#315 | Zack Smith; Revolutionizing Agriculture with Innovative Farming Methods

Innovative Farming Methods [00:00:00] And so the beauty of the system is that where the animals go one year and the corn is next year, we just simply take 'em and flip 'em. So now the corn is planted, where the animals went has the ability to utilize those nutrients that are, you know, gonna be slowly made available. And so we've, the net result is that we've, you know, decreased the on farm need or buying nutrients off the farm from somebody else by 80% roughly. We still need some additional nitrogen for the corn crop at 80% reduction in nutrients. I'm Chris Haworth, a grain originator and accountant living in Pocahontas, Iowa, and you are listening to the Vance Crow podcast. Welcome back to the

Vance Crowe [00:00:37] Podcast. I'm glad

Innovative Farming Methods [00:00:38] You're here.

Vance Crowe [00:00:39] Today we sit down with Farmer Zach Smith. Zach is the stock cropper. Many of you may have heard of him or seen him on Twitter. He's one of those guys that's taking some of the more avant-garde ideas, maybe even dreams, and turning them into a reality, changing the hyper-efficient system where we're planting rows and rows and rows of corn and soybeans. And instead creating a system where he can actually run livestock in between the rows of crops and then rotating them year after year. What he's going to explain here will blow your mind. And he is actually producing some products that I think could actually really change the nature of how we get things like eggs in the future. His ideas for making the roomba of chicken eggs is really neat. You're gonna find this interesting and you're gonna find Zach to be one of those pragmatic people that both knows the large scale agriculture system and is trying to create something new and different within the system. We're gonna get to that interview in just a moment, but first I wanted to tell you a story that happened earlier this week. A woman came in, she was brought by her son, and she was nervous about doing the interview. We sat outside in the waiting area for about 20 minutes just talking about what kinds of questions I would ask and how it would all work. She had been sent the preparing guide and she'd gone through it, but there was something that just really felt uncomfortable about doing this legacy interview. She was nervous, and it was interesting because this was clearly a woman that was determined, that ran a very successful family, that was really a confident person, and yet she felt kind of intimidated.

Vance Crowe [00:02:20] But when we sat down here in the studio and we got to talk about where her parents came from, why they ended up in farming and about her childhood, by the time we moved into some of the more deep and and intense questions, she was really open. And in fact, at the end of the interview, she stopped me and said, you know, there were things I talked about with you that I haven't told anybody in 70 years. Now, it's not that she was telling me big secrets or things that were hidden away. It was that there just wasn't the context for her to tell these stories. I am certain when her children and grandchildren watch these interviews, they're gonna hear things that they maybe wouldn't have heard if they hadn't sat down and done a legacy interview. If you're interested in having me interview your loved one, perhaps your father for Father's Day, then go to Legacy Interviews dot com. We are now offering these transcripts to go along with Legacy Interviews, and if you get a half day, you can also order this transcript along with it. The details for how to do this are on the website, so go to Legacy Interviews dot com to find out more. All right, without further ado, let's head to the interview with Zach Smith, farmer. Zach Smith, welcome to the podcast. Yes,

Innovative Farming Methods [00:03:40] Crow. Thanks for having

Vance Crowe [00:03:41] Me. What does it take to make really good bacon?

Innovative Farming Methods [00:03:48] Well, yeah, you got to enjoy some this morning. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:03:50] You

Innovative Farming Methods [00:03:50] Got to enjoy some star cropper bacon. Good bacon, I think, in my opinion, comes from good hearty breeds that have, that have some fat on 'em, 'cause fat's where the flavor comes from. And I like pigs that are raised on dirt because they're just something about pigs on dirt versus pigs on slats and concrete that it's hard to replicate. And I'll put the bacon that I raise in my stock cropper barns and or, or any outdoor if, if pigs can be on soil where I think they belong. I think that's the best way to best tasting best raised meats you can have.

Vance Crowe [00:04:31] I think most people kind of assume that pigs are living in dirt and have like pig sties and are living outside by a barn.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:04:39] No, no, they're not. I mean, I don't know what the percentage is, but probably 95, 90 8% of, you know, hogs produced in the country are raised in confinement barns. And they're actually, when you go in them, they're really clean. I think most people, I think, you know, they're not allowed in to sea, but like, if you actually get in there, they're, they're really impressive buildings and structures are super efficient and you see very little manure because the manure goes through the concrete slats and down into the pits below. But it's, but they never see sunlight other than it hitting 'em on the ass when they walk out the loading chute into the truck and they never see soil. And you know, I, one of the things I, I was sharing with you earlier when we were talking about one of the lessons in COVID when they were destroying a lot of animals, you know, they were, they gave, they were, they had programs where you could, if you could butcher the animal and give it to somebody, they would.

Vance Crowe [00:05:34] Yeah. They, because in COVID, when all of a sudden you weren't butchering these hogs, these hogs have gotta go. Yeah. They can't, you can't just keep 'em. So people were like, we're just gonna go slaughter 'em and bury 'em in a pit. Right. So you guys came along and were like, Hey, we'll slaughter him and give him away his food.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:05:48] Yeah. And one of the, the most telling things that happened when that happened is we went and got, I had a, a real good friend that we set up our seed dealership actually, actually as a butcher shop. And we just took hogs from his farm and we butchered them, but we needed a place to hold 'em in the meanwhile till we had enough time to, to process 'em. And we put them out onto dirt, out of his trailer, into our dirt pen. And all of those, all those confinement pigs wanted to do when they hit the ground was not at the earth. And they did it for like two hours straight.

Vance Crowe [00:06:17] What do you mean? Not at the earth?

Innovative Farming Methods [00:06:19] They just, they acted like they were desperate to eat soil. And I'd never seen anything like that before in my life. Like where they'd never seen it before, but they knew that there was something in that soil that they wanted and they just, you know, a pig snout is not meant to, you know, easily eat earth that is compacted, but they just wanted to be in it. And there's, you know, and even with my hogs that are used to it, the first thing when we move our barns, they, they put their, their noses down and there's something that's mineral or it's the, the bugs or the worms, I don't really understand it, but they're meant to be on that, obviously. And when you, when they hadn't had it and they never seen it, they immediately had that instinct to start trying to consume soil. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:06:58] I understand why we have confinement like raising pgs. Yeah. Like it is the mass production to meat. But I will say that is in all of agriculture, the part of ag that makes me the most uncomfortable. I've been to large confinement operations for cattle, I've seen chickens, I've seen egg production. Pigs are the ones where you're like, those things are really smart.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:07:20] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:07:21] They really know what's going on and they're in like a very sterile environment. Yeah.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:07:26] I'll be careful. I don't want to be over dramatic. I think there's a lot of people I'm really good friends with in the, in the industry that work really hard and take a lot of pride in taking care of their pigs. And it's a system that is exploitive to the people. Hog production and chicken, you know, production, not so much cattle. That's a little structured a little bit differently. But you, the business, the, It's not that there's very few independent producers anymore that are actually what I would call being like an artisanal independent farmer that are making all the decisions. They don't own the lifestyle. Very few of them like own pigs anymore. You, the way it works is you put it, you, you have land, you build a, a hog barn on it and you get the manure, but everything else is controlled by the vertically integrated company like a Smithfield or a JBS or whoever. And they are in control of, and you are there to provide cheap labor and be responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of that building. And, and the hog industry especially right now is in, in a world of hurt because all of that confinement, there's been a lot of problems with amplification of disease and all sorts of things now. And we have things like Prop 12 that just got upheld by the Supreme Court, which is gonna change that industry a lot. And it really puts you, you kind of get put on this hook of, I I call it serfdom, where like you're at the beck and call of these large integrators. They hold, you know, kind of a hammer over the, the grower's head and say, you must do this.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:08:56] You must go and spend all this capital now to, to bring this, otherwise we'll pull your contract and you won't have anything. And so that, that's not the way it used to be. Every, you know, every farmer was independent. They made their own decisions, they had their own infrastructure. They owned it for, they were, they were the craftsmen of, of raising the things. They didn't have a field man that told them how to do it. They, they knew how to do that on their own. And so we've, in the last 30 to 40 years, we've, that industry has changed substantially. And in my opinion, it's not for the better.

Vance Crowe [00:09:25] Yeah. When I talk to pork producers who I think like actually care a great deal about their animals. Yeah, a hundred percent. You know, like, they're like, well we took out the dirt because there was disease and we took out these things because like, so you understand each step they took along the way. Yeah. And I think any one of 'em would say, oh, it'd be great to have pasture raised pork. Like, it's not like they don't understand the value. It's, yeah.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:09:47] Why

Vance Crowe [00:09:48] Is it so much more work?

Innovative Farming Methods [00:09:54] Well, it's just, I mean, you eliminate like those environmental issues that come along. Cold weather, you know, disease, you know, mud thi things like that that make it, you know, more difficult. And it's also, you know, when you build it like a factory, you can get the throughput through. And that we, we made a decision a while back that that was more important and a lot of the other external costs that come along with it. We have never, we've never decided as an industry to put that in the ledger of the mathematics of how the systems, how the system works. And I, it's, it's fake math or it's fuzzy math is George Bush would say on accounting for the costs of the system as a whole. And I think it's high time that, that we stand up and actually account for those costs.

Vance Crowe [00:10:42] Well, I think one of the reasons we don't account for the costs is because most people have never had the bacon like I had this morning. Right. Like, so we got my two daughters, my wife, you and I were about to have breakfast and we have this bacon in it. It look it actually looked different Yeah. Than the bacon that I get at the store. And even if I wanted to go to the store and get it, I couldn't.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:11:02] Yeah. I mean the supply of it is minuscule compared to Yeah. To what people are used to. I mean, I was, you know, I, I ate at a Culver's on the way down here and like I, I only eat the meat that I produce and it was a salad with chicken on it. And like the chicken breasts that I had was, it tasted completely foreign to me. You know, it's pumped full of, you know, preservatives and, you know, brine solutions. It doesn't even taste like what I'm used to killing a chicken, you know, letting it, you know, go through rigor and, and freezing it and then throwing it on my Traeger. Like it's a totally different product. And yeah, most people aren't, don't have access to know the difference or even to question it. This is just what chicken tastes like. This is just what bake and tastes like. So

Vance Crowe [00:11:45] I think my experience with working at Monsanto, I got the, I got the behind the scenes look and the thing that it showed me was people on the outside of the industrial food system that are throwing rocks at it believe that there's a bunch of people that are intentionally doing something really negative. Something that like, oh, we're trying to trick these people. We're trying. But basically everything that is going on in, in the industrial food system is to solve a problem. It's that like, hey, people got sick from food poisoning, so we're going to treat food this way and, and we're going to, you know, apply these regulations. And so then these things done at giant scales start making it so it's just like, like you wake up one day and the system is so different than the way that your father or grandfather did it, but you understand how you took all those steps to get there.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:12:38] Yeah. Policy drives agriculture and farmers respond to the policy because they're in the business to make money. And so if the policy is not set up intelligently enough to take into account the things we were talking about, the farmers do it, but I don't, I don't necessarily blame farmers. I do, I am critical of farmers not being more self-critical and looking at what we're doing and asking tougher questions as to why or could we do it better or the lack of curiosity. But I think that's probably in, in every form of, of, of business. You know, people get used to tradition. They get used to the way that things that dad did it or grand grandpa did it. And it's hard to rock that boat or to get out of that lane. And I don't, that's not just to agriculture, that's to, that's to everything. But I, I think that the, the consistent things for me are, are poorly constructed policy that doesn't account for external costs and the fact that change is hard. I think those Yeah, human nature is a big reason as well. So,

Vance Crowe [00:13:48] So you are the founder or the president of Stock cropper. What is stock cropper?

Innovative Farming Methods [00:13:54] So stock cropper is an idea that was hatched four springs ago, right when COVID was hitting myself and two other farmers, Sheldon Steven and Lance Peterson. We were farmers that were, I should back up commodity prices right before COVID were like just garbage, 2 75 cash corn, 7 25 bushel of beans. We're both corn, are all corn soybean farmers, well below the cost of production. And we're all small farmers. And we were trying to find a way of how in the hell are we gonna stay in business? 'cause we didn't have the scale like a lot of the big operations where they can have advantages with negotiating, you know, deals on equipment or seed or whatever. And we'd been playing around with some of these concepts I call biohacks, where you change the arrangement of the field and be able to boost yield just by not buying an input but changing the architecture of what a field looks like. We were interested in this concept called strip intercropping, where instead of all corn or all soybeans across the field, you plant alternating strips of 20 foot of corn, 20 foot of soybeans, 20 foot of corn. And the idea is, is by changing that arrangement, you get some cultural benefits to growing that way. And you also get increased light for the corn on the outside rose. And when you give them that, you can substantially boost the yield. And so the idea is, is that the beans will take a little bit of a hit and yield, but the corn increase, when you do the math across the entire field, you're better off to put that diversity in and it kind of raises all ships and you can increase gross revenue. That was the concept we were thinking about putting broad acre across.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:15:29] But the problem is, is that the soybean, it's a risky thing to do. It's not as efficient as just broad acre farming. And we're like, well, what if we could crack a code and find something to put in between the corn that would be as productive as the corn from a revenue standpoint? And we were this idea of like relay cropping from folks like John Kouts and Jason Mock and Lauren Stein Loggy, folks like that. They're working on that. But you know, it's what's relay cropping? Relay cropping is where you plant a, a crop like wheat or rye in the fall, and then you come in and plant a crop like soybeans into it, and then you will harvest the wheat or the Rhine July and then the soybeans will come up. It allows you to get two crops essentially in one year, but the further north you are, it's harder to get the fall crop established 'cause of our hard winters and cool springs. And so we're like, well, what else could there be? And the idea was hatched by my friend Lance. He said, well what if we put a pen of sheep in between the corn? I'm like a pen of sheep. What the hell? How? Well first of all, who's gonna eat lamb? We live in the corn belt, you know, people eat pork and beef and you know, and some chicken. And, and, and then we started talking like, well, what if it, what if it wasn't just a pen of lamb? What if, you know, we're told we don't have enough diversity on our landscape, which we don't, you know, what if we made a four ring animal circus on wheels where we had not just sheep, but we had sheep and goats and pigs and chickens, and what if we, what if we built this thing and we incorporated all the technology that we have on our fancy, you know, $400,000 tractors with GPS.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:17:03] And, but what if we didn't burn diesel to make it go across the field? What if we put solar panels and batteries and made a device like Elon Musk would and make that go across the field? And we changed the arrangement of a field so that we don't need to call a fertilizer truck anymore and pay a nutrient or, or whoever to bring me map and potash and, and nitrogen out like the animals produce that. And, and we have this system that essentially is self-sustaining in a loop where we're producing grain, not to burn it an ethanol plant, but to feed back to livestock in a, an incredibly low carbon footprint system. That just makes a ton of sense. It's an intelligent use of old ways with new technology. And that was the birth of this concept that we called stock cropping, which is why I define it simply as the re intersection of livestock and crops working together simultaneously or simultaneously at the same time in the field. So

Vance Crowe [00:18:02] It's so funny because like it's one of those ideas that you could see a couple of guys sitting around playing yure, drinking some beers Oh yeah. Talking about. And then be like, remember when we talked about that idea? But nobody ever moves these crazy four ring circus ideas forward.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:18:19] Yeah, I I was so excited about it. Like I couldn't hardly sleep. I mean it was just, and it was the same way with the others. I mean, we had a it, this all was hatched on Twitter dm. This idea was, and it was just a rapid fire, like the whole concept came to fruition in our minds in about 10 minutes of just rapid fire ideas. And then my, my friend Sheldon was an egg engineer, brilliant ag mechanical engineer. And so that was a huge leg up. 'cause if I would've built this thing, it would've been looked like bubble bubble gum and two by four strapped together. But like, he actually sat down together and we designed this barn that had, you know, a place for the animals to go and have, be protected inside, have food and water available and shade. The roof was designed actually to capture its own rain water. So we took advantage of when it rained, we could water the animals and minimize the need to chore it. Animals had the ability to go out and graze outdoors. So the sheep and goats would be our leading pen, then followed by the pigs and then followed with the chickens. And that was in an intentional order because they all perform different tasks. So the sheep and goats are our lawnmowers. The pigs are kind of our tillage agent. And then the

Vance Crowe [00:19:27] Whoa, slow this down. Talk, talk more. What do you mean they're lawnmowers?

Innovative Farming Methods [00:19:31] So, you know, we, we, we plant, so I, I should back up. Instead of having the corn and beans in the system, we plant corn the first year. And then in between where we had soybeans before in this 20 foot strip, we put a strip of pasture. Okay. So that and, and a caca or like a cornucopia of, of, of plants out there. So instead of just having corn or soybeans, now we have, we have a pasture mix in between that has five or six different species of plants feeding the soil. And then the animals or the sheep and goats come into it first as the pen moves into fresh pasture.

Vance Crowe [00:20:09] So you're imagining like, like a square. Correct. And then inside of that square, at the front of the square is a little area where it's fenced in and it automatically moves forward. Correct. And then the sheep move along with it. Yep. Eating the first round of grass.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:20:23] Yep. As soon as they hear the motors kick in, they jump up out of the barn and run out like it's Christmas morning. 'cause they just, they want to chomp at that fresh vegetation. And the what has been grazed down then goes to the pigs, they root around in it a little bit and then, and then it's passed on to the chickens who scratch. And you know, if the pigs have rooted it up, they'll kind of finish it off. The idea with the the chickens is, is that if you can delay the time of them coming, if the if flies have laid eggs in the manure that they'll scratch for the larva. And you have kind of this intelligent complete system of just changing the arrangement with different animals serving d different purposes and they're all laying down nutrient rich manure in real time as it goes across the field. The difference when our system and the conventional system that spreads manure, usually only in the fall when it's convenient and there's nothing to hold that manure in place.

Vance Crowe [00:21:19] And the conventional system is you got a bunch of cattle in a pen or you've got pigs somewhere. You take that manure and you're using it. Yeah. You're like putting it up in a manure spreader and you're going out, but you're doing it once a year. You're, you're putting it out in the fall before the winter. Right.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:21:34] And there's nothing, you know, gr the ground will freeze and that will stop a lot of the, a lot of the movement. But in the springtime, when things warm up, there's nothing there to, to hold it typically. And so in our system we have, we have a living root in the, in the ground that is holding that nutrient and then making it available and with kind of a time release as that organic matter decays to the next crop. And so the beauty of the system is that where the animals go one year and the corn is next year, we just simply take 'em and flip 'em. So now the corn is planted, where the animals went has the ability to utilize those nutrients that are, you know, gonna be slowly made available. And so we've, the net result is that we've, you know, decreased the on-farm need of buying nutrients off the farm from somebody else by 80% roughly. We still need some additional nitrogen for the corn crop, but 80% reduction in nutrients. We've 10 x the amount of diversity between the animals and the plant species versus just corn soybeans. And, you know, we've produced something in a fashion that consumers are much more friendly to being open to and excited about buying when it's raised. And so therefore increasing the value for the farmer to retain sovereignty and be an independent producer, which is, that was the, we wanted to make a better system for farmers and rural communities, not to be Luddites and like go back back in time, but to make, to make something that was, you know, similar to that but with new technology and, and try to restore, I think, which was what was a better way of way of real life.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:23:13] And

Vance Crowe [00:23:13] If you're cutting out half of all of your corn crop in order to be able to make these paths for the, for the stock cropper, how are you gonna make up that, that price difference?

Innovative Farming Methods [00:23:25] So the fun thing in this system is the corn really becomes irrelevant because the corn is not, you know, it's hard for people to think about. 'cause most people raise corn like an Iowa now six outta every 10 bushels goes to an ethanol plant. Well, we didn't have that,

Vance Crowe [00:23:38] Is that right? Yeah. Six outta 10.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:23:40] Yeah. That's why the carbon pipelines are pretty important because if we can't, 60% of our market goes to make an ethanol. And I think nationally it's four out of 10 goes to ethanol. So if ethanol, you know, goes away, it's a big problem. Huge problem for people that have made the investments in infrastructure. And so I lost my train of thought. What,

Vance Crowe [00:24:04] So we're talking about the livestock relative to the corn because you're cutting

Innovative Farming Methods [00:24:08] Out half of your corn.

Vance Crowe [00:24:09] There you go.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:24:09] So in our, in our system though, we're, we're trying to raise the food stuffs to feed back to the non rumenin animals. So we're not feeding like our sheep and our goats or if you put cattle, we're just allowing them to graze the pasture. But for animals like pigs and chickens, a lot of people think you can just grass feed them. But it would take five years in a day to finish an animal without, because they have a, they have a different stomach that they're not ruminants. And so they need to have a starch and a protein in order to build muscle. And so the idea is that we would grow those crops next door to them the year prior and then grind them in the yard and feed them back and make this closed closed loop system where really the, the revenue generating part of the system is the value of the livestock. And it's sub the value of what you can produce in this stacked enterprise intelligence system is substantially higher than what you can do theoretically than a just a mono cropp field of corn soybeans. And

Vance Crowe [00:25:09] The amount, I assume that a person would be willing to pay for a pig that's been

Innovative Farming Methods [00:25:13] Pasture

Vance Crowe [00:25:14] Raised for his whole life. He's just been out, rooting around in the dirt eating this is gonna be a higher price than what you're gonna get from the grocery

Innovative Farming Methods [00:25:21] Store. Correct. It's a differentiated product. A hundred percent. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:25:25] And so what's the, what's the process been like? How, how far have you gotten in, in building this? Yeah,

Innovative Farming Methods [00:25:31] So we started in February, 2020. It was actually, yeah, it was actually Memorial Day weekend, which we're coming up on. We built the first barn, we built it in less than a week. And that was kind of in the middle of all of our other farm operation stuff. And it was really stressful. But we launched it in the world June 14th, 2020, right in the right in the middle of COVID. And we ended up, we, we kind of argued over whether or not to put it on the internet and share it, but we decided to, and that was the best decision we ever could have made. It got amplified by a lot of folks, Jason Mock, who's been on your podcast and you know, was a huge early supporter of it. He asked us to come to his first field day and, and that led to a whole chain of other events that have come along, ending up partnering with Joe Bassett of Don Equipment, who has a really forward thinking, small or medium sized ag manufacturing or equipment manufacturing company that's interested in this regenerative building products to support regenerative agriculture practices. And he kind of looked at what we'd come up with stock cropper as kind of the pinnacle of what a soil health product line could be built around in building these barns. And so we forged that relationship. The first year we did not get the barn to be autonomous. We just, we advanced the barn. I should, I didn't explain that. We advanced the barn several times a day based off of the animals grazing them down. So we don't want 'em to go hungry. So they keep moving.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:27:02] And so two or three times a day the barns would move and that would keep them satiated. Wait,

Vance Crowe [00:27:06] You did this on your farm?

Innovative Farming Methods [00:27:07] Yes.

Vance Crowe [00:27:08] So you ended up doing the cropping the way you described Yeah. With the, with the pads and then a couple times a day you're going out there and moving the pens. Yep.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:27:16] But we had, we did it with a cable system and a winch. So I took an old winch that I had off another piece of farm equipment that was designed to hook onto an hydrous tanks and pull them up closer. And we just said, well, we're not using it, let's just throw it on the barn. 'cause we added, we didn't have to buy it and we hooked it to a, a tractor at the end of the pasture run. And my, my my hired guy who lived on the site, he would go out and just hit the button on the winch and the barn would go 11 feet ahead and it would stop. And just

Vance Crowe [00:27:44] And did those goats go running forward to get some

Innovative Farming Methods [00:27:46] New

Vance Crowe [00:27:46] Grass? Oh yeah.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:27:47] Yeah. They absolutely loved it. And the chickens go nuts because if there's bugs, you know, grasshoppers, last year we had a really dry year in the system. There's all sorts of grasshoppers, chickens just went ape shit to eat grasshoppers. And so you could see their excitement, their heads are just going nuts and they can't hardly keep up with 'em all jumping and they would just go. So, you know, getting rid of the pests with, with an animal instead of having to go out and spray something. You know, it's just, there's so many things. I've been trained in the, I've been in big agriculture for my whole career, like 20 years and like there's so many things that this has just kind of opened my eyes up to what is possible with Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:28:24] And that's no joke. I mean, you were a seed salesman for one of the best companies in the country. Like Yeah. You, you were like, I

Innovative Farming Methods [00:28:30] Sold legit. I sold most, I over half of my career, 15 years I spent selling all I did. And I, I was, I was a chemical salesman. I have sold shit tons of glyphosate

Vance Crowe [00:28:42] And

Innovative Farming Methods [00:28:42] Everything else, fungicides, PEs and I was good at it and I understood it. And it's not that, but I don't, I I don't want to say that I think that, I know there's a big push to go like completely organic and, but I think a lot of people that make those claims really don't know what that means at scale. And so I try to have a position of, yeah, a lot of things can have value. There's good things. I mean, it's important to be, have a stable, abundant food supply. But it's also important, I think, to ask the questions to make sure we truly understand of what's happening. And I think when you just look around at the condition of human beings in this country, something is wrong with just health and appearance and our culture around wellbeing. And it starts with, in my opinion, it starts with soil and food and the culture around that. And this idea of convenience and quick hitting taste, you know, immediate satisfaction. I think, you know, we don't sit, you know, just, we don't sit down and have meals as families. We don't, that's not venerated anymore. And so there's just a whole lot of things that I think that we can make improvements on and how we look at food and, and soil and all that.

Vance Crowe [00:29:53] I think the, the one thing that really struck me since I've been doing the podcast just in the last year, I interviewed a guy named Laslo Barbae. And so he's like a network scientist. He's actually like, considered the godfather of modern network science. And he was like, I think the things we're adding into food, like additives and preservatives. Like I think they might be doing more to our bodies than we realize. And he was saying like, there's just a whole bunch of signals inside of your body that you get hormones and different things that just, that are triggered by chemicals around your body. I just never thought of it. Yeah. And then when you start looking at it, my wife and I decided to make the transition like, all right, we got little girls, how can we make food as whole as possible? Right. And I, you know, it's hard to know whether or not that made some big difference, but when you start looking at the number of chemicals that you ingest, and I'm not like a, a freaky cat of chemicals. Yeah. Like I I, but it is something that,

Innovative Farming Methods [00:30:48] I mean, you work for Monsanto. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:30:50] Right. Like, and I mean like i I, and, and there I learned a lot about how like, hey, there's trade offs.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:30:56] Yeah, absolutely.

Vance Crowe [00:30:56] You're right. You don't have to use chemicals. Right.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:30:58] But

Vance Crowe [00:30:59] If you don't, you're to, if you're not gonna do that, then you need to send people out to pull those weeds.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:31:04] Yeah. And organic farming, like the way that it's done at scale is terrible for the soil. Like there's,

Vance Crowe [00:31:10] Oh, say that, say more about that.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:31:12] Oh my gosh,

Vance Crowe [00:31:15] You were really gonna piss some listeners off, but

Innovative Farming Methods [00:31:17] Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:31:17] Good. But hit it hard.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:31:18] Go ahead then, then go look at what it looks like. Okay, yeah, I'll look at the camera and say that, go look at what it actually looks like because from a soil health standpoint and soil sustainability, that's one of the things I'm most passionate about and we'll, we'll get into that I'm sure. But like organic farming, like crop farming anyway, is dependent on about 14 passes of tillage. Because when you don't have chemicals like they didn't a hundred years ago, you had to go out and either manually pull stuff or use steel through the earth, which I don't think people it, back then it, I don't think people were conscious of what that was doing. But when you till ground, I mean, the first thing I learned in agronomy course at Iowa State is that tillage is a destructive force in the soil. And in order to make people

Vance Crowe [00:32:02] Don't even know what tillage is. This is when you hook and implement onto the back of the tractor. Well, you till it,

Innovative Farming Methods [00:32:07] Yeah, exactly what you just said. You hook an implement to the tractor and you go through and disturb the soil. And there's lots of reasons for it that there's things from a production standpoint that are beneficial. You can kill weeds, you can turn the ground blacker to help it warm up. That's a big reason, especially in like the northern latitudes when you need to get in the spring, there's, there's definite benefits to doing that. But when you do it ad nauseum and over and over you basically pulverize the, the strength and the rigidity of the soil to hold itself together. And you start to have soil erosion, water erosion, wind erosion. The event that happened in Illinois, you know, less than a month ago, where we had a a hundred car pile up on.

Vance Crowe [00:32:47] Yeah. What was that all about?

Innovative Farming Methods [00:32:49] I 55? Well it's, it's something that happens every year and it just happened in the wrong spot at the wrong time. Where some farm fields, I don't know the specifics. So if you're from that area and you, and I've got egg in my face, so be it, I've seen it enough. I had it happen around my house last year. We had a terrible windstorm on Memorial Day and it, it was just, it looked like 1936 Dust Bowl, you know, where when soil is detached and it doesn't have any cover in the spring and it's bare like right after planting season, the wind can come along and once, if you have 50 or 60 mile an hour winds, the wrong weather event, it causes the soil particles that detach and they start doing what's called saltation and they bounce across the surface. And when they bounce, that energy hits another soil particle and it detaches that and it just becomes this combustible Edison and snowballs. And eventually you get to the point where you have so much soil blowing in the air that you cannot physically see. And that's what happened on the I 55 crash. And there was seven people killed because they couldn't see, 'cause there was so much soil blowing in the air. Now though, I'm, I don't think that was organic production specifically there, but when, when you look at organic crop farming in Iowa, there's some pockets of it and the soil erosion is absolutely horrendous. So there's trade offs. That's why I'm not, I'm not completely against all chemicals because it's just not as simple as saying organic is best. I think honestly, I think a system like Stock Cropper has a ton of potential for organic 'cause I think we have a better system design that can fix some of those problems and not make it as a reliant, you know, a goat can eat a hell of a lot of water hemp, you know, and so if we just change how we're using tools, different tools, better tools create value that way by thinking a little bit differently.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:34:39] So,

Vance Crowe [00:34:40] So talk about where, where you are right now. Can people go out and buy a stock cropper system?

Innovative Farming Methods [00:34:48] So we've been, you know, we've been really experimenting over the last three seasons. Last year was our third season with figuring out the first season was like, does this crazy ass idea even work? Yes. Okay. So the next step was, okay, how do we make it autonomous? Because the only way it's not scalable to have somebody go out, pull a machine with a tractor three times a day, or even go out and click a button three times a day. 'cause imagine if you do this at scale, you're going to have, you know, 30, 40, 50, 60 of maybe 80 of these barns on a quarter section of land. So you need to have it so that the things will move on themselves. So we, we started working on making a barn that would go on its own, which is a big undertaking to do. And we bootstrapped this all of ourselves between myself and Joe Bassett at Dawn. And so we've, we're getting to the point we, we debuted that successfully in late 21. We worked more on that last year in 22. And as we're sitting here today, we're finishing up work at the, the facility in Milwaukee to have a, a reconfiguration and hopefully launch that system out. And we're going to actually, for people who know the precision planting site in Pontiac, Illinois, one of our barns is aimed to be hopefully there within the next two weeks to be on demonstration with, at their PTI farm with a lot of the other plots that they have and also am developing, I haven't talked about this publicly a lot yet, but I'm developing a backyard autonomous poultry barn for people in on homesteads or urban areas to give them the ability to have an intelligent device to manage livestock, which makes it simpler.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:36:30] Allows them still to be able to go to the lake on the weekend and, and not have to have somebody come over and chore and make, gets more people interested in protein sovereignty with producing,

Vance Crowe [00:36:45] Oh, you had my wife ready to buy, buy a cluster clock. Yeah. Like do last night, you ready to go explain it. So if you got a backyard, what, what happens?

Innovative Farming Methods [00:36:54] So if you have a backyard, you buy, you'll buy this device from us. It's gonna be constructed like with an IKEA design where you buy it in a box and it's incredibly easy to assemble. You need like, you know, we'll need like three tools that would maybe come with it. Flat packable, very common sensical things, but very well built and engineered to last. You know, a lot of these things that you can buy the kits for like a backyard, they might last five, six years and the wood starts to rot and then you just, you have a problem in your yard. The other problem with those things is they just sit there and they just accumulate manure and you don't get any benefit out of, you know, and so if you had a device that could work itself across your property and feed your lawn instead of buying Scot's from, you know, Lowe's or Menards or you know, whatever your local garden store, like, you're building that value and you're, and know if you have like little kids like you do, like, you know, they get exposure to what food production is. They have some semblance of like understanding, like they can go out and collect the eggs or if you had broiler chickens, they could, you know, we were talking about last night like, you know, what if you made your own meat, instead of just saying, well, we're gonna give this to somebody else to do the mess. Like what if we are our children, like actually understood where food comes from and they have, they de developed the, the respect of the process that it is what it is to kill an animal and then harvest the meat and understand then preparing it. And it's, it's a, like when I've shown it to other people, it's a trans, you know, it's a transformative process for people that have never been around it.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:38:28] It's really powerful and it's not gonna be for, for everybody. But I think there's a lot of people, especially coming outta COVID where when they went to the grocery store for the first time and like there was not protein on the shelf. Like, what are we gonna do? And they have no skillset to, to counter that with anything. And so,

Vance Crowe [00:38:46] And not really the facilities. I mean, you can build a, a little hen house in your backyard, but this is a pretty neat thing because this would be like, like people dream of having their mobile or their autonomous lawnmower, but this is like putting a box out there. You have a slot for feed, you have a slot for water, you put the, the chickens in there and starting a, after they get acclimated, they're gonna be chew, eating up the bugs in your field and then producing eggs. Yeah. And now you go out there and if you've got 12 eggs, you're getting a dozen eggs a day. Yeah.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:39:18] It's designed to, it's designed to hold a dozen hands, which gives you a dozen eggs a day for a family of four that that's about what a family of four, if they eat eggs consistently for breakfast, you know, would maybe consume. And it's really, yeah, it's really designed for people that want to, or, or you, like I said, you could put broiler chickens, it would house 25 broilers, so from the square footage. So if, and 25 is a number that is manageable if you wanted to actually process your own chickens, it's not hard to do. You could, you know, you have have your family sit down on a Saturday afternoon and you could process 25 chickens and put 'em in your freezer and, and have, you know, if the next thing hits or whatever, you know, world War III comes and you still have electricity to keep it cold. You've got meat in the freezer. And the best thing is you grew it yourself. You knew, you knew exactly how it was made. A lot of people used to know this art and they would gather it was a community activity. And that's what really got me passionate about it. My family, a buddy and I started butchering all of our own meat about 12 or 13 years ago. And it came from just two guys into doing it, trying to figure it out. Like literally reading a book and like looking at a hog hanging on a hook and like, okay, what's next? And like we had no idea it was kind of a disaster the first year, but then we got through it and we're like, we told people, oh, you killed a pig and you actually butchered it and made your own bacon and ham. I'm like, yeah. He's like, that sounds pretty cool. Can I come, can I get a pig? And it just kept building and building and it turned into this great thing where the weekend before Thanksgiving for the last 12 years, like that's, we, we, we butcher stock crop or pork and then we have Thanksgiving and like that's the tradition and we gather and it's a, I don't know, it's, I don't, we have probably close to a dozen people that participate in it now.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:41:05] And it's kind of a selective club to get into, to be invited to do it because it's a special thing and you gotta show up and work and, but it's a, there's not a lot of real things like that anymore. You know, it's people picking up their cell phones and seeing what's trending and like, it's, it's, it's boring and stale and like, I think, I think people are going to be hungry to, to do real stuff again.

Vance Crowe [00:41:31] So yeah, I think the, the idea of doing this, like in my Legacy Interviews, there's two things that you've said that have really struck me. One is the number of stories that women tell me about when they were little girls about having to go collect the eggs and getting attacked by a rooster. I've heard stories like that many times and it's a formative one, right? Yeah. Because you'll hear a, a woman say, I was attacked by the rooster and dad didn't believe me. And finally I killed the rooster. One time dad went out and he saw the rooster pecking me and he killed it right in front of me. And, you know, that taught me about the facts of life. Yeah. I mean these are things that people are remembering 80 years later. Yeah. And it's a really important one. And the other one, and I, I mentioned this to you when you talked about the having your slaughtering your meat is, or is men used to do this at church groups. There used to be like, we're gonna have the, the, the men's club sausage breakfast where the men actually came and produced the sausage. They were cutting up the hog, they were, you know, putting it through the grinder. And this is something that like, clearly we used to know

Innovative Farming Methods [00:42:35] That

Vance Crowe [00:42:35] That processing your own food together as a community has like some, some deep, some deep meaning creation. Yeah,

Innovative Farming Methods [00:42:43] A hundred percent. And, and you know, and, and now we've regulated to death where we've made it seem like it's an untouchable thing. But you know, you take a couple basic precautions and I mean, I'd rather, I'd take my chances on me butchering versus buying, you know, buying from a store any day of the week. So Yeah, it it's the

Vance Crowe [00:43:00] First time you ever do meat though. I I'm sure you've plucked a few chickens in your,

Innovative Farming Methods [00:43:05] Your

Vance Crowe [00:43:06] Time. Oh yeah. Like, that's no joke. That's real work.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:43:08] It is

Vance Crowe [00:43:09] Like, like you, you, it gives you a whole new appreciation. I remember when I was in, in Kenya, I had eaten chicken. People had prepared for me that I had watched them. And you hear that like pluck, pluck, pluck, pluck sound as you're pulling the feathers out. And then one time I decided like, oh, I can do this on my own. And if you're a little lazy and you don't actually pull the feathers out or the feathers that are underneath the skin that you don't get, then you're eating dinner and you're like, oh, what is that? There's a little bit of quilt. Yeah,

Innovative Farming Methods [00:43:36] No, that's the thing. Like, so I wa so people don't know what a chicken pucker is. You should Google it. It's a wonderful device that you throw the chicken in after you've dropped it into a hundred and fifty five, a hundred sixty degree water allows the feathers to release. And it's like just a washing drum with fingers and it pulls all the, like in 10 seconds you can have all the feathers off and it, oh

Vance Crowe [00:43:57] Man, that'd

Innovative Farming Methods [00:43:58] A game changer. It makes a million times easier to do it. So, and you can even have attachments for like cordless drills that will do it that, you know, would cost you 15 bucks at Lowe's to create your own thing to, and that's, that's kinda the idea is like, I wanna not only make a barn, but like, I want to, I wanna make a brand around facilitating these activities for people to, to get closer back to understanding, you know, food production, real food production. And I, the really interesting thing is farmers talk about all the time, it just drives me insane when I see them talking about how we feed the world. We feed the world we're so mighty. We feel most farmers, if the shit hit the fan could not feed themselves, that's gonna piss some people off. But my dad raised hogs for 30 years. He never once butchered an animal. First time he butchered a hog is when I did it. And it was just off of a whim. And, you know, we, we produce commodities and, and that those eventually get turned into to food in some form or fashion. But you know, you, there's not that many victory gardens, I mean out on farm sites. I, I just, I think we're we're overly proud or as an industry on boasting about that when most of us couldn't feed ourselves if the lights went out.

Vance Crowe [00:45:16] I mean, to be fair though, like the way that the government put money into the system, you had to get big or go home Yeah. And you had percent to specialize. And that specialization didn't include, I'm gonna do this robust, you know, I'm gonna raise pigs and also feed them. Like there's no, to me, like, and we voted for the politicians, right? Yeah. It's, it's our fault. But like we have the farming system that our government wants us to have is Absolutely. Which is as efficient as humanly possible to keep the prices as low as possible. Absolutely. So that way as our dollars lose their value, you can still get, you know, a, a decent amount of food.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:45:54] Absolutely. Yeah. Like I said before, the policy directs what we have. If we have shit policy, we're gonna have shit results. And I think that's where we're at. I I would push back that. I think there's a lot of intelligent people that know better in the system. You know, I've, I've sat in board rooms with some of the top execs in, in agriculture and you have these sidebar conversations. I, when you talk about stuff like this, they know, but their duty is to the shareholder, you know, and that's, it's so much of what we do in this business is based off of are we gonna hit Q4 numbers? You know, can we pay the bank loan off at the end of the year? We have a very, very shortsighted view of what this business should be and it's why we don't take a lot of these external things and that have very much a much longer time window of impact than what anybody else is really talking about.

Vance Crowe [00:46:43] I mean, that's the biggest problem with inflation. Like, I'm, I'm in the world where people talk all the time about inflation and the thing that I think is hitting us the hardest is the inflation of land prices. And it is because as that price goes up, you have less and less ability to take chances and you have to do whatever is going to make it so you can pay that bank note. And like, I think this has been a thing that's been happening for 30 to 40 years, maybe even longer than that.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:47:10] But

Vance Crowe [00:47:10] Like this, the, the more the government pumps into the money, into the economy so that the price of land goes up, it means the more people are gonna have to fight for efficiencies and you're gonna do less and less long-term thinking about your land than, than if you found a way to have hard money.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:47:29] That's a hundred percent right. And you know, you look at, you look at ethanol policy, I mean that was, you know, that mandate came through. You're

Vance Crowe [00:47:37] Just looking to just piss everyone off. No, I'm not looking.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:47:40] Listen, I I am a corn and soybean farmer. Everything that I'm talking about is financially in not in my best interest. I sell 75, 80% of my corn to an ethanol plant. So I get it. So if you're saying like, this guy's, you know, this, this viewpoint is hippie, he doesn't know what the hell he is talking about. Like, I'm in this business, I just see the other things coming. You know, Elon Musk has plans and people can say, well that'll never happen with EVs, but like, what are we gonna do next? And you know, if you bought $25,000 an acre land in northwest Iowa, and I just said six outta 10 bushels goes through an ethanol plant, it's something that was created by our demand that was, you know, created essentially by the government to push toward reducing emissions. Which I think is a good thing. But there now there's other things that are, could potentially do it, you know, and be and replace that. It's, it's a major consequence. And this push towards scale has had, and the thing I'm really pa one of the things I'm really passionate about and have been for a long time is the soil and conservation and all of the thoughts of thing. You know, when you maximize corn production, the way that corn has grown or soybeans are grown, the loss of soil is one of the last things that gets taken place. And like, if you're a, if you're a student of history, you know, that's been a problem of other civilizations. I've said that before. But when you look at what we've lost in farming, the corn belt in the last 125 or 40 years or whatever it's been, we've lost a third of our actual top soil.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:49:13] We've lost half of our organic matter. You know, organic matter is the gold, it's the Bitcoin in the soil that has all of the value. And we have policy that does not take that into account in a serious way at all. And it's something that I'm passionate about because we can't just rebuild it. It takes 500 years to build an inch of soil. Like it took thousands and thousands of years after the glaciers went across places in Iowa, you know, to, to make the richest soil in the world. And we treat it like shit. And we have policy that does not take that into account. And that's something I think a lot more people, if you're really interested in feeding the world, you know, I went to so many chemical things, I'm sure meetings you're at where they have that, that thumping, you know, club beat music feed the world by 2050 9 billion people. You know? And like I would used to get pumped up like, we got a fungicide, we gotta do all this stuff to do it. But like, who cares about 2050? What about 2060? If we, like, if the goal is 2050 and we do all this bad stuff in the meanwhile to, to make the, like we're depending on this technology wagon coming outta companies like, you know, Corte and Syngenta and BASF and, and bear like, and we're dependent on that. Like, can we, is technology always going? Can we have a crappier medium from our farming practice getting worse? And are they always going to deliver that tech to get us over that next to the next drought, you know, gene or whatever else. And, and my contention is that eventually that hits a, a wall where it's just, it becomes physically impossible to do that.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:50:47] And we still have a hungry world to feed. And I think we need to think less, we need to start building that in and not thinking just about Q4, but Q4 in 2089, not just Q4 in 2023. Well,

Vance Crowe [00:51:00] One of the things I've wondered about is how the ag companies are gonna respond when they finally fully realize like, wait, we aren't gonna actually hit nine point whatever billion people. Right. In fact, the numbers may go down. Yeah. Like what does the marketing change when the, when, when the world begins to recognize like, oh wait, actually population collapses our big issue, we're gonna have way less people. Yeah. Because you're no longer gonna be able to be like, we gotta do more with less.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:51:27] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:51:27] Now you gotta change it. And I don't, I mean like, we'll see who the first one to abscond from the herd is. But eventually farmers are gonna start being like, no, we don't. No, no, we don't need to feed more with less. We're gonna have less people. How should we think about this? Right.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:51:41] Yeah. I it's, it's gonna be interesting to see what I, I've read a lot of stuff both ways on that, but I, I, I do see it. I mean, you see, you see what birth rates are doing, people waiting, you know, later in life a lot of people just not interested and, and settling down or getting married and, and having kids. And I think it's a, it's a real deal all over the place.

Vance Crowe [00:52:02] Well, you and I are the same age. Yeah. And it is shocking to me. You have a daughter that just graduated high school and I'm sitting there with a 10 month old throwing her cup on the ground.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:52:11] Yeah. It was a trip to see the contrast of like, watching my daughter give her commencement address and like, it it did, it seemed like yesterday that I was in your shoes. So Yeah. It is wild to be the Yeah. But we'll be empty nesters here. Our other daughter graduates next year and we'll, we'll be done at the age of 44 and 43.

Vance Crowe [00:52:28] So what will you miss about being a father with daughters at home?

Innovative Farming Methods [00:52:38] Well, now he got me. Just gimme a second here. I'll get this out. I think probably the, the, the, the need to, the immediate need to teach and give guidance even when it's not wanted. I think when they're not there to, that'll come, you know, that'll, that'll be there when they go off to college. But like, being needed in, in an intimate way like that where you have other people that look to you for, for help and direction. And the thought of that going away and just not seeing 'em come up the stairs, you know, in the morning. Huh. You really kicked me in the nuts there with that question. But it's good. It's real. So,

Vance Crowe [00:53:28] I mean that's, that's, it's a good way to remind yourself when you're going through the hard things. 'cause I mean, like last night, you know, you're sitting at the dinner table, I'm trying to eat steak with my buddy and you know, my other daughter is like, you know, screaming and needs like time alone and, and like you could resent the amount that your child needs you or you can embrace it. Yeah.

Innovative Farming Methods [00:53:50] And

Vance Crowe [00:53:50] To see you, to see you be like the way you are makes you, makes it much easier to be like, this is a flower that's blossoming and it's

Innovative Farming Methods [00:53:57] The good stuff. Yeah. It doesn't last forever. And it's like, it was humbling to be there. 'cause like it just seemed, and you know, that's a whole nother tangent, but I've spent, I was so focused my entire career until like two years ago of just focusing on striving and putting the extra effort in work, work, work the farm, growing the farm, growing the business, and like customers calling at six 30 at night or eight o'clock at night and I'm sitting down or I'm, and I'm taking calls and not giving them time and attention. That's a major problem. You know, the expectations of like 24 7, drop everything, screw your family, screw the fact you've got a game. Like the work life balance in agriculture is, I think there's more light getting shed. I think my generation and younger are getting better at that, but man, I missed a lot of stuff for the pursuit of something. I don't know. There's good and bad that comes with it. 'cause part of that put me in a position to be here and doing this. But you

Vance Crowe [00:54:59] Yeah, there's a real trade off, right? Yeah. And it's like a very, very difficult one to make because if you say, ah, I'm gonna just stop and smell the roses for 18 years. Like, you can't, you can't,

Innovative Farming Methods [00:55:10] You can't make your somebody eat you up. If you, if you do or I shouldn't. It's not I, but it's you. The reason I built my business is because I, I did what I did. I would go above and beyond and that was my brand. And when you, when you don't do that, then you're just like everyone else. And I, but I, I do have regrets about that, so I don't have many regrets in life. But that's one of 'em that I was focused on serving other people than my family. And which it's funny after the fact, like I still have some good customers that I stay in contact with, but I thought, like I had a personal relationship with these people and they really appreciate it when I went away. Like it, it went away too, you know, and it didn't, didn't mean anything. My kids are still there, you know? So I'm grateful to have the opportunities that I've had and I'm really, really grateful to be independent now and to be able, like to, last week I had the time to just focus on my daughter's graduation if I was working for somebody, if I was still in the seed business in the middle of planting season, you know? But I enjoyed it and I, I wasn't beholden to anybody else's time during that important time for, for her. So, yeah. You

Vance Crowe [00:56:22] Know that you've been a good house guest that's won my wife over. If before we go to bed, she's like, you know, what advice do you have? What, what do you, what advice do you have for, for people? For, for me, I mean, we're the same age, but you've gone through the

Innovative Farming Methods [00:56:34] Yeah. Thing.

Vance Crowe [00:56:35] What, how should I be thinking about raising my daughters? I think

Innovative Farming Methods [00:56:40] The thing I've witnessed in like raising my own kids and then watching how other people raise kids is that I don't think kids need to be told no more. They need to be taught like real respect. I think one of the biggest problems in, in the education system, and this is this doesn't matter if it's public, private, homeschool, I don't care if kids aren't taught to, you know, my dad had a saying, if if schools were effective at what they did, you'd have reason to be concerned because 90% of it starts at home. And I think there's been a huge shift in, in parenting that has not been positive. And it, and it raises ra it produces children that are very, very hard to manage. And I think even teach to, and I think there's a big problem with self-accountability in our, in our culture. People wanna blame somebody else for the, if we have a problem, you know? And that's the thing I appreciated with you last night. You know, you were fretting over your daughter's behavior, but I told you like parents, like she's great. Like you, you need to go visit some other households and see how,

Vance Crowe [00:57:45] How kids,

Innovative Farming Methods [00:57:46] Kids behave, you know? But yeah, teaching accountability, given responsibility, that's, you know, things like having a chicken tractor that they're responsible for and if something goes wrong, you know, and, and they don't shut the door and a coyote comes in the yard and kills the chickens, you go out and make 'em look at that, you know, you're responsible for things. There's impacts on your actions in life. And I think our culture has a real, real problem with accountability. And it goes all the way to the top, you know, the top of the country, all the, all the levels. Just push the blame. It's bullshit, you know, it's, I, it drives me nuts. And then teach 'em to do real things, real skills. You know, a phone is not a skill. You know, we, we allowed our kids to have cell phones because we thought we needed to. And that was, in hindsight, it, it hasn't been terrible for them because they're fairly balanced in other ways. But it's, that stuff is not good. If I had to start over, my kids would not have Snapchat or TikTok or especially with girls'. Instagram I think is terrible for these images that they're, they're thinking that they need to be beholden to. And in a lot of ways there's, it's good to be connected. I mean, stock cropper's here because of Twitter, you know, like, so there, there is, yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:59:03] That's the tough tension, isn't it?

Innovative Farming Methods [00:59:04] Yeah. And it's like this balance. And that's what, you know, like I was telling you and your wife this morning, like, I don't know that everything should just be banned or taken away, but I think people, parents need to get off their own damn phones and start paying more attention to their kids. You know, you can blame the kids on the phones, but they're the, the parent and I'm guilty as, as the rest, you know, I'm, and my wife would say this, she'd, yeah, she'd lay into me. But yeah, I spend too much time looking at it and not paying attention. And there's a, there's a cost to that and teaching kids how to communicate, how to look somebody in the eye, how to hold a conversation. It's embarrassing. Like what I've witnessed with other kids that don't have a support system at home that drives those basic principles that our generation took for granted in generations before. You know, the, the ability to communicate and write, like, I don't know, it's, there's benefits to it, but I think we've gone backwards in a lot of ways. Lost our hu sense of humanity.

Vance Crowe [01:00:04] Yeah. I, for myself, I started to realize like, I would not want my daughters to treat me the way that I treat them with my phone by being like, no, I have this important thing. So I started deleting social media off my phone and at first I was like, how can I do this? Yeah. But when I got Twitter off my phone, I still have it. I can still use it on my computer. Yeah.

Innovative Farming Methods [01:00:22] But

Vance Crowe [01:00:22] When I got it off my phone, the number of times that I was drawn to looking at that thing, it wasn't huge, but I bet it went down five to 10%. Oh

Innovative Farming Methods [01:00:30] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:00:31] Right. And then that all of a sudden starts changing what you're viewing around you. And then I, I try and think like, all right, I need to as quickly as I possibly can model the way that I want them to treat me when they eventually have a phone. Because I will be bitter and resentful if they're talking to me in the middle of a conversation and putting their head down and looking at it. So like, I gotta make damn sure I'm not doing that. Yeah.

Innovative Farming Methods [01:00:56] And I've been a failure at that. So good on you for recognizing it. And I think most people probably are, I've had this conversation with some of my really good friends and the parents are the example. I think our generation has been a failure at parenting when I look at the results. Not saying that there's not good kids out there, but I, I don't, and I don't know why it is, but as a whole, when you look at the problems and the, that, that are existing in society now, like I think we need to all look ourselves in the mirror instead of blaming somebody else. Blame, you know, it's somebody else's fault. Look yourself in the mirror and, and then be honest. It's kinda the same stuff I'm talking about with ag, you know, somebody else's fault, not our problem. I just, accountability needs to be addressed.

Vance Crowe [01:01:40] So if you could design a curriculum so that regular Americans could understand soil and water, what are things that people should learn in high school about the way food has grown?

Innovative Farming Methods [01:01:54] Yeah, I, I think it, I you know, vocational agriculture in a lot of places has gone away, you know, because there, especially even in rural America, it's like a lot of these farm towns don't even have FFH chapters 'cause there's hardly any farm kids, right. You know, the number of family aged farmers and I mean, the average age is like what, 60 now I think. And so there's not even a critical mass of people that are remotely interested. But, you know, just basics of, of chemistry and, and you know, I don't know if home ec, I don't know if home ec is still a thing. My mom was a home ec teacher. I haven't worried about that 'cause my girls cook and like my wife is really good about teaching those things. But like those skills, I'm understanding the importance of food and, and you know, a balanced meal, you know, and not going to, you know, mackers and, and ordering, you know, four number sixes like, you know, sitting down and, and eating together as a family. And, but just being more aware and like, that's the thing. Like have a garden. You know, it's not something, I mean I guess, yeah, you could make that part of a curriculum, but like learning what it is and, and learning the difference between, you know, what happens to soil when you know it's mismanaged and you know, how do you keep a crop healthy and what are, you know, how do pests work and like people are so disconnected from food, you know? And like there's so few people, like it's less than when you look at the actual number of farmers, it's like less than half of a percent of the general population are, are raising all the food. And most people have no idea. I mean even people in rural small Iowa towns in the middle of all of it, I went and talked at the high school last week and there were no farm kids in that class.

Innovative Farming Methods [01:03:31] Zero. And their concept being surrounded by all of this food production, they couldn't tell you how it was being produced. You know, then there's, you

Vance Crowe [01:03:40] Know, so let's talk more in detail. 'cause I think, you know, a whole bunch of my listeners are in the ag community, but a lot of 'em aren't. So if you were selling chemistry and fungicides, like what are the problems that a, a farmer is facing and what are their options to, to solve it when it comes to things trying to eat their crops?

Innovative Farming Methods [01:03:59] Yeah, so a lot of the problems that we have are created by the system itself. So we don't really, I mean we have a crop rotation in Iowa for the mo I mean if you call it most people like that understand ecological systems would not call corn soybeans a crop rotation. Because you know, when my great-grandfather would farm, he had like five or six different crops and it was rotated in an intelligent form 'cause they didn't have a pesticide solution. But when we got pesticides, it gave us the utility to just grow one or two things. And if there was a problem that resulted from that, like, you know, European corn bore or extended diapause from rootworm beetles in corn that would, they figured out they evolved over time. So rootworm beetles attack corn, they lay eggs. If corn isn't there the next year to feed on they die. Well that works good enough until evolution and Mr. Darwin comes along and the rootworm beetles figure out to lay their eggs and they go through something called extended diapause where the eggs don't hatch that year. They wait the next year for the corn and to come back. And then all of a sudden you, I did a rotation, I did this cultural practice and now we have this insect that's evolved and so now we need to go, we need to go and buy insecticide. Well insecticide sucks and you know, 'cause as a farmer, like you and I sold it like, you know, we get bring the insecticide in the shed and if there were any birds in the shed, they were dead, you know, on the floor. And like you put it as a farmer on and you get a little on your hands and you know they're nerve agents and you start feeling it in your hands.

Innovative Farming Methods [01:05:36] And I've had it happen, you know, a hundred I've handled it and those things are real. So then you're like, well that's not good. So then you go to Monsanto and say, we would really like a solution in the bag. And the seeds, the seed is engineered to be effective at controlling those things. And so that's what, that was my game for 20 years is helping farmers navigate options within the confines of the monocropping system. But it not just, it's not just insects, you know, fungus, same way. Weeds, you know, weeds. I think weeds could be enormous challenge for our current farming system because we're on the last limb of the, the technology in the pipeline for the next 10 years to control tough to control weeds like waterhemp. But we have a system that has self-selected for that. And we've used single modes of control, which lead to resistance. And we don't ever seem to learn that. I think we've gotten better. But like now we've exhausted Roundup used, you know, when I started selling chemistry, it was so easy to do once we got roundup ready corn, because I would ask a customer, how many acres of corn do you have? How many acres of soybeans do you have? And my, I went to my calculator and I would take acres of corn, acres of beans times 64 ounces. Here's your invoice, here's some ammonium sulfate, here's some volunteer corn killer. And that was it. It was very, very, it made it idiot proof. Okay. And we did idiot proof things for three or four years because

Vance Crowe [01:07:08] For people that don't know at this time, Roundup will go kill any plant that's out there incredible touches it. It was in. But if you have the roundup ready gene inside of you, then when the, when the pesticide hits it now it says, Hey don't, don't die. You're gonna be just fine. Just keep growing. Right?

Innovative Farming Methods [01:07:26] And so it made bad farmers look like good farmers. 'cause the judgment of a farmer when I was growing up was how clean was your fields and the herb, there was no such thing as a herbicide that would just kill everything. And so when round of Pretty Crops came out, soybeans first in 96, then I think corn was like 99. And then it was when I got into ag retail is really when it got up to like 90 to 95% adoption. But then we started having problems and it's like, well gosh, now we gotta figure a way to manage out of this. And so we start introducing new chemistries or new traits to help us do that. But then we just use the shit out of them because it's what we know. It's easy. It works really good until it doesn't. And then we create, and we've been doing that now for the last 30 years and like I'm out of the game now for a couple years, so maybe there's something new coming in the pipeline, but when I left the game game, there was not anything novel or new.

Vance Crowe [01:08:16] No, I mean it is so difficult to get a chemistry through the regulatory pipeline that most companies won't even do it because you could get all the way through, you've done all this r and d, you've spent hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars and and then they just say, no, we, we aren't gonna, yeah. And so what they're doing is they're going back to old seventies chemicals like dicamba and they're saying, ah, we put a new, a new surfactant in it so it doesn't lift off the fields when there's a temperature inversion and go in a big fog off to go kill other things. And maybe it does and maybe it doesn't. I don't know.

Innovative Farming Methods [01:08:49] But like that, that was a lie. I'll say it on the podcast. So that's, we don't have to go down that wormhole, but yeah, they're,

Vance Crowe [01:08:59] But the, the reason they're doing it is because if they are going to return a, an investment for their shareholders, the danger of going through and trying to do r and d is just too high. Right?

Innovative Farming Methods [01:09:10] Absolutely. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:09:11] And I would say, I would even push back on your description about the good farmers and bad farmers. I would go back to the idea that I think this is inflationary pressure. I think they do not have time to like go and make managed decisions. And what happens if this doesn't work, that in, in order to stay in the game, they were focused on being efficient to be able to pay that bank note. Because

Innovative Farming Methods [01:09:32] Yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:09:33] If you aren't willing to pay it, the next guy is willing to pay more. And if you can't bring the price, I mean, 'cause commodities are always gonna go to just exactly the price of, of production. And if somebody else is gonna do it right next to you cheaper, you're gonna lose your land eventually.

Innovative Farming Methods [01:09:48] Yeah, yeah. Perhaps. But the thing I would push back is though that there are people out there that do know better on some of these things and they, they go along quietly with it and it doesn't help long term in the situation. That's the pushback. But you're a hundred percent right in describing why, why we have a lot of the issues that we have. It is farming is a business and you need to stay in business and you need to make money. And so you play the game. My dad always said, you gotta play the game and you play the game as, as best and you can. But I'm one that I, I'm in a position now where I can be, I learned a lot in 20 years. I understand the game pretty well, but I have nothing to lose in questioning it right now. 'cause my, my motivation is it's not to, I have, well I maybe stock cropper takes off and I make money. I really, I mean I want it to be successful, but I, I'm more, I want a better, and there's a lot of people in this space that I think want the same things. They want just a better future for this business. 'cause it's, it's an incredible business that to be able to grow food, it's so satisfying to to, to grow a crop and to see it and take it to harvest. And it's, it's an incredible way to make a living. It's just, I, I think we can do better and that's what I, I aim to try to push. Sometimes I probably push too hard and I'm sure there's a lot of people that don't like my approach, but I, you just kinda get sick of some of the bullshit and the greenwashing and the, the advocating that happens. I think we, I think if we want consumers to trust us, we need to be honest about the things that are part of this and, and be advocates for policy change rather than just complacency and apathy.

Innovative Farming Methods [01:11:28] You know, most of the farm groups want no changes to the farm bill, keep crop insurance the same. We're happy no

Vance Crowe [01:11:35] Change. Explain crop insurance to people that dunno.

Innovative Farming Methods [01:11:38] So crop insurance, I can't remember when it really accelerate when I got, I got into farming in 2010 when there was room for me to come in. And it's ever since I think, I think it was maybe the early, early two thousands where it really became a lucrative deal. But essentially crop insurance allows me as a farmer to, what they do is they look at my average yields over the last 10 years. Okay? And they take an average of what my production is, and that's called your annual production history. And what you can do is, or what I can do is I can go out and I can buy an insurance premium against the value or the, the, my annual production history times the average Chicago board of price, either in February or December of the month. Don't worry about those details so much. But you can, there's a price relative to the year that you're producing something in. And then you can buy up to, you know, like, like I have 85% coverage so I can insure essentially, I don't know, it's this year it's probably somewhere around like, I think it's like $1,063 an acre so that if price goes down or my, if I have a production loss that I'm guaranteed that. So if I have a bad year, there's a floor underneath me that will kick that amount of revenue. If, if, if I don't produce that based off of that formula. You

Vance Crowe [01:13:03] Know, I don't think I realized it was also if just the prices didn't hold up.

Innovative Farming Methods [01:13:07] Oh yeah. Yeah. So right now the, the corn, so the February average was 5 91 for new crop corn and for the December contract was, and the December contract today I think was trading at five 19 this morning. So it's fallen substantially so that that's worth, you know, whatever that whatever that delta difference is quite little to have that right now. 'cause if it's lower in the fall, it'll be, it's whatever price is higher is what it ends up getting, getting based off of. And so it's a, it's a floor that it takes a lot of the risk out of, out of doing. A lot of people have said that. I mean it's, it's, you know, farming has almost got impossible to fail at and there's a lot of truth in it, you know, because of these things. And what, what I'm passionate about is the taxpayer and this, this will hit all the fiscal hawks right in the hot, the taxpayer subsidizes my insurance premiums to the tune of somewhere between like 62 to 65%. They pick up the bill for my crop insurance. I pay about 35% or 37%, whatever that is. And the dig that I have is that with the things I've been talking about, the the taxpayer really doesn't get anything in return other than what gets put forward by a lot of the, the important people in the room is that well you get cheap food. Yeah, you get stable food, you get stable cheap food. That's, that's your, your public investment. And yeah, there's some truth to that because farming is incredibly risky.

Innovative Farming Methods [01:14:42] I live in a, in a, for people watching, it's getting angry at me saying this stuff. I live in a pretty risk averse place. North central Iowa is a pretty good place to go. We have deep top soil, it rains. I've had a crop insurance loss once in the last 10 years. So, you know, with that said, but it's, but it, it, it takes the risk out of taking chances that you wouldn't take if that thing wasn't there. And the taxpayers subsidizing that without getting anything else in return. And so, like with the farm bill coming up, like I've been, I've put some content out saying, listen, I think we need to start taking and we need to leverage the subsidy to get things that are in the benefit of the public interest which land is now the, the government I don't think should own the land, you know, individuals own that land. But my view with government is like when people are not taking things that are account that have long-term benefits, some, you know, that's the role, the limited role the government should have, should step in and try to put policy that's intelligent to take care of those things. And so I would advocate that the subsidy that we get just for, without any strings attached should have strings attached so that there should be practices and it would probably have to be, you know, adapted for regional differences. 'cause not farming is not the same everywhere. But to take account for some of these things around soil conservation, soil health, the longevity of our food production system should be built in the policy to actually include the external costs of things like the Gulf of Mexico, zone of hypoxia or just soil loss in general.

Innovative Farming Methods [01:16:16] And it would be an intelligent way instead of like just getting rid of the subsidies. 'cause that's an argument. I don't think that would fix the issue. 'cause I think people would just keep on doing what they're used to and what the culture is and what's normal. And the same problems would just keep happening at the same, same. Now there may not be people that grow corn every year in the fringe areas like Northern North Dakota or, or you know, dry land corn in Kansas or something like that if crop insurance wasn't there. But the same problems with like in my neck of the woods, like losing topsoil in these wind events or, or we had a four inch rain. I mean the, my god, you should have seen the water running off the fields and the color of it and the things moving with that water because there is no break in the system naturally that is substantial enough to make a a change. And I think if the taxpayer is going to invest in the farmer, that should be part of it. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:17:11] Do you have concerns that if you give that power of the purse through the insurance system to the government to be able to tell you how to run your farm, that you would be dominated by bureaucrats saying we want you to do this practice? Yeah, that's

Innovative Farming Methods [01:17:24] Definitely a risk. But the thing is, is that these practices are not only in the benefit for site, but it's actually in the benefit of the farmer. Like it's, like I said before, you spend $25,000 an acre on ground and you farm it in a way that increases the chance of it blowing or washing away. Does that make any sense? You know, like would you do that to your farm pickup that you wax pictures of and put, put it on Twitter about how clean your shed and

Vance Crowe [01:17:48] Your shop looks like,

Innovative Farming Methods [01:17:50] You know, that that asset value pay pales in in comparison to it. And so the things I'm talking about are not, it's science. Like this is stuff you learn in agronomy 1 54 at Iowa State University soils introductory, like this is not like magic or speculation. It's real stuff. And there's real science behind this thing. And, and so if it's going to benefit not only, you know, the farmer because like, and it actually decreases these practices if they're done correctly, my chances of filing a or collecting an indemnity payment on a crop insurance claim are less because I'm utilizing practices on my farm, like strip till and cover crops. 'cause in a dry year when the rainfall falls on my farms, it doesn't just run off to the bottom. It actually penetrates the soil and goes into the soil. I retain and hold onto those nutrients when right now they're talking about a flash drought developing in the corn belt over the next 10 days, I have a layer of cover and protection on top of my field that limit evapotranspiration up into the atmosphere. So I'm decreasing the, the chance of stress and risk on my farm. I'm keeping the nutrients where I want 'em, which is in my pocket not running somewhere else. And, and it's just, it, it's is it easy to do? No, it takes management. It's hard. It's not perfect. There's challenges that come along with it, but I think over the long term, I think putting policies in forth that foster this change over in mindset mentality to long-term land management are incredibly important for the future of food security of our country.

Vance Crowe [01:19:23] But if it's good for your farm, this is already better. You're not losing, you know, valuable topsoil. Why do, why do you need a subsidy to make it happen?

Innovative Farming Methods [01:19:31] It's a great question. I don't, I don't, that's what's so infuriating when I look at it like you need somebody to tell you to wipe your ass in the morning. No. Because

Vance Crowe [01:19:44] Running

Innovative Farming Methods [01:19:44] Around stinking all day is no good. Like people won't want to be around you. Right. And that's the way I look. It's so I, but so to answer that question better than what I just said, we have a, we have a soil literacy problem in agriculture. People really don't understand soil farmers. And I'm, boy, I'm sure that the emails will come from that one. But it's true because if, if you did and you actually had a, if you, if they went, if you went through a soils class at a major American university and you looked at what we actually do versus what the science says, we do the exact opposite of what is what is good. And we do it because it's tradition. It's what dad did, it's what grandpa did. It's what gets made to be looked sexy upon by companies like John Deere and Case and then the influencers that they support on like

Vance Crowe [01:20:41] What, like what's a practice that John Deere makes Look sexy. But

Innovative Farming Methods [01:20:46] So the, one of the things that I've, that has really become vogue in, in the corn belt is vertical high speed tillage machines. So for those people that don't know, like usually tillage is done at like four to six miles an hour and you would pull either like a ripper through the field, it would go deep release, which

Vance Crowe [01:21:08] Is a big spike that's down

Innovative Farming Methods [01:21:09] In the ground. A big spike. Yeah. And it would pull up big boulders and like, but it sucks a lot of fuel. And when fuel prices went up, you know, it was like, man, this sucks and you can't get as much done. And then they came out with these vertical till devices and these things are awesome. They, they've got these disks on 'em and you can put a big tractor and you can pull 'em like 12, 14, maybe, you know, 10 to 12 miles an hour, you know, twice the speed, you can get a lot more done in a day, right? And it produces this plume of soil blowing up in the air and it just looks badass going through a field on your, on your Instagram or your YouTube channel. And, but you know, the reality is is that what it's doing to the soil is absolutely pulverizing any type of glues, you know, biological glues from soil biology that held that together so that when the Illinois wind storm comes, it doesn't blow. And instead that's, you know, and, and I'm or hold, you know, ho hold a residue in place. They're terrible for residue blowing because what it does is it, it causes the residue to detach from like the stalk or the root ball and it allows it to just blow. And like I had this happen personally to me where had a neighbor, and this happens all over the place, I'm not going to pick just on them, but because of that practice, the, all the residue which has fertilizer and carbon in it blows off the field into the ditch, you know, and it's, so then you gotta go out there and burn it up and like, or you know, just set it on fire. You know? Wait,

Vance Crowe [01:22:32] Literally, literally.

Innovative Farming Methods [01:22:33] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:22:34] What do you mean?

Innovative Farming Methods [01:22:36] Like last year I had, it took, I spent 30 hours removing cornstalks from my windbreak that blew onto my property that I had to clean up. And then I produced a windrow that was 60 feet long about this deep of nothing but cornstalks that blew off the field and, but lit it on fire. 'cause it was, what else was I gonna do? You know? And, and this, this happens all over the place. So we say that we love the land and we love car, you know, we're, we're stewards of land and we produce where, you know, we've been capturing carbon for a long time. Well you're not capturing carbon if your residue is blowing off the field jack wagon. Like that's the carbon, you know, leaving. And that's the, that I I just think there's like, if we start asking ourselves like what are we really doing? And, and people are like, well those carbon stuff, it doesn't make any sense. Oh bullshit you, if you have run a combine in your life across the field and you have that fancy yield monitor that you paid big money from John Deere case or ag leader, whatever company, where does that thing, you know, pump gas at it is in the lowest area of the fields where you have the highest amount of soil, organic carbon. That's where, that's the sweet spot. You have that reminder every time that you combine, you know, the hills that have been eroded and everything's washed off, they suck. You get down into the bottoms where it's washed to or where it, it was formed, you know, geologically when the soils performed the most, when that used to be a wetland that wasn't drained before all the biological, you know, stuff settled there.

Innovative Farming Methods [01:24:09] That's where, that's where you grow 300 bushel corn is in those stuff. And so like to me it's, so when you think of like what is based in your biscuit, it's soil carbon. And so anything that would be destructive of that is antithetical to good production. You know, it might be. And so for, there's a, I mean there's definitely a small community of us out there that see this stuff and it's kind of painful to, to watch and frustrating. But yeah, people, I, I don't, I don't think, I don't think people are, are trying to do bad things. I wanna say that. 'cause I know there's gonna be a lot of people that get angry at me for saying this stuff. But I don't think people are making a conscious decision. I just think there's a lot of people that don't know better and the system, the system is not set up or encouraged to know better because in doing those things it create demands for, it creates demand for other things that the companies can sell.

Vance Crowe [01:25:04] Oh, that's interesting. You know, I, one of my favorite conspiracy theories and like I have literally no evidence to back this up at all, but I, I had an old scientist tell me this one time he was like, you knew who funded the original anti GMO like activist. And I'm like, no. He is like, well who stood to lose the most money when all of a sudden you could go out and spray instead of doing what you did before.

Innovative Farming Methods [01:25:29] And

Vance Crowe [01:25:30] He is like all the tractor makers that were making giant engines to be able to drive a spike into the ground and use that to rip out weeds. Yeah. And once you had glyphosate, now all of a sudden you don't need these giant engines anymore. Right. And so he is basically saying all the, all the tractor companies were the ones Yeah. Funding the original anti GMO stuff. Yeah. Now I don't have any, I have no new any information to back that up or corroborate it in any way.

Innovative Farming Methods [01:25:55] But there, there is truth to it because I, I don't know that that's an active thing, but it is a result. Like when you do these things, if you produce an environment, you know, like right now at home there's a lot of people, you know, replanting seed because they went out and they tilled the piss out of it. And guess what happens after you destroy the soil structure and you get a four inch rain, it packs it, it makes a crust and then the corn can't come out of the ground. And so then now they're running back and, and, and then the cycle just re and so you would think like next year did, did somebody, did you make a change? That didn't happen 95% of the time. No, it's the same.

Vance Crowe [01:26:31] So you, we kind of, in the early part you had mentioned how much corn goes to ethanol, particularly in the state of Iowa. If ethanol were to go away in your electric car universe, what would happen to the state of, of American, you know, geography, geology? Like what would happen to the face of of

Innovative Farming Methods [01:26:52] Well there'd be a, it would be horrible for the corn belt economy. I mean it would collapse, it would get, you know, we didn't have it. I mean I got,

Vance Crowe [01:27:04] I got in the business in 2003

Innovative Farming Methods [01:27:06] And I can't remember what year the RFS was passed. It was sometime between 2003 and 2000

Vance Crowe [01:27:10] Renewable fuel standard.

Innovative Farming Methods [01:27:11] Yeah. That,

Vance Crowe [01:27:12] So that's when they're like, you have to put ethanol in here. And

Innovative Farming Methods [01:27:14] When I came back like stuff was tough. Like corn was, corn was, you know, loan rate like a buck 80 a bushel and there was no money. I remember when I started in retail, like we had to be careful with who we would let product go out to the door where there were some guys that they just didn't have the money and we were carrying them and like, it was tough, tough times. There were not lots of jobs in agriculture. Like when I came out, the job market was really tough. I never thought I'd end up back at home 'cause I wanted to go work for a big company in the big city. That was my, my trajectory. But it just wasn't there 'cause there wasn't money, you know. And when the RFS happened, it changed everything. No longer had to ask people questions about if they had money to cover the check. People got caught up in current, 'cause you know, the price of corn went from a buck 80 to three and a half, four bucks and then five. And you know, we had our first boom in like 10 through 13, you know, we got the seven

Vance Crowe [01:28:10] 15, yeah

Innovative Farming Methods [01:28:11] $7, $7 corn. And then we had a long tail and that's when the stock cropper came in because that tail had been going on for like seven or eight years. And I, and we're like, well now we gotta do something. And then COVID happened and all of the, I mean there were, between the trade war and COVID, you know, it's like over $60 billion got pumped into the ag economy to support it. And, and then you put on top of that the fact that we had three years of drought in a row. And like for me the last two or three years have been fantastic. 'cause if you have deep, deep black soils, you can grow some fantastic corn. And we've had had great crops the last three years and record prices. I sold corn off the combine for 7 43 a bushel delivered to the feed mill and I grossed more on 180 acre farm last year growing corn. Then my dad paid for the entire farm in 1992 when he bought it. Unbelievable. But you know, we've had production problems for the last three years and I think we're on the it price of corn has come down substantially. I don't the market's I think flat this morning, but it's come down in the last weeks like 60 cents on corn and driving down to St. Louis. It looks, the crop looks excellent to me. El Nino's back, I think we're gonna produce most of the countries planted. I think we're gonna produce a hell of a crop. And I think we're gonna be back to the economic conditions that stock cropper was created in in 2020 and act. 'cause a lot of people have said when corn went up, like why are you still screwing around with stock cropper? I'm like, well 'cause history repeats itself.

Innovative Farming Methods [01:29:44] We always catch up. We get, we hit, we ring the bell and we go back into this seven or eight year tail where things get tough. And I think we're, I think the next thing that's happening with the alignment with baby boomers retiring, a lot of these baby boomers been hanging on the last two, three years. I think they were gonna re retire in 2020. A lot of 'em. But it's like, holy cow now we can't, can't afford to get out 'cause we're gonna make so much money, we got everything paid for. Like, this is legacy building time. And I think now that things are gonna head back to break even or less potentially, I think we're gonna see a huge exodus and there's gonna be a huge transfer to the next generation and our generation's gonna have to figure out what to do with it. And, but it's also time for a lot of opportunity to maybe make some changes as well. So. So

Vance Crowe [01:30:29] You mentioned the word legacy and you, you gave me permission to ask you this, but can I, you, you got a legacy interview for your dad. Can you tell me what made you decide to do that?

Innovative Farming Methods [01:30:41] I don't know, I just thought it was a, a cool idea and my dad is somebody that loves to tell stories and I, I tried to, I got it to him for, to him for his 70th birthday and I tried to get my siblings to come along with it and they weren't convinced. They're like, well who's this Vance Crow guy? And like, like, why don't we just ask dad questions and like get a, you know, a camcorder out or whatever, our phone or whatever. And like yeah, like I want something that will last. And like there's so much value of history that he knows that I don't know and like the pass that stuff on. And so I I, I just, I just said, you know, screw it, I'm gonna do this. I had another brother that came along in on me and we gave it to him for his 70th birthday and I told him about it and you know, he is like a lot of people, well I don't think I have anything worth saying I'm, it's embarrassing to talk about myself, you know, and he was kind of resistant to it. But then I kind of, I told him about the historical value and the stories and I said, wouldn't you want your mom to have been able to do something like, 'cause she was a great storyteller. And he's like, yeah. And so he considered it and it finally went along and we got it set up and we did it last fall. And so he got it back and I wanted to watch it 'cause you know, I'd invested, you know, in hiring you to do this. And he didn't know that if he wanted me to, you know, look at it. And so finally two days ago I put enough pressure, like, I don't know how many more months after you got it, I got to watch it. And it was, it was incredible. And I would, you know, the value of the stories and why your parents are the way that they are hearing that background, like, not so much for me, but like I think for future generations like my kids to understand, you know, what has shaped me, which you know, was my parents and like, but they, they couldn't see that they, they didn't grow up when we grew up, right?

Innovative Farming Methods [01:32:30] They just see this stern tight wad that there is their father, you know? But like that's because he was, you know, influenced by this and the, the stories and the strife that people went through in the tough times of, you know, like farming, you know, in the fifties and again, the eighties and you know, the, just the value of passing on like, I I mean it was, it was an incredibly emotional thing to watch and it's priceless. I mean that to, to be able to capture it and do it in such a professional way and to have somebody curate it with care and skill. Like my, my dad is loves to talk and he goes all over the place and like you just did a masterful job of like roping him in and doing things in a chronological order so that when somebody watched it, it made sense. And so I know it seems like people are watching like, oh, what, you know, Zach, what's Vance paying, paying me nothing. I'm just, I would highly, highly encourage if you think you have a story worth telling or even if you don't, getting people in here to just let 'em talk and get it down. And I, I guarantee you will not regret that decision because it, I I am so excited for the future generations to be able to look back at this and use it as a, just a historical reference to the time. It's, it's, I'm very, very glad I made the decision to take the chance doing it. So, well,

Vance Crowe [01:33:54] I I was honored that you did and then afterwards your dad brought, brought me out and he like had me fall him out to his Yeah. Car and gave me a, a watermelon and it was a great experience with him.

Innovative Farming Methods [01:34:05] Yeah, well, you know, you've, you've made it when Ray Smith gives you a watermelon. So,

Vance Crowe [01:34:10] So man, I think you have probably gotten some people on board with your vision of stock cropping and as we've been talking about on the podcast quite a bit, people wanna join communities, they want to get involved. If people wanted to just be a part of what you're doing, and first off, how long do they gotta wait? If somebody wanted to buy a, a a, you know, one of your chicken coops, what would that, when could they get one?

Innovative Farming Methods [01:34:33] Yeah, so where we're at right now is we're in final prototype testing is, is my hope in the next month. And then the, the idea is our first smaller rounds of barns, the single species and the dual species. I'm hoping that we will be able to do a production run or planning, I should say, of doing a production run later this fall for delivery into the spring of 2024 subject to change that could happen. I thought we were gonna be there last year, but it's not easy doing this stuff and I have a lot of people that want it. We've got a waiting list. So I guess if you're interested, the easiest way is to go to my website, the stock cropper.com and just subscribe to our mailing list. And when we get to that point, we will send out information to, to make the initial buying happen. But the goal is later this year,

Vance Crowe [01:35:16] I mean I watched my wife go from being like, I don't know who this farmer guy is to being like, I want one of those vans. What, how long do we have to wait? Can we put one? She like went and looked up the indentures in her neighborhood last night to be like, can we actually do this? Yeah. So like, I think you are onto something and like to be able to touch my wife's heart about this. She's not a farm girl. I think you're tapping into something really important and man, I'm so glad you made the trip down here. Yeah.

Innovative Farming Methods [01:35:44] This is worth to, this is my first podcast I've gotten to do in person and look somebody in the eye and this favorite one I've done so far. So, hey,

Vance Crowe [01:35:51] Hey. All right. This is the opportunity and if people wanted to find you on social media, where should they go?

Innovative Farming Methods [01:35:56] Yeah, so the, what I post the most content to is as far as like what I'm up to, like on a weekly basis I'll post to YouTube. So just search the stock cropper and if you wanna see a lot of the back content, the barns that we've made, kinda the path we've been on some of the other farming practices I do. That's a good place to look on Twitter. I'm, it's not easy to remember 'cause it's a nickname from college, but I'm at Zeus Prime on Twitter or if you search stock cropper,

Vance Crowe [01:36:24] I'll put it in the show.

Innovative Farming Methods [01:36:25] Yeah, you put it in the show notes. We're on Instagram. I have a Tik, a stock cropper TikTok account. I haven't done a lot this year I'm going to plan to do more on TikTok and just keep pumping content out and subscribe, follow along and you know, hopefully we get to the point where eventually this becomes something a lot more people can, you know, participate on. And, and our, the trajectory is like from, you know, changing agriculture with it. Like I think that was our initial idea with this system to produce like at scale. I still think this is a, if we could get the support mechanisms in place from funding, I think this would be a very formidable regenerative ag scalable platform. It's not gonna happen overnight. So I'm gonna focus, my plan is to focus the business on other, these more low hanging fruits, you know, for people in urban areas that still could benefit, learn more about their food, which is one of the core, you know, mantras of my company. And then stair step hopefully, you know, down the road into the thing that an idea that we think could change agriculture for the better in the future.

Vance Crowe [01:37:33] Well man, thank you so much for coming on.

Innovative Farming Methods [01:37:35] Yeah, this has been awesome. Thanks for the opportunity advance. Appreciate it.