Regenerative Ranching and Ministry: Clay Conry on Ultra-High Density Grazing and Shepherding

Clay Conry [00:00:00] I'm open to anything. I will, I'll talk to anybody. And so I'm, I'm not afraid of any topic that when it comes to ranching necessarily. And so I'm al always open just to an interesting conversation that challenges my paradigms, challenges somebody else's paradigms. I'm Brian Moose, a farmer living in Florence, South Dakota, and you're listening to the Vance Grow Podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:00:28] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today we sit down with Clay Conry. If you don't know Clay, he runs one of the most popular cattle podcast in the entire country called Working Cows. He's a pastor and he raises sheep in South Dakota. This is an interesting character and we had a chance to sit down and talk all about what do you talk about week after week on a cattle podcast? What does a pastor actually do? Why do people trust you? And I learned a lot about sheep that I knew nothing about. My sense is that this is one of those podcasts that you're gonna say, I don't know, should I give this a shot? And you'll get all the way through it and you'll realize you had a very interesting conversation with a guy that's humble, has many good ideas, and is really extraordinary at explaining what goes on in the world of cattle ranchers mines. So we're gonna get to that in just a moment. But first, a couple of announcements on February 8th and ninth. Legacy Interviews is headed to Monticello, Indiana, where we'll be recording local Legacy Interviews. If you've had a loved one that you've thought would be perfect and you really want to capture their life stories so that future generations can know their family history, but thought the drive to St. Louis might be a bit much, then consider signing up for one of six slots that we have available. We had a listener generously offer us an opportunity to use their bend dominium, that's a grain bin turned into a condo. And we've decided to open up some slots for people in northwest Indiana to get one of these Legacy Interviews.

Vance Crowe [00:02:01] So if you're interested, go to Legacy Interviews dot com slash Indiana to sign up. We only have six slots available, so go. Now. Another big announcement that I wanna make is a few weeks ago I aired the talk that I gave at the Colorado Farm Bureau called The Art of Picking Up Nails. That talk is about communications, how to help people open up so that you can have deeper conversations that might lead to conversations about succession planning or changes that are coming, the sort of opening up that builds relationships. I had some groups reach out to me and ask, would I be willing to come give that talk at their organization? And the answer is, of course, yes. I'm very interested in booking out talks in the late spring and early summer. And if that particular talk didn't fit you, you can go to Vance Crowe dot com to find out more talks that we're delivering these days. Right now we have a talk on strategy and thinking about new technologies that are coming down the line. I have another talk about negotiations and how to make sure that you can get what you need and make sure that other people are happy. Or for your group, we could always develop a new talk that matches your organization precisely. If you're interested in having me come speak to your group, go to Vance Crowe dot com to find out more. Alright, without further ado, let's head to the interview with Clay Conry. Clay Conry, welcome to the podcast.

Clay Conry [00:03:19] Yeah, thanks for the opportunity, Vance. Appreciate it,

Vance Crowe [00:03:22] Man. I have been on a lot of people's podcasts, but never before have I been on somebody's podcast and I had so many people write me, call me, text me. It was unbelievable. So let's start off there talking about your podcast. Who is listening to you and how'd you get this thing started?

Clay Conry [00:03:39] I guess about six years ago now, just a little over six years ago now, my wife and I embarked on a journey of taking some continuing education courses. And kind of the 30,000 foot view of that is I grew up on a, on a ranch. My parents are, I always say my parents are heroes. They started their ranch from nothing in the eighties, and just both of them hustled jobs in town to get it going. And were able to retire early by some metrics to the ranch and then just, just enjoy some time doing what they loved after they worked their jobs in town. And so I grew up where my parents were, like I said, hustling jobs in town and, and every night and every weekend pretty much was the ranch for us. And so I kind of resented the ranch, didn't really like it, didn't enjoy it. And so I went away, lived in Milwaukee for two years, went to Bible school, and I kind of remember coming home from Bible school one time, and maybe it was just the funk of a, of the inside of a 19-year-old boy's car and a 13 hour drive. But I got out in Western South Dakota and I smelled the air, and I'm like, the air is fresh here. This is nice. I kind of do enjoy that. And I always say, that's kind of the seed I think that really planted this connection to Western South Dakota and the agricultural lifestyle that goes along with it. So continue, fast forward a little bit. I spent 12 years as a a, as a youth and associate pastor in the, the church where I was saved, where I became a Christian and I, that that stream of income, so to speak, was starting to go down.

Clay Conry [00:05:20] And my dad was starting to need more help on the ranch. So he offered me a part-time job working on the ranch. And in the course of that, he said, you know, you should really go get some continuing education related to ranching so that we can have some more intelligent conversations. And I'm not just telling you, put that staple there, you know, haul those cows there, we can kind of start to make some plans and decisions together. And I go to this continuing education course called the High Plains Ranch Practicum. I don't think it exists in the same format anymore, but it was put on by Blake Hopman, Dallas Mount, and Aaron Berger, Dallas Mount, and all of three of 'em were extension agents. Blake and Dallas were with University of Wyoming, and Aaron was with the University of Nebraska. And they cooperated together to put on this High Plains Ranch practicum. And Dallas made the statement a couple of times in the course of that class. He said, you know, somebody in this room should start a podcast for ranchers. Well, I was a podcast addict already at that point, had been listening for a couple of years to a number of different podcasts on a weekly basis or daily, depending on the frequency of their release schedule. And you know, I, I had an un understanding of the recording equipment through my job at the church and recording sermons. I had an understanding of websites also through the job at church. So I had the technical side down. I had the love for podcasting down, and I'd heard podcasters always saying, you should start a podcast. Everybody always says, you know, you should start a podcast. And, which I think is something unique that separates radio from podcasting, but that's another conversation.

Clay Conry [00:06:57] And so, you know, he said, you should start a podcast. I'm like, well, I grew up on a ranch. I know the technical side. I can ask a reasonably intelligent question about cows. And the way that they were presenting ranching was unlike anything I'd ever heard before about high, high intensity rotational grazing and some of these things. And more, more than that, just looking at ranching as a business rather than a lifestyle. Because I think sometimes we supplement poor performing businesses or we, we, we subsidize poor performing businesses by telling ourselves it's a lifestyle. And so it was really opening up a whole different way of looking at ranching a new paradigm, so to speak. And so I started to think about, okay, maybe I can do this. And so I started the podcast in November of 2017 and started releasing just about an episode a week. For the last six years, I've averaged more than an episode a week. This year I released about 65 episodes, I think as I partnered with some different organizations to release some branded content for them. So yeah, it just has continued to grow. And I think, you know, first of all, all glory to God for the, the success of the podcast. Honestly, I, I always say it's proof that he can draw a straight line with a crooked stick. But I also think that some, some of that has to do with timing. Like you get, you get to market first. I was one of the first agricultural podcasts, and by no means the first, there were other people doing it before me, but I was pretty early as far as agricultural podcasts con are concerned.

Clay Conry [00:08:34] And I think that helps a lot. And so, and then to the guests, you know, the guests have been a great part of that. You know, just leveraging the network of the guests and saying, you know, who do you think that I should be talking to? Who's the next guy I should answer? Or they'll just mention names in passing. And you take down the notes, you write down the notes, and you, you reach out to those people and they mention other people. And it's just continued to grow in that way. And it's an awesome community. I see people from all over the country and all over the world making connections through the podcast. And it's just been a real fun journey and a real blessing to my family. And it's just been a huge, my wife has been a huge support through this whole thing of letting me hide out in the closet when I need to and record an intro or record a whole episode or whatever it takes to get decent acoustics in a room to, to make a, to make a recording. So, and

Vance Crowe [00:09:30] When you have working cows, is the title of your thing, does this mean you are put putting out their ranching information that people already know? This is like the normal way to do it. Are you doing something on the edge?

Clay Conry [00:09:43] The tagline? I has been, you know, providing producers a platform to discuss and share paradigm challenging practices. And so basically the goal is to produce something that is out of the box. And one of, one good example of that is two episodes back to back. I talked to a guy in chapel Nebraska who runs a feedlot, and we talked about the changes in the feedlot business over the last, you know, 30, 40 years since he's been involved in it. And some of the ways that they are trying to set themselves apart in that business to eke out a better margin and, and some of those things. And then the very next episode was with a guy from Minnesota who says, I, who said, I haven't, he's a veterinarian, you know, and he said, I have not held or sold vaccine in 21 years. And he said, it's just been all grass finishing, no, no confinement, all on pasture. And I haven't held or sold vaccine in 21 years. So just, and, and there were people after the release of both of those episodes that were upset, like, how can you be talking to the feedlot guy? And then there's other guys who are like, well, how can he not vaccinate cattle? Does he hate his cows? Are they all gonna die? You know? And so it's, I'm, I'm, you challenge somebody's paradigm with every episode. And so it, it's kind of broad. I'm open to anything I will, I'll talk to anybody. And so I'm, I'm not afraid of any topic that when it comes to ranching necessarily.

Clay Conry [00:11:18] And so I'm al always open just to an interesting conversation that challenges my paradigms, challenges somebody else's paradigms. Because I think that, I heard it said one time, if you read one author, you're a clone. If you read two authors, you're confused. If you read a thousand authors, you can become wise. And so I think that if we, we will broaden our perspectives and our horizons, we can become better managers. And if we approach it with an open mind, we can learn something from everybody. Everybody has something that they can teach us if we're willing to approach it with humility.

Vance Crowe [00:11:52] Yeah. And as the person on the, that's running the podcast, it's amazing to me when people will be like, I can't believe you let that person talk, or I can't believe you let that person say that thing. And, and you realize like the concepts that go behind something like free speech are, are deeply foreign to the human social animal. It might be really something that the, that the individual understands, but the social animal definitely has this desire to say, Hey, those are things you shouldn't say, or, or I believe that they're so wrong that we should try and push those ideas out. It's, it's been fascinating to me to, to, to see this.

Clay Conry [00:12:32] Yeah. And I think that that's, you know, the, the, the idea of free speech is that even if I don't agree with what you say, I will defend your right to say it. Right. I think that's when you, when you really understand free speech, you come to that conclusion, you know, and I think that as long as free speech isn't harming somebody else, that you know, that there are, there's a pretty broad spectrum of things that people ought to be allowed to say in the public space.

Vance Crowe [00:13:04] And when you think of some of these paradigm changing interviews that you've had, which have been the ones that have caused you to actually make a change in your life.

Clay Conry [00:13:12] Yeah, I think that, you know, some of the ones, like we talk about running sheep and sheep have fallen out of favor, but you talk to most people, like in my parents' generation and older sheep were a big part of what really paid for a lot of land in the west. And honestly, I think it's because they're a, they're an animal better suited to the west. First of all, they're very susceptible to paradi parasites. So when we have them in eastern context where the parasite load is higher, they are, they struggle in those contexts. And so in the west, the parasite load is lower, right? There are smaller animals, so they don't take as much input for to stay alive, right? You think about a 250 pound u versus a 13, 14, 1500 pound cow, the ratio stays the same, right? 3% of body weight for dry in dry matter intake, right? So they're gonna, they need less food. And it just so happens that in the west we have less food available. You know, I grew up in western South Dakota, 15 inches of rain a year. The next step below that is semi arid, and then the next one below that is a desert. And so, you know, we're, we're just a couple of steps up from being a desert in Western South Dakota. And so we should start to look at, well, what animals thrive in deserts in other places? Yeah, you get to wear a bigger, bigger belt buckle to the coffee shop if you run big black cows. But what animals thrive in a desert sheep?

Clay Conry [00:14:45] And so maybe we should think about incorporating sheep into some of these operations, even if they don't carry as much swagger at the coffee shop.

Vance Crowe [00:14:56] Is there a place to harvest sheep around where you're at? I would imagine that'd be one of the biggest challenges,

Clay Conry [00:15:01] Right? Yeah. So there's one of the largest sheep sale barns. I know it's at different points. It's been one of the largest ones in the world. More head of sheep have run through there than anywhere else is just 35 miles from my house. And so this, again, this place, this, this whole area was really built on, on the back of the sheep. People call them the mortgage lifters. So they, they really did help a lot of people get by and survive, but they're, they're a different animal. I heard somebody say recently, you, you can run cows because you get that social capital, but you cannot run sheep unless you love sheep because they will frustrate you. They will do things that you don't want them to do. They'll get out, they'll test your fences, they'll all kinds of things, right? And they're just a totally different animal when it comes to how you approach them from a stockmanship perspective. How you work them, how you get them to move through a gate. They're just totally different than than a cow. And so it, it does take a special set of skills to do it well, skills that we are still trying to acquire at my house. But it is, it is a, a totally different scenario. And so I think that we do have that infrastructure here. We have people who know how to sheer sheep. We run wool sheep. So they, they have a fleece that they produce every year. And we have people who know how to shear 'em. And we have a sail barn big enough that multiple semi-loads of sheep will leave there every week, whether it's slaughter use or lambs or some combination of the two multiple semi-loads go outta there every week of the year.

Clay Conry [00:16:43] And so it's big enough to keep trucks coming and those trucks can drive straight to a feedlot facility or a facility that is gonna harvest them. You know? So it's, that's not a problem.

Vance Crowe [00:16:55] So I wasn't expecting you to say you run sheep for wool. Like, to me that what I've heard is that the wool is like, you know, you're just shearing it off 'em to keep 'em going, but you guys are actually capturing that and selling it somewhere. Yeah.

Clay Conry [00:17:07] Again, one of the largest sheep wear wool warehouses in the world, again, is, is 70 miles from a house in Befor South Dakota. And so again, Australia and New Zealand, I'm not sure how they play into that. I know Australia produces a way finer wool than we do in America. I think it has something to do with the arid climate that helps them in that regard. But it is a very, we can, we can make it work. It's worth us, it's worth it for us. I know a lot of people in the East, I've even gotten emails from people 'cause I've talked about sheep quite a bit on the working cows podcast. I've talked about sheep quite a bit, and I've gotten emails from people in Missouri and said, I, I just burned my wool. That's all we do with it. Like you said, we just, we, we shear it off and we use it to start a fire somewhere because we, we can't get rid of it here. But I mean, again, there's, there's a wool warehouse that, I don't know how many, I think I've heard. It said that this guy, the wool warehouse will put together like kinds of wool that are similar as far as micron, which is the, the width of the individual fibers. He puts together like kinds of wool and he sells 'em by the, like the container ship load out of that wool warehouse. So there's a lot of wool that goes through that warehouse in a given year. And so again, it's a advantage for us, it's a regional advantage for us, which I think is part of the key to success in agriculture in these days, is taking advantage of those regional advantages that you have. We have unfair advantages here and we should try to take advantage of them so that we can succeed in, in agriculture financially, not just relationally.

Vance Crowe [00:18:47] And what is the profit model look like on sheep?

Clay Conry [00:18:50] You know, it's better, it's just like anything else. It's a, it's a market. It's just like anything else. It, it's better at sometimes than others. Three and four years ago it was incredibly good. And that was partly due to the fact that they had a major freeze during lambing season in Texas, if you remember that kind of freak below zero su sustain sustained spell that came right during lambing season in Texas and really set them back for a couple of years. And about the time that Texas got ramped back up with sheep production, our market fell out of bed. And so then it was down for about a year and now it's bounced back. It's pretty decent. And I think a lot of what's driving the better sheep markets of late is more, more ethnic populations in America that are, that are consumers of lamb, right? And so we don't, by and large, my family doesn't eat much. We've eaten some, not of our own, but from our neighbors who invited us over to go through the process of, of butchering their, their lambs. And, and they sent us home with a little bit that day and, and we enjoyed it. I mean, it's good eat, good eat and critter, but just not something we grew up with. So it's not something that we're familiar with or accustomed to. And so a lot of our lamb leaves and goes somewhere else and gets used up. But I think that there has been the growth of that population in America so that less of our, our lamb has to get exported than probably it did before.

Vance Crowe [00:20:22] Well, you mentioned that you have regional advantages, like the ability to have sheep up where you're at and make it profitable, but you're also in the most bitterly cold place that I would imagine makes it difficult to run cattle. You know, basically from October on through March, April, I know Brian Mos sends me these photographs of, of his frozen beard and it's just un unreal what he, he goes through, in fact, a quick story about Brian Mos. I'm in a group of people, we sometimes do little experiments for like a month, and we decided a couple years ago, I think it was November, that we were gonna do cold showers that you couldn't use hot water, not realizing that Brian was gonna be like, you know, like 20 degrees colder than everybody else.

Clay Conry [00:21:08] So you just had to crank that shower all the way over to the cul a setting.

Vance Crowe [00:21:12] Yeah. And he was, he was trying to do it too, but so that, you know, that brings up, you're both in South Dakota, you know, you're trying to raise cattle where you gotta go out and cab in the middle of the night cold has gotta be a serious disadvantage to you.

Clay Conry [00:21:25] Yep. Again, and, but I think that again, that's another paradigm challenging practice, right? So that's part of what really the ethos of the Working Cows podcast is, is we're putting cows to work for us rather than us work for the cows. Why don't we make them work for us? And so I think that, you know, Brian, I've toured his operation, it's incredible. They, they were a candidate for the NC MBA's Stewardship Award. They won their region, which I think is district five or seven, I can't remember which, but they won their region and they went to the NCBA conference and they were up, I, I don't know how how many of those districts, there are seven or eight of those districts and they were one of the seven or eight in the nation that was up for that award. And so, I mean, they're doing an amazing job. They are doing an incredible job of capturing manure from their feedlot, reapplying it to their feeds, helping defray the costs of, of more than one salary on their operation, you know, they're doing, and they've got an incredible facility that makes calving in February when they do calve a lot easier. And they're also very busy in the field in May when it's a lot less of a burden to calve as far as from a temperature perspective. So all that to say that one of the paradigm challenging practices that we talk a lot about is calving in sync with nature, or as I like to say, it, calving in sync with what God provides, right? So the, the the world, the, our region goes through a shift from high availability of forage to low availability of forage.

Clay Conry [00:23:07] The, the bottom of the trough as far as forage availability is February, right? The top of the trough as far as forage availability is may and June. And so when does the cow have her greatest nutrient requirements? The last trimester of pregnancy and the first trim or the first quarter after birth when that calf is depending on her completely for all of its nutrients from her milk supply. And so her nutrient requirement is ramping up right when our forage availability is at the lowest if we're, if we're doing it in February. Now, like I said, Brian's got a great, great setup. They've got a huge feed pile that they can use because they harvest it from their corn and, and, and all those things, you know, they make it into silage works really well for them. They've got the facilities to do it. So, and they're doing a great job of it. But for somebody who's just trying to get start out, there's a lot of capital that goes into starting with that. You gotta build a barn. Sometimes you put a heated floor in that barn, you've gotta have the tractors to, to plant the corn, the tractors to, you know, all all of the equipment to, to fertilize the corn, harvest the corn, put the corn in the silage pile packet, all of that. You know, that's all, those are dollars that you need to start if you're gonna start in that kind of a, of a mode. And so maybe there's another way to start, and that could be calving in May and June when the forage supply is at its peak, right?

Clay Conry [00:24:37] When the cows nutrient requirements are at their peak. And so that's one of the things that we talk about on the Working Cows podcast is matching our, our, our businesses, our business models to what nature provides as far as those things are required. So in a lot of places they end up feeding cattle six months out of the year or more. Right? And, and, and here's the thing that blows a lot of people's minds. That number really doesn't change that much from Canada to Texas. In Canada. They feed just as much as they do in Texas and they do it for different reasons, right? In, in the Gulf Coast of Texas, they don't really grow what we would call grass here. They grow what we would call tall water, right? There's not much to that grass. It's very, what we call washy. It's just a lot of high water content. There's not much protein, not much nutrients in that grass. And so they, it, and it goes really downhill when it goes dormant. And so they have to feed, not because there isn't grass there, but because the grass that is there is so low quality that they have to supplement that cow through her low nutrient requirement or through her high nutrient requirement phases of her year. And so, but we could maybe change the wind, change wind we cal, so that we can match that cow's nutrient requirements to the forage availability of our landscapes and save ourselves some money, reduce the startup costs and some of those things.

Vance Crowe [00:26:12] I always wondered why, why is it that that ranchers are often calving in February? I mean, it seems like the worst time to be doing it, but they must have had a good reason to be doing it.

Clay Conry [00:26:23] Yeah, so I think that that goes to a couple of things. One of, one of 'em is a cultural thing and the other one is about just the cycle of the year, right? If you get that calf on the ground in February, you can wean a pretty good sized calf by, by October and you've got all of your production in one year basically. Right? And so it makes it a little cleaner, a little easier. But I think also there's a cultural thing that goes to that because we haven't always been calving at the same time. I think this goes to something that I've been thinking about a lot lately, which is what I call the eternality of the present. We think that just because it's happening this way right now, it's always been happening this way and we can't, we don't remember, or we don't realize how recently people were doing it differently than we're doing it right now. And so I, I think that it's easy for us to think that people have always been calving in February. They haven't, it's, it's not that old that people, it's not that that long ago that people started calving and really, it, it has a lot to do with the mechanization of, of ranching, right? We, we didn't have tractors 150 years ago, you know, a lot of those things, or may or maybe, you know, we can quibble on dates. A

Vance Crowe [00:27:41] Lot of people didn't have tractors in the 1930s. Right? Right, right. Like it's not that long ago. Yeah, right,

Clay Conry [00:27:44] Right. So, so the, the mechanization of agriculture has opened up those opportunities that probably didn't exist. So a good way to measure this is look at, look at the wildlife in your area. When are they calving? When or when are they, you know, having their young, when are the deer having their fawns? When are the elk having their calves? You know, look at the wildlife in your area, especially the ruminants and the ungulates. Look at them and say, when are they doing their thing? And then think, I bet there's a reason they're doing their thing then. And maybe think about matching your, your production schedule up to it. So the cultural thing though that I was talking about is there has been what, what some people have called the space race in livestock, agricultural especially mostly affecting cattle. And that is bigger, faster basically is what it is. They wanted to get the biggest animal possible in the shortest amount of time possible. Well, that animal that can do that is going to be highly dependent on supplementation. There are breeds of cattle, there are sizes of cattle, there are even shapes of cattle that do a lot better on less supplementation, even no supplementation, even in difficult environments like Montana, South Dakota, North Dakota. But if you, if you go after that heavier weaning weight and that weaning a calf and selling a calf in October when everybody else is selling a calf, it's gonna take a different animal and it's gonna take some, some supplementation to do it.

Clay Conry [00:29:24] And so those are kind of some of the reasons why it ends up working out the way it does.

Vance Crowe [00:29:31] When do you guys calve?

Clay Conry [00:29:34] So I run the Working Cows podcast. I don't own cows, I own sheep and I bring in other people's cows to my place during the growing season. That's how we approach it. I, I shouldn't say I don't own cows, I own two cows. They're milk cows. And they will, they'll probably calve around, around May or after one of them, the neighbor's bull gone in, so she might calve a little earlier. But that, that, that happens.

Vance Crowe [00:30:03] Yeah. The reality of nature. So you have milking cows that mean you're out there every morning and every afternoon milking 'em.

Clay Conry [00:30:10] Right now our, our milk cow is raising a calf that will end up in our freezer next fall. And so she doesn't require much milking at this moment. And then the other one is a first calf heifer. She hasn't had her first calf yet. And so when she does calf, we will start milking her. So we're not currently milking anything. We're kinda like old McDonald's farm. The ranch for us is a sm is a side hustle. Okay? So the ranch is a side hustle for us. It, it has supplemented our income and helped us just have a little bit higher standard of living, be able to be a little more generous and give away a little bit more money than, than we would otherwise. And so it, it isn't our sole source of income. So like I said, we've got goats, we've milked to those at different times. And I actually prefer goat milk to cow's milk. If you don't have a buck around, if you've got a buck around, it tastes like the buck smells. If you know what a, what a male goat smells like, not pleasant. But if you don't have a buck around, in my experience, it tastes a lot better and it's really good. I actually heard one guy say one time, just think about the size of the animal that's, that they're attempting to raise with when with, with the milk that they're producing. A cow is trying to produce a 1300 pound animal, well, a goat's trying to produce a 200 pound animal. So maybe we should drink milk from animals that are a little closer in size to what we are. That was an interesting perspective, I thought. And I do prefer

Vance Crowe [00:31:37] Yeah, I never heard that before.

Clay Conry [00:31:38] Yeah, and they're, and they're easier to keep around, right? They're, they're, well, other than keeping them in, you basically have to build a swimming pool to keep a goat in. But it's, it's, they're easier from that same, same idea, right? They're smaller animal, they, they take less feed to keep alive. And honestly, a milk cow will probably produce more milk than one family can drink. And so you end up with a lot of milk that either goes to waste, gets fed to the chickens, gets fed to the dogs, gets, you know, and, and there's other things you can do to it. You do with it. You can turn it into cheese, you could do butter, you know, whatever. So you don't have to drink every gallon that comes through there. But it's, it's a little, just a different perspective. Another thing about goats is a lot of people have milk allergies, and there's a beta case in protein in milk, there's a one and a two milk, right? There's, and then there's, I, they get, I I think they get half from each side. And so you can have a one, a two, A one, a one or a two a two milk, right? A two A two milk is very digestible for most people. And all goats that I'm aware of, all milk goats that I'm aware of are a two A two. They produce a two a two milk. So most people can drink it, even if they're allergic to goats milk or cow's milk. So another, another boat in favor of cows. So yeah, we're, we're like old McDonald's farm. We got the big guardian dog out in the front garden. Our chickens, we've got goats, sheep, cows, horses. And so we, we try to protect our grass and keep it for spring use when we bring in somebody else's cattle for about 90 days a year.

Clay Conry [00:33:14] And then we keep the sheep and the goats and the cow and the milk cows and the horses around year round.

Vance Crowe [00:33:20] You know, this is the second time you've mentioned grass, which is something that most people don't think about at all. But you know, if you're working cows, that makes a big difference. Or sheep or goats. What do you know about grass now that you've been doing this podcast for a while?

Clay Conry [00:33:33] It's the Dunning crew grew effect, for sure. Right? The more I learn about grass, the less I know about grass. So the, it's, it's the foundation of our business, right? It is what we get free energy from the sun, right? It, the only free thing in the world is energy from the sun, right? And so what we're trying to do is create a better solar panel with our grass to capture more of that free energy from the sun so that we have to do less supplementation of the animals that do live on our place for year round. And so grass is the most important thing. Bud Williams was a great thinker in agriculture. He passed away here 10 years ago, maybe a little less than that. But he was a great thinker in agriculture. Had a lot to say about how we handle cattle and reducing stress in the livestock that we're handling. But he also had a lot of good things to say just about how we conduct business as ranchers, as agriculturalists, as farmers. And one of the things that he's famous for saying is that you need to come to a point where you love your grass and you hate your cows, not hate your cows from a perspective of abusing them or anything like that, but that you're willing to sell cows to protect grass. He, and he would say it this way, there's been a lot of people who have gone broke by having too many cows around.

Clay Conry [00:35:04] Nobody in ranching has ever gone broke by having too much grass and too much money. But if you, you can, you can get to a point where you have too many cows, not enough grass, not enough money, and then it's easy to go broke that way. And so grass is the foundation of everything we do. And more importantly than that, the underground soil microbes that really are the engine for the production of grass in our world, that's really what grass is about, is about making a good house for underground soil microbes to thrive. And they do a lot of the work that really makes grass grow, actually.

Vance Crowe [00:35:41] And so if you know that about, you know, needing to tend to the grass, what are you guys doing that's different than just letting it grow?

Clay Conry [00:35:47] Yeah, so I think that the, the, the high end of the spectrum of grass management is something that has come to be called ultra high density grazing. And we're talking about like a thousand animals on one acre of grass, which is what about a football field is an acre just to, if somebody needs to figure out how big an acre is, it's about the size of a football field. So a thousand animals on that amount of grass for a very, very short period of time. And the most of the guys that I know that are ultra high density grazing are moving four times per day, right? So they're moving cows four different times in a day, and then they're onto another place and they're moving 'em four different times in a day. And so they give them four football fields a day, let's say with a thousand cows, and they go to the next set of four football fields a day. And they do that again. And they do that every day, all day, every year. Now the problem for us in here's an, here's an a disadvantage, a regional disadvantage. We talked about unfair advantages earlier. Here's a disadvantage is labor, right? I can't pay myself or anyone else to move cows four times a day in my neighborhood, or let me say it this way, can't as a strong word. Let me say it this way. It, I haven't figured out how to pay myself or anyone else in my neighborhood to come and move cows four times a day for me.

Clay Conry [00:37:18] I know a lot of people in in Mexico who do it. And I talked to one of 'em and I said, how does that work? How does moving cows four times a day work? He said, well, I give my guy that works for me a four wheeler and an umbrella. And he goes out and he sits there and he watches the cow cows. And as soon as one of them lays down, he knows it's time to move them and he moves them to the next paddock and they go back to eating. As soon as another one goes to lay down, he moves 'em to the next one. And, but could you, could, could we do that in American agriculture? It'd be a tough sell. I'll just say it that way. It'd be a tough sell. And if you could do it, if you would, could find somebody, especially in Western South Dakota where it gets pretty hot over a hundred degrees for a week at a time, generally at least once a summer, if you could find somebody that was willing to do it, could you afford to pay them to do it? It, it gets kind of tough. The the margins get kind of tight on that. So can't, like I said, strong word, I would prefer not to use it, but it is it, so that's the high end of the spectrum. That's like the ultimate, that's the best. But what,

Vance Crowe [00:38:26] And let's talk about why, let's talk about why that is, right? I, I get that they're standing there, they're stomping up and down, they're, they're biting, they're peeing, they're throwing their manure, but why such a fast time with so many animals as opposed to

Clay Conry [00:38:39] Yep.

Vance Crowe [00:38:40] Less animals with a little bit more time.

Clay Conry [00:38:42] Yeah, great question. So I think that the, the deal there is we are increasing stock density, all the things you talked about, manure, urine distribution, hoof action, saliva comes into it. They, people say they eat with, with six mouths, they have four feet, one mouth, and they lay on stuff. And so what we're trying to do there is get plant manner pushed down on top of the soil because those underground soil microbes, we need to provide them with a house. And that house needs to have a roof. That's like the most important thing that that house needs is a roof. And it needs to be covered by plant material so that when rain hits it, it it slows down, it doesn't cap the soil. When rain hits bare soil, it caps it and then it runs off, right? The number one export in American agriculture every single year is topsoil, wind and water erosion, export more topsoil than all of the other commodities that American agriculture exports. And so that's what we're trying to stop. We're trying to stop that, trying to slow it down, trying to reverse it, trying to build soil rather than lose it. And so the, all those things we talked, you talked about are right on, but the, the missing piece is recovery period. The amount of time that the cows aren't there is actually more important than the amount of time that they are there. The amount of cut time that that grass has to recover, regrow, come back totally re regenerate itself is more important than how long they were actually there.

Clay Conry [00:40:19] And so that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to maximize the amount of, we're trying to maximize the density of the herd when they are there, but then we're trying to also at the same time, maximize the amount of time that we're not there so that, that, that piece of land has enough time to come back and get back to full senescence and, and really express itself ecologically speaking. So yeah, that's, that's why that's important.

Vance Crowe [00:40:46] And then the opposite of ultra high density grazing has to be just open pastures, go, go where you want.

Clay Conry [00:40:52] Yep, yep. We call it set stocking where, or some people to be cute or to maybe settle in people's minds a little bit better have called it Christopher Columbus ranching. We just turn them out in the spring and then we go and discover them in the fall. We never, never look at them. We just go discover them in the fall, see what we've got left and round 'em up. So yeah, I think it's, it's, it's called set stocking. It's just however many acres it's gonna take to feed this number of cows for the year. We're gonna turn 'em out on that and we're, we'll come back and get 'em later. Nobody really does that in my neighborhood. I mean, it's, it's pretty rare that that's done. Most people have some form of a pasture rotation and they're cer certainly checking on them. They're certainly checking on their herd health, certainly checking on, you know, illnesses or any other issues that they might be finding and, and taking care of them. You know, people take excellent care of their cattle and nothing really illustrates that better than a tragedy that we had 10 years ago this year in my neighborhood called the Atlas Blizzard, which killed thousands of cattle in, in our neighborhood. Came in October, October 4th and fifth of 2013. Four feet of snow after two inches of rain, 70 mile an hour winds, and just as devastated this part of the world. And there were a lot of broken ranchers. And part of what I like to do on the Working Cows podcast is document history. And so I, I asked a few different people, my, the church that I pastor is like the epicenter of that blizzard, like a hundred miles in every direction, was affected pretty, pretty heavily by that blizzard.

Clay Conry [00:42:39] And so I, I asked some of my, the members of my congregation, I asked some of my neighbors if they would be willing to talk to it. Almost every single one of them 10 years later still turned me down. You know, and you're thinking, big tough ranchers, nope, don't wanna talk about it. Can't do it yet. Still too fresh, still too much of a tragedy. Let me illustrate how bad that blizzard was. I was talking to one of my, one of my congregants one time, one of my neighbors, and I asked him how he came through the atlas blizzard and he said, you know, we were pretty blessed. We only lost 25% of our herd, one storm, 25% of your herd. And you call yourself blessed compared to your neighbors. I mean, that's the level of devastation we're talking about here. So maybe you vance as an outsider with your Legacy Interviews could come and capture some of that history sometime because I, I think it needs to be told that story needs to be told. But again, it's, it's still too fresh.

Vance Crowe [00:43:34] You know, it's funny you mentioned that like the storms really are something that is universal across people. You mentioned that Texas ice storm. I've interviewed several people from Texas and that being like a relatively recent thing, but you look at the whole, you know, distance of somebody's life, they look back on it and they're like, we had to do these crazy things I never thought we were gonna have to do in order to survive. And, and you know, I think in a lot of ways we believe that we're past those things, but when you get hit by mother nature, a tornado, a blizzard, a a heat storm, it makes you realize like, oh, this is just the illusion of control. There's, I don't actually have control here at all.

Clay Conry [00:44:13] Yeah. Nature is undefeated, right?

Vance Crowe [00:44:15] Yeah. Over the long haul. So you've mentioned a couple of times that you're a pastor. My, my immediate reaction if I'm being very candid with you, is anytime somebody mentions that they're a pastor or a minister or a priest, like I take one step back that's like that because it's somebody saying like, I have some way to interpret the word of God for other people. And, and it, and it. So to me, somebody that takes on that mantle has, has is in a big position. Tell me about your path to, to get to being a pastor and Yeah. How, how you feel about somebody saying, I take a step back when I hear somebody say they're a pastor.

Clay Conry [00:44:56] Yeah, I do too, honestly, because it is a huge responsibility and every time I step behind that pulpit, I do so in fear and trembling. Like if I, if I mishandle this word of God, I, I am liable. You know, I mean, the book of Revelation says if anyone adds to or takes away from this word, let all the plagues of this book be added unto them, you know? So like, it's a big responsibility and it has been perverted, you know, no doubt it's been perverted. It's been used by people for their own benefit to, to line their own pockets throughout history. And so yeah, there's a, there is a lot of baggage with that, with that office and with that, with that mantle. And, and so totally, totally understand that. And it is a huge responsibility and, and one that I continue to try to familiarize myself with the, with the magnitude of that responsibility. You know, as far as my path to being a pastor, I grew up in a, what I would call a nominally Christian home. We attended church when we weren't working cows, basically. And most of the time we made it for Christmas and Easter. And so about high school, I was kind of in a funk, probably just teenage hormones, but not really finding a place to fit in in my high school. Grew up on a ranch, didn't really identify with the ranch kids, wasn't athletic enough to be a jock or anything else.

Clay Conry [00:46:29] And I don't know if my mom just sensed I was at a low point or what, but she had some friends who had been at the church that we were at when I was younger and they had since left that church and moved on to another one. And my mom called them up and said, Hey, you know, would it be okay if Clay comes to youth group with, with Steven on Wednesday evenings? And, you know, it was kind of that, that phone call, I still remember I was laying on the floor in front of the tv, like I loved to do as a kid watching something who knows what probably the Red Green Show. I don't know. And, and I still remember that conversation and, and my mom having that conversation. And yeah, so that was in September of 2000, or maybe in the summer of 2000, September of 2000 is when I started regularly attending youth group. And I really have been in church at least once a week, pretty much every time, every week since then. And it just set the course for my life really. I mean, I, I I, I went to, when that summer I went on a mission trip to Ukraine. My youth pastor at the time felt like he should go and train youth pastors in Ukraine. We're talking nine years after the fall of communism and he's moving to Ukraine to train youth pastors so that, so that Ukraine can have youth ministry basically. And he, he did that, did that for 15 years and now he's onto other things. So then I went on another mission trip into, in Kenya, to Kenya in 2001. Spent nine hours in JFK on a layover about two weeks before nine 11.

Clay Conry [00:48:00] So that was kind of a hair, a sobering experience to again be laying on the floor in front of my television as the second plane hit. I'm eating my Cheerios, getting ready to go to school, and the second plane hits the towers and I'm watching on tv. It's like, yeah, that was a wild one. Then I went on another mission trip to Mexico, got hooked up with a school in Central South Dakota called Sunshine Bible Academy. And I ended up going there for my senior year of high school. And then we took a mission trip. So like my whole path into ministry is what I'm telling you, has been a series of mission trips, basically. And we took a, we took a mission trip to the Milwaukee Rescue Mission where I got to rub shoulders with some students of new tribes Bible Institute. I ended up going to New Tribes Bible Institute for two years to get my bi biblical education. Moved back in the course of that, started dating my wife and she was going to this little Baptist church in a beautiful little town called Spearfish in the Black Hills of South Dakota. And I was more interested in attending church with my wife than I was, or with my girlfriend at that time than I wasn't attending church anywhere else. So I I, I started going there and as a Bible school graduate, they asked me for some reason to teach the adult Sunday school class. And I ended up getting myself painted into all kinds of logical corners, starting arguments in the, in the Sunday school class that I couldn't win. And it was a great learning experience as a 20-year-old boy. So after that, you know, the church where I was saved at the church where I became a Christian, I was walking out of the post office one day and the pastor there stopped me and said, Hey, are you interested in ministry position?

Clay Conry [00:49:39] Well, at that point my wife and I thought we were gonna go back to Bible school together and finish the missionary training with new tribe's mission and go probably to Mozambique at that point was where we were looking at going to Mozambique to plant churches among tribal churches or among tribes in Africa. And I said, oh, I don't know, maybe. And so, but he offered me a free breakfast, which at that time I was a bachelor living on my own and a free breakfast sounded awesome. So I went to breakfast with him and he pitched me the idea and I would say God kept the door open long enough for us to walk through it. And spent 12 years there as a youth and associate pastor. And then kind of similar story, God kept the door open long enough for for us to walk through it again here to come to Prairie Home Church. Where I'm at now, I'm sitting in my office here at Prairie Home Church and where I sit right now, I'm 35 miles from the nearest gas station. So I'm in the middle of nowhere. And the, the church is just a great vibrant young church. A lot of young families. I always say it's like going back in time, 70 years when you come to church here. 'cause it's a bunch of young families getting together every Sunday and they, they stand around for two hours after church is over just talking and enjoying each other's company because it's the first person they've talked to that they don't share a last name with in the last seven days. So they're, they're enjoying the opportunity to just connect. And so now that's kind of how I got where I'm at. I mean, that's a real high level overview, but,

Vance Crowe [00:51:07] Well, when you talk about your congregation, what do you think they expect from you?

Clay Conry [00:51:12] Probably, first of all, faithfulness to the word of God. You know, just to rightly divide the word as it says in, in two Timothy, to really just allow that to be my authority. Allow that to be what directs the course of my preaching. You know, visit them when they're sick, dedicate their children, do their weddings, do their funerals. You know, I think those are some of the things that they expect from me. I, I, when I, and I was, I've been here for about five years and I remember in the interview process or or even early on in my time as pastor here talking about trying to get out into the community and do some ranch work to maybe add some credibility to the ministry. And one of my board members had a good point. He said, no, you don't need to do any of that to be credible. Just be genuine. Just be genuine and, and, and preach faithfully and the credibility will come. I was like, eh, good point.

Vance Crowe [00:52:11] Tell me about the, the Bible studying that you did. You, you went with a group, I, I've not heard of them, but it sounds like a pretty well established group. How did you choose them and and what's the difference between what they do and what others do?

Clay Conry [00:52:23] Yeah, so bible schools, by and large in, in, in the, in America are pretty similar. And they fill a niche of preparing people for seminary or, or just giving people who don't want to spend six years getting a master's degree in theology or pastoral ministry, giving them a place to go and get some more Bible education. Just spend two years kind of devoted to that. So new tribes Bible Institute actually doesn't technically exist anymore. The building's still there. It's got a new name on the front, it's called Ethnos 360. That's ethnos, which is the Greek word for, for languages or people. And so that's the, that's what they're, they're doing is basically they're, what they, what they have focused on in the entire time of their existence is reaching those tribes in the Amazon and Papua New Guinea and Cambodia all over the world that have had very little to no contact with the western world or with Christianity or, or anything like that. And so there, the Bible school I went to is basically the first leg of their missionary training program. It's the first two years and what they do basically is take you through every chapter of the Old Testament and every verse of the New Testament in two years. And so I've talked to seminary graduates who said you had more Bible education in tho in that context than I did in the six year seminary course I took.

Clay Conry [00:53:58] But really what seminary's about is giving you the tools to study the Bible for yourself in its original languages of Hebrew and Greek. And so it's kind of a different set of goals. Bible school's trying to give you that biblical foundation so that you can go on to something else. Seminaries trying to give you the tools to do the, the real nuts and bolts work of Bible study for yourself, not have to rely on on commentaries as much or some of these other tools that we have. So yeah, it's really interesting the work that new tribes or Ethnos 360 does, you know, because I remember they showed us video of first contact with a tribe in Cambodia that they, they weren't sure, there was no other record of contact with this tribe by people from the western world that they were aware of. And actually, one of my, a guy that was a year ahead of me ended up going and visiting that tribe. And he asked them, he said, oh, I knew about Cambodia was the Khmer Rouge. And he said, so tell me about your experience with the Khmer Rouge. And they kind of started chuckling and through the interpreters told him, well, the Khmer Rouge, we were the Khmer Rouge. Like he came out into the tribes, Paul Pot came out into the tribes and rounded up some people and gave them guns and uniforms and asked them to help him in what he did there in Cambodia. And so it was kind of a, he, he said it was a little bit of a tense moment.

Vance Crowe [00:55:25] You've been a minister now for quite some time. What has been harder for you about that than what you anticipated?

Clay Conry [00:55:32] So I think that people are wired differently. And this is born out by the, you know, Myers-Briggs or you know, whatever personality test you wanna use, disc profile, you know, pick your, pick your poison there. And I think that those are valuable. I think that those, those can help us understand ourselves, help us understand other people. Well, I think pastors are no different. Pastors tend to fall into one of three categories, and this is gonna sound really, really highbrow, but I'll try to, I'll try to not make it sound so arrogant. They fall into one of three categories, prophet, priest, and king. And what I mean by that is a, a prophet is somebody who centers on the word centers on, on declaring the word authoritatively without apology. The priest is somebody who is the guy you want to walk in at, like the second after you get the cancer diagnosis. The priest is the guy you want to walk in. He's there to, to help you through the suffering. He's there to help you through the tragedy. He's there to, to dedicate or baptize the babies depending on your convictions. He's there to, he's there to do the wedding, you know, he's that guy. And then the king is the organ organizational leader. He's the one who's good with spreadsheets and numbers and, and people management and making sure that all the, you know, to borrow Jim Collins' phrase, everybody on the bus is in the right seat.

Clay Conry [00:57:04] You know, those are, those are kind of the three categories. And so I would tend to fall more into that prophetic gifting or wiring. The way I, the way I approach things tends to be more from a prophetic bent. And so what I'm interested in is truth. I'm interested sometimes I'm interested in the truth, to the detriment of caring about how it makes you feel. And so it, it could, that's hard for me to, to want to walk into that room where somebody has just gotten a cancer diagnosis or where somebody's just lost a baby or, you know, these really difficult, gritty circumstances. And I, I worked under a guy for 12 years who was the priest. He is the guy, you want to walk into that room. He is the guy you want there after the untimely death, death of, of a loved one. He, he's just that guy. He thrives in those crisis scenarios. And it's always going to be apart from God's help, it's always gonna be more difficult for me to do that. And it just comes with the territory, you know? It is, it is part of the job. And, and so it's just something that I've tried to get better at over time. But it is, it is my biggest struggle in ministry without a doubt.

Vance Crowe [00:58:23] And what do you see is going on with Christianity right now? Is it growing? Is it shrinking? Is what, what are, what's your perspective?

Clay Conry [00:58:30] Here's an interesting tidbit. When America was founded, 1776, in, in, in England, the Revolutionary War was called the Presbyterian Revolt because it was led by the Presbyterians. They called the pastors that were doing a lot of preaching that was stoking the fires of the Revolutionary War. They called them the Black Robe Regiment because they were wearing black robes and they were preaching and people were getting fired up about casting off tyranny. Right. Here's the interesting tidbit, though. There are by some metrics, depending on who's counting, there are now more people who identify as Wiccans in America than there are people who identify as Presbyterians. So definitely the, there's a shift that's taken place as far as Christianity is concerned in America. And so I would be lying if I told you otherwise, but I think that God's, God's timeline is longer than ours. Right. One Peter says, A day with the Lord is as a thousand years and a thousand years as is as a day. And so he's got a different timeline, he's got a different perspective. Christianity in, in America might be on the, on the decline, but in other places it's on the rise. I think by the year 2050, it's anticipated that the majority of Christians in the world will be non-white from places like Africa, south America, and China.

Clay Conry [01:00:07] There's actually, I, I think it's really hard to count, but I, I've heard it said that there are more Christians in China than there are people in America or than there are Christians in America right now. Even though it's illegal, even though you can go to jail for believing in Jesus, even though you can go to jail for naming Christ as Lord, even though you can go to jail for meeting as a church in China, there are more Christians in China than there are in America right now. And so now they've got three times a population of ours. So you can make of that what you will, but I think that God is, God is on the move in other places. Not to say he's not on the move in America, but it just looks different right now than it does in other places.

Vance Crowe [01:00:47] So in your church, are you preaching once a week then?

Clay Conry [01:00:52] More like twice, I do a, I do a Sunday morning service and then a Wednesday evening service, and then I do a Wednesday youth group. So every other week I do a Wednesday service for the whole church. And then every other week I do a Wednesday service for the youth group. So about twice a week on average. Yeah, it gets to be more than that. Sometimes I do Sunday school, then I do a release time for the kids from the school. They come up here on Wednesdays every week. So yeah, we'll just say two, three times a week on average. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:01:25] And is every time you post a like, or put forward a, a new, I don't know. I'm, I'm grew up Catholic, so the protestant system is a little different to me. But like you, you don't have homilies, you have you sermons preach, is that right?

Clay Conry [01:01:39] Yeah. Right

Vance Crowe [01:01:40] Sermons. Yeah. And so the sermons is that every week you're, you're writing a new one. What's your process like to get something good out?

Clay Conry [01:01:48] Ed Young said, ed Young Jr actually said, being a pastor is like giving birth on Sunday and finding out you're pregnant again on Monday. So it's every week it's coming again. And so what I like to do is preach through books of the Bible. I I, I've been going through Matthew verse by verse. So just take a chunk of verses whatever makes sense in the, in the flow of Matthew's narrative arc and deal with that and the ideas and the, the implications of that on this week. And then the next week we'll pick up right where we left off and go to the next one. So basically my preaching strategy is to preach through a New Testament book. And when I finish that, I'll go and preach through an Old Testament book. But it's taken me, I think just a little over two years. I think I started on August of 2021, preaching through the book of Matthew. And I'm just now getting to kind of the last phase of Matthew's gospel. Matthew chapters 24 through 28 is where we'll pick up after the Christmas season. I've been doing some preaching on Isaac Watt's, accidental Christmas hymn Joy of the World for the Christmas season. But yeah, so I like to preach verse by verse through books of the Bible. And so that kind of sets my preaching what I'm, what I'm preaching on that helps me decide. And then the process of getting, getting it, I'm, I'm busy, got four kids, got a business, basically the podcast has grown into a business, have a, a side hustle ranch, you know, and my wife and I are homeschooling our children, so I help her in the mornings get started in the homeschool, then I come to the office, you know, so I got a lot going on.

Clay Conry [01:03:29] So my sermon prep a lot of times looks like going out and finding pastors who are also preaching through that book and listening. 'cause I'm 20, 25 miles or 20 mil miles of gravel from my house to the church. And so I got a 20 minute commute every day. And so listening to their sermon on the text, I'm about to preach reading books, reading commentaries, reading the Bible of course, of, of what I'm about to preach. That's how my preparation looks a lot of times. And so when I actually sit down to actually write out the sermon, everybody's different. Some guys are one hour I've heard, some people say it's one hour of pre preparation for every minute of preaching, which means it's a 40 hour process to prepare a 40 minute present sermon. I'm not that, I don't have that kind of time, that's a, that's a luxury that somebody in a bigger church with a bigger staff has. I don't have that kind of time. And so I, if you count all the listening and reading and everything, it might be five to 10 hours to prepare a 40 minute message for me. And then when I actually sit down to actually write it, it takes me hour and a half, two hours to actually write out the, the outline. I use an outline to write mine.

Vance Crowe [01:04:47] And then is it a script when you're up there or are you reading it word for word or you got the, you got the kinda general consensus before you get up there.

Clay Conry [01:04:54] I don't think I've got an outline handy here. I'd show you what it looks like. But it's, it's an outline. So it takes up two pages. The title and the sermon text are 16 point font. The actual text of the sermon is 14 point font. So when I put it on a, on a tablet iPad, I use a Windows Go tablet because I'm the world's oldest millennial and I haven't adopted Apple products yet. But anyways, so I use a, a Windows go tablet with a smaller screen. So when you put, put that document on there, a 14 point font is about right. So it's an outline, two pages long in 14 point font. And that's, that's just the, the growth of preaching. So when I, I think the first outline I ever preached from when I got, when I got a job as a pastor was nine pages long and it lasted 26 minutes. And now I preach from two pages of notes and it lasts about 40 minutes. Yesterday I got a little wound up and I think it was closer to 50 some minutes. So,

Vance Crowe [01:05:57] And who gives you feedback on your sermons

Clay Conry [01:06:00] The best? So it's hard to get feedback on sermons. Most of the people are just gonna pinch your cheek and say, you're, you did such a good job today. You know? So the best feedback I've ever gotten on a sermon probably came from a group of other preachers and I just, and, and actually we were there preaching to be critiqued, right? So that, that's really helpful feedback. And other people give great feedback. I've got a, one of my elders is a, a really, really solid guy, and he does most of the preaching when I'm not here. And even yesterday he was asking me some technical questions about the sermon to make sure that everything, you know, was on the up and up and, and my interpretations weren't going astray, you know? And so those are, that's solid, but it's, it, most people are just, if I'm gonna be really blunt, most people are just glad they're not the one up there doing it.

Vance Crowe [01:06:56] Yeah. I mean, I've heard it said before, people, and I don't have this at all, so it's just something I imagine. But when they say the people's two largest fears are fear of public speaking and fear of dying, you know, and people are, are, would rather be in the casket than speaking in front of it, you know?

Clay Conry [01:07:13] Yep, for sure. Heard that.

Vance Crowe [01:07:15] And so how do you, how, how does the church or your elders or whatever decide if you're being successful? Do you, are you aiming to get more butts in the seats or you, you know, like more dollars in the coffers? How does this get rated?

Clay Conry [01:07:30] Those definitely are metrics that get used in churches for sure. But I have never felt that pressure, honestly, in any of the, my ministry experiences. I've never felt that pressure. You know, I, I would count myself blessed because of that, because it, I I've definitely been in conversations with guys that did feel that pressure. And so, no, I, I, again, I think it goes back to especially in, in Bible churches, non-denominational Bible churches, are you faithful to the word of God? Did you show up when I was sick or in the hospital or facing surgery, or, you know, go on and on and on. Did, did you show up? Were you there? And were you faithful to the word of God in your preaching? You know? And I think it goes, it, it comes back to just basic people management skills and, and you know, are you, are you decent to be around? And do you, do you dot the i's and cross the T's and take care of the details and, and look out for those things? Or if you're not good at those things, do you delegate them? You know, I think a lot of times people get themselves painted into corners by trying to do things they're not good at, rather than just recognizing, Hey, this isn't my deal. I'm not good at this. I'll delegate that to somebody else. And so, you know, I think probably the, I I would get fired faster if I invented or drummed up some ancient heresy from the past in the church.

Clay Conry [01:09:09] I get fired faster for doing that than if the church shrunk to 10 people. So I, I think now what, maybe I might have to supplement my income. I might have to figure out a way to, to make ends meet and take less of a salary from the church if, if there were fewer people in the, in the seats. But yeah, I, I'm pretty sure lack of faithfulness to the word of God would be the biggest thing that would get me fired. And then second to that would be he, he wasn't good as a shepherd. He wasn't good as somebody who showed up when X, Y, and Z tragedy struck my family. And so I think those two things would probably be the biggest, biggest determiners of my success as judged by those in charge of making that decision. Now, the reality in my, in my position is that every year we have an annual meeting where the congregation casts a vote, says, do you have confidence in Pastor Clay and his ministry or do you not? And that, I don't know how binding that vote is, but it definitely is a instruction to the elders at the church as to whether or not I'm continuing to be fit for ministry here. So that's kind of the reality. My performance review just happens with the members who show up to the meeting, whereas somebody else's annual performance review is with the supervisor.

Clay Conry [01:10:40] That's kind of how mine works.

Vance Crowe [01:10:43] Do you worry about the vote or are you pretty confident each year that it's you're in a good spot?

Clay Conry [01:10:49] Yeah, I think that I, I, I don't know that anybody doesn't worry about an annual performance review, right? On some level. Like, oh, there could be the catastrophe that happens, but I, I know that I, there's more I could have done every year. There's more I could have done. I could have, I could have shown up more often for people, again, back to that prophet priest and king taxonomy. I think there's, there's more that I could have done in those scenarios. And so there's always that sense of analysis and regret and thinking let's do better next year. But yeah, I think that there's just a, it's, I mean, it's, I I love coming to church every Sunday. I'm, I'm here with some of my closest friends in the world, and it's a pretty special place. Like I said, it's like going back in time about 70 years. And so I, I enjoy it a lot. And I, if, if they would still have me after I got fired from being pastor here, I'd still attend if they'd still have me.

Vance Crowe [01:12:00] So, clay, maybe the final question is you both raise sheep and as a pastor, you, you mentioned shepherd, you know, like, this can tell me, like from seeing it on the ground on, on both levels, both as in the religious context and in the livestock context. Why does that analogy make sense for pastors?

Clay Conry [01:12:21] Yeah. I, I think it's a caring thing, right? So those animals need the eye of the shepherd, right? They need the shepherd to, to look after them and to help them see things coming that they might not be able to see themselves. And I, I think that's just human, human nature and, and animal nature is that we can't, we're blind to our own faults and unhealthy habits. You know, we don't see them as clearly as other people do, you know? And so it's easier to spot the speck in your brother's eye than it is the log in your own right. That's, Jesus said that. And so I think it, we just, we need that care. And so livestock will get themselves into trouble, especially sheep, right? They're vulnerable to predators. They need, they need the shepherd there to protect them from predators. I think that somebody who's spent the time just steeping, like a bag of tea, steeping in the word of God, can spot error and false teaching and help people avoid it. And so that's part of it. Checking up on them mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, financially, all of those things go into it. Like just holistic. That's all, all of those things going into what it means to be a human, right. We're just trying to, to help them be as healthy as they possibly can in all facets of what it means to be a human. And the, and the shepherd role as far as livestock is no different, right?

Clay Conry [01:13:55] We're trying to make sure that they've got everything they need to be healthy, that they're, that they're provided with all of the immunizations or whatever it takes for them to survive. And so I think that it's a really fitting, really fitting analogy. And it's an analogy that God used not only in the Old Testament, but the New Testament with Jesus calling himself the good shepherd. And Peter picking up that language and saying, we are under shepherds working under the chief shepherd who is Jesus. And so, and it, it came out of pastoral context. The and pastoral meaning like in the pasture, that's the, the environment that the Bible sprung from, right? I mean, Abraham, the father of three faiths was a shepherd, right? Him and lot, they had a conflict because their goat herds got too big, right? So they had to separate ways. And that's how a lot ended up in Sodom. You know, the whole story, right? So I mean, it's, it sprung from that context. And still today you go to Israel and you will see people herding sheep in the countryside. The shepherds came to the birth of Jesus, right? We're in the Christmas season, at least at the time of this recording, the shepherds came to the birth of Jesus. 'cause they lived out there in the, in that context. So it, that's the, that's the environment from which the Bible sprang. But it's also a really helpful illustration for what, what pastors do.

Clay Conry [01:15:26] And that's where the word pastor comes from, is from that shepherd shepherding idea.

Vance Crowe [01:15:32] Well, clay, if people wanted to learn more about you, catch the Working Cows podcast, where would you send them?

Clay Conry [01:15:40] Ranching podcast.com. We'll get you to the entire back catalog of every episode. Go through there, find the things that sound interesting to you. Download an episode or two, and if you like what you hear, come back for more.

Vance Crowe [01:15:53] Well, Clay Conry, it has been awesome to have you on. Thank you so much for making the time and, and, and sitting down and chatting with me.

Clay Conry [01:16:00] Vance, thank you for the opportunity. It was an honor.