Starting Out in Agriculture

Conversation with Brian Heffernan, Mary Heffernan, and George Allers (Monarch Bones Ranch)

Audio transcript · approx. 37 minutes

[00:01]  We are here today to talk about starting out an agriculture. I'm with my husband, Brian Heffernin, and our friend, a beginning farmer in rancher, George Allers from Monarch Bones Ranch. So George is going to kind of ask some questions that a lot of people have when starting out in agriculture, and Brian and I will give it our best shot at sharing kind of what we learned along the way.

[00:24]  George, you have a question you want to start out with? Yeah, thanks for having us guys. We've enjoyed getting to know you guys better over the past couple of months, and so thanks for this opportunity. The biggest question that I have for both of you, we have a similar background and the fact that we don't have a family ramps to take over, a family

[00:42]  farm, and just to dive into or inherit, we're starting blank canvas if you will. How would you go about starting that? How did you go about starting it and some of the ways you would advise starting it today? You know, I think it's not easy, and I think you kind of have to kind of reach deep down inside as a couple and make sure it's kind of both of you on the same page that this is what you

[01:08]  want to do. There's, you know, it's expensive, the capital piece of it's very difficult, but that's only one piece of it. The big piece is, you know, how do you actually figure it out? How do you know how to buy a tractor? How do you know? How to buy a cow? How do you know where to get feed for that cow? What do you feed the cow? And, you know, what I always like to tell people is,

[01:40]  you know, it's tempting to read books, it's tempting to get wrapped up in kind of what you see that can, you see that people, you think they want when you're raising animals and selling them directly to consumers, but at the end of the day, we've learned more from people who've been doing it a long, long time than we have from anyone else, and it's figuring out how you find those mentors,

[02:08]  and you know, those mentors oftentimes have been through, you know, they know your, they know your area, they've been through all the trials and tribulations and market challenges and weather challenges and economic challenges and all that kind of thing, those are the people who you're biggest allies, and it's not what you read in books, it's not what you go to seminars for,

[02:31]  it's the people who have been doing it for generation over generation on the same piece of property. Yeah, I mean, I think it's important for people like us to have this conversation because there is a stereotype that you don't get into this business, that you're born into it or good luck, and unfortunately there's some truth to that because the capital investment is huge, but there are so

[02:57]  many ways to get into it, and a lot of resources and support for first-generation farmers, I mean, no one wants farms to go away, and the way things have been changing, we always said, you know, doing the director consumer model, we knew that was going to be the only way for us to make the most bang for our buck, find enough profit to cover a first-generation ranch with

[03:20]  their land that needed a lot of fencing, we needed tractors, we needed silos, we needed barns, we needed pannets, all that infrastructure, the director consumer model really helps make sure that you're making the biggest margins possible to cover all that, but you know, we, people say, gosh, the director consumer, that's so hard, you have to have

[03:43]  all this infrastructure because you do, you've got to, you know, do your own cabin program or by young calves, you've got to do a feed and finish program, it's not easy, you've got to take cattle all the way to the finish line, find a place to get them butchered, there's a lot of extra inputs but in some ways it's easier to start that way than to take a generational ranch that's been

[04:02]  doing things one way for years and decades and say, hey, we want to change this, so I think we believe the director consumer model is where it's at in terms of finding the best profit and so I don't think you should be discouraged as a new farmer or rancher of thinking that you want to get into this business because there are ways to do it, you just have to work hard,

[04:25]  but anybody has to work hard in the business and in some ways starting from scratch might be a little easier. Yeah, and for us, you know, again, it really wasn't a choice of what we're going to do, and we knew flat out when we took and put everything we had into buying the ranch that it was obvious, it wasn't going to work in a commodity kind of a operation, we weren't just going to be able to sell

[04:52]  cattle on the market and expect that we were going to be able to do this full time. We would both have to continue to have other... jobs and that works for some people. For us, we wanted to ranch and we wanted to raise our kids in the agricultural community and we had to find a way to be in it. We're going to dabble in

[05:14]  this and we're going to figure this out. So I think the first step is land, either buying land, leasing land, trading land, borrowing land. That's a big question for people and there's multiple ways to do it. You guys are starting on 30 acres and starting small, which is fantastic. That is a great way to figure out, hey, is this lifestyle for you? It's a Ruby limoushto zero.

[05:41]  I'm asking the phrase, yeah. And to learn, you guys are doing pork and beef. Like, do we like one of these more than the other? Do we want to do both? Do we want to do poultry? Do we want to do land? It's like you can do things on a small scale and figure out what works for you and what doesn't. When we started, we started doing chickens and eggs and turkey. We'll never do turkeys again.

[06:03]  When I'm glad people do turkeys. Yes, I'm glad other people raised chicken and turkeys. The economics are good with turkeys. They are. They are, especially heritage-free turkeys. But for us, that just didn't, wasn't something that we were passionate enough about to put the work in and we became passionate about raising good cattle, raising good sheep, raising good hogs and those are

[06:23]  the things we're proud of. So I think starting small is a fantastic way to, as you said, witness test to see what works and what doesn't. Start with two pigs. Start with one beef. Yeah. When we, and starting small, not just on an acreage standpoint, but not biting off more than you can chew. When it comes to, you know, there's finite resources, you know, in terms of land,

[06:49]  capital, all those kinds of things. And I think what we did, the first time we took animals to the butcher, we had two steers that we took to the butcher. And we figured out, okay, you know, we didn't know how steers were cut. We didn't know how to get a brand inspection. We didn't know anything. Well, we took those two steers and kind of figured out a cut list. Mary figured out how to sell

[07:13]  those pieces, which pieces sold best, which pieces people wanted. And then we took three steers. And then we took four steers, but not expecting that we're going to buy, you know, 60 cattle and we're going to sell them and we're going to figure it out as we go because that's just, that's a meat grinder with regard to your, your economics and your inputs. It's, you know, just incremental growth,

[07:37]  very organic growth that I think is really important to see a lot of people get way out of head over their skis and you know, they get the product and they get all the infrastructure, but they don't focus on how they're going to sell it. And you know, getting yourself into a spot where you have too much meat. And it's a, at some point it's a perishable product and you have to fire sell it and it

[08:05]  destroys all your budgets and performers and things like that. It's, you know, you feed your market that you build. You don't expect to build a market that you're going to feel. And I think Leastland is a great option too, you know, especially if you kind of have a home base and you want to lease more land. And some people start out just like that. Some people buying any land is not an option

[08:26]  and it can be done. My friend Caroline who's a five entrepreneur is from Little Creek. She, and her husband have done an amazing job of starting a direct consumer land and beef operation and they own zero land. But she talks about all the time starting scrappy, you know, borrowing some pastures from somebody she was ranch handing for and putting a few sheep on it because she

[08:46]  worked on a cattle ranch and she understood like there's money in cattle. I'm going to be a cattle rancher, but you know what? Sheep or cheaper. And I can start with a lot less infrastructure. For cattle, you need shoots and squeezes and to be able to doctor and to be able to sort sheep. You can pretty much just put them in a corner and manhandle them and give them their vaccinations

[09:05]  or whatever you need to do. Although they won't admit it, a lot of very successful legacy family cattle operations started off as sheep operations out here in the west. Yeah, yeah, cattle people don't love sheep and that's all been a challenge for us finding ranch hands because, you know, a lot of cowboys don't want a tough sheep. But there's, you can make great money on

[09:27]  lamb if you do it right. You know, there's not enough lamb on a carcass usually, especially with the heritage breeds, to really kill it. But if your, you know, Caroline does the same thing we do, the tan the hides and all the hides and people fiend for really good American raised lamb. Most of it in this country, I think it's something crazy like 90%, 70%, 98% is shipped from Australia

[09:52]  to New Zealand. They're so little American raised lamb and it's a great place to start. And when you're starting with something like that, there are great resources. four farmers and ranchers, the American lamb board, American lamb out here, and I didn't know until I met them face to face, they have

[10:08]  a whole library of resources on cuts of lamb, how to sell lamb, recipes that you can share with your customers, ways to brand lamb. Like there are resources out there for farmers and ranchers who want to sell direct to consumer and a lot of them are free, they're just like not always easy to find.

[10:25]  Well, and then when it comes to resources, one of the things that George and I talked about earlier, and Leah and I talked about Leah, George's wife, when she was out here, you know, a lot of the, how do I do it kind of thing? One of your best opportunities for gaining knowledge is with your local university extension offices. And most states or far as

[10:50]  I know all the states have offices, ag extension offices that are there to really help farmers and they're free and they're staffed and you have questions and they'll research questions and it's been, they've been very helpful to us in the times that we've called on them as well.

[11:08]  Yeah, definitely. It's a great job. Yeah, cattle nutrition, grazing, what, what, what kind of variety of grass you're supposed to plant? How do you till a field and how deep do you set your plow? Like all these things, they're intuitive to a lot of people who've been doing it generations over generations,

[11:26]  but for when we got started, these were enormous obstacles. Like you buy a piece of equipment and you think you've figured it out, but then you have to adjust it in a way that gets the seed into the ground exactly at three quarters of an inch. And then you have press wheels that can't have to press it down just enough, but not too much. I mean, you need to rely

[11:51]  on people who've done it before in order to figure it out. So I think that brings up a good point because people in agriculture are willing to share. Absolutely. But you have to approach it right and you have to understand that farmers and ranchers are

[12:07]  some of the busiest people around, so they don't really have time. We get requests all the time. Can I come live with you and work for three weeks in exchange for room and board? You don't have to pay me anything. Can I come stay with you for a day and a half?

[12:20]  Yeah, and let me know what you're doing. And that's okay. That's okay. It's more work. There's a huge liability for the rancher. That situation nobody's really

[12:29]  going to say yes to, especially no one that you really want to learn from, because they're too busy to spend three or four or ten days training you and they're probably worried you're going to hurt yourself because ranchers are dangerous places. But looking for people who might be a mentor, asking bite-sized questions, small step-by-step,

[12:48]  when you're in a situation, okay, here's, I'm stuck in a situation. I need more info on this. Who might I call? Calling them, hey, I've got a pig that's feroaring, she seems stuck, what should I do?

[12:59]  Ranchers are great at that. Okay, let me help you out. Here's what I got. Kind of asking, I want to learn everything can I learn from you is too much. But if you can bite-size that down and create that community.

[13:11]  And I think that's what we've done here. Meaning, you and Leah, through them by logic nerds, creating a community where we have this website forum, like boom, ask the question, Brian, right, are on there almost every day. What is your specific question? How can we help you answer it?

[13:27]  Right. And we've made all these mistakes and sometimes been able to ask people and save a lot of expenses on not making the mistake, or we did it wrong and we learned from that mistake.

[13:37]  And we want to share that knowledge. But you have to kind of make it approachable for the people that you're asking to share. And going totally green to work on a ranch is not always feasible. But finding a mentor, being apart, you know, binding from farms and ranches, kind of

[13:57]  learning more about their operation, immersing themselves in that. And then there's a point where you kind of have to jump off the cliff and see if it works. And you know, nobody's going to teach you start to finish how to raise pigs, how to raise cows.

[14:10]  And that's what you guys have done. You know, you brought land. I've always heard that you can read all the books you want about doing push-ups, but it won't help. You've got to just start doing push-ups.

[14:17]  You've got to start doing push-ups. And I think that's so true in the ag community. I think one of the things for us that really ingratiated ourselves with our neighbors who were skeptical of us as first generation ranchers was seeing how hard that we were willing to work for, to be part of the ag community,

[14:38]  to do things right, to manage things right. And I always think about the fact that when we first started irrigating and we used these things out in California, these movable sprinklers called wheel lines. And you have to get up and disconnect them and then start an engine and rotate them.

[14:56]  They're big wheels. Rotate them three turns and you do... do that twice a day. And when we first started,

[15:02]  I think it took me eight hours the first day to move these wheelwinds just to irrigate our problem. Oh, it was crazy. And I kept trying.

[15:11]  I wasn't asking questions. I didn't want to impose on my neighbors. But I think at some point, them seeing me out there,

[15:20]  with a headlamp on in the morning, and a headlamp on in the evening, and all hours of the day, trying to figure out this problem.

[15:26]  And we're right next to the road, and they all drive by. At some point, they started feeling sorry for me. And they'd come over and they'd say,

[15:33]  you know, there's an easier way to do what you're doing. Or you don't need to do it exactly that way. But I was not, I was very open to any good advice I would get.

[15:47]  But I wasn't expecting they would do it for me or make it easier. It we just, they saw that we were working really, really hard as a family.

[15:56]  And doing what everybody else does in ag, and it wasn't being spoon fed to us. We're trying our best. And I think that ingratiated us

[16:05]  to some people who've been doing a long time. Yeah, and there were a lot of times, they stopped on the side of the road, pouring down rain,

[16:12]  Brandon and I trying to pull a cab. It's not going well. Somebody would stop and we're like, it's Thursday night, go home to your family.

[16:20]  Yeah, we can do this. We can do this. And eventually, they're like, actually we watch you.

[16:24]  You can't do this. Let us show you how to do this. And again, that wouldn't have happened. Had we gone in trying to be different

[16:34]  than what our neighbors were doing. We were trying to fit in. We weren't trying to make a splash in our production side.

[16:42]  Yeah. And people are willing to help you just, it is an industry where you can't come in like a bull in the China shop and say,

[16:48]  I'm going to do things different. I'm smarter than these old ranchers because we're not. We're not. Absolutely not.

[16:53]  I am still wet behind the years. Yeah. There's people have been, there are a whole lot smarter than I am in this whole business.

[16:59]  And, but again, people are willing to share. And, you know, it's so much of it's just not discounting the knowledge of the guy down the street. And, you know, thinking you're going to come in

[17:11]  and do it better because those are the people have been doing it for generation, over generation on the same land. To me, that's the hallmark definition of sustainability.

[17:22]  It's not some word that we find on the sign in the groceries to run it, right? And I think starting small is really the key. You know, if you have some capital in the bank,

[17:34]  deploying that very thoughtfully and carefully, whether that's on land or animals or tractors, but if you don't have a lot of runway, being really careful about where you're putting that money,

[17:46]  because you're going to need a reserve. Yeah. You know, there's no like, okay, I've got this much. I'll start making money immediately.

[17:51]  There's so many curve balls and obstacles. If I had the, if I should show you some time, the budget that we prepared when we first bought this place and how completely, completely, orders of magnitude

[18:09]  off of reality once we started going, yeah. Yeah, and that's why we say in the course, like a business plan that's only as good as how hard you're going to work.

[18:19]  And you can't really estimate what's going to work, what's not, what are your dollars going to be? You have to be prepared to work hard, start small, be scrappy, you know, a dollar save, is a dollar earned.

[18:29]  Well, and every dollar, I mean, like when we came to buying equipment and things like that, because the sky's the limit. It's like, well, we need a tractor.

[18:37]  We also need, maybe we need a backhoe. And then we also need a loader. And then how are we going to haul, you know, this, this, this, we got to have a trailer.

[18:46]  And we got to, and all those decisions, like you can slip on a banana and spend three X, what you should be spending. It's just, I just kept, we just kept asking ourselves

[18:56]  when we're looking at purchases like that, what's the path to monetization? Like, where is this going to pay for itself? And some things are easier than others

[19:07]  because if I buy, if it's feed, and it's a big feed bill, we're getting a semi of feed because it's cheaper to do it that way, I can, I can identify my path to monetization, right?

[19:18]  I feed this much to a pig or a steer every day. And this is what it's going to cost. That's easy. But when it comes to some of your infrastructure

[19:26]  and making those decisions, you know, should I put my money into an irrigation well, or should I put my money into equipment? And doing that analysis of power savings and irrigation

[19:38]  and all those kinds of things. And it's not easy. And we miss, we missed, absolutely we missed sometimes but a lot of time was spent wrangling over those decisions.

[19:51]  And some things I think you really want to look at from the beginning is this the most efficient path? Like, for instance, we've purchased. There's three different feet mixers.

[20:01]  Gen 1, Gen 2, and Gen 3. Gen 1 was the crappiest thing we got from a neighbor. We called it like the Dr. Seuss Mobile. It was this blue contraption that literally looked out

[20:12]  like it was out of Dr. Seuss. It was legit in a Tadeh though. I'm sure, but we paid. No, we paid nothing.

[20:19]  $1500 or something. It worked for a little while. We were mixing feet in it, putting it into troughs, and then Brian, I would go shovel that feet

[20:28]  into rubber-made buckets. Take those rubber-made buckets up to the feet then. You start small. And I think it's important to remind people

[20:36]  there's beauty in starting small. We talk about all the time. Some of our best memories are those like, oh gosh, remember when we used to have to feed all the cows

[20:46]  by dumping rubber-made buckets in here? Or I was shipping from the shipping container, and it was freezing cold, and I was getting rained on. Starting small, you learn less than so well.

[20:59]  And it's really cool to look back and be like, oh, look how far we've come. Nobody jumps into it and goes straight to Gen 3. No, and I think that's not the right path to take.

[21:10]  I think I always find that, you know, you're talking about feeding cattle. We were talking about that today out of trash cans and hand-mixing it in your feed bucket.

[21:18]  Like, that's what we did. But when it came to, you know, having to make purchases, the longer you, for me, the more I suffer doing something, the better the decision is at the end of the day

[21:34]  where, okay, I know it kind of scaled my decision how big of a unit to buy, how big of a piece of equipment to buy, but really struggling and thinking about it

[21:47]  before you just say, well, it looks like we need this too. We're gonna buy this. That's what Lee and I did. The place we moved into, we were lucky enough to have a barn

[21:57]  and it had a corral, but we had no idea how the pretty-be-soner had it configured. It had two pans and then a really small pan and then a tiny pan all connected,

[22:07]  and we couldn't figure it out. Neighbors couldn't figure it out. Nobody knew what to do, so we started off by two, and three, and four panels at a time.

[22:14]  And then it was all right. If we're gonna dock to them, we can at least get them to this little spot, then it was a couple months ago by two or three more panels.

[22:20]  And finally, this year, once we knew how our flow would work better based on our land, we pulled the trigger and got an alley tub, squee-shoot, but to your point,

[22:31]  had I come in day one and said, well, I've seen somebody else who has one, let's buy it, it'd be sitting in my shop or on the driveway or the garage,

[22:38]  and pointing the wrong way, going down to the creek, and we'd have no idea where you're doing it, so. I appreciate that nuance. Yeah, that's such a good point,

[22:45]  and I think it's really important that you do step-by-step because every operation's different. So you can ask somebody, what did you buy? Oh, I'm gonna buy the same thing,

[22:55]  and then you're like, this does not work at all for what I need. So I love that analogy, like you buy a couple panels, you buy a couple more.

[23:02]  Yeah, that's a perfect analogy, and you figure out what works, and then when it comes to actually building it and putting the time and the capital into doing it,

[23:10]  you have confidence because you know what doesn't work. Cool, yeah. And that's a lot of the learning curve it seems like that we've gone through

[23:18]  is learning what doesn't work as opposed to learning what does work. Yeah, so coming back to like the feed analogy, Nick Sir, the feed mixer analogy,

[23:30]  the, you know, Dr. Seuss Mobile we bought, it was rough. We had to do a lot of work. If we'd spent more money, we would have had to do less work,

[23:38]  and sometimes you need to look at it that way. Like you're gonna buy something that's barely gonna work, you know, it's not the long-term fix. If you have the money for the long-term fix,

[23:45]  buy all means. Buy all means. The $15,000. We didn't have that money.

[23:49]  Yeah. So we had to buy that and say, okay, this is gonna get us five. We know this isn't perfect, but this is gonna get us five.

[23:55]  And then we found a used Kirby bigger mixer that already this one is gonna be our next step. You know, we can justify the money that this one's gonna cost. It was probably $10,000.

[24:07]  You're 12,000. I was close. You were close. $12,000 mixer, wow, that's a big step up from $1500 mixer.

[24:13]  But by then we'd started selling enough cattle to like the amount of time this is gonna save us. We can put that time into selling more meat. So now this makes sense.

[24:22]  It's time to do it. And then a few years later, probably three or three years later, we bought a new mixer, Koon, tell me about a double auger.

[24:32]  Actually, it was a single auger, but it's a vertical screw. Okay, single auger, single auger, vertical mixer. And that was like Christmas. We're like, gosh, this makes our life so much easier.

[24:42]  Could we have bought now when we started to make our life easier then if we could afford it? Yes, but you've got to start with what you have. You've got to start scrappy.

[24:50]  Because if you, and a thing is, is if we looked at it like, well, we're gonna need this. So we're just gonna buy it even though it's the ultimate result. up with if we looked at every decision like that, I always say like the battleship, the ship would never have

[25:05]  gotten out of the harbor because the impediments, the capital impediments, you have to, you have to be willing to start and suffer, start small, suffer and not have what you think you're going to end up with sometimes. But then, you know, again, it's, it's, it's, it's not, you're constantly evaluating it. The more you suffer, the more you're out there and then you come and come to the right result. And now for what

[25:29]  we do for the number of cattle we feed, we've got exactly the right mixture. Yeah. And I think another thing that's really important to think about when you're starting out is how can I make money right now? Because raising cattle is expensive. It's a long game. There's a ton of infrastructure. Yeah, in the long term, you can make more dollars selling one cow than you can any other species,

[25:51]  but it takes a lot to get there. So when we started, we sold chicken eggs. It $10 a dozen, which I know, not all of America gets $10 a dozen other eggs. But then in California, that was like people, they were flying off the shelves. It was a lot of work. Yeah. You know, having all these chickens, collecting eggs, washing eggs, getting them somewhere where people would buy them. I would drive down

[26:10]  to the Bay Area, sell our eggs, then we started getting lamb. Like you kind of have to figure out, that's why we did turkeys because it was a short runway to raise those turkeys. Yeah. What's the path to revenue? How can you find products that people will buy that you can raise quickly and with little infrastructure? You know, if it takes more work, and it doesn't have to be your path, you know, we

[26:34]  didn't start out, oh, we want to be fresh, farm fresh egg farmers. But hey, if we buy these chickens, these chickens will pay for itself and pay for a lot of our bills because we're hustling selling eggs. So you have to start with those small things. And that's how you build your customer base. You have this product that's a low price point, $10 for a dozen eggs, that people want to buy.

[26:55]  It has cute branding. It's just like the rest of your products and people are like, oh my gosh, I want to buy this from this family. These are great quality eggs, you know, they're farm fresh. What else can I buy from you? Okay, now we've got things to give me turkeys. Now we've got lamb. Now we've got pork. Now we've got beef. Now we're shipping it. We can get it

[27:12]  right to your doorstep. You know, those things are so valuable. And whether that's for somebody starting now, it's eggs or it's cut flowers or it's bulbs or it's pumpkins or it's turkeys or it's chickens. Whatever it is, starting small with low overhead is really going to help you get to that main goal financially and tell you if this is what you really want to do. Yeah, well, I'll say that if I can,

[27:37]  that's encouraging to hear because believe it or not, you hear often, you have probably heard tenfold weave-hearted at this point. You know, if you're an adding never making money. And then it's kind of a cliche. I feel like it's been kind of spread poorly in my opinion and it's discouraging and it kind of I think pushes people away because all you hear all the time,

[27:57]  I don't have to make any money in the ag. But to your point though, and you guys have used a phrase multiple times, I'm going to jump in now. If you're scrappy about it and you're creative about it and you're finding the niche and the new wants to penetrating your market, you absolutely can, you know. Yeah, but I'll say, I think that's spot on. I will say, I will say, there's there's easier ways

[28:18]  to make money. If you're, you're I, if don't go into agriculture to make money. There's way easier ways to make money and not work, you know, 80 hours a week and have a bunch of at risk, a bunch of risk starting out in agriculture. You have to want the lifestyle. You have to want the lifestyle. And for us, our big motivator was a big motivator for us was our kids. And we saw

[28:44]  how beneficial, I mean, the, the, how beneficial it was to give our kids the opportunity to problem solve, to take responsibility to really kind of play above their age grade in terms of taking ownership of things. And that was a big motivator for us. It wasn't just an economic motivator, but economic is a reality and you have to make money. And so, yeah, I think that was a big

[29:10]  piece of it for us. One other thing I wanted to drop in on is, you know, you were talking about being scrappy and things like that. One of the things that, and we were talking about kind of suffering through things, there's a temptation, you know, a lot of people ask, when do you hire employees? Right? Like when you're first started. And my advice is you wait as long as humanly

[29:34]  possible because you're going to learn more, you're going to suffer through more, and it's going to keep your overhead down. And nobody's going to do it. It's your vision, it's your dream, it's it's your sandbox. Nobody's going to do it like you do. And there's absolutely zero likelihood that you're going to short circuit problem solving by handing it off to someone else.

[30:00]  And so you don't have to deal with it. You have to deal with it all the time. And so we talked about this morning, Brian, you and I, you know, no one's going to care as much too. No. You know, they're not as vests that they don't have, they don't have everything poured into it like you do. No.

[30:13]  And it's not their kitchen table at risk. It's yours. Correct. And there's great people out there who've helped us. We've got a great team now of people who help us.

[30:22]  But at the end of the day, especially getting started, like you have to figure out where your pressure points are, where your priorities are, how things work on your operation, constantly keeping in mind, you know, pushing things forward, but also mindful of the economics. Like that's for you to figure out who's the one writing the checks.

[30:43]  And that's what like I kind of preach in the whole course is like you need to build your own website. You need to price your own cuts. If you hire someone to do something, hey, that's money out that you could have saved. Be that person's not going to be around in one, two, five years.

[30:59]  So then they built something that you have to go back and rebuild because you didn't learn how to do that in the first place and now you're stuck with the website you can't edit. Yeah. A feed programmer, you know, another program you don't know how to do.

[31:11]  You really have to be willing to be involved in everything. If you are, you'll be more successful and you're going to save yourself a lot of headache down the road. Yeah, you have to get in the weeds and there's no short circling map. And at least I haven't found a way to short circuit that in any way shape or form.

[31:27]  So if you could give someone starting out advice on like we were, we live in suburbia, we're tired of the rat race. We are drawn to agriculture whether it's in your blood, like it was brushed, but it wasn't, you know, how we were immediately raised, at least not me.

[31:48]  What would you say someone should do to try to jump into an agriculture lifestyle? I think it's a matter of making it, making the jump. I think it's a matter of making the jump when you have some gas in the tank where it's not, you have to expect that there's going to be, you're going to spend more money, spend more time.

[32:20]  It's going to be harder than you think it is. And so you have to have reserves so that you're making, you're able to make decisions that support your long-term vision as opposed to making decisions to pay the power bill every month. And I think that can be kind of frustrating to hear, but it's very true.

[32:43]  Yeah. It's what you have to hear, but I also try to tell people like you want to raise cattle. That's awesome. That is your end goal dream. But maybe you need to start by, you know, selling something, you know, a side product, even if it's a benefit. If you want to raise cattle, maybe it makes sense to start by raising pigs.

[33:03]  Yeah. And even if that's your dream and you watch Yellowstone and you think that this is, this is the guy I'm going to be, you know, the economics are reality for all of us. And everybody has different, you know, economic drivers. But, you know, pigs, for example, starting with pigs, you know, pigs,

[33:19]  pigs are are are are a much shorter time frame, less land intensive, much fewer acres, easier to raise, easier to raise, less infrastructure. I mean, it's like starting off and it's smaller bites from a capital standpoint and figure out, you know, sell some pigs, figure out how to get your feet wet doing that before you just, you know, chase the dream of buying cattle because

[33:49]  cattle are expensive and they require a lot of land and they require a lot of feed and they actually have to be fed 365 days out of the year. And, and all those things add up where, where, you know, just, you can have your dream, but you need to get, you need to figure out your path to get to your dream. Right. Pigs don't need to be fed, three hundred and sixty bags. Pigs do.

[34:11]  But it's not easier. But actually, actually that's not true because you can put a feeder out. Well, you can put a feeder out and pigs don't even live 365 days to get them to market. True. So let's talk about those stats briefly. A cow, a steer, yeah, birth to harvest is, 18 months is about the fastest I'm willing to go. 18 months to two years.

[34:35]  Uh-huh. For a green fed steer. Yes. Grass fed year another year on top of that. And then if you go past 30 months, you have to remove the backbone and harvest, which means your yield is going to be last and longer. Of course. But there's a lot involved in raising cattle. Well, longer term. Longer term. Hobbs from fairway into harvest is, ideally seven months.

[34:59]  For us. It's a big difference and faster for some other operations I mean lambs are seven months eight months Two-year yeah, and on the breed and how big they grow yeah

[35:16]  Turkey's and think it's like 90 days I think it's more than that well, I think we usually got him June or July Yeah, and I guess we harvested about October so thanks given you yeah, it makes sense and

[35:30]  Chicken poults can be really quick eggs you got to wait six months for Them to start laying eggs, but you do need to look with animals. You need to look at what you're in ways You're gonna do things like pumpkins or flowers or vegetables. It can be a lot shorter But all of these things are a perishable product so you really have to identify

[35:52]  How am I gonna sell this when I get it? How am I gonna store it? That's when your wife Leo was here you guys had four stairs ready And she said we're taking her to the butcher. It is amazing like you finished them. You got the butcher date But coming home with

[36:08]  You know four to two or three weeks whatever the butcher. Yeah, where do they go? four to six years that's a lot of research based two three two three thousand pounds of meat So then you have to think about you know

[36:19]  Not everybody's gonna come to your house and pick it up with a few hours to be harvested or picked up from the butcher So how do you manage storage and make sure that you know you've got a plan to get this product to your customers? So it all it all comes with Kind of being thoughtful, but I think the

[36:37]  The message is start small. Yeah start small starts crappy Barrel cake steal butter. Yeah, you can do that interesting trades considered. Yes Yeah, fair enough starting small making sure that you're passionate about it

[36:53]  You've got the grit for it and you see a path forward, you know You can identify who that market is you can build your brand If you start small and you work hard, you can be successful