An Ag Chemical Salesman on Supply Chain Fragility and Class Conflict During COVID Lockdowns

Vance Crowe [00:00:01] As the crow flies on the Vance Crow podcast, Brian Rund, welcome to the podcast.

Brian Rund [00:00:10] Thanks, Vance. Good to see you and hear you finally.

Vance Crowe [00:00:14] So, Brian's an interesting interaction here because the way that you and I found one another was via Twitter, and most recently it was because you and I had come into conflict about how we perceived what views to listen to on, on, on a podcast, some of my guests. And you and I started a conversation in back channels, and you're a super nice dude. So we were having a miscommunication and I thought, man, there's no better person to talk with on here than a person that, that you thought you had conflict with. You ended up hearing what his perspective was and you thought it was really interesting. So welcome to the podcast and I'm really excited to have an, an honest conversation between two people with different perspectives.

Brian Rund [00:00:56] Well, thanks Vance, and I appreciate your willingness to engage. It's, that means a lot, and that's part of what I see. It's not really my job, per se, but part of my personal mission is I'm trying to bridge across worlds. I'm an ag guy, but I live in a big city. I was born, raised in the country, but I have a liberal arts education. I've lived all over the country. I've traveled all over the world. So I, I try to bring, you know, kind of a more, a different viewpoint to, to my interactions and, and wherever I can try to get discussions across groups that may not intersect normally. I think it's a good thing.

Vance Crowe [00:01:45] So it is April 9th, 2020 and you and I have only spoken just for a few moments right before this started, but the one thing you said is we are busy, busy, busy right now. So amidst a whole bunch of coronavirus pandemic, you are describing your work as being, you know, at the edge of chaos. What's going on for you with work? Why is it so busy and, and how does, how does Coronavirus impact that?

Brian Rund [00:02:09] Well, I, I work for a manufacturing company that makes crop protection chemicals, and we have three manufacturing plants here in the US and there were a lot of factors. I, there was some economic uncertainty. There's been the issues with tariffs and the bad weather last year. So a lot of things sort of rolled up and resulted in customers delaying when they placed their orders all the way from the farm gate up the channel to us. So we were very slow. And then lo and behold about oh, March 20th, people woke up and said, oh wait a minute. We gotta plant a crop this year. So, so our, our orderings, it's always busy for us. This time of year, this year is just a little more compressed. And so we are going absolutely throttle to the firewall to fill orders and, and get 'em shipped and trying to do that in the COVID-19 environment, which I think we're handling as, you know, as an industry I think we're handling pretty darn well. But boy, it's not easy. You know, we've had to do things like we had to quarantine a few workers a couple of weeks ago. I think they're back now. We've had to sanitize the workspaces. We have to, you know, for the people that are in our plants, we've had to space 'em out a little bit. They're, they're generally one good thing in chemical formulation plants, you're generally not, there's not a lot of people and they don't work very close together anyway, so, and they also wear a lot of PPE already.

Brian Rund [00:03:45] They typically all shower when they leave before they leave, work, shower, and change their clothes. 'cause it's kind of ferous to, so to speak. So from that standpoint, it hasn't affected us a lot, but the entire office staff, including like customer service people, we're all working remote. We have been for weeks. Those of us in sales and, and our, and our marketing teams, we're all working from home. So it's, it's been an adjustment. I don't think it's, we're still getting product to customers. I don't think it's really hurt our performance yet. It's just maybe slowed it down a little.

Vance Crowe [00:04:25] You know, I'm struck by the idea that there are many people in the United States that have never even been in a factory. And you think about the people that are, those are probably people living in the city, probably in the middle to middle upper class, and they don't really understand how sophisticated some of these factories are and the types of workers that are in there. And that you don't need a lot of workers, but you still need people to get things done.

Brian Rund [00:04:54] Oh, absolutely.

Vance Crowe [00:04:55] And so when you hear people talking about how strict the lockdown should be, and I know you're concerned about the disease, but you also understand manufacturing concerns. Where's the balance there? Because you're talking to a population that doesn't even know how production works.

Brian Rund [00:05:13] Yeah, I, that's a good question, Vance. I, and I've thought about this a lot, I think, and again, I'm not an epidemiologist or an infectious disease expert by any stretch. However, I do come from a very science-based perspective. And I think that we need to listen to those people. I also understand that there are certain trade-offs we have to make. We, and we have to prioritize, you know, where those trade-offs go. And I think that, yeah, from the factory standpoint, you know, we're classified as essential. We, all of us in the, you know, the ag industry generally has been classified as essential. And I think the, the approach has been pretty good. I know that we've done things, for example, and I'm not really speaking for the company here, but, but I know that a lot of manufacturers are doing things like taking people's temperatures every day when they come in and if they're elevated, they go home. So I hope that what we're doing is enough. I think that where it's not an essential industry, I think we need to clamp down very hard. I was just reading today about Wuhan in China where they've opened it up finally after 11 weeks. And from everything that I've read, they were really locked down.

Brian Rund [00:06:45] There was no essential anything. They brought food to people and basically, you know, made 'em stay home here where I live, I think, yeah, I think you asked me this the other day is my reaction on, on how things are being handled locally. And I'm in Indianapolis, so a good sized city. We have a lot of cases here. I think we're up to, oh, about 2000 in a county of a million people. So it's pretty significant. And the, the shutdown keeps getting a little tighter because people aren't really ad you know, weren't adhering to it as well as they, as they could have been. So, yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:07:26] I'm, I'm struck by this. You know, when people talk about the numbers at, at first when we were watching New York go start burning down, you know, I was watching those numbers and felt like they meant something to me, but now I hear the numbers and I hear you say, we have 2000 infected. And my my quick reaction is I don't, is that a lot or is that not a lot? I don't, you know, does that, is that overwhelming our system or is that like totally manageable? And so as I watch the Clampdowns come on, I am saying, I, I don't have a choice. I'm not running for office and I'm not gonna go try and overthrow the government. So I'm, I'll just take whatever they're doing to be the right thing.

Brian Rund [00:08:07] Right.

Vance Crowe [00:08:08] But at some level, you know, when you tell me the reason you have to do it is 'cause these numbers right here are bad. I don't know what that really means.

Brian Rund [00:08:16] Yeah, yeah. And I, I hear you and I agree. I mean, and that's where I think, honestly, I think all we can do is trust the science, you know, and, and the people who study this and, and look at their models, one thing I think is important to remember is models are models. They are not reality. They are never, they're never a hundred percent accurate. All they do is give us some parameters, you know? And I think that's what we gotta look at is, okay, what are our choices? We, we, you know, we, we are anywhere on a spectrum from life as, as always, which obviously has pretty untenable risk to Wuhan or Northern Italy style, shut everything down, period. No movement, can't leave the city, whatever. And I hope that what we're doing, you know, is enough to put, to relieve the strain on our healthcare system. I, I hope that it's enough that we don't get a resurgence. I'm kind of a history nut. I was reading about the 1918 epidemic and how the second wave was actually much worse than the first there were. And, and it was a very scattered approach to it. Of course, this, you know, a hundred years ago, not near as much knowledge, didn't even know what was really causing the disease at that point. They just knew that quarantines worked. And one of the things that was interesting, you're in St. Louis and St. Louis was one of the most effective, had one of the most effective quarantines.

Brian Rund [00:09:50] And Philadelphia was kind of the opposite. And the, the death toll was, I don't remember the numbers, but it was far higher in Philadelphia than St. Louis. And there was a lot of interesting little nuggets out of that.

Vance Crowe [00:10:00] Yeah. And there's interesting things that happen in society as history is being written. So in St. Louis, there was a, a young woman, I think college age that was in Italy when Coronavirus happened. So she flies home, her parents are like, Hey, we'll get you outta there. And they live in an affluent part of town. And so ultimately the, she came down and got sick and they called the doctor a bunch of times and they said, ah, you probably don't have it. You probably don't have it. Okay, we're gonna give you the test. The mom is supposedly the one that's been taking care of the child and they've quarantined her away. And the dad and the daughter of the, the younger daughter decide they're gonna go to a daddy-daughter dance. And so they go to this and they get the news that she tested positive for Coronavirus while he was there. So he gets the text message, I don't know how much time elapsed, but he leaves and goes home after daddy-daughter dance. The next day word of this gets out, this county executive comes on. This is before all the quarantines have happened.

Brian Rund [00:11:03] And

Vance Crowe [00:11:03] It freaked everyone out. So they shut down months or a bear, they shut down centene, they shut down all these major businesses. And so the whole city was shaken awake before everybody else.

Brian Rund [00:11:16] I remember that. Yes.

Vance Crowe [00:11:18] And so there's an interesting thing that happens here. I think there is a reasonable possibility that because that guy did it, and it woke everybody up, that it made people take the quarantine way more seriously, way earlier and maybe saved lives because they didn't

Brian Rund [00:11:34] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:11:34] They didn't wait around.

Brian Rund [00:11:37] We don't understand, we as humans don't ever really understand risk until we see it personally. I, I think that's kind of the truism. And I think that's part of what you've seen with this, you know, know on, on the positive side in St. Louis, maybe on the negative side, where some of the places that have been slower to shut down are just now starting to see that, you know, whoa, this stuff does get out to rural areas. It does get out to small towns. It's not just, it's not some far away place like New York City or Seattle or, or Los Angeles or Detroit, you know, and, and it's, it's, it, it really is, apart from all the tragedy of this, of this whole thing, the economic that of course the death number one, and the, and the sickness, you know, that that's the worst part of the tragedy. But, and the economic impact, which is horrific. But I, I think there are some really fascinating things that are coming out of this in, in the study of human behavior, the risk aversion, some of the communication and how messages have been shaped and distorted. And I think there's some, I was talking to a customer of mine this morning and, and we were talking about how we feel like there, we hope that there will be a lot of good that comes out of this. And I think, which sounds strange when we've had, you know, 12,000 people die and what, 10, 12 million outta work right now.

Brian Rund [00:13:09] But I think that the, the, when we look back on this in, you know, 15 or 20 or 30 or a hundred years, I think there will be some some good things to come out of it too.

Vance Crowe [00:13:19] I, I mean, I think there's no, no doubt that the world is gonna change. I think the die has been cast and we're now living in a post coronavirus world, and it's no longer, like, when we get to the post coronavirus world, it exists right now, and the Overton window is wide open. So the ideas that were acceptable may be thrown out. And the things that we used to think of as radical are now becoming, I mean, if you had gone two months ago and said, Donald Trump is gonna advocate to have every American be printed a check for $1,200, somebody had said, you're insane. Yeah. This is a Luna, I'll take that bet a million to one. And, and yet here we are. And so the questions that I have are often around, what are the ideas that you think we should be open to now that we're in a more radically open society? And which ideas should we be making? Sure, like, Hey guys, we already went down that road. We don't need to do it again. Don't that, that idea is not one we wanna bring back.

Brian Rund [00:14:19] Well, a couple of things. First of all, I think from some, some sort of major revision to the way that we provide healthcare insurance in this country, I think this may be the cataclysmic event that tips the scales. I don't know what that looks like personally. I don't think that you can just wipe out the everything we have and replace it with something else, you know, overnight. I think it's gonna have to be, you know, maybe there's a, a baseline approach where everybody qualifies for Medicare, who can't get insurance somewhere else. You know? And if they can get it through their employer and it's, and they like it and it's better, great. And if they, but if, but there's, I think we have to have some kind of floor because I think that the knock on effect, as my Australian friends say from this will be that in a few months we'll see these people who are outta work and out of and don't have health insurance, you know, they'll start to suffer from other things as well as coronavirus possibly.

Vance Crowe [00:15:23] That's super interesting. Can I, can I push on that one a little bit? I think that maybe we should go deeper. I think that potentially we should start thinking about how many doctors are able to become medical doctors. How many people, how many people did they let into their schools? How do we license that? Is the way that we're licensing that make sense in a modern world? Or are we still using an ancient out of date system that really selects for a system where we have a lack of doctors? And maybe if we had a whole lot more doctors that were allowed to practice medicine without doing absurd amounts of paperwork and enormous amounts of liability and everybody protecting everyone else. And I mean, maybe we need to really shake the floor and say, let's look at how we train doctors. 'cause in the state of New York, suddenly when there was a pandemic, the governor says, you guys don't even have to finish school. You can practice medicine as doctors right now. Yeah.

Brian Rund [00:16:18] So,

Vance Crowe [00:16:18] Oh

Brian Rund [00:16:18] Yeah, why

Vance Crowe [00:16:18] Don't we kick that door open?

Brian Rund [00:16:21] Yeah, that's, and that's happened a lot of places, you know, retired, retired doctors and nurses. Yeah. Come back to work, you know, we trust you. So yes, I think, I think that's a, that's a great example. Vance and I, there are a lot of, you know, another one in the ag world that's gotten a lot of traction, at least in, in the Twitter sphere lately, which I know is not reality, but it's fun, is the idea of more localized, decentralized meat processing and packing. You know, we're down to four major packers in the country and that's, you know, that's awfully close to monopoly territory. And, you know, what

Vance Crowe [00:17:06] Would you attribute this to? Because I, I'll tell you the other day, so I've been involved with nami, the North American Meat Institute. I have been invited by different cattle organizations from all over the United States to go speak with them. You know, I was even up in Canada at the Alberta Beef Group. I have studied this like very closely, and I have literally no idea what to think because when I listened to, you know, the standard groups, things are, well, we need money, we've got these challenges. I listened to our calf and I was told you even listened to our calf, you're on the side of the enemy and we don't want to talk with you. Like, what in the hell is going on with cattle markets and how should we think about decentralizing? What I, I don't think that there are people sitting at the top of JBS being evil dictators that are, you know, just run. I think they're looking at the market and they're maximizing their value. So how do you make it so we have a system that's different than the one that you have?

Brian Rund [00:18:03] That's, yeah, again, that's one of those things, I, I don't know what the answer is. I would like to see us, so let me take that a step back just from a minute and use a, use an example. The, the manufacturing type companies, like the one I worked for, you know, a tremendous amount of our raw ingredients are, are or raw materials come from China.

Vance Crowe [00:18:30] Oh.

Brian Rund [00:18:31] You know, it's just a fact. Interesting time in the, in the chemical business most of the time. In fact, I would say virtually all the time, that works great. You know, we have great relationships with our Chinese suppliers, but what this crisis, this pandemic has pointed out is how vulnerable you can be when you're not diversified. And it's that, you know, so if you have this single pipeline to China and all of a sudden it's slowed down, cut off, holy crap, you got a problem. So we're already, you know, our company has been doing this for a while, but we're already looking for other suppliers, and I know other ones are too. So I think in, in the beef industry, I'm, I'm just learning about this. I don't know that much about what's going on with the whole packing thing. I think what we have is kind of a perfect storm of this collapse in demand at the restaurant level, which just like we're seeing with milk and fresh produce and all these other elements, the, the food service channel is so different from the retail, you know, consumer channel. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:19:36] Meaning if you had 30% of your calories were being delivered by restaurants, you can't just convert what it takes to box and sell what you sell to a restaurant and convert it into consumer goods. Because consumers, for the most part, aren't prepared to take a 50 pound bag of flour and, you know, a 30 pound bag of sugar and make that work into their system. They want more

Brian Rund [00:19:54] In time and Yeah. Yeah. But

Vance Crowe [00:19:57] That's changing right

Brian Rund [00:19:57] Now.

Vance Crowe [00:19:58] You know, it took me a long time to be able to buy a freezer because so many people had bought freezers and they were filling it up with beef. And the challenge is right now, it's not like I can go to my grocery store and say, I'm gonna take a quarter or a half of beef, because everybody in the store would be like, Hey there buddy, we need beef too. So it's an interesting thing. We have this surge of demand and we can't, we can't scale to meet it, but the system we have has kept everybody fed so far.

Brian Rund [00:20:27] Right, right. And, and, and that's one of the tough things too. You know what I always tell people, and I'm like, when I'm explaining how agriculture works to somebody who doesn't know about it, you know, one of my standard lines is we do the things we do in agriculture for a reason. You know, it's not, nobody wakes up in the, the morning and says, oh, I wanna go spray my fields with some carcinogenic pesticide, you know, I want to go do something to harm the environment. That doesn't happen. But there are reasons why we grow what we do, where we do, why we, why we produce beef the way we do, you know, why it's packed the way it is. And it works until it works incredibly well, until you have this, you know, perfect storm kind of event. And then that makes you start to question all of it, which I think is a good thing. And then, you know, the next thing is, well, how much of this can we change? Do we fiddle around the edges or can we really make deep structural change?

Vance Crowe [00:21:26] Okay. So as you're thinking about making change, what is the problem that you are seeing? Are you concerned about food shortages coming up?

Brian Rund [00:21:35] No, I don't think so. I think, I think there will be limited specific shortages. You know, you mentioned flour, that's one that you know is the, there, i i, from what I've seen, there's plenty of flour in the system, but a lot of it's in 50 pound bags, or it's still in bulk or whatever. I think it'll just take time for that to readjust. There are shortages of frozen vegetables right now, but because they're, you know, they're frozen, those are coming from, again, that's a different supply chain than the fresh product. So frozen peas, for example, almost all grown in the northern Midwest, Minnesota, Wisconsin, frozen green beans here in Indiana, Michigan, they only harvest those once a year. Florida, California, you know, the, the, the warmer climates, that's where the fresh market stuff's coming from.

Vance Crowe [00:22:27] So do you see the fresh market problems that we're having right now down in Florida where they're having, I mean, the news reports are saying, and, and Dr. Kevin Fulta, who's the former head of horticulture studies for the University of Florida, is saying there are hundreds, if not thousands of trucks that are leaving hundreds of thousands of pounds of fruits and vegetables on the ground. Yeah,

Brian Rund [00:22:46] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:22:46] What are we gonna do here? So does that, does that wave, is that just hurt those farmers and ucks, it's just like a drought, or does that actually send waves large enough into the system that we have shortages of necessary calories and how many of those can you have before it's a real problem?

Brian Rund [00:23:04] I, I, that's a great question. You know, I mean, if, if we're looking at, you know, six, eight months of greatly reduced restaurant demand, and I'm not saying that that's gonna happen. It's just, you know, if, if that was a possibility, then I think yeah, there's, there's gonna be some serious effect. Whether that leads to shortages, you know, I don't know. It's all, it's all very complex because you run into things like with, you know, right now they're, and I, the reports I've seen that I think they're plowing down, you know, the equivalent of a million pounds of green beans. There was one big grower down there, it was plowing down a million pounds every few days of green beans because it's not worth harvesting them. So the easy answer is well freeze 'em. Well, the freezing plants, the processing plants aren't in Florida, you know, so do you haul 'em all the way to Wisconsin? Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:24:00] And there's a shortage on truckers right now, or at least there's a hell of a demand. I don't know if there's a shortage, but

Brian Rund [00:24:04] Yeah. So, so the, you know, you, you get into these, these rabbit holes of these, you know, consequence after consequence. I think that the, the, the thing that we're really good at in this country, probably better than anywhere else is, is the on the fly innovation to figure out how to solve problems. I think some of this will start to happen. I think you'll see, you know, produce brokers, for example, who are handling primarily food service, going to the big grocery store chains and saying, Hey, look, I've got a line on fresh green beans, Mr. Kroger buyer, let me get you, you know, a million pounds of green beans up to your, to your stores, to your distribution centers. I think we'll see that. But these things are complex and you don't change 'em overnight. You know, it's, it's, it's like, you know, like something like flour, you can't, if you have a packing line for 50 pound bags of commercial flour, you can't just suddenly flip a switch and make five pound bags from that.

Vance Crowe [00:25:09] You're right. And I'll tell you what I want right now. One of the thing, well, one, I think that the people that have the freezer space, you can go to a restaurant and they do wanna sell it to you because they're having it sit at their house. And if you can find a way to get connected, call 'em up, you know, and offer 'em a, a fair price for it and 'cause it's not doing them any good there, and it's not doing you any good if you're, if you don't have it. But I'll tell you, the thing I want is I want some people that are producing milk in cartons that are not so full, that when you freeze them and they expand that the bottle doesn't break.

Brian Rund [00:25:42] Yeah. If

Vance Crowe [00:25:43] We're gonna have this excess capacity make, make frozen liquid milk, and everybody that has a chest freezer right now goes and buys two or three of those, it's a great way to suck off. And I don't know how hard it is to put the, the that into production, but if you could, man, I'd be buying a lot of those.

Brian Rund [00:26:01] And it's, it's unfortunate that we haven't embraced the sta shelf stable milk here as much as other parts of the world have, you know?

Vance Crowe [00:26:09] Well, I couldn't find it. You're talking about like the powdered milk?

Brian Rund [00:26:12] No, I'm talking about the liquid milk in the, like in the, the, those cryo pack containers. It's

Vance Crowe [00:26:17] Oh, like the ultra pasteurized, it's, yeah, I used to have that when I was on the ship.

Brian Rund [00:26:20] You see it all over the rest of the world, but it is really rare here. And

Vance Crowe [00:26:24] That's because our milk prices are so cheap that you don't

Brian Rund [00:26:26] Have to, right.

Vance Crowe [00:26:27] Like for them

Brian Rund [00:26:28] Wasting milk, big refrigerators and so, so all these things, you know, and you mentioned buying a freezer, you know, a hundred years ago when I was a kid, everybody had chest freezers, everything was frozen. I mean, it, it, it was something like of the, of the produce meat, vegetables. I, I, I picked up this stat somewhere and I, I don't remember where, but in the mid seventies, something like 70% of those categories sold were frozen. And now the percentage is almost exactly flipped, which is, and I'm a, I'm a big cook and kind of a foodie and, but, but I, I call myself a pragmatic foodie because I don't buy into a lot of the elitism that goes with that whole, you know, foodie mindset. And one of the things that, that I really struggle with is this, this sort of trope that fresh is always better, you know? And so we've created this, this perception that, oh, if it's, if it's not fresh, it's not good or not as good. And, you know, that's, that runs into problems when you're in a situation like this. And, and it makes our food more expensive and it concentrates the production in fewer places. You know, you look at the dominance of Florida for, for fresh vegetables for the restaurant trade, I think it's like 70% of the tomatoes are coming out of Florida for fresh tomatoes and lettuce and all those things from Florida and California.

Brian Rund [00:28:03] Now, lettuce obviously you can't freeze, but some of these other things, you know, if we,

Vance Crowe [00:28:07] Well, your food culture matters, right? And we were

Brian Rund [00:28:09] Optimized,

Vance Crowe [00:28:10] We were optimized for a world under which if you decided to throw out everything in your refrigerator and start again tomorrow, like it might be a little bit of money, but it's not that bad. And so you didn't have to think about that, right? If everything went bad, if your refrigerator, if your power was out for three days and, and you, you couldn't get your refrigerator to stay cold, okay, that's not terrible. You're in a situation right now. And those kind of gaps could cause you to be in a situation where you've gotta go stand in a food line for with hundreds of other people. Yeah. And I, that's one of the things that I wanna know. So my biggest concern right now is a mob mentality, and it's a mob mentality around how we should treat the disease. Because if you get people that are too afraid to go work, to be able to pick vegetables, to be able to get our, our stuff stocked, to be able to grow our food, to keep our trucks moving, doing all these things, if we get into a battle with the people that have the luxury of sitting at home right now because they have a white collar job and they've got money coming in, they don't understand that they're at the top of the pyramid and you're demanding that other people go work for you.

Brian Rund [00:29:24] Yeah. It can

Vance Crowe [00:29:25] Get scary in that way. And

Brian Rund [00:29:26] That's, that's one of those positive outcomes that I hope we see is that we as a society start to value those people more, you know, and value the jobs that they provide, whether it's supermarket, cashier, truck driver, warehouse work, or whatever it is, the people and the people in our factories who have, you know, like, that are producing these essential things, working to slaughterhouses all those jobs that are so essential. And in the short term, that's where, back to the science piece of this, that's where we need testing. We need testing, testing, testing. You look at all the countries that have, that have really flattened the curve. And that's been the cornerstone is knowing who has the disease. And then right on the heels of that is we have to have the serological testing so we can tell who has had the disease.

Vance Crowe [00:30:17] I I agree with that. That is, I, I, I agree with that, but we also have to live in the present moment. Like when we, when I hear people talking about that, I think you're thinking two steps away and you need to also remember there's an intermediary step in between that. Yeah.

Brian Rund [00:30:32] Yeah. And

Vance Crowe [00:30:32] That intermediary step is what about the people that don't have the luxury of working when they don't know if they've had it right and they need that money, and what happens if it extends on for a really long period of time? Yeah. What if the serological testing is not two months away, but instead, you know, 10 months away Yeah.

Brian Rund [00:30:53] At

Vance Crowe [00:30:53] At what point do we start having the social norm that you are going to take some risk? Because if we keep everybody locked in their houses, eventually the system breaks.

Brian Rund [00:31:06] Yep. And that's, you know, that you've touched on the crux of the whole thing is do we, you know, I, I was li Dr. Fauci was on the Daily, the New York Times Daily podcast last week, and it was interesting to hear him and also a little bit discouraging because he said, you know, the thing with these quarantines is a partial quarantine does no good. You know, essentially, and you might, you might help a little, but he said, you have to have a really complete shutdown, or it's just gonna linger on like you talked about. You'll still have enough virus circulating that it'll just go on and on. And the cumulative effect is much worse. What I wonder is, have we done enough yet, or have we been, you know, a little too casual on this? And again, that's not my field of expertise, but I, you know, all I can do is on, in my little circle is try to abide by it the best I can. Try to do my best to protect the people that I come in. You know, I occasionally have to come in contact with on my few voyages to the outside world and hope that others are doing the same.

Vance Crowe [00:32:30] Man, I'm so glad to be talking to you because I am a magnet with the entirely opposite polarity. My, my concern now, for better or for worse, I might be a fool. You know, I'm not going out into the coronavirus stuff. Yeah. But my propensity is to say, I am so concerned about people getting hungry and by people losing meaning in their lives by having work and that work, giving them the ability to progress forward in life. Those two things combined in this way that unemployment can be, I see tremendous danger in that. And I am more worried about that than I am of the disease. And you're talking to a guy that has a pregnant wife, and I don't wanna bring it home to her. So it's not fair for me to be like, Hey, you guys go out and do work. I'm gonna stay in here. Yeah.

Brian Rund [00:33:23] Eventually

Vance Crowe [00:33:23] I need to hit the place where my, where I'm going out to keep the economy going. But I don't wanna do that too early. I don't wanna be wrong. So how do you bridge this divide? None

Brian Rund [00:33:33] Of us do. Yeah. And, and you know, it's, it Vance, it's a, it's what a friend of mine used to call a 360 degree argument, because I could, I could flip around and, and you just thought about polar options. I could, I could flip poles and totally agree with you because there are real, there are real problems with every aspect of this. You know, I think about the kids here, you know, I'm in basically the inner city and what

Vance Crowe [00:34:01] There's

Brian Rund [00:34:02] The,

Vance Crowe [00:34:03] I did not expect that you, where are you?

Brian Rund [00:34:06] I'm, I am halfway between four, four blocks from the Indiana Governor's mansion on one side and four blocks from the start of some of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in the city on the other. So literally I can walk down the street four blocks and there's drunks yelling at me on the sidewalk and four blocks. The other way is the governor's mansion. And in between is beautiful old, I mean a historic neighborhood. It's beautiful old houses, old money around, not, not my house, but around me, you know,

Vance Crowe [00:34:35] And so,

Brian Rund [00:34:36] So it's a very different view.

Vance Crowe [00:34:38] And so what is it like? There are, I mean, like,

Brian Rund [00:34:42] Well, what I was getting to was, was when the city really clamped down, I guess this was two weeks ago and three weeks ago they closed all the parks and, you know, and, and so there's this beautiful city park two blocks down the street. It's Indiana, so it has incredible basketball courts, three full, full full-size courts and three half courts with the all weather surface, the gold rilla glass, you know, glass backboards, none of this crappy, you know, metal stuff. And those courts are busy all the time. And I just happened to be walking by and Park Ranger's car was there, you know, with the loudspeaker, you know, park is closed, you have to leave. And I talked to one of these kids who was leaving there, and I, you know, I felt bad. I said, why, what, what did, because I couldn't hear the park ranger. And I said, what did he say? And he said, well, we gotta go home. We can't, you know, we can't play ball anymore. And there was probably 15 guys there playing basketball in this beautiful spring afternoon. And you know, there, these are teenagers look like,

Vance Crowe [00:35:45] Oh man, if I was 18 and I was locked into my parents' house, there would've been, there's no possible way. My father was a wonderful man. We would have had a physical confrontation. Yeah. You can't lock people that have testosterone and, and yes. Hormones and all of this stuff in their house. Yeah. And say, no, you gotta stay there. Yeah. It's like locking everybody in jail.

Brian Rund [00:36:07] Yeah. Yeah. And you know, so one of my ideas was, I, I haven't acted on this, but I thought maybe I should contact some of the pacers and, you know, some of the other basketball people with money and say, Hey guys, go buy a bunch of portable goals and go put 'em on the streets. You know, so guys can, because it's fine. Two or three guys are playing together. That that'd be fine. I think, I mean that's not against the rules, but, but to your point, what happens when these guys are caged up for so long with testosterone and, and energy and don't have the resources? I mean, I'm sitting here in this nice house with, you know, gigabit internet and three, three big screen TVs and, you know, a nice kitchen and everything else. They're not in that situation,

Vance Crowe [00:36:50] You know, and, and, and for us to, this is, I love your thinking on this. I think somebody ought to try and move that up. That's the, what we need to be doing is going way outside of the box to solve the problems that people have right now. And there are some people that can think about the future, but if, like, I am always trying to be like, Hey, does anybody know where I can get some beef? Does anybody know where I can get some flour? Yeah. 'cause it's not just me that wants it. There's a lot of people that want it. Yeah. And so if we're figuring out how to, how to keep those kids from going crazy in their house, that is the way we get through this.

Brian Rund [00:37:24] Yeah. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:37:25] So I'm gonna, I I'm gonna let you get back with your busy sales day, but before we go, who is somebody interesting on Twitter that you think other people should pay attention to, but they might not find them on their own? Who who would you recommend?

Brian Rund [00:37:42] Oh boy. I think in, in the ag world, somebody I think is very interesting is Jenny Tilton Flood.

Vance Crowe [00:37:51] Okay, sure. I know Jenny,

Brian Rund [00:37:53] Her family operates a big dairy in Maine and she's got a, she's pretty vocal and and articulate and she's really been somebody out front on this milk issue and explaining what's going on with milk being dumped. But also, and I retweeted this the other day to my measly little following, but, but she is involved in a group that aligns milk production with outlets, you know, food banks, United Way type agencies, wherever, wherever they can, they can get it to make sure that Fresh Milk is getting the people who can use use it. And I, I think she's one that comes to mind immediately that's, that's doing, doing something about it. And it's interesting to me that, you know, the approach she's taking,

Vance Crowe [00:38:43] I mean, I, I think dairy is a critical, critical commodity and in some cases right now, it's gonna become a specialty crop for people. So yeah. Thank God for people like Jenny til and Flood and, and yeah, Dwayne Faber on the West Coast. So man, thank you so much. If people wanted to follow you, engage with you on Twitter, where would they find you? I think you're Brian Rund, right? Yeah,

Brian Rund [00:39:07] I'm just Brian Run. Yep. Yep. Alright man, I, anything,

Vance Crowe [00:39:10] Well we will always have this, this observations on Coronavirus from April 9th, 2020. So thanks so much, Brian. I appreciate you coming on. Thanks

Brian Rund [00:39:18] Man. Pleasure talking to you.