The Sevan Podcast - Mary Heffernan Super Entrepreneur | Five Marys Farms #1024

Episode Date: September 28, 2023

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That's BetterHelp.com. meeting with friends before the show we can book your reservation and when you get to the main event skip to the good bit using the card member entrance let's go seize the night that's the powerful backing of american express visit amex.ca slash y amex benefits vary by card other conditions bam we're live hey thank you to um thank you to uh the person who reached out to me yesterday and told me that my iso is on auto that's why like when i was leaning into the camera the exposure was changing they're like dude when you lean into your camera you look like a vampire i'm like oh okay thank you fix that this morning so now I'm just one exposure. How could I not know that? Oh, sorry. Hey. Hey, daddy. How are you? Podcast time. Oh, man. I'm so happy for you. You're crushing it, dude. Thanks, buddy. Are you on right

now? I am on right now. Oh, shit, man. I have so many for you you're crushing it dude thanks buddy are you on right now I am on right now oh shit man I have so many important questions to ask you but crush the podcast I'll call you later okay talk to you in 90

bye talk well Mr. McIntyre uh Dick Butter hey good morning uh Madeline uh Edgar

good morning in the green dress uh Brandon LeCoc good morning in the green dress uh brandon lecoq good morning um i started following you the other day brandon a couple days ago brandon did you give someone at the podcast free tickets or were you going to or we did it already you did it at the games i'm so confused i shouldn't even open that door. This morning we have Mary Heffernan coming on. Holy cow.

This is a crazy story. Wild story. Good story. Healthy story. Ambition. A human with crazy ambition and horsepower. I think she's coming on. Five Mary's Farms. Five Mary's Farms?

Five Mary Farms? I better look up the exact name, enunciation of it. Five Mary's Meats? Five Mary's Farm. Five Mary's Ranch Raised Meats. Man, all their stuff is so nice. Want to see their ranch? Look at this.

Place is crazy. Crazy, crazy, crazy. Look at their ranch? Look at this. This place is crazy. Crazy, crazy, crazy. Look at this ranch. Look at that. Oh, my goodness. Hey. Good morning. We were just...

I call it ogling. My mom told me I'm pronouncing it wrong, and it's ogling. I don't know if you like ogling better. We were ogling your My mom told me I'm pronouncing it wrong and it's ogling. We were ogling your ranch. Thank you. It's a pretty special place. Very few people say that to me when I say I'm ogling their stuff, but you did it. People ogle me too. I'm like, well, thank you.

I'm planning to say it if anyone ever does say it to me. No one's ever said it to me. You're ready. Hey, I was watching another podcast you did before. And I don't know if that's a throw rug or what that is, but that white thing behind you. Yes, my sheep pouts. So for the first five minutes of the podcast, I thought that was a giant sheep dog behind you. And I kept waiting for it to move. I'm like, man, her dog is loyal. He's calm. And then if I see those sheep dogs that could blend in, but they are not allowed indoors. They're wild feral dogs who stay outside and guard the sheep.

Mary, what high school did you go to? I went to Sacred Heart in Menlo Park. Okay. I guess I don't know Menlo Park so good. I was born in Oakland. Where were you born? Okay. Palo Alto. Okay. I was born at Oakland Children's Hospital. Are you a home birth kid? Nope. I'm a Stanford hospital. Okay. Oh, good place. Yeah. I think that's where I had all my kids too. That's where you go. If you're in the Bay Area and like you want like actual medical care. Like I live in Santa Cruz and like a kid breaks their arm and the the the what are they called? The orthopedist will tell you something. You're like, OK, thank you. And then you immediately rush over the hill to Stanford. We do the same thing up here in Fort Jones.

Medical care. You got to drive a while to find a doctor you trust. We've had a few episodes that didn't end well, but yeah. How do you know, how do you, how do you know when to do stitches? I usually just, um, the other day my kid snapped his shin in half in the morning, but it wasn't until nine o'clock till my wife's like, Hey man, he's gone into shock a few times. I think we should take him to the doctor. I've heard that if it looks like lips, it needs a stitch. Oh, oh, it's a good rule. A good life rule, right? Yeah. I like that. I like that. Um, you're, you're seventh generation, California. I'm six. My kids are seventh. Yeah, that's nuts. What year do you know who originally came to California and why they came? And it was actually down by you.

On my mom's side in 1850 or 1851, so right around the time of the gold rush, they came to Pajaro Valley and settled in Watsonville and were farmers there. Wild. So they didn't come for gold? in Watsonville and were farmers there. Wild. So they didn't come for gold? You know, they actually were pretty smart. They came and set up a gold rush like mercantile, like they sold supplies to the miners. So more of steady income instead of the strike it rich. They came from Ireland first and then Croatia, half Croatian. And they started selling gold rush

supplies and then farming potatoes that they brought over from Ireland. That's what they knew how to do. And then eventually did, you know, the typical Santa Cruz Valley or Pajo Valley crops like lettuce and berries. Tomatoes. So, so one of your, one of those great grandparents was Croatian and the other one was Irish. You know how they met? Did they meet on the journey over?

No, I think they were both Irish at that generation. And then one married a Croatian halfway down the generations. A buddy of mine is in Croatia now. Have you been there? No, I haven't been. We're trying to plan a family trip to go now that kids are older. It's a friend of mine who's been pretty much everywhere. And I like to think I've been everywhere. And he's like, have you been to Croatia? And I said, no. And he said it is the nicest place he has ever, ever been. Yeah, he says he's never been anywhere nicer on planet Earth. Really?

Yeah, people, cuisine, landscape, water, the whole shebang. He said it's nuts. Yeah, and I think it's like not overrun with tourists yet. Yeah, I mean, I FaceTimed with him there. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Yeah, it looked amazing. All right, it's on my list. It does not look like Oakland, California.

scene yeah it looked amazing all right it's on my list does not look like oakland california um jumping to the end here real quick with the current circumstances that you we see so much of the united states going through right now kind of the reworking i i i hope it's the reworking of civilization and not a collapse of it but um are you pretty excited about where you're at, the decisions you made to go where you did? Yeah. You're 10 years up there? Just about 10 years. And, yeah, we say all the time, you know, how lucky we are.

We moved when we did because we, you know, it wasn't like our kids were old enough to get established. Or, you know, we'd pretty much established ourself in life down there. It was hard to undo. But I'm glad we did it when we did we're pretty happy here yeah fort jones uh california the show's live by the way i don't know if you know if you knew that so i'm just going to show people on the map uh where it's at this is an incredible this is in a really truly incredible spot in the country for those of you who've ever driven up here, it is right, basically.

I mean, at least I like to think of it as at the Oregon-California border, and you're north of Shasta. Right. Yeah, California is pretty amazing. People think, you know, where you are, Oakland, is northern California, and we're six hours farther north. Yeah, and it's a whole different country. It is. It's mountainous. You know, one side of our ranch feels like Oregon. It's like 10 degrees cooler and we've got moss and Redwood trees and the South facing side of

our ranch is, uh, you know, we've got sagebrush and lots of rock and oak trees, but it's, we're at 3000 feet at the bottom of our ranch, 4,800 at the top. So we've already had, you know, we're waking up to 30 degree temperatures already. Hey, did that, when did that happen? Two days ago, I came in my office here to do my podcast and I was like, oh, is winter here? Did it just happen a couple of days ago? Yeah, it did. That was the first freeze garden gardens are toast yeah interesting okay um but just to be clear not that it matters to you but i'm in santa cruz i got out of there uh four or five years ago okay so you're yeah you're even farther south yeah i got neighbors with peacocks and donkeys and i'm i'm a little insulated from the uh from the chaos it's still It's still a little podunk down here.

At least I like to think of it. Santa Cruz is a great place. It's a nice little pocket too that's pretty special. What year did you graduate from high school? 96. Okay. And you said you went to Menlo Park. And then where did you go after that?

Did you go to college? Yeah, I went to college at William and Mary in Virginia, which was pretty random, but I just love California, you know, family history in California. I knew I wanted to come back to California, so I figured that I should go to college somewhere really different, and Virginia was very different. So I was there for four years, pre-med, thought I was going to medical school. I've always been an entrepreneur. I just didn't know that that was a thing. I didn't know

that was a word. I thought I needed to pick a career, traditional career path. And then after college, moved back to the Bay Area in 2000, the height of the dot-com bubble just blowing up, height of the dot-com bubble just blowing up and started tutoring kids while I was taking the MCAT. And then that turned into opening a tutoring center. I leased a space downtown Menlo Park where rents were crazy at 22 years old, had no idea what I was doing. But it worked. It was kind of the land of opportunity then. And so I started this tutoring center and just loved the, you know, late nights, building a website and putting together brochures and making the logo and getting customers. And it was, it was pretty quickly. I said, I'm not going back to school. I like what I'm doing. Any of those students from when you were 22, you're still in contact with?

Yeah, actually some of them, um, I like, you know, work with on a professional level today and they're, they're like helping me out. And I'm like, thanks for doing this. They're like, thanks for getting me through high school. I couldn't have done it if I didn't have your place. They're full blown adults now. Yeah. Like with kids, their own kids and stuff. Yeah, I know. It's crazy. It makes you feel old. Wow. Nuts. And, and, and were you involved? What was your your what was that like being in menlo park during that time i mean that was uh i'm trying to think i mean i remember i'm trying i remember my mom buying me the first apple computer at macy's they sold it at macy's when it came out you know my mom was making like thirteen thousand dollars a year and the computer was like thirty four hundred

bucks i can't even now in hindsight i like, what was she thinking buying me that? So expensive. The Apple IIGS. I think we still have the box from it. My mom refuses to throw away. Yeah. That was – actually, I didn't have the first Apple. I had the first Macintosh.

Or maybe it was 84. It was the first Macintosh. Was the IIGS a Macintosh or was that like one of those big, big computers? I think it was a Macintosh, you know, it was a lot bigger than they are now, but it was, it was desktop. Yeah. Great. And did you, did you know any of those people being down there? Did you ever see any of those, those people down there? Would you see Steve jobs down there or all the names that we hear about today? Jobs, kids came to my tutoring center. They were clients and all those big families,

whether they were tech or VC. When I grew up in Menlo Park, it was a small town. There were families there for generations, lots of kids, everybody knew each other. And then all of a sudden in 2000, it was just like, what is this place? And people would ask like, where are you from? And I said, here. And they're like, no one's from here. Everyone moves here. I'm like, no, I'm from here, this small town. It's not a small town anymore. But yeah, it was crazy. You know, it was lots of wealth and excess and things moving quickly. And, you know, I loved the opportunity and the fact that you could do anything quickly and make things happen. But, quickly and make things happen. But, you know, all that wealth comes with a lot of it's harder to find that real satisfaction in life and to be, you know, feel accomplished at

the end of the day, like I did something when it's just kind of, you know, tech and things moving and funny money and VC money. And, uh, that's what we really found. I think a lot of people that I, we, you know, saw were, um, not happy. This isn't the point of the podcast, but, but why not? Why, why don't you think they were happy? Do you think that I always see this connection between people who, and I'm not suggesting you're saying this, but this connection between people who didn't earn something and got it, whether it be money or whatever, and their happiness,

like people don't realize that if you didn't earn it, you won't actually be able to be happy by it. No, I agree. And sometimes they earned it, but you know, it was lucky being at the right time at the right place. You know,

the tech world is crazy because there were a lot of people who, you know, you think, Oh, wealth and it, you know, you get your dad's money, you inherit money. And how can you really like see that? But a lot of these people did make a life for themselves with a lot of money, but it was just like appeared overnight. And, you know, or is it's like stocks? It's like, what is this? How valuable is this? But, you know, I think you, when you are actually creating something or physically working and seeing day to day progress, I think that's really what happiness is. And, you know, making money is not a bad thing. I think people put such a weight on like, oh, you can't, you know, money doesn't buy happiness, but productivity does, you know, and part of that is making money. And I would just see a lot of people would say, you know,

I was in the service business. I was still, I had all these small businesses, brick and mortar stores, you know, working for the dollar, keeping everybody happy. But every day was like, I'd wake up excited, like a new project. I'm going to put this into this business. I'm going to do this. You know, I'd physically be building installations or changing businesses around. And I think that's really what we found at the ranch when we made this move. You know, we didn't think we'd move here full time. We bought this land to raise really good beef. How much land, Mary? We have 1800 acres800 acres here. Okay. Okay. Between our, we have about 500 irrigated pastures and the rest is hill country. So we run a good number of animals here, but not crazy amounts. So we came up here with four little kids in car seats,

made that commute every weekend and thought, well, this will be our escape from the Bay Area. And the kids can go run around barefoot and play with animals and we'll have the best of both worlds. And we just quickly realized that that was totally naive to think that we could really put our whole heart into ranching and be the one taking care of our animals and still run businesses in the Bay Area. You know, we'd be up at the ranch and they would call like the restaurant, the hood's filling up with smoke and somebody has to get on the roof and reset it. And my husband's like, I'm the only one that can do that

because somebody else is going to fall and it's going to be a workers' comp claim. And then we'd be down at the restaurants and the ranch hand that we hired would be like, oh, the cows got out and they're doing this, but I'm just going to put them here. And Brian's like, no, they need to stay on feed. It's really important, like how we're raising these animals. So we just looked at each other, you know, packed up one Sunday night to go back to the Bay Area and looked at each other and said, we're going the wrong direction. We want to stay here. We want to be on this land every day, waking up before the sunrise, working with our hands, working with our kids, that physical labor where at the end of the night, you don't need a sound machine to

go to bed. You put your head on the pillow and you're so tired from working all day. We're like, that's what we want. This is the life we want for our kids. So it was the easiest decision we ever made to just say, we're leaving it all behind. We're going to go full, move into a town of 600 people. And from a house, a suburban house that we'd worked so hard for, I was like, gosh, I'm so lucky to live in this beautiful house to a 760 square foot cabin, no heat, wood stove only, you know, no dishwashers, no amenities with six of us. And it felt right. It felt like this is where we're supposed to be. Um, so it was an easy decision, but it was, it was hard to unwind the life we'd built there. You know, my husband had a law practice. We had eight brick and mortar shops.

We had a house. We lived right near my parents. Um, it was just a huge brick and mortar shops. Yeah. See, it's so fucked up when you say that because then i'm like god that could be a whole show right there i was trying to get my head wrapped around you there's no there's no way to get i need to explain to people that it's impossible to get your head wrapped around mary's life mary how many businesses in totality no business too small no business too big do you think that you have been involved in either started or worked at in your entire life roughly? Well, I've only worked for like one place and it lasted two weeks. Cause I was like, Oh, I can't work for someone else. I have to do my own thing.

Where did you work? Uh, well, it was McDonald's. Please tell me it was McDonald's. No, I had like waitressing jobs in college. I've worked more places, but you know, doing my own thing is like really what, what I'm passionate about. And it's just the way my brain is wired. But I think we we've, it's between 20 and 25 businesses. Okay. And, and what's the small, like what's the smallest business you ever ran? Like, like, like the yearly income of the revenue of the

smallest business you ran? Gosh, that's a great question. Um, I probably, you know, a few hundred thousand a year. That's the smallest, that's the revenue of the smallest. Yeah. I mean, they were all, I, I put everything into a mall until they were successful and then I'd either sell it, sell it or, or keep it going. But even like my tutoring center, I still ran without being there for years and finally sold it right before COVID. And then the girl, it tanked somehow. You had that business for 19 years. Yeah. Did you cry when it tanked?

No, not attached to businesses. Okay. Okay. So smallest is several hundred thousand. And how many employees do you think that you've had in your entrepreneurial life? Wow. That's a great question. You're on the greatest podcast ever. I should have – I always forget to apologize to people when they come on. I say with a zero humility from here,

it's all downhill. I should have told you. I should have told you. I love it. No, that's a really good question. Um, 10,000 probably.

Oh my God. But you know, small, small business. Maybe that's maybe it's 5,000. I don't know. It's somewhere in the, but uncountable to you. Yeah,, small business. Maybe that's maybe it's five thousand. I don't know. It's somewhere in the.

But uncountable to you. Yeah, I get it. Yeah. You're more likely to tell me how many cars you've owned and how many employees you've had. Yes. How many cars have you owned, you think, in your life? My life. I started with a Jeep Wrangler when I turned 16.

I still wish I kept many five, six. Yeah. What are you driving today? But i either drive a truck or a expedition and the expedition is um kids get in the car we're going to town yes that's a town car okay for me because i needed a town car um going a total i guess different direction uh why did you have kids? Um, super entrepreneur, uh, what, how do kids fit in? You know, my husband and I are both from big, big families. We're both from Catholic families. Uh, lots of kids, family's really important to us.

Food and family is kind of what our life centers around. It was always first priority and still is. You know, I think that's the beauty of the entrepreneurial lifestyle is that your kids come right along with you. You know, I never, I had my, I'd had, I had four babies in under five years and they always were with me just tagging along whatever I was doing. And now, you know, there's such a big part of what we do. We had a big shipping day yesterday here. We ship all of our meats across the country to customers and we did a, ran a special and had a thousand orders come through, which packing a thousand meat boxes is no small task because each one, you know, it's frozen meat, special cuts. We put dry ice. The boxes have to be packed really kind of as a specialty. And two of my kids,

we do kind of a mixture of homeschool and regular school. But two of the kids who didn't have school, they were here helping pack boxes and get those orders out with our team. And they really see a lot. You know, they see mistakes that you make. They see the things that make it successful. They see that, you know, if you want, they're really into rodeo. They're all competitive rodeo girls. But they're like, if I want a new horse, I got to work for it. But here's the opportunity. You know, it's not like, how am I going to make money?

They're like, I see lots of ways I can make money. I can sell something through my parents' site. I can, you know, help work there. I can think of my own thing and find customers. They'll raise beef and sell it through 4-H. So I think that kids and an entrepreneurial lifestyle go well together. Let me see if I can follow that. You're Catholic, so you're not allowed to use contraception. That was my takeaway.

No. you're not allowed to use contraception. That was my takeaway. No. Okay. I missed it. Sorry. Uh, so, so food and family, food and family. Yep. And that's kind of what we built our businesses on, all the businesses that I've done have centered around, um, families and it kind of, to me, it was, you know, it's recession proof. If you have a business where people are investing in their, in their kids or family or, you know, even good food, they, that's when, that's the last thing to go. You know, they're going to, it might cut back on fancy vacations or gym memberships, but people are always going to, people are always going to pay for their kids before anything else. I'm a hundred percent there with you. I never cut stuff for my kids. I'll cut

everything else first. Everything. Yeah. I can't remember the last time my wife and I go out and spend money on clothes like we did before we had kids. Yeah. It's over $1,600 a month for tennis. Like you're not, you're not, you don't buy clothes anymore. And your kids have nicer clothes than you do. Of course, of course. Heidi Kroom from Madison, Wisconsin. What is the key to starting a business and getting it up and running successfully? That is a great question, Heidi. So I believe the secret is you have to just do it all yourself and just make it happen.

So when I think a lot of ideas get stuck in the, gosh, I have this great idea, but I'd have to find someone to like help me execute it. There must be a specialist who can tell me if this is a good idea and make it happen. Then I got to hire someone to like build a website for me, make a logo for me. You're going to get stuck because these people aren't going to have your same vision. It's going to be expensive to pay all these people. Nobody cares about that idea, has the passion like you do. When you have an idea in this day and age, you can make that happen. You can have a business running in five days. You can build a website. You can make a logo. You can create a brand.

You can find customers. You can take payments.. You can create a brand. You can find customers. You can take payments. Whatever idea it is, you know, some things are harder than others. If it's, you know, you've got to get FDA clearance. But it's still possible. But you're the only one who's going to be passionate enough to make that happen. So you've got to just, like, go for it. We actually started a course.

We have a small business academy. My husband and I have compiled all the resources we learned in these 25 businesses that we started. And it's called M5 Entrepreneurs. And our tagline is you can do it because you have to be scrappy and you have to figure these things out to just make it happen yourself. Sorry. Lead me to this again. I really want people to see this. Go to the M5 Academy. Okay. Got it. Um, sorry, lead me to this again. I really want people to see this.

Okay. Got it. Yeah. So we call it M5 entrepreneurs, ways to grow your business. There's 40 different workshops on everything from, you know, branding to, um, entity formation and insurance. Like, do you need an LLC? Can you be a sole proprietor? That's where my husband's background in law has been helpful. Um, email marketing, I think is so important these days. That's your number one tool as an entrepreneur. So we have a little free email marketing course. But this, a lot of people in this community, we, we have like an app where people can kind of come and ask questions. And we have over 4,000 entrepreneurs in this course. And it's really just about empowerment and giving entrepreneurs the tools to say,

okay, I'm not waiting around for somebody else to do this. I'm going to go make this happen. I bring you onto the show to let people know that there's a good place where they can get healthy meat. Because I think the people who follow this show are pretty, uh, food conscious and they're big consumers of meat. And then here we are, uh, the small business course. Hey, what's the, um, what's the most, what's some of the most successful stories you've heard out of people who've been shot out of this course? Um, you know, I, there's a lot of people who've just started from scratch and have built these

amazing businesses. Um, my Hannah and Daniel Nealman in Utah, they have, they run ballerina farm and they came to us when we started and said, we want to do what you guys are doing. How do we do it? And we said, well, you know, here's, here's all the materials. Hannah came to one of my workshops and she's got six and a half million followers on Instagram. They, they built a farm, a dairy, a creamery, a farm store. Um, they're wildly successful. And there's, there's lots of people like that, whether it's on a larger scale like that, or what I think has been really neat is to see a lot of people in the agricultural industry, which is traditionally, you know, change is bad. We do the same thing generation after generation. Well, times have changed and you can't necessarily make a good living, especially to feed, you know,

multiple components in a family. There's, you know, multiple kids and they have kids and everybody wants to keep the farm going. You got to find different outlets. And the direct to consumer market is what we realized when we started as first-generation ranchers. There are so many inputs. You know, every day you need a new tractor, you need a silo, you need irrigation, you need fencing. It's so expensive, the barrier for entry. But direct-to-consumer, you control the price of that meat. There's no middleman. In a traditional commercial operation selling beef, that beef will change hands seven times.

Wow. And the margins that are killed every time and the trust and the quality just, you know, are not there. So by doing this direct to consumer beef operation, like we do, um, you control the price and you get directly to the customers so you can put more into it. You know, we spend a lot of money to raise really great quality beef and that's genetics. It's your feeding program. It's your finishing program.

It's keeping them on feed long enough. And then it's the butchering. So we're the only ranch in the country that's doing it from birth and breeding. We do AI. We do artificial insemination for our breeding because we get the best quality genetics. And we can say, we want to pick great ribeye quality. We want to pick great ribeye size. We want these, we want the stakes to matter. And then we harvest on the ranch. So we built a USDA harvest facility where the animals never

have to get on a trailer. Um, my husband worked with Temple Grandin, who's this, the guru of animal handling, the autistic woman, she's amazing. It's all designed for animal handling. So we harvest on the ranch, and then those carcasses are taken to a USDA butchery we built right here in Fort Jones. We dry age to really extremes. We've got these dry aging coolers, and that's kind of the secret to the finishing with that really great quality. And we dry age our whole carcass.

So even our ground beef is dry aged, which you really can't find, you know, the dry aging, you lose volume. There's so many reasons people don't do it because you'll lose money. But we know that the quality is there so we can charge more for this meat because the flavor, the tenderness is amazing. And then we have our own team of craft butchers who are putting everything in packages and then shipping it directly to customers' doorsteps. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead.

Go ahead. Go ahead. You go ahead. So we've been able to do that, which to us is, you know, what the ultimate goal was to have this whole vertical integration. And I've seen a lot of other farmers and ranchers say, hey, we got to get to that. We got to do this direct to consumer thing, but how do we do it? And this course I've just seen, love to see the empowerment that it gives people, especially women to say, Hey, father-in-law, I know you don't like change, but I want my kids to be around. I don't want this ranch to be sold at auction. How about we change things and do this? And here's

the tools I think I can help. And to see that happen is like the most rewarding thing ever, more rewarding than doing it ourselves. The drying thing resonates with me. I used to grow when there was a market in it 30 years ago, I would grow weed, dry it and sell it. And if you over dry it, you lose money. Keep it a little moist and you could – I mean the margins are massive. You could have twice as much. And you're saying that you don't do that. You don't cut corners. You dry it.

Yeah, no shortcuts. That's our motto. But yeah, we'll lose 20% by dry aging. We could – most meat in the grocery store you're buying now is wet aged. So they just put it in a vacuum seal pack and let it sit. The dry aging, you're losing all that water. You're breaking down the protein and the quality is unreal. Like especially the ground beef. If you tried side by side, dry aged ground beef raised well. When we bought the restaurant, we have a restaurant in town too, which we said we'd never do again. And then this old restaurant

came up for sale in town and we couldn't say no. But we had the hood cleaned. You know, restaurant hoods are nasty. Hood cleaned. Six months later, the guys come to clean the hood. They came out of there and they look at me and go, what are you doing? And I'm like, Oh God, that's never good. And he said, I've never seen fat like this. It's clean, clear. He's like, there's no, there's no grease. And I said, well, that's cause we're cooking our own meat. That's cool. That's great feedback. Hey, why did you say especially for women? What do you mean by that?

I think the agriculture industry is traditionally a man's game, you know, and women have always been so important and they're, you know. I agree. Women have always been important. I agree. Okay, we're on the same page there. I think they're super.

My mom was especially important. You know, traditionally it's like, I'm a, I'm a rancher's wife. I'm a farmer's wife. You wouldn't say I'm the rancher, but the women are doing so much behind the scenes and always have been, you know, that hasn't changed. They're doing the books, they're doing payroll, they're paying the bills. They're, you know, making sure everybody's fed for these brandings. They're organizing who's going where, paying the fee. The adult stuff. I call that the adult stuff. My wife does all the adult stuff, like pays taxes, buys houses, shit like that.

I don't do any of that. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. But now, but they'd still say, I'm the farmer's wife. But now to say like, no, I'm a rancher too. And I want to make this happen with you. And to be the ones bringing ideas to the ranch and saying, hey, what if we did direct to consumer? What if we finish our own

cattle? I'll take them to the butcher. I'll do the packaging. I'll do the branding. I'll build the website. Um, that is, that's a change and that's pretty cool to see. So has the, has the delegation changed of the work, you think, or just the titles? I think it's more the opportunity. Instead of just saying, well, we'll see. Traditionally, you take your cattle to auction, to market, and you find out at the end of the day what your cattle sold for, and that's your paycheck. And that could be people's paycheck for the year.

And it was just kind of like, I'm going to sit back and see what happens. And now it's like, wait a minute, if we are proactive about this, we can go out there and ask our own prices if we're cutting out these distributors. So how do we do that? And, you know, traditionally, you know, the ranchers might be steeped in like, I got to, you know, feed and finish and wake up in the morning and do everything I've always been doing. And then the daughter-in-law might come in and the wife and say, hey, let's let's look at making a change here. And that's pretty bold to do to an operation that's been generationally doing the same thing over and over. But it's it's working people, not everyone, but people are open to it and they see a change.

And it's more likely their kids are going to be able to continue on this family legacy. Yeah. I can't really speak for your husband, but I'll speak for him. He's very happy with the powerhouse that you are and your ambition and your follow through and your commitment. We're a good team. That land that you got um you said uh um 1300 acres of it was hill country what does that mean i don't know what that means mountains um we have we have a couple different mountains that go different directions so uh you can't irrigate

it you can't grow grass okay much more valuable we still run our cows on it like all year long we run our bulls on it because you only need bulls for about one month out of the year. But in the winter, we run our cows up there because the past, so that saves our pastures from getting just trampled on, or, you know, we might, we're next to a river, we might have a flooding event. So in the winter, we bring all our animals up on the mountain and we feed them there, um, our cattle. And then in the fall, there is some grass growth. So they kind of forage over there, but then we, when the grasses are growing, we do the rotational grazing on the pastures, um, and the grasses work for us, but we have to feed the cattle all winter twice a day. I think that's a lot of people are,

are shocked at that. Like I had to feed cows yeah i thought they just walked around and ate too hey so that's cool um and do you do you buy new cattle or do or do they just they're just procreating their procreation uh works for about a third of our cattle. And then, but we, we harvest 12 cattle every single week all year. So we have in the fall once a year, it's having right now it's labor intensive. You're out there every two hours checking to see, you know, sometimes a calf will get stuck and I got to go in there and pull it out. And there's just a lot that goes into, to calving. So we have once a year, those calves will be raised up. You know, the bigger ones go in our feed program sooner.

The smaller ones we hold back, let them get a bigger frame. But that gives us product for about three to five months of the year. And then there's two other ranches that we buy from. One of them is my brother-in-law in Eastern Oregon, raises cattle the same way we do. You know, there's all these gaps for certifications and all natural programs. You want to make sure they've not had growth hormones implanted in them because that's a real thing in the cattle industry to make them grow bigger. So we get we get top quality genetics cattle raised all naturally. There's two ranches that we trust. And so we buy calves from them

to fill those gaps in the year. You know, humans do that too. They're pellets. They put, they have pellets implanted in their hip with human growth hormone in them that slowly releases so that they can get all, yeah, get all jacked. And that's what you were talking about for cows, huh? They'll put pellets in them, human growth hormone pellets. Yeah, crazy. Yeah.

in them human growth hormone pellets yeah crazy yeah um the you said you uh do a mixture of uh schooling for your kids homeschooling and schooling can you how old are your daughters uh they are 10 to 16 okay 11 to 16 now um yeah every year is a little different you know i think especially having all having four girls all you you know, tight in age, people think they're kind of all the same, right? You just do the same thing. But they're such different personalities. And we kind of look at each one every year, like what's going to work for you? What are your goals this year?

And we ask them that. And I think that's kind of the neat thing about education now is there's so many options. So my oldest last year said, I want to be really efficient with school, but I want to take lots of honors classes, college courses. I want to get ahead. I want to exercise my horses every day and I want to work and earn money. And he said, okay, well, traditional high school is not going to give you that. So she does this online program through Laurel Springs. It's a great, uh, that's a good, good picture you picked there. Um, a great picture, by the way. Crazy picture. And then the next one says, you know, I don't want to have to work harder than I need to at school.

I said, okay, well, then we're going to do a different program for you. And it just changes every year. So we don't actually homeschool. I'm not teaching them out here every day. You know, we will help them. But they do programs. There's great programs online that is, you know, it's not zoom school. It's like a real in-depth honors enrichment courses programs that they can do. And I think that's really important, you know,

in a town of 600 people, you can have some disadvantages with what you're offered. But again, thanks to the worldwide web there's, there's, it's limitless, but what the options are available to you. Um, my dad was a first generation came, you know, at 20 years old from Lebanon to the United States. And, uh, he ended up owning, opening a wine and cheese store in Berkeley, California, and, uh, tons of interaction with the customers, right? People would come in there and drink wine or drink beer, buy cheese, tons of interaction. So I spent my weekends there, you know,

Saturday and Sunday for years and years working there. So from a little kid, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine years old, I would be behind the counter and I would ring people up and talk to people and carry, you know, carry boxes of wine out to the car and just whatever they needed. And through that, I learned some pretty crazy human skills. What did your parents do? Where did you get these skills that you have? The inherent ones, the ones that seem inherent in you, but that you had to learn. So my dad was a lawyer. He did medical malpractice, defending the doctors. He was usually on the

good side of the medical malpractice world and very much had one job out of law school and was the first one in the parking lot at 5 a.m. every morning, very loyal, worked hard. And my mom was a stay-at-home mom. And she really, any, all my crazy ideas, because I was starting businesses when I was in seventh grade. I didn't know then that I was starting businesses, but you know, somebody says, Hey, we babysit my, my twins for the summer. I said, well, if I'm going to babysit two, I might as well babysit like 20. So I started Mary's summer fun camp in the backyard. And my mom was like, yeah, sure. I'll cook lunch for everybody. And my dad would come home on his lunch break and barbecue for all the parents while I did a talent show. So I, I'm very fortunate that

my parents were so supportive of let, you know, giving me the platform to do these things. They didn't do any of it for me. And that was equally important. You know, I would have to roller blade down to Kinko's copy shop to make my flyers and print them out and put, you know, tape them all over the neighborhood. But they, they said, yeah, go for it. You can, you can do it. If you think you want to do that, I'm not holding you back. But my grandfather was an entrepreneur and not a super successful one. You know, he had a lot of ideas. He tried to start an airline with one plane and he would stand at San Jose airport with a sign that said, I'm cheaper if you want to fly on my plane. Wow. Yeah. Wow. It didn't work. Oh, that's pretty bold though. I like that. Wow. But yeah, we'd drive around Watsonville and see an empty storefront

and he'd say, what should we put it, what should we put in there? What could we build there? An ice cream shop is taco store. And I think I was really inspired by him of like, yeah, at his taco store. I think I was really inspired by him of like, yeah, possibilities are endless. You can go whatever you can imagine, you can make it happen. Do you have an entrepreneur

that you've read their biography or autobiography and you're like, yeah. I read Aristotle Onassis' I think it's his biography, I don't know, a year or two ago. Absolutely nuts. Really?

Nuts. Basically, he came over here. I mean, his dad was scooped up by the Nazis. He came to South America in the bottom of a boat, just disgusting. You know what I mean? The month in the boat with people vomiting and pooing and peeing on him. Came to South America and just started selling cigarettes and then bought a boat to move gasoline, get his gas in, oil in. And the rest is history. It became so wealthy. It's mind boggling. You know, I think that's really like

the secret of entrepreneurs is you've got to be opportunistic and always look, what is that? Where's that next thing? And you know, yeah, people need gasoline. Do I buy a boat and like move the gasoline like that? That's a great example because, uh, cigarettes, they didn't have, he brought Turkish cigarettes to South America who got his first, you know, yeah. From poor to rich quick. Yeah. And you do. And, you know, the entrepreneurs, there's always, there's always an expense hiding around the next corner. You know, sometimes you got to think on your feet, like, all right, we need to pull some income in. When we started ranching, you know, we were scrappy. We were like, we got to figure out how to pay for all this. So we, we built an outdoor kitchen and these glamping tents and we invited

people and said, Hey, come do chores with us in the morning. See, see what we do here. And man, hosting people is exhausting. But that helped us grow our ranch. It helped people learn about us, learn about our passion for creating really good meat. And those people are all still lifetime customers telling all their friends. But that wasn't what we set out to do. We didn't want to be a hospitality guest ranch, but you've got to do things like that when you see that opportunity to, you know, businesses have to have a lot of different streams of income, especially when you're starting. Anyone in particular that you, that you held up as a, as a role model, anything come to mind? I mean, I guess your grandfather. Yeah, I would say so. And, you know, like I said, I didn't realize that I,

that I had this entrepreneurial like drive in me until it was like, oh yeah, I didn't realize that I, that I had this entrepreneurial, like drive in me until it was like, Oh yeah, I guess that's what I do. You know, I, I, I wish I had had more direction younger that, um, that that was a passion and people to look up to, but I don't think I really did. Why do your kids even need to go to school? There's this, um, a school called Acton Academy where the school is the kids run the school so that's you know they they run the school everything and um from cleaning the bathrooms to hiring the teachers they do it all wow it seems like that's what your kids are doing it seems like your kids are doing exactly what i did like i just learned how to run this business yeah the

store like whether i wanted to or not, my dad would be like, Hey, go to the bank, take this, you know, bag to the bank or just do your kids even need to go to school? I think they get a lot more out of life experiences and working on the ranch than they do out of school. But unfortunately we still live in this society where, you know, the traditional, you can't, can't go to college unless you have the age requirements in these classes and accredited, accredited school. So, you know, if they didn't want to go to college, which I don't I think it's you know, there's a lot less importance on college these days than when we went. It doesn't make you any more hireable if you've gone to college or not. But if you want doors open for you for certain things in life, it is important.

And it's still, you know, there's a lot of value in the social experience of going to college. And like I said, my girls rodeo, they want to be, they want to college rodeo. There's some great rodeo programs out there. They've seen their friends, you know, go on that path. So I was, I was really disappointed. I thought like post pandemic, we would all say, we got to change the school system. Like what can we do different? Um, and it kind of went back to,

you know, some things changed, but kind of went right back to following the traditional path. Um, and I think it's going to take a lot longer for that to change than we all hope for. There were, um, I saw this stat that there were 51 million kids in the U.S. public school system pre-pandemic. Then after that whole debacle, there were only 49 million. And my kids were three of the kids that did not go back to school. My kids now will never go to school. To be frank, my kids are way, way cooler, way nicer, better eye contact,

more polite, more honest, less trouble than all the other kids that I see anywhere. They're, they're on a, they're on a different plane. I take them out in public and people just know. And, um, I don't, yeah, I, I would hope that more people would raise their kids. I thought that I was going to be too incompetent to raise my kids. I guess you never thought that though, since you were tutoring at a young age. Yeah. I mean, I think it's, you know, partly it's like a bandwidth issue of like, that's why I like these, this online program that they do, because it's, it's very, it gives them all the tools. And what I think is so cool about it is these are the tools you need

as an adult, upload a PDF, like organize your Google drives that communicate with, with your teachers. Um, and that's not, that's something that you can do from, from anywhere. Do your kids do like a, a program or are you just totally homeschooling? They're doing their, they do Kumon in the morning. Are you familiar with Kumon? They do Kumon every morning and we're part of some schooling program, but they check in, they check in on us every like three or four months. And, but my kids are like off the charts, right? Cause they're not, they're not watching TV. They're interacting. They're, yeah, it's just

and i and i'm raising my kids now i raise them say that again it's a lot more efficient crazy efficient my kids are so happy it's it's crazy efficient joe neils as the owner of crossfit kenosha um this is so spot on uh what Mary is saying, Mary, what's your last name? Heffernan. Heffernan. Sorry. This is so spot on. What Mary Heffernan is saying, just start build it brick by brick yourself. The right people will come when they see your passion. Looks like five Mary farms will be upping my game on the meat and fruit life. Love it. the meat and fruit life. Love it. Thanks, Joe. Um, can people come, um, visit the farm? Like, like, do you still do that glamping thing? Do you still do the thing where people could come and spend the day there or spend a couple hours there? Yeah. So we do these like in the summers,

we haven't done it in three years because of the world, but we are gonna, we're hoping to get back to that and just host hosting a couple of farm dinners and stays during the world. But we're hoping to get back to that and just hosting a couple of farm dinners and stays during the summer. But we have this amazing restaurant right here in downtown Fort Jones. It's pre-prohibition building with the full liquor license. It's insane. We do our own whiskey, our own bourbon, our own wine. So a lot of people will come to the town of Fort Jones and come get a burger. Like our, we have this famous burger because it's made with our dry aged ground beef. Um, but people will come to kind of experience five Mary's.

We have three shops along our, our downtown. We have a retail store. Um, I'm in my kind of little, uh, office here and then we have the burger house. Um, so it's a great kind of stopping point to come experience five mary's you can buy meat you will serve you a burger or a steak um and then kind of do a tour of the valley and you can you can see the ranch and we're usually in and out of the restaurant to check in and say hi to people we don't do like official ranch tours because you know you end up just wanting to talk to people for hours and hours and then we're like oh we we

gotta we got some stuff to take care of we got some animals we got work to do yeah but yeah the burger house is a great stopping point we get people from all over i've had people from ireland come to sit to come to five mary's burger house this this town of fort jones how many people live there 630 i think oh my goodness oh my. There's about 2000, like in our Valley, we're in a little round around secluded Valley here. How do you find people to, to, to help you in a town that's so small? You know, in the beginning, so we share our story on Instagram. We have a pretty like, um, large following on Instagram. And so in the beginning, we'd say, hey, we need somebody at the restaurant. We need somebody here. And people would come out of the woodwork wanting to

move here and work here. And locals were a little more hesitant to work for us or, you know, be on our side. It's really hard to be new in a small town and, you know, be seen as successful, in a small town and, you know, be seen as successful, have businesses. Small towns are very skeptical of new people. So it was nobody in town wanted to work for us because they're like, we don't know yet if they're cool or the enemy. Right. Change and change. No one wants change. No one wants change. Now they see that we're good people. You know, we work just as hard as they do. We're out there every morning. We're not hiring people to do the work for us. So we've earned respect in the local community,

and now it's almost all locals that we employ. Okay, and people do love jobs. Yes. It's come back around. For a while, no one wanted to work. It's getting better. Is it hard to find good people? Just in the retail experiences that I have, um, it doesn't look like there's a

lot of good people out there who give a shit. You know, I think that's the beauty of a small town. And what's come back around is the people that we have working here. They love their job and we treat them well. And they, they don't want to go anywhere. You know, they want to be here where I think is in more kind of urban areas, people are, where am I going? What's the next thing? The people who we have on our team, they're like, this is a great job.

I love being a part of what Five Marys is doing. And we have them, you know, they're here for five or seven years so far. And hopefully we'll be here a lot longer. I'm not a recycling guy. I have no a, um, I'm not a recycling guy. I have no faith in recycling. I'm not a charity guy. I have no faith in charity. Like I'm a, um, uh, tip the kid $5 at Starbucks who smiles at me or the, the, the pull up to the hotel, the guy who opens my door. If he's like, Hey, how are you? Beautiful kids, dude, you get five bucks. I'm rewarding you.

And I'm all about sharing. Give, give, give. Yep. All that being said, this thing you're doing with your boxes, could you share that with the audience? That is so freaking cool. So the box is where we're just giving them to people having a hard time? No. So if I buy meat from you, you send it out in a package. And then if I understood correctly, the box that you send it to me and has a return

label on it. So then I can take some books and God knows I have too many books and I can put the books in the box, put the label on it and send it back to you at the post office and i used to send stuff media mail all the time it's so cheap it's so cheap it's crazy cheap that's the secret so you get your box back yes and so we're we're killing less trees and i like when you normally i'm like fuck you there's plenty of trees but i just love that and i love the fact that someone's getting my book and then you donate the book yeah we have a foster program and all the local schools, they like rely on it now. We're getting, you know, thousands of books a month infused in this little town that they're like, thank you. This is crazy.

But yeah, again, that was just being an entrepreneur and having to get scrappy because these these liners are expensive. You know, they're they're like eight to 12 bucks for this insulated liner. That's going to keep that meat frozen. I can do cheaper ones, but they don't work the same. And we've worked so hard for this meat. Like it can't thaw in transit. So we have these expensive liners. We brand every box with our actual cattle brand. It gets an M5 brand on it and we ship those out. Well, to get it back in FedEx, it's like 15 bucks. It's, you know, a dollar more than the cost of the box. I'm like, well, that doesn't make sense.

So I figured out this media mail. If the customer, and we are so lucky we have customers who care enough. Going to the post office is terrible. But they'll do it. They'll put a used book or two in that box, take it, and we have a little return address and a sticker you put over the perishable sticker that says media mail. And it takes a little while

to get to us, but we get hundreds of boxes back a week. And the post office got mad. They were like, you know, small town post office, we don't, there's too many boxes here. And, you know, a couple other post offices were like, we think this is abuse of media mail. And we went all the way to the postmaster in Sacramento and said, can we do this? And he said, this is a fantastic use of media mail. Yes. And he gave us a letter. If anybody gives us grief that says this is, this is a perfect use of media mail. Wow. Hey, when you, that's crazy. So, so you could have thrown your hands up at any point. You could have thrown your hands up at the beginning and been like, fuck it. We're giving the, the, the cost of these boxes to the customers. The second year people started pushing back about the books.

You could have thrown your hands up. Hey, when you came up with that idea, how do you know that's not a harebrained idea? Like part of me is like, dude, that's a harebrained idea. No one wants to go to the post office. It's like basically douchebag heaven there or douchebag hell. And then on top of that, do people really want to part with their books? How did you know that was with their books? You know – How did you know that was going to work?

You didn't care? No, I didn't. I was, you know, scrappy. Like, let's try this. I don't know. I don't have a better option. I'm not paying $15 from FedEx to do it. I don't want people – like, I know where my parents live in the Bay Area.

You can't even get that box in your garbage can. Their garbage can's allotment isotment is like this. Right. So I got to find a way to get these back. And we also have a drop spot in my parents' house. People just drop boxes on their porch and my dad chats with them. How was your steak? Puts them in the garage. And then I go and get them. But you know, when you have a harebrained idea, it's like, there's nobody to tell you this isn't going to work. So let's try it.

And I think you have a little benefit of being a small business and being, you know, these are their friendly ranchers where they know the face of us, where people are like, I'm going to get this box back to them. I'll go to the post office because I know that's going to make a difference for them. And you have the label on there. It's pretty easy. That's pretty easy. Hey, is there a bookstore in town?

No. I wonder if that would work to open a bookstore with the books that are returned. Yeah, probably. Although the schools benefit from them so much. Just 1,000 books a month is crazy. Yeah. Well, we've got four schools here and then a foster program. Actually, there is a bookstore a half hour away.

Sometimes we'll take them there, and they give us free coffee in exchange. I was thinking about just ordering some meat just so I could find a place to – In Santa Cruz, I don't know where to take my books, but I got this dining room table just full of books that I need to get rid of. Really? Yeah. Brand-new books. I think I'm going to buy of books that I need to get rid of. Really? Yeah. Brand new books. I think I'm going to buy meat after the show just to send to you.

Do people ever send more than one book? Yeah. Like, do they get just a whole box of books? Yeah. It gets more expensive for the customer, though, because the media mail is weight. So we're like, meat is one. But yeah, sometimes they come chock full of books. But it's still so dirt cheap.

Back in the day, I used to send shitloads of DVDvds loads of dvds hundreds or thousands at a time and uh it was so i couldn't believe it was like basically free yeah no it's three to five dollars to get these boxes back and they're pretty big yeah a great idea um when you you're married to a gentleman named Brian. Yep. And he was an attorney. He's an attorney. You have four kids with him and you move out of comfort zone. How does that work in the relationship? Those are pretty big choices to agree on for two people, especially someone as ambitious as you. And he's put so much time into law school.

But then you're going to pack up and go. Yeah. Working with your spouse is hard too when you're an entrepreneur. It's like you do everything together and you have to make all these decisions together. Um, but luckily we kind of had eased into that. Um, so his dad was a farmer in Imperial Valley and then Tehama County. So in California, his, his family's also got strong, long roots in California, but, uh, his dad was a farmer and Brian's the oldest of five kids. And he said, you know, hi, dad, I want to I want to do what you're doing. And his dad said, there's there's

no I can't barely feed my family with this money I'm making being a farmer. It's a hard living. You need to go do something and make money and then maybe you go back to agriculture someday. His dad was very wise saying that he got Parkinson's very young and died recently after a long, long battle with Parkinson's. But he gave Brian that really sage advice before when he was still kind of a sound mind. So Brian went to law school and he was working in real estate. He called it dirt law doing entitlement. So he was working with some like ranches, you know, figuring out lot lines and all that fun stuff. he was working with some like ranches, you know, figuring out lot lines and all that fun stuff.

But he worked for a big firm where, you know, it's billable hour and all these rules and late long nights. And after we got married, I think he saw like, wait, you work for yourself. You have all this flexibility. We're going to have a kid like I don't want to be doing this billable hour for someone else. So he left the firm, basically hung his own shingle and just said, you know, law office of Brian Heffernan, I'm here if you need me. And he had his senior partners at the law firm. You are an idiot. This is career suicide. What are you doing?

And he just said, you know, it's my family is going to be more important to me. And then the way that, you know. That was with one kid. He had one kid. Yeah, I was in 2005, 2006. And what were you doing then? I had three small businesses. I had the tutoring center. I had a kind of a drop off play care center. I had an errand running service called go, go Menlo, where we sent girls to do whatever errands you needed. It was like task rabbit before task rabbit. Um, I wasn't smart enough to make it an app. But then 2008 comes around and all those senior partners are knocking on his door. Hey, this was really smart. We're leaving the firm too. Can we come with you? So then he built a firm, a small firm with four or five guys, but he had all that autonomy, you know, and it was the

same thing. The entrepreneur life just gives you so much more benefits. There's where's work and risk and all the things. But, um, and then I accidentally started a restaurant. I would, did not mean to be a restaurateur. I had no experience with the restaurant, but I'd done all these other businesses. Like I said, kid and family focused. And we have two little kids by now. And we're like, we love to go out for good food, get beer and wine and sit and enjoy a meal out. And you walk into a restaurant with two kids and they're like, Oh God, sit in the corner and eat as fast as you can and get out of here. So we're like, let's just build like a clubhouse. We'll cater in good food from one of these, you know, Calafia or all these Google chefs at the time, all the restaurants in the Bay area,

we'll just cater in the food. Um, but we'll get a beer and wine license and we'll have like areas kids can just play while you're eating. And it's not weird, but the aesthetic is going to be beautiful. It's not going to be McDonald's. It's going to be like nice, like where you want to go and get good wine and a good steak, but your kids can come. So we rented this little like a cottage in Los Altos built it, started building it out and realized, well, the health department is going to require us to have a full commercial kitchen to serve food unless it's airplane wrapped in Saran wrap. So we might as well just hire a chef. So we opened up, literally looked at each other, like, what did we do? Breakfast, lunch, dinner, seven days a week no restaurant experience

like this is crazy so we had what was it called what was it called it was called bumble it's not it's not open anymore um no we sold it and it ran for a few years and uh didn't i don't know what happened but uh we were thrown into this and then but there was a line out the door the concept was great we just had to figure out like you know chefs and chef schedules and you know chefs are a different breed to manage and um food costs and how to make it all work and so we were learning as we went on that and then we opened the second restaurant because that one was successful um and by then then Brian was helping me. Yeah. Is this the Instagram? Dude, this place is so cool.

It was awesome. I imagine if you have little kids, look at that sandbox in the front yard. We had a fish tank dividing a playroom in the back. So, you know, parents could look in and check on their kids. And we always had teachers in the back in the playroom, but the kids didn't see their parents. They just thought they just saw fish, but really healthy food, great quality beer, good coffee, good wine. So Brian really kind of started helping me manage the restaurants. And he, you know, like I said, if food's always been important to him, he really enjoyed this aspect of like running a business. And so we kind of, he was only doing maybe halftime law and halftime helping me run and start these businesses.

So we had like a ramp, we had a runway to working together as entrepreneurs before we just picked up and moved to a 700 square foot cabin and became ranchers together. And now, you know, he jokes, Mary raised, Brian raises it, Mary sells it. So we have our own paths, you know he jokes mary raised brian raises it mary sells it so we have our own paths you know we don't stop each other's toes he's all cattle all ranching he's got two ranch hands um which is not a lot for the number of animals we raise he does most of it himself um and then i've got the shops the selling the branding the marketing and you know we we have lunch together every day at our restaurant and kind of powwow on like what are we doing here the shops, the selling, the branding, the marketing. And, you know, we, we have lunch together every day at our restaurant and the kind of powwow on like, what are we doing here? What

things are we moving around? Where do we need to push? Um, but then, you know, we, we don't second guess each other. We don't, you know, step on each other's toes. And that has really kind of, I think been our secret to secret to not going crazy. Was it, was it, was the move easy? Was it, was it contentious at all when you're like, hey, no, how about buying the ranch originally? Was that contentious? No, we were on the same page. I think we were really both burnt out on the Bay Area. You know, it wasn't like, oh, are we leaving this life for another? We were like, go, like run. Okay. That's nice.

I can't do this anymore. You know, my parents met all their best friends when I went to kindergarten, still their best friends. And so we sent our first to kindergarten thinking we're so excited. We can't wait to meet our new best friends for like the second part of our life. And we just looked around like, where, where are they? These, you know, these people are consumed with like, did you go to Maui or are you going to Europe? And you don't have a pool and you don't have a pool guy. You don't have a guest house. You don't fly private. It was like a whole nother level of wealth. And we were like, I don't really think these are the kids we want our kids to be around. So it was like such an easy decision to be like,

we're not doing that. We're moving to this small town with people who work hard and have these values. And we're going to make our kids be scrappy. You know, they shared one bed for the first year and a half, four kids in a double bed because this house was teeny tiny. And then we kind of expanded up into the attic and they all had their own bed, but they shared a room. But, you know, we're out there. If we don't cut firewood, we're in trouble. So Sunday afternoon, every Sunday, our whole life so far, we're out there cutting firewood as a family. And you get such satisfaction from that. And my kids are, you know, they'll do anything. Remember the second year we moved here, um, my daughter said, mom, let's get a Christmas tree. Let's get a

Christmas tree. And we're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we will. Maybe tomorrow, maybe tomorrow. They're like, no, screw you, mom. They jump in an ATV. They drive a mile up into the mountains with a battery operated handsaw. They cut down a tree. They bring that thing back. They're hauling it in the house. So proud of themselves, decorated it all their own. We're like, good job. You solved your problem. That's awesome. Got it. So, uh, it, there were, we saw so many benefits that it was like, all right, I can deal without the amenities of the life I had are going to, you know, get my hair done, get my nails done, all the things that I was used to. Um, but we took, we sold the businesses. He gave his law

practice to a friend. And then we didn't sell the house for like three months. Cause my husband was like, I, I'm not sure you can hack this, like this life. He's like, I can, I know I can, I don't need nice things, but I don't know if you can. So we waited three months and, um, you know, there was some hard, there was some hard adjustments, but we, there was no looking back for what we gained. Why did you sell the house? Why not rent it out? We didn't want the, you know, hassle of renters. And then we thought this market's going to, this bubble's going to pop and it hasn't. Yeah. Yeah. It was, it's a. When your celebration of life is prepaid in advance, it becomes a gift from you to your

family later because no one should have to plan for a loss while they're experiencing one. Paying in advance protects your loved ones and gives you the peace of mind you deserve. Let us help you plan every detail with professionalism and compassion. We are your local Dignity Memorial provider. Find us at DignityMemorial.ca. dignity memorial provider find us at dignity memorial.ca pretty deep uh investment to keep a house in the bay area these days yeah do you speaking about money do you do property do you guys own property besides that do you do just our uh we had like a rental house in town that we did an Airbnb and it was too hard to manage people and that.

But no, only our commercial properties. Okay. My dad would like that. My dad's – I like residential. My dad's like commercial, commercial, commercial. Okay. So these places, when you move into them, you buy the buildings also. You like to buy the buildings and own the property.

What about internet when you get there? Your picture is pretty good right now. Fiber. We've got fiber here. Wow. Okay. Yeah. There's a lot of, you know, like government benefits and small towns.

There's a, they applied for a grant and they got fiber here. Wow. And so that's never an issue. No, we have Starlink at home cause they because they haven't ran fiber out that far yet. And it's fine, but it's better in town here. How long have you had Starlink? Like a year and a half, maybe. Have you done a podcast out of there?

I've done like my Zoom calls won't even work on it. So I haven't even tried. Interesting. OK, OK. My dad's an Armenian. He keeps wanting me to visit. And I'm like and i they just got starlink there and i'm like god can i do my podcast with starlink yeah that's a good question

you know that i only have the residential they have a commercial i wonder if that has more bandwidth but it's fine for everything else i just notice on zoom sometimes it tells me unstable connection but that could be something else going on in our universe. It might work. What about Amazon? Does Amazon deliver to your house? Yep. When we were first moved here, same thing as everyone else, next day, two-day delivery. Now they have kind of gotten smart to rural areas and it's like, might be three or four days, but no, it still works. It's even like that in santa cruz for a while you could you i could grocery shop on amazon yeah and it was pretty crazy and the mail lady would come to

my house and the entire mail truck would be just my groceries because they would put them in those those totes yeah in the totes and then eventually after a year that amazon's like fuck you we're not doing that anymore i know but you know what. We're not doing that anymore. I know. But you know what was great about that whole, that mindset during the pandemic was now everybody's like, oh yeah, ship meat to my door. Because for the first five years, I had to really tell people it's okay. I'm going to put meat in a box with dry ice and it's going to come to your doorstep. And they're like, you can't mail meat. That is not going to work.

So now everybody's like, yeah, whatever. Just ship it mail meat. That is not going to work. So that now everybody's like, yeah, whatever. Just ship it to me. That's really been helpful for our business. So the pandemic was good for you. Yeah. I mean, you know, as much as you can say, it was a good thing. There was a lot of hard things, but, um, the after effects is people are more used to shopping online and buying groceries online and getting things delivered to their doorstep. And for a little while during it, you know, there was a couple of meat shortage times. And then people were like, I restocked our website with like 30,000 pounds of meat and

we sold out in 17 minutes. And yeah, the pandemic was good for you, Mary. The pandemic was good for you. I love it. It wasn't bad. Hey, same with the gym equipment space people who are selling gym equipment murdered wealthy overnight crazy yeah crazy yeah but that's kind of dropped off because everyone has one now whereas there's still we got a lot of people hooked on our meat that are still buying. Yeah. Right. Right. People still need, uh, meat. Well, do you, do you see, um, the limits of your operation constantly? Like, are you like, okay, if, if, if we put on this many customers, this 1800 acres, isn't going to

cut it. Yeah. We're going to reach a point soon where that's as much meat as we can raise. Um, I'd say we're within 20% of that right now. Oh, wow. Okay. And you know, all the infrastructure we've built. So like we have this beautiful full service butchery, five Mary's custom meat co we can't, we, you know, we can only dry age so much meat. So we're, we're getting closer to that kind of, uh, stopping point, but, um, I think it'll just, you know, make it a little easier for me to sell meat right now. I still, every week I got to send a newsletter, do a special, like I have to move that meat like actively every week. Um, but we're looking into doing more, um, like lifestyle home goods, doing some kitchen, kitchen wear,

um, and kind of expanding our brand in other areas. Have you, have you, have you run into any, um, integrity or value issues? Um, with, with the company, I give you just two things with, with the podcast. Um, some, someone came to me and they said, Hey, I want to, uh, this paper street coffee company that I drink their coffee. They said, Hey, we want to support your podcast. And I said, okay, but I already drink this other kind of coffee. And they're like, yeah, but we're going to give you this much money a month. I said, yeah, but I drink it. He's a fine. I don't give a fuck what you say. I like your show and I'm going to give you money every month. You don't have to drink my coffee.

You can even say you don't like it. I was like, well, shit, I'll take your money. And then eventually he started sending me coffee, and I started drinking his coffee, and I'm like, shit, I'm drinking your coffee. It's authentic. Right. Or there's another company on here, California Hormones. They sell testosterone replacement therapy for men. Okay.

And I'm like, there's no fucking way I'll ever do that. I'm not taking testosterone. I'm not taking testosterone. They're like, we don't care. We love your show so I was able to like you know what I mean like you're still authentic but I still get to tell the truth but but yeah do you I'm guessing the food industry there's all sorts of stuff like that like there's choices every day it's like oh shit and and I heard you say that you, you,

you don't want to show the bad side of farming, but you want to be honest. And I'm like that too. Like I show all the good things I do. I try not to show when I'm out getting drunk on my Instagram, not because I'm hiding it, but I don't, I'm not interested in promoting that. Yeah. But I'm not hiding it. That's what I tell my entrepreneur people. Like people are voyeuristic. They want to the real story. And also by, by opening that window into your life, they trust you. Like you're, you know, they trust you because you're like, I'm not going to tell you I like this coffee unless I really like this coffee. I'm going to tell you it's shit. If it's shit, you know, for us, we're, but the truth is I won't even tell them it's shit, just to put in there. I just wouldn't say anything. Like, I tell them that too.

Like, hey, I'm not going to badmouth these people. Yeah. But if I don't say anything, you should probably know. That's what I say. Like, we share the good and the bad, but we don't share the ugly. You know, there's a certain stuff that stays off social media. But for us... Like, if a calf was born dead, you don't show that.

I might tell the story. Okay. But for us, if a calf was born dead, you don't show that. I might tell the story. OK, calf has a huge abscess that needs to be lanced and it's got infection coming out. There's some gross stuff in ranching. I'm not showing that because I want people to envision delicious, perfect, yummy meat. But I do share the hard days because that I think people they want to know they don't want to they don't want to think that ranching is all sunshine and rainbows. You know, there's hard days. We'll have a pig farrow and have a litter and all the piglets are stillborn.

And you're like, shit. And people are interested, like, wow, how does that affect their bottom line? How does that affect their mental state? Like, they just did all this work and they're all dead. I think that is important to share. And that's why people trust us, because we're showing the good parts and the bad parts. There's just a certain level of stuff people don't need to see, you know, like the gross stuff is what I'm not, I'm not putting on Instagram.

But I think it's, it is really important to stay true to your values. And my husband is like so hardcore about that, that he really makes sure I stay in line. Cause sometimes, you know, you want to use superlatives and we'll say, you know, all this meat at five Mary's is raised on our ranch. And he's like, well, that's not true, Mary, because some of the calves we buy are six months old and they, so they, they lived on someone else's ranch. So you need to clarify that for people. And I'm like, all right.

All right. You're right. I do. That's cool. That's cool. I'm more where you are. And my wife does what your husband does. Yeah. I'll do that. Yeah. I'll be like, all right. All right. You're right. I do. That's cool. That's cool. I'm more where you are. My wife does what your husband does. Yeah, I'll do that.

Yeah. I'll be like, what? Who gives a fuck about the first six months? You're like, no, no, just tell them. Then just tell them. Yeah, no, it's true. And so it's a good, it's a good balance because he makes sure that I'm telling the whole story. But, you know, we've seen people in this industry cut corners, get big.

You know, we looked at growing and scaling with bringing in a partner and scaling this operation because we've built a strong brand. And we said no, because if we scale, we lose what we're doing and we lose the quality. But there was an operation who had a ranch here that was based in Oakland and Hollywood, Malibu, and they got too big and they were buying, they were doing things that weren't right. And they got, they, it blew up in a fiery crash eventually. And we kind of were just watching like, what's going to happen at some point. So integrity is really important. And you know, if you don't have that, you're not going to be successful long-term. Karma bites. Yeah. And I guess that's a story that's common in a lot of businesses i'm

reading into it what you're saying but where the margins become better to buy from someone else and put your label on it until you get caught 100 but yeah you can't you can't do that i mean you can for a while and then it it'll come back to bite you how um how in shape before he started working the ranch like 10 years ago? Did he stay in shape? I mean, he looks like you got a strong, beautiful man. But was he ready for the ranch? You know, he's – before I met him, he had a point in his life. He was like over 300 pounds.

No shit. Yeah. And he got to a point how tall is he he's tall right five six five yeah shortest one in his family wow okay wow uh yeah he got to a point he said this was before i met him he said that i this isn't the life i want and so he signed up for a marathon never having run one ran a marathon lost a bunch of weight. And then when we lived in the Bay Area, he would, his outlet was going on hunts, you know, going to Alaska on a moose hunt where they'd drop him off on a riverfront and say, we'll pick you up in 21 days.

And, you know, here's a sat phone, but it might not work. So he did kind of those extreme hunts and hikes and he would stay in shape. You know, he's always been a really good, good dad. And when we had little kids, you know, it's hard to be like, okay, I'm, I'm going to go for a run for an hour and a half. So he would put rice and beans and his hunting backpack and hike up and down the trellis of our backyard over and over. Um, and now he still hikes, you know, he's physically working out.

We, we feed our cattle hay. The first year that we were here, we did what's called small bales. They're about 70, 80, 90 pounds each. And we loaded, he loaded 1.3 million pounds of hay that we fed the cattle in a couple months in the winter. Every morning out there loading, you know, 60 bales, feeding them to the cattle. Tell me those numbers again. He did what? 1.3 million pounds of hay.

He loaded onto a tractor. Him himself, not even help. That's the math on 1.3 million pounds of hay he he loaded onto a tractor him himself not not even help that's the math on yeah 1.3 million pounds every winter um but now he he hikes he still puts on a big heavy backpack and hikes up our mountain um you know every other day he likes to stay in shape um uh how tall are you i'm 5 10 oh wow you're tall too yeah we've our girls are are pretty tall uh cave dastro uh sebon he's two feet taller than you that yeah that's accurate uh melissa um now sebon you're full of uh peptides he's settled down I'm not full of peptides. I dabbled in some peptides. Leave me alone. These people.

That's wild. And are your daughters – so your daughters are strong too? Yeah, they are. They are. They all – so they rope, which is so cool. And this whole rodeo sport, you know, I never thought I'd be a rodeo mom, but we have a semi truck that we pull this 52 foot trailer that has living quarters and room for six horses and eight saddles and all their tack. Um, and we travel around to rodeos and camp out for the

weekend while the kids compete in barrel racing and wrote a goat tying pole bending, but they're little ropers, which is kind of like, I could never do it. It's amazing. You know, they're full speed on a horse, swinging a rope, they catch a dally on their saddle and they're doing team roping and all these sports that, you know, Yellowstone, the move, the TV show for better or worse has really like been good for the industry ranching industry. because people now are like wait what is this what is this world and like you know yellowstone has the the uh dallas drama side of it but it's team roping and these rodeo sports have become a lot more popular um since the show

um does your husband carry a a gun with him everywhere he goes? Yeah, I do too. I mean, I don't off the ranch, but on the ranch. We've got bears, mountain lions. We've had wolves. The first wolf in California camped out on our ranch one winter for three months. We had it on game cameras,

like the same as our livestock guardian dogs, like minutes of each other. What about mountain mountain lions yeah we we see mountain lions we had a mountain lion kill 60 of our sheep one year oh my god yeah it was terrible why 60 well just an asshole move he's just trying to kill him he's not even eating him teaching her young to kill oh my god yeah and so but you got to get a depredate you can't just shoot a mountain lion you got to get a depredation permit so the first night 20 we call the county trapper he says yeah that's a mountain lion the second night kills 20 more you have they have to kill three times before you get or they have to kill twice before you get a permit so then they got the depredation permit

and they were out there my husband and the county trapper yeah that's our rig isn't that insane dude that truck is yummy. Wait, so it wasn't, when you say kill twice, you mean it had to kill two separate times, 20 wasn't enough? Yeah. Hey, off the record, you just go out there and say that the mountain lion was going to kill you. I know. Even that, like when the wolf was here, you couldn't even try to scare the wolf.

The wolves were here before us. You can't try to scare them. You have to just move your livestock so that they're safe. But the wolf is the priority. They can't be like that in Idaho. That's just a California thing. California is the harshest.

Yeah. It's weird that where you live is even considered California. Those people up there must hate being lumped up with us ding-dongs down here. Well, you have heard the State of Jefferson movement. They've been trying to make its own state for like 50, 60 years. Yeah, don't leave us. We need you. People ask me all the time, why don't you leave?

It's like because I'm not a coward. I'm staying. Yeah. I'm staying and I'm walking around barefoot and like no mask and I'm doing my thing with my kids. Hey, this truck is crazy. Yeah, it really is. So it's a seven passenger semi. He has a class A.

I could drive it without the truck, but he has a class a to drive it with the trailer. I mean, who made, who makes that? It's a Schwalbe conversion. There's this guy who like converted these trucks. It's a Peterbilt, but it's got the Schwalbe conversion.

So there's a bench seat in the back that turns into a bed. And then like four, it's like an expedition and you get in it and you're, you're like a truck driver. It's like bouncing around. It's, it's pretty amazing. And then we live in that front part and we haul six horses around. We'll go as far as like rodeos in Utah. We've got to, you have to stop at a fairgrounds that like you can board your horses for the night. Cause they can't just ride in that thing for more than eight hours. It's like a whole culture. Who watches the ranch when you guys do that?

We have two ranch hands that we really trust. One of them's been here for three or four years, and he's like Brian's right hand. And he cares as much as we do. So we bring in a couple other extra people to help them when we're gone. But we're lucky to be at a point now where we can leave. And those horses live on your property. Yeah. We've got like 13 or 14 horses. They only travel with like the, their ones are competitive with at that time. And your girls, do they each have their own horse? Like that? Hey, that one's mine. Yeah. And what's crazy about rodeos. Sometimes

they need two horses. Here's Brian. You can come say hi. I'm still a pod. Hey, Hey, how you doing? Hey, what's up dude? Not much. Hey, where Hey, were you tickled when you got that truck? Were you tripping? Were you like, oh my goodness? It's a lot of bling, more bling than I'm used to. Oh, dude, it's beautiful. That looks so fun. And congratulations on having a beautiful wife and four amazing daughters, dude. You're a blessed man. I'm a lucky guy. More than I deserve. Yeah, crazy. Right on.

Well, thank you for letting us borrow your wife in the morning and share it with the audience. You bet. You bet. Wow. Special guest appearance by Brian from Five Marys Ranch, formerly 300 pounds. A cameo.

Hey, what about the whole keto movement and this whole carnivore movement and just all this? I mean, the mainstream media has declared war on meat, but basically all the healthiest people in the world, like myself, these specimens like myself, we've all embraced meat. Has it been a boon for business even even with the war that the um sick america has declared on me it's it's crazy that this that the sickest part of america has declared war on the industry that all the healthiest people uh have embraced but whatever fuck them uh how has and there's always going to be, you know, the pendulum's always going to swing.

We just like, don't listen to the noise. It's like, if you want to eat lab grown meat, go for it. Yeah. Okay. Okay. You're not going to enjoy it, but you can try. We really just like to, you know, not say you should eat this. You shouldn't eat that. We just don't soapbox. It's like, we raise a really good product. You are not going to find better meat than this. Here it is. If you want it, if you don't, you go do your thing. But people do want, they want clean meat. They want to know the story behind it. They want to trust it. And these days you can't always trust those, those labels, those stickers. We don't certify organic. We don't certify anything because it's just red tape

and it costs you more. It costs us more. We just want our customers to know that we're raising the best quality with the standards that we're going to feed our own kids and that's what they want to. Yeah, that's cool.

And people can come up and people can come up and look. Yeah, yeah. And see it. And they, you know, they don't have to because these days, you know, it used to be that there was a butcher shop in every small town and there was farmers and ranchers, you know, on the outskirts of every town, but now that doesn't happen. You know, we were so much more segregated. Um, but thanks to Instagram, they can see what we

do every day. You know, I'm out there checking cows, showing it on Instagram. We have a calf born. We're showing the whole process. And that's really all people need to feel that level of comfort. Like I see, I see how you raise them. I trust you. I want to buy your product. Um, and I can ship it to somebody in Florida or New York from our California ranch. So it kind of is like the best of both worlds of this old school. I'm your neighbor. You can see what I do and trust me, but you don't have to live here. I can ship it to you 3000 miles away and it'll get there in 12 hours overnight and you're having it for dinner. Did you notice that there was a, you know, I would say we're still in it, but a couple of years ago there was a big ketosis keto movement. Did that affect your business also?

Yeah. I mean, I think what I've seen is like when people are super into the keto or the paleo or whatever, they're not always the ones looking for the super quality. They're just more concerned with like, I just want meat all the time. And maybe, you know, the price point. Our thing is like our meat's a little bit more expensive. Although these days it's really not because grocery store meat has gone up in price so much. And we're like, we don't, we can't really raise our prices that much more. Um, so we're not that much more expensive, but I think it's, you know, it's, it's the accessibility. We go for the people who are like, I want to know and trust. And I care

about the quality of every bite. And maybe I don't need to eat as much meat because I'm paying a little bit more for really good quality meat. So that seems like more of our customer base that the paleo keto guys were like, I need to go to Costco because I need so much meat that I just want to like stock up and I don't really care as much where it's from or what it's doing. SEMA Globes, does Brian have a a single brother i own a ranch near them no he has two brothers and they're uh six foot nine and six foot eight and they're both um taken with children uh well well hold on a sec here mary don't get crazy uh i don't have a middle name and i would even change it to mary well shit i love you se Seema. You're awesome. That's good. Flexible. Very flexible. She brought she brought a husband seven hours away from the city and you're willing to change your name.

have done they're going to romanticize it they're not going to have the balls to do it um they're gonna do it and fail right i mean those are all the other those are the other options um let me start here if you would have known how much work it's it was going to be would you have still done it you know people ask me that about kids i'm like i love my kids i want three more but i wouldn't but god i i can't it's so much fucking work it's crazy you can't even get your head wrapped around if you think about it you'll go run out and jump off a cliff is it like that what you've done yeah i mean we look back at the hurdles that we've had to overcome and you know in california too it's so hard the regulations and like this you know we have to there's really regulations up there they come up there yeah california water oh my god

yeah it's it's hard it's hardcore um if if somebody had said these are all the things that you're gonna have to figure out a way around i think you know we would have said we would have second guessed it but we also are people who are like you're only going to have to figure out a way around, I think, you know, we would have second, we would have second guessed it. But we also are people who are like, you're only going to be successful if you figure out a way around those things, you know, and I kind of like the challenge. Like if things were smooth all the time, you'd be like, well, that's, that's boring. When, when we're like, here's a big issue, you know, the roads are closed. We can't get our cows to the butcher shop today. I mean, that's a small thing, but like, all right, let's go. Let's figure out a way around this.

We can go to here. We can figure out this. We'll get somebody to help us here. Like there's always a solution. You just got to find it. And for me, that's kind of like the high of being an entrepreneur is like, I'm going to find a way through this and I'm going to do it right now. And you can always do that.

But is it easy? No, it's not. And if somebody told you all the things at once, you'd be like, that's a lot. But you take it one day at a time and you solve those problems one at a time. And you kind of are a little – you stand a little taller when you've solved those problems. So I'm just thinking of a problem you must have. You have to have so many boxes on hand and then you need a place to store them and then you need dry ice and you're in the middle of nowhere. Where do you get that dry ice?

And like, those are like real problems. Yeah. And that's very intuitive of you. Most people don't think about that, but yeah, getting dry ice was a huge problem in the beginning. And where do we like source these boxes? So 10 years ago, you know, I did by six months to a year of trial and error on the boxes, I found the best boxes. And now that's what everybody across the country at branches doing direct to consumer is using because they've seen us do it or, you know, they've taken my course. So we really did then kind of have to pioneer this because there was nobody else doing it. Dry ice, you know, you can, some people think you can ship with gel packs. Gel packs are the same temperature as your meat. So they both thaw together. You might as well not even have them in

there. Dry ice is at negative 119 degrees. So it pulls the temperature of everything down in that box. So you have so that, you know, everything pulls the temperature down when that dry ice is subliminated, then the temperature starts rising. So you have to have dry ice. Is it easy to get? No. So for the first years I would, I found a supplier in Medford, Oregon, about an hour and a half North. And I would have to drive there and dry ice doesn't last forever. You know, it sublimates like in a day, if you don't have a lot of it, I would have to drive there and dry ice doesn't last forever. You know, it sublimates like in a day, if you don't have a lot of it, I would have to drive there early in the morning on days that I would ship come back. Maybe I got a few more orders in. I got to go back, get more dry ice. Um, it was a hassle. It was a, you know, something we had to say, well, we can't do it without this. So we just got to make it happen. Now we're getting 6,000

pounds of dry ice delivered every week to ship our boxes. This week we went through those 6,000 pounds. Where is it shipped from? Is it shipped from Medford still? From Medford. But Sacramento is like the main distributor. Airgas does dry ice. When do you know to make your own dry ice manufacturer out in the middle of your – in Fort Jones? You're like, fuck it.

I'm making my own dry ice. We looked at it, but the machines are like 10 grand and you still have to get the CO2 delivered. Okay. Just as easy to get the dry ice delivered if you can find a place that'll do it. So we, you know, we years of figuring it out and we've now we have a good solution for that. Do all the girls have their own room now? They do, but they kind of all share. They, they all end up, I go up there and they're all sleeping in the same bed.

Yeah. That, that my kids too. I six, six and eight. And I, the boys all still sleep in the same bed together. And I'm like,

dude, you got, everyone has their own shit. What are you doing? Yeah. So you've got twins, six year old twins and an eight year old. Yeah.

That's fine. Yeah. They, it's good sibling relationship. Do you, do you think that they move away when they're older? Or what do you think happens in the next 10 years? Such an interesting thing to think about.

I hope that they do. I don't want them to just stay here in this small town. I hope that they go spread their wings and experience life and live in New York City or wherever it is and experience different states and different people. You know, I live in the South. My sister lives in Nashville and I love the experience she's had. But I think some of them maybe will come back. I don't know. I used to think that's the ultimate goal in life. You know, I want all my kids to live near me. But my mom had two girls and two boys and the girls flew the coop. You know, I'm six hours north by car and my sister's in Nashville and my brothers both still live there. But what's fun is like coming

home is so much more special when you don't just live there and, you know, having your parents visit where instead of just going over for dinner, you're that, you know, you're living there, you're waking up together, you're sitting around the fire at night. So we'll be happy, you know, even if they all leave, we didn't build this for any pressure for them to say, you got to take over this family ranch. You know, our goal is they've take the tools here to start their own business, but if they want to, they could. And that's kind of what's driven us to have so many different avenues in the, you know, in the, what we, in our operation, we have a restaurant, we do whiskey and wine. Um, we do hospitality,

we do retail, we do books, you know, if there's an avenue that they're interested in, you know, great, you go and take this, but I kind of hope they all pick their own thing and, and, um, just take what they've learned here. And if this ranch doesn't succeed to the next generation, um, that's, you know, that might be for the better for them. You never know. I'm going to push back on that in one second. Clock, did she say that she's the one who first designed dry ice meat shipping? No, she didn't. She said she made a contribution to it. Jeffrey Birchfield, do they have their own slaughter facility?

Yes, they do. On the property. On the ranch. USDA certified. Temple Grandin designed. How old is Temple Grandin now? I can't believe she's still alive. USDA certified. Temple Grandin designed. How old is Temple Grandin now? I can't believe she's still alive. I know.

A lot of people can't believe she is. I think she's in her late 70s. She's just an icon. She's amazing to work with. Has she come up to your property? No. I don't think she travels. Well, she does travel for speaking engagements.

But no, it was all just over, um, over the phone. And for anyone who doesn't know who that is, look her up, read her book. I, in a nutshell, she had autism and she, and she, she, she, she, I don't want to say she healed herself, but she healed herself. She, she unfucked herself kind of wild story and connects with animals on like a deeper level. There's a great documentary.

I wonder what she thinks about microdosing a different story um uh wouldn't it be aren't you excited about grandkids though mary wouldn't it be nice to have fucking 20 grandkids on the property and for sure i would love communal living would make me happier than anything but you know you don't want to put that pressure on your kids so but if, but if it happens, yes, I would be very happy. Are you a homesteader? No, I don't really consider myself a homesteader. I think, you know, we've don't, we have milk cows and they are nursemaids. So if we have bottled baby, if we have orphans, when we are calving, then we give them to the Jersey cows because they can feed like three babies. So we don't have to make bottles every day, but I'm not out there milking a cow.

I actually hate chickens. Chickens are like dinosaurs and just- They are like dinosaurs. How could you hate dinosaurs? Dinosaurs are cool, aren't they? I like dinosaurs. I don't like chickens. Wait, a homesteader by definition is someone who goes to live and grow crops on land given by the government, especially in the past. Oh, I guess that's not you. You're a farmer. Okay, you're a farmer. My definition of homesteader is you want to be self-sufficient. So you have your milk cow, you have your eggs, you have maybe one cow for beef, you have a couple pigs.

maybe one cow for beef, a couple pigs. We're doing this because we believe in raising really great quality beef to share with people all over the country. We're not like, we need to be self-sufficient. You don't? Don't you want to be? Doesn't that sound fun? We could be. If the apocalypse comes, we're good. We got water storage. We got food storage. We got animals that we could harvest. We got the facility to harvest them. We could be ourselves and our neighbors for a long time, but you know, I, I, I'd figure out a way to milk one of the cows, but that's not like what I'm doing, you know, on a daily basis. Do you like milk? You personally? No, no, you don't. Your kids like it. Chocolate milk. Does Brian like it? He doesn't like reach for a glass of milk. No, like, like

raw milk. He didn't like take a big old scoop of raw milk and you open it and you take a spoon and you take that love of fat off. He didn't do that. No, we do. There's an organic dairy right next to us and we get a lot of, we get milk from him. Sometimes I like making butter, but, uh, Mary, this is my friend, Travis. Uh, he has just started a small business a couple of years ago that grew big enough so that he, um, could quit his day job, which is pretty cool. Mary, when starting your business, uh, how did you manage debt? Uh, did you accrue a lot of debt? Don't need numbers. My biggest fear as a small business. Yeah, it's a great question, especially in agriculture, because people do. There's a big barrier for entry.

You know, a tractor costs seventy five thousand dollars. A silo costs eighty thousand dollars. Everything that breaks is like a ten thousand dollar fix. So it would be naive to say, oh, you know, just jump in, make it happen. We had a little savings from selling these businesses that we came to this with. And we, you know, try to avoid debt as much as possible. We're big in reinvesting what we're making to pay for what we need. And I think that really comes with that like concept of being scrappy. You know, I'm not going to pay somebody five grand to build my website. Is it going to be perfect? No, but it's going to serve its function. It's going to be free

because I did it myself. And, you know, we lived this 760 square foot house. We thought we'll live in this for a year and then we'll build a nice house because that's what, you know, people do, right? We're grown adults. We should have a house that has heat and amenities. Well, we realized like there's so much we need to do to invest in this business to make it work. So we're going to live minimally for the next, you know, we didn't put a number on it, but it turned out to be eight years in that little house. And then we kind of fixed up this old ranch house. And now we live in that, but we still don't have heat. We still have to cut firewood. You know, we live as minimally as we can and invest back in the business. You know, people say, don't you pay

yourself a salary? Like, no, we take what we need to live, but we make decisions very carefully on like, you know, what's important to us. Does that rodeo rig cost a lot? Yes. But we're also like, here's our window of having children at home and here's how we spend time with them. That's what we're going to prioritize our money. But we don't prioritize, you know, spending money on ourselves on fancy vacations on any of this because we, we put it back in the business. And when there's something we say, okay, we, we really want to do this. We want to buy a new tractor with $75,000. That's when I would do those glamping retreats and say, okay, if I do four weekends with this many people, I can make the

money to buy that tractor. So it was more like there's necessity. What can I do to get scrappy to make that money and put it back in the business? That's, that's what I'm going to do. And you reap the rewards from that long-term. Is it easy? No, but it's a great solution. Yeah. Okay. Uh, work harder is what she said, Travis, uh, be, be innovative. Try not to accrue Yeah, okay Work harder Is what she said, Travis Be innovative, try not to accrue debt And you might not You know, if your goal is this

It might not be a singular path to get there You might have to do some other things To make money to get there And that's, I think, very normal But debt's not the only answer Mary, do you have ideas That you know are just very normal, but debt's not the only, the only answer. Mary, do you have ideas that, you know, are just, just like, like, if you just poke this idea with the, with the straw, it's going to shoot oil out of the ground, but you just don't either have the bandwidth or the time or the resources or the location to do it. Like, you're like, fuck, the paper straws are so fucked.

And I could innovate and make a killing with paper straws with these idiot environmentalists who are, do you have ideas like that? Like, yeah, I think, you know, Brian and I are both like big idea people, but bandwidth is definitely an issue. And, you know,

share an idea that we can run and steal from you. What do you got? What do you got? What, what can I, what can I be like, dude, like I'm to the paper straw industries.

Like someone in the United States got so rich overnight. There was only one paper straw manufacturing United States. And then like five States made it where you had to use paper straws and they're horrible, but they had no competition. And I read an article on the guy and he became like a fucking gazillionaire overnight. And now paper straws.

I don't know if recently they reported paper straws have poison in them that are more toxic for the environment and the people who drink out of them than plastic straws. I'm like, well, of course. Well, that was so funny.

California was right before the pandemic. It was like, save the turtles, all paper straws. And then we go to, to go, to go materials that got wasted during COVID. Yeah. Orders is insane. Like we're just masks are everywhere.

Oh, yeah. Right. Everywhere you go, the beach is covered in masks. You're like, what's going on? Yeah, it's crazy. Do you have some ideas where you're like, man, I need to execute or like just even stuff like you see when you get into the tractor, you're like, OK, there's two hundred forty seven thousand tractors in the United States and they all need this modification. So when people get in there, their gun doesn't get hooked on the on the side of the door. Yeah, I mean, there's we have these like innovations that we have to figure out in ranching because they like products don't exist like we do rotational grazing and we have these huge irrigation pivots that go around well since the you know rotational grazing is kind of a new thing you can't have fence lines in between the pivots so we had to engineer these pivot gates that have a bucket of concrete and a garage door spring and a pulley so that when the wheels go through,

they push the gate down. But then when the pivot goes through, the gate goes back up because you don't want your cattle and your sheep mixing up. And it's like, why doesn't this product exist? Because there's pivots all over the country and all these people are doing rotational grazing, but the agricultural world is not really big enough to have a huge market. And farmers and ranchers are just like, I'll just go do it myself. So they, they innovate, they figure these things out, they build them, but scaling them doesn't always work because you know, we're not, we're not a big farming ranching industry anymore. The percentage of people in the industry is like very small. Um, so you do have ideas. There's stuff out there. There's stuff out there, but you know,

I'm more of a like small town. Like I see an opportunity. I want to like physically build it right here. I've never really had a business that was like a large scale or you know, a production. I'm, I like the, the shops and the services and the needs and, you know, filling those needs. That's kind of where my mind is. Um, have you ever, are you, do you see a timeline for this when you're like, okay, um, Brian and I are getting up and we're going to move to Hawaii and we're going to get into surfboard manufacturing? No, we're pretty happy here. Yeah. I think we, you know, we, we found a place that we really like and, you know, we've talked about it like Yeah. I think we, you know, we, we found a place that we really like,

and, you know, we've talked about it like, Oh, do we want to like move somewhere else? Like, should we, you know, build that house we've always wanted to build here. But I think for us, you know, our kids roots are here. This is where they grew up. And for us, there's a, there's something nice about our kids always being able to come back home to where they grew up and where Brian and I were like, we could be happy kind of anywhere. I think we're going to be most happy here because it's where we raised our family

and where we'll always feel like home. Wow. Do you have Silicon Valley friends who come up and visit you? Yeah. There's a private airport right here oh gotcha and fly out uh no a little airstrip but yeah people come and i think they're um i think that's was part of our success in when we grew you know we grew this instagram following

following when we were so early because people were shocked. Like, how do you leave the Bay area? How do you leave this land of opportunity and nice things? And, you know, a lot of people think that's the goal in life is to live somewhere like that, where, you know, there, there are all those things. And like, why would you leave that to move to this small town? Like, that seems like you're going backwards. So I think people were really fascinated to watch and see, is this going to fail? And how are they actually doing this? So people do come up and are kind of shocked by, you know, what the change that we've made. Go ahead. I think they like to, a lot of people romanticize this life, you know well it's a ranch especially you know with the yellowstone phenomenon i want to i want to be on the ranch i want to be a part of it um and they do for like short periods of time but then they see like i don't i don't want to work that hard i don't want to give up that so i i like visiting you, but I don't want your life.

How has your perspective changed? Like having kids for me was a massive just like awakening for me. How has living out there changed your view? Has it changed your views on the world? That's a good question. I mean, I think it has given me more hope in like the next generation when I see these country kids. You know, I think that I was at fault too when we lived in the Bay Area of entitling my kids. And even at very young ages, like, oh, you need, you need your sippy cup filled. You know, you need the TV turned on for you. Meanwhile,

like four-year-olds are operating iPhones. Like they know how to work all these apps. Here. I was like, you, you know, there's so much to do. Brian and I are out here. Like you guys need to figure out how to make dinner, how to do the laundry. Yeah. Four-year-old can, can do the laundry. They can operate a washer and dryer better than they can operate an app. We don't expect that of them. So I had to raise my expectations out of necessity. And the result in these like immediately capable kids that were like so proud to be a part of it was shocking. And these kids where we live, you know, like I had a little, we had chickens and eggs when we first started. And I had a little roadside egg stand out in front of the ranch. And I see this kid, this truck pull up, this little kid jump out of the car, get the eggs,

climb back in. And I said, Brian, I think that's that kid from down the road. He's like 10. And he was driving and he drove there. Yeah, he drove, you know, it's country road. It was maybe, but he could wear it. I'm like, how how does he even reach the pedals he's like this little short 10 year old kid yeah they're all driving they're all operating tractors you know the haying operations haying is a whole thing you got to like when the when the hay is ready you got to bail it even if

it's the middle of the night they're running these these up these operations all night and all these high school kids are working there and then they get up and go to school the next day and go to football practice and do the whole thing. Like it's no big deal. So seeing these kids that I'm like, these kids are, these are the kids that can, that can do anything. Will they be the ones running the world? Who knows? Cause they might not want to, you know, ever do that, but it's like, kids are still very capable and kids can do anything that they want to do. And we should expect more from them. And I think there'll be better kids if we do.

I'm going to tread gently here. But has it changed your politics from when you were a young Bay Area person to a mom of four and running a large, you know, what I would consider a large ranch in the United States of America? I would say so. And I think, you know, California really pushes the limit because these like regulations and the stuff that's going on in California, you're just like, it's making it so hard to run a business, to be an employer. Um, and it's, it is a different political climate up here. And, uh, yeah, I mean, I think it'd be, we'd stay pretty apolitical as a business because that's, you know, we're, we're not soapboxing. We're not trying to change anybody's mind. You do you will do us. But, um, yeah, I think it definitely has. Yeah. I've completely changed.

That's like part of the premise of this entire podcast i having kids and then just and then just seeing but i was raised i was born in oakland and raised in berkeley so you know exactly what um i was a do-gooder of the highest order even if it meant just completely destroying someone else. As long as I'm doing good. But I mean well. But I'm really nice. I mean well. Hey, I've had you on a long time, but I got to touch on this chicken, this school, Five Marys Farm School thing.

Who is this for? Can I sign up for this and give this to my kids? Yes, for sure. During the pandemic, the kids are all home and they learn a lot on the ranch to start with, but we're like, hey, we've got all this extra time. Let's teach him some of the stuff that's really important. We had this awesome old school handyman, John, he's in a bunch of the videos. He's teaching them how to weld. He's teaching them mechanics. We went through, um, you know, the old skills that people don't do anymore, like canning and candle making and bread making. We go through like what it's like to raise livestock, how to harvest maple syrup. You know, we went on kind of all over the country to

different operations, um, ice fishing to fly fishing, just like outdoors and agriculture and old world skills. So we have 40 workshops on all of these things. You know, there's like survival skills and then there's raising pigs. There's dairy cattles and tree harvesting, leather work. So what we made and it was kind of it was a it was a feat to do this because we did this program in one year. And there's 1,200 pages of learning and worksheets and activities. There's a lot of entrepreneurial activities.

Like, are you really going to raise chickens to sell eggs? Like, are you going to make money? Or does it just make more sense to buy eggs at the grocery store? Because there's a lot that goes into that. So it kind of makes kids think about some things that they might not have in their normal everyday life. Each one has a video that Brian and I do and that we have guests from different operations that do things differently than us. And then there's like a little community where people can kind of like check in if they're, you know, post what they're learning from the videos, share and kind of feel like they're part

of part of something. But it's a fun program. We have the online program. It's all digital. You can access it anywhere. We have an app. And then we actually just had a book that came out this week called the Hands on Ranch book that we did with the publisher. That's kind of an abbreviated version of Ranch School. That's like it's called How to of ranch school. Uh, that's like, it's called how to tie a knot, saddle a horse, start a garden and everything else people used to know how to do. So it's kind of just an ode to, you know, the, those skills that have gone by the wayside. Um, uh, Hey, so you're telling me in practicality, I get this M ranch school lifetime membership teacher edition. Yep. Do I need to get this other one too?

The school one? No, you can do one or the other. The regular lifetime membership is all on the app. The teacher edition gives you access to a whole Google Drive with all the stuff because teachers like to be like, you know, play it on the screen and print it out. So it's just really the user interface upgrade on the teacher edition. And then I can print these papers out and I can take my kids through this. I can be like, Hey, like my six year olds and eight year olds can learn like the different parts of a cow and how to raise chickens. Like I want to get chicken so

bad. My wife won't let me. There's a whole, there's a whole lesson where I take you to the feed store and say, this is what you need to buy. If you're going to bring chickens home and you're going to get baby chicks, you know, you got to dip their beak when you first get them home, and you're going to get baby chicks. You know, you got to dip their beak when you first get them home, teach them how to drink water. But yeah, it, it really is a great resource. Um, and that six and eight years old is absolutely perfect. It, you know, it's kind of like four to 16 is the range, but it's really targeted. Most of the worksheets are targeted for the like six to 12 year olds. Cool. Hey, thanks for coming on. Mary, if you were ever, did you know how we met? Do you know, by the way, who put us in contact?

Through Ross and AJ? Yeah. I don't know who AJ is, but through Ross. Yeah. I have a friend who's friends with Ross and I've got to have lunch and dinner with Ross a handful of times. And I've, like, I've really hit it off with them. I really enjoy him. Yeah. He's a great guy. He and my husband, Brian are like on the same level. Like they have a, they're, they think a lot alike and really are good friends. He's a great guy. Was your husband in the military? No, but he, um, before he went to law school,

he like was kind of law enforcement DEA kind of stuff. So, um, and I think Ross was a seal i think ross was a seal yeah okay yeah ross is a neat guy they shared office space in the bay area together for a while was ross a lawyer no attorney but okay only doing like half lawyer stuff and ross was startup stuff and they're all yeah ross is cool as shit what kind of shit yeah he's a great guy he's been up to brand he has and they helped us brand one year but they've been up a few times

he's a gentleman if you're ever in Santa Cruz you have my phone number we'll host you and your girls I have three little boys if you're ever down here you want to spend the day at the beach I'm sure you know plenty of people down here, you want to spend the day at the beach or there's anything, you know, I'm sure, you know, plenty of people down here used to be from there, but from here. But anyway, thank you so much for coming on. My sister has been working

on ranches for the last 20 years, and she was so excited to hear you on the podcast. So I can't wait to get her feedback. But you were great. Thank you for sharing so much. Yeah, thanks for having me. It was a fun fun morning all right thank you all right talk to you later ciao bye mary heffernan time to order some meat uh from the uh m5 ranch mary's five ranch four daughters all named mary you know what i want to see i wonder what um what's the name of the town fort jones truly uh i wonder how much it cost to move up there they got fiber they got let's look you guys want to look at homes with me at fort jones

uh fort jones okay let's go by any price. How do we search by new listings? No, let's go from high to low. High to low. $6,850,000 for a seven-bedroom format. Oh, I looked at this property already. For a seven bedroom format. Oh, this I looked at this property already. Look at this property in this. Oh, this is six sixty one hundred acres. Holy shit. Here's a one point five million for eight hundred acres. Oh, here's six hundred,000 for 10 acres. $462,000 for 35 acres.

Oh, this is cute. Wow. Look at this blue one. Oh, look at this log cabin. This is what I picture Hiller's house to look like. This log cabin right here. Wow. Requested tours early as 11am today. Hi Mary, I'm your new neighbor. Remember you were on my podcast? Oh, I clicked on it and it didn't take you guys there.

What do you think the cheapest thing is in town for ninety thousand dollars oh 20 acres they got 20 acres for 90 000 homes near homes near wow wow look at this place oh my goodness uh here's a two-bedroom three-bath house for 945 000 on 60 acres how can it be 3 000 square feet but only two bedroom that doesn't make any sense dude i'm moving to fort j Jones with fiber. Dude, these are crazy houses. These are so cute. I wonder if there's a downtown Fort Jones.

Wow. Do you think Fort Jones has a jujitsu gym? do you think Ford Jones has a jujitsu gym Vittorio you'll have all that space to wear your leggings outside well thanks dear Bill and Katie I would like to

uh uh clock what a great story well done well thank you I would like to... Clock, what a great story. Well done, Sevan. Well, thank you. Karina Pace, it never makes sense financially to get chickens. It doesn't.

All right, fine. I won't get any. Dildo, you don't get entitlement or have time to think about how unfair life is when you live that way for your livelihood. Yeah, I was kind of thinking that too. You're not like if the cow takes a shit on your doorstep, you're not like, he did that because I'm black. He did that because I'm short. He did that because I'm Jewish. No, he just took a shit on your doorstep you're not like he did that because i'm black he did that because i'm short he did that because i'm jewish uh no he just took a shit on your doorstep uh just because you're you're douchebag uh anthony hendrix seve uh sevan uh severino uh you could start a ceo jujitsu and crossfit ceo matosi and bjs oh bjj

wow send me a photo my mom has 200 chickens i know that's what i'd like to do 200 chickens would be awesome uh chickens will demolish the tick population yeah i like that oh my i'll tell you this about my wife. I probably shouldn't share this. My wife's a super dirt twirler. She can handle anything. Anything. But she got tick, crazy tick phobia.

Crazy, crazy, crazy. Crazy. I don't think the kids have ever gotten a tick around our house. But we do live by fields and tall grass and all that shit. And yet she's always like, do they got ticks? They got ticks. I know I'm going to go in the house. She was like, oh, they did to get ticks this one time last week.

But I don't ever remember them getting ticks. She got crazy tick phobia. Crazy. Let me see. She's probably going to text me right now. Let's see. Oh, shit. Money doesn't buy happiness, but productivity does oh that's what

she just um she sent me that did mary say that today you don't gotta tell me that fool although when i found when i found that when i found that fucking hunter g's in my youtube account i Let me tell you, I was so happy. Graham Holmberg, 2010 CrossFit Games champion. I'm going to talk to Graham in forever. How about last night with Guy?

We went to straight Bible school. What is this oh CrossFit the crash crucible starts Friday at 9 a.m. I wonder when Hillary gets there. All right, now I'm multitasking. It's always weird when I forget that I'm on a podcast. Let me start. Deja entando.

Many, many times I try to reiterate this thought in different forms. The solution for depression is action. Fair enough. I feel you on that. I know exactly what you mean. I don't know if it's a solution, but it's a remedy. I would choose the word remedy, but I feel you. I feel you. How about that? I feel you. Eric Ootley, and now you have to source unvaxxed chickens and other livestock.

Don't just go buy chicks from your local tractor supply. But what about the – really? What about the babies of those chicks? Like, do those count someone also told me yesterday they were telling me about my iso about my exposure being all fucked up but someone else also said that my lights are wrong my head looks i look too flat and that i used to have a nice shadow on me but i got a light here and a light here. I don't know what I'm doing. Just winging it.

Okay. That was going to be my most challenging podcast of the week. That was the one I was most scared about. Try to take that off the list. Mary Heffernan. I know she, she, I bet you she has great,

um, Silicon Valley stories. I wonder, I wonder like what her engagements were like with Steve jobs. Uh, tomorrow, uh, Trung Nguyen.

Did I, did I pronounce that right? That's going to be, uh, uh, uh, uh, Did I pronounce that right? That's going to be. Joe.

There's a coffee called that. Hmm. Is he a cop police? Videos? hmm police videos oh here he is here he is found him on Instagram oh this is going to be a crazy show tomorrow this is going to be fun

uh here we go look at this guy's profile pic owns a supplement company what's this clearing the house SWAT team guy talk about a stressful job my god

I wish someone could tell me how to pronounce his name Trung Trung Trung Nguyen Nguyen am I saying it right? oh hey Javier

oh okay buddy I'll come outside right now awesome okay bye he called me hermano I'm here hermano okay Javier's here guys we got an irrigation leak at the three plane brothers empire

I will see you guys tomorrow morning 7am love you guys buh bye