor that will do the retail packaging. You know, but that's difficult also because they got to have a roll stock machine. They really need Vista track or something like that for barcoding. You know, they need a third-party certification. So this is way, way more complex than we just need USDA processing plants. We need USDA processing plants with some flexibility. We need USDA processing plants with some capabilities. and that's so much more difficult in an industry that is extremely capital management and labor

Starting point is 00:36:29 intensive. I don't see the reason that lots of people would actually get into it except for that it being a necessity. Yeah. So let's go into your journey. So you got into the, tell us the story of getting into processing. You explain why, but you knew the industry was changing. You knew if you were going to control your own destiny.

Starting point is 00:36:53 you had to get in, right? So what's the jury? Our first adventure into processing, I failed miserably. My wife and I became part owners of a processing plant 37 miles north of us in Michigan. We were owners with three other farmers. And believe it or not, they were ostrich farmers. I don't know if you remember that whole pyramid scheme. Yep.

Starting point is 00:37:16 If I had a dollar for every time they told me that ostrich was going to be the new chicken and beef, I'd have a lot of dollars. and the second that the hide market for the ostrichers, we were basically processing them for the hides. The hides were worth $150 to $200 each, and we were doing 20 to 30 of them a week. And we were keeping our head above water by doing that plus the beef and the pork that we were doing.

Starting point is 00:37:39 And the second, the South Africans figured out that, hey, this hide market in the U.S. is good, and they started shipping hides that honestly were way better than ours. They didn't put holes in them. They actually pulled all the feathers out so the quills closed. I mean, there were beautiful hides. Our hide market went to zero, and it did that in less than six months. It kind of made me feel like I was reliving the hog industry.

Starting point is 00:38:03 And our share of the losses that last year was about $60,000. So you can do the math. We were keeping our head above water with ostrich hides, and we weren't. Yeah. And once that was gone. So, you know, I got this wild idea. And I had a degree in farm business management. I should have known better, but I got this wild idea that, you know, I can make this work if I wasn't 37 miles north of the farm when I needed to do something with the farm or I wasn't in Chicago making deliveries when something was blowing up at the plant or blowing up.

Starting point is 00:38:36 And, you know, if the plant was at the farm, you can make this work no problem. I didn't factor in that there was no bank on the planet after we'd already, you know, failed to, you know, lost all of our equity in the hog business, failed at the processing business. Like, oh, yeah, no problem. Just give us a few hundred thousand to build a plant on the farm. But we did it anyways. And so, you know, and it's been an amazing journey. The processing, you know, I kind of take the same approach as Will Harris. Processing is difficult to get your actual grant of inspection, to get processing established.

Starting point is 00:39:14 But I still think that the challenge, you know, and people that aren't in it, they don't know what they don't know. it's difficult to get a processing plant. The bigger challenge is running a processing plant and figuring out that whole carcass utilization and figure out your markets that are at margins that make all of it work. It's much more complicated to run it than it actually is. I could help anybody tomorrow if they wanted a processing plant.

Starting point is 00:39:38 I could, for that matter, help anybody that's built a plant and they're saying USDA won't let them get started. If they know for a fact they're ready to get started, give them my phone number. I'll get them started. That's no problem. you know, they actually want to see more processing plants. But that doesn't mean they're going to be successful.

Starting point is 00:39:55 Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's funny because I think, and you touched on this last night, you know, our president put out a truth social post about he's just waking up to the fact about the big four and that we need a, we need to cut back on this USDA regulation so we can get smaller plants going. That's only one piece of this whole entire pie. I think everybody just broad brushes thinks that the way that,

Starting point is 00:40:18 the way that the reason we don't have all these small plants and the reason we don't have a localized food system is because the USDA regulation. Just too much regulation in general and we can just fix that. You can touch on that. We talked about that last night and, you know, I still think that falls in that category. People don't know what they don't know. And if you've never run a processing plant or some of the people that even have and then their story by somebody listening to it, it's all morphs into the USDA regulations. I try to equate it the same as like you guys putting up contract hog barns. You know, you build a building that you're going to wash, you're going to put sanitizers in it, you're going to run animals through it in a processing plant, you're going to run pallet jacks

Starting point is 00:41:03 with pallets in it, you know, you're going to use the thing. And every single bit of that starts to deteriorate from day one. And is it really the USDA regulations got more difficult because actually the sanitation regulations didn't. It's 9 CFR 416. They eliminated all of the set in stone. They have one statement now. You have to maintain sanitary conditions. It's your responsibility to support. I could do the exact same sanitation things that we could. In fact, I could do things that are less stringent. If I showed that I had a program to ensure that we were sanitary, for example, you know, used to be you had to have certain widths on hallways. You had to have certain heights that your

Starting point is 00:41:44 shelves were above. If you had a program to make sure that you weren't spraying stuff off the floor onto a shelf. You can have a shelf lower than 12 inches from the floor nowadays. You can have a hallway narrower if you show that your walls are clean so if something touches it. So in some ways, they're less stringent. In some ways, Hassup and SSOP gives us opportunities to have flexibility. In some ways, yeah, it's more stringent, but not a lot.

Starting point is 00:42:08 But I'd argue that what it really is, you know, we built a processing plant 20-some years ago on the farm. And there's portions of our processing plant that look like it. It was built 20 some years ago on the farm. And you guys know as well as I do that if you rebuild anything nowadays, it can cost way more just to fix it back up than what it costs to build it in the first place. So is that really regulations or is that we're dealing with a very fast depreciating asset that is no longer really relevant for what we need now? And so I don't think it's regulations as much as anything. I think it's a lot more complex than that.

Starting point is 00:42:46 Yeah. Well, it's also the markets too. It's your margin. It's the margin. It's the markets. It's the labor. It's the, it's the having to replace and renovate it. Like people, I just, I get tired of people that are uneducated about the subject. Just broad brush say, oh, it's just because of regulation. Farmers, this will fix this. Farmers and ranchers will have more opportunity if we just fix the regulation. They don't know. Don't get me wrong. I actually think that we ought to have. an exemption for the smallest of red meat producers and processors very similar to we have the equivalent of prime act even i'd probably call it primac plus for poultry and it's allowed in about 27 of the states where you can process up to a thousand birds with no inspection and you can process up to 20 000 birds per year where they only inspect the facility and you can still sell the birds i think we ought to have a similar exemption for red meat as that do i believe that will fix the

Starting point is 00:43:44 market, absolutely not. It's going to create some opportunities. It's going to reduce some barriers to entry, but it's not going to fix the market. It's much more complicated to fix the market. Let's go into, let's go into you built, so you had the first plant, it didn't work. Then you build the plant on the farm where you maxed out your credit cards. You touched on that earlier in the episode. You were all in. And it was balls to the wall. We're going to to make this thing work because we believe in the market that we've created for ourself and if we want to control our own desk and we got to do this you build it you then you get I don't know you said eight years later or five years later some around there you're it comes full

Starting point is 00:44:29 circle and you're like all right we got this thing we got the world by the tail what year was that where you're like we got the world by the tail that was that that was that 2008 to 2011 time frame you know we we were doubling every year uh you could walk into a restaurant if it was a nice restaurant they were going to buy something from you even if it was just for a special you know and so it was that time frame i don't feel like the whole thing uh died off um until closer to 2015 2017 why why was it was it just everybody was on this movement of farm to table yeah farm to table and local food was really really trendy and if you look at the top five restaurant trends and you look at them over the year

Starting point is 00:45:14 there was three or four years there that that was the top one and it gradually moved down you know but it was it was hugely trendy you know everybody was wanting the farmer's name on the menu everybody wanted a farmer you know it was the glory days of farm to table yeah yeah and then uh all of the big boys all the big boys they they saw that and they saw margin and they were like hey bob go put on a pair of coveralls and posed for this picture. We're going to start a subsidiary called Bob's Farm. Yeah. So explain that. How is it

Starting point is 00:45:52 changed? Oh, yeah. You know, we woke the big guys up and I would argue that we won a few battles and we actually lost the war. What we really did and I hate to acknowledge this, but what we really did is we created some very valuable

Starting point is 00:46:08 niches that the big guys co-opted and took. And I can prove this and you know I I know as well as anyone that statistics you know normally just go in one ear and out the other but I strongly suggest people listen to this one you know when they talk about that local food coming from small farms through local processors in the United States of America 0.3% of the pigs come out of facilities our size the 10,000 or less per year so 200 per week 99.7% of the hogs come from less than 100 slaughter plants.

Starting point is 00:46:50 There's no physical possible way in which small farmers through small processors are supplying any portion of the market. We can't be supplying more than 0.3%. I didn't look up the numbers, but I'd be willing to bet you that we actually lost market share. There may be a much sizable percentage of it coming through those plants where they're not, you know, head to tail butcher shop or whole animal butcher shop, but there's not a lot of them that's actually originating there. And, you know, if we want a resilient food supply and we want true farm to table, it's got to be slaughtered, processed, and delivered from farmers through small processing plants,

Starting point is 00:47:29 not a marketing and advertising department of the big four that are just slapping a label on it or shipping primals to get repackaged for somebody else to slap a little. label. And I think you touched on it on your one when you talked about closing down farmer grade. I think when people see, if they really seem behind the curtain, and like I said, I think the way that you can tell that is you just got to look at the numbers. In beef, it's not quite as lopsided, but it's still really bad. It's 2% in beef that comes through the small plants. And 98% of it is less than 100 slaughter plants. Yeah. So basically, when you go to a, when you go to a, when you go to a chain steakhouse or or I'm not I won't even pick on that you just go to a go to a restaurant

Starting point is 00:48:17 and on their menu they have like a pork chop that's from you know sunny I don't want to disdain anybody that has a real brand so but I'll say like it says that you know we've got this we've got this pork chop that comes from sunny view acres farm or whatever and it sounds really good to you that's not direct from a farmer. Well, it's not always. No, I'm just saying, but what he's saying is the math just doesn't add up. Yeah, I'm saying the math doesn't add up. And I'm saying that there's actually two ways. I'm saying that the math doesn't add up. And the second way to show this is you need to look at recalls. And an excellent example, it's not meat, but just happened. You know, the whole cyclospora recall.

Starting point is 00:49:05 when you've got Taco Bell, Whole Foods, and Chipotle on the same recall, you got two of those that claim that they're buying from small farmers that are local. How do you get it, how are they involved in a recall in the middle of the growing season from product that's coming from Mexico? Yep. You know, somebody, you know, we have producers in Indiana. I'm sure you have producers in Iowa that would love to supply them local lettuce during the growing season. and probably don't want two in the middle of the winter,

Starting point is 00:49:36 but by God, they'd like to in July. Yeah, yeah, 100%. And, you know, that, you know, we talked about that last night. And I think that, you know, I kicked myself in the rear because I was just as bad as everyone else. You know, we spent decades fighting amongst ourselves as farmers of should pigs be raised inside or should they be outside? Should cattle be grass-fed or should they be grain finished?

Starting point is 00:50:02 should crops be organic or not organic? Should we do GMOs? Should we not do GMOs? We should have all argued that to not do those things was probably significantly more risk and significantly more cost. And if the consumer wanted to pay for that, the farmer would choose to do it. But instead what we did, we sat there and argued amongst ourselves, while they, without even changing their practices,

Starting point is 00:50:31 took those markets. And that's absolutely wrong. It's so anti-capitalism. It's so anti-American that we ought to do something about it. Yeah, we should have stopped fighting each other about this practice is better than this practice. We should have said we got to keep these market independent to us so that no matter what farm it is, they can take advantage of it.

Starting point is 00:50:51 We can be civil, you know. You can think it's just absolutely crazy that I put 400 sows outside and that I try to figure out how to find enough help and enough management to do that, the same as I can think it's crazy that, you know, you spend $700,000 to build a building to raise pigs for somebody else. But we can still appreciate the fact that, you know, people need deep pork. And if people want to pay more for pigs that are Durok and Berkshire crosses, spent their whole life outside, never had an antibiotic. Mine costs a whole hell of a lot more. But when I have to

Starting point is 00:51:26 compete with the big guys that are just slapping a label on it, it takes away opportunity. for you guys and for me and rural America looks like we hollowed the whole damn thing out. And nobody's left that knows where the future is to own a pig. It's very true. And it's the same thing on the beef side. Well, I kind of want to go deeper into the food, like the food service world, the packing world, because you touch on that. And I kind of want to lay that out for people.

Starting point is 00:51:56 And I've talked about it on the show before, like you said, you know, I, Doing Farmer grade, doing the direct consumer meat business, it kind of opened the curtain up for me to see behind the scenes of what was going on. These Packers, food service, Cisco's, the U.S. Foods of the World, and the Big Four have way more grip on this whole thing than what people even realize. Like people, people are painting them as the villain now, but they don't even know how far it goes down the rabbit hole. I saw other direct-to-consumer meat businesses buying primals.

Starting point is 00:52:33 When I say primals, I'm talking a strip loin, you know, a rib, you know, a rib section. They were buying these primals from the big four to then cut them into stakes and then put their label on that package and send it out and claim it as theirs, whether that was going to a restaurant, whether that was been putting in a box and shipping it to a consumer to their door, whether that was going to retail. there are so many other direct-to-consumer meat businesses, even butcher shops, where everything in their meat case is box beef from a packing plant. Because the economics for them does not work. If you're the direct-to-consumer meat guy, there's not enough cattle. It costs way too much money to slaughter that many cattle. You only get so many steaks from that cattle. And there's no way that you're going to provide a restaurant or you're going to provide have enough stakes to send to all your subscription,

Starting point is 00:53:26 customers for your, you know, your direct-to-consumer subscription offering. And you have to, you have to play the game and go buy these box primals from this packer to keep up with your production. And it's cheaper. It's cheaper. And it's the same thing with these butcher shops. I saw countless butcher shops. They make the most money on custom slaughter for the neighbor down the road that wants a half-quarter whole beef or same with a hog. Everything in the meat case, though, they don't have enough throughput. It's, It would tank the plant to say all of the meat that we're going to put in this meat case, we're going to slaughter ourselves, pay for the production, pay for the labor,

Starting point is 00:54:06 and then put it in our meat case. That won't work. It economically will not work. And so it's not just at the restaurant level. It's at the meat case. It's at the meat case at the grocery store. Other direct-to-consumer meat businesses are doing it. They are fully, fully entrenched in this thing.

Starting point is 00:54:25 and they have everybody by the balls. And so what Greg actually does, when he truly is saying that he's taking his pigs, running it through his plant, and that product is then going to these restaurants, and it's his pork, you don't understand how rare that is. That is extremely rare.

Starting point is 00:54:44 That's not what's happening. And I think the consumer thinks that that's happening everywhere. Like that's what's happening at the butcher shops, all these direct-to-consumer meat businesses. It's actually farm-raised meat. Well, it is raised at some farm, but it's not like the farmer down the road with your pitchfork. Right. And like I said, I think the proof in it is that is those numbers and those recalls, people, you know, so consumers in some way are naive and I guess they choose to be naive. But I always question, you know, I've been to Europe a few times and it's completely different in Europe.

Starting point is 00:55:20 And I don't really quite understand why that is. I don't know whether the big four. have a handle on it, whether our consumers are apathetic. But, you know, I'd argue there's at least 12 to 20 percent of the consumers that really, really care. And I think that there's, you know, that leaves 80 plus percent of them that are going to buy commodity in the cheapest regardless. And so that leaves a huge, huge market, you know, that we're never going to touch. But, you know, when you take the demand away for that 12 to 20 percent that will pay a premium by Greenwater, you know, washing, that's a huge, huge difference on whether or not you can sell your product. And it is, it is an uphill battle on, and the biggest uphill battle, you know, on the beef guys, it's

Starting point is 00:56:06 figuring out what to do with their grind. For us hog guys, it's figuring out what to do with everything besides the belly and the front half of the loin. You know, we could sell the bellies off from a thousand pigs a week or more. If we, you know, if our pigs had 12 bellies each, we'd still be short on bellies and you know we can sell tomahawk chops from now to the sun goes down you know so that's no problem but man when you have to figure out what you're going to do with the shoulders off from 80 pigs a week yeah or worse yet the hams off from 80 pigs a week you know you've got a you got a job and when you're competing against especially you know when pork cut out languishes at 80 cents a pound for two years.

Starting point is 00:56:56 So, you know, your pork board guy didn't quite get the definition of pork cutout right. But to explain it, pork cutout is the value of the live pig as the product. So it includes the pig. When that whole pig in a box as primals is only worth 80 cents a pound, there isn't a hell of a lot of money left for the farmer, and there wasn't really even much left for the packer. And when it's 80 cents pound, there's a lot of cheap pork in the marketplace. And we have some really, really loyal customers love them to death. But, you know, when our price is two or three times the price, there's a customer base out there.

Starting point is 00:57:35 When our product is 10 times the price and they're struggling because, you know, there's not a lot of people coming to downtown. Some of them got no choice but to say, you know, there was trim products delivered at a dollar in change. We can't even process it for that if there was no value on the pig. So, I mean, it's an uphill battle for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I just wanted to say something else.

Starting point is 00:58:01 And I've said this many times, but when we're talking about this question about the advantage that the Packer has, one of the greatest advantages, at least on the pork side that people don't realize is hambs are not a profitable, they can't, well, they're profitable a couple of times. times a year. You sell a lot of hams around Christmas. You sell a lot of hams around Easter. But other than that, it's not a big moving product. But Mexico is a big, they move a pile of them to

Starting point is 00:58:34 Mexico. But then everything that we pay, everything, when we had farmer grade, when you had farmer grade, everything you paid to get rid of. Awful. Yeah. They sell that all over the world. And there was a point, I know when I worked on the other side of this business, there was a point where one of the Packers, they were making more money off of the front end of the pig and the back end of the pig than what they were making off the rest of the pig because they were selling that to Asia and Mexico. You're locked out of that.

Starting point is 00:59:08 You can't do that. Yeah, to compete in those byproduct markets and to compete in the export markets, you have to do truckloads of those products. You know, just for example, the blood is worth, you know, three to six cents a pound, but you have to do it in tanker loads. You know, we wouldn't get tanker loads ever. You know, the blood in little plants cost to plant significantly more money because the biological oxygen demand of blood is huge. So it means that your waste treatment system has to be bigger because you're not collecting it.

Starting point is 00:59:39 But you can't economically collect it because you don't sell, you don't have enough quantity of it to sell into a market. The same with all the other pieces. You know, you have to have a line that flows and in a big plant, if you got a thousand plus pigs coming per hour, you can justify a person collecting this one thing because they're probably, it's all they can do. They probably end up with carpal tunnel collect in that piece. In our plant, we can't have a person that, I mean, we could, but there's only so much you can train people for and there's only so much you can do. And when you get all said and done, we'd have a few pounds of it. Who's going to buy that, you know? Right.

Starting point is 01:00:15 Where if you do a thousand an hour, a few ounces per pig at the end of the day after two shifts, you know, you got combos of the stuff. Yeah, you know what I mean? You got plenty of heads. You got plenty of eyeballs. You got plenty of butthole rings. That said that there was a Spotify advertising connects you with an audience that's engaged and ready to discover your brand. Launch a campaign with Spotify ads manager. What is it a delicacy in Japan?

Starting point is 01:00:42 Thailand. Thailand. I think it's Thailand. We toured through. I can't remember what I want to say. I won't say what planet was. But anyway, a guy that I know was taking that tour and got down to the further processing

Starting point is 01:00:57 and he found a roll of a roll of stickers that said pig rectums. And he was filling a box. And all it was was the sphincter muscle out of a pig. And that whole bot, they were like pallet of them. Yeah. They were sending them all to Thailand because they serve a dish where each cup of this green cold soup they sell has one of those rings in it. They're making money off of that.

Starting point is 01:01:21 It's a delicacy. It's a delicacy. We work on it. We work on it every single day. We try to sell every single thing off the pig that we can. We have a really good pet treat customer. And ironically, I think there's actually more transparency and there's more desire for Americans to feed their pets correctly than there is humans.

Starting point is 01:01:42 I hate to say that, but I genuinely. believe that's the truth we sell to a company down in marietta georgia farmhounds and they make pet treats and sell them to probably 400 and some independent pet food pets shops around the country and so we're able to sell snouts and uh livers and hearts and tails and uh you you name it but uh you know we still end up with a sizable amount. We even at times compost almost all of our skin. I've talked to Rudolph. If we had 150,000 pounds at a time, they'd run a batch of cracklings for us.

Starting point is 01:02:24 And how am I going to get 150,000 pounds of skin at one time? You know, so I mean, you know, those things, you know, it'd be great to do all that stuff, but, you know, there's only so many hours in the day and there's only so much product. And to do it at a smaller scale, we'd be right back. to the, you'd have to develop a really good niche market for it. And then where are you going to get shelf space in the U.S.? The place that I just mentioned that would make it for us is not going to come right in. And, you know, the retailer's going to say, oh, no, their price is over here.

Starting point is 01:02:54 Yeah. And then tomorrow that market, you lose it. Right. I mean, that's the thing. There's no security there. Right. Yeah. But that's just another advantage of Packer has.

Starting point is 01:03:02 So you said the word greenwashing. So we kind of laid out this landscape of you build the plant. You're in restaurant. It's humming from 2008 to, what did you say, 2013, 2012, the restaurant. It started to go sideways in 2015. I wasn't smart enough to recognize it. And I was convinced that we were going to solve it by expanding our region. We were going to sell outside of the Midwest area. And I guess that that was a little naive because I think that the other people that were having the same problem in other regions were going to sell into the Midwest. so the competition and noise just started to grow exponentially. And when you say greenwashing, you're saying, just to give you guys, like, it's everything we just talked about.

Starting point is 01:03:46 So these packers have all these sub-brands and they go through a U.S. foods or a Cisco. And Cisco is going into these restaurants distributing on the behalf of the packer. And they're looking at what you've done for them. And they're trying to match the same product that you're offering and going to the same restaurant and trying to get them to work with Cisco rather than you, right? I'm saying that the overwhelming majority of the greenwash product ends up being about 25 to 40% over commodity price. Almost all of your big packers have one of those brands. And don't get me wrong, I'd be willing to bet you anything that they're sorting out to the point it's way more uniform.

Starting point is 01:04:25 And they probably got higher specs on it so that the quality of it is better than what their normal line is. But it's conventional commodity production. And we can't compete against. that. So I'm saying greenwashing is taking commodity production and putting something else on it. I think the most egregious one, and I spent probably as much time and resources fighting it as probably any independent producer in the country was that whole product of USA labeling. And I'm sure you and your listeners are aware that from 2015 until January of 2026, you could take foreign meat, as long as you put it in a package in the U.S., they considered that a product of

Starting point is 01:05:09 USA. And that in my mind was the most egregious greenwashing. And I believe that if we could get that fixed, that would force USDA to put the systems in place in which they would have to understand what consumer expectations are. And they would go forward and they would start to fix some of them that, you know, and lots of people's eyes are less obvious and less egregious, but that was for sure the worst one. And isn't it ironic, we did a lot of that for our Canadian friends. Yeah, because so much pork comes in from Canada and beef as far as that goes. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:05:42 And now then we, you know, now then we're worried about, we're fighting over our tariffs with them. Well, that, like that whole country of origin thing was, that was directly lobbied by the Canadians because they didn't want it. Yeah. Because I get worried about the hog industry and maybe, and hopefully you can tell me I'm wrong. And I hope I don't fall into the same category as my dad where you just come up with things that end up being completely correct. And we all just keep doing what we're doing anyways.

Starting point is 01:06:12 But, you know, Brazil started to import pork into the U.S. last year. And their cost of production is at least 25 to 40 percent lower than ours. And they have some serious disease problems that cause restrictions from imports. at least in certain areas. If they can straighten those out, how does the U.S. pork industry? And, you know, lots of people will say, oh, Greg, you don't sell commodity pork.

Starting point is 01:06:37 I'm not naive anymore. I used to be naive and used to believe that the commodity market was over here and I was over here. When the commodity market price is shit, we have problems as niche producers. When the commodity market is good and people are actually making money,

Starting point is 01:06:53 we make money too. and we have a lot easier time selling something when our price difference is reasonable compared to, yeah. And I think Brazil is going to overrun this U.S. hog industry. It might take them two decades, but they have a significantly lower cost of production. You know, quite honestly, they have a significantly different opinion on whether or not food safety rules are enforced. and they have a completely different opinion on whether corruption with officials are acceptable. And I don't know how we compete against that. Well, I don't think that it's a whole lot different than what you see in the grains.

Starting point is 01:07:40 We went to Brazil out of the goodness of our heart, and we went down there and we showed them how we raised soybeans and, you know, gave them every, every bit of help we could. Now then they produce soybeans cheaper than we can, and they are our number one competitor around the world. And our cost of production is lower than what there's is in most cases. And beef,

Starting point is 01:08:09 beef's the same way, pork's the same way. Oh yeah, beef, their cost of production is significantly lower than ours. You know, I don't think most consumers stop and think about it. We're actually the niche producer of the world when it comes to beef. We produce the highest quality beef in the world, and we export a large portion of it,

Starting point is 01:08:27 and then we import the lowest quality beef in the world, and we export it, pay the farmers here, commodity price for it, and we import it as commodity lowest cost. The farmer and the rancher is the one that gets screwed on that whole deal, and I think the same thing will end up happening on the pig side, and I hope I'm wrong. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:08:47 You know, and I think that leads us into the fact that, ultimately, and I, you know, it's probably where I start to diverge with everyone that agrees with me. But I think that if we're going to have food policy in the United States, I think food policy should ensure some resiliency for our food supply, for a domestic food supply. And I think food policy should ensure some security for the next generation that they at least got in their head that, hey, they're going to be able to continue to farm. And I don't think for a second that that's what we have out of any of the past farm bills. And I don't think for a second that that's what the House GOP wrote for a farm bill for this go-around.

Starting point is 01:09:32 I think it's more just foot on the gas or the status quo. And I don't think there's any farmers out here that believe that that ensures a really, really good secure future for them. Yeah. every aspect of production agriculture, I would say, especially on the grain side, is all, as you say, foot on the gas for consolidation and larger farms, fewer people. Because every hand that's in that cookie jar equipment, inputs, and I would already. argue investors, all the weight is one way. The weight is all towards larger farms, bigger equipment, farming more acres, and fewer people. And if you want to see the hollowing out of rural America, that's a really good way to do it. Because I feel like this year and the people we've had on,

Starting point is 01:10:40 it's really come home to me that you know, you can talk about, this policy and that policy and rural development and we're going to invest in this and that and that and everything else it's not it's not difficult the the best way to improve rural americas have a very vibrant uh livestock right well just agriculture i i think agriculture is the backbone of rural america and you know i i keep watching the guests that you guys have on and uh you know the In my mind, it seems obvious where we would actually go if we wanted vibrant rural communities. And you guys had John on, and we use him for bookkeeping for our solar grazing enterprise. We now use him for our bookkeeping and consulting for the farm.

Starting point is 01:11:32 I'm actually troubled by the comments that he makes that he tends to steer people out of direct-to-consumer and out of the processing end. but he's probably right on the economic difference between ruminant grass-fed operations. But, you know, as I drove from Indiana to Iowa, I'm sitting there looking thinking, you know, if it wasn't for this farm program that we had, knowing what we do on the farm with the whole seasonal ruminant sheep operation,

Starting point is 01:12:04 there would be a sizable portion of this acreage that I believe that would have cows or ewes back on it. And I think when you get all sorts, said and done, I think the big difference in that, and this is probably where people are going to think I'm crazy too, but the big difference long term is not just the independence, but I think it's the wealth creation. You know, the past generations of our farms, they amassed big amounts of wealth. And, you know, I'm sitting here probably in a somewhat similar situation. You know, our balance sheet looks pretty good, but our balance sheet looks pretty good because of COVID stimulus funds.

Starting point is 01:12:45 You know, I was never fortunate enough to get into the ag funding because we don't raise corn and soybeans. But, you know, you take out government payments and you take out land appreciation. There's not a lot of farms out here that would really have a good balance sheet. And then you take the average age of the farmers approaching 70 years old. you take what I talk about all the time that I don't think anyone really feels secure about the next generation. I think those are signs of dying industries. And I think that agriculture, and I think especially the House and Senate Ag Committee, aren't really willing to talk about these kind of things.

Starting point is 01:13:23 And I think part of the solution is that we have to integrate livestock. And that's where people think I'm crazy. I think we have to integrate livestock in a low-input manner to the point. that the younger generation can actually afford to get into it. There's absolutely no reason in the Midwest that cows, sheep, even sows, weren't following combines. On our farm growing up, we had all 600 acres were woven wire fence. We didn't feed the sows in the winter,

Starting point is 01:13:58 except when we brought them up to have pigs. They were running on corn stalks with covers on them. We had to worry about them getting too fat. Yeah. You know, and the livestock of this country would be a much more resilient livestock, and we'd have a much more resilient communities if we had livestock operations that were sized appropriately. You know, we shouldn't have to have 400 sows to make a living. You know, a person should still be able to make a living on 100 sows.

Starting point is 01:14:28 A person should be able to make a living on a few hundred beef cows. A person should be able to make a living, and people will think of it. it's crazy numbers, but, you know, 1,500, 2,000 use. And if you were running them on grass, you're moving the fence. It's work, but it's not crazy amount of work. And we always prided ourselves in farmers in the fact that hard work was something that was worthwhile. And hard work for your own, you know, enterprise was something that you got up in the morning and was really happy to do. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:15:01 And we've took away that wealth creation and we've took away that independence. and in the result, I think we've took away our resilience. And I think we've seen that at the beginning of COVID. And I think that the American consumers and the politicians should wake up because, you know, I can't fault American agriculture. It's extremely, extremely productive and efficient. But it really, really lacks on resilience. And I think it's risky for us to rely on a handful of multinational corporations

Starting point is 01:15:31 to produce our food. and especially for us to be net food importers, and we're net food importers. And I think that we set on the largest resource for any agricultural nation in the world, and we're a net food importer. We should be ashamed of that. We shouldn't be running around yelling,

Starting point is 01:15:51 hey, we feed the world. Do we really? I mean, we feed the world, but we don't feed ourselves. We produce a lot of empty calories. We don't produce a lot of new, nutrient dense, local food. And, you know, it's extremely efficient, but it's probably not the wisest plan.

Starting point is 01:16:13 And the government just keeps creating policies that encourages more of it. It's crazy in mind. It's probably the law. I mean, it's the lobbying happening in D.C. I mean, you got to think the big four are entrenched in policymaking. I mean, they're paying politicians off. They got to be.

Starting point is 01:16:31 Batistas were just at the White House, Right? And I mean, it's a coincidence. For anybody that doesn't know who they are, who are those pros? They're JBS. Yeah, they're the owners of JBS. They're the ones that right before we put them on the New York Stock Exchange that they were setting in prison in Brazil for bribing somewhere between 1800 to 2100 politicians and inspectors.

Starting point is 01:16:57 And we were the only country in the world that didn't cut off their imports. and we took 97 days, which I'm not making any allegations, but that coincidentally probably coincided with the amount of pounds that they had set in that they couldn't sell anywhere else in the world. And after those 97 days, their corrective actions were done, and they went back to work selling to wherever. It's corruption at the highest levels. And we let them buy Cargill's live pork business.

Starting point is 01:17:25 Yeah. And we let them buy. What Packer did they buy? Was that Excel? or was it Monford? Who did they buy to get into the U.S. B. Swift? Swift. Yes, they bought Swift.

Starting point is 01:17:38 Yeah, yeah. We allowed that. People should read. A good friend of mine wrote the book, Barons, and they were one of the seven barons that he talks about. But, you know, and he says so eloquently, and I don't really disagree with him. I don't know that anybody could really disagree with him. There's close as we have to a criminal organization

Starting point is 01:17:59 operating in the United States, and we didn't do anything about it. We actually listed them on the New York Stock Exchange, and we let them into the White House, and we give them preferential treatment, and I'd argue that we should enforce the Meat and Poultry Act. The Meat and Poultry Act gives the secretary the authority to pull grants of inspection if you're caught with multiple misdemeanors or single felony. You know damn good and well that if I was bribing politicians and inspectors, I'd never have a grant of inspection to operate a USDA plant again in this country.

Starting point is 01:18:33 Yeah. And Brazil, they reward them. They get preferential treatment on government procurement. Midwest and Investigator wrote a whole story about it, how they get the prices that they do and the purchase agreements that they do with the federal government. There's something fishy going on there. It's really, really weird. And, you know, it's corruption at the highest levels.

Starting point is 01:18:57 and we don't do anything about it. And we should do something about it. Yeah. I don't want to only talk negative about somebody. So this is the one thing you can say positive about them. People in America, where they go wrong is they only bribe one or two politicians. In Brazil, they just paid off everybody. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:19:21 They didn't discriminate. They pretty well, I mean, they pretty well just own the government. They just paid them all. So they're very inclusive. I don't want to make any further allegations because I have no proof on any of this. It's just, you know, if you connect the dots and the dots line up, it just seems like it makes sense. But I'm just making wild claims. But, you know, Argentina, did you see?

Starting point is 01:19:47 Got that, what, 80,000 metric tons disallowed in China, using an antibiotic that's a last course, antibiotic that is only allowed for humans in developed countries. You know, I'm a big fan of the fact that we shouldn't waste antibiotics on animals. We shouldn't waste antibiotics on humans because I firmly believe that we might need them someday. And I've been fooled, you know, we haven't used antibiotics on the pig since the 90s and the risk that we take and the amount of management that's required to do that is just off the chart crazy. And I don't believe for a second that the stuff in the store that they claim is antibiotic

Starting point is 01:20:26 free is actually antibiotic free or if it is, they get an occasional barn that they don't have to use antibiotics. And I don't think that's actually the intent of people what they're saying about no antibiotics. But if you show up in Argentina with a class of antibiotics that's not even allowed and it gets refused and then a day or two later, the president says, we're going to import four times that amount, 300,000 metric tons and we're going to do it at 25 percent lower than what the price of beef is, and beef is in short supply across the world. It's a seller's market. Who in their right mind is going to want to sell it at 25% below the price?

Starting point is 01:21:10 I mean, prices are sky high right now. You start connecting the dots. Are we importing Argentina beef with known violative antibiotic residues, or are we not? I don't know, but it just seems like... Holy shit. We should. I did know we were going to go this way. I should have went and got the tinfoil hats.

Starting point is 01:21:31 We should have. We should have brought the tinfoil hats. Well, they're definitely on the top five. You can, I mean, you can Google all that. I come up with some crazy things at times. You know, I'm friends with some people that some of society says are crazy things, you know. In fact, I'm friends with them on both sides of the aisle. You know, I do stuff with ma-ha.

Starting point is 01:21:53 I do stuff with, you know, I had breakfast with Senator Booker and Samantha Walton the week before the DNC convention. You know, so, I mean, I interact with lots of people that people out in rural America think are crazy. Just because somebody says some wild things at times doesn't mean that some of it or most of it isn't true. And I tried to not say things that I can't substantiate. But, you know, I think all of us figured out during. both COVID and the Epstein files that the government can and will tell you some wild-ass crazy stories. And even if they believed them at the time, they're not going to back down for most of any of it. And we got a serious problem in this country because they took half of the population and convinced them that the government was out of control.

Starting point is 01:22:44 And then just a few years later, they took the other half and convinced them that they're out of control. and now who even believes that they're not out of control. That is also one of the biggest problems we have in this country now is that we have been conditioned to not believe anything. Right, right. And then I told you guys last night, I think you go one step further from that. I think when you get, we've got a population out here,

Starting point is 01:23:11 especially in rural America, but I think in our whole society, that largely agrees on most of the issues. I think we have 80s. 90, 95% agreement on a lot of issues, and we don't fix them. And my proof of that is, you know, I spoke at a Maha event at the Intercontinental, so right across from the White House, April two years ago. So a very, very strong conservative crowd.

Starting point is 01:23:36 And then just in June, I spoke at an Open Market Institute event right across from the Capitol, so very, very strong liberal crowd. I gave almost the identical speech at both of them. And it was very well received at both of them. You know, my four points are that I think we need subsidy reform. I think we need anti-trust enforcement. I think we need truth and labeling reform. And I think we need some inspection reform.

Starting point is 01:24:04 Nobody argues with that. But do we fix it? No. So does that give you hope, though, that because it's rare that both sides will tolerate. Yeah. You touched on that last time. Yeah. I mean, you know, I can be very cynical and negative.

Starting point is 01:24:18 I don't think anybody will ever question that because it, you know, rural America can be rough. I think it's economically hollowed out. I think it's difficult for the next generation to figure out where they're going to securely fit. But I am very, very hopeful in the fact that, you know, I've been doing advocacy work since the late 90s. And, you know, we got the left to agree on lots of things. We always struggled to ever get the right to, you know, acknowledge that we don't have a resilient food supply, that we have some problems with what we're actually feeding people where the standard American diet is 70% ultra-processed foods, you know, all of these issues. We have both sides now that, you know, want local food, want independent farmers, want small processors, want resilient. They're talking about it.

Starting point is 01:25:10 And, you know, I had a good friend when I served on that USDA Small Farm Commission, Chuck Hassebrook. He ran unsuccessfully against Ricketts the first time was actually three, four points out on Gallup poll and wanted to debate him. And then the big money came in and he got wiped out. But really, really good guy. But he pointed out to me and he was spot on. He pointed out to me back in the late 90s. changing the federal government, first of all, you have to convince them that it's actually a problem. And we've convinced them it's a problem.

Starting point is 01:25:44 It can still take 10, 15, 20 years, because it's like turning a rudder on a big ocean liner out in the ocean. You turn it and you don't see any movement for a long while. But it finally does move. And I think we've got both sides now acknowledging this is a problem. They're going to fight it for a while. Big money's going to come in and always push against it. but we're going to change this because we've got both sides now that realize that we've got a problem. Something's not right. Yeah, something's not right. Yeah. Well, I feel like we went broad ag there,

Starting point is 01:26:18 which I'm happy we did because I love talking about just the general landscape of agriculture. But let's, we're going to go back. We're going to come back to that because I have a whole section dedicated to some questions on just your overall thoughts. I want to go back to you kind of, you told your story you you bad have the plant things are humming now now you're having all these other players getting into the game with you uh that are greenwashing where does your operation sit today we told we we talked about where it was back in the past your story of how you've got to where you are and when i talk about your operation today as a whole i'm talking about your farming operation the plant let's talk about the solar and the sheep grazing let's let's talk about it all because

Starting point is 01:27:03 Because I think, one, you obviously farm different than we farm, and I want to just hear about the ends and outs of that. But also, is it harder now to have a processing plant versus when it was in the heyday of when it was humming? And how big is this solar sheep grazing been? You know, I just kind of want to get the 50,000 view of where you are today. You know, we have about 275 acres, and I challenge people, I'll send you guys the picture after,

Starting point is 01:27:30 but I challenge people look at our farm from Google Earth. they're from Apple Maps. You know, we actually rotationally grace 400 sows plus their pigs across about 275 acres. We got a USDA plan on the farm. We have about 15 to 20 employees. We got a lot of spinning plates. It's more difficult nowadays in ways there's some more opportunities in ways it's significantly more difficult to fit in the marketplace. I still have extreme hope that we'll figure all that out on where we're.

Starting point is 01:28:03 fit. You know, I told you guys last night, our big plan on the farm is that we have to continue to produce value-added products that the big guys either can't or don't want to do. And, you know, right now for us, that's, we've got a thousand-pound sous-vee tank at the farm. So we do value-added, fully cooked pork products for chefs that have locations in spaces such as Disney or O'Hare Airport where they couldn't have a kitchen even if they want to. It's chefs that would love to do all their own preparation. They do all scratch, but they can't because they don't have space. So that's a place that we fit in. And, you know, if we could run that five, seven days a week, life, you know, we'd get rid of those, all of our shoulders and ham ends of the pig and we can sell the rest of it

Starting point is 01:28:52 to, you know, so that we have hope that we can make all of that work. It's a lot of spinning plates and it's a lot of things to get going. And then, you know, we quit doing. chickens at the first year after COVID, 21 February, was our last chicken that we processed, and we added sheep in place of them. I wanted to just don't lose training thought, but how hard was COVID on you? I mean, selling directly to restaurants. I mean, it's got to be a challenge, right? I don't want to talk about that too much because I was having troubles before and not

Starting point is 01:29:25 trying to tear up on some of the things I talked about. but I highly recommend not being a food service supplier during a pandemic when they closed down all the restaurants. I didn't have any gray hair before COVID. I know where the gray hair came from. Yeah, yeah. We navigated it okay, and I'm almost ashamed to say, and I had no idea how it was going to play out, but we also navigated all the COVID stimulus package completely fine the way it all felt. It was actually really weird.

Starting point is 01:30:01 So we survived. We chose the risk of continuing chickens when we lost a large portion of our customer base versus taking that COVID stimulus money and throwing it back into trying to figure out a market again was probably not a wise plan. And we took that as an opportunity to say we've wanted all along to have a sizable portion of our income come from a ruminant grass-fed operation that is not bringing in purchased import. In Toronto, every arrival is a statement,

Starting point is 01:30:32 and nothing says it better than this. Cadillac Optic was the number one selling luxury EV in Canada for 2025. Find your rhythm across a seamless 33-inch display and an immersive 19-speaker AKG surround audio system. This city demands agility, and Optic delivers with precision, to make every drive extraordinary. Let's take the Cadillac.

Starting point is 01:30:51 Find out more at Cadillac Canada.ca. dot CA luxury sales claim based on S&P Global Mobility Canadian New Vehicle Total Registrations for calendar year 2025 for the Cadillac definition of luxury. And so we took that as an opportunity to invest in sheep. And so in 2021,

Starting point is 01:31:08 me and my son got a sheep flock. We bought some more the next year. We bought 200 that first time. We have a couple thousand sheep now. And our goal was to max out the grass. on the farm, but then to leverage that to be able to be a vegetation service provider for utility scale solar, because I've seen that was just starting to happen. My family spent

Starting point is 01:31:34 New Year's Eve with Will Harris down at White Oaks right during the time frame that he was starting to become a solar grazer. Good friends of ours, the Hendrix in Missouri was already grazing solar on, it was probably an 800-acre or 800-mile radius from their farm. arm. So, you know, I thought this solar grazing is going to happen. It still hasn't happened at the level that I'd like to see it because my rough guess is only 10 or 12 percent of the utility scale solar in this country is being grazed. And I think that we still have a really big education battle on our hands. I think the solar developers are just starting to find out on this side of the Mississippi that grass actually grows. And the natives, when you start talking about

Starting point is 01:32:22 area are probably old kickery mulberries, that kind of stuff, and that you probably don't want those out on a solar site. And that, you know, when you get out of California where we actually get rain, that you probably have to mow the solar sites about the same number of times as what you've got to do, mow hay, and that's really expensive when you've got a six-inch eye beam, 20 foot on center throughout the whole thing. So sheep are a natural fit.

Starting point is 01:32:48 We do a better job at a slightly lower price than what the mowers, are so we actually get paid to graze solar. So it was a natural fit. It let us be, you know, regenerative farmers, grass-based farmers to scale. And I think the solar grazing, this is going to be a magic carpet ride bigger than the farm to table for us. My son talks about three to five thousand acres with 10,000 ewes, and he is way, way sharper than I ever was. says that's what we're going to do what we're going to do so then you're lamb in those ewes too yeah yeah i should the where you're at those lambs are you taking them what is that like like there's basically two lamb markets yeah there's there's i i always argue that there's uh three lamb markets uh there's

Starting point is 01:33:41 um the ethnic um trade that really likes that 40 to 60 pound lamb depending on the time of year they'll let you take them up to 90 pounds and then there's the fat lambs that go to the feedlot that you know the lowest end up to be 100 but most of them 140, 160 on up. And that market is highly influenced by imports. The ethnic trade is largely a fresh lamb that the person actually wants to know where it was slaughtered. It's probably the most legit, transparent niche market in the whole United States. Also, 20% of the lamb in the United States slaughtered by those small plants.

Starting point is 01:34:16 So it's still a competitive market. And then there's the people that raise lambs that don't have either one of those. Those are the people that immediately say the lamb market at the auction sucks. And then the people that take those fat lambs, at times that market sucks, depending on how much Australia is dumping in here, the exchange value. That's the most like vertically integrated. Oh, yeah. I don't, I don't think that market is for players.

Starting point is 01:34:43 I think it's for plants. Okay. I mean, it's bad. But then the, it's weird because the bottom end of the lamb market is truly competitive. it's like what the hog packing industry was probably back in the 70s. I mean, there's, there's all kinds of buyers.

Starting point is 01:34:59 We take lambs to the auction and, you know, there could be, they're buying for probably 50 different plants. And so you're shooting for like an 80 poundish lamb. Yeah, 80 poundish lamb. And it's a beautiful system. And it's,

Starting point is 01:35:15 it's very similar to what we was doing with pigs before we started direct marketing. The only thing that we have, in the winter is dry yews. They don't lamb until late spring, early summer. So they lamb on what is spring flush, first cut in hay time. So the highest quality and highest quantity of grass. We have those lambs until late fall early winter. So we have no lambs over the winter.

Starting point is 01:35:43 So when we actually have green grass and when we don't have to feed anything, we got our largest numbers of sheep. The sheep gets sold before we run out of grass. We stockpile grass at home. We put the sows off on sacrifice lots by October. So we have grass at home. We bring the sheep home. We strip graze the ewes across the farm.

Starting point is 01:36:07 We feed hay for 10 to 20 days of the winter. So we feed almost no hay to our ewes. And we feed the lambs, never see bad weather. they get mineral and they get water and they get the fence moved. And I tell people jokingly because they say that's a lot of sheep. It doesn't matter how many sheep you have in a mob. It's no more work to speak of if you're grazing them. The only time that it's more work is when you've got to run them down the shoot.

Starting point is 01:36:38 Don't get me wrong, sheep can have problems. They can have hoof problems and they can have parasite problems. But we got enough acres, you know, that barber pole worm, the science on its really, fascinating. You know, it comes out of their feces in about four days. So if you're rotationally grazing at a shorter time frame than four days, you don't have parasite problems on where they're at. And then if you're not coming back in less than 60 to 90 days, that Barber pole larvae largely dies off. We don't have to worm our use at the solar site because we have enough acres. And my son and our shepherd over there are anal about the fact they don't even walk across the spot where they were before because, you know,

Starting point is 01:37:21 sheep are going to stop and eat some grass. So we're able to keep the parasite under control without any, without having to run them down the shoot. We're able to keep our expenses under control. It's what John Haskell talks about. You know, it's, you guys go to ranching for profit. It's the whole, you know, you get your animals in sync with the season. And it's not some of the, you know, it's not, something that you can do easily with direct marketing because you run a processing plant, you need animals 52 weeks of the year. And most people don't appreciate, we were a really low-cost pig producer. We're not a really low-cost pig producer now.

Starting point is 01:38:05 And one of the biggest challenges is we don't put any maternal genetics into our sows. So our pigs per litter and our conception rates are lower. but the other big thing is we ferrow year around. And if you're going to feral outside, ideally there's times a year that you'd feral outside. And how do you do that one? You know, we started with next to nothing in a processing plant, but you figure out really quick you have to have roll stock machines and you have to have stuffers and you have to have vacuum tumblers and smoke houses.

Starting point is 01:38:36 And we got $2 million in a processing plant right now. How do you leave a processing plant set empty and run just a fall group of pigs? We could produce fall pigs cheaper than your guys' system, but I couldn't afford to run them through a plant and couldn't have staff for that seasonal production. Yeah. Is this a dumb question? Lamb.

Starting point is 01:38:58 Could you process lamb? Oh, we've processed a few lamb. Okay. And we sell some lamb. If you're ever in downtown Chicago, Chef Rick Bayliss's Bar Sotano, downstairs, beautiful. place mostly for cocktails. But if you get the lamb taco, it's our lamb. And these Katadn,

Starting point is 01:39:21 Dorper Cross, Hare Sheep, really, really mild, grass fed. They're really, really nice lamb. But we can't compete in the lamb market. And I'm actually testifying that the International Trade Commission here in October, I was talking to our lawyer on the way into town. I had a Zoom meeting with him. you know, and we're testifying the other ones for the lamb board are those big guys, the four packers. And it's kind of weird that I'd get in that situation. But you can't compete in the lamb market as a little processor because that spread between, at times, Australia just dumps so much lamb into this country.

Starting point is 01:40:05 70% of the lamb in the U.S. is imported, and at times it is so below cost of production. production. We can even process it if our lamb's not worth anything. And those ethnic lambs are worth something. So why are we going to take a lamb that has a really high value, run it through the plant and sell it for and lose money? That just makes no sense. If you were going to rank your enterprises you got going on your operation right now on just profitability, labor, opportunity costs, what's at the top as best versus what's at the bottom? Like what's one through three? The solar grazing is by far the best right now, and I don't know that that'll last, but that's for sure.

Starting point is 01:40:48 Why do you say that? Why do you say that if it'll last? Like, you, yeah, explain that. You know, I think in agriculture, I think we have a long history of that we massively overproduce everything. Ironically, we talk about that we got to feed the world and that we have to have more food. every single thing that we do is massively overproduced. And I think we have the potential, and I hope I'm wrong, but I think we have the potential of ruining the U.S. lamb market

Starting point is 01:41:20 and all of us cutting each other's throat to the point that we don't get a vegetation fee for solar grazing, because that's just what we do as farmers. We're dumber than a box of rocks, but we're predictable. You know, I mean, all of us, you know, you talk about it. And I still think that the big guys, because they played pyramid schemes with premium standard, and they did, and Tyson bought plants and closed them down. I think there was a whole lot of corruption in 98 that they should have done something about. But absolutely, we played a part in it.

Starting point is 01:41:56 I mean, I had every intentions. And I told you guys, if I'd had two more years under my belt, I'd want broken 98 because I'd have a hell of a lot more saloes. Everybody wanted more saloes because there was money in it. There's money in solar grazing. If you can do a better job and it's a completely different dynamic than farm to table, we are not two to three times higher price. We do a better job and we do it at a slightly lower price than the mowers.

Starting point is 01:42:25 And we give them great public relations in the process. And once these solar developers figure out that, hey, it really doesn't matter that you have sheep out there because I think that's their biggest objection. There's two big objections. They're really worried about whether sheep are okay out there with all their solar equipment. And then the other thing they're worried about, which is probably a legitimate concern, is how do we identify which producers actually have the ability to do thousands of lambs? Because nobody on this side of the Mississippi has had thousands of use.

Starting point is 01:42:58 You know, that's not even a thing. So they have to figure out those. Once they figure out those, this solar grazing, like said, it's going to be a ride bigger than farm to table. But then next in line would probably be our value-added products, you know, our suavee capabilities in the plant, you know, our smoked meat in the plant. Just the production side of it, pigs is probably next. Slaughter is by far the lowest.

Starting point is 01:43:30 I do not believe that there's a small-scale slaughter plant in this country that actually economically justifies their slaughter plant. I tell people all the time, I do a little bit of consulting for the niche meat processors' Assistance Network, and I tell people all the time, I think the minimum viable scale for slaughter is 20,000 to 40,000 pounds of carcasses per day, five days a week. We still break that. It's not even funny because we only slaughter one day a week. you build a kill floor.

Starting point is 01:43:59 You need to run it five days a week. But my son and I both wake up in the morning and it's not really at the top of our list that we want to kill things and put them in plastic bags. And I don't believe that humans are actually designed to kill animals five days a week. So we tie, you know, I told you guys that last night. It wasn't joking.

Starting point is 01:44:17 I think we tie both of our hands behind our back economically on figuring this out. But the little plants, the kill floors just aren't, don't make economic sense. So I think that's at the bottom. The sheep at the moment are at the top. I think that we have potential that consumers and policy could change to the point that, you know, I always have hope the slaughter plant might make sense at some point.

Starting point is 01:44:44 Do you think that there is an opportunity? So like in your situation, if there was an option somebody that build a plant, that was at scale big enough on the kill side that they could run it five days a week and they would just provide you back, you would deliver your animals, then they'd provide you back a process carcass that you would process it then,

Starting point is 01:45:12 finish process it, how you want it. Do you think that's something that has legs to help that whole industry? I think it has a lot more legs and I don't think anybody talks about it. Instead, they talk about the opposite of, let's do mobile process, mobile slaughter, and then let's take it to a brick and mortar facility to cut it up. And I'm odd in that regards, because I think that with the existing regulatory framework and the existing market, I think it makes a lot more sense that we should actually

Starting point is 01:45:44 have scaled, kill and chill facilities in this country that farmers have access to, and then the retail because that's where the that's where you control the professionalism that's where you control the cuts that's where you control the labeling and that's where the margins are never were the margins between the producer and the wholesale and that margin between the wholesale the packer and the retailer just keeps getting wider all the time so the opportunities in this and we probably won't ever do it because first of all I didn't have enough kids and I don't know that we have the resources. But the true opportunity is in building a direct to individual brand.

Starting point is 01:46:24 I think the ones that are relevant nowadays and actually, you know, like White Oaks or my friend Mike Calicrate with his ranch foods direct, I think those are the, you know, when you see pasture poultry producers, there's opportunities in selling at full retail price much more than there is at selling at wholesale prices. and I think that getting them, being able to get them killed and chilled and then cut them up as retail, because as long as you're selling them at that location, whether that be in the city or if your farm's close enough to the big area

Starting point is 01:46:57 that people will come out, it's a much less regulatory hurdle to get a retail-exempt butcher shop than it is to get a full USDA. And then that allows that slaughter plant to scale enough to actually run five days a week and have a set of employees that that's all they do. And I think it's a much more viable model, but I don't think anybody talks about it. The people that aren't in the slaughter business immediately talk about,

Starting point is 01:47:22 let's build mobile slaughter plants that have the capability of killing, you know, what, 3,600 pounds a day. So you're so, you know, and you got to set it up every single day, move it, set it up. You got to still comply with the humane slaughter. So you've got to have facilities to be able to handle the animals. You still got to have wastewater treatment at every single place. You still have to have potable water. You still have to have an office for the inspector, bathrooms.

Starting point is 01:47:49 I mean, don't get me wrong. There are some situations where mobile slaughter makes sense. But talk about tying both your hands behind your back. I think that's maybe even worse. Yeah. I love when you could just drop the mic like that. You go ahead. No, I just, to me, that's just the inspection side of it, I think, would be a nightmare.

Starting point is 01:48:12 Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. You know, I want to talk about that for a second because, you know, the people talk about that. And maybe I'm weird. But, and I guess I was probably deer in the headlights when we first started. But I don't actually believe that the inspection is that crazy. And I think in some ways we have the wrong mindset on HACCP because HASIP in lots of ways is like,

Starting point is 01:48:44 your high school geometry class. It's like proofs. You have to identify every step and then you have to support how that step is okay with either USDA support or scientific support. And it actually allows you the flexibility to do anything that you want as long as you can support it. The big plants love it for that because they can do anything they want as long as they support it. And, you know, they have six or ten people in their QA department. They have college degrees and microbiology and all of this stuff, you know, but I don't think in any way that they're sharper than the rest of us that are out here in rural America. If you stop and think about it, HACACACA plans really aren't that difficult. You know, on the slaughter side, you're starting with an animal that's healthy,

Starting point is 01:49:29 you're starting with a facility that's clean, you're starting with employees that know what they're supposed to do, you're keeping the animal clean through the process, you're getting it, you're putting an approved antimicrobial on it, and you're getting it cold. It's not rocket science. You don't have to have patents to build slaughter plants. And some people, and I was just as bad, you know, and I think he had Jason on. He was saying the same thing. We all tend to get and can get into big pissing contest with USDA.

Starting point is 01:50:01 And there is a manner in which you fight with bureaucrats. And I used to not understand it. And this is going to sound like semantics, but it's not. you have to, if you're going to fight with the USDA or any bureaucrat for that matter, you have to fight about your ability to have due process, not about the actual issue. So if they're saying that you're doing something wrong and you know for a fact that you're doing something, you're correct, you have the right to appeal that. Your politicians and the higher ups in Washington, D.C.

Starting point is 01:50:36 are not going to listen to you if you go calling them saying, oh, I was right on. this, you know, say my plucker was clean and he's seen one feather in it and that's not a big deal. They're never going to take on your, they're never going to take on your case if you do that. But if you appeal it and they don't answer your appeal within two weeks, Washington, D.C. and the politicians are going to listen to you. And then if you file a complaint against them because they didn't, they have to respond to the complaint. There's a way in which you fight with USDA. And at first, I think actually the whole way through it, lots of people never figure that out. And if you don't figure that out, you're in trouble because they're getting paid to fight with you.

Starting point is 01:51:20 You're not doing anything when you're fighting with them. And once you figure out, fight with them in writing, figure out how to file appeals, figure out how to file complaints, understand who your congressman is, know the people in Washington, D.C., and I think they've actually got significantly better. And I think this secretary, she's actually really good at putting out fires. And all of the people underneath her know that if they got people at USDA that are doing stuff that's silly, egregious, unprofessional, she doesn't want it to happen. And they've been more responsive.

Starting point is 01:51:54 I help some plants out when it just gets to be silly. And I call them up in Washington, D.C. They take care of it. but, you know, if the person wants to just still argue about the issue rather than argue about whether or not they have the ability to solve the issue, you know, because when you're right, that's the most frustrating thing in the world. If you know you're right and they're just sitting there arguing with you still, you know, because they can be correct. And if they're correct, fix it and go on. And the system works fine. But when they're wrong, you have to be able to show that you're correct.

Starting point is 01:52:26 And if you can do that, I think the system works. So I think we need a little bit of training in people and how to deal with bureaucracies. Yeah, no, that's that's really, really good. I wanted to just touch on something quick before we jump to the next thing. You talk about Will Harris a lot. And I know on the solar sheep grazing thing, he kind of showed you that was even possible to do. Talk about not just that, but talk about how I, opening it was to go to his farm. Like how big of an influence has he been on what you've

Starting point is 01:53:05 implemented or tried to do or change on your operation? Well, it's been a good friend of mine since about 2013. Me and him were at a conference together out in San Francisco and went and had dinner with Bill and Nicolette went across the Golden Gate Bridge. That's a whole other story that we'll tell some other day. But Will's been a, well, has been a huge, huge inspiration for lots of people, you know, in lots of ways I feel like that we have an operation very similar to wills just at a much, much smaller scale. And I have such less of a presence in the world. You know, he's been on Rogan. He's been to the White House way more times than I have. He's got, you know, just so much more following on social media. And I swear that a sizable, sizable

Starting point is 01:53:55 percentage of the population would listen to him, read the phone book that Southern Dural of his is just captivating. But, you know, Will, um, well had to the amount of risk that he took. And I know for a fact that, uh, you know, he was struggling at times through that process the same as we were to keep his head above water. Um, but, you know, he's, he's for sure an inspiration to lots and lots of people. And, uh, you know, me and the whole family have been down there. Me and my son have been down there. We, um, come down and gave him some suggestions when he wanted to do pigs in the poultry plant and you know and he sent his crew up several times they parked out in my driveway for three days and spent three days with this um taking care of pigs and process and so i mean

Starting point is 01:54:43 we've we've known each other and he's he's an inspiration to me for sure and a really really good friend yeah that's awesome and you i said you said this last night but as you were building your plant and it was humming and you were and you said you can get on the ink 5,000. Yeah. He was kind of at the same point, right? Oh, yes. You kind of both built process and facilities on your operations at the same time, right? Yeah, you know, there's a handful of us.

Starting point is 01:55:11 You know, he built his at a very similar time. And ironically, Whole Foods put a sizable amount of the money in to make it so that he was possible to even get financing for his. A good friend of mine, Mike Calacrate, his facilities. out in St. Francis, Kansas. You know, he built his at a similar time. We all had slightly different marketing models. You know, Will's was a wholesaler to retail, and he's successfully made the transition to direct individual consumer. His internet fulfillment is just humming. I feel so glad for him, because, I mean, he's selling product all over the country. And then a friend of

Starting point is 01:55:55 mind I mentioned, Mike Calacrate in St. Francis, Kansas, he built his at a very similar time. And his wholesale was mostly to Chipotle, you know, until Chipotle kicked out the little guys. And then he's built two retail shops in Colorado Springs. And his business is humming too. So that's where I think the big opportunity is in the direct individual. Yeah. Okay. we're going to get to the back half of this of this puppy here and I want to go I want to touch on more of that broad agriculture theme and also just rural America because you can obviously tell you're really passionate.

Starting point is 01:56:38 What I admire about you is you're very, very passionate about rural America, agriculture. You're not just trying to do stuff on your operation and be a damn good operator and make your generational farm viable for the next one. but you want the revitalization of rural America. And I absolutely love that. And so you've probably touched on it before. But what in this episode, but what are you think, what are the biggest challenges that we face in agriculture today?

Starting point is 01:57:12 And what do you think are the salute? Like how do we, what do you think in your mind are the solutions of how we can maybe fix this thing? I think the biggest challenge, that we face as farmers is that the overarching is that loss of our share of the consumer dollars. We're down to, what, 14 cents of the consumer dollar as farmers total. And, you know, I think that's partially our fault, but I think that's mostly a net impact of consolidation and concentration. And, you know, I think to fix the, you know, I think to fix the, you know,

Starting point is 01:57:52 the problems in rural America. I always tell that I believe there's four means in which we make it so that local and regional processing and direct marketing is a possibility. And I think that's subsidy reform. I think that's antitrust enforcement. I think that's truth and labeling enforcement. And I think that's some inspection reform. But then I think that, you know, I'm a big fan of that and it's partially my mindset and why I do all of this advocacy work. I think that we have a have to think globally and I think that we have to act locally. So even as I try to do a lot of advocacy work at the state and especially at the national level, because I'm very, very passionate about that I think we need transformational change in rural America. I'd love to see vibrant

Starting point is 01:58:40 rural communities. But I think regardless of that, I think that we have responsibilities on our own farm to understand business and economics and, you know, overhead and gross margins and all of the economic metrics that actually make us viable. And I think we have to do those regardless, you know, so we can complain, we can sit around and complain, and trust me, I do my fair share of that. We can sit around and complain and we can talk about, you know, the four-packers own 86% of the beef supply. And we can talk about the almost half of the, hog slaughter in the United States is controlled by foreign companies, you know, stuff that shouldn't have happened.

Starting point is 01:59:21 But it happened. And we still got to figure out a way that we got to fit in that system and we still have to make a living in that system. So you still have to act, you have to be responsible and you still got to act locally and take care of what you're supposed to take care of. But I think that we need to collectively. And I think we're getting closer all the time.

Starting point is 01:59:41 Collectively, we got to stay on these politicians and bureaucrats. they got to quit making every single decision and determination to encourage the status quo of agriculture. And it's time that they give the independent agriculture some preferential treatment because I think that every consumer and every taxpayer expects that. We don't put enough money into the politicians' coffers for that, but I still think every single consumer and every single consumer and every single taxpayer expects that. Do you get the feeling the time that you spend in Washington, D.C. and in legislatures across the country, we have, and the state of Iowa has like kind of the goat of the career politician. Our senator has been our senator forever. Do you feel like

Starting point is 02:00:43 I'm trying to think of the best way to phrase this, but do you think that's going to become a thing of the past? Do you think that the constituency and the level of distrust for politicians has pushed this to a point where do you think we're holding politicians more accountable or less accountable? And are we to the point where we're less likely to see these representatives become, just entrenched where once they're there, they're just there? As an American people, we're holding the politicians less accountable every single year. And I firmly believe if I was king for a day, we would exercise not just our rights,

Starting point is 02:01:29 but our responsibilities as states. And we'd have a state constitutional convention. And we would be strict in that we could only probably do three things. And that would be campaign finance reform. We need to fix citizens united. We need to make it so that money doesn't control elections, that people control elections and people, especially within their political district, control their elections.

Starting point is 02:01:57 Excellent example. Our last district, and I actually like who won, but our last congressional district race, there was $10 million spent, six and a half million of it was money from outside of our district. We don't even control our own representative elections anymore. But that's the first thing that we need to fix. We need to put term limits in place. We shouldn't have, Chuck's a good guy, but we shouldn't have people 90 years old in the Senate.

Starting point is 02:02:26 You know, our congressional leaders should be very similar age to what CEOs of companies are. There would be a few of them that would be old, but most of them would be, you know, they'd have some experience in the real world, and they'd be a little bit older than Sawyer would be what most of them would be because that's the progressive side.

Starting point is 02:02:50 And we'd have a, if we did that, we'd probably have a two-party system where the one side was extremely fiscally conservative and the other side was telling us that as a nation, we need to dream big and we need to go do things and the other side would hold them back a little bit where our country used to run. These guys, I don't know,

Starting point is 02:03:09 maybe they were that way at one point in their life, but they're probably not anymore. And then we need a balanced budget amendment. They need some fiscal restraints. There's not a one of us that lives long term without some serious consequences. I think we're all starting to realize now that the value of our dollar just keeps getting eroded every single year by those drunken sailors in D.C. just writing checks that they can't cash. And we're cashing them, but we're cashing them with inflation. And, you know, I think people are finally waking up to that.

Starting point is 02:03:50 It's not that the government will go broke. You can't go broke when you're your own currency. People should read the deficit myth. They can print more dollars tomorrow. They could pay it all off if they wanted. But if they paid it all off, inflation would just go that much higher. And so collectively we have to start looking at the amount of taxes that we have is collectively our resources and we're wasting our resources. It's not that we're wasting our dollars.

Starting point is 02:04:20 Those dollars are a fiat currency and collectively there are resources and we're wasting our resources. Man, preach it. I love it. I mean, it doesn't seem like it'd be that difficult. I talk about that to people too. and I don't care which side of the aisle they're on, people agree with that. Why can't we get 28 states that says, let's do this and let's do only that because it would turn into the biggest circus and shit show if you just did a constitutional convention.

Starting point is 02:04:52 But if you did only those three things, because Washington, D.C. is not going to fix it. Chuck Grassley's not going to vote for his term limits. He's probably going to run three more times if he lives. I mean, I'm just joking. But, you know, I mean, they're not going to, they're not going to require themselves to balance the budget. They're not going to fix campaign finance reform. They're not going to do any of it on their own.

Starting point is 02:05:19 And I think we have the responsibility to go take care of it because our founding fathers actually put that in there, not just as our right, but I think is our responsibility. Yep. Amen. I wanted to ask you, because I heard this on another podcast you were on about, you know, all these people that are in these industry groups that become the leaders of these industry groups. And they've kind of rounded third base. And they're coming around the plate because they grew up and they had an amazing successful farming operation. And they,

Starting point is 02:05:50 you know, they're at the top right now. And they're like, oh, yeah, farming is great. Agriculture is great. Explain that analogy and your thought process. I like it. I'll probably piss some people. I'll probably piss some people off with this. And I won't mention too many names, but the National cattlemen's beef association and the Farm Bureau come to the top of my list and they probably do some good things but you know I think too much of their farm leadership ends up being people and I don't have anything against inheriting things but too many of them inherited sizable amounts of land and so you know I always say they were born round in third base and they're standing there cheering that they hit home runs and they think that for some reason that it's not rough out here in agriculture

Starting point is 02:06:36 and that you just need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Well, if you inherited a thousand or two thousand acres and a brokerage account that has commas and everything imaginable in front of the decimal point, hell yes, life isn't too bad. We live in a K-based economy. If you're on the top leg of the K-based economy, life is good. But what, 70, 80 percent of the income, for farmers is off farm income. The average age is almost 70 years old. We're a dying industry. You can find purple unicorns that think it's great out here.

Starting point is 02:07:12 You can find purple unicorns that figured out how to survive the hog industry and sell meat. That doesn't mean that it's wonderful. That's that whole think locally and act globally. If you got a lot of money, yeah, go farm how you want. But don't tell us that the rest of us just needed to. to figure out how to get our grandpa and our great grandpa to buy enough land. When land was cheap, that's not a possibility. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:07:38 Yeah. Yeah. That's good. I love that. I love your stance on that. And that's very, I've never heard that before, but I feel like you're hitting the nail right on the head. Well, I mean, you can see it out of a couple of the farm organizations. Their policy definitely represents it.

Starting point is 02:07:54 And, you know, the, I don't want to pick on checkoff organizations. And they'll tell me that they're not a checkoff organization. But, you know, when you represent 5% of the cattle producers of this country and, you know, we go do advocacy work telling the congressman that there's a concentration problem in here and, you know, we're telling the staffers and they're following us actually getting to talk to the congressman and they only represent 5% of the producers, you know, it's tilting what they believe is actually happening in rural America. And I'd argue that, you know, their whole argument that we're all in this together. And in a way, we are all in this together, you know, with the processor and the retailer. But I'd actually argue that we probably have more solidarity with the worker than we do the packer and the retailer. And I think that we have some potentials there because, you know, every single bit of more money that they make and extract is less that we get. And every single niche that they take away is less opportunity for us.

Starting point is 02:09:05 And every single bit of control that they take away is less independence for us. So we're not all in it together. We have an incentive that they still function and that they're good. But it's no different than the union for a worker. You know, we need to be able to negotiate. And we've lost our ability to negotiate in a highly concentrated system. I wanted to touch on one more thing before we get to the last section here. And it's,

Starting point is 02:09:34 you've already kind of touched on it before, but do you still feel like the regenerative guys and the conventional guys are fighting each other? And if we are, how do we stop and get to what you were saying about? I feel like we all need to come together and stop fighting each other. How do we do it? Absolutely. We're still fighting.

Starting point is 02:09:56 and I try my best not to ever join in those and I try to actually stop some of them because I think the ironic thing right now and I think you guys see this, I think the lowest hanging fruit is the actual integration of regenerative livestock into conventional cropping system. I think the lowest hanging fruit in the Midwest

Starting point is 02:10:18 is all of these stocks, if they had covers on them, add ruminants over the winter. You know, the forage slump, for grass-fed operations is when the grass doesn't grow in the middle of the winter. And these fields, if we're going to build organic matter and we're going to increase fertility without buying expensive fertilizers that got to come through the strait of Hermouse, we need to put some livestock back on these land.

Starting point is 02:10:46 So we need to quit fighting and we actually need to build relationships. We're doing that at the farm. This was our first year. We're custom grazing. Holstein heifers for the local mill. You know, they've been really good to us. We get our pig minerals custom blended by them, and they were short a building for heifers.

Starting point is 02:11:10 And I think, I mean, I can't speak for them, but I think it's worked out really, really well for both of us. And if the secretary would happen to open up CRP ground, which I think Brooks talking about, I don't want to put words in her mouth, and I don't want to give her suggestions, but she should actually think about it. But if they'd happen to open up CRP ground, you know, we could run Holstein Heifers on CRP ground.

Starting point is 02:11:38 We could carry them over the winter on stocks with covers on it. We wouldn't be the only one that'd do it. You'd see it across the Midwest. Regenerative guys wouldn't have to fight with conventional guys. They really wouldn't. And then we come back to that whole other. argument that I make, you know, if you're going to take more risk and you're going to have a higher cost of production, the consumers ought to pay a higher price for that and the marketplace

Starting point is 02:12:04 ought to be transparent and it ought to work. And so I think part of this dysfunction and part of this arguing is that we all know the marketplace isn't functioning correctly. So we're all fighting over crumbs that are falling off the table and we want to seat at the table. And it's easier to fight amongst ourselves than to figure out how to fix this system. Yeah. Well, and they want us fighting ourselves. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:12:30 It creates a whole lot of dysfunction. We don't fight the real problems if we fight amongst ourselves. And I've been just as guilty of it as anybody. I'd hate to guess how much time I've spent in my life fighting over where the pigs should be inside or outside. Yeah. Okay. We're going to round this thing out.

Starting point is 02:12:47 I want to get to know you, Greg, as the operator, the dad, the leader. Because I feel like you, you are a very passionate man. And I admire you as a businessman, as a farmer, as a leader. You've taken risk. You seem like you're a constant learner. You feel like I feel like you are trying to lead and make change in the world for the better. And I respect it.

Starting point is 02:13:09 I respect a lot of it. How do you do all the things that you do? How do you farm? How do you be a business owner? How do you be an advocate? how do you manage your time? How do you balance your life? I think that's actually the biggest challenge in this.

Starting point is 02:13:26 And I tell people all the time, I'm not sure that this is actually possible to be done both profitably with a quality of life that has balanced. I've come to that conclusion that I'm not sure that's possible. But I'm going to talk about my mom a little bit. She probably won't be too thrilled with me, but she'll get over it. But growing up, my mom's comment always was everybody gets seven days a week, 24 hours a day.

Starting point is 02:13:58 When you say you don't have enough time, what you're really saying is that it's not a priority. And she would always follow that with no excuses. So, you know, you get up in the morning and you do it. I mean, you know how it is. If you've got stuff to do, you just do it. Yeah. I think your answer is a common thread of people that are trying to build anything. Right. Is the fact that our society, I feel like that's kind of, it's kind of become chic in the last,

Starting point is 02:14:30 however many years, this, this idea and people talking about it and people, hell, writing books about it and doing whatever about work life balance. And work life balance, if you are a builder, I don't think it exists. Right. No. Yeah. And you know, don't get me wrong, I could do a lot better job of delegating. I could do a lot better job of surrounding myself with people that would take a lot more off my plate. I have a, I'm so bad that I have a scheduled meeting with a guy that's supposed to help me out with AI to keep my schedule and to help with my emails and my text. And I keep missing my meeting with him, which is he's ironic. Yeah, ironic. But, you know, so I can do a lot better job at it. And my son does a much, much better job at that. And I think that that's, you know, another one of the things I see hope in the whole, you know,

Starting point is 02:15:25 that he's so much more systems oriented, so much more organized, so much more. You know, I was more, you know, and I grew up in that, you know, it was fly by the sea of your pants. You take care of what you got to take care of. And you're the person responsible for it. So if it's in your head and you have to know what you got to do, you know what you got to do but that doesn't work when you got 15 or 20 employees you know you have to have SOPs and you have to have systems and you have to have all that structure and so I'm my my son does a much much better job at that you know but I I'm I'm I'm I probably will never

Starting point is 02:16:04 learn how to say no my wife tells me that you know I I going home to load up both grills I got a pig roast at Huntington University tomorrow. I have to be there by midnight to roast two pigs. And I still probably got to figure out how to dump a batch feed in between there. Yep. So, I mean, but it's, you know, you get 24 hours a day and you just do it. Yep. How do you learn?

Starting point is 02:16:33 How do you learn? You seem like you're a guy that always is trying to learn new things and new ideas. And is that, are you a reader? Do you listen to podcasts? Are you just a people's person? I know that you're a put your feet to the fire and learn that way. I know that. But how do you learn?

Starting point is 02:16:53 I like podcasts. I like my connections with other people in the industry. I'm actually a big fan that you have to have some connections outside of your portion of the industry because I think that, you know, that's one thing I was arguing, the regenerative and the local food people, the appropriate technology that the commodities guys use, so I like to try to keep up on what that is. I'm on several email list serves, which haven't went away yet.

Starting point is 02:17:25 Learn a lot of stuff through the Internet, through searches and that, and I just like to take in information. And it's getting worse all the time, but I was very, very fortunate that when information went in my head, especially when I was younger. I still had it all. I was one of those guys in school that never took home a book, graduated in National Honor Society,

Starting point is 02:17:54 went to college, rarely, if ever studied in college, still got good grades because if I heard something once, it was up there. And I, yeah. And so I'm a big fan of the fact that I, I think when you do local food, niche regenerative, I think the science is really, really cool. And I think that my grandma taught me this because she, from the time we were little, I always said that, you know, she would have appreciated listening better in science and understanding.

Starting point is 02:18:33 I'm a big fan that the world is much simpler and livestock and farming is much simpler. If you actually understand the science of what's happening, because you know, you have the ability then to work with it. And if you don't understand what's going on out there, you know, like I mentioned before, the Barbara poleworms, parasites huge problem in sheep. If you don't understand that the larvae come out of the feces within four days and you don't understand that they die. off in the environment in that 60 to 90 days. You know, you can structure your grazing around the fact that you have a significantly lower parasite load if you understand that science. If you don't understand that science, you're fighting it all the time.

Starting point is 02:19:17 You're fighting it all the time, you know. And so we have millions of things that we do on the farm. If you understand what's going on, you know, we have millions of things in the plant, you know, the temperatures at which bacteria grow. And there's a huge correlation between shelf life. and pathogenic bacteria. You keep meat colder, it lasts longer. And if chefs have stuff with better shelf life,

Starting point is 02:19:41 they like you better than stuff without a good shelf life. So, you know, it's science and everything we do and understanding in everything we do. What about risk? You've taken a lot of risk in your lifetime. What is your relationship with it today versus 30 years ago? I find myself each and every day fighting the fact that I'm turning more and more into my dad and grandpa every single day. You know, when you start to actually accumulate something, and, you know, we still have a huge amount of debt on 275 acres,

Starting point is 02:20:19 but it's insignificant compared to the value of it now. And we have a much larger business, so I feel like I actually have something. you get a lot more risk adverse than you were. You know, I lived my life when we first started. I lived my life completely out past my bounds because we didn't have anything to lose. Right. You know, we'd lost all of our equity in 98. How hell did I have to lose?

Starting point is 02:20:47 You know, I was going to do it regardless because no big deal. We have something to lose now, so I'm probably, significantly more risk adverse, but we're still so much more risk than the same gross in a corn and soybean. Don't you wish you could just hit skip on the worst parts of your life? You know the same way you can skip an ad? I get it. I'm Siaya and I live in Ice Cove.

Starting point is 02:21:19 I've made some questionable decisions that didn't end up the way I planned. And today I'm still figuring it out. Somehow things usually get worse before they get better. Apparently, that's how I roll. So bundle up and come along for the bumpy ride. Stream a new episode of North of North Tuesdays on CBC Gem. System, you know, we now can have pasture rainsland and forage insurance, and we could get LRPs if we wanted. I don't know what the hell good LRPs would do for a niche operation.

Starting point is 02:21:50 I mean, maybe it'd be legalized gambling with expected value, so we probably could add some dollars long term because I think it'd pay what 1.62 for every dollar we put in. But I don't think it would actually protect our financial interest. So we don't have any of the risk tools, no guaranteed revenue insurance, none of the things that the crop guys do. So, I mean, we, if I can't sell pork tomorrow, which happened once in COVID, so that puts a thought in your mind, we can't sell the pork tomorrow or we can't get employees so we can't even process it. We're flat out screwed. So yeah, we we live with risk and I mean it is what it is.

Starting point is 02:22:32 Yeah. You're farming with your son. What's that relationship like? Does he push you or do you push him or do you who's the more aggressive one? Oh, I don't push him. He's, I wasn't joking when I said he's just magnitudes more talented than me and way more organized way more systems based and I'm sure that there's days that he'd love to be able to push me more is the way it is but you know my sister jokingly has to remind me that um uh at my dad and my grandpa's age both of them had quit being the person that was farrowing sows by my age and at some point you know the dog hits the end of the chain but um I'm gonna keep doing it for a long while how important is it to you that you pass this thing on to the next generation and like what do you

Starting point is 02:23:29 when you look back like when you get when you when you get to your end of your time what do you want your legacy to be i want to see two things and it's probably too broad and too adventurous but my mom also always told us that if you want something you got to let the world know and you got to ask she says if you go somewhere and you don't tell people what you were thinking it was your fault when you left that they didn't know what you're thinking. So I want two things. I want a farm that is easily passed on from generation to generation. So we have to somehow or another amass a decent size amount of paid four acres and then instill a thought process into future generations that we're going to raise animals in a low-input manner and figure out how to add value to them

Starting point is 02:24:19 and sell them to consumers that want to actually buy them and hope that we don't end up with the generation that decides that it's just simpler to sell the thing off. And I think that's a challenge in rural America too. But then I think the second thing that I want is I want transformational change in rural America. I want preferential treatment, and I'm not afraid to say it. I want preferential treatment for independent, resilient agriculture.

Starting point is 02:24:49 I want farmers to be able to control their destiny, and I want farmers to know that they have security, not just our farm, but rural America. And I think that that's in the benefit of the consumers and the taxpayers that we have a resilient agriculture and that we have vibrant rural communities. It's just in everyone's best interest. I firmly believe, and it's probably,

Starting point is 02:25:14 I don't think it's too far-fetched. I firmly believe we have that K-based economy, and I think we fix it starting with rural America. We still have the independent people and we still have the scrappy entrepreneurs out here that are ready to go at it if they just seen a small light at the end of the tunnel of opportunity.

Starting point is 02:25:34 Yeah, I have a question here that's, why is rural America worth fighting for? Why is agriculture worth fighting for? Why stay in the fight? Why go through all the shit that you go through that we go through why why is it so important to you to fight uh you know there there's a certain pride in knowing that you're uh raising uh good clean and fair food and to see people when they're consuming it and see that uh respect and appreciation that's probably the biggest reason

Starting point is 02:26:11 uh but you know i i firmly believe that uh that whole idea of uh food security is national security and that we need to be part of that. I think that should be our message rather than feeding the world. And I think that, you know, we talked about it last night. I think there's no better place to raise a family than out on a, not just out on a farm. I'm going to probably piss some of your listeners off, but I think that out on a diversified grass or crop and livestock farm, but I think it has to, I think it has to, I think it has to have chores for the young kids because, you know, that whole psychology and my youngest

Starting point is 02:26:55 daughter is going to get upset. She's got a psychology degree, and she could talk about this. The development stage is way better than I can, and she'll be upset if I talk about it, but I'm going to talk about it anyways. You know, we all know it. There's a certain age that if you put kids to work, they grow up with a really, really strong work ethic. And don't get me wrong, there's some that still do. But as a society, we've created a whole system in which we don't have meaningful work. We don't have a main street businesses, and we don't have small family farms that the kids that weren't on a farm also went and worked because we see it at the farm.

Starting point is 02:27:36 If you get kids that are 14 years old and they come out to the farm, there's some really, really bright, hardworking kids. You get them after they've worked two years at McDonald's. or you get them that we don't have family that work for us, it's pretty bad. It's just about impossible to keep them off their phone. It's just about impossible to get them to buy into the fact that they're actually responsible for doing the task that you hired them for.

Starting point is 02:28:03 But if you get them before that, they're really good. And we used to have a rural America where everybody either grew up on a family farm where they had to work when they were at that age, or they got to work on their relatives either in mainstream. treater. And we used to be the excess labor. And Chuck Hassebrook explained this to me. And I thought he was, you know, let's get out to tinfoil haps and it was a little bit too far-fetched. But as we see it, he is completely right. We used to send excess kids into the labor force. And we've hit a tipping point in this country to where we're not sending bright, hardworking people into the labor

Starting point is 02:28:44 force and I think that we could actually coherently make the message that losing the independent small family farm changed the whole work ethic in this country. They really think it did because we reached a tipping point where those people that were go-getters, the extra ones that left the farm that left the small Main Street businesses are no longer enough to carry the rest of them along and that'll change it goes in cycles our society has to move back to something but but i think that is actually probably the largest cost you know i jokingly you probably've seen it on twitter i jokingly say the most valuable things that we've sent off of our farms over the decades is our topsoil and our kids um and we're not even sending enough kids anymore because we don't

Starting point is 02:29:39 have enough family farms and that has a direct impact on the direction this country goes. And it's probably too deep. But if you stop and think about it, it's probably correct. I don't think you're wrong. And I don't think you're wrong on a whole lot that we talked about today. We're going to wrap it up with the segment we always end the show with. It's called Tip of the Hat.

Starting point is 02:30:03 Who's somebody in your life or what's a brand that you use or a tool that you used on a day-to-day basis could be any one of those things that you want to tip your hat to and give your flowers and say, hey, this person's done it right or they're doing it right or I couldn't have done this without this person, whatever it is to you. Okay. If you'll allow me a little bit of liberty, I want to take this just a little bit longer. I want to first start out, and I didn't know it at the time, but I think the picking your correct spouse is the most important thing that a person can ever do in their life, and I was really, really lucky. I think then we don't realize that when we're young, and we realize that now, I think that parents and their influence on our life can be just massive and huge.

Starting point is 02:30:50 And I was really, really fortunate in that regards to my dad and mom were just a huge, huge influence in my life. And I think all of us don't appreciate that and don't respect that well enough when we're young. You know, I've got some really good friends, you know, mention some of them, Mike, Will, Carrie. you know they they've just been really really good to me we've got an excellent team at the farm a couple of them have been with us forever you know like Antonio Victor I really shouldn't have started mentioning all this stuff because I'm going to kiss a few people off and I don't mean to forget anyone but you know we've had some really good friends that were also on the team you know like Jamie over the years that was part of that whole sales you know I've got a couple

Starting point is 02:31:36 friends that are as connected on both sides of the aisle as you can get, guys like Joe and Pete that have been really, really instrumental in my advocacy work. But when you come down to this brand part, I got to thank Tracy Vowell, who was the managing chef at Frontier Grill for giving us a shot to supply their chicken. And I got to thank Matthias Murgis, who is the executive. And I got to thank Matthias Murgis, who is the executive chef, chef day cuisine at Charlie Trotter, buy that first pig. This would have never happened without them. And then I guess if you come down to a brand and something that I really, really respect, it'd probably be, and I don't want to single out one of our customers because I don't want

Starting point is 02:32:28 to be little the rest of them, but it's probably chef Rick Bayliss and watching his journey has just been really, really cool because he's one of the most successful chefs in the country. You know, one top chef's masters, and if you go to his restaurant, his whole walls full of James Beard. I think him and Dan Barber are the only two that have ever won outstanding restaurant

Starting point is 02:32:49 for two different restaurants. But he was highly successful because he's really, really passionate about good food. And then he's extremely articulate about explaining that passion, and he's just really, really good at surrounding himself with people that share that vision. And, you know, I think that's one of the things in this whole farm-to-table journey. You know, the trip to England, the farm-to-table journey, it is just my college experience. It is just so broadened my horizon beyond what I would have ever seen growing up in, you know,

Starting point is 02:33:29 brushy prairie mongo in La Grange, Indiana. You know, so, I mean, it's been, I can't overstate how amazing of a journey it is. And I can't overstate all of the wonderful people that I've met that I would have never met through this. And I apologize to all of my great friends that I've not mentioned in this. But yeah, that's, yeah. Yeah, that's good. That's good. I respect you.

Starting point is 02:33:55 I respect your journey. I admire what you've built and what you do. all I can say is just thanks for coming on the show it's been an absolute pleasure to sit down and talk with you thank you for what you do for rural America and agriculture and where can people find you if they want to reach out to you or they want to follow what you're doing or support you on your journey Twitter is a good place to find me

Starting point is 02:34:22 I get a little controversial on Twitter but I think it's G. Gunthorpe on Twitter I'm on Facebook significantly more professional on Facebook. Me and my daughter actually even have a politics from the pastures page. Join that. But a friend requests me on Facebook. We have a Gunthorpe Farms page. If you want to see the day-to-day details of the farm and the sheep,

Starting point is 02:34:46 I strongly recommend that you follow both my son, both on Facebook and Instagram. I'm too old to do Instagram. I think I think I probably have Instagram, but I don't ever think I ever put anything on there. What's your son's name? Evan Gunthorpe. Okay.

Starting point is 02:35:03 Yep. And reach out to me anytime. I normally get back to people. People call me, message me, whatever. Awesome. It's been a true pleasure to have you on. It has. Greg, thanks for coming.

Starting point is 02:35:18 Thanks. Yep. Well, guys, if you didn't get any value from that one, you must have been sleeping under a rock. So if you did, share the show with the people that you know. Leave your view on Spotify or Apple. we love you guys we appreciate you and we'll see you back here next week for another episode

Barn Talk - The Big 4 Stole The Only Market Small Farmers Ever Built

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.