What’s the One Tool You Can’t Farm Without? | The Granary

00:00 Tools and technology that make your farming life better. What are they and why do they matter to you so much? 00:00:06 That's what we're talking about in this episode of the Great with my friends, Kevin Matthews, Chad Henderson, Matt Miles, 00:00:11 you ready for a conversation with some real farmers about real issues? And the best part you are invited. 00:00:17 Support yourself a drink, grab a snack. Most importantly, pull up a chair. Welcome to the Grainery. Hey guys. 00:00:33 Alright. I know that you guys probably are like saying, oh, wait a minute, Damien, toss another topic at me. I don't know. And then they're gonna say, Matt, hell, 00:00:41 he doesn't even get out and do the farm anymore. He is just in the office all the time. What tools, technology do you use on your farming operation? 00:00:47 You're like, oh my God, this is a life changer. I think you can go back to the first thing, the second thing, the third thing. 00:00:53 What do you like, what do you use? Why does it matter? I wouldn't know if I'm not doing either work. Yeah. I'm not the one that says that. 00:00:58 They're the guys that say that. I didn't say that. He ain't never said, I don't know what Saw last time you were at this very table. 00:01:02 You know what they did to Matt? They got him his ta. They made him get his hands out and said, you don't have any callouses, Matt, you don't, 00:01:08 you don't really do farm and farm work Anymore. Are we going back to mules or where we going with 00:01:12 Yeah. First, the first innovation auto steer. What was before that? Which thing did you say? Like, man, this is a game changer. 00:01:18 Yeah. So we went from, from, well actually went from hand. If we're going all the way back, 00:01:21 we're going back from handpicking to the cotton picker. Right? That was the first. And, but I mean really you, the Cotton gin and you All 00:01:26 that the innovations have been in the harvesting. You know, we went from a picker that we dumped in a cotton trailer that you had 00:01:32 to manually trumped to the square bales, you know, with a module builder that we thought there wasn't gonna be anything better than that. 00:01:39 Now my dad was refused to use 'em when they first come out 'cause you were actually putting your cotton on the ground. 00:01:43 Mm-hmm. He's like, I ain't never put no cotton on the ground because With the degree de value of their quality, 00:01:48 But it ended up being an inch or two and it was way more efficient. And then when they come with a round 00:01:52 bale was a game changer. I don't see how, I'm sure there will be, there'll be an autonomous picker I guess. 00:01:58 But the round bale revolutionized the cotton industry. Yeah. Right now it's, it's like when you go buy a hay field 00:02:04 and it's, it's a lot easier. And it's all that, Well, like you said, I don't work, so I I didn't say that. That guys 00:02:09 sometimes say that Operations. Who do you think pix My cotton? I actually think that I heard Temple Roads bash on you 00:02:15 about not doing enough farming work. It is never, it's not these guys. Oh no, it ain't them guys for sure. 00:02:21 No, not while we're here. We May maybe Later on the phone, but the operations center alone has been a 00:02:26 big deal for us. There's The technology that's The John Deere Operations Center has almost become flawless. 00:02:30 It's like a Bible lan. I mean, we can be in, we can be a thousand miles away and know what every single piece 00:02:36 of machinery's doing and where it's at. And that just keeps getting better all the time. You're The tool guy. 00:02:41 You're the, you're the machinery guy. What's the game changer that came along and you're like, wow, man, this is, this is revolutionary. 00:02:48 I'm gonna pass Kevin. All right. What's the game changer? That was revolutionary. He likes to do this all the time. 00:02:52 Yeah. Ain't ain't nothing wrong with that. I understand. He likes to see he gets better 00:02:55 Stories point band. No, you know, the auto steer you mentioned that that was a, that was a great thing. 00:03:00 But what really put money in the farmer's pockets was when we become with section control on sprayers 00:03:07 and section control on planters to be able to get independent row shutoffs. We quit our overlapping, we become a lot more efficient 00:03:13 with our herbicides and, and our pesticides that we sprayed. And that was in, in our lifetime. Mine and Chad's lifetime. 00:03:21 Matt's a little older than us, but, um, you Know, well it's stick on Matt. Well, You what brother? I 00:03:26 I'm sorry. Well, I started it. I know, but now I feel like I gotta give you a hug. But, but no, I mean seriously that was um, you know, 00:03:34 when we built the first planter and put section control on it, we was thinking about our overlap, you know, 00:03:39 where the corn was not yielding. 'cause we went from 28,000 to 50 plus thousand and, but then when we got done planting, 00:03:48 we returned 28 units to seed that year. Yeah. Less than the previous year. We're like, whoa, wait a minute. 00:03:53 We wasn't thinking about the seed saving side on it. And auto steer is nice. It's a convenience, 00:04:00 but those section coverage controls is profitability. I didn't even know they were called that section coverage control. 00:04:09 So the idea that you're not, if you got a 16 year row planter and a four rows over here 00:04:13 that are overlapping, don't just overlap. You can just shut 'em off. That's called section coverage control. 00:04:18 It actually shut, shuts itself off. Yeah. You got a boundary of the field is the way ours, ours works. And when it hits that boundary, it shuts off. 00:04:24 So you're not putting the seed twice in one Same place. Yeah. The same with spray. Obviously we on edges and whatever. 00:04:30 All right. You ready to go Mr. I pass? You've had an hour to think. Yeah, And I mean, I mean all those things are great. 00:04:36 I mean the, I mean the advances in the planters, you know, have been good. You know, we got the exact emerge planters, you know, 00:04:42 where we're controlling the seed all the way down electric drive trying to get the harmonics out of it. 00:04:47 You know, all that stuff's been good, but still, you look at the tools we're using today, how many people could run their farm they think today 00:04:54 without a battery impact? Oh man, I'll tell you what. Two m walk m walkies is a deal right there now. I mean, you know, just look at 00:05:02 how much we used to use air. Yep. And now how little we use air. Mm-hmm. I say about that yesterday we, I was going looking for a, 00:05:10 uh, looking for a slack adjuster, uh, piece to go on a dump truck and in the toolbox and right there set the air wrench with 00:05:19 so much dust and all on it. And I'm like, man, that was top of the line saw we Had on every truck. And 00:05:23 we don't even use 'em now. All we use is the impact electric impacts. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I, we're done. 00:05:30 We're done, we're done doing this thing about, you know, who uses tools? Who does? I'll go with mine. 00:05:34 Mine more rudimentary than all that. You guys go straight to this advanced technology. It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. 00:05:39 I was gonna tell you around my hobby farm here, bale forks on the front of the tractor. I don't lift anything that 00:05:46 weighs more than a hundred pounds now. And so you're saying, well that's not that big of an innovation. 00:05:50 Well, it was for me because, uh, any single thing that looked like a job renovating these properties out here, I'm like, hang on, this is not a job for me or a pick 00:05:59 or a shovel or, uh, my back. This is gonna be a job for the tractor. If we're gonna go that route, we're going 00:06:05 to go the forklift versus the hand truck. Well, that, you know, if we're gonna go that that Far. We didn't have the money to 00:06:10 have a forklift when I was younger. Now We got the first hand truck. I thought that was awesome. Well, 00:06:14 We got a forklift. I I mean in today's world, they'll walk 300 yards, go get the forklift to keep from lifting a 00:06:21 50 pound bag. Yeah. And the thing is you're like, well, I said they, you know, 'cause I'm in office. I'm gonna tell you though, it's really, it is 00:06:29 because it is really an interesting thing because there's a bunch of stuff like, okay, yeah, you're cut down a dead tree. 00:06:34 I'm like, well I can cut them a bunch of little bitty bitty pieces and then bend over and pick 'em all up. 00:06:37 Or I can cut it in five foot sections and then it down that bale fork. I can come right there to the forks and boom boom boom. 00:06:44 Like I just say, can you get one of them in here where I can stoke it in your inside? Well, I was gonna say, you might need my bale forks 00:06:49 to come in here and just put the logs on the fire in case you can't feel the heat from this TV 00:06:53 show you're watching right here. Yeah. Chad's got about, it's Getting pretty warm. I, 00:06:57 y'all roasted Me. He and Temple said about seeing how hot they could make it. They burned down little one and a half oak trees so far. 00:07:05 Burn his firewood up. If It gets any hotter, I'm quitting. Um, I know that's pretty simple. Big forks forklift. 00:07:14 When you start thinking what's made my life easier, some of those things. Let's not overlook 'em. You get a skid loader. 00:07:19 My brother used to say, growing up with a dairy farm, we have a skid loader. 'cause they hadn't really become a thing until really the 00:07:24 eighties when they kind of really caught it on. He said we wouldn't have had a milk surplus. We never did have a milk surplus 00:07:30 until skid loaders became omnipresent on all the dairy operations. Because you throw two skid loaders out there. 00:07:35 It is not even work. You're just sitting in there. It's almost kind of fun. You can just keep doing stuff and doing stuff and 00:07:41 Yeah. Till they break down into manure Pile. Well yeah. Then there's a lot of work and in there. 00:07:44 All right. What's your favorite technology? You said tools. You talked about air, uh, uh, battery operated pneumatics. 00:07:50 What um, what's your other favorite technology pass? Make it for Bridge? I can answer for him. His, his baby's the planter. 00:07:59 Yeah. I mean we mentioned it to him. I know what kind of mentioned it, but You know, the planter's great. 00:08:06 One thing that stood out for me is, you know, Tim, he come back and run. He's having Exactly. Merge 00:08:11 Over other Well, yeah, but no, you know, Tim come back this to the farm this past year, full season 00:08:18 and um, we had a bad crop. So it was a good time for 'em to learn to run stuff that they hadn't had opportunities. 00:08:24 'cause they obviously wasn't gonna run a lot of good crop out on the ground. So he got in, he ran our combine 00:08:29 and we're running a cloud 8,700. And to see the system on, it's pretty much automating everything. 00:08:35 And Chad and I have talked about this before, you know, we don't really care for all that automation on the combine. 00:08:41 We can set one up as good or better than what the automation is. But with this new generation coming in 00:08:47 that didn't get all that seat time. 'cause face it, you know, kids, my kids, they're, they're playing ball. 00:08:54 They're in hunter safety. They're in all kinds of shooting sports where we was in a tobacco field or we was riding on the fender of the tractor. 00:09:00 We didn't have the iPads and the iPhones to sit there. We was in the field learning from our fathers and their workers how to set things up. 00:09:07 And that automation that's been brought in, you wonder where it's going to benefit. But with this new generation of employees, 00:09:16 there's not many farm raised children Yeah. To hire from. So when you're hiring them, that's never done it. 00:09:23 It's a huge benefit. Having that technology there. I Got a question. Is it Klaus or Kloss? It's 00:09:28 Kloss. All right. I'm Just curious. We've had this a conversation before. What do, I'm not gonna get it right. It's 00:09:33 Closes Klaus k, black ball Klaus, but we're not German. Depends On which dealer it is. When 00:09:38 you're, when you're talking to em. Uh, I'm gonna keep going down the road of, uh, rudimentary. 00:09:42 I think anything that made it, she didn't have to pick up small square bales and throw 'em around would get my vote for, uh, innovation. 00:09:48 And I know small square bales still have a place for like horse ra, race horse people and all that. But if you don't have to handle 'em, uh, I got, 00:09:56 I got no discs in my lower back because of handling 'em all the time. So I think anything that got away from 00:10:00 that would be one of my favorite advancements. And I'd say looking at what the technology, uh, I don't think that these driverless things are as big 00:10:07 of a deal because you're already gotta be in the tra until you can get outta the tractor. I don't know what the big benefit is to it steering itself, 00:10:14 if you gotta sit in there anyhow. If it could be that you didn't have to sit in there and it was truly autonomous, then that'd be, I think 00:10:19 that's an overrated, it's an overrated technological advancement. Well, There's company now, Mike. Wait mistake. 00:10:24 You think autos steer is a It's not Overrated. And what we're forgetting too, 00:10:27 we're forgetting the genetics. We're forgetting that we've learned about carbons and different things that we're using today 00:10:32 that we didn't use back in the fifties. But I went to a meeting last week and they actually have a robot 00:10:37 that runs in your field, 24 sevens. And it can detect diseases, it can detect grass versus broadleaf 00:10:45 Wildlife. They had, they had it at Raleigh Cha showing it, chasing deer outta the Field. It can do, it can 00:10:49 do so many different things. It was hilarious. Solar powered. And it's also got a 40 foot boom with, with tanks mounted 00:10:54 underneath the solar panel. So there's no nothing being generated. Everything's being generated from 00:10:59 the sun as far as the energy. And so it out there, it can run through your field and, and then is it, it spraying? Yeah. 00:11:04 Well you can spray or you can just scout with it. You can do the one. It looks like a big ping pong table. Is it, is 00:11:09 It, is it, is it still in the, uh, concept or is it I Can buy one. No, they have it in production. I can buy this thing. You Could buy that thing. 00:11:17 50,000. I checked them. You one Chad. Chad's got two of, And I don't, I really want one bad. 00:11:22 I just can't afford it. You If corn, if corn goes to $6 a month, you gonna get one of those? Oh Man. I'd like to have one him. We'd crash it though. 00:11:29 Oh, it don't run for one mile an hour. Oh, They got, they got that, was it Raleigh? Like four legs look like a dog. Looks 00:11:35 It kind. A four Wheel it scoot. It's on wheel. It Hits it. No, it is like legs. I don't Know. It actually 00:11:40 Goes like that, Sir. We ain't got that far With it, huh? Yes sir. The AI technology is fixing 00:11:45 to change the world in farming. I mean from, we, we see it on, on the ai just on writing letters or whatever. 00:11:51 Yeah. But I mean, it's literally going to change at the same meeting. There's a guy now with a company 00:11:56 that is measuring droplets per plant. Not gallons per ac, not gallons Per acre. Droplets 00:12:02 per plant. So the, the claim is that you can reduce your chemicals by 30%, change your water volume to half. 00:12:07 If you can get those amount of droplets per plant. There's nobody else in the world doing that. He, this guy graduated from MIT in spray technology. Oh 00:12:14 My. He came from India and was on a backpack sprayer his whole life. So that he had, was motivation to, to get this done. 00:12:21 So that backpack sprayer will motivate you On we 14 acres is what they found. 14 Acres of the backpack. You got that right. 00:12:27 He did all the sprays. What'd you think about that? That we think we're already using lower dose and we're getting better. 00:12:33 And we already talked about, in a different episode, we were talking about the lowering of uh, the amount of nasty chemicals we're putting out there, 00:12:40 you know, and all that kind of stuff. Now we're talking about drops per plant, cutting the rate and cutting the amount of water, 00:12:47 which means you're gonna have to go and fill up the sprayer less. I mean this is, that could be a game changer. It 00:12:51 Is. It's again, and I'm, I'm gonna work with 'em some this year on it and I'll know more about next year when we do grand roots, 00:12:57 but it's absolutely amazing. Now are the chemical, the crop protection companies gonna like that? 00:13:02 Maybe not, you know. No, because they're selling those product, But he Yeah, like you say 00:13:07 that when you're putting on a herbicide Yeah. A contact herbicide, it's not a residual. You don't, you don't want it on the ground. No. 00:13:13 The thing is, you'll use the same amount of herbicide once, you'll just use less, less water. So, well he's saying you can cut. 00:13:19 He's saying with the coverage you can cut the right back. Yeah. Right, Right. Because you're gonna get more, 00:13:23 more precise placement of the drop Of the drop. More parts per million. And nobody's been 00:13:28 measuring droplets per plant. Yeah, No, that's pretty much So that, and that's part of ai. He also has a drone that follows behind your dry spreader. 00:13:36 And AI is calculating the, the, where we do pan tests, if you know what that is. With the dry spreader. There'll be no 00:13:42 more pan test with this. It sits there and tells you, okay, you need to adjust these fins or you need to, you know, 00:13:47 open your gate, gate gate. It's doing everything by drone technology with ai. And this Is why I keep you extreme ag guys around 00:13:53 and we do this here in the grain room. 'cause you guys are broadening my mind. I was so rudimentary, I didn't even get to the tech. 00:13:58 I was just going through things that I like. I've got a little steel chainsaw that's only this big as battery operated. 00:14:03 So when I need to prune stuff, I can just go like this. Instead of taking a bill of salt like this, you're over here talking about the, like the, the space, 00:14:11 like the future of like, we're farming on Mars kinda stuff. And I'm over here just thinking 00:14:16 about tools that chain change. So I don't have to work as hard thinking about chainsaws. When you 00:14:19 Set in office, you have time to think about these kinds. He Keeps going back us. I'm never gonna live it down. 00:14:25 Alright. I mean, look at the, look at the technology you've got at the, with your Jabo deal. 00:14:29 Mm-hmm. I mean, look at that. I mean we're, we're sitting there measuring all the grain. You've got know what's in each bin. Yeah. 00:14:35 You know what the scale tickets are. You can tell me how many bushels is in there. It's all recorded. Yeah. 00:14:40 You can get, we're getting more engaged with what's going on. Mm-hmm. And the AI's gonna work in the field 00:14:45 to do the same things we're doing with computers and stuff and office of grain bins or whatever. 00:14:49 And we went over genetics. The difference in the genetics today, we ain't, we ain't open that door yet. 00:14:54 So I've had people ask me, you know, non-farm people, Hey, you're an ag guy. I read that chickens today are twice as big 00:15:02 as they were just 30, 40, 40 years ago. And it's all because of steroids. I said, you're right that chickens are twice the size 00:15:10 and, you know, fit. It only takes 45 days. And, and I said, but none of 'em are on any kind of steroids or growth hormones. 00:15:18 It's because genetics, because they have people and not too far from him, there's an entire poultry company. I did a program for them right there. 00:15:25 All their thing about every day is how to build a better chicken genetically. And then on the other side 00:15:30 of the campus is somebody figuring out how to use nutrition at places like Auburn or Arkansas where there's big chicken states, nutrition, 00:15:37 genetics, nutrition, genetics. I had to correct my pastor about that. He said that from the pulpit, the hormones and chickens. 00:15:43 He said there's nothing. I sent him a text during his sermon where he'd get it when he got through and said, there ain't no hormones in chicken. Yeah. 00:15:50 And we can argue that maybe it's, uh, it is not as flavorful as grandma made, you know, came off the pasture or whatever. But 00:15:56 We'll feed more people. Yeah. And it's, it's, it's, it's amazing technology, like you said, that's genetics about the seed. 00:16:03 Uh, you know, Kelly switched back to non traded seed, but hell, 10 year ago seed technology is still better than 30 year ago seed technology by double. 00:16:14 Yeah. And Kelly's not, not wrong. I mean, I, the the roundup, I roundup corn a lot of times without yield. 00:16:21 You know, I traded corn. But you take something like cotton and you don't have, you don't have resistance to boar. 00:16:27 You know, that's a whole nother story Until you get in a situation that you hadn't never been in. 00:16:32 Yep. You know, a lot of this stuff is a protection deal, you know, and it's insurance policy, 00:16:35 this insurance policy, and this in this one area. I mean, you can't be in every field all the time. Right. You get, you get in a situation you hadn't been in, 00:16:44 you get a flat in, when we did the bo weevil eradication, what happened with the worms, right? 00:16:48 I mean, like, to eat us up, you get a flight or you get something like that happen and well, you got a problem on your hands. 00:16:54 You can do the math on corn in our area. And the amount of corn that the, that the worm eats is less value than what the cost of the trade is. 00:17:04 The problem is these companies, they ain't stupid. Mm-hmm. So they're gonna put their best corn with the traits in it, 00:17:10 you know, just like there's a company right now that's, that's gonna have a, a lifesaver product that I've gotta use. 00:17:15 They're pairing it with their non-generic partner that they've had all the time. That's now you can buy generic. 00:17:21 So if you buy that lifesaving product, you're gonna have to buy their branded version of, of the other one. 00:17:26 Yeah. I'm not gonna say who that is or whatever, but I mean that these, these marketing firms ain't stupid. What about I did a thing, a video for social media 00:17:35 and one of my fields over here, down the road, and it was a June, we got 1.2 inches in June of rain, and that was coming into a fairly dry, 00:17:43 after a fairly dry may, and it was 90 more days than, you know, maybe one third of the month was 90. 00:17:50 It was not normal for Northern Indiana. I went out and stood in that field and it still is looking pretty darn good. 00:17:56 And I shot the video and said, you wanna talk about, uh, oh, I don't like all the factory farms and modern technology 00:18:02 and my food and all that. I said, if you're not an ag person, you have no understanding of how amazing this is. 00:18:08 Because 30 years ago, this would've already been shriveled up and dead. Yeah. Shriveled up and dead. 00:18:12 You can dig down and couldn't find moisture that far. That's a testament to the genetics period. It is. And so you keep that crop. I I mean, did it set a record? 00:18:21 Not necessarily, but it stayed alive 30 years ago. It would've been shriveled and 60 years ago done blown away. Well, and it's that plus you take the difference in the 00:18:29 root mass, you know, with these new products we have from these companies Building that factory, You know, the build, 00:18:33 you're building a bigger root system, which you go deeper in the ground. You know, those technologies are coming from our, you know, 00:18:39 our companies, you know, our infers and different products that we Yeah. What do you or something behind my back? No, 00:18:44 I was good. I I mean you looking at him, y'all smiled. I wanna smile with Chad. Me, Chad, Chad makes me smile sometimes he makes me 00:18:50 mad too, but that's all right. We touch all those gen genetic. Kelly was here earlier when he was talking about this, the, 00:18:54 all the, all the uh, uh, emotions. Mad, sad, glad and he forgot the other one. Fear. Um, Chad's getting to where he is almost afraid of me. 00:19:01 But anyway, not really. He doesn't fear. I wanna see that day. He Not really afraid about, well, you know what, the technology 00:19:07 that's beneficial isn't just to farmers. That's where you'd like to tell, you know, the average consumer, those technologies we talked about, 00:19:13 they keep a plant and a field alive in those kind of conditions. It has an environmental impact. 00:19:19 That plant is still alive, which means it's processing car, you know, it's taking the carbon monoxide out of the sky 00:19:24 and it's protecting that soil from blowing away. I mean, there's an environmental benefit to a lot of these things we're talking about. 00:19:30 Well, you take, yeah. You take for instance, you know, like a BT Cotton. Yeah. Well Your choice is to have a GMO cotton Right. 00:19:38 Or spray pesticides on it. Which one's the safest? Yeah. It's, I'd a whole lot rather have a GMO embedded in my plant than have more pesticides put on it. Look at 00:19:46 The environmental and it's working all the time. Yeah. The stuff, stuff that you talked about, know the sprayer shutoffs, 00:19:50 there's environmental benefit to there. You're putting out Well, Well it's, it's true. But, you 00:19:54 know, we'll talk about GMOs a minute. You know, one thing you gotta remember, GMO is genetically modified organism. So 00:20:02 I've heard this story in his head. I know where he is going. So Every time since Adam 00:20:07 and Eve conceived the first child, the DNA has been different. The genetics has changed in the beginning of time. 00:20:15 Every time No two genetics are the same. So, you know, you're, you're breeding to get something better. 00:20:25 Hmm. You know, it's, it is just like, you know, you want, you want your child to, to have a spouse 00:20:30 that's a good spouse, good positive. You, you know, you want, you want improve your cattle herd. You want improve. Yeah. 00:20:36 You know, you're not going, you're not going to breed that bull with a sick cow. Right. I mean, you're not going to do it. 00:20:41 You know, you, you want it healthy. It's just like a ball team. You, you put together a good ball team to win. 00:20:47 And that's what they do with these varieties and the breeding, like you talked about with the chickens. And same with corn, soybeans, even wheat. 00:20:56 And, you know, you now, one thing to remember with wheat is you do not have roundup ready wheat. 00:21:03 So you don't have chemically altered genetics or different trait resistance in, in any wheat products that I'm aware of to this day. 00:21:12 Or rice. Or rice. Yep. But the fact is, is you're, they're, the goal is to breed it so that the plants defend the diseases off their cell. 00:21:22 And then one thing to remember the products that we use lots of times we're putting a quarter of an ounce on 43,560 00:21:33 square foot of land. That's how accurate and particular and precise. Yep. The equipment and the operators are doing this. 00:21:42 That's pretty impressive when you can spread that evenly across 43,560 square feet. Chad, since I keep going to you on equipment stuff, 00:21:51 the one you didn't go with and it's not one, it's an evolution. I always, uh, these people, like he's got pictures 00:21:58 of his family in front of a, an old, uh, 50-year-old, um, international harvester tractor and all that. 00:22:05 We like going to the fair state fair and seeing some old tractors. I don't have any interest in going out here 00:22:11 and working all day with one of those. Oh. They'll make 'em like they used to know. They make 'em a lot better. He, 00:22:16 He ain't never had a computer software mess up. Shut you down, but a week. Yeah. Well, maybe not, 00:22:20 but I can tell you what, I can tell you this. I ain't going back. Back, Man. We thought it was cool. 00:22:25 We bought this 49 55 and thought it's cool to go down the road Till you drive It. You 00:22:29 drove that thing about two hours Cool. Was gone. Yeah, it was gone, man. Just all I get a Massage Every 00:22:35 day. Three o'clock You got machine. Well, seriously, you know, it's, it's neat to look back and, and say all that, but okay, great. 00:22:42 Go and get all those capless tractors. You know, the first trailer they put me on the clutch. You had to push it this far. I was eight years old. 00:22:48 I had to stand up and use the steering wheel. Like I'm Spoil We hand, We could grab crops on our ears. Yeah. I mean, honestly. Yeah. 00:22:57 I don't wanna go back there. It dusty, dirty loud. You got sunburn probably lost your hairy and also everything. 00:23:03 Nothing was convenient about any of that equipment back then. You know, my little utility tractor, I just, 00:23:07 I just marvel at how much more productive it is at 15 horsepower. Less than the first tractor they put me on the 48 years 00:23:14 ago. It's amazing. Yeah. I mean this, the first time we had a full time, you know, a four wheel drive, row crop tractor, flip 00:23:22 that front axle in and you're like, how does 150 horsepower tractor do this? It'd pull a 202 wheel drive backwards. Mm-hmm. 00:23:28 Do you remember a 150 horsepower tractor 40 years ago? Get stuck. You don't get stuck now. Your tractors are better. We 00:23:36 was better at weight than you got. Better. That's The operator. Oh, It's an operator. Operator. Really? 00:23:39 You Bigger mess Operator. It's a bigger mess When it's just a bigger, get these bigger ones done. You need 00:23:45 A dark bucket when you get one. Yeah. Uh, all right. Going round tables. Any last thought technology 00:23:51 and tools that make your farm life better? You, you talked about you went sprayer, you went planter, uh, then we talk about the evolution of machinery. 00:23:58 We talk about genetics. We kind of covered about the whole entire farm. Nobody's going back to the, let's 00:24:02 Talk about a, let's talk about a cell phone, man. I mean, used to, you had used to, you had to go to the payphone that might with your broker needs. 00:24:09 It probably is the, the biggest, that's the biggest one That with Google. I mean, right now we wanna see what our, 00:24:15 what the commodity markets are. Before you had to go to the cell phone, call your broker and see what the commodity markets were. 00:24:20 Yeah. Now it's right at the right at your fingertips. Seriously. I'm surprised it took it till now when I said 00:24:26 let's, it'll go the last. That is the biggest one. It is, yeah. I mean, he, sometimes he's on a, he's on a FaceTime 00:24:32 with his granddaughter, but sometimes he's actually under doing business, You know? Yeah. He's got one 00:24:36 that just hangs off his head. It just stays right there. Well, ain't on no hits here. It 00:24:41 Keeps you information and you can look up stuff. I mean, there's a whole, I mean, well, I mean it's, it's, it's allowed us 00:24:47 in all business sense to work with what? Way less just a percentage of the same people. Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. You know, because you didn't have people running 00:24:54 there where like you can handle services. We're farming more acres, you know, there's no way we could farm makers. 00:24:58 Were farming now with eight. Oh sixes? No. Oh man. Four. Oh, I was just talking about a cell phone. 00:25:03 Yeah, we're talking about cell phones there. How would, how many eight oh sixes would it take, Uh, that 40, 50? 00:25:10 I mean, where you gonna get 40 or, well, I guess you could find 40 people that, that's another thing. 00:25:14 They can't just, you can't just go pick somebody up off the street now to drive this. Well, That's what he is talking about is that it, it's, uh, you, 00:25:20 you gotta have a little bit of skill, but it's also, it's supposed to be more user friendly once you get 'em to that point. 00:25:24 But, you know, the thing is too though, you, it's, it's a, you can put people that understand technology 00:25:29 and they'll do a better job on it than an operator. Will You? I'm account. 00:25:32 Yeah. I mean, yep. I think the smartphone is the one obviously, and we, it's, we probably all have the same relationship, 00:25:39 but sometimes I'd like to throw the thing in a lake because, and I'm tired of being annoyed 00:25:42 and I just want to, you know, what'd They say about the Blackberry? It had more storage on it than 00:25:46 they did when they put the shuttle up. Put the man on the bus. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that was a Blackberry 15 years ago. Yeah. You're 00:25:52 Talking about, and I phone my wife when she got one. I said, you got a computer and a phone. That's stupid. I had a flip phone. You know, you ever try to text a flip 00:26:00 Phone? Yeah. Now you go in there and you handle, you handle you, you manage your employees, you know what they're doing. 00:26:05 You can monitor the pace of the farm. You can be here at Indiana in our grainery and still be doing business. Pretty 00:26:12 Watching my guys working the shop off of cameras. Yeah. Yeah. I mean it's just, they're just, it's unlimited. And AI's even improving that, 00:26:21 Where Are we gonna go? What's the next big thing? AI's the next big thing. AI Is the next big thing. And we're 00:26:27 not even, I'm not sure, even you guys, We don't even understand what potential it really is. We think we know, but we, well, I 00:26:32 Mean, I've heard it's gonna make world decisions, you know, that they're gonna, and, and I ask a, a pretty influential person in the government, 00:26:39 I said, I heard it won't be many years before AI is gonna make world decisions, you know, whether we should go to war or not at a and 00:26:46 and the guy said, just, just stranger things have happened. So that told me that it's, it's coming. 00:26:54 I guess that means then predicted Weather three or four years out. We've heard that. Somebody told us that not too long ago. 00:26:58 That's right. What if it's wrong though? Then we're gonna really screw Up. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. 00:27:02 I've trust the weather and there ain't nobody to get Mad at. No, That's the thing. Because it 00:27:06 becomes, it's like wizard Oz now. It's like who's really behind the curtain? Yeah. Who's behind the curtain? AI's gonna change stuff. 00:27:12 I'm not sure that we Google. Yeah. Mr. Google. Yeah. We don't have a clue what it's going to. We 00:27:15 Don't really, I think that it's kind of the ground robotics. I mean, it, it's fixing to get weird. 00:27:20 That stuff we kind of knew, we knew there's eventually gonna be more automation. Right? I mean, look at from cotton to just, uh, 00:27:26 picking celery or whatever. We're gonna get more automation less. We knew that. But there's some stuff right here 00:27:31 that we don't necessarily Yeah. But the, the implementation of AI with the robotics is what's bringing things to a level 00:27:37 that a lot of heart any of us could have ever Imagined. But you just said there's a 00:27:42 robot that goes out and scouts for you. Yeah. Hmm. We talk about stuff like this all the time here at Greenery. 00:27:47 We're a very forward looking group, as you might well know. So anyway, I'm sitting here with Kevin Matthews, 00:27:50 Chad Henderson, Matt Miles there, extreme ag guys. And you know what? You're welcome to pull up a chair, figuratively, anytime. 00:27:55 Pour yourself a drink. Make yourself at home because we want you to be part of the conversation. We do this quite often as you well know, 00:28:01 and we really want you to be a part of it. So until next time, thank you for joining us 00:28:05.075 --> 00:28:06.255