Young Farmer Explains the Hidden Supply Chain Behind Costco's $5 Rotisserie Chicken

Hannah Borg [00:00:00] So when it rains, you better believe it. We will be the happiest people because we value that rain. Now, if I didn't live on the farm and I lived in town, that rain day might interfere with what I was gonna do that day. It might interfere with, you know, an outdoor party or whatever and it might, you know, it might be frustrating that it rain that day. Whereas when it rains for us, we shut down and enjoy it.

Vance Crowe [00:00:26] This is Joseph Ring. I'm a cattle feed lot operator in Northern Illinois and you're listening to the Vance Crow podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today we talk to the youthful and energetic Hannah Borg. She is a cattle and poultry farmer living in Nebraska and she's one of the people that raised her hand and said, Hey, I have something to talk with you about regarding agriculture. When I went out on Twitter and said, what are some big ag issues that are going on? Hannah's an unusual family in that they had a cattle operation and decided that they were going to start raising chickens. So she is a part of making the Costco rotisserie chickens that you see in Costco that everybody knows about. Well, her family is one of the central groups that produces those chickens. So we have a fantastic conversation about values, about what does it mean to be organic about sustainability, Costco chickens, but also what's it like to be a young person living in the wilderness of Nebraska and meeting young people and hanging out with them. So I really enjoyed this conversation with Hannah and I think you will too. During our conversation, Hannah mentions the Legacy Interviews. Those have been exploding lately and they are for people that want to capture the family stories, whether it's grandma and grandpa talking about where their family came from and the values that they have. Or maybe it's a young child and you wanna capture that memory of who they were when they were a little kid before they got outside the, the walled garden that you've created for them, it's a, I sit down with them for an hour over Zoom or if you're in the St.

Vance Crowe [00:02:07] Louis area, you can come to the studio. We sit down, we have a conversation, and then I send you the recording afterwards for you to have for as long as you as your family would like. There are really interesting gift and everyone that I've ever worked with has really enjoyed them. I would say it's probably some of the most meaningful work I've ever put out into the world. Also, if you are running an organization and you are inviting keynote speakers, this summer has started to get really, really hot. I've gotten quite busy and my schedule is booking up, but I do love giving talks. So if you are interested in inviting me to come, you can go to Vance Crowe dot com to learn more. So I'll have more about the Legacy Interviews down below. And let's head now to the interview with Hannah Borg. Hannah Borg, welcome to the podcast.

Hannah Borg [00:02:58] Thank you Vance Crowe.

Vance Crowe [00:03:00] So a few days ago I put out on Twitter that I wanted to start doing some ag series. I think there are major issues going on in agriculture right now from water shortages on a scale that people are really don't recognize. Mice are running wild and free in Australia. And so I put this out there and you tweeted back about your family raising Costco chickens and I was like, that's an interesting topic. That's something I think a lot of people engage with but have no knowledge of. So just to begin, Hannah, tell me a little bit about your family farm and why you said, you know, hey, my family raises chickens for Costco.

Hannah Borg [00:03:41] Well, I'm Hannah. I'm from Wakefield, Nebraska, the little teen town in northeast Nebraska. And my family's a six generation farm and we grow corn cattle or well specifically crops, cattle and chickens. Chickens for Costco. So we've been in production for 135 years and five years ago now, my family had kind of a wild idea to expand and diversify into poultry production. So we feed cattle, we background them, we raise the crops, our crops feed our cattle. My dad farms with his three brothers, so we're a four family operation. My 87-year-old grandma still lives on the homestead. Kind of keeps us all in line. We're, we're about as traditional as it gets, but the tradition was kind of, the traditional mold was kind of broke when we decided to build these chicken barns. And so I went to University of Nebraska Lincoln studied agricultural communications and the timing worked out perfect. I took my last final senior year on a Tuesday or no, we got chickens on a Tuesday, went back to school and took my finals and I've been home on the farm ever since and that's been two years ago.

Vance Crowe [00:04:53] It's interesting, I meet a lot of young people, particularly when I was the director of millennial engagement and they would say, I'm doing agricultural communications. And I was always like, I don't know what you're gonna do with that. But when I looked at your background, like you have really made a splash in, in the world of ag communications. In fact, I think a lot of people wouldn't realize how many millions of Americans have seen you connected with things like agriculture. You were in a Ford commercial, all kinds of crazy stuff.

Hannah Borg [00:05:24] Yeah, it's a little intimidating for you to say that because I am as normal as it gets. I woke up, I did chores this morning, I had breakfast, came home gardened for a little bit and now I'm on this interview like I lived the most lowkey life and last year I found myself on a Ford commercial. So how that started was three years ago, maybe four years ago, I interned for national FFA convention during national convention in the media room as a radio broadcaster. I did an internship as a farm broadcaster for Caribbean in Nebraska, which is a large farm, farm and ranch owned radio station. And through that got connected with National FFA, went out there, did some farm or did some broadcasting and I did that couple years and really got to know the media crew, those, those people that run the FFA brand behind the scenes. And when they, last February when they were kind of getting organized to put together this Ford commercial, they reached out to me to see if I would be interested in being in it. And I blindly said yes like I did to a lot of things. And fast forward last Thanksgiving day, this Ford commercial in partnership with FFA aired next to the Cowboys game about six o'clock. And it was wild. Like what the heck will little Miss Hannah from Little Wakefield, Nebraska is on the big screen? But that was really cool to showcase my area of the world and my family and kind of a little bit about what we do.

Vance Crowe [00:07:02] You know, it's interesting that you describe yourself as like, I'm totally normal, I'm really normal. But I think the description of the morning that you had is one that people think of as kind of a quintessential country mourning, but it's certainly far less than 2% of the US population has a mourning like that. And even fewer really now because most of the time a lot of the ag that's going on there are families involved in ag, but a lot of times it's way more corporate, right? They don't necessarily have young people working on the farms and doing chores and gardening. Do you have a lot of friends your age that are doing the same thing that you're doing right now?

Hannah Borg [00:07:41] Yes I do. In fact. So I'm gonna push back on the, we're, I think people think maybe families not are not involved on the farm to extent of what they are. But I think I'm normal because I am surrounded by family farms. I, you know, where I'm sitting, they're half mile, not even a half mile, quarter mile north of me family farm, three little kids quarter mile south of me family farm, his son's on the farm and every single direction around me where I look, there's a family farm at least one generation, if not two. So there is what you would call a corporate farm in my hometown of Wakefield Michael Foods. They produce a lot of the dry egg product. They're large commercial poultry operation. So that's, they would fall into the category of corporate farming, but they rely on local people to raise those chickens and you know, do all the production. So yes, maybe to your, to your point, I think people kind of forget about the family. Farmers like me sometimes, but it's all I know and I went, I drove four hours across Nebraska this weekend and all you see is family farms. So I am pretty normal for our area. We are a little bit unique with the, the, you know, the multi-family aspect, you know, for families involved farming together. But I have to think that I'm normal otherwise I think my head could get a little bit too big thinking that I, or knowing that I was in a Ford commercial.

Vance Crowe [00:09:20] I think that's probably true. I think there the, the concept of farmers being told all the time, Hey, you're less than 2%, you're less than 2%. It does kind of float you away from the rest of the society. So it probably is a very good thing for you to be like, hey, this is everybody, I know that that is this way.

Hannah Borg [00:09:38] Yeah, and to your point, so when I went back home to the farm, I got, you know, got, got some stories around it 'cause I, as an agriculture communication student, I was well versed into, you know, industry leaders and reached out and did a lot of internships. And so my story well was well known in a sense of, you know, it's not every day that a family builds a new business out of left field of chicken barn and the next generation comes back. So that is a really cool story. But my two best friends, they, they have town jobs but they're working their way back home to the farm. My neighbor, they have their son farming full time. So it is, it is, it is easy for someone to say, oh yeah, there's not a lot of kids come going back to the farm. But I am surrounded, especially in college and around here, I'm surrounded by people fighting to go back to their family farms and figuring it out. I was lucky enough, I got the direct path, I stepped from college back home to the farm. Not everyone gets that, but I think you would be surprised of how many people are trying to get back home to the farm and continue the legacy that their ancestors started.

Vance Crowe [00:10:54] Yeah, I think so just last week I had a guy on named Sam Obria who, who studies like why is it that some empires and civilizations live longer than others and how come there's never been an immortal one? And we had a really long part of our conversation about succession planning and about how really the only way to hand things down is not to just say the tacit knowledge, right? The the things that you could all write down, go to the barn, the birds get this kind of feed, make sure they're cleaned out. But also the implicit knowledge that only comes from watching and apprenticing. And as you're saying that you guys have four generations on your farm, it seems like

Hannah Borg [00:11:33] We have four families.

Vance Crowe [00:11:35] Four families, yeah. Which

Hannah Borg [00:11:36] Three diff different generations now my grandma's not involved in day-to-day operations in a sense of like production management. But yesterday I went to go pick up a bucket calf and I called grandma, I said, in 10 minutes I'm leaving. Do you wanna ride with? And she said, yes, absolutely. So grandma is still very involved in our day-to-day lives. She's not in production but it's a fifth and sixth generations that are involved in day-to-day production.

Vance Crowe [00:12:02] And so what has your family figured out about being able to work together? Because I think many, many people in the city maybe have like an i idyllic version of what it is to have a multi-generational business, but is very rare that one could ever last over a hundred years. So you guys must have figured out systems that make this possible.

Hannah Borg [00:12:23] I wish I could confidently say yes because it is the most beautiful and the most chaotic and hardest thing all at the same time. So yes, we, you know, I, I'm very familiar with my family's generation I or Ancestry. I could walk you through each line of generations and like they did this and this and this and now here I am today. So it's, you know, in my memory I just know my grandpa, my grandpa passed away 10 years ago, but he was very intentional about working with the brothers, knowing they knew what they were going to inherit and you know, kind of their role that they were going to play. And so that, that was clear communication and my, my dad and his uncles had worked with my grandpa, their dad, you know, for multiple decades. And now the same thing's happening with my family, with my parents, my siblings. So one thing that I haven't said yet is at this point in time, both my sister and my brother are home on the farm full time. So my sister, she has a part-time job off the farm, but she is still very much involved in the day-to-day production of the farm. So my parents have three kids home at kids at home working together. So it is, it is hard in a sense of there's big emotions, high stakes in a sense of big opinions. We all have our different opinions, but I cannot imagine if my dad, you know, heaven forbid he was killed and we had to take over the next day.

Hannah Borg [00:13:54] Like I cannot imagine what that would be like for a family because two years in I still learn things all the time. And I think it's, I think it's the beauty of working next to each other and working through those hard, big emotions that allow for the farm to keep going because if we just came back and dad retired the next day, it wouldn't work. But it's through the years of working together that he did with his dad, that allows, you know, the seasons and learnings to happen together and just the simple little things of, ooh, I don't even have a good example, but just, well the little things that you pick up over time that is worth more than just kind of the big, like this is what we do this day, this is what we do this season. Those little things are more valuable sometimes in those bigger things.

Vance Crowe [00:14:43] Yeah, I mean I, I think even just the figuring out a way to have big egos and big opinions and big dreams, figuring out how to lace all those together can be a powerful rope if you can make it all happen. But if it can't, like things split up and and break apart, so there something must be going right, right. You, you can't, none of this could happen where you have multi-generations over such a long period by accident. But also if you went to, let's say your grandfather before he passed or your dad right now and said like how is it that you hand this down? It's probably far more in the things that he just does without knowing about it than and your family culture than what he explicitly knows.

Hannah Borg [00:15:26] Yeah, the family culture thing is for sure a real thing. I have a very vivid memory of we were itty-bitty and we were helping my parents plant trees and my dad made a comment, he's like, I'm not planting these trees this grove for me, I'm planting this for you guys. The grove is just north of a farm, kind of a wind break. And so having that mindset for very early on that he's working for us and even I have the mindset of like, I'm working for the next generation. We, none of us have grandkids or kids any yet, but just having that mindset of, you know, I'm honoring our ancestors. 'cause again, I'm very familiar with them. I could walk you to the first generation of borgs in the cemetery where they're buried and could tell you their whole story. I'm honoring them but also working towards the future. And you know, we value tradition but we also understand that you can't just rely on tradition to keep on going. Raising chickens commercially is not anywhere in our family history of of tradition. But that is something that, you know, my parents decided that if we wanted to keep those traditions going in a sense of family and working together on the farm, we gotta do different things. And it might be uncomfortable for a little bit, but it's working so far and I don't wanna take away, like we have some days that we work beautiful together and that that all encompasses communication.

Hannah Borg [00:16:57] Every time we don't work well together, there's some sort of breakdown of communication. And so I think we're to the point where we over communicate sometimes of like, okay, this, this, and this is gonna happen, then we're gonna do this and this and next time we come back, okay, you've got this, this is the plan. And so it, it's a learning experience every single day we're working together because I say things to my boss who's my dad, who I would never say to my boss if he was not my dad. I, he says things to me in heated moments that he'd probably not say to an employee who's not his daughter. And so we've had to learn how to,

Vance Crowe [00:17:35] Like what? Like what, tell me, tell me more. This is interesting.

Hannah Borg [00:17:39] Well I'm, I don't know if they're podcast appropriate.

Vance Crowe [00:17:44] You can say anything on this podcast.

Hannah Borg [00:17:48] I like the classic example of working together with a family is working cattle. You know, cattle, working cattle is a craft, it's an art. You can't just have no experience and walk into a yard of cattle to move 'em down to the working facility just to load 'em out on a truck with no experience. So sometimes when those communication breakdowns happen, it might be, you know, we, my dad didn't tell us when we're gonna load out a cattle and so we're already scrambling and frustrated because we had something go wrong in the chicken barns, but we gotta put that on hold to go help dad and brother and the cattle barn. So then our and the cattle yard, so then our emotions are heated. And then when we get in to work cattle, you know, it's not the fault of the cattle, but we say things, you know, in our personalities, in our, in our vibes I guess, I don't know, you gotta maintain calmness around cattle and if you don't do that and you start to get frustrated with other people, the cattle start to get frustrated with you and then it just tailspins into like, this is not working. We have gotten better at communicating and making sure those things don't happen. But that doesn't mean that sometimes on tough days things go wrong and we say things of specific things, I guess I don't even know how to, you know, give examples 'cause you're just in the moment and you're just frustrated.

Hannah Borg [00:19:20] But as time has gone on, I don't say things like that. 'cause I know words, you know, I can't say hurtful things to my dad 'cause he'll remember those and you know, I think he's learning, he has to be a little bit, you know, less hurtful with words in those can moments. But my dad is, sorry dad, if you're listening, love you. But he's a, he's a, he's a glass half full kind of guy. And I mean he, we all know this about my dad, so I tell him, but he, he's not as optimistic as me. And so, you know, something breaks down. It's like, oh we just gotta sell the farm. Like, ugh, like just throws his hands and, and walks away. And so when my dad says comments we're just gonna sell the farm, it's like, well no dad doesn't actually mean that. And I have to remind myself like, dad's just 'cause he's frustrated and the auger broke down and it made a big old spill and he's frustrated in the moment. He's like, just gonna quit. I have to remind myself he doesn't actually mean that he's just frustrated. So that narrative in my head of changing that around, of not taking what he says literally has been really helpful. But this has been an ongoing, I mean I've been on the farm for two years and that's not that long compared to his, you know, he's never, or he went to school and come back and he's 60 something. So, you know, a long time he's been on the farm. So maybe his frustrations, like he has a shorter optimistic stick than I do because I have two years of experience, whereas he is 40 some years.

Hannah Borg [00:20:51] So yeah, just reminding myself he doesn't mean those things in those moments.

Vance Crowe [00:20:56] So Hannah, you are a very forward-leaning young woman, right? You're, you've got these internships and you've just been go, go, go. There's something interesting about being able to take that level of ambition and fit it within a family farm, right? Because if one person is too ambitious or, you know, if you're in the city, a desire to climb the corporate ladder and become the youngest, you know, vice president that the company has ever seen means one thing, but in a family business it's something else. So how do you think about like tempering your, I don't, I don't wanna, I don't, I don't know if it is tempering it, but like fitting your excitement and enthusiasm into a tapestry of a larger family business.

Hannah Borg [00:21:40] So I don't think I have to fit into anything because I am figuring my, everything I do revolves around the farm in a sense of, you know, job or not job opportunities, but opportunities they all have to kind of come back to my mission of the importance of the day-to-day production of feeding animals. I have, you know, I was gone for this weekend and my mom did chores for me, but it's like whatever I do, I always have to think about, you know, getting the animals fed, preparing for what's next, you know, things like that. So having that narrow mindset of I gotta keep, you know, my focus on the farm, everything else falls in around that. My dad is a way more private person than I am. And so I didn't specifically tell him what, what I was doing this morning again, hi dad, I hope you're doing well. So he, he would not agree with me coming on a podcast for an hour talking about, you know, the intimate details of him getting frustrated and some of my things. And so I've kind of learned to balance, you know, respecting my dad and his wishes and kind of his privacy stuff, but also knowing that if I want to, I don't know always what I want to do, but I'm not sure what my long-term goal is.

Hannah Borg [00:23:10] But anyway, to help my professional career, whatever you may call it, off the farm. And if it's good for me, like I'm really excited to talk to you today and that's been something that I've wanted to do for a while, but I'm not gonna let my dad's desire of like keeping things a little bit more private, get in my way of, you know, having a thoughtful conversation with you. And that happens a lot of, sometimes, you know, when I had those, those news outlets come to me talking about our family farm, I would talk to dad about him and, and my, my mom's a little bit more open than he is. I don't mean this to be like a rant on my dad, but it's, it is, it's just, it is a hard thing to balance and I'm not always good at it, but I've just had to learn like this is what I'm doing. I am back, I am working on the farm, but I also have these things that I want to do off the farm and you're gonna have to allow me some space to do that within the means of, you know, farm things. And I'm not sure if I can bring it back to a point, but all I'm saying is I, well

Vance Crowe [00:24:19] I think that what you're saying is like a, is like a really deeply important thing, right? And the ag organizations of the US have been talking about this pretty much relentlessly, right? It is, if you want freedom to operate, if you want consumers to trust you, consumers have to find a way to know you. And so, because so many people like go to the grocery store and they have literally no concept of where anything came from or even what things are made of. And I found myself recently watching this whole series, he's like almost obsessively about this guy from like the, he's a reenactor from like civil war battles and things like this. And so he makes food from the 17 hundreds and there's a whole bunch of foods that he's making that I'm like, wait a second, I didn't, I didn't know that's what was in that. That's crazy. And if you don't have farmers in today's day and age, teaching people about these things and what their life is and why are they on their farm and how does it work and the fact that it isn't just like a corporate monolith, then then you've got real problems because then consumers can very easily start to say, well I don't like that because it's a faceless corporation and if you want the freedom to operate to be able to build new barns, you have to have people supporting you.

Hannah Borg [00:25:33] Yeah. And so the tricky thing with that is, my family, our business is a corporation, we're an LLC, so are we corporate or are we a family farm? And so there's kind of a fine line of, even, even though we have corporate farms, they rely on people like people, my my friends in my area, you know, I don't think corporations are bad because we rely on them to get our seed supply, to build our equipment, you know, for a lot of things we rely on those corporations. We can't do a lot of things without them. They also can't do a lot of things without us. So I I, you know, I know it, it's a feel good thing to say that there's 98% family farms, but even on the corporate farms, you know, you, you know, you go to those and you see managers that have been there for 20 years. So I, I don't like putting people in a bucket of your family farm and you're better than the corporate farm because they're bigger. You know, I carry an iPhone every day. I have absolutely no idea who made that, how it's made, how it got here. But I rely on that device every single day. And it's not bad because I don't know who it is. I mean, sure if I have the opportunity to go to a factory where iPhones are made, I'd love that. But I don't see people out there waving the flag of this is how your phones are made now food is more personal. So yes, absolutely we want people to know where their food comes from, but it's

Vance Crowe [00:27:10] Again, people, I think it matters to the iPhone. I think, I think that there's a, i I agree with you on the corporate farm explanation and it's a hard thing to be able to explain how someone think can be both corporate and like individually owned or that that, that it's not just strictly profit driven at the, at the expense of all other things, but even an iPhone, right? When when activists wanna shut them down, they start saying that's slave labor. The people don't want to be working there. You're violating their, their freedoms and their rights and these are all bad things. And you then see those workers saying like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you're not defending me. That's not actually correct. I do wanna work here. So there is some balance and it has something to do with the human mind at least kind of like you were saying, the narrative that it tells itself about what it is and what they're supporting. Yeah. But let's, let's actually talk about the where your food ends up because the reason that you really caught my attention was you were saying we raised chickens for Costco and it's actually a little bit more complicated than just raising chickens for Costco. So explain to me the food system and how chickens go from your farm to Costco.

Hannah Borg [00:28:22] Okay, so this is going to get in the weeds a little bit, but we are pul growers. So we get, lemme back up. We have three barns, 60 by 600 feet long and it's an open floor concept and our equipment comes down and they have, if we wanna use a label, they're free range, but that is just the system that we raise 'em in. Free range is not better or worse than any other kind of raising is just different than raising them in cages. What does

Vance Crowe [00:28:52] It mean to be free range?

Hannah Borg [00:28:54] So our barns are, it's just a dirt floor with four to six inches of wood shavings on it. So they have, they have free range, they can run back and forth. They don't run I guess, but they, they're not necessarily confined to a specific space. But the commercial poultry operation I talked about that's in my hometown, they use cages and there's a, there's a reason why the industry went to cages because when you have birds, you know, 13,000 birds in one area, there's a different management style and there's also risks to that because if they get, if they get scared in the middle of the night when it's dark in there and they're going to run to the end of the barn, they're gonna pile up suffocate and die and you're gonna have, you're gonna have issues there. So when you put them in cages that safety is increased because they don't have to worry about external things to the extent that we have to. So marketing has told us that cages are bad and free range is good and I, it's just different because you live in a city, I live in a rural area, so you are more confined than I am. So does that mean I'm a better person? 'cause I'm less confined than you are in my means of travel? It doesn't, it's just a matter, it's just different. So back to back to my farm. Okay, so open floor concept is open floor four to six inches of shavings. We get 60,000 birds twice a year.

Hannah Borg [00:30:27] And that comes from a breeding, breeding barn in Oklahoma City, Ava, there's kind of two main, there's two main breeds or businesses that supply the chicken to you know, Tyson or all the other chicken businesses. But we get our birds from Ava and they come to us at a day old and they are vaccinated and separated males and females. So we get 53,000 females and 7,000 males. So for the first three weeks of their, at the time at our place there're in brooding, brooding is when we, we have, we have 13,000 birds in, lemme back up, there's 27,000 birds in one barn, but it's divided in two, just a stud wall with some chicken wire. So we have two houses in one barn. And now this is interesting because I learned us people in the Midwest, we call 'em chicken barns, but I think out east during the south they call 'em chicken houses. So we have two separate chicken houses, you know, divide, divide divisions in one barn. So on each side, 13,000 birds, we brewed them for three weeks, which means they're in a smaller space 'cause they're itty bitty birds and it's about 90 to a hundred degrees in there. So it's very warm and that's very nice 'cause we get, we brewed in November and it's pretty cooled out in November. So for the first three weeks they have, it's pretty intense.

Hannah Borg [00:32:00] There's a lot of labor that goes into getting the barns ready. And then when we have baby chicks and so they have a lot of feet out, they have drinkers drinker cups to help them make sure that they are finding water. Water and feed are obviously very important. It's warm in there. We're walking the barns constantly to encourage 'em to get up to eat and drink because that's going to be how they start their healthy life. And then after three weeks we turn 'em out to the whole barn and they, they are just out and about for the next 17 weeks. So we have the, we have the birds at our place for 21 weeks in about, which is about five months. So we have two rotations a year. So in that 21 weeks we're feeding 'em, they obviously have access to water and we are vaccinating 'em. There's different ways to vaccinate chickens and we're vaccinating them to maintain, for them to maintain a healthy, healthy life laying eggs. So when they leave our place, they go to a breeding barn, the males and females get put together and they start laying eggs. So one hint in her about the course of her life will lay about 156 eggs. Once those eggs, you know, our, once those hens lay those eggs at the breeding barn, a truck picks up those eggs and takes 'em to a hatchery in Fremont, Fremont's about 80 miles south of us in Fremont. In that hatchery, those eggs are hatched and then they go out to boiler barns.

Hannah Borg [00:33:32] And boiler barns are kind of similar to ours. They don't have as much equipment and then there's more bar, there's more birds in them. There's about 46,000 birds per house. Whereas we have about 27,000. And then those broiler, those broilers birds are in those barns for 42 days and they're brought up to, they're fed to about six pounds. After six pounds they go back to Fremont to be processed in a brand new state of the art facility processing plant. And then they are turned into those rotisserie chickens that will end up on the Costco shelves in the western United States.

Vance Crowe [00:34:13] So you're in the part of the raising the chickens that is like the, you know, the exponential growth, right? Where it goes from just a few eggs to lots more broilers. Is that, is that the explanation then?

Hannah Borg [00:34:26] Yeah, so we, you know, when I'm talking to cattle people talking, I say we raise the heifers. So you can't have what came first, the chicken or the egg. Well in our case the chicken did because our chickens are laying the eggs. So you can't have those bro, those breeders, you can't have those hens laying those eggs without being brought up to sexual maturity in the right age with us. So that's, you know, a lot of times when you think of chicken, the chicken industry, you just think of the meat birds, the broilers and those chicken barns. But there's, you know, pul growers like us, so there's seven pul growers for the whole company. 14 breeder barns, and then 430 some houses of broilers. So we have two, we go through two rotations, two flocks a year. So that means there's two breeder barns to every pull barns. And then, I'm not sure what the math is, but there's over 400 boiler barns to the 14 breeder barns. So it's, it's, we have a half million dollars worth of birds at our place. So it's, it's high risk. So we have intense biosecurity because disease walks in on two feet. So if we had a disease goes through our barn, and when I was in high school, the avogen flu went through the Midwest and I saw that firsthand in my community, the intensity of what that is.

Hannah Borg [00:35:57] And so if we had to lose a whole barn of puls, that's not going to in fact affect us, but that's gonna affect the breeders, the broilers, the processing. So it's a, it's a higher level of biosecurity and stress a little bit put on us because we have to raise healthy birds to maintain 'cause that that trickles down all the way down through the supply chain.

Vance Crowe [00:36:23] It's really interesting about the Costco rotisserie chickens is that it's not like when you're raising the broilers, you're like, hey, let's get these things to be as big as we possibly can 'cause we're gonna sell them for poundage. The point is actually to make them as close within, within like pretty tight parameters as you possibly can because they want the same chicken. People wanna have like the same experience every time. The way the meat tastes, the size of it, the way it comes off the bone. And that like, to be able to do that at such a large scale is actually really impressive. Probably harder to do it that way than it is to just say let's grow for pure poundage where we're just getting them to accelerate their weight as much as we can.

Hannah Borg [00:37:05] Yeah, you're absolutely right because that starts with us, that starts with us pull growers because we wanna maintain, you know, keeping our feed lines level, keeping our water lines level and at the right height maintains consistency in our hens. If our hens are consistently the same weight, then they're gonna lay better eggs. And so, and it is a very tight parameters that that chicken has to meet a very tight parameter to become a rotisserie chicken because if it has any sort of, you know, flaws to it or it's too big or too small, it's not gonna go to that $5 rotisserie chicken. And it is, it, it's, you know, everything I'm talking about I've learned in the last two years. So by no means am I an expert, I don't have a lot of depth of this field, I just have a lot of experience. So, but when we are raising consistent chickens that those broilers are consistently the same size and that starts with a good vaccination program that starts with a good feeding program, a good lighting program, a good ventilation program, there's just a lot of specifics. I go into it and it's mind blowing because I come from a cattle background where again, we have very specific things that we do to feed our cattle, but not quite to the intensity that we do to feed our chickens. So that's been a intense learning, not only curve learning line that's straight up that you just think differently when you're raising chickens and you do raising cattle.

Vance Crowe [00:38:39] It's interesting the kind of view on life that people living on farms have that people off the farm have never had. So if you are living, if you're a suburban kid, you grew up, you went to college and then maybe you got married and you had kids, the only birth you maybe have ever seen in your life is the birth of your child. Whereas if you're on a farm, you've not only seen birth, but you've seen death, you've maybe even been a part of it. And I think that that has like major cultural ramifications that we just didn't really understand because the people that grew up in the farming world, that's just the way it always was. And the same thing with the people in the suburbs. So do you feel like, does that resonate with you? Do you think that's true?

Hannah Borg [00:39:23] Yeah, absolutely. Just yesterday I picked up a bucket calf, it's Dale and I'm, I'm teaching it how to feed from a bottle and that's a new life that's on our farm now, you know, in the barn there is mortality, we don't have a hundred percent livability, you don't have a hundred percent livability with anything. So part of part of the daily chores is picking up that those mortality. And so I, you know, I pick up dead birds every day now I don't wanna give the impression of, you know, whatever horrific thing comes to your head. That is not what it is at all. But we have about a 96 and 98% livability, which is really good. That's actually higher than the industry sta standard as I've been told. So we're, you know, in the springtime when we're calving, we are elbows deep in afterbirth because we had to pull a calf out in the, you know, we feed cattle and so we send cattle to the processing plant to be processed often. Yesterday I was at a feedlot where they finished track cattle and those cattle get on a trailer to go to be turned into hamburger and steaks that we eat. So I, and right now it's green, it's July, it's beautiful in Nebraska right now. And we saw the earth get greener this spring and then in, you know, in a couple months when it's fall everything kind of dies off and we go into winter.

Hannah Borg [00:40:56] And so to see that rhythm of life and death and the seasons change gives you appreciation for everything. I guess yesterday it was just the most beautiful, beautiful day. You know, everything's green. The sky was bright blue with big old white fluffy clouds and it was about 60 degrees and I was outside all day and over and over in my head I was like, this is so pretty. Like I'm so grateful to be on this farm right now because I know how crappy it can get here in Nebraska. And so I worked really hard unfreezing vents and unfreezing a lot of crap this winter to enjoy a day like yesterday. And so just having, just knowing how the seasons changed, being in it, because if I lived in town I probably wouldn't have to work as hard. You work a different kind of hard in town, but I just appreciate, you know, the seasons of life, the seasons of green even higher than maybe I wouldn't if I didn't see those seasons of, you know, dead grass and empty fields. And it just, I, I'm terrible about bringing the point back to where I started.

Vance Crowe [00:42:11] I mean like what you're saying,

Hannah Borg [00:42:11] Didn't appreciate things

Vance Crowe [00:42:12] To, to me one of the things that you get when you're around the agriculture industry, so I think a lot of people forget, there are really only three stages in life. There's the pre reproductive, you're a child, you're kind of in the garden of Ed and you're learning about how things work, then you're in the reproductive phase and that's actually a relatively short period of time for humans. It's, you know, somewhere between let's say 16 to 35, something like that. And now we have this post reproductive phase, which it could be 40, 60 years, right? It could be really long time. But like if you're living in the city, not only do you not care what the weather is because the weather has so little bearing on your life, I think you can begin to be separated from the seasons. And that separation from the seasons that you're talking about, I think has cultural ramifications. I, the lot of what I've kind of picked up in the last few years, because I've had the chance of working so much closer with ag, is there's just a bunch of fundamental things about what it is to be human that we left about 60, 70, 80 years ago. And I think that's a big part of why there is so much conflict between the people living in the countryside and the people living in the cities and their values being so radically different. Like if you're divorced from the seasons and you're divorced from the weather, it it, you're a different kind of human than than the human that has to be aware of these things.

Hannah Borg [00:43:41] Yeah, and I experienced that in college. I went and lived in Lincoln for four years and I still went back home to the farm very often, but even my weeks away, you know, I became out of touch really quick and so I sympathize with people who are, are, are, are out of touch because there's so much joy in seeing the seasons change. And you know, right now we're pretty dry in our area so when it rains you better believe it. We will be the happiest people because we value that rain. Now if I didn't live on the farm and I lived in town, that rain day might interfere with what I was gonna do that day. It might interfere with, you know, an outdoor party or whatever and it might, you know, it might be frustrating that it rain that day. Whereas when it rains for us, we shut down and enjoy it. We, you know, do shop projects or do office work or even maybe take the day a little bit slower, go visit the neighbors eight o'clock the day after it rains. My dad's already called his group of friends to ask how much rain they got. 'cause you know, you've gotta compare north of town probably gets a little bit different than south of town, things like that. So I just, I just think that, I mean obviously I'm biased, but I think you can experience a higher level of joy because you get to see how things change. But there's also a deeper valley, valley of darkness because on the dry years, which this, this year is getting really dry, it hurts a lot.

Hannah Borg [00:45:12] Last year was a pretty good year and so we were thankful for that. But this year, you know, moods and temperaments aren't to the extent of what they were last year because things are drier and that, that's so regionally and, and I'm not speaking for the ag industry as a whole obviously, but I just, I just am joyful just when it a beautiful day like yesterday and I don't know if I could appreciate it to the extent that I could if I didn't see all the hard work in the winter and fall that goes into enjoying a day like yesterday.

Vance Crowe [00:45:45] I think that one of the things that we're hitting on here is like there's a, there's a deep value to heterogeneity, right? Where things change and they're different. And one of the things that happens when you move into the city is that you have all of those peaks and valleys that you were talking about smoothed out to some degree. But there's a memory in it for you. Last year was rainy, this year was dry. And because you have that variation, there's something to remember for people that have had all those peaks and valleys all smoothed out there. It's not that they're doing anything wrong, there's just not much to remember there.

Hannah Borg [00:46:21] No, and this is not a knock on people who live in the city. 'cause honestly, when I lived in the city and I lived five minutes from the grocery store, I could be cooking and I forgot something and I could just go to the grocery store and come back while my food was still in the oven. Here you have to be a little bit more st strategic when you're going to town. Town is 10 minutes away for us, you know, to the local lumber store. If we're gonna go grocery shopping, it's 20 minutes away, but if we're gonna go to Sam's Club, we're gonna go a half an hour away. So there's a lot of conveniences. That's why cities, you know, are formed. There's conveniences there that make sense. And we rely on people in cities, you know, anytime we all of, you know, all the companies that we work with are based in a city and they are employees that we work with are quote unquote city people. So again, we can't function without those city people. They can't function without us. But as that gap gets farther and farther away from people being off the farm and not even having any of farm experience, that's starting to make our jobs harder because those people who don't have any city or farm experience are making rules and regulations that are getting really hard for us to follow and getting in the way of some of our day-to-day practices. So if you know people who don't have that farm experience, I just wish they were a little softer and had a a little bit more appreciation for the people like me and my neighbors and what we do and not just hammer down and say, I want my food to do this and say this label now, yes, there are those people who live in the cities who are not connected to our farm.

Hannah Borg [00:48:00] They are our customers and they drive what we do. Sometimes it's a little aggressive sometimes we, we still, we have a hundred over a hundred years of farming experience. It's in our blood, it's in everything that we do. And when, you know, people in the legislature are trying to make rules for us to follow, it's hard to respect that sometimes because that disconnect is so deep.

Vance Crowe [00:48:28] So let's talk about that. What are some of the, excuse me, what are some of the things that have been going on that you think people in the city, they're trying to do something good by putting in a regulation, but that it's ramifications are not fully understood by the people putting the rule in?

Hannah Borg [00:48:45] So I'm gonna tiptoe a little bit 'cause I'm not, I'm not sure if I'm the perfect person to talk on this, but right now, from my perspective, sustainability is kind of a religion, right? All these companies, you go, you go to a website and you can click a button and you can say, I want my clothes to be sustainably sourced. And I value sustainability so much. You know, my family hasn't been perfect in the sense of like, you know, 30 years ago we were probably, or you know, 30, 35 years ago, my family adopted no-till. So we've been no tilling our ground, which means the only thing that we do in our fields is we plant, we spray, we harvest. We're not tearing up the soil, we're not harming it. We leave the trash, which is all the leaves and foliage that comes out of the combine on the field. We don't touch that. So a lot of times when companies are talking about going sustainability, they're talking about going no-till. And it's like, hey, we've been doing that for 35 years. At one point we did till our fields, we did dis our fields, but we quickly learned that's not good for it. There's so in the, in the religion of sustainability, they talk like farmers are starting at zero, we're starting at ground zero, we've never been sustainable and all of a sudden we gotta make ourselves sustainable. Well sometimes they forget to factor in financial, you know, sustainability also means being pro profitable, which sometimes is uncomfortable to talk about.

Hannah Borg [00:50:20] We we're a family farm, we are all the feel good things, but we have to be pro profitable and we can't be sustainable without being profitable. So right now something that is really pushed is cover crops. There's a lot of value for cover crops, but cover crops is not just a bandaid solution to solve all of our sustainability. So we plant cover crops, but just yesterday we plant cover crops where we chop silage. 'cause where you chop silage, you're taking the whole ear, you're taking the whole stock and not leaving anything behind. So the, so you're talking

Vance Crowe [00:50:51] About it with corn, you're, you're

Hannah Borg [00:50:53] Yes, yes. Corn silage.

Vance Crowe [00:50:54] And what do people use silage for? Just for anybody that doesn't know

Hannah Borg [00:50:57] We feed cattle. It's a big part of our cattle ration because it has, it's just good earlage foliage, all the things. And so when we chop silage, that's taking the whole stock and not, and chopping it up until it almost looks like salad. It's cow salad essentially. Cattle salad. That's what the label on the bag. When you plant silage corn, it says cow salad. So whoever did that marketing, I appreciate you. So chopping silage, nothing comes out the back. The, the field is bare. So then we plant cover crop because we don't want any runoff water runoff on our hills. We're pretty hilly here or we don't want, you know, big dust storm or whatever. But this year it's really dry. And so where the cover crop is, the corn is struggling more than where the cover crop wasn't because that cover crop is taking those, that moisture that the corn needs right now. So then you gotta play the game of like, is it going to be, what year is it gonna be dry year? So last year it didn't necessarily rain a lot, but two years ago it rained a lot and we had a lot of subsoil moisture. So that's why last year was still good. 'cause our soils were still wet. Now this year we've used up all that subsoil moisture and it's not raining, so we're dry this year. So it's just hard when people who are not connected to the farm day to day in production comes and say, you need to do this, this, and this, and this is gonna solve all the sustainability issues.

Hannah Borg [00:52:28] Well that's not the case because our area looks different than, you know, you go an hour west of us, almost two hours west of us and you hit the Sandhills in Nebraska, which is totally different ecosystem and they manage their fields and pastures and land way differently than we do. And you go to Iowa, the soil is way different and you go, you know, anywhere, it doesn't take too far to go and find different soils and different management. So it's just hard to have a conversation of sustainability and talk broadly because it really depends on specifically down to the field, how has it been managed the last 30 years? What is profitable for this field? It's just a hard one, one stamp and it's gonna solve all of our sustainability issues.

Vance Crowe [00:53:17] Yeah, and I think even just the term sustainability that is therein lies the challenge. It's, it's he who controls the definition controls the argument. And so if you say this is what sustainability is and now everybody has to meet that bar, and like you said, well that, that might be right on that field, but this field over here is totally different. And, but if you're just a consumer, really what you want is, is this good? Is this okay? Yeah, is this the right thing? And I just want somebody that I can trust to tell me that this is the right thing. And there's a lot of marketing dollars to be made and a lot of sales to be made by having people argue over which is the right one. And it, and in order to know the right answer, you have to get into such specificity that it, it would seem absurd to the consumer where they would just be like, I don't need to know that. I just wanna know, is it good or is it bad? Yes. And I don't, I don't see how that will ever be overcome. I think it will be a forever challenge that will be fought between. And

Hannah Borg [00:54:15] That challenge is good. Different

Vance Crowe [00:54:16] Perspectives good. Yeah, because

Hannah Borg [00:54:17] We're, it's always pushing us to be better, but how fast can we adopt things when it's gonna, you know, get in the way of productivity or not be profitable? So in fact, I kind of feel victim for the marketing aspect not too long ago. So we've all watched a Netflix documentary and either felt really good about what they were talking about for, felt really bad. Well I've watched all the farming documentaries and none of them really portray what we do in accurate light. So I recently watched a documentary, I think it was called Sea, spear Sea, it was on commercial fishing and it just painted them in a terrible light. And then I, I got to the end of it and looked, I don't even like fish, but I'm not going to eat any more of it. Well then I got on Instagram and I followed, I, you know, things were being shared about this is not accurate. And I started following someone who does a family that does commercial fishing and they were talking about everything that they do. I was like, come on Hannah, be better than this. Like, I don't like when people fall victims of watching a Netflix documentary on farming that's inaccurate. And yet I just fell for one, just blindly believed everything. Now I'm sure that documentary has a lot of truth to it, just like a lot of the farming documentaries that we see, but there's a lot of inaccuracies that were painted as well. And so even as someone I know a lot about corn and cattle, but I know nothing about commercial fishing. And that was an opportunity for me to open my eyes and see ea how easily it is to fall. But another thing about agriculture, like I just said, I am very knowledgeable in a sense of, I know how crops and, and cattle are grown, but I know nothing about how fruits and nuts and you know, wheat.

Hannah Borg [00:56:02] I don't, I don't know how wheat is processed into flour. I still don't know a lot where a lot of my food comes from if we wanna use that term. I'm just trusting that it's families like mine that are doing the best that they can with the tools they have to make a healthy product, healthy and safe product that gets to the grocery store. Sometimes I fall victim to the marketing tactic tactics as well. 'cause as a communication student, I can appreciate good branding and good marketing. And so when I go to the grocery store even I'm confused sometimes and it's like, even with the, my knowledge that I have, I still have a lot to learn. I still am overwhelmed sometimes. So I feel for those people that are asking the questions 'cause they just want to make the best choice for their family. And it is very confusing. And I'm not, I'm not sure how we get to the point of a hundred. Well, we'll never have a hundred percent trust, but I'm not sure how we get to the point where ag is not painted in a bad light. And where people can go to the grocery store confident that whatever they choose is going to be safe and healthy. Do you have any insight on that? Like, do you feel even with your depth of knowledge, do you ever get stuck in like, man, I'm, I'm not exactly sure which direction to choose or go with this?

Vance Crowe [00:57:21] Well, so it, that's funny you would ask this. So I often talk about what you're describing is the Dunning Kruger effect, right? You've watched one or two documentaries, you've read one book. And so you think we have this sense that like you, the confidence that you're gonna have in, in what you know happens like over time I study a little bit, I get a little more confident, I study a little more, I get a little more confident. But that's not actually what happens. What happens is when you first learn about something, your confidence spikes. You read one book or watch one movie and then it, what happens is eventually you hit a point that the more you study something, all of a sudden it comes in conflict with what you thought you already knew. And so your confidence goes down and that makes you feel really uncomfortable. That's cognitive dissonance where you're like, oh no, something isn't right. And most of the time is

Hannah Borg [00:58:07] That the saying, the more you know, the more you don't know. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:58:10] Exactly. Exactly. Because like the more that you start studying, you eventually get to a point, you know, you're two years in on chicken farming and you feel like I may never hit the bottom of where, where there is to know, right? So you, you have to like go through this very painful process of the more that I'm learning, the less it feels like. I understand the, the pro is that the stunning Kruger effect, these two social scientists figured out if you keep studying for long enough, eventually your confidence starts to go back up about what you know. And I would say the, since I have had such a vast experience, I've been invited to go out and speak with people that are tree nut farmers and berries and eggs and all these things. So I've had a chance to meet them all. I overly simplify the good guys versus the bad guys. And the best example I can have is I used to think that the term organic, like I actively went away from it. Like if something said organic, I didn't want anything to do with it because those people were making money off of, you know, lies and, and it's just not right. Well we had organic chicken a couple of months ago from the store 'cause it was out of this other kind that I normally get. And we had it and it was awesome. Now, I don't think that it had anything to do with like the food that it was raised. I think they were actually able to raise it to the right size and to do these other things. So I don't, like, I'm not now going out and changing my opinion on organic chicken as a whole, but I do know that one particular brand is really good and I don't really care that they call it organic.

Vance Crowe [00:59:44] I just want the one that was really, really good. Yeah. And that was hard for me. I remember having to back off some of the things I'd told my wife about organic or about, you know, the different ways they labeled chicken. And so it was really good for me to remember like, hey, it's not just marketing on one side that's, that's tilting the, the floor. It's, it's everybody. Yeah. And I

Hannah Borg [01:00:04] Think like

Vance Crowe [01:00:05] To your, to your point about, you know, will this go on forever? I think it goes on in any domain where there are options where you can say, I could buy this thing or I could buy that thing. Right? There's a reason that everybody knows the, the name Foxcon and it's because the people that aren't making Apple iPhones in those foxcon factories are making them somewhere else. And it really benefits them if they think hey slave labor and people that are killing themselves are doing it because at the Apple factories, but not at our Android factories. Right? So this goes on in every domain that there is and if it isn't going on, it's going to soon, as soon as there's a competitor in a marketplace.

Hannah Borg [01:00:43] Yeah. To the organic point. And I, I've kind of backed off a little bit on it too because I vividly remember you used to be able to drive down the road and you could point that is an organic field that is not an organic field. Because when the, when the customer wanted those more organic labels, people just assume you, you stopped spraying your, spraying your fields and using those tools, those fields had weeds in 'em and they did not look good. And so the, the farmer, you know, the, you know, the lifelong farmer put a wall up because those fields do not look good. Therefore the product is not good 'cause it's not as consistent or it might, you know, whatever. It just, it did not look good, but it didn't have any sprays on it or, you know, it wasn't used any of those insecticides or pesticides. So it's again, has a negative connotation to it. Now over time, those organic practices have been honed in a little bit and you, you can't tell, hardly tell an organic field from not, but organic field and I'm, I'm no expert, like I don't, I don't, we don't grow, grow organic. So I'm not sure exactly what that is, but you could all, you used to what I'm saying, you used to be able to see what an organic field is and as someone who takes pride in how our place is cleaned up and our fields are clean and whatnot, and you put it next to one of our fields is like, well I'm gonna prefer the clean field with no weeds, no bugs, because that that's what we value as, you know, good consistent crop.

Hannah Borg [01:02:16] So that has changed over time. Organic also is like a, a word for like we're just having, or an organic conversation. We're, you know, organic is not bad, but from a marketing aspect, when organic puts down conventional, it's like, well listen up. That's your preference. Let's not put, let's not put our label down for pursuit of a better label. So that's where I think farmers had struggled with organic, but now there's more good opportunities you can make money doing that. The practices are better. And that's, again, I can't ever wrap it up, Ty.

Vance Crowe [01:02:58] It's really good to be, it's really good to just say like, I, I think this

Hannah Borg [01:03:03] Pod I've learned, yeah, this

Vance Crowe [01:03:03] Podcast has taught me a lot about, like, I generally have a Disneyland understanding of basically everything. Like everything from Christopher Columbus to how crops are grown to like every bit of information that I feel really confident about. If you probed it just a little bit, like it all falls apart. So yeah, I I like the phrase strong opinions loosely held.

Hannah Borg [01:03:27] Yes.

Vance Crowe [01:03:27] And like, it's okay to be passionate about something, but if you confront information that makes you go like, ah, that doesn't seem quite right, it's good to like just set it down and, and, and pick up a new way of thinking.

Hannah Borg [01:03:38] Yeah. I'm learning not to, you know, as we get older weLearn things, right, I'm learning not to just blindly believe everything I'm told. And that seems simple. But to be actively listening to things, not to question everything like the trust, but verify, verify of just like, I'm not gonna fall for the marketing first time I wanna, I wanna, you know, kind of take time to learn about it. And that's what I hope that people are customers. Something I've actively tried to remove from my language is consumers. Because I don't like the saying we need to educate our consumers because I'm a consumer. Let's say I love music, I'm a big consumer of music. I don't wanna be educated on music and the, the business aspect of how Nashville works, I don't wanna be educated on anything. I'd love to learn and listen to podcasts and organically learn more about the business. But I don't wanna be educated and I don't wanna be called a consumer because I'm your customer. I'm paying that subscription fee every month to listen to pre to music without listening for ads. So when I'm talking about, you know, the city people, they are our customers. They, they consume our product, but they are the customers walking into the store making a decision. Do I want organic or conventional? And both is good. One is not better than the other, but some people value one more than the other. So we will stay in our lane, we're going to use the practices and that works for our farm that is sustainable because we can, we, you know, we wanna plant a crop every year.

Hannah Borg [01:05:17] We wanna harvest the crop every year for other families and other businesses that will be organic because you also have the infrastructure around it. So there's not a lot of organic fields around us. Because if you were to go, go or grow corn that is organic to go to a dairy, you're gonna have, you gotta have dairy

Vance Crowe [01:05:35] To get to. Yeah.

Hannah Borg [01:05:36] Yes. So that's, you know, and that's why corn and soybeans are grown in our area because we have the infrastructure to process that. We have the livestock to eat the corn and you know, the soybean meal. So, you know, sometimes when we talk, sometimes people are like, well why do you only grow corn and soybeans? Well, it's like, I, I don't know, maybe we could grow cotton here. I have no idea. I know nothing about growing cotton. I know nothing about growing anything besides corn and soybeans. Maybe we have the environment to grow something else, but we don't have the infrastructure for it. So that's like, you know, maybe we could grow organic, but we don't have anywhere to take it without costing us more money to haul it there than what it is to gain that profit from it.

Vance Crowe [01:06:20] So Hannah, in, in wrapping up, I'm interested, it's not often that I have a young woman that's on the farm that to be able to ask this, what is like the young social scene like going on right now? Are you going to concerts, do you date? Do you, like how does this all work in, in small town Nebraska?

Hannah Borg [01:06:40] I would've put money that you were gonna ask me that question. 'cause that's a very common question that I get. So it's not gonna look like someone who's 24 and lives in the city. I, I have friends, I'm social, I go out, but it looks differently. You know, last year when, you know, people shut down their lives and did quarantine and whatnot, my life did not change at all. We were still able, I mean, church shut down for a little bit, but I still went in to record the service every Sunday. You know, my, my two best friends live a mile up the road. Last weekend they worked till 10 30. I brought them a bushel of bush light and we went and drove around or I shouldn't admit that we were not drinking and driving, but we were, I was not drinking and driving off shoot, but you know, a beer tracking, checking the crops, you know, last year the only main social thing that I didn't really have was concerts. Like I said, I love music. I didn't go go to a concert last year. We still had county fair. So had church events. Like it was, I'm grateful in our small, what we consider a small town life, we didn't feel the impacts like what you probably did in your day-to-day life. So, you know, we, we, we go to the bars. We right now summer ha there's a lot of towns in our area that have their celebrations. So, you know, a town away from us, they're celebrating 150 years of being a town. And so they're bringing a concert in this weekend, pretty pop, my first concert in over a year this weekend and going to the rodeo.

Hannah Borg [01:08:16] And so those are cliche things, but I don't need to go. I, maybe it's because I'm just small town minded. Like I, I find joy in sitting outside and just drinking beer and watching the world go by. I find joy in going to a small town concert. I love county fairs. Dating is different a little bit. There's definitely single young men around this area, not necessarily the caliber that I'm interested in or that I've found. And I, that's not a knock on the people around here. It's just a

Vance Crowe [01:08:53] Little bit, it's a little bit a knock.

Hannah Borg [01:08:56] I mean it in a way of like, I don't know why I mean it in a way, but like, it's just, I haven't found my person yet. My sister, she's dating an amazing guy. So there's definitely people around. But also my first year on the farm was really hard. Like I, I had to live at home for a little bit because housing is really hard to find in our area. The first year of business was so hard. It was just, you know, I, I don't have a lot of memory of my first year on the farm 'cause I was just trials after trials of starting the chicken barn, learning how, you know, we have a hundred motors that run every time we feed. And so they didn't work for a very long time. Consecutively working with our service techs, learning how to do, working with our contract company, learning how to manage that relationship. There's so many aspects of it. Living at home, moving back in with your parents. I live by, I live, you know, 10 miles away from my farm now. But that first year was really hard. Didn't really lift my eyes to do anything. Now this year I, I'm on my local county fair board. I love history. Oh my goodness, I'm a nerd for history and documenting it. So like what you do with the podcast, the Legacy Interviews, I wanna do that through photography and videos because something that inspires me is flipping through my grandma's old photo albums that are all black and white photos. I wanna create those images for families to have for the next a hundred years. So I'm on our heritage organization, we call Heritage Organization board in Wakefield.

Hannah Borg [01:10:30] I'm on our trustees board. So I'm involved in our community and through that, like I was in a bowling league this winter and we have a strong optimist group in my hometown. And so a lot of, it's a lot of, you know, 30 thirties and forties people, late twenties with younger kids. So I, I'm definitely like one of the few single people in there. But what I'm trying to say is like, we're not deprived of social things to do out here. It's different and we, I value, you know, people who live in the city might be bored out here, but I'm overwhelmed when I go to the city. I don't find joy in going to a park that's super busy and taking my dog out on a walk. Like I find joy in going to my small town bar and seeing my neighbors. So it's just a different kind of social preferences.

Vance Crowe [01:11:21] Hannah, what a wonderful answer. I had no idea what you were gonna say, but I figured it would probably be pretty creative because this has been a fantastic conversation. If people were interested, they wanted to learn more about you or your farm or they wanted, they wanted to see your photography, how could they go about doing that?

Hannah Borg [01:11:38] So you can find me on social media at, it's Hannah Borg, ITS Hannah Borg. I'm working on a website. So like a lot of people, I'm terrible about talking to myself about myself. So I'm going against every single fiber my being when it comes to marketing communication when it comes to my business, I don't wanna have any social pages for it and whatnot. 'cause I really wanna grow organically through word of mouth and not be motivated to, you know, do sessions or take pictures just based off of a good caption or just based off of like, oh it's gonna get a bunch of likes on social media. I really wanna create images for families working together that aren't posed of 'em. You know, the multi-generations working together that will last, that will go in a photo album and that will last for many more years to come. So I'm kind of working on that right now. I just kind of do small family stuff in my area. I love taking pictures of our own livestock, just kind of a craft that I've been working on. So I guess just follow me on social media and eventually you'll find me posts about my website hopefully at the end of the summer. So I am, I'm sometimes active. I show farms thing, I show things on the farm. Sometimes I'm not, but I'm not, I'm not your advocate. Like I don't really do, I just post pretty pictures from the farm. I don't always tell what we're doing. Just like here's, here's a picture of us feeding cattle. It's pretty, I enjoy the sounds. Hope you enjoy it too.

Vance Crowe [01:13:06] Well, I'm sure there are a lot of people that'll like to check that out. Hanna Borg, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Hannah Borg [01:13:12] Thank you so much for having me.

Vance Crowe [01:13:14] Thanks so much for checking out this interview. I hope you'll check out the links below to Hannah's Social Media. She was a very interesting person. We talked about the Legacy Interviews. If you are interested in having me interview one of your loved ones or maybe even you, you wanna leave something behind for your family, just go to store dot Articulate Ventures where you can book it either as a one hour zoom call or you can, if you're in the St. Louis area, come into the studio and do it right here. We'd love to have you and you can find out more at store dot Articulate Ventures. Alright, well we'll be back next week with another interview.