Odd Lots - How a Vibecoded Newsletter Is Making the Hay Market More Transparent

Episode Date: June 12, 2026

The hay market is not a transparent market: It is very fractured by types of hay, whether it is alfalfa or clover hay. There are a few opaque, illiquid markets like this — scrap metal for instance — that require some hands-on investigating to figure out. Aiden Johnson is co-founder and CEO of the HayWire newsletter, which aims to make the hay market more transparent: He and co-founder Cole Glasgow use an AI model to mine public data sources — like USDA reports on auction prices across different regions — to produce a weekly newsletter on the hay market. On this episode, we speak with Johnson as he explains why he chose hay over other kinds of markets, how HayWire was made possible through vibecoding, networking with hay farmers, why the ROI of owning a horse is dropping with hay prices spiking, and why hay demand keeps on tightening.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts Radio News. Oh, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Wisenthel. Joe, I was lurking on the Homestead subreddit recently, as one does. As Tracy Alley does.

There have been a number of posts recently about hay prices and hay getting more expensive. And the craziest thing is, there's one guy, one poster, who keeps talking about hay prices, and on one of his post, someone came in and said, they commented, you should go on all thoughts. I love episodes that come about that way. All right, can I make a little confession here? Please.

I've done no prep for this episode. I mean, I, you know, I'm often not as diligent as you are, but I was just like, you know what? I know that hay exists. I've seen it in bales. I figure something is dried. I know it's consumed. I've done no research. You know a little bit.

I've just decided, yeah. You know a little bit about hay though? Because we spoke with that was in New Mexico or Arizona now? I can't remember. The farmer growing alfalfa. Yeah. It's like fermented, right? Isn't hay like sort of like fermented and dried or something?

Yeah, something like that. I mean, I guess well. But one of the reasons it's good to grow hay in the desert is because you don't have to worry about it getting wet in the drying process. Yeah. Oh, right. I did. We did learn that. All right.

So that's the one hay fact that we all know. So we're going to be talking about hay prices today. I can't wait. But beyond that, I find the hay market really interesting because there are. No, seriously. No, I believe you. I believe you. There aren't that many markets out there nowadays that are like non-transparent, I want to say.

Do we have any hay indices on the terminal? There's a PPI index. Oh, it is. Yeah. Okay. So you can look up like alfalfa hay pPI.i. So how's that been looking? I assume, I mean, everything is up.

I just like, if you name something that exists in the world, it's probably up. But what is U.S. hay seeds? Yeah. Well, no, I don't know. Is this even up to date? I can't even find one. I don't know. But this is what I mean.

Like, it is not a transparent market. It's very fractured by type of hay. So I didn't realize this, but there's like Timothy, there's alfalfa, there's supreme hay. So I'm just going to say, like I said, I haven't done any, I don't know anything about hey. I decided I would just learn it all on the fly. But I also, I did do a little bit of research about our upcoming guest who you identified. The guy posting on Reddit.

The guy posting. And I have said this, his business is very cool. And we'll talk about it. But I just want to say the business that he has built in terms of like becoming the man who knows about hey is advice have given to young journalists who have like asked me. like for career. I've literally said this. And I'm going to drop some alpha. No. Alfa. I'm going to drop some alfalfa alpha here. And but now it'll be commoditized by the time we say it. I've always thought that one way you could like build a business as a young journalist or someone is find a piece of public data that exists that is out there that is consumable for free

that nobody is regularly looking at. Gather it. Beards. Beards. Be it. become the central repository for it and then occasionally comment on it. There's all kinds of data in the world. A million public agencies of all sorts are producing monthly reports on this or that and PDFs that nobody is looking at. And if you say, you know what, I want to learn about X and I want to end a newsletter, update what X is doing each week or month or whatever, you can become the man, the X on this topic.

And the guests that you have found for today's episode, I think has done. exactly what I've told numerous young individuals to do. So we'll see if this, I'm curious about hey, but I'm also curious about this individual's business model. It's a good market structure story and I guess technology stories. And a media story. Yeah, exactly. All right. So without further ado, we do in fact have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Aden Johnson. He is the founder of, can you guess? Well, you know what the company is. Haywire, right? Haywire. It's so good. It's such a good name for what this company actually does. So Aiden, thank you so much for coming on odd lots. Yeah, I appreciate you guys having me on. So why don't we start with the basics? What is it

that Haywire is actually doing? Yeah, so essentially what we are doing and kind of what we built our business around is pulling public data, just like Joe said, and kind of putting it all on plain English newsletters for our subscribers. So, I mean, USDA publishes reports weekly, biweekly, and then even monthly, depending on region. So we kind of built up. a system and a technology and our model to kind of do all the hard work for us and then analyze it and put it on to plain English. So it's been a great, great, I don't know, like lesson, I guess, learning going through the flaws, making sure we're producing the most accurate data. But no, it's been fun. Well, let's go into this a little bit more. And I'm sure that AI makes the process

of collecting and absorbing the relevant data easier. But what are these reports? out there that you're able to mine. Who's producing them? What is the sort of the public data source that you're mining? And what can you pull from it? Yeah. So we actually have a direct API integration with the USAA. So we get live feed strictly from them.

And that basically funnels into our four system type of, I guess you could say, verification. And so we're mining that, which publishes every week. But the problem we're kind of running into is that. Sorry, when you say that we're mining that, what is this report? Let's go step by step. What is this report that the USDA publishes every week? Yeah, so the USDA is publishing basically auction prices throughout the region, throughout the countries.

So every auction house will report kind of what they're paying or what they're seeing on the ground there. And then it'll be put on a PDFs, but buried in PDF. So it's kind of hard for people to find. Yeah. So you actually call up some of the auction houses. By the way, I didn't even realize there were auctions for hay. But you call them up to get additional pricing information as well, right? Yeah.

So we actually have Rock Valley, Iowa, Rock Valley Hay Auction as our primary data partner, which is one of the biggest hay auctions in the country. So having them to kind of get intel from what they're seeing on the ground to kind of cover the gray area between the USDA data and then the live market, what people are actually seeing on the ground. And we are actively trying to, you know, brand. off a network to more auction houses throughout the country to different regions so we can kind of get a forecast what's actually happening there.

Joe, this reminds me of the old scrap metal market, right? Where like you had a broker who actually had to call up all these junkyards and ask what price they were selling. I don't know if that's still the case, but it might actually still be the case. Yeah. And I remember 11 or 12 years ago, like very early on when I joined Bloomberg talking to one of our reporters, she would base in London, who was covering scrap metal. And she talked about that part of it was essentially calling up the scrapyards and saying,

what did you price for? And of course, you know, it's not that different from LIBOR, right? It's not like we think of something like these very opaque, illiquid markets like scrap metal. But that fundamental idea of we're going to ring people up or get an email or something and then triangulate the data is how some of the most, you know, famous liquid markets there are. That's the alpha, alfalfa. That's the, yes. Calling people up. Calling people up.

Wait, so just on these reports that the USDA publishes, I assume A, it's not, is it just a hay report? And do they just publish price data or volume data or quality data? Is there anything else that like, what are the, what is the context with which you pull this data from? Yeah, so there's many sources that we can pull our data from, but specifically on the USDA data. It'll show the region, the type of bail, the weight, you know, the quality of hay or alfalfa that's producing. So, and that automatically goes into our database. And it kind of makes it easy for us. So when we take on ground intel that we can put it through our data wheel and it's able to,

you know, cross-reference it with the USDA data and the table, it kind of presets. So we're able to make sure it's not, the data that's coming from the ground is, you know, valuable and actually not hallucinations, I guess. You know, I know we're going to get to Hay specifically, but just as we're talking about sort of this business model. There have been some really successful, you know, I think like it might be flight radar 24. One of these other things that was worth a lot of money was essentially some people who found a really good way to visualize or present. Yeah.

Data that was already public, but it's opaque, et cetera. And so I'm very fascinated by this business model of like there's all this data out there. And if you put a nice skin on it. User interface still matters. And then you make a user interface and actually like, let me just see the price or let me just see the map that it's. it's moving on can suddenly be a very monetizable thing. Well, I expect with vibe coding, it's going to become more common as well. So, Aidan, why did you decide to get into this particular project?

If you don't mind me saying so, like, you look, you look very young. I assume you're a young founder of Haywire. Why was this your first project? Your passion project. Oh, man. Well, if you were to tell me this last year, I wouldn't believe you because the idea was kind of thrown out by my dad who was actually looking to start a startup company for Alfalfa cubes. And throughout that process, he kind of needed, he was crunching number. And he asked the question, what is the cost of hay to find that raw materials price?

So that's kind of how it all started. And he's like, Aidan, you know, you should probably like start this. It's a great idea. And, you know, at the time, I'm like, okay, come on. I'm 19 years old. I'm a college basketball player. I don't really care about hay. which year was this was what year was 2025 okay oh okay so this this conversation happened in 2025 and at the time

you know i'm i'm a college basketball player um i don't really care about hey but you know i always knew i wanted to kind of get into entrepreneurship i guess and i'm like dad you know you know you know i want to run a business but you know hey is definitely not going to get me a girlfriend so that's kind of how it started and that's kind of how it started and that's kind of how it started And, you know, as I got to college, I was introduced to kind of AI, which kind of started out as, you know, vibe coding websites for local businesses. And then I actually, my co-founder, Cole, who is very intelligent with the AI, we kind of just started working together about it to get to the more agentic and automation type of AI. So that kind of started a rapid hole. I'm like, which kind of started out as a vibe code project with no infrastructure or no system at all, kind of turned into something we thought.

We knew that was reachable. So we kind of got into that. You know, just we basically hop on a call every day, deciding how we can improve our product, improve our technology so we can produce the best volume. And you know, the haymarket is very untransparent, I guess you could say. So we found a problem. You know, first week of college classes in the business class,

you're going to learn, okay, you need to find a problem and then a solution to start a successful business. And that's kind of how it all came about. and, you know, we've been kind of attacking it every day. And I'm very grateful for my dad to ask the question, what is the price of alpha and hay? Do you have a girlfriend now? Did you get one yet? Absolutely not.

So people ask what type of business you run. And I just say, I try to, you know, mask it as something really intelligent. Like, yeah, I run a market intelligent AI infrastructure company and not just a market, hey market company. So no, in the process. All right. Well, odd lots, listeners in Minnesota. Eligible young bachelor, 20 years old. We're just putting it out there. Maybe we can do some matchmaking for you.

Just had your dad had this idea, I don't know, had this been 10 years earlier, like orders of magnitude, would this have been doable at all to you and your co-founder in a real way prior to AI and vibe coding as we know it? Oh, no, 10 years ago, I don't think I would even scratch the surface of getting to the death I am here now. And that's just simply because I think the infrastructure of AI is getting smarter and smarter every day. And it makes it able for, you know, two young 20-year-olds like me and my co-founder Cole to, you know, mess around and create a whole company and platform. So, yeah, I don't think it would be, it would probably take a big team 10 years ago. Tritia, I already want to be Aiden Johnson. Like everything about this is just like so cool to me.

Like in my next life, this is my plan. Well, go out and find that niche market. Find your hay. That's right. Find your alfalfa. Yeah. What is your hay? Pursue your Timothy dream.

Okay, well, why don't we actually get to hay prices? So first of all, if I try to look up hay prices, I'm definitely going to haywire, but setting haywire aside, what am I trying to find? Is there a benchmark hay price out there? the way there is, you know, when we talk about U.S. stocks, we talk about the S&P 500 or another index like the Dow Jones. Is there a particular hay price I should be looking at? You know, not really. The USDA NASS is what it's called will, you know, produce kind of an average cost of hay. So right now I'm looking at, hey, for April, it's $180 per ton, which is up $167 for March.

And then for the alfalfa side of things, it's $185 a ton, which is up from $175 since March. So essentially, I was talking to Levi-Russ at Rock Valley, and I was kind of explaining this issue. And I'm like, how do people really know what they're paying for hay? And like, what do they benchmark it against? Because, you know, people aren't really going into those USDA PDF files unless you kind of have a degree in economics and, you know, have the time to find it. So I kind of talked to him and he's like, yeah, actually we have a lot of people in our region, Rock Valley specifically is in the Midwest, use their auction data as the benchmark of kind of what Hay is going for. So the crazy thing about the Hay market is what I realized is not just one market. It's like fragmented markets across the whole country.

Every market, every regional market is very hyper local simply because transportation costs are a lot. you can't domestically transport it across the country. And then you think, like, there's so many inputs how it affects the quality of hay to, you know, produce the output. You know, Minnesota, hey, may not be the same as California hay in terms of price because it's just all very hyper local markets. Pride month, Toronto. Pride is an opportunity for you to create your own space. to celebrate your existence. IHeart Radio is proud to be an official sponsor of Pride Toronto Festival,

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Just don't know the girlfriend. You're 6'6 and you can dunk about it. basketball, I see on Twitter. Okay, sorry. I'm just, Oh, you're really doing all you can to help here, Joe. I'm looking at his Twitter profile. And you can dunk. I'm really impressed. I wish I couldn't. I appreciate that. Appreciate it. Yeah, no, it's really cool. Let's talk about these, to what degree, all right, there's this lack of transparency and there's this wide variety of prices regionally, which again is not unlike many other commodity. I mean, even oil, obviously.

has regional price variations, the cost of shipping is going to affect it. But, you know, we talked about this with lumber with Stinson Dean as an example. To what degree are they generally correlated across the country? Like, will they generate, well, prices generally rise and fall around the same time, even if there are wide gaps in the, you know, wide spreads from one region to another? Yeah. So there is a bunch of different factors to kind of how different regions can, you know, know, be affected by markets. I mean, you think of what's kind of going on in the West right now

with the drought kind of going on. Forty-six percent of the U.S. alfalfa acreage is actually in a drought. So you might see some demand coming from the West, maybe moving east, but actually I was kind of looking into this the other day. And it's, I was like kind of looking at the East Coast kind of, because I don't really, like there's not really much out there, I guess, for hey, I mean, there's a lot hobby farms. And it's like small square. markets out there. But it's kind of its own ecosystem because it's cool because it won't really feel the effects of the drought from the West simply because transportation is a big factor in that because you're not going to ship or transport hay that far because it just it will eventually

cost more than the actual value of the hay simply because, you know, these brokers, these dealers will charge anywhere from $5 to $8 per mile to have it ship. So that can easily average to be more valuable than hay. So it's kind of weird. So yeah, I guess. So if I'm in a location, one of the drought-stricken states, drought-stricken states, that's hard to say. I'm reading the USDA, one of the USDA reports right now, and it says, hey, prices continue to increase as ranchers search for hay. Are you seeing people who are trying to, like, bulk buy or secure supply ahead of more price increases?

I mean, yeah, I'm seeing right now and, you know, just talking with farmers kind of networking across the country. I'm seeing people are trying to get their stockpile for summer. I'm hearing that first cut is being extremely light. The yields are not really producing it at a volume. And carryover from 2025 is essentially gone. Sorry. I actually did find, if you search on the terminal, Tracy, if you search USDA hay prices by state, then you can find some fairly regularly updated price indices.

So I have to say, like, I mean, I understand you have a great business going, but if any listeners just want to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a Bloomberg terminal, they can also. Any farmers out there want to look up pay prices. Bloomberg actually offers a haywire competitor. You just get a bunch of other stuff. You're probably not interested. But, no, but this gets to my, so like, this is another important business question.

anyone can collect data and produce it. Then you have to find people who will purchase it from you. And this is the other half of business. Some people are in the house produced and some people sell. How do you go about finding farmers or growers or anyone in the business, anyone in the chain? How do you get them to discover haywire? I guess just network and obviously discovery, a big part of that has been on the homestead Reddit, we're Tracy kind of bound everything, but, you know, just actively reaching out to them, I guess,

kind of just showing them, okay, this is what we're trying to do, trying to, trying to be that transparency layer just to kind of make your guys's local markets a little easier for you and not kind of guessing and buying blind and selling blind. So we're basically going to them and we're like, okay, this has no cost for you. Just like kind of tell us what you're seeing so we can provide that clarity and transparency for, you know, hay prices. You know, we're not going to fix the whole transparency issue like we were going to try but probably won't but we just at least want to make it a little more transparent for your local region you know these farmers know their regional market like the back of their hand and especially these old gen farmers they're not really going to adapt to technology like that

so it's been kind of difficult trying to get them to adapt to be like okay like this is technology nowadays like this can actually really help your business so honestly just networking with them providing you know, kind of the data we're seeing and kind of the value and telling them that there's no really cost to just kind of sharing me your data. So Tracy mentioned the sort of timing of purchases or people trying to accumulate or stockpile. At times of high stress, when prices are really high again, maybe due to a drought or whatnot, do you see farmers essentially expanding their geographical search? So such that they start buying hay from a an auction house or a hay firm or whatever that wouldn't normally be under typical conditions

economical for them to purchase from yeah you know i i actually had this question the other day and i was on a call with rock valley my my main go-to guy and i was like are you guys seeing any shipping or any transactions coming from more west of you yeah i just kind of i was kind of testing a hypothesis of okay so the drought is very tight over in these western states our buyers coming over to these eastern states and producing it because we did see a spike kind of in auction data. We kind of covered it a little bit, maybe on the Reddit, but we called it kind of the Missouri pattern. It was kind of a hypothesis we were testing. So it basically is, so after we figured out that the drought and, you know, supply is very, very tight there in the western states, we started

watching those Western Midwest states. So we saw demand and or prices in Missouri go up and that like, okay, well, we'll keep an eye on it. And then the next week we saw Rock Valley's prices kind of spike a little bit. And they're like, okay, so maybe there is some demand coming over from there. And then the next week we saw, you know, go up a little bit again. So it's kind of what we're seeing right now. I can't confirm fully if it's true because auction house we track in Missouri posts their data monthly.

So and then Rock Valley's weekly. So it's just kind of cool, like I guess I'm kind of, it's like a Lego set. I'm kind of just like building piece by piece. And it's like a puzzle trying to solve the puzzle. Okay. So talk to us. I know you're not in agriculture directly, but I'm sure you've heard some things about this. Talk to us about the second order effects of higher hay prices.

And here I got a shout out our fellow Bloomberg podcaster, Katie Greifeld, who has a horse. And so I asked her if she had like noticed any changes in hay prices. and she said like the cost of boarding had gone up because of hay prices. Boarding. Oh, yeah, yeah, right, right. And then I saw another headline just before we recorded this podcast about a horse sanctuary in Texas on the brink of closure because of rising hay prices and also gas. So are people feeling the effects of these higher prices?

Yeah, absolutely. Just talking with farmers and even horse owners across the country, I personally, my family owns horses so I can kind of see this firsthand. But yeah, I've been talking to a lot of farm or horse owners and they're basically saying we love our horse so much. But the return on investment on horses right now is just like it's too, it's too expensive. No, I'm paying so much to maintain a horse and we don't know like exactly what we're going to do because it's so expensive. But and then on the other side of things, some dairy houses, these these dairies are going to be the ones buying the higher quality RFV alfalfa to, you know, feed these cows that are

producing 80 pounds of milk a day. And they're actually taking that high higher quality RFV and then mixing it with lower quality RFV to, you know, control their rations and, you know, maybe create a little more volume. So especially with these crazy high prices, they can kind of control their, their volume a little more. And then on top of that, I was talking to a farmer the other day. And he said, so he went to go put his hay up up in the auction. But he actually pulled it back because the demand for hay was getting so increasingly, like it was getting really tight. And he needed the hay.

So he's kind of predicting it to get even tighter. So yeah, as I can tell, a lot of people are kind of feeling the outcomes of these high, hay prices. Just to back up, for example, so you mentioned horses, cows also eat hay, right? Yes, yes. So cows will eat. There's different types of qualities. I guess you could say.

Walk through us. Did you say something like RFD? What was the term used? Like higher. What was it? RFV, relative feed value. Okay. Which basically is,

which could, I think I'm pretty sure it controls or it, it gets the protein contents and the fiber in the, the hay. And it's, it's a base of 100. So anything like 150, I think is pretty good.

Below that, you can see the lower quality hay. So like I said, the dairies are going to be using that higher quality alfalfa and Supreme Hay, higher RFV to have their cows on the best. And then you're going to have the eclient people, the horses also using this higher quality stuff because they love their horses and they only want what's best for their horses. And then you have the lower quality type of stuff, which is going to go to like the utility and fair, which is going to go to your beef, which is just a cheap. way to beef up your cow for a cheaper price instead of paying the premium alfalfa.

And then, yeah, there's there's so many different qualities. Yeah, yeah, just real quickly. So hay made out of alfalfa's high quality. What is low quality hay mode made out of? Yeah, so low quality hay, which will be lower RFV. I'm pretty sure, you know, I'm not a farm kid, but I'm pretty sure it's the amount of dryness and the protein contents. So when it rains, rain affects a lot.

You have to have a dry week or forecast to produce or cut hay. And if it rains, rain can decrease the protein and nutritional value in the hay. I think the lower quality stuff is drier and doesn't have the leaf content that the higher quality stuff does. Because that's where the protein is in the leaf. And then the fiber comes from the stem. Pride is like love. You feel it in your heart. IR. Radio.

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and how you think about your bottom line. Listen to the big take from Bloomberg News every weekday afternoon on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts are you seeing anyone devote more acreage to growing hay as a result of these high prices because i'm kind of thinking i got i got two fields they're not doing anything except growing invasive weeds at the moment um maybe i could rent them out for hay production yeah you know i'm not i'm not really seeing that but um i'm not really sure on that one if i'm seeing people doing that but i actually was thinking about this other day, kind of driving past 20 minutes south of me. I was driving on the

highway. And I realized that Google was actually going to build a 482 acre data center 20 minutes south of me. And I was like thinking, how will this affect the agricultural land? I mean, you know, it's already not a lot of people are alfalfa's kind of in a weird spot. And hey, because they're already competing against other crops, you know, the more stable crops like corn and soybean. So how are these data centers going to, you know, they're going to go in agricultural land. So kind of vice versa. you were saying, how are they going to take away this agricultural land? And

you know, I was kind of thinking too. The 482 acre data center Google's building here is going to be cooled by air. But what if you put those kind of in the western states and where the drought conditions are? And alfalfa's already a very water intrusive plant.

So then alfalfa is going to have to be competing with these big data centers for water. I really, I really I'm really seeing kind of the flip side of it kind of, kind of just what I'm seeing personally. So, but yeah, you did mention you had 75 acres. And I think you do have four different options from when I know. That's kind of the next niche I kind of want to get into because once again, it's kind of like the hay.

My dad's kind of going through the same process. He just closed on 164 acre farm here. And he had the question of I don't really know what to do with it. But I don't know. I'm not an expert on it yet. But I do know there's a couple options. you can rent it out to your farm or to farmers basically like rent per acre and then you can the USDA will basically pay you to conserve it and then the downside of that is you probably lose

your land or access to your land for 25 to 35 years and then the third choice is kind of the money crop right now I guess you can these solar panel companies are coming in to maybe place solar panels on your fields for a huge chunk of change but also are you okay with, you know, putting solar panel on appreciating farmland. So, I mean, there's, there's a couple options. And like you said, you can also start growing hay or grow every crop is producing the most money, I guess. So there's some options that that's as much as I know right now. But yeah, it's pretty interesting. Tracy, have you considered putting a data center on your land? You know, is that something? You know, you could put maybe half the land solar

panels and then they could power a data center on the other. That's right. So many, it's like, a jackpot episode of like things that we're interested in. Well, the solar panel thing is true, because in the Northeast where I'm based some of the time, I see a lot of farms that are now like just solar panels. Really? Huge fields of solar panels. Wow. They're so big. In fact, whenever I drive past one, it's so big. It looks like a body of water off in the distance. Oh, that's kind of beautiful. I don't know. I mean, it's interesting. Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, it's interesting. How big is the hay market, just generally? Like, what do we, like, again, I don't know, like, yeah, how big is it volume-wise, dollar-wise, all that stuff?

Yeah, so the hay market is actually pretty, pretty dang big. I mean, you have hay acreage covering 49 to 50 million acres across the U.S. And itself, alfalfa itself, is producing $8 billion per year, which is the fourth most valuable crop. And that kind of brings my question back to, so it's pretty, pretty big, you know, market commodity. And there's not really a firm transparency layer. So yeah, it's, it's really big. Are you still in college? Yep. I just finished my first two years at the University of Jamestown. I'm going into my third. Oh, wow. Okay. So what, you know, you're juggling a business as well as college. What's next for Haywire? You mentioned like maybe evaluating different options for land.

owners, but where do you want to take this? Yeah. So I guess like I said, the main goal is kind of be on top of, you know, the kind of hay chain. You know, you got your producers, your farmers, and then you got your brokers. We kind of want to be at the top, you know, being the benchmark data for these prices regionally. So we just want to be that information layer on the top and, you know, just providing this information to these farmers so they can kind of make better decisions based off a timing and then based off of what the market's actually seeing in their region. You know, I would, I like the newsletter. I kind of like hearing people connect, connecting to people.

I love answering my emails and kind of picking people's brains. And then we would, we would eventually like to also be, you know, just kind of more the business side of things, you know, give someone maybe our API database and they can use it for their website. You know, that's kind of a business plan, not necessarily what we want out of the hay market. But yeah, that's kind of what we want to do. just build that transparency layer a little better. You know, we work for a company that sort of I mean, really, I started under like the same premise. So like that you literally, you know, you could, you could want this could one day be a fortune 500 company for you. I mean,

this, the idea of like, find agricultural database. Yeah, find some data niche. Make it built layer on top. I have a confession. Yeah. Um, so when I started first planning this business, our motto was the Bloomberg for Hay. There we go. There we go. You know, we've had, so can I say something? We've had people come on. I've seen the Bloomberg of X, Bloomberg of Watt. People always say this. This I find to be legitimate. You know what I'm saying? Everyone wants to be the Bloomberg of something. But when I think about how you're like building this from the ground up, et cetera, like you didn't even have to say it. It was like you're building the, uh, potentially the Bloomberg of Hay. One day you may have a TV network. Could we have a pay futures based on if we had

So that's a question. I mean, this is, that's clearly a theoretical way, which is like, you can't have a hedgeable, tradable, financialized market until you first have that index, right? Something that everyone agrees on as a reference price. At night, when you dream about the future, like, could you see, have you thought about the possibility of essentially, okay, this could be something that financial exchanges could now benchmark something against? You know, I have thought about it, but it's also very tricky because you have to have Mother Nature on your side to kind of standardize or like make it more stable, I guess. It's very unstable. I mean, too much drought, too much rain, you know, too much heat, like all these different inputs can really have effects on the outputs.

That just makes it so unpredictable. You know, but this is why we need a, this is why we need a hedgeable instrument precisely. because of this volatility. So I think, I think there's... Yeah, there's something there. Yeah, there's something there for sure. I would love to be the guy that does that then. So from your perspective, let's say like, you know, opacity is a friend to some people in any business, right? There are a lot of businesses that sort of, you know,

they can have higher margins because their customers aren't aware of the prices available. Like the, you know, obviously the consumer wants more transparency, but some people benefit from the opacity. Is there anyone in the supply chain of hay, et cetera, or in the market for hay that theoretically stands to lose out if customers are, and farmers are more informed about prices? Yeah, absolutely. So this kind of ties back to my dad working for a private brokerage here in my hometown. And I was actually talking about this with him. I said, who kind of, who kind of loses out on this? And he says typically in business, especially commodities, the middleman will always feel

the out or the outcomes of more transparency because they're the ones making deals, especially in the hay market, kind of blindly and kind of just guessing. I mean, I caught, I witnessed firsthand my, I sat there and someone called the owner and was just like, um, can I do 157? This is an example. Can I just do $157 per ton? for you know X amount of bales or tons. Yeah.

And he was like, yeah, yeah, that works. So we're not going off anything here. There's no transparency and that can either work for the broker or that can, you know, maybe make margins a little slimmer. So I do think that the middleman will always, you know, have something to lose with more transparency. All right. Aidan Johnson of Haywire. Thank you so much for coming on odd laws.

That was really fun. Yeah, I appreciate you guys having me on. So Joe, that was a really fun conversation. I mean, it is fascinating to see someone like vibe code this kind of database, right? And it does seem like low hanging fruit for a bunch of other different markets. What I will say, though, is whenever we do these like agricultural or food episodes, there seems to be this overriding theme in recent years, which is volatility. Volatility, right?

We're getting these big spikes. Sometimes we're getting big drops down, although often the drops are not as big as the initial spikes. And so you can see, like, there is a need here, not just for price transparency, but also potentially for some sort of hedging instrument. Totally. Absolutely. I do think there's a lot of probably a lot more data out there. I also just think this is like a very interesting AI story specifically because it's a very clear example of here is a new type of business that might not have been economical to run. Like, you know, maybe there's not tons of subscribers willing to pay up. For sure, you wouldn't have been doing it while you're in college. No, so the pro version, so he's a free version of his newsletter, which I'm going to subscribe to. And there's a pro version. And you know what?

I'll subscribe to that too. It's just $14 a month. But okay, $14 a month is like not a ton of money. Even if you had like, you know, a thousand, you know, it's like, it's not a ton. But if you could do it with two people and if you can automate a really big chunk of it. Yeah. And automated only because AI makes it really easy to do. things like ingest the data, turn them into pretty charts and so forth, keep a database,

give people AI access. Suddenly, there's all these new markets that theoretically could become unlocked simply because here is data out there and you could put it in a usable form in a way that would have just been too laborious prior to it. Yeah, Labelius. Two Labelius. Bales of pay. No, that was a bit forced. I'm sorry. But it's a, it is a clear. example of like, okay, this is a productivity on lock. And I've no doubt that it works. Some things with AI don't work as much, but I'm pretty sure.

But automated, you can feel pretty confident that that's something that you can build, et cetera. I'm very, I think it's really cool. Oh, the price of being a founding member is going to rise to $17 a month after June 30th. So, get it. You're rising along with the hay prices. Yeah. All right. Shall we

leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Oddlots podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Wisenthall. You can follow me at the stalwart. Follow Aidan Johnson. He's at Aden Johnson underscore. And check out Haywire, haywire ag.com. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armid. Dashel Bennett at Dashbot, Kale Brooks at Kail Brooks and Kevin Lazzano at Kevin Lloyd Lazzano. And for more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash oddlots. We have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all of these topics 24-7 in our Discord. Discord.g.s slash oddlots. And if you enjoy oddlots, if you like it when we

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