How Much Is Your Closed Mind Costing You? | The Granary

00:00:00 How much is your closed mind costing you? That's the discussion I'm gonna have with two of the most open-minded farming guys. 00:00:06 I know Kelly Garrett and Jason Mock in this episode of The Gravy. You ready for a conversation 00:00:11 with some real farmers about real issues? And the best part, you are invited. Support yourself a drink, grab a snack. 00:00:20 Most importantly, pull up a chair. Welcome to the Grainery. Hey Guys. 00:00:33 All right guys. You heard the topic. Um, It came up just last week on an internet situation, on a social media fa, uh, feed, I should say. 00:00:43 Um, a person started popping off saying, now I found another person I'll never listen to. And he's talking about Kelly Garrett 00:00:49 and this guy's a Kentucky farmer and I have no, and he's become friends now with Kelly because he was popping off like people do keyboard warrior, 00:00:56 you know, everybody's tough when they can just do this. Mm-hmm. Popping off that Kelly, uh, you know, didn't understand where he farms. 00:01:02 And you don't understand. Farmers love to do this. Jason, you're one of the most open-minded farming people. I know. I've had you on my business 00:01:10 of agriculture show twice 'cause you're always trying some entrepreneurial thing, something 00:01:14 that coffee shop crowd won't do. Something you're getting judged for. And at some point you're like, you can be close-minded 00:01:19 as you want, but it ain't gonna make you a lot of money. So Jason Mock, by the way, Delaware County, 00:01:24 about 50 miles south of here. You've done some kind of outrageous stuff. How much is the closed mind costing your 00:01:31 neighbors that it's not costing you? 'cause they're gonna say, yeah, well, you know what? I might be close-minded, but I didn't do this 00:01:36 and lose money on this stupid adventure that Jason did. I don't think that they're really losing much money yet. But I think as agriculture changes in the future 00:01:48 and we lose that guarantee, then people are gonna be scrambling to what to do next. And they're gonna be in a position where there's fear there 00:01:58 because they hadn't got off the corn and bean trained. So somebody, I took it personal. I'm more of a hotheaded. You did take it. Well, I'm of a hothead 00:02:06 and a guy's a smart mouth than you on his keyboard warrior. And, and I just thought, this guy's a closed-minded, 00:02:12 uh, dumb dumb. And, uh, let 'em twist in the wind. Instead you adopt them to go under your wing and befriended 'em. 00:02:17 Um, I think I already blocked them, but anyway. No, that's okay. A lot of people in agriculture, it'll never work here. 00:02:24 That'll work for you, but doesn't work for me. Oh, I, I, I tried that. I tried that back in 1993. And it's always something. 00:02:31 And at some point you say you either experienced, you know what you're talking about, or you're just being 00:02:35 close-minded. Which one is it? People can be close-minded. And then, you know, a lot of times people, uh, 00:02:42 can say things sarcastically, which is a poor way to communicate my opinion. Uh, and when, when that happened on social media, I, uh, 00:02:49 I just direct messaged Tim and I said, you know, maybe we should talk about this in a phone call. 00:02:53 I I think you're missing the point. And then he called, he said he reread the message, he apologized, which that's rare. 00:02:59 I would give him credit for that. He, he said, you know, that didn't come off the way I meant it to be. 00:03:03 I apologize for the way it sounded. And we talked about things and now I've, I've like, he, uh, is in Kentucky not too far from Johnny. 00:03:09 And Johnny and Brian Adams now are gonna help him with some stuff. And because he is trying to be different, 00:03:14 which again is rare, but you, you know, your your topic there, how much is our closed mind affecting us? 00:03:20 It's a lot. Um, and you know, before we started taping, I said how much I have learned from Matt, Chad and Temple 00:03:27 because of where they farm. And it's different. I've learned to desiccate soybeans from Matt that is a game changer for us. 00:03:32 I've learned so much about dry fertilizer from Chad. I've learned so much about cover crops and balancing the crop 00:03:38 because of the, uh, government regulation in the Chesapeake Bay. Yeah. It, it, the three of them have really 00:03:42 changed my outlook on farming. And I would tell you what, what's it costing you? Probably 50%. Because I look at 00:03:48 how much I've learned from those other partners of extreme ag. Mm-hmm. Yeah. 00:03:53 Um, it, it is just, it is just tough to quantify how much your ne I don't wanna do because I have neighbors next to farm 00:04:02 and they they do very well. Yeah. Right. So I gotta go miles down the road before I can really, I 00:04:08 I'm being facetious of course. Why I talk about your neighbor that's judging all that. And you obviously, you get along with your neighbors 00:04:12 and he killing us too. And I, I, I go owe about half of mine. Um, but it's, you know, it's fine. 00:04:18 Um, it's hard to quantify as your point. Right. But there's a lot of stuff that you're looking at. I, I'll give you an example. I'm his part of the world. 00:04:26 I just said this to his agronomist, Mike Evans calibrate agronomy guy. I said out there in a and I drove by 00:04:32 and I saw half a field washed into the ditch. Yeah. 'cause they've all plowed on 40% slopes. I said, you know what? That dumb 00:04:39 sum of a b***h blamed the weather. He, he thinks the reason this field washed away was because the kind of spring they had. 00:04:44 Like, no, that spring's pretty much like every spring it's you. And so to say that that's not caused them, well, 00:04:50 what's a, a piece of farm ground? $12,000, $15,000 an acre, and you're just degrading the value up 00:04:55 by letting it wash away. Yeah. There's, you can quantify that. Yeah. I mean, again, I'm not trying to make excuses 00:05:02 for him, but everything's expensive. And he might've thought in my head, this is the only tool that I have. 00:05:05 I'm going do it. And that's the trouble we get into with the capital investment. But, but that to, you know, what we're learning 00:05:15 is we really don't need it If we can use the cover crops or use strip wheat 00:05:19 or something like that to take on the weather. But, um, yeah, you Guys are both to give you both compliments. 00:05:27 You're not judgemental. You get judged, but you're not judgemental. You, you, you just said, well, whatever that guy, you know, 00:05:34 maybe that works for him and not you're, you're Very good about That. You don't judge others. You, you know, you get judged. 00:05:40 I think that people get judged very harshly on social media because when the communication is in a written form, it seems to be the human nature to take it the wrong way. 00:05:48 Mm-hmm. And, and so, and the name of the movie escapes me, but I have learned to be curious, not judgmental. 00:05:54 And I try to do that all The time. It was a TV show, Ted Lasso. There you go. And usually it's Jason that's starting 00:05:59 to reference obscure movies or actors or, Well, after Rick Moranis, I really wanted to come up with That. But going off of, of 00:06:06 Kelly's point earlier, a lot of times the people that are the meanest on social media, if you reach out to them 00:06:12 and have that heart to heart with them, they open up and they're actually good people. Yep. And a lot of times the meanness 00:06:18 or that is, is really insecurity coming out. Yeah. It's insecurity of how dare you think that there's a better way when my dad did it this way, 00:06:27 the university says it this way. I've proven my farm does this way. So it's not, it's not like I think anyone's an idiot. 00:06:34 Yeah. There's certain, there's a certain, Oh wait, wait. You don't think anyone's 00:06:37 An idiot? There's a certain amount of people, I can give you names. There's A certain amount of people that think if you do something 00:06:42 different, you were saying that they were wrong. Right. Right. That's not true. We've learned more. Yeah. The decision you made at the time with the experience 00:06:49 and the technology you had at that time, that let, let's give you the benefit of the doubt that was the best decision. 00:06:54 Yeah. But now what we have learned, there's a better way. It doesn't mean you were wrong, it means we've learned more 00:06:59 and it needs to be taken in that context. There's a sensitivity, uh, as you said, and agriculture, I think, um, our producer will 00:07:09 and I talk about it, we find farmers to be much more sensitive than the general public. Mm-hmm. Would you say that? Yeah. Yeah. 00:07:17 And, and the other thing is, is, uh, you know, a lot of us are isolated. So, um, when you shake things up a little bit, you know, 00:07:27 you just, it you can get pretty flustered. Uh, how much does your clothes might cost you? I guess let's look at the other ones. 00:07:34 'cause the person that's gonna then say, yeah, well, you know, it's easy for them to say sitting on grain Dam Mac, he doesn't even farm. 00:07:39 Okay. Say that true. Fine, you're accurate. But if I did, I would be a game B player to reference a point that Jason 00:07:46 made in the previous episode. Um, I'd be a game B player because I would have to, I don't have, 00:07:51 I don't have the financial holdings. I don't have the agricultural capital to be a pure commodity producer, I would have, 00:08:02 I would have to be on your page of saying, you know what? Mock did this. I'm gonna try this crazy thing. 00:08:09 I'd have to, because I think when you're a small player, you'd have to be that. How much is your closed mind costing you? 00:08:15 If I look at my own experiences, uh, until a few years ago, I was wanting to go back to a 50 50 corn soybean rotation. 00:08:23 Uh, I would've told you I wanted to shrink the cow herd because I believe that the cows were at best breaking even I thought the soybeans were making money, paying, you know, 00:08:31 we've talked about this, paying attention to the data, really looking at the numbers. The cows are making a lot of money 00:08:36 and the soybeans were losing. So if we quantify that, and if I would've stayed close-minded and not really researched that it cost me a lot of money, 00:08:44 a tremendous amount of money to do that, then that's my own experience. And you would've, you wouldn't have, 00:08:49 you wouldn't have been judged because that's what everybody was doing. No. Ah, those cows are a lot of work. 00:08:53 You gotta be out there in the winter day, like today, pulling calves, be a grain farmer. You've got the financial poi position to do that. And 00:09:00 We still would've been deemed successful because I don't believe that that not making, you know, now we're almost all corn, we're increasing the cow herd. 00:09:07 If we hadn't done that, we still would've been deemed successful because I don't believe it would've made us fail. 00:09:11 Mm-hmm. But we would've been less successful. And we, you know, I really just wanna reach my potential. I wanna do, I wanna do as good as I can do. Mm-hmm. 00:09:19 And that, and, and I guess to answer your question about close mind, what does it cost us? 00:09:24 It Yeah. I look at everything three to five years or even beyond that. And not having a closed mind allows you for, 00:09:31 for our operation. You know, I plant, I spray, I sidedress, I do about all the passes. 00:09:36 So when I first came to the farm, I started just messing around. Mm-hmm. With, all right, we're gonna put half 00:09:42 of the p and k on this field. We're gonna reduce our nitrogen rate, we're gonna play with the population. 00:09:48 And you come back to all these kind of spectrum analysis to make the decision next year. 00:09:54 Uh, but when you are forthright on social media and you share what you're doing, what happens is it unlocks everyone doing the same. 00:10:02 So it's the direct messages of saying, I've done this, I had this experience. It's, it's having a friend. 00:10:09 I just, uh, showed my friend Zach Smith, our chemical breakdown of, uh, we were gonna switch programs to save some money. 00:10:16 And because he had sold chemicals for 20 years, he came back and he saved us about $50,000 with, 00:10:22 with the right person looking at that. Mm-hmm. And that's, that's where it comes down to. So it's not directly my closed mind costs me, 00:10:31 it's the open mind of researching on your farm, understanding what strings you can pull and how hard sharing that, 00:10:38 and then having that gravity well of people to come in and help you. And that's, that's what it comes down for me, 00:10:46 is are we in this helping economy, sharing economy, or are we getting in this sold economy of, of being good conformists? He brought 00:10:54 This up in another episode. He's kind of got this whole share. You know, there's a place down 00:10:58 in southern India called New Harmony. It was, it was a communal experience. Uh, a hundred years ago, they starved. 00:11:04 Just, just so you know, how, how sharing and communism works, you know, Jason, it doesn't always, it doesn't always end up as, I'm 00:11:09 Not burning There. There are a few, there's a few neighbors at home that we're really close with and 00:11:13 we're doing more to more together. Yeah. A couple of 'em are my brother-in-laws, you know, one's married to Amber's sister, one 00:11:17 to mine, but there's another neighbor. And we do more and more together all the time. There really is strength in numbers. Well, you bring 00:11:22 Up the thing about sharing, and I have pointed out to my aggro, I said, you know, we're at 8% money right now, 00:11:28 and these pieces of machinery are not getting cheaper. If you farm, uh, you know, no, not being me, but a few thousand acres is not a 00:11:35 massively big farm anymore. Mm-hmm. You could have a lot of mon unnecessary money tied up. 00:11:40 So you talk about open mind versus closed mind. If you told your father's no longer with us, let's just told, you know, he's still was, he'd say, listen, 00:11:48 son, I need that combine. We need that combine. And you're sitting there saying, dad, this is $670,000 even 00:11:54 after a couple years depreciation tied up in this piece of equipment. No, we're gonna, we're gonna pool. That would be them. 00:12:01 Take an open-minded person that's 70 years old to even think that way, because they've always thought, 00:12:05 gotta have those tools in the shed. Always had those tools. Grandpa had tools in the shed. I got tools in 00:12:09 The shed. Yeah. But that was tier one. Right? That was 40 20 that you just worked on a wrench and a screwdriver. 00:12:14 It's not tier five Does doesn't have $60,000 of just electronics in the cab. Yeah. And that's the come to Jesus that operations like us, 00:12:21 2,850 acres is, is gonna come. We can't, we can't trade a planter, a sprayer or a combine, you know, every two or three years. 00:12:28 Right. And have that technology, we either gotta size down right. Or keep things for 10, 15 years, 00:12:35 Or collaborate with another operation, collaborate with another Operator. And, and that's 00:12:39 where you've gotta kind of, uh, draw the lines in the sand of, am I gonna chase this rabbit getting the extra two bushel 00:12:44 to have this perfect placement? But I need 14,000 acres to drag this piece of equipment to come across to pay for it. 00:12:51 Of changing our paradigms to what is actually important Since you guys are not judgmental. I, I will be a little bit, when I say this, there's lots 00:12:59 of people that are close-minded, but again, they're doing it, uh, uh, they're defensive and they're, they're masking it as, um, playing it smart. 00:13:07 I'm playing my card smart. Well, maybe, but at some point you go from playing your smart cars to being defensive, to now being closed 00:13:13 to new ideas and new options. Mm-hmm. And their defense would be, well, neighbor guy tried that and it didn't work out 00:13:22 for 'em, so that's why I won't do it. I mean, that's usually the fault. Right. They usually default is I I think he can spin any message 00:13:27 to make it sound like you're doing the right thing. Johnny Verell, who's gonna be here not too long from now with the green, and Reese says his grandpa's favorite staple 00:13:35 was a man can justify anything he wants to. There you go. No, we can too, presumably. But yeah, just anything you want to, um, 00:13:44 do you think you're gonna get old and become more closed off to new ideas? No. No. I will be, 00:13:50 You'll get more financially well off. The kids are gonna be raised. You're gonna look good. And you're gonna say, yeah, well, I was 40. 00:13:57 I'd have done this crazy ass thing, but you know what, got some hay in the barn. I'm pretty comfortable done experimenting. 00:14:03 You gonna get there? No. I mean, you know me, but I, I've seen a lot of control that I've had to deal with of, if I give you an inch, they, 00:14:15 they think they're gonna give you a mile. And, you know, my goal is to farm less and less and have more diverse, more life on the acres. 00:14:23 And at, at that point, if I get my acres less and less and my acres are working more and more, then I don't have to have the control to be 00:14:30 that a*****e that says you can't change a thing, or the farm's gonna go gross. We might edit that out, but we might not. I don't know. 00:14:37 We're pretty open here. You just said something that I've, I think in the history of being around farmers, 00:14:43 I've never heard a farmer say it, I want to farm less acres someday. He just said that most farmers are great ingrained. 00:14:52 I think it's like they teach you when you're, uh, a little kid. If you're gonna be a farmer, tell everybody 00:14:57 how hard you work, what time you wake up, and I wanna farm more acres. So those are the, the three things I think 00:15:01 I want to continue to do better and better. And, and, you know, we've talked about this before. That's the difference between the finite 00:15:07 game and the infinite game. I just wanna have continued process improvement, which is really what he wants to have. 00:15:12 I wanna have process improvement as well. If the opportunity comes up to grow and we can handle it, then, then it's fine. 00:15:20 I, I just wanna continue to improve on the acres that we have. Um, doesn't mean I want more, doesn't mean I want less. 00:15:25 I just wanna continue to improve. We farm on two different, and not, not, we're both in the Midwest. 00:15:31 He's western Iowa. I'm, I'm around here. And, and, and you have population around there, but it's probably, you know, two to three 00:15:37 to four times more dense around here. Oh, Absolutely. And it's at least three to four times more dense here 00:15:42 than it is where he lives. Um, So when you get up to 3000 acres and, you know, I just did all our fields and, 00:15:48 and we farm about 90 fields to do that. Yeah. And, uh, And you drive through seven neighborhoods to get to those fields and, and all that. 00:15:55 We've got our extreme ag friends, Johnny Verell in a very population dense area. Uh, Kevin is, and, uh, Chad is and Temple. 00:16:03 All of 'em and Temple are Yeah. You're, you're arguably the one that's not that way. So that's one of your reasons why you wanna farm less. 00:16:10 Yeah. Because once you shake, if you think in a paredo system, and I say this is my most profitable acre 00:16:16 where I have all my pig barns. I mean, I can drag line the acres. I make 10 times more on 00:16:21 that acre than I do on the bottom 20%. And if I go the bottom of the 20 and the 20%, there's no reason I should farm it. 00:16:28 So if I wanna grow my farm, I'm gonna have to pay additional for non coveted ground. 00:16:35 And it doesn't make any sense in the financial escape that we are right now, Those bottom 20% 00:16:40 of acres are the ones I'm trying to put cows on. Exactly. And if you don't, if and if you don't have the cows, you, you could let 'em go 00:16:46 and probably it'd be better off to do so. Right. Those people don't have the mindset. Again, you about close-minded. 00:16:51 Well, you let acres go, the next thing you know, you'll lose some more acres. Or you let those acres go, you'll never grow. Or 00:16:55 The, the reason people always wanna grow is because they think they need to grow to make more money. Mm-hmm. Let's, let's improve the quality, let's do better 00:17:02 and not have to do more. That's all he is trying to do. And that, that is, that is really the correct way to think. There's more money to make if you, if you want 00:17:09 to manage more intensively. But, uh, it, it's not the typical mindset. It's my mindset. The 00:17:15 Big trouble around here, we have high c, EC grounds heavy clay. And I mean, quite frankly, there's really only two or three 00:17:21 or four great days to plant corn. I mean, you're usually mud the other way where sea dry, We, we usually have a moisture problem. So 00:17:30 That's where I get irritated when we farm a bunch. I do this uncrustable mindset where I do farms that I don't really care about too much a day early Right. 00:17:37 To get everything set up. And then I don't sleep for two days and I get absolutely everything in at the exact same time. 00:17:43 And when I get ragged and outside of that, then I start making mistakes. And, and, and, and, 00:17:49 and quite frankly, it, a lot of people won't like this statement, but allow of us farm too much to be able 00:17:55 to do everything exactly how we want. Yeah. You're doing, you're doing more than you're doing a c you're doing a c grade. 00:18:01 You, you're, you're, you're getting a, a a 70% on all your, and you would do a lot better if you were a, you know, 95, 00:18:07 a hundred percent on lesser. Yes. And the problem with that is, now I have 120 foot planter, 00:18:13 or even I got a 60 foot planter. It's too big to A to BA lot of times, but I go to the edge of the field, I back up and I turn, 00:18:20 and I do that on five different pieces of equipment in the same exact spot. And we're just packing the crap out of our stuff. 00:18:27 And you can call me old school, but I think all our stuff should weigh more like 10 or 20,000 pounds. Joe, 00:18:33 You are kind of old school, by the way. Yeah. And you and I both agree 1000000% on that. I think equipment needs to get smaller, uh, you know, 00:18:39 close mine versus open mine. Farmers always wanna get bigger and they want to, they wanna own lots of machinery. 00:18:43 And I think those are both not necessarily good business decisions. Yeah. But, but, but here's the thing. 00:18:48 Like we, we were able to, you know, we came out of, uh, you know, 10, 11, 12, we had a spike. Um, we had a lot of equity in the system, 00:19:00 and these older farmers, we were able to trade in these big toys. And that's, that's gonna be the hard thing in the next 00:19:05 years to come. Yeah. All the way up, you know, 10, 11, 12, all the way up to 16 was very, very good economically. 00:19:11 Yep. And since then, it has been, uh, uh, it's been a little bit tougher. Mm-hmm. Well, So, um, the, there's gonna be of course, the person 00:19:19 that says, yeah, well, all your stuff that you've done, uh, a bunch of it has, what's your ratio? 00:19:23 What's your percentage? Uh, you can say, I'm always trying new stuff. I'm very open-minded. Well, they don't all work out. 00:19:28 You know, J Chad, our friend Chad always says, I've never had a failure. Just had experiments that didn't work out. 00:19:33 That's right. What's your ratio, Um, On wins? What's your, what's your, how many of you, how many of your, how many of your crazy out there way open-minded, 00:19:42 innovative ideas? Experiments have been hits. Not many of 'em have been duds. Most of them have been fantastic. 00:19:52 Um, we had some Dr uh, drier summer last year. So some of our relay didn't perform up to my expectations. And for the person who listening to this, it says, Hey, 00:20:00 I'm a cranberry producer in, uh, Wisconsin. What the hell is he talking about? What's a relay acre? So a relay acre is, we plant early corn on purpose. 00:20:08 So we plant a hundred, 108 day corn, somewhere in there. We shell it 20%, 00:20:13 and then we plant wheat in strips in September, and we're basically planting about 30 to 40% of the wheat population. 00:20:19 And strips, we're planting about half the fertility, half the nitrogen. And because the ground is warmer where the wheat isn't, 00:20:27 and the the plants get more sunlight, we can drive about 89% of the wheat yields in the strips. 00:20:33 So then we plant soys 80, 80% of the normal expected yield and only doing that on 50% of the property. 00:20:39 Yeah. Even less than that. More like 35% footprint. Okay. So we're planting 15 inch wheat, and we leave a 30 inch gap. 00:20:46 Yeah. And this year we're planting three rows of beans, seven inches apart in that gap really early. As soon as it dries out in April, 00:20:54 we plant a really late maturing bean. And we allow that to, and if we get a lot of rain, 00:21:00 they will out yield our monocrop beans because the wheat kind of takes the grenade of those two or three inch rains that will kill the root here. 00:21:07 And you're harvesting the wheat off. I mean, I, I know this, but the person listening to this doesn't, watching this does not, you're harvesting 00:21:14 that wheat off and you're driving over your soybeans in July to do that? No, we're driving down the, uh, rows of wheat. 00:21:20 So, uh, we've been 60 inch wheat in the past with four rows and four rows, four, uh, traffic lanes. 00:21:27 And now we made tram line rows with our wheat and w we will be a 40 foot controlled traffic. Okay. So our combine goes right out there. 00:21:34 And then our beans are R two. So they're up about 18 inches tall, and then they zip right back in. 00:21:39 Mm-hmm. So our idea is to get the wheat growing. Well, we lay a residual down ahead of a rain in March or April, and then canopy takes over 00:21:48 and our wheat control on our beans instead of burn down in the fall post or, or burn down in the spring. And couple posts we're, we're getting way ahead of it 00:21:59 with our corn trash. Yep. So we're growing 20 inch corn at high population 40 inch, and we're using the residual chemistry, chemistry 00:22:07 and the trash of the corn as our weed control, getting the weed up. And then we just get out ahead of it to 00:22:12 where we're not killing weeds with our beans. You like, you like this, you like this tk? Yeah. You gonna do something like this, 00:22:18 by the way, will you harvest the wheat? You're blowing the straw out. It blows on top of the soybeans, but doesn't, doesn't shade 'em or 00:22:24 No, the beans are are, you know, they're an adolescent growth stage, so they'll just shake it off 00:22:28 and then they have the whole light to themselves. I, I do like this because it, it's a way for us in a northern latitude 00:22:34 to accomplish a double crop. Double crop. Yes. Uh, you don't do it because of erosion. You don't, he's got 40% slopes on some of his fields. 00:22:41 Mm-hmm. You've got 4%, you don't have any ground's. Mostly all flat. He's just doing, he's doing 00:22:46 It. You're doing it because of the, you're doing it because of biology and economics. Right. Economics drives everything. I, I would be interested 00:22:54 to try some of this. You know, he talked about the twins 60 inch rows of corn and the cover crops in between. 00:22:59 Maybe I should try it with some wheat, you know, when, and you're planting the wheat in June and July, you said, to get more fall growth 00:23:05 Where we want to try that this year, put it inside our corn strips to see if we can alleviate. So that's the problem with me is 00:23:11 what I'm trying to planting wheat In the summer. What's the thing that we told us kids, the fly free something, there was 00:23:16 Some kind of a fly Or something supposed to not, it has To fly. They're not really around anymore. What 00:23:20 Was the thing when I was a kid? You couldn't plan until frost free date. Right, right. Wait until, until October 7th. So 00:23:25 They found in Asia that they call it root intensification. And if they would spring their rice 00:23:30 and plant it super early Yeah. Bigger springs than the laws of, of exponential math would take over 00:23:38 and your tiller continues to grow. So that's the whole play. As we reduce, we we're gonna try planting in 00:23:45 our corn strips mm-hmm. And have the corn a little bit wider to allow just enough light to keep it kind of pacified. 00:23:52 Mm-hmm. So when we shell off the corn now, instead of a hundred day corn or 104 day corn that we may give up five or 10 bushel. 00:23:59 Mm-hmm. We can go 117 day corn. Let us sit out in the field and we already have our wheat there. 00:24:05 And that's the, the cool calm feeling of relay cropping. Normally when you're double cropping, you're trying 00:24:11 to run your wheat the first day that it's ready or drying it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. To speed up the process. 00:24:17 I can allow that, those crops to grow. 'cause I've got a wheat just drying. You lose Your mind and you don't sleep for two days 00:24:23 to get your corn planted all within 48 hours of time. But you let your wheat stand around until some time. And when it's passed, 00:24:29 It's dry. When it's Dry, when it's ready, instead of pushing it Yeah. Have to push the planting, 00:24:33 but he doesn't have to push the harvest. Yeah. I can go, He's getting three crops in two years, just like Chad and Johnny. 00:24:38 However he's doing it. There's, there's an overlap. Yes. There's an Overlap. The whole trick to the 00:24:43 whole relay cropping is I am planting something on purpose Yep. To aggressively grow knowing that it will die. Mm-hmm. 00:24:49 Knowing, and we keep pushing the maturity back some on the, on the wheat earlier to make it die earlier. 00:24:54 But you'll see it in the beans as soon as it starts telling yellow, even if we're dry, the beans just start growing better and better 00:25:02 and better as, as you're taking the amperage pull down out of the situation you're Spending also, you're, 00:25:06 you're spending considerably less on fertility and still not sacrificing yield. Exactly. We're we're, we're just replacing the time. 00:25:12 Well, you just is just a, as a matter of persistence and time, you just, You're, he keeps getting deeper 00:25:19 and deeper, doesn't he? That Was pretty deep. Yeah. But we are getting, wealth Is per equals persistence Plus time. 00:25:24 So there's no way around the corn deal. Like I can't just make up time. Like there's only gonna be two days. 00:25:29 So the way I stretch that is I stay up all night, mess around with stuff when I don't think it's perfect and then I really kill it. 00:25:35 But other things, you actually can create time by doing two things. But Jason Locke called me this winter. 00:25:42 He was doing a speaking engagement and he was like driving after he'd been on stage. 00:25:45 He was driving. You just did that yesterday. And he called and I said, what's going on? He says, uh, One side I said, Said, when you get tired 00:25:53 of this s**t, I said, Tara Woods. I was like beating the road and said, oh, because it was neat the first first few years you did it 00:25:59 and now it starts to be like work. Oh. And you're out there also, you're sharing all of your crazy ideas 00:26:05 to half your audience is probably sitting there like this. So I don't have as much of a skeptical audience. 00:26:10 The road can grind on you. Being on stage is work, but also at least my audience is generally not crossing their arms and saying, oh, this guy's full of crap. 00:26:18 You probably have half your audience that folds your arms and thinks you're out there. Yes. Now the but the other half doesn't. 00:26:22 Yesterday I had a few that crossed their arms. They were skeptical when I told them that pH wasn't relevant. 00:26:28 Worry about the nutritional balance. pH will be fine. I always lose a few people when you say things like that because worrying about pH is a pretty accepted practice. 00:26:35 Those are the things, yes. People can be skeptical when you're outside the box. And if you wonder what makes us tick, 00:26:42 it's when you're in the field and you have that aha moment and you know, before anyone else isn't that cool? 00:26:48 And, and when you're doing all this stuff and you're going out there and you're seeing how different shocks or different weather events affects your crops 00:26:56 and you think you're onto something. I mean, that's the whole reason why we do this. You get excited, you get excited. 00:27:03 It's when you're, when you're an innovator and you're open-minded and you pride yourself on not being closed-minded. 00:27:08 Yeah. So when something works, when it's like, by God I pulled This, that may, that 00:27:13 that moment when it changes from something you think to something you feel, you know mm-hmm. That's a good feeling. Mm-hmm. 00:27:19 And these people right here, those are the people in the interstate with cruise control going 56 miles an hour. 00:27:25 Right. Yeah. So I, yeah, I do. I do know that. Um, so I just think it's also funny that you, you called me because, uh, you were beating the road 00:27:35 and then it started to dawn on you that, uh, that that is work work beating the road, isn't it? Yes. It's, What's uh, what's one of your biggest things 00:27:43 that you're, okay, the relay farming, all that, what's one of your biggest things that you had 00:27:47 to actually sell yourself on it? 'cause you were like, this is so innovative and open-minded. I'm almost scared of it myself. 00:27:52 Gimme one. You have more than one. Uh, you got one Kiley. First time we desiccated soybeans, you 00:27:58 Thought, I, this is crazy. I've never, dad, never This we spent, we spent all year trying to make these things grow and now we're gonna kill 'em. 00:28:04 Yeah. You know? Yeah. But yeah. Yes. That was, that was, I was worried about that killing Your crop of Soybeans, uh, not putting on the map 00:28:11 and the pot ash because we were gonna switch to plant food on every acre, you know, thing in, uh, when I sign the check for the drip irrigation, all 00:28:19 of those things, you know, Which you're gonna be doing soon. Uh, no, we'll see, we'll see. 00:28:24 We'll see if it's, if it pencils out. But well, You've got a means of then using your hog manure and all of a sudden that lowers your fertility spend. 00:28:31 And there's a lot of reasons to just no more dragline and do on there. And Yeah. That is 00:28:36 definitely could pay over the years When we turn the anhydrous down, you know, we, our, our nitrogen is way low, uh, relative, 00:28:44 One thing I wanna share about relay cropping, he talks about desiccating soybeans and speeding up harvest and not taking the horsepower 00:28:50 and layer tear on the combine when I harvest regular wheat. So we're planting three times the seed more nitrogen 00:28:58 to get it to make 110, a one 20 your fungicide. And well, it takes a lot of horsepower. So we're running a combine, you know, a mile and a half. 00:29:06 Oh yeah. Two miles, two and a half. Or it goes down when I do the relay thing, we're changing the ratio in the plant 00:29:12 where all the leaves are viable. Yep. So my heads are bigger. I get more rows around 00:29:18 so I can actually run the combine five or six miles an hour at 40 feet running relays changing things. 00:29:24 And that's the interesting thing with all this relay cropping. If you can grow two crops in the same year, 00:29:30 or if you can release corn and cattle in the same year, you're willing, if you're able to index nitrogen in twin 60 inch corn, 00:29:39 and let's say you can do it for 30 pounds less nitrogen, maybe a little less seed, 00:29:43 let's say it yields five bushel less. Well if you get, you know, $75 in value in your cattle going across mm-hmm. 00:29:50 We've now changed the math. Yeah. Yeah. And it, this, this is what it all comes down to is taking the pressure off of maxing the one thing. 00:29:57 Yeah. Introducing two entities to now we can play these parade of distribution synergies, Diversification of revenue, 00:30:06 but you didn't have to do it by going, buying two convenience stores. You did it on the same acre you already 00:30:11 Tried. And the whole thing with wheat, for me, I had a landscape business and I kept going. I just still plowed snow till two years ago. 00:30:18 And I, when I was younger, I used to go gamble quite a bit. And there's a few times 00:30:23 that I put the rent check out there and I didn't have it. And we had to, uh, fume our way back. 00:30:28 But it was, have some deep lessons about mathematics on the crafts table. And I look at wheat as the crafts table. 00:30:36 If it snows, I get in my truck and make money. If the sun comes up and it's 50, then the wheat grows. So it's black or red. 00:30:43 And a lot of things that I do is, is in this black and red mentality of who gives a s**t. If it doesn't go my way. Let's, let's position ourselves to 00:30:51 where I have something else that creates value in this situation. You just, we always need to be grown. You just 00:30:58 Told Kelly about your penant for gambling. He, he would gamble on whether this table is made of wood. I mean, he, he, he gambles on, oh, 00:31:07 I love to play craps. Uh, You get, The only thing better than playing craps is playing poker. 00:31:12 He, he's, he likes to gamble. Um, I don't anymore. It's Really, it's really, um, the question I said, how much your close mind costs you, it could also be how, 00:31:20 how much is your open mind making it? And that's where you've got, uh, the innovative, uh, the innovative approach. 00:31:27 You're gonna have some duds. You're gonna have some, you're gonna, some turds. You've had some turds. 00:31:31 Yes. You know, like the people that don't wanna be innovative though, and I, I've said this before, when you try something, 00:31:38 it very rarely is it a 10 out of 10, but very rarely is it a zero out of 10. Yeah. Right. Most of the times it's a six or a seven. 00:31:45 There's gleaning something, it's a six or a seven, and then it evolves that the idea that it's gonna work the first time, that that's not, 00:31:53 but it, it's not, it's not, you know, you use black, I would say it's not, this is not a black and white scenario. 00:31:58 It's not a 10 out 10, it's not a zero out 10. It's gonna evolve. You're gonna learn things. You're gonna get better and more 00:32:02 efficient, but don't give up. And the first year is not gonna be a home run. But the second year in the third year 00:32:07 could be because it'll evolve. And that's the whole point of the f the fho, the f the framework of that. 00:32:13 So to share, like this year we have 14 relay fields. We're scaling that up even more. But last year we had six. And every field that I went into, 00:32:22 I changed the gate setting on the, on the drill. Mm-hmm. When I was playing by week. And we did a field that, uh, was drag line 00:32:29 with manure on the other side of the ditch. I wanted to grow really good beans. So I shut the gate down way past 20. 00:32:36 And I only planted about a quarter million wheat seeds per acre, which is, if you ask in agro, 00:32:41 that's just losing your mind because they want 2 million. Right. That's low. And then the other part of the field, 00:32:46 I wanted to, it was out by the road. I thought it'd make a little fluffier wheat. And I doubled it to about, I think I had 5 50, 600. 00:32:54 Well, that wheat looked great, and I got a lot of attaboys. Oh, that looks great. Well, what happened was, 00:32:59 we got like an inch of rain in May, June was hot, so the wheat was slightly better, but the beans took it kind of in the chin. 00:33:07 And they barely made 50 in that field. Where I choked it back, the wheat was about 10 back, but the beans were 25 bushel better. 00:33:14 And if you can try all these things with all these different iterations while you're trying it, but when you make these experiments 00:33:22 and you do a lot of different iterations, you'll figure out that if it wasn't exactly in the thing that I did, 00:33:28 it was exactly how I did it in the cards that were dealt in this season. And it's understanding the spectrums 00:33:36 and understanding what you're gonna do, it's how smart you make your moves is the, you, you know, the value in doing this kind of stuff. 00:33:45 Yeah. There's just, because it worked perfectly this year, next year's gonna be different. You're right. And there's value in changing 00:33:51 those populations all the time. Jason, you said that there's, uh, you know, you go on the road and you talk about this, 00:33:56 you're on social media talking about this. Is it rewarding? It's rewarding when you see your, your innovation come to fruition. 00:34:05 Is it rewarding when other people adopt it? Oh, tremendously. That is my favorite part. You know, I, I was in Colorado, uh, in 22 00:34:15 and I was, I sat in a room, they said, this guy's doing it in Colorado. I sat in the back and he did the presentation 00:34:23 and to a t he had the pads, he took the duals off the John Deere and he's talking about going the FSA 00:34:30 office and doing the acres. Yeah. Where so, so to to share that story, when you go to the FSA and you're doing wheat 00:34:37 and soybeans, they don't have a box for that. So if you're doing 500 acres, you're doing 250 acres of wheat. 00:34:43 Yeah. 250 acres of soybeans. Well, he had scaled it up over the years and he was getting 95 00:34:49 to a hundred percent yield of both crops. Being in Colorado, he has a hundred degree days. He's got a pivot. Irrigation. 00:34:56 Yeah, I was gonna say, he doesn't get much water, so he has to irrigate or he is going to dry land. Yeah. And, and he had massive success. 00:35:01 And he's going out and telling people, and as I travel all these different states, you're finding all these people that are doing it 00:35:08 in a different iteration in their context. And that's, that's why we started farm Weird. And not to compete with, uh, with extreme ads. 00:35:16 But it's same idea. You know, you, you're, you're not, you're collaborating. Let's learn together. You're collaborating. 00:35:21 It's called Open-Minded, or I call it mock minded, as in Jason Mock Minded. Anyway, we're gonna leave 00:35:25 It there. His name is Jason Mog, Delaware County Farmer, About 50 miles south of here. And a, and a good dude, 00:35:30 and a friend of the extreme at Greenery. You know what, your friend also. So make sure you always pull up the 00:35:34 chair right here, figuratively. And, uh, join us for these conversations. We've got episodes all over the place. 00:35:39 We want you to check 'em out. Go to Extreme Mag Farm, also go to YouTube and uh, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. 00:35:44 We'd love to have you on there. Kelly Garrett of Extreme Mag, Jason m Indiana Farmer and innovator, and very open-minded, innovative guy. 00:35:51 So we're happy to have you here. Till next time, cheers from me. 00:35:53.565 --> 00:35:53.765