Indiana Farmer Breaks Every Rule: Relay Cropping, Crop Insurance Scams, and Why He Shares Secrets

Jason Mauck [00:00:00] We're, we're just making koala bears that we just put into the lion's den, like nonstop, right? Like if, if, if you, we need, that's

Vance Crowe [00:00:09] A hell of a metaphor.

Jason Mauck [00:00:10] It is. This is Lyle Benjamin from Montana. You are

Vance Crowe [00:00:14] Listening to the Vance Crow podcast. Jason Mock, welcome to the podcast.

Jason Mauck [00:00:20] Yeah, thanks for having me.

Vance Crowe [00:00:22] I'm glad you're here. You have been the talk of the town when it became official that you were coming on my podcast, I started putting out feelers and a lot of people had questions for you just kind of in back channels,

Jason Mauck [00:00:34] But one of

Vance Crowe [00:00:35] My friends in particular, a woman named Kate Crosby, who you don't know probably, she lives out in California. She's a plant breeder that does phenomenal research, like mind blowing stuff was over the moon that I was going to, that I was gonna talk with you because she has been watching you from afar and says that the things that you're pushing on the edges are really, really interesting. And so I feel a great deal of pressure to be able to help you articulate the crazy farming that you're doing out in the world because Kate was over the moon about you.

Jason Mauck [00:01:07] Awesome. Let's get into it.

Vance Crowe [00:01:09] So you're not a regular farmer. I mean, you're a farmer that farms corn and soy, but you don't do it like other people. What, what's your deal?

Jason Mauck [00:01:18] It's just a total, to me, it's just holes in the bottom of bucket everywhere. And you know, when I grew up, literally I would steal seeds outta the grain bin and I would have like 30 fields throughout our property. Like, I would farm like a little corner and I had all these little crops, and then I would take like the cat's manure and stuff. And that's just what I did growing up. And then I started, you know, I, I went to get a real job and I just wanted to be a landscaper. So I spent about seven or eight years being a landscaper, had some bad things happen with the family. So I came to the farm and, and it was like, well, this is what we do. We grow this one crop, and then it's just like nothing for eight months. It was like, you gotta be kidding me. And that's just kind of led to my happiness, if you will. As I started experimenting and learning kind of in that, in, in kind of the farming way,

Vance Crowe [00:02:09] You do seem very happy. You have a Twitter feed that is always talking about the various things that you're doing. And really as deep as I know you is that you grow corn and soy in the same field. The soybeans go in between the corn fields. And at my first look at it, it's like, oh, that's neat. But I hear other people that think you're a crazy person, they think you're nuts.

Jason Mauck [00:02:31] Right, right. And that's, that's good. That's good.

Vance Crowe [00:02:35] What are you doing out there with corn and soy in between the rows?

Jason Mauck [00:02:38] So it's changed, like initially before I started poly cropping, I thought that you could physically just produce more and maybe you can somewhat if you kind of collect light on times when the crops aren't normally doing it. But it all comes down to elasticity. That's why I speak about it quite a bit. So the best way to describe it is Amazon mentality. So Amazon does not care if you buy Crest or Colgate, they just wanna sell you more toothpaste. Well, as farmers were just happy collecting sun at full canopy, maybe 70 or 80 days a year. Well, if you can collect more sun, then it's just like Amazon getting 21% of your income instead of 16%. So, so every crop is, has like brains on it, like animals, and they're constantly figuring out day in and day out as context change how much it can produce. So through time and space, if you kind of this be the ball mentality, you can figure out how to increase unit evaluation. So by bake, making a bouquet based on time and space and what's gonna happen, you can just produce more with less, which is the, the main idea here is banding things and getting more out of entities.

Vance Crowe [00:03:48] And when you're saying I want to get more outta the sunlight, are you saying I want to have more valuable days that we're getting where we wanna get into the fields earlier and leave later? Yeah,

Jason Mauck [00:03:56] More days, more shape. So imagine you're, you're, you're just driving on I 80. Okay. Dead flat. That's a hundred percent. So in my presentations, I have a picture linear sun capture. What if you are in Asheville, North Carolina and you want to get to Chattanooga or Gatlin, the bird flies 12 miles, you get in your car and it's 36. So if you can completely change the shape, then that plan is gonna draw more energy and, and have more energy collectively into the soil.

Vance Crowe [00:04:28] And when you're thinking about this, this is stuff that you're researching or you're just going out there and trying, like how are you constructing these experiments that you're doing?

Jason Mauck [00:04:38] Well, I, I'm a DHD but I'm also very patient. So everything is a three to five year deal. So I have a initial idea. I do it at a small scale and I make it bigger. And then I'm constantly criticizing, not really criticizing, but just figuring out what I should do next. So it's actually, when I first started doing this, I was really mad that like it wasn't taking off that grandpa thought I was nuts, but then I realized that there's not a lot of other people doing it. So you're in this space by yourself, so there's no like speed to figure it out. You can just get collectively better and better and better. And as you get something better at something, now you can start investing and making that more efficient. So it's just allowed you to just, just be you and it's fun.

Vance Crowe [00:05:21] So let's go back to that beginning. Yeah. What were some of the first experiments? What were the first thing you were doing saying, Hey, we're gonna try this differently? Well,

Jason Mauck [00:05:27] First it was just core, or sorry, sorry, wheat and soybeans. And I was selling for a little regional company called Broad Back. And they were coming up with these enlist soybeans so you could spray wheat herbicide on soybeans. I'm like, well, this is a no brainer. We'll just put 'em back out there, spray it once and be, be good. And initially I didn't realize that compromise was a big part of it. So I, my, my rows were too narrow on the wheat and I choked out the soybeans too much and it just didn't really work out. And there was moment when I was out there that first season, I was like, this is a stupid idea. But what I learned is all the actual imperfections is where I learned, where I, where I drove and I terminated the wheat, the soybeans were just so much more vigorous where it had opportunity. So as I've, where I've really learned is through my screw ups, if you will, through my fat rows or where I ran over it. And it's been constantly figuring out, okay, where's the solar arrays hitting? How much water do we get? How does that plant feel? How deep are the roots? So you start getting a feel for the seasons and you, you feel like you're kind of building an armor as you figure out kind of, it's, it's, to me it's really comes down to mathematics. Just finite mathematics.

Vance Crowe [00:06:37] And are you sitting there doing the mathematics?

Jason Mauck [00:06:39] It's just more through just watching. I mean, it's just like, if you're a, if you're a pro athlete, you don't think about Tiger Woods doesn't think about, you know, 90 degrees. Once he gets good at something, it just becomes instinctual, which takes repetition, which takes, you know, a lifetime of, of doing it.

Vance Crowe [00:06:57] Yeah, I, I'm, I, so I started doing juujitsu. I, I talk about this quite a bit. And the thing is, you could read Juujitsu, you could read thousands and thousands of pages, and it doesn't matter until you get in there and you actually try it. And the people that are really great can do both the math, the, the logic part of Jiujitsu and then the physical part. But I think for the most part, you have to have a feel for it, otherwise you'll never be truly great at it.

Jason Mauck [00:07:21] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:07:22] And so when you have this first fail are, is your family giving you a hard time? I mean, is this hurting your bottom line or is it making it difficult?

Jason Mauck [00:07:29] That's the whole point of the incubator. So it, you could start in a garden just on a corner, you know, and then the next year may scale times 20. And that still might scale, you know, infinitely. But when you start small, you can do a thousand experiments in an acre. So that's, that's basically what I do is I, I spend all winter all cooped up with my A DHD and I come up with ideas and I just try to scatter tadpoles and I'm like, let stuff happen. Let's see what happens, what tadpoles hop into my, you know, patio in April. But it's that patience plus the A DHD that gets you kind of, and it's, it's change. It's, I think that's the most important part of getting to where you want to go.

Vance Crowe [00:08:12] And so where is it that you're trying to get to?

Jason Mauck [00:08:15] So I've fascinated with kind of the sharing economy, you know, the Airbnb idea of not really owning anything, just connecting things. So I've, I've kind of came my logic and I, I, I kind of come up with tangent here, but I've got three triangles. First is the triangle offense, which IST winners, Chicago Bulls, or Airbnb. It's just need consumer end user, or sorry, same thing, supply end user. But the two spectrums that are really important in ag is the spectrum of a, what the industry says you need to do. The BMP says you need to spray this to kill this.

Vance Crowe [00:08:49] The bmp

Jason Mauck [00:08:50] The best management practice.

Vance Crowe [00:08:51] Oh, okay.

Jason Mauck [00:08:52] So anything that you can replace the best management practice with just a natural system is value to the farmer. So if I, just a blunt thing, if I'm removing animals from a barn, I can come up with some awesome widget to hold the door open, or I could just put a rock there. Just simple dumb observations that most people are so into just looking at field view and looking at the numbers instead of just getting out of their truck and looking at things. So the more of that you can implement into a system, the more value. The other one is unit valuation. So you see that at beer, at a ball game, right? You wanna get a buzz, you know it's gonna be $15 a beer, you get three of 'em, you got a slight buzz, you got $50, $45 outta your pocket. You can go down town liquor store and spend five and get a buzz, right? So the same ounce of Miller Lite is evaluated 1000 or 1500 times percent. Same thing happens in plants. So when you combine these two spectrums from replacing BMPs and actually accomplishing the same need with something natural plus unit evaluation, it has this force multiplier effect. And that's where all the value comes, is saying, instead of being plugged into big Ag me, like I need this $10 million balance sheet of all these John Deere tire tits just going around everything brand new and debt up to my eyeballs. I just figure out how to naturally put things together. So then, then you start bringing in what's happening to the end product, like manure, what's happening to energy.

Jason Mauck [00:10:26] And you start kind of plugging then the same matrix, if you will, on these other industries. 'cause it's all connected.

Vance Crowe [00:10:33] And so what are you doing with manure?

Jason Mauck [00:10:36] So in our area, as you go north and west, there are literally 2, 3, 4 barns every square mile or everywhere. It just smells like manure. So all of our subsidies and everything, it just said grow corn, grow corn, grow corn. If you look on a map, we have the highest basis around because we just have this drain. We feed so many animals. But what's happened, it was great 10, 15, 20 years ago, but as we've built more and more barns, our phosphorous levels have went through the roof. So now we have all these real estate developments around lakes, and they're green, the algae blooms are toxic, there's antibiotics in the water systems, there's all kinds of things happening from just bad distribution. And we,

Vance Crowe [00:11:17] I would say that you are literally the first farmer that I've ever heard say that the, the green lakes are the phosphorus from farming and the, that these things are happening as a re and antibiotics in the water is a result of farmers. Like, they don't, they don't say that. That's not as people really dislike you if you say that.

Jason Mauck [00:11:36] Exactly. Exactly. And look, people are just in camps. There's, there's not many people that aren't in a, the safe tent. But in reality, I mean, if you make more blacktop, the city's gonna be hotter. I mean, it's just simple science and you, you see it, you just physically see it does not make sense. If you just go back in the Times machine into the forties, everyone had cows, they milked, they had pigs, they had this nuclear, you know, like what's the beavers like? There's this nuclear farm and everything has been just completely ripped apart. And the distribution is so jacked up. And there's a guy in Illinois right now that's got five foot of topsoil, and he wakes up in April and he says, time to plant corn. And he does as fast as he can. And that's all he worries about. And, and there's so many people doing that.

Vance Crowe [00:12:27] And you think this is like a dead end or one that, like, what do you think is the consequence of that?

Jason Mauck [00:12:33] I I just think it's more primed every day to be exploited by the sharing economy. It's like you can't build scarcity if there's piles.

Vance Crowe [00:12:43] What do you, when you're talking about this sharing economy within farming, what do you, what do you mean?

Jason Mauck [00:12:49] Well, first off, knowledge. So if you're open, you know, there's, there's so many people that, especially two or three years ago, would approach me before I really was allowed to talk at places and they said, why do you keep putting all this stuff up for free? You need to be charging for it. You know,

Vance Crowe [00:13:04] This is actually, I heard this comment about you this morning. Right? I think he should hide some of that stuff. He shares too much. Right?

Jason Mauck [00:13:11] But that is marketing is, is plugging in. I wanna make a connection with you, with everyone. And now you'd be just, you just have so many more options. It's like, and, and you go back to that unit evaluation. Now your time is so much more valuable because it's all about reduction and not production anymore. If that makes much sense. By saying, no, I don't have to go do this thing that I can replace my time with a $12 an hour job. Now I say no to that. I think that's what you strive to do. And, and the reason why that's connected with sharing everything is as you share, you add value and people value your time more.

Vance Crowe [00:13:49] Are people doing the things that you're trying out?

Jason Mauck [00:13:51] Yeah, yeah. In, in certain ways. I mean, it's not scaled. And again, it goes back to how subsidized and rules and crop insurance. And

Vance Crowe [00:14:02] So tell me about that. We got time. What, what, tell me like the subsidies are, are making this happen. Tell me more.

Jason Mauck [00:14:09] Yeah, so I mean, your mail money or, or candy or whatever you wanna call it, you can tell, I got a little s slant on it. But it says, look, Vance, you've grown corn the last 10 years and let's take out your worst year and your best year and you average 200 bushels per acre next year. The February average price is $4 an acre. We're gonna guarantee you $800 an acre times. What, what year is your insurance you want to buy? And you say 80%, you get $800 an acre to do, to do what you gotta do. And there are so many writers. But the, the problem is not, it's, the problem is not that, the problem is it's not true actuary science. So there's this prorated subsidy that's undercharged from the federal government into that solution. So your 75% is almost nearly purely subsidized by the government.

Vance Crowe [00:15:02] You're saying that the insurance itself is subsidized by the

Jason Mauck [00:15:04] Yes, it should be $75 an acre and it's 17.

Vance Crowe [00:15:08] I see. Whatever the numbers are, you can take on a lot more insurance because you're not covering the cost yet.

Jason Mauck [00:15:12] Right. So, so, you know, everything is after a few years is exploited. So it might say this is helping young farmers, but really what it does is I farm 14,000 acres. Now I can take on another three and I don't have to worry about completely getting a goose egg here. Worst case scenario, I lose a little. So you can basically just play on the side. It's like being in Vegas on penny slots. I can sit there and drink house whiskey and get hammered hoping that one year outta two we get a drought, corn goes to $7, and now I farm the world and I can make it kick.

Vance Crowe [00:15:48] And you, you think that this is prop propping up a system that's not good?

Jason Mauck [00:15:53] Yeah, it just needs to be true risk like it used to be.

Vance Crowe [00:15:57] I mean, I totally believe in that we need to build

Jason Mauck [00:15:59] Resiliency.

Vance Crowe [00:16:00] I, I think so my, one of my biggest fears in our society is the number of people that are taking on debt to go to school. Right? So they take on tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. But the risk was all taken outta that game when I was in college 2002 probably you, you and I are about the same age. Yeah. The Bush administration came out and said, we are gonna try and make college more accessible for people. So the one of the ways that we're gonna do this is by taking it off and saying, you can't declare bankruptcy on your loans. Which meant now if a school, if a, if a bank can get money to a student through a school,

Jason Mauck [00:16:36] It

Vance Crowe [00:16:37] Is a risk free loan. Right. They are going to get that money. They can garnish your wages. Yeah. Which meant then that the school no longer had a, a reason to control prices and the students weren't having somebody that was in the real world reality check. Like, hey, that degree probably won't do the return on investment that you're talking about. And since no one was on the hook for it, except for that 18-year-old, we've let it explode. I I think that is it when I think inflation is a very serious problem in the United States. Yes. And I think there's two places that I can say for sure that I see it showing up, which is student loans and land prices. 'cause it doesn't make sense to me. I don't know. And healthcare, yeah, that's right. Yeah. Three.

Jason Mauck [00:17:19] Yeah. I mean, when, when, when you send out a tweet that says more cash is coming, you do that three times. It's not going to the farmer, it's just going towards to prop up the whole supply, the landlords everything. I mean it is,

Vance Crowe [00:17:32] But in, even in that, I mean one of the things that I'm always cautious of is like my overly simplistic view on how things work. I mean, there is a reason why we want our, our ag system to be extremely resilient and why we would keep pumping money into that. And it's 'cause that is the major driver of our economy. I mean that's what gives us the huge advantage over everybody else. So I'm cautious about saying, you know,

Jason Mauck [00:17:59] I mean there's good things

Vance Crowe [00:18:00] Subsidies

Jason Mauck [00:18:01] About spurring on economies of scale, don't get me wrong. But there's, there's, there, there needs to be checks and balances. You need to be able to basically run the screen, pass against the blitz and, and if you've got piles of corn and you can't get rid of it, what really bothers me is you go to the coffee shop and we're worried about China. Why aren't we just worried about what your neighbor's doing? You know, how he's feeling or, or whatever. And it's just like, we produced it. This is our God-given Right. You take it.

Vance Crowe [00:18:28] Oh, interesting. It, there was a huge pile of corn for a while. I mean, I think if you're not in farming Yeah. So significant portion of my audience not in farming at all. And they don't realize that two years ago we had so much corn, it was like coming out of our ears. China had so much corn. Is that gone now? Is it, is it

Jason Mauck [00:18:45] Through much? You know, I mean it's it's coming down somewhat. You can just, you can, I hopefully you can tell my distaste towards pushing that ball ball. Yeah, that's apparent up the hill. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:18:56] Yeah. What would you do instead? You would let, I mean, what I'm hearing you say is I wish there was more risk in the market so that if people have skin in the game, sometimes they'll be losers. But then that's how you have changeover. That's how you have people doing new things.

Jason Mauck [00:19:10] Say I, my big thing is we should be wanting more farmers. We should be wanting to get the community involved on our acres. And we have this, all of these policy spurred on just competition. It's, it's, I I can basically gobble up and, and combine mine with this and now we just have these mega farms. But in reality, if we're, if we just look at the ash trees, I don't know if you have that around here. Oh,

Vance Crowe [00:19:36] The ash bore? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean we don't have that problem here as far as I know, but I familiar. Yeah, they're familiar

Jason Mauck [00:19:40] With it. They're all in Indiana and it's just not natural. We've robbed so many acres from all these crops to grow more corn. I know industry has figured out ways to make everything outta corn, but it is a pretty,

Vance Crowe [00:19:53] Pretty magical crop. Right? It is pretty magical in in that it is probably the best gra like as far as collecting solar radiation and turning it into storable, transportable energy. There's corn and sugar cane, right. May, maybe there's something else out there, but the, it is a very powerful conversion. Yeah. So, so your problem is more with the, how the system is stacked up to make a few big winners and a lot of other people just locked outta the game.

Jason Mauck [00:20:23] Yeah, I mean everybody can know the rules of the game and, and go about it. I'm just, I'm just thinking long term, we're just getting more division in, you know, defending and, and I think it would, I think just, just in general, I'm just more about free market and just, you need some checks and balances in there.

Vance Crowe [00:20:44] So when you're run, you have a company called Constant Canopy. First of all, why did you name it that?

Jason Mauck [00:20:52] I was gonna call it Occupy for about a week and it didn't really What

Vance Crowe [00:20:56] Was your timing on that?

Jason Mauck [00:20:57] Yeah, right then and I, it was something constant canopy unleashes progress and just constant canopy sounded better.

Vance Crowe [00:21:06] And so people bring you in to try and say, Hey, I wanna try some different things or I wanna try some experiments. What's like,

Jason Mauck [00:21:12] Well basically, so I kind of reconnected with an old college friend a couple years ago and you know, as I was starting to get attention, he's like, man, we can really start doing projects. So we just tap into our networks to basically start getting the, the, the ball rolling forward on, on bigger ideas and projects.

Vance Crowe [00:21:34] So what are some of the bigger ideas that you're excited about?

Jason Mauck [00:21:37] Well, of, of course with the relay cropping, there's developing equipment around scaling it to make it go faster to, you know, I'm, I'm all into less trips across the field. We're producing biochar from the manure, which we can put around nitrogen to.

Vance Crowe [00:21:55] So explain that when, when you're saying biochar, what do you mean? So

Jason Mauck [00:21:58] Just a quick kind of and dirty on, on our manure project. So as you really start condensing these livestock barns, you have a ton of manure around, sorry, ton of manure around one area. So we, we have an open contract with guys that they get, we take 20% of their manure for the right to bring it there. And then we can clean the methane out and inject that natural gas right into the pipeline. And that's, that's basically traded in the California market. This, the smell, the smell of money, if you will, can be converted in natural gas from there.

Vance Crowe [00:22:34] You already have the digester to do that.

Jason Mauck [00:22:36] That's the project we're working on now. So basically we're taking bits and pieces of different projects and we're putting all this technology into one to have this scalable solution. And we basically want to take all these nutrients that are just blindly produced and distributed bad and get it into forms that we can get into all these different industries and distribute that in 10 or a hundred times more acres. Different applications. Like you may have your lawn applied with a fertilizer coated with this manure biochar so that phosphorus and nitrogen doesn't get in the storm drain.

Vance Crowe [00:23:13] Interesting. So how far away is that from, from going live?

Jason Mauck [00:23:17] We're hoping to be taking in manure by next spring.

Vance Crowe [00:23:21] Oh, that's by 2021. Okay. And what are the steps that you have to work on between then and now?

Jason Mauck [00:23:28] It's mostly scientific stuff, so messing with formulations. So it gets, it gets pretty complicated in the economics. California has this program they call carbon intensity matrix. So renewable natural gas is one of the highest negative numbers. So if you're a corporation like UPS and you burn diesel in your trucks, you accrue so much sin if you will. So they,

Vance Crowe [00:23:52] Huh, that's exactly how I think of it. Sin that's,

Jason Mauck [00:23:54] Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:23:55] Yeah,

Jason Mauck [00:23:55] Yeah. So you, you need to acquire so much of this renewable natural gas to offset that. So we have to figure out how much hemp are we going to put in the digester, how much cow manure, how much pig manure to get the right score with the amount right amount of gas. So we're kind of cooking up mixes with that. We're figuring out Your

Vance Crowe [00:24:15] Phone's going crazy man. Yeah,

Jason Mauck [00:24:17] I thought it was off. Lemme turn it off. That's

Vance Crowe [00:24:19] All right.

Jason Mauck [00:24:21] Okay.

Vance Crowe [00:24:24] How's that? There you go. Wow.

Jason Mauck [00:24:27] Okay, so where was I on,

Vance Crowe [00:24:30] You were putting together hemp oil and, and cow manure and

Jason Mauck [00:24:33] Trying

Vance Crowe [00:24:33] To make the right formulation to get the inact away. Yeah. With d So with

Jason Mauck [00:24:36] The CBD thing, you have these processes and they're, and they're squeezing out the, the hemp oil and then what do they do with all this bran and sticks? You can give it to a digester. So there's all kinds of connections.

Vance Crowe [00:24:48] No way.

Jason Mauck [00:24:48] Yeah, yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:24:49] That's cool. So

Jason Mauck [00:24:49] There's all kinds of connections that you make and we have all these concrete bins so we can source carbon from all these different industries and add that to that to kind of make this mix so it, we not only get the natural gas out of there. So basically we're pumping natural, same natural gas that's natural gas out of pig manure, but we're just net metering it and we just keep track of that.

Vance Crowe [00:25:11] My brother Dan Crow was on Twitter this morning talking about the beneficial electrification. Have you seen about how there's cities now that are banning natural gas?

Jason Mauck [00:25:21] I have not.

Vance Crowe [00:25:22] It's, it started in California, I think where they're saying new construction specifically in homes can't have natural gas because that's actually where the leaks happen. So you burn natural gas, it's really good. It's, it's a high burn rate, but if you have any kinda leaks around any one of your seals and it doesn't take much to not be dangerous, but yet still be emitting. And I, I think people are gonna be surprised when they wake up and they find out there are a lot of cities that have started to ban

Jason Mauck [00:25:51] The

Vance Crowe [00:25:51] Use of natural gas. Yeah. I'll be so pissed if that happened.

Jason Mauck [00:25:54] Yeah. Because

Vance Crowe [00:25:55] Cooking on natural gas is like a hundred times better than cooking on electric.

Jason Mauck [00:25:59] Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:26:00] But you've not heard of that?

Jason Mauck [00:26:01] Yeah, I've not, I've not heard that.

Vance Crowe [00:26:03] Well, I think it's coming man.

Jason Mauck [00:26:05] Well this is all gonna be that compressed natural gas for

Vance Crowe [00:26:08] Okay. Mostly

Jason Mauck [00:26:09] To replace diesel. I mean the push is towards electric, but to get that torque, that's kind of the new kind of green

Vance Crowe [00:26:16] Of getting that. And is this so compressed natural gas, does that mean you'll be able to put it in tankers or how will you transport it? Can you go through a pipeline? If it's compressed natural gas

Jason Mauck [00:26:25] That's, that's later in the processes, you would just put in natural gas. And there's a company called Contri that does that in Indianapolis. There's companies and you know, we just, we just basically physically need to make more natural gas.

Vance Crowe [00:26:36] It seems to me like

Jason Mauck [00:26:37] Remodeling the, the farts, if you will, and, and getting value out of it. How,

Vance Crowe [00:26:42] It seems to me that you, you have turned what would be a really severe handicap for a lot of people. The, the, you know, attention bouncing around into value. Have you always been that way? Was your A-D-H-D-A problem before and you learned how to do this? Or have you always

Jason Mauck [00:26:59] Yeah, I would usually just work, you know, just work a lot and that's when you start kind of seeing value, like when people invite you somewhere and pay you for your time or if you get a connection that helps this guy. And then when you, you, you get this new dopamine if you will. Now everybody that you see, you wanna make a really good conversation with, you know, you want to talk to them again. And I think I've just kind of replaced a drug with another drug, if you will. And

Vance Crowe [00:27:28] Oh, that's interesting. Yeah.

Jason Mauck [00:27:29] That

Vance Crowe [00:27:30] This is the drug that comes from figuring out what people's problems are and yeah. Solving them in a novel way. So you

Jason Mauck [00:27:34] Get, when I first came on, they're like, who is this guy with his markers? And you know, I was using crayons 'cause my kids were little, so I had all these, you know, these feeble ways of, of articulating my ideas and

Vance Crowe [00:27:47] You're putting 'em out on Twitter this way,

Jason Mauck [00:27:48] Right? And I'm just, and I'm just machine gun and, and the people that says don't share, you know, they think you're going like run out or something. But just all it is is I'm really into fi and you know, the golden ratio and stuff as you make that tree bigger now, you just got, you just got every fruit known to mankind that you can kind of pick up and make better and, and what have you, what

Vance Crowe [00:28:09] Do you mean you're into PHI and the golden ratio? So

Jason Mauck [00:28:11] That is really big into sun capture, you know, the, the math and, and, and you see it in how the crops will grow. So most people don't see it because they push push crop density. You know, all these breeders are saying how the high, the way we're gonna get the higher monocrop yield is we plant more plants. So

Vance Crowe [00:28:31] For somebody that's not in the farming world, seed companies come along and they say, you can plant this many corn crops, this many seeds in the ground, and this is the optimal distance that you should have in between each corn. And then how wide the roads should be. Right. And people don't realize, you know, a slight adjustment to the density can mean the difference between 180 bushels or 200 bushels, right? Yeah. It's, it, it has the potential to be a big, but the companies have it in their interest to be like, we can fit more and more and more in here and they'll still grow. And they have the mantra of you wanna put them equally space so they don't compete with one another. So for somebody that wasn't in involved in farming, that's kinda the background you would need to have.

Jason Mauck [00:29:13] Yeah. And everything's getting better genetics. And so what I mean, a a a market sheep is now 150 pounds instead 115, 15 years ago, cows produce more milk, we're getting more yield or whatever. So we think we're really pushing the ball forward. But what I've kinda looked at, when we go back to that three triangle deal, we now, we are getting so crazy of weather, we're getting these months where we get 10 or 12 inches of rain. You know, and that's what's hurting our crop more than all the stuff you wanna talk about on these meetings. It doesn't matter if it's gonna drown. Right. So when I started planting these wheat rows further and further apart, what I noticed was it would grow in this half a circle or in the, in the shape of phi and phi isn't, isn't a half pie or 3.17, 1.57. It's 1.618. So what happens is your southern sun shapes and contorts that plant, so it'll be higher on the north side and lower on the, and it makes it an actual perfect phi circle

Vance Crowe [00:30:16] In the, in each row.

Jason Mauck [00:30:18] Yeah. In a row. If you give it the space.

Vance Crowe [00:30:21] What? No, I'm kidding.

Jason Mauck [00:30:21] So what, so you go back to this force multiplication. If I can spur on that crop to think that it's by itself, it'll multiply and then all the leaves can collect solar energy and it just produces so much more with the same exact seed. So going back three years ago in my garden, I took a corn plant that was emerged and I put it in a spot by itself. And my five-year-old was two at the time, and he was potty training. And I said, Liam, why don't you just have target practice on that guy? So I had plenty of energy in that,

Vance Crowe [00:30:55] But a lot of nitrogen in there. Yeah. But,

Jason Mauck [00:30:57] But it instantaneously went from one plant to three stocks. And then I ended up getting 31 ears from that one seed. Now 12 of them had viable nice kernels. About 10 of them had spot, but there was 31 silks from that one plant. So think

Vance Crowe [00:31:15] About that. Did it look like a tte plant? Like that sounds like what you're describing. So it's spread out like that?

Jason Mauck [00:31:19] Yeah, yeah. Like

Vance Crowe [00:31:20] A bush.

Jason Mauck [00:31:20] Yeah. And, and, and that normal plant, 1197 gets maybe nine, 10 feet tall. It was five five. It was, it was Gary Coleman on Roys.

Vance Crowe [00:31:29] Wow. Yeah.

Jason Mauck [00:31:30] And

Vance Crowe [00:31:31] So what did that teach you then?

Jason Mauck [00:31:32] That elasticity is amazing. It took six weeks from the first time I saw a silk to the last silk, so that, that plant is constantly evaluating its environment. So at that point I'm like, if I spread it out, I can get more higher unit valuations and now I can kind of change bio agronomics around and then, and then everything's just a math formula, you know, you know, we, we talk about precipitation, so how do we take that head on? A would be make a phone call, get on Google and get a drainage guy out there and spend a thousand dollars on pattern tile. Now there's value in that, or I can just put a lot of minions out there. So the weed in wide rows is consuming one acre inch for every three bushel.

Vance Crowe [00:32:16] You've already lost me, man. Let's slow, slow this down. Okay, so I'm, I'm not raising crops, okay. So's I'm, I'm with you on most of it. But, so you've got a wheat field, right?

Jason Mauck [00:32:24] And

Vance Crowe [00:32:24] It rains a whole bunch, right? You have two options. You can either bring a guy in to lay pipe in tile, right,

Jason Mauck [00:32:30] To

Vance Crowe [00:32:31] Drain it faster or you could have minions out there. What did you mean by that? Right?

Jason Mauck [00:32:35] You can beat it to its spot. So you have to have some growth in the fall, and then it wakes up in February instead of mid-May, and it's consuming.

Vance Crowe [00:32:44] Okay. And

Jason Mauck [00:32:45] It's a cold season grass. So if it's 32, it's, it's loving life,

Vance Crowe [00:32:48] Okay?

Jason Mauck [00:32:49] And it's growing. So when it rains now, instead of that water kind of, you know,

Vance Crowe [00:32:55] Either pooling on the top or off

Jason Mauck [00:32:57] And gonna the low spot it stays in, stays in its spot, it infiltrates and then it's consumed. So it complete comes down to finite math. If, if three bushels equals one acre inch and I get 40 inches of rain, I wanna consume 12 inches, I need to raise 36 bushel wheat. And then you take that liability and turn it into an asset and you can have life consuming and you can have death actually preserving moisture because now is this dead thatch that can control weeds. And when it rains, it stays wet and cool. Same thing with finite math. If my surface is 110 degrees, I'm burning enough moisture. If it's 82 with a mat, I'm holding moisture. So people bitch about the rain all the time. What are you doing about the rain? You know what I mean? And that's what it kind of comes down on all these stuff. We can talk all day about

Vance Crowe [00:33:49] That question. Even that question is, is almost heterodox, right? It's like, hey, there's too much rain. What are you doing about the rain? Like that's, you know, like, what, what do you mean what am I doing about the rain? Well,

Jason Mauck [00:34:01] I, I love, I, the be best thing that I love is I have all these people from around the world are kind of on these little tours and they'll come by and the Australians will come by and they, you give 'em like five or six beers and they just start bloody effing this and that. And the guy, the guy was talking about the rain and he was, he hadn't had a crop in three years. And you can see it's on fire now.

Vance Crowe [00:34:21] Yeah.

Jason Mauck [00:34:22] And he had, he just had this meeting with an old timer and he is, and the old timer just basically called him a bitch, if you will. I mean, he just was like, well, what are you doing about it? Quit bitching about the rain. Do something about it. And that was kind of like his, his kind of where

Vance Crowe [00:34:39] Man, and that's like the, that's the ultimate example of extreme ownership, right? Yeah. Where it's saying like, you don't like the way that the heavens are, are breaking open and pouring water down then, then deal with it, right? And you feel like you're, you're establishing answers that are legitimately going to gonna change how you

Jason Mauck [00:34:55] Someone, I'm not saying that tile, like you still need the water to get out, but you can actually improve a crop yield by placing another species to be a big brother. Just imagine, did you have a brother or sister?

Vance Crowe [00:35:11] Oh yeah, I'm the middle of seven, man.

Jason Mauck [00:35:12] Oh, you're middle of seven. Well, if you were 14 and you go, it was pretty nice having a 17-year-old brother, you know, and that's kinda what you see, but it's this spectrum analysis. Okay. I don't want the weed to be so thick that it hurts it, but I wanted to be a big brother and be able to just say, you know, get, you know, check.

Vance Crowe [00:35:28] And so in these fields, when you were describing that wheat would grow in this, in the, is that be, why does the entire field not grow that way?

Jason Mauck [00:35:37] Because my, my crop, I I I manage my footprint, if you will. So I've widened the rows, I figured out, I call it the leash of a dog, if you will. You know, if I have a deadly dog here and it's got a five foot leash on it and it's this long, it's gonna get so close, it's not gonna, you know, bite your head off. Right? So I figure out physiologically how a, a crop is built and then I make my row spacing based on the solar angles that that is gonna block, if you will. And that's where I need to have my crops.

Vance Crowe [00:36:09] You mean like your soybeans in that case? Right.

Jason Mauck [00:36:11] So most people have all this equipment in the barn and they're like, well, we're gonna make this work on 20 inches. We're gonna make it work when really you need to have, you know, not a pot to piss in and go out in your garden and figure out what's actually important and then build a machine. And that's really the biggest problem that I have. People have these ideas, they fester over what they should do and really they need to just do it

Vance Crowe [00:36:35] Become, and you're kind of saying the sunk cost fallacy. So for people that don't know when you're saying we're gonna make this equipment work, it's because if you have a combine, you buy a header and it's expensive. I don't know what, what does a header cost? Right? A hundred thousand dollars. A hundred

Jason Mauck [00:36:46] Thousand? Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:36:47] Okay. And that's what allows you to go through the field and pick up either sory or corn and, but they're put they're, they're designed such that they can only grab the rows that are so wide apart and you've got a little bit of wiggle room. Yeah. But not a lot. Yeah. And so you are saying, Hey, that's a sunk cost. Yes, that's the capital asset that you have. But if you don't look at another way of doing this, you're gonna miss out on the fact that you could do this either more efficiently or well, that's probably it more efficiently.

Jason Mauck [00:37:15] Or just go to the junk pile a tile and just make it work. You can, there's going back to the rock by the door, hold it on or break a stick off to do this. I mean, four years ago on Twitter, i, I came up with this cutter bar condom or poly procol, and I just took the kids Play-Doh and just stuck it on a toy combine. And I drew my little crop schematics and I made it go. And I'm like, well just block it. So a company in Canada developed flexi fingers and we put it on any head that you can think of and we can just move it. I mean it's,

Vance Crowe [00:37:47] It's, and then it's not, it's not grabbing up there. So you could actually knock out that row and then make the other rows on the outside.

Jason Mauck [00:37:53] Yeah, let's make the soybeans do the limbo. So they're two foot tall. I figured out just by pushing it and being like, is it dead yet? I mean, you can compress a two foot soybean down to about five inches and it's fine. Actually likes it. It likes

Vance Crowe [00:38:05] To be, dude, you're nuts, man. You are, you are crazy there. People must think that you do, do people put like, poke you about this? Like

Jason Mauck [00:38:13] Oh yeah, who cares? I mean,

Vance Crowe [00:38:18] Have, have you, is your like, so I'm wondering now, is your house like constructed, I'm trying to think of the book, you know, the cheaper by the dozen where the dad builds all these contraptions and, and makes everything work as like, what do you call those? The, you know, where you click over a domino and it just keeps going to hit other dom? Yeah.

Jason Mauck [00:38:37] I love that domino.

Vance Crowe [00:38:37] Is your house, is your house like that? Are

Jason Mauck [00:38:39] You Not really. I mean, my wife, I, I I should have more projects around the house. I like to just be outside. So

Vance Crowe [00:38:45] I see,

Jason Mauck [00:38:45] I try to, I've got about seven different little mini businesses I do. Like, I love weather, so I want to like, take on snowstorms, like Lieutenant Dan. So I have a little snow removal ice business and I get to go out and watch every flake and get on my radar and stuff. And then I got a golf course, you know, a little Tesla nine if you will. It's like three greens and nine holes. So I got there and play and you just, you just, and then, and then Oh, you,

Vance Crowe [00:39:08] Oh, when you said I wish I brought my golf clubs. You weren't kidding. You actually do golf? Oh

Jason Mauck [00:39:11] Yeah. I've been playing a lot lately.

Vance Crowe [00:39:13] Oh wow. It's been nice. Okay.

Jason Mauck [00:39:15] The we can talk, I'd love to talk, talk what I want to do with the golf industry.

Vance Crowe [00:39:20] Oh, I, I'm, I'm open to hearing it, you know, the golf industry, well, not so much the golf industry, but I've gone down to speak to several turf management com like either companies or, or universities. And people in the United States have no idea that grass is actually the largest crop we grow in the United States by far. We, there's a lot more acres of planted grass than any other single crop. And so you show up at these turf symposiums and you think, oh, there's gonna be like, you know, 10 people here, 20 people. No, there's like hundreds and hundreds of people that all they do all day every day is study seed development and machine building. And it's, it's cool. Yeah, North Carolina state was where I went most recently. It was cool. So what do you want? I I'm into this. I don't like golf that I don't, I'm

Jason Mauck [00:40:05] Play golf. Okay. There's the problem. I, I share something, people say, golf's dead, right? And it is dead. There's all these courses going bankrupt. And the problem isn't that golf's dead people don't have six hours. That's

Vance Crowe [00:40:16] Right.

Jason Mauck [00:40:16] Right? That's

Vance Crowe [00:40:17] Right.

Jason Mauck [00:40:17] And another problem is if, if, if we're, we just became friends and you golf, and I don't, and I kind of suck, you know, there's, it's like going to Vegas and playing blackjack next to they're gonna give you shit if you don't play the right card.

Vance Crowe [00:40:29] Right?

Jason Mauck [00:40:30] And Topgolf has basically made this, it's

Vance Crowe [00:40:33] Turned golf into bowling. Right. Maybe you can just sit there and

Jason Mauck [00:40:36] Just drink a beer and beat a ball. Right?

Vance Crowe [00:40:37] Yeah. It's, I mean I thought that was, when I was there I was like, this is so clever because they took out the fact that I'm gonna go golf for four hours and they made it into an hour long thing. Right?

Jason Mauck [00:40:47] Right. So there's space, there's tons of space between having 200 acres of turf with 12 employees and like a million dollar operating budget and have snack bar. And then all these old people are like, there's our club, we tuck our shirts in and just all this stuff. And, and then if you're this new novice, you go out there and you, you top your ball and then the guys are like, nice shot. What if you could take that down to this synergistic kind of nickel and I that I talk about like a few greens. You and your buddies have the whole damn place to do whatever you want, right? You can have a wedding there, you can do whatever you want. Have a little, but the point is on all this is people are so infatuated by, I need a better word than decorum or best management practice. They just say, this is how it's done. But you can do things, you can just eliminate so much. Like you just want the golfing experience. You wanna beat a white ball and drink some beer. Right?

Vance Crowe [00:41:45] Right, right.

Jason Mauck [00:41:46] And well,

Vance Crowe [00:41:47] I don't top golf, but I know that there are people that do

Jason Mauck [00:41:49] AstroTurf,

Vance Crowe [00:41:50] Right? There's,

Jason Mauck [00:41:51] There's a space between, and I think you just build it and once you have enough connections, you show people that it's awesome and they'll come and it'll become a cult classic. And then we can funnel all of our hog manure products onto the turf. So

Vance Crowe [00:42:06] You're married with two kids. I think there are a lot of husbands out there that would say, yeah, I got some ideas, but there's no way I'm gonna talk my other half into letting me roll the dice on some of these ideas. Yeah. How have you made that work?

Jason Mauck [00:42:19] Just a lot of friends just instill ideas and they run with it, give 'em some pep talks, you know?

Vance Crowe [00:42:24] So a lot of what you're doing is inspiring other people to get things done.

Jason Mauck [00:42:28] Exactly that. I mean, that, that's a big joy. It is not only people coming by, but my direct messages, they're like, I tried this, what should I do? And then, and then, and then I mean, where I had this moment with my wife when I came back from, I went on this eight day trip to five different cities and I went to the FBN thing and I couldn't get away from people, it's just

Vance Crowe [00:42:51] Farmer's business network,

Jason Mauck [00:42:52] Farmer farmer's business network. And I, I told her, I was like, I had 30 dumpster fires where I'm sitting around and I'm getting into all my stuff and I never bought a beer. Everyone bought me beer. And I'm just like, you think that when I was two years old, I had an imaginary friend in my belly button. I've never told anybody this. I, I named him Poie. And that was, I talked to Poie and I've always felt like before this really got going, when you get your phone out, it's an imaginary friend. And when you see how many people are, are absorbing the information, taking it into their context and then trying things and then sharing it and then, and then kind of changing their mindset is powerful.

Vance Crowe [00:43:30] I I think they're, you're totally, you're hitting on something really important, which is there are a lot of people that have good ideas or ideas that are along the edge, but they've spent so much time around people that want them to be cautious

Jason Mauck [00:43:45] That,

Vance Crowe [00:43:46] That they're, that they feel like they're completely alone. So when you open up the gate and say like, Hey, I'm interested in hearing your crazy idea and I may just believe in you, that changes somebody's demeanor because they don't, they're just not that many options for them to get it in another environment. And I think even if you have a really great spouse, they can only take so many of your ideas. Right. Whereas a lot of things, you know, the, the, there's a book that, I think it's the History of Scientific Revolution and it, and it says, new knowledge does not come from the chaos, new knowledge comes from making mistakes. And so you have to come up with an idea that's a little bit chaotic, but you've gotta put it into a system like what you're talking about and then figure out exactly what you're saying, what works and what doesn't work. But the tolerance that most people are taught that they should have for mistakes is pretty close to zero. Yeah. And it makes it so if you pop up and you're, and you're like, Hey, I want to hear your crazy idea, people are down with that.

Jason Mauck [00:44:46] Yeah. And, and has, we've had these kind of conglomerate corporations, if you will. There's this feeling of we have less control as farmers, we're not as independent, but that is the screen pass, if you will, that exploits you doing what they can't do by being free with an idea even if it doesn't work. You know, I as as kind of, I've gained some recognition, I've been in some interesting meetings, and you'll talk to a rather large corporation and you'll, you'll start talking about an idea. It's starting to get traction or this, and, and you can tell there's really smart guys in the room and they're, you can see their eyes go in the back of their head and saying, oh shit, if we go to 60 inch rows, we sell less units. You know, and that's the threat of a lot of of things when we go back to that matrix, if you start replacing things with natural systems, it's really disruptive to an industry. You know, it's, it could be a blockbuster, literally. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:45:40] And I think there's, people are, are predisposed to loss aversion. So I think most of the time the person that's calculating those units, right, like it's a lot easier to, to get somebody, it's really hard to get people to gamble, right? Like if it's their money, like sure, you can go to Las Vegas and you can see a lot of people doing that, but when you do experiments on, would you be willing to put in a dollar in order that you might get $10? People most of the time are like, no, I don't, I don't want, it's, it's actually kind of amazing how the lottery works at all because people's loss aversion is so high. And when I was working in corporations, that's what I saw all the time. You would say, I have a new idea. And people, instead of figuring out how can we make this idea fit into the paradigm that we're at, they would, they would much rather just cut it out and say, no, we're not. No, we, we tried that before. Oh, that doesn't work.

Jason Mauck [00:46:30] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:46:31] So what, where, where do you, where are you headed? What do you think is the most exciting thing going on in agriculture now?

Jason Mauck [00:46:39] Man, I don't know where to start. There's something every week. I mean, just in the last month we're talking about going to Africa,

Vance Crowe [00:46:49] Where

Jason Mauck [00:46:50] Tanzania

Vance Crowe [00:46:51] Okay. Swahili.

Jason Mauck [00:46:53] Yeah, guess so

Vance Crowe [00:46:55] How, how's, why Tanzania?

Jason Mauck [00:46:57] They need help. There's, there's a lot of places in the world that have just been kind of forgotten and, and big acts kind of coming in and, and saying this is the way, and their culture really isn't accepting that. So I think that's really the power of not so much.

Vance Crowe [00:47:16] Where are you going there? Where, like, do you know where in Tanzania?

Jason Mauck [00:47:20] I, I don't wanna share too much. Okay.

Vance Crowe [00:47:22] And

Jason Mauck [00:47:22] I mean, it's new, but from a, you know, I think we all get closer to 40 and we start thinking about, you know, your legacy and stuff. And I think, I think you get kind of turned off by the rat race that is here somewhat. I mean, I still wanna develop a bunch of things here, but I'm really wanting to get into kind of the educational standpoint. What's, what's a great thing about that part of the world is, let's say you're a young student that wants to get in agriculture, you know, I don't wanna throw any universities under the bus, but most of them are, most of the buildings have, you know, are sponsored by some big corporation and they're just trying to make cogs in the wheel, if you will. You know, can there be a place that you could go? And an acre of ground is basically like me ripping out one notebook and saying, Vance, you draw on this and, and, and you make some art and do whatever you want. And that's pretty cool to have a climate that'll grow things. And nobody's screwed the canvas up yet.

Vance Crowe [00:48:26] It's interesting, Africa clearly is getting the most sun, right? There's like bountiful huge volumes of sun, you know, basically 365 days a year, and as long as you have water, it should work.

Jason Mauck [00:48:40] But

Vance Crowe [00:48:41] I, I live there for a while and I was struck by the fact that infrastructure is a real thing and that you, that that it's not just the putting in of, you know, I, I saw many, many, many projects where there used to be a well here, but it was run with a generator that nobody could get the replacement parts to. So now it just sits there. I wonder as, as people are moving into Africa, how they'll overcome that because the Chinese have a strategy and the strategy is we are gonna dump all of our inflationary money into Africa and bring people over here to fix these things and then build them up and build relationships. That's not gonna work in a US context. And I don't know how much money China has to actually do that over the long term. So how do you think Africa will level up in terms of infrastructure?

Jason Mauck [00:49:28] Well, I mean it all begins, I mean, it's just like the urban crawl or whatever. I mean, you're gonna have to start around a port, right? Yeah. And you don't have to drag it across the whole country. And then that's where the reduction comes in point. You know, if you can develop no-till organic, you don't need all this thing things that you need to need, you think you need you, you know? Right. So there's perennials that grow that animals can just be grazed on. So yeah, I think, I think the future of ag is gonna be even more options, but it's, it's gonna be pretty simple. I think you can get pretty simple there.

Vance Crowe [00:50:07] Interesting.

Jason Mauck [00:50:08] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:50:09] So you brought up where organic, it's

Jason Mauck [00:50:11] More about knowledge, right? Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:50:12] I mean, I, I think you're completely right about the sharing ideas and mathematics. Like there, there's a guy, I'll have him on the podcast here in the next, I dunno, a couple of months that I, when I lived in Kenya, you, you're put in with a family. I was in the Peace Corps and in that family they, you like learn, how do I take a bucket bath? How do I live without electricity? So you don't really know. So you live with a family. And there was a, a guy that was a cousin to my family, he was around all the time, named Sam. And Sam's IQ was off the charts. I mean, it's, it is unbelievable how smart that guy was. He just didn't have access to like tools. So he was taking computer coding classes with a cardboard box. It was like, he would go there and they would talk about it, and then they would pretend to type on it. And he told me this one time I thought he was kidding. And then we went and I saw it and it was like literally that's what they were paying for, for these classes. But he now lives in the us He got a, a nursing license and he's in Oklahoma actually with our buddy Jared McDaniel near there. And I think that you're right that there are a lot, like, there are more chances for people to take that sheet of paper out of the notebook and experiment here in a way that it just doesn't exist there. And it doesn't exist in part because of what I was saying about infrastructure. But another big part of it is they don't have a margin for error, right? Like, you mess up that one page and now people aren't eating.

Jason Mauck [00:51:32] I think we might have gotta mix it around. I'm saying we could bring younger people there to experiment

Vance Crowe [00:51:37] In the us from the us, from

Jason Mauck [00:51:39] The US to Africa, from Europe, from Australia, make it like a global hub. While South America is basically deforesting to make more soybeans. You're over here because ground is so cheap. Maybe we replace deforestation and we're making paper out of hemp and where we're building homes with hemp, maybe we're

Vance Crowe [00:51:59] Wow, wow.

Jason Mauck [00:52:00] You know,

Vance Crowe [00:52:01] Dude, that's way out there.

Jason Mauck [00:52:03] Right? Right. But it's, it's the economics work much better when you're giving land to basically be a teacher, right? Then you're coming with the idea of move over, get the bulldozer out, bringing GMOs here, sling the urea. Let's start pumping out soybeans, you know?

Vance Crowe [00:52:26] Wow. I am damn near speechless that that's your idea. That's, I I mean, I don't have a

Jason Mauck [00:52:33] Mean feeling

Vance Crowe [00:52:33] On it one way or another. It's just very different. I've never heard anything of

Jason Mauck [00:52:36] That. I, one thing that you've get the feel of is you start pushing things. I mean, we can, Canada can do all this climate stuff or whatever, and I'm not saying that's the number one thing, but whatever you don't do here, they're gonna do in another part of the world. Right. So I think you've, you've gotta kind of smother the fire, you know, somewhat. And, and, and I don't know,

Vance Crowe [00:53:01] So changing the subject, but you brought up the word organic and I am keenly interested in what a guy like you thinks of organic farming, which includes all the way from planting and raising the crop using the organic guidelines, but then also the sales and how it gets to people and why they choose it. What are your thoughts on organic?

Jason Mauck [00:53:22] I don't know. It's, it's tough. You've got the transition period around here. I've never grown it myself. The three years I'm really

Vance Crowe [00:53:30] Between when you've used products that are considered conventional or traditional, you have three years of I can't use it and I can't declare it as organic, so I don't get that premium right.

Jason Mauck [00:53:39] But

Vance Crowe [00:53:39] I, once that three years is done, now you've sunk three years into getting lower crop yields, but not getting the value for organic. And now you're in the system. So it is a little bit of like a met noia, you've gotta go die from the old system to get into the new one.

Jason Mauck [00:53:53] But I don't think it's gonna be really relevant. I mean, it will be somewhat, but not nearly the weight that it had two or three years ago. There's some been some things to really devalue it. Really?

Vance Crowe [00:54:02] Tell me more about that.

Jason Mauck [00:54:03] I just think everything's gonna be just more transparent, you know, you know, what's the thing on your ring, you know, on your doorstep? Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:54:10] I mean,

Jason Mauck [00:54:11] Why wouldn't you just have your food on a camera all the time and check it out? I mean, people are gonna start buying their food before it's produced, and that's gonna be this next level when you start infusing a blockchain, when you start the things we can do with the char to kind of be this litmus test of what's actually happening with your, your water quality and things like that.

Vance Crowe [00:54:32] I one time made a proposal with my buddy Rob Long, basically saying, this is before Amazon bought Whole Foods. We were like, imagine Amazon goes into the food system and now imagine that once they do that you can subscribe to basically a playlist of food Taco Tuesdays, you know, something mon, maybe it's meatless Monday, whatever. And Amazon just starts shipping you guys the food that is in within that genre. So not, it was before Blue Apron had become what it was and then how it died. But then you start thinking like Amazon, the further out that you decide, you know, I'm gonna do a six month subscription for this playlist of food, now they can start going out into the futures market and buying chicken six months ahead of time because they know it's going to your house and they know it's going to that guy's house. They could really steal the show when it comes to how products get sold before they're even produced, to your point.

Jason Mauck [00:55:27] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:55:28] So I think that that's almost inevitable, I think, I think is is there, there'll be a place for grocery stores, but in 10 years we're gonna have to find something to do with a whole lot of parking lots in the United States.

Jason Mauck [00:55:40] See, I, I'm always intrigued by different industries that really kind of build an app and kind of bring people to the community to participate in the workforce. Have you ever, you've probably ran into a city where they have bird scooters. I was in Nashville, Tennessee

Vance Crowe [00:55:54] Bird scooters.

Jason Mauck [00:55:55] Yeah, these just little scooters. So you just put

Vance Crowe [00:55:57] Your car Oh yeah. They call 'em line bike here.

Jason Mauck [00:55:59] Yeah. We had a, a Indianapolis Colts game there for New Year's.

Vance Crowe [00:56:01] Okay. I

Jason Mauck [00:56:02] Spent New Year's somehow with Kid Rock at this little thing

Vance Crowe [00:56:05] As you do.

Jason Mauck [00:56:05] Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there was about a thousand of these scooters on the bridge. So the next morning we get up and eat breakfast and they're all like perfectly charged up in a line everywhere and in the city it was just chaos. So all these people just on the workforce picked them up, take 'em back to their apartment, plug 'em in, put 'em back to the spot. And they get so much for that. It's just like how Uber works. So when you start figuring out something from a, from a, a level of first in your garden, get better in a three year, then you start plugging in the community, you know, with chickens. Why are they in barns? Honestly, I mean, I know that I, they're

Vance Crowe [00:56:40] In, they're in barns because hawks that'll come and Right, right, right, right. Sweep 'em away and disease. And,

Jason Mauck [00:56:45] But there's natural ways to, you know, grow 'em a little bit different. I'm not saying that's not against, but, but I think there's gonna be ways to, as research and knowledge rolls forward on the kind of regenerative organic cover crops and everything, you're gonna have maybe 10 people from the community working your field. And they're gonna have another entity that's building them wealth. They're doing a specific job for that crop. They're distributing the manure, they're managing the weeds and the bugs, and then you're growing corn. And I think that's what excites me on sharing knowledge and, and and, and, you know, putting seeds in people's mind and every is is, is what's the next level that's gonna be more community.

Vance Crowe [00:57:28] You seem to have a lot of faith in other people. Did does that, is that, is that true? Yeah.

Jason Mauck [00:57:34] Yeah. Because

Vance Crowe [00:57:35] I mean, I think that the vision that you're putting forward of the sharing economy and people wanting to go out into fields has something to do with the level of energy, if not discipline that people wanna put into these types of things. Yeah. How accurate do you, I mean, as I hear you say it, I think Jason sounds naive because he sounds like he believes too much in people. But I could be the asshole here. Like I could be wrong.

Jason Mauck [00:58:02] The, the problem is everyone thinks that it's gotta be the answer. It just has to be your answer. You just create it. Right. And that's the big hiccup is like, well that won't work on a scale. Who cares? You just do it and prove it. And then somebody, if I die tomorrow, somebody will pick up something if it's interesting. And the more you do that, but honestly, the way that I'm shaped, I lost my father at 53 to pancreatic cancer. That's why I came to the farm. And then the, my next dad up, if you will. So I was farming with my farm and then my mom's brother farmed and he was farming 7,000 acres.

Vance Crowe [00:58:35] Wow.

Jason Mauck [00:58:35] A go-getter. And kind of, my mom and dad were kind of the prosperous farmers on this side of the county. Well he built that. He's just workaholic. But he got cancer when he was 53 and passed. So I went seeing two way too young deaths in their prime. I mean, I was playing basketball with my dad at that time. I mean, he would, we'd check each other, I mean

Vance Crowe [00:58:55] Wow.

Jason Mauck [00:58:55] Both of them extremely physical.

Vance Crowe [00:58:57] How old were you?

Jason Mauck [00:58:58] I was 29 and then 35, 36.

Vance Crowe [00:59:01] Geez.

Jason Mauck [00:59:01] Yeah. So I drive now, you know, I have all the land. I remember farming with him. And then you drive east and you just go, we call it Louis land and no one's there. And you just lose that gland that all these farmers have like this like I'm going to farm the county gland, you know, where you just work like 120 hour weeks. It does not matter. 'cause you're building when, when, when, when people just leave. Like in, in that, when, when, when cancer hits 'em and they just, they just, you just watch that. You just, you just, your legacy changes. You see what I'm saying?

Vance Crowe [00:59:42] Yeah. I mean once you know you're finite, once you really feel that, then yeah. Then the whole world changes focus.

Jason Mauck [00:59:48] Yeah. So I, I totally am naive and I have a lot of ideas that won't work. And I think I've became more not worried about if something doesn't work out because I just need to be engaged, you know? And I, I have a lot of faith in people.

Vance Crowe [01:00:06] The death thing is an interesting one and I even, so I think my view on death has changed rather dramatically just in the last few months. I remember one of my first podcast guests we talked about, my buddy Nick Cek one time asked me if, when I meditate, if I ever meditate on death. And I was like, no, hell no. Why would I go anywhere near that? And just last week my buddy gave me a little, a little coin and it says Memento Maori, which is, remember you will die. And I love it now because it a, in that span of time from one of the first podcasts to today, I think the knowledge that you are going to die clarifies some shit. Like it says like, Hey, I don't actually, if I waste it day, that's actually a real thing that's gone. I don't get it back.

Jason Mauck [01:00:55] Right. That, that's what it all boils down to. It's, it's time. You know, that's all, that's all you got.

Vance Crowe [01:01:02] Do you, when you watched your dad die at that age and then your uncle, do you have a sense that fifties is when you're gonna go? Or do you Yeah.

Jason Mauck [01:01:09] Yeah. I mean,

Vance Crowe [01:01:10] That happened to a good friend of mine that, that that's that then he got it in his head and he could never shake it.

Jason Mauck [01:01:14] Yeah, yeah. And

Vance Crowe [01:01:16] So that

Jason Mauck [01:01:16] I'm very like weird, you know, I just like,

Vance Crowe [01:01:20] Are you

Jason Mauck [01:01:20] Spiritual? I like love the cat, love the dog, love the boys, love the wife. I can't go in this like vicious circle. And then I get in my A DHD thing and I'm just,

Vance Crowe [01:01:28] I mean, I like, so the things that you say, and when I said that you sound naive, I want you to take that as like a real compliment because I spent the last five years of my life in corporate America,

Jason Mauck [01:01:41] And

Vance Crowe [01:01:41] Their people are not naive. And their people are, they've seen everything and they're tired and they're, and they, and they look around for other people to inspire them. And when I think of somebody being naive, sure it could be like Jason could get taken advantage of, but you're a fricking huge guy. I think you're gonna be just fine. I mean it in the sense of like pure of heart, you know, white snow. That's, it's good. It's, it's good to be around. It's, it's refreshing. When, when I hear you say these things about love and about your family and are you spiritual guy, is this something that, that you think about regularly?

Jason Mauck [01:02:19] I love people. I don't like politics or organized religion much. I,

Vance Crowe [01:02:24] I just

Jason Mauck [01:02:26] Don't really like rules and

Vance Crowe [01:02:29] Yeah. That's becoming

Jason Mauck [01:02:30] Clear. Yeah. I hate judgment. I said hate. I don't like to say hate, but yeah, I, I don't know how to go beyond that. But I, I just feel like from, from my experience, I mean my, my grandma was the first one right before dad, and you just like, you just remember your grandma, you know, you're like during the day and you like, you ever like, like once you get over like the first month or two and then it's kind of hard. But then, and then when you start remembering people, you know, something they did or something they said or something, then I think that's what's like concrete. And then like, and then so, so my interaction with my kids and my wife or, or anyone I meet is like, let's, I mean, just do the best you can to like, just be remembered, you know? I don't know.

Vance Crowe [01:03:14] Yeah. I mean I, I, I've had, I've been very, very fortunate, although now I kind of feel like it's a debt I owe the universe in that very few people in my life that I've been close to have died. I mean, I have a mentor that's 99 years old and he, he just keeps going. And I've been so lucky. But I was at church with my parents for Christmas and you know, I went back home and I was looking around and I was thinking about this, this man that was my godfather when I was growing up. And I was like, oh, I can't wait to see Greg.

Jason Mauck [01:03:45] And

Vance Crowe [01:03:46] Then it hit me like, Greg's not here and he's never coming back. And even as a 30 something year old guy, like that concept of what, what legacy did he leave? He left a guy that wanted to see him at Christmas, but then what legacy do I want to leave? That's, that's a, it's a powerful thing to think about. How much interaction have you had with the, with the seed companies, right? So you work for a seed company and then you clearly buy seeds from

Jason Mauck [01:04:16] Companies, right? Right. So I do sell pioneer seeds. I have, I've been in the seed business for five or six years. I don't pursue it too much. Just kind of the local farmer agronomist guy. I have a field day and that kinda stuff.

Vance Crowe [01:04:30] And the, the consolidation of the seed companies bear buying Monsanto, Syngenta being purchased by the Chinese Dao and DuPont coming together. What are your thoughts on that? You don't seem to be a guy that loves consolidation.

Jason Mauck [01:04:48] I don't know. I think it's, I'm just real hesitant to share the data. I just, there, there's something about me when, you know, when you go back to the commodities things and it's subsidized and now I don't have control over my market and now I'm, I'm I need to follow by the rules to get this operating loan and now they have all my data. At a certain point, if they're telling you exactly what to do, you're just a cashier. I mean, I think that's part of the whole death thing. Like if I die tomorrow, there's gonna be some dude come over and plant corn and beans. Like if, if, and and that's what it all comes down to with, with, you know, kind of the consolidation of the right decisions and the right hybrid on the right acre and the right. It's like, hello, I'm here. I'm a farmer,

Vance Crowe [01:05:37] I

Jason Mauck [01:05:38] Can do something else. And that's, that's not really answering your question.

Vance Crowe [01:05:41] No, but I think that opens up an interesting, but it's just,

Jason Mauck [01:05:44] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:05:44] What do you think? So there, there's, there's the seed companies want to want to try and level out the waves that come with, Hey, we're having a really great sales year. Hey, we're not having such a great sales year. And one of the ways that they're doing this, at least I think Bayer is rolling out this pricing where you share in the profits. So I don't understand it all that well. But essentially it's, you plan a crop and as long as you follow within these parameters of, you know, applying this much nitrogen or making sure that it has the right crop protection, then we split the earnings. You, we take a third off the top and you get the other two thirds, but you get a reduced seed price. Is that accurate in the way that I'm describing it? Yeah,

Jason Mauck [01:06:28] And I don't What

Vance Crowe [01:06:29] Do you think of that numbers?

Jason Mauck [01:06:30] I mean it's, it's really, it's kind of blue ocean if you will. The, I mean I, I'd like to use Airbnb as an example. If the Super Bowl comes to St. Louis, now the days end goes from 59 to $589. So they're just basically capitalizing on good weather in different regions and they're kind of using this kind of, we share the risk as just lube.

Vance Crowe [01:06:53] It's just lube.

Jason Mauck [01:06:54] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:06:54] Owe to getting fucked.

Jason Mauck [01:06:57] Yeah. Not so much, but just make it, I, I mean the problem is I'm like, oh, I know people that will like that idea. You know, well, farm

Vance Crowe [01:07:05] Grandpa

Jason Mauck [01:07:06] Wants to farm 50 50 and you are sharing risk, but

Vance Crowe [01:07:11] Well, a huge percentage of our acres in the United States are farmed by farm managers. And if a farm manager can go to an absentee landlord, so a farm manager is a person that says, you put your land under my control and I will either pay you rent for it or I will do some sort of, I'll, I'll follow these rules that you have. But the farm manager loves it because it really slows down the amount of risk, the up and down. They're not, they're not trying to ride the up and down, they're just trying to get a consistent payment in. Right.

Jason Mauck [01:07:42] And farm manager, I know a lot of 'em, they're great people, but it's just, it's like, you know, one of my first jobs outta college, I sold windows. You know, if I got $1,100 a window, my commission was huge. If I got 900, I got zero. So marketing and sales organizations use the sales person as the interface. And if you can't lock in that tremendous profit margin, guess what? You're gonna eat beans next month. Were you a good salesman? But they're still gonna push for market share. They're gonna keep theirs. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So, so your farm manager says, if you don't like three 50 an acre, tough titty said to kitty, I'll go by and get it from somebody else. 'cause he's willing to take that lack of risk. And there's just, there just seems to be, we just get further and further and further away from, from that, you know, grandpa, true risk, if

Vance Crowe [01:08:34] You'll, do you think there will be a, a, a person that identifies as a farmer in the same way over the next 10, 15, 20 years?

Jason Mauck [01:08:42] Is what what, what do you mean by that

Vance Crowe [01:08:43] Question? Well, I mean, you were, you were saying like, Hey, I'm a farmer. I'm here, I'm an individual. But in a lot of ways what you're describing is a craftsman, right? Yeah. A person that that takes a look at it and does it by hand. Whereas you could probably hedge a lot of risk, cut out a lot of craftsmen that aren't good if you just standardized and industrialized the whole thing. I don't necessarily want that, but it seems like that seems inevitable, right? The march from 40% of people living and working on farms in the 19 hundreds all the way down to 1.8%

Jason Mauck [01:09:16] In

Vance Crowe [01:09:16] 2020. If

Jason Mauck [01:09:16] It's not 1.8, really, I mean,

Vance Crowe [01:09:17] It's probably,

Jason Mauck [01:09:18] It is. But the, the true like 2000 acre farmer that, I'm not saying if you don't farm two th whatever it is, it's less than a percent for the most part. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:09:28] I i that drive their entire income from farming. Yeah.

Jason Mauck [01:09:31] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:09:32] So do you think that will continue?

Jason Mauck [01:09:35] I hope not. I mean, like I said, it doesn't have to be the trend, but you can do whatever you want and share it and you can do it in your own little world. Were

Vance Crowe [01:09:44] You a good salesman?

Jason Mauck [01:09:46] No, not really. I, I actually found a big loophole. You, me, to share it a little

Vance Crowe [01:09:52] Bit? Yeah. Oh yeah, I'd love to

Jason Mauck [01:09:53] Hear this. Okay, so I was in insurance sales. I didn't really like that too much. So I went to a home improvement sales and I did that for about a year. And so they would give you a couple leads, two or three or four at the beginning of the day and you would drive all over the state and they would just derive these leads from like farm, you know, like county fairs and stuff. So you got some true great ones like demolition derby people and they're like, there's, there's no way. So anyway, I went on this lead and I, I was down literally like, I, I had like $20,000 in, in college from selling stuff and stuff and I kind of burnt through it my senior year road trips and whatever. And I was just literally about down to nothing. And I went to a lead and nobody was there. And there was these two roosters that came up and chased me to my car and I barely made it to my car. And I'm, I'm just shut the door. I'm like, what the hell am I doing? I'm broke and whatever. So basically you have like two or three sales managers and then they have kind of their minions go out and run all these calls and I said, screw it. I'm just gonna go start calling on their customers. So I I, I went that night and printed off all the customers. They had 50,000 customers.

Vance Crowe [01:11:03] Wait, whose customers?

Jason Mauck [01:11:05] Just the companies, you know, the, the, the, the top guys would get the best leads, just kind of the, the underhand throw just, you know, sign 'em up and make your 150 K. So I just went to these small towns and I just started knocking on doors and I just killed it for about three weeks and they would pay me more commission and then I quit. 'cause they were starting to get pissed off because

Vance Crowe [01:11:27] You were taking the easy good ones. Yeah, but

Jason Mauck [01:11:28] It wasn't a lead. It's not like they would ever service that account. I just went in there and said, I'm quality control. I'd like to see your windows we installed. You have a nice conversation with them. But the whole point is just like with the relay cropping, it's just like everything I talk about, we spend so much time spinning our wheels. Like I could farm 10,000 acres and have a guaranteed make $12 an acre. Right? What's the derivative, right? What's the derivative of that? Sales is being in front of a good prospect, a past customer racking the shotgun, right? So if you can spend 100% of your time doing something valuable, then you increase your, what you do in that time exponentially. And, and that just set it all off. So the, you know, the, the previous year and a half I learned how to get people on paper and all that stuff. So I made up my own forms at started landscape business.

Vance Crowe [01:12:22] Ah. And so the, then you, so when you left your home improvement, then you went into your landscaping.

Jason Mauck [01:12:29] Landscaping. And since that day, I've never really thought about, I'm not well off or nothing, but I've never worried about money really. You know, it just, you can just do things at small scales and stay in kind of a low overhead cocoon and then just figure out, you know, better valuations of your time.

Vance Crowe [01:12:49] So you did landscaping. Landscaping is tough because it's the natural world doesn't really wanna have things created on top of it. And you've gotta make flat surfaces and make it look pretty. Why did you, why were you drawn towards landscaping? I

Jason Mauck [01:13:01] Just wanted to get dirty. I mean, I was, I was in insurance and then I had to wear suit and tie for that deal and I just wanted, you know, take my shirt off and, and I always felt like I had talent with working with the land. And so what, and I, at that time I was 23, I played a lot of basketball. So I go to the university of ball, ball state and I could just literally just be like, you over there. And then I get like the best athletes to run the weed eater and, and those specimens could, if it's 95 degrees, I could work 13 hours. So when you're go into an industry and you've got talent to put the things together and then you have the actual horsepower and vigor if you will, you can make it happen.

Vance Crowe [01:13:42] So you were getting players and stuff to come work on your landscaping crew?

Jason Mauck [01:13:45] Yeah. Just really good athletes, right?

Vance Crowe [01:13:48] Dude, I think this is your talent. I think this is the thing that you're, that I'm, I'm discovering it. It's by believing in people and directing them to build something like Yeah,

Jason Mauck [01:13:58] I always say love the talk. So you know, when you're running a landscape business, you, it's not corporate, you know, and I would have this like baseball talk with them, you know, like, I'm gonna give you two hours, right? If you suck, you're gone. Like if you bat 2 22, I'm gonna pay you $8 an hour if you really hustle 11 if you kick ass. And I love you 14. So I was, I had these people, nobody does that.

Vance Crowe [01:14:25] That's awesome. Right? That is fantastic.

Jason Mauck [01:14:27] I mean, I was constantly

Vance Crowe [01:14:29] Yes.

Jason Mauck [01:14:29] Talking to people and we'd drink two or three beers afterwards or whatever and people would be let go. But there was this,

Vance Crowe [01:14:37] You have a selection pressure there that makes it so you can select for people that are,

Jason Mauck [01:14:41] Can work in do. Yeah. I thought it was a good kinda life lesson for 'em. They were in school and they couldn't go to, you know, wherever they could work somewhere else. The market was at seven or eight bucks. Right? So if they could bust ass and make $15 an hour, you'd give 'em a shovel. Hard.

Vance Crowe [01:14:56] You know, this leads right into one of my gripes with corporate America is that in order to hedge getting sued for discrimination, they took out most of the tests that you would give at a, at a corporation. So the way that they tell whether or not you're qualified for this job is, do you have a degree? Well the only way to get the degree is to go into debt to do that because they're not going to have you come in, you have to have that college degree. Otherwise the HR system says we can only pay them $32,000 a year. Well if you are capable and competent and smart, you, you wanna make 40, 50, 60, 80, a hundred thousand dollars a year. And so they are forcing people to go get college degrees because they don't want to take on the risk of doing what you did, which is bringing somebody in, evaluating 'em and kicking out certain ones. 'cause they don't wanna get sued. We're

Jason Mauck [01:15:49] We're just making koala bears that we just put into the lion's den, like nonstop, right? Like if, if, if you, we need, that's a hell of a

Vance Crowe [01:15:59] Metaphor.

Jason Mauck [01:16:00] It's, It's like, oh, don't, don't get a job then your grades will suffer. Like we're, we're valuing the wrong thing. And I think that's goes back to like whether it's chickens here or that I, I want to start a community garden. I wanna do all these things where I connect with young kids and make them start a small business. And it doesn't, doesn't matter. I saw something on, so I, I saw something on YouTube like two years ago who got this ball rolling? If I'm doing something completely mindless, I'm constantly listening to content on YouTube. This guy like talks about all for YouTube, all languages. Do you YouTube? No dude,

Vance Crowe [01:16:37] It is worth the $10 a month.

Jason Mauck [01:16:39] Okay.

Vance Crowe [01:16:40] No questions asked because you now can click the lock button on your phone and it still plays it, but only plays the audio, not the video. And so like

Jason Mauck [01:16:49] I wondered, I get so mad at that,

Vance Crowe [01:16:51] Right? So if you pay the $10, you can do that and then also think about your time, right? 30 seconds per new video per every 10 minutes. You

Jason Mauck [01:16:59] Don't see that?

Vance Crowe [01:16:59] None of it.

Jason Mauck [01:17:00] Oh yeah, yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:17:00] It's all gone. Okay. So that 10 minutes bought me hours and hours and hours e every week because I listen to a lot of YouTube because there's a lot of content that is on YouTube that's not on a podcast. Yeah.

Jason Mauck [01:17:12] But because

Vance Crowe [01:17:12] I can click that lock button now it's just become a podcast.

Jason Mauck [01:17:15] It's helped me like do things on the honey do list. Now I'm like, I'm just listening to YouTube and do this thing I don't really want to do. So it's

Vance Crowe [01:17:22] Coming on that, well I think the, the podcast revolution, like what we're doing right here is bigger than gutenberg's printing press by by orders of magnitude. Because gutenberg's printing press required that you still had to know how to read and a physical object had to arrive in front of you for you to be able to open it up and shift through it. So you've already taken out, you know, if you figure the bell distribution of the number of people that can read something, it's, it's not everybody. Right? Like so you've already taken out all the people that either can't read or don't like to read or don't have the time to read. And by having it be in a podcast, anybody can listen. You, you can get through much more course material if you have the intonation and the volume and the enthusiasm and you've made it so I can now double my output. I can be weed eating and listening to a podcast. This is way, way bigger. The intellectual enlightenment that is coming from this is unparalleled. There's never been an invention like this before.

Jason Mauck [01:18:23] Yeah, yeah. And just think how much better when you communicate or get up on the stage and talk and, and just all the content that you came in. A hundred percent you think about something and it's, it's,

Vance Crowe [01:18:33] I think about all the people that you get to meet this way, right?

Jason Mauck [01:18:36] Like

Vance Crowe [01:18:36] There's a guy, the way that I learned how to eat was this guy named Du Antonio who was just this like Hungarian guy making weightlifting videos. And because of the way that he made them, it was like we were friends and then on top of that you could stack on like, oh I trust what he's saying, I'm gonna, I'm gonna follow his path for a little while. 'cause I've gotten to look into his eyes and I've gotten to hear his voice. And so you build a relationship and then you get that volume of information. Like it's truly amazing what's happened in our society and I think a lot of people sit around and complain and talk about how bad and negative things are on social media. You can get rid of negative stuff on social media and

Jason Mauck [01:19:19] Just let 'em dig their own grave.

Vance Crowe [01:19:20] Yeah.

Jason Mauck [01:19:21] Who cares What is your, I mean people are gonna see people that are trolling me or whatever and you think, you think they're gonna do people troll you. I have three or four troll accounts.

Vance Crowe [01:19:31] You're like the nicest guy in the world. Like I think people would have to go pretty far out of their way to,

Jason Mauck [01:19:37] To truly honestly, people don't experiment enough to know that like elasticity is a thing and they think that like, it makes no sense. But I've, all my videos I am like literally right there. You know, I'm showing you what's happening

Vance Crowe [01:19:53] Between your videos and Jared McDaniel telling me that we should talk. I mean your videos are awesome. I mean more people that are experimenting should do that because what you've done is created a gravity well of people like me that are like, I don't necessarily need to know this, but it feels good to see somebody experimenting. And particularly this fall, like as you were getting excited about how many soybean like pods were on the plants. Yeah. I mean I think I felt just as much joy and excitement outta that as I would watching my close best friend doing it because I got to watch that progress.

Jason Mauck [01:20:28] And you talked about the feelers or whatever, you know, it, it cost nothing. You know, it costs nothing to make a video, put it out there and get people's feedback. And that's when you, when you look at this, this fractal experimentation, I think that's what I really wanna encourage with young people starting a business is you don't need the capital, you don't need anything. You just need an idea and you need to share it and you can share 10 ideas in a day.

Vance Crowe [01:20:51] Did you have a business as a kid?

Jason Mauck [01:20:54] Yeah, I, well I had four H animals, but I sold sweet corn. I started selling sweet corn when I was about nine and by the time I was 16 I had about six stands and I would Whoa. So I would take, I would take my, it was got corn. You remember when milk? Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:21:10] So

Jason Mauck [01:21:10] I had all these, got corn signs and the state police would always get on me 'cause I would have these, whatever the biggest piece of plywood was, I had like 10 or 12 of 'em and I would have 'em everywhere. Like sweet corn two miles ahead.

Vance Crowe [01:21:22] Oh, just like the South Dakota wall or

Jason Mauck [01:21:24] Whatever. Yeah. Yeah. So I really enjoyed that. But that's what I say like, like I understood demand at that point. I knew when people started getting more sweet corn because the, you know, you could feel it. So I would be in a mad rush with my dad. I'm like, we gotta plant corn. He's like, it's snowing, but if I could beat the market, I could sell corn for four or $5 a dozen and you were selling it for like a dollar and a quarter three weeks later. So that was kind of my summer deal. I look forward to. But it was, it was interesting.

Vance Crowe [01:21:59] I, I ran a lawn mowing company, which was, which was a good one. Once I mowed enough to be able to buy my own riding lawn mower, that's when I was off to the races because then I figured out that it's really easy to pay a kid to ride around on a riding mower. Right?

Jason Mauck [01:22:14] And

Vance Crowe [01:22:14] As long as you don't care that you're the one pushing that guy's gonna mow and he thinks he's got the greatest job in the world and I'm just making boatloads of money right

Jason Mauck [01:22:22] Off

Vance Crowe [01:22:22] Of the fact that

Jason Mauck [01:22:23] You're talking to the front, getting more jobs and then you're getting the crust good.

Vance Crowe [01:22:26] Yeah, it was really good. Yeah. And that was one of those educations that if I didn't have as a kid, it's a lot more expensive to learn those lessons as an adult. That's

Jason Mauck [01:22:35] A great lesson right there by the way. Let them do the easy job. You do the actual things that they'll see and make all the connection point. And that's, that's what I did when, when I was landscaping. And I think, I think a lot of people want to go towards the, you know, the high horse job. But,

Vance Crowe [01:22:51] Well I, my brother was a good experience, he was a good teacher for me. My dad helped him print off cards and mail 'em out. So I had seen how that business ran, but I had a, a customer,

Jason Mauck [01:23:02] I'm gonna talk about another tangent while we're on it.

Vance Crowe [01:23:04] So I had all this is I had a customer that actually was like, Hey, did you know that if you get an edger and you edge somebody's sidewalk, the value of what you're doing here goes up by more than 25%. I'm like, what? Are you serious? He's like, yeah, just get an edger and just do it once and then no one will be able to compete with you that isn't doing that. Yeah. And I was like, okay. And I tried it and he was exactly right. Went out and bought an edger and I started to making a lot of money.

Jason Mauck [01:23:29] Yeah. Color contrast and cleanliness. That was my thing. And it'd be edge dyed whatever, like the system of look. But I got a good feeling for packaging. And this is what kind of has a big deal with the relay intercropping thing. So you go look at like a condominium place or something that had like 53 places and people wanted that account. So let's say it was at $500. Well each one of 'em, $53, 53 houses is worth say 40 or $50. So if you would package

Vance Crowe [01:23:55] For landscaping or for mowing, what are you talking, I'm just

Jason Mauck [01:23:57] Putting numbers out there as far as a packaging deal. So like

Vance Crowe [01:24:01] Packaging for, I just, I'm

Jason Mauck [01:24:02] Confused. This is like an open bid to let's say take care of a property. Oh, okay. Add 50 units might go for 500, but each one of them by themselves is maybe $40.

Vance Crowe [01:24:10] Right?

Jason Mauck [01:24:11] So you discounted the job by 75% to get the package and no one has the, the get up and go to knock on the doors to make the connections to make your own packaging. And that's all relay cropping is, is figuring out how to get more preach unit. But everyone has to think total yield. It's the same exact thing. It's the same thing as the sales thing getting,

Vance Crowe [01:24:33] I think you can do more here on this unit packaging because I, I sense your enthusiasm, but I'm, I don't, I don't understand it. If I tried to walk outta here and explain it, I'd be like, I know you get more. It was just, it was good. So start from the beginning when you're saying this is currently how people think about per unit pricing in a farm. Tell me about that. So

Jason Mauck [01:24:53] Let's just do the wheat and soybean thing. Okay. Most people are just a one summer annual. So that space between October and really may is goose egg. And more importantly than that, the rain's washing soil down the road and whatever. So we're just basically putting wheat there for water draw down for biological stimulant and for weed control in that space.

Vance Crowe [01:25:18] Okay.

Jason Mauck [01:25:18] So we're putting biochar

Vance Crowe [01:25:20] Oh, because if there's weeds there and if there's wheat there, there's not palmer amaranth or Right. Or what whatever these other weeds are that are out there. There's no thistle. There's, it's exactly.

Jason Mauck [01:25:32] Yeah. You're just, you're just taking, you're saying chemical company, we're not going to broadcast spray this whole field because the weed is in this space.

Vance Crowe [01:25:41] Okay. So

Jason Mauck [01:25:41] I'm developing things to only do actual inches of the field. So big ag is looking at a field view of prescriptions. I'm making kind of agronomic algorithms of time and space and species that makes much sense. So palmer amaranth won't come until my soil hits a certain temperature, let's say 81 degrees. So that trigger point might not be till June 11th. So it's not relevant yet, but this other weed species is, but you can manage a species to change the solar angles and you can do all these things if you think offensively instead of this problem's gonna happen. But this is the product that I use that

Vance Crowe [01:26:21] That's the whole space man, that is cool. That okay. That landed with me. And in particular, your, your explanation of the weeds, I also didn't realize, but you're totally right that a soil has to be a certain temperature for seeds to get going. Does it? Oh

Jason Mauck [01:26:35] Yeah. Like crab grass. You wouldn't worry about, you wouldn't see it till July 12th. Right. It doesn't grow to a point till then. So that when I ran the landscape business, say you had 200 acres, if you grew the grass five and a half inches tall instead of three and fertilized it, you would get zero weeds in the turf. Now if you edged it, you might get these little tiny crab grasses right on the edge. Right. So why would you spray all the acres? Just put a little backpack sprayer and just spray the edge weed eating right. You weed eat every time they have, make a spray where the grass doesn't grow, mix it with some two four D. Now we don't have to weed eat, but I don't do that across the whole lawn. I wouldn't get paid to mow it. I might as well just do it right where we would, we eat. So everything has specific, you know, management that, but big Ag is thinking this is what we're gonna do with this script, but we need to think more, how can we actually use natural things to replace what you think I need here? So it's not specifically organic, it's hedging risk and it's replacing costs, elimination

Vance Crowe [01:27:40] And, and

Jason Mauck [01:27:41] That's the significance. So

Vance Crowe [01:27:45] I think the thing that you're discounting

Jason Mauck [01:27:47] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:27:47] Is the value of iq. I think that you, I think and, and probably the value of attention, because like yours it seems like can be divided quickly. You can context switch quickly and you're able to hold a lot of rote information in your mind to apply it.

Jason Mauck [01:28:03] I don't, I have never written anything down.

Vance Crowe [01:28:04] Yeah, that's interesting. Why not?

Jason Mauck [01:28:08] If if it's not worth remembering, it's not. Look, everything's fine. That

Vance Crowe [01:28:12] Can't possibly be true. Look, look, these ideas were written down and then shared Right. Many, many, many times over and over. What's that?

Jason Mauck [01:28:19] I'll write stuff down. I mean, I, that is a hyperbole, but I'm just saying like, if I'm, if I go to a class, I'm the guy that's just doing this and I've always been that guy because

Vance Crowe [01:28:28] If it doesn't stick, I mean I'm And

Jason Mauck [01:28:30] That keeps you present.

Vance Crowe [01:28:31] That's true.

Jason Mauck [01:28:32] Right?

Vance Crowe [01:28:33] I've never gone back and looked at notes.

Jason Mauck [01:28:34] Exactly.

Vance Crowe [01:28:35] That's

Jason Mauck [01:28:35] Exactly. Once you figure that out, then you're like, what's the point?

Vance Crowe [01:28:38] Yeah. I still take notes though.

Jason Mauck [01:28:40] I, I think people, when we talk about reduction, they, they can't, they can't get over this. Like, if I don't do this, it's gonna be a disaster. There's, that's a total fear all the time. So it takes experimentation to, to know what's not relevant.

Vance Crowe [01:28:53] But don't you think there's

Jason Mauck [01:28:54] Only so much,

Vance Crowe [01:28:55] I mean, some of that fear, one of the things that I've observed in farming, and I'm actually next week I'll have a guy on Brian Scott, which would be really, it's interesting, he as a, he works with his dad really closely. It'd be interesting to talk with him. I think a lot of the traditions that happened in agriculture when people say they're afraid to try new things is because you're not getting over what your old boss told you you should do. You're getting over what your father and your grandfather told you you should do. And they kept the farm in the family. Yeah. Yeah. And so there's something real to that that is, is a fear to overcome. Was your dad open with you to try these new things?

Jason Mauck [01:29:31] Never really tested. I mean, we weren't in the same space. I would just help him out load pigs and that stuff. I never questioned what he did. He was, he basically was pulling the rope and then he was gone and I had to pick that rope up.

Vance Crowe [01:29:44] Oh, that's right. 'cause you didn't come back to the farm until after he had died.

Jason Mauck [01:29:47] Yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:29:47] That's right. And then your uncle, was he supportive?

Jason Mauck [01:29:50] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, dad was just the, he wasn't, you know, if he messed up, he was gonna chew your ass. He was. He was. He was. That was just him, you know.

Vance Crowe [01:30:01] Are you that way to your kids?

Jason Mauck [01:30:02] No. No.

Vance Crowe [01:30:03] Do you think you will be when you're,

Jason Mauck [01:30:04] But they're not old enough

Vance Crowe [01:30:05] Yet. Yeah. You can't really chew their head.

Jason Mauck [01:30:06] My wife's really good. She's an elementary teacher, so she's got this whole mind calculus thing figured out or something. So I just kinda let her teach me on what to do. But

Vance Crowe [01:30:18] I shoot. I was gonna ask you a question about, oh, I'll think of it in a little bit. What do you, what are you worried about? Oh, I know what I was gonna ask you. So you've now mentioned a couple times that you ran pigs. They still

Jason Mauck [01:30:36] Do.

Vance Crowe [01:30:37] I I think African swine fever is a potential catastrophic apocalypse.

Jason Mauck [01:30:43] What

Vance Crowe [01:30:44] Do you think?

Jason Mauck [01:30:45] I hope not because I've got a lot of faith that it doesn't, but I think it will come here. But I think that we will, we've developed enough, you know, whether it's a vaccination or protocol to stop it in its place, I don't think it's gonna take over.

Vance Crowe [01:31:00] But there is no vaccination for African swen.

Jason Mauck [01:31:03] Huh? I've got some theories. Don't. They

Vance Crowe [01:31:05] Isn't so, so for anybody that doesn't know African swen fever was in Africa, like the name suggests really long time. And it hit African farmers because it was carried by ticks with wild boar populations, which would mix with the regular pigs, the domestic pigs. It had really stayed largely in Africa, but then it moved over to Asia and then spread slowly into China. And then China let that burn outta control. And once, once it gets into a pig population, you no longer need ticks to have it spread. What happens is the, the feed that it's in, whether mucus or any kind of animal, you know, just the way that diseases spread and it was in China, cut their population down. Some say by a third, some say by a half, some say by more. That's the largest pork eating area in the world now. That's where it was until two weeks ago. And it shows up in Europe and now it's outside of the city of Brussels. This to me is like, people were not expecting that it would happen that fast. And I think that if you decimate 50% of the world's population of pigs,

Jason Mauck [01:32:10] We

Vance Crowe [01:32:10] Have a real problem on our hands. Yeah. Because you can't replace that level of protein. And a lot of the people that are eating that are particularly in China, but all over the world, they are not, it's not like eating cattle. It's not, it's not like a luxury thing. They're doing it because if they don't have access to that protein, they won't. So tell me about the protocols to make it so your pigs don't get African swine fever. Because I think it's really dangerous.

Jason Mauck [01:32:36] I mean, there's

Vance Crowe [01:32:37] No vaccine,

Jason Mauck [01:32:37] Right?

Vance Crowe [01:32:37] There's no gene edited pig. Once it spreads.

Jason Mauck [01:32:41] I mean, I haven't done a particular lot of research. What I, there's

Vance Crowe [01:32:47] A really great YouTube video about it. The, the African Veterinarian Society has a three hour documentary and it is worth the price of admission. I will, that it's fascinating. I'll that,

Jason Mauck [01:32:57] I mean from, from my knowledge, if it does come, they literally just let the pigs just sit there and they don't even come back to the site for like seven or eight months.

Vance Crowe [01:33:10] Oh, I didn't know that. I hadn't heard that. Yeah.

Jason Mauck [01:33:11] And they put some kind of like foam around it and they just basically treat it like a fire that burnt down

Vance Crowe [01:33:17] Really. I mean it's, it's can stay on close for something like seven months. If so, if people are, and that's the difference between us system. And I don't, I don't know how Europe's is set up, but we have really strong bio controls when we think things are going on. But I,

Jason Mauck [01:33:34] Who

Vance Crowe [01:33:34] Knows man.

Jason Mauck [01:33:34] Yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:33:35] You, you don't seem very keen to talk about African swine fever.

Jason Mauck [01:33:39] You really don't. I mean yeah. It's, it's may maybe my biggest worry.

Vance Crowe [01:33:44] Really.

Jason Mauck [01:33:45] Yeah. You'd think I'd learn more about it. But

Vance Crowe [01:33:48] I think that this is like a dragon, right? Sometimes hard to look at the dragon. For me it's a worry because I keep thinking like, what is the way that you react? If you think that a huge percentage of the protein in the in the world could be at risk, what would you do differently? And I don't have an answer for that. So I bring it up with people 'cause I want to hear

Jason Mauck [01:34:06] What

Vance Crowe [01:34:07] Do they think? But you see very, very little of it in the US news. I, I have to get almost everything either from Europe or from nami. The North American Meat Institutes been really good about publishing stuff, but I'm probably hyper alert about it, but I think it's a big deal.

Jason Mauck [01:34:22] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:34:23] So what are you listening to on YouTube?

Jason Mauck [01:34:27] Oh man. Everything. I like to, I like a lot of, I, you know what I'm really into honestly animals and my kid's into it. So I just, we he's, he's very, he wasn't a dinosaur and just now he's an animal. So he is got this big dictionary and then we get on YouTube. But it's just so awesome to see how the, the animals have evolved and their predator prey relationships and all that stuff. And then, and then we play animals in the house. And so there's a lot of animals, there's a lot of, you know, my meat and potatoes, a lot of Seth Godin and Gary v and some of those people. And

Vance Crowe [01:35:09] Have you ever heard of this guy Wes Watson? I'm a little nervous to talk about this, but, so Wes Watson is a convicted felon and he was in prison for 10 years

Jason Mauck [01:35:20] And

Vance Crowe [01:35:20] He does all of these episodes where he's in California and he's wearing like California kind of skater dude sunglasses, but he doesn't have a shirt on. And he is this huge muscular dude with tattoos all up and down his neck. But he is a stoic philosopher. He's basically like, this is how you harden your mind to be able to survive the worst place on earth. And this is what then I've learned since I've spent 15 months out of it. And he talks about like the raw, edgy stuff. I mean, there's all sorts of racism and stuff in prison. There's, it's crazy. But I have never heard anybody that you is be as compelling as he is on having a disciplined life. And it, and it, so you should, if you like Gary V check that out, it'll blow your hair back.

Jason Mauck [01:36:04] Okay. His

Vance Crowe [01:36:04] Name is Wes Watson. He goes by like GP gen general population or penitentiary life, something like that.

Jason Mauck [01:36:10] Okay. Little tangent on that. You know, I don't wanna really wanna bring back the African swine flu, but, or fever. Fever. Yeah. But you know, things are gonna happen if we live in a completely bleached, sterile environment, you know, and I think that's the, that's the, that's just like coddling your kids. I mean, you, you, you think you get so good at one thing and sterilize and fix, fix, fix, but you just lose all the resiliency and you just become more sensitive to a disaster.

Vance Crowe [01:36:42] Yeah. I mean there's that whole theory about the reason that allergies have gone up is because we're in such a hyper clean society and they say people that have a dog that goes outside their kids have far less allergies because they're exposed to the dirt and grime and

Jason Mauck [01:36:57] Things like that. Yeah. And I don't want to, I don't want anyone to hear this and think I'm pissing anybody, but if you would interview a farmer from probably a 1910, if you wanna read good literature on just like the stuff that I talk about, you'd have to go far that back. You know, when I talk about separation, we, we've, we've gotta have more of a sense of the true derivatives of, of what's driving ag more than how to drive a tractor, take a script, or what hybrid you should plant. I'm, I think we're getting further removed from that. I'm

Vance Crowe [01:37:30] Much more open to you saying this than I am to like the people at Stone Barns or the Michael Pollans because when I've heard them say it, I think I put on a sheen that's not fair to them. That's like, oh, you're saying that because you wanna disrupt the system 'cause you wanna be on top.

Jason Mauck [01:37:46] Right.

Vance Crowe [01:37:47] And when I hear you say it, I hear you saying like, Hey, we're missing out on things guys. Hey, don't, don't forget this. Like, don't, don't leave this behind. So I'm really glad that you're out talking about this stuff because even if you're wrong, at least people, I, I, I'm not saying you are, but even if you were wrong about some of your different, at least somebody's going out there and, and trying and shaking things up. Yeah. And you're at least making people go like, I don't know, should we do something different than 20

Jason Mauck [01:38:14] Inch rows? I don't know. Well, I think so just a little tangent on kind of my thought process as of late. So, you know, in the fifties or whenever Henry Ford came, when was that? The

Vance Crowe [01:38:26] It would be before, yeah.

Jason Mauck [01:38:27] Twenties. Twenties, twenties. Yeah. I mean he just made it man's hands more valuable through, through all that stuff. And, and we kind of kept that in ag for a while. But then, you know, in the seventies and eighties we were trying to, as all this tech was coming in, we're like, okay, it wasn't just about horsepower. How many, you know, plows I can turn over and how much I could cultivate. We had this like urgency plus kind of what's relevant or important. What should, when I wake up, should I plant today or plow or whatever. But what I really strive to get is this significance factor, right? Like, what can I do right now to like that next year? I won't have to do that. You know what I mean? That's what I think is significant. It might not scale across the whole world, but I think we're stuck in two dimensional thinking and we need to be thinking three or four.

Vance Crowe [01:39:22] Yeah. I mean, I, I think you're right. I think you are discounting the fact that the way that you think is not common and that that's probably one of your hurdles. But I think that social media helps you come over that o overcome that

Jason Mauck [01:39:35] Hurdle. It's a, it's a opportunity really. Again, it doesn't have to scale, you just have to do it. And I, I put a tweet out a couple weeks ago, it's like, quit worrying about what anyone or everyone thinks, you know, shoot your gun as loud as you can and the people that are still haven't scattered away. That's the someone you're looking for.

Vance Crowe [01:39:54] Amen. I love that. I love that. That's right. That's right. So you can do

Jason Mauck [01:39:59] That now.

Vance Crowe [01:40:00] You

Jason Mauck [01:40:00] Don't have to be in, you know, corporate polished America. What's

Vance Crowe [01:40:03] Your, what's your philosophy on Twitter? How do you think about it? How do you think what you post and what you look at and who you follow?

Jason Mauck [01:40:13] I've got a, I don't really look at it that much. I, I just post things. I go to other avenues for that, which is bad. I mean, I interact a little bit just mostly dms, just conversations back there. But I just use, use Twitter to just, that's just my microphone, you know.

Vance Crowe [01:40:34] Are your dms open? So if somebody wants to, what is your Twitter handle?

Jason Mauck [01:40:38] Jason Mock one. That's M-A-U-C-K one.

Vance Crowe [01:40:40] Okay man, this is great. I'm so glad that you came into town where you say you speak some, if people wanted to go out and see you at different things. Do you?

Jason Mauck [01:40:51] Yeah. So Wednesday morning National no-till conference. I speak at nine 30. That,

Vance Crowe [01:40:55] That will have been last week. So a week ago you spoke at the

Jason Mauck [01:40:58] Oh yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:40:59] But, and any other things on the horizon? Any other places you're going to speak?

Jason Mauck [01:41:02] Yeah, several. There's a no-Till on the Plains doing some young farmers deal in Iowa down to Florida, Washington, DC Speaking from front of, front of the USDA coming up.

Vance Crowe [01:41:14] What gonna tell them

Jason Mauck [01:41:15] In Ohio? Just kinda share the, I'd really like to get into kind of the subsidized production deal and our distribution and manure and relay cropping and, you know, it's hard. I only got a half hour and instead of an hour, so that'll be kind of tough.

Vance Crowe [01:41:31] Well you are very fast talking. This has been a wild, wild ride. So thank you so much for stopping by and, and hanging up, man. Yeah,

Jason Mauck [01:41:40] Come

Vance Crowe [01:41:40] Back again.

Jason Mauck [01:41:41] Alright, thanks.