Quit wearing your machinery out on hopes and dreams.
01:37:55 Share

Podbean, your message amplified. Ready to share your message with the world? Start your podcast journey with Podbean. Podbean. Podbean. Podbean. Podbean. The AI-powered, all-in-one podcast platform. Thousands of businesses and enterprises trust Podbean to launch their podcasts. Launch your podcast on Podbean today. My school uses Podbean. My church, too. I love it. I really do. ♪

All right.

Hello, folks. Welcome back to the Straightforward Farming Podcast. I'm your host, Tony Reid, alongside Nick McCormick. And yes, we are still alive. We're back. It's been a while. Let's look at the calendar here. February 28th, I think, was the last one. That could be. Yeah. It's been a busy pre-spring. It has. We've shot a couple others, but they hadn't made the airwaves yet. We got some major editing to do.

Yeah. So haven't had time to do that, but maybe this one can just go straight on the airwaves and yeah, I'll stay awake for this one. There you go. Yeah. Perfect. Yeah. That was probably the last time we're right. Yeah. That's the last one on the air. Yep. Sure enough. So we're not.

terribly far out of line here. I mean, we're better than the unfiltered farm. Well, that's true. We're blowing them out of the water. They would be February 28th, 2022, probably somewhere. And we can talk smack on them because they'll never listen to ours. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Yep. So, so yeah, we were just shooting the shit out in the shed talking about farming and all this,

stuff nowadays and we got on the subject of sea and spray and tillage and vertical tillage and chisel plowing and yeah moldboard plowing the whole yeah the whole ball of wax yeah we basically don't know any more now than what we did 20 minutes ago no but we're gonna discuss with you guys yeah exactly exactly yep so i don't know we were talking about sea and spray and how i don't really know how that fits

into where and how we farm currently. And maybe this is a summer fallow deal for the guys out west. It might be regional, yeah. Because I just don't know how you would make that work on... I don't see the advantage here. It just seems like you've got a high-dollar sprayer and a high-dollar operator out there driving around a lot. Exactly. And I don't know what the sea and spray option costs on a sprayer. I don't either, yeah. But I'm sure it's not cheap. Nothing else is. No, it can't be. But... Yeah. But I don't know. I still think around here, I just...

And 10 years ago, I told you you were wrong. I'm not sold on deep tillage, but I don't know that I'm personally sold on vertical tillage purse. I guess we got to define vertical tillage first. And I'm not knocking any... I want everybody to know I'm not knocking any company when we talk about them here. I'm not. But like... And I'm just going to use like Landall, for example. That's... To me, that's just a disc with...

shallow cup blades not saying it doesn't work but i don't think that's vertical tillage yeah i think the the term vertical tillage got thrown out there a lot on some things that aren't that vertical to me there's a difference between vertical tillage and a high speed disc yes in my humble opinion if it looks like a disc and it acts like a disc it's probably just a disc yeah but that that definition got thrown out there and then a lot of people captured onto the term and

Don't know that that's that accurate. And I still don't think where we farm, a guy has to rip 18, 20 inches deep. No, where we're at, I don't think it does. I don't think it matters. I don't think it does any good. Too much clay where we're at. Ten years ago, I'd have probably told you different, but I just don't think, based on what I've seen, enough guys that do –

And I'm doing the air quotes, vertical tillage. Yeah. You know, that basically ain't doing any deep tillage now. I don't, I don't know that their yields are suffering, but I do think you got to have something somewhere in the mix to prevent stratification or break that cycle of stratification. And once again, I'm not saying you got to get a big John Deere disc ripper and rip it 20 inches deep, but. Well, I think here's part of the problem. So we have all this technology and we can hybrid track and we can, we can track all these things, right?

But most of it's like, well, Tony, did you like that? Yeah, I think that was the way to go. Well, did you test anything else in that field? Well, no, but I'm pretty sure it was better than the way I was doing it or the way I did the rest of my farms. Well, okay. I mean, was that your best crop? Well, yeah, that was my best field. Well, did it catch another? Well, it caught two more rains than the other one. Like, yeah. Or how scientific are our test results here on what we're doing? And I'm just as guilty. Like, I just told you in the shed, like, my goal this fall is to

do some fall tillage in variety of different ways, market, track it, note it, and then keep track of that for the following year to see for the 26 crop, did that make any difference or not?

Because otherwise, you're just out there burning fuel. And what kills us here is literally, you can have a 40-acre field with nine different soil types in it. That's not uncommon. Yeah, absolutely. And each one of them responds to rain differently. It's so variable. It can be black as coal on one end and look like red Alabama clay on the other, literally. Yeah. So you got to throw that into the equation. You got to throw that in the equation. And you can't really ask your neighbors.

Because those lion SOBs will tell you one thing, and the next thing you know, the next year, they're not doing that anymore. Oh, I thought that was the best thing you'd ever done. Well, I mean, it was, but we decided to go this direction. Well, okay, that just tells me what you told me last fall was kind of a crocker. Agreed. Shit, you know, it's like, okay. And how much of the high-speed disc world...

has come about because guys want to farm 10,000 acres. They don't have the help. Just think about it. If you took the average guy around here that farmed 6,000 acres and you had to go back to the average ripper when they got big around here was 20 or 23, whatever John Deere's folding one was at the time. But stop and think about it. If you had to rip...

Five, 6,000 acres in the fall with two or three of them or four or whatever. In that week and a half window that you get after harvest before it starts raining. So it's always easy to say, well, yeah, that worked really good. Well, I mean, yeah, it worked good, but did your yield suffer? I mean, so, you know, how much of that kind of got a light shined on it and got praised for the ease factor? There's something to that. And let's face it, if you save that deep chiseled pass, right?

Well, there's a 875 Ripper you didn't have to buy. There's a four-wheel drive you didn't put how many hours on. There's how many gallons of diesel fuel you didn't burn. So if your yield's two bushel less than me and I did all that, you won. Absolutely. Because it's not about yield. It's about return on investment. Maximum economic yield is what you're looking for. But there again, I don't know how many people are actually keeping track of that versus, well, I think this was better. Here's my other hang-up, and I run into this a lot.

farmers will tell you that they want to do everything the best agronomic way and the best way for the pocketbook, but they also want it to look a certain way. Agreed. So next thing you know, they're doing this, this, and this, because, well, that makes it look how they want it to look. Well, yeah, but you know that's wrong. Well, yeah, but it makes it look how I want it to look. Okay. And at some point in time, I don't know that we give, and I hate to go down this path at some level, but planning attachments and planner stuff has gotten a little bit better.

it's a lot bit better but so some of that you can do with a planter that you couldn't necessarily do with a shoe planter back in the day and so maybe you don't have to have it bug dust

perfect, you know, loose soil, et cetera, et cetera. You can get by with some other things. You got no-till coulters or clean sweeps or whatever your product is that you're. And just nowadays, I mean, you can get most any new planter in the ground. I don't care how hard it is. You can get in the ground. Yeah. So do you need all that stuff? I don't know. You know, and then you go over to, you know, John Q. Farmer's.

and, you know, it's him and his dad, and he's 65 and his dad's 85, and all they've got is a 490 disc and a Tiger Mate 2, and, well, they raise pretty good crops too. So, you know, they're not doing anything that special either, and I don't know. You know, it's where you're going to put your dollars, and you've got to have machinery that will get across what you've got to get across for your given operation.

So I don't know. I don't know that anybody's keeping track of that as close as they should be for as much shit as they're talking. I've always thought, and for the people that are in this line of work, I'm not trying to take anything away from you here because I know it is tough, but

I've always thought ag sales is almost pretty easy because it is so hard to pinpoint anything because you and I could both use the same product. It worked for you. It didn't work for me. Well, you caught two more rains. Well, I didn't. Well, should I try it next year? Cause it worked for him. And I mean, there were just 4,000 variables. No two years are the same, right? Like if you drove from here to Champaign three times a week and you took the Buick one week, you took one of your pickup trucks the next week, you took the old 78 the next week.

Three months from now, you can tell me that, well, the 78 doesn't do the best on gas on these trips. Like one day it was windy, but out of that, out of those two or three months, you're going to know you've got an average in there. Okay. The Buick got the best mileage doing that trip. Right. Right.

Because there were some variables there, but for the most part, they were consistent. Well, farming's never the same from year to year. Everybody talks, well, this is not a normal year. You tell me what a normal year is now. Yeah, agreed. Normal in the 80s was drought. We had a drought every year. Yeah. I don't want that normal. Yeah. That didn't work out so great for anybody. So now it does seem to jump around a bunch and so on and so forth. And I just don't know that guys are tracking all that well.

You know, we're all guilty of it. Oh yeah. And it could be as simple as you plant a cow by plant pioneer. This guy plants back, you know, I mean, maybe this number flop. I mean, maybe this number roots down. The other number doesn't like, right. So this tool has worked great on two weeks ahead of me. I mean, it's such a moving target that I'll never forget. A good friend of ours got married to good friends of ours got married and we, we were planting that day and we planted half that farm and we quit and went to the reception. Yeah.

And we came back the next day and finished that field. It was about 15 to 20 bushels an acre. Really? That one day. No kidding. I have no idea why. It didn't rain, nothing. That's why we're like, well, we'll plant through the wedding. We'll get cleaned up. We'll go to the reception. My whole family was invited. We were all there.

that was literally 15 it was about 15 bushel an acre as i recall i'm like that was a pretty expensive wedding to go absolutely i should have kept planting that day yeah like i should have should have got to the reception late yeah but who knew that that was gonna i don't know why you know i said it didn't rain that that night didn't rain the next day didn't rain for a week but there was 15 bushel in there yeah you know between 10 and 15 it's like well

Guess I should have kept going. Yeah, exactly. On the flip side, had I kept going, it would have been the other way. You know, it's like, well, I should have stopped, you know? Yep. Sure enough. So it's hard to judge all that stuff. It's, you know, people don't document that or keep track of it as well as they should have. Yeah. And a good example, and I'm not knocking the product at all. I'm not, I've never used it four or five years ago. Pivot bio around here. Everybody, you can't give that shit away around here. That's the one product that,

It baffles me because I didn't even cut my nitrogen. I put full rate nitrogen on, then used that, and it was lower. And I did side-by-side that, and it was lower than the stuff that I didn't put it on. Now, how does it lower the yield? Yeah. I mean, I had plenty of nitrogen there. And how can the next guy swear by it running on every acre? I don't know anybody swearing by it now. Yeah, exactly. Not a single soul. Like, yeah. The only guy that's swearing by it, that's the guy that's selling it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I never – that didn't pencil out so well for us. Thank goodness we didn't try it widespread. Yeah. But, yeah. I come close to doing it on the seed one year. Yeah. Ended up – I don't remember what the deal was. Ended up didn't do it, but sounds like I'm glad I didn't, but – Yeah. You didn't miss anything there. So much of that stuff's timing and whatnot, too, though. Like, it's been several years ago now, but we had a field –

dad's like i just can't take it anymore it's got weeds in it i know the beans are too tall i'm just gonna spray it i can't take it i know i shouldn't but i'm gonna spray it i'm like well you're going out there i got this stuff i want to try so i sent him with it he put it in with the chemical best beans we had that year by far and away blew everything else out of the water oh must have been that product right i think it was that product and next year bought a

And then it didn't rain after that. Didn't matter. Just let that money on fire and burned it. You're like, cause it timed out that year. You put that on a couple of days later, we got a rain. It was able to activate that, use it, grow on, knock it out. It was great.

The next year, took what little bit we made on that and just littered on fire. Yep. You know? 99% of the time I do fall anhydrous. That's just what I've always done. Just a full rate. I don't split shot. I don't come back. Don't do nothing. And for four or five years in there, people, oh, you got to side dress. Got to side dress. So every year I'd pick a farm and split it, you know, or whatever.

I never, ever seen side dress and pay for it. So, you know, I would put on anhydrous in the fall, cut the rate back and come back in and side dress. I never, ever seen it pay for itself, but the next guy just swears by it. I know. And maybe I'm doing it wrong. I don't know. I'm with you there too. I,

Fond hydro soil is my best stuff. Same. Corn's drier, yields better. Corn's drier, yields better. And we're too far south to be doing it. I won't disagree with that. Yep. And there was, you know, if you'd asked me 10, 15 years ago, I'd have told you a terrible plan. We tried it a little bit, hated it. Got a neighbor that just absolutely despised it, will not do it, and tried it one time, it was 40 bushel less. Will never do it again. And that's the experience that we had with it at that same year, apparently. Since then...

It's never worked out that way for me. So I always, I do put a check in for that every year on the stuff I find hydrous. If I, I always keep a little bit for spring cause I got a couple of farms that honestly, I just don't want the shanks in, in the fall. Cause I was always the same way. Had it. It's got some role to it. I don't want it to wash. I do it in the spring.

So I've always got a tank in there. I got to clean the bar out. So I'll go in on semi-fall and I'll make a pass or two to clean the bar out. So it's double in, right? It got 180 in the fall. It gets 180 in the spring. You can't tell where that extra 180 is in the spring. Can't find it. On the yield map, you will never find it. Nitrogen wasn't my limiting factor. So the fall is so much easier. It goes on so much nicer. Part of what I think screws the spring around here is

And this year is a prime example. We had that little window in March where it was pretty nice, pretty dry. Okay. But if you didn't get your nitrogen on then, now we're coming on, it's the middle of April. Yeah. So now here in three or four or five, 10 days, whatever it's going to be, guys are going to go three days sooner than they should to get the rest of their in on so that they can plant three days after that. Yep. Okay.

Well, now they're going to smear the shit out of it. They're going to have tank tracks in it, all this stuff. Pack the shit out of it. I mean, Hydra's was invented to make runways, right? Like it was invented to pack ground. Yep. That's going to be a shit show. They're going to do it anyway. And I would do it too if I was in that situation. Yeah.

And I think that's what kills spring anhydrous. But you never know if you're getting that March window. What do we get a March window to put anhydrous on? One out of every 10? Yeah. Maybe. Yeah, exactly. Maybe. I was glad we got it this year because I didn't put any fall ammonia on last year just because I didn't know which way I was going to go. Corn beans. I didn't know the markets were such a train wreck. Yeah. And luckily I got all mine on in that March window. So. Yeah.

I'm good to go. But yeah, that's a rare thing in these parts to get a big window like that. It doesn't happen very often. No. And it was still a tick heavy. It really needed one more day of sun. It did. Not really here at your house because it was pretty dry here.

But eat a little bit south of us where I farm. And you really needed one more day in places, but it's like, well, they're calling for rain. We'll go ahead and do it. And I'm sure glad I did now because it's going to be a wreck here. I went to equity today to pay a bill and asked him how they got along with their ammonia. I said, I assume you guys about got done. He said, I said, we probably got two thirds of it. He said, right here where we're at. He said, you can draw a horseshoe around us. You go 10 miles east, 10 miles south, 10 miles west.

It was just wet enough, they couldn't do much. So all them guys were sitting there with their ass hanging out in the breeze. Yeah. And now they're going to really be hurting. The other thing that always makes me nervous about anhydrous, and I realize we're a unique area, not everywhere in the world uses anhydrous, but we're literally 10 miles from two terminals. Yeah. Like, we could drive there and link this podcast, we could go see them both. I will use it until they quit making me use it. Absolutely. You know, but...

I know it just works out better. They don't have the logistics for it, but even being that close to the terminals, there's once in a while where you run short. Well, if you run short in the fall and you don't get it on, at least you got the spring. If it's spring and you're held up,

Waiting on tanks won't... Now you're not planting. Yeah. Or you're planting on side dressing, or you're doing 28 or 32 or pivot bio or whatever your other options. All those cost more than anhydrous. I'm going to use it till the... Yep. I'm going to use it forever as long as I can use it. That's what I always like about fall ammonia is if you don't get the early window like we had there in March, but just say you go all the way through and you get to the 10th of April and the weather changes, starts warming up, I'm going to plant. Everybody else is fucking around, working ground because...

I've always had better luck working ground ahead in the spring on anhydrous. It just seals better. It just dries it out a little better. I mean, you can go in on chisel ground or whatever and do it, but you're always seeing little poofs of smoke. And then you've got these clods, and then the wind came, and the sun came out, and now you can't beat those down with anything but a coltipacker, which is not agronomically great, and nobody has one anymore.

And you're putting an extra trip in there somewhere to try to beat the shit out. Like you're better off to work on it in advance. Usually. Yeah. Yep. And I will admit it was 2000 and maybe 19. One of them really wet years. I put an hydrous on one evening and planted the field less than 24 hours later and got by with it. I've done that too. I've been in the same field. I would not recommend. I wouldn't recommend it. We got lucky that year and it rained and it was fine, but I wouldn't recommend it. We've been in the same field. It was a late,

It was one of those deals we didn't start putting anhydrous on until May. Yeah, we didn't finish planting corn until June. And it was like, oh, shit, here we go. And it's like, well, we'll put it on a little bit of an angle with anhydrous and then plant, and hopefully it's okay. And we put it on deep, you know, to try to prevent it. But I love anhydrous. A lot of guys, oh, you know, they're scared to death of it. It's no different than anything else. Is it dangerous? Absolutely it is. Do you have to respect it? Sure you do.

You'll never breathe better than putting anhydrous on. Oh, absolutely. It's my favorite job on the farm. Same. I love putting on anhydrous. Clean you right out. Clean you right out. You breathe great. Like, you've got to respect it, and I want it to be breezy out. And nothing worse than putting anhydrous on on a still day. I want a light breeze to a gale force wind. Yeah. I don't care. I need some air moving. You plan ahead for that a little bit. You figure out how you're going to park your stuff, where you're going to hook up, so on and so forth. And there's some strategy to all of that.

I would handle a ton of acres fast. Like it, I love putting on anhydrous. I would handle anhydrous 10 times on Sunday versus half these chemicals. Doubting. You know what I mean? Absolutely. And I'm not going down the road that roundup causes cancer. That's not what I'm saying, but most of that stuff ain't very good on either breathing. Absolutely. It's not everything else. Yeah. Anhydrous doesn't scare me. I respect the shit out of it. Yeah. Same. And I'm pretty, I'm pretty safety conscious on some of that to the point that my dad used to make fun of me. He's like,

It's 85 degrees out. Why do you have a coat on? I'm like, well, so I don't get shit on my arms. Like if something goes, I had a special coat I used to wear for it. I've long since outgrown that. But I always try to wear something. You know, you wear the gloves, you wear the goggles. You do the shit, right? Like you do the things you're supposed to do on it. And you plan ahead with the breeze and so on and so forth. And you can still catch yourself in a pickle. You got to respect it. But it's the cheap source and or the cheapest source. It's not cheap, but the cheapest source.

I don't know. Like I said, it's one of my favorite jobs on the farm. Yeah, same. I love it. And there's so much strategy to diving that in a corner and getting it in the corner. Like you're going to hit it from two directions, but getting it in there, because you can't back any of that shit. So you're going to dive it in there, fold the wing, go around, spin around a circle, dive it into the corner again, because we don't have any square shit, you know? I don't know. I like anhydrous. Yep. Same. Yep. I don't know. Going back to tillage here, do you think this –

high-speed disc fad will come and go because you know you and i've seen anything from no-till drills to row crop heads to whatever the fads we've seen over the years and i and i had a guy tell me one time i'll never forget this and i was probably 20 years old and that was before any of this stuff ever come out but you know there was seemed like every other was something and people making tools and this and that and he said you know if you ever stop and watch he said eventually it always comes back to just the old-fashioned way of

turning dirt, working it down, and planting it. And I'm not saying, because I say, that was before any of this high-speed disc vertical till stuff, so I mean, he didn't even know what that was, and he's dead now. I think, you know, when chisel plows came out, the guys that are still moldboarding, look at these buffoons over here chiseling. What a waste of time. What a bunch of idiots, you know? And then 10 years from then or five years from then or whenever it was, they were doing it too. I think vertical tillage, I won't call it a fad,

It got popular. I think the definition got spread a little too broad. I think it needs some tweaking. Everybody thinks they have a vertical tillage tool. A disc with shallow cut blades is still a disc. You can call it whatever you want, but it's not vertical. I mean, McFarland sells theirs as a vertical tillage tool. It says disc right on the side. Real disc. Exactly. But we're selling it as vertical tillage. I thought it was a disc. It says disc, but you're telling me it's not. But whatever. I think...

But I think the trend is now for all the narrow fold shit. One, I don't like to do shit how Europeans do it because if they were good at it, my ancestors wouldn't have got on a wooden boat with no map and sailed across an ocean and get the fuck away from them. But that's my own personal opinion. No offense to Europeans, but we're in America. I don't have to do shit your way. Now, we do have some narrow roads here and there, whatever. We're blessed since we're west of Indiana where our stuff's a little bit wider than

And a little easier to get around on that. But a bunch of that stuff's just trendy, right? I got my new quad track. It's narrow or four track if I'm a deer guy, whatever we're calling them today, a challenger, whatever we got. So I want the tool to be the same width. Okay. So the trend is to have all the stuff like the Diggleman, the Kinsey Mocktail, the Salford, whatever. Everybody's got one, right? Oh, yeah. Everybody's got a tool that folds up like that. And that's cute. I'll be curious to see if that lasts forever or not. Yeah.

I think it's probably here to stay in some way, shape, or form for the simple fact farms are bigger. People want to go fast.

You'll cover lots of acres in a day. Your government's pushing it. Anything they can do to save fuel, save the soil, which makes no sense to me. John Deere and everybody else are coming out with 800-horsepower tractors, and the government and everybody else is pushing no-till. It's like, what the fuck are we – what do we need 800-horse tractors for? We had 800-horse tractors with Big Bud back in the day. Nope. Nope. Ridiculous. Can't have those. And then 30 years later, we're back to them now. I will say speed is addictive.

It is. So you could have a 20 foot tool and go eight mile an hour. I could have a 40 foot tool and go four mile an hour. In theory, let's just say I'm getting that we're getting the same amount done, but the guy going eight mile an hour is happier. Absolutely. Right. Like,

You know, you could take the long way to F and M. I could take the short way, but you drove twice as fast. We get there at the same time. You feel better about it because you drove faster, right? Like we're addicted to the speed. I'll be the first one to admit. I told my dad one day, I'm like, you know, if we got rid of these softwoods, I'm like, I don't think I could farm anymore. I'm like,

kind of used to going to eight to 12 mile an hour like i don't know that i'm going back to that's kind of like going from a 12 row cornet back to a six it's like i mean i'm still doing something i can get much done i don't know that i'm going back to going four mile an hour no matter what the width is like it you're still going four mile an hour like i like going fast now there's some beauty in being wide and slow like i won't argue that but i don't know i i think that stuff is probably here to stay i don't know that all of it's

The stuff folding that way makes sense to me at some level, but they haven't really figured out a great way to raise and lower it out of the ground either. So...

I don't know. It's mind-boggling to me that this shit will stay together. Yes. I mean, when you start putting that much iron in the ground and pulling it 9 and 10 miles, and we're fortunate here that it's flat, no rocks. But, I mean, you saw these guys on TikTok and everything else just digging these rocks the size of this table out of the ground. And that shit's bouncing over that. We are lucky. Like, I'll never forget, we were sitting around BSing at a tractor pull one time, and there was a guy talking about rocks in his field. And a buddy of mine is like, rocks in your field?

He's like, yeah, he's a pretty good-sized rock. She was like, who in the hell put him there? The guy's like, God. He's like, they've been there forever. Because he was from our area. Yeah, she's about 50 miles from here, but he...

If it rocks in his field, it's because somebody drove by and threw it out. Like, you know, they don't have rocks where he's at. I was just talking on the phone tonight to a guy from North Dakota, and he was asking about if we had rocks down here. I said, no. He's like, you don't have any? I said, literally, I said, I'll pick up one the size of a baseball every two or three years. One. We got one farm that has them fairly regular, but other than that. Yeah. But, like, I'm not doing anything where you're digging out with backhoes or rock pickers. Absolutely not, no. I mean, you could drive all day.

on every acre between me you and all the neighbors that join us you could drive all day every day for a week straight and i'll pick up a ranger load no not even close not even close no no this one farm did have a ton of wood and a ton of rocks in it and i really don't know why it had the rocks the wood i understand because it used to be woods sure and they shoved it off at some point the rocks i never did really figure out and i'll still run into one here and there but

There's not rock really around there. So I really don't know why they're there, but I suppose God put them there, but, uh,

But still, if I drove out there tomorrow, I wouldn't get a Ranger full, and that's if I worked hard and took a shovel with me. Yeah, and that's your rocky farm. That's my rocky farm. Yeah, that's the rockiest one I got by far. Like miles rockier than anything else I have. I mean, you'll back me up with this. When I say I'll pick up one the size of a baseball or softball every two or three years, and like this freak has like, oh, my God, stop and pick that up. The sulfur's got that rock basket on it. I've never filled it. Yeah. I mean, it would hold, I don't know.

10 pieces of riprap, I've never filled it in a year. Like, ever. Not even close. Like, if somebody comes back with a rocket, it's like, holy shit, where'd you find that at? Yeah, exactly. We're asking questions. Did you get next to an old well or something? Like, where somebody shoved the ditch out, like, they get some riprap that somebody put in for a water check and ended up in the field? No, no, it was out in the middle of the field. No kidding. It was out in the middle of the field. No kidding. Yeah. Yeah, it's just not a thing around here. But...

Yeah, I mean, that stuff is probably here to stay just from a speed standpoint and a getting stuff done standpoint. I wonder, and maybe we're there now, so everything else has doubled in speed, you know, tillage, planting. I wonder when harvesting, which it has doubled, I guess. You know, when we were kids, you run maybe three mile an hour with a six row, maybe. Now you're running six with a 12 row or a 16 and unloading on the go. So, I mean, it has...

But I wonder, will we ever have combines running 10 miles an hour? I don't know. We keep going wider, but we're pretty much maxed out on width now. Yeah. I don't think corn heads and beam platforms are getting any bigger. Like, there's what, a 62-foot draper now? I don't see them getting any bigger than that. Not here. For sure not here. You know, 16-row corn head, about as big as you're going to do around here. You could maybe go a little bigger in places. I only know of one 16-row corn head in the area. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, there's not very many.

So I assume now that combines have more power than the first space shuttle that went to the moon, allegedly, that they're going to go faster at some point. But now that combines are 7, 800, 900 horse, like I assume they're going to go faster. But you can only go so fast too. Yeah. Yeah, that's definitely one bottleneck there between grain carts, trucks, everything else. Yeah. Well, this combine's 9,000 bushel an hour. Okay. Well, your head will only take...

5,500 bushel an hour. So tell me again how this thing's 9,000. Like it, it doesn't work that way, but I did. I just wonder how tight this thing winds up though. I mean, when you just look at from the time you and I were in junior high,

I mean, everybody was mostly six-row planters back then, mostly. There wasn't very many eight-rows. No. A guy that had an eight-row was kind of a big deal. Mostly six, and you would catch a 12 every now and again. Every now and then. That was kind of a rarity. Yeah. And then, I mean, 16s come out of nowhere straight to 24s. Like, honestly, the whole Kinsey making them full deal or the deer guys putting them on a trailer thing or the IH guys pulling them however the hell they pulled them. Yeah.

down the road really wasn't a thing here. No, absolutely not. Because it was all six rows. Absolutely. Like, the biggest thing was, well, we went from six row wide to six row narrow. Well, now it's even easier. Yeah. You know, like, that really didn't ever really happen here for the most part. In fact, I'll bet the most of our way through school, and we graduated, Nick and I graduated high school in 1998, I'll bet it was pretty close to when we graduated high school before you even took a bean or a grain table off a combine to get it down the road.

A lot of that shit was 2015, 20-foot then. We didn't take a grain table off a combine until it would have been once we got that 25-foot head with the 2188, and that wasn't. Well, we bought that combine in 12. Okay. We bought that combine in 12 because it had a scored piston, and we bought it. That's why we bought it. A dealer buddy of mine is like, hey, got just what you need. And he was right, and he got me a good deal on it. We overhauled the motor that summer, the summer of 12.

And it needed completely rebuilt. We didn't really have a crop, so we didn't worry about it. It was a nice way to break the engine in. But even that 25, I took down the road most places. Yeah. We only took it off, well, probably twice. And we're still talking narrow roads. Yeah. Like we got 40-foot wide roads. Exactly. I mean... Yeah, you're exactly right. That wasn't a thing until not that long ago. Yeah. It's changed a bunch. Mm-hmm.

There wasn't, I don't remember much moldboard plowing going on when I was a kid. I mean, there was some, but it was more uncommon than it was common when we were like little kids to see somebody moldboard plowing here. Yeah. I mean, there was some, but not much. So we kind of missed that window. Yeah, there was one neighbor that did some of that, but they were about the only ones that I can remember plowing.

And you'd catch an outlier here or there. One guy might have plowed a farm just for whatever reason, but he wasn't plowing everything. He wasn't plowing everything. They're the only guys I can think of that plowed the majority of their acres. Oh, yeah. And that was just up until 10 years ago. Yeah. I can't think of anybody else that plowed before that. No. No, I can't either. But I remember seeing, you know. Nope.

And it is intriguing when you start talking about moldboard plowing, just because, you know, you and I didn't grow up around it and never done it. Seed companies still do it for diseases and weeds and that, or I assume they like didn't, didn't, uh, when you was a sulfur dealer, Bex was big on, you know, they still plow. I assume they still do. They'd bought two or three new sulfur plows, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's been so long ago on that. My great uncle had some ground he had in hay that he took out of hay when I was a little kid or,

He was, he was, he was retired, but he messed around bailing a little bit. And he finally decided I'm old enough. I'm not even jacking with that. Plow it under and farm it. Okay. And we had a old age plow of some fashion, but it's been setting so long. The hitch was froze up on it.

Podbean, your message amplified. Ready to share your message with the world? Start your podcast journey with Podbean. Podbean, the AI-powered all-in-one podcast platform. Thousands of businesses and enterprises trust Podbean to launch their podcasts. Use Podbean to record your podcast.

Use Podbean AI to optimize your podcast. Use Podbean AI to turn your blog into a podcast. Use Podbean to distribute your podcast everywhere. Launch your podcast on Podbean today. And broke right off the get-go because it was froze up. And we ended up having to borrow a plow. And that was the deal with the neighbor we borrowed it from. He's like, you can borrow it. Just put it for sale on your lot and sell it for me. That's all I ask. And that thing sat there for another month.

10 years seemed like. It probably wasn't that long, but it was probably at least five before anybody wanted it. And it was a nice plow. Low use. We painted it back up after we got done plowing with it. We literally plowed like 15 acres with it. I've plowed. I'm going to say not a ton of acres. Not anybody the generation...

above us if that's going the right direction anybody older than me i mean but i you know i've i've plowed some acres but if you just turn me in a loose in a field and said go plow this field i would have a fucking disaster as far as plowing shit back shut you know when you get when it meets in the middle i have no idea how to do that yeah same never plowed only plowing i've ever done is with the one bottom and that's in my garden yeah like i my grandpa used it for a ditcher

That's how he made his ditches. He had a one-bottom plow, and that's the one I've got now. I can tell you this much. From what I've seen of our neighbors who used to plow, you can fuck a field up in pretty short order if you don't know what you're doing with a plow. As far as plowing a shot and everything else. We have a good friend whose dad, when he was a kid, his dad sent him out to plow and assumed he knew how to do it.

He in fact did not. And he plowed back and forth and back and forth. Yeah. And he worked through the night. His dad worked through the night trying to disc it down before the neighbors saw it because it was not pretty. I remember dad telling the story that him and a local guy from here went up to Sullivan, Illinois to plow for custom plow for a guy. I don't know if his tractor went down or whatever, but the ground up there is considerably blacker than ours. And they got there and,

Somebody must have followed them up in a pickup truck or whatever. And they promptly drove back down here and got wheel weights and suitcase weights for the front end because so they dropped the plows and the front ends were in the air and they didn't have enough power and enough weight. And they come down and got a shitload of weights and,

tools turn the tractors up some more stack a bunch of weights on them shift down and start plowing but uh yeah i i do love watching that dirt roll yes it's my god you talk about working all day and getting nothing accomplished i mean all you do is spend all your time deadheading and uh just yeah if i was a multi-gazillionaire i'd probably have 40 acres and we would just plow it all out of it but yeah but

As far as being practical, I can see why everybody got away from it. Yeah, it wouldn't hurt to be talking me out of that. If I'm buying one, I want one that flips over. Yeah, that's the same. I would always love to run a rollover plow just to run back and forth. Those got high. I should have bought one of those when they weren't worth anything. And that is one item that has never, ever been in this area. I have never seen a rollover plow in person, ever. Nope. And even my uncle, who was a connoisseur of all that and grew up, you know, he's 10 years older than my dad. So plowing, he was in the prime of all the plowing stuff.

And they had fairly newer stuff. I asked him about that one time. Like, anybody around here have one of those? Like, no. He's like, we talked about it once and that that's kind of when we were getting out of it. I don't know that he'd ever seen one in person, at least in this area. Like, you know, in a brochure. Yeah. Was that the deal? Like them kind of come out and got popular when everybody was quitting plowing? Because before it always heard of all the things weren't made heavy enough. You'd tear them up, which I don't know by that. I mean, I don't buy that either. Yeah.

I think it was towards the end of plowing around here, and they just kind of too late to the game. I love watching them TikTok videos like in Europe. You know, the guys that got them little John Deere tractors. Yeah. Probably 100 horse front wheel sis just plowing the shit out of things, little three and four butters. But it's all auto steering, just back and forth. Back and forth, yeah. But half those videos I watch, I'm like, those guys are doing a shitty job plowing. They are. Like, I don't go to a lot of plow days, but I'll see videos from them. I got buddies that do it. Yeah.

And I think the same thing every time. Well, half those guys ought to be beat with a stick. I don't know shit about plowing, but I know they're doing it wrong. I don't know what to tell them to do it right, but I know they're doing it wrong. Well, I always look at that when I see them plow day videos. It's like, if I was ever going to host this, we're going to have a chisel plow days because I'm not knocking these guys, but you'll see these tractors go through the plows all cocked in the ground and twist. I mean, you can tell it anywhere remotely. They're not rolling it fully over. They're going so fast. They're rolling it over twice or once and a half. And it's standing back up like,

let's just admit we need an excuse to get out of the house and drink beer. So let's tell our wives we're having a plow day. We'd be better off to get a really good log chain. Let's have a pull-off. Like you guys just hook up and you guys pull back and forth or we just drive our tractors to this spot. We'll drink a bunch and somebody will Uber us home. This is our next million dollar idea. Why don't we get a bunch of them blue jet deep rivers that don't disturb the soil? Yeah.

If you want to pull the shit out of your tractor, it's fine, but we're not going to screw it up. Inline Ripper Challenge. Yeah, exactly. It was funny down there. First 2.1 of those. Yeah, exactly. They're at Renner's at Belleville, Illinois. They're 100 years of horsepower. They was back there. And, of course, they had so many tractors and plows that they plowed literally everything. So then they dissed it all down and plowed it again. I mean, God, it was a dirty mess out there. Yeah. Yeah, we need Inline Ripper days. There we go.

Well, I mean, things change with generations, you know. That's what my wife and I always talk like, where is our Branson going to be? Right. That's what we need to find out. So in the world of tractors and plow days, plow days are over. You know, our parents' generation, once they're done, we're not having plow days. How I can't plow. I'm the first guy to tell you. I don't know how to do it.

We're in line ripper days. I like it. You can have little two and three shankers on carts, you know, caddy carts for like M's and H's and shit. You know, there's going to be an asshole show up with a stagger. Yeah, exactly. He's going to do it real quick and be like, okay, it's all done. Yeah.

Yeah. Inline rip at the other direction, which I guess you could. Wouldn't hurt nothing. Yeah. Yeah. Inline ripper days. You heard it here first, folks. Yep. But yeah, the next Branson, I don't know where that'll be for our generation. Seems like a lot of people here go to Pigeon Forge, which I've never been to. Which it's, I mean, it's basically Branson. Yeah. I mean. Yeah. I've never been there. But.

We got to figure out where it's at. I want to buy some real estate there. Well, we don't need a place to retire though, Tony. I mean, we can, we can look for those places, but we don't need one. The generation before us never retired till they were old and gray or well past old and gray. We don't have to worry about it either. Yeah. Yep. What's, what is your retirement plan? Like, are you going to hang it up at 65? Are you just going to go till if I'm still around at that point in time, my goal, and I will never be able to pull it off. And my goal is,

My son wants to farm then, or my nephew, or my son and my nephew, whatever it is. I'm done. My birthday's in September. That's my last crop. I'll drive whatever you want me to drive. I'll do whatever I can do. As far as on paper, it's your baby from here on out. Yep. That's my goal. I'm not going to be able to pull it off. I don't think. I hope I can, but I'm done at that point. Yeah. Yeah, you're not wrong. I'll do whatever. If you don't do it then...

Then it just drags on, and we see the thousand scenarios that we've all seen where John Q. Farmer's 87 and his son's 67, and he's never been in charge. He has no decision-making ability because, well, dad still makes the final call on everything. And in a sense, he got skipped. I'm not going to do that. Absolutely. Because if he's got a boy, well, now he's taking orders from the old man and the boy. That's like, well, I'm just stuck in the middle. The boy doesn't want to come back because he's like, well, shit.

you're not in charge and you're 67. Yeah. Like, why am I coming back? I'm 47. I've got a good job. I'm 10 years from retirement from my government job or whatever it is, you know, pre-doge where you can just knock it out. And it's like, I don't know that I'm coming back for the last few years. So do you think...

And I guess I'm not getting personal. Like you don't have to answer this or go into any detail, but like, well, there'll be a point where you sat down with your son and be like, Hey, which direction are we going? I need to know. So I can make some, I think, I think every family needs to have those conversations. And my dad and I talked about this, that, and the other, he also knew he had two boys that both went to farms who wasn't super concerned about it. I have a daughter and a son.

And I don't know who she's going to end up with or who he's going to end up with or, or what he wants to do longterm. But I think when he gets closer to 18, we're going to have the conversation. Hey, is this something you're interested in? Cause if not, I'm going to make these decisions going forward. And if you change your mind later, we'll try to work it out, but it may be too late. If this is the way you want to go, then I'm going to, I'm going to start shoving. Absolutely. Cause you can't, you can't plan without knowing that stuff. Like,

Not, once again, knocking our parents' generation, but I don't think they were the best at planning on that. All the generations prior to them, those guys were dying to retire, right? In some ways, farming got easier. Not that they were making buku dollars, but the physical labor of it got easier. You could do it longer because your body wasn't as trashed. You got auto steer. The tractors are nicer. If every acre in the world had to be farmed right now with a 4010 and 806, you're going

Open station. Bunch of guys bowing out. You're not looking to farm 25,000 acres on that, right? Yeah. Your 500's gobs of plenty. Things have gotten nicer. Your drinks are still cold at the end of the day. Your lunch is, you know, good. You got a refrigerator in the combine. You're good. You can talk to your wife on the phone, your kids, whatever. You can see whatever. You can watch the Illini game. You can watch the Illini game. You can watch them play their sports on some sort of Facebook app, whatever it is. You know, so a lot of that has changed.

I want to get out then. I won't want to get out then, but I know now, 45-year-old Nick knows that I need to get out then to bring them into it if they're ever going to do it. And I want to have those conversations when they're making their decisions. I don't want them to be chasing after the proverbial carrot that they're never going to get to where I'm 85, God willing that I may get that long, which we've all seen me live. I'm not going to make it that long, and I'm fine with that.

I'm looking forward to hanging out with Jesus. I'm not, I'm not scared of death. So that doesn't bother me, but you want them to be able to plan accordingly as well. So my goal is to, to get out by then. Hey, I'll run whatever you want me to run, but all this shit's yours.

I'm going to work it out with your sister. I'm going to work it out with your mom. But on paper, whatever, this is your deal. And that's a different generation thing, too. And maybe I'm wrong on this. But it seemed like when we were kids and the old men getting out then, like when they got out, they got out. They're like, I'm not driving. I'm not doing nothing. I'm retired. I'm moving to town. See you. Where we hear this.

and I'm not going to say an excuse that I don't mean to make this sound harsh, but people, my dad's age or that generation, the baby boomers. Yeah. Well, what would I do if I retired? Well, you don't have to, you don't have to sit in the house. Like you can drive all the tractors you want, but just retire on paper where it's the kids. Yeah. It's their operation. Now it's their decisions. It's whatever.

But you just tell them up front, hey, I'm leaving at 4 o'clock today because I'm going wherever. Find a hobby. I got 10,000 things I'd like to do tomorrow. I can't do any of them because I've got to go to work. But if I didn't have to, there's a ton of shit I'd like to do. But I'm with you. I think conversations need to be had with kids.

I mean, it can affect their marriage life. If your boy, if you don't have the conversation and he's like, well, yeah, I kind of want to farm, then he meets a gal that's from 200 miles from where he's like, well, see ya, I'm getting married and we're moving down to where she's from. Well, now that blows up. But once he's in it, it's like, well...

This is the lady I want to marry, but I'm stuck here. So if she's not okay with that, then we can't go forward. It makes decisions for a lot of people. You need to have those conversations. They don't happen very often anymore, but I think they need to happen. And actually, I think that's one of the number one faults in farming nowadays is lack of communication as far as nobody tells anything until somebody dies.

And how many times we heard this, well, so-and-so wanted me to do this or they wanted me to have that or they wanted this, they wanted to go a certain way, but they didn't take the effort to tell anybody else. They didn't put it on paper that way. It was just generally known that Tony gets whatever has the opportunity to buy or whatever it is. Take your pick. Well, that's all well, good and great, but.

If it's not wrote down, it's not signed and inked and moving forward. Like my classic one is, and I hear this all the time in the shop. Well, you know, John Q. Farmer has farmed this ground for this couple for years. And then that guy dies, his wife owns it, and she wants us to have it too.

But there's just no way that they could transfer it before she dies. Well, then she dies. Whether they have any kids or not, it ends up being a cluster. They don't end up with it. It goes to auction, the estate, whatever. And while we can't swing it, we can't do this. And even though we did all this shit for them, and that's the way they wanted to go, but they didn't want it to go that way enough to actually make it happen. Agreed. At the end of the term on some of those people,

If they sell it, give it whatever, it doesn't make any difference in their life. A lot of those people, if you give them a million dollars tomorrow, cash, $100 bills, they're not doing anything different on Friday than they did today. Yeah, you're right. Because they're old, they can't do anything, they can't get out, so on and so forth. It doesn't change other than the control that they basically don't even know they have because they're old. And again, I'm not knocking old people. I'm just saying you...

You're not as sharp when you're older as you are when you're younger. That's a fact. That's a proven fact. We can see it a thousand times over. So make those decisions when you're young enough to make them. The reason that some families are in control of this country and that are uber wealthy is they made those choices and they set it all up to continue to grow and continue to expand because they planned the groundwork out early. Yeah. And if you look around here, most of the big farmers are

Maybe 30 years ago weren't the biggest farmers, but they've pre-planned all that. There's succession plans, and it keeps going. There's no, well, this sister wants her cut, and she's branching off, and there's none of that. It just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. You know, I've talked about this before, but what's right and what's fair are two drastically different things. Two drastically different things. So you have to make that choice, and in my opinion, do your son a favor and make that choice before they turn 18. Yeah.

And I'm not saying that I'm going to jip my daughter. I'm not saying I'm giving her everything. I'm not saying I'm giving my son everything. I'm going to reevaluate at that time on the way I think it's going to go based on the facts I have at that time. But what's right and what's fair are not the same thing. If you want the farm to continue and you want things to go on, I think you've got to lean on the side of what's right versus what's fair.

Fair is always even cut, right? And you and I have had this conversation. You're of the mindset, and correct me if I'm wrong, that all three of your kids get a third, a third, a third. Absolutely. Which, I guess, before we go any further, I got to say this because I don't own hundreds of acres or millions of... And neither do I. I don't necessarily think that I believe it should go that way. So, actually, this could be a good topic. And, like, we're not going to argue on this, but, like, let's throw out scenarios. So...

I look at it as I want it to be fair, even if the boy helps me, because I will pay him as we go. So at the end of the day, when I die, he can't say, well, they owe me this because no, I'm you keep track of your hours. I'm paying you all that stuff. So that way he can't have this sweat equity, this imaginary shit that everybody wants to talk about, you know, because maybe he did, maybe he didn't.

Do you want animosity between your kids? I do not. When you die, it's like, well, he got all this. So now I never talk to my brother again because he got $150,000 more than I did, which can go both ways too, though. On one hand, the kid who didn't get that should just let it roll off because of an inheritance. You didn't earn it. Nobody stole it from you. This is what people wanted.

but it does create a lot of animosity. Oh, absolutely. It creates animosity. So where do you get stuck in the middle of that? You know, it is such a fine line and so much different for every family. And that's where I think these conversations need to happen. I do too. While everybody's alive, everybody's alive and in good mental capacity and, and they can do what they need to do. And you can explain to the daughter, this is why I want this. Yeah. We're going to try to make this as fair as we can, but in order for this to happen, we have to do this. You know what? As males, we probably look at it.

Probably incorrectly. We hang a lot of, and I'm saying as a farming community, but even bigger than that, as a business community, we hang a lot on the last name. Like Wrigley Bubblegum might be ran by the Widows, whatever their last name was. We'll never know. It's still Wrigley.

Would they rather have a Wrigley in charge of it? Absolutely. And that's just one random name I just picked out. So we probably get hung up on that a little bit more than we maybe should, but I just think those conversations need to happen so you can plan accordingly and go forward on that. Let me ask you this. So like you say, what's right and what's fair ain't always the same. So let me throw this scenario at you. So your boy wants to farm.

Yep, dad, I'm going to farm. So he starts farming at 18. By the time he's about 22, 23, he starts going to the bar, starts raising hell. He's still farming, but you're kind of like, man, you know, he better get it together or

But the daughter, she's very capable. It's like, okay, I know if she gets this, it's not going anywhere. She can manage this. She can take care of it. So now what kind of a predicament are we in? Because he should get it, but yet I don't know if he can handle it. I think you have to judge it based on the scenario and the facts that you have at that time. Like, you know, at this point in time, like if I die tonight, it goes 50-50. Sure. The age could half, which is just a shitload of debt. And, uh,

Yeah. Yeah. Sorry about your luck. But assuming I work my way through that, if, if they both put in some time, okay, then it's 50, 50. If, if one puts in more time than the other, and I don't really care if it's my daughter or my son, well, then I'm going to try to adjust accordingly. You know, so my, let me back up here on my mom's side of the family. It always goes to the boys, boys get it all. And if everybody does that,

The girls don't have to worry about it because whoever they married got their cut. Exactly. Doesn't matter. Unfortunately, not everybody marries farmers now and it's not 1947. So that's tough to do now. I'm just going to try to base it on what I see at that time. And I will probably adjust my will accordingly, giving on some things there. Let's say my daughter marries the guy she's dating now, who is a great guy.

It really pains me to say that, but he's a good kid. And it's more than likely going to farm. And my son wants to get a tech job in San Francisco. God forbid. Excuse me. Well, then we've got to adjust accordingly for that. It's so tough to predict.

how I'm going to lay that out. If, if it looks like he's going to piss it away, then I'm not going to give it to him. So I'm going to throw one more scenario out. And like, this is all, this is just like we were talking earlier with the selling stuff in farming. There's 400 scenarios and you can never pinpoint it. So, so let's take you and your brother, for example, and let's just say your brother wants to farm and you don't. Yeah. Okay. So he puts in all this sweat equity. So yep, he's going to get to farm. So your dad dies. Okay. So this is the way it's going. Now mom has a stroke.

Well, brother here, he's busy farming, got kids, his wife, blah, blah, blah, can't deal with it. So now you got to take care of mom while she's having a stroke. So now where does this come into play? Because that's sweat equity too, but it's not. So does that still mean that if your mom and dad owned a thousand acres that he just gets it all, then you're just, I think at that point in time, you just default to 50, 50, right? You know, at that point in time, you default to, to equal and fair, but how many, how many,

scenarios have we seen around here over the years and just pick a random farmer sibling a whether it's oldest youngest middle child whatever sticks with the farm and he does whatever and takes less than he could make in the corporate world and then mom and dad get sick and then sibling b or b and c come back and they and they are rock stars for a

That month, that two months, that three months, whatever that is. And that's super valuable. And that is great for them and their parents. Does that equate out to the 13 years he put up with everyday bullshit of, hey, the batteries went dead in my door lock. Can you change those? Hey, dad's got a doctor's appointment three hours from here. Yeah. Hey, you know, we need.

You to call the septic guy or septics backed up, have it pumped. Does that equate to all that? I don't know. That's a family by family decision. I'm just saying all that shit should be factored in. Agreed. Like let's say in your scenario, for instance, that you say, hey, I'm going to give my son 60% and I'm going to divide the other 40%, 20% and 20% to my daughter because my son has done more on the physical, actual work.

This, that, and the other, you know, your, your two daughters take care of you when you're older or I'm planning on, I need you to take care of me and your mother when we're older. But Henry has done ABCD for a while. Is that right or wrong? That's that's scenario based. It could be, you know, he got a little bit more, but it wasn't over the top more.

but it was to compensate for all that time. That's so hard to judge. There's no mold for that. I just think those conversations need to happen where everybody's on the same page. I agree. I totally agree where everybody knows ahead of time to where there's no shock factor that, well, I'll just turn out. He gets $100,000 and I got $10,000. And the other scenario is here, and you and I have seen this a thousand times too. Okay, so Henry gets...

75 of it and your daughters get their 25 split up well then henry decides women are kind of a pain in the ass i'm never getting married but my two sisters both have boys that want to farm well shit what do we do now by giving it to them are we are we repositioning this over here what what are we doing or you know there's a thousand different scenarios in that in that scenario you know

my grandparents generation, there was, I think my grandpa had 11 siblings. My cousin's the last living one, you know, like that, that entire family has disappeared more or less going to here, you know, within the next 30 years, you know, so where do you, where do you, would you ever put, would you ever put stipulation? And let's just say that you and your wife own 2000 acres. And so,

The boy wants to farm, so he's going to get the land. We're going to try to compensate the daughter with cash. She might get 100 acres, but he's going to get the vast majority of it. And we're going to try to make up as good as we can with the daughter. She's moved to wherever, gone from here. Do you make stipulations, though, where when he inherits that, that he has to continue farming? Or does he just, nope, I put in sweat equity. I got 2,000 acres. I'm going to call the auctioneer tomorrow. We're going to cash in $10 million. You know, so...

So much of that has changed because back in our grandparents' generation, they offset all that with cash. Right. Because ground wasn't worth anything, and they'd saved because they grew, you know, within the Depression, whatever, so they never spent any money after that. So they could offset all that with cash. So if they had 500 acres, they had 500 acres for what they bought it for, which was $75 an acre. Yeah. They had that in cash when they died. So it was easy enough to offset that.

You're never offsetting that. Now, at current land prices, nobody has that kind of cash to offset that. If you did, you don't know the thousand acres, right? I agree. You're not stockpiling that kind of cash. So that's tough to do, too. Like I said, it goes so fast. You can't dictate his life. And you can't control stuff from the grave. Like, I'm not a Rockefeller. I'm not planning six generations out. Cripes, I'm barely lucky to make it through the day. So I'm just trying to plan for me, however it goes from there.

Might be a shit show for you. I can only do so much. I'm trying to position it as best as I think fit at the time. But hell, you never know. The generation after, I mean, let's say I give it all to my son. He has seven girls and my daughter doesn't have any kids. They're just all gone anyway. Agreed. Officially, right? Right.

So who the hell cares? It doesn't matter. Let's either one of them ask kids. This is the easiest thing that I've found, and this is going to sound mean, and if my kids are listening to this, which they won't be, I apologize. But here's the deal. I'm going to live my life. I'm going to do what I want. I'm going to spend what I want. And when I'm done, if there's $10 million left, split it three ways. And if there's nothing left, split that three ways. Yeah.

I can't plan everybody else's life and figure this and go here and what are we going to do? Because you and I don't have large estates. We don't own 4,000 acres and millions of dollars worth of machinery. Knowing what I know now, and it's not even right to say or fair, had you asked me this question prior to my dad getting sick, but towards the end of his life, I would have told you that knowing what I knew at that time,

I would have done things differently just because I wouldn't try. I can't say it now because I wouldn't trade any of that time with my dad, but knowing what I, what I know now that I should have known then, but didn't know then I would have done things differently. I would have lived for the moment for myself as selfish as that sounds now. And there again, I would not trade a second with my dad for that, but like you got to do your thing. If it happens to coincide with,

Whoever else is in your life, hey, that's great. You have to make some concessions here and there. But for the most part, for all you guys in high school that might be listening to this deal, you do your deal. If it works out on the backside for you with somebody else, great. But otherwise, don't count on anything on any of that. And I'm in no way, shape, or form knocking my parents or any of my family on that. I put a lot of things together between my personal situation and

I run into this every day at the shop. Every day at the shop, this is a conversation with somebody whose dad's getting sick or dad just died or mom just passed or we got to take care of this and we got to take care of that. And I've got three sisters and they moved to North Dakota and New Mexico and Arizona and they come home once a year for Christmas and now all of a sudden they want their cut of the farm and I can't afford to write that check. Like I run into that pretty regularly.

My thing is you do what you consider other people's feelings, but you don't base your entire life decisions off of what's good for them. You make damn sure that you and your family, you make your wife, your number one priority. You make your, let me rephrase that. You make God your number one priority. You make your wife, your number two priority, and you make your kids your number three priority. And if all that shit happens to line up and that works out with your family, that's great. If it doesn't,

you've made your own shit and you're good with God, your wife and your kids and the rest of that shit don't matter. No, you're right. Like that, that's my advice. You, you, you line it up like that. I think you'll be fine. Yeah. If you end up inheriting some shit from your parents, great. If you don't, that's fine too. And I in no way or shape or form knocking my parents or my, my, my brother in any way, shape or form, I'm just compiling data that I see that,

from a variety of situations because i can sit down right now and tell you well this guy did this and this guy did this and i can tell you all these different scenarios and they all played out different and they all come back to one common thing there's only one guy you got to answer to outside of jesus christ your savior and that's yourself in the mirror you make sure you're good with him make sure you're good with yourself the rest that shit will play out yeah i i agree i have seen so many people

myself included, get screwed over. Somebody's going to promise you the world. We've all done. We've all done. We've all done shit. And where do you draw the line on just being a good friend or a good neighbor on helping somebody out versus just being their bitch? There's a fine line there too. And the bad part is with farming. And I think it's the only occupation on the planet that,

that I don't know hardly anybody. And let's just take you and I, for example. Let's just, and I'm not even going to mention a name, but let's just pick Joe Blow Farmer five miles from anywhere where you and I both farm. And your phone rings one night and he says, man, I can't get my corn planted this year. Could you come plant it for me? The first light bulb that's going to go off in any farmer's head is I'm going to go do that because I might have a chance to pick that ground up. Absolutely. Now, when my dad owned his own construction business, being a carpenter, Joe Blow Carpenter calls,

Hey man, I can't get this house built. Could you come build it for me? Sorry. I got my own shit to do. I don't know what to tell you. And that's where people fall into that trap. I think in the farming world. Absolutely. They do. But it's the one, one thing like we talked in the shit earlier, uh,

I know 10 guys that want to farm that can't. I know 10 guys that are farming that don't want to. Absolutely. But they can't get together. Yep. Like there's 10 guys that got pigeonholed into it because that's what their family did, and they have no desire to be there, but that's what they're doing because that's what their family does. And I got 10 guys that would cut off their left nut to do it, can't do it. Like you can start a construction business tomorrow. You got a hammer, a nail, a two-by-four, you can build a house. You're good to go. You're not going to start farming out of the blue. I guess basically is what we're saying is –

don't ever go help anybody with the expectation of something coming back to you. If you want to help them out of the goodness of your heart that he just needs help, I will go help the guy, but it's no different than loaning your best friend five bucks. If he pays it back, fine. If he don't, there's no hard feelings. I don't care. Look, look at it exactly like that. Like,

If I got the money to spare, great. If I get it back, outstanding. If he pays me interest, even better. But if I never get it back, we're still buddies. I'm just not loading you money anymore. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I cannot name on my hands and feet both combined the amount of guys who just bent over backwards to help Joe Blow Farmer at 80 years old and ran their machinery in the ground to

helped him yep gonna take it over and the guy dies and the fucking ground goes to somebody 35 miles from here that was never even on the radar every single time every time like a buddy of mine told me if you can't make it off your friends how in the hell do you expect it to make it off your enemies exactly he wasn't wrong on that yeah like if your friends won't pay you to do work for them

For sure to hell, your enemies aren't going to pay you. And he wasn't wrong with that. Now, that being said, absolutely help your neighbor every chance you can. And I've had some great neighbors and some of them have taken great care of me. So I am an outlier in that situation at some level. But you have to make sure that you're not shortchanging your family for the sake of

of a hope and a prayer and a dream that probably ain't coming true. I have physically... And if you get shortchanged, hey, whatever. If you can endure it, just go on. Put your head up and know like, hey, I was in it right here. I tried to help. I did what I could. That's great. It didn't work out. Don't be bitter bird about it. Just move on. Don't bitch about it for the next 30 years.

Which maybe is what we're doing now. But anyway. Just go into it with no expectations of getting anything out of it. I have literally, and you've seen it too, I have watched guys wear out a line of machinery. Absolutely. Farming for a guy that they were going to take this 500 acres over and didn't get a single stitch of it. But like you said, if the situation was on the other foot, if I had a concrete truck or a construction crew,

You wouldn't have built three houses and poured four basements. No. For free. No. So don't feel like you have to just because farming is this community-ish. Yeah. Do it with caution. Go ahead and do it if you feel you need to, but do it with caution and some stipulations. Find out up front, not being mean here, but are you going to cover my fuel? Gladly help you, but you've got to base it on a situation. Like if a neighbor who's been like a grandparent to you,

turns up ill and he needs some help, you don't have to ask him, hey, you covered my fuel. You're just going to do it out of the goodness of your heart. He watched your dog while you were on vacation. He did this, that, and the other. You have to factor all this shit into the scenario. But if it's also like a random dude who had some opportunities to help you, never did, but needs help now, just know in advance a little bit, am I getting anything for this? And it might be as easy as, hey, I'm bringing my three hired men

to your farm, am I paying him or are you paying him? Yep. Because why am I paying three hired men to come to your farm? You might be down on your luck, your combine might have broke down, whatever. But why am I paying your green cart guy

And two truck drivers. And don't you think that's where it all comes back to lack of communication and farming? Nobody talks. Nobody talks. Nobody will talk about it because, well, I don't really want to put this guy on the spot. His combine just burnt down. I'm just going to bring my stuff over. And you know what? If I do this, he'll remember that when he wrenches ground out. But the guy never does. No, he will never do it. In their defense, it never crosses their mind. No. Never crosses their mind. It should, but it doesn't. You think it should. I think it should. The other 10 neighbors think it should.

The BTO down the road, he didn't think about it, neither the guy that owns it. Because that's never the way it goes. It always goes the exact wrong way. Every farmer that I have ever helped, worked for, done whatever, it's always been pay as you go. I cannot sit here right now...

and say that somebody owes me something for something that I did. It's always been me personally, but I don't run all over the county trying to help every guy who's getting a little bit sick either. No, I'm absolutely not. Yeah, you can wear some shit out just being that guy. And sometimes that works out. Sometimes it does not. Most of the time it does not. Most of the time it does not. You just want to be a little cautious on that.

And like I say, you don't have to be upfront on, well, am I getting a dime out of this or not? Nope. You do some shit out of the goodness of your heart. Not everything you do makes money. Right? Like sometimes you're just doing shit to help people because they need the help. You have the means to do it. And, and that's what you're doing. And I will admit right here where I immediately live. If you were to draw a three, four mile circle around my house, whatever it is,

I could call any one of them guys right now as we sit here and say, man, I'm in a bad way. I need this, this, or this. And three of them would be here. Absolutely. By the time I got the phone hung up. And I would be the same for them. But nobody expects it. Well, I'm already in his ground. That's nothing to do with anything. No. We're just friends and we help each other. Absolutely. And it's a good community that way. And we're very fortunate to be in that scenario. Because there's not a ton of stuff owned outside of here. I mean, there are some, but not everything.

Right. In general, we're in good shape there. But just know that you want to plan ahead a little bit for some of that. Don't bite off more volunteer work than you can chew. Yeah, I agree. I guess is where I'll leave it on that. I do think that we should start a Facebook page where you can post anonymously to, like, people that come to funeral homes and offer cash rent in the line. I mean, seriously, I think you should be able to post anonymously that –

Joe Blow here come to the funeral line and offered cash rent in the funeral line. I think that's to the point that we're at now. Yeah. That we should make this public. I mean, what are we doing? It does boggle the mind. I mean, and I have heard this firsthand from people that I trust. Like, it's not internet hearsay. Like, fact. It more or less happened to my mom at my dad's funeral with my brother and I standing next to her. Yeah. Who both farm. Yeah. Yeah.

like just in case, just, just covering their basis. I mean, all right, I guess. I mean, if that's where you're at, you know, at that point in time, you're, you're tied up with a few other emotions and I didn't physically hear it, kind of heard it, but kind of having another conversation at the same time. So I'll just move on. But,

Like, really? That's where we're at. All right. Okay. You know, that's fine. I'll remember that going forward. I just do not understand that mentality. I just, I never have and never will. But then it's like, well, on the flip side of that, and to play devil's advocate, not saying that isn't right in any way, shape, or form.

It's like, well, I mean, if you just asked, you know how I didn't even think of you, you know, so-and-so asked the funeral. So I shit, well, that was the first guy. So we went ahead and went with him to bullshit. I didn't know I had to, you know, I didn't got the five 80 back out there and dug the, dug the hole three days before he died. If I knew that's what it took, you know? Yeah. You're not wrong. You know, it, it, it goes both ways on that, but they're getting back to lack of communication or.

Well, goddamn, you know, John Q. Farmer would have never rented that ground to him. Well, he didn't tell his wife that. The part that cracks me up with farmers in general is with land machinery. I mean, maybe not so much grain at this current day and time, but for the most part.

You know, let's just say that you and your wife owned 500 acres and you're 65 years old. That's a substantial amount of money. 500 acres. Yeah. Plus some machinery, a little bit of grain. Maybe you got a house, blah, blah, blah. And let's just say it was all worth $8 million. Pick a number. And like nobody even bothers to plan, look at it, know nothing, know we're just going to die and it is what it is. But if you owned...

a chain of clothing stores and it was worth eight million dollars like we got we got to get this shit figured out i mean geez right that's like eight million dollar company you know that's a whole different animal when it comes to farming it's like 10 million dollars we're on a whim we're just sent to probate and however it falls it falls shit yeah we ain't got no kids and we'll see what happens yeah you're exactly right it is

Ag is such a unique market and such a shit show in so many directions. It's literally unreal. Oh, I can only imagine. It is a great lifestyle. I wouldn't trade it for anything. Like, I love farming. I love farming communities. If it wasn't...

But it is such a shit show from a business standpoint because there's so much emotion tied to it. Yeah. If it wasn't for incriminating people, it would be like if you could just record your daily telephone conversation, put them on TikTok. If it wasn't for incriminating people, that would be the best series on there. Yeah. I mean. Absolutely. The shit that people come up with is just unreal.

But, yeah, people do not bat an eye what a farm is worth, what the machinery is worth. No, we ain't going to cover nothing. No. Barely have a will that basically covers if I die, it goes to my wife. If they have a will at all. If they have one at all. And that's the end of it. It just baffles me. So do some estate planning. And I am in no way an estate planning expert. What I can tell you is you do need an estate plan and lay it out as best you can, given the circumstances that are present.

you know, available to you at the time, but for goodness sake, have it on paper. Yeah. At some level. I agree. I mean, it's otherwise it goes sideways fast. Yeah. I mean, it's no different. I could go upstairs right now and tell my son, you know, man, if something happens to me, I want you to have my 40, 10, my old 78 pickup name off a few things. But if I only tell him, yeah, my wife's like, well, he never said nothing to me about that.

Well, she's like, I'd like to, I'd like to remodel the kitchen. I'm selling the truck. Yeah. Well, she didn't know you told Henry that. Exactly. You know, it happens all the time. You know, I literally hear it every day from somewhere. And I, I don't cut a huge wide swath, but I do talk to a fair amount of people in a, in a week or whatever, you know, from a, from basically most of the Midwest and, and a little bit beyond, um,

And if you talk to them long enough, I mean, it's everywhere. But like you said, I can assure you Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos have an estate plan. Absolutely. They know how all that shit's going for the next 50 years. Meanwhile, a guy who proportionally has equal wealth, not to the same dollar amount, but given their swath in life, they've got $10 million, even though they thought they had 10 bucks. Yeah.

But they have enough ground to equal $10 million. Well, shit, I guess I'm just going to... One of us is going to die, the other one gets it, and then I guess we'll see where it goes from there. Yeah. You know, like... And it's funny. When you look at... I don't care if it's farm magazines, farm websites, Facebook posts, whatever. If you open any of them up and it says, Nick...

You got a dump year in list means you have to plant dicamba. That's where the money's at. People are just tripping over themselves in droves to do that. But literally, every one of them sites you go to talk about estate planning. I mean, that's half their content, estate planning. Everybody's like, nah, fuck it. No big deal. I'll trip over a dime to pick up a dime. I'm just as guilty. I got a copy of my will. I think I'll let you bring it up. A new one.

Because when I did my first one, my son wasn't born. I have a new one laying there that I think I need to approve, sign off on. He's named in the one, but I need to do a new one. It's laying there. I haven't done it. Like, could you just put it off? Because you can. It's just dumb. Get it done. Take care of it. Like, it'll be fine if something happens to me at this current time. But...

My main concern. That's why big corporations and big families end up being what they are. Because they have planned ahead for that. Absolutely. I just want, at the end of the day...

If I die, I want my wife, or if me and the wife both die, I want the kids. I want everybody to get along. That's my number one thing. Get along. And I think Nick would vouch for this. I'm not a greedy person. If you come up and you screw me out of $1,000, you're not going to see me all over Facebook. We're going to stay away from Nick McCormick or whatever. I just make a mental note. I don't deal with Nick McCormick anymore, but I'm not going to fight you. I'm not going to take you to court. It is what it is. I'm just not greedy in that way. But I just...

I want my kids to get along. I don't want, at the end of the day, once I'm dead and gone, I can't defend myself. As the daughters were like, well, my dad was a piece of shit. I mean, look what he left my brother, and he only left me a third of that, which, once again, it comes back to inheritance. It's a gift. You should always look at it as a gift. You could have got nothing. So be thankful for whatever you got, but I do want it to be fair. The flip side of that is, how many guys died, and they had X minus...

50% before sibling or their son or daughter, whoever helped them build it to X. Sure. I'm not saying that's, that's not your case in this scenario. That's not my case right now, but I've seen that a lot. Yeah. So one sibling helps them build it to $25 million. You know, when, when, when sibling a was 18, it was worth 2 million and they help them build it to 25. Yeah.

And then they die. Well, shit, we'd kind of like to have our $23 million. You got to buy us out. Well, shit, that $23 million doesn't exist without sibling A doing what he did to get it there. It's just like we talked earlier. How many grandpa whatever we're helping are still farming?

without auto steer or the, you know, and I'm not being mean. If you and your brother would have both walked out of your family business 20 years ago, your dad wouldn't have farmed the day he died. And I'm not being mean. He just wouldn't have, he didn't have the help. So wouldn't have the help. He wouldn't have, he would have never spent any money on technology on any of that stuff. Like, so,

Let me ask you this. Now, we're going to throw out one more scenario because we've got a thousand of these to go through. But wait, there's more. Yeah, exactly. So we got a $25 million estate. The land in the estate is worth $12.5 million, and I got $12.5 million cash. Okay. I got two girls and a boy. I owe sweat equity to the boy. Yep.

So does he get any of the cash, too, though? Because now if we split it equal, because he gets all the land but none of the cash, well, now he got paid for none of the sweat equity, right? Because it's all, or I should say one girl, because otherwise I guess you would have split the cash. Assuming it's 50-50. So I actually know a guy that bitches about that constantly within that exact scenario. Because now there's no sweat equity, right? Around here. Granted, you got the land, but. But the land appreciates.

If he hangs on, you have to work the land to make the money out of it. But the money could too if you invest it right. Absolutely could. Absolutely could. Or the boy could have made the choice to be like, piss off. I'm not helping you do shit. I'm going to get my half regardless. So my sister and I will just split the cash and the land. At the end, I've got cash to invest. I've got land to sell. We're good. At some point in time, that's on them.

They could do a shitty job investing it, or they could go to the gas station casinos and piss that $12.5 million away. Or they could take the land and farm it poorly and turn it into a farm sale. Or they could farm it really well and turn it into $24 million. You know actually what would make this a lot easier, and I think you and I have talked about this in the past, to even this up.

In the event that we own 900 acres, we have three kids, the boy wants to farm, he's getting 300, each girl gets 300, so there's the 900 acres. But if we could structure these tax laws, let's say, where if you'll sell it to a farmer or however you want to word this, where you can cut down the tax burden, but you got to be careful too, though, then, because then the big dogs who already own 20,000 acres...

They start playing funky games that, well, I'm getting ready to die, so I'll sell those to the boy. I don't know how you structure that to make it fair. I think food supply is a unique commodity, and the fact that controlling the food supply should be done by farmers, more or less. So I think active farmers should own the majority of the land. You're not wrong. Bill Gates, is he the largest landowner in the United States? He's close. I don't know if he is or not. If he's not the largest, he's close.

Has he ever even planted a garden? Probably not. Probably not. Not bagging Bill Gates, but my guess is he can't grow enough food tomorrow or through this spring to feed 45 people this fall, even though he owns hundreds of thousands of acres. I think investors and foreign companies and absentee landowners that are not even absentee landowners, landowners that are two to three generations removed from farming,

are dangerous. And the fact that they're far enough removed that it just becomes dollars and say it becomes no different than a stock. It's, it's Apple stock to them. It's, it's Microsoft stock to them. It's, it's whatever. And I think that's not a big deal other than it's connected to the food supply. And it's also a deal on farming is a very small percentage of the population. Let's face it. If you're not born into farming, you're,

You're not getting into farming. There's not a kid in the inner city anywhere in the United States right now that says, you know, I think I want to be a farmer. And it actively pursues it. Like if you don't grow up doing it, you're not doing it. Agreed. If you are in that scenario, you're probably not doing a great job of it because there's just so many lessons that you didn't learn growing up. It's going to be a hard road to hoe for you. Like you might pull it off, but you're going to be a damn sure an outlier. Like to get into that and be good at it.

I mean, shit, you and I were taught by some of the best for years, and we still have our days, right? Like, you still don't know. It's the day-to-day things that the textbook don't teach you. Absolutely. You just don't know. So I think as close as you can keep that to active, productive farming people, the better off you are. Where do you draw the line? Because you and I are, I mean, I'm going to call it libertarian, like,

not Democrat Republicans. Like, just leave me alone. Just, you know, I'm all about freedom. You do whatever. If you want to smoke meth, smoke meth. Don't put, don't bring it in my house. Yeah. Go put it on my kids. Other than that, I don't care what you do. Burn yourself down. I don't care. So where do you draw the line? Like when it comes to landowner rights. So do you think a person who is in Chicago that ain't been outside the city of Chicago for 45 years? He said shitty. Exactly. Cause it is. It is.

So if they own land down here, should they be able to put solar panels on that? They don't have to deal with it. They just get the check. But they own the land. You can't, as a landowner, you shouldn't be able to say, because I'm of the opinion, like, let's just use a hog building, for example, because I got fucked on that deal big time. You know that story, and we'll tell it someday.

But I really think if you're going to build a hog building, as long as you're willing to build it next to the house where you live in, it shouldn't matter to the neighbors across the road or whatever. Now, granted, you're the one making the money, but by God, I live here too. I got to smell it. It's not like I just went and bought 40 acres over here and put a hog building so I don't have to deal with any of the other bullshit that goes with it while you guys do.

If I'm willing to build one right here at my house, it shouldn't matter if there's a city across the road. Fuck all you guys. I own this land. It's mine. I'm smelling it too. Fuck you guys. So where does this come into play when it comes to solar, wind, whatever? Should you just be able to say, nope, you can't do it? Or is it, well, it's your land. If you want to do it, do it. That's such a double-edged sword. It is because I hate renewable energy. My thing is renewable energy is not renewable. No.

It's not a great deal. The oil didn't come from dinosaurs. No. God put it in the ground, and it renews. There's plenty of it. We're not going to run out of it. We're damn sure not running out of it in my lifetime. Subsidizing stupid windmills and solar panels is an epic crock of shit. Yep. It's all pay-to-play. That's a whole other deal. It's pay-to-play, and it's a whole bunch of shit. We're taking out a ton of productive farmland to do that, which is a joke. But back to your hog building thing. Where do you draw the line? Like, do I want to smell it? No. No.

Do I want you to have your freedoms? Yes. Do I want to have my freedoms? Yes. Does it devalue property near you? Yes. Am I selling my house? No. That's the only way you can cash out of that to get your value out of it. So if I am selling my house, well then if it's devalued, that's a, that's a bigger deal. Um, so then you throw the renewable quote unquote green energy in this shit, which is subsidized by tax dollars. I like bacon. I like electricity. Um,

I have to have hogs to have bacon. I don't have to have a windmill to have electricity. We've got plenty of nuclear. We've got plenty of coal. We've got plenty of LP. We've got plenty of natural gas. And you can tell me if you put two giant windmills right outside your front door across the road that that don't devalue your property. Absolutely, it does. I'll flat tell you, and I've told numerous people this.

If they put windmills near my house, I will no longer live here. My shit's for sale. I'm leaving. I don't know where I'm going, but a damn string going to be here. If they put windmills outside of my house, I won't live next to them. I'm not putting up with the sun flickering. I'm not putting up with the noise. I'm not putting up with any of that shit. I'm done. I'm gone. I'm moving. I don't know where I'm going, but it ain't going to be here. Yep.

The backside of that is, like I said, there's plenty of ways to make power. We have all those resources. They're in play. We've taken how many coal plants out of power. Take coal back to them. We're the Saudi Arabia of coal in Illinois. We're too goddamn dumb to use it. Agreed. Because all these libtards have some bullshit agenda. Shit can that.

If you're going to put up solar panels, I can kind of sort of get on board on that. Why in the hell would you put them on productive farmland? That's where I smell a rat. Everywhere in the United States. When it is productive farmland. There are plenty of shit box. I mean, Nevada basically has Las Vegas and then a desert. Exactly. That's all they got. New Mexico, a desert. Desert. Put them there. Sunshine's there every day. Put them there. It ain't hurting nobody.

And maybe they would argue that, and I would welcome that argument because maybe I just don't know. But I know for goddamn sure we grow more corn in Illinois than they do in New Mexico. I can tell you this much. I've drove all over them states, both of them. New Mexico, Nevada, top to bottom, side to side, been all over them. There's nothing there but fucking scrub brush and sand, dirt, whatever you want to call it. And the sun shines all the time. Absolutely. All the time. That looks like a pretty good place to put a solar panel. One would assume, yes. But...

If it wasn't for subsidies, none of that shit would exist. At the end of the day, when Doge digs into this long enough and far enough, we're going to find out that, well, we got some government money over here. And it's going to be your Rockefellers, your Gates, your Black Rocks. To pay this guy, to pay that guy that employed all these people, and that's how it'll come back, and then we got a kickback. That's how it's going to go. It hasn't all come to fruition yet, but that's where it's going. And the bad part is, because I've never been in this position,

Let's just say you own 300 acres right here by your house, and they come in and say, we're going to give you $2,000 per acre per year for the next 30 years. Are you dumb enough to take the money and, fuck it, I'll turn into good farm ground north of here, and you guys can have this shit? Or do you just dig in and say, nope, I don't believe in this, I'm not doing it? And that's a tough question until the contract is laid in front of you. I think some of that comes back to the problem of 1031 exchange.

I think 1031 exchange should have been acre per acre. Agreed. I don't think you should sell 20 acres off on the south side of Chicago and buy 2,000 acres in Champaign County or here or wherever. I don't think you should. You can buy 20, and then after that, you're paying the taxes. Because do you want to know how a guy like Bill Gates acquires, and I'm just drawing a number, 200,000 acres? They generally grease enough politicians' palms to say, you know what?

We're going to put an interstate right through here. So they sneak in eight years prior and buy this ground. Absolutely. I'll be damned. You know what? The interstate come through here, and they're going to do a 1031. You know why? FAM has two interstates running through it, no frontage roads.

Because the right guy paid the right politician back when the Eisenhower interstate system went through. Yep. And that's why it's set up the way it is. Exactly. So now. That is proof. I just got a 20 for one exchange here and a 20 for one exchange here and a hundred for one here. And that was long before 1031. Absolutely. That guy still cashed in. Now, in retrospect, he should have held out and did some things different, but those weren't supposed to cross there. No.

But he put the right pieces in play and it worked out and they come out pretty good on it. But... Yep, absolutely. What we've learned through all this doge shit is you can have all these NGOs, this, that, and the other. It all comes back to they're using our tax dollars to work against us. Yep. So...

It's a little fussy that way. Yeah, I think we need a fucking Illinois doge at this point in the fucking game. Absolutely we do. Jesus. Uncle JB ain't doing this too hot on that. We could use a doge in Illinois. Fucking idiot.

Couldn't find much worse. I do love how Trump dickbags him every chance he gets. Absolutely. Twitter, X, whatever you want to call it. That guy is a piece of shit. Yeah, he does seem to have that quality. Be prepared. He's going to run for president. I'm just confident. I think he is. That's what he's positioning himself for. Doing a great job of it. He's done such great things. I think that's why Trump's taking the jabs at him here and there. Not over the top, but just...

Floating the name here and there. Only way he's winning if there's a donut eating contest. Yeah, during COVID we're going to take health advice off a guy who weighs 7,000 fucking pounds. Are you serious? I mean, I'm fat, but he's obese. Yeah, I mean...

Unbelievable. Yes. Unreal. Yep. Well, I tell you what, though. We have actually kept this podcast mostly farming. We have. Mostly farming. In our lifetime. Like, we didn't go way down the rabbit holes. We didn't really go around the world like usual, which is kind of interesting. Rare for us. It actually is. We'll try to do better next time. Yeah. Yeah, we'll see if we can get back on track here of at least making one every week.

If it keeps raining, we'll try to get another one in before spring planting. Yeah, give people something to listen to on the plant dratter. Not making any promises. Yeah, but just a general suggestion. We'll try to. Exactly. We might even go over and invade the Unfiltered Farm Wives podcast and shoot some for them. Yes, absolutely. Just to keep that one going. Yeah. It essentially went the way of the dodo. Yeah.

Absolutely. We haven't heard much or seen much. Maybe does root them out and there's like no funding left for them. Yeah, it could be. Unfiltered farm. Wombat done funding them. Exactly. That could be the case. Yeah, that's exactly right. But what a deal. We've covered...

A lot of topics. Yeah, we have. So talk to your family and kids and parents and grandparents. Work it all out in advance before it becomes a thing, before somebody's on their deathbed, etc. Well, great granddad wanted me to have this 916th wrench. Work that out in advance.

Communication is the key. As people that own the shit that you want certain people to have, go ahead and give it to them now. You don't need that 916th wrench. Give it to them now so they have it now so it's not a thing later. Yep. Just get it over with and move on. Yep. We're just trying to make your life simpler. Absolutely. Like, just talk about it, work it out.

Make it happen. Don't be afraid to ask questions. If they get pissed about it, well, then you kind of know where they stood. Then if they got pissed. Yeah. There's a good chance they're not using any of that shit. So go ahead and move it on to the people that you want to have it as you see fit so that some court appointed attorney doesn't deviate out later. Absolutely. Yep. I don't know how far we got into this one getting off on the timer here, but.

I think it's been a pretty good podcast. It's been good. It wasn't no 30-minute deal there. No, we're good. We've kind of tried to give you guys what you wanted. Yeah. Should be very little editing in this, except for the piss breaks. Got to smash them together so you never even knew we left. Yeah. Talk to your people. Yeah. All good. What did it say? Like April 8th or something thereabouts. I think it's the 9th. Yeah.

We'll see. Maybe this weekend we can get you back in here. Yeah, we'll try to knock some more out. Yeah. We'll try to help you guys out. Yeah, it's too wet to farm. Maybe we can get in here like Saturday and just start about noon Saturday. Marathon podcast day. Yeah. We were just talking. We're going to do a marathon deal where we're going to do like a six-hour podcast so you can make it all the way through. We're going to do one solid podcast.

six-hour episode. Look, some clues to the middle that get you to one of those books. Turn to page 78 if you want us to turn left. 98 if you want us to turn right. Yeah, exactly. It's going to be crafty. Yep, that's exactly right. Alright, thanks for tuning in, guys. We will see you next time.