 Too much of an introduction. He's been a sustainable farmer for, he says, for more years than he cares to admit. He's the author of A Guide to Raising Pigs, Dirt Hog, Talking Chicken, and is the small acreage management columnist in Small Farm Today. He's active in promoting and participating in the River Hills Farmers Market of Silex. Okay, Joel, take it away. Good afternoon. I want to thank you all for coming out and being with us, and I want to thank the Mokker family for inviting me out. I'm supposed to make an announcement, is in the tradition of the political season, Ron Mokker does not improve everything I'm going to say. He did set me down, he said this. He said, Kelly, he said this is an election year. He said no politics, no picking on the university, leave the USDA alone, be politically correct. So thank you all for coming and have a safe drive home. So actually I didn't let him bother me because I counted. I said, well then, Ron, you're going to let me give a talk called 50 Shades of Farming. And he backed away from that. But we're going to talk about marketing, the hard job on the family farm, especially getting paid for what you grow and what you know. We're going to start this way. I've got something in my hand. I brought it here today from my farm. It has historical value, it has tradition, it has lore. Many, many people want it. It is highly valued. And I only want a dollar and a quarter for it. And the first one up here for a dollar and a quarter will get what I have to sell in my right hand. Come right on up here, young man. Let's see your dollar and a quarter. Okay. Here's your dollar. No, it's a deal. Talk to me after the talk. Okay, let's, let's, we've had a little fun in the little chicanery and he's got a wife and a baby here so he can have his five back. But ladies and gentlemen, if I had grown a pound of tomatoes and it cost me a dollar to grow them, and I asked three dollars for them, what's the difference? Everything I told him was the truth. That was a Sacajawea dollar. It has value. It has tradition. It has heft in the economy and people want it. And they want what you and I as small farmers produce. Trust me, they've seen enough episodes of 60 minutes that very few people in the United States really feel comfortable with what they buy in the supermarket right now. And they're looking more and more to people like us to supply what they need to grow. I'm sorry, I need to eat. And they're looking to us to provide it because they believe we have the good stuff and we know what we're doing out here. Well, most of us do. And we're all trying to do a better job of our farming. And that's what we want to talk about today is in the product should go what you know. And some of us have been a lifetime putting this together. I started out many, many, many years ago as the kid with the good red hogs. Then I became the man with the red hogs that would work in the dirt. Now I'm the old guy that knows a little bit about chickens. Back home in our farmers market, which is the second Saturday of every month, February through December, will be their next Saturday. Y'all come or go back there where we're at today. But the point is, I'm positioned as the fellow with the heirloom chickens. The Bergen family is in there with their pigeons. Helen Lemon is the waterfowl lady. Everybody in that market has something of which they're knowledgeable, and something that sets them apart and makes them distinct as a producer. And that is the key. Right now, today, we are in a process of moving into a new age of agriculture. Some are calling it artisanal. Some of it are calling it local foods based. But essentially, it's after a product that can be depended upon both consistently in quality and consistently in presence in the market. And that's the role we're going to have to come to fill, the supplier. In other words, you all are going to have to become your own Walmart store, your own University of Missouri doing research, and you're going to have to become your own sales staff. And that's hard. Very, very hard. I'm like every one of you in here. I'd just as soon be left alone to go home and farm. I like to work outside. I like to work with my birds and eat something I enjoy. I feel I almost earn it, but I know I can't do that anymore. I've got to get off the farm and away from the farm. And I have to go where the people are with the money. And that's the crucial part. We have to get outside of our comfort zones. And that's hard to do. And folks, we have to put on a little bit of an edge. And that's very hard for most of us. We grew up in a tradition of going into the marketplace once, twice, three times a year, selling a crop, selling some finished livestock. You take a whole growing season to grow a grain crop, haul it in. Last day of harvest, you'd go to the elevator, plop down on the seat, buy a soda and wait for them to write you the check. Well, in a good year, you made a little money. In a bad year, you didn't make any money. In a year like this one, you owed a lot of money. And we've said, how do we get away from doing that? Well, we get away from doing that when we start doing what the big boys do. We take control of our production. We've got to realize that agriculture for the last two centuries has functioned as a wholesale marketing operation. The money was made far, far away from where we live as farmers. It's in the meat counter. It's across the shelves that the groceries store. It's at the cash register. We don't have a presence there until now. And we're starting to have that presence. But it's not coming easy. It's demanding a lot of us. And we've got to start thinking very, very differently. A few years ago, up at our farmer's market, a lady came in, fancy big Cadillac. And she walked up to me and she said, I want to buy a pig. I thought, okay, where are we going to go with this? And she said, I want to buy a pig for my stable. And I thought, I don't know how to go there. But what she was doing, folks, was she had a high end performance horse stable in St. Louis County. She had a hog there that was a companion animal. It kept the horses calm. It moved back and forth. It was a big pet and they wanted another pig. Well, I sent him to the family on our market that day. I knew he had some shoals at home. Well, she went up to the man and said, I'd like to buy a pig. Well, he was a 30 year hog farmer. Well, what do you want to buy? You want to buy a boar pig? You want to buy a butcher hoe? I said, no, I want to buy a pet for my horses. Well, he just walked away from that woman. I don't do this kind of business. It's not hog business. Well, I can tell you what his thinking was, was a large pile of male bovine excrement. But he was married to a good country woman and she followed that lady out to the parking lot. And she said, we've got a pen full of pigs back home. And I've got two growing boys. I'd like to buy some groceries next week. The lady came with the new Cadillac the next day and gave a hundred dollar bill for a 40 pound pig. And I hope to the day that that man dies, she stands there and reminds him of that pig story as a regular as clockwork. And don't worry, my wife, Phyllis has some stories about me I can be reminded of too. But she's not here and that man's not here and I can talk about people back home. They'll learn to come to the farm show. See, the farm show is a lot like Las Vegas. What happens here stays here unless your neighbors are with you. And I see that camera back there and I was supposed to make an announcement and did is anybody here that's not with anyone they're not supposed to be, you need to know we're taking pictures. But the point was that was a hundred dollar pig. And you're going to have all kinds of these opportunities now. We're selling $45 trios of chickens back home. Now what makes two pullets in a rooster worth $45? Well, I'd like to think it's the good looks of their owner but I'm not that good a salesman. But what makes our birds valuable is their pure bread. They have performance behind them and I am behind them. On the Friday night before the farmers market people can call me. What are you bringing? How's it bread? That Saturday morning I'm in the market. I'm standing right there with it. And on Monday night they can call me again if they want to make another purchase or if they need more information. I said we've gone through two centuries of wholesale agriculture. We've gone through two centuries of faceless, soulless agriculture. Anyone here know what Don Tyson looks like? The Purdue man? The dean of the school of agriculture at the University of Missouri? Are you getting my point folks? This is faceless, blind, empty agriculture and people are scared of it. They're scared of it for what it's doing to their health. It's what it's doing to their environment. It's what it's doing to God's creatures which we were told to be stewards of. So now we have to take it back. And it's going to be slow and it's going to be hard. You're going to take the hog market back one pig at a time, one pound of pork sausage at a time, one day at a time in a farmer's market or a CSA or in an ad in the local paper. And it's not going to work the same everywhere you go. I'm from a pretty rural area. And no, we don't all play banjos, but it's pretty rural up there in Lincoln County. So we're far enough away that we don't always get St. Louis prices. But I can know this is each 10 miles from Silex to St. Louis, you move closer, you can add 35 to 40 cents a dozen to brown eggs. But you have to have better traffic skills. You have to be willing to put in the time and you have to make the commitment. We found our niche with live animals. I thought we had the most unique farmers market in the world. You can come to Silex and you can buy rabbits and chickens and lambs and calves and firewood until I found out something. You know where there's two major farmers markets in the United States where you can buy lambs and calves and pigs and goats and chickens. Chicago, Illinois and Miami, Florida. They're going right in there where the people are where the people have the money. And they're taking it in there and they're having the presence. And it's a different situation. You're going to encounter people that some of them don't really know a lot about what you're doing. Some of them are from very different cultures than you are. I've dealt with Bosnians. People are still practicing their Indian culture. Some Pakistani folks. And they don't always buy exactly like I would. There's a beautiful Pakistani family back home. And the thing they want most is those big old ugly black Muscovy duck drinks. And I can remember when we had them in a boy, the best thing we did with them was kick them off the front porch. But if you don't learn anything else today, I learned something that corrected me after 50 years. There's no such thing as a Muscovy duck. They're Muscovy, Muscovy ducks. So that's the last time you'll hear me call them anything but Muscovy ducks, but I did correct you today. But it values to these people. And it matters. And they don't always get what they want. And a lot of these ethnic people have been abused very, very badly. We conducted a farm tour a few years ago for some folks that were Muslims. They'd been buying a lot of goats, a lot of rough calves. We took them out on the farms. And we're just average farm folk up there. But they saw the first time they saw boar cross goats. The first time they saw some good cows with a lot of beef breeding in them. And they saw some grass. They didn't see the inside of a rundown sale barn. And they were appreciative of it. And that appreciation translates to money. And they do have the money. That's when we come back to selling this young man a dollar for a five dollar bill, which by the way, I hope you'll follow me back to Silas because son, I've got a bridge on the Quiver River. You really need to buy my folks. That's that's the essence of it. What we know makes what we grow better. And it does. Every one of you in here has talents, skills and expertise. I've done it at many of these others and I'll do it a little bit again. But you older folks, you convey wisdom. There's a growing number of women involved in production agriculture. Something like 38% of the small farms United States now today are managed and operated by women. In the marketplace, it gives your production a little bit greater value because housewives and homemakers respect your opinion. This young man is valued because he's trying and he's bringing energy and that's crucial. We can't all be the same. We can't all sell the same things, but we can market ourselves. We are the farm people. And that's what I want you to start thinking about today. As you move to develop your farming program, think about what you can do. Think about where you're at and what you can best convey. I said a little bit earlier about the problem with some very rural markets and there are some in Missouri, way up in the north and all. And the thing is, as you get into a real rural farmers market and you can divide the buyers into three groups. There's the ones like me who are old enough to remember when you can buy everything for pennies on the dollar. There's a third of the community that isn't economic hard times. They can't afford to spend a lot of prices. And there's a third of them that have a brother-in-law back home that can grow what you're growing. So I just wiped out your market if you're a long, long way away, unless you are coming up with something new and something different, something unique and something special. Real quick, how many of you live in a county that doesn't have a Walmart store? Not as many as I thought. But here's the thing. Go into that Walmart store next time and go back and look in that egg counter. Walmart will sell you a dozen brown cage-free eggs. I checked the other day for $2.79. They will sell you a dozen brown organic eggs for $3.28. If they weren't getting them sold and in goodly numbers, trust me, they wouldn't be in that Walmart store. Also trust this, time after time surveys have shown that consumers, even in rural areas, are willing to pay a three to 10% premium to buy locally, buy from people they trust, and buy a product that they perceive to be better. Now folks, you're not going to sell a lot of a lot of these things. I'd like to tell you you could go out of here tomorrow and sell 10,000 dozen eggs at $3.28. But it ain't gonna happen. But if you sell 50, that's $150 a week gross, $7,500 off of one farm venture. And that's a part of it. We have got to start thinking along those lines. There is a process called stacking of enterprises. I don't like to say you're competing against Walmart, but I do say they've got some good ideas in there. You go into a Walmart store and you can buy tires and bicycles and goldfish. Okay. All right, on your farm back home, let's forget about all this specialization and this high techy crud. If it's so good, why aren't the university professors that are teaching it out doing it? Yeah, I got my shot in, Ron. But the point is, folks, on your farm, and I don't care how small your farm is, you can start stacking ventures, eight, 10, and 12 of each of them earning you two to three to $4,000. As long as they do not compete directly for your time and your resources, you can make them fly and you can extend your earning period. You might have 100 laying hens. You might produce 500 broilers. But don't get too swept away on poultry. I mean, your eggs and broilers don't think you can do turkeys, geese, ducks, pigeons, and everything else. But you can market garden. You can produce a little grass-fed beef, some natural pork. Don't get arrogant with it. Now I'm going to really get a little controversial. We've got a bad thing going on in alternative agriculture. Because we're broke up in these little camps, each of us thinking, I'm doing the best and the only and the right thing. I believe organic food is a good thing. But I don't believe any of us in here can sell enough organic corn at $20 a bushel to make it fly. If you can, only very few of you can. But local, natural, additive-free, all kinds of good things are available to us to sell. And we've got to think about that. Quit getting off in coiners and pointing fingers at each other. I'm from Lincoln County, Missouri. And as they like to say back home, if the last three people on earth were from Lincoln County, two of them would get off in a corner and talk about the third one. So don't be divisive. If you found a niche with organic production, God bless you. But if your neighbor does that, you can find something else that will work for you. Look at some new things. Get involved. The thing that you're going to have to, and all of you are going to have to emphasize quality, that's where they can't come against you. Because they're making their money by producing cheaply. Cutting corners, cutting corners, cutting corners. And they will leave this country to get what they want. In the typical shopping cart today, there are food items from at least five different countries. The state of Illinois imports 95% of the food that the people in Illinois eat. There are farmers in the state of Missouri tonight that if they had to eat what they grew would starve to death. Because they can't eat ethanol and they can't eat soybeans turned into plastics. You say, Kelly, well, I haven't got any choices. The heck you don't. The state of California leads the nation in the production of 85 different crops. If it were a standalone country, it would have the eighth largest agriculture in the world. Well, we're not going to grow a lot of avocados or papayas in Missouri. Do you know at one time we had 35,000 acres of apple trees in the state of Missouri? Do you know at one time that up where I'm from in the northeast Missouri, we were the milk shed, the produce shed, the egg shed, and the poultry meat shed for a little place called the city of St. Louis? Look at all this growth out here in Columbia. I think all of us as taxpayers, we'd like to get a little at university professor money back in our pockets. And they do come to these farmers markets and they do get all excited about some of this produce. But you know what? They need other things. We got a boy back home that sells hickory nuts by the five gallon bucket. Now he's not selling tons of them, but he didn't know he could sell any until he tried. Ernie Bonner out here. Imagine what he did the first time he grew a crop of blueberries in southeast and southwest Missouri. That's flying against logic if there ever was. Tremendous success story. So you've got to be looking for those little niches and opportunities. The bad thing about niche markets is they pay well, but they never get very big. And you can bust them. You can do more good and make more money with three sows right now than probably you can with 300. If you're selling pork and not pork as a commodity, you can make more money with grass fed beef than you can with feed dot beef. The same is true of chickens and on and on and on. And you have to get involved in it. You have to take it above the first run. We talk about value added production and we probably don't make enough of that. Now back home, we tried to do as much as we can. Jams, jellies, things of that sort. Gotta be a little bit careful. The people want it. The bureaucrats don't understand it. You've got to be subtle and you've got to be careful and you've got to ask a lot of questions. But the thing I learned a long time ago is you ask your bureaucratic question, he's got to come up with an answer. And if he sees that you're the one and he's going to come and find out why you asked the question. Well go back home and ask it through a market master or an extension agent or someone like that. Get to find out just what is involved. And each and every county puts a different spin on it. Up where I'm from in our farmers market, you can sell jams and jellies, but you can't sell canned tomatoes. You can sell watermelon, but you can't plug a watermelon and it's going to vary from place to place. And as I said before, you've got to be a little bit practical. We in the chicken industry have seen something in about the last 18 months. This economy has jerked us back to earth. You're not selling a lot of high dollar eggs or broilers anymore. It's not a bad thing. It's a good thing because we were just kind of sailing along on good luck and good looks. Some of us had more of that than the others. We'll argue about that. But I tell you what I did do. Talk to a man up in New Hampshire that's still getting $25 a piece for five pound broiler chickens. Everybody looked up $25 for broiler chickens. How many thousand can I get to New Hampshire tomorrow? Well, thanks to that hurricane, I don't even think you could get to New Hampshire tomorrow, but he's not selling thousands. But what he has done is he's made a connection up in the Northeast to the Italian American communities. And he's going after that special market. He has breeds of chickens that go back hundreds of years with traditions in Italy. He's got Encona laying hens and dorking meat birds. And he gets $25 for a dorking broiler. But he does it this way. It takes a lot of time. And he goes into it and he says, here is this broiler. Let me show you how to get three meals out of this one chicken. And he tells them how to take the more meaty parts for an entree. You take the trimmings and all and then you make a wrap or something of that sort. Then you take the bones and the bony parts and you make soup. Well, you know, we don't think that way too much. We don't realize this is how most of the people on earth think about food. One meal at a time, one bite at a time. Remember the most profitable beef marketing organization in the United States sells beef four ounces at a time. McDonald's. Four ounces at a time. Now, you go home tonight and you open up that beef magazine and boys, if you ain't got 200 cows, you ain't in the game. Well, I'll tell you what, if you've got 200 cows in the state of Missouri, you're in one very high priced game today because you're buying $11 a bale hay. And you ain't found a banker that'll talk to you for the last 90 days. So what's the difference? They got to the consumers. They did the marketing. Well, I don't think you need to build golden arches. And I think you need to get busy about keeping more of the gold back home. And that's where you have to get involved in this. This guy with the $25 chickens. Now, he's as hammy as they come. Some of you've probably seen him on public television. He got on a couple of those Itay and cooking shows, bought a lady out on PBS. And he did a smart thing. He got a little chicken manure on. But oh, this is what my great, great grandparents had in Italy. He didn't know. He said if they were from Italy and then from where these chickens come from, they could have. So he'd found that link. He'd found that connection. He'd put a face on stuff that is pretty basic. Eggs and chicken meat. We don't know what Ty and Tyson looks like. But there are a lot of people up in New Hampshire now that know what that old boy looks like. And they're not turned off by his $25 chickens. And like I said, it's not going to be easy. And it's not going to be for everyone exactly. But more and more, you have to think about how am I going to get off the farm and get out to the people? And there is a concept. And we don't play it quite as much as we are to, but it's called cooperation. No, I'm not going to say your membership in the MFA. I'm not going to tell you to start an elevator that we're going to close down someday because you're not selling enough fertilizer. But I'm saying back home, you boys with lambs probably got a neighbor with beef cattle and another neighbor with chickens and another neighbor that's a pretty fair gardener. And by golly, I just put together a CSA for you people, didn't I? And you go back home and you get involved, you start saying, well, how do I reach out to these people? Not going to be easy. A couple of three years ago, I was bopping through the farm show and just ended up one day. And two extension people grabbed me and said, Kelly, we need you in a meeting. I thought, okay, got to be a free meal at the extension. So they took me upstairs back here over the restaurant. I thought, wow, they may even buy something in the restaurant. Plumped me down. I was between two extension agents, there was an extension agent over here and another one over here. Boy, before I was busy out there, people going back and forth. And extension agent on this side was probably 60 years old and the other one's a young lady and they said, Kelly, what do you think we need to be doing more? We know extensions into trouble in Missouri. And I said, well, quite simply, I said, you need to be helping people market. He said, oh, we'll never do that. And there's nothing round up ready. We can sell you to help with marketing. There's nothing that Cargill or Pioneer or anything has to do with marketing. And they said, well, it'll never happen. And I turned to that old gentleman, because I knew by then there wasn't going to be anything to eat. And I said, you see all them people down here on that floor? And he said, yes, I do. He said, we want to reach out to them people. I said, well, I'm going to tell you something about them people. I said, at least half of them pretty well are convinced that someday they're going to have to shoot people like you to stay in production. And it got real quiet. And I was left alone with nothing to eat. And I haven't been invited back to any of those meetings either. But the point is, folks, you've got to come together. You've got to do it yourselves. They don't grasp what's happening. And there's some very good extension people here today. Debbie Kelly and Bud Rieber are lots of good people. I pick on them maybe a little more than I should, but they're kind of an easy target. Rather like the senator candidates for the state of Missouri this year. But as I look over this Senate race, I'm reminded of what Will Rogers said many, many years ago. We in Missouri are proud. We've got the best politicians money can buy. But the thing is, folks, we're coming to a time when we're going to have two agricultures emerge, like it or not. The corporations are going their way. They're selling products that make them some money. But it's not good production. It's not trusted production. And more and more, it's nothing we can eat. Ethanol is probably the cruelest joke that's ever been played on the American farmer. Because all they did is tie the corn market to the oil market. And folks, there was a cartoon that made it into the New York papers a few years ago. And we didn't see it very much because we don't think about New York. We think about Columbia and Jefferson. But there was a picture of a man in a Cadillac driving through a sub-Saharan African city. And he's grabbing up little bowls of grain from starving children and dumping them in the gas tank of his car. And the point has to be made. We've been beat down because we're small farmers. Well, they hide behind our image really well. Yes, they do. But the point is they need us. The people believe in us. And we're the ones that are going to endure and last. We're coming to the end of this. They're calling this the post-agricultural age. And there's something to that. You have 300,000 full-time farmers in the United States. Each one of them is said to feed 123 people. Do the math people. They're not even feeding all of the people in the United States. How are we going to feed the world? And I'm going to tell you who it's your job to feed. It's your own family. You don't have to farm to look good for the big slick magazines. I never will forget Dad telling me. He said, Kelly, every time you see something on one of the covers of those magazines you think you'd like to have at home, he said, wait 18 months. And he said, you'll be able to buy it in that guy's bankruptcy sale. And he's pretty much right. So we're going to have to come off the farms. And we're going to have to come out in the public. There are 112,000 farmers in the state of Missouri, full and part-time. Best studies say three times that many have a hands-on at-risk investment in production agriculture, mostly livestock. But you go into Sulaard Market, the oldest farmer's market east of the Mississippi River on Saturday morning, and they're selling live chickens. They're talking to people with funny accents. It's kind of ironic that people that come from foreign countries and listen to me speak Missouri, they think I'm the one with the funny accent. And they're probably right. But they come in there with those green pictures of dead presidents. And that's what we've got to be about. Not making lots of money, but keeping as much of the money as we make it possible. I talked about stacking ventures on your farm. 12 ventures on your farm earning $3,000 net each, that's $36,000. Play a little game with me here real fast. Consistently, a high profit margin on a feeder calf is $80. How many cows does it take to make $16,000? $200. Actually, you figure 90% cow calf, you're up to 215. Anybody bought a cow lately? We've got over a quarter of a million dollars in the game and we ain't got a calf on the ground. Then we've bought bulls. Then we've bought ground. Two and a half acres per cow calf unit. Then we've got to go buy tractors. Then we've got to go buy balers. Then we've got to go buy pickups. I mean, Lord knows you can't farm unless you've got a brand new four-wheel drive pickup, but we'll let that go. The thing is, folks, those 200 cows, you've got an investment of over $2 million to make $16,000. Let me tell you something a little bit confident here and I feel sure about telling you that. I know you ain't getting a lot of money on a money market now, but you walk into any bank in rural Missouri and you tell them you've got $2 million to put in there and I guarantee you make a whole lot more interest in $16,000 and you'll never find yourself on a cold January morning strip to the waist with your arm to your shoulder inside a bulky heifer trying to pull a calf or paying a veterinarian $200 for the same service. Now, I'm not saying let's not get in the cattle business, but let's grow out five or six grass-fed bees. Let's venture in a little closer to the city. Let's sell some of that $6 hamburger and back home if they balk a little bit. Well, I look at it this way. Oh, buddy, if I just gave you $300 for a new tractor tire, I think you ought to buy 10 pounds of the $9 hamburger. Little pit quid pro quo. Two years ago, I had an old gentleman stop me. He said, Kelly, he said, I'd like to buy a few chickens for my granddaughter's 4-H project. I said, okay, I shot him a price and he stepped back like I'd Bernie. Another one of them real quiet moments that seemed to befall me when I get out in public. He said, Kelly, he said, I haven't paid that price ever. And I said, when was the last time you bought any chickens? He said, 25 years ago. Well, I looked out the window there, the senior citizen center, and he'd pulled up in a brand new Dodge pickup and he had just bought 80 acres of ground. I said, I'll tell you what I'll do. He said, what's that? I said, I'll say you're my chickens for what you'd have paid 25 years ago, but you've got to sell me that pickup and that 80 acres for what you'd have paid for him 25 years ago. Got real quiet again. I was all alone again, and no one bought me dinner that day either. But as you can tell, I haven't missed too many meals already. But the point is folks, the point is folks, we've got to stand up a little bit. We know this. We've hung on hard. We've earned this gray hair. We've earned these calluses. We're here when people thought we wouldn't be here. I did 35 years in the Duroc-Hulk business. I saw a hundred thousand dollar boar sold and I saw eight dollar butcher hogs. I saw a good friend as I ever had, won into a mental institution when she fell. There's another boy back home that won't even talk to his father when they had to let the hogs go, but they're coming back small, tight, and hard. They're doing it three, five, and 10 cells at a time and they're selling pork. Lady called me by the arm up here last year at the farm show and we were talking about whole hog pork sausage. She said, well, he said, I'm in the Chicago farmers market and I get six dollars a pound. Do a little math on that real fast. She's getting 150, 160 pounds pork sausage at six dollars a pound. Anybody else in here sold any $900 butcher hogs lately? All right, let me ask you this much. Let's go a little bit further. If you're making five dollars a head profit, which would be real good in a high confinement unit, you got to sell 180. She made as much money on one as her neighbor down the road made with 180. She doesn't have to sell a lot of them. So she sells five or 10. Then she sells some of those five dollar a pound tomatoes. She sells some of those 25, 35, 40 dollar trios of chickens. She goes that distance and she gets three and a half dollars for a dozen eggs. She's selling green beans. This corn looks real good right now at seven something a bushel. What's a 40 pound bag of deer corn cost at the Walmart store, boys? 15. What's a 10 pound bag of bird seed cost at the Walmart store? Well, I got to tell you a true story. I worked in the water industry for a number of years. DNR took us up to a big meeting in St. Louis County. We're standing outside their big head office. They had a big glass wall there. We're standing there and they had a feeding station. They had chipmunks and they had squirrels and everything's running around. And here comes this touring group of St. Louis people through there. And old country boys were standing back there nursing the free coffee and the donuts. I did get fed that day. Little dark colored squirrel ran by and the woman said, what did they call that? And I heard the old boy behind me clear his throat and I knew where he was going with that. He said, ma'am, he said, back where I come from, we call that breakfast. That's the gap we have to bridge. And they want it bridged. They want to be appreciated and respected. When they give you two dollars or three dollars for that pound of tomatoes, it's not really the cost of the tomatoes that matters. It's the fact that you respect them and you listen to them and you've tried to oblige them and you don't have to get real fancy. My wife is in the food industry. She has one standard for buying tomatoes. Those slices have to be big enough to cover a hamburger. Now I'm going to tell you folks and like I said, I'm a little tired of us pointing fingers at each other, but there's one reason a lot of those heirloom tomatoes are pretty rare is they look funky and they don't yield well. You've got to combine the good with the practical. The artisanal with the real world dynamic of it. And that's where what you know has value and you have to tell these people why it's worth that. The consumer is always right because they have the money. They're not always sharp. They don't always know. The average American now is 10 generations removed from farming experience. You hand people a live chicken in the event of a national crisis and they'll starve to death holding that chicken wondering what they're supposed to do with it. That's the truth. Folks, they won't buy a turkey unless it has a little thing in the breast that pops up and tells them when it's done. Now let alone hand them an axe and point them out the door and say take him now, but that's what we've come to. We've got to be there to do that. You've got to make them understand. And you've got to cooperate. We're blessed back home. We have several small little meatpacking operations and they're real good. We take a hog up there into our one and he makes bulk pork sausage. Take the whole hog, turns into pork sausage. The only thing that comes back on the farm are the ribs. So we don't have to worry about marketing anything high end. We can sell one pound or two pound sticks of pork sausage. Put them in a dedicated deep freeze, bring them out, take them to the farmer's market in the Coleman cooler. And the first time or two, you're only going to sell one stick. American people are cautious. First hog, I only bought, I bought, I only bought one. That's all the money I had. That's the point people are slow. But if you've done your job, then you're going to come back and they're going to buy more because they're starting to put your face with it. They're starting to trust you. They're starting to say, you know there's something out here other than farmland. There's John Smith or there's Kelly Klober or there's Garrett over here. And they're going to go looking for these people. And folks are going to come more and more. They're going to come out of those cities. And I'm going to tell you this, the thing you want to have to start farming now is the sprawl. Get serious about going where the people in the money are. You're going to have to reach beyond just down the road. You're going to have to go into places. You're going to have to take things that you didn't believe you could sell. But you will find a market. Pick on Walmart one more time. Big target. Went through the Walmart store not too long ago. Got over into the gardening section. They were selling soil. Rotted sheet manure and tree bark. Went back into the electronics and they were selling compressed air to clean electronic material. Went over into groceries and they were selling water. Folks there selling manure, water, dirt, sticks in the craft department and sand and being paid very, very well for it. Why aren't we being paid well for good pork and good vegetables and good beef and good chickens? Because we didn't think enough to ask for it. We got to get a little bit tougher. They tell a story about the northern counties up in Iowa. A few years ago the winter went out, came to a crossroads up there. Lo and behold, there were two pickups across the road from each other's stop signs had been covered over by a blizzard. They looked inside and there was an old farmer frozen to death in each one of the pickups. Near as they can tell, they'd both come to the intersection at the same time and they'd frozen to death waiting for each other to go first through the intersection. Now, I know one should go against your raisins but I do want you to get a little bolder. I want you to stand up to be proud of what you are. I was walking through the farm show a couple years ago and there was a nice man back there looking at some of those cattle and he said, I can't do that. I only have five acres. Well, I was at the end of the day and my pain medicine was wearing off and I'm afraid I turned on him a little harder than I could. I said, you've only got five acres? I said, how many people on the face of this earth would give their right arm to have five acres of farmland in the United States of America? The only problem you've got, my friend, is no imagination, no creativity, and not very much grit. What can you put on that five acres? Well, I can't have big cattle or a big tractor. I said, well, I'm going to tell you something old buddy. I did 35 years in the hog business. Never made a dime with a hog house. I made my money with hogs. You're not going to make a dime in the cattle business with Baylor's and John and their tractors. You're going to make your money with good cattle. You've got to get serious about the products you sell. My wife's dietary magazines come in and I read them and they've been an eye-opening experience. You read Farm Journal and they say, boys, you've got to figure out how to do this to grow 10,000 bushels of this. You know what they worry about in the retailing of the food industry? How much money they can make off of a slice of pie? A slice of pie. We've got a lady back home. She kind of put two and two together. She's got some blackberries. She's got some other kinds of fruit. She gets $12 a piece for pies at the farmer's market. She's got to get a little closer to the city. She's not going to sell hundreds of them, but she's going to make a little bit of money. And folks, you don't think things can't be done. Anyone been to Lancaster, Pennsylvania? You want to see an 11 acre farmer's market under one roof? You want to see boys paying six and $7,000 an acre for farm ground and making a good living at it? Watch what they're doing there. The Lancaster farmer is a weekly farm paper of 150 to 200 pages, week in, week out, for Lancaster County. Those boys can't farm big. A lot of them are farming with horses. They're farming for the people in Philadelphia, in New York City. They're not farming for the global village. They're farming for the big white houses on the hills above the global village. Folks, forget about the global village. In the global village, you have to work 10 years to buy a bicycle. In the global village, it doesn't matter to them if we grew 500 bushel corn in Indiana tomorrow because they're eating rice. What has to matter is what we do right here right now with what we know, what we have, and what's in our own hands. And we've got to be about that kind of farming. Are we running over on time? They haven't drugged me off. Garrett's going now. Man, you want a lot for $5. Got eight minutes? Oh, I've got time enough to take up an offering. I show you how to make a little money here real fast. Folks, I am going to make one last point. I thank you for being patient and I thank you for listening. But I hope you realize what I'm doing up here too is I'm marketing. I'm selling what I grow and I'm selling what I know. I don't have the best chickens in the world. I didn't raise the best hogs, but I was there and I tried and I listened. And that's very important now. I was raised on a stretch of Blacktop Road in Montgomery County. There were eight purebred hog farms on nine miles of Blacktop Road. On one end was Yorkshire Reader. About halfway up we were with our Derox and on the far end was a man named Ruben Edwards. And I'm sure a lot of you know that name today. Well, Mr. Edwards was a master of marketing. My wife and I had been going together for a while and I said, Phyllis, I said, you kind of need to see my life. I said, we're going to Ruben Edwards' fall hog sale. We went and sat down at the hog sale and they ran the first little boar pig in the ring, little old March pig by, sorry by a boar named Warthog. Well, this was October sale so the pig wasn't very big. They ran him through the ring and Danny Baker was working hard on the microphone. And the pig brought $15,500 back when $15,500 was a lot of money. My wife had been raising the country all her life, but her jaw dropped. She turned to me and she said out loud, she said, Kelly, they can die, can't they? An old gentleman sitting behind her, wretched over any pageant on his shoulder. He said, sweetheart, they can and they do. But the thing was, I was between the Yorkshire Park and I was back the road from Ruben Edwards. I had my Derox sign out on the road. And that kind of had a little joke he liked to tell. They'd pull in, they'd see the sign and they'd come in and they'd say, they're looking kind of glassy eyed. They've been to Rubes. You'll get one sold today if you keep your brains about you. Well, we found our market was to other small farmers. We sold boars one and two at a time. And that's how we prospered. That's where we found our niche. And we only cranked out 25 to 35 a year. But it was enough. We did other things. And that was the key to it. You can't put all your eggs in one basket. Because what's going to happen, I guarantee the bottom's going to fall out of that basket. And there's just no way around it, folks. It will happen sooner or later. We get a little bit greedy and we overproduce. But I remind you of something about big business, an agribusiness. Big business responds to two emotions and two emotions only, greed and fear. Well, right now, their greed won't let them cake us over in local foods. That's our niche. Fear is that they're losing ground. And folks, there's some pretty nasty threats being made right now. But I'll tell you something I've told you today about quality. And I'm going to talk to you more about it in a session ahead. But the importance of pure bread livestock. Anyone see what the Black Angus Association started doing this month? They rolled up their sleeves and they looked them right straight in the eye. And they said, you don't need to cross breed. You don't need hybrid vigor. You need good black cows that are bred to be good. Folks, you can breed good black cows out of five head as well as 500. We kicked out 35 Duroc boars a year from five Duroc sows. We learned our lesson pretty fast. You went and paid the price it took to buy a good sow. And if she raised you five good boars a year, she paid for herself no matter what she cost. And you make your opportunities. And that's what it's about now. You make your opportunities. You go into the market. They believe you've got the good stuff. I know you're smart enough to take advantage of it. God puts you down on the best place on earth to farm. And I'll leave you with a little bit of encouragement. John F. Kennedy hosted a celebration and a dinner one time for the prize winners, the Nobel Prize winners. They sat around the table and he said, this is the greatest assembly of intellect to dine in the White House since Thomas Jefferson dined here alone. You know what Thomas Jefferson said about America's farmers? He called you the chosen of God in whom rest he has made to burn the sacred flame. All right. Don't hide that lie. Stand out there and tell them, here I am. This is what I grew. I'm proud of it. Here's what it's worth. And I'll be here next Saturday again with more of it because I'm going to be at Silic's next Saturday, the farmers market. I'm going to be back there this afternoon. You all are welcome. Thank you very much and bid them up, boys.