 Yeah, so I made up a fancy title, Enhancing Economic Stability by Building Financial Resilience. Moses approached me about presenting on this topic because in 2016, I had written a SARE Pharma Rancher Grant, which if you're not familiar with SARE, it's the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program, and it's funded through USDA. But they give out these nice little SARE Pharma Rancher Grants where farmers can partner up with other farms or go at it alone and write a little grant and then get some money to do some work. And so back in 2016, when Matt and I had kind of just started going down this path of entrepreneurship, neither of us really were business people, and we really needed to find our people and find folks that were going to help us out, and I thought it was a good chance to bring some of my friends together that were also just starting businesses, and we could learn together. And so I'm going to start with that, and then we'll just kind of go into talking about money and where we got our money, maybe some other options to get money. Because when you go into a food business, it's not like a slow growth, like maybe some sort of internet-based or service-based business. I mean, when you go into manufacturing, you go from zero up to I need a bunch of money for a facility, and then you outgrow that facility, and you need a bunch more money. It's a step process. It's not a slow growth process where you can really make some money, reinvest it, make some money, reinvest it, and slowly grow your business. To grow these food businesses or manufacturing businesses and these kind of giant leaps and bounds, and it makes the economics where the financials behind it just a little bit more complicated. And so I'm always really open about our finances. I'm willing to talk to anyone about where we got our money, how we got our money, and whether it's working or not. So on that, I will start with kind of, I'll just give you a quick introduction about who I am and definitely who I'm not. And I feel like the who I'm not matters as much as the who I am. So I'm a born and raised Wisconsin girl originally from way up north and made my way down to the Driflus area. My background is soil science and agroecology. I have a couple degrees there. And I worked a long, I've worked and continue to work in conservation. So I worked for about 10 years with USDA and RCS as a soil conservationist, administering different cost year programs, things like that. I worked for a couple years with the Ag Research Service out in Beltsville, Maryland at the National Ag Research Farm. And there I did research. I was a research technician. Kind of the early days of the no-till organic roller crimper. So we worked with Rodale Institute and the University of Delaware out there. So that was back in 2010 that we started working on that. So that was kind of an interesting time to be kind of newer in that whole roller crimper world. Then actually, my husband and I moved to sub-Saharan Africa. He was working with the State Department. And I took a job helping to run a nonprofit that was an education facility in Lillangue, Malawi, on sustainable agriculture. So that's kind of where I got a little bit more financial, I would say, experience. Anyone who's worked in the nonprofit world knows that it's quite the rat race. And the international nonprofit world is no different. And so getting money, writing grants, funding what we were doing, and figuring out how to run an 80-acre farm to make some money and pay some employees. We had about 30 employees that we were trying to keep on staff. So that was a really good way to learn a lot in a couple years. And I think I was able to take some of that back to our business. And then finally, I got, to be honest, like international development was not for me. And so I took a job back with NRCS in Wisconsin. And then just recently, about four years ago, I took a job with Dane County Land Conservation. And so I went from federal conservation work into county conservation work. And it's very similar, but I kind of have access to a little bit different pots of money. And I'll talk about some of that at the end because that's all part of what's available to us as farmers. So what I'm not is a financial advisor. I am not a trained accountant. I am not, I don't have my MBA. I don't have any of that stuff. What I have is like 15 years of work. And then over the past five years, we've built up this food business pretty much from nothing. We didn't buy a business or anything like that. And so we've had to learn a lot. I think we formed our LLC in 2016. And we started selling our first products in early 2017. And I'll go over that a little bit more. But I just, I'm not giving financial advice. I'm just going to kind of tell you our story and what we did and what has worked and what has helped us get to where we're at. And it has not all been, we're a little scrappy, but it's definitely not all that. So, our company, our vision is that we believe, we do everything we can as local as humanly possible. I mean, we, you know, box suppliers, anyone printing our labels, nothing comes from really out of state. Our label guy, he's a newer guy, he comes down the road. He prints all of our labels for us. We don't do anything bulk online. We really try to keep everything super local. And we believe that, you know, Cider is this beverage that is actually local, which is very different than a lot of our, quote unquote, local beers and other drinks. I mean, if only I could get all my ingredients shipped to the loading dock and have, you know, a recipe, like that's just not how we work. We go out and we pick apples and we press them and we make them into Cider and everything comes from our community. It comes from our friends and things like that. So, we really believe in what we do. We believe that we can influence our local food economy in a really positive way. And we've really been able to over the past several years but anyway, that's kind of who we are just to give you our background and what we believe in. And then also, you know, when it comes to money, where we spend our money, we're very deliberate about how we spend our money and where we spend our money. And then why we do it is Matt and I are, you know, we're really passionate about our community. We live, we just, we actually, we were living in Barnabal, which is a very small town in Iowa County. And we just bought a new farm we closed two weeks ago in Dane County, just south of Mount Horab. And we're really excited to be even closer to our brick and mortar, which is brick cider in Mount Horab. And then have our kids in the school district and just really kind of embrace all of our friends and the people who have supported us here. And we plan on doing a lot of really great things with the farm that we bought. And so, and I'm gonna go into how we bought it because that's not easy either. I'm not gonna pretend like buying a farm is something that's super easy. So, and those are my two cute little kiddos, which is another reason why we do all this, just trying to, trying to do good by our kids and make them proud of us. So, all right. So I was asked to do this presentation to focus on this Sarah Farmer Rancher Grant that we did back in 2016. So again, Sarah Farmer Rancher Grants are these nice little grants. I think they're up to $30,000 if you're pairing up with other farms or organizers. And you write these grants, they're not that hard to write. They're a really good introduction grant. And I'm gonna go into some other grants that we've utilized that are definitely not for beginners. So this one is a great one to kind of get your, get your boots a little bit muddy in the grant world. So, Sarah again is Sustainable Egg Research and Education. It's a USDA funded program. They run it out of the University of Minnesota and really great people run the program. I've been working with them for years. I've gotten some other Sarah grants for some work in my day job with the county as well. And so it's a really good, it's a really good program and they just wanna do good stuff and give firms money. So it's great. So what we did is back in like, I don't know, maybe 2006 or something, I was working up in Green Bay and there was this really cool group of dairy farmers that had, you know, not nothing formal but had formed this collaboration where they were gonna get together. And I think it was monthly or bimonthly and open their books to one another and really talk to each other and be honest and truthful and give each other feedback on things that they were doing in their operation. And then helping to sort out what everyone else was doing, give advice, say, hey, I tried this or I did this and just be a really collaborative group of farmers and really trust in one another to give good advice and be truthful and open about what's working and what's not. And I was always really impressed by that group. Rick Adamski, if anyone knows Rick was part of that. And when we wrote this grant, I had Rick write a letter of recommendation for it because I knew that he had found that to be a really useful thing that he started up in that area. So we built off of that and I've got a group of seven farms together. All pretty beginning farmers, some maybe had been farming somewhere else but starting their own operation, things like that. And they're farms that we all know and love now. So we started with Lauren Rootersdorf from Raleigh's Hillside Farm, which some of you probably know. We've got Beth Wright from Winterfell Acres, Robbie Aberomia from Adams to Apples and then John and Hallie Webking from Metalark Organics. And what's really neat is we're all really good friends. Rami is like, I can see his house from my new house, we're neighbors. Rami and I still work together a lot. He custom presses all of our apples for us. I source food from both Beth and Lauren for my restaurant. And of course, Metalark Organics is the only flour that we use, all of our bread buns, pizza crust, everything is 100% locally grown and milled flour from John and Hallie. And like our kids go to school together. I mean, this is like, we're like a real, we're like a real live little community. Rami's daughter is a dishwasher and I'm sure she'll be a bartender before we know it at Bricks. We keep things really close. And that way we're, what I like about that is we're not just friends and friendly but we're also very interdependent in these small rural communities. And I think it's really important that all of us and we all live in these small communities for the most part, understand and respect that interdependence. And I think if more people, especially, I think, obviously I know food and I know farming. So people in food and farming, if they recognized, if we could recognize that interdependence more and we could convince our restaurant owners that if they can just source things more locally that money is gonna come back around. I think that's, you know, like a hairdresser comes into my restaurant and maybe that next week I turn around and I spend money to get a haircut. I mean, it's really simple math. Like this is not a complicated system. And I think we can all do better at demanding that our local institutions support things more locally. Asking when you go out to eat, like, hey, where does your burger come from? And if they don't know, maybe, you know, make a little stink about it and maybe drop a name of someone you know that they could get their burger from, like this isn't a big deal. But I really just wanna emphasize like how just a small business, like we did, you know, just over half a million in sales last year. But of that, I would guess probably somewhere, and we just did an analysis. I think it was about 85% of the money that we spent was to either directly to farms, to local producers and manufacturers or to I would call them more regional. So like there's a couple of things we source from Minnesota and Iowa, but for the most part, I mean, it's like, it's an incredible amount of money that goes right back into the community. And in my head, eventually it turns around and comes back into our business. And so I just wanna emphasize that before I even get into this, into this grant that we did a few years back and the importance of collaboration and friendship and trust and understanding that these things all come back to us. So poor Teddy, that's my, he's now almost six, but I thought anyone talking about money balance sheets cash flows, like that's how we all feel. We all kind of wanna curl up in a ball in the corner and cry and maybe have snot running out of our nose a little bit because it's just, I'm sure all of us, I didn't get into, we didn't buy a farm or start a food, start this cool business, this farm to table restaurant and cidery to do balance sheets and cash flows and taxes and all that stuff. So it's a little bit painful, but it's really important. And I've always been one where I'm willing to pass things off to professionals and to find the right resources, but I do wanna understand it myself first. And so a good example of that is, this group that we started in 2016 and went into 2017, what we did is we met seven times with, actually we met eight times, but seven times with different professionals and had really just close knit nice conversations about all of these things. And so the other thing that's neat about this is none of, we didn't pay for any of these resources. So it's really, it's replicable, like if you've got a group of people that you trust and are in a similar, but not, it doesn't have to be the same type of business. And I'll go, we had a kind of a more large-scale grain farm, couple CSA farms, Apple Grower, then we had Vanessa Harold from Make Time Farm, which she does these really neat little retreats out at her farm. Really a whole bunch of different people got together with different business models and we still could work together and help each other out. So I immediately paired up with the infamous or famous infamous Paul Ditman from Compure Financial at the time, it was still Badger Land Financial. So he was a partner in the grant and he, day one, we just jumped into it and everyone, we went over how to get your balance sheet up to date, how to keep it up to date. And then we all came to the next session with an up to date balance sheet. And it's like, we had to agree that we were all gonna do a little bit of work, but I think it forced, we could also help each other a little bit accountable. And so we did that and then that went into cash flow analysis. And we all know that cash flows on farms are a little bit more complicated as our cash flows and any sort of manufacturing. So we're a manufacturer, we are technically a winery. Cash flow is really interesting because in farming, you may get a glut of cash at one point of the year, and then you have kind of this boom and bust where for us, we have to spend a lot of money in the fall. We need to pick all the apples, press all the apples. And at that point, it's not a quick turnaround to an actual, to making the money back. We have to do everything in about a 12 week period. And then the rest of the year is when we sell that product either in the tack room or we distribute to 30 or 40 different stores around the area. And so understanding those cash flows and when you might need, and I think it's really important, but when you might need an influx of money from somewhere else just to carry you through. And I also, I'll be the first to say like everyone has different risk levels and risk management, some people are more risk averse than others as far as loans and taking out loans to expand businesses. I mean, I've seen the lean model for farming. I respect that. It's just not the way that a manufacturer can think. We can't think, like I said at the beginning, in this super small growth. But in my opinion, and I know enough, food manufacturers around, it's just not, unless you're so small scale that you're never gonna really need a facility, it's jumps and starts, jumps and stops and starts. And so cash flow is really important in understanding when to bring in some of that outside money just to get you through knowing that you're gonna recoup that money later on and then which money to get. A big thing we learned is the right money from the right source at the right time. And I think if everyone can remember that right money, right source, right time, it can really help out when you're trying to make those decisions on when you take out a loan, when you don't and how that money is spent and how that affects your balance sheet. And what I think is really nice about keeping an up to date balance sheet is that it makes you, at least for me, it makes me feel really good at the end of the year because for the most part, as long as you're paying off those loans and you don't have incredibly depreciable assets, you start to look really good. You may not have a bunch of money in your pocket and you might not be going on vacation twice a year to who knows where, but when you go to take out that bigger loan in a few years to expand your business, you can do it because you've built this equity and you've built a business that's worth something. And so keeping that balance sheet up to date, at least once a year, it's a little boost of confidence for me as well. And then when we went to buy our farm, the fact that we had built all this equity over the past few years was what allowed us to do that. So Paul Ditman helped with balance sheets and catch flow. And then what we did is we, actually this is where I did spend a little money as I hired a tax consultant and I used the grant money, but I think you could probably find someone to do this without payment as well if you needed to. But also everyone deserves to get paid for their expertise. So I'm all about paying people to do things and not always kind of going with the free version of everything. There's a reason people are good at their jobs and those people should get paid for their expertise. So we did hire a tax consultant to come in and this was right around tax time. I wanna say it was like February or something. And so we all just sat around a table and went over a schedule F and I thought that was really useful. It almost, you know, it can almost double as your balance sheet in some ways. It really helps fill in gaps on your balance sheet at the end of the year. But we hired someone and we spent several hours going around and making sure we really understood that schedule F top to bottom. And then we did go a little bit into, I think it was like a schedule C for folks that needed that. But she was really great, explained everything. We could ask questions and then there was, you know, some room for a follow up with her as well if people have questions afterwards. Cause some of us were hiring out our taxes and some of us were doing the taxes ourselves. So it kind of depended on where you were there. We also paid for, I believe I paid for the QuickBooks session. And that was because most of us are using QuickBooks at this point. There is other, I wish there was other, but whatever, love, hate relationship with QuickBooks. I'm sure we all feel that way. And that's a little tougher. That would be one that I don't know that a group setting was necessarily the way to learn QuickBooks. I feel like it's not my language either. I'll be the first to admit that I struggle with it. I'm still the accountant at Bricks at some point in the very near future. I'd like to hand more and more of that off. But like I said before, I really like to understand things before I hand them off to someone else because I like to go in there and look at reporting and things like that. QuickBooks is one that I think you almost just gotta get in it and start messing things up. I mean, I spend more time probably fixing my mistakes than actually entering things into QuickBooks. It's embarrassing, but I'll admit it. I'm not great, not a great accountant, but I do go back and I work with my accountant that helps me fix everything and we get it to get it to work by the end of the year. The other, the next meeting we had was, I just called it investments, but we had Tara Johnson from the Food and Finance Institute come in and talk to the group about capital investment. And then she is, so she, if you guys don't know Tara Johnson, she has a really great podcast called Edible Alpha. If anyone in the food industry, I really recommend her podcast. She's an incredibly knowledgeable woman. She's run cheese companies in the past. She built a company from the ground up called Tara's Way, which was taking waste organic way from a cheese producing facility and then manufacturing that into a whey protein product that is still one of the top organic way products on the market, which secrets out. I don't use it, but I've heard really great things. And so she built this company up in Reedsburg, Wisconsin, which is a small town, not an easy thing to do. She is really talented at getting people to invest in businesses. Because like I said, some of these companies you need, you need a pretty solid investment to even get going in a manufacturing setting. And so Tara's great. Again, she's a food and finance institute at the University of Wisconsin. And her podcast, it's Edible Alpha and I'll plug her all day. She's been our business consultant from the beginning. We probably first met with her in 2016. The best thing about Tara is that she is, she is not a cheerleader. And we all need cheerleaders in our life, but even more than that, we kind of need dream crushers. I think anyone starting a business, you need your family cheering you on on one shoulder and then you need some sort of small animal that dream crushes you over and over again to make sure that you continually reevaluate your ideas and make sure that what you're doing makes sense and that you're not going the wrong direction. So having those sounding boards and going to these groups, like I feel like I can walk, because Halle is one of my best friends. I can call Halle when I have a random question about something and I know I'm gonna get good advice or if she doesn't have it, we'll figure it out together kind of thing. And so just having those people that you really trust that are not always gonna tell you, yes, yes, yes. I think it's really important to have people that tell you what's up. So another group session we did was on capital analysis and basically we took two different, two different of the group members were doing building projects at the time or had plans for building projects. I think it was, one of them was a pack shed and just going through and like just running a rate of return on investment calculation. And these are like apps you can get on your phone. It is not, it's not super complicated. But what I think more often than not, when I run a return on investment, it turns out to be a no brainer where maybe like, oh, do I buy another display freezer? Do I buy this piece of equipment or blah, blah, blah? And it keeps you up at night where if you would just spend the five minutes even on the back of an envelope, whatever, and just run those numbers quick, you might save yourself a whole bunch of sleep. I mean, I know when we looked at getting, and this COVID stuff like, of course we had to do a pivot, blah, blah, I'm not gonna dive into that too much. But the point was when I looked at kind of changing our tap room around and investing in some equipment, we sat down and did some return on investments and some equipment and it was like a no brainer. Where if I hadn't done that, maybe I would have hemmed and hawed and waited another month and that's all, that's potential profit that we would have lost and instead we were able to really capitalize on, there's some silver linings and all this, let's just be honest, capitalize on some of that. And so I really encourage people to like, if you can do it, and if it's gonna save you some sweat and sleepless nights on, should I or shouldn't I invest in this new vehicle or invest in whatever it is that you need for your farm? I really encourage you to like, how long is it really gonna take you to make up that cash, especially equipment? And I think that's something where we often are nervous about purchasing new equipment, but when you look at what it costs in human labor to do a lot of this stuff, boy, it can be a real quick return on investment. So I really encourage people to just learn how to do that. Be realistic with your numbers though. I mean, don't make it too rosy, maybe be a little bit conservative and just utilize those resources. And then finally, we worked with SCORE, which I should know what SCORE stands for, but it's a bunch of retired entrepreneurs and business owners and they go around and they just help other business owners out. And so we had someone from SCORE who was really knowledgeable and just payroll and taxes and payroll, all the workmen's comp, all of that stuff sit down with us and just go over just kind of the nuts and bolts of like, what does it mean to have employees? How do you make sure that you're compensating them appropriately? And then also what I learned from that is what having an employee actually costs you. And that's really important because you might say, oh, I can afford to pay 20 bucks an hour, but you need to understand that you can pay that and that's, and if you can, gosh, I hope we really, we try to pay employees well, but I'd love to pay everyone 20 bucks an hour, but really there's all these associated costs behind that. And you need to be really careful that when you do start to add employees, that you understand what your workman's comp is gonna be, that you're responsible for half of the payroll taxes, which get expensive, fast people. I'm telling you, my payroll tax bill every month is in the thousands for sure, several, several thousands. And I only have 14 employees and three are full-time. And so, yes, several thousand dollars every month goes to federal payroll taxes. And that is not something that is really, I mean, your employee pays for half of it, but it's still a lot, I'm just putting it out there. Stuff like that that I wish more people would have told me when I was writing up my business plan at the beginning, because it's a lot of money. Okay, so those were our group meetings. Poor Teddy looks miserable. We weren't all that miserable. We often shared pretty good food and snacks. And we went around to everybody's different place. And so we got to see everyone's farms and made it a little bit fun. So resources, again, I'm gonna go over these again because I think it's really important that everyone understands what resources are out there. I think that some of these might be Wisconsin specific, but probably not, to be honest with you. It might come under a different name in a different stator region. But, so Small Business Development Center, I would think most states have a Small Business Development Center. SBDC is what we call it here. That was definitely our first contact. And we wanted to start a business, was we contacted SBDC and we met with an advisor. And she was the one that initially introduced us to our lawyer, which another really fun resource everyone needs is a good lawyer in my opinion. I love our lawyer. Finding a lawyer that specializes in something you're doing is really important. I can't tell you, yes, they're expensive, but a good one is worth every penny and more. Because what they can save you in time and headache is absolutely worth it. And when you start a business, you need to save, I'm telling you this, you need to save every minute you possibly can. Because you will kill yourself. Trying to do everything always by yourself. Time is my most precious commodity. It has been for the past five years and it will continue to be. It's what I don't have. And so I really encourage people to find their people and the people they can trust and lean into them and use them because they're there to help and they wanna help. So Small Business Development Center can't say enough about them. They really pushed us, she introduced us to Tara Johnson and then also to our lawyer, Jeff Glazer, who is, he works at the university, but he also has a private firm that him and his wife run and they are just, they're wonderful. And I'm gonna say it, I love my lawyer and I love my bank or two. The other resource, again, every state is gonna have this, but UW Extension is actually was really helpful when we went to write our business plan and then anyone who's written a business plan, you also have to write a pro forma and that can be really daunting. If anyone wants to see an example of a pro forma, shoot me an email, I am more than happy to share ours. It's a beast of a spreadsheet. I mentioned it before, the Food and Finance Institute, that's Tara Johnson. She also helped us find the right extension agent to help us write that pro forma so we could get the bank loan. Bankers, Paul Ditman's my banker. He's our lender for Brick Cider. He's the lender on my farm. I absolutely trust him. He trusts us. It's a really, really great relationship and I could go on and on about how good it is to have a good relationship with a banker and how awful it can be when you don't have a good relationship with your banker. I work with enough farmers in my day job where, oh my gosh, these bankers drive me crazy. So if you have a good one, hold on tight because they're great. I mentioned it, but score is something that's in Wisconsin. Again, maybe it's a bunch of retired entrepreneurs, maybe in other states they have them too. Your peers, whether it's people that you're really tight with or maybe just people on social media that you follow. I mean, I randomly ask questions on Instagram to businesses that I don't know all the time. I am not scared to send someone a message. Sometimes they answer, sometimes they don't. But when we were looking for a pizza oven, I was like, ugh, how do I know? I just found some business that had the same one and sent them an Instagram message. Now we're pretend friends on the Instagram, that's great. And then finally friends, this is, if you guys don't know Hallie, this is Hallie Webking from Metal Arc Organics. Like I said, our kids are the same age. We've been friends for years. What I would do without the webkings. We heavily rely on each other for just, not even all business, but like emotional mom support too. I mean, having little itty-bitty kids at home and trying to start a business is really tough. And so knowing that there's someone else who's kind of struggling along with you is always really important. So thanks to Hallie and John. So some quick outcomes. I'm really bad at taking pictures. So I just, this is a crafting group that gets together at BRICS. But the point here is that it's a group of people that get together and share resources. We're sharing beads and yarn and things but you can share whatever you wanna share. I just think it's important to know that, to find some people that are in your community that you can rely on and to be cheesy, cross-pollinate with. Just find your people and they might not be in the exact business as you. And maybe that's better because you don't feel like you're in competition with them. But just finding your people is really important. So setting some priorities. If you do have a group like, it doesn't even have to be economics. Maybe you have a different priority. Maybe you get a group together that's really focused on soil health or cover crops. Or you feel like in your locale, there's not a good grazing resource group. And maybe that's what you do. There's all these different things you can do. Identify the resources that are available to you and build and have confidence. Like, what we're doing is really hard as business owners and as entrepreneurs and as moms and all the makers and community organizers. And we're all these different things and we're wearing all these different hats. But it's important to be confident in the hat that you're wearing and know that what you're doing is the right thing and persevere, but also like check yourself. And it's not all about confidence. You don't wanna be an asshole either. So community, I won't stress community anymore. I mean, it's the number one thing that keeps our business alive and keeps me sane. I love partnerships. I think anytime you can utilize someone else's expertise and resources and they can gain something from you, obviously that's the best way to go. We partner with other businesses in the community, literally all the time. Trust is important, find people you can trust. And then what I think is great about these groups and it's any group and we're probably all a part of these groups without even thinking about them as being kind of more formal, but you can always make them a little bit more like, hey guys, let's bring in this resource that we all need. It's all replicable, right? Like any of us can do this in our community with our friends, with our peers. What I would say is for longevity, you do need some sort of leader or a few people who are gonna kind of take the helm and organize things. If you wanted to keep going, I'd say stability. I'm in a couple other like, and again, random groups like a women's outdoor group and we meet monthly and sometimes there's five of us and sometimes there's two of us, but the point is that we meet monthly. And then reorganize as needed. I always put that, I mean, there's no reason to stay stagnant. So keep moving, keep moving forward, bring in new people, maybe some people shut out and that's okay too. So this is one of my favorite pictures. This was Moses' conference in La Crosse, of course, exactly two years ago. It came up, I threw this picture in this morning because it came up on my Instagram memories. But so that's three of us moms at Moses and I think our babies range from like three weeks to six weeks old in that picture. And it was just such a fun weekend even though we hardly got to hang out because we had these little babies around, but it was really empowering and fun to be able to hang out with my fellow moms at Moses and I miss Moses. So I'm just gonna reiterate, I think this is important. This came out of my Sarah report is as small communities continue to lose strength in their social fabric, which we've all seen in these small communities as businesses go out, main streets shutter, collectives of small businesses supporting one another are gonna really become vital to preserving their resiliency. And I really think that the more we can do together, rising tide raises all the ships. I am a firm believer that supporting even another restaurant in town. I'm constantly reposting posts from other restaurants in town, which seems really counterintuitive, but I think the more my town thrives, the more I'm gonna thrive. And so I want everyone to do well and I'm a firm believer in that. And I think it's helped us because I think when customers see that you want everyone to do well, they believe in you more and they're gonna support you and they're gonna support everyone else that you do too. So, all right. So I'm gonna quick go through our money story. I know I talk a lot. I'm sorry and I'm gonna leave plenty of time for questions if there are any. I can't even tell if anyone's out there. I mean, maybe no one's listening to me right now which is really awkward and strange. So our money story, I put BC which is before COVID and then I have an AC which is after even though we're not quite there yet. So these pictures I have like, how did we go from this like homebrew cider making, everything in car boys and on that little wooden press to like a product that we commercially sell and how do we make that jump? And so the first thing we got which it seems small and crazy but we got this little buy local, buy Wisconsin grant from the state and what it did, it helped us pay our employees and get our product to market. So it was just $24,000 but it helped us pick apples and get a product made. It was totally imperative to us getting an actual commercial product. And what we did is we rented space and an existing winery for two years before we opened our own production space. So it helped us get a product launched. Then when we were ready to really go for it, open our own space by equipment, we did through Compeer Financial, we did what's called an SBA 7A loan which is a small business association. So it's a federally subsidizer federally backed loan. And what that means is that it takes some of the risk away from the bank. And so it allow banks to make riskier loans to small businesses. I'm not gonna pretend it's easy. You do a lot of work to get these loans. The federal government like we all know requires a lot of paperwork. But you surround yourself with people like Paul Ditman, Tara Johnson, you've got a good lawyer, you've got this person at UW extension helping you tighten up that preforma and make sure that when the bank gets it, it's in the condition it needs to be $150,000 was our initial, I think it's our only bank loan at this point. And the reason we were able to build out a facility for such a small, I mean, 150,000 is a very small amount of money to open. I think we have like a 6,000 foot tap room and winery space is because we, our landlord financed the build out of the space. And so that's another layer to all this is like, is this something you're building on farm because then you need the equity to also do a build out, which is not easy. And trust me, we looked at it and we weren't gonna find a bank that was gonna loan us all the money to build a brand new facility on the farm and give us the working capital we needed to launch it. And so sometimes there's all these things that come into play. And so finding a landlord for us that financed that build out and worked it into the rent. So our rent is really high, but our loan payments are actually pretty low considering for us a game changer. And whether you're prepared to jump into the world of grants or not was the value added producer grant, the VAPG, it's a USDA grant and it's specifically for farmers to add value, help with working capital to add value to agricultural products. It's no joke of a grant. I have this funny picture, which I can't find, but when Matt printed out the grant once he finished writing it, my husband Matt is a good grant writer. He's, we've both worked in nonprofit world and grant writing world, but he's quite good at it. It was literally a ream of paper and we had to print it and mail it into USDA hard copy. And so it was, I mean, it was like this. I don't know if you guys can, I mean, it was incredible the size of that grant package. It's something to look into if you really are going to kind of make that leap from kind of a small maybe test kitchen into a full-on production facility. And what's magical about the value added producer grant and it is magical is that it is working capital. And that's working capital. And once you start to get into this world of loans and banks, it's like the unicorn that no one can get. I mean, it is so hard to find someone to give you money to exist. They will give you money for tanks. They will give you money for a sign to put on the front of your building, but no one's gonna give you money to actually run your company and hire people and buy in kind of the little product that isn't a stainless steel tank. We also took a second mortgage out on our house. We ended up, we paid back everything on that so far, but 30,000, which I feel pretty good about. Is that right? Maybe it was, no, it was 50. Damn it, I don't feel as good about that now. Anyway, the point is we did pull the equity out of our house because we didn't have, we don't have money. We don't have people who come from money. We just don't have access to other funds, private family funds. So we pulled the equity out of our house and well, we'll see hopefully, I did pay off the loan when we bought the new farm. So at least I'm clear on that second mortgage now, but I'm not gonna pretend like we didn't put a bunch of our personal money into this. And then, you know, I mean, you kind of have to be in it to be in it. And then the scrappiness part, I mean, you can be scrappy for so long until you run out of money. And then the scrappiness doesn't get you any further. But we really, it was incredible. When we opened our doors and when we opened the tap room in January, so just over two years ago, I think we had like a thousand bucks left in our checking account. I mean, to say I was scared shitless is an understatement. I mean, we were literally $1,000 away from like, I don't know what we would have done. And slowly we were able to just get people in the door. And, ah, it was nuts, it was nuts. And then just to quickly go over what we've used post COVID because we did shut down completely for three months and switched to delivering local groceries. So we basically turned into a food co-op. We got a couple of these Wisconsin Economic Development grants. The $2,500 one was the one that kind of anyone could get. And then we did get an Innovator grant which took some effort and I do struggle a little because I, you know, everyone gets mad. That's our, I mean, certain people got screwed out of this money. I'm not going to pretend they didn't. But you also did need to put in a little bit of work to get some of it. And like that 2,500, you actually didn't. You put in your bank, your name and your bank account information. But the Innovator grant, they wrote up a little grant for that and we got it and we got some new display freezers which was great. We did a PPP loan for 33,000 which was again, great, helped us pay the rent and groceries are not as profitable as selling booze who would have thought, right? And so it did help us keep our employees. The ones that needed the money we made sure to keep employed during all of that. We did end up getting economic injury disaster loan which I still have well over 100,000 in the bank on that one, I'm sitting on it because we use some of it to make some pretty big investments at BRICS but the investments are also, I ran those return on investments and we are gonna make the money back on those very quickly. And so I'm not, again, I'm not scared of taking out a loan if I know that I can make the money back. And then the big one that we did this year, again, I'm gonna credit my husband Matt with this is we did a local food promotion program grant which was big, $423,000. However, not all of that comes to us. We are working very closely with the University of Wisconsin to do an analysis on what a community food hub really looks like if they can be profitable because that's really what we've turned our food side of the business into. The cidery chugs along, it makes cider. We distribute cider, it does not by any means cover the costs of an entire tap room, staff, all of that. But the local food promotion program grant, I'd say follow us and that one just launched. We hired a local media company called BlackCrim Creative which is anyone who knows, Janna and Jesse Perkins of Vermont Valley Community Farm. They have their own media company and so they're one of our main partners on this grant as well as University of Wisconsin, Madison, we have a PhD student working with us on analyzing all this local food business stuff. I took a blurry picture of Matt working on his computer because grants, things that kind of have helped us along, grants are really tedious and take a lot of time and when you don't get them it's a bummer but when you do it can be a game changer. And so there's all levels of grants, right? There's state and local grants which might be something like Wisconsin Economic Development or maybe your counties. I know Dane County had a few grants available to small businesses depending on the county you're in. There's federal grants, so we've taken advantage of several USDA grants, SARA grants and then there's private and I was just chatting with a farmer friend this morning who needs some infrastructure and she was asking me if I knew of any available grants. And I know one that's open right now that I would really encourage people to look at is the Frontera Farmer Foundation grants. I have, I know several people who were awarded grants last year it's for capital improvements on farms. And I think that that is something that I wish private industry would do more of. I mean, we're never gonna get to be where we wanna be until private industry invests in us. I do believe that like we do need and it's not investments handouts, it's like investments. We're investing in the economy, we're investing in our local communities. I don't consider that any sort of handout by any means. We're gonna turn that money over and over again in these communities. Quickly because I've worked with Costia for so long I'm sure most people are aware of this but I'll just throw it out there anyway. Your local land conservation if you're in Wisconsin or whether you have soil and water districts if you're like over in Minnesota or maybe Illinois has that as well. County funds sometimes there's some Costia available for different things. But I just wanna distinguish between Costia and grants because Costia is often a few more while they all have strings attached but there's differences NRCS doesn't give out grants they provide Costia and it's Costia for a specific practice. Same with Fish and Wildlife Service. I mean, there's all sorts of different Costia out there and I think for me to try to give advice on it doesn't really work because every county, every region is so different. It totally depends on what you're doing. And my main after doing Costia and working as a conservationist is like don't farm to the program. I can't tell you how often I get people who come and say I own this farm like what can you Costia? That is please don't do that. What you need to do is come with your vision of what you want and then find out if there's money to support that. But farming to these programs are saying, oh yeah, I'll do, I'll add cut flowers to my business so that I can get a hoop house. Like don't please don't do that. It never works out. Really just do what you're gonna do and if the Costia works out take advantage and if it doesn't please don't that's my advice. And finally loans. So I said I'd get a little bit more into loans so there's private loans, obviously friends, family. Sometimes you get loans from people and that can be a game changer for sure especially when it comes to that working capital. Bank loans, we have a new to us 2009 big one ton truck because our old truck, the brakes went out twice. Like I can tell you the loan on that truck that isn't even that big. It we spent $20,000 getting ourselves a new truck and trailer but I sleep better at night knowing that we're not driving something around that's unsafe. That truck can handle the capacity that we're asking it to do. I drive junky old cars that 11 year old truck is the nicest thing we own and I wouldn't have it any other way. I really, I mean safety is obviously important. This is a picture of our new farm, just one of the barns. We bought a, it's beautiful 25 acre farm. So not big but big enough for us and our apples and some livestock but I'd encourage people I know farm ownership is it's controversial if nothing else. It's also really hard to do. And I understand that we use the equity of course in our previous house and we had a smaller farm to purchase this one but what was critical and I really want everyone to know this and hopefully when it does come time if you have the opportunity to purchase your own farm is utilizing the farm service agency and their beginning farmer loan program. So what that is is it's a federally backed loan. So you partner with a bank. I partnered with Compere Financial in Paul Ditman and they call it a 50, 45, five loan. And basically what it means is I believe the bank covers 50% of the loan farm service agency which is USDA covers 45% of the loan and then it's a 5% down payment. And anyone buying a farm of any size knows that that down payment is if you have to do a traditional loan at 20% that can be that can be what ends it. A 5% down loan is much more attainable and then also because it's a federally backed loan the interest rate comes way down. So I think our interest rate ended up being about 2.2% which is pretty incredible. So I just want people to know that that resource exists. I'm surprised, I'm working with farmers every day. Some people don't know about these farm loans and it's really critical and it can make all the difference. And so I just wanna point that out. It's called a FSA beginning farmer loan. So last thoughts I had were just, I don't know, I guess I kind of I've been talking a really long time. Oh my gosh, I've been talking for an hour. I'm gonna stop talking and let some questions come on in. I really liked what you had to say. You have a way of doing it in a very conversational way even though you don't know what you were talking to. So I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna final use some questions that have come in and we have some questions for you. So, okay. And I'm just gonna read them to you and you can answer them as we go along. So I'm scrolling back. I appreciate your thoughts on the community-based farming aspect, the connection between farms and communities. It's so important, but it's not often recognized. So what is Mount Horrible like? And I mean, in Iowa, so many of our communities are basically empty and it's really, it's like a ghost town. And so, what are we gonna, what's it gonna take to get back some of the communities that we've lost? I mean, so it's a good topic. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that, but... You know, I've lived in all sorts of communities all over the Midwest. So Barnabale, the community we just moved from and it's only six miles away from here. My kids still go to school there is there's not much in Barnabale. We were down to one bar. It does have a K through 12 school which was basically the life of that community was that school. I do believe that schools can build communities. I've seen it in several in Wisconsin. I think the loss of a school is sometimes the end of a community, to be honest. I've seen that happen in Wisconsin. So I'm a strong, strong, strong, strong supporter of public education and getting kids into public schools, enroll your kids in the public schools, please. Because that's oftentimes the lifeline to those communities and that's what builds pride and what makes people wanna come back and invest and live there. I mean, who wants to live in a community without a school? And even though we did leave Barnabale, it was because our business was in Mount Horrib and Mount Horrib is very, Mount Horrib's fine, right? It's 7,000 people, it's a suburb of Madison, it's commutable to Madison, and that's why we can have a business there. I mean, if we would have opened a business in Barnabale or in one of the smaller, and we did, we looked at it, it just would have been a very different business model. It would have been smaller scale and we would have focused more on distribution. What's nice about being in Mount Horrib is that we can focus on taproom sales because we have enough of a community to support us, but I've lived all over and I don't know what to do about it. I mean... It's not a problem easily solved, but it was something that I think resonated with people. So here's another one. How did you go about building your cohort in relationships? Was there a natural fit as it was already established or did you search for people around you and businesses that were like you, or how did you develop that over time? So some of the folks in our little group, I just knew very well anyway, like the webkings from Metalark Organics, we were just friends anyway. And then I did look for... I wanted a diversity of businesses in the group. I didn't wanna be all CSAs or all grazing or all, and so I did... Like I didn't know Bethany from Winterfell Acres, I just kind of came out of the blue and asked her. I definitely, I wanted some women owner, women business owners in the group was important to me. I did want us to be of similar startup size so that there wasn't... You weren't leaving anyone behind when you weren't and people were bored. I think my advantage, and I'll be honest, is that because I work in agriculture, in the community, I kind of know everyone who's farming and so I could go out and find the people that I thought would benefit most from the group. Excellent. It's tough, especially if you're new to a community. You kind of gotta get out there. Yeah, you seem to have the right kind of personality to draw people to you, I'll tell you. I like to talk. Your sales of 500,000 in three years, that's pretty impressive. What's your trade area for your products? I mean, is it just local, regional, national? I mean, that's pretty impressive, so. Yeah, so that's split, right? So we have our distribution, which I think last year was 45,000, was distribution sales. So that's not a majority of our sales are on-premise at the cidery sales. And I think our first year was closer to 350,000 in our second year, just over 500. And I think our distribution sales followed that. I'll be honest with you, I don't make money on distribution. When we bottle up cider, it's really expensive. We self-distribute to the Madison area and I'd write it off as advertising. And we've talked about, you're always at this moment where do we make that next step and really push our distribution or do we continue where we're at, push it a little, a little, but don't overrun our capacity in the cidery because at some point we'd need to increase production pretty dramatically and because we pick all the apples, we would also have to re-look at the way that we obtain product. And we're not going to start shipping in apples from Washington state. And so we need to decide how that growth is gonna look. But that's the breakdown is it is definitely, it's about 10% comes from distribution and we're in like 30 to 40 different stores. So this is a related question that's sort of like the decision points. Back before you started this business, where did you start trying to figure it out? Meaning, did you start with market research? I mean, what did that process look like? Were there benchmarks that you came across that were decision points, like it's a go, no go kind of thing, but how did you get started thinking, you know, that kind of stuff? Yeah, so when we first, I mean, oh my gosh, a number of business names and iterations of business plans, I think, I kid you not, I bet Matt, between the two of us, we probably have 15 different business plans on our computers somewhere since like 2014, maybe. When we were living in Malawi, Matt took a online course called The Business of Brewing out of Portland state. And that helped him kind of get a grip on we wanted to, we liked making things boozy. We would take fruit and crush it and ferment it out. And that was kind of our thing. You know, avid home brewers, obviously. And so he took that course and that really just kind of helped him at least wrap his head around some of the business stuff. And he was the one who took a majority of the writing of the business plan. Cause I was always, for the most part, kind of working that other job that just, you know, got us the health insurance and paid the mortgage. And now I work that other job and I feel like I work at bricks full time. So I'm like a little bit over. And that's why I really emphasize time. Cause I really, I could use a little bit more time. But that's how it started. And then I will not emphasize enough having that little dream crusher on your shoulder, someone to tell you when your idea isn't gonna work. And that was Tara for us. We came to her thinking we were gonna start a brewery. And she looked at us and she said, there's too many goddamn breweries, pick something else. And we always had cider in the back of our head too. And we'd always made cider. And then we moved to the drift list and like, it was springtime. And it was like, well, duh, there's apples everywhere. Like we don't even need to grow on there so many. And so it was just a really easy, it was actually easy for us to pivot right into cider and focus on that. And that's because we had someone telling us that to not be stupid. This is a question that's related to a comment you just made a little bit ago about your time. And time is love. I've had somebody say that to me. When do you feel you can quit your day job? And is that a goal or not? That's funny, everyone asked me that. And I really, so I'm really good at my job and I like my job. And my job is the reason that I know all the farmers. My job is the reason that we are sourcing, so much of our food locally is because I know everyone. And I love working as a grazing specialist. I love working with dairy farmers. And I don't think I'm gonna give it up. I mean, bricks would make more money if I spent 100% of my time focused on it. I can guarantee, I could cover it. We could serve, I'm not having any more babies. We could figure out healthcare, but I like my job. And I think that it's, I think I'm really good at it. And so I'm gonna keep doing it. But I appreciate that people want me to be able to quit my job. And I wanna tell you that I could. I absolutely could and I'm choosing not to. That's it. That's a nice explanation of that situation. Here's another question. You had a lot of names and organizations that you had on your resource page there. Do many of those work throughout the Midwest or only in Iowa? I'm not sure that you can answer that very well, but you have a broad list of options available to you. Yeah, my advice is find your small business development corporation, small business association, whoever, you just need to like make contact with someone and then it'll just snowball out. Okay. Just make a contact. Try not to, you know, just find someone. Even if it's a banker extent, I mean, sometimes extension is dead end, trust me. Like extension agents can be duds. And if they're not good, find someone else. Here's another related question. The SBDC here in Iowa, they're not that knowledgeable about value-added types of businesses. Do you run up against that very often in, yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like if you make contact with someone and they're not any good, plenty of us aren't good at our jobs, right? My advice is just go find someone else. And I even say that, you know, once in a while, if you're looking for like farm cost share and you go into your local county office and they're duds, my advice is maybe go to a neighboring county and see if you can't kind of stoke the fire a little bit and push someone into helping you. Cool. We need more of you. Why did, why do you have an attitude? Why didn't you go towards more private investment as an option? Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's a good question. And we did have offers of private investment. We didn't need to. We got, we were able to secure that bank loan. And I did mention this in my, if our landlord hadn't done the build out of the facility we're in, so we own anything in the building that moves, he owns everything that doesn't. He put the hood in, flooring, walls, lights, my land and we pay that in rent. So my rent isn't cheap, but my loan, I have a very small loan. And because we were able to find that situation, we didn't have to do private investment. We did, there were other buildings with, oh my dog, hold on. There were other buildings that we would have, I think we would have had to go with some private investment and it's nice to own your own company and not have to deal with it, so. Cool. That your LFPP grant sounds timely and interesting, a local food hub development project. Is that a statewide thing? I mean, would like to learn more. That one's a big one. It's federal, it's administered by the Agricultural Marketing Service, which is a branch of USDA. You could just Google it. They're big, big grants. They're not for the faint of heart. It's a lot of work and there are days when we kind of wish we hadn't done it. I mean, we're glad to do it and it's good work, but it's a pain. Working with some of those programs is a big pain. And Matt worked for the State Department, administering basically really big grants in developing countries and he didn't like it but he was good at it and so we do have a competitive advantage in the whole grant, grant writing business. But again, sometimes that takes away from efforts that you could be putting into your business too and that's why it's really important to sometimes not take the money. I've heard people say the best and the worst day of your life is when you get a grant. Yeah, great. So. Except for that value added producer grant, I have to say those are amazing. Those are great. A couple of other, what would you recommend to learn about grant writing? It sounds like you've got it right in your back pocket with Matt. Yeah, I mean, what I would say is start with one. I mean, everyone should look at these Sarah Farmer Rancher grants. They're national, every region has their own. We're in the North Central region, which would cover, I don't know if it's all the way to Indiana or what the North Central region covers. It's a really good little way to kind of get your feet wet with grant writing and know what deliverables are and making sure that you're reporting the way you need to report accounting. It's like a small accounting project. So I would really say that those are, those would be a really good first step. They usually announce them in the late fall, like December is usually when the call for proposals comes out. So I just, I'd watch for those. Another one like I was talking about is this Frontera Foundation. And you do have to be in the Chicago-ish area. And that's a private grant, but I was just flipping through it earlier this morning and that would be a good one for someone who isn't a professional grant writer to apply for it. And your other option, and this is real, and again, I'm all about paying people for their talents as you can hire people to write those bigger grants for you. There's a gentleman named Jim Gage that writes BAPG grants. He's out of Southeast Wisconsin. He's wonderful. He knows the systems. You pay him to do it and he deserves what he gets paid to write those grants. And so that's your other option is find someone to do it for you. And don't feel bad about that. That's fine. It reminds me of me and drywall. I cannot do drywall, but... Find someone who can, right? This is related. I mean, what websites or resources do you scour for grants? I mean, how do you find, like the one in Chicago you just mentioned and stuff? I mean... I mean, for me, it's mostly word of mouth. Boy, you just kind of have to... I don't know, that's a good question. I don't know that a lot of Google searches are gonna get you there. I think a lot of times it goes back to like, Tara Johnson sends me grants when she sees something come across her desk that she thinks my extension agents are really good at sending me things that they think I'm... So creating really good relationships with people, they're gonna funnel those things to you. You don't have to kill yourself to find them. Just be a good friend and hang out with people. Yeah, booze comes in handy, then I would imagine. Yes, right. Does help when you make booze, yeah. Any advice about financials for transitioning between generations, farms? Is that something? That's a tough one. Would you recommend to firing farmers to take a training in financial literacy or business finances before going into business? Those two are kind of connected, yeah. I think so, but I mean, I do think so. I mean, I wish I had done more, but I also think you can do all the training you want. I mean, how many... We all have them in our family, I'm sure. I have an MBA in my family who thinks that he's giving me advice all the time, but the guys never run a company. I mean, I struggle when people who've never... And that's, I love extension. I love all of our conservationist friends, but sometimes it can be really tough when someone's never done it themselves. Yeah, and that's where it goes back to finding those people, whether it's retired business owners, people in your community that have done it and kind of been there is probably more valuable even than a course sometimes. I think, yeah, I mean, I think until you're in it and get into QuickBooks. And that's what I was saying about the QuickBooks training. I was like, we did it and I feel like that was like the worst one because it's just everyone's so unique and different. That's really, that's tough. As far as transitions, farms, one generation to another, within a family, it can be really tough. Like what are the aunts and uncles? What are their expectations? And all the cousins, I would say though that FSA loan I'm talking about can be a game changer if you can come up with enough equity to get one of those low interest, low down payment loans, maybe you can just straight up buy a portion of the farm. I am nervous for a lot of the young farmers I work with, dairy farms where one kid stayed behind. And to be honest, that kid deserves the farm in my opinion. I don't think Aunt Flo and Aunt Jane deserve to get their piece of the farm. But unfortunately fairness is this thing that we've equated to birthright instead of work. And so I've always felt like the kid who stays behind should get it. And I think the other people need to step back a little bit and you do see a little bit of that transition of farms outside of families can also work. But that farmer has to be of the minds that were there willing to transition the farm out of the family. People are really stuck in their ways and it's almost never about the money. It's like cultural, right? We feel like mom and dad worked hard so I deserve this farm instead of really mom and dad worked hard to make this farm and take care of this place while they had it. And we need to figure out how to continue to, I mean, the farms, it's terrible. I wish it, I don't have a good answer, sorry. I think you just touched on a very important range of issues that people have to address. There's no single solution. So I think you're right on top of it, you know? But yeah, fairness and what's fair. I'm always curious about this. What do you do for childcare? Okay, pre-COVID my kids went to an in-home daycare. I pulled them out back in September when school started because we decided to keep our kindergartner at home and not send them to school because we wanted the grandparents to still stay. I am a, again, to each their own, I love my kids, but I am not meant to be home with my kids all day. And I can tell you that now more than ever. Time, I mean, I love my kids, but they also enjoy, like now they're in school again and it's really wonderful. Childcare is really tough. Right now, my five-year-olds in all day and my three-year-old is there three days a week and Matt and I just deal with the other two days. It's been really, really stressful. And to be honest with you, it hasn't done great things for my relationship with my kids, the COVID. I'm really happy to have someone else help me out and people that they really love. So I'm a childcare proponent. Hire it done when it's needs to be. Hire it done, yeah, exactly. Last question and there's a couple more comments. A small meat processing facilities are closing. How might a group of farmers organize and run a processing plant for their chicken, ducks, hogs, et cetera? If that's something you're... So it's interesting that you... My friend, April Prussia, Dorothy's range farm, she's down in Blanchardville. She's been working really hard on this problem. Depending on what state you're in, you're always gonna have different regulations. I can speak to Wisconsin. We have state-inspected facilities. We have federal-inspected facilities. I always think there's a place for cooperatives and then sometimes there's not a place for cooperatives. I don't know about... Someone's gotta be in it and someone's gotta run that plant and someone's gotta not also have a farm, in my opinion. I think that to think that a group of farmers can farm effectively and well and market and then also run a processing facility cooperatively, it's tough. I mean, I think you could go back and maybe read the history on Organic Valley and see how they managed to get where they're at. And I think cooperatively owned is beautiful. Cooperatively run is a different story. I think that meat processing is a huge problem. I get calls on it several times a week. I'm not gonna pretend it's not big. I just... If I had to run my business cooperatively with someone other than Matt, it gets complicated really quick. And I just think it's fine to own it. I think that you just need to really find that someone who could run it. That would be my advice, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And when we had Ty Gustafson with the Story City locker here in Iowa on yesterday and then similar kinds of questions and similar kinds of comments back as well. So that, I think every state has to deal with this issue of not having that processing available that's needed right now. Right, and I think mobile slaughter units are the most economical humane way that we can deal with it. No one wants a slaughter plant in their backyard anymore. And so I think sighting them in a community is gonna be pretty much impossible. And so we need to really invest in these mobile units. It's better for the animal, it's better for everyone. And then get some well-trained butchers in whole animal butchery back on them. Back on the main street. I think, and that's what Ty brought up yesterday is mobile processing as the solution to some of the mid-sized lack of. I think that's it. There is one comment here, and we're about 1025. I love your humor. I love your attitude. It's refreshing. The Dream Crusher comment was great. Tara is great at that. All right, I'm glad someone else knows Tara and knows the Dream Crusher. It is, it's really important. You can't surround yourself by cheerleaders all the time. Or you'll get led down a road that's not a good one, so. Yeah, yeah. It's that, I think that's it for questions. Wendy is part of this. And if Wendy, I'll look down at the bottom here and see. Oh, what is your employee, last one. What is your employee-employer relationship style? That's interesting. So you can ask my employees, but we are, the one thing I really love about my employees is for the most part, I employ all adults. Like older people, which is amazing. The high school students I do have are like spot on and awesome and they're great. But for the most part, I've gotten really lucky and people wanna work for us. And so it tends to be, I have several farmers that, you know, over the winter they work for us that we source from. And then people just kind of wanna be a part of what we're doing. And so I end up getting older people who are, you know, I don't mind someone working a couple shifts a week. And the thing about me and Matt is we are like, we are so hands off. Like that's why I like having adults. I want my employees to be able to make decisions and feel confident about those decisions. And so we're, we are not micromanagers. It probably bites me sometimes, but I just, it's not my style. And so we are, we're real hands off, but we trust our employees to make good decisions. And I think that's important. Excellent. I think I could tell that they would probably like working for you as well. So. Well, you can ask them. Well, I mean, I think that will wrap up our session this morning. I think there was a lot of good questions, a lot of entertaining commentary, insightful. Somebody who's doing it is always better than somebody who's talking about doing it. And so thank you. We're at 1028. One last question. Can you speak to, into providing health insurance for employees on a farm? How much is an employer contribution? Is there any subsidizing of it? That's a big issue of health insurance. So that's, yes, I don't know, I don't know on farm as much. What I do know is that I'm doing my employees a disservice at this point if I offer them health insurance. How messed up is that? So the second I start offering my employees health insurance, they're gonna have to pay a good chunk of money and now they're not eligible to go through the marketplace. And so I've had that conversation with several of my full-time employees and we've made a decision together. Again, I was willing, but we've made that decision, we've done the research and we decided because we're not obligated to offer it, my employees are better off without me offering it. Oh, interesting. So you talk to them about it and work out a solution. Yeah, because I do, I have full-time employees that have families and I wanna make sure that they're taken care of. Yeah.