#519： How to Start Your Own Farm
Episode Stats
Summary
Forrest Pritchard is a farmer and the co-author of the book, Start Your Own Farm: The Authoritative Guide to Becoming a Sustainable 21st Century Farmer. In this episode, we discuss the state of the farming profession today and the social and economic forces that have made it harder and harder to pursue.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Have you ever been sitting at your office desk and found yourself daydreaming about becoming
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a farmer? Well, my guest today has written a practical, all-encompassing handbook to
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help you turn that dream into reality. His name is Forrest Pritchard. He's a farmer and
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the co-author of the book, Start Your Own Farm, The Authoritative Guide to Becoming a Sustainable
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21st Century Farmer. We begin our conversation discussing the state of the farming profession
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today and the social and economic forces that have made it harder and harder to pursue.
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Despite the headwinds facing would-be farmers, Forrest makes the case for why farming can still
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be a fulfilling and financially sustainable profession. He then delves into the nitty-gritty
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of starting and running a farm, including startup costs, land acquisition, deciding on what
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to farm, creating multiple streams of revenue, pricing product, and figuring out where to
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sell your goods. We then discuss the mental and emotional toll of farming and how to manage
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burnout. If you ever dreamed about becoming a farmer, this episode will provide a lot of
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useful information. Even if you don't want to become a farmer, you'll find this to be
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a surprisingly interesting look at a lesser-known lifestyle and gain insights that are applicable
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to any business and to life in general. After the show's over, check out our show notes
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at aom.is slash startyourfarm. Forrest joins me now via clearcast.io.
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Here we go. Forrest Pritchard, welcome back to the show.
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Thanks, Brett. It's always the greatest honor being invited a second time, I think.
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Well, yeah, we had you on about six years ago to talk about your experience of becoming
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a farmer. Now you've got a new book out called Start Your Farm, The Authoritative Guide to
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Becoming a Sustainable 21st Century Farmer. This is basically a how-to guide for other people
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who have had that itch to become a farmer. This is how you do it. Let's talk about the
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state of farming as a profession today. Has it changed in the six years since you were
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last on the show, or is it about the same? Well, I think it's changed in ways that consumers,
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which is all of us, you, me, and everybody that's listening, because we all eat three times
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a day, hopefully, can identify in kind of an unexpected way. I don't think agriculture itself
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has changed nearly so much as consumers being more conscious, whether intentionally or
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unintentionally, about where their food comes from. And to wit, yesterday, Walmart announced
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a major headline sourcing cattle for 500 different Walmart locations from a network of co-op farmers
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down in Texas. So their customers, who are interested in knowing more precisely where their food comes
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from, can have a direct source of putting a face to that food. So a college roommate of mine 20 years
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ago kind of heard what we were doing, and he kind of got a faraway look. He's an MBA guy, and he said,
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look, Forrest, if what you're saying about organic and sustainable food is half as good as it sounds to
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me, and he said, and it sounds very good, eventually the big boys, quote-unquote, are going to want to get
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into it. And it's taken two decades, but here they are. Well, so there is an uptick in interest in
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independent farming. But as you talk about in the beginning of the book, farming as a profession,
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like getting into it, you know, it's been declining for the past 100 years. And I think it's now,
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like, what is it, like, 2% of the population are farmers? Is that correct? Yeah, a little bit less
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than that, but not to split hairs. Right. I mean, a lot of that is just due to mechanization,
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correct? Yeah, well, it's due to a lot of things. I think mechanization is certainly a part of that.
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You know, post-industrial revolution, once that really hit its stride, you know, let's just throw
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a number out there, say post-1920, things really started to decline. We're talking industrialization
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on a, you know, multi-decade level and kind of the advent of improved seed varieties and things of
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that nature. But I think that, you know, there was an intersection that eventually led to
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specifically the decline of the classic American farm, which is that one we kind of imagine our
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grandmother and granddad farming or aunt and uncle in some recent distant past, which is the midsize
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farm. It's the one with the dairy cows and some pigs and chickens, which isn't completely extinct,
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but it's largely mythological at this point. And there's a whole number of reasons we could
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devote a full hour, you know, drilling into the economics of all that. But for the sake of this
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discussion, we've got, you know, kind of mega farms on one end and smaller economically sustainable farms
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on the other. And, you know, kind of the missing link is that classic midsize American farm.
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So not only are the number of farmers going down, because we need fewer farmers, it's possible to
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get the food we need with fewer farmers next to these giant agribusinesses. There's that aspect,
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but there's also, it's hard to become a farmer too, because like there's less land. I mean, you know,
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you go 150 years ago, 100, you know, like the country was given away land even then.
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That's right. And I should back up just a second and put an asterisk next to, you know, enough
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mechanization to grow our food. It's to grow a certain kind of food. And, you know, from a large scale
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agricultural standpoint, we're talking farms in excess of 1,000 to 2,000 acres and up into the
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tens of thousands of acres. We're largely talking about corn, soybeans, wheat, and confinement
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livestock systems, you know, confinement chicken, things of that nature versus a lot of times what
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we identify as food is, you know, our salads and our other items on the menu that aren't called,
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you know, chicken sandwiches. So there's just this big disparity between mechanization and what has to
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be more intentionally hand grown. But yeah, I mean, to your, to your second point, you're out in
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Oklahoma. It wasn't more than 150 years ago that the Homestead Act enabled folks to, you know,
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literally go out there with their sooner wagons and do these land rushes and get a hundred plus
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acres up to 300 acres. As recently as I think the late sixties, early seventies, one could homestead in
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Alaska. So the government was giving away this land. If you could demonstrate that you were
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quote unquote, improving the land that meant growing a crop and, and putting, putting a house
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on the land. So there was this free land. There was all the way back to the American revolution
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when we didn't have, you know, an economy, so to speak, a soldiers were given free land
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as compensation for fighting the American revolution. And this land has been handed down
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to people to a certain degree, people like myself. I didn't purchase my farm. It was handed down to my
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grandfather. It wasn't originally purchased, but I didn't go out and purchase it. So there's,
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you know, there's hundreds of thousands of folks out there that either were given the land in one
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way or another, which makes it really challenging to create a level, level playing field when it comes
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to business. And we'll get into the land topic of what you can do to overcome that issue. If that's
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something you want to do, but let's say, despite all these headwinds that are going against farming as
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a profession, you've got, you know, economic incentives, thanks to subsidies where, you know,
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corn, soybeans, wheat, all that stuff. That's, there's incentive to grow that stuff. Right. There's,
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it's fewer, we need fewer farmers to produce that sort of thing. Correct. There's less land available.
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And also farming is just really, it's expensive and hard to do despite all that. Yeah. Why should
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someone decide to become a farmer? Well, you've listed all the very pragmatic, sensible,
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logical reasons not to do it. And then, you know, this is something we immediately tackle
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in, in chapter one of the book. We don't beat around the bush with asking the question,
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why be a farmer? Which is followed by chapter two is, do you have what it takes? These are
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very introspective questions. So, so why do you do anything? You know, why did you start,
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you know, the art, art of manliness brand? Presumably you had a passion for it. You had something
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that transcended just dollars and cents to saying, this is something you want to devote
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yourself to. It means something to you. And farming fits all those categories. I believe
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for many of us, you know, what's not to like about growing food. What's not to like about
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healing the land. What's not to like about having a family, you know, on a piece of property or where
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kids are able to, you know, free range and come home to the ring of a dinner bell. It sounds a little
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dreamy, but it's also very realistic and attainable when one puts their mind to it. It's one of those
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questions, you know, you have to ask, how can you justify or do anything that isn't just getting on
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the hamster wheel and, you know, and getting in the, uh, getting in the car every morning and getting
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into the commute. A lot of people wait their whole lives to, to some, you know, fictional retirement
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that never really fulfills itself either. So you start farming just like you do any passion. You just
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start. Well, I'm curious. So you've been, you've been working with, you know, sort of people who
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are just getting started with farming. Yeah. Who are these people that are doing it? Are they people
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who have had like a family history of farming or it's like, these are, you know, just sort of city
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dwellers and they, they went out for a vacation to Vermont and they decide, Oh, this looks really nice.
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I want to become a farmer. Yeah. It's, it's a terrific question, but it's, it's not an easy one to
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answer. So I think there's burgeoning interest that's pretty widespread. I'm sure your listeners
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will be able to kind of identify themselves through this. As alluded to earlier, there's
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the dreamers of the worthy dream. You think to yourself, well, maybe I'm not satisfied with
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the job I currently have. What could I do that would provide more meaning to my life? Farming
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certainly fits that bill. You have young people and make no mistake that farming requires energy
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and enthusiasm and physicality. And you get these 22 year olds who have just graduated with a BA,
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you know, from, from whatever college and get to looking around and saying, geez,
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is this what I want to participate in? Maybe I want to do something to get my hands in the soil
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after, after 18 years of being under fluorescent lights. I mean, I don't want to sign up for that
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anymore. And then you've got folks that may be like, like me inherited land and get intimidated by
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the thought of, you know, $500,000 combines or thousands of acres of monoculture, corn and
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soybeans and say, look, maybe I want to pivot into something where I can be more of a participant in
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my community. Maybe I want to be able to get an authentic paycheck for my food instead of what's
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dictated by the Chicago mercantile board of exchange, you know, things like that. So I think
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there's, there's a whole different bunch of angles that folks can be taken to kind of arrive at a
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similar destination. So you mentioned in the book, you start off talking about like just the
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practicalities and you, it's a very, it's like a rude awakening, right? You guys lay out your
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coauthor and you lay out like, man, it's tough. You're going to, you're going to, you might lose
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money. There's gonna be years that you're just like, man, I don't know if I can do this. But then
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you talk about like, there's certain mindsets and skills you kind of have to have going into being
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a farmer. So you can prepare for that. So what are some of those, like the mindsets? And I don't know,
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they're like, I wouldn't say like specific, like hard skills, like how to till and things like
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that. Cause you can learn that, but like this sort of softer skills that you need in order to
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make a go at farming. Yeah. Well, we were chatting briefly before we went on air about how this is
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kind of a sneaky business book and a farming is a business. I think it's a wonderful kind of like
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a primer for an MBA. I think you could get a lot of transfer credits by trying to operate a farm
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for a year and then enter any MBA program in the country. So first and foremost, we need to think
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about farming from a profitability margins and, and all those wonderful didactic terms that we get
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before our eyes glaze over. But pursuing that passion, we have to think some really practical
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considerations. Are we physically fit for this? Can't, are we willing to face seven day a week work?
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Are we too introverted to promote our products? Are we intellectually curious enough to do the hard
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work of, of understanding all the science that goes into successful agricultural production?
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And, you know, last but not least, are we willing to kind of put all those things together and risk
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emotional and, and, and mental burnout? You know, are we able to pace ourselves and,
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and, and be our own best ally in taking care of ourselves? Something we could all probably improve
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on. No, for sure. And when you work with young farmers, what's like the most common erroneous
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assumption you see them have that makes farming a lot harder than it needs to be when they're first
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starting out? Well, that's a terrific question. And, you know, we've all probably heard some
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iteration of do what you love and the money will follow. I think that's, that's certainly been the case
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for me, but it's, it works a lot better after 10 years. You know, once you've got all the economic
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framework, the, the customers and the hard, the hard business of failure, the hard business of,
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of, of struggling through failure. So I think it is wise to pursue farming from a passion and a dream,
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a standpoint, but to go in as, as my co-writer, Ellen says, with, with eyes wide open to this,
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because the money will eventually follow, but it does, it just, any business takes so long. I mean,
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the average business takes five years of running at a loss and with farming that can just be, you
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know, terrifically debilitating on top of the physicality, the dependence on the weather,
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the competition of dealing with corn. That's, that's $3 a bushel, the same price it's been since
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1975 for Pete's sake price of a pizza, which is 599 delivered from Domino's. I can put in my old VHS tapes
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from, you know, 1995 and see the same pizzas from 25, 30 years ago at this point.
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So there's just, there's just terrific headwinds to success. And that's the most important thing to
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be aware of. It's not, it's not insurmountable, but one needs to be aware of it.
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Yeah. I think that's one of the hard things with particularly younger people who were getting
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into farming for the first time and never really had like, you know, grandparents or aunts
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and uncles who were on a farm. Like when, when I was reading this book and I, when I've read,
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you know, talked to you previously, one of the things about farming is that the time scale you
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have to think on is, you know, years, two years, maybe 10 years. Cause sometimes it might, that
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takes that long for a field to get ready or a cow to get ready for slaughter. And we're so used to
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today, if you haven't any experience with that is like, well, it's like the quarter, like what can I
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get done in a quarter? Like, or next week. And so being able to expand your timeframe or how you
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think about time, I imagine is a, is a, is a shift that can be really hard to make for a lot of
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Yeah. I'd agree with that wholeheartedly. You know, I don't want to ignore the fact that we
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have huge assets that didn't exist previously too. I mean, our ability to brand ourselves,
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to share our story on social media, you know, Instagram and, and, and websites and Twitter and all
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that stuff is extraordinary. And the ability for us to provide transparency and authenticity
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on one end and then consumer, as you know, as I allude to, to start the conversation off,
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Walmart is, is finally got on board with this. And, you know, the former CEO of what is it that
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home delivery service blue apron, right? Right. He's now the biggest fan of free range chicken
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and they're going to, you know, quote unquote, revolutionize the free range chicken business.
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So all these, you know, if Silicon Valley on one end and, and Arkansas from the point of Walmart is
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getting in into this on the other, that's a huge corporate asset to a new farmer because that's just
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driving consumer awareness. So there's, it's not all headwinds. There are some, some remarkable
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tailwinds as well. Again, as long as we go in here with the knowledge that some things from a
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biological standpoint, such as the restoration of soil, you know, just physically it's, it's seven
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to 10 years. It's a mandatory thing. There's only so much of a rush job you can do and rush jobs
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generally get us into trouble. All right. So let's say someone's listening and they decide they want
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to, they want to go in on farming. The next decision you have to make is like, what kind of farming are
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you going to do? Right. So how do you, how do you make that decision? Cause like you mentioned
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really, cause like the stereotypical farm that we think of when it's like aunt Bess and uncle Joe
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or whatever. Oh, it was like, yeah, it was a dairy farm. There was corn, there was lettuce, there was,
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you know, chickens, multi things. But it seems like in the book, you said that's pretty hard to pull
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off, especially when you're starting off. Yeah. Well, I mean, think about it, Brett. I mean,
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how many things can you be an expert at? Yeah. Not many. Are you going to be an expert accountant
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and a plumber and a car mechanic? You know, probably not. Right. I mean, how many,
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we live in a time of special specialization and, you know, I kind of joke at farmer's market,
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people often say, well, you raise cattle and pigs and sheep and chickens. Do you also have a dairy
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and you, you know, have a garden and raise fruits and have horses? And I say, of course I do. I'm also
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a cowboy astronaut and I drive a mechanical unicorn to work. You know what I mean? How many,
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how many ways can we spread ourselves thin? So, so knowing that, and I think there's wisdom
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in, in kind of taking a big step back and saying, look, can I grow blueberries and,
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and, and goats at the same time? Maybe, but to fool ourselves into thinking that there's not an
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infinity of information out there on both of those subjects is, is truly delusional. So what can we do
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to circumvent that? We do apprenticeships. We go to the source of people who are experts and we politely
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ask for their knowledge, right? So we do that by being an intern or apprentice and there's no age
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barrier to any of this stuff. If, if you're 40 years old and you're saying, I'm not going to be
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an apprentice on a sustainable vegetable farm, then your ego is much too far in the way to become a
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farmer. So you need to work on that first. And then once you're able to realize that there's this,
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just a huge ocean of, of very useful experience out there, then we can use the goodwill of other
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people to leverage that to our benefit, right? And this is how, this isn't romantic or, you know,
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new age thinking. This is how we got forward as a civilization for, for millennia. You had
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apprentices, uh, apprentice to masters and you had apprentices to the apprentices and it's a succession
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of knowledge. And as much as I like to jump on YouTube and watch a five minute video and,
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and feel like I, I now know how to grow hops. For example, it, life just doesn't work that way.
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There's too many variables to it. And that's, that's always going to be a human,
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a human component where the master needs to teach, teach the student.
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So you can, uh, yeah. Sync in with somebody to learn this stuff. You don't have to start off from
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scratch. You don't want to overextend yourself. That's like any business. I mean, there's a lot of
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business. If you're a small business owner and they're listening to that, it's like, well, of course I
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wouldn't like try to do, you know, five different things in my business that would just lead to
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failure. The same applies to a farm. So you can't, you have to pick one thing that you're going to do
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really well at, but here's the question. Is it going to say like you decide blueberries are your
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thing? Like, is it always going to be blueberries or are you going to have to change sometime?
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Well, you know, nature hates a vacuum as much as like, you know, the human spirit. So,
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you know, if I was a new farmer starting out, I would, and we've got a whole chapter devoted to
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this. It's called matching the land to its suited use, right? So you've identified yourself as a
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farmer. You've got the passion, you've got the spirit, you've got the physicality. Next, we need
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to say, Hey, I'm in Temecula, California. This is ideally suited for citrus, probably not suited for,
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you know, growing cattle, for example, or perhaps maybe that's not the best example, but you get my
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point. It's, it's air and it's dry and it's, it's a high elevation. I'm in upstate Wisconsin.
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Maybe it's not best suited for citrus and vice versa. So we, we take a big look at this and then we have to
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say, well, what's our market? Is the market saturated with blueberries? Is there an opportunity
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for, you know, goat cheese? Is there enough on the opposite end of the spectrum? Are, you know,
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federal subsidies so compelling that I should be growing, you know, a thousand acres of wheat this
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year? So there's, there's all these various metrics that combine to overlap into a Venn diagram,
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you know, where you find your sweet spot in the center. And so you start out with blueberries,
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for example, build your expertise with that. And then of course you're going to expand. If,
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if you're selling blueberries, people are going to want to know, well, where are the raspberries?
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You know, so you expand into raspberries and if you're into raspberries, people are going to say,
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well, where are the peaches? You know, so maybe you dip your toe into these different areas,
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but probably don't, you don't try to start out in the first five years
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of becoming an expert on, uh, on brambles and bush fruits and also try to be raising,
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you know, aquaculture where you're raising rainbow trout on the side, for example.
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We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.
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Well, it's, but here's the thing about specialization that can get you in trouble,
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particularly on a farm is that, okay, berries only grow a certain time of year and there's a
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harvest season and they're going to sell a certain time of year. Like, how do you figure out what do
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you do with the rest of your time? Right. Or like, what is, what do you, what do you do if
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like the berry crop just sucks that year? Like, I mean, so I mean, I imagine you, you don't want
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to diversify too much, but there has to be some diversity in order to keep the income coming in
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so you can stay afloat. Right. Well, you are already thinking like a businessman farmer.
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So kudos to you. Yes. You're a shining example for our listeners. So, uh, terrific questions.
00:21:51.460
What do you do with that? Well, you probably, the first thing to do is immediately go into a,
00:21:56.280
a concept of year round availability, which would require what we call value adding, right? So you
00:22:03.080
take a fresh product and you somehow turn it into additional value. You could, you could freeze that
00:22:08.700
product. You could turn it into pies, jams. I'm just spitballing from the blueberry standpoint.
00:22:14.600
What I do as a livestock farmer in a parallel universe is we raise lamb about six months out of the
00:22:20.620
year. And so what I do is I stockpile because that's the optimal growing season for us is when
00:22:27.440
pastures flourishing, the lambs are going to grow at the cost of me of photosynthesis rainfall and my
00:22:34.800
personal management. It's going to cost me a lot more to feed those lambs, you know, hay in the middle
00:22:39.260
of January hour. I am then in the middle of July when things are flourishing. So we'll grow way in
00:22:45.680
excess number of lambs that we're able to grow. And then we will, you know, process those lambs,
00:22:50.620
vacuum pack them and freeze them at zero degrees. And then we'll, you know, spend that product off
00:22:55.120
throughout the next six months. So, you know, there's end arounds on all this stuff. Your
00:23:00.320
listeners might be thinking, well, what do you do with, you know, 10,000 acres of corn or soybeans?
00:23:05.060
Well, that's our commodity system. And it goes into rail cars and gets distributed to confinement
00:23:10.320
livestock systems or turns into biodiesel or things like that. So these are less perishable
00:23:14.140
goods. But when you're dealing with perishability from a, something that's not going to be turned
00:23:19.660
into, you know, diesel fuel or animal feed, then you've, you've got a lot more considerations for
00:23:24.620
sure. So let's talk about, so we've figured out what we want. So you're going to have to, you're
00:23:28.280
going to grow whatever's good for the area. You're going to take into account the demand for it. So
00:23:33.320
you have to, you know, put on your economics hat and look into that. You also have to think about
00:23:37.400
diversity, diversifying in a way that you don't overextend yourself, but still allow yourself to
00:23:42.340
have income coming the entire year. And there's ways you can even diversify within like the niche
00:23:47.260
you pick. Let's talk about the thing you need to have a farm, which is land. And as we talked about
00:23:52.200
earlier, that's in short supply now. So, and it's getting expensive. So how do you start, how do you
00:24:00.380
get the land you need to start a farm when it's pretty hard to get a hold of?
00:24:04.060
It's an enormous question. I think it's one of the, you know, I think historians will probably look back
00:24:09.000
for the early 21st century and say, this is one of the, you know, the big elephants in the room
00:24:14.260
that we were all kind of ignoring. So terrific question. Again, complicated answers. We try to
00:24:21.000
provide a lot of answers to this. I think chapter five is getting your hands on land. And we acknowledge
00:24:28.880
this problem first and foremost in so much that land is mostly valued on what kind of house you can
00:24:35.140
build on it. Not what kind of roots and berries and chickens you can raise on it, right? So we've
00:24:41.480
kind of shifted historically, you know, the bullseye on what is land for? Land is for subdivisions and
00:24:49.140
strip malls. No disrespect. People have to live somewhere. I get that. But we also have to eat.
00:24:54.360
So the bullseye has shifted so radically, it's left people who want to buy land kind of in the lurch.
00:25:00.120
So it's my opinion. And, you know, listeners might be saying it's easy for me to say,
00:25:05.300
because I already have my land, but it troubles me that I'm unable to go out and replicate my
00:25:11.300
business. That's not a sustainable business model to me. Like, yes, I'm profitable from an operating
00:25:18.560
cost standpoint, but from an investment standpoint, I'm still trying to recoup those costs.
00:25:23.500
And that bothers me because, you know, beware of false profits, right?
00:25:26.520
Haha. So we have to move the bullseye away from land ownership, which is a very romantic
00:25:33.520
part of our American dream and manifest destiny and our American experience and all these things,
00:25:39.560
and get into what we call land acquisition, or land access is a better word for that.
00:25:46.100
And land access can mean a whole suite of things. All those farmers who have traditionally inherited
00:25:52.660
their land, more commonly than not, I think it's up to 70% of those landowners, the statistics kind
00:26:00.440
of bouncing around in my head, have children and or grandchildren that are not interested in either
00:26:06.040
becoming farmers or managing that land. Light bulb, huge opportunity to leverage the land that you need
00:26:13.160
at a long-term lease or some kind of profit sharing arrangement, where you never have to
00:26:19.620
take physical ownership. You never have to go to the bank and say, hey, would you loan me $2 million
00:26:25.900
so I can capitalize my farm outside of Denver or outside of Chicago? And, you know, in a business
00:26:33.940
that's, you know, lucky to return 5% to 10%, you're not going to get that loan. It's not going to happen.
00:26:39.620
So we have to creatively utilize, again, going back to the passion and the dreams of these landowners
00:26:47.460
who want to see their farms remain farms and try to pair that goodwill with our ambitions. I think
00:26:56.200
it's a very sensible way to do that. Now, if we're intent on having to own the land, Ellen and I have
00:27:03.200
come up with about five or six different, what we think are pretty clever ways to go about doing so,
00:27:07.760
which would take too much time in this podcast. So I encourage you to go out and read chapter five.
00:27:13.500
So yeah, you encourage like just leasing, like finding someone just to lease the land from
00:27:17.200
to grow your land and look for a long-term lease. You're looking 10, 20, maybe 50 years.
00:27:22.120
Yeah, certainly to start with at least. That way you're softening. You've got a soft landing if
00:27:27.860
things don't work right. Because typically it's extraordinary. You can lease or rent land as,
00:27:34.100
you know, pick your terminology for a fraction, an absolute fraction of what it costs to buy the
00:27:41.240
land, but be able to produce the same goods. So, I mean, if you're a factory and you're able to
00:27:47.080
produce the exact same goods for nickel or the same goods for 90 cents, I mean, what are you going to
00:27:51.980
do? Presumably, if everything else is absolutely equal, you're going to take that advantage. And this
00:27:58.140
is just, you know, like farmland rents for like $70 an acre, depending on where you are, versus $7,000
00:28:05.540
an acre. Okay. I mean, these aren't numbers I'm pulling out of thin air. You just, you know,
00:28:12.480
get on your local Craigslist and look for a pasture rental or cropland rental. It's somewhere, you know,
00:28:18.020
between 50 and $150 an acre across the country. Maybe as high as 300, but you're not going to find land
00:28:23.840
even in the most remote areas of the country that are likely to be less than $3,000 an acre.
00:28:28.940
And if you're anywhere at all near an urban population where you're likely to get the
00:28:33.120
highest return for your goods, we're talking tens of thousands of dollars per acre. So yeah,
00:28:37.640
we have to be intelligent business people and maybe compromise what a concept, you know,
00:28:44.760
to compromise our dreams or to, you know, kind of pull the reins momentarily on our passions to
00:28:50.560
have the economic return to defer that dream to somewhere in the future. It's a real concept.
00:28:57.940
No, sure. I think that's like one of the most interesting chapters I read where you made the
00:29:01.900
case, like, don't buy land because you're never, you're, you're, you're not going to get your money
00:29:06.600
back basically for, I mean, for a very long time, if you even do. But let's go back to this idea that
00:29:12.840
there's a downside to farming is that there's less land because a lot of it's been going to
00:29:17.220
development as for the suburbs and things like that. There's actually an upside to that because
00:29:21.380
now you have, you can have farmland, access to farmland if you're leasing, but still be close
00:29:26.760
to a market. Like you don't have to drive two or three hours. It might just be 30 minutes.
00:29:32.320
Right. So overhead is, is the, you know, the distribution marketing and, and overhead of,
00:29:38.960
of getting this food onto, you know, Arby's and Chick-fil-A's and, and Panera's across the country
00:29:45.880
from sea to shining sea is largely taken care of by the commodity system. So the farmer receives a
00:29:53.440
nominal price, which is determined in Chicago for corn, soybeans, wheat, chicken, hogs, all these
00:29:59.280
things. And then food makes its way through the distribution, the processing and the trucking and
00:30:03.840
the warehousing and into these restaurants. And the farmer receives, you know, historically 10 cents
00:30:09.060
on the dollar for that. It's, it's a kind of diminishing, diminishing thing. But the benefit is,
00:30:13.600
is you don't have to worry about your own warehousing and distribution, all those things. So it's,
00:30:17.940
you know, Ellen and I posit that the, the biggest value in all likelihood and our peer group, and, you
00:30:25.620
know, we travel around across the country and speak at conferences and meet people and all this stuff.
00:30:30.980
The, the biggest advantage is to grow on one to two acres of intensive vegetable or fruit production
00:30:38.540
or some kind of micro, you know, laying hens or something like that, or maybe a goat cheese
00:30:42.900
dairy, something that can sustainably be produced on a couple acres and perhaps even purchase those
00:30:48.820
acres. But again, you know, if you, if you cannot do that, then don't. And then you've got your
00:30:53.740
customer base built in. It's, it's pretty remarkable, I think. And again, going back to those consumers
00:30:59.680
who are already keyed into having that connection with the land, which is now missing, not just a
00:31:05.540
generation, but probably two generations to borrow your, your, your uncle Joe and aunt Bess analogy
00:31:10.680
from earlier. And on top of that, social media, you can just, you know, acquire 10,000 fans practically
00:31:16.760
overnight. So what an amazing time to be thinking about, especially small scale, sustainable agriculture.
00:31:23.840
Yeah. Speaking of small scale and being close to the market, like I think in Detroit, they're doing
00:31:28.400
that thing where they're taking neighborhoods that have just been abandoned and they're turning into
00:31:32.740
little small farms where they're growing lettuce, carrots, goats, and it's right there in Detroit.
00:31:38.560
Yeah, it's extraordinary. So one farm I visited is, is called D-Town and Abbo Ifoima was spearheading
00:31:44.100
that a few years ago. She's one of the main partners there. And they took a River Rouge Park,
00:31:50.120
which is Detroit Central Park. And it's truly, it's, you know, I don't want to overstate to,
00:31:55.720
I don't want to insult people from Detroit, but I think anyone would agree with me. It was overgrown
00:31:59.780
and the budget wasn't there to maintain this place. They had an Olympic swimming pool that
00:32:03.980
they put in and it's just, you know, full, it's got tires laying in it, at least a couple of years
00:32:07.500
ago. And they negotiated with the, with the city and said, look, we've got the manpower and the
00:32:14.740
motivation to put a farm in the middle of this park and start teaching kids how to grow asparagus
00:32:20.520
and lettuce and, you know, honeybees. What, but we don't have any money. What can you do? And they
00:32:24.780
leased it for 10 years for a dollar a year, seven acres, seven acres in the middle of Detroit.
00:32:28.960
So that's extraordinary to me. So, you know, let's, let's, let's be creative and we have to
00:32:35.640
move, move the bullseye on, on this idea of land ownership. Because once we pull back the curtain,
00:32:40.820
we realize that land ownership has never really been a level playing field to begin with,
00:32:45.360
with the land giveaways and the inheritance. Right. So that's just an incredible story to me.
00:32:50.820
Yeah. So you have to get creative and like, don't, don't, yeah. And also move the bullseye of like,
00:32:54.540
it has to be out in the country somewhere to have a farm. It could be in a suburb literally,
00:32:59.660
and you can have a good, sustainable, small farm.
00:33:02.960
Yeah. Yeah. Brett, last, last week I was up in Central Park in New York and I was walking through
00:33:08.320
just enjoying the lilacs and the, the, the splendor of Central Park and two guys come walking past me
00:33:14.040
and they're talking very volubly and saying, oh, the futures in, in vertical farming, you know,
00:33:19.880
these abandoned warehouses and other guys just agreeing. I'm thinking to myself, my gosh, when
00:33:24.380
you're walking through Central Park in 2019 and two guys are talking about vertical farming,
00:33:29.280
you know, we're just, uh, we've reached a different level of consciousness in this country.
00:33:33.940
So you get the land, you're going to look for something maybe you could lease when you're
00:33:37.200
first starting out. There's a little more cushion there in case things go wrong, but besides the
00:33:42.320
land, like there's other stuff you need to start a farm. So you're going to need capital,
00:33:46.720
like any business. It's like, what, what is that besides what, what are you, what are you
00:33:51.240
going to use the money for when you first start your farm? Is it just buying it? I mean, I guess
00:33:54.760
it's going to depend on what you're farming, right? Yeah, of course. Yeah. So there's going to be,
00:33:58.940
there's mandatory stuff that you have to have. There has to be some kind of infrastructure.
00:34:03.080
So, you know, just, you know, nuts and bolts is going to be some kind of packing shed slash
00:34:09.680
workshop, right. Where you're going to keep your tools, park your, you know, hopefully modest
00:34:14.720
amount of diesel, diesel and gas burning equipment and a place to store your products against weather,
00:34:22.660
ability to pack for whatever orders you have, whether it's going to be a restaurant business
00:34:26.820
or a CSA, community supported agriculture, farmer's market, or, you know, up from there,
00:34:32.160
you have to have these things. What else are you going to need? You're going to need a water supply.
00:34:36.360
You're going to need presumably some kind of fencing to either keep varmints out of your
00:34:42.000
pumpkin patch or coyotes out of your flock of lambs. So that's a safe bet. You're going to need
00:34:48.880
a reserve fund for unexpected contingencies, such as, you know, weather catastrophes,
00:34:56.120
rainy days at your markets, times when the restaurant that's been reliably buying $3,000
00:35:01.500
every week of your product suddenly changes ownership and says, we don't, we don't know who
00:35:06.900
you are anymore. Don't ask me how I know how that feels. It's heartbreaking. I'm stabbing myself
00:35:11.880
in the chest right now. So all those things, you know, are just practical considerations that are
00:35:17.300
also happen to be mandatory. So, I mean, how, I mean, I guess, what's it look like? I mean,
00:35:22.080
you're imagining if the beginning farmer is going to have to take out some debt to get going or is it,
00:35:27.220
yeah. Yeah. Ideally, again, if we are uniting, you know, the ultimate sweet spot to me is to
00:35:36.580
identify with one of these older farmers. And I'm not, I'm, this isn't like a ride at Disneyland.
00:35:43.320
Okay. There are services out there that pair older farmers that want to supply a mentorship. Now,
00:35:50.300
you know, nothing in life is easy, especially when you get into human nature, you got to deal with
00:35:53.700
personalities. But so many of these farms exist with barns, power, water supplies, packing sheds,
00:36:01.040
pickup trucks, tractors. Okay. And these things, these items, if they're not utilized,
00:36:06.800
get sold for insultingly less than, less than pennies on the dollar. I mean, you just cue the
00:36:12.580
John Mellencamp songs from 1985, you know, blood on the scarecrow kind of thing. It's, it's, it's a,
00:36:18.160
it's a tragedy. So if we can have the wisdom to not only find these places that are willing to lend
00:36:25.900
the expectation, lend the experience, sorry, the expertise, the experience, as well as the
00:36:30.720
infrastructure, then our debt requirements can be, can be much lower. We just have to have the,
00:36:35.560
hopefully the wisdom to deal with the, with the personalities of, of, of, of a potentially
00:36:39.940
crotchety old farmer. Right. Potentially crotchety. It's a lot. Uncle Joe is pretty crotchety.
00:36:44.620
I'll tell you, man, I'll tell you, but it's pretty, pretty valuable if you don't have to
00:36:48.860
lay out a couple hundred thousand dollars. No, for sure. One of the most, I think,
00:36:53.360
useful chapters for me, even though I'm not a farmer, I thought it was really a good business
00:36:57.240
thing to think about, is that a farmer should focus on his limiting factors instead of trying
00:37:03.400
to maximize their strength, which is kind of, it goes against to what you typically hear people say is,
00:37:08.380
oh, you should focus on your strengths, not on your weaknesses. Right. Why, why is it important
00:37:12.060
for farmers to think about their limiting factors? Because it's really hard to throw money at these,
00:37:17.380
at these problems. See, with, with so many modern businesses, we, we hire a consultant. We got a
00:37:22.460
problem. We hire a consultant. The consultant supplies a solution for us. And that's, that's all
00:37:26.640
well and appropriate for a lot of businesses. Hey, I don't know how to network my cloud. So my app is at
00:37:32.820
maximum functionality. Hey, there's a guy, you know, that can fix that for me. I pay him,
00:37:37.400
you know, $4,500 and off to the races. I go, it's much more difficult for me to say, Hey,
00:37:43.380
my soil is lacking in organic matter. I need to move my organic matter from 1.5% up to 3%.
00:37:51.000
Well, how do you do that efficiently? Nature can do that. Nature has done that. It's called,
00:37:56.300
you know, the great plains where the soil used to be presumably where you're sitting right now.
00:38:00.800
The soil used to be like 30 feet deep or something like that. And then we had the dust bowl and it all
00:38:05.580
blew to where I am in Northern Virginia. You know, uh, the clouds turned dark in Washington DC and
00:38:10.840
there went all our soil 2000 miles away. So there are limiting factors can't just be solved by throwing
00:38:17.320
money at them, especially because money is so hard to come by with farming. So we have to be patient
00:38:23.920
by building our experience, growing our markets, developing a relationship with the land where you
00:38:31.740
become like a doctor for lack of a better analogy, where the land is communicating with you, telling
00:38:37.100
you its symptoms saying, you know, my elbow hurts over here and my stomach grumble is grumbly over
00:38:42.340
here. Well, we need some different fertilizer over here. And maybe we need different plants planted at,
00:38:48.060
you know, not in a moist place on the farm, but a drier place and et cetera, et cetera.
00:38:51.960
These things are just gained by hard one experience rather than, than financial solutions.
00:38:58.780
So whatever our limiting factors are, we just have to be very patient with knowing that's going to
00:39:04.720
take time. And your limiting factors is also going to control your growth, right? Like if you might
00:39:10.720
have like a great crop, but if you don't have a market for it, like that's your limiting factor,
00:39:15.520
well, you're not going to do, you're not going to, you're not going to grow, right?
00:39:18.980
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Maybe your limiting factor is, I mean, it can be a number of things. It can be
00:39:23.600
a human component from emotionality to physicality to, you know, experiential, it can be biological,
00:39:30.560
it can be soil related, it can be weather related, it can be a financial related, you know, name your
00:39:35.980
limiting factor, name, name the weakness of your farm. And that's, what's going to hold you back.
00:39:41.540
But typically by necessity, that's the place where you have to address things slowly in order to move
00:39:49.700
everything else forward. You know, if you have a bar graph, if you've, you know, you've got,
00:39:53.800
you know, six different bar graphs and one's human energy, one's economic resiliency, one's
00:39:58.840
biological potential, one's experience, you know, and insert a couple more. If five of those are
00:40:05.360
within 10% of each other, but the sixth one is 50% reduced, it's going to hold back the growth on the
00:40:13.640
other five. And then you also give an example of, you know, playing to your strengths can work out for
00:40:18.200
you in the short run, but then bites you in the butt in the long run. You get the example you
00:40:23.480
gave that stuck out to me was your food truck business. Can you talk about a bit about that?
00:40:28.620
Yeah, well, my food truck business was the most successful business that ever failed.
00:40:33.480
Okay. So at this point, you know, I've been farming for 22 years straight out of college. And I have
00:40:40.900
I've reinvented the wheel so many times, I'm very prepared not to try to do that anymore.
00:40:46.440
But one of the things we tried to do was to take our product and embed a food truck within
00:40:53.660
farmers markets. And it was a staggering success. Right out of the gate, we had lines 10 people deep,
00:40:59.340
but it was too much of a success, right? So I was true. So I hired, you know, I had a manager and
00:41:04.720
everybody says, Oh, just hire a better manager. Well, that's, that's no disrespect. That can be very
00:41:10.960
naive thinking. Okay. There's only so much a manager can accomplish without good ownership.
00:41:16.800
And I was not being a good owner. Okay. I was not being the farmer that I needed to be. So suffice to
00:41:21.500
say, we had too much success. We're running out of things. I had personnel issues. I wasn't able to
00:41:27.600
produce the quality of goods that I wanted to either back at the farm, or to put out a great product on a
00:41:34.920
bun in the form of a cheeseburger. In DC, we got what's called half smoke, which is kind of our
00:41:39.920
native street food. And I realized that if I couldn't be the farmer, then I, that I needed to
00:41:46.620
be, there was no point in running a farm to table food truck. I could have all the management in the
00:41:50.860
world. But if I didn't have the authenticity of the product, then it was only a matter of time before
00:41:57.560
everything unraveled. So I ended up getting this food truck stuck in a tunnel in Georgetown University
00:42:03.600
because long story short, we were supposed to take some measurements. The measurements weren't taken
00:42:08.840
and I'm in the middle of Georgetown and during dinnertime and the food truck is stuck in this
00:42:14.260
tunnel. And I said, that's it. That's it. I cannot be an hour away from the farm driving a food truck and
00:42:20.560
being a farmer at the same time. So it's just one of those classic things, you know, and any business
00:42:26.460
person is going to say, well, you just outsource that. Well, Brett, in my opinion, outsourcing leads to
00:42:30.800
mediocrity. You know, that's, that's how we get everything everywhere all the time. You know, food is
00:42:37.420
24 seven available, but as good food is, you know, as food is nutritious and wonderful food available 24
00:42:44.200
seven. No, it can't be by definition. Right. And if it's not good food, I'm not interested in growing it. So
00:42:51.740
All right. So you got to pick your battles. Yeah, I like it. I like that's a great example of success actually
00:42:55.540
being a failure. So, okay, you've got your farm going, you're growing the product, but you got
00:43:00.400
to price it to sell and pricing things in any business is tricky, but it gets trickier in farming
00:43:08.180
because I mean, your approach could be like, let's look at what the market rate is, but maybe the
00:43:13.020
market rate, if you sold it there, it would cause you to go bankrupt in a season. So how do you price
00:43:18.380
a product when you're a small farmer? Yeah. So we take you through a whole thought diagram or,
00:43:25.000
you know, kind of a thought exercise in the book, but to nutshell it real quick, you're basically
00:43:30.980
dealing with externalities that you can't control largely quote unquote cheap food. So, you know,
00:43:38.180
despite never growing food as, you know, as you alluded to earlier, more than 98% of us don't do that.
00:43:44.900
We all seem to be experts on what food should cost and we take deep umbrage very much to the core of
00:43:52.060
our hearts when we think food is expensive and we make all sorts of jokes and snide remarks,
00:43:57.880
perhaps without really fully understanding what food should cost. And, you know, the axiom that I
00:44:04.060
try and keep in mind and tell folks is if we say, why is organic and sustainable food so expensive? We say,
00:44:10.720
why is that so expensive? Well, we never ask, why is that other stuff so cheap? Okay. So as farmers,
00:44:18.120
we have to have an understanding of why these corn and soybean based products, AKA corn and soybean fed
00:44:24.980
chickens and pigs, AKA bacon and chicken sandwiches, right? You following my train of thought here,
00:44:31.080
have been the same price practically for decades at this point. So that's what we have to deal with
00:44:36.060
from a consumer standpoint. And then from business people, we have to take the wisdom of people like
00:44:41.460
Warren Buffett, who says, never get into a business where you couldn't raise your prices 10% overnight and
00:44:47.980
not, you know, lose your customers, right? So you have two very opposite ends of the spectrum right there.
00:44:55.100
Okay. So it's our opinion. Again, this is way oversimplified and we give it a lot more color
00:45:01.180
in the, in the book to don't apologize for your prices. If you apologize for your prices, you're doing
00:45:08.360
yourself a disservice. You're dishonoring the hard work that you put into the product to push, push the high
00:45:14.760
end of the limit of what the market will bear because you are growing a unique product. If you are putting
00:45:21.940
your passion and turning your mineralized soil into a delicious product, whether that be heirloom
00:45:29.360
tomatoes and everyone knows how good a homegrown tomato tastes relative to this January tomatoes you
00:45:36.800
get at Costco, right? Everybody knows that everybody knows that fresh eggs taste better than, than
00:45:42.380
store-bought eggs that have been sitting on the shelf for a month. That translates in onto the plates
00:45:47.600
and the taste buds of customers. If you are putting out a quality product, people don't mind paying for
00:45:54.100
it. It's when you put out a mediocre product that you can't charge a high price for it.
00:45:59.360
So, so that was a lot of information shotgunned at you, but if you can figure out the, the, the message
00:46:05.520
and all that, then you're, then you're doing okay. So, okay. You've priced it. How do farmers sell
00:46:11.060
their products? So there's farmers markets, obviously. I think that's everyone would think,
00:46:14.160
okay, let's go to the farmers market, but there's other way, other places to go to sell your product
00:46:18.480
because farmers markets, they don't happen year round either. Yeah. Well, let's not have any confusion
00:46:24.500
for any of your listeners who are, are farmers who are, you know, kind of thumbing their noses at farmer's
00:46:30.560
markets. Farmer's markets happen to be the poster child of a very charismatic face of a strapping young
00:46:37.640
here suit, 25 year olds wearing plaid and having perfect smiles. Right. And I say that very good
00:46:43.920
naturedly, but, but farmer's markets comprise way less than 1% of the way our food, I think even the way
00:46:49.820
food is direct marketed, it's like less than 5%. Okay. And then the commodity, let's just, I'll just
00:46:54.120
throw some numbers at you. So like 96% of our food system is commodity based, corn, soybean, wheat,
00:46:59.180
grain fed cattle, all this stuff. It's only like 4% that's being direct marketed. And only a fraction
00:47:04.340
of that may be less than 10% or even 5% is through farmer's markets. So farmer's markets is a very
00:47:09.960
infinitesimally small component of the way food gets transacted. Now for farmers who aren't commodity
00:47:15.360
farmers, which again is less than 4%, the vast majority of that is going through wholesale.
00:47:19.820
So it's going to, uh, uh, co-ops and wholesalers where people are making bids much like the stock
00:47:26.860
market, except this is the livestock market or the fresh vegetable market or the fresh fruit market.
00:47:31.660
So then the distributor purchases and aggregates things that goes to a warehouse and then it gets
00:47:36.800
to, uh, you know, downtown Oklahoma city on one end or, or, you know, mom and pop stores in Newark,
00:47:42.880
New Jersey on the other end. And then the other places that, uh, food gets distributed is to
00:47:48.060
restaurants, uh, direct, uh, direct from the farmer community supported agriculture where farmers take
00:47:53.320
subscriptions from individual citizens, consumers, and the, the, the customers buy shares of the farm
00:48:00.360
up front. And then they get food spun off throughout the course of the year. And the list goes on and on
00:48:04.640
and on. It's, it's just about as long as one can be creative. They're shipping. Of course you can put
00:48:09.660
it in a styrofoam box and overnight it. So yeah, that's a, that's plenty to think about. I think
00:48:14.440
no, there's those different ways. So don't just think farmer's market. There's other ways you can
00:48:18.580
get your product to the market besides going to a place in a park in downtown Tulsa to sell cabbage.
00:48:24.540
Yeah. Think about farmer's markets to, uh, to take, uh, take your first date on. That's a good
00:48:29.420
first date move. Not a good farmer's move. First farmer day move. Debatable. Debatable. All right.
00:48:35.200
Well, I mean, so we've mentioned throughout this, that in farming, there's a lot of external factors
00:48:39.160
that are outside of your control. Weather, you get pestilence, animals get sick, die. It happened
00:48:45.920
anytime and it can just like decimate you like for that year. So how do you take that into account
00:48:50.520
with your business when you don't know if it's going to happen or not that year?
00:48:54.540
Yeah. So we take our cues from nature, every farmer, irrespective of, of whether you're
00:49:01.540
growing 10,000 acres of corn or a quarter acre, you know, of tomatillos, you know, in New Mexico,
00:49:08.200
you have to take your cues from nature. So nature provides excess of everything. You know, there's,
00:49:15.880
there's always more seeds on a tree than, than are going to turn into seedlings. I just had a sheep,
00:49:21.920
a ewe that gave birth to quintuplets two days ago, right? Out in nature. If I wasn't there to assist
00:49:27.520
her, statistically, at least two of those lambs would be preyed upon or not be able to get enough
00:49:33.320
milk to survive, right? So nature provides all this excess and we as farmers operate under the
00:49:41.340
egotistical illusion of, of control, right? We all, we all have that egotistical illusion,
00:49:47.020
you know, despite whatever enterprise we might be pursuing, right? But farmers have to build
00:49:52.640
abundance into their control mechanism. So when bad things happen, you either have that extra
00:50:00.420
or you're able to allow it just to go fallow to, you know, to, you know, cue the birds for
00:50:06.680
everything. There's a season, turn, turn, turn, right? I mean, you know, one great example of this
00:50:11.160
is Lloyd Nichols, who's up in Marengo, Illinois, outside of Chicago. Nichols Farm and Orchard sells
00:50:16.460
to the Chicago farmers markets. And he has these migratory flocks of Canadian geese that come through
00:50:23.080
and they just tear through his onions. All right. So he's got, you know, a hundred, a hundred acres
00:50:27.000
of onions, but he doesn't plant them all on 100 acres. He spreads them in different patches. So if
00:50:32.960
the geese come down, they can only do so much damage. And of course he takes precautions to scare
00:50:36.880
the geese away and all this stuff, but you can, you know, there's only so many places you can be at
00:50:40.220
once and so much technology you can have. Or his farm is so spread out that he might have like a,
00:50:45.700
you know, a very strong storm at the north side of his farm, but the south side of the farm
00:50:51.980
has no weather impact at all. So he grids his whole farm like a checkerboard,
00:50:57.460
even though he's got redundancies of all his crops to help mitigate that. So that's one clever way to
00:51:03.220
help solve that. So another part, sort of practical aspect of farming that can be hard on folks is that,
00:51:09.000
man, this is a job, an occupation where it's, it's 365 days of the year, right? Like it's Sunday
00:51:14.620
and it's four inches of snow outside. The cows still need milking or whatever. There's no weekends.
00:51:24.620
Terrific question. I don't know. I'll take, I'll take advice in the comment section of this podcast,
00:51:30.160
please. Well, how do you do that about being kind to yourself by realizing that you're human?
00:51:37.580
Making a good night's sleep, a mandatory part of your schedule by being very honest with your
00:51:45.940
partner and taking care of your partner. So you, so that you're taken care of, you need,
00:51:51.200
you need support, whether that's with a, you know, romantic partner, a business partner, your family,
00:51:56.840
whoever that is, you need other human contact. We need to be able to grouse, have, you know,
00:52:03.640
be able to blow off steam appropriately. That doesn't mean like yelling at people,
00:52:06.980
but be able to say, Hey, this thing really frustrated me today. And thanks for listening.
00:52:10.660
You know, it's very therapeutic. You have a most, most importantly is to have that intentionality
00:52:16.660
of, of good habits. You know, my, my best friend from childhood is a neurologist down in Florida.
00:52:22.600
And he, we, he went to Duke university and got his MBA and, or not his MBA, his MD, I'm sorry.
00:52:28.220
And he sees all these patients. And I asked him a couple of years ago, I said, let me ask you a
00:52:33.460
question. You see all these people. I said, what's the number one complaint? He says headaches and
00:52:37.580
fatigue. And I said, that sounds right to me. Now, let me ask you this. I don't know anything
00:52:44.160
about what you're doing really, but what percentage of folks, if they just stayed hydrated and got a
00:52:49.200
good night's sleep and did some meaningful exercise every day would eliminate their problems,
00:52:54.620
their symptoms. And he kind of got a far away look in his eyes and he goes, you know,
00:52:58.640
I'd guess about 90% of them. Right. And these folks come in, God bless them wanting a pill or
00:53:05.820
an MRI or a CAT scan. Now let's not make a mistake. And some of these people have serious medical
00:53:11.500
conditions, right? But the vast majority of folks are just like farmers, just like anybody who would
00:53:18.120
benefit from good night's sleep, staying hydrated, getting your heart rate up for 30 minutes a day
00:53:22.900
and having love in your life that you nurture and cherish. So that's how you do it, Brett. Simple,
00:53:29.120
right? Sure. Yeah. Simple. Let's say someone's listening to this and they're like, man, this
00:53:34.060
sounds great. I'm ready to quit the corporate job, exchange my necktie for a bow. Do farmers
00:53:41.020
wear bow ties? No, I don't think farmers wear bow ties. A John Deere trucker hat. They can. We get dressed
00:53:46.180
up sometimes. You get dressed up for the hoedown. That's right. I'm busting out as many farmer
00:53:51.560
stereotypes as I can. Let's say they want to do that. What's the first thing that you think they
00:53:56.160
should go do? What would be the first step to make that idea a reality? You mean besides reading
00:54:01.760
Start Your Farm, of course? Besides reading Start Your Farm. What would be the actual thing?
00:54:05.960
This was concrete. This is going to put you down the path to getting going and becoming a farmer.
00:54:10.780
Yeah. Wonderful question. Get excited. Don't restrain yourself from enthusiasm. If you're feeling
00:54:16.980
enthusiasm, if you're feeling passion, then you're feeling something right. Farming is an
00:54:22.220
ancient, beautiful component of how we all got here. Whatever your opinions are about whatever
00:54:30.440
you want to raise, wherever part of the country you are, know that this morning you probably ate
00:54:37.220
breakfast. You're probably going to want to have some lunch and maybe later you're going to have
00:54:40.060
dinner. Where does that food come from? Could you be a participant in that? Could you contribute
00:54:43.980
to that? Could you do it better than what you're getting? That's a worthy dream. And then beyond
00:54:50.060
that, could you feed your community? Could you do this profitably? Again, these are worthy dreams,
00:54:56.960
right? And then educate yourself to the nth degree. Watch all the videos, read all the books,
00:55:03.960
then take the next step. Go out and identify people that are actually doing it and talk to them.
00:55:08.580
Get the hard lessons. But do all this, certainly, before you start getting on Zillow and Googling
00:55:13.740
available land near me. All right, Forrest, where can people go to learn more about the book and your
00:55:17.820
work? Well, real easy, forrestpritchard.com. Of course, there's a little website out there called
00:55:23.620
amazon.com. But I suggest you march boldly to your local bookstore in your hometown, which may not
00:55:32.700
exist. So then you drive boldly to the town next to you and go to that local bookstore and patiently
00:55:39.240
order the book so they get full retail value and you're supporting your downtown, presumably as well as
00:55:45.320
your values. And I say that with no eye rolling.
00:55:49.080
Well, Forrest, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:55:51.680
Brett, pleasure's mine. And congratulations, our manliness is... What am I trying to say? You've done a
00:56:02.300
My guest today was Forrest Pritchard. He's the author of the book, Start Your Farm. It's available on
00:56:05.860
amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find out more information about his work at his
00:56:09.380
website, forrestpritchard.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is slash startyourfarm. We can
00:56:14.700
find links to resources where we can delve deeper into this topic.
00:56:24.240
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website at
00:56:27.760
artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives. There's over 500 episodes there,
00:56:31.640
as well as thousands of articles we've written over the years on farming. We got stuff on farming,
00:56:35.820
on there. Personal finance, how to be a better husband, better father, physical fitness,
00:56:39.380
you name it, we've got it. And if you'd like to listen to new episodes ad-free of The Art
00:56:43.280
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00:56:55.980
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00:56:59.780
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00:57:03.540
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00:57:06.940
friend or family member who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for
00:57:10.120
the continued support. And until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you not only listen to
00:57:13.540
the A1 Podcast, but put what you've heard into action.
00:57:33.540
the A1 Podcast, but on the A1 Podcast, what you appreciate to haveHelloets, I can have
00:57:39.520
a great extremely stand-off link. And if you're thinking about watching, I'm going na
00:57:45.080
website. And this one would be on the other 항 to what you've heard. And I also
00:57:48.820
saw that four runs a few of them, it's basically a really big, big plant, like a big, big
00:57:49.880
plant on otherli semicığıowment yet. And that I still haven't heard of it, but it was
00:57:52.960
important to have the advice. And that the fact that I would definitely
00:57:57.560
have a lot of the opportunity to keep going on in every one of the ones that you've
00:57:59.040
been here энdothment. Analyte park Am Venezuel in between 24 square