Jason Mauck: The dangers of frost, thinking differently, hosting Woodstock

Vance Crowe [00:00:02] As the crow flies on the Vance Crowe podcast, Jason Mauck, welcome back to the podcast.

Jason Mauck [00:00:12] Thank you. Don't drag the mal. Make it. Oh, it's mock.

Vance Crowe [00:00:16] Mock. Oh

Jason Mauck [00:00:17] Yeah, mock, yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:00:21] You know, it's funny because I don't speak to you very often, but yet I see your stuff all the time online. And so you get a phrase in your, in your mind, like, the way a character's name in a book should sound. And I, I never hear you pronounce your own name. And so you just create this like, I, I'm sure I mispronounce basically everybody's name on Twitter.

Jason Mauck [00:00:43] Yours is easy. So it's just as the crow flies, right?

Vance Crowe [00:00:46] Yeah. So what in the hell man? You're a farmer and you are sitting indoors right now. Shouldn't you be hammered down, planting, going all, all out?

Jason Mauck [00:00:55] We're pretty much done, Elise. We were until this frost on the way in. I was trying to see the damage and I think it's gonna be a little scattered. But yeah, I mean if this, I don't know if you're into weather as much as I am, but this was a pretty historic cold snap as far as the region. And a lot of these people that got after these crops really early are gonna see a lot of damage.

Vance Crowe [00:01:19] What kinda damage does frost do to a plant? I mean, I know I went out and covered my tomato plants up last night, but I don't really know why.

Jason Mauck [00:01:27] Yeah, so it just, it just makes it have basically a massive heart attack on the cellular level. And it all depends on its growth stage. You know, with, with wheat, once it gets close to flowering, it's very sensitive beans. Coline opens up corn growing point, which is like V four. So corn is, you can take a freeze, it just burns off. 'cause the growing point's underground, but it all depends on the plant size. So if this had happened, say 10 days from now, it'd be massive. Like everyone would replant everything. But we're just a few days from an apocalypse, but there's gonna be a lot of replanting

Vance Crowe [00:02:02] Really. I mean, I, yeah, I had no idea. This is, I mean, this is the consequence of

Jason Mauck [00:02:07] Every time

Vance Crowe [00:02:08] All coronavirus all the time is because you forget like life has moved on and, and nothing is static. Just because the world doesn't seem to be moving doesn't mean it's not.

Jason Mauck [00:02:18] Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, this spring was completely different than last year. Last year we didn't turn a wheel till June 4th and this year, ideal conditions, everything was went in the ground well across the whole region, which is probably why you saw commodities tank even harder. You know, we cranked the corn in the ground early and you really got this responsive going

Vance Crowe [00:02:42] In. What would the signals to you that you could get in earlier than you usual? Now

Jason Mauck [00:02:47] It's just as simple as getting outta your truck and the shovel and seeing how wet it was. I mean, we just, we just have not received the heavy rains. You know, last year we probably had 10 or 12 inches of, of rainfall in, in April and May, our water table was right to the surface and everyone was getting stuck everywhere. And we've gotten maybe one eighth of precipitation in the last couple months.

Vance Crowe [00:03:10] So everybody's life, you know, runs on gambles and chances and you don't know what's gonna happen. But there's gotta be something to being a farmer where you walk out in the morning, a couple of, you know, days or weeks after you're done planning and you like have that pit in your stomach that you maybe made a mistake. What, what goes on in your mind as, as you wake up in the morning, knowing there could have been a bad frost?

Jason Mauck [00:03:36] I don't know. It just, it just is what it is. It's everything. You know, I got this Pareto thing behind me, everything's just a percentage thing to me, so it's not gonna be like everything's bad. But you know, you're, as you go across the land, you got black bottoms that'll be a little bit colder and you just know you gotta go out and scout and figure it out. But we're still in a great position as far as our crop yields and our stands where we're at. But you just gotta take everything. As I made the decision that day, and as a farmer, all you can do is put the seed in the ground in fit conditions and hope it works out. I mean, there are no guarantees in this business whatsoever.

Vance Crowe [00:04:15] So you are always doing something weird with your fields. You're always like pushing the envelope. What are you doing this year? What did you plant? What's, what are you looking for,

Jason Mauck [00:04:23] Man, we are doing all kinds of things and this dry spell has allowed me to put it all in and I'm super excited. So, you know, four or five years ago I started on this wheat soybean relay and we scaled that up. We scaled at times about five this year.

Vance Crowe [00:04:38] What does that mean? You gotta slow this way down, man. What, what does that mean?

Jason Mauck [00:04:41] Okay, so wheat and soybeans is, we plant really wide wheat in 60 inch rows and then we plant soybeans in between it. And they grow together for about 80 days. And we use the wheat for kind of this root exude sugars in the system, feed the biology, wheat control thing, and, and through trial and error, kind of where we're at. And, and it looked really good. And then we started messing with corn and soybeans where we grow them together. And now we're starting to use cover crops like rye. We, we have a community garden where we're, we're grow rye real tall and we're gonna push it down and we're planting pumpkins between sweet corn. We just picked up an organic farm, so we did all the, we've got it all ready to go. We're gonna put a cover crop in there and we're gonna have a chicken pop and chicken pot. So we're gonna have chicken tractors, which are these mobile chicken coops that manage the vegetation and they're going in an organic sense instead of relying on tillage. We want to use animals to control the vegetation and the, and the fertility. I could go on and on and on. We have, well,

Vance Crowe [00:05:47] I mean, it seems like you're opt you're not optimizing for efficiency necessarily here. It sounds like you're doing something different, like you're not, I mean, a lot of corn and soybean farmers in the Midwest, they are going hammer down to try and get as high a yield in soybeans as they possibly can. It doesn't sound like that is what you are trying to do. You're not hammering down in that same way.

Jason Mauck [00:06:10] Well, let's put it this way, Vance. Okay, 97 million acres of corn. There's probably gonna be some people that flip flop around. I know locally they did. So let's say we're at 92 million, there might be 75 million acres of corn that are less profitable together. 75 million acres than one acre of sweet corn. You know why

Vance Crowe [00:06:34] Know? No. Why?

Jason Mauck [00:06:35] Because every one of those 75 million acres lose money.

Vance Crowe [00:06:40] How do, how what do you mean they lose money? These corn? I mean like,

Jason Mauck [00:06:43] Okay, it might average 2 20, 220 bushels an acre, but how much is a bushel of corn worth?

Vance Crowe [00:06:49] Yeah, not, not very much right now.

Jason Mauck [00:06:50] 2 82. So let's say they lose, you know, you can, you can have piles and piles and trains and trains and trains and piles and piles if there's no animals to eat it. And ethanol goes down. And I mean, the reality we live in today is we like, I, like I said earlier, we had a wreck on the interstate. There are no exits and we're just, we're sitting here. So I'm not focused so much on productivity on these projects as I am learning and then getting better the next year. See what works and come up with new ideas. I think, I think farmers need customers. The, the, the top of the list customers. What does that

Vance Crowe [00:07:35] Mean when you say farmers need customers? I mean they, they have 'em, grain elevators, they go in there, they, they take a price and then they weigh their their thing and dump their soybeans. That's their customer, right?

Jason Mauck [00:07:48] Yeah. But it's, it's, it's so connected that it's disconnected. I mean we, we became so good at our craft that we've, we've just completely burned those bridges between us and the customer. And now we do this thing called advocating. But you know, I think we're getting so far removed that we need this, you know, million dollar planner to get the exact down pressure in this exact soil to, to, to rate, to go to gain five or 10 bushels. But are we eating, do you sit down and eat GMO number two corn? Like do you pour milk on it and go, mm, this is good.

Vance Crowe [00:08:31] No, I don't. Yeah,

Jason Mauck [00:08:33] No you don't. But would, would you eat sweet corn? Would you eat, would you, would you, you know, popcorn, would you, you know, I think, I don't know. I I'm not, I know I'm going on and on here, but I'm not looking for like an answer for everyone. I'm just looking for an answer for our farm. I, I had a guy talk at the field day last year, said, feed your family. Don't worry about feeding the world.

Vance Crowe [00:08:57] I mean, I, there's a humility to that that is, is probably really healthy right now. Like, and I talked about this with Rob Fraley when he came on the former chief technology officer of Monsanto. I really had, had come very awkwardly to Monsanto where I was like, ah, they're, they're bad, they're evil. And then once I got in there, I was like, Hey, wait a second, we are feeding a lot of people. I like efficiency. I really like this thing hammered down. But then you see a situation like this and you realize, hey, wait a second, it can get too big or too efficient or too optimized for one thing, not imagining that everything could change really, really fast. And I really was humbled by that. So I, I take what you're saying about like, I want to feed my fa family. That's a legit way to look at the world.

Jason Mauck [00:09:50] Yeah. And it's not so much as, it's not so much about the efficiency. You know, my grandpa always said, if you lose your efficiency, you lose your ass. So there is importance to that, but it's more of what we were talking about earlier, how when you start subsidizing, you know, when you see it in the hospitals and the universities and now commodities, we've, we've robbed acres from all these diverse crops and funneled that into corn and beans and we've become this cookie cutter society where we make this piece of equipment to do this. And, and all these has risen and it's, it's really screwed up the true supply and demand of what we should be producing by all these rules and regulations and, and safety nets and all this stuff. So, you know, I would argue that we can take all this technology and forethought and move it to different sectors and, and not, you know, not take a step back. But it's good to kind of have a checks and balances and kind of maybe lay off the gas pedal on, on helping people out. It's not gonna be good to just, you know, print money, give it all to the farmers and say, Hey, grow some more corn next year. And, you know, maybe we need to look at growing some different stuff and changing some of these, you know, diverse logistical channels a little bit.

Vance Crowe [00:11:11] Who are your customers? Who, who buys from you?

Jason Mauck [00:11:14] So from a corn and soybean standpoint, all of our corn goes to a feed mill. So we grow, grow pigs for Tyson. There's a feed mill about three miles north of my house that I'm on a board of directors for. And we feed about, we were feeding about a quarter million pigs there. There's no railroad tracks that goes through this, this grain elevator, which is very rare in our area, usually, you know, where we take our beans, it goes on a rail. So everything is vertically integrated going into livestock feed there. Now, since we've had a lot of competition in that space, there's been feed mills that went and been built in the last three or five years. So we've lost the, a number of pigs that we've fed, but we've created this new product where we're feeding show pigs. There's a lot more margin in that. So a company called Linder Feeds we supply for in a bagged variety. So we're bagging a lot. So a lot of the corn that we produce is either going in a confined feeding operation, but now a lot of it's going into a 50 pound bag for, you know, little Margaret to win the county fair.

Vance Crowe [00:12:28] So that actually is specialized then. I mean, just, just that, yep. That aspect of it is not doing direct commodity selling.

Jason Mauck [00:12:37] Yep, it is, it is nice. And we enjoy one of the highest bases in the whole corn belt in this area. We've got tons of live stock just north and west of us in eastern Indiana and northwest Ohio. And you know, like this show pig thing is kind of a big deal around here.

Vance Crowe [00:12:55] You know, I've thought about you quite a bit during the coronavirus because one of the things that I, I realized when I met you in person is that you think very differently than other people. And it's not that you don't care what other people think, it's that you don't notice it. And I think that there's something to be said for that in being swept up in this, in this time that we're in right now with Coronavirus. Like how is it that you keep yourself from free from taking one narrative and just accepting it? Because I think we're all really vulnerable to that. But you seem to be slippery, man. You don't, you don't get stuck in one train.

Jason Mauck [00:13:35] I have, honestly, I'm very fortunate, you know, the backstory is both my sides of my family both farmed and my grandfather was ultra conservative. So we're just, we're just not bound, we're not a leveraged operation. And something happened to me when I lost my father in 2010. I talked about the emotional side, but I had a landscape business and I was kind of leveraged. I had a house and I, I didn't have a wife and kids yet, but I had several notes with equipment and all this stuff. And they basically, my family asked me, Hey, come to the farm. And I'm like, well, shit, I got a half million dollar landscape business. I'm making good money, but I got all these notes. So I was kind of growing and I kind of got just stuck with this debt. So I had to just be a workaholic for about two years and kept that going while I farmed. And at that point I did not ever want to be in a position where I was married to anything. So that's why I wrote this on the board, this Pareto principle is take the, take the, get the joke and move on. So I've been fascinated, I had this goal a couple years ago to have 10 entities that contribute over $10,000. So I am a serial entrepreneur on a small scale. So I really like adversity somewhat because it allows you to not be, if I had an operation where I had this balance sheet full of debt, then I would be freaking out because I've, I'm married to it.

Jason Mauck [00:15:13] But if you can use old equipment that's paid for and not have high cash rent, and then you can change around and, and be more an observer, a listener than fighting to continue on. Does that make much sense?

Vance Crowe [00:15:29] Oh, a hundred percent. So I mean if you're, if you have distance from needing to make decisions right now, then then you're able to have a wider perspective on, on what you're looking at and what you think is important. It it allows you to recalibrate.

Jason Mauck [00:15:43] Yep. And this whole Twitter thing that I started three or four years ago is also added value. And to me being an experimenter and I have had no more joy than seeing all these people on Twitter start to do these different things and tag me and they're doing it and, and now I feel like I have this bandwidth, okay, now that this is working that we're doing, we're gonna do this and then we're gonna share that. And you know, part of that formulation is, you know, I'm gonna have a bigger, better stage to talk about it on. And there's value in that.

Vance Crowe [00:16:26] You know, there's a term that Kate Crosby came up with, I think, you know, Kate, she, she calls it the whale pod, which is the ability that we now have with social media and podcasts and, and Twitter, that you can have a group of friends that are dispersed across a vast space and you can communicate what are you seeing, where you're at, what are you seeing, where you're at, you're all working together, but you're all your own whale somewhere out in the ocean. And I, it to me, that's what it seems like you've done with Twitter is you've created a really diverse whale pod all over the place.

Jason Mauck [00:17:02] One thing I love, I I, I called Jared McDaniel like six weeks ago and I was talking about this meat crisis, you know, and then I wasn't on Twitter 'cause I was working and I seen that he took his studio and he is selling meat out of it. And I don't know if I had anything to do with that or not, but I've had a lot of these cricket conversations with especially people close of like, we need, you need to get a customer, you need to get outta your comfort zone. And a lot of people are starting to think differently that, you know what? I can sit here and bitch about the way things are, or I can tomorrow wake up and and make a first step towards this. You know?

Vance Crowe [00:17:44] That's exactly right. And that's what a whale pod ends up telling you to do because you see like all my other friends are getting stuff done, right? Like the guy from Strange Donut was out there delivering donuts. The Ring brothers are are killing a, a steer, having it butchered and and getting meat out to their friends. So you look at people and you say, Hey, if they're getting stuff done, I wanna get stuff done too. And I think one of the best parts about social media is people will show up and give you actual feedback. Not like, Hey, you're an idiot. Hey, stop doing that. Or I disagree with your opinion, but hey, this is a way that I tried it and I got better. That's what I love about it. Like the podcast is opened my network up to people helping me get better on a, on a scale that's hard to even comprehend.

Jason Mauck [00:18:31] And it's, it's so much more personal. You just get, I I think there's like a 10% of people that just completely shut out this stupid fox news talking points, CNN like, I don't need to hear this shit. If I want to hear this shit, I'll turn on the tv. I can just completely shut off the news. Let's talk about what's actually freaking happening, what's relevant in my world, how can I actually mold it and change it and contort it into my future being what I needs to be, not sitting back acting like I'm not in control of, of my own world.

Vance Crowe [00:19:09] Yeah, it's one thing, it's an it, what you need is enough information about the outside world to be changing behaviors that help you succeed in the future. Right? If you're listening to all these like, mainstream news, it's, it's the reason that I started this podcast, you get a normie mindset, you get the middle of the pack, you are not going to have ideas that allow you to think outside of the box and to do things differently. So I want to be away from the normie ideas.

Jason Mauck [00:19:38] Yeah. And I, you know, when I was, when I was probably 16 or 18, there was this a little thing at a, a local restaurant, and this is just an old jank restaurant that hadn't been remodeled since the sixties, but it said, grandpa says, consider the source. And I used to just look at that and, but more recently in all of this, I mean you really saw in the last election, but a really in the last two or three months, you see anything on your Google, you know, your stories when you look at your phone and it is so skewed. Everything is so skewed. You have, I don't know if it's right or left, but one side's just rooting for this thing to just bury everything down to the ground. Another one saying it's not a big deal, you know, the stock market's gonna go up, you know, put your money back here. And everything is so skewed anymore that I really don't believe anything. There's hardly anything with authenticity than other than just me and you talking, you know, it's, I just, I just don't look for the news or anything on my phone as real other than, you know, whether it's the social media platforms where we're showing actually what's going on in my field. I don't want to hear this polished bullshit anymore.

Vance Crowe [00:20:54] Okay. So when you open up your phone in the morning, the first time you're drinking your coffee or whatever, what is the first thing you look up on your phone?

Jason Mauck [00:21:03] I wanna look, yeah, I don't look at Twitter a lot, but I, I wanna see what other farmers are doing. I, I, you know, I, I get thrown promoted things, but I do not spend any time now if I'm, you know, planting and I've got time, then I'll read a couple articles just to, and it's always this feeling of why as I'm reading it, I'm like, yeah, yeah, I just want to see what materials out there. But you can just blatantly see how they're skewing everything. I don't know.

Vance Crowe [00:21:39] So how has Coronavirus impacted your family? You guys? Are you, you got still working and still school or what?

Jason Mauck [00:21:48] Honestly, I love it. I don't love the, the, you know, people are getting sick, but the family time is amazing. My wife needs a break. She teaches and, and people think that she's off work, but she's on Zoom all the time. She still has to meet with parents. But our kids absolutely love it. They're spending time outside. We just got a puppy life. They're gonna remember these days is probably the best days of their life. And that makes me happy.

Vance Crowe [00:22:20] I mean, for the, for the people that are sheltered from the chaos of the economy of all this, it really is a, a special time, right? Like never before have we been like, all right, everybody has to focus on themselves and their home and really like, clean up your room. You're, you're gonna be in the room that you're living in and that's where you're at. So for me and my wife, it's been a good experience. I mean, I got to spend at more than two months with my pregnant wife before we have a baby. Like, so it's a, it's a great preparation time.

Jason Mauck [00:22:51] Yep. Think of all the, like, the conversations you've had that you probably wouldn't ever got to that point

Vance Crowe [00:22:57] Before Thousand.

Jason Mauck [00:22:57] You were busy. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:22:58] Yeah,

Jason Mauck [00:22:59] Yeah. It's, it's been great. And you know, I'm so glad we don't live, you know, in an urban area or something like that. 'cause we can just, you know, get on a gator and go a different direction. It would be pretty bad if I lived in New York City. I couldn't imagine that.

Vance Crowe [00:23:16] Yeah, and I think, so I've had some people on Twitter gimme a really hard time about this, but I believe that there are gonna be people that lived in really urban environments that are gonna try and move out to, at a minimum the suburbs, if not trying to get out to rural America and people show up on my Twitter feed, apparently it makes 'em mad that I, that I think this, the thing is just complete rubbish. But if you've been living in a 500 square foot apartment that looks out on another brick wall, you don't, you're not gonna stay there. If you've been locked up there for two months, you're not gonna suddenly feel like that's home and that's what you wanna do. You're gonna try and stretch and f get free. Maybe not everybody, but a lot more.

Jason Mauck [00:23:54] I think you're touching on where all the opportunity is in ag and where all the pressure is right there. And that's been happening for five or 10 years when Amazon Prime really started to get the subscription base. You know, people are coming to the country and they don't wanna smell pig shit or they don't wanna be slowed down by vehicle and they want shit on their doorstep when they need it right away. And that's putting pressure and it's also giving tons of opportunity for farmers to connect with people and give them what they need. But it is going to change a lot of things and I think that is going to ramp up and speed up in the next few years at a crazy pace.

Vance Crowe [00:24:34] Well, I think you're dead on with the being able to have farms that deliver directly to consumers and people scoff at this and it won't be for everybody. Most people will still keep going to the grocery store, but the number of people, so one third of all Americans live in towns of 10,000 people or less. And if you are living around a city you think, or like a little town of 10,000 or 5,000 people, those people want, they don't, they don't necessarily know a farmer. They didn't necessarily know how to fill up their freezer full of beef this, this spring. But if somebody showed up and was their friend and connected with them and then came around and said, I have a steer to sell you for four grand, I bet you could sell it for four grand and now everybody's happy, guy's, happy to pay way more than market price for the beef and, and you've just made a nice profit.

Jason Mauck [00:25:23] Exactly. And you touched on something that is really gonna be relevant that people are really opening their eyes on is convenience. There's a lot of businesses that have changed their business practices and you know, my wife makes this con comment all the time as I kinda love some of these agreements that these people are, you know, you, you go, we don't eat out a restaurant, but if you can, we go all these places and pull in and they just bring our shit out. And when you look at like freezer beef, you know, a lot of people don't want a thousand pounds of frozen meat in their deep freezer. We've been doing that for five or 10 years and our kids will unplug the deep freezer to charge up their little plastic mobile and it's came undone a couple times and it's been bad. So that's one thing me and Jonathan are, are working on is, is packaging this, this freezer beef down to where a subscription to where you'll be getting it, you know, every two weeks or something like that. You don't have to hold onto that much. And

Vance Crowe [00:26:28] You have to remember that like all the options, one of the things I've noticed is that people that are in the country, they, they think like, oh, somebody wants to get a quarter or a half of beef. Well a a regular person has no idea how much space is that gonna be in my freezer? And you can be like, well it's gonna be about 15 cubic feet. Well, they don't know what a 15 cubic feet are, right? And then if you say, well what, how do you want this cut up? They're like, I don't know, there are burgers, steaks and the other things that my mom used to make, right? They don't know what chops are, flank steak, none of that stuff. But if it's made easy for them to order as though they were ordering off of a menu, they'll do it, man. They'll and they'll pay you top dollar for it.

Jason Mauck [00:27:10] And that's one thing that me and my wife have really found out as we, you know, when we were single, we just go out to eat. We didn't even think about it. But there's so much waste when we go to the grocery store and spend two or $300 of shit we don't eat, you know, the strawberries go bad, this goes bad, we didn't use all this. You, if you get, if you wanna cook for something and, and have a recipe that one dish might cost you $38 because all that shit you have to buy, there's, there's so much efficiency on these meals that come to your house and the proportions and all that stuff. And people are starting to see that, hey, it's so much easier to have a schedule say, you know, we're gonna use Blue Apron I that that's kinda went down, but there's so many of these subscription things, you know, Monday through Thursday and then we'll go out to eat and I think we're gonna see this in the meat market to where people are gonna really want, you know, a t-bone that's vaed and they can and they can put it in their fridge and they can sit there for five days and you know, wet age and they open it up and they, and they enjoy it and they, my

Vance Crowe [00:28:13] Huge, my magic to

Jason Mauck [00:28:14] The bottom of their freezer in its junk

Vance Crowe [00:28:16] A year later. My idea idea on this free on the, on the packaging the beef is put it in sous v drive act things so that way you can take it outta your fridge and drop it in your sous V and it'll cook right there. If you could do that, people would eat beef so much more or any meat that you could do it because then there's no, you don't even have to get your hands messy, but you're having local beef or pork people would love it.

Jason Mauck [00:28:41] Yeah. I don't even know what, what word did you use there,

Vance Crowe [00:28:45] Vid? Oh, this is, I've been telling everybody about this. So vid means under vacuum and it's a style of cooking where you put like meat in a water bath that's like 135 degrees for a burger, let's say. Because what happens is you put that, that burger in a plastic and you suck out all the air. And when you put it into that water bath circulating at 135 degrees, it only, the entire burger is medium rare. So then you leave it in there for 45 minutes to four hours. It doesn't matter the longer you leave it in the softer it'll be, and then you take it out and you go throw it on the grill to get that char and now you have a perfectly cooked, medium rare burger.

Jason Mauck [00:29:25] Okay, that's what, and

Vance Crowe [00:29:26] You can do that with steaks. So

Jason Mauck [00:29:27] V is that what those ribs were? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, now it's coming back to me.

Vance Crowe [00:29:35] And so, so like all you would need is to be able to reach into your fridge and have, because right now if I wanna do vid, I've gotta buy something from the butcher, from the grocer, take it outta the package, put it into my plastic, suck out all the air. But if that was already done for me, that convenience factor and having it be local would be huge, man. I'm telling you

Jason Mauck [00:29:53] It's

Vance Crowe [00:29:53] Million dollar idea right there.

Jason Mauck [00:29:55] Okay, let's do it.

Vance Crowe [00:29:58] So are you selling more food directly to, to customers right now? Are you in that business?

Jason Mauck [00:30:05] Well, we've got a lot of crops growing that we're going to do this summer. We're trying to close on this meat deal and we've got tons of cold storage upcoming that we can store this local vegetables and the meat and we want to create this. So basically the idea is instead of the, the hangup, now you take an animal to one of these regional processing facilities, now they're six months to a year behind. They charge us 60 to 70 cents. Now it's 80 or 90 cents to process that beef into the, the paper packages.

Vance Crowe [00:30:39] For people that don't know, he's talking about like if in order to, if you showed up with a live cow and then you had to get it killed and then get it butchered, slaughtered the, right now if you went to most lockers in the US it'd be October or maybe even January before they're able to open up and, and kill local animals. And with the large packing plants being down, that means that there's or or reduced efficiency 50% or something like that. Yeah. It means that you're, it's it's struggling to keep up with demand.

Jason Mauck [00:31:09] Yeah. And it's hard for them to keep their same labor force. It's hard to everyone. So what we're going to do is have these small, and we might actually purchase one of these kill plants, but just kill the animal and put it on a, on a, a pallet. And then we bring back that to our facility and we vac it, we, we cut it up, we put it in a nice package and then we put people on subscription. But the, the, the difference we wanna do is we want to utilize the local farmer and pay him a fair market price and then have him be a part of the selling process. So we'll say that, let's say it's David Mock, my uncle's subscription freezer beef is in Gaston, Indiana. Come pick up my cow. Instead of you buying the cow and it sits in your freezer for a year, you're buying a new cow every week and we're, we're giving it to everyone and then they say that my cow's here and they get a percentage of that sale. We want to create that in all these small towns that don't have that meat option. A lot of these small towns just have a DG and you have bologna and it's some old packaged meat. It's kind of a food desert for vegetables and fresh meat.

Vance Crowe [00:32:20] Man, I mean this sounds like something people would want, you know, like and it benefits everybody. Yeah.

Jason Mauck [00:32:25] Yeah. And then we want to integrate just real simple vegetables like freezer sweet corn. Have you had fresh grandma's freezer sweet corn where they blanc it, cut it, put it in a Ziploc bag and you throw it in there with a stick of butter? Butter?

Vance Crowe [00:32:39] No, I don't think so.

Jason Mauck [00:32:40] All it's is great. So why not grow a bunch of sweet corn and do that and, and throw that in with the deal. So we, we picked up a a lot that's right on the busiest highway in east central Indiana and I planted sweet corn and ultra wide rows in between rye and we're gonna have sweet corn and then we're gonna have pumpkins growing in between the sweet corn and then the customers will come out and park and they'll pick their own sweet corn and they'll see the pumpkins growing. So we'll sell 'em sweet corn and then pumpkins later with moms and all that stuff. And then we'll have our meat truck there in the parking lot so you can roll in and get, you know, two dozen ears of sweet corn and say 10 T-bones from a local farmer that's backed that you can throw on your grill. And that's an amazing summer weekend. You just need a little beer. Right?

Vance Crowe [00:33:30] Yeah, that sounds like a great plan.

Jason Mauck [00:33:32] Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:33:33] The challenge then is labor. You got a bunch of kids around that need some need some work to do.

Jason Mauck [00:33:39] We've got interns and that's been a great thing about doing what we're doing. The universities have, you know, a lot of these young kids are, are have, we've had tons of people that wanna do their interns with us. So we've got three interns now, we may get a few more. And these universities, the first year that you have an intern, they pay a portion of that wage. So we've got a lot of good help and we've got Ball State, David Letterman came from Ball State, they have an amazing tcomm department. So we're gonna have some real good YouTube content. We've got some, some of those kids coming out as well.

Vance Crowe [00:34:17] Man, this is awesome. This makes me really look forward to coming out for your field day, which yeah, you guys still doing your big field day?

Jason Mauck [00:34:25] Yes, June 26th And just a second to promote that. So we've got all these projects, we're gonna get some buses and we'll drive around and you'll see these different crops growing together and all this stuff. And then you're gonna speak, I think Kate's gonna speak

Vance Crowe [00:34:42] Kate Crosby. That'll be, that'll be lit. I've got a

Jason Mauck [00:34:45] Golf course out at my house, so we will have some cold barley pops out there and play a little golf. And then we've got two awesome bands. One guy's a local guy named Jake Hinshaw, he was on The Voice and then last year we had the Flying Buffaloes. They're coming back out. They are amazing. They're like, the Doobie Brothers got in a time machine and came out and they just, they're they're just freaking amazing. And we've played till one or two in the morning out in front of a barn like amphitheater with a pond and, and it's, it's kinda like a, it's a poor man's Woodstock

Vance Crowe [00:35:20] Man. I didn't even know what I was getting into. What, how did, if people wanted to be a part of your field day, how would they, how would they do that?

Jason Mauck [00:35:27] I, I'll be promoting it on social media, but there's, there's no cost. We'll have a food truck or we might even provide our own food. You just show up and, you know, kind of A-A-B-Y-O-B and, and what

Vance Crowe [00:35:40] Is a field day for people that aren't from the farming ag background? They've never been to a field day, what is it?

Jason Mauck [00:35:46] Well, most field days Vance are paid bo by corporations and they kind of push their product and have your agronomists tell you, you know, say, you know, we need to do this, this, and this, and everybody kind of comes up and, but our field day is more of a, just a networking deal. So like, like I told you before, I want you to just speak whatever you want to speak and it's kind of more of an inspirational thing. And, and we've got a lot of projects on the farm that are different. They're not the status quo, they are not the best management practice. They are, let's do this and figure it out and share it. So it's more of an ideal tank. Last year we had Zach from Rabbit tractors, he had his small autonomous tractors out there going around and we'll have a lot of things that are hopefully, you know, futuristic.

Vance Crowe [00:36:41] Man, this sounds great. I'm gonna, I'm gonna try and talk my brother into coming with me and Kate will be there. Yes. And that'll be a good time, man. Well, Jason,

Jason Mauck [00:36:48] He's your brother. Younger or older? He's, he is

Vance Crowe [00:36:52] Two years older.

Jason Mauck [00:36:53] Okay. Okay

Vance Crowe [00:36:54] Dude, thank you so much for coming on. It's Saturday morning doing this. I really appreciate it. If people wanna find you on Twitter, where, what is your Twitter handle?

Jason Mauck [00:37:03] Jason Mock one That's Mock, M-A-U-C-K, but mock Jason Mach one and, and Google Search Constant Canopy or Jason Mach. And you'll, we've got 250 videos on YouTube now, me out in the field, you know, explaining what I do.

Vance Crowe [00:37:22] Well, brother, we will talk before this, but we're, let's record what we do at, at your field days and let's throw it up on the podcast so anybody that can't make it gets to see and hear about it.

Jason Mauck [00:37:33] Okay.

Vance Crowe [00:37:33] All right. Thanks brother.

Jason Mauck [00:37:35] Yep. We'll see you.