Barn Talk - The Ultimate Tork Talk | Part 1

Episode Date: June 25, 2021

Welcome To Barn Talk! In today’s episode, Tork shares lessons learned in his half century. From growin up in the 80’s to the hardships of raising pigs in the 90’s, & much, much more!    SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST ➱https://bit.ly/3a7r3nR   SUBSCRIBE TO THIS’LL DO FARM ➱ https://bit.ly/2X8g45c     ADD US ON:  INSTAGRAM ➱ https://bit.ly/3gaobdN   TIKTOK ➱ https://bit.ly/3eJfftr     -------------------------------   ***PLEASE NOTE*** Barn Talk is a significant break from the typical content viewers have come to expect from This’ll Do Farm. Please be advised that we will be exploring a wide variety of topics (some adult-themed) and our younger viewers (and their parents) should be advised that some topics will be for mature audiences only. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All of the food we eat and much of the clothing we wear comes from plants and animals that are raised on farms. Farms are different in type, in size, and even in name. Welcome to Barn Talk. What happens at the barn stays at the barn until Dad and I came along. Now we're just going to let it all out for you guys. So today is a very special episode because today is Torque's birthday. We got a birthday episode, birthday special. I should have a sombrero. He should. We need a mariachi band to get in here and start singing. Free fried ice cream. He doesn't even look 50. I don't think you guys have ever seen Tork without his beard on his face.

That nasty old, crusty beard. It's getting gray. Well, I'm not as clean shaving as I was, but yeah, I'm pretty much clean shaving. I got chastised a little bit from that. You're looking young and spry. I'm feeling pretty spry. Yeah. I got taken for a ride. yeah what yesterday morning we loaded pigs and i got knocked on my arse uh but nobody saw me so it was okay i was in the pen getting the pigs out so i didn't see it i our buddy helped my buddy kale he might saw it because no he didn't see either neither did the trucker so then i felt okay i felt really bad i hit the ground and thumped my head a little bit you felt the pain but you didn't feel the pain

of embarrassment right that's exactly right it's a double hitter if you get people watching you mess up too i quick looked around and nobody saw me, so then I just, I got up really quickly. I got my wits about me and went back at it. There you go. And I can still walk the next day. And he hit his head, and dad's hit his head many, many times. I mean, I don't know if we'll ever get into the stories.

Today could be the day we get into the stories, but you've cracked your head. I don't know how many times. I don't know. So many that I can't remember now. All that lead paint you've eaten too probably didn't help. And it's just, I don't know. But we did a lot this week. I don't know.

It was kind of a blur. always talk about what we did it's been it's like we said last time this is the time of year that it's kind of whirlwind yeah weather's been crap just absolutely crap it hasn't been crappy but it's turning it's getting a little it's finally getting back to warm still haven't side dressed yet it's too too damp too wet out there so we can't get out there i'm thinking probably next week tuesday we i won't get a rig on memorial day but we'll get one tuesday and if it doesn't rain between now and then we should be able to go yeah that's good i got an upcoming trip coming up with the with my boys we always have a annual brozarks trip in the in the ozarks and a bunch of my friends

from high school and people we've met from college go down there and i've met when i go up to college campuses and we all go down there and have fun and we're going to have four days in the ozarks with the bro so it's kind of my vacation it's my vacation in my early 20s some of day i think i'll have to probably give up rosarcks and spend going a vacation with my wife you know so if she'll keep you if she'll keep me if i can if i can if i can cat i think cat i think cat you know she might be she might be the she's gonna be the one probably be careful this is going out over the airwaves but uh hopefully she can stand with me for for a little bit longer anyway but yeah i'll have to take her probably somewhere instead of having to go to the annual rose arcs but i'm going to enjoy every second

of it. It's been a long year. So, and last year, I got salmonella down in the Ozarks. So my Ozarks trip last year was horrible. I was getting, so I was sick. And then, you know, you got a bunch of kids, young kids in their 20s that are drinkers and go to college and are full of testosterone. Trying to get you to do this. Trying to get up and stop being a, stop being a wuss.

Get up. Get up. Yeah. And then, you know, me being old and dumb, I'd get up. up and I'd try and then that just made it worse so and full-blown COVID going yeah oh let's see was that i don't know it might have just been starting yeah i don't think it was going it's this whole COVID thing it's it's blur but anyway this year I'm hoping it'll be better for me but that's that's what's coming up so dad's going to have to run the side dress rig by himself and hopefully yeah I can do that and I want you

to go and have a good time and don't worry about a thing and just know that I'll get the corn side dress and other than that, nothing will get done. Hopefully you just get the vlogging, too. I'll try to do some vlogging. Dad's got to do the vlog. We've got to get some content for this will do Farm Channel. It's a never-ending... It's a never-content, never-ending content warfare, you know.

Sometimes you really just don't want to whip out the camera, but you kind of have to, you know, you got to make it. That's right. It's getting easier. I'm putting it on you. It is getting easier. Two years ago, I was... awkward as shit on camera now now you're just awkward now i'm just awkward that's right what do you got for

a market update well and while you're doing this this wouldn't be a birthday special edition of barn talk if there wasn't something special to go with it so while you're doing this i'm going to go get up and get you something you're giving the market up all right back i'll give you i'll give him the market update i'm scared i'm a little i'm a little bit scared now um really for all of the all the and down. The markets this week were not that far off of where we were. Corn delivered that one of the feeders around here is 698, and that's a Friday. And beans 1537 on one side of the river and 1559 on the other side of the river. And last time we talked, we were talking about the idea whether lean hogs would go higher than cattle, and they did, they closed Friday at

a buck 17 a pound, and fat cattle closed at 1.15. So I don't know when the last time that happened, but, and there was, I was reading, there were some packers out that were paying a buck 20 to get pigs before the weekend last week. So crazy. Feeder cattle, buck 50. I was trying to find somewhere a price on what somebody was paying for wiener pigs, but I couldn't find one. I'm sure it's outrageous or feeder pigs. There must not be any, so it's pretty high. The crypto market, not good. Not good. Not good at all. Stocks aren't good either. No. Stocks have been bad for a while. Yeah, they're just kind of playing a holding game, but man, crypto had a big sell-off. Bitcoin, I think, got down somewhere around 32. 32-5.000.

maybe. It's at 34 now? It's at 34-4 as of Friday afternoon. Ethereum's at 22, and I don't know with all the rest. But those are the only two we really track right now. Yeah, not much else. But the thing about, I think, where people get a little caught up in that price, with Bitcoin, you're pricing that off of the dollar. And the price is as much a reflection of what's going on in the dollar as it is with what's going on in Bitcoin. And what you really have to look at is the total market value. Like if the size of the market of Bitcoin is growing, price isn't as big a concern because in the long run, if you're a hoddler, it doesn't matter because in the long run, it's going to win out. But I mean, it's still over a trillion dollars. It actually dipped down a little

I think it got a little below a trillion dollars in market cap. I think I saw something say it's the fastest growing asset. Yeah. I mean, it's gone to a trillion dollar market cap, the fastest than Google, faster than Google, Amazon, Microsoft, all those companies, or I don't know if all those are trillion dollar companies, but of the trillion dollar companies, Bitcoin surpassed them by like 10 years. Yeah.

Well, in the fastest growing. And this downturn, there's a lot of institutional investors. that are buying it up. They're buying it cheap. That's the thing. When people panic and people sell, somebody's buying. What did Claude Griner always tell you?

Claude Griner told me a lot of things, but he always told me that when everybody was scared and everybody was selling, well, actually, he said that when everything's going up and everybody's buying and it's high, high, high, he goes that's when you shouldn't be buying and you should be doing what holding and holding and saving because when everything went down that's the time to buy he said why buy it high when you can buy it on sale but you got you got to be really patient to do that but there's a lot of people that are

patient and they're buying now oh there's a lot of people that aren't either yeah true true i mean obviously it's it's it's the same because there's a lot of people that sold out well actually when the when the big drop was, there are a bunch of people that were speculating and they got sold out because they were trading on margin. And trading on margin buying crypto futures is no different than trading on margin, you know, in the commodities or in stocks or anything else. And they lost their margin and they got sold out. And so, yeah, you can get upside down in a hurry. Yeah, I think I talked about this last episode, but you just really, when you buy an asset, you buy real estate, when you buy crypto, when you buy a stock, you need to,

you got to have a belief in it that what it's about instead of the hype around it. Because if you believe what it's about is good and you think it's going to work in the future and it's going to be an innovative thing that's going to be around for a long time, that's what's going to keep you staying and holding your money when everyone else is selling. Yeah, you know what? Or your crypto or your real estate or whatever. that might be one of the reasons why gotta believe what you're

gotta believe what you're buying worthwhile. I think that might be one of the reasons why farmers end up in the long run doing as well as they can because if you buy farmland no matter what you're not going to sell it even when you want to even when it's really bad.

You just rent it out. Well, I mean, you know, you're in it for the long run. Right. And the up and down and over time it pays off. It's going to pay. And hog billings the same way. Once you sign your name on the dotted line, you're pretty much on right or wrong.

And you know what? I can speak to this because this is kind of along the lines. 10 years goes pretty fast. And the 10 years between your 40s and your 50s go a hell of a lot faster than the 10 between your 30s and your 20s, in the 20s, your 20s and 30s. So, yeah.

I think, yeah. I think real estate and farming, it's kind of in your control, you know, with the stocks and crypto. I mean, it is in your control how much you buy and whatever if you hold it or sell it. Right. It's a lot easier.

It's a lot easier because you're not, you're not so tied to it. It's a lot easier to panic, and it's a lot easier to take the quick buck. But when you own something, when you own a piece of real estate, stay on a piece of ground. There's power in putting your backup against the wall. Because you'll make it work when it'll do whatever it takes. You'll do whatever it takes.

So there's absolutely right. There's power in that. But yeah, I forgot to say how old dad is going to, how old dad is today? How old are you? I am 50. It's the big five-o, the big five-o. And I bought these gifts. I've been sitting on these gifts and we were going to, I've been waiting. for the right time and I thought, well, no better time than shooting live barn talk. I'm a little, I'm a little on edge. Give you these gifts and show everybody, you know, that I'm not a terrible son and I do some nice things for you once in a while. This is actually very impressive because, one, you remembered my birthday.

Yep. Two, you didn't procrastinate to where fast shipping couldn't save you because you've done that before, where you just assumed that you could get next day shipping. and three, you plan far enough ahead that you had it and actually had it up here, and I didn't even know you had it. That's right. Cudos to you. I'm getting wiser in my old age.

I'm getting up there in the brain power. Nice. Before we give you this gift, why don't you show what a fan gave you? Yeah. What gave us? So my wife, so the mercantile. What's her Instagram handle? The mercantile, yeah.

The mercantile? I think it's the mercantile on Marion, is her Instagram. You can probably look it up, it'll pop up. Yeah. So anyway, she schemed with everybody, and I had a little bit of a surprise party at a brewery last night, and I was surprised because we've got a lot of stuff going on this weekend, and we're all pretty busy,

and it just looked like it wasn't going to work to really do a whole lot, which I was fine with. I was a little irked because... You weren't going to your favorite restaurant. I wasn't going to my favorite restaurant to get my pork ribeye. But other than that, I'm a team player. All dad knew was it was going to be the close-nitch family. It was just going to be six of us.

But we were scheming. We had it. We knew we had a show out for the Big 5-0, and we shoot through a surprise party. We had people come out to the brewery, stand up, drink, and have a good old time. Yeah. I actually, I did show...

I showed the sign of my age, because I was trying to work the room because everybody that, you know, showed up and kept showing up after dinner and all that, you know, they were all there to say, happy birthday to me. So I was trying to work the room and get to everybody. And about the time that it was starting to wind down, I was tired. I felt like that I was back at World Pork Expo trying to make every sale I could. And I told Trish, I said, I'm about tired of talking. so I slept good. So you got something from a fan

that lost of the show at that surprise party. Yeah, so a good friend of ours, Realtor. Shout out to, you want to show that camera right there. Shout out to Jenny Morgan. Jenny Morgan, shout out to you. Realtor extraordinaire.

This is, I was super, like, blown away because I think it's a, it's a really heartfelt gift. Yeah, they did a good job. They did a damn good job. So show that camera too. Show them there. So this is the, this will do.

This will do farm pod. stars we're the podcaster stars don't get it twisted with porn star we're pod stars out here yeah there you go so we got to find a good place we're going to have to start a wall we got to have a wall of you know what's funny you last episode you said send us some snacks yeah there you go send us some snacks well jenny you did better than send us some snacks you you gave us some memorabilia we can't say that say that one more time i can't really say that word i'm not going to embarrass myself but we got something to hang on the wall mementos we've got some mementos yeah we got something to up on the wall. So I, thanks to Jenny. Thanks to Jenny. Pat, Jenny. Okay. So now you guys seen that

awesome gift from one of the fans. Now we got this big hunk right here. Oh boy. We're just going to cut to the wide shot. So right here, we'll just open that. I'm going to tip it because I'm short. Yeah, go ahead and tip it. It looks like white tissue. Ignore the, if you're listening to this on audio. Oh, here's the card. I don't know. That's, I got kind of heartfelt. That's. I got kind of heartfelt. So am I supposed to read it out loud? Or is this for private? I think that's for private, yeah. Ah, nice, nice, nice.

If you're listening on audio version, that is the wrapping inside the gift that I give you that. Yes, so this, that's an awesome hat. It's, show them what's on the front of it. A big old American hog. Patriotic hog, and on the side of it, it says, take pride in your queue, as in barbecue. Heck, yeah.

I like that a lot. Dad likes to smoke his meats. That's a nice, that's a nice hat. Nice hat. Good job. Yep. I'll wear that with pride. Ah, yes.

You can't go wrong with this. I did, I did, you did request a different kind. I got, you said barbecue, hot barbecue and the Mexican seasoning one. Yeah. And I got you that. But, you know, these are more expensive. So I was like, you know what, I'm going to get him the Caribbean. He can get barbecue whenever he wants.

So, uh, damn good seasonings. everybody. If you are a fan of barbecue and you haven't seen how to barbecue right, that guy does a really good job. He does it right. He does. I haven't, anything that I've made that I've watched him make. He's got a YouTube channel.

Yeah, he's got a great YouTube channel. Anyway, he's single-handedly probably done more for my barbecue game than anybody else just from watching his video. Shout out to Malcolm Reed. I don't know if you'll be watching, but if you are, shout out to you, buddy. Malcolm Reed is, he's the man. He's the man. And I got you something special here.

I think you got to have some apparel while you're smoking and seasoning the meats. You got to read the front of it. So it says, I like pig butts, and I cannot lie. And that is true. That's so true. Show them, show them it up. You got to lift the front of. There you go.

I'm trying to maneuver my mic. There you go. so yeah awesome there you go i got you all decked out for your smoker so you can okay make make me some good food well memorial day is memorial day's coming up that's right and there are there's a there's a two pack of pork butts sitting in the refrigerator right now so that's right we'll probably put those on bright and early you want me to take these off or we want to just have them sitting there they can i don't care they can sit there all right all right it doesn't it doesn't it's up to you if you want to read the car just know it's sent them

I'll wait. Okay. I'll wait. Well, so there's the gift given. It wouldn't be a special edition if we didn't have something special for Torque. So this is Torque's special edition. So that's kind of getting us to what we're going to talk about today. You're going to get to know Torque like you've never known him before. You're going to know his whole story on how we got to be where we are today. And it was a very long journey, but a long and twisted journey. Long and twisted journey. But here we are. are. So you're going to get all the ends and outs of that today. Well, take it away. So, you know, we've talked a little bit about some of our family history and my dad and his adventures and, you know, you know that I came along late in life for him. But so I'm a child of the 70s and 80s. I was born in 1971. And it's crazy to me. when I think about raising our kids,

no cell phones, you know, and we would go, we would go out, and we started with BMX bikes, me and my friends, and then we graduated to three-wheeler's and dirt bikes. I still never ridden one of those, and I would love to. It's probably good. They got kind of a bad rap.

Death trap. Yeah, they were. kind of a death trap, but I guess back up a little bit. So something kind of crazy that I really think when I look back had a lot of influence on how, probably how I turned out is the fact that in our little neighborhood, there were five boys. And this is before I got to like junior high, but just in this neighborhood here in about a, let's just say in about a five-mile radius. My two best friends, we were all the youngest of at least three boys. Some of them had a sister in there, but I was the youngest of three boys.

And there was a pretty good gap between the next brother and them, just like there was a gap between me. and we were all the youngest. I had one friend that had a sister that was younger than he was, but then I had two other friends that I was pretty good, that we were pretty good friends. They lived a little further away, but it was the same deal with them.

They were the youngest of four, and the product of that is that you end up with parents that have all raised two or three kids ahead of you, and by the time you come along, they're just tired. and they probably let a little more slide than what they did with the first one. They're beaten down. Yeah, they're pretty much beaten down.

And then not only that, but you have the benefit of watching your brothers and sisters, and you can kind of sit there and see, oh, well, that worked pretty good. That was a pretty good sales job on that deal on to go to that movie or to go to this person's house. Or, ooh, no, that was bad. That went too far. That approach was not good. Yeah, that wasn't a good approach. We won't use that.

And, you know, I don't think people give kids enough credit, but when you watch, they may not say anything, but they watch. And we all pretty much had it figured out. And as I said, we were the generation, the 80s was, you know, I think everybody thinks that the generation or the period of time that they grew up and went through middle school and high school, they probably all think that it was the best time ever. And I'm certainly no different, but I really feel like, well, I'll just tell you,

I talk to people and you run into people and inevitably you end up talking about, you know, high school or college. And there's a lot of people that don't have good experiences with high school. You know, they were a late bloomer or they were, you know, they had goofy teeth or they had goofy hair. They're just awkward, and, you know, it takes a while to figure it out, and I'm certainly that way. But I was very insecure, but I was lucky in the fact that I had these friends that I grew up with, that we were together all the way through, and we all kind of had that bond. We all had that in common.

And, man, we had a really good tongue. I mean, we had a really good time. None of us were what I would say were overachievers. You guys. Academically, I don't think we were, and we'll get into that. But, man, we had a good time. Well, even when my friends, you know, my friends, their dads grew up in the 80s too, and, you know, all your stories that you've told us and my friends, their dads that tell them their stories,

we're all envious to the 80s. Well, and we all are. We all know the 80s was probably the best damn time to grow up and live through that because you had enough leeway. You could get away with things and it wasn't a huge deal. Yeah. And you didn't have cell phones, which we've talked about cell phones are great. Technology is great. But the fact that you had to get out of your house and cruise the lanes and meet up with people and that was the only way you knew what was going on.

and you weren't on social media and the memories that you made were just here. They weren't on your phone, which it's nice to see them and look back on it. But I bet it was also nice that, you know, what happened happened? And you can you can miscue the story however you want. Yeah, I mean, that's the greatest thing about it. Everything that we went through, maybe it happened. Maybe it didn't because there's very little photographic evidence of any of the stuff that we might or might not have done. And it was, the 80s were a time where the technology seemed like it was just

coming so fast. And we had all this cool stuff. But you didn't have, you didn't have the disconnection that you have today as far as everybody was still really, really social. So like music, MTV was huge. And I was a poor cut. Money for nothing. chicks for free. Chicks for free. And I was one of the poor country kids that didn't have cable. And so all I had was Friday night videos. But I love going into town to my friend's places and watching MTV.

I just thought it was great. But yeah, I didn't have it 24-7 like a lot of them did. But, you know, there was so much commonality because, and I talked to Sawyer about this all the time, how his generation, you know, you listen to songs. and you kind of sample them. Like you don't even listen to a whole song. You really like the chorus, so you listen to that,

and then you're on to the next thing. My generation was like, if you really like John Cougar, you had to go buy the album, and there wasn't any skip on a turntable. Now, my brother's generation was more the albums were, so cassettes had kind of, of taking over by the time I got to where I was driving. But even then, you know, you had to invest

either money or time to making that soundtrack, like for, because that's, you could make a mix tape. You could make a mixtape. You can make a mixtape. And with the records, you purchased the record. So damn it, you're going to listen to the whole record for. Oh, yeah. I envy that a little bit too, because, you know, you were stuck with it and you really had to listen to a whole album. Yeah. You know? Yeah. So probably my senior year in high school, guns and roses' appetite for destruction is probably the only cassette that I literally wore out and bought twice. Because I had a copy in my car, and I had a copy at home. And the one of my car, once in a while you might have pulled it out for ACDC back in black.

Oh, yeah. Or Steve Miller Band, if you were feeling kind of nostalgic, you'd pop in some Steve Miller. But appetite for destruction, that was, I graduated in 89. And I mean, that was like, but the thing was, that was like, the amount of commonality between you would go to a party. And so the way you knew there was a party was all your friends, we would call, you know, we'd either, we would call each other, but we would meet at somebody's house and then pile into one car, or maybe two cars if we had some extra people that were, you know, fringe friends that weren't with us all the time. But by the time I was in

high school, I had six guys that we hung around all the time. But we would, you didn't know what was going on. So you would literally go cruise the four lanes. And in our little town, there was a high V. There was a grocery store at one end. And at the other end, there was a fast food restaurant. And you'd go around the block at the fast food restaurant and then back to the grocery store. And that parking lot, that was the hub of information. spot that was where you figured out what was going on and if nobody was there you missed out you really screwed up because uh all the information had been put out and you weren't there to get so if you got there and showed up and you all got the plan would you just convoy out there yeah yeah so there are a lot of parties out you know in somebody's field or some some park or some you know somewhere somebody's barn somebody's machine shed whatever um and that was the that was the pastime. But what was interesting about that was that, you know,

like we were talking about music, everybody had that stuff. There was a, what I liked about the eight, and this is with music, there was a, like, it was what was popular and that was it. Like pop music in the 80s was pretty much rock music. Yeah. And that was the music to listen to.

Yep. Now, wow, my voice just went, I don't know what happened there. now you have all kinds of different genres you can listen to and there's not like the there's not like the genre to listen to right which is good it's nice but i wish there was kind of like the genre to listen to back when i was in high school because i mean there was we listen to rap and hip-hop and country and whatever but that was nice but everyone kind of shared the same thing yeah it was just a piece of commonality that everybody kind of had and um so in in my situation

it's just crazy to me. So when I was 12, I think I was probably, maybe I was only 10, I got my first three-wheeler. I had a three-wheeler. I had a Honda 110, which looked like now you see Shriners driving them in parades. But I got that, and one of my friends, he got a three-wheeler, and then my other friend had a dirt bike.

and then we all moved up as we got a little older. I got a 185, and then the 185 wasn't fast enough. So one of my buddies, his brother was going to, like, Yotech, like to work on motorcycles, and so I bought a kit, and we board it out, and we ported it, and we put a bigger car breaker on it. And so my dad, I couldn't finagle a way to buy a 200X, so I board a 185 out to make it like a 200. Warped the head, ended up ruining it.

And I sold that off, and I finally got a 250R, a Honda ATC 250R. And that was the epitome of, that was the top dog in the three-wheeler game. Honda tried to make a 350X, and that was right at the end when I think all the lawsuits were starting, because that was when the four-wheelers came out. And eventually that killed the three-wheeler's. But I had a 250R, and it had a six-inch extended swing arm, four-inch extended dura blue axles, and it had flat-track tires on it.

And that thing was just, it was, oh, man, it was fun. It was so much fun. And in the summertime, this would have been between, this probably would have been about when we were 13, 14 years old. We couldn't drive. We had school permits, but we couldn't really drive. We did drive a little bit, but we couldn't really drive. And, you know, we would get our work done.

We were all farm kids. We'd get our work done. And then we would just go to each other's houses, find, you know, somebody would show up in my house. So I had a pool, which was, I don't know how that, well, I think basically how that happened was that my dad got tired of us going to town and he figured he could get more work out of us if he put a pool in. So he did that when I was fairly young. So that was pretty nice because you could lure young ladies over to your house even when you probably weren't the, you weren't exactly the hottest thing on the planet, I don't think. I was probably a little chubby, I think. But anyway, you could, yeah, I could

get a few girls to come over once in a while. But anyway, we would go to each other's houses or we'd go fishing and the thing is when I talk about cell phones my parents didn't know where none of our parents knew where we were for I don't know six six hours a day I mean we would try to get our work done and if I could if I could guilt my dad into just letting me not have to do anything in the afternoon unless we were bailing hay or it was you know fall spring whatever where we had a lot of work to do but if I could get my pig work done I mean we were gone all afternoon and we were going you know we went, like I said, we went fishing. We went all over. And there was only one time that we left, and we went up to the English River, which is probably about, and it was probably about 10 or 12 miles

as the crow flies. I remember I had to strap two, two and a half gallon gas jugs on my 250R because it burned so much gas that if I was afraid I wouldn't be able to make it home, because when we got up there, the river was low and we were out riding the sand in the sand and the in the river. But anyway, my mom actually called the sheriff because it was like eight, it was like getting dark and we got home. And that was the only time where I think everybody's parents called each other because they were afraid, you know, they had no idea where we were. But that was just the, that was the norm. That was the norm. That's just what it was. And then we all, once again, commonality, we, you know, we sat around and,

And we all liked Hot Rod magazines. You know, when we were 12, 13 years old, we were all like, oh, yeah, we wanted a Camara, or we wanted a Chevelle, or we wanted a challenger. And as we started turning 16, everybody's goal was to get one of those babies. And being farm kids, we all worked and we all saved money, and we had her own money, and we all bought muscle cars. And the first, I think the first one, one of my names, neighbors or one of my friends he got a 67 chavelle and um so it's the older long longer chival and i mean

we were like oh man this is awesome this is awesome and then my next friend um i remember going with him i think we went with him actually i don't know if i went or not i think my other buddy went with him to look at a car and they went and looked at a 70 plymouth gt x 440 six-pack and his dad was very super nice guy but very conservative never really got upset and this guy was selling this car and my buddy had the money to buy it and they test drove it and that thing was so hot that you couldn't you couldn't drive it and shift it and not have it squawk the tires because it just had so much power and i heard uh my buddy told me that they took it out and took it up the street and back.

And his dad. His dad was like, hell no. Hell no. And when he said hell no, it was a deal. So he didn't end up getting that, but he ended up getting a 70, a 71 charger, and it had a 340 in it. And that was a sweet car.

And then I bought a 74 Camaro for $800, and it was the biggest pile of crap that you'd ever seen. It was green and it was ugly. I didn't know. know you bought it you like i didn't know oh yeah it was it was terrible and so we ended up replacing both doors both quarter panels one front fender i think everything else we were able to to fix and was it a group was it a group effort no so um my parents were good friends with a family down by crawfordsville and their son was probably 20 years older than me 25 years older than

me and he had a body shop and um i i convinced my parents more my mom um i pretty much i pretty much um i don't know what you want to say but i were the baby so i was the baby and i took full advantage of it and i paid for a lot of it myself but i know i finagled i finagled a few dollars out of mom dad i'm sure i did i don't know how much but anyway we got it we got it we got it all redone and repainted. It had an interior that was red crushed velvet and black. It wasn't leather. I'm sure it was black vinyl. It looked like a whorehouse. But it was, oh, it was nice. And it was bright red. And the 350 that was in it, it was bad. And so I bought a crate motor for it. And I bought a stroked 350 with a 400 crank, turned down. So it was a 383. It was

punched 30 over. It was a 383 and that thing. It, it ran. It ran really good. You can imagine what they got into high school. It was nuts. Well, this is what happened. So I got my, I got my permit the summer before. So let's see, I had turned 15 and got my permit going into my, I don't know what year that would have been. But anyway, I lost my license within, I lost my license for too many speeding tickets. Within, I would say within three months, by winter I had lost my license

because I had to ride, I had to, my buddy had to pick me up and take me to school, and then he was in wrestling, and I'd have to hang out in town until he got done with wrestling, bring me home. so yeah and and in the process i tore the transmission out of it it had a turbo 350 transmission which wasn't near strong enough for what what it was and so we took it to a transmission place and we swapped it out and put a turbo 400 in it that was built and then it threw the ring and pinion

out of it and we ended up putting a we ended up putting a 10 bolt it was still a 10 bolt rear but we had it all built and anyway i mean i was a i was a motorhead i just we loved rent on stuff and and um we would that's funny about the cops they when you got that they're like all right oh it was bad then you were on the radar yeah i was on the radar um all your i mean i'm sure all your buddies were on the radar i think they they were the one that had the 67 he was probably the he was the least he was the least heavy foot of any of us and and i'm not even gonna i won't go down rode very far, but we had another friend that had a 70 GTO with a 400 Pontiac in it, and that was a runner.

And he had terrible luck with cars. We did a whole podcast about the luck of this guy. I mean, every vehicle he touched would end up just getting destroyed. But anyway, he had a GTO. That was a nice car. Just a lot of, you know, we had a great time cruising around. gas was a buck. I think when I got my license, that summer gas was maybe right around a dollar.

And there was a shell station in Washington that you could still get, you could still get 93 octane fuel, which that's kind of what I needed because I had a little higher compression ratio. I ended up putting a barrel at the farm, and I would mix 104 octane boost to get the, to get the octane level high enough to make my car run right or you know what i really don't know i thought i needed it i might not have but anyway um i think gas was yeah it was right around a buck it got up to like a buck 15 and we thought it was terrible but you know on a good friday night

you could burn a half a tank of gas in an hour if you really kept your geez just going geez okay so you had a lot of fun you and your buddies you and your buddies got a lot of cars You had to do three wheelers. You all ran together at an early age. Yeah. What was your craziest legal story you can tell on this podcast that ever happened with that group of guys, either middle school, high school, whatever, that you're not going to get? I'm pretty sure the statute of limitations is gone on all that.

I think probably the... Before you see your story, Dad, he kind of read the great. groundwork there, but the stories that I heard, he was kind of a hellion. You guys tore some stuff up. We weren't too bad. Nobody got hurt, and none of us did anything that was even close to being considered a felony or anything like that. We didn't steal anything. We just had a lot of fun. We loved we loved drag racing. We loved hunting. We liked just messing around. Like, okay, so one of of the things that we love doing was at our high school in the town we grew up with it was a one way it was a one way drive all the way around the school so on one end of the school the four lanes went by

one end of the school pretty much there's a few houses in between but then when you turned and went up around the high school that was all one way going around there and at the end of the one way that met the four lanes there was a stop sign there that sat in a barrens that sat in a barrens It was not, it was in the middle of the street because it was two lanes wide because it was one way. And you had to either go straight or right or left. You couldn't go straight if you were in the other. You had to turn left. And so we had a tradition at every basketball game in the fall. When we left there, we would flip that sign over every time, which isn't very smart because after you do it two or three times, not only the school, but the local police know that some. somebody's going to turn that sign over, but we weren't very bright.

You wanted to do it anyway. Well, yeah, and then we wanted to. Even when you were on the hit list, you still did. We wanted to do it. And so that was one of the things that we did. And, you know, I'm not going to, God bless anybody that's a police officer that has to deal with young kids. Because, and I always said this with Sawyer's friends, whenever they would come over,

I would love to sit at the top stair if they were in the basement, or I would just sit on the deep freeze in the garage if they were all sitting outside by the pool. And I love to listen to the scheming. And I always told my wife, and I told them this too, all of them together is dumber than any of them by themselves. And we were the exact same way. I mean, the stuff we thought up, just stupid, just stupid. And to be a cop, I just, the stories those guys have got to have, because the stuff kids come up with is just stupid. Especially in small towns. Yeah. You know, Because, you know, well, you get bored doing the same thing, so you're trying to do something else. So anyway, you know, we'd flip that sign.

We'd flip that thing over. And then we got chased a few times. And then probably the biggest, the biggest brew ha-ha that we ever got into was one year, we were probably sophomores or juniors. And around Thanksgiving, there's an old road that goes out of town. It was the old highway, and then they built a new highway further north, and so it was the old highway. And it went out of town, and it went underneath a railroad overpass, and the overpass was too short to where semis, like van trailers, couldn't go under it. And I think that's probably part of the reason that they build a new road, because it was right where there was a creek, and they couldn't lower the road, and the railroad wasn't going to raise the, bridge so anyway it was kind of a less traveled area but a buddy mine they owned some ground out

there and we got the idea and i'm not even sure if it was really our deal our idea or it was his older brother's idea and we kind of took oh yeah i think we took up the the cause as his older brother graduated we thought oh yeah we're going to do that so we would every year we would make a dummy and stuff you know stuff a pair of bib coveralls in a shirt with hay, and we would tie a rope around the dummy, and then we would go to this field, and we would get up on the railroad grade, and we would walk out onto the overpass, and wait for somebody to come by, and then just as they were getting close, we would drop this dummy down, like somebody was getting thrown off the bridge.

And not very bright, not endorsing this, because obviously bad things can happen, and we didn't think things very through. No one was ever injured doing this. No car wrecked. Do not attempt. Yeah, don't do this. This is not, yeah, this is, we're telling you this so that you know not to do it. You wouldn't get away with it anyway if you even tried, so don't even try it. Right. And, um, this is the beautiful thing about the 80s. Right. And so usually what would happen is, um, the time of night we were doing it, it's usually all young kids out. And they would either not stop or they would slam on their brakes and if it was a car full of girls they would yell something and if it was some girl that we wanted to talk to or find out who it was then we would all start yelling from the top of

the overpass and a few numbers might have even been gotten out of that deal i don't know or it would be some guys or someone and they would be all pissed you know and they would they would tell you that you know come down here and we're going to beat your ass and all that and it would it would you know it would it never it never turned in anything they finally get tired and drive off because it's really a lot of work to try to get up the embankment. And so we did that. And the first year we did it, it was like, oh, yeah, it was awesome. And then the second year, we were like, it's going to be bigger and better.

So we made a bigger dummy or got a longer rope or we had it measured out just perfect so that when we dropped it, it wouldn't touch a car. It would be just above it, you know. And but once again, we weren't very smart. And so enough people the first year had said, called the police and said, these guys are out there doing this. And so they were smart enough to think, you know, I bet you they'd do it again. So we're out there, probably my junior year, and we're dropping this dummy and a few cars come by, and we all think it's pretty funny.

And then one of my friends is like, I think there's a train coming. and we look down the tracks towards the town and yeah there's a light you know there's a light coming down the tracks and you're like well yeah it's not coming very fast yeah we don't hear anything yeah something's not right but yet you know we're not bright enough to think what could possibly you know it's got to be and then finally at dawned on all of us no it was some person with a flashlight coming down the tracks and it was a police officer coming down the tracks and it was a police officer coming down the tracks. And then we look the other way, and there's another flashlight coming the other way. And on top of a railroad trussle, there is no, all it is is the railroad ties with the rails.

There's nothing between them. So you have to step fairly gingerly, cautiously, because if you step between them, you're going to break your ankle. So you can't, like, really run. You can trot quickly. So we figure out that, you know, bad things are coming, and we take off as quickly as we can, and we literally get to the edge of the trussle and just dive off the side of it in the weeds rolling down the hill because a police officer is right there. One of my friends literally he had a hold of his shirt as he was going down. The last guy. The last guy. And, yeah, it's kind of like the bear's.

story when you're doing things stupid as kids you don't have to be the fastest you only have to be faster than the slowest kid that's the thing if as long as you can outrun one of your friends you're fine because because that's the guy that's that's that's that's it right he's the low-hanging fruit he's probably going to get anyway um you know they chased they chased after us and you know they're middle-aged middle-aged men and we're really scared teenagers so we got away and um it was all it was all fun but um there was a pretty serious investigation that went in and um let's just say that there were people within the community school system that had a idea had a pretty good idea if they had to guess which group of young men uh would be involved in such a thing they had kind

of a short list and we were all brought in for questioning and we were all brought in for questioning and we were set down and we were told the severity of what, you know, what was in front of us. And usually I think that when you get there was, at that point there's probably, I know there was six of us. There might have been eight of us, but I think there was six. And usually there's always a weak link and somebody cracks. And all takes this one person to crack. And that's what they were going after.

They were trying to find the weak link. And none of us did. None of us. We all had our story straight. That's some loyalty right there. We were pretty loyal to each other. And we had our own, we all had our story straight, and we stuck to it. And when it was all said and done, and don't get me wrong, we were all scared, scared to death that, you know, the hammer was going to drop and we were going to be in trouble and all that. And I will say this, this is an important part of, I guess, my upbringing is, and I think that's something that's missing. today, and that's part of the reason that I think kids have a lot of problems with authority and getting into trouble, I was never, I was never afraid of what a police officer was going to do to me. Not that I didn't respect them, but I just didn't worry about if somebody like that thought ill of me. And I never worried about what a teacher

might do to me or think of me, but I was very worried about what Lawrence Whistler was going to do to me. So if it came down to a deal where my parents got involved, yeah, I didn't want that to ever happen because my dad, he was the heavy, and if he got involved, you knew it was going to be, it wasn't going to be a big, it wasn't going to be a good deal. And I actually got picked up for possession, same bunch of guys. We got some beer, and we were out in the country, and we were sitting in this vacant, abandoned farmstead, and a car pulled in behind us, and it was the local county deputy, and it was on a Saturday night, not much going on in the fall of the year, and none of us were of age. we were all, we were all 18 except for me and one of my friend had late birthdays, so we were 17. And anyway, we ended up getting possession tickets, and my parents had to come pick me up from the police station.

And there was eight of you, but you got to, you got to finish the story. Yeah, so this is a good story. This is a really good story. So this will be the last one and he'll finish his point, but this is too good not to put in it in it. Yeah, so he gets us all out of the car. and he knew us from, he just knew us because we were known. And he lines us up and he gives us all a breathalyzer test because he knew we were underage and we all had had some beer. And he's going to write us up. And he's got to go get his, he goes back to the car to get his ticket book.

And one of my friends is standing next to me. And he just says, he says, I'm not getting a ticket. I'm getting the hell out of here. And he literally just turns around and takes off running, runs right out the driveway, right across the ditch, into the field. And he lived about, I'd say he lived about three and a half miles straight south of where we were. He ran all the way home. But the funniest part of the whole thing was, this guy gets out of the car, and he comes back, and he looks, and then he looks down. he starts right in the first ticket, and he looks back up, and he says, wasn't there, wasn't there six of you? I think it was six of us. I think there was six of us. And he goes, wasn't there six of you? And we all go, no. And he's like, no, there was six of you. And then we go, no, no, just us.

And then he just kind of took it at face value and just kept going. And anyway, back to the loyalty part, though. Yep. Never ratted. Yeah. Well, you know, there wasn't any reason to. But so my dad, you know what? I didn't really get punished that much because I had to get up and work every day anyway. But he told me how disappointed he was in me and how that when that came out in the paper,

that it wasn't a reflection on me because I was just a young kid. It was a reflection on him and that I needed to think more about. how what I did affected my family and not just me. And I think that was the first time that I had ever... I even thought about that. Right. And so, you know, that was a teachable moment, and I learned something from it.

But you're saying, were you saying, that kids don't really fear their parents much anymore? Yeah, so that, you know, that today, today I feel like that... Amazon presents Jeff versus... taco truck salsa, whether it's Verde, Roja, or the orange one. For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids, ginger tea, and milk.

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Saving those children is how we all go home. From binge all episodes exclusively on Paramount Plus. Children, parents want to be their kids. friend, which is great. I want to be my kids' friend. But at the end of the day, it's not, it's not the public's job to raise my kids. It's not the teacher's job to raise my kids. It's the teacher's job to teach them. And it's not the policeman's job to raise my kids. It's a policeman's job to enforce the law. And if my kids breaking the law, then I'm the one that needs to know about it, and I'm the one that needs to discipline.

And I feel like it swung the other way where we expect, society expects all these people outside of the home to basically raise their kids for them. And those people don't have any credibility with these kids, so they don't have any respect. And then on the parent's side, they want to be their buddy.

And so it doesn't work. And so you end up with a generation of people that are pretty confused, about responsibility and respect and respect and how hard it is to regulate themselves. They don't know how to regulate themselves because, and that's a hard thing. Discipline's not easy, and I'm not going to get in the whole corporal punishment or anything like that, and it doesn't even have to get into that. But I knew, like I said, I was never worried about anything.

I was never worried about a teacher or some person as far as what they were going to do to me or what they thought of me, but I definitely worried about what my mother and father thought of me and what my dad was going to do to me. Because dynamite comes in small packages, and he, yeah, he was like dynamite. So, anyway. So, but we, you know, we had a great time, and I'm friends with all those guys to this day. and when we get together, you know, it's one of those, there's not very many people that you can, that you share as many, it's like being, it's probably a lot like guys that are in the army together

or something like that. When you spend that much life experience together, you just, you kind of learn enough about each other that there's a bond there, and it's pretty neat. And I don't feel like that's probably the same as it is now. Like, I mean, I'm obviously, friends with my high school buddies and we'll be close for a long time. But I think it was it's you got you guys probably have a little bit of that connection closer bond just because the world has changed so much. Yeah. And it's not what it used to be at all. Like no. It's significantly different. So like you can share those. You can share that. If we were to do that today, I would have been in, we would have probably got the whole book thrown at us. But you guys got, we're in the time where they weren't so strict and

and it wasn't such a big deal. And you got to share that. You guys shared that more than any generation really got to. We didn't really touch on that. And that's something else that I think is a negative of where we are today. Did we get away with more than what we should have? Yeah, we did. And there were people that probably did things more destructive than what we did

that actually hurt people that probably got away with more than what they should. However, there's something to be said. Today, there's not much tolerance for people that are not mature. And you do not, it's like we talk about, we talk about betting on yourself, and we talk about, you know, learning by mistakes. Well, when you're a kid, I feel like kids today are held to such a high standard that if they mess up, it dictates how they're looked at for their whole life. And we saw that kid, the kid that had the sign during the, I think it was during the wave.

Remember the Bushlight guy, the kid that had the picture? And, you know, everybody thought it was, oh, he was great, you know, such a great thing. And then they went rooting back through his tweets, and he had some tweet or something he put on Facebook, like three years before that when he would have been like 16 or 17 years old that was derogatory towards somebody and they just went after him well oh carson king yeah the the demoine register went after him which the demoian register is a trash publication so i don't have much standard for that but anyway that's just an example he did so much good and then you you go back to when he was a kid and they just totally destroy you for it yeah and you can't i'm sorry but you um you know jo rogan talks

about he teaches his daughters about kids having mushy brain and that's because you're not you're not you're especially men they mature a little slower and when you're that age you're not who you are then is not who you're going to be and what you do you i'm sorry but you should not be held liable um for that well i mean honestly you do something crazy bad but like yeah yeah i get i totally get what you mean no one wants to make a mistake and when you make a mistake not only do people around you blow up on you, but, I mean, internally, you probably blow up on yourself too. And then that's why you get these kids there, I feel like they got to always be perfect all the time, everything. They got to do what their parents tell them. They got to do what the society tells them. And then

when they mess up and they never failed in their life, it could turn tragic. It destroys them. Yeah. Totally destroys them. Yeah. So long story short, I think that might be one of the things that we don't really think about that much. But we were actually one of the last generations where I feel like you could make some mistakes and somebody, whether it be your parent, whether it be a teacher, whether it be a coach, whether it be a police officer, gave you the benefit of the doubt and gave you another chance. Don't do it again. And you know what? Yeah, and we always talk about this too. Mistakes are learning lessons. If you don't make mistakes, you don't fail, you don't mess up, you're never going to learn from it. I've learned way more from my mistakes than I have from what I've done

Right. And obviously, don't, don't commit a felony because, yeah, if you commit a felony, that's a big mistake and you're going to get, oh yeah. You're going to get freaking the book thrown at you. But if you make a mistake, nowadays it seems like it's just like on the felony level. But yeah. So I made it through, I made it through high school, um, barely. I just barely made it through. I had the, I had the bad, uh, I had the good fortune, bad fortune that one of my best friends that I got to be not he wasn't I didn't know him when I was a child or young young but we got to be good friends through high school um he actually had I would say he had a photographic memory and I did not and um it made for difficult uh difficult studies my senior year because um I my grade point average suffered terribly and

And he did pretty well. And I just barely made it out. I'll just say that. But anyway, we got through high school. And I knew what I wanted to do. But at that time, everybody, that was when everybody was starting to go to college. And my oldest brother had gone to the University of Colorado, followed my dad. he had a degree in business. He had graduated, and he had a job in Denver, and he was making good money,

and he, you know, thought he had the world. I thought he had the world by the tail. And my other brother, he had not gone to college, but he was in a Christian singing group that traveled around, and they'd been to Russia, and they'd been to Europe, and he was doing, he was doing that, and he had gotten done with that and was living in California, and I don't think he knew what he wanted to do. And I knew that. And that didn't appeal to me. So I felt like I needed to do something. And so I went to community college. I went to Kirkwood Community College. Yeah. Kegwood. And I, it's a good, that's a good, if you want a cheap, if you want a cheap two-year education to transfer to a four-year school, it's an excellent program. And they've done,

they've done great things. I just was not a good student. And, I didn't have good motives of going there. The most valuable thing that I learned there was how to drink beer out of a funnel with a garden juice because I hadn't done that until I went to Perkwood. I had a really good time there, but I didn't really learn anything. And the problem was that all I really wanted to do was farm.

Well, you also, I remember you telling me this too, like seeing your older brother do business, that intrigued you a little bit. like you didn't know if you wanted to do a little bit of business or you wanted to come back and farm so i feel like if we self-reflect on these great 50 years you've had yeah i think you've always kind of you when school wasn't for you you weren't really a good student because it just didn't interest you and i was the same way i just was trying to get by and i didn't care really because it just didn't fill me up but you always you always liked farming

you always like business and that intrigued you and yeah yeah um i think i think that That was at the time, too, that my father, my dad, our relationship wasn't the best at that point. It was probably, you know, about as bad as it would get, being a teenager of that age where you think you know everything, and you've got a really old father who's pretty conservative, and you don't think he knows anything. And so, you know, I, this was at the very beginning of the expansion in the hog business, and guys were starting to get bigger. and I think that if I was a little bit, I think if I was a little more sure of myself

and not as intimidated with my dad, I probably would have set them both down and said, you know, all I want to do is stay here and farm and I think we can make this deal work. But I didn't do that. I went to Kirkwood for a year, and then I realized really quick when I was up there that the best way for me,

to make my way in the world was do what I had passion for. And I didn't really have passion for business as far as going to work for some company. I wanted to farm. I wanted to raise pigs. And I knew that it was changing. And I knew that guys were growing. And I felt like it was time, it was time to kind of pick, yep, decide. And so I came home that spring. And I came home that spring. I think if I wouldn't have decided to stay home, somebody at Kirkwood probably would have called and said, you need to get out. He doesn't really need to come back.

But so I stayed home and started farming with my dad, and we had 160 sows, fair to finish. And that was right when we'd had Suda rabies. And what is that? It was kind of like, Sudea rabies was kind of the forerunner, I guess I'd say it's a little like what PERS is today. So it's a disease for pigs.

It's a disease for pigs. And they had a really hard time eradicating it. So there was a vaccine for it. And were your pigs outside at the time? No, we were all inside. We had all our pigs in confinement. So our first hog buildings were built 72 and then 74 and 75. And so we were fair to finish, but we had all the pigs on one site.

And I convinced my dad, and we had all farmers hybrid. Farmers Hybrid, which is out of business today. And if anybody out there has a large farmer's hybrid boar power sign that they would like to part with, I would love to talk to you because I've been trying to find one for years. What was that? So it was a genetics company. Okay. But they were a, they were a whole different.

So PIC, DeKalb were two of the big companies then. and they were taking the hogs leaner. They were using York Landrace sows, and basically they were pushing the idea of using that white female, and then they were using a hampt Durok cross boar. Farmers hybrid, and they were more on lean, they were geared towards getting a pig leaner because that was the whole beginning of pork, the other white meat.

We thought we were going to have to compete with chicken, and so we had to get these pigs leaner. we had to get them leaner. Well, we ended up getting them too lean and the meat lost its flavor and that's why we're back where we are. That's why we're not in Chick-fil-A. Right.

I mean, that's, I mean, really, that's it. They took the shortcut. Yeah. Well, I mean, they worked hard on it. Yeah. It just didn't turn out to be... Yeah, it's not a shortcut, but it's just a wrong decision.

Farmers hybrid was they had a lot of Poland, China, Durrock, ham, they didn't have a lot of white color in them. Mm-hmm. And in their heyday, People were buying pigs on yield, not on percent lean. And farmers hybrid were very good for that yield, not on percent. So, to someone that has no idea what that means.

Yield is basically, if you take a pig and you weigh that pig live and he weighs two, just say he weighs 300 pounds. He weighs 300 pounds. And then you take everything off the pig that isn't meat, that you can't sell as meat. So you take, you can sell just about everything but the squeal out of a pig, but if you take all the bone, you take the bones out that aren't included in the rib cut, or bone in ham or whatever that. You take the skin off. All that stuff. You take, yeah, all that stuff off. So what's left? What's left. And you divide what's left by the total weight. The difference is the yield. So seven. They're all about that selling point. Sevent. Seventy-seven percent yield. Well, then. people started want to talk about how much fat was in the meat, how thick the fat was around the loin, and percent lean. So they came up with this idea of selling pigs grade and yield. So grade and

yield was the percentage was the yield, but also the grade was how lean. And that was when they had the lino meter. So they started coming out with technology. Technology started making its way into these plants where they had a machine that measured the fat, measured the back fat. Okay, farmers hybrid. And then farmers hybrid, they had problems with pseudorabies, and they had a heck of a time getting it out. Anyway, basically they were old technology. They were old technology.

They didn't innovate. They didn't innovate. And so they ended up going out of business, basically. But we were all farmers hybrid. And then when I came home, I convinced my dad that we should go repop, depop, so we got rid of all the pigs, washed everything out, let it set, and we reprop. We brought in Canbro 15 gilts from PIC, and we bred them. And then the other thing we changed was at that time, we were continuously farrowing.

So literally what we did is every week we would go over to the sow building, and my dad would walk through and we'd look at the sows, and we'd find all the ones that we thought were going to pharaoh that week, and we'd count them up, and then we'd go to the salle. to the farrowing house and we'd be like all right well we need to move this many sows out yeah when you make space so then we'd go over to the finishing building and we'd look at all the pigs and we'd like well this is how many pigs we think we can sell i think we can sell you know these four pens out of the finisher so we'd call up you had to constantly making space for what was happening at the sow barn so every

week we would sell how many pigs we needed to to oscar mire in washington and um we if that was one straight truck load, or if it was two straight truck loads, whatever it was, and then we'd move pigs from our grower to our finisher, from our nursery to our grower, and then we'd we'd we'd we'd we'd whine how many pigs, take those sows out, wash that many crates, and then we'd put in those sows. And sometimes it worked really good, and then sometimes we would find a sow that we feroed in the pen and we would get all the pigs gathered up, and then we'd quick, we'd quick, double up pigs, and, you know, it was, it was something. But that's how it's how it you know, that's how we did it. It was continuous, continuous flow. And we went to grouping them.

We bred them in groups, and then we started pregg checking, and we started keeping better records, and we started getting better, you know, getting better at keeping track of stuff. And then we, that was in, uh, were you making good money? Was that the way it was, that was a good way off your grain farming operation is to? Yeah, we were feeding the corn to, the pigs and you know my dad had raised us three boys put us through school bought us cars um all that off of basically off of 160 acres and 160 sows fair to finish yep so it's a good business it was a good great business it was and nobody kept good well we didn't keep good records all we knew was when we needed money we sold pigs and or we needed the room we sold pigs i mean that's pretty much how

we went we got the pigs as big as we could get till we needed the room right um And then my dad got the opportunity to buy the meek place, which that's where our site two or our site one is and that's where your building is. Yep. We got the opportunity to buy 240 acres that had been in the family up the chain of ways and we bought that. And that was in about 80. I want to say that was 88. I think that was like when I was a junior. And so I'll tell you a good story. in ninth so I came back and we did that and we'd gone you know a couple years and you were like this is it this is what I needed yep and I thought we're going to make this thing is going to go and I wanted to get bigger I wanted to get bigger so there was a neighbor of ours that he had a he had a

little place about four miles away from us and he had 120 sows fair to finish and he raised breeding stock for Premier. And, well, his name was Gary Ledger. So if any of you that are listening, Gary, Gary, I think is working, I think he still works for PSI, but he lives up in West Des Moines. But anyway, Gary grew up here and was a neighbor mine. And anyway, he found an opportunity to buy a place over by Williamsburg. And so he was selling his farm, big four square house, and he had 120 south

fair to finish. And I was like, that's the thing to do. That's the thing to do. And I was dating my wife at the time, and we went and looked at it, and she was eager to get out of her parents' house, and I was eager to, you know, blaze my own trail. And we were banking, the bank that we were banking with was very high on the hog business, and we could make it cash flow. and my grandpa gave me $10,000 to help with a down payment, and we bought that in the fall of 1992, and then Trish and I got married fall of 1993.

We moved in there first of January, and we lived in sin for eight months, and, yeah, I think that's right, because we got married that fall. and I bought my gilts and I kept them down here at this place. In fact, I kept them in this barn. And we bred down here. And when I moved in January and we moved the sows up there, I started Farrowan like in February.

So you had sows and he and your grandpa had sows. We both had sows and 140 here and 140 there. 160 there and 120 or 160 here and 120 up there. Okay. And that was in 93. And if any of you remember, 92 going in 93, hogs were about $70, $100, $70 a hundred weight.

And we were making great money, and I was 23 in 90, I was 22 and 92. So I thought I had the world by the tail. And we cash flowed all that at $42 or something like that. And man, it was going to work so good. And we did. and then we went through 94 and then we came to 95 and 95 hog market went to crap hog market crashed yeah it went it went to crap and it didn't go

it wasn't terrible but it was pretty bad so how many years did you do it so you had your sows and grandpa it is too so 93 to 95 so you had like two years two years and that was you were like oh yeah i made the right decision. Yep, yep. And you know what? Here's the other thing, though. I was, we, nobody told us. Like, it's so weird.

Like, we got married and we set up house and all of my schooling of her and me and my parents and her parents, nobody ever set us down and told us, you need to save all the money you can. don't buy anything stupid. And I grew up in a family where my mom, my dad worked all the time, and he didn't do the books, my mom did. And if we had the money, he didn't care what you bought.

And if we didn't have the money, we didn't buy it. But when I was spoiled, I was spoiled rotten, and when Trish and I got married, we lived, I mean, we didn't live extravagantly at all because we knew we didn't have money. But as far as eating out and as far as if we wanted a new shirt or we wanted this or that, we didn't worry about it. And if Von Marr was giving you a charge card, well, yeah, give me a charge card.

And it all worked fine until the hog market started going to crap. And then things got really tight. And because we never had the conversation, things got really hard between us. because my wife, so Tricia, she didn't grow up on a farm. She didn't know anything about it. She didn't know anything that went on. And she had balanced her own checkbook when she was going to school and buying her own gas and all that.

But the numbers that I wrote, the bills that I wrote, the feed bill, the bill for guilt, the bill for LP, all that, she was just like, the numbers were huge to her. and she was just overwhelmed. And so she basically just left it to me to do it all. And it was tough because... So 95 hits. 95 hits.

Not that bad of a crash, but it was a crash. It was bad enough that we got... Concerned. We got woke up. Yep. And my dad and I knew that we had to figure out a more efficient way to do it. And so we made the decision that we were going to put all the sows down here and take our nurseries out and move them to my place,

and then we were still going to finish at both sites because we had finishers at both sites. So we combined the sows, and we had 240 sows, fair to finish is what we had here. And we'd haul the pigs up there and nursery them, and then if we needed to finish them, we'd haul them back down here.

Or up, whichever place. Yeah, if you needed to bring them down here, you would have to finish them out. And we, that worked pretty good. but purrs, we started getting purrs, that was when that all started, and it was hard to keep sow's bread. We were, you know, we were pen-mating pigs, and we started A-Ion pigs, and there was a group of guys that started a-bore stud, and we bought a-bore and put it in a-stud, and we started A-Ion, and our conception rate wasn't good, and we had problems here and there, and so production,

the production was never great. It was okay, but then we got into 98, and 98 was just a absolute train wreck. And at one point, 98, I was pretty sure that I was going to lose the farm up there, that my wife was going to leave me, and I wasn't sure whether or not my parents who were, my dad was, by normal standards,

my dad was elderly at that point. He wasn't because he worked, He could outwork me, but it was stressful. It was very stressful. So 98 was another hog market. And 98 was the wake-up call that this deal wasn't going to work.