Physicist Creates Tool That Lets Farmers Test Products Before Buying Them

Vance Crowe [00:00:00] What kind of things could people change if they had the availability of this data?

Nick Cizek [00:00:03] Now we're just on this cusp where it's cheaper for the grower to do the experiment, to know what works best on their field. The grower can get that data and know that better than the ag input company.

Vance Crowe [00:00:14] The storytelling aspect of life I think is

Nick Cizek [00:00:17] Really important. When couples are in here, they look at each other and they're like, you know, I totally forgot that we had

Vance Crowe [00:00:24] This tragedy, this

Nick Cizek [00:00:26] Bankruptcy,

Vance Crowe [00:00:26] This, you know, catastrophe.

Nick Cizek [00:00:29] Remember how hard that

Vance Crowe [00:00:29] Was? Because when they were living it, as

Nick Cizek [00:00:31] Soon as they got done with that problem, a new problem came up. And there was never a time when they were like, let's sit down and chat about,

Vance Crowe [00:00:39] You know, this thing that we

Nick Cizek [00:00:40] Went through we're in the middle of a fifth wave where social media came out, and now all these kind of gatekeepers of distributing information are no longer as powerful as they were. It's made it really easy to see when people make mistakes and to distribute it and share about that and point out mistakes, but it's actually social media hasn't made it easier for us to organize and fix problems. Howdy. I'm Hannah Neuenschwander, a production lead at a soybean seed facility in central Illinois, and you're listening to the Vance Crowe podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:01:07] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today we have Nick Cizek who has returned to the podcast only this time. He flew out from California to be in person. Nick Cizek is a long time friend of mine, and actually we have one of these relationships that's been very important to me over the last few years. Nick and I both started our own companies at the same time, and we've gone through the pains of trying to grow something when you didn't know the path while we're raising children. So you are about to sit in on a great conversation where this man gets to talk about how he came up with a company that is now allowing farmers and crop consultants to actually do scientifically verifiable tests on their fields with the products and services that are being offered to them. This is going to offer a level of sovereignty and freedom to farmers that I think has never existed in the history of modern agriculture. We're gonna get to that interview in just a moment, but first I wanna talk a little bit about Legacy Interviews. If you're a new listener to the podcast, you may not know that I, in this studio, record people sharing their life stories so that future generations have an opportunity to know their history, where they came from. We sit down with people and we have these great conversations about their ancestors, their childhood, their careers, marriage and parenting, and ultimately the wisdom that they've learned along the way. If you would be interested in doing a legacy interview, consider doing it as a whole family trip.

Vance Crowe [00:02:40] Just last week, we had a family come in and their children came with them to stay in the hotel, bring the grandkids, and then make St. Louis a whole destination where they went to City Museum and tried out our custard. And I got an email actually the night after we did the legacy interview, and they talked about how fun it was to take grandma and grandpa out to dinner and hear them talk glowingly about the experience and go on to share many, many more stories that they didn't even capture on the interview. If you're interested in doing a legacy interview, go to Legacy Interviews dot com. Also, if you are just tuning in, you should be aware that I have started a new project. I am going to do a weekly ag news roundup, and the purpose of this is to capture the news that's going on out in the ag world and make it relevant to people living both in agriculture and in the city and suburbs. This is gonna be a rapid fire thing where I bring on a cohost from some of ags biggest podcasts and ask them to tell me about different headlines that are going on, talk about different perspectives they have that not everybody agrees with them on and many other things. This is going to be a live experience and we're going to air it at 6:00 PM on Thursday evenings starting July 11th. So tune in then and check it out on this channel to find out more. Alright, without further ado, we're gonna head to the interview with my good friend Nick Cizek with Farm test.ag. Nick Cizek, welcome to the podcast.

Nick Cizek [00:04:14] Hi Vance. Thanks for having me.

Vance Crowe [00:04:16] So Nick, you are a physicist that is not doing physics work, but what were you doing when you were an actual laboratory physicist?

Nick Cizek [00:04:25] I worked on, it's called Cold atom Physics. And so you take a dilute vapor of atoms and you cool them down using a set of tricks to get them down to a couple millionths of a degree above absolute zero. So, you know, a refrigerator's cold, but this is much, much colder than that. And it turns out that when things are cold, they're very organized and that you can actually make very good sensors out of cold atoms. And I worked on that for a number of years, and then halfway through graduate school I figured out I wanted to work on food, water, and energy security, and that's what eventually brought me out of that into what I work on today in farming. But you said I'm not a phys, I still consider myself a physicist. My, so my specialty, my training is a precision measurement. And so I learned as a, as a graduate student how to, and as a, a practicing optical engineer, how to take systems that have lots of noise and extract out the signal that you want to in order to do to, to, to measure something or to figure out an answer to, to a question. And so it could be something like, I, I worked at an optical switching company, we're working on internet switches, and we had to figure out, you know, which components which should we put in that will have the, the right reflectivity or the right amount of light transmit through or the right efficiency and string right light, the correct direction. And so I built instruments that would measure all those components and, and we would then make decisions like, this one goes in and this one's a defect. And so I've taken all that practice on how to u do experiments in, in a physics lab, and now I apply that in the real world.

Nick Cizek [00:06:02] I basically, the cold atom stuff is gonna be in products in 50 years. And I realized I wanted to work on stuff that would be in affecting people's lives while I'm alive in my lifetime. And so that's why I switched to working on the food system. And so I do experiments in the food system to help farmers figure out what to, what works best on their farms.

Vance Crowe [00:06:22] So when you think about physics, like at least when I think about physics, I have like a high school understanding of it, right? So friction and

Nick Cizek [00:06:29] You know

Vance Crowe [00:06:30] How things react when they hit each other, but there's never many times when you get to meet an actual physicist. Yeah.

Nick Cizek [00:06:37] What

Vance Crowe [00:06:37] Does it take to be an actual physicist?

Nick Cizek [00:06:41] You know, that's a great question. I, lemme start with why I'm a physicist. This might sound silly, but I loved the TV show, MacGyver growing up and MacGyver was, I don't know, a chemist or a physicist. That was one thing. I had some amazing teachers. My eighth grade science teacher was so great. My high school physics teacher was wonderful. And I actually, when I got to under to college, my first couple semesters, I didn't quite click with the teachers and I was thinking like, basically I was like, I'm gonna do one more semester and if I don't like it, I'm gonna switch to economics. And then I had another wonderful teacher and I spent the, you know, many more years in school pursuing it. I have also been a questioner. I've, I've learned by asking questions and sometimes that question is of myself. Sometimes it's another person and sometimes that's asking

Vance Crowe [00:07:33] A machine

Nick Cizek [00:07:34] Like, why are you breaking and trying to figure out why, why it's not working the way it's supposed to.

Vance Crowe [00:07:39] Yeah. We have a joke among all of our friends. Nick is a part of a, a very tight group of my friends and we have a joke that's, if you give Nick a cookie, he's just, he's gonna keep ask for another one. And it's that it's really that if Nick asks you a question and you give him an answer, that answer is never going to be enough. You, you always ask more questions. So I definitely agree that that's your personality type. Yeah. Are you disagreeable?

Nick Cizek [00:08:03] You know, I took the big five personality tests, you recommended it and I'm kind of right in the middle on agreeable and disagreeable. I was very surprised. I thought it was gonna be highly disagreeable.

Vance Crowe [00:08:12] Yeah, me too. I I would put you all the way down somewhat near Rob Long.

Nick Cizek [00:08:16] Yeah. That's not what the test said.

Vance Crowe [00:08:18] And so when you think about physics, I think about, particularly at the level you were at, is that things have to be extremely precise, right? There's not like, ah, we're gonna get it kind of close enough and that'll be enough. Is that difficult for you to care about details on that level?

Nick Cizek [00:08:35] It's actually interesting. I I, I get sometimes obsessed with details and so when I was a, an engineer, I actually had a challenge with that. And it's part of why I went back to graduate school is I would get working on a problem and I would start, I would feel like I just figured out how to like start answering the question and my bosses would say, no, you solve that enough. Like now we gotta to work on a problem that's more important and that's good enough. And that's part of why I went to graduate school is I wanted to just dig in on something hard and actually really work on it for a long time and solve it to the, you know, the extent that I would be able to Oh,

Vance Crowe [00:09:09] That's hilarious. Because I mean, engineers have to do everything within tolerances, right? Yeah. They're like, Hey, we just need to know, is this plane gonna keep the Yeah,

Nick Cizek [00:09:16] You

Vance Crowe [00:09:16] Know, 99% of people up in the air, 99.9. But after that, we don't need to know the actual right answer just as long as it fits within this. But in physics you don't find the answer unless it's precise or you don't find the answer that you're looking for. I

Nick Cizek [00:09:29] Similar thing with tolerances, you, it just, in this case, it was more that there was not, in graduate school, there's not a profit motive and so you don't have to, you don't have to act quickly. You can spend five years working on an experiment, which I spent five years on an experiment working on it. And that was kind of, actually, I was faster probably than average for my research group, but that was like a typical amount of time. And it's because, yeah, because you don't have a company where the clock is ticking and you gotta make a decision and choose which component goes in the switch or whatever and and move on. And so when you remove that, you can work very deeply.

Vance Crowe [00:10:07] So we met when you were working at a climate corporation, which was a division of Monsanto at the time, it had been an independent company and then it, it was bought by Monsanto. How many like professional jobs had you had prior to you working at climate? Yeah,

Nick Cizek [00:10:24] I, I mean I had the typical like high school students slew of physics.

Vance Crowe [00:10:29] Yeah, I'm not talking about that. I'm saying like, you know, people care about your intellect at this point. Yeah. How many jobs were they?

Nick Cizek [00:10:35] So yeah, after, so I worked as an undergraduate in a, in a physics lab. Then I worked at two startups doing optics. I was an engineer and then I went to graduate school and then I went from there to

Vance Crowe [00:10:46] And where'd you go to graduate school?

Nick Cizek [00:10:48] I went to Stanford. I was in the applied physics program.

Vance Crowe [00:10:50] Okay.

Nick Cizek [00:10:51] So I went from there to the, it's, it was called the Advanced Research Project Agency Energy ARPA e. It's similar to DARPA if you've heard of that. So we funded high risk, high reward, energy technology research

Vance Crowe [00:11:05] And DARPA was the one that's for defense. Darpa. Yeah. And this is where they're like, we're gonna build the crazy things, but if we get it then we have a huge advantage in military. That's

Nick Cizek [00:11:13] Right.

Vance Crowe [00:11:13] And this was for energy, like probably won't work, but if anybody we're gonna fund it, the government has the money to do it, so we're gonna try things. Yeah.

Nick Cizek [00:11:20] And I went there, like I said, during graduate school I figured I wanted to work on food, water, and energy. And I went to ARPA-E in order to kind of do a pivot. I wanted a, it was a place where I could refocus my career and I wanted to find an idea to start an energy company around. And so yeah, that's what I did there. I met a co-founder and I ended up meeting someone to who had an idea and we started a company together. And so I left there to start a battery company and then as I was exiting that a friend said, Hey, I need a physicist to come to the climate corporation. We're selling farmers' advice and we think it would be more valuable if we had local data from the farms. And so figure out what sensors will and measurements will help farmers make more money and then we will figure out how to deliver that to farmers and give them better advice. So it was kind of a, a really broad problem that hadn't really been solved that well at the time. Yeah. What measurements will make farmers more money and how do we deliver that at a good price so that they can get that value?

Vance Crowe [00:12:20] How did we even meet at Climate Corp?

Nick Cizek [00:12:22] That's so funny. We were at the TCM, the conference that Monsanto holds and I watched you present on this tribe theory of how to get influence people and change opinions. And I, I thought, wow, this is like a great talk. And we went and chatted and I mentioned that I was giving a presentation the next day and then you came to my talk.

Vance Crowe [00:12:44] Yes, I remember that You were showing like the challenge of measuring nitrogen in soil. Like that's right. If you move even a few feet forward, all of a sudden the amount of nitrogen there is changes. It's,

Nick Cizek [00:12:56] It's even worse. Like you can move from on the band where they apply the fertilizer to off the band and it will change by a factor of 200. Like no one really realizes that the, it changes that much. And so if you're basically there's no, what I worked on a lot of times is like, what are the error bars on soil sampling measurements? Not just in a laboratory when you have the soil, but if you collect the soil more than once, how big is the error? And it's way bigger than people expect.

Vance Crowe [00:13:19] And so this challenge is because people want to go out there and be like, I collected soil. They know that their field changes from here to a quarter of a mile up or up the hill. They know that that changes. But like, it really depends within the few inches where you grab the soil sample.

Nick Cizek [00:13:35] Well, so it does for the soil sample, but for the plant, like a corn plant is gonna be, its roots are gonna go out and spread. And I don't a couple feet in each direction and four feet down. And so the, the plant root, once it's fully grown, it's gonna interrogate all that soil. But when you're collecting soil cores, it makes a big difference in your final measurement. If you're, especially when someone's applying banded fertilizer where they cut a little cut in the, in the earth and they put the fertilizer down inside there, it doesn't spread very far. It's different if you broadcast it across the whole field. But yeah, it will, it, depending on where you collect those soil cords to make your sample, it could really change the value that you read in the laboratory

Vance Crowe [00:14:14] And then you might think, oh, we don't have enough here. Or That's right.

Nick Cizek [00:14:17] So it would change either you would overly or maybe you would under apply and, and the, you actually lose a lot more money if you under apply. And so it's, it's the more we can make these measurements precise, the more farmers can get the right amount and, and not waste nitrogen or under apply and lose yield.

Vance Crowe [00:14:31] Yeah. So let's talk about this. This is like the Liebig barrel kind of concept, right? Yeah. Where, where the barrel is only gonna fill up to wherever the lowest hole is and that's right. And so if, if one of the planks is potassium and the plant needs X amount of potassium, if it, if it's way too low, then all the water leaks out to that point. We, you said something when you're right there that if you under apply nitrogen, it costs you a lot more money than it does to just like, Hey, let's just go put more nitrogen out there. That's

Nick Cizek [00:15:00] Right. So when you under apply nitrogen, you, you lose yield and so you Yeah, the the, the number of bushels that you lose per pound of nitrogen that you underplay costs more money than if you apply extra end, you just lose the price of that nitrogen. And so that's,

Vance Crowe [00:15:19] Yeah,

Nick Cizek [00:15:19] It's just, it's very different. The, you lose a lot more money if you underplay. I

Vance Crowe [00:15:23] Had a guy named John Kemp on, so he runs advanced in EAG that, so he had a very interesting thing that I had not really thought about where he was like, what's the problem if you apply too much nitrogen? Does this allow other things in the soil to grow? And like it's funny 'cause sometimes like you don't think about something until somebody says it and then you're like, oh yeah, of course microbes and things that are adjusted to nitrogen are clearly gonna grow. And this could include things like fungus and all kinds of things. So really having that nailed down to not over applying probably over the long run actually helps you in pretty, in ways that are more difficult to detect than just this is what we think kind of

Nick Cizek [00:16:03] The other part is the weather changes so much year to year and you, because the penalty is so bad if you underplay that you wanna put a little more than you think you need on the average year so that you don't underplay on the year when you have too much rain. And so that compounds the problem. But back to what you said about John Kemp, I also love this concept you said of the last 30 years we've just been trying to maximize yield, but what happens if you try and have healthy plants? And I just, was that a paradigm that I've really thought a lot about and I I really enjoyed that conversation 'cause it made me start thinking differently about how we might grow plants.

Vance Crowe [00:16:41] Yeah. I think that one of the reasons that's so difficult is because your experience of food, at least in the modern suburban world right, is you go to the grocery store and you're like, all right, well this grocery store has a huge amount of selection. Look, it has two kinds of watermelon or three kinds of grapes. And you don't think within that like, okay, well these grapes and watermelon are all grown ostensibly within the same parameters,

Nick Cizek [00:17:08] But

Vance Crowe [00:17:08] Not like, is there anything being grown here that's grown way outside of the system in some very different way? And even if you did, how many of those watermelons grown in that different system would you need for it to reflect back positive health for you? And because these are so distantly linked, it begins to be like, ah, it doesn't really matter, it'll be just fine. But like you go, you know, 30, 50, 70 years like that for, for an economy, then you really do probably change health outcomes of people and they don't even know how to detect it.

Nick Cizek [00:17:40] That could be right. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:17:42] So you are running farm test right now, a company, and we've talked about this on the PO first podcast that we did, but that was like during COVID, that was four years a, a long time ago. Years ago, yeah. So how do you describe farm test now to people? Yeah,

Nick Cizek [00:17:57] So farm test is, it's a, we're a software company, but what we are doing is we're automating on farm testing on commercial farms using commercial farm equipment. So there are basically, we're trying to help farmers and their trusted advisors solve problems like, how many seeds per acre should I plant? How many am I applying the right amount of nitrogen fertilizer or should I apply more or less on this field? Do, is it pay off this year to apply fungicide or not? And the way we do that is we do, it's a type of randomized controlled trial where we use software to write a file that would control, say it's a planting experiment with like seeding rate. Yeah. Say it's a, a soybean seeding rate experiment. So a grower normally does say they do 140,000 seeds per acre eight years ago, maybe they're doing 180,000 seeds breaker. They've learned they can go lower and lower. And so they come to us and say, I wonder if I can go even lower than one 40. And so what we do is we write a, it's called a variable rate prescription for their planter, and it adjusts the seeding rates based on the GPS coordinates. And so we'll have blocks where we'll say have 140,000 seed breaker, 120 and a hundred. And so as they go through the field ran we'll randomly place these blocks and when they go through the field, it will change the rates based on the GPS. And so then when they harvest, we'll look at the, the yield data and as they go through the field, they're harvesting, sorry, they're weighing the grain as they harvest. And so once a second or a couple times a second, they'll be weighing the grain and they have GPS coordinates tied to that.

Nick Cizek [00:19:29] And so we can then say like, the yield when you're in a hundred thousand seats breaker was x and the yield when you were in one 20 was more or less. And if when you were in the one 40 it was, you know, different. And from that we can not only tell the difference of what yielded the best, but we can subtract off the price of the seeds to figure out which one makes the most profit.

Vance Crowe [00:19:46] Wow. Yeah. And right now the farmer, the only way they have to do that is to look at tests that somebody's done on someone else's fields and then say, yeah, what, what is it about working and not, how is this working on my land?

Nick Cizek [00:20:00] That's right. So the typical paradigms in, in testing and ag are when a product is very new, you do what's called small plot trials and you use very custom, it's called research grade equipment. And these may be small plots like 17 feet by five feet wide, and there'll usually be a boundary around them so that things don't mix. And you'll harvest that, or you'll treat that plot a certain way, then you go to the next plot and you'll change the treatments. You'll do it in a randomized tray. It's a, it's a legit really great experiment. It's just slow to do and it's really expensive. And so historically the only companies that could afford to do that are like a, an input company that is generating new products. They're the ones who have that data about where things work.

Vance Crowe [00:20:42] So you're talking about the large ag companies, the Corteva, the bears, the nutrients, the, those are the only ones.

Nick Cizek [00:20:47] And so they can't afford to do that everywhere. Like that's too expensive. And so then a lot of times they will end up doing, they're called like large scale field trials, but it'll typically be, you'll take half a field and do with fungicide and half the field and don't spray fungicide or you'll spray fungicide over most of the field, but you'll leave one or two strips unsprayed and you'll compare the yield in the unsprayed areas with the yield in the sprayed areas. That works well. It's really simple and practical. The challenge with that is that particularly if you only have one field or a couple fields in a county, you don't get great. The uncertainty is actually way higher than people anticipated. If you have a single field that's like an 80 acre field, so a quarter mile by half mile, and you take two strips out where you change the, the treatments, no one realizes that even if you did no experiment, you just randomly picked two strips and said, we're gonna compare this to the rest of the field. The air difference is typically plus or minus 20%. So with, with 200 bushel acre corn, that'd be 40 bushels per acre. Like that's way bigger than the things that farmers are typically trying to see. They're trying to see like, did this change my yield by five bushels per acre? And with an experiment like that, you can't really tell. And so yeah, historically the best data you could get with then because those strip trials aren't actually that great on your local field, you would instead say, I'm gonna, I have to trust the, the seed dealer. And so that's the the way people would, yeah. They would trust the people who give them the advice that that works for them.

Vance Crowe [00:22:12] And even in that circumstance, even if you have the most trustworthy seed dealer, he's dealing with error bars that are 20%. So it's like,

Nick Cizek [00:22:18] Well no, with the small pot trials, you have much lower air bars, but you don't have the data on my fields or you don't have it in my area. It might be in my state or in maybe if I'm lucky in my county, but you don't have really local data. And if you wanted to know what would work best on your field, your best bet was to rely on that small pot data from somewhere probably far away.

Vance Crowe [00:22:38] So how much does this kind of testing matter? Like what, what, what kind of things could people change if they had the availability of this data

Nick Cizek [00:22:47] Historically, the best data on what would work on your fields? You would have, you would, you would basically have to take data from somewhere far away from these small pot trials to know what should work in your area. And you just kind of have to hope that the conditions were similar to your field. And that was because, so what's different now is, I guess I should say I, we're on a, we're on a technology cusp where for the last 30 years there have been all this investment into precision ag technologies. And so this is things like better yield monitors and rate variable rate controllers. So you can put a rate controller in your, your planter and it will change the seeding rate or in your sprayer and it will change the rate that you apply the spray or, or the, the amount of fertilizer that goes down. The other thing is like software packages, like farm tests, those exist now to help you design trials further things like better GPS or nozzle by nozzle control on your sprayer and also like telematics data transfer. So if you are a climate FieldView, a customer or my John Deere, you can get the data from your experiment outta the field easily. And you can also push these instructions, these prescriptions to your equipment. All those together have made it where now we're just on this cusp where it's cheaper for the grower to do the experiment, to know what works best on their field. The grower can get that data and know that better than the ag input company. And so maybe we're not exactly there today, but that's happening right now and that transition is gonna really change the way ag inputs are sold and valued.

Vance Crowe [00:24:18] So what kind of changes do you predict people will make if they have this kind of data?

Nick Cizek [00:24:24] Well, my hope is that farmers will learn which products work well in their area and we'll see the adoption of those products really take off and expand. And then there'll be some products that are tested that shouldn't have been advanced in the research pipeline and the way the experiments were done, maybe they didn't have enough statistical power to really see like, this product actually didn't work as well as we thought. Or it wasn't reproducible when you got to the large scale fields. And so we wanna see great products, see their adoption accelerate, and ones that don't work well, they'll, they'll have, it'll be easier for people to see that. And so then they, they won't have as much as much adoption. This

Vance Crowe [00:25:00] Is hilarious. Like you give such a great, like Nick the physicist answers, but I love this whole thing because it, it really inverts the power structure here, right? Like there's in for farming really in almost all kinds of products, you have the person that's buying it, they just have to take the word of the other person for it. And like now, if somebody is able to figure out how to use this kind of software, now all of a sudden they can be like, Hey, I'm happy to try your product, but we're gonna actually test it and we're gonna spend a year or two years seeing if it works. Yeah. And if it works, we're gonna go big time on it. And it's not just like, Hey, did we happen to get better yields this year because like, you know, this year up in the state of Iowa, they've gotten more rain than, you know, the city of Tampa. And so like how, how in the world are you gonna be able to compare this to other, other years if you're only watching your harvest for the whole field? It's not enough to know what's going on. And so this is gonna invert the power structure in a really amazing way.

Nick Cizek [00:26:00] And also, ah, I guess it's, it makes people more sovereign Yeah. Makes farmers more sovereign with their data and knowing what works in their area. And I think that will just have profound impacts. I can I tell you a couple of stories about some of our customers? Oh,

Vance Crowe [00:26:13] Yeah. Yeah.

Nick Cizek [00:26:13] So we work with an agronomist in an independent crop consulting company in Min Wisconsin, and they, they're using our tool, they have a lot of growers in their area that they want to have as their customer. And so, but the, these people like, why should I trust you? You know, your, your advice is different from what I've been doing all this time. And so what they'll say is, I think there are a couple of products that you're applying that we think aren't gonna help, and we think these other ones are gonna be better. And so they will say, he'll say, so what I'd like to propose is we're gonna do some trials on your farm and test the, the program that you have and the one that we think you should do. And we're gonna, we're gonna pay for that trial and then, but if it works, we would like you to to come on board as our customer. And so it's, it's, it's amazing. It's wonderful. I, the more I could encourage that, I would I would love that.

Vance Crowe [00:27:04] Yeah. Competition, competition, competition. And if they can prove that it works, like what you want more than that.

Nick Cizek [00:27:09] So it's like kind of gives them this new tool that they didn't have before to, to show that it works. Another is, we work with ag input companies who are developing new products and if the best tests you can do on farmer's fields are we do half the field with it and half without, I've already told you like the typical air bars on that are like 40%. And that's, it's almost like you're gonna the field and you're like flipping a coin, like is it gonna work or not? It's way better for those companies if they could, like they know their product works, it's way better to have the air bar be plus or minus 2% or 3%, which is achievable with the sort of an 80 acre field. And you do the sort of small plot trial, or sorry, the plot trials that we propose and that we do. And so now instead of having it be this coin flip, it's like I know my air bar is gonna be plus or minus six bushels per acre instead of 40 bushels per acre. And so if I raise the yield by 10 bushels per acre, I can prove that to everybody in their farms that this thing is really working. And so it should, our hope is that it should speed up product development. If you can get that clean signal faster, this is working or it's not. And the earlier in the product development cycle, you can see something is working and accelerate it or see it's not and kill it is gonna save a lot of money and time for the input companies.

Vance Crowe [00:28:19] So people that aren't in ag maybe are, they've heard like tractors have GPS and you know that they run on their own. But like for the guy that is used to setting up their, their GPS to run in the field, how much more work is it to, to do farm tests? Yeah,

Nick Cizek [00:28:38] So like I said, our, we do work with customers, but usually we're working with, sorry, we work with growers, but normally we're working with

Vance Crowe [00:28:46] Independent crop consultants, crop

Nick Cizek [00:28:47] Consultants. So the crop consultants know the growers and they are, they're the ones who are making these prescriptions. So we have a, a webpage, you log in and then there's a big create trial button and there it just kind of walks you through the steps we need to design your trial. When you get to the end of it, we, you purchase and then you can download a shape file of that trial and it's, and then it's just sort of like a, a file you would load in your machine and, but you can also visualize it on like map shaper or you could upload it in there and see, and you could see like, oh, here's the places where it's a low seating rate and here's where it's a high seating rate. That's we basically, we live and die by how easy we make that. And so there are lots of software packages that we'll do that for people. And we have spent a lot of time trying to make that as easy as possible and we are continuously trying to improve that. Did that answer your question?

Vance Crowe [00:29:37] Yeah, did it is like hard. So I, you and I actually one time went together to an independent crop consultant meeting. That's right. I was given a talk there. That's right. Yeah. And then you were like, Hey, I need to meet with these people. Yeah. But that's like notoriously a very rough place to break into because everyone wants to get the attention of independent crop consultants because instead of reaching one farmer, you're reaching somebody that influences lots of farmers. How have these guys reacted to what you're producing?

Nick Cizek [00:30:06] You know, I would say overall it's been very positive. The but we're, we're always trying to grow obviously. So we've got, I would say we've got some real true fans and the, but yeah, I've been going to the National Alliance of Independent Crop Consultants annual meetings since that one that we went to together

Vance Crowe [00:30:22] San Antonio.

Nick Cizek [00:30:23] I think there was one year where they didn't have it in person because of COVID. And then I've been to all the rest of them. So I I, the second one I went to, I, I think I presented at that one. And then this last year actually one of my customers presented on how they use farm test to make more money. And I mean, I did like a little presentation about just our product to like the general audience and then he did this one to the, the crop consult is about, yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:30:48] So when you say people will like, you know, he presented on making money, like, like is this like they're saving $50? Is this like how, how, how do you think about that kind

Nick Cizek [00:30:59] Of Oh yeah. So if you're a, if you're I guess kind of ballpark numbers, if you're growing corn in the Midwest, it's, you're, you're putting on 200 bushels, sorry, 200 pounds of nitrogen per acre. I'm just gonna use really round numbers. So say that's 50 cents a pound of nitrogen. I think it's, I don't know the exact prices right now, but it's somewhere between,

Vance Crowe [00:31:22] Wouldn't you say that's what it's Yeah,

Nick Cizek [00:31:23] So roughly, so, so you're basically like talking about a hundred dollars per acre is going to go to typically feeding that, that plant. And so if you can knock that down by, if you could reduce that yield and be confident that you could reduce that, sorry, reduce that, not reduce the yield, reduce,

Vance Crowe [00:31:43] If you could reduce the application, the

Nick Cizek [00:31:44] Application, if you could reduce that from 200 to 180, that would save the farmer $10 per acre.

Vance Crowe [00:31:49] Oh,

Nick Cizek [00:31:50] That's a real amount of money that people care about.

Vance Crowe [00:31:52] Yeah. Because if you were getting that much more yield at $10 more per acre, you'd be perfectly happy with that. So whether you reduce price or increase yield does doesn't really matter.

Nick Cizek [00:32:02] Yes. And so then you roll that out across the grower with a couple thousand acres, like that's, that adds up really quick. Whether, you know, if you can see that, you could see the investment payoff, like doing that testing helps you, I should say like the big complicating thing with what we do is that the weather is different every year. And so especially with nitrogen fertilizer, you have to do multiple years of testing. And so we, that's another reason why we work with crop consultants and university researchers and ag input companies is they, they have relationships where they know this is gonna take many years and it's gonna just take a while for us to get where this data is gonna start helping us, where we can be confident we can change our decisions.

Vance Crowe [00:32:39] How are people finding you right now?

Nick Cizek [00:32:42] We're not very good at that. So I should say the, the first couple years, like when I first came on, we manually made the, our, our trials using ag leader SMS as a trial design program. And that's what we used our first year. And so it was,

Vance Crowe [00:32:58] That means you, the physicists were manually sitting there

Nick Cizek [00:33:00] Yeah. Like sitting around a computer program, someone else's computer program designing these trials. And it, it worked well, it got the job done, but it, it took more time than we felt we wanted to spend on it. And so we wrote our own tools eventually and it just took a long time to make it. For a number of years, I would just run, the software existed and I would run it on my own laptop and I'd get on the phone with all of our customers. And that doesn't scale very well. Like, there's a lot of growing pains going from that to where we are today. Now we have our trial design tool is online, you go and you log in and anyone, whenever they want, they don't have to hop on the phone with me. They can just go and upload the shape file of their field boundary and they can design a trial for the field that they need. Up until this year where we have that, like it was actually, we had the right number of customers and now that we have that automated, now we, it makes sense for us to grow and, and get more customers. So I'm just learning how to do that now. I'm, I don't think I'm very good at it and I'm, I'm, yeah, I'm trying to learn how,

Vance Crowe [00:33:55] I mean, so, so for full disclosure, Nick and I talk every other week about basically running businesses because we both jumped out of corporate America at the same time. And then we, you know, I like, we planned it, it was like, oh, you jumped out. Oh, I jumped out too. Yeah. And then we've talked a lot about these things and actually just right before this we sat down to this podcast, I was sitting down with Sean, the editor, the the creative director here, and he was like, Hey Vance, I reorganized the files so you can see what we did in 21. And then he like clicks it and it opens up and then 22 and it clicks it and opens up and then 23 and you see this list and now you've gotta start scrolling for Legacy Interviews and you start to realize like, there was no possible way I could have done that many interviews in 21 or 22 because there was so much work to be done to figure out just how do I do this? Right. That's right. Like, because when I originally started I thought like, oh, you just turn on a camera and some microphones and ask people questions and then you, you send it to them and what you don't realize is like, no, there are a thousand more steps there. And like you spend so much time getting the system set up that that's why most companies like I now have a much deeper appreciation and understanding why a lot of startups, whether they're a great company or not, can fail because it just takes so much time to set stuff up so that you can get to scale.

Nick Cizek [00:35:19] I think the other part is finding the right people. I've just, I'm so happy with the team that I have now, but it took a while to get the right team and oh, it makes such a big difference having someone that is just like, they know what needs to be done and they get in and get it done. And it's like it's, we, I couldn't get my, my company would just be nowhere if I didn't have the team that I haven't, but I'm so thankful I found them. For me,

Vance Crowe [00:35:43] I think there's, it's, i I sense of it almost being like divine in some way in that like there are a lot of skills that my company needed that if you had asked me at the beginning or even two years in, like, what skill are you gonna need? I would not have been able to write this down. And I'll give you an example. So we hired this woman, Jessica, to be our reception person.

Nick Cizek [00:36:05] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:36:05] And she like is, she didn't have any like, background in doing administration and scheduling and things like this, so it took her a while to learn it. But she was always came in the most optimistic po positive person that you possibly have ever met. Like, I'm sorry you didn't meet her today. Like, so excited and happy about everything. And so at first you're like, Hey, this is great for company culture, but what I didn't realize was that every time she talks to somebody on the phone, she's like, Hey, how you doing? I heard you were nervous. What can we talk about? Let's talk about how that is. Like there's no way one, I could have written that on a job description that I wanted a person that like is intrinsically just wants to care about people.

Nick Cizek [00:36:49] And

Vance Crowe [00:36:49] Then two, like there's no amount of education you can go out to give that, give a person to make them be that way. So I had to have a person walk in the door and work on my team to know like, oh, that skill is irreplaceable. And like think, thank goodness you're here. 'cause I, I I don't, I don't know what we would be without you. Yeah.

Nick Cizek [00:37:09] Yeah. I mean similar, I have an executive assistant and I sometimes like, it's like she reads my mind and actually we talk about like, anything you can do to just read my mind. And she does, I don't know how she thinks of it, but she finds things that she just sees me doing stuff more than a couple times and she'll find a way to automate that. Similar with our, our software engineering team. Like they see, especially now that we're trying to get, find more customers that we can provide value to, we're trying to scale up and they're starting to see like, oh, here's a place that we, where our, our trial design tool, like it could be faster and they'll start digging in and see like that that's actually gonna, we're gonna save people a lot of time if we make a change here. And I, it's nice when you don't have to prompt people, they just have ownership and they,

Vance Crowe [00:37:53] Well I found that like I literally had to learn to stop getting in their way. Yeah. So we have this guy that does production, his name's Solomon. And one time he was like, Vance, I'd like to take a few hours and I wanna do some organizing of the cables. And I was like, oh my god, you a couple hours. Like, I like we're really burning cash here and we wanna do it on organizing cables 'cause it just not be something I would do. Well he comes in with a drill and like he's gone to the store and gotten these hooks and you think like, what's the big deal? Well now my studio actually has a place to put all the cables and everything looks so much better.

Nick Cizek [00:38:26] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:38:27] But like, I would never have thought to ask him to do that. So if you don't have somebody on your team that's like, Hey, I, this is annoying me, so I'm gonna go fix it, then you don't have any idea like how else you could grow. But like I, I wouldn't have sat down and said, Hey, I hope my audio engineer is a freak about organizing cables. Yeah. But now I would.

Nick Cizek [00:38:48] Yeah. So I mean, similar for me, like my expertise is precision measurement. I have some expertise working with farmers. You know, I, I was at climate for four years in Monsanto and Bayer where I did get to meet a lot of farmers and, but I don't know how to design software. I can write, I write software, but I'm not a great software engineer. And actually that's one of the big lessons I had to take is like, as anytime I'm doing coding or viewing coding, that means like there's a, it's bad for a company. And, and similarly on the sales side, like I'm not a great salesperson, but I've hired someone who is really helping me learn how to find people who can benefit from our tools. And, and it's, as you're figuring it out, it's really hard. But there, it's neat to know there are systems to help you get there and figure it out over time. And so,

Vance Crowe [00:39:33] And the the biggest thing I think of all, and anybody that's running business knows this, like the difference between a B player and an A player is, is miles. It's like it's, there's, it's like indescribable how much like somebody that's like, Hey, I put in a good job, I do better than average. That's good. You want that. But if you have a person that comes in and they're like, I know how to do this thing, then you're like, I I, there's no replacement for that. That's amazing.

Nick Cizek [00:40:02] Can I come back to the thing about the cables? Yeah. It's so funny. So when I was a grad student, the experiment, I, so when you get to these really hard experiments, a lot of times you like inherit a machine that someone did a first step on and you're kind of taking it to the next level to do a harder experiment. And so the machine that I inherited, it was really complicated, exceedingly complicated. I mean, it was a four foot by 16 foot optic table with probably a couple hundred elements on it that you had to align and get in the right place to have the light, have the right color and timing and et cetera. And so we spent a lot of time just like, yeah, rerouting cables, figuring out which things we could get rid of so we could simplify the experiment. And all that really adds up because you end up with something, you're like, now I can finally understand it. And also, at least in experiments, the more you can get rid of all that extra stuff that does is anything crucial, you have to keep in. But anything you can get out, you have to, because otherwise the experiment's too hard and you're not gonna make it work. And so anyway, I can relate to the, it, it's really, when you have a place like I'm looking around your studio, it, it makes sense to me why someone would wanna align all these cables and get them in the right spots. And it's, it's a beautiful space.

Vance Crowe [00:41:16] Well thanks. Yeah. So the other thing that we've have in common is that we're running businesses while trying to raise kids. Yeah. And like, you know, like keep everything afloat. And that's been a lot more pressure. Like I didn't really understand as I'm jumping outta the plane being like, and my wife and I are gonna try and have some kids, and you don't really know that like, it, like how much easier life is when there's not like too little beings that not only like need you to provide for them, but like they need you to look at them. They need you to be able to smile at them.

Nick Cizek [00:41:53] I feel like that's my biggest growth area the last year is realizing that I need to prioritize my family more. I've, I wouldn't say I'm a workaholic, but I have tendencies that way. I really think a lot about my business. I care a lot about it. If, if we could do something better, like I'm thinking all the time, how can I make that work better? But I also then I carry the successes and, and the mistakes that we make really with, I, I let it, I identify too much with that instead of identifying like, I'm also a father, I'm a husband, I'm a community member, I'm a team member and I'm this startup founder and I was really putting it all into the startup founder and really trying to pull my identity from that. And this year, I dunno, I, I I I meditate, I think Yeah, you do occasionally too, right? Oh

Vance Crowe [00:42:47] Yeah.

Nick Cizek [00:42:48] And so one of the things I started doing is I just, I for a few minutes I kind of recite like, almost like a litany that I've written, which is like, I may, I make my choices, make my family and me healthier, happier, safer, more resilient, more resourceful. And it's really hard to own that and do that. Especially like, I feel like as a provider for a family, like I want my business to do really well and I can really, when I get a success in business, I, I feel that I'm like, ah, it's satisfying. And when I like hit a home run at home, I, it takes a while for me to recognize it and be like, I, I should celebrate that. And so I've been really trying to appreciate that and notice that. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:43:27] I think you have to be conscious of it because like, I'm this exact same way and Joscha Bach had a really interesting point on one of the earlier podcasts I did this year. And he said like, your emotions are actually like an indicator of how are you doing in the social hierarchy, right? That's right. Are you moving up or are you moving down? And when you get a deal come through, somebody calls me up and says, Hey, we want you to come do a speech. Or somebody says, Hey, let's, we wanna buy a legacy interview for my parents. Like that's a quick win. You know, they just put it in the wind column. There's no quantity about that. This morning I'm driving my two daughters to daycare and I turn around and I'm like, I can see that left eye looks like it's pink eye and I wanna try and slide this one past the goalie and see if I can get her into school. 'cause I want to go to work because spending the day with her, like making sure that she's like, gets to go to the doctor and then gets her eye drops, like that doesn't feel like a win on the board in the same way. But like, if I don't do it, who will? No. I mean,

Nick Cizek [00:44:30] And also it is, is a win. That's the thing I think we have to get better at recognizing that it is a win. I, so, you know, I have my stickers when I, when I work, oh

Vance Crowe [00:44:38] Yeah, you taught me this like the Pomodoro method.

Nick Cizek [00:44:40] Yeah. So I, I turn off my phone, turn off my email, and I will pick a problem I'm gonna work on for 45 minutes and I set a timer.

Vance Crowe [00:44:47] And if you do three of them, then you get a sticker.

Nick Cizek [00:44:50] I do one for each 45 minute and then, oh

Vance Crowe [00:44:53] Man, I've been, I've been starving myself with stickers. I only give,

Nick Cizek [00:44:56] I'm trying to get three a day though

Vance Crowe [00:44:57] Every

Nick Cizek [00:44:58] Day. Like I want 3 45 minutes of really deep work.

Vance Crowe [00:45:00] That's great. Yeah.

Nick Cizek [00:45:01] And so I am thinking about throwing that out and just saying, I'm gonna try and get three on important family things and then I'm gonna work on my professional job or I'm gonna try and get three of each. Because there's a lot of things that slide when you're just, at least in my life when I've just focused on the company and but

Vance Crowe [00:45:20] You are a lot, like my wife is like, the term we use among our friends is like aspi, right? Like you, you can focus on something to the degree where that focus can actually like

Nick Cizek [00:45:32] Yeah. You

Vance Crowe [00:45:33] Know, you, you know, we were driving here to the interview and you had an alarm go off and then, you know, I was like, oh man, if I had an alarm go off in my car, I I want to, to like throw my phone away and smash it. And you're like, if I don't have several alarms to alert me to the fact that I need to stop focusing, like I'll just focus and go right through things. That's my wife. Totally. Yeah. And I'm just not that way.

Nick Cizek [00:45:54] It's, I have to do that to be conscientious. 'cause I have to have a warning to myself like, it's coming up. You can't work on this forever. Especially when I code. This is part of why I, it's actually good for me not to code is I get addicted to it. It's like a video game for me. Like you get success really quickly and quick feedback and it forms this addictive loop. And when I get done at the end of the day, I can't really talk to my kids or my wife. I

Vance Crowe [00:46:18] Mean, to be in the flow state, like feels great, but it also is expensive. Cognitively you're tired. My flow state is either when I'm on stage and then part of that is that, you know, you have to be done in 40 minutes or 60 minutes. And I really pride myself on like nailing that down to the second. But when I first started doing interviews, I always thought, well, I'm in the flow state. I'm loving this. I'm

Nick Cizek [00:46:42] Fully,

Vance Crowe [00:46:42] You know, engaged in this person in the conversation. They're fully engaged. And so sometimes I'd let the interview go on for like three, three and a half hours. And I one time got a, I got a call from a a, a good friend of mine. He was like, I absolutely loved my, my mother's stories, but I think you went too long. And I think you need to like,

Nick Cizek [00:47:01] Oh, on the record

Vance Crowe [00:47:02] That in Yeah, because he's saying like, there's an upper maximum when you're a listener on, on like, how much can you do? And he was like, the whole stories were all great, but like you, you need to be conscious of that. And it like snap me out of it to be like, oh, there's something else to be aware of here and I just didn't know it.

Nick Cizek [00:47:20] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I agree completely. I, so I do get in a flow state, and it can be really hard to get out. One of the things,

Vance Crowe [00:47:29] It's not easy to get into a flow state with your kids because they're like, they just, they, their emotional state is, I mean, you were at my house, right? It's just like, it's up and then it's down and then it's over here. And, and of course my children right, are gonna have like really big highs and really big lows. Yeah.

Nick Cizek [00:47:45] I, one of my teachers was telling me a mentor just visualize, it's like you're filling up a balloon, you're blowing up a balloon, and it's, you're trying the knot and it's hard to get the knot tied and sometimes you let go and the balloon like flies and zips all over the room. And she's like, whether it's the company or the family, like when you are just, if you ride the balloon, it's crazy. But if you can sit back and watch the balloon zip all around, like you don't have to be crazy. And so I just keep, that's a picture I'm always trying to think of now with, with my company is like, the farm test can have the rollercoaster of ups and downs, but that doesn't mean I have to be that way. And so I'm, anyway, just trying to be mindful of that. And the same with the family. Like family life can be doing really well and then we can all be sad or mad or a big fight and then we can all be doing, and like, you don't have to, you don't have to be right there and like on the balloon.

Vance Crowe [00:48:36] So I, anyway, when we're in progress, we're getting ready for this interview. I'm always worried when I'm talking with people that are close friends of mine that like, well, what, like if we talk like the way we normally talk, people would be excluded because you're just talking about your jargon and your whatever. Yeah. And so we were sharing different topics and you were like, Hey, I actually read this book, or I, this guy Arthur Brooks. Yeah. That put out a, a book called From

Nick Cizek [00:49:02] Strength to Strength. From

Vance Crowe [00:49:03] Strength to Strength. And you were the second person this week, another guy named Lance Woodbury, who I saw at a conference said, Hey, you ought to read this book. And then you said it. So what's the rundown on that?

Nick Cizek [00:49:15] Well, it's been, I, I haven't finished the book. I listened to two podcasts by this guy and I was like, whoa. Like,

Vance Crowe [00:49:21] Yeah, I, I, you sent me the, I got the Peter Attia one where he's interviewing the Arthur Brooks.

Nick Cizek [00:49:27] So basically he says, so I should say, he basically says like, there's a, you can get addicted to success and it's actually really easy to do. And what happens is you kind of always play the hero in your life. And eventually you get to the point where you can't do that anymore. You hit, basically it says like, in almost all careers, there's some, well, there's always like a, you can kind of say like the halfway point where half the work is done before that in your life and half is done after, and it's surprisingly low. And so it typically happens in lots of jobs at 30, well, maybe mid thirties or mid forties. There's certain jobs where it's much later, like, my wife's a historian, and so that one I think is like 55 or 60, like where, like you write half of your books after that. But I've always been this jobs where like, I have to think of the, the solution myself. And because he's essentially saying is, you can't do that. Like your brain stops working that way. But what's really interesting is you stop being able to solve those problems and you start being able to solve a whole different set of problems. Like you end up becoming much better at teaching, much better, explaining things, much better at integrating other people's ideas and, and figuring out, so maybe you don't know the answer to something, but you know when someone does have the answer, like what you need it for. And so I've, I'm taking a lot of inspiration from this, this book, and it's, it's just really interesting. It's like, oh, this is a, a path. Lots of people have traveled and you don't have to invent it yourself.

Vance Crowe [00:50:56] I, I talk about this sometimes that, that the storytelling aspect of life I think is really important because people come in here and they've spent all these years being in the, to do years of their lives. So they're just like, I gotta get things done. I gotta go, go, go, go, go, go, go. And by coming in here, and I think actually the most important part of Legacy Interviews is you have to set a date and you actually have an appointment, and then you come into this room and it becomes this oasis for like two hours or for a full day. And then people start telling their stories. And like when couples are in here, they look at each other and they're like, you know, I totally forgot that we had this tragedy, this bankruptcy, this, you know, catastrophe. Remember how hard that was? Because when they were living it, as soon as they got done with that problem, a new problem came up. And there was never a time when they were like, let's sit down and chat about Yeah.

Nick Cizek [00:51:51] You

Vance Crowe [00:51:51] Know, this thing that we went through. But I think in order to move from being a to do person to being a wise person, you have to have that storytelling situation. And I think it's why it's so important when people sit in here, not that they get all of their stories out, but that they begin that process that they like start, they like, now their kids have shown with very clear evidence, we want to hear your stories, we got you this gift. And then the parents get to sit there and do the thing and they get the experience of like, oh, this didn't hurt to go back and look at these things. Yeah. I, I act, we actually, I got

Nick Cizek [00:52:27] A lot of value from it.

Vance Crowe [00:52:27] Yeah. Yeah. And so like, they then look at those things and by telling the story, I think they recategorize what they thought of that experience. So it was brutal before, but now they can look back and be like, well, because of that bankruptcy, we met that banker, and then that banker helped us do this and look at all the great things that happened. Yeah. And so they connect all these dots and I think they move into that phase that Arthur Brooks is talking about. Yeah.

Nick Cizek [00:52:51] Where

Vance Crowe [00:52:51] They become the wise person that can see things from a different vantage point.

Nick Cizek [00:52:54] The other thing is the book, there's just a lot of great wisdom. Like, well, actually I should say in the podcast, I haven't gotten this part in the book yet, and I hope he has a discussion of it. He, one thing that really moved me this last year is he says, Thomas Aquinas defined love as willing, the the good for the other, another person as another person. It's like, when like my kids, like, I love them and I think like I'm doing the best for them, but a lot of times I'm doing the best for them, for me. Right. And so it's really different to be like, I'm gonna do the best for you as if you like, I like you're a separate independent, independent individual that's not related to me. And like, we're gonna still figure out the best thing for you. And so I'm just yeah. Really trying to internalize that one. So that was like another gem that I got out of this. Have

Vance Crowe [00:53:40] You ever experienced love from another person then?

Nick Cizek [00:53:43] Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I feel like, my gosh, another thing, my parents have given me so much wisdom the last year as I've been trying to like refocus on family. I feel like I, I appreciated my parents' wisdom before in a way, but I, I feel like they've just gone up many notches and, and their ability to say things in ways that I can hear them now, it's, it's been like real, I'm getting goosebumps like talking about it. I really, it's really been a big shift for me.

Vance Crowe [00:54:12] I, the, the, one of the biggest change points in my entire life was when my mentor Pete, I sometimes talk about him. He and I had, we had spent some times together. I would go over and hang out with him. We'd go to dinner, we'd just talk. And he called me up one day and he was like, Hey, Vance, I have some things I want to tell you. And, and I was like, okay. It's like seven o'clock in the morning. So we had just been together the night before and he is like, one, you need to start dressing better when you come over here. You, you actually look like unkempt. And so do you, do you know how to buy a suit? And I was like, no. And he is like, all right, well bring your checkbook and come over here and I'm gonna, I'm gonna take you and you're gonna buy a suit and I'll teach you how. And then he said, he asked me some question of clarification about what I had told him the night before about some un charter, something that I was learning in grad school. And then the last thing was he was like, Vance, have you been putting on weight? And I was like, yeah, I, I think so. And he was like, okay, well we need to get our arms around this. Like, what do you, what do you, what are we gonna do to, to do this? I'm gonna send you a book and you can read that or you can read some other one. And I got off the phone and I think, you know, this

Nick Cizek [00:55:18] Is over the phone. This

Vance Crowe [00:55:19] Is over the phone. 'cause he was just like, it, it wasn't even something hard for him. He just, this is, he had, he actually, what he started the conversation was I was looking over my notes from last night. So that told me he had like made notes after we had been together. And then he had these things to say and you think like, he did not tell me these things because it makes him look good.

Nick Cizek [00:55:39] Yeah. Right.

Vance Crowe [00:55:39] These, these are things that could have alienated me from him. He's saying this because he really genuinely believes it. And I don't think up until that point in my life I had ever experienced what now I think is fair to say is love in that way. And from that moment on, I was devoted to Pete because I was like, what else can you tell me? Like, what, what else is the world not willing to share with me? Yeah. Or reflect back to me. And that was a very, very important point in my life. Yeah.

Nick Cizek [00:56:06] I think that's a, a strength of our relationship too, is I feel like you're one of the people who can tell me if I'm doing something where I could improve, actually several of our friends, I, I, that's a thing that I value in friends and I value in my wife a lot.

Vance Crowe [00:56:19] Yeah. Man, that's, that's hard, right? You gotta have humility, but like, it's totally true. Your wife or not your wife? My wife, your wife's lovely. I've not met her, but I've, I've read things and watched a lot of interviews she's been on, but my wife like really knows what's best for me. Like definitely. And like sometimes I'm really annoyed by it and sometimes the advice is like slightly off. But if I am ever able to put down my ego and like really listen to what she's saying, there's never a time when she's telling me something that's going to hurt me. Yeah.

Nick Cizek [00:56:54] Like

Vance Crowe [00:56:54] It's, it's maybe isn't exactly on point, but it's better than almost what anybody else would tell me. Yeah.

Nick Cizek [00:57:00] I agree. And that's, that's a big part of why I married my wife is because we could have hard conversations. We had a several before we got married and we were able to do that. And I just never met someone outside my parents where we could have conversations that hard and get through them before. Were

Vance Crowe [00:57:17] You cognizant that you're, that about that about your wife? Like before you got married? Were you, if you given Nick a cookie, like asking questions and thinking very deeply about this,

Nick Cizek [00:57:26] This Yeah. I, I I've just having being able to like really communicate clearly was that something I really wanted in whoever I was going marry. And I, I've really cherished that about our relationship

Vance Crowe [00:57:37] Because I like, the more I've thought about it, the more like me marrying Anne, I think of as like a total fluke of luck. Like at that point in my life, I was not mature enough to actually know what I was marrying and what was going to be the result of it. But there was just some voice that was just like, don't, don't stop, go, go, go. Don't, don't delay. Don't screw this up. That hadn't been there on any other one. And I think, like even in my mind, I was like, I am, if I'm watching myself from outside of myself, this is impetuous and illogical. But if I'm, if I'm listening to that inner voice, this is the only decision I could make. And if I had married almost anyone else, yeah. I could have driven a relationship right off a cliff and done terrible things for my own life. Yeah.

Nick Cizek [00:58:25] I think I was just met my wife at the perfect time where I was just kind of reached a point in my life where I was properly marryable. You know, like I just, I was ready and she kind of pulled me into that in a way that I, it was really wonderful and lucky.

Vance Crowe [00:58:43] Yeah. If I hadn't met Pete, there's no chance Anne would've married me. Like he shaped me up right. In time. Like she wouldn't, I mean, I don't even know that we would've finished the first date. She would've been like, goodbye if I, if she had met me as the person I was before I met Pete.

Nick Cizek [00:58:57] I was just thinking about, it's interesting you say Pete, the other, my undergraduate research advisor who I worked for for three years doing experiments in a physics lab. I, I did really well as an undergrad in, in physics. I, I studied hard, I mean, I, I went to University of Colorado Boulder, so I, it was a kind of a party school and I enjoyed that to the fullest, but I also worked really

Vance Crowe [00:59:17] Hard. Okay.

Nick Cizek [00:59:18] And so lots of people left the program and went right to graduate school and he was the only person who sat down and was like, I don't think you should do this, and I think you should take some time. And, 'cause he saw, like, I loved physics, but I also, I really wanted a break and I wanted to, I actually wanted to do a startup and so I wanted to go to a company and he was like, you should do that. Like, people only go to physics graduate if they really want to do it, and you shouldn't go if you don't totally want to. And that was really great advice. And you know, my other professors, I, I love them all and they were really meaningful to me, but lot of them were like, you just need to go to grad school, like, you're really good at this and go. And he really looked at me and saw what was I needed to hear and, and gave me that message that was a little hard to hear at the time, but really was a great thing. And then I was able to go four years later and I really wanted to be there.

Vance Crowe [01:00:09] Yeah. And, and that change that happens in your early twenties to like, Hey, I'm doing this because I actually want this, or I've looked at the world and I'm afraid of another path, so I'm gonna run towards this path. Yeah. And I'm gonna be a lot more motivated than if I would do something else. You also mentioned about trust. Like we had a little bit of a conversation, I don't know that I could replicate it about social trust and how it's breaking down among groups and people and Oh

Nick Cizek [01:00:35] Yeah. We've talked a bit about this book, the Revolt of the Public, and it's, it's, well, it's a really interesting book. It was self-published and then it kind of, I don't know, spread sort of virally a little bit. And eventually, like, I think it's now published by Stripe Press, like one of the Collison family picked it up and was like, this is a great book. And so now it's more widespread. But the basic idea is that there's been media technology, like big changes that have happened. So the first was spoken language, then written language, then the printing press, and then they would say the fourth wave was broadcast media. And so that was the age before the internet. And so it was like a, that had to be like very centralizing and made strong central societies and civilizations because it was like from the center broadcasting out. So radio and television in particular, the idea that the book says there's a, we're in the middle of a fifth wave where social media came out and now all these kind of gatekeepers of distributing information are no longer as powerful as they were. And it's made it, it's made it really easy to see when people make mistakes and to distribute and share about that and point out mistakes. But it's actually, social media hasn't made it easier for us to organize and fix problems. So it's easier for us to tell like, there's a problem, but we can't fix it. And so he basically just says like, until we figure out that second part, how do we use the internet to help us fix our problems?

Nick Cizek [01:02:07] Like we're just gonna be in this period where we don't trust each other very well and we, we get in lots of fights. So that was one book.

Vance Crowe [01:02:15] I mean, I like this, this idea of like, I mean, I think one of the biggest challenges that we have online is I don't want to give up my anonymity, right? Like, I don't want to have to be my own person. But at the same time, like having anonymous entities out there, being able to spread information is like a source of extreme chaos. Yeah. And so we need to figure out this, you know, they call it pseudo anonymous, being pseudo anonymous where you can prove like, I am a person, this is what I said. But also you're, you're able to distinguish between, you know, bots or botnets creating all this information. And without this, like, it's just too, it's like being out in the ocean and there's just too much information and noise to know what's real.

Nick Cizek [01:03:02] It's really hard. I mean, I'm consider myself a pretty educated person and it's, it's really hard to know what to believe and not to believe. Well

Vance Crowe [01:03:10] 'cause it used to be enough to be like, the way I can be a really well informed person is I'm gonna read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and that's gonna give me, you know, two different perspectives. Or I'm gonna watch Fox News and, and

Nick Cizek [01:03:23] Cnn.

Vance Crowe [01:03:24] Cnn. And like, by doing that, I'll figure out that somewhere in between there. Now I think what we've discovered is the reality was that was never balanced, right? That's like two poles that were far closer together than people realized. And that there was all this other information that you just couldn't get access to. You just didn't have the opportunity. But now that we are aware, it's a little like coming outta the Garden of Eden and we can never go back to childhood. You can never go back into the garden and this creates cynicism and cynicism is dark and it's like, it's very difficult to build in a cynical work. It's, yeah.

Nick Cizek [01:04:02] So I, I hear all that and then I, I think there are just these, there are real reasons to be optimistic. I guess I'm underneath, I'm a techno optimist, so I remember the wizard and the prophet, like I'm, I'm a wizard. Like I think we're gonna solve our problems that we have. And I, you know, I was at Rob's other yesterday and we talked a lot about this idea of like chains of trust. And so I think like as we become more sovereign over our data, we are going to be able to rate on our own, which we're gonna work together to build a way for us to share with each other which sources we trust. And that will happen in a over our lifetime will get easier and easier as people build better and to better and better tools for that.

Vance Crowe [01:04:47] Yeah. Like for example, if like right now my medical records are kept by some company out there kind of, and like some of 'em are over here and a lot of 'em are over there. And if I want 'em, I gotta go ask them for it. But at some point there will come a time where I will be able to compile those onto my own server, my own situation that is impenetrable or very difficult. And then when I wanna share that medical information, I don't have to hold it super close. It's not just like, here's my social security number. Please, please, please don't leak this. It's gonna be like, hey, I not only can share that information with my doctor, but if I wanted to share it with my friends so they could see what I'm dealing with or whatever that is, or

Nick Cizek [01:05:25] With the startup company that, that you know and trust

Vance Crowe [01:05:28] And now you have people being able to use that information and give you valuable things back. But that, that information sovereignty is the first, is the absolute first step in, in taking that seriously.

Nick Cizek [01:05:41] So like an example, I if, if there was a place where I could share products and services that I really like, and I could do that in a way where I could pick who to, that we could share that with. Like, I would love to have some service like that where I could then, like if I want to go buy a new pair of running shoes and I could go look at what my 10

Vance Crowe [01:05:59] Friends, what does Anne think? Right? Yeah. Like yeah, exactly. Yeah,

Nick Cizek [01:06:01] That's right. Yeah. Someone who knows a lot about this is like, Anne, like which shoes are actually gonna be good for me? That would be like so cool if I, if there was an easy way for me to give access to what I recommend and other people could. But I don't really want to go to a big tech company and share all that information with them and they'll them be the intermediate. Yeah, the

Vance Crowe [01:06:16] Intermediate. I, I feel the same way. Like Rob and I in the podcast Rob Long, we talk about like, it'd be great to see like what's your a hundred books? What's my a hundred books? Yeah. Right? What's on my bookshelf and what news in my reading that I want you to easily be able to see and, and share it. And right now the best we can do is that we have them on a message board or a Slack where we are able to share those things. But the reality is there should be a way to say, Hey, I I first of all value for value, like I want to be able to pay people. If I'm reading your blog and I get four paragraphs in, then I want to give you four paragraphs worth of worth of Bitcoin or whatever that is. But even more than that, I want to be able to share that information with my friends so they can be like, what does Vance think about these things? Or what news is Nick reading about that? And it'll come, it's time.

Nick Cizek [01:07:04] Yeah. The other is like, I would like to, I'd like to be able to log into something kinda like Facebook, but instead of having like all the stories I would just like, of the 20 people that I'm the closest with, tell me the story that they was the most liked one for each of them. And then I'm gonna go in and like, I would do that once a week. If I could do that would be, that'd be like the weekly recap you're talking about. That would be, I would love to be able to do something like that. But I, that wouldn't get me in the platform long enough for a company to want to build a, a tool for me to be able to do that. It's, it's not worth it to them. And so as we, we will build our own sovereign version of that somehow. And, and it will, we, we will accrue the benefits of that rather than another company getting it.

Vance Crowe [01:07:48] So then maybe the, a good rounding out question, are you then involved in Noster at all?

Nick Cizek [01:07:53] I'm not, but I'm, I, I'm, I'm very interested in it. If I wasn't busy raising kids, I would probably be on Noster. I'm really excited about it. Yeah. Yeah, I

Vance Crowe [01:08:01] Think so too. Like I've dabbled in it and I think there's a lot of potential there and I I, you know, maybe it's not the the last solution, but it seems like this is getting us to a place where it could happen. So if you listen in the last podcast with Rob Long Noster is a protocol that allows you to decide who are you going to share things with and how do you share it with, it's still very much like the be it's it's way before a OL was on the internet. We're talking like, you know, five, maybe 10 years before that. But eventually more and more tech will get built out on there.

Nick Cizek [01:08:34] Yeah. And it will be built in a way that the users get more of the benefits.

Vance Crowe [01:08:39] Well Nick, it has been fantastic having you on. I'm so glad you, you came out here to do this. Before I have you talk about where people can find farm test. I just wanna say personally I believe that the farm test system that you're building is of deep importance. I think that it has the potential to radically transform agriculture in the ways that everybody says that they want to, but they don't have the information to.

Nick Cizek [01:09:07] And

Vance Crowe [01:09:07] I don't think that there's necessarily bad actors out there, but there are certainly people pedaling information that that prompts people to take actions that are not the right ones. And people will be able to really hone in which products work for them. They'll be able to make way better environmental decisions. And so anything I can ever do to support that, you have my full endorsement. I think you were a man of integrity. So if anybody wanted to reach out to you and, and learn more about your products, where should they go?

Nick Cizek [01:09:37] Well gosh, Vance, thank you first of all. And so yeah, we're at farmtest.ag and you can create an account and try our tools for free. And we have a, yeah, online trial design and we're working on getting our analysis tool up online right now too.

Vance Crowe [01:09:53] And if there was, if there's contact information, can I put that in the show

Nick Cizek [01:09:57] Notes? Oh yeah, you can always email us at info@farmtest.ag.

Vance Crowe [01:10:01] Alright man, well thank you so much for coming out here and being on the podcast. Really

Nick Cizek [01:10:04] Enjoyed Advance. Thanks for having me. Ah.