The Nick Bare Podcast - 009: How A Digital Ad Executive Is Transforming Agriculture - Sam Moffett

Episode Date: April 24, 2023

Today I sit down with Sam Moffett, a former digital advertising executive who left a successful job to pursue his passion for regenerative agriculture. Sam self-funded his farm, Shirttail Creek Farms, and took on the challenges of building a successful business in a new industry in hopes of changing our food ecosystem. Sam's story is of risk-taking and entrepreneurship as he learns how to transform from a city-dwelling executive to a first-generation rancher providing beef, chicken, pork, and eggs to his local community and nationwide. Enjoy the episode! Topics: (00:00) Intro (1:22) BPN Supps (2:20) Starting a new life on the farm (4:10) Sam’s background (8:47) Farming operations (13:54) Regenerative agriculture (19:30) Diet before starting the farm (22:30) Grass-fed popularity (28:00) Grass-fed regulations (37:40) Choosing the hard right (40:00) Grass-fed benefits (44:53) Truth about eggs (51:00) Scaling Shirttail Creek Farms (1:03:50) Direct-to-consumer operations Save 10% at BPN Supps: ⁠https://bit.ly/nickbare10audio⁠ Follow for more: https://www.instagram.com/nickbarefitness/ Keep up with Sam here: IG: https://www.instagram.com/shirttailcreekfarm/Website: https://shirttailcreekfarm.com/

The first year we broke a million dollars in sales, and I think I made like $5,000 in profit. And I was like, oh, man, something's wrong here. Yeah. So when you bought the farm, what was the intent? When I got into digital advertising, I joined a startup. I spent 15 years selling pixels. There was a question as to whether or not I was actually delivering true value to anybody. I saw a business go from two or three million a year in revenues to 37 million in the last year that I was there.

And I went and saw this farm in Elgin. They sell the Whole Foods. And I was like, I could probably do this. My goal with this conversation is to really learn about where your food's coming from. Yes. What kind of regulations are available with grass-fed, grass finish? We don't have any sort of entity that verifies what we're doing. It's important for people that research and ask questions.

What's a goal? Like, where do you want to be with Shirtail in the next couple years? I want there to be an awareness among the people that are doing conventional agriculture to open their minds up about some of these concepts. They get to be 65-70, their back goes out, making the case for regenerative. of agriculture and this style of farming being something that people can aspire to go do. Some smart kid coming out of school or whatever instead of going to work for Goldman Sachs, I want to go pursue this and I'm going to go start an operation doing this.

The more examples there are for people to follow, I think, the more producers there will be that are doing this, and that's going to be a net benefit for the world and our food ecosystems. Before jumping into this episode, I want to thank you for tuning in and spending your time with me. Every watch and listen truly does matter. Now, we've decided to not take on any sponsors for this podcast because we don't want to interrupt your listening experience. But if you do want to support me, you can head over to BPNSups.com for all of your performance, endurance, and wellness supplement needs. We offer a wide range of products from amazing tasting protein powders, effective pre-workouts, green superfoods, multivitamins, sleep support, and much more. I spent the last decade building this brand community and product offering, and I'm extremely

thankful that it has helped so many people. So if you are in need of a new supplement routine, head over to BPNSups.com and use code Nick Bear 10 to save 10% off your order. Now let's jump right into this episode. As a first generation farmer, after spending 15 years in a traditional digital advertising job, what drew you into this new life that you weren't expecting or experiencing in your previous? You know, I spent 15 years selling a product that was pixels. It was not tangible. And at some points in my career, there was a question as to whether or not I was actually delivering

true value to anybody. You know, if you ever had a pop-up on your computer, I might have had something to do with it at one point in time, you know, more than, you know, 15 years ago. And we ran high volumes of ads on mobile apps and websites. And so when I was younger, I would work in an office and watch, you know, consume content about pro surfers or mountain climbers or Patagonia sponsored athletes that were out doing cool stuff or like taking these crazy adventurous trips and climbing, you know, big mountains. And there's something about that, that I wanted that quality in my life, that sense of like pursuing a passion, where it wasn't like, okay, I got to wake up and put my slacks on and go to this meeting and put

together this report and to get a paycheck and try to get a, you know, a bump in pay or a promotion at some point. And I didn't want to be stuck in that. I wanted to be doing something that I was passionate about and that I could, also I wanted there to be some tangibility. I wanted to be able to hold it in my hand and for there to be some sort of artisanal element to, um, to, to what I was creating, you know,

I wanted to be able to stand behind that and, and feel like, hey, this is what we produced and it's really good and we're proud of it. I had Lewis pot or Lewis Howells on the podcast a few weeks ago. And he talked about identity foreclosure. Mm-hmm. Where a lot of people will choose a path in life early on.

And then they quickly arise, well, I've, I've gone to school for, four years for it. I've spent $100,000 in student loans towards it. I might as well suck it up for another 10, 15, 20 years. And you see a lot of people do it where they choose a path and they're five years into it and they realize this is not necessarily the path I want. But they've invested so much financially all this energy, all this time. They just kind of suck it up. Yeah. How early on in your career did you start thinking about something else? Or was it towards the back end of those 15

that you were like, I don't know if this is it. So when I got into digital advertising, I joined a startup that Red McCombs was an investor in. He's a big billionaire from San Antonio. And it was just a really scrappy, disorganized, chaotic mess of a startup. And very few people in that organization knew what they were doing, and which presented an opportunity for me,

like a really hungry 25-year-old to like get in there. And I went from being an assistant media buyer making 35 grand a year to being the VP of media operations, two and a half years later making six figures. It was a weird and quick evolution. But what I learned during that process, and we ended up selling that business. And, you know, I leveraged my,

what I was doing into a small equity position. And what I learned through that whole process was I saw a business go from, you know, two or three million a year in revenues to 37 million the last year that I was there. And I saw what went into that whole evolution. And so what I'm getting at is I learned about being an entrepreneur and what it took to get a business to scale. So I'm in advertising.

I left that business after we completed our contract with the company that bought us and started my own business with my wife, and it was going really well. Well, I was monetizing a very niche part of the advertising world. I'm not going to go off into the minutia of this, but basically we were monetizing in a way that was, we were making money filling a void that was like an inefficiency in the marketplace that just hadn't been addressed. And Google and Facebook, through the creation of their ad platforms,

quickly addressed it. And then Google, through some new rules they put in place with the Chrome browser, what it wouldn't, wouldn't allow to load, quickly just chop my business by more than a half. And so I was like, okay, I'd already bought the farm at this point. And I had been through the Rememocombs Media, RMM experience, and I'd been through starting my own business. And during my non-compete time, I was flipping houses and getting my hands dirty. And so I found myself at this point where my business is like softening quickly and and I had to kind of make a decision. Am I going to just really revamp this and figure out a new angle or am I going to just do something completely different? And, you know, I started researching about other farms. I found some people that

were doing this direct marketing. They did pork and beef and eggs and I went and saw this farm in Elgin, a coyote creek farm that has like 25,000 hens. They sell the whole foods and world's best egg. And I was like, you know, I could probably do that. Like that's a 40 acre pasture. I've got 72 that I could put chickens on, like, you know. And then that's when like the kind of background of having worked in a startup environment kicked in. And of course I proceeded to give my wife like endless anxiety attacks through that whole process. But yeah. So you can confidently say that. You like going zero to one. I get bored. it's like too easy.

I'm the same way. I like zero to one. Yeah. I like building from ground zero and then figure out steps one, two, and three. When it starts getting steps four, five, six, I don't love it as much. Yeah. I like the scrappy, getting started, kind of painful process. Yeah, I mean, because when you get through it, it's the greatest level of fulfillment you can feel, right?

I think. I mean, you know, when you can get through all that mess and then get to the other. the side and be like, yeah. Oh, 100%. So when you bought the farm, what was the intent? I always wanted to live in the country and have a farm. And Carolyn, you know,

we had talked about it. My wife Carolyn and I had talked about it. And we always said, well, maybe we'll do that before the kids are in elementary school. And, you know, it was an idea. And even in our wedding vows, she said something like, I'll love you till the cows come home. Because, you know,

which by the way, the cows come home every So I don't know where we're at, but I ask her once in a while, and she's still there. But it was basically just to live there, run the ad business, and raise our kids. And, you know, we're close to the town of Brunham. And I had, at the time we had an office in Austin, we worked in New York with a couple sales guys and some developers in Romania. And it's like it was all digital. I didn't have to be in the office.

I was going to go to Austin a couple days a week, which I did. But yeah, it was just like, I don't have to be in central Austin to do my job. I was telling you before we started recording, I've been a consumer of the product for quite some time now. I found Churchill Creek farms through farmhouse delivery. Started buying the egg, started buying the beef, and love the product. I already consumed through the products this morning, the eggs this morning. And then I always eat lunch at like 10 a.m. I guess it's like a meal two, I consider it.

Yeah. Had eight ounces of the ground beef. So, like, those are my two staples that I order from farmhouse every single week. But I love for you to explain, like, what the farm looks like. Yeah. You know, I'm sure a lot of people listening to this or watching this. When they think farm, they might think of either, like, this very small, rustic, historic farm, or they, their mind might go the other direction of this massive commercial property.

I grew up in central Pennsylvania. My dad's side of the family were dairy farmers. My grandpa had a dairy farm there, and my dad grew up milk and cows every morning, every night. So we kind of grew up on a farm with my grandfather. But I love you could explain and kind of paint a picture for the audience of what this farm that you purchase and build out looks like. Well, we own 115 acres in Washington County, Blackland Prairie,

and then we lease another, oh, 250 acres that we use for hay production and or grazing. But our farm is, it's very bucolic, picturesque, you know. We live in an 1880s farmhouse that we redid when we bought the farm. And so when you pull up to the farm, it's like, yeah, it's very quaint kind of what you'd expect. But it was just some, a family had had it for 45 years as a weekend place. Some rancher leased the pastures. Little to no maintenance was done on any of the infrastructure on the farm. And of course, the house was a weekend house.

So there was not really any investment made there. So the whole place needed revamping. How on that take? The house took 10 months. And we lived out of a camper. And then there's another house, which is now an Airbnb in the back of the farm that we lived in during that. and then, you know, the fencing and the, excuse me, the working pins and the barns and all of the repairs we had to make is kind of ongoing. But I'd say it was four years of like building infrastructure.

I mean, I kind of went crazy because for two and a half years, my main focus was building chicken coops, like the big pasture chicken coops. Yeah. And I'm not a carpenter. I mean, I guess I'm a rough carpenter now. But, but yeah, so the way the farm's set up now is that we've got, um, 13 layer coops, which are movable, that we move every Thursday. It's all hands on deck. We move everything.

So those birds are constantly rotating around the pastures. And then we've got our more wooded areas of the farm where we rotate our pigs. So everything's rotated on our farm. And one of the key kind of foundational components of our operation is that we're trying to mimic nature and mimic a healthy ecosystem. And so we've got multiple species of animals rotating across the land. We've got multiple species of plants that are competing with each other for nutrients and providing forage for the animals and building structure in the soil. And so, yeah, we've got, you know, a big open prairie pasture where we can easily move our layer

coops because, you know, you couldn't do that with a lot of trees. And then our other pasture where we've got more woods is where our pigs and then rotate. And then we've got meatbirds that rotate. all over the farm. And then of course the cattle are rotating in with all those other species. And so at the core of what we do, we're there to produce grass and feed our cattle. And the chickens and the laying hens and the pigs enhance the fertility of the soil while they rotate around the farm. And this rotation of crops and animals, this is the foundation of the foundation of the foundation of, the

foundation of regenerative agriculture. Yeah. Yeah. If I understand it's kind of building this sustainable ecosystem that already exists and utilizing crop and an animal without chemical pesticides and herbicides to kind of sustain and grow. Correct. Yeah. The people who lived on this property owned the property prior to you, were they practicing regenerative farming and agriculture? No, I mean, it was grazed by a rancher that had leased it. And he actually did a pretty good job of not overstocking the farm too much. But ranchers typically rely on something called compensatory gain. And so you'll see a lot of ranches.

Like right now you drive around and you see a lot of pretty good looking cattle relative to what maybe they looked like last August because the rains came and the grasses grew and the cattle gained weight. And so the thinking is these ranchers, because it's hard to make money with cattle, they don't want to spend any more they have to. So if they're in a time of drought when feeds expensive and they don't have a lot of hay, they will feed as little as they have to to keep everybody going and then get to the better time when they're going to get that compensatory gain that's going to come naturally.

And so there's a lot of times a year you'll see places that are really overstocked for the amount of rainfall and forage production that we've, had, whereas what we do is what we call managed intensive grazing with the cattle, and it is managed and it is intensive, and you've got to be there every day doing it, but it allows you to stock a higher density or a higher number of head on the farm, and you're rotating them with hot fence in paddocks all over the farm. So we'll run a hot wire and create, let's say, a one acre, an acre and a half paddock for a yard for them to graze. maybe for 60 head, 70 head, or whatever, and it depends on how thick the forage is.

We'll let them graze that for a day or however long it takes for them to eat about 40 or 50% of what's there. And then they move to the next one. Meanwhile, that's closed off. So each piece of our farm is getting grazed, controlled, intense graze for a day, two days, depending on the time of year. And then it's not getting touched again for, you know, five, six weeks. And what that's trying to mimic is, like, you know, when the southern, buffalo would come through. They'd hit the, wherever they landed, they'd hit really hard and they'd graze the crap out of it and then they'd leave and they wouldn't come back for a long time.

Whereas on these farms that are overstalked and it continuously grazed, every time a blade of grass comes up, it gets eaten. And that impacts, and I won't geek out on you too much, but it impacts the root structure formation of the plants, which impacts the structure of the soil and, you know, the mycorrhizal fungi in the ground that connect the plants and a lot of the, to cycle nutrients together. It inhibits that whole process. I've heard a lot of farmers talk about this where they'll buy a piece of land

and it was tilled really heavy, monocrop for years, and it's like dirt. And they come in, they start practicing regenerative agriculture for a few years and it turns into this rich soil after being essentially clay and dust for possibly decades. It does, but it's kind of like working out, right?

If you're like not fit and you're skinny and you want to see changes and you go do it for a couple months. Like you'll see a little bit, but it's not like you're just going to turn into Nick Bear right away. Right. But like, so it's a commitment over a period of many years and you start seeing tangible changes. And we've seen that. You know, we're six years in now.

And so it is. It's funny. I talk about, you know, what I'd love to see. And the reason I like having these conversations is because I want to see people talking about this more. I want there to be, you know, an awareness. among the people that are doing conventional agriculture and conventional farming to open their minds up about some of these concepts. Because it feels like a total crazy leap of faith to somebody that's like, hey man, I buy the herbicide, I kill the weeds, I plant the stuff, I put the fertilizer,

it grows, it works, don't screw with me. But it's like, well, you wouldn't need to buy all those inputs if you managed your ground differently. And if you're doing a thousand acres, carve out 20 and just, you know, do a beta test or whatever. It definitely, we've definitely seen changes in our soil. And it's a combination of, like, the grazing, the, what forages we plant. And also, like, having chickens, you know, having 6,000 chickens constantly pooping and rotating around your pastures. I've seen the videos on social.

Like, I remember this one video you posted, and the sun was rising one morning, and you had all the chickens out in the pasture. It looked absolutely beautiful. It is. And a massive property for all these birds just walk around. I think it's super important. I mean, my goal with this conversation is to share with people to really learn about where your food's coming from. Yes.

I'm a massive fan of supporting local. That's why I buy from farmhouse. Yeah, you're right. For example. Yeah. Just like knowing where your food's coming from and what that process looks like and, you know, where you decide to spend your money, I believe is a lot about your character and what you actually believe and want to change. Yeah. A lot of people will say one thing and they spend their money on another thing.

Right. It's like where you put your money to me is where you actually care. Sure. So you're living in Austin. You know, we talked previously, you were training for triathlon. You were triathlete. Run this digital advertising business. Families starting to grow up.

I think you said when your kids were one and three, you move from the farm. Yeah. You know, for someone who wasn't necessarily consuming grass fed, grass finished beef, past race, eggs and chickens, or really searching for those types of options, when you opened the farm, what made you choose to take that route?

Why was that such a high priority? We always tried to buy organic. Was there a reason or it was because everyone's telling you to buy organic? Yeah, it's just organic's better. Like, I don't want stuff that got sprayed with some chemical or whatever, right? And so when we bought the farm and we started deciding to raise cattle and do eggs, which is the first two things we did, I wanted to be organic.

And so I started researching, well, how do I raise organic beef? And then that led me down the rabbit hole of like, well, you can buy organic grain and feed them that. Or you can do like an organic grass-fed approach. And quickly I did the research on like grain-fed beef versus grass-fed beef. And it became clear to me that truly grass-fed, grass-finished beef is superior if you're really a health-focused person. It's also harder, heavily nuanced thing to do and risky because I depend heavily on rainfall. And when I don't have rainfall, I've got a source really expensive ingredients from other states, you know, alfalfa, beet pulp, hay. But going

back to like when we're talking about kind of how I transitioned from advertising to the farm and why, you know, I wanted to really produce something that was good. And so, and talking about going from zero to one, like, I was excited to jump in on like this challenge of growing grass and then converting it into beef and then having that beef actually be good. Because when we first started and we first were butchering calves, it was not. My good friends were like, hey, thanks for that ribeye, it's kind of tough, you know. we just didn't know, you know, and this was five years ago. Is that because of what they were eating? It was because we were harvesting too young.

They hadn't had time to fatten, and they didn't have enough what we call, what the cattle people call energy, which is carbohydrate in their diet. So they couldn't fatten probably enough anyway. It was a lot of alfalfa. We mix in beet pulp. When we don't have forage, we mix in beet pulp and maybe a little bit of cane molasses into what we mix. but right now like they're eating rye grass and oats and stuff and there's naturally occurring sugars that are really available in those grasses this time of year

but yeah we were just harvesting too young you know 13 months old instead of now we target you know as close to two years old as we can get so yeah just not enough fat not enough time for that to the meat to just get tender and good how popular was was grass fed and past raised in 2017-18 compared to now 2020 Have you seen a change in the preferences from consumers? I don't know how to quantify that, but I mean, our business has certainly grown, and the number of people actively seeking out grass-fed beef seems to have grown to me.

I think what's interesting is like COVID caused a lot of people to take a second look at where their food's coming from and not only how they're getting it, but then, okay, well, how am I getting it? Now I'm going to buy from this farm. What are they doing? How's it being produced? and I also took, I think a lot of people became really hyperware of like how they're living their life and whether their lifestyle was conducive to producing an immune system that could, you know, fight off COVID or whatever.

And then people like Paul Saladino, you know, carnivore diet and all this kind of stuff, like that's definitely kind of caused more people to seek out specifically grass-fed meat. meats. Yeah. You know, you follow an animal-based diet. Yeah. I would like to talk about, you know, what made you decide to do that. I think you were talking about you had, or some of your gums, you're like in inflammation of your gums. And you found that an animal-based diet helped you kind of solve that. But what I loved was your perspective on, like, you're not here to push a certain diet. Right. And like, you come across a lot of people where, like, they're constantly push a certain. and diet down your throat. It's keto, paleo, animal-based, vegan. It's like, do we get it. I always been a massive fan of like, this is what I'm doing. Right. It works for me. Yeah. I enjoy it. So I did. I really respected and appreciated that perspective. But I'd love to talk about, you know, why you started animal-based. I'm assuming part of is you're on this farm and you have all this food available. Yeah. But I'd love to know about the inflammation of your

gums and how that improved within an animal-based diet. I have a ton of customers that are on the carnivore diet. And so every weekend at the farmer's market, you know, they're talking to me about, and they're buying kidneys and talking to me how they cook it, how they eat it, and all this kind of stuff. And my wife and I originally were like, okay, you know. And, you know, there's varying degrees of, like, how hardcore people are about it. but I was talking one day to a friend of mine, Chris Bates, who's from Heart and Soil, actually,

he works with Paul. And he was telling me, I was telling him about my gum stuff. And I was like, you know, and he sent me a video. There's an MD. I forgot the name, Ken Barry or something like that, who had a video about like curing gum disease with, you know, a carnivore, animal-based diet. And I watched it. And the next day, I told my wife.

said, I'm, I'm going to do this and, and double down and see if it makes a difference. Because, like, I'm pretty conscious of trying to optimize my health. And this is the one thing I just hadn't been able to correct. I go to a periodontist, like, four times a year, and I get these cleanings and, and, you know, and all this stuff. And I'm very diligent about, you know, my flossing and all this stuff, but it just was kind of persisting. And so, yeah, so I just, for that, that was the motivating factor that finally got me

to just try it, because I'd never done a diet before. I'd never, I've always been really. very averse to like, because it becomes like almost like a fad or like a religion, it's like, well, I go to this church, you know, I do this diet, like you're saying. It can become unsustainable, depending on how strict you are and who it affects, like, doesn't only affect you, but your family and friends and social activities. Yeah, I get it. Yeah, yeah.

I don't know. I've seen good results. I've been doing that for a year and a half and it's been working for me. And like, also like, man, if I'm on vacation with my family, we just went to San Francisco for spring break with the kids, like. there's a pizza place and that's what we're doing, then I'm going to have a couple pieces of pizza. Like, I'm not like hardline, but, but I mean, I'd say 95% of the time.

I, like, you know, I eat on the farm. I don't go to restaurants much. And so it's just like, you know, eggs, fruit, caveman blend, you know, whatever. That's just, it's easy for me to do. So is your family follow the same approach with food? No. My wife, she told me the other day how long it takes her to go through, like a one pound bag of sugar for her.

coffee and stuff. And I was like, what? Like, it was like, you know, two weeks or something. And I was like, you're kidding me. No, we're totally like, in fact, I was not popular in the house for the first few months because my wife is like, she takes pride in like cooking for the family. And then all of a sudden she's like, well, linguine clamps tonight, I guess I got to make you a steak, a separate, you know, a separate dinner. And I'm like, I'll make it myself. I have to. Yeah. I'm sorry, you know. How many steaks do you have a week right now? I usually eat steak for dinner every night, you know, steak or pork chop or something. We had one of your steaks last night.

Yeah. I had the filet, and then it was the New York strip loin. Yeah. Had like the small bone on the end, cook those on the green egg. Nice. They were great. Oh, I'm glad. Yeah.

But you also do pork on the farm too? Yeah. Yeah. Since the chickens, pork, and then beef. Yeah, we added pork. I think we started selling pork maybe. six, seven months ago or something. So it's a newer thing for us.

I'd love to really dive into grass-fed, grass-finished beef. Yeah. Talk about the benefits. But even more importantly, I would love to understand the regulations on grass-fed, grass-finished. You kind of mentioned it earlier in the podcast, how there's a lot of marketing hype on packaging, in-store.

You have, like, organic. you have grass fed, grass fed, but not grass finished. Right. And if you look at like organic vegetables, for example, there's USDA certified organic. Yeah. So you know if it's organic, you know if it's not. Right. What kind of regulations are available or enforced with grass fed, grass finished?

And how enforced are they? So I think USDA at one point had or was putting together a grass fed certification. I think they actually were regulating it. And they backed off of it and stopped doing that. And I may be slightly off on that, but they backed away in some way from wanting to touch that. And so it's basically a self-police thing. Now, big producers who are selling in a way where it's like blind,

you know, it's going on a grocery store shelf. Like Whole Foods will require people to have all these certifications and audits. but, you know, there's no, like, government entity that's verifying that. So, you know, bigger producers will use third-party, you know, verification services or or grass-fed beef association, things like that, to verify their practices, which is good, especially for bigger producers, because one thing that can happen is, and this is, you know, at the farmer's market, I used to just say I had grass-fed beef, and then people would be like, well, is it grass-finished? And I'm like, oh, well, yeah, it is, but why do I have to say that?

And it turns out, obviously, there are people, even at Whole Foods, I've seen meat that is grass-fed and grain finished, and people put the cattle on grain for 60 days, 90 days at the tail end to get them fatter. And a lot of people are quick to just kind of like see a buzzword or a keyword and just go, yep, that's the one I want. And then they make an assumption about the product that may or may not be true. And then they get really disappointed later when they find out it isn't. So it's important for people to ask and research if it's really important to them. So like we don't have any sort of entity that verifies what we're doing. We try to sort of interface with our customers. And I try to post and be very transparent about like, here's what I'm feeding right now.

We're in a drought. This is the stuff I trucked in to feed my cattle. This is what I'm planting. And because our business is mostly direct to consumer, and we still interface directly with so many of our customers through our retail store in Austin, local pastures, or through the website, like, I'm always answering questions and getting phone calls about the meat or are we using mRNA vaccines or whatever. We've been fine without doing a certification. But yeah, it's a little bit of a wild west out there and it's important for people that you know research and ask questions i think i was i was seeing this on your social media i think it was last summer it was last summer the drought yeah yeah it was last summer there was a drought and obviously you know having grass fed

grass finished cows grazing on that grass there's a drought's a massive issue and i remember you saying that the American Grass Fed Association, in certain circumstances based off of weather or drought, they allow certain things. Yeah. But you don't necessarily follow those as well. Right. What does the American Grass Fed Association say when there is a drought or circumstances where grass fed cows can't get enough food?

And then what did you do last summer in that situation? In times of drought and poor forage, poor grazing, or the quality of the grasses that are there or poor, which under heat stress and lack of rain is going to be the case. They allow inputs like cotton seed, cubes, soy holes, so soybean holes. Cubes are like a processed grain-based feed that you can, it's like a big pellet, and they're commonly fed to cattle, and some producers will use them just to get the cattle to come in the pin, they'll shake the bag. So the cotton seed is a big one and soy holes.

And there may be others that I didn't talk about, but I think I talked about those two on that post. When we talk about grass finishing beef being risky, this is what we're talking about. You've got to have, like, well, in any business, in any case, like for sourcing ingredients and stuff, you've probably got like a plan ABC in case this guy doesn't have what you need anymore, right? And so for us, it's like, okay, my plan, my eight,

A plan is to plant forages, graze them, cut hay with the extra, use that to feed the cattle in the part of the year when we don't have grazing. When that doesn't happen in a drought, then you've got to have, okay, I can do that, but that didn't work this year like it didn't last year. And so my plan B is to truck in alfalfa, beat pulp and more hay and do that. Suddenly, you started being where you couldn't get alfalfa anymore. So it's like, okay, well, I could get in a situation where I've got to go feed. cotton seed or something, which is really, really not what I want to be feeding my cattle. I mean, cotton's a pretty chemical heavy crop.

It's hard on the soil. It's not grown as a food crop. It's grown as a textile and then can be, you know, the byproducts of it can be used for feeding cattle. But people also feed chicken crap to cattle. There are cattle producers that buy chicken crap from big confinement houses and because it's got remnants of chicken feed and stuff in it and they will feed that to cattle. Okay. Sounds tasty.

Yeah. And if you're buying beef at the grocery store during a drought or any time, there's a chance. There's a possibility that, you know, you're eating crap-fed beef or whatever, I guess. But, but, but, yeah. So, but even, you know, just saying you're certified by the American Grass Fed Association doesn't guarantee

that your cattle have never had any of those things all the time. And I understand why they put those stipulations in, but most consumers don't realize that, you know, so. So what did you guys do in the drought last year? Well, we were able to get alfalfa, beet pulp, which is sugar beets are grown for sugar production, and after they extract that, there's this pulp left over, which still has some carbohydrate in it, which the cattle need. We blend a little bit of cane molasses.

It's rich in electrolytes. And then we mix that. We've got a big tub vertical feed mixer. It's got an auger, a bladed auger that just, like, it would be deadly if you fell into it just to get an idea. And you throw the hay in, you throw the alfalfa and the beet pulp and pour a little, you know, a bucket of molasses in there. And then it chops it all up into this nice, fine, grassy feed stuff. I posted pictures of that or videos of that online. And that's what we fed. And fortunately, we didn't have to seek out anything else, you know. Was that the worst weather conditions

you've experienced the farmer so far? The worst, yeah. Yeah. And like, what a lot of small producers, and we're not a huge producer, but I mean, what a lot of people would run into is cash flow constraints in that, because we were trucking in 18-mielers of alfalfa and storing it in our barns and filling up our bins with beet pulp

and we were kind of like going into, oh shit mode and stocking up on stuff, which it was financially not a great year for us, but, you know, it's like we were kind of do, that happens once every 10 or 12 years, so, yeah. I mean, I can only imagine the stress. I remember I was still young when my grandfather was,

farming. My dad tells me stories of, you know, any season where there was a drought or little rain, my grandpa was sweating. Yeah. Constantly. He was, he was always stressing and always nervous because the weather directly out of his control affected his yield, affected the money they were making, affected the inputs and supply chain. And, you know, as a business owner where supply chain is absolutely necessary, I understand the constraints. and how much stress that can put on a business owner or an operator over the course of time. Oh, yeah. I tell people, I'm like, you know, if making money was my primary goal and all this,

I would have like, I don't know, you know, opened up. I would have done something else. Buy an H-FAT company or anything. Like, you know, this is a pursuit of passion that needs to be profitable as well. But, you know, it's we've had a lot of years where we worked for free or even negative a bit. And, you know, we're turning a corner now with the business. But, yeah, it's not a – and most farmers you'll find it's – that's what it is. They love the lifestyle and they love the animals, and they just – there's more to it than just the money.

But, you know, I had uncles that ranched and stuff. And it's like they'd always talk about, yeah, a lot of money comes in when we harvest, but most of it goes right back out. And a lot of those guys, I think, live in a system where it's like, okay, you had a good year, good. Don't go buy a nice car. like, you know, self-insure for the next year because you don't know what's coming. How soon after you guys got out in the forum, after leaving the digital advertising job, did you realize it was the right decision? I self-funded the whole thing.

I mean, you know, it had a good career before. And so I pumped a lot of money into infrastructure and equipment and startup costs. and by the time I started looking in going, oh, crap, you know, was this a good idea? It was too late. It was like, I just got to keep going, you know? It's like there's no turning this off and walking away unscathed at this point. So, and I didn't want to, but it wasn't really even an option. It's like I've had a lot of days where, that have sucked.

Like wintertime can get sucky when it's cold and muddy and wet for extended periods of time. Summer in the extreme heat can suck. It sucks less now that we have a legit, really great. team on the farm. When it was my wife and I, like in the beginning, I mean, man, our marriage is like strong as heck now because we went through a lot of uncomfortable times. And, you know, we're getting over 4,000 eggs a day now off the pasture. I think at the point where we were getting like 1,000 or 1,200, we were still packing them in our kitchen. And so the kids would go to bed. My wife would collect. And then we'd be in the kitchen washing and packing eggs by hand and labeling

the cartons every day. I mean, it's seven days a week. The eggs are coming off the pasture. And she looked at me and was like, yeah, I didn't sign up for this. This is like bonkers. I'm like, I know, I know, you know, there's a machine we can buy. And, you know, and of course, we're in a different place now, but I'm picturing my head right now. It could be completely incorrect, but all these chickens are, are just grazing on this pasture? They're dropping eggs wherever they want. Are you just walking all these acres, picking up all these eggs every day? No, no. So we build these chicken coops that are made out of car porch, and then we frame them and put them on skids and modify them. And we hang nesting boxes inside of those. And so hens naturally have an instinct to want to go lay eggs in a place that feels like kind of protected and dark. And so, you know, 95% of the eggs, more than that probably, are all laid in those boxes. So you just go into the houses. At the time, we use baskets. And we would we would collect eggs that way. And so, yeah, no. Thank God we weren't having to walk around, like doing an Easter egg hunt all the time.

Can you tell personally now, as your palate becomes so strong that you can tell what those cows have consumed in that season, whether, you know, there was a change in the crops that were growing or something that you had to feed them externally? Can you taste what they've been consuming? We've had enough consistency in our program, and we generally use feeds or grow feeds. that aren't known to cause weird flavors and beef. So no, I wouldn't say so. I can tell if we slaughtered a calf that was not fat enough yet, and I'm not super happy with the amount of fat in the ribbyes or whatever.

And some of that's genetic. Some of them, some cattle will just never marble, and occasionally we'll get one that marbles like crazy, and it's just a, you know, it's a genetic trait. But no, I've heard of, like, you know, dairy farmers, you know, have a dairy cow that gets into some sort of, and it makes the milk taste bad or whatever, but I haven't noticed that in the beef.

My understanding is grass-fed beef, some of the benefits, one generally a little bit leaner. The ratio of omega-3s to omega-6s is higher, so there's more omega-3s than omega-6s is based off of their diet with their consuming, naturally higher in some vitamins,

minerals, and in CLA. Are there any other additional benefits that you're aware of? of from grass-fed beef other than, like, I know personally, I can tell when I'm consuming grass-fed beef. It just tastes better. Yeah. Anything that you're aware of. One big thing that's important to a lot of our customers that is different is that when cattle are eating grains and stuff, they're eating a diet that's richer in polyunsaturated fatty acids, you know, poofas. And so, and that gets, a lot of that gets stored in the fat. Whereas with our, our, our, our

our grass finished beef, it's going to be very low poofa and obviously there's less fat to begin with. But for people that are concerned about that, that's a key difference. I guess downfalls of running a grass-fed operation, is it more expensive for you? We talked about the possible negative consequences of whether that affecting yield. but is it more expensive in terms of the inputs, or the operations, I would say? One of the key things to think about is, if you look at it as a business,

we have, and we're a grass finishing operation. So in the beginning, we were breeding and finishing, and we don't have enough acreage to do that. So we partnered with two other ranches that use no antibiotic, no hormone, no grain, and we get calves from them at about 700,750 pounds, and then we finish them up to 1,100 pound if we can get that high. A thousand is our goal.

What's the highest you ever seen a cow, the heaviest on grass finished? 1,300, but that's not, you're not going to get that very often. It's rare. Yeah, and it's just a function. Maybe it was a hard one to catch, so it just stayed in the pasture and ate for longer. But the key thing is we buy calves, and then we've got to get them up to a certain weight and then monetize that carcass. And we've got to get them up to a certain weight in a certain way.

And so the most economical way to do that would be to, generally, would be to get some rich grain ration that will fatten them quickly. And you'll get, you know, three to four pound a day gains, which is kind of what feedlots are seeking. We probably average, I don't know exactly, but I'd say we average definitely sub two pound a day gain. so maybe a 1.75, I would estimate. And so that naturally makes it more expensive to get,

because the feedlot cattle might be getting butchered at 13, 14, 15 months, 16 months, whereas we're targeting that 20 to 24 month timeframe for a much smaller carcass than the feedlots going to put out. So that's why grass-fed beef is more expensive. And then you add on the fact that you've got all this risk with producing the forage. and then if you have a drought you got a truck in really expensive stuff from far away so yeah man it's it's a way less efficient and pasture raised eggs same thing eight dollars a dozen is what we sell our eggs for most people are cool with that but it's like man i got raccoons and skunks

and hawks and coyotes and bobcats eating my chickens every day and you know and then and then there's just you know the fact that we go out and there's all this manual labor associated it's a beautiful thing and I'm for it, but it's like, it's a more expensive production model for sure. Yeah. When I was growing up, my grandfather wanted me to have a farm in Pennsylvania and have chicken houses.

So I went towards some of these industrial chicken houses, and I mean, they were massive. Yeah. And maybe some of them were the double-deckers. Right. And there'd be like three to six of them on farms. You could smell them from miles away. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. And I walked into some of them. these operations into those kind of chicken houses and I remember there being so many we would I worked those operations a few times and we would a truck would back up and we take the little chicks in and we dump the chicks in there and they'd feed them and grow them and I remember asking the one farmer there I was like how you know how long do you feed them and how much do you feed them and he said we pump them with food until they're about to explode so they have heart attacks yeah like holy shit yeah and you know you see them when you drop the chicks on

off and you see them when they're older than, I mean, they can't move more than an inch side to side. Yeah. So I know there's cage free. There's organic. There's pasture raised. What made you choose pasture raise? And, you know, how popular of an option is that compared to the others?

Because, you know, you go buy eggs in the store and you see all the taglines. And I remember there's one package in there. It's a mega three. All you see is a big omega three. I'm assuming they were fed an omega-3 rich diet. Yeah. But can you talk more about like pasture raise? Because I've seen, like I said, the videos of your chickens, and they're living a good life.

Yeah. Like they're enjoying Central Texas farmland and laying their eggs and eat what they want to eat. But then I've seen the extremes of industrial farming chickens and it's completely different lifestyle for those chickens where they're probably stressed. Probably produces a different flavor of meat. definitely a different nutrient profile of meat. So, like, you know, what benefits have you seen with pasture raised in terms of the chicken's life as well as the profile of that meat and that egg? It's funny you mentioned, like, the omega-3 thing on the egg carton, you know, you ever see

like a thing at toothpaste and it's like 16% more? And then in the fine print, it's like, you know, it'll be like a 1.16-16-pound thing a toothpaste, 16% more than the one pound package. Exactly, yeah. And so it's the omega-3. It's just like, they're just trying to trigger you to go, yeah, that's the one. And I think eggs in general are rich in Omega's. I think pasture-raise eggs are supposed to be richer.

But anyway, how do we choose that production model for eggs? Well, I think probably that's the expectation of people going to a farmer's market buying eggs is that they were out on a farm running around. we you know I told you before I had gone to buy some chicken feed at from Coyote Creek in Elgin and they've got just a ton of hens, a big pasturays operation and I saw that and I saw other farms videos on YouTube and stuff that were doing this and I I just gravitated to it I was like that's really awesome and you know obviously of all the different models like that's got to be the greatest one because again at the core of everything that we do we're trying to

to mimic a healthy ecosystem or trying to mimic nature as much as we can. And nature doesn't involve birds living in a sterile humidity-controlled environment. Nature doesn't involve, you know, all that. Nature involves animals being out in nature, living and expressing themselves in a natural way. And so pasture raise is the closest you can get to just having some jungle fowl, you know, foraging in the jungle and, you know, laying eggs. So, Yeah, that was kind of what was behind our decision making there. I'll be honest, I was pretty disappointed to find out that the color of the egg doesn't represent the nutrition profile of the egg.

And for my understanding, it is the beta, the keratinoids. Yeah, keratinoids, yeah. Carytonoids in their diet that changes the color of that yolk. Yeah. Yeah, so that's a big, that's a really important conversation for us. And we kind of got alarmed when we first started the egg business because a lot of people would come to us and they'd rave about the eggs and they'd tell their friend, like, these eggs are, these hens are eating the best pasture forage because, and look at the egg color. And where that came from is like a lot of farms with really orange yolks will claim that, hey, they're on good pasture or whatever. And green grass maybe has some impact to the quality of the forages, a lot of clover, a lot of leafy greens on the pasture.

can impact, I mean, do make the diet more rich in carotenoids. But the concentration of carotenoids in those things is not enough to consistently achieve like a really orange yolk. When we started the farm, there are a couple farms, who I won't name, who were known for these orange yolks. And it was like this, you know, just this cool thing everybody wanted. And I was like, well, how do I do that? And I researched it. And honestly, it's just a Google search away. But, you know, and in some countries, this is kind of,

more commonplace, but people will mix varying amounts of marigold and paprika into the feed to tweak the keratinoid levels and impact the yolk color. And so that's what we were doing. And, you know, but it's important. I like talking about it because I want people to be crystal clear like, yes, our eggs are great. And I believe our eggs are superior. And the quality of our eggs, when you crack our eggs, they're firm, they taste good, but the color of the yolk is not a reflection.

of the nutritional profile of the egg. It's a reflection of the concentration of keratinoids in the hens diet. I'm not bullshit in you because you cross the table from me right now. I used to buy Vital Farms eggs. And I thought that was a massive step up from what I was previously buying in the market.

And I started buying your guys' eggs and they're very buttery. Yeah. They're like the most delicious eggs. And whenever you guys are sold out, they're not on farmhouse. Yeah. I'm extremely disappointed

because I have to buy something else. but your guys eggs are by far the best eggs I've ever had. I appreciate you. I really appreciate it. We're proud of them. I mean, yeah, thank you. So I'd love to learn a little bit more about the scaling operation of

of Shirtel Creek. Yeah. Because for me, it's an interesting concept of operation being, you know, as a business owner myself, I create a product. My product is dietary supplements, their package. Right.

So shipping direct to consumers is fairly convenient and easy. They're not perishable for a few years, so getting them into retail stores is fairly easy. Yeah. But being a startup farm, beef operation, chicken, egg operation. Yeah. What was the first step in actually selling those products? Was it going to the farmer's market and just building the brand story and voice?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I had this crazy idea to order a bunch of hens and buy cattle. And my wife's like, what are you doing? And I'm like, don't worry. We'll go to the farmer's markets and it'll be great. And so we invested all this money and went to the butcher and got some cattle butchered and got our eggs and went to the farmer's market. I think the first day we sold like, I think I spent 40 bucks on fuel and I had a gross

sales of $120. And I was like, oh, crap, you know, and it grew over time. But yeah, that was what we did. We went, we were at three farmers markets every weekend. Consistency's key. So, you know, as you know, you got to commit and stick with it to build a brand and get people to notice you. And, you know, within a couple years, you know, well, I think within two years of starting farmers markets, COVID happened. And then we were already kind of feeling some growth.

And then it was all of a sudden like, you know, people coming at you, you know, we had these crazy lines at the farmers markets for quite a while. with COVID and and um but yeah that was the the first step was just farmers markets and that's kind of low hanging fruit for i listened to your conversation by the way like i said with with your CEO cat and which is an awesome conversation not totally done with it but um talking about shipping perishables and um and and i think she even started at going to farmers markets and getting her her product out when she had her previous business um and it's kind of like the low hanging fruit if you're trying to get a product started like go to farmers markets get in your community, you know, get out there.

So that's what we did. Yeah. And then I kind of made a mistake in hindsight, but my vision was, well, this farmer's market thing is for the birds because this is not, I'm, you know, I got little kids. I got, I'm going to have, they're going to get older. I'm going to have baseball games on Saturdays and all this stuff. Like I cannot be married to this lifestyle of waking up at 430 every Saturday and, and again on Sunday, which for a while I was doing seven days a week.

That's nonstop. Dude, yeah. And it's like, by, I got, I get. to a point where by Sunday I go to the Mueller Farmer's Market by myself and it was real hard to crack a smile because you're just like so burnt out. So I was like, I want to scale

wholesale. I want to be like, I want to be in grocery stores and I want to sell beef to, you know, whole foods or whatever. And so I started kind of modeling the farm that way. And again, I had a good career before, you know, had a little cheese to put into the business. And so I'm self-funding

this and and so we start doing that. And and farmhouse is a great relationship and some other folks and other grocery stores. We were in the central market stores with our eggs for a while. But, you know, quickly realized we had our biggest revenue year ever. And, you know, the first year we broke a million dollars in sales. And I think I made like $5,000 in profit. And I was like, oh, man, something's wrong here.

Yeah, that's tough. And talking about your four levels of being a founder or whatever. Like I was doing everything. I wasn't watching the books. I was just trying to push the operation, get things drying, get the eggs out of my kitchen and into the warehouse and having somebody else pack those. And obviously we do wholesale,

but that being the core of our business wasn't the right move. And so now, yeah, now we're shipping nationwide and we've opened our own retail store with some friends of ours at Bellev Farm, and we're planning to open more of those and then just focus on retail store and shipping for getting the products out. capture more of that direct retail sale as opposed to just moving big chunks of product at

very little margin. Yeah, that reminds me of when our business was growing and scaling. My philosophy was just build the brand. Keep building the brand. I wasn't necessarily watching the books, P&L. I didn't know if we were profitable. I was like, just keep this thing moving forward, right? And you get to a point where like, okay, maybe we should look at the balance sheet and P&L

and see if this actually makes sense. but in the beginning you just got to you just got to build some awareness and if you have momentum, run with that momentum and then refine afterwards. Yeah, exactly. I mean, and I'm a big fan of like, let's make a mess and we'll clean it up later.

Let's just make the mess, get this built and put together, and then we'll clean up and optimize afterwards. And that drives my wife crazy. I'm a massive fan of that approach. Yeah. Yeah, that's my approach. Yeah. What's a goal?

Like, where do you want to be with Shirtail in the next couple years? What does operations and kind of distribution look like? I really want to grow the e-commerce side of the business. I think that's the most scalable opportunity we have for our meats. Of course, I haven't attempted to ship eggs, and I don't know if I will because the eggs move pretty well on their own. But, yeah, e-commerce is where it's at.

And so we're kind of in the process of we started offering shipping early last year, and then in January this year we started offering nationwide shipping, and we're still kind of learning, it's not, it's, you know, 15, 20% of our business right now, but we're still in the process of kind of, like, we're getting ready to go into our first summer of shipping frozen meat nationwide now. We've already learned about like when orders are going to Wisconsin and there's a snowstorm or, you know, there's a big rain in Dallas that's, you know, that's a hub and your stuff gets stuck and then it takes eight days for it to get somewhere.

And so, yeah, there's some challenges to over. come. And the people that have all the answers to how to do that well are competitors. They're not going to just be like, well, here you go, pal. Here's what you do. What are you guys packing with? Is it dry ice? Yeah, we get dry ice delivered to the farm. And basically our motto is like, if you're feeling in doubt that that's going to get there in good shape, then heavy up the dry ice. And, you know, when the box gets to be more than 50 pounds, it becomes uneconomical to ship. So we've got to optimize our bundles and stuff that we offer to be able to work with the amount of dry ice we've got to put in there.

But in some cases, the 50% of the weight of the shipment is dry ice. Of course, a lot of that's gone by the time it gets to the customer. I'm sure years ago, the thought of buying meat online was non-existent. Yeah. I buy a lot of my meat online now. If I'm craving a certain cut or a certain type of meat, I mean, I'd say almost weekly. Yeah. I have, I'm buying food.

Yeah. Perishable food online. I'm the third person who will spend money and pay for quality. Inconvenience. I'm excited to see that part of your business scale and grow. Yeah. I'm sure that the farmer's market operation is, one, it's a lot of time and energy. Yeah.

But then you build a brand, you meet people face to face, you tell the story. But I'm excited to see where D to C goes for you guys. I think there's a lot of opportunity, especially for a really good. product. Thanks, man. Yeah, I mean, we're excited about it too. And again, I think, you know, I talked to my wife a lot of times about the vision for the future of what we're trying to do here because, like, yeah, the startup farm thing where we're washing eggs in the kitchen and feeding pigs in the rain or whatever is cute and makes for good Instagram posts. But like, it's not sustainable long term. And we've got to have a business. And people have this idea in

their head that if you own a farm, oh, you've got a farm, well, you're never going to be able to leave. It's like, no, it's like anything else. You own a restaurant, you're going to bust tables and do what you've got to do to get it going. But eventually you're going to have it, you know, running to where, yeah, you're involved. But if you got to piece out for a couple weeks and go to a conference or whatever it is, the machine can still run. And that's what we're trying to build. And so many small farms don't ever think that way. And then they get to be, I've seen it.

You know, they get to be 65, 70, their back goes out. And then it's just like, it's kind of tough, you know. And that's not what I'm. I want. I'm thinking about, you know, building a business that can sustain and be there for us and be there for our customers, regardless of whether I've got a bad back or not, you know. Put operators in place. Yeah. And again, like, I think making the case for regenerative agriculture and this style of farming being something that people can aspire to go do, you know, that some smart kid coming out of school or whatever can look at and go, hey, you know, instead of

going to work for Goldman Sachs or whatever big firm, you know, I want to go pursue this. I'm going to go intern at some other big farms and then I'm going to get a bank loan or my dad's going to help me out or whatever and I'm going to go start an operation doing this. It is absolutely doable and it's doable in a way that doesn't need to make you a complete slave to the business, you know, but it's also like it's hard to go from knowing nothing and, you know, and whatever amount of time and getting it there. It's not easy. But, you know, the more examples there are for people to follow,

I think, the more producers there will be that are doing this. And that's going to be a net benefit for, you know, for the world in our food ecosystem. I like to describe it as the mud or like when you start a business as a founder. Yeah. You can't avoid the mud. You have to get through the mud for a while. You're just trenching through some shit.

Yeah. And it's like you're trying to pick up one foot. You know, the foot stuck in the mud. You're just trying to get through the mud and eventually you get to the other side where it's dry and you're out of the mud. And you're definitely a visionary. I'm a visionary myself. Yeah. I read this book this past year.

It's called Traction. And it talks about this business model called EOS, the entrepreneurial operating system. Yeah. And we implemented EOS in the business in the last eight months or so. Yeah. Where essentially I've now moved into the visionary role. and I've put operators in place that kind of operate the business

with my vision kind of leading. And I think you're like spot on saying most people would apply that to any other business, digital advertising, tech, product-based business. But a lot of people look at farming as like once you go all in, you're operating the rest of your life.

My grandfather was that way. Right. So I saw him just, breaking his back year over year. Eventually he sold the farm because he just couldn't do it any longer. But for any entrepreneurs or business owners listening,

I highly recommend the book Traction. That's cool. Implementing EOS because it's super powerful for visionaries. Because a visionary, not everyone has that mind and that brain. So allow a visionary act in a way that's

seeing the future and kind of building brand and then letting someone operate on that behalf is, I mean, that one, two punch is so powerful. Yeah. You know, in the case of like your grandpa or so many farmers, they're selling into a commodity system and they don't have any pricing power and, you know, they're squeeze between the commodity markets on their input needs and the same thing on when they're selling their end product. And so it's a tough life. And again, you get the lifestyle of being on the farm, but you don't have the control. Now, the tradeoff is,

you know, I'm, I now have to be a marketing guy and I've, you know, I've got to distribute my product. I've got to have a refrigerated truck to get my product. You know, there's all these other complexities, but the freedom is great. And again, I think, you know, with e-commerce having evolved to where it is now, I mean, there's so much opportunity, but it's, yeah, it's a different animal for sure. I guess with D to C and e-com and the business you're in, you get to control. I can see why you'd want to move more into the DTC route as opposed to wholesale, because you get to control some of that commodity architecture a little bit.

You control some of your pricing and more flexible with, your hands aren't tied behind your back as much. Yeah, like in a drought, if you're a beef producer and you sell to feedlots or whatever, they're buying, they're paying a price that's kind of dictated by the commodity market. So whatever calves are going for on that day when you sell your cattle, they're being auctioned.

And so you don't know what the outcome's going to be. So if you're a cattle producer going into a drought, you're sitting there going, well, do I spend all this money trucking and feed? They say the futures might be good for calves, but I don't know. Or do I not feed the calves as much? Or do I just sell them all right now and have an absolutely terrible crap year and turn the farm off or squeak by on baloney and Velveeta or, you know, for the year.

And it's tricky. In our case, we look at it and go, okay, well, our feed costs are going to be higher. Our input costs are higher. Our diesel's gone up. I mean, the last year was crazy, right? Drought and inflation. It was just like this monster of a year for us. But what we're going to have to do is look at where we're priced and we're going to

have to adjust that and we're going to have to communicate that to our customers that, hey, in order for us to still be here next year, this is what we've got to do, in order for us to take care of our employees. and make sure we do a good job of what we're doing, that we're going to have to do this. And when you have a business like ours that directly interfaces with customers, whether it's through social media

or at the farmer's markets or whatever, or even just, you know, I literally talk to people, like, you know, so many calls and emails every day with questions and whatever, you know, I think people are willing to go, okay, that makes sense, I get it. But if you're selling even through a distributor, like it may be that, like I've had a big grocery store chain, carry my eggs and I said I got to go up on the price and they said no nobody's going to buy it at that

price I'm like well it's got to be that you know and eventually they relent and then sure enough they're like hey can I get a double order you know it's like no you know so so you've got you know roadblocks in place that that can prevent you from from doing that so yeah there's a freedom there for sure to be able to tweak your pricing and and adjust to what's going on in the market we try to do that as well here at BPN with our social media platforms as being transparent with, hey, we might have to increase prices or we did increase prices. And here's why. Trust me, it's not because we're trying to put more money in our back pocket. Or we're trying to maintain certain margins so that we can pay the people that work here and we can keep the lights

on him. Yeah. The business decision that we have to make, but we're going to educate and inform you why we're making these decisions. But when you go through a wholesaler or a retailer, you do lose a part of your voice through that process. You know, like for the most part, We had pretty good response. There's always a couple people that get nasty with you about it. But, you know, it's, what are you going to do? You got to, it's like, do you want us to be here or not? Because, you know, we want to be here, but this is, we've got to, you know, we've got to tweak things.

When I buy your guys beef or eggs, I don't even look at the price. I'm like, I know what I'm getting. I'm going to pay for it. As soon as you see me, if you see me driving up to the farmer's market in a Lambo, then you can complain. But otherwise, you know, yeah. No, I appreciate it, man. Yeah, it's...

I mean, again, like, and that goes back to the conversation of, like, I was talking to somebody recently about, like, priorities and people who do claim, like, oh, the grass-fed beef's too expensive or whatever. And I like talking about this because it's just, it's kind of fascinating to me. But, you know, you go to the grocery store and you see the stuff people are prioritizing and the mountain, like, you know, families there with, like, filling up two carts and is just pure, like, I don't know, hot pockets and, you know, soda and just packaged, processed stuff.

And in many cases, the same person might be like, I'm not going to pay $28 a pound for a steak or you don't even need eat steak, $9 a pound for ground beef or whatever, when I can get it for $4.35 at, you know, whatever grocery store. And it's like, well, you know, maybe it's not so much the cost of that. Like, that's a very nutrient-dense thing right there, whereas that hot. pocket is not. So, you know, but getting people to have some perspective on those things is it's interesting. Yeah. You pay for it in one way or the other. Yeah. Like I said in the beginning, I've been a customer, a fan of the product and in your operation for a while now. I think you're

doing some really great things. I'm a fan of the way you run the operation and the ethics behind everything you create, but also it tastes really freaking good. Well, thanks. That's good. That's what we want. So that's why I keep coming back. But if, you know, listeners or the audience is in Central Texas, or I guess nationwide now, purchasing DDC, Churchill Creek Farms, it's the V's Knees. It's the real deal. So I appreciate you, man. Thanks a lot, man.

I appreciate you having me. That's a wrap.