Farm Banking vs Farm Credit: Why Leverage Ratios Hit All-Time Lows Despite $20K Acre Land

Guest [00:00:00] Why aren't we shooting it down? If supposedly the owners of the balloon say that it's drifted off course and not for its intended use, shouldn't they be okay with it coming down? 'cause it's not doing what it originally went up there for. And if we don't know what it's doing and it's safer for us to have it on the ground, shouldn't we put it on the ground? I am Caleb Zi, a precision Ag specialist living in Aurora, South Dakota, and you are listening to the Vance Crow podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:00:30] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today we have two out of the three hosts of the Farm for Profit Podcast, Tanner Winter Hoff, and Cory Hillow. It's funny, before we got started, I had to be like, Hey guys, actually, what is your last name? I've known them for years, but because we only see each other online, I've never actually had a time where I would ask them about something as personal as their last names. This conversation is gonna be a good one, whether or not you're involved in farming because Tanner knows all about banking. He knows about the price of land and what's going on with interest rates. And Corey has a farm operation that he's running with his brothers and his family. And he gets to talk about the details of how this works. This is a fascinating conversation and I'm really glad that you're here for it. Earlier this week, I had a transcript delivered and I was able to push it across the table at a man who had recorded an interview a few weeks earlier and watched him really kind of tear up. He looked at me and he said, my whole life I've wanted to put together an autobiography. And now I've done it. And I think that's why I am so proud of these books. If you have a loved one that you'd love to capture their family stories and you know how much it would mean to them to have it written down in a book that could be passed down for generations, then go to Legacy Interviews dot com to find out more. We're excited to offer these services where we interview your loved one to capture their life stories, their values, and the wisdom that they wanna pass down for many, many generations.

Vance Crowe [00:02:02] All right, without further ado, let's head to my conversation with Corey and Tanner of the Farm for Profit podcast.

Guest [00:02:08] Tanner and Corey, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having us. Absolutely. This is a pleasure. Why do you guys differentiate farming for profit? Why

Vance Crowe [00:02:21] I

Guest [00:02:21] Would say that goes back to the beginning of why farm for Profit ever started because I'm by profession and ag lender, an ag banker, and if I could help my farmers, my customers achieve higher levels of profitability, I would expect their repayment to come in maybe more faster, more timely. So then I don't have to worry about chasing past dues, don't have to go and worry about a troubled loan. So start off selfishly as to how can I make my customers the most profitable that they can be to make my job easier? That was the core base. Now how do we distinguish it? How? How do you be profitable, Corey? It's a tough question and that's why I started. I, when I came into the podcast I said, you know, and it was kind of a bad year, I said, it's not always for profit. Sometimes it's just for fun. So there's literally two parts of the show and I call my part the farm for fun side of things. So it's not always profit, even though you still, it's business, you do need to profit. Right.

Vance Crowe [00:03:22] But you are a farmer. So what is your operation like?

Guest [00:03:25] So corn and soybeans and hogs in central Iowa, about 2000 acres. What we get over between what we rent, own and custom farm. And yeah, it's a very typical Midwest farm. I would say we're, I used to say medium, I, I almost feel kind of small anymore. I know there's a lot smaller than that, but with the way ag is going, it seems like it's a lot bigger than that now.

Vance Crowe [00:03:50] And when you say where ags going, you're talking about like the Bill Gates just going up and buying big treks of land.

Guest [00:03:55] It's part of it, but I mean even the, the family farms have gotten, I know on average I feel like in our area is 3000 to 5,000 acres. And it's so tough. 'cause we know in, in interviewing everyone, it doesn't, a 2000 acre farm is not the same as a 2000 acre farm in Iowa that is in Illinois. Right. Or or here or there. It could be different in counties, there's so many different dimensions of it.

Vance Crowe [00:04:20] How much are farmers buying land for around you right now?

Guest [00:04:25] So what we've seen is across the board, but if you just wanted to blanket talk about the headlines that everybody sees, it's north of $20,000 an acre. I mean if you're, if you're thinking, if you're thinking you're gonna go buy it for 10 or 12, it's not gonna be a high quality piece of ground. It's probably gonna need improvement or it's gonna have a, a part of that farm that's not productive. You know, just doesn't create anything, doesn't give you any return on investment. Maybe it's timber, maybe it's waterway, maybe it's just wetland. But no, if you are in a competitive environment, you know we are just between the Des Moines metro and Ames. So a lot of development happening between those two areas that you're competing against developers, whether it's right on the edge of town or they wanna create a go build your mansion home in a quiet, secluded suburb. You run into that. So that just pushes land prices up to where, yeah, 12, $14,000 feels like a steal.

Vance Crowe [00:05:22] Do you think that the land prices are a representation of inflation? Like is that just a better, more accurate rate than whatever the government tells you? With CPI,

Guest [00:05:33] My, my take is there's some correlation, but I don't think it's necessarily more accurate historically. So we've got a co-host on the podcast that is a realtor and auctioneer and if he looks at data over the long-term trend, there's just been a steady increase in value to an acre of land. It's outpaced s and p, it's outpaced historically. You stretch it out long enough, the data's there that says it's just a standard upward trend because they're not, his famous words is they're not making any more of it. So you have less inventory and with left less inventory drives up value. So I don't, I wouldn't say it necessarily ties into inflation. It's gotten popular too. I mean like the woke class, you know, you see Travis Kelsey and Joe Burrow and all those guys, they're going and literally bought into a fund now and they own ground in north central Iowa. And so it's just gotten to be the cool thing, right? Even though they might only own $200,000 worth of land, which is a lot of money. But what that buys you 20 acres now? No, not even that and buy 10 acres, right? It's be, it's become an investment class. It's just another, you know, somebody years ago may have never thought they could own Apple stock and now they've got the opportunity or or a, a company as such people didn't know it was an option to own farm ground as an investment. And now there's vehicles and fund managers and farm managers that allow you to do that and not feel like you have to know everything about it.

Vance Crowe [00:07:06] Yeah, the rise of the farm manager is one of those things that if you're just sitting in a city you don't have any concept for, you can own land and you can have some people that really know what they were doing. They wanted to work on mom and dad's farm, but it just wasn't in the cards. And now they're out there farming for and they'll do it however you want. They'll, they'll try and do it for profit, they'll try and make it for fun. They'll do whatever you want. And I think that opened up farming for people in a way that it just, I mean it used to be if you wanted to make that land, make money, you had to get out there and firm it yourself.

Guest [00:07:36] Corey works every year with absenteeism, landlords, landowners that don't live anywhere close to the farm may have never seen it. Yeah. Or yeah, they might be come down and see it one time and they remember that they played at grandpa's house on right there on the corner of the house. Might not be there anymore, but they just have that small connection. But alls they get is a check every year. But I would say most of our, we don't have any land managers in our farm portfolio. Now there, there is a, a place for that, but I really enjoy the relationship and the honesty that we have between us and the landlord. There's a lot of people that can take advantage of that situation, which is why you would need a farm manager

Vance Crowe [00:08:19] That if you're not in farming, like I think most people's concept is like a farm is you just like, you look on a map and you're like, this is our farm right here. And what they don't realize is like most farms are like, oh, we got some acres right here and then you gotta drive down the road and get 'em here. I mean, you'd love to have 'em all be right next to each other, but just most farms don't look like that.

Guest [00:08:38] That's why, that's why when you hear the, the high land prices in northwest Iowa is because it was right next to their farm. So the old Dutch money up there, they will pay up to $30,000 an acre because, not because it's gonna cash flow, but because it's right next door. And they want that accessibility right there, there. And I, it'll never cashflow their whole life, but for some reason they want it. We've interviewed guests that have 90 miles from one farm to the other and they farm all in between. But if they were to start in the morning at their furthest south farm and drive all the way to their furthest north, it's a 90 mile drive.

Vance Crowe [00:09:15] And at some level you'd have to be so big on your 90 miles farm that's so far apart that you could have combines on both of them. 'cause you're not gonna drive that combine 90. I mean you could drive it 90 miles, but that'd be hell of a, you

Guest [00:09:28] Can, I mean you gotta, or you gotta be good at logistics and kind of plan your maturities of crop that how you go and all that. But then you're at the mercy of mother nature and it might rain on one side and then you gotta go to the other side. So it's hard.

Vance Crowe [00:09:42] Yeah, I think so in my audience, I think about half, if I were to estimate, I can't really know, but if I judge by who contacts me, it's about half are farmers and then about half have no connection at all with farming at all. So it's hard to do this podcast 'cause if you do it too slow and we just sit here and talk about like, you know, oh this is the way a farm works, like the farmers are gonna be clicking off. But then on the other hand, you know, most people when they're talking about farming have literally no concept for how big a business this is. I remember one time I had a banker actually tell me like, Hey, you shouldn't tell people that your podcast is for farmers. 'cause like they're gonna think that your, you know, your people are a little slow. I'm like, these people are running multimillion dollar businesses. To me when we're talking about saying like, oh, a farmers listen, that, that's like a compliment.

Guest [00:10:30] It's, there was a guy that told me one time, it is a multimillion dollar business, but he, he said, sometimes I feel like I'm just getting, I'm putting $800,000 into the ground and hope to dig up 850. Like it's a lot of money getting washed.

Vance Crowe [00:10:46] Isn't that wild? Like the seed bills that people pick up, like, like what do you see? You must see insane thing, well not insane, insane to you, but to the regular person. Tell us about like what is on the balance sheet of a farm that people wouldn't maybe necessarily realize?

Guest [00:11:01] Yeah, I, I don't know about necessarily realize, but just there is such a vast difference from top to bottom to where yes, we have clients that are utilizing multimillion dollar operating lines of credit and have millions of dollars borrowed in assets, whether it be in fixed grain storage or equipment or buying pieces of real estate to where you combine and you add up to tens of millions of dollars of net worth out of a hundred million in assets to operations that are running on $2 million worth of assets and a a net worth just shy of a million dollars. I mean, it, it's a very stark difference between operations, but fundamentally they're all the same. And that's what Farm for Profit is, is it's evolved. Our listener base is no longer just farmers because there's so many business principles that we coach and teach and shed light on give access to that helps somebody who's running their own plumbing business or running something along those lines. I mean, all the episodes that we've recorded together is about negotiation that takes place everywhere. Even sitting across the desk from me and the bank knowing that there's an opportunity to, to potentially get a better deal or a better package that fits you. And, and then when I look at a balance sheet, to get more directly to your question is probably the most shocking thing to a a non-farm listener of yours is you may own a $120,000 SUV and that is an expensive vehicle that you've worked your entire career up to own and drive and are really proud of A farmer's pickup truck that they use and sometimes abuse and, and just working every single day will rival that same type of purchase price.

Guest [00:12:50] The tractor that they're farming worth is easily a quarter of a million dollars. So just the sheer amount of capital that goes into agriculture for those that aren't farming may not realize that you're looking and talking to millionaires on paper and a lot of it's tied up into your equipment. Yeah, absolutely. Poor cash poor. And I would say that the equipment has gone up since 20, 20, 35, 40% if not 50% in some aspects. You know, you said a quarter million dollars for a tractor that doesn't get you a used 300 horsepower tractor with 2000 hours anymore. You know, it's half a million dollars retractor, it's a million dollars for a combine.

Vance Crowe [00:13:30] Yeah, I mean I talk with people about, like I had an estate planner on, right? And they say like, okay, the first 12 million of your estate that you handed down tax free, no problem. But then everything beyond that now starts getting taxed and you hear people be like, oh, tax the shit out of them. Right. Just, you know, 50% tax more than that. Yeah. What they don't realize is if you're running a farm and you hand that down, it's not like these people have liquid cash going. They're gonna have to then actually tell, take real assets and sell them just to be able to pay the taxes on the stuff that was handed down to them. And it's like a, a weird bizarre world that we live in because the value of the thing that you're passing down is there, but the cash oftentimes isn't.

Guest [00:14:10] Yeah. It and or borrow, you know, you may end up hurting the cashflow position of the next generation because if you're not planned out correctly, you're right, they may have to borrow to pay the taxes and now they start with a lean that they have to cover, dig out of when it was meant to be an opportunity to continue to grow. So many of Dave, our other co-hosts clients for selling farmland is estates. It's 2, 3 4 brothers and sisters. The parents are gone now, one or two of them wanna keep the land. One or two of them wanna sell the land. They physic the ones that wanna keep the land, can't physically buy the brother or sister out and they have to sell off a quarter, sell off 40, you know, sell off some ground just to pay the dang bill. That's not even including the taxes on it.

Vance Crowe [00:14:59] Oh. I mean some of the most creative, we talk about negotiations that I've ever heard are for how families can figure out how can we pass this down Making sure the sister that doesn't wanna stay on the property still gets her, you know, share of the family wealth. But how can we do it without blowing everybody out? And, and there's probably, for every one story that's a success story, there's probably 15 that are total abject failures.

Guest [00:15:22] There's entire professions based around trying to solve that problem. I mean, what's fair, what's equal? How do you determine fair and equal?

Vance Crowe [00:15:32] Yeah. You think about like for somebody that's not aware, like you might have a son that came back and worked on the farm for a lot of years, didn't really get much of a paycheck. Sure. He got to live on the, in the house that, you know, used to be grandma's and now it comes time to divide up the farm. And there are other people that are like, oh, I get 50, I get my 50%. And he's like, well I was working all these years to keep the farm going. Things get really complicated.

Guest [00:15:55] Sweat equity is what that, I mean you've been there and we've, we've had a lane phrase and a couple other people on for that farm transition planning and trying to figure out what is fair. It's not always a 50 50. There is some sort of formula and I, I would say the best thing to do is what she say. It's better to plan it before your dad than someone reading it when you're, when you're cold. Right, right. You know, like than a lawyer reading the will. 'cause

Vance Crowe [00:16:25] That's

Guest [00:16:26] What tears up families faster than anything. It's an expectation. I mean that's the same way that we try to do with interviews is, you know, one, you're gonna try and calm the nerves. So someone comes and sits in an interview by saying it's gonna take 45 minutes. We're gonna be sitting around, you know, sitting around a table, we're gonna have a camera here, but that's not your focus.

Vance Crowe [00:16:45] I didn't do any of these things for you guys. I figured you'd be,

Guest [00:16:48] You did have a nice, a nice email that came out. True that was more than ours. We knew exactly where we're going, the address, what to expect.

Vance Crowe [00:16:55] Oh that's all sydnee, that's not me. That's we'll be copying her.

Guest [00:16:58] We do not do that right now. Yeah, I mean it, it's the same thing with an estate. If, if I know that my two siblings are going to actively be working on a farm and it's communicated that, you know, this will be your portion, as long as everything continues down the road, Tanner, you're gonna get 40 acres. But my siblings are going to actively manage and farm 200 if I know the reasons why because mom and dad are alive to tell me or I understand that, you know, this is a part of the agreement. They're only making $35,000 a year, but as they build up, we want to give them a larger share for the work that they're doing. We couldn't do it without 'em then it's a lot less, a lot less conversations around it not being fair. If it, if it's a clear expectation I got my part or I got a little more than my part, then I'm happy.

Vance Crowe [00:17:51] I had a chance one time to sit in at the white Commercial corporation does this, they're like a grain trading group. And once a year they come together and they have this like networking conferencing and I get to sit in on this morning session they were doing where they talked about succession planning and it was Chatham House rules. So like, I'm not gonna say anything that was in there, but they talked about things like dad realizing that the youngest son was actually the most capable and like now they're gonna have to go and tell the oldest brother and the two sisters like, yeah, well we're gonna make the CEO, you know, little Johnny there and like how difficult it was. But everybody talks about it is so much better if you tell it now and you start implementing it than if you wait till somebody dies. People fight in courts and rip it all the shreds.

Guest [00:18:39] I don't, I don't know the timeliness of of this episode, but we're recording the day after the Super Bowl and I had heard on another favorite podcast of mine, the Twisted History podcast of the Hunt family that owns the Kansas City Chiefs and the current son of Lamar Hunt, who the famously all the trophies are, are named after. And I can't remember which division it is that gets the championship trophy, it's the Lamar Hunt trophy, but he's not the oldest and he is one of like 16, but was tapped as a CEO. I mean that, that had to have been a conversation that was very clearly laid out. Otherwise you have 15, and I might be butchering the details, but you have a large family that's frustrated as to well why does he get to run the Chiefs, you know, capable someone come do a business, has a vision

Vance Crowe [00:19:33] Your brothers and sisters in, in your operations.

Guest [00:19:36] Yeah, so I have an older brother, he's handicapped. My brother Jake, he's still on the farm, not capable of being in, but he is still at home with my parents actually. And then my younger brother, Austin, he's eight years younger than I am and he's actually taking care of the farm while I'm gone. We brought him back to the farm last fall full time. So yeah, he, him and I had different backgrounds. Like he grew up playing sports and I grew up playing sports too, but he got into like the AAU and travel league and all that. So he was really never around the farm, so didn't have much interest in coming back until later. And I was always pretty much knew I was gonna come back. So it's been kind of fun getting him up to speed on everything. So completely two completely different directions

Vance Crowe [00:20:19] When you think about the price of farmland going up and then the amount of consolidation, right? There's less and less people that get to come back to the farm a as it is every year. Like there's just not, I mean if, if that a thousand acres goes into the larger pot of now, now 3000 acre farm, well there's that many less farms. Yeah.

Guest [00:20:38] And part of part of that is probably because we've got this podcast going the way we are, it takes up a lot of my time and we're, we're gonna be gone for a week this week. We'll be gone for another week in a couple weeks down at Commodity Classic and that go into Farm Progress and Husker Harvest all the, all over the place. So I physically needed someone there, you know, if I'm going to be taking this time, I need to make sure that my rollback on the farm is taken care of. And so that was kind of a ne necessity to get him back.

Vance Crowe [00:21:08] Man, it is great to watch you. I remember when you guys started and it was like, I mean just, just like barely getting started, right? Just like everybody started the podcast

Guest [00:21:17] E everyone does start a podcast. I've always said that like everyone's got a podcast. But I think the reason that Tanner started something that's so successful is he is, I call him, he's a robot when it comes to consistency. I mean, he has everything scheduled out. It's gonna be out at this time every Monday, this time, every Thursday we are going to record on this day. And from this time to this time, this time, I mean very polished.

Vance Crowe [00:21:47] What's your driving like? What do you, what makes you decide, hey, I want to go after this and I want to be in the podcast space?

Guest [00:21:54] Yeah, the motivations changed. Like I said in the beginning it was, it was so selfish. It was, I want my customers to do well, so my job's easier. And it very, very quickly changed. I would say the this next evolutional step was, it was still partially selfish because I gained access, you know, to

Vance Crowe [00:22:15] Anybody you want, right?

Guest [00:22:16] Just say, Hey, I have a podcast, you wanna do an interview Rather than trying to get them to come to a coffee thinking it's a sales pitch. No, I, I had the ability to deliver value to somebody that I thought was an expert or had followed and been impressed by or just was curious to learn more about and, and boom, selfishly I had an avenue to do so. But thirdly, selfishly I was learning. I, there were some times that I was talking about something I have no idea what it is about. And I, I now have the ability to learn. I can do the pre-work, I can do the, the research ahead of the conversation. I can follow up and help fact check ourselves. But I would say almost now, the, the last step in the evolution is the feedback that we get from everybody else. Listeners that we're no longer doing this for ourselves. I mean it sounds so cliche, but it's so true. I mean we, we put out an episode that was titled The Business of Fatherhood.

Vance Crowe [00:23:19] Yeah, I was just listening to it. Yeah.

Guest [00:23:21] And Ben was an individual that I got introduced to when I was in a transitional period about a year and a half ago of deciding what direction do I personally want to go. Touched your mic. Do I personally want to go, do I want to invest more time, more energy into the podcast? Do I want to invest more time and more energy into my banking job? Do I want to invest more time in trying to build and grow our family farm? It just a lot of so many different directions that I could have gone and Ben helped really shed some light on establishing values. Well it took almost a year and a half for us to get 'em on our podcast, but we put that episode out and we've gotten so many emails back of Thank you for doing this. I've tried the, you know, I've gone to my child. One of his pieces of advice was just go to your child and say, I have 10 minutes. What do you want to do? And just see what they say. It may be, come color with me, I wanna go play a card game. Let's go for a walk. Can we, you know, can we go give the dog a bath? Whatever it is. But we've had people writing in saying, I've done this but I stretched it to 20 minutes and you'll never imagine what my kids come up with. And we get these emails back, you could probably roll it back in a little bit to selfishness again because that's a cool feeling. We did that, we put that show out, we connected them to it, but we did not originally do that show because it was something that we felt was gonna be personal gain. We knew that almost every topic that we talk about, every guest that we want to interview is somebody that we think someone else is gonna find interesting or valuable.

Guest [00:25:00] So it's a completely different shift into not what do Tanner, Corey and Dave want, it's what do the listeners want? Whether it's a suggestion from an email, a thought for a feeling. But that's, that's the shift Now

Vance Crowe [00:25:13] It's totally wild that you can just have a conversation. Like, I got a phone call this morning and Guy was like, oh, I was listening to your conversation with that Jewish guy and this prompted me to have a conversation with my wife and now we're doing X, Y, and Z. And you're like, I had a conversation with a dude and it is changing the way the molecules are hitting each other out in the rest of the world. And I, like, I always tell listeners, like, if you have a thought in your head, it could be positive or negative, but like, write me and tell me that. In fact, I was telling you guys about the Ring Brothers right before we got started, right? That that guy, the way that I got in touch with him is he wrote and was like, your sound is shit. You need to fix this. And I was like, Hey, alright.

Guest [00:25:50] That's how Corey joined the podcast. Corey said, you guys have promise potential, but you suck at it. He might not have said it exactly like that.

Vance Crowe [00:26:01] Well Joseph Ring definitely did. And now he's like one of my good friends, right? Like, and I think like that's one of the craziest things, first of all to, to your point about a podcast, right? Like I can be interested in something. I can call somebody and shape that conversation between us. And then you put it out into the world and you have no idea how that's going to impact somebody. They're washing dishes and they turn to their wife and they say, Hey, I just learned this thing and what that does. But then like the ability for people to be able to write you, like you get messages from people you never imagine to have met any other way.

Guest [00:26:34] We've got got an email just over the weekend that was, I remembered you talking to this gal that has a program that allows you to keep track of grain tickets, grain receipts from the cab by taking a picture and uploading it into her app. But I can't remember who that is. We, we did that episode over a year ago, that was a long time ago. But somebody, like you said, they heard it, they remembered it, and he is going through tax season right now and he's sitting there going, I need to do better. I just need to have a better process. I remember these guys had somebody and a connection to where no, the motivation now is how can we produce something that will bring our listeners value? And then, yeah, the side benefits is the connections we get, not only with the guests but with our audience. The pieces that we learned, the stuff that Corey takes back to his farm, the, the knowledge I have to communicate with a banking customer.

Vance Crowe [00:27:29] Oh, and as a banker, I've always thought this about you, and this is like, you can get stuck in a rut in any business, right? But bankers in particular, you're just like, heads down, I'm just gonna do my exact thing. And if you're getting bombarded with all these different ideas that enables you to look at a spreadsheet and normally be like, nah, this isn't gonna work and you're gonna see it in some other way than you would've seen before. Or, or figure out a way to convince them that they need to make a change that you wouldn't have thought before.

Guest [00:27:55] You gotta challenge the process. This is typically stereotypically this time of year, February, March, I'm slammed. I'm 12 hours a day in an office, 10 hours a day in an office running through balance sheets, cashflow projections, you know, everything that's related to what the old ag banker used to do to where I'm gonna be gone for two weeks. We've gone for this week, we've gone for a week in March, and my customers aren't gonna suffer. Because now there's a new process, there's a new team approach to banking. I mean there's, there's evolutions that have happened in my professional career because of that, that we've learned or experienced or had suggested on time management that makes things work. You know, technology is great 'cause I can still respond to emails while I'm on the road and take care of business that way. But you know, if you don't get out of the box sometimes you just think this is the way it has to be done. I, I would definitely say that you've gotten from the beginning of the podcast to now you've taken what we've learned on the podcast and you've become a great manager, delegator, right? You know, delegate the $20 an hour job, do the a hundred dollars an hour job, is what a lot of people in farming say. And you've got a great team under you now for the bank and for the podcast. You said, well, we got five people kind of working with us now. Oh,

Vance Crowe [00:29:10] Do you really? Yeah. Tell me about that.

Guest [00:29:14] Just several part-timers. We've got gig workers. Yeah. We're, we're just a general contractor hiring out sub subcontractors at this point. We, we do what we love, which we love to record content and learn. And then as soon as we're done, we ship it off to one guy to edit audio, one guy to edit some video. We got a gal that helps us with social and, and post ag with Emma. And then you just hired a more of an administrative type role. Yeah. Someone to handle the inbox, handle the monthly reporting, put together prospective mailers for potential ad sponsors. So yeah, the the things that allow us to do more of, not necessarily just what we're good at, but what we're best at,

Vance Crowe [00:29:59] Man. Isn't it hard like you to spend money on these kinds of things? Like my, my business partner Ben is always like this, all right. Like, what is the thing we need to get rid? We brought Nate on and all of a sudden I was like, oh my God, I now have 25 hours backing every single week going forward. And then you just, you just keep building on that. But it's hard to do 'cause you're like, it it start is it really worth it to pay him? Yeah, it's hard to start.

Guest [00:30:22] Yes, it's hard to start and as soon as you do it. So I would say the first thing that happened was our audio editing and that was one of those that I had guarded with my life because he goes back to the robot comment of, I want every time you turn our podcast on to know that if you have your volume dial at eight, you will be fine. You'll hear every guest.

Vance Crowe [00:30:45] You

Guest [00:30:45] Don't have to worry about up, down, I can't hear this. You know, this is a very, very high priority item of ours. Do I worry so much about the breathing and the stuttering? No, I don't want you to touch the dial on your radio or on your AirPods or whichever it is. So to relinquish that to somebody else and explain the same level of emphasis that I don't care if you don't cut out breaths, I don't care if you don't, you know, straight shorten up the gap of a delay from a Zoom meeting. I care is that all the audio is balanced. That took a while, but as soon as we got him up to speed, it was about two months. That's so nice. I don't have to worry about it.

Vance Crowe [00:31:26] Yeah, there is an activation cost on doing anything. Like I told you guys, that email that you got was from Sydney. You know, you had, we had to spend some time getting sydnee to be like, Hey, we do these things, we do 'em in this order. But now she not only does everything we asked her to do, she does it so much better than when I would do it. How do you guys find people

Guest [00:31:46] All came to us really, I mean, been suggested, Emma was a guest on our show and it just came from a conversation after the show and she's like, I'm kind of looking for some work. And it's like, well, you know, we've, we've got a lot of work that could be done. It's, it's not glory work right now, but it could work that way. Work towards that. The audio editor was doing the audio for another podcast that we love listening to. The video editor was doing video for another podcast that we listened to and just was crushing it. Like, what are you doing? This is my guy. Oh, can we talk to your guy? Yeah, the personal assistant. She came to me or her dad came to me, he was an old seed client of mine in the seed industry and said, Hey, I got a couple daughters that are going to Iowa State and they're looking for internships and they, they'd love to be in, you know, social media type type stuff and kind of sent 'em to Tanner has actually got two si two sisters, twins. Twins. Yeah. Didn't you, did you interview both of them? Yeah. Yep. And Juan ended up getting a job and he took the other one. She was our first pick. Anyway,

Vance Crowe [00:32:49] I I, a couple months ago I'd been telling Ben I wanted to do YouTube shorts, but I was like, I I do not have time to do this, but I wanted, I want to get it done. And I started, you know, I just randomly get this email and it's like, Hey, have you considered doing YouTube shorts? I watched your video on this and here's a sample of one. And I was like, that's pretty innovative, right? Yeah, I'll take this call. And, and turns out the person, like I was like, we, they, they didn't turn on their camera when we first started this zoom call. So I was like, uhoh,

Guest [00:33:19] Suspicious

Vance Crowe [00:33:20] Uhoh, what are we doing here? And and I was like, are you gonna turn on your camera? And they're like, it's not really customary for me. And I was like, this is weird. But they like ended up doing a pretty good job, like just talking. And they did like this whole kind of script. They were asking me questions and then after we, I did the whole like, I gotta go talk to my business partner. And they followed up and then they followed up again, then they followed up again and they sent me another short and I was like, all right, let's hire 'em. Right? So we hire 'em And, and it's, it's a she and she goes, we go to pay her. And we're like, all right, we're gonna need your like 10 99. And she's like, well I'm in Mongolia, so how can we help out? You know, how can we figure this out? And so we ended up like not realizing that we had hired this person from Mongolia. She did the shorts for a while. We're like, this is good, but it's, you know, not really working out. And so she starts suggesting other things she could do. Turns out this woman is, was on her way from Mongolia to Austria to get a degree in economics from the, from like a school in Austria. Her visa got delayed. And so now she wants to do work, she's like killing it for her. She's doing all this crazy work. So for me, I'm like, if there's somebody out there that knows how to do something cool for me, let me know because this is the power of the podcast, right? It's like somebody from Mongolia can now be doing work for you. That's better than what we were doing on our own.

Guest [00:34:37] And that's the wild part is we've never asked for any of it. And, and I don't know if it just didn't draw, we didn't wanna draw the attention, like we couldn't do it ourselves. But that's a mechanism that we haven't employed. We haven't said, Hey listeners, we need this. Is there anybody out there that wants to do that? I guess I did one social media post saying we need a podcast mob, someone that could be the organizer, the the somebody that could watch over us. You know, make sure that you send your thank yous, you know, that the, the stereotypical doesn't have to be that at all. And it was fascinating the number of people that responded. And that's just a route we didn't choose to go. It's not what we needed at that time. But, you know, part of the thing that's really helped us is we actually give little guidance. I would say that I give very little guidance, you know, for example, to the editor, it's, you know how to do this. I care about balanced audio, I care about making sure that the intro lines up every single show and the outro is there. What you do in between you do you, you, you're good at this. I'm not gonna tell you to change something. If I get a final cut and we need something fixed, I'll let you know. We're not afraid to do that. But that being said, when we turn social media over, I thought I was doing a good job. I had all these posts scheduled out, we were doing extremely well.

Vance Crowe [00:36:02] You shaking your head.

Guest [00:36:05] So the core content didn't change, but she takes this over and whew follows tweets, retweet, engagement, all go up. She was doing what she knew how to do, but I didn't know I was missing. He thought, he thought that he was such a robot. He would, every Monday at eight o'clock at night, he would schedule every social media post for the week, you know, over across every platform from one program basically. So if you tagged Vance Crowe on Twitter, it would probably not go over to Facebook or YouTube and so we'd mis tags. It was not personable at all. There was no interaction. I think it's all that time allowed at that stage of the podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:36:50] Oh, I know how that goes. Yeah. And then like, you gotta grow it the right way. So on your farm, what have you done? What have, what have you outsourced

Guest [00:36:58] On the actual farming side of things? Yeah, boy we haven't probably just bringing my brother back so we didn't have to outsource. We're still not, we still hired the co-op to do some custom application of fertilizer. But I mean we, we pretty much do everything just because that's where all the savings are, it feels like for us, right. In operations now. I said you don't wash your barns. Yeah. And on the, in the pig pig side of farming, I've actually, I've hired out loading and power washing both very crappy

Vance Crowe [00:37:34] Jobs. Yeah. Quite literally.

Guest [00:37:36] Yeah. Yeah. Very, very literally.

Vance Crowe [00:37:37] Well then when you think about it, 'cause you're sitting here, everybody's got, hey, insight into farming and getting better. What have you changed on the farm?

Guest [00:37:46] We've, we've dabbled into some strip till. So a little reduced tillage. We got into that in 21 or 20.

Vance Crowe [00:37:53] What is strip-till for people that aren't farming?

Guest [00:37:54] So, so the typical Midwest farm you had a, what would call a mold board plow because you had a, a prairie that you had to break. And so John Deere developed the plow to physically dig into the soil and turn it over to turn it black. That would be considered intensive tillage because

Vance Crowe [00:38:16] You're trying to dig into the ground. Yeah, rip the roots apart, throw it up into the area. You, you,

Guest [00:38:20] You f floate the soil, you make it into smaller particles and then which opens it up for the wind to blow it. The water when you get heavy rains to wash it away. And that's why, you know, you see all these water quality things. So full tillage though it was a necessity at one time is probably not a necessity now. And so you can go to no-till and there's a lot of people that are behind that. Or you can do somewhere in between full tillage and no-till, which is what we're doing, which is strip till. So we're tilling, we have a 30 inch inch row planter, so 30 inches between rows and we are tilling a seven inch strip where our seed is actually going and we're leaving the ground in between the rows untouched. So it's about a third of what we were doing for tillage. And it allows us to put nutrients there so we can concentrate nutrients not spread across the whole acre furrow slice so we can reduce our fertilize fertilization rates. And in theory it's great. Where it doesn't work is when you get the heavy rains in the spring and you can't get stuff to dry out 'cause it's, you know, that's one nice thing about full tillage is the, the soil's black and the sun hits it and dries out and you can actually get back in like last year we had 17 inches of rain I think in a couple weeks in May. And we ended up having to abandon our strips and go do tillage just so we could dry it out because we were racing mother April.

Vance Crowe [00:39:50] Oh man, that's new to me. I didn't realize that it would dry out faster if you were doing tillage.

Guest [00:39:54] So it's usually a no-no to go till when it's too wet. Right. We got to the point of saturation where it, it was almost like the ground sealed off and it was dry on the, the top but underneath was just muck. So it almost needed like the top breaking off so it could air out. And so we took a field cultivator and did a really, really light and not a very intensive tillage. Tried to not put a lot of compaction back 'cause it was too wet to be in it. But we were up against June, which we typically plant from early to mid April to early to mid-May. We had about a month window where we like to after that you were physically, if you look at university data, losing one to two bushels of potential per day. So you're losing money. Right. It was May 17th. We've already lost 12 days of potential according to Iowa State University and,

Vance Crowe [00:40:45] And insurance. Right. If you wanna, if you wanna get crop insurance

Guest [00:40:48] Against Yeah, at a certain point you start losing your insurance guarantees as well. So, and then there's an o there's obviously a day in June in our area that you could potentially have to take prevent plant and you don't wanna do that. Right? We don't want to, we're not farming for insurance. We're farming to make make a crop.

Vance Crowe [00:41:06] What is Prevent plant?

Guest [00:41:08] Yeah, pre prevent plant. That's something I think the Dakota people know a lot better than I do. They, they seem to take prevent plant a lot more than we do. But if, if Mother Nature did not allow you to plant in your normal planting windows there, there would be a time usually in June that after this date you could take prevent plant and it would be, and I I'm not a crop insurance expert, but it would be a government program.

Vance Crowe [00:41:33] It's like 80% of their last five years in a median thing. Something like that.

Guest [00:41:37] Yeah, there's something like, I mean there's, there's different things you can buy into, I mean we, we have like 85% crop insurance, you know, type of deal. But it, I can guarantee you it is not as good as even if you could get in the day before that prevent plant date and then get a crop in, it would be better than prevent plant.

Vance Crowe [00:41:54] Oh really?

Guest [00:41:55] I mean it is just there as a safety net to make sure that you could probably survive another year. You're not thriving on that.

Vance Crowe [00:42:05] So let's talk banking

Guest [00:42:06] And farming

Vance Crowe [00:42:06] Because like they go hand in hand, right? Particularly 'cause things are so expensive right now. What is like, what is the state of how much do people actually own that are farming right now? How much, how much of that, like I don't, is there a good way to describe this?

Guest [00:42:24] I would say right now the best way to describe it is the leverage ratio. So the amount borrowed compared to the assets that a farmer operation owns is at an all time low. So the lower that ratio, the less borrowed. And a lot of that I think is due to the age of the farming community. Because historically if you have a well balanced age demographic of throughout your industry, plumbing, agriculture, investments, whatever it is, there's gonna be people starting out and there's gonna be people retiring and those that start out typically have to borrow more because they've had less physical time to earn money. We've got a, a strange thing in agriculture happening right now that we either have really old farmers or we have old farmers and some, right? Yeah, yeah. Some of those old farmers just inherited from the really old farmer. You know, they, the stereotype is farmers don't retire, farmers will farm until they can't physically due to death or injury can't farm anymore. So they spend their entire careers working. There's not an age 62 I'm gonna retire. So they just continue to compound wealth after that year, after the next year, after the next year. Which lowers their borrowing 'cause

Vance Crowe [00:43:55] Which makes 'em more profitable there too, right?

Guest [00:43:57] Well, right, yeah. Yeah. So it keeps happening. So right now, due to the demographic and agriculture on average, the amount borrowed is extremely low compared to history just because the age demographic is there. You think about it in your household, you have nothing to do with agriculture If you are two or three years out of college or you freshly got married and started your family, your parents have typically more disposable income than you do. The same thing goes in agriculture. And there are far fewer young farmers now than there ever was. I mean the USDA is putting together programs to incentivize young farmers to get back into or remain in agriculture because it's an issue. So historically right now, if you were to compare now to the farming crisis of the eighties, late seventies, early eighties, it's not gonna happen because there's so much cash. We go back to the, one of the first questions you asked us about land values, and I don't mean to sound like I'm on a soapbox, it's just, it's just true. Farmers older in their careers have more cash, have more investible resources, and the asset they desire to invest in is one that they know the most. And that's land. So the price goes up. There's only so many pieces of land that sell every year. There's only so many pieces of farm equipment that sell every year. So the cash goes into the marketplace. Well, if I can leverage more cash and a little bit of the bank's money, I can pay more. So overall, right now, agriculture in banking is super sound, the safest it's probably ever been.

Guest [00:45:31] And even in the risky spots we've got government guaranteed loans that protect banks. I mean the, the ag sector of banking is the securest it's ever been.

Vance Crowe [00:45:44] How, how do you guys get, how do you compete with like a farm, credit of of America?

Guest [00:45:50] Yeah, so right now it's really easy because we're funded two completely different ways.

Vance Crowe [00:45:55] So for people that don't know, farm credit is a government, I don't even know how you describe it. They're a part of Congress's mandate where congress gives them money and to loan out at way lower rates than they're

Guest [00:46:06] Funded through bond packages.

Vance Crowe [00:46:07] Okay.

Guest [00:46:08] Yeah. So it's not necessarily government funded, it was government organized, but they have to go secure their own funding by selling bonds.

Vance Crowe [00:46:17] Okay.

Guest [00:46:18] So the bond, their, their funding source is directly tied to the bond market. What they can sell a package for, get investible funds, loan those out to the farmer. Banks are funded through deposits or other borrowings. So what we pay grandma to put her CD in our bank for a certain period of time, certificate, a deposit or a savings account that gives us a base cost of funds, we turn right around and loan back out a percentage of that to people that want to borrow money from us. So the two completely different sides of the spectrum, when the bond market was cheap, farm credits borrowings were cheap and it was hard to compete. The only way you can compete there is service. The nostalgia of, I want to have a bank, the knowledge that you as a lender have and the ability to say that we are full service. You can deposit your checks with me, a checking account, a savings account, a lockbox, you can do everything here. Which kinda almost ties into the nostalgia side of it. Flip now we've seen interest rates rise, we've seen bond markets change and now farm credit's cost of funding is so much higher than mine to where I'm actually the cheaper option.

Vance Crowe [00:47:40] Wow. Even with deposit costs going up. And

Guest [00:47:43] So the the greatest scheme of things in Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:47:45] It's gonna, it's coming. He's,

Guest [00:47:48] He's dead on. I mean you'd be a fool to think that banks wake up every morning and hopefully my bank's not listening. No. The banks wake up every morning and go, oh, this is the day we should pay our depositors more.

Vance Crowe [00:48:03] Yeah. They're not gonna pay until you sit there and be like, I'm taking my money somewhere

Guest [00:48:07] Until the market drives it. Yeah. And typically that's in the version of people going somewhere else. So if the competitor is only at 1%, what's our incentive to go to 2%? It's the same thing. Cory's not gonna go pay an extra a hundred dollars for a bag of corn just because he wants to, you know, he is all obviously not gonna go and raise the price on a bag of corn selling it just because the, he wants to. It has to be a market driven factor. But right now deposit rates are lagging that of the bond market. So at this point in time, my cost of funds is lower than that of farm credit.

Vance Crowe [00:48:47] Man, it's wild how much the world can change because like I would've said a year ago, November, I was like way up on all everything that's going on and it has changed so much because farm credit used to be so much cheaper than the banks. It'd be like a bank getting involved in the ag lending market is crazy.

Guest [00:49:04] I was purchasing a farm in, in 2020, my first farm, only farm using the beginning farmer program to the FSA and I priced Tanner and I don't even think you were within 2%. I was not farm credit, I was not close enough to get the, I'm a good friend and to give a 1% dividend back at, at the end of that. So it was like two and a half, 3% less. And now it would be completely opposite.

Vance Crowe [00:49:30] So when you go to to buy something, a bag of seeds, a tractor, there's no, there's no shortage of people willing to line up to sign up for financing. Right.

Guest [00:49:41] Financ, it doesn't seem like, I mean it seems like there any corner I could go. I mean you got your FBMs online, you got Tanner on the, on the local corner, you got farm credit.

Vance Crowe [00:49:52] FBN runs a finance wing

Guest [00:49:54] Ra. Yeah. Rabo, you got a bunch of,

Vance Crowe [00:49:57] It's interesting 'cause like I remember the day somebody sat me down and was like, you think Monsanto makes money on their bag of seeds? And what you don't understand is Monsanto makes their money on the financing

Guest [00:50:07] Of

Vance Crowe [00:50:07] That bag of

Guest [00:50:08] Seeds. Yeah. Then you got John Deere credit and

Vance Crowe [00:50:11] I mean, Deere credit is actually larger than, like, they make more money than the actual selling of the, of the steel from what I understand.

Guest [00:50:18] Absolutely. Just as much as they make more money on the parts for the equipment than actually selling that million dollar combine.

Vance Crowe [00:50:26] What is, so who, where, who all is stopping by your house to sell you things?

Guest [00:50:31] I hide from people when they come anymore. No, it's, I sell a little bit of seed. I'm a farmer dealer for seed myself, so I've kind of, we What do you

Vance Crowe [00:50:42] Sell for

Guest [00:50:43] It? It'd be under the Corteva brand. It's Meyer, so it'd be west of 35.

Vance Crowe [00:50:48] Okay.

Guest [00:50:48] It's a regional and all the consolidations of seed. It, it used to be Curry seed and now it's Homi Good, good family company out of Nebraska.

Vance Crowe [00:50:57] And for people that aren't in farming, Corteva is the only American of the major, a farm seed company. So Monsanto was bought by Bayer. All the other companies consolidated. So Corteva is the, like they position themselves as the

Guest [00:51:11] Yeah. Head headquartered in Johnston, Iowa. And so I, I sell that seed. I've sold that for about 10 years now. Not a, that's not my main goal by any means, but it was kind of a a means to, you know, help bring things together when times are bad. I do rely on that, that income. So, you know, maybe the podcast could have, could take that over now, but I got a customer base that I, you know, why would I walk away from it? I, I do enjoy it. So, so I don't have any seed guys really stopping by. Once in a while, Beck's person will stop by try to get me to sign up,

Vance Crowe [00:51:44] But

Guest [00:51:46] Other than that, maybe an equipment dealer anymore. I feel like so much stuff has moved online anymore with marketing and we hard hardly get maybe a se maybe one salesman a week or every couple weeks. Used to be every day. Well,

Vance Crowe [00:52:00] Wasn't it long ago that the claim was farmers won't buy stuff online, right. It was like they wanna buy it from a salesman and then like that all changes. And

Guest [00:52:08] I've maybe gotten to the point where maybe I've just been hardheaded enough, like, I'm gonna come to you if I wanna buy something. Right? And, and I'm going to usually take my friends or my neighbor's opinion on their experiences on where I'm gonna go. More than just randomly, oh, this guy stopped in, I'm gonna buy six bags from him.

Vance Crowe [00:52:28] And what's the big hot thing people are selling now? Like, is it microbials or people doing

Guest [00:52:33] Bugs and a Joe.

Vance Crowe [00:52:34] Okay.

Guest [00:52:35] Yeah, yeah, that's,

Vance Crowe [00:52:35] Say about that. Yeah.

Guest [00:52:37] The, the microbes, it's a, it's a big one. You know, the same thing with the strip till, right? We're just trying to reduce, we get, reduce our fertilizer and our impact on the environment basically. And so the less, the less amount of fertilizer that we can put on, the less amount of tillage that we can do, the least amount of passes across the field, least amount of diesel fuel that we can use. It's, it's a, a, a better business decision because it costs less money. And B, if we can grow the same crop or more with less, then we're, we're making more money there too. And hopefully it is a less of an impact on the environment. So bugs in a jug or microbes is a big thing. There's several companies that have gotten into that market and basically trying to boost your microbe levels in the soil to make fertilizer more efficient is probably the overall, they all do something different. It seems like some fixed nitrogen, some fixed phosphorus, but basically our soil is a living organism that has millions of microbes in it and they're trying to enhance that. Maybe they, sometimes they're just trying to feed the microbes. So

Vance Crowe [00:53:44] Yeah. And by the time somebody comes to you saying, Hey, I wanna buy this jug of microbes and they told me this is gonna be, you know, a hundred thousand dollars a gallon H how, how much do you care about like, hey, I wanna see the spec sheet on that before you get

Guest [00:53:58] Loan? We don't, we don't tell the banker, don't tell your, they don't tell the bankers that stuff. That's just like probably a bunch of nitrogen or something on the looks like he's not wrong. Yeah, he's not wrong. I mean, the clients that I sit with and we work on projected cash flow, we try to factor in as many of the variables that we can. And typically we look at either projected crop sales or a marketing plan that they know what the potential safety net is due to. Crop insurance is gonna be their minimum income, gross income. And then we look at historical yield averages and potential positions that they've got in place or pre-sold grain to look at where we think income's gonna come at. And then we usually run a third set of what's the best case scenario. And then you take what we've put together for projected expenses in there and find out where we think a margin's gonna be. And if we look at the low side, which is typically prices below market, achievability today, yields below what you've historically produced and income or expenses that you've on average done. We don't have a positive cash flow. So we hope that worst case scenario, the safety net of crop insurance is not where you end up. But that middle number, yeah, that ends up being kind of CO's decision as to, I know I've got a $50 an acre margin and if I want to put $20 an acre into microbes, that's an expense that I took on with the hopes that it makes my $50 net go to 70 to offset the cost.

Guest [00:55:34] Or if not, I just shrunk it to 30 bucks an acre. So no, it's, he's right. We're usually the last to find out. And if it didn't go well, we find out at the end of the year when we're sitting down going, okay, why are we short? Or why are things tighter than they were what we projected them to be. Great customers, top echelon of customers come to you just to hit a harvest. Or as they're going through the field saying we might have a problem, the early identifiers, but most will wait until they're required to come into the bank and sit down for a meeting if something didn't go well. Not fun.

Vance Crowe [00:56:13] When was the last time there was a, like, is it a natural disaster or something where like a whole bunch of farmers have to come in because they hit that worst case scenario line?

Guest [00:56:24] Yeah, so we got bailed out, but 2020 was the year of the Draco and that sandblasted lamb blasted, whatever direct dramatic term you want us to use, the Draco, high wind straight line winds, it flattened crops in central Iowa took a,

Vance Crowe [00:56:45] I forgot about that. That

Guest [00:56:46] Went all the way to Illinois, like 120 mile wide swath throughout the state. Almost the entire width of the state of Iowa out into Illinois and completely flattened corn crops to where you couldn't harvest it. And I say we got bailed out because COVID also was creating some extra government payments during that time period. So if those payments didn't occur, there was a wide swath of farmers that were told that their crop was unhostable and they were to till it under take their crop insurance claim. And that was going to barely cover expenses. There was an incentive that year because of how poor that claim payment was gonna be, that farmers were trying to combine the corn going one direction. Cory got a special corn head to try and pick up downed corn because it was still worth more combined off the ground than the crop insurance payment was gonna be. So at that point in time, that's the most recent in our area, natural disaster. That could have been devastating. But then that in line with COVID sanctioned CAP one, CAP two, and other direct payments that hit the mailbox to really strengthen that time period. Right? Yeah, I'd say that I just, one thing from us, we, we did not take a insurance check that year. We harvested every acre because of the way our insurance was set up.

Guest [00:58:19] It wasn't set up on a field by field basis, it was set up on like a whole group. So if one field did zero over here, you'd really, the rest of 'em would have to do zero to get a payment. The otherwise, if you got 180 bushel over here and this one did zero, it would bring the average up that you probably wouldn't get a payment. So you might as well go try to, that's why we bought a corn head that was specifically designed for, for that. So

Vance Crowe [00:58:42] Did you do the same kind of insurance the next year?

Guest [00:58:46] We did because it's, it was a once in a lifetime that was a once we're spread out enough, like we are, our typical issues are wind Yes. Or hail. Right. And hail is usually not a wide swath area. And this was, I mean we're talking 40 mile wide that just flattened everything at it.

Vance Crowe [00:59:07] Yeah, the photos were nuts.

Guest [00:59:09] Yeah. It's huge. 400,000 bushel bins at the co-op in our hometown, just flattened, like nothing like they were tin can and took my drone up after that and it was just sickening, devastating. I mean, so you, you drive through our country and you see a lot of new bins, a lot of new sheds that got blown down and that kind of stuff. So insurance was definitely key for personal property during that. But

Vance Crowe [00:59:34] Yeah. Yeah,

Guest [00:59:35] Back to your question, like we as bankers during that time period were scrambling, we were scrambling so much that we did two special episodes on the podcast to try and triangulate all the resources that my customers needed from the crop insurance agent to an agronomist to, we even had a pastor on to help with mental health, but we did two emergency derecho, part one, part two episodes. Temporary storage. Yeah, because grand, I mean, and we threw those out there and that was our first real organic shot in the arm for a listener base because there was a need. People were, ah, farm for Profit is a resource, but that was us as bankers. I mean, that's where the original idea came from is I had customers that didn't know what to do and they knew if they didn't make the right choice or the best choice available to them, we were gonna look at refinancing some debt, stretching it out, taking a bad year, and you pay for it over the next,

Vance Crowe [01:00:39] Oh man. Oh man. How powerful is that as a, as a banker to be able to be like, all right, I'm gonna hit all of my customers with the best conversation I could have about this subject, bang. Instead of, I'm gonna call this one and then I'm gonna take this call and I'm gonna try and email. That's so powerful.

Guest [01:00:55] We went to the leading agronomist, in my opinion, the leading agronomist at Iowa State University. Who's that? One of the best year? Katie, not Katie, Michelle, MJ Anders. Ooh, you put us on the spot now we can't think of her name. Isn't that her Twitter handle? You're gonna look it up, aren't you? We went straight to the top at Rain and Hale. Ryan. Ben. So Crop insurance wanted to get information. Megan, mj, we knew it was mj. I I knew it was an m Yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:01:29] Megan Anderson, the, the top agronomist from Iowa State. Yeah.

Guest [01:01:32] One of the most relatable people. Same thing. We went to a pastor off of Twitter, pastor Ben, just to get perspective on how things to do. Part two was Leslie Ray Kelly. So she was in there to help with, there's a tomorrow, you know, today's hard, there's a tomorrow. But we just kind of kept finding people again that we'd respected, that people that we worked with suggested and yeah, I didn't have to, I still called my customers, but I could call 'em and say, here's what I got. If you wanna listen to it again, episode 100.

Vance Crowe [01:02:12] For me, the podcast in that way has been helpful for, like, I, I have like a group of friends, right? And if there's some something that I'm like super into, I can be like, Hey, I'm gonna go call it and I'm gonna go get this person on and we'll do this podcast. But to think about it as a response to a natural disaster where thousands of people, tens of thousands of people are being impacted by it. Like that's fantastic. We

Guest [01:02:35] Did one a year ago when Russia invaded Ukraine.

Vance Crowe [01:02:39] Oh, did you? Interesting. We, I, we did some of that too, but what did, how did yours turn out?

Guest [01:02:45] So actually our co-writer pilot, you know, had some direct ties in the political system and then in the defense department to kind of shed some light, but then also directly tied that. 'cause the biggest concern our listeners had is what's this gonna do to commodity markets? It's not here, it's not directly affecting US safety wise in Iowa, in the Midwest, in the US at the time. But what is this going to do? Because all of a sudden now everybody became an expert on Ukraine and what they exported and if they can't get it out, what demand? So it was kind of a a

Vance Crowe [01:03:24] You gonna start planting wheat in Iowa? Yes.

Guest [01:03:27] That's a dead serious question. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah. We kind of got punched in the mouth there. 'cause when we were on the way down to Louisville last year, this is still about a year ago now, was when it was just ramping up. And that's what all of our conversations felt like. It focused around, you know, how is this affecting, it went from COVID to that and what a couple years it was.

Vance Crowe [01:03:51] So what do you guys think? Are we under attack with all these balloons flying over the US people,

Guest [01:03:57] Him about, I've been following it. These guys, they haven't been following it as much as I have. I watched the, the Twitter tweet about all this stuff and it's like, my gosh, what is it? I don't, I don't know. I put a TikTok out when the first balloon, the first balloon we were aware of was tracking over the country. And I just simply put out there a question, why aren't we shooting it down? If supposedly the owners of the balloon say that it's drifted off course and not per its intended use, shouldn't they be okay with it coming down? 'cause it's not doing what it originally went up there for. And if we don't know what it's doing and it's safer for us to have it on the ground, shouldn't we put it on the ground? It was amazing. The response that TikTok got back was, well, we want it over safe airspace. We don't wanna, you know, we don't know if it'll release gas. We don't know if it's going to set a string of detonations. I mean, there's so many things as to why it didn't get taken down and it passed all over the country. And now in the last couple of days, stuff gets into us airspace and it's coming down.

Vance Crowe [01:05:04] My, my sense was that certainly we could take it down with like, you know, an F 18, but like we maybe didn't have the capability to take it down without flying a fighter jet up there and actually launching missiles at it, right? Because it was moving really slow. It's in between that space where planes fly and satellites are at. And I had a buddy that's, that has done work in the aerospace industry that was like, Uhuh, we could blow that thing outta the sky right now. I implying that we could do it with satellites, but like, I don't know, like I feel like,

Guest [01:05:37] Or a ground missile or something.

Vance Crowe [01:05:38] Yeah. Like this was clearly like if we could do it easily, we, we, we didn't. And like, I don't know, like it, it definitely made me be like, it's good to question how secure you really are because it could be that somebody has started to figure out that there are vulnerabilities here that we have not accounted for and that maybe it was an actual test balloon, not so much a weather balloon.

Guest [01:06:01] Yeah, it seems, it did seem weird to me as like just a balloon, why can't we just go up there with like a helicopter and shoot it with a rifle or something, you know, why do we gotta take a several, well, hundreds of million dollars of assets up and million dollar, it

Vance Crowe [01:06:16] Was 6,000 feet, right? So 30 miles

Guest [01:06:18] Some, yeah, some have been 60,000, some at 40. I saw one at, you know, actually that was in civilian airspace, like 30,000 feet type deal. So I think what there's been like four or five shot down now. But yeah, it just like you talk about what is the security level now, you know, I'm completely outta my realm with knowledge, but I was disappointed that our defense mechanisms didn't catch it. It was civilian spotted.

Vance Crowe [01:06:50] Yeah. I mean my buddy walked out to, to saw it while he was there, then got a telescope and hooked his phone up to it and was watching it. And I was like, you

Guest [01:06:57] Know what I mean?

Vance Crowe [01:06:57] That's crazy.

Guest [01:06:58] That was even the initial discoveries of it where civilian spotted.

Vance Crowe [01:07:01] Yeah, that's right

Guest [01:07:03] There. There's not a defense mechanism that we have as a country, especially I'm imagining a dome, we don't have that, but a dome of electronic sphere of radar that says beep beep beep. Something just entered our airspace. Especially if it came in. But if it didn't come in and it came from somewhere here launched, then that's a different story.

Vance Crowe [01:07:27] One of the most surreal experiences I had as a young person was I was a deckhand on a ship and I traveled all along the western hemisphere. And when you travel unimpeded along the coast, you realize like just how big the space is, right? Like when you're driving in your car, you, you're kind of mistaken, right? Because you're stopping off at gas stations. And like, it is so big that I think it, like any kind of fear that this drives in us, not fear, fear's not the right word, but like any kinda, like, we are not impenetrable. Like we are not 100% like safe. We, you know, we don't live in some magical world where Americans cannot possibly be harmed. It's probably not a bad thing like that. That kind of thing breeds humility to me.

Guest [01:08:10] It certainly has opened my eyes. You know, you just, same thing with Russia, Ukraine, we did that special episode because we didn't think it was affecting us physically. So let's do a report on how it's gonna potentially affect my income. We're a little different perspective now. Somebody just came to us intentionally or maybe non intrusive or non maliciously, or maybe it was because how do you, I mean, whole nother podcast one another can of worms that I have no education on is what do you believe when it gets reported?

Vance Crowe [01:08:47] Oh, that this is exactly what I think about Russia. Because I'll tell you what, the thing that really like lit my fire with Russia was that somehow our government made it their, within their purview to stop us from being able to watch Russian television. Like, wait a second, you like, we are in the free country. We're in the country where you're allowed to hear what the other people are saying, not the country where you get to choose whether we get to hear what they're saying or not. And I tried for hours one night to to see Putin's entire speech and have it be translated and you couldn't find it. Like that's when you're like, wait, wait, wait. The internet was designed. We were told, we were told we were, you know, embracing this was that Now we're gonna be able to find out what those people in that other country that were thinking about fighting with thing and it was all shut down. Which to me, that made us like maybe we're not entirely the good guys here. Maybe we got some things that we're trying to hide.

Guest [01:09:40] Well, even, even Corey trying to judge a marketing plan for a growing year using export figures as part of that consideration. Can't get accurate data, data outta China, one of the most technologically advanced countries can't tell us how many bushels of corn they're gonna need. Why are they gonna tell us when we can't even be honest with ourselves? And you know, like Twitter,

Vance Crowe [01:10:04] Oh yeah, that's a running joke. Was was

Guest [01:10:05] Just filtering everything from, you know, COVID to the war stuff to, you know, just taking out free speech, right? It was not there. So, and it, and now they're fighting about it in Congress. Isn't that weird that Congress is fighting or they're having trials on a social media platform?

Vance Crowe [01:10:26] Well, so are you guys familiar with this concept for your podcast value for value? This I think a super important thing. So there is a way now using the Bitcoin system, but you, you, you're actually using what's called lightning. So lightning is like a layer built on top of Bitcoin where you can have an app where if I'm listening to you guys, I can stream you money based on how much time I'm listening to it for. So the, you know, in in the Bitcoin system, the smallest unit of Bitcoin is a Satoshi, it's 0.7 zeros and a one. That's one that's a satoshi. So if I'm listening to you guys, I can, I, I have a little wallet and it just automatically sends you guys that money or oh, if you guys have like a particularly good podcast, I can just send that to you directly. Now why is this important? Well, if you go to use like Patreon or this system of buy me a cup of coffee, right? Well let's say I give you $10, the $10, there's automatically a $2 processing fee. And then there's also the fee that I pay in order to be able to have this service. So like you're cutting way in 20, 30, 40%. And if the Canadian trucker rallies or any indication, if they decide you guys aren't the type of message, you know, we want here, they can just shut it off. So there's a new way of doing it now. Like the one that I use now is called the Fountain app. And I think it is a very interesting play because it's going to, it's going to disaggregate the ability for one person to come along and just say, you're not allowed to get paid for this or you're not allowed to get money.

Guest [01:12:06] The Fountain app is using crypto currency.

Vance Crowe [01:12:09] Yeah. So it is used, so what happens with the Fountain app is you don't even have to have Bitcoin. You, you just go on there and they'll say, Hey, if you listen to, for every minute of a podcast you listen to, we're gonna give you a random amount of, of Satoshi's. So one day it might be four Satoshi's per minute, one day it might be one. So you listen to a few podcasts this way and you amass a little pile of, of Satoshis a little bit. And then if I decide I wanna start spending them on you guys, now I can send you a boost or I can do whatever. And you never actually take any money unless you decide I want to cash out. And so if you have a node, which is a part of the Bitcoin system, you could say, okay, send it to this wallet and I want to take it out and actually have that money. Otherwise it's basically Monopoly money. But I think it's the first step for people to be able to have, to be able to have this subscription based model where you're not using the visas or the banks or any of these things. So

Guest [01:13:08] They're paying you to listen to some and then you're paying to listen to some.

Vance Crowe [01:13:12] So the right, I think the way that they're doing it is to, they must have a pile and sure, there's like venture capital where they said, here buy a pile of Bitcoin and now give people, they're paying me right now initially to listen. And I think that's just to get the economy right,

Guest [01:13:26] Excitement.

Vance Crowe [01:13:27] Correct. But you can also subscribe to, to the Fountain app. And then you give them like actual dollars and then they convert that some portion of that into Satoshi's that you can then put out. To me it's like, I was just up with a guy named Sean Newman who has a podcast and he has 100% already been kicked off of YouTube and he is gonna get kicked off of other things. And I've been just like hammering him like, you've got to set this up because the Canadian system, I don't know if you guys have been following what's going on in Canada, but Canada is wild right now. And so if I were running a podcast in Canada, I would definitely want to be as censorship proof as I could get.

Guest [01:14:06] So they're taken out the free speech.

Vance Crowe [01:14:08] Oh yeah. They have all these things that are like, oh, if, if you, you know, use hate speech, we can boot you, we can fine you, we can. They, they've got, and they've like have all these like, oh, they, they've got bills running through there about whether or not you can take somebody off of different social media. It it's wild up there right now. What

Guest [01:14:24] Is gonna be the result of, of all this, when you only let the people hear what you want 'em to hear, it just seems like it, it's not a good end to come.

Vance Crowe [01:14:34] It means that the it, the fight to get elected becomes more and more and more vicious, right? Because then who, if you're elected, then you're the one that's in charge of who gets to hear what. And then eventually you just get to a point where you're all powerful

Guest [01:14:48] And then you're all of the same opinion because that's all you have access to. And then people become more radical.

Vance Crowe [01:14:58] I mean, isn't it weird when you talk to somebody and they're like actual, not just their opinion about the facts are different, but what they actually think happens is night and day different than you. It's, it's like a bizarre thing that I don't think happened when we were younger and maybe it was happening and I just, we've been living in a banana republic all along. But it used to be that we were operating at least in the same

Guest [01:15:21] Parameter

Vance Crowe [01:15:22] Of facts,

Guest [01:15:22] Certainly was a lot easier to hide it back then. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:15:25] That's probably true, right?

Guest [01:15:26] We have access to so many different people now and all these socials, even though they're still making it so you can only see certain stuff. I mean there's a lot of different avenues. You can see stuff back in the sixties and seventies. I mean, you had to dial someone up on the phone, you might see news that was a week old, right? Or get the newspaper that's several days old. So the speed of travel of information and you have, you're just trusting that it's good information. And you know, one of my pastimes, what I enjoy is listening to podcasts. A lot of that content is history based. And it's neat for me to go back and listen to how elections were run in history. You know, there's some public officials that, you know, are deemed to have been naturally gotten some of the popular vote just due to their appearance. They physically looked stronger or more attractive, carried themselves well, spoke more confidently, maybe not necessarily were the most qualified, but won elections because of public perception. And that might've been due to the black and white news that they watched Friday nights or the way they spoke over the radio that, you know, that's what you had and got for information. I just, I go back to government class that, that in high school, and I don't remember anything outta that class being so dramatically polarizing. You know, obviously that's a public school system, that's an intentional way of teaching, but, but there was not any of that exposure.

Vance Crowe [01:17:01] One of the best books I ever read about the media landscape, I I was the working at Monsanto at the time doing pr like pretty hardcore PR work. And it's called Trust Me, I'm Lying, it's by Ryan Holiday. The guy that wrote the, the Obstacle as the way, I don't know, he is like a big stoicism guy. Anyway, the book, trust Me, I'm lying, talks about how the initial newspapers used to be entirely political and partisan. So you'd have like the democrat PA paper and the Republican paper. And the, the, the downside to that is you're like, all right, well where am I gonna get my information? They're totally bifurcated. But the benefit was nobody was trying to hide it, right? It was like they, they, they were originally riding these newspapers and putting them out there to try and get their candidates elected and then eventually started putting in other types of newspaper. And it wasn't until the subscription model came along that places like the New York Times were like, wait, wait, wait. If we, if we only play to one part of this distribution, we're missing out on all these other people. So let's try and play to the middle because that middle is gonna be more, we're gonna get larger audiences. But then, then I think once the internet came about, all of a sudden it became way cheaper to target people. So it was able to do it. So it, yeah, it was a fascinating book.

Guest [01:18:19] Back to this Bitcoin paying for podcasts. You think that's the direction that podcasts and and media is gonna be consumed? Is people paying for it in that way?

Vance Crowe [01:18:30] Whether or not that becomes the mainstream, I don't know, but I think it will become the path for being able to hear things that the mainstream doesn't want you to hear. Because right now it's just too hard for somebody to, to set up a system that if they decide, like in, I'll go back to Canada 'cause it's the one I think Canada's 10 years ahead of us. People say, oh, watch what's going on in Europe and it's gonna happen in the United States. No, it's, watch what happened in Canada and it will come down here. And like, 'cause a lot of people don't realize this, you know, Canada urbanized faster than the United States. So they like, you know, you think about how many people left farms and then moved into the city. They were about 15 years ahead of us in terms of urbanization. In fact, they're still more urbanized than we are. But then, so then if you look at what's going on in Canada, they're knocking people out, they're kicking people out of the banking system. They can't use the a CH system. And so you think about like, all right, well what happens if you have ideas that the system doesn't want you to have here? Well you, you're gonna need some other way to do it. And Bitcoin is a very interesting system because you can send value money without somebody getting in between that. And I think that now that people are, now that it's been around for long enough, people are building systems for things like podcasts to be able to benefit from that. I don't, I don't think if you started your lightning network, you know, if you started a fountain app, you guys are gonna be able to like quit your day job.

Guest [01:19:53] Well, I mean I, I just, I asked because we're on YouTube now and it's like, I think we've made like $17 on the monetization of YouTube. So it's like we're not getting rich by any means. I don't know that people would actually go physically pay us, you know?

Vance Crowe [01:20:05] Well I got Sean to join the Fountain app and within a day he had $20 in donations, like bang right away. And so, I mean, I don't know, I think that whether it's the fountain app or it's something else, this is happening and it's happening in the, in the light of exactly what we were talking about. When you're like, since when did the government get to tell us what we get to listen to? Since when do these outlets get to do this? Do

Guest [01:20:28] You think there's a way we could just stop the direction we're going like that so it doesn't have to be like, to that point? Or is it, it's just gonna go,

Vance Crowe [01:20:37] I don't think there's any way to stop it. What do you think?

Guest [01:20:43] You'd like to believe that there's a way to stop it. But you look at failed political campaigns that seem radical in the beginning, a wild out of hand, out of left field approach or trying to call out and they don't win. There's a lot of herd mentality. Look at what COVID did.

Vance Crowe [01:21:07] Oh yeah. That, that's the one that if you had any question about whether your neighbors would turn you in or not, like that, that became very clear. Like there are people that are like, they, they wanna follow the system and that we're

Guest [01:21:20] Trying to figure out for the podcast whatever level of fear consumption toilet paper had to get people to think they have to listen to farm farm or they don't know, you know, and then just all of a sudden millions of listeners because there's a fear of not having it. That's facetious of course. But that, that's the masses. I mean you, you're not gonna change anything when a majority follows.

Vance Crowe [01:21:50] Yeah. And there's some kind of selection pressure, right? Like as you put more people into a city, you don't really want them, it's just like putting 'em in a cafo, right? You don't really want a, a wild bull inside of that CAFO because that kind of alpha bull in there is gonna cause all kinds of problems. So you want people that are getting along. I think that's largely why people living in ag communities, like they can tolerate having the, the guy that doesn't want to get along with people. They can tolerate the group of people that think differently. But in a city you can't have like giant alpha men walking, you know, getting on the subway, riding in your elevator with you. It's a problem. Do you think there's a way out of the,

Guest [01:22:35] I just, it, it's scary to think about it. It's, I I've gotten to the point where I don't think that deeply, I used to actually go down that path, you know, listen to the radical one side, radical the other side and form an opinion. And, and I dunno, maybe it's just ignorance is bliss sometimes, or I'm just happier that way I can get, I, it's pretty polarizing to, I can go down to some pretty deep rabbit holes.

Vance Crowe [01:22:58] I was just telling my buddies the other day, I can't believe I'm finally the guy that doesn't know what's going on. Like that balloon thing. Like it had been going on for three or four days and, and I I like popped my head up. I'm like, wait a second, some balloons like, what happened here? And, and then that's 'cause I had kids, right? Like once you had kids, you are genuinely making a decision. Should I know what's going on in that place way far away? Or should I spend 10 minutes coloring with my daughter? And you can find out what's going on sometimes, but you cash those moments in, they're not coming back. Yeah.

Guest [01:23:29] Yeah. If you, what, what would it have changed in your mind if you would've learned about it three days ago rather than learning about it this morning? Would you have lived the last three days differently?

Vance Crowe [01:23:41] No. Uhuh. Yeah. I mean, like, my, my big thing now is I'm planting trees like, and I think, I think trees is like the ultimate like time bank, right? You, and, and like this is like totally clear when you go talk to the people that sell 'em, you know, like a nursery, right? If you have a tree that they've been growing for three or four years, you can tell exactly how much that is worth because people are willing to pay, you know, $80 for a, a one foot tree and $500 for a six foot tree.

Guest [01:24:12] So are you using the trees as a, like a retirement or like a payment?

Vance Crowe [01:24:17] No, next generation. No, I'm trying to build orchard in my yard. I want to get 'em going as quick as I can so that my daughters have a chance to climb, climb in a cherry tree, climb, climb up in and, and like, I also am doing it as trying to create privacy from, from the people living close to me. To me it's like, it it, I can, I have total tendency to do what you're talking about. Go down the rabbit hole. I'm like stockpiling quinoa, you know, getting generators. Yeah. But like the trees, you're like, well this is proof of work. There's gonna, if I, if I go dig this hole and plant a tree, something will be different in the future.

Guest [01:24:52] I like that. I know some other people that have taken some rougher ground around their farm. It'll grove in the back or old cattle pasture or something like that and then have physically planted oak trees or walnut trees in, in rows. And knowing that they're not gonna see the value of it. But in 40 years time they're gonna have a harvestable asset that their kids could possibly have. And that the memories that you create, planting them and watching them grow and all that, taking a piece of ground that is relatively low value and it gives habitat, planting trees for the environment, all that holds the soil. So it's got a lot of good benefits. So it's kind of a, a neat way to store wealth. Great wealth.

Vance Crowe [01:25:35] So you guys are heading down to Louisville. Whatcha gonna do down there?

Guest [01:25:40] We are going to meet hundreds of people and ultimately we are under contract to broadcast four shows a day, live from the Soukup manufacturing booth and be in an extension of their sales team to draw attention and, and focus on them. Make 'em stand out from a competitor, be a source of entertainment, make people pause long enough to draw further interest in what they have going on, but kind of provide a extra value that goes along the lines of just branding. You know, they're the company that puts their dollars behind an educational resource for farmers, which is their clients. But really what we're going down to do is we're gonna see hundreds of people and get to hear hundreds of stories and you know, talk to hundreds of listeners that come and tell us how much value we provided or what we can do to do better or change and just build our little social network networking really. I mean that's all it is.

Vance Crowe [01:26:44] So give your best pitch for your sponsor. What, what do they do? What do they provide?

Guest [01:26:49] So we, we do the best that we can to provide an unbiased approach to helping farmers better themselves, both personally and their business. We are truly trying to teach them to make themselves more profitable in turn, buy more things, invest in more things, build their legacy. Everything comes from profit. Money's not everything, but you can certainly have a lot more of everything else with more profit. And with that gives a lot of companies a great avenue to share their story as to how they can truly affect the bottom line in agriculture. So to partner with us, we kind of provide a very unintrusive avenue to tell somebody's story, whether it's yours, whether it's sue, cut manufacturing. But if you're gonna try and differentiate yourself in a commodity driven world, there's value to that. We love working with the Sue Cut family. We're not under contract to say that just legitimately as a partner, the really cool family history, the multi-generational operation and leadership, the fact that they took a nowhere town in Iowa and created a booming center of wealth. I mean just, there's tens of thousands of jobs in a town that doesn't have tens of thousands of rooftops. That's a cool story.

Guest [01:28:21] That's what agriculture's all about. And we get to help share that.

Vance Crowe [01:28:26] And do you guys already have all your guests lined up?

Guest [01:28:29] Yeah, we got a schedule like Tanner said for a day. But we know that there's going to be a couple drop bys that we'll probably have to do last year. So last year at National Farm Machinery Show was our first ever on site for the podcast on site recording sessions. We had no idea what was going on flying by the seat of our

Vance Crowe [01:28:46] Pants.

Guest [01:28:47] You know, we bought thousands of dollars of equipment twice. Now we have, we have, we could actually go in two different places and record if we want to. Probably three. If we really wanted to get thin, we have enough stuff. But we scheduled ourself way too thick last year. We were physically just beat at the end of every day. And this year hopefully we can have a lot more meaningful conversations and, and also get just the same amount of quality content out there. Last year we captured 25 audio files in three days. Whoa.

Vance Crowe [01:29:22] That's a lot of paying attention, right? Like that, that's the thing that, like I tell Ben, you know, my my business partner like doing these or Legacy Interviews, I think I burn more calories doing this than I do anything else because you're a hundred percent focused. There's no like, oh, I'm gonna check my phone. Yeah, I'm gonna take a little break here. You are a hundred percent focused. So to do 25 in three days,

Guest [01:29:45] I'm not saying we did them the right way because there's that, there is exactly what you just said and that's disrespectful to the guest. But did we do that last year? Yeah, they're just, you just physically can't, mentally can't. And that's the habit is I'm not here right now. I did, I just looked at a text message and responded to an email and phoned in my next question. That's why we're doing, we have 12 scheduled, we know there's gonna be more than that. We, we have 12 scheduled and they're scheduled to where we can be there. We will mentally be present. And we missed lunch almost every day last year. And when Tanner doesn't eat, he gets angry

Vance Crowe [01:30:26] Little guy. Like,

Guest [01:30:27] You know, I got a lot of reserves I can draw on. So, but it, gosh, I'm, I don't think I've ever been so mentally drained before. And you were even worse off. You'd get to, you'd get to have drinks at night to try and wind down and just, everything was funny and it's not because of the drinks, you just had no mental capacity to do anything except for relax. Yeah. Maybe that's giving you some of that TH Steven, but it's so true. Like my, I've got young daughters and our third and fourth grade basketball team. I had the honor of coaching this season and it was fascinating how drained I was at the end of an hour long game of kids that put up 12 to 16 points an entire game.

Vance Crowe [01:31:13] And

Guest [01:31:13] You get done with that. And I just was freaking wiped. But you're making sure that she's not crying and you got the substitutions correct and you looked at the time and you made sure the referee switched the possession error. Get your technical foul, don't get your,

Vance Crowe [01:31:27] Don't get yourself

Guest [01:31:28] Kicked out. Just all those little things. And it's the same thing in my opinion for a good podcast interview. We should be worn out at the end of it.

Vance Crowe [01:31:37] I do these Legacy Interviews and like I, I literally lay down on the ground when we're done because like it's not because they're not interesting, it's that there's no moment where I'm worried about yawning or anything like this because you're just so intense. And I heard people talking about how many calories the, the chess players burn when they're playing chess. And I was like, I think that's what that feels like. I think 'cause you're just, you're so focused that you're just exhausted afterwards. And I'm sure coaching a team is probably the same. I mean, I don't think that should justify going out, you know, like eating a bunch of cake or something. But

Guest [01:32:13] It does make those after game snacks more worth it.

Vance Crowe [01:32:17] And so if people were gonna go look at the Farm for profit like podcast schedule, like in fact this year I always, I I, every year I do a, hey, these are three things to pay attention to. And you guys are one of the three. What podcast would somebody that's not necessarily engaged in agriculture but wants to kinda get oriented towards farming, what, what would you have them listen to

Guest [01:32:38] As far as our shows?

Vance Crowe [01:32:39] Yeah, what episode would you say? Ah, this is a good one.

Guest [01:32:43] I mean I would, gosh, it's not even farming, but like, this is interesting me 'cause I'm engulfed in farming, but it is like that the off shows that we do that are loosely tied to agriculture, like the, the business of fatherhood. I wasn't even part of that show, but I listened to it.

Vance Crowe [01:32:57] That was good.

Guest [01:32:57] Physically took a lot of, and then the scarcity mindset Tanner had a pastor on and oh my gosh, it was just fantastic. Not like our typical shows, but those to me as, so maybe if you're a farmer, maybe you should go listen to those shows. And then if you're not a farmer, I don't, you got a couple ideas. One thing that we, we do, and I I think it came out of a conversation that the three of us had over a Zoom chat is we've asked our guests, because almost every guest we bring on is an expert, whether they believe it or not, we deemed them an expert in what we're gonna talk about. If it's a fun show and we're talking about them, they're an expert in themselves, something that they've done they know the most about. If it's Pastor Ashley, she was the expert around the scarcity mindset. So we value their opinions and we ask over a certain period of time, all of our guests the same question. You know, like right now our question is what does success look like to you? And we compile, I shouldn't say we Mama Lynn, my mom, the number one fan of the podcast compiles all those answers. I

Vance Crowe [01:34:09] Remember you talking about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Guest [01:34:11] And then we take that and make an episode of it. So right now the question is what does success look like to you? And most of our guests will go right into, if they're selling a microbiological, well it means that we've impacted so many farmers and we try to reframe it that, no, to you, is it financial freedom, is it wealth, is it legacy? Is it, what is that? And then we will take those answers and we'll put an episode together that kind of summarizes that. So to answer your question is go to the first part of 2023. Two of our first three episodes are a summary of the last six months of 2022. And that question escapes my mind. Yeah, the best advice. The best advice. What's the best advice you've been given? 'cause now it's what does success look like to you? Sweet. So we have 52 answers. We didn't put them all into the same show, but it was enough. We broke it out into a part one, part two, and we compartmentalized what is the best advice. So if you are loosely tied to agriculture, you'll get where some of those crossover. But it's just good life advice. I mean, anybody can listen to those shit. Anyone can listen. So the four that we've talked about, scarcity mindset in the fall of 22, business of Fatherhood. Fatherhood

Vance Crowe [01:35:37] February. Yeah. Real recent. Yeah. Yeah.

Guest [01:35:38] February 23. And the first two shows of 23 would be great openers into Farm for Profit. And then I hope that they enjoy it, that they just let it roll. I like, there's 200 and some episodes, just keep going. I just like how our show flows. I mean we're really two shows in one. It's Farm for Profit podcast, but Monday is the, is the profit show to help you with either your life or your business. And Thursday's just like a happy hour coffee shop talk. We usually bring someone in. It's not scripted, it's chill, laid back. And sometimes my personality, I can draw more out of those conversations than I can out of the, the expert that's on. It's the way I learned.

Vance Crowe [01:36:19] So let me end with a, with a question that's kind of in this line. I heard it one of my buddies who is not a good manager to begin with, like, but he worked on it really hard and I think now is an excellent manager. And he starts off every one of his meetings when he doesn't and he has a lot of remote workers and he says, tell me about something beautiful you've seen in the last week. So I ask you guys that some, something you've seen that's beautiful in the last week.

Guest [01:36:45] Okay, I got two things. I'll give you a chance. 'cause two things pop in my mind and I've learned just to say those. I pick my daughter up from piano lessons and we're coming around the corner, I'm gonna fricking tear up. We're coming around the corner and she goes, dad, look at the sunset. We stopped. We stopped. I had no reason to stop. And I got to look at that. It wasn't over anything fancy, it was just over the houses and that was pretty. And then the second one was the emails that are coming in from this business of fatherhood episode just telling us how it's affecting their lives. Yeah, I don't know that I have anything that can

Vance Crowe [01:37:29] Well that's the power of beauty, right

Guest [01:37:30] Terry? Yep. Right there. I would say same thing going back. We both have two daughters about the same age. And my grandparents are still alive and still living next to the farm. And it was about a week ago. We took them over there on the weekend and unannounced, and we've kind of been going through this, my grandpa's got Parkinson's pretty bad, pretty bad. And they probably need to get some assisted living type and they just don't wanna leave. And I can, I don't fault 'em for that, but you know, they, we stopped by unannounced and my girls were playing. One was playing the piano, the other one was playing with some toys and just seeing the joy on my grandparents' face, especially my grandpa's. And he, he sat up and said, I'm really glad you guys stopped by today. I wasn't expecting it, but I was really hoping you would. And it was a pretty, pretty big moment. Pretty cool. And, and it, and it didn't feel like it at the time, but then when you're kind of drive away and you're reflecting on it and it's like, wow. Like that's, that's all they want at that point in their life. So pretty cool.

Vance Crowe [01:38:38] Yeah, man. Great.

Guest [01:38:40] What about you Vance?

Vance Crowe [01:38:42] Well, I was taking care of both of my daughters this weekend, like full-time. My wife is taking a trip. She hasn't taken a trip in years and years and years. So it was like, hey, I'm, I'm glad to do this. And I've got both girls in the backseat. I've got a two and a half year old and a six month old. And for whatever right reason, the six month old just, she got upset in her car seat. So she starts crying and I'm starting to be frustrated, right? You're like, all right, I gotta take a deep breath here. And all of a sudden my daughter, you're talking about tearing up. But my daughter starts singing, twinkle twinkle little star and her little sister stops crying, right? And like, and and like afterwards I was like, what made you think to do that Violet? And she was like, she just needed to know that I loved her. And I was like, man, and like, you know, like nobody taught her that, right? So it's whatever she's around, whatever that is. And like, you know, you think about your question about what is success? Like to have one sister sing to another little sister like that is to have succeeded. I think so. Well I think we better wrap it up and just cry without the cameras on. It was, it was so good to see you guys. If people wanted to find out more about Farm for Profit, where would they go?

Guest [01:39:53] Yeah, go to farm for profit.com. That's the number four. We were super creative. Thought we were. So it's FARM four, the actual number profit and that's the website, but ultimately hit our TikTok up. I mean, it's probably where we are the most active as users. So go out there. It's at Farm for Profit on TikTok. We have all the social media platforms, but that's probably where we spend most of our time as hosts. So you go to the general account, it links you to everybody else. So yeah, we've put a bigger emphasis on YouTube lately as well. And then we both, we do have personal tiktoks and accounts as well. I'm corn, pork and beans,

Vance Crowe [01:40:34] Bladder and yeah,

Guest [01:40:36] Again, creative and Tanner's, Iowa banker, man.

Vance Crowe [01:40:39] Well I would never, like, we've been talking for years and I was always like, I don't wanna do ours over Zoom. I wanna do it in person. And we finally made it happen. So I'm so glad you guys came by and thank you so much.

Guest [01:40:50] Next time will be in our new studio.

Vance Crowe [01:40:53] Oh,

Guest [01:40:54] That's right. Yeah, yeah. No, the pleasure's ours. Thank you for the invite.