Stock Cropper Field Day Speech & Wes Carney Interview

Vance Crowe [00:00:04] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today we're gonna do two things that are a little bit different than the norm one. I'm going to play a small 10 minute talk that I gave at the farm Weird Field Day. Zach Smith, the stock cropper every year has this incredible field day where people come in from all over the corn belt to talk about how can they grow crops in a more bountiful, in a more effective system that doesn't require as many inputs, but can help your crops be prepared for drought and flood and all the diseases that can get them. And it is a really incredible experience because there're amazing people that show up at this day and they share what they've been working on, their successes, their failures. I absolutely love it. And Zach asked me to give a talk this year. So I took some of what I've learned from recording all these Legacy Interviews and turned it into what I hope helped people think about the day a little differently. So we're gonna air that and then right afterwards, we're gonna go straight into an interview that I did with a man named Wes Carney. Now as it turns out, Wes is a guy that I met when at one of these farm weird field days, and Wes and I have known each other for years. And one of the things that always strikes me after I get done talking with him is that I know I just absolutely know that when he's talking with regular people in their everyday lives, they have no idea how incredible his mind is, how he thinks through problems, how he solves things, what he's been through, and how he applies that to his everyday life.

Vance Crowe [00:01:38] So I love talking with Wes. In fact, Wes and I use what I call asynchronous communication. I'll record something at five in the morning and I'll send it to him. He'll send me something at 11 o'clock at night and we just go back and forth, almost never talking at the same time on the phone, but just sharing these voicemails back and forth. And I am really excited for you to be able to hear the way he thinks through problems, how he reasons just how great of a guy he is. And we're gonna get to that interview in just a moment. But I had an experience this morning that I wanted to tell you about because it really hit me right in the heart and I've been thinking about it all morning. So this morning it is a cool crisp fall day. And fall is my favorite season. So much so that I named my daughter Autumn. And this morning as I was walking out the door with my hot cup of coffee to enjoy this crisp, cold morning, I hear Autumn crying in her crib. Now she's two years old, so I go in there and pick her up and I wrap her in this big fuzzy, furry blanket and we go outside and we have one of those magical father daughter moments where she's pretending to drink my coffee. We're playing with her doll, we're talking about what bird sounds we're hearing, and I can just feel this deep connection with her. And this deep connection is one of those things that if you don't have children, you can't quite grasp it. You know what it is to be connected with somebody older than you, but to have this connection with this small child is truly profound.

Vance Crowe [00:03:13] And I was sitting there thinking about how much I have to share with her, how much I wanna teach her, how much I wanna show her, and just how much I love her. But she's two and she can't take in all that I have to share. And so even if I got all those words out, it would just kind of bounce off of her because it's not time yet. And I know that one day my little autumn is gonna grow up and she's gonna walk out of the Garden of Eden and there's gonna be some separation between me and her. It's not gonna be the same. And that's the natural course of things children break away from their parents so that they can go on and do their own thing. But what I thought of what really gave me pause and hope, and I don't know, something that I wanted to share with you was that I hope one day that I'll be able to share my legacy interview with her, that I'll be able to tell her those stories that she's not old enough yet to understand or the context and the challenges that she, my, her mother and I had while we were trying to raise her as a little girl. And the reason that I am really excited about this is not just because I want her to know my stories, although who are we other than our stories. But it's something more than that because I've heard from so many guests that when they watch their legacy interview with their loved one, there is a sense of reconnection.

Vance Crowe [00:04:48] There's that sense of wonder and awe. And I, I know just how incredibly intoxicating it is to have a small child look up at you and wanna know what was it like when you were a little boy? What did you do? Did you ever cut your finger? Dad, did you ever get in trouble Dad? And to imagine having a chance to connect not just with your young child but with your adult child, where you can finally share those things with them, they can understand you, they can connect the dots, and they can learn things about you and themselves that we don't always take the time to do. So if you are interested in having me help you articulate your story or help your loved one, articulate their stories so that you can have that moment of connection so that you can watch your video together and feel it and then know that you have this heirloom for some time in the distant future, if you ever wanna look back on it, then go to Legacy Interviews dot com to find out more. And you know what? Better yet, if you stayed all the way through here, why don't I just share my phone number with you? This is our office phone. You can call, you'll either get me or a lovely voice from a woman named Jessica and we can answer any questions you have about what you're thinking about. That number is 3 1 4 8 6 6 2 9 9 1 3 1 4 8 6 6 2 9 9 1. Give us a call, talk with us about the loved one and tell us what's keeping you from doing this interview so far.

Vance Crowe [00:06:24] And maybe we can find a way to make this the right thing for you and the right thing for your family. Alright, without further ado, let's head to this very unusual podcast where I give a talk and then also have a discussion with my good friend Wes Carney. I wanna introduce and bring up my very good friend, Vance Crowe, who's working the way around. He's playing farmer today with his bib overall on, so Vance is from St. Louis. We've, we've become friends through our mutual friend over here, Keaton Kruger, who's been a really great supporter of stock crop or two over the years. And Vance and I have become, you know, close friends over the last year and a half. And I've been on his podcast, the Vance Crowe Podcast, and then now the new Ag Tribes podcast, if you haven't checked that out, he host that on Thursday nights. I was lucky enough to be a guest, not because he wanted me, because John Kempf dropped out in the fillings and told Zach to, to to be the guy. So, and then he also has Legacy Interviews and this is something that I invested in two years ago for my dad, where he sits down with your loved ones and documents the stories of their life and then puts it in a super professional package that you can share and pass on with generations. And it is, it is one of the best investments that, that I made for my folks. My dad did a a day long interview and it was just, it was really fantastic. I want Vance to come up today. He spoke last year too, but he's just such a talented orator and he's so articulate and I asked him to kind of come up and frame the spirit of the rest of the day for us before we head out.

Vance Crowe [00:07:58] So Vance, come on up, give him a round applause, please. Thanks man. So I had the opportunity last night because Zach was here and Jason showed up night early to just kind of hang out with my buddies that I normally only either see on X or talk to on the phone. And one of the things that has really powered me through life is my deep curiosity about why people do what they do. I'm the middle child of seven and almost all of my other siblings had some thing that they wanted to go out and become, and I just didn't have that. I was much more curious about why do other people do what they do? And when you're a young person, like you can kind of bounce around it, it doesn't really matter, it it's not having some goal that you're shooting for is just fine. But one day I encountered a quote from Nietzsche and the quote is, he who has a why can bear any how. This struck me very deeply because what this meant for, for me as a young person was finding a why would allow you to power through all the difficulty in your life. And so I became fascinated even more so with this concept of why and what does it mean for me and why do I do what I do? And it, it is, it's probably why I do Legacy Interviews.

Vance Crowe [00:09:31] I'm deeply curious in finding what is the motivation in other people, what drives them to do what they've done to be who they are. And last night as we're hanging out with Jason and Zach, I started asking them really kind of poking them. Like, why are people coming to this? Why do they drive from Nebraska, Illinois? Why do they pack their kids in the car who are gonna be totally annoyed for hours until you get there? Why? And the funny thing was, Zach had some ideas about why you guys are here. Jason had a few ideas and then we talked for a little bit and those ideas about why would change and it's, it made me realize in that moment that actually why is an incredibly difficult question to answer. And in fact, when I'm doing Legacy Interviews, I make it a point almost to never ask someone that's led a life up till the time when there's 65 or 70. Why did you do that? Instead, I ask them, how did you do that? How did you do that? Is often one of these things that's a lot easier to get your mind around because people, people's whys the thing in them that motivates them is often a lot more than just one thing. Certainly they're doing it because they love their family or they have some aspiration on having financial security or they wanna have adventure. Whatever your why is is probably multifactorial and probably it's really difficult to distill.

Vance Crowe [00:11:05] But in doing Legacy Interviews, I've come to understand that if you ask someone how they did what they did embedded in that is the why. And there's two things I think I've pulled out from asking so many people, how did you do that? How did you overcome bankruptcy? How did you raise these kids in a time when things were not easy? How, how, how? And there's two things that I've kind of seen as a pattern that I wanna share with this group here, because I think it probably might impact the way you think about what you're hearing today. And the first thing that I've learned by, by interviewing hundreds and hundreds of people is that success doesn't feel like success. And it's a funny thing and it's because of the way we're built here, right? In order to get real things done in the world, you have to be motivated, you have to have something you're afraid of that's gonna happen, something that you're concerned at, whether it's gonna work out or not. And I want you just to think back one year ago what you were worried about a year ago right now, what was the problem that was bearing down on you that was keeping you up at night or was the thing you just kept talking about with your spouse over and over again? The chances are the problem that you were dealing with last year that seemed like an insurmountable thing. You are way past that now. You figured out the answer to it and you kept going.

Vance Crowe [00:12:37] And this is why I say that success doesn't feel like success because when I'm interviewing people, if I interview a couple and they're sitting there talking about their lives and how they raise kids and what they endured, almost always, every single time we're interviewing, they'll talk about something that they went through and then they'll turn and they'll be like, dang, you're right. We got through that and we never stopped to look back on it. And that's easy to see why, because as soon as you solve one problem, what happens? Another problem comes up and another problem and another problem. And you're solving all these problems and you're moving forward with your life and your soil has improved and you understand how to work your farm and now you have more people on your operation or you've grown and raised your kids and they are getting out to go to college or they are successful. But a new problem has come in and we almost never take the time to stop and talk about it. But what I've come to see through Legacy Interviews is that you can have someone walk into your office and they are incredibly nervous to talk about their lives. They look down, they ask me kind of aggressive questions about what I'm gonna ask 'em 'cause they're worried and they sit there and they think, well, why would anybody want to hear my life story? What have I accomplished? What have I done? And it isn't until somebody sits down to say, how did you do that?

Vance Crowe [00:14:09] That they're able to look back on their lives, the things that they've done that they were gripping so hard in order to get all their to-do lists done and all these things. And by talking about it, they get to say, yeah, we did that. And they set it down and now they can move on in a new way. And if it's an older person, I've seen it so many times that I'll get a phone call from somebody and they'll say, Hey, you know what? After dad told his stories, he's gonna take his first vacation in 40 years. Or Mom is gonna let us do some big changes on the operation. And so you see this and you think, well, what's going on there? And I think what's happening is we need to tell our stories in order to be able to understand the success that we've had. And that's why it's so important to come to an event like this and talk with one another about what it is that you did. But now I know that everybody in here is gonna have trouble to sit there and be like, let me tell you about this success and this success and this success. So that brings me to the second thing that I've learned as a pattern from interviewing all these people. And that is that the only way you get real, deep, powerful, important experience that can be turned into wisdom is through failing. The hero's journey is absolutely boring, has nothing to teach us. If you woke up and your hair was perfect and you went downstairs and breakfast was ready and you went to work and everything went fine and you went back home and you went to bed, that story has no value.

Vance Crowe [00:15:47] Not only for anybody else, but for you, the person that experienced it. And so what really matters is the experience that you can only get from being knocked on the ground or from tripping or from trying something and looking at it and being like, oh man, that did not work out like I planned. And that's the real amazing thing about wisdom is that the people that end life with the most of it, with the most to pass down are required to risk something. They're required to come to a place like this and hear about ideas that make them uncomfortable and think about things that when they go back, they know their neighbors are gonna be like, oh yeah, that's that weird guy. And they're also gonna have to have conversations with their family about how we want to try something and it might not work, but if it does work, look at all the benefits, the people that wrap up their lives and they have more to hand down than just money or just a house or even just land, are the people that have wisdom to pass down that can only be hued out of the ground of hard knocks. And you getting close to it and saying, gosh, what do I need to learn? What do I need to change so that I can stand up and cross the line and then go cross another line and another line. So as we wrap up today, what I wanna encourage everyone here to do is to look around at the people you're here with and ask them what they're working on, asking what they've tried and ask them how'd you do it?

Vance Crowe [00:17:28] And then be delighted and be so supportive when what you hear them say is the first 15 times I've failed and I've got something to share with you that might help you get past those first 15 failures. So you can have a failure of your own. Because it's those moments when you fall down and then you pick yourself back up and you move on that you have a story to tell that will get passed into the future and it will make the most difference that you can make in your lives. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you Zach for doing this and making this opportunity possible. Thank you. Wes Carney, welcome to the podcast. Thanks

Guest [00:18:11] Vince, I'm glad to be here.

Vance Crowe [00:18:12] So we are at the farm, weird stock Cropper Field Day and we're gonna talk all about that. But first, you are like a farm engineer guy. What is your background? How did you get into farming and the engineering world you came from?

Guest [00:18:28] Okay, well I grew up on a farm in central Illinois, southwest of Springfield and, but I was kind of a nerdy guy, so I was really into computers and which was for my age, I was a little bit early on the home computer front. And so I, when it came time to go to college, I was looking at two different paths basically. I had a offer from Carnegie Mellon out in Pennsylvania, which would've been taken me more of a computer science robotics route or the University of Illinois. And it was more of a agricultural engineering route, which if you're not familiar with agricultural engineering, there's lots of different specialties in there. Mine was kind of a mechanical engineering focus specializing in the agricultural area. So could be tractors, could be farm food processing equipment, could be anything related to agriculture.

Vance Crowe [00:19:26] I mean Carnegie Mellon, that's like the top, that's, that's like a big time engineering school.

Guest [00:19:31] Yeah, I think often what would my life have been different had I gone that route versus going to the University of Illinois? But I'm glad that the route I chose, I know at the time, I think the main thing that took me away from that is when we took a drive out to to Pennsylvania that was, that was a long ways away. So I chose to stay closer to Illinois and to the farm and everything.

Vance Crowe [00:20:00] And so you get to school and you're like with the engineering kids or you're with the Ag engineering kids or what?

Guest [00:20:05] Well, I was when in two crowds, the ag engineering kid and the band kids, so

Vance Crowe [00:20:09] Oh, you were band out? I

Guest [00:20:10] Was in the marching band at the University of Illinois, which I didn't quite, I wasn't quite good enough to be there. I'm not still sure how that happened, but I had a lot of good years in in the Marching Illini band. What instrument were you playing? Trombone.

Vance Crowe [00:20:24] Trombone,

Guest [00:20:25] Yep.

Vance Crowe [00:20:25] I, I

Guest [00:20:26] And I, I got to go to bowl games three years in a row. All three years that I was in the marching band. I went to bowl games, which for the Illinois, that was kind of rare.

Vance Crowe [00:20:37] And so when you get to the upper level engineering classes for ag engineering, are you, you're building plows, you're engineering tractors, what are you doing?

Guest [00:20:47] All sorts of different projects. I was probably mostly focused on farm implements and, and tractors and stuff like that. And then I, so I actually started as a co-op student with John Deere while I was still in college. So I, Deere has a plant in Ankeny, Iowa, which produces grain drills, tillage equipment, self-propelled sprayers and self-propelled cotton harvesters. Quite a bit of variety there. And so I took a job as a co-op student in, in Ankeny, was actually getting real world work experience to prove out that that was a path I wanted to go, which I would recommend for a lot of people to, to get a co-op job while you're in college and, and validate early on that this is what you wanna spend your career doing.

Vance Crowe [00:21:37] And when you were younger, had you like physically worked on implements before? I mean, were you used to throwing wrenches and,

Guest [00:21:44] Oh, I, I wouldn't say I am a great mechanic. It's probably good that I don't try to make my career that way. I can do the jobs, but I'm slow. And mainly I helped dad and followed his direction when it came to, to working on the equipment and, and all the farming in general. I kept the books for the farm. That was one of the ways we were able to justify getting a, a computer in those early days at the farm was the, we got a computer that could run the farm accounting software. And so at end of my eighth grade year, I was the farm's bookkeeper earning. So I spent a lot of time with the farm in that way. And then I would go out and run the tractor or do whatever dad asked me to do, sometimes holding the flashlight, whatever the case may be. But it's,

Vance Crowe [00:22:37] It's interesting, I do these Legacy Interviews, right? And you hear people talk about, you know, different moments as their farm progressed or as their family progressed and when they finally got a computer is like a big deal. 'cause all of a sudden you weren't doing like paper ledgers and people now don't even realize like, oh

Guest [00:22:54] Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:22:54] You couldn't even keep your, if you weren't a really good record keeper. A lot of it was like

Guest [00:22:59] Control things fast.

Vance Crowe [00:23:00] Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Guest [00:23:02] So

Vance Crowe [00:23:02] You're on the, you're in school, you're doing this. Are you envisioning I'm gonna go work for corporate America or are you thinking I'm gonna go back to the farm and farm?

Guest [00:23:11] Well I, I honestly did not see myself going back to the farm. That was, you know, I graduated high school in the late eighties, which was a tough time for the farm and, and my parents had to get an off farm job at nights while my sister and I were in high school. So like we would work together in the evenings and then mom and dad would get ready to, to go to work. My sister and I would give them a hug and kiss and, and they would go off to work in Springfield for the night and we would get ourselves up, feed the animals and, and go to school in the morning all by ourselves. And that was how we kept the farm afloat in the eighties. So there wasn't a lot of encouragement from my parents to come back to the farm at that time 'cause they just didn't think there was much future there. Now the farming times, you know, in the two thousands and, and they improved quite a bit and so in retrospect that might've been different, but at the time there wasn't a lot of hope for coming back to the farm and I, I didn't see myself doing it either. I did kind of make one of those plans in college that I was gonna work for Deere for about five years and then go off and start my own company. I remember when I got a note from my high school roommate, or sorry, college roommate that I had lost contact with, but he contacted, had the general contact line at Deere and Company to try to find out where I was at and sent me a note at five years and said, Hey, as I recall you were gonna be self-employed after, after five years.

Guest [00:24:56] What's your plan to make that happen? I ended up working for Deere for 26 and a half years, so I did not make that switch at the five year mark like I thought I would.

Vance Crowe [00:25:06] So if you're on the outside of any kind of corporate America, but even something as like iconic as John Deere, people are like, okay, you work at John Deere, you are building tractors, you are, what are you doing in your 20 some odd years of doing this?

Guest [00:25:20] Well that is the wonderful thing about working for a large company like Deere is that there are so many things you can do and once you get inside the door you can branch off into really any area you want. So as a co-op student, I was, I had a, a semester working as a plant engineer, which does maintenance and facility or manages the maintenance and, and the facility improvements in the factory. Then product test and evaluation and then a couple sessions in product design, which is actually where I was hoping to go long term was product design. So then when I graduated college and got my full-time offer, I got an offer to be in product support and marketing and that really kind of rocked my world. I was like, wait a second, this is not what I went to college for because

Vance Crowe [00:26:11] Product support is, it's already been designed. You're not imagining anything now you're maintenance, you're,

Guest [00:26:16] Well you're, you're basically the interfaced helping customers, many of them who have concerns or or frustrations with the products. So you're, you're kind of going into

Vance Crowe [00:26:26] Are you the helpline?

Guest [00:26:27] You're you're the helpline, you're the I'D worked the shows. And so it, it was a, a mix of helping customers decide that they wanted to buy the product and also helping them after the sale, usually interfacing with dealers and stuff. But a lot of times you, you would be designing training programs and, and support literature at that time. You know, not everything was on the web in the early nineties to help customers know how to operate their machinery. You you're responsible for the manuals. And so what what Deere was trying to do was they had decided we have a problem and that's that our engineers don't understand the customer as well as we would like. So they wanted, they were rotating engineers through the product support marketing side to try to get them more face time and experience and perspective from the customer, which, which was really good.

Vance Crowe [00:27:25] So it worked,

Guest [00:27:27] It, it worked. The, I I would say I, I always wonder if I would've been a different, would have different skills if I had used some of those engineering things that I'd learned immediately after college versus having gone off and done something else for four and a half years before I moved back to engineering. And, you know, there was, I had offers elsewhere in deer to maybe I wouldn't have gone ever back to engineering. I would've gone off into the sales branches or stayed in that customer, customer support area. But I did think I wanted to get back to engineering. So I did that. I think one of the, I I said that when I got the offer to be in marketing product support, that was, it kind of rocked my world. And what I finally decided I wanted to work for Deere and I decided it was still problem solving. That's what I had learned as an engineer was how to solve problems. What I had to do was listen to customers, figure out what their problem was and, and help them through the process of, of resolving that problem. Either that helping them understand how the machine was could do that itself or figuring out what we need to do do to the machine to help it meet their needs.

Vance Crowe [00:28:40] So as you progressed through your career, we don't need to go into all the details of it, but when did you get to start solving problems in a way that you liked?

Guest [00:28:49] Well, so what I learned quickly was I was solving those problems immediately, even in the product support area. And then I moved back to product engineering and started to, to develop the product from that side. 'cause I was actually getting to help be the customer interface to the product development teams and, and designing those new products.

Vance Crowe [00:29:12] And this is like, hey, when I go to work on this thing, the the unit is too hard to get my hands in there. Can you make it so the thing is wider or is it some, like what types of things are you hearing from

Guest [00:29:23] It's it's developing well, so the interesting thing, my, the product development that I, product line that I was working on was a self-propelled sprayers. And at the time deer was not the behemoth in the self-propelled sprayer area that it is today. In fact, we had a small sprayer that was honestly developed primarily for the cotton market in the south and, and was manufactured at this factory because it offset the seasonal product production needs of, of the cotton harvesters wasn't suited to the Midwest and, and more other crops very well. But we decided we wanted to get into that industry and so we were developing new sprayers, what we call clean sheet designs, not just tweaking a previous design that was out there, but but developing something from scratch. And, and when you've got all of that freedom to say, what do you want this product that doesn't exist to look like? You gotta ask yourself a lot of questions that you've not asked before. And so that we got to have a lot of input to the, the way those products looked. And it was a lot of fun even though I wasn't on the, i I wasn't drafting part designs and, and stuff like that. We had a lot of impact into how those machines looked. And then I got to switch sides and actually be designing the physical parts and, and putting them together in systems. And so it was, it was fun all the way through.

Vance Crowe [00:30:53] You've told me before that you have a philosophy about product design and kind of how, like is it best practices or how people should think of it? What is it?

Guest [00:31:03] Well, I I think one of the things that I always take away from product development is you're trying to figure out the best compromise. I think about my kids asking me a question of of, well which is better? Which of these is is the best? And then I always say, well best for what, what are you trying to optimize for? I don't always say it this way to my kids, but, but trying to help them realize that there's few things that are perfect and you're optimizing for something. You're either optimizing for speed or cost or reliability or, or lightweight to be able to get through a field in, in adverse soil conditions or to apply one product or to be able to have diversity and, and

Vance Crowe [00:31:56] Easily swapped out is gonna be one that's different than we use the same chemical in it every single time.

Guest [00:32:01] Yes. Or liquid only versus liquid and dry and, and spread seeds or whatever. So, or for primarily accuracy or there's a million things that you can optimize for. And so when you're designing a product, you're, you're figuring out what that thing is that you wanna optimize for and, and realizing that you're sacrificing something along the way. Maybe it's just cost and, and you're coming up with a more expensive product that does the things you want it to do really, really well or is more reliable and you sacrifice weight to build in a stronger beefier product or something like that. So I think that's my philosophy on in product design is that you gotta figure out what you're optimizing for and make sure you don't miss that target and be aware of what you sacrificed along the way rather than delude yourself into thinking that you did design the perfect product that has no weaknesses and no shortcomings.

Vance Crowe [00:33:02] I feel like when a man goes through their life and they specialize on something and they realize something deep about it, like you are, the optimization requires, you have to know what what are the trade offs, interest space, negotiating you think in terms of interests and, and it's funny how when you develop a philosophy about your work and then you can actually say like, actually if this is a pure philosophy, I can apply this to other areas of my life that don't, they weren't initially a part of what this was. And when you and I have talked about that kind of compromise, how would you describe how this informs parts that are unrelated to building tractor equipment?

Guest [00:33:43] Well, as an engineer I think you find that one of your strength is analyzing different decisions and whether that's your decision analysis tool or just informally in your head, you're always kind of weighing those different strategies and, and well the question, you know, you're helping the kids through, is it better to buy this cheap toy or the, the more expensive one is the, is the cheap one good enough for what you wanna spend it, spend time on it for? Or is it gonna break as soon as you get it because it's so cheaply made. So it just flows over into every area of trying to analyze decisions to make sure you're making a a wise one. The, the, I think the joke about engineers that I've always enjoyed is, you know, the optimist would say the glass is half full. The pessimist would say the glass is half empty. The engineer says the glass was twice as big as it needed to be in the first place

Vance Crowe [00:34:45] Because it wasn't optimized for what it needed to do. So the

Guest [00:34:48] Engineers always trying to optimize that. And the, and the weak side of that is sometimes you get into analysis paralysis where you have to get forced to make a decision. Are

Vance Crowe [00:34:59] You that way?

Guest [00:34:59] Oh, I can be easily if I don't force myself to move on.

Vance Crowe [00:35:04] Yeah, I mean Nick Cizik, the physicist engineer Yeah, he talked about that on his episode or he is like, just as I'm getting my arms around like, oh, now we're finally getting somewhere. People are like, you gotta move on. We got it as close as we need to get it here.

Guest [00:35:17] I'll never forget that first semester as a co-op student in product or plant engineering, we were putting this new long line in those made shovels and sweeps for tillage equipment in the, in the plant. And one day the, the wage guys that we were training to operate this new line put a sign on the door to the little control room for the line that said at some point you just gotta shoot the engineer and put it in production because they know our temptation is always to perfect and, and and continue to work on it 'cause we want to achieve that perfect optimization.

Vance Crowe [00:35:54] So you worked on sprayers, what else?

Guest [00:35:58] So like I said, I always wonder what kind of engineer I would've been if I had gone to the engineering side immediately outta college. And, and I've always said that I was not the engineer you wanted to design your mainframe to make sure it lasted. Where I was better at was coming up with the big ideas for how the whole machine should work and integrate and the different features that it should have. So more of the bigger ideas. And so I, I got to where we had this beautiful opportunity where we weren't just tweaking these new machine new design or old designs. Like I said, we were coming up with clean sheet designs and so you'd, you built the middle-sized sprayer, put it into production and then okay, we're gonna design a new larger, well what do we want to do differently? We don't, we're not bound to do it. Just everything's scaled up. 'cause we know there are some flaws in that one. We haven't figured out what is the best design yet. And so then each of our, those new machines in the early days, nineties and two thousands were were very different designs, had a lot of uniqueness and then now there's a lot more commonality 'cause they've really improved and figured out what the optimum designs are. But so I was doing that layout of brand new designs and then turning that design over to engineers for different functional areas too.

Vance Crowe [00:37:18] So now I think most people, including myself, it is very, very difficult to imagine building something from zero, right? Where there's nothing there. When you say that, are you like, all right, we're gonna build a bigger one, we're not constrained, but we need to use these nozzles or we need to, or are you like, hey, no, we can throw out even what the nozzles were, what the hoses were, we could do literally anything. How, how new is this?

Guest [00:37:41] Well, you always have to make those decisions. What existing technology are you going to use or, and what things are you going to invent on your own? That's one of the constraints that you have to put upon yourself. If you say everything on your vehicle is gonna be brand new technology, then it's, you're gonna really struggle to get it to production. So you want to use some common things and you're gonna pick up things from suppliers, but you might still use them in, in brand new ways. For example, the, the rate control system that the vehicle is controlling, how much liquid it's putting out out, which has to change as you speed up or slow down in the field to make sure you don't overly or under apply the, all the systems on the market. Basically use a little valve to throttle the flow more or less as you sped up or slow down. But they then you had to wait for a flow meter to tell you how much fluid was going out. And there was a slow feedback loop. We developed a new process where we, we sped the pump up and slowed it down as we wanted to change the, the flow rate. And so that was new technology that nobody else was doing it that way at the time. We also had ideas that, you know, the little key fob for your car and remember this is the early nineties to unlock and lock open your trunk, stuff like that. Well what if we had one of those to, to control your boom spray on and off so that you could be out there checking the flow rate of each nozzle, calibrating it, et cetera, and not have to be running back to the cab to do it.

Guest [00:39:18] We had that idea in the early nineties, but it wasn't, we chose not to do it then. And the sprayers that they're producing now have that functionality, which I think is just awesome to see that idea that we had in the early nineties eventually make it into production. But you, you have to limit yourself somewhat. So,

Vance Crowe [00:39:37] So as you look back to remember the things that you did, is it hard for you to remember what problem you were solving? Like, oh, we built that thing, why didn't you do that? Or is it like, no, I know like people that play sports, right? Some of 'em remember every single game. Every single

Guest [00:39:52] Yeah. If you ask me that about sports, I I couldn't tell you at all. But, but definitely there are those momentous points in, in the product development lifecycle that you work through and, and survive and, and come out differently. And one of my friends in the, on the engineering team, he used to always say they, they don't always remember who got them into a mess. They remember the engineer that came in and and solved the problem. It could have been the same engineer that designed a, something that wasn't working well. And then you come in and, and work hard and, and figure out the, the solution to the problem that resolves the issue. And, and that's who you remember as the hero. But

Vance Crowe [00:40:41] So you talked about the flow rate, the fob idea. What are other ones that you look back on and you're like, that was a clever solution to a problem?

Guest [00:40:57] Well, one, one of the ideas I, I remember I mapped out a, well we, the initial process to patent disclosure or patenting an item was you filled out an invention disclosure. And so I had an invention disclosure where in the pre GPS guided vehicles days, there were foam markers and, and the machine would produce foam and it would drop that foam out of a dispenser on the very end of the boom. And that would kind of leave a mark through the field. So, so

Vance Crowe [00:41:29] You'd know when you turned back around where she was

Guest [00:41:31] Starting to line the, the tip of your room up with that

Vance Crowe [00:41:32] Okay.

Guest [00:41:33] Foam trail that was left out there. Now as someone who gets more chance to operate the sprayers, I I'm amazed at those operators that could do a good job guiding off of that marker that was, you know, maybe 45, 50 feet out from where they're driving and, and line up with it. Well, but nonetheless there was this foam marker and you usually pre-mixed a, a soap concentrate with some water and, and then put it in there. And I, so like I had a idea to draw the, I had just put the jug of foam concentrate right on the vehicle and then pull some outta that meter water from another tank called the freshwater rinse tank that you had 150 gallons of or something on the, on the vehicle and, and mix them. So you never had to pre-mix that concentrate. And it was interesting, my, I had a, a good friend, so I, I filed a invention disclosure on this good friend from supply management was talking to the company that we were sourcing phone markers from at the time and mentioned this design, well they ended up putting it in production. Technically we had the, the rights to it, but at the time Deere's legal team wasn't focused necessarily on, on patents for the sprayer industry. They were off in other areas and they've gotten a lot more serious about patents in the intervening time. But I always laugh about that one and, and one that got away, but at the same time it foam markers aren't on hardly into the sprayers anymore.

Guest [00:43:04] So it is technology that went out the way of the dodo bird or whatever you wanna say.

Vance Crowe [00:43:09] What do you know about the patent system that somebody that's never filed a patent wouldn't, wouldn't know or understand?

Guest [00:43:16] Well, it's kind of funny because the two patents that I have are from my time as a co-op engineer. So while I was still in college Wow.

Vance Crowe [00:43:23] And

Guest [00:43:24] They're on cotton harvesters rather than the sprayer products that I spent most of my time on. And after I got out of the, I kind of moved on from designing physical product, deer got more serious about filing the product. So I wouldn't say I'm an expert in that, that area. I've got lots of buddies who have long lists of patents and it's pretty exciting to see their amazing inventions.

Vance Crowe [00:43:50] So when you were

Guest [00:43:51] That, you talked about the creativity and just starting from a clean sheet and what you want it to be like that I, I find that fascinating and, and how, how anything comes into existence from nothing, whether it's a sprayer design or a field design or art or music or anything. All of that is just the process of creativity is fascinating to me and something I really enjoy.

Vance Crowe [00:44:16] Do you consider yourself to be creative?

Guest [00:44:18] I do like to be creative and yes, I would consider myself creative.

Vance Crowe [00:44:25] In what realms do you get to express your creativity?

Guest [00:44:28] I would say I come up with a lot of designs since I've left Deere. It's, I'm still trying to figure out how to put some of those designs into reality. I'm, like I said, I'm not the great greatest mechanic to weld or bolt things together on my own. When you're working in a large company like that, you have this huge experimental shop that guys can turn your designs and your concepts into reality. Some of them with more detail working from a explicit drawing. Nonetheless, they'll, they'll create that part no matter what it looks like. They'll figure out a way to make it for you. Others, you, you can just turn over the design to them and they'll figure out how to or turn over the concept to them and they'll, they'll figure out how to, to turn it into reality too. So you work with all sorts of people.

Vance Crowe [00:45:16] Yeah. Like it's crystal clear for me about how things evolve. Like you get something down on paper and then you turn it into reality and then you're like, oh, like the stock cropper is a great example. So Zach has his latest model parked right out there and I remember last year you would open this chicken, so the stock cropper, the, the, the nano the one that's just doing chickens, it has an automatic door that lets the chickens in and out and it's got an ability to move forward and backwards, but you still gotta clean it, you still gotta add feed to it. Well he went from you have to lift up the entire lid in order to be able to get there to see the chickens, to no, that all can be bolted down and you can just open up this tiny door

Guest [00:45:56] And

Vance Crowe [00:45:56] The interaction that you have with that machine is so much better. But it'd very difficult for somebody to predict when they're drawing it out. Oh, I'm going to, that's gonna be a problem that's gonna come up. The thing's gonna be too heavy for me to lift the door up. And I have to imagine like you might if, if you are in an iterative cycle where somebody can build the thing that you've imagined in your mind quickly and then you can be like, ah, no, that's gonna have some drawbacks that we didn't foresee.

Guest [00:46:23] Yeah, and I think product development has picked up on a lot of tools and processes from the software development world in term what software we call agile development. Trying to make those quick iterations to fail fast, figure out what's, what needs to be improved, figure out what your minimum viable product is to push that out to the market or at least out to the test field so you can start getting experience with it and figure out what problems like that heavy door need to be solved. Because as I said earlier, sometimes the temptation of an engineer or anybody is say, I don't wanna release this until it's perfect. If I'm gonna put my name on it, I want it to be perfect. Well that first generation, what you think is perfect isn't perfect and you don't know that until you get it out to real world use.

Vance Crowe [00:47:13] Yeah. And I think there's a special person that can look at something the way that it is and be like, you know, if you made it so you could just mix the water in over here instead of having to go pour it into a bucket over there, that's gonna be a lot better. 'cause a lot of people, and myself included, I'm just kinda like, oh, I'm gonna take it as it is and maybe I get frustrated, but some people they're like, I'm frustrated and there's another way to do this and I'm going to go do it.

Guest [00:47:38] Yeah, yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:47:40] Are you that way?

Guest [00:47:41] Yeah, I, I think I'm constantly redesigning things in my head and I think one of the, the fun shifts that I've noticed is like when I worked for Deere and I would go to the farm progress show or, or some show where you'd see lots of equipment by different manufacturers. I would look at the equipment to see how they solved problems. But the problems I was looking at was were how did they route hydraulic and electrical through this area? How did they attach this folding hinge or how did they achieve transport with for this wide machine? Things like that. Whereas now when I go to the thing or to the shows and see lots of equipment, I'm looking, well how did they solve the problem of operator access to, to reload the access to the door that you're gonna have to open. Oh

Vance Crowe [00:48:30] 'cause you care because you're one,

Guest [00:48:31] Yes.

Vance Crowe [00:48:31] You're the one that's gonna have to open up the door and haul seed in there or do whatever. Correct. So that goes along with an international relations. They have a a saying that I, I tell people all the time where you stand on an issue depends on where you sit at the table. You know, so like if you're the United States, your stand is on, you know, something else. If you're from another country, Israel, where you stand on the issue, the same thing if you're the engineer, are we trying to get the thing to the dealer lot to sell it? That's one it position you could be on. Or am I actually using this thing and am I gonna be swearing when I drop a bag of seed all over the place because it's not engineered properly. Yeah.

Guest [00:49:10] And let me go back to the compromise statements that I made earlier. The example you gave with the stock cropper going from a large door that you open to a smaller door, well that's a compromise because a smaller door now you have to have another part to cover the rest of the, of the top of the vehicle that you're not opening up. You have to have more hardware to mount that door plus the, the small door. So you've introduced more parts, more parts are more opportunity for failure modes and, and it's also more manufacturing time. The, the sum of the cost of the two door sections, the fixed one plus the, the raised one is probably more than one large door. So everything's a, a compromise and you're just trying to figure out what that sweet spot is and, and figuring out what items you're gonna prioritize, whether it's customer service, customer ease of use, low cost, extreme high reliability, which like if you look at the next engine, next generation Raptor engines that, that SpaceX is designing, they've almost removed all of the lines and tubes outside of the engine. They've just designed the, the internal parts to limit flow and, and do what they needed to do that they were doing with external parts. So they've reduced the number of, of parts and add-on things, which comes with reduced increased reliability, reduced failure opportunities.

Vance Crowe [00:50:45] And they could be reacting to the fact they're like, oh man, we used to have to go replace these things all the time that was taking us three days and that was costing us this thing over here. And so we'd rather deal with the problem in the, in the front end money we didn't wanna spend before we're willing to spend.

Guest [00:50:58] Right. They didn't do it in the first generation. They didn't perfect that design on generation one. They're on four or five or something like that. And, and that's when they're making these improvements and they've made improvements all along the way. So

Vance Crowe [00:51:09] I think Normies like me, somebody like I worked with an architect, we were gonna do some remodeling on my house and the architect was like, well how much do you wanna spend? And I, well how much does it cost? Right? And then you have to figure out, 'cause you know, I don't know, I'm sure that you could tell me that I need to spend 50,000 or I need to spend 200,000 then, you know, that's gonna be different things versus well what can I actually get for that? And it's this very like backing into how you make decisions. Do you approach problems in that same way or you approach it in a different way?

Guest [00:51:43] No, I think I, I do approach them in the same way. 'cause you, you often start with this, you know, if you were designing a house, you, you might start with this mansion and if you could afford the mansion, you might not hesitate to build that. But most of the time we start with this, with this mile long list of, of specifications of things that we would like it to do. And then we figure out, hey, I can't afford that. So we start backing down, well these are lower priority, I'm gonna take that out. Or that one's, that one would really be nice, but for the mount it's adding to the total price tag I need. I can't do it.

Vance Crowe [00:52:16] You know, it's fascinating. So we have some good friends, they've been very fortunate, they're building a house and I got to see their designs. And one of the things that we, I walk away from after looking at this design is there's not a lot of creativity in there because they don't have to have a lot of creativity, right? They didn't have that many problems. It was like, oh, do you want a movie theater? Well we'll just put the movie theater in and we'll just put it there. I know the dining room. And so when I look at the house that we remodeled, my wife is an aerospace engineer and so she thinks like an engineer. And when we would run into a problem, it didn't make her happy, but she'd certainly would just sit there and be like, how could we figure this out? How could we solve this problem? And now when I look at the house, the story, the richness of how we did what we did or why we did what we did is all a function of like, well, we kept, we ran into this problem. And so how we got around that informed so much. And as long as we had, this is the core things that we care about. You know, we wanna be able to live in the house for 60 years. We want to make it so the kids enjoy the house right now, and things need to, everything needs to have a place. That was my mantra. And as long as we met those three criteria, that's like what, in, in addition to budget, it made our house more interesting.

Guest [00:53:35] And you probably noticed that she didn't get sad or depressed when she, when you encountered one of these challenges, she probably lit up with the opportunity to dig in and solve this problem because that's just

Vance Crowe [00:53:48] Her and my architect. And, and like, you see that, that creativity, like there might be an initial like, oh shoot, that's not gonna work. But then the like, euphoria, the, you know, our, our mutual friend Kate Crosby talks about the click,

Guest [00:54:03] Right?

Vance Crowe [00:54:03] When you're like, oh no, this doesn't work, but if I do it this way, click and it, like, you can figure something out. But the only way that click is valuable is if you've gone for a long time pulling your hair out or being frustrated or not, not even necessarily frustrated, but like being like, this way that we're doing isn't working. We need to do something different.

Guest [00:54:21] Yes. And I, I think boredom is a critical component of allowing your brain time to work on those problems. I just, I just enjoy many times driving along in my vehicle and I know that you, I I, you know, I put a lot of miles on my car. I, a lot of times it's without anything playing, just letting my mind soak on sometimes nothingness and sometimes it ventures off into solving a problem and, and then the challenges stop and write down that solution or, or something like

Vance Crowe [00:54:53] That. I have, I would say over the years it has become way more difficult for me to find myself in a place of boredom. It is a lot more uncomfortable than it was when Bo I didn't have an option. You know, when I worked on a ship, for example, like you didn't have every single album you've ever owned on your phone at all times. You didn't have any infinite access to podcasts, CYSA podcast. And so I'd either be reading a book or staring up at my bunk, you know, but like now to do that, I, it feels like pain or at least psychic pain.

Guest [00:55:27] Yeah. And again, there's no perfect answer on that. To me, that's another area of compromise. You gotta fear out what the balance is there to giving yourself your, your brain, the empty space to, to work on something, versus listening to a podcast and, and learning new information through that method, or reading a book and being stimulated by what you read there. Listening to music and seeing the beauty in that creation and wondering how in the world they were inspired to put that little note or accent in that moment that really just makes that piece of music sing to you.

Vance Crowe [00:56:03] The latest meditation that I've been able to do that's not painful, I often do with my daughter, is like, we'll be sitting in the morning, she wakes up before everybody else is. She comes and sits in my lap sitting outside, and I'll be like, what are the different sounds that you can hear? That has been really, really neat. Because at first you're like, it's just crickets. That's all I can hear. And they're like, wait a second. No, I hear a bird and I think I can name that bird and there's another bird I can't name. And all of a sudden you realize like there were so many sounds around you that you had just tuned out, but if you're listening for them, you can't help but hear 'em. In fact, it almost becomes distracting because you're tuning into them.

Guest [00:56:42] Yeah. We did an exercise like that last year at our get together where we were just out quite, and one of the challenges was, well, I need to overcome listening to my heartbeat or something. Or maybe I wanted to listen to my heartbeat or maybe I wanted to listen to the, the wind brushing through the grass over there.

Vance Crowe [00:57:02] Are you a meditator? Do you meditate?

Guest [00:57:04] It's something I'd like to do more, but I have not spent time doing that other than just allowing myself quiet time to Yeah, quiet long. But it's not just sitting still. It's usually as I'm driving or something like that. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:57:15] You're kind of captive and so you might as well be. Rob Long is the one that really helped me with meditation where he would say like, you know, you start, let's say all you're doing is just breathing in and breathing out. That's all you're doing. And then you find like, oh, my mind was wandering. Yeah, but you became aware that your mind was wandering. And so then you get back on and if you sit there and you're like, you're dumb. I used so bad at meditating, then you're not. But if you're like, oh, I'm off the path now, I'm back on the path now I'm doing it. Yeah. It makes the whole thing way less stressful. But like I think in our culture we're so oriented towards I need to be moving forward that it's easy to get stressed by the fact that like I'm sitting still.

Guest [00:57:56] Yeah, it is. It's a challenge. You were talking about listening things and being observant and it gave me a, one of the things I think is fascinating from a equipment operator's perspective today, the, a really good equipment operator knows the sounds that his machine makes. And you know, people ask, well, what do you do when you're out there in the tractor, the tractor's driving itself through the field. It's increase in decreasing the, the number of seeds it's putting in or the amount of spray that it's putting out, or it's, you're out there basically as a manager observing everything that it's doing and, and a really good operator can hear the things that it's doing and know when something started to go wrong. When I was in high school, my dad had been doing tillage all night long. I came out to replace him in the morning and continue in the field. And we made a couple rounds just to talk over how everything had been going and, and make sure that I knew what the plan was. He was about to get out. And as we came to the end of the field, he said, let's make one more round. We made one more round. And in that next round, the clutch on the tractor went out. He sensed, knew, heard whatever the case may be, that something was not right in that tractor.

Guest [00:59:28] He had spent a lot of time in and I did not have that skill, but he did. And, and I was always grateful that it happened on his watch rather than Yeah, because it would've been like, like, what were you three later when I was out there? And so, and the question would've existed, well, what did you do, Wes that,

Vance Crowe [00:59:47] Have you developed it now that you've spent more hours in the tractor?

Guest [00:59:51] I'm not there yet. No. I, I work with a couple more experienced farmers that, that definitely have that skill and they're, I'm still working towards that, so,

Vance Crowe [01:00:03] So let's talk about that. You retired from John Deere.

Guest [01:00:07] Technically I didn't retire. They started operating or offering voluntary separations as the market changed in, in 2016. And I had kind of had this wrestling with God over the probably year and a half prior to that where I felt like I was supposed to leave and, and not be a deer anymore. And so I said, well, when the opportunity, if, if I ever see an opportunity to do that, I will. And so the

Vance Crowe [01:00:39] But it'd be hard 'cause you're raising kids Exactly. And the salary is good and for you to jump out and start your own company or go to some smaller startup that has the compromise, the freedoms that maybe you want the exactly sacrifice that you have to have for the kids you're raising and all the family you're trying to create. Yeah.

Guest [01:00:55] Figuring out how to make that transition. I didn't know how to do it at the time and then all of a sudden, whoa, deer starts offering these voluntary separations that come with a financial incentive to, to leave the company. And I, I took one of those and, and in the first rounds of which they've offered many rounds since then and, and some very recently, some by choice and some by force. But mine got to be a, a choice, which I was grateful for. And

Vance Crowe [01:01:18] So I'm not talking to an engineer that was fired and told they needed to.

Guest [01:01:23] No. And there were some great engineers that were fired. And

Vance Crowe [01:01:26] So when

Guest [01:01:26] You hear that, that, that that engineer was fired, don't assume that they were a weak engineer or something. There were some amazing talented people. That company,

Vance Crowe [01:01:35] Well, it's amazing. Corporate America decides they're gonna slash and burn. Like I, I know for other seed companies like top salesman, you know where the guy is, no doubt when you look at the bottom line, that dude was making money, but his division was cut, so he was gone.

Guest [01:01:49] Yes.

Vance Crowe [01:01:49] And that's one of those weird things that for your ego as an, as an adult or as a man, you're like, somebody gets fired. Well, what'd they do? But the reality is sometimes it's not. Yep.

Guest [01:02:00] But

Vance Crowe [01:02:01] You took a voluntary one and what did you think you were gonna go do?

Guest [01:02:05] I I had to figure that out 'cause I didn't have that next step figured out. What I, what I knew I needed to do at the time was to focus more on my family. I had been in a role where I was out of country probably two months of the year if if you add it up all the time. And, and even though I had an office of the corporate headquarters or I, I didn't consider my commute could have been 20 minutes to the corporate headquarters or maybe my commute was up to Waterloo or to Des Moines or something that day. It didn't really matter to me which facility I drove to to work at. That was just my commute for the day. I didn't even consider that a travel day 'cause I was just working at all those facilities and gone all the time. My, my last role was in the product development processes and tools, interfacing between product development teams to kind of the IT group and figuring out how to make Deere overall as a company as efficient as possible in our product development processes and being able to manufacture that product anywhere around the world. So it was a lot of travel and a lot of work with global teams, which I loved. But my wife was battling cancer and I knew I didn't have forever with her and I needed to spend more time there. So the first couple years I, I didn't go off and get a new job. I started doing, after a couple years I started doing some consulting for a, a joint venture that Deer had bought into and started helping them with that, that integration into the company as somebody who could fight for the joint ventures representation inside the company and knew the side, both sides of it.

Guest [01:03:53] And then COVID and the quarantine hit and people were eliminating any, any discretionary spending. So I, but we had kind of finished that project anyway, so it was time to move on.

Vance Crowe [01:04:04] And so when did you start farming?

Guest [01:04:06] Well, it was right at that time our, so my dad died in 2002 and for the 2001 crop year we started renting out our land. 'cause we knew he was sick. And so the farm had been rented out for almost 20 years. And, but my cousin was renting about a third of that land and he decided he was gonna start slowing down. So he came and said, I'm, we're gonna let the lease go. And I thought, well, we can either find a new tenant to farm this or I've actually got the time now 'cause I'd just left that consulting role and, and I decided I wanted to, to start farming the land. So, so starting for the 2020 crop year, I started farming a third of our family's land in central Illinois. And then for 23 I took back the rest of, of our land. So

Vance Crowe [01:05:01] I mean, that's it. So it'd be really easy from somebody on the outside to be like, oh, he wasn't farming. Now he is farming. But the reality is you were talking about like, I lost four years between when I got done with college to when I started doing engineering and what I really understand it well now you're talking about, it was 20 years since you were driving over your land, putting the seed in it, choosing the seed, choosing what chemistry you're gonna put on it, choosing all these things. And now you're like, I'm gonna try and make this land produce as much as it costs to own it and hopefully create a profit on it. But you've been out of the game for a long time.

Guest [01:05:35] Yeah, and to be honest, I never made those decisions when I was growing up on the farm. My dad made those decisions and he wasn't around anymore for me to ask and, and gain that insight from and that the agronomic side of it was the scariest part of returning to the farm. Definitely. Well

Vance Crowe [01:05:51] 'cause you had done the books before. Yeah.

Guest [01:05:53] I, I could do the books and as an engineer I knew the machinery side of it. I honestly, I thought that if I ever went back to the farm, I would be kind of a, just a iron jockey or, or what

Vance Crowe [01:06:04] Does that mean, an iron

Guest [01:06:05] Jockey? Well, just somebody who really enjoyed the machinery and

Vance Crowe [01:06:07] He just wanted to get on there and ride it. It doesn't even matter if it's his crop, he

Guest [01:06:11] Go

Vance Crowe [01:06:11] Do it for somebody else.

Guest [01:06:12] Exactly. Is it Jason that talks about his dad like to do recreational tillage or No, that's Gabe Brown. If you know Gabe Brown from North Dakota, he talks about his dad doing recreational tillage

Vance Crowe [01:06:25] Because they just like being in it. It's fun. You're in a tractor. Yeah.

Guest [01:06:28] You

Vance Crowe [01:06:28] Can see what you've done. Like it's just like that feeling of getting done mowing where you're like, look how pretty it is. But you could do it with making your soil black.

Guest [01:06:36] Yeah. And that might sound crazy for somebody who's never grown up on a farm, how much, how enjoyable it is to spend a day in the tractor or a combine or whatever. But it is, it can be very enjoyable.

Vance Crowe [01:06:47] So you start doing it

Guest [01:06:48] And I start, well, I kind of knew that I didn't want to farm in what I'll call conventional manner with full tillage and, and chemicals and stuff like that. In fact, for my second year I decided I wanted to start a transition to organic and I, which takes three years, three cropping years before you can be certified organic.

Vance Crowe [01:07:17] Yeah. They create a sunk cost that if you're gonna switch out and you're not gonna use the chemistry, they say, Hey, you need, your land needs to have time to rest and become fully organic. But what it really does is it means you have to use all the practices and you don't get any of the benefit from selling it. And so once you've got it into organic, the idea of going back is like pretty steep hill. 'cause you put it, you have quite a bit of sunk cost towards going to organic.

Guest [01:07:41] Yes. And so that was kind of a naive decision. I I made, I I've backed off on that since then. Maybe I'll get back to that in the future. But really I think there's, I I'm, I'm still trying to go as what the buzzword might be today, regenerative as as possible reduce the amount of things that end inside or other synthetics that I apply to my fields as much as possible. As much use, as much cover crop or other biological things to stimulate the natural processes in the soil because I believe that it was designed to function and be bountiful overflow in its in its produce and it's, you can do things to stimulate it in the short term, but it's kind of like cocaine. You, you put it on, you might feel great. I don't have personal experience with that nuance or that example, but you know, you start and, and you get this big boost of energy or in the case of farms productivity by putting something on. And over time the effectiveness of that goes down, the health of the system goes down. And pretty soon you've got a, a highly struggling system that needs revived. And that's primarily why I backed off on the transition to organic is people, many people told me my soil wasn't healthy enough to do it yet. And I needed to work towards building up the soil health before I made that transition.

Guest [01:09:13] Or I would encounter some significant hurdles, which you can go into it with all sorts of good intentions, but if you burn out and become bankrupt, then it's gonna revert back to conventional farming in somebody else's hands. So, so a slow transition or a managed transition to a healthier process is, is probably better than flipping a switch and, and burning out.

Vance Crowe [01:09:41] So if you're gonna make changes, right, right now the, there's like conventional knowledge or kind of what everybody does. You're planting rows of corn, you know, one year, then the next year you're coming in putting down roses, soybeans, right on top of it. You're getting some nitrogen back. Then you go to plant corn again. You put nitrogen on it and then you make sure you get some fungicide and herbicides on it. Like what are you doing that's different than that?

Guest [01:10:07] The most basic thing I'm doing, there's probably two things that I'm doing well that are different than that. And that is first is no-till, which I believe all that disturbance to the soil is kind of like coming through and, and taking excavator through a house and, and then figuring out where you're supposed to live. 'cause all the microbiology that's down in that soil that's actually makes it work and be something other than dirt or sand particles is needs a place to live. And you just come through and destroy that. So I'm no-till. And then cover crops, which are a, a, a crop that you actually plant in the, in the soil. Usually in times when you don't have your cache crop in the, in the field growing so that there's something out there photosynthesizing producing exudates that get released into the soil to feed that biology year round or at least as much of the year as possible and keep that, that population alive so that when you do put your cash crop in there, it's it's ready to feed it and keep it going and, and provide it the nutrients that it needs.

Vance Crowe [01:11:17] It's wild. Like the thing that you're describing about tillage until I got around ag as an adult and you start opening your eyes, you're like, there, there's a reason people do this. It's 'cause they have weeds in their field or they wanna make sure that they've got black soil and they can, like, so you put a spike in the ground or you run a disc through it and you've got this giant tractor engine that's pulling it up and ripping the CLOs apart and that's ripping whatever weeds are there.

Guest [01:11:42] So

Vance Crowe [01:11:42] The idea that you could actually just leave it all there and instead go plant, you call 'em cover crops, what they could be is weeds, right? They're, they're like, yes. You know, a weed is any plant where you don't want it to be where it is.

Guest [01:11:55] Exactly.

Vance Crowe [01:11:55] And so you're taking these plants and saying, I'm gonna plant these down there and then that's actually gonna make the soil be looser and be able to absorb more water and whatever. But when you look at it, it doesn't look like that. It looks like, well why wouldn't I rip it open and make it so it's easy for the water to drain?

Guest [01:12:12] And I'm confident that I could go through and do some tillage in my fields and get at least a one year boost in, in my yields or in certain conditions I could get that boost. But then you get a layer of compaction about six, eight inches down or whatever beyond the reach of those tillage tools and, and then the roots can't get down there and the the, so the water can't percolate through infiltrate. And so overall long term, I believe that eliminating that physical disturbance of the soil is, is a good thing. Now there are a lot of organic producers that are heavy tillage and sometimes that's tilling in the cover crops. So they're mixing that biomass down in the fields and, and it goes back to that compromise and figuring out what the best solution is, the one that you feel comfort, confident in. And what I'm focused on,

Vance Crowe [01:13:02] One of the things I think is hilarious is that a lot of the activists that are like, Hey, I want to see things, you know, more cover crops, I hear farmers are doing that, that's better. And what they don't realize is, okay, you wanna do cover crops, you wanna do no-till then that's gonna mean glyphosate, right? Like, and, and so you have these people that have been completely told glyphosate roundup just a terrible thing. It's causing poison cancer, da da da da. Well, if you want this way of preserving, if you want the trade off, if you want the compromise of not having your water wash away if you, because if you till and rain comes Yep.

Guest [01:13:37] Whole

Vance Crowe [01:13:37] Bunch of that water wa washes all that soil away, you use glyphosate. But people are saying they don't want it. These are weird trade-offs that people that are outside of the system don't understand. They're asking farmers to make.

Guest [01:13:48] Exactly. That's, that's a hundred percent true. I mean, you'd like to say, I could just turn on this perfect solution system and execute it. But if your soil's not healthy enough to live in that new environment where it's in the past been spoon fed all the nutrients that it needed externally shipped in from all over the world, produce with lots of energy. But you, you put those fields or inputs on the field and the soil itself doesn't have to release to

Vance Crowe [01:14:19] Produce it. Yeah.

Guest [01:14:19] Produce any of those nutrients or, or supply it to the field or to the growing crop at the appropriate time. You could crash pretty hard and, and you can have the best intentions and be bankrupt and not change the world much in that manner. So you gotta figure out the path to, to productive profitably transforming your operation. And that usually requires some compromises in the, in the short term.

Vance Crowe [01:14:48] So you decided I wanna do things differently. Is this, you were reading 'em out of a book, were you finding stuff on YouTube watching documentaries? What?

Guest [01:14:57] I should do some, a lot more reading than I do, especially some old books that I have on my reading list that, but I tend to focus on the podcast and the YouTube videos and, and learning from people that are doing things kind of on the edge of the farm. Weird community, Zach, Jason Mauck, Gabe Brown, people that are innovating and, and doing things the way I would like to do them. And you know, I came back to the farm, did not have the agronomic knowledge to say I'm gonna be, I I'm gonna be great at figuring out what external nutrients need to be supplied to my field and the manners of doing those what herbicides, what all the chemistries do. I was gonna have to learn a system and I've so far decided that I'm gonna focus on learning this regenerative system and, and trying it out rather than becoming an expert in more conventional agriculture. I think there's enough people out there that can help me and then, but the challenge is okay, figuring out when to listen to them to say, okay, you need to apply the glyphosate now or no, you can help make your crop healthier and the insects will then ignore your crop because it, they're designed to take out the, the weak plants and they'll see that, that that weed is weaker and the insects will attack your weed rather than your, than your cash crop.

Guest [01:16:30] Those are all big challenges that you have to figure out how to,

Vance Crowe [01:16:33] It was wild. So we're taking, so we're at the, we're in Buffalo Center, Iowa and this morning I was walking around in the fields with Zach Smith. So this is his field day. And for people that aren't following along, this is what they call it, farm weird. And it's, I I mean ostensibly it's trying things that other people are not trying. So you drive down these fields and you see two rows of corn and four rows of soybeans and then two more rows of corn. You're like, what is going on here? Why isn't it all just one giant field of corn? Well he was showing me, Hey, you see on this end row there's these, these things on the bottom of this leaf and they're all eggs of, of like insects that are going eat that soybean plant. And he is like, now look at this field over here because it's right next to all these pollinators, these radishes and these flowers. There's aphids on it and look at there on the underside of this leaf eating all those eggs. So I'm not going to have to come in here and spray insecticide because you can tell they've already eaten 'em all here. So I've figured out a, he has figured out a system that if you can put it in balance, it can all work. But going to a farmer that's been doing, like you had said this very traditional system, if he tried to just be like, well I'm gonna plant it next to some radish radishes and some clover and the the beneficial insects are just gonna do it, it doesn't happen overnight. So you've gotta transition in this way that meets the speed of nature.

Guest [01:17:53] Correct. And one of the challenges I find as somebody who's coming to farming as a second career or third career, wherever you wanna start counting, I know I don't have 50 cropping seasons ahead of me to make a transition. So I'm maybe a little bit more aggressive at making that transition to achieve the goal I want before I am supposed to retire or, or turn it over to the next generation.

Vance Crowe [01:18:18] What do you think is regenerative farming?

Guest [01:18:21] I think it's trusting in God's design for the soil, for our environment that it it that it was actually designed to function. It does not, it's not a system that needs to be propped up. It needs to be cared for and, but if you care for it, it can be phenomenally productive and healthy and Hmm, I need to work on a more concise definition.

Vance Crowe [01:19:00] That's pretty good. I mean, I'm sitting here still stuck all the way back at the beginning asking myself, do you think God actually designed it like I'm gonna tinker around or do you think evolution brought it this way? You've said that twice now. God designed it.

Guest [01:19:16] I I fully believe that. I I believe that, that God designed it to be overflowing and abundant and when we live in accordance, whether as farmers or as people as stewards of, of that land, it can, it can do that. It, it's not something that we have to figure out how to overcome a broken system. If it's broken, it's 'cause we broke it. It's

Vance Crowe [01:19:49] One thing to talk about regenerative farming, but I don't know that everybody that's coming here thinks of themselves as regenerative. They, they talk about this concept farm weird. What does that mean to you?

Guest [01:20:00] Oh, basically I think it's just willingness to do things outside of the mainstream of, you know, solid seeded mono crops in large fields with large equipment and chemicals, synthetic fertilizers. Not that any one of those that you wouldn't find any one of those in a farm weird environment. But it's, it's trying to find alternatives to them and and even employ them in different mixes than maybe conventional agriculture does. We've really optimized agriculture for few people on large acres and, and that and for commodities. So commodities always drive down to low pro productivity, sorry, low profitability

Vance Crowe [01:20:59] Because you're always gonna bring it down to what is the absolute cheapest we can produce it for the most amount of money. Yeah.

Guest [01:21:04] And and you're competing with all the farmers in your county, in your state, across the country. You're competing with farmers in Brazil and China and, and Russia and Ukraine and so

Vance Crowe [01:21:16] Yeah, the ag companies are gonna run into a ban saw here pretty soon and you can already feel it. Things could change. You could have massive drought, you could have some kind of thing. But right now we have a supply glut. We have so many people producing such high yields. We're having a bumper crop year and the messaging of we've gotta feed, you know, 10 billion by 2050. We don't have time to wait around and like all of a sudden like that narrative is collapsing. 'cause we're saying, well, population is collapsing, we're not going up in population, we're going down. And farmers growing as much as humanly possible isn't feeding the world that's driving the value of their crops down. Correct,

Guest [01:21:52] Correct. So that it, everybody has a, the opportunity to decide where they wanna specialize in where they wanna focus. Do you wanna, is your goal to produce the, the most bushels period or to produce the best ROI are you willing to reduce some of that profitability to maybe for environmental reasons or for personal health reasons? Or maybe can you find a way if you operate enough differently in a farm, weird environment or, or if you, if you experiment outside of the norm, can you find a way that actually improves profitability at the same time accomplishing some of those goals? The, going back to one of our mantras in engineering, when management would come to us, you know, often management would want the product timeline, development timeline shorter. And we would joke say, hey, cost quality or speed, speed to product release. Those are three, choose two of them, but you don't get all three. Well, but you're always optimizing trying to figure out how you can do best on all three of those. And, and so to me, farm weird is, and regenerative is trying to figure out a different optimization that maintains profitability while achieving other goals along the way.

Guest [01:23:24] That might be with high yields, that might be with lesser yields, but, but better, better productivity and better impacts on community or, or whatever. I think it's whatever's important to you, you can optimize for.

Vance Crowe [01:23:41] When I talk to Zach, I don't wanna represent even Jason. Like they perceive we are running out of time to get out of the monocropping system like that, that what we're actually doing is every single year. It's not just a little bit of top soil. We are flushing top soil down into the Gulf of Mexico and that there should be a sense of urgency. Do you have that sense of urgency?

Guest [01:24:07] I'd say that's what drove me to the cover crops first was hating to see erosion on my soils, on this land that I'd grown up on starting again in 1970 and that my parents and my grandparents have owned before that. So there's a lot of history, those that land is important to me. And I don't mean to say this as if I don't care about what happens in the Gulf of Mexico. 'cause I do, that impacts us. But my primary motivation is, is protecting this land that that is mine. And, and if I degrade it too far, it will never be the same that has a side benefit of protecting the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi River and the economy or the environment around the world. But my primary focus is the, the land that I'm in charge of stewarding right now.

Vance Crowe [01:25:10] So there's a couple people that'll show up on Twitter and they're not really ag people. I'm not an ag person. Right. But do they either, so I'm with humility, I'm, I'm bringing this up, but they often will be like, well, what we need to do is get some more laws here. If we could just have some laws that make farmers do cover crops or, or you know, use the, the pesticides in the right way. Is the problem from your perspective that there aren't enough laws.

Guest [01:25:40] I'm a free market person. It's, I don't believe the laws can be optimized long term for what's best at the moment and best for every field. So that's always a struggle as to whether you need a law to, to require this or do you want people to be free to innovate on their own? I like being free to innovate on my own. I think there are, whenever there's always unintended consequences of, of laws. And so when even the best law is optimized for something, going back to that compromise thing that I talked about in the beginning and, and e it will either force a lot of people out of business or it'll encourage and possibly encourage more monopolies of

Vance Crowe [01:26:45] The farming land. Yeah, I can, A perfect example, this is one I was talking with Zach about this the other night. All right, so let's say the government mandates cover crops. Well now you gotta say, well which cover crops are you allowed to plant? What qualifies? Well now we're gonna need to create a new wing at the USDA for the people that certify that these are the cover crops that allow you to get that preferred insurance rate or that you're passing you, you're not violating the law.

Guest [01:27:06] So

Vance Crowe [01:27:06] Now, because those have to get certified, then there's only certain companies that are gonna jump through all the bureaucratic hoops. And then they do, and then they say, you know, it's not fair that these other companies aren't certified and they're selling their cover crops. So now we need some enforcement mechanism and somebody needs to go take those guys out. And now the people that have the certified seeds, they can sell 'em for whatever they want because they're the ones that figured out how to do the bureaucratic hurdle hurdles. And that ends up just benefiting the large ag companies that they can put their money into teams of lawyers that can go through that system. Now nobody in that system is bad necessarily. Nobody's sitting there being like, I'm gonna go do the wrong thing. They are just maximizing on their interests. And because there's law there, it creates bubbles and pushes people out of the market. And I think you create a law about cover crops and you're gonna get the opposite of what you want, which is a whole bunch of different types of cover crops and different businesses competing to say, mine are the best.

Guest [01:28:03] Yeah. Honestly, what I would like to see more than anything is reduction in subsidies. And I haven't fully analyzed, you know, that, how that will impact farmers and will it cause the small guys go outta the business. But I think it's hard to know the true cost.

Vance Crowe [01:28:18] Which subsidies do you wanna take out?

Guest [01:28:20] Well, I'll, I think I'll give a corollary example rather than maybe a specific answer to that question. But I think anytime that there's a lot of subsidies in the market, it's hard to know what the true costs and true cost of production is. And the true competitiveness and efficiency

Vance Crowe [01:28:38] Is. Yeah. Not, not hard. Impossible. Literally

Guest [01:28:40] Impossible. It's, it's, it's filtered out. You cannot figure it out anymore. And the only really way to get back to knowing is to eliminate the subsidies. 'cause the subsidies are always advan advan providing an advantage to something that you think is better at the cost of trying to discourage something that is less good. And you know, if you look at solar wind power versus fossil fuels or something like that, it's hard to figure out what is truly best or ethanol or what.

Vance Crowe [01:29:13] Well, what you find definitely is you've distorted the market. So if you, if you prop up that solar company now, they don't actually have to be competitive, they just have to meet the government guidelines as opposed to being more effective than carbon. Yeah.

Guest [01:29:25] Or

Vance Crowe [01:29:25] Coal. Coal, I mean,

Guest [01:29:26] But they're competing against a fossil fuel market that those company companies are subsidized as well. So, so it's just, are you gonna give, pretty soon you're, you're subsidizing everybody or you're choosing who the winners are and saying, these are the people we're gonna allow to win and, and all the other people, they'll just suffer or figure out how to be more productive than all the subsidized companies, which is really, really hard. Okay.

Vance Crowe [01:29:54] So right now, Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, Illinois for sure, they say you must blend a certain amount of corn ethanol into the gasoline that everyone has to buy. If you took that away, it would be, right now the, the amount of corn that goes to the ethanol is 40% at

Guest [01:30:16] Least.

Vance Crowe [01:30:17] So let's imagine, you know, some percentage of that is needed. People want really, really want ethanol. But if you didn't have it mandated that it had to be in gas can stations, what would you do if 40% of the acreage got freed up from growing corn? What would happen? Would it be that prices would just collapse or would you start, what would happen?

Guest [01:30:39] Well, initially I think well, so knowing what would happen, would people continue to blend in some methanol or whatever? I, I don't know the answer to that because I, if you took all the ways, all the subsidies away from ethanol, but you are still subsidizing the petroleum side, then obviously they're just gonna go where the maximum subsidies are. So, so that would be a huge shock to the system. And I think in the short term commodity prices would fall, which I can't imagine them falling anymore than they are right now. But it's very possible when you look at current price of corn and especially if you accommodate for inflation. I mean that corn has gotta be the cheapest it's ever been in, in world history. I

Vance Crowe [01:31:30] Think you're right. I think you're the only person I've heard say that, but I, now that you say it, I'm like, gosh, you know, you look, what is corn right now? What was it today?

Guest [01:31:37] Oh, I haven't looked today, but maybe three 80, somewhere in there

Vance Crowe [01:31:41] On the future market and then like it's 20, the value of our dollars are 20% less at a minimum just

Guest [01:31:45] Over the last four years. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:31:47] And so like that three 80 is probably two 80 like, you know, a a

Guest [01:31:52] Two

Vance Crowe [01:31:53] 50

Guest [01:31:53] From the last time we saw corn at this price. And, and the inflation that we've experienced since then, it's way less than it than it's showing on the market compared to whatever year that was.

Vance Crowe [01:32:06] Are you able to produce corn and soybeans at a profit this year?

Guest [01:32:10] I don't believe that I will be, and it all depends on yields, so that's gonna be an interesting thing. But that's, this is, you know, one of my partners jokes that it's better to be lucky than good. And I've had several years where luck has been in my favor, prices have been good as I've figured out things that impact positively or negatively, my yields, I've still come out profitable. This year's gonna be, if not no pro no profit, it'll be much thinner profit than it has been in in previous years. And is that scary? You know, it's very scary and you know, I I I think people that don't, aren't self-employed or they probably can't comprehend the thought of working hard, investing hundreds of thousands of dollars for a year and, and coming out with less money than you went into all that with which, you know, if, if you wanna blast conventional farmers and say they should be flipping the switch and going to regenerative practices or something, put yourself in their shoes and saying, I've got millions of dollars equipment tied up and, and I should all just put that at risk because somebody on the outside says I should. So going back, I said, I'm a free market capitalist. I don't believe we should be forced to do that. Everybody's gotta figure out something that allows 'em to sleep at night.

Vance Crowe [01:33:47] It's, it's interesting, something I had never considered with regenerative farming because I've been very resistant to it. I mean, I remember when the yogurt company, whatever the Stonyfield Farm was pumping regenerative and I'm like, this is just a comi plot to, you know, do organic 2.0 and then it'll be taken over by the government. But now that I've met people like you and John Kempf and

Guest [01:34:09] John's fascinating, yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:34:12] I'm, I'm way more open to it. But something I had not thought of until this conversation is that if you have an off year, but you're doing regenerative practices, at least your soil is that much better off for next year. You've, you've done some adding back to it, you've added more carbon, you've got a better nitrogen sink. And so there could be something where you're like, yeah, well it didn't pay off this year, but as long as we don't go under our soil for next year and the year after and the year after continues to get better. Is that fair?

Guest [01:34:43] I think that is fair. I think with any, any venture new, starting a new company, whatever, you gotta figure out when it is that you, hold on, hang on, how strongly you believe this will eventually pan out or do you cut bait and go back to the way other people are doing it or whatever. And so if you, if we believe that we're making our soils healthier, eventually we're getting ourselves away from more synthetic purchased inputs to, to put into our fields, then, then that's, there's a payoff there. And there is this transition. A lot of times people say with cover crops you got at least a three year investment before you really start seeing the, the soil transform from the presence of those cover crops. So it's, if you make the decision after the first year that, well, I didn't like how that worked or the second year you're really walking away from almost seeing the benefit of it. But you've gotta be, gotta be feel good about that plan that you're on to say, I am going to see this benefit eventually and I can make it to that point where it starts hitting my bottom line if you don't see it immediately. John Kempf talks a lot about, we don't, he doesn't believe that you should see a reduction in profitability when you start making some of these changes.

Guest [01:36:18] And I'm not a good one to ask on that because I don't have the history of of being a full conventional. I only know what my crop yields are starting in 2020 and my profitability and my expenses and all that stuff. And it's been my best to follow these, these practices.

Vance Crowe [01:36:36] Well Wes, I have wanted to do a podcast with you. We've known each other. I did we meet at Jason Maucks first field day or did we just happen to be passing there? I

Guest [01:36:47] I honestly couldn't tell you if I did any more than introduce myself that day or if I even introduced myself. But the first time I encountered you was at Jason Moxville day in, in 2020 and started listening to the podcast and then started participating in book clubs and, and

Vance Crowe [01:37:03] Yeah, I mean I, when we were talking about doing this podcast, I had grand aspirations for let's talk about this and this and this and this, but now things are getting started. We gotta get ready for the field day. We'll have to do another one of these podcasts. You have to come down to the studio. This

Guest [01:37:16] Has been fun.

Vance Crowe [01:37:17] If people wanted to, you know, get your insights on farm equipment iterations that they should do or talk regenerative farming, how should they get ahold of you?

Guest [01:37:28] Well, on, on Twitter, I'm out there at I Wes Carney, that's my main social media presence. But you won't find a picture out there. I you're constantly encouraging me to, to be more active out there. I'm not sure I'm a an expert to follow yet, but I'm anxious to have some examples and I'll definitely share what I've learned,

Vance Crowe [01:37:49] What I've seen. I mean, I'm pushing you not I, I, it's not like I go around being like all farmers should be on social media. I think you have an incr. One of the reasons we have a friendship, and I tell people this all the time and they're like really shy, Wes, he does it. I'm like, every time I talk to him, he like makes me look at a problem in a different way. And often it's not like I'm like, oh, Wes really made me deeply think about it. You just have a very gentle way about the way you express things, the way you give feedback, what you hear. And so I think if you are a part of the social media ecosphere, you're not gonna be a guy that's sitting there hammering it and, oh, look at me in my field doing this. But you have a way of changing the trajectory of the conversation, I think is really important. So that's why I wanna see you there.

Guest [01:38:33] I try to be an encourager and that's probably more my skillset rather than a critiquer or a look at me person.

Vance Crowe [01:38:41] Well man, I'm so glad you made it up to the field day and thanks man. It's

Guest [01:38:44] Gonna be fun.

Vance Crowe [01:38:45] All right,

Guest [01:38:46] Cool. Thanks fans. Yeah, great. This was good.