6 Ranch Podcast
Farming with Tyler Coppin
This episode dives into the realities of modern farming with Tyler Coppin, a seasoned hay farmer. We explore the economic challenges farmers face, where a single storm can devastate a year's work. Tyler shares the difficult decisions farmers make, like managing crop insurance and navigating generational changes. We also discuss the barriers new farmers encounter, the impact of global trade, and the high costs of equipment. The episode explores the hardships of rural life, the mental strain often hidden behind a strong exterior, and the support network that sustains farmers through tough times.
Check out the new DECKED system and get free shipping.
Want to chat with Tyler? Here is his FACEBOOK profile.
This episode dives into the realities of modern farming with Tyler Coppin, a seasoned hay farmer. We explore the economic challenges farmers face, where a single storm can devastate a year's work. Tyler shares the difficult decisions farmers make, like managing crop insurance and navigating generational changes. We also discuss the barriers new farmers encounter, the impact of global trade, and the high costs of equipment. The episode explores the hardships of rural life, the mental strain often hidden behind a strong exterior, and the support network that sustains farmers through tough times.
Check out the new DECKED system and get free shipping.
Want to chat with Tyler? Here is his FACEBOOK profile.
A million dollars in agriculture really isn't that much money. When you're spending a million dollars to make $50,000 or $100,000, and then you add 9% interest onto that million, your $100,000 is gone.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:I mean, you're looking at, you can go bankrupt instantly From a storm. From a storm.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Or, like I said, just a hailstorm. I know a guy down the wallow and the wallow area. They had that hail storm come through. It was golf ball size hail and how. I don't know what the wind was.
Speaker 1:It was 100 at least down there had to be, I think it was like 150, 160 miles and he goes yeah, my, uh, one of my best crops of wheat, he said the hail hit it which it knocks all the seeds out of it. Of course it hit us in. What august? Something like which it knocks all the seeds out of it, and of course it hit us in what August?
Speaker 2:Something like that.
Speaker 1:So the seeds were hard enough to where they just got blown out on the ground and it flattened that crop to the ground. And I go, well, did you have insurance on it? And he says, well, no, because insurance is kind of expensive, it just eats up all your profit.
Speaker 2:Yep, and I'm going. Man, you just took a hundred percent loss on that. Then he goes yep. These are stories of outdoor adventure and expert advice from folks with calloused hands. I'm James Nash and this is the 6th Ranch Podcast. This episode of the 6th Ranch Podcast is brought to you by DECT. That's D-E-C-K-E-D.
Speaker 2:If you don't know what that is, dect is a drawer system that goes in the bed of a pickup truck or a van and it'll fit just about any American-made pickup truck or van. It's a flat surface on top and then underneath there are two drawers that slide out that you can put your gear in, and it's going to be completely weatherproof, so I've never had snow or rain or anything get in there. There's also a bunch of organizational features, like the deco line, and there's boxes that you can put rifles or bows or tools all different sizes. There's some bags and tool kits. There's a bunch of different stuff that you can put in there. But the biggest thing is you can take the stuff that's in your back seat out of your back seat and store it in the drawer system and it's secure.
Speaker 2:You can put a huge payload of a couple thousand pounds on top of this deck drawer system. There's tie downs on it so you could strap down all your coolers and your four-wheeler and whatever else you've got up there. It's good stuff. This is made out of all recycled material that's a% manufactured in America, and if you go to deckedcom, slash six ranch, you'll get free shipping on anything that you order. This show is possible because companies like decked sponsor it, and I would highly encourage you to support this American made business and get yourself some good gear. So here with Tyler Coppin, what would you say your profession is?
Speaker 1:Farmer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's what I thought you were going to say.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:What's the difference between a farmer and a rancher?
Speaker 1:Cows, cows yes.
Speaker 2:Can you have a cow farm?
Speaker 1:You can. That's a rancher.
Speaker 2:That's a rancher, yeah.
Speaker 1:That's what I would call a rancher. That's a rancher. Yeah, that's what I would call a rancher. So we have cows. We actually just cut our herd back. We used to have about 150. Now we're down to about 80 mother cows.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Anyways, it was just I'm getting too big farming and Dad's getting too old. So it's just one of those things where you can't find any help anymore and it's getting tough out there. So we just kind of decided I'm more the farmer and Dad's kind of weaning himself out. So that was the route we took.
Speaker 2:How old are you?
Speaker 1:35.
Speaker 2:And how old's your dad?
Speaker 1:He'll be 78 in a month.
Speaker 2:Okay, so the average age of a farmer in the United States is 57 1⁄2 years old. Yep, and if that doesn't scare people who eat food to death, it's terrible.
Speaker 1:So I thought I try to explain this to people all the time I go. When you weed us all out and you essentially either build houses on all of our land or you make it where it's not worth us doing this, we will be the only ones alive at the end. Yeah, because worth us doing this. We will be the only ones alive at the end. Yeah, because when you think about it, it's it's uh, you know, you think about the great depression. I had grandparents that were depression babies and just the stuff that they kept over into my lifetime from theirs was remarkable. I remember cleaning out my shop um, their shop after they'd'd passed, and just sacks, grain sacks full of canned food, cans that they had washed, taken the labels off and taken both sides out of and kept and we're not talking one sack, we're talking like four or five. And I'm going what could you possibly do with these?
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:But it was just. You never threw anything away, you never did anything.
Speaker 2:And that's an interesting question when it comes to stuff like that, right? So from your, your perspective, it's like what could you possibly do with this? From their perspective, it's the same question, but with a different tone well, what would I need this for?
Speaker 1:yeah when I don't have something like this yeah, exactly you know, used nails and I hate to say used nails, but old bent nails, uh, bolts that had been broken, dude, it's nuts, how many um buckets of nails and old coffee tins of stuff that I still have from them, that, and I'm not complaining about it, because sometimes I actually go to dig through them, sure, but it's just you're thinking, man, this was a different time, yeah, and back when they used to live off of, they had chickens, hogs and milk cows and they would take their cream off the milk every day, and I think it was every Friday, the train would come into Joseph and they would take eggs and cream in.
Speaker 1:And that's how you made your, your check right and other than that they lived off a garden and smoked some hams and had a beef or two every now and then.
Speaker 2:But and a lot of the milk byproducts. The whey went directly into the hogs yes, you fed your.
Speaker 1:Fed your hogs to slop the hogs. That's where it came from.
Speaker 2:So yeah, so the the slop.
Speaker 2:The reason that it's sloppy is it's any food scraps, but it's also your leftover milk product Cream is a lot more shelf-stable than milk, so that's why it was an export product.
Speaker 2:I know down there in Hells, near Johnson Bar, there's that big rock out in the middle of the river that's called Sturgeon Rock. Near Johnson Bar there's that big rock out in the middle of the river that's called Sturgeon Rock. It used to have big eye bolts in it and big bull rings in that rock and the homesteaders down there would tie sturgeon up to that rock and when one of the steamboats came upriver it could collect those sturgeon and take them back to market and at the same time that they were sending that fish out they would also put their cream out there on that rock as well. And you know, one of the most remarkable things that I would have loved to have seen in Wallowa County was the hog drive from the county to Elgin, because the train didn't used to come all the way here. And there were a lot of, you know, I wouldn't even call them dairies, but all these homesteads had a handful of milk cows.
Speaker 1:Everybody had their own small production creamery. I guess Everybody's got a milk stall back. If you look even my place, go look at all the old homesteads. They all had a little milk shack where they all took their milk cows. They usually got a concrete floor in them and the head catch, and I mean that was, everybody had milk cows, everybody had chickens.
Speaker 2:It was just how you, how you made a living back there and self-sufficient but because there are so many extra hogs around and you know, pigs reproduce really rapidly. Their gestation is three months, three weeks, three days. They big litters, they can eat all kinds of stuff and because they had this leftover milk product, we had all these hogs that we needed to send to market and they would take those pigs and drive them through the mine across the Wallowa River and across Cricket Flat and graze those hogs on Mormon crickets on their way out across there to the railhead in Elgin and horses do not like pigs.
Speaker 1:No, and pigs don't really like anything else either. Yeah, I remember I had a 4-H or each other.
Speaker 2:They're fighting with each other all the time.
Speaker 1:No, I was going to say I had. Well, we remember 4-H and FFA. In the show ring there was always two guys standing there, you know, an old Bud Botts or whoever else.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and they had a big old panel with two handles in it because pigs they want to kill each other. Yeah, and some pigs do and some pigs don't. And I remember I had two pigs for fair one time and we always had a little gobbledygook there. We had about 20, 30 sheep usually my whole life, and I remember one time the pig got out of the pen and got in with the sheep and it looked like a coyote chasing sheep down across the bed and it was pulling wool out.
Speaker 1:It wanted to eat one yeah, you know, and I and dad just goes you got to get that hog out of them sheep. He's going to kill one and and uh because they, my granddad, used to have.
Speaker 1:Dad said that they would raise about 300 hogs a year out there at the place, so cows weren't a thing. Cows were milk cows. That's what we had. As far as the beef industry and chickens, dad said we had about six, seven hundred chickens when he was a kid. That's why he can't eat chicken anymore no kidding when mom cooks chicken, dad looks at her and kind of gives her the we raise beef woman you know and what the heck are we eating chicken noodles again for.
Speaker 1:But he said every day. He said they'd go out, milk the cows, slop the hogs, he said, and then you'd find chicken eggs and then they'd go out and they'd get a couple old stew hands and he said they'd have the blanch pot and then the wax pot. And he said before school we're saying so they'd get a couple chickens ready and then his mom would, uh, you know, have a chicken for lunch. So lunch was the big thing. So those they'd go out and work all morning. You know, start early and lunch was like our dinners. Now I would say they had a great big lunch. He's like it would be a roast, it'd be, you know, a couple chickens, and he's like you ate everything took a 30 minute nap and you were up and off. You went until dark again. So, but he chicken was a lot of his diet and I know him and his sister that's still around here. They you don't eat chicken around them, they just kind of look at you silly they. Yeah, we don't need any more of that.
Speaker 2:But and you know if you're taking hens that are too old to be laying anymore. The reason that you're getting up early to get those things killed is because they're on the pot it's gonna take several hours to make that thing edible.
Speaker 1:This isn't the six week old chicken that you're buying at the grocery store today that's why they call them stew hens yeah because you about got to stew them into being tender enough to eat yeah and uh and catching them in the morning. That's when they're on the nest, so it's when you can catch them and get them and chickens are a morning and night animal and other than that you chase them around the barnyard all you want.
Speaker 2:But yeah, and they have two speeds and one of them is a little bit faster than me oh yeah yeah, no it.
Speaker 2:It's an interesting point and I am, you know, as fun as it is to joke about this stuff, I am really concerned about the future of agriculture right now, and I think that the age of the people who are doing the job is almost more alarming than the percentage. So I think 1% to 2% of the U S population works in agriculture. So two people are feeding 98, and we're able to do that because of equipment, because of tractors, um, because of pesticides and chemicals, antibiotics, um, you know a lot of things that have enabled this, enabled this really small percentage of the population to feed everybody else, but the age thing, that's different. You know, if that number keeps going up, which it has been, we're going to run into a really significant problem.
Speaker 1:Well, you're going to be paying the $20 for a loaf of bread, and that's what they don't understand. People think we're just these dumb farmers out here, and maybe maybe we are. Maybe that's why we're getting weeded out. But my thing is pretty much it's so hard to get into farming now unless you're a generational, so if you're not second, third generation man, the cost of everything now to actually come in and make money in agriculture especially with all the crap we got going on now with every other in, and make money in agriculture, especially with all the crap we got going on now with every other country.
Speaker 1:And we're importing all of our, you know, fertilizers and so natural gas is where we make a lot of our fertilizer out of. So the keystone pipeline stuff like that that boosted our input costs huge and we had a really good year of farming here two years ago. You know kind of a drought-inspired cost increase on the other side of it, but it came down to where they were almost paying us so much that we were laughing. And we're like man, we're going to have a good year, we're going to make it. Finally, yeah.
Speaker 1:And they outpriced the other side that was buying.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And they said we can't pay that. They outpriced the other side that was buying Right. And they said we can't pay that. And so now they had to cut their costs back so that the other side would buy. And when I'm talking the other side, I'm talking Japan, saudi Arabia, china, and well, now that company just took a hit. So where do they get to put their loss onto the bottom guy, which is always the farmer? So now I'm paying the highest I've ever paid in fertilizer, almost except for last year. I mean, I'm about the same. All my input costs are crazy. It almost makes you really think about what you're doing, because this is gambling.
Speaker 2:And I want to talk about that, I want to get into that. I want people to understand how expensive this stuff is, Because I think a lot of folks look at a tractor and they go son of a gun. I bet that thing costs $100,000.
Speaker 1:So the $100,000 is a lot of money, but not in the tractor world anymore.
Speaker 2:So how much does a tractor cost?
Speaker 1:So you're looking at a lot of the tractors you see around here. On the newer scale, you're looking at $200,000 to $250,000 for and I wouldn't even say new anymore, right, and that's the thing. And it's not even just the tractors, it's any piece of iron too that you're pulling behind it. It's everything. I mean. You're not going to be with a tractor and a baler. You're going to look at a field with a farmer out there haying in it. You're going to see a half million dollars worth of equipment or more, yep, and that's.
Speaker 2:That's just for that farmer to go out there and make and spin some circles yeah okay, uh, what kind of crops do you produce right now?
Speaker 1:so I am trying to strictly be in the export hay business. So I'm doing a lot of just alfalfa and Timothy grass.
Speaker 2:And alfalfa is something that we do really well here.
Speaker 1:We do do it well here, but I wouldn't say that it's as good here as it is anywhere else.
Speaker 2:So when you go to like the.
Speaker 1:Columbia Basin, or Baker alfalfa loves hot, it loves heat, it loves heat, it loves dry. That's how it lives. We grow grass here like mad.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So you know, like the Zumwalt Prairie, a perfect example the grass that can produce for cattle feed is, I mean, they have studies on that in colleges. They're like have you ever seen? The Zumwalt Prairie Grass is what we grow up here. So pretty much alfalfa is a crop that we grow just to because you can spray grass out of it. Because since we have so much native grass here that's just, I mean, bluegrass and foxtail and just all the pretty much our native prairie grasses we don't want that in our Timothy because they don't like they will dock us for that. So the reason that we grow a lot of alfalfa up here is so we want to be able to spray the native grass that's coming up, like a weed, I guess, out of it, so we can have just a pure Timothy crop. But we are big on the market now with the Timothy. It used to be Ellensburg.
Speaker 2:And what is Timothy for folks that don't know?
Speaker 1:Timothy is a grass. It for folks that don't know, timothy is a grass. It's a high sugar, high fiber grass and, for whatever reason, horses, camels, dairy cattle they supplement it in for a high fiber, but it has a high sugar so it makes them do really well. They used to feed it. My dad said they used to have back when it was draft horses plowing the fields. It used to be oats and timothy.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:That's what kept them going in.
Speaker 2:So it's a high-performance food.
Speaker 1:High-performance food. So, and we can grow it like crazy here, yeah, and like I said, we're a little tiny place, we're not in Ellensburg or anywhere else but for whatever reason, this high elevation, we've matched them and maybe even surpassed them on the quality of it that we can grow. So we've came onto the map in the export market as being, hey, wallowa County is a Timothy place. That's where they all come to find premium Timothy timothy place.
Speaker 2:That's where they all come to find premium timothy. So if you go to churchill downs and you're going to watch horses run in the kentucky derby, they're eating timothy not only are they eating timothy, there's a good chance they're eating timothy from this valley 100.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I can tell you even the grower's name so that's the thing is and it's uh, that's exactly what it is.
Speaker 1:It's a performance animal deal. Don't ask me what or how, but we got lucky. We finally have our crop we can grow, because we can't grow corn I'd love to grow corn we can't grow soybeans, we can't grow anything like the Midwest or pretty much any of the rest of the country can grow. That's a big money crop. We're kind of stuck to well, we, we got grass, we got alfalfa and we finally found our grass, yeah, that we can grow that's actually profitable to us. That makes makes us money finally.
Speaker 2:So now that that gambling aspect of it. You know one of my, one of my neighbors right here is john john vanderzannon good farmer good farmer, he farmer, he's got this bare ground out here. That wasn't alfalfa, didn't do that great, sprayed it out. And I was talking to him at the feed store just here three or four weeks ago and I said what are you going to plant this year? And it doesn't really matter to me, except that for whitetail deer hunting purposes.
Speaker 2:I have all the bedding ground right here, so the deer are going to spend all day on me and morning and evening they're going to travel out and eat. So what he plants is going to change the way my wildlife act.
Speaker 1:And I hope it's Timothy, Because I'm going to tell you so I battle the elk and the deer.
Speaker 2:Elk love Timothy and elk and deer.
Speaker 1:Love Timothy and it's high sugars.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And that's the thing. And you can turn cows out in a 200-acre field that's broken half and have half of it alfalfa. But what you'd think alfalfa would be, they're all going to run over there and eat it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Not the case. They always go to the Timothy or feeding cows. You ever fed cows and you got two different kinds of hay on there or three, and you're feeding the bales and they just kind of walk along and sniff it and then they keep following you. But the second you throw off that one bale. That, for whatever reason, they just love they all stop and you just eat on that section. That's how it is with like second cutting Timothy with cattle. It's crazy how much they just will walk past alfalfa to get to that second Timothy. Like they know it's on that truck and they're just waiting for you to throw it off.
Speaker 2:So, as you're rotating a crop, like what John's doing here, you've really got to be racking your brain for like wondering what to plant Because there's only a handful of options that will grow here and you're trying to guess what the market is going to do, what you have the equipment to be able to do and where your field's at. Yeah, that's another thing, and you know, we've got Melville's on this side and they're such a wild card, you never know what they're going to plant.
Speaker 1:They're annuals, man, and there's a lot of annuals that will grow everywhere. But you they could plant what's what's an annual? So an annual is a crop that grows one time and dies every year. Yeah, so on, a perennial is like a grass or an alfalfa, that every year it will grow back every time until you terminate it or spray it out and kill it. And an annual is something that, when the seed goes in the ground and sprouts and it comes out of the ground, its job is to strictly grow up, make a seed and drop it down. It dies. Its seeds survive. So, like grain or rice or oats or anything like that, those are all annual. So melville's over here where they're growing man flax seed and rape seed and wheat and barley, and I mean they're just canola.
Speaker 2:I mean they're, they're the guys um, but yeah you never know.
Speaker 1:they're just canola, I mean they're, they're the guys, Um, but yeah, you never know what they're going to plant over there.
Speaker 2:but yeah, they're. They're good farmers too.
Speaker 1:Awesome farmers.
Speaker 1:Their kids work super hard Um and I love watching them farm because they're they're one of the most self-sufficient um ag families up here when it comes to they. You know we are a John Deere based county here, so that's our dealer. It's hard to get parts for everything else, so we all kind of stick to green, you see. They stick to red, but they bring in mechanics to work on their own stuff and they have a shop that they can work on everything themselves. They bring their own fertilizer in their own chemical. They are pretty much 100, 100 independent on nobody else but themselves and it's it's really cool. And kevin is an awesome guy and I know I talked to him quite a bit. Um, he leased a place below one of my places on farming, so I love picking that guy's brain yeah and just asking him like, hey, what are you planting, what are we doing?
Speaker 1:and should I plant this, you know, is it too cold, is it too early? I just got done talking to him about a week ago. I said, kevin, I've seen it snow here this time every year, usually Right, am I stupid to start planting? He goes oh, tyler, you know you'll be fine.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, that's reassuring, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay.
Speaker 2:Well, we're good. Yeah, do you feel? I feel, I guess, but and that's, that's another part of the gambling aspect when you have such a volatile climate like we do here short window.
Speaker 2:I mean, it was just a couple weeks ago. We had two feet of snow in a night. In a night I went out. It was one of the most sketchy days of driving in my life and I've driven in a lot of, a lot of bad storms. But I was uh, heading to Vegas to work for the weekend and I needed to get my boat worked on because a pack rat had lived in my boat for the winter and eaten a bunch of wires. I wish every pack rat in the world would die miserably. But uh, so I had to tow my boat. I was committed to it and I almost didn't hook up because we had just over 12 inches of snow here overnight. I was like, oh, whatever, I'll do it. How bad can it be? They had one lane plowed on the north highway and it was.
Speaker 2:It was the other lane and it had knocked, you know, snow into my lane. That was the size of the chairs that were sitting in. You know would be accurate. Everybody wants to say it's the size of a volkswagen bug. It wasn't, but it was huge, right, nothing that you wanted to hit, going any speed at all. So I would have to drive in the opposite lane until I saw somebody come and then get into my lane and plow through these giant donikers of snow. It was so sketchy, man, and and that's just springtime conditions, that's April, and that could happen again in.
Speaker 1:May, so we always call it the 90 days of March. So that's just how we always think about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:When it's March, you figure you could have 90 days of this.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And sometimes more. I mean I've seen it snow in June Right, multiple times in my life. Yeah, 90 days of this, yeah, and sometimes more.
Speaker 2:I mean I've seen it snow in june, right, multiple times in my life yeah, I mean we've had snow on the fourth of july on the moraine lots of years, especially when we're kids my dad told me one time that it was july 22nd and his dad came upstairs when he was a little kid.
Speaker 1:He said he was seven or eight years old. His dad came upstairs and said mike, you need to wake up. Um, get your brother up. He said get your clothes on, get some warm clothes on. You got to come downstairs. We got a problem and my dad's just thinking you know whatever. And he said yeah, oh joy it snowed 22 inches that night and of course all the trees have leaves on them and everything and so all the branches are broke off, everything's down.
Speaker 1:Uh, the power lines are down, everything's. You know they're having problems. All the animals, you know we're. We're in july, we're almost in august yeah and we're dealing with that. So it's uh, you never know what's going to happen up here. We have a very short window because and it's scary like this year where we had a very mild winter, I would say- very mild and I mean that last snowstorm we had was the biggest snowstorm of the year and it happened in like five hours.
Speaker 2:Biggest event, for sure.
Speaker 1:For sure. So you don't know what's going to happen. But what I'm seeing is, with these mild winters, from what I've kind of seen in the past is usually that means we're either going to have a wet spring or a wet summer. We'll always get the moisture. It's just when we're going to get it that really determines it. And for a farmer, you have to have a dry window, like we do now, to come in and plant, because you can't be out there in the mud doing anything. You're just going to tear everything up. It's not going to be worth it. But you also, if it gets too late in the year, you know you get towards June. If you don't have your seeds in the ground, you're not getting a crop right because it could just go to freezing in november and then you're done.
Speaker 1:Yeah, um, so that's kind of what we all are scared about up here is when we do have a window to go in and start farming, like we did here a couple weeks ago, it just all of a sudden 70 degrees and we're thinking, holy cow, it's march and we all started going because you don't know, that could be your last window of the spring, right To get it in, because I've seen it happen before. I mean, what was it? Three or four years ago we had kind of a month-long really dry spell early and then up at our place it rained 14 inches in two months and you weren't going out and doing anything and luckily we'd all got out there and put our seed in the ground and we just got to sit back and watch.
Speaker 2:Put that into perspective on my rain gauge right here and we're 20 air miles away from your place about maybe less I've had 13 inches in the last year and that's fairly typical of Wallowa County in general.
Speaker 1:So if we're talking about numbers like what you're saying, you know that's a year's worth of moisture we sat in the house and watched the crops grow, but it came time to cut them and it kept raining and yeah, and we're going well.
Speaker 2:Now what you know what do we do what?
Speaker 1:do we do, and of course it's going to take time to dry out, because you can't take a 30,000 pound tractor out there in the field after it just rained 14 inches and just go to harvesting because you're just going to get stuck yeah so we're watching and, and I remember that year, it ended up finally drying out.
Speaker 1:We were all late and we got in there and we started going and then it just was dry as a bone. The rest of the year was one of the best farming years we ever had. Um, but last year, where it rained just about every other day through the summer, I mean, and the weatherman said it was supposed to rain 14 days and it rained the next day and then right dry the next day. So, um, yeah, we. And once your crop gets rained on, for people that don't know it's damaged. So it's either if it's a seed, it starts to grow, or if it's hay, it, uh, it will start to mold.
Speaker 2:So and we've got most of oregon's tallest peaks on one side of us. We've got the deepest gorge on the continent on the other side of us. I think that that's part of why our weather is so unpredictable we can suck a storm in I've I've never been to a place where weather forecasts are as bad as they are here.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, it's unbelievable. I mean, if you took one of these weathermen to Vegas, you know you'd have just good odds betting against him. I'm pretty sure, because it's so hard and that's like my phone. I've got four different weather stations on it and I look at all of them about every day and I try to average it out.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Because I know that half of them are right, half of them are semi-right or half of them are all wrong. Who knows, you never know with these guys. But you just try to kind of look and, like you learn weather. So you watch the weather channel and you get to see the fronts coming in. You look at the ocean, you see what's kind of swirling around. Where it's going to go high pressure, low pressure try to figure out. Are we going to go? Is it going to come around us? Is it going to go above us? You know, and where you live here, I will say that when we see the storms coming north, you know, out of baker boise, if they can go behind mount jose, our big mountain, and hug your guys' hill and you guys just get poured rain on you know I'm good up there, I know I'm fine, but when it comes over me, it will sit in there and swirl, that's exactly right and when the clouds.
Speaker 1:My dad's told me this. I've seen it a million times. When those clouds get below Mount Joseph, we're done, it's going to sit in there.
Speaker 2:It's gonna be cold and it's gonna be miserable I've got a neat perspective on it here because I can watch. I can watch weather come out of hurricane creek and wrap around the base of the lake and go out there into prairie creek and it just continues to feed it yeah and uh, it just sits right on top of you there why do they call it hurricane creek?
Speaker 1:I don't know, I think you because you see all the pivots blown down up there, all the time I mean that you can't time down any better than these guys are doing, sure, and I've always wondered why did they, uh, why did that get the name hurricane?
Speaker 2:yeah, I mean, it's had wind out of it for a long time. I think it's funny. You know, we call it hurricane and, uh, I I've always thought that that's kind of funny, especially after living in places that have hurricanes, that we're we feel so familiar with the word that we're willing to put our own pronunciation on it, when all we really get are storms. There's they're super interesting wind conditions that come out of there and coming off of Mount Joseph in particular, and folks, this wind will come in very much like a freight train, and I mean that in the size as well.
Speaker 1:You can hear it.
Speaker 2:You can hear it, but you know this wind gust may only be 12 or 15 feet wide and it might be going 120 miles an hour and you can see lines coming all the way down the mountain that look like it's a summertime avalanche of these trees that get cut off halfway up, and I'm talking big pine trees and furs and stuff like that and like that. That barn just outside Joseph only half of it got hit by one of those wind bullets and it ripped that half of the barn in half, and on the other side they had a bunch of tin stacked up that didn't even get ruffled.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's remarkable.
Speaker 1:No, we had a windstorm hit us two years ago and, like you said, we had a wing of one of our hay sheds where it just went in and it just blew the middle out of the one wing and then tore the tree down. That was about 100 feet left of it and was gone, and there's pivots and and everything else sitting on every side of this thing and nothing got blown over and I'm thinking this is just a weird pattern, but we we are.
Speaker 1:We get wind here, and that's what a lot of people don't understand is I love that people are moving here and then figuring it out that it's not. They come here in the summer or the spring and they go man, look at this place. We got the lake and this beautiful mountain. We got to retire here. We have to. This is the most beautiful place we've seen in God's country, they all say. Then they buy a piece of property and they build a house on it and they come here and they spend one winter and they go. What in the hell are we doing here?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. And there's something about the winters that is very, very uncomfortable. You know, the winters here are tough, increasingly, as ODOT kind of struggles to keep up with roads. It seems like every single storm all the interstates get shut down, for, you know, almost a 300-mile section of road, 200-mile section of road, and then our grocery stores run out of food and those folks that moved here, that aren't used to that kind of thing Panic, that aren't self-sufficient, that don't have a chicken, that haven't ever canned anything, they don't have a garden, they didn't shoot an elk last year and have a freezer full of meat. They go to the store and there's nothing there. And they go the store and there's nothing there and they go.
Speaker 1:Well, shoot, we got to leave it's like well, where are you going to go? All the roads are closed.
Speaker 2:You can go to the amnaha tavern I guess that's about where you're going to go, and I bet cody's out of most of his stuff down there too yeah um, no, it's.
Speaker 1:This is a very difficult place to live in. I've heard you say that before, I think. But and I've always just thought I said man, especially with farming sometimes I just look at myself and I'm like, you know, I could sell out everything and I could have a pretty good little chunk of change. I could go buy me a 40-foot contender down in Florida and I could take hot girls in bikinis fishing all day. You know rich people, all day you know rich people. But there's just something about here and I and I've heard this from a lot of like coaches and just kind of mentor people that I've been around they go, you need to leave, Cause I went left, went to college and thought I don't want to be here. I they all told me the same thing. They said, well, you're going to leave and you're, you'll be back.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Don't you worry, you'll be back back and you see that with some people, you know, there's a lot of people that leave and never come back and I don't blame them, but to me, when I left, I just I got out of here and I spent my time and I thought, man, this isn't for me anywhere else. This is where I'm born and raised, this is my area, and I came back and it was been here ever since and, like I said, I wouldn't trade this place for anything well, it becomes part of your identity it's true, the county yeah, the county, not umatilla county, not union county, it is the county and they know this in other places.
Speaker 1:That's what's scary they do as you go to you know a rodeo and haynes or something, and oh, there's them, county boys and they're talking about us.
Speaker 2:They're not talking about jail, they're not talking about anything.
Speaker 1:They're talking about us, but no, it's a unique spot, hard to live and it's hard to make living here.
Speaker 2:It is Everything's more expensive, there's a lot of volatility and, uh, you've got to live here on purpose. Not that that's. What I say is that the folks that live here live here on purpose because it's easier to live someplace else. And I also think that that lends itself to making the community really strong, because if, if anybody has a problem, everybody takes it on as their own problem.
Speaker 1:So how far would you say? Your farthest neighbor lives away from you.
Speaker 2:My farthest neighbor Because, this is a question.
Speaker 1:I like to ask people.
Speaker 1:So my dad he sells a lot of little two-string horse bales to people and they come from everywhere in Portland and every place, anyways, of course my dad, he's got to give them a speech every time and talk to them about where they're from, and Portland and every place Anyways. And we, of course my daddy's got to give him a speech every time and talk to him about where they're from. And he gets into politics and yada, yada, yada. But he always asks well, you know how big is your community, how far is your farthest neighbor? And you know a lot of people from Portland. They'll go, well, or he'll ask them how many doors down do you know the people on your street Right? And they'll all say, oh, four or five, and they all kind of say that yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, why don't you know more people on your street? Well, you just don't really want to, I guess, and I go. Well, you know, in Wallowa I had that hailstorm down there that just destroyed Wallowa. I mean I have a lot of good friends and I consider neighbors down there, right, and we all packed up our stuff and we went down there and we helped them board up their windows. And our county is a community that's why we call it the county people, because we're so close with everybody here and like, if someone's family takes a tragedy or has something happen, you know how many people bring meals to them. I mean it's it's a remarkable place to live.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, to answer your question, I'd feel like anybody that lived in the County is a neighbor. You know, if somebody, you know, if I was in Tennessee and somebody was like oh do you know, Tyler Copp, and I'd be like yeah, I know, tyler.
Speaker 1:Tyler's my neighbor.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know I Coppin, I'd be like, yeah, I know Tyler, tyler's my neighbor. Um, you know, I couldn't hit your house with a 50 Cal from here, but you're, you're still a neighbor and I think that there's a lot that goes with that. There's, uh, I was talking with Corey Carmen about this years ago because Corey likes the city and and she likes the country, and I said, you know, I, I just wouldn't want to be around that many people. Um, you know, that's something that I that I don't really like about cities is just being around a lot of people when I feel like, you know, I need some space because I'm also an introvert. You know I'm an introvert and an extrovert and I need that time. And she said, no, no, you don't understand, in a city you have complete anonymity, like nobody knows you. It's like that's a really interesting perspective that you know there's just so many people that you're around them but you don't have any real connection with. You know, the vast majority.
Speaker 1:And I can see how some people would like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because we've all heard that. You know the County rumors up here. I mean, it's just being in a small town. You know one person gets a hangnail. Next thing you know it's a broken arm on the other side of the County.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And uh, and that's kind of a small County thing, but yeah, if you were in a city and I don't know it'd be for me I, yeah, that'd be a tough one. I, I can't do it. I know I can't. I can't even work around a bunch of people.
Speaker 1:I took a job one summer me and dad got in a fight and I thought I was too good to be out there and you know, over setting irrigation pipe, I wasn't straight enough or something, anyways, and I went up and got a job at the willow lake marina.
Speaker 1:I loved that job, got to wear shorts and had a tank top on and there was always some girl running around on the dock, you know, or something. And anyways, I had my friends up there working, but I could not get along with rude people. And there was always rude people that weren't from here, just kind of looking at you like you're lower than them, and to me people around here really don't do that, and so when I started seeing that, you know it really set me off. Anyways, I end up throwing a guy in the lake and and, uh, getting fired essentially for it. But yeah, I, just I can't, I can't do that with people, and and even going to the cities. Now, man, it's, it's hard for me to walk down the street and step over a homeless guy or some druggie and just not want to turn around and then just be like what are you doing?
Speaker 2:Like there's it's, it's, it's tough, it's tough for me to see something like that.
Speaker 1:Cause I don't understand it, I guess fully, is how could you not go want to work for, to better yourself?
Speaker 2:I guess is my thing, but yeah, well, you know, there's all kinds of things that go into that, right? True, there's some mental health issues.
Speaker 2:Well, and I'm not trying to point at it, Sure, I understand, but you know it's always complex and you know I fall back on a story from the Civil War, on a story from from the civil war, and Abraham Lincoln's wife is named Mary Beth and she was, um, speaking really critically of the South, understandably right Um her, her husband's, fighting against them. It's insanely bloody conflict. And he said, uh, don't criticize them harshly, they're only doing what we would do in that situation. It's true.
Speaker 2:And don't criticize them harshly. They're only doing what we would do in that situation. It's true, and I try to remember that piece of compassion sometimes.
Speaker 2:I was at Salt Lake City at a trade show a couple years ago and it was terribly cold. It was about 20 below zero and I was waiting outside of a restaurant I was going to meet some friends and go in and have dinner and there were some homeless folks out there downtown Salt Lake and, man, I was in some really classy hunting gear and I was freezing. You know, standing there, I was just freezing and it's easy to get cold at 20 below zero, and I was looking up and down the street at these folks who are going to be living out there all night. And I just came back to that like there's easier ways to live than what they're doing right now, and my thinking about homelessness growing up was well, this is about laziness, you know, it's people that don't want to work but in reality that they've got a harder path. Um, so I just I think that probably if I'd been dealt that hand, that that's where I would be too well, I hope that's not the case.
Speaker 1:Well, no, and you know, I've always kind of been a teach a man to fish or give a man a fish kind of mentality on people and the way I see a lot of them is maybe if you let them get hungry a little bit, um, quit enabling them just a little bit and let them get hungry and let them see what they're actually made of to survive, it might bust some of them out of their shell a little bit and bring them back to, because the old saying is well you, you can't get fixed unless you hit rock bottom. But when we're not letting somebody hit rock bottom, um, or they're happy, what we would think is rock bottom, but maybe that's not rock bottom to them, you know, um, maybe it would bring people out of the shell, but regardless it's we could go on forever about this it's here, in this community, it it's not something that we ever see ever um, but we have plenty of poverty.
Speaker 2:We have food insecurity. There's people that that depend on, depend upon hunting every year for food, some of it illegally oh yeah and one of the differences, I think, is that because we have this strong community, we're not going to let somebody get to that point.
Speaker 1:No, and that's where we differ is and that's where I was kind of going with the Wallowa and the neighbor thing. Was people up here? Like I said, if someone has a hard time or a kid dies or someone gets an illness, the community comes and helps the people that are worth helping right.
Speaker 1:I would say everybody's got a support group behind them, whether you know it or not, and I just think, like maybe in the cities like that, you know there's nobody willing or wanting, because you don't know that many people down the street from you. So maybe you don't want to go help this guy because you don't know him from adam. So yeah, why would you ever want to go do that?
Speaker 1:and it just brings the sense of community up here is a whole different meaning, and that's why, like I said, if everything ever just does backfire and we all go to hell, I imagine that this place is still going to be just cooking along like it always has, and I think we'll be just fine.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think we'll be okay. Yeah, it's, uh, it's. It's such an interesting thing. Another thing that's interesting about the way this community supports each other is it's not even like people that just like each other. There are people that don't like me that would be there in an instant if I needed help, just because we're part of the same program here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's the truth.
Speaker 2:And that that, I think, is also rare.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of good people here.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Good people, and that's something that you you can't teach anymore. I think it's just how we are.
Speaker 2:Something that is happening right now is that uh is extremely high, and that's been well publicized and people are well aware of it. What is also happening is that farmer and rancher suicide is right there with it.
Speaker 1:So I just got a letter. I actually got a letter the last two years. It's like a hotline for farmers, essentially, or for agriculturalists, a hotline to call in case you're starting to have these down thoughts or whatever, in case you're thinking about suicide. And this is what people got to understand is a million dollars in agriculture really isn't that much money? A million dollars in agriculture really isn't that much money. When you're spending a million dollars to make $50,000 or $100,000, and then you add 9% interest onto that million, your $100,000 is gone.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:I mean you're looking at. You can go bankrupt instantly From a storm From a storm. Right or like I said, just a hailstorm. I know a guy down in the Wallowa area. They had that hailstorm come through. It was golf ball-sized hail and I don't know what the wind was. It was 100 at least down there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it was like 150, 160 miles an hour.
Speaker 1:And he goes yeah, one of my best crops of wheat, he said the hail hit it which it knocks all the seeds out of it. And of course it hit us. In what August?
Speaker 2:Something like that.
Speaker 1:So the seeds were hard enough to where they just got blown out on the ground and it flattened that crop to the ground. And I go, well, did you have insurance on it? And he says, well, no, because insurance is kind of expensive, it just eats up all your profit.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And I'm going man, you just took 100% loss on that.
Speaker 1:Then he goes yep, yeah, and that's hard to do, especially where A lot of places up here aren't big family-owned ranches.
Speaker 1:We are small family-owned ranches that rent ground from people that have either came in here and invested money or had made their money somewhere else and bought property as an investment, and you're just kind of supplementing their pocket by farming it for them and keeping it up and keeping the value of their place up.
Speaker 1:And keeping it up and keeping the value of their place up. So when you're paying rent and fertilizer and chemicals, and then all the diesel that it takes to work that ground up, the seed costs and then everything it is to get that crop off the ground, and then the trucking to get it out of here and then waiting to get paid, and you're paying interest on an operating loan. The whole time you're waiting it gets tough and stressful and you just kind of have to live very frugally through that process until the end of the year and then you got to figure out what to spend your money on. So the government doesn't take half of it and I mean it's just it's. It's a tough, tough industry to be in, because you're you're getting middleman by every angle, you know, and it's, it's just, it's tough so why do it?
Speaker 2:because I love it what do you love about it?
Speaker 1:I don't know yeah I honestly couldn't tell you, but I was just born and raised watching my dad um, watch my granddad, watch my dad um just work harder than most my other friends' dads and I just always strive to want to be that guy that my son's friends or my kids' friends said man, your dad, that's a tough working man.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I want, like I want, to live up to that image of my father.
Speaker 2:I read uh, read something from uh, from a buddy of mine who's a uh, he's a green beret and a rancher and he said imagine telling your kids you quit because you were tired yeah right what's tired? Yeah, what, yeah, what is tired what is time?
Speaker 2:I'd like to know that uh if, if not constant right, I mean, there's another saying in the Marines that fatigue makes a coward of all men, and I've found that to be true. There is a point of exhaustion where people don't have courage anymore, but for some reason farmers and ranchers manage to keep digging a little bit deeper, to keep digging a little bit deeper. However, sometimes it all mounts up against them, and especially for these folks. I think that don't have a generation coming up behind them, like maybe their kids grew up with the work. They didn't want it. They moved to town, they've got a nine-to-five, they make good money. You know, they live two minutes from a grocery store, two minutes from everything else, and they don't want to do it anymore. And then along comes that storm, and then their tractor has a transmission issue and then they get hit by a tax bill they didn't know was coming, and then two other things happen and suddenly suicide looks like a pretty appealing option.
Speaker 1:Well, hey, it's a good out when you're in that point, you know.
Speaker 2:And the fact of the matter is's not right? No, because there's there's. There's still, there's still community to support you. There's still a way out, but it can seem like it's not, and I think that that's why stuff like that hotline which goes through the extension agency so you're you're not just, you know, talking to somebody who doesn't know anything about ag, you're going to talk to somebody who understands ranching and farming a little bit, that that that's available to you, and I think that that's a tremendous thing that that oregon did to make sure that that was available well, and you know, in our little county, here you see, I mean you can see the, the guys that struggling, and it's just tough on people and that's the thing you don't want to see your neighbor have to sell half of his equipment to make a living.
Speaker 1:So, that's where you also step in and you help. You go, man, this guy's having a bad time. You know, I know some people that we donate some hay to every year, kind of, because they're older couples struggling a little bit Some years, some years not. But I just, you know, you look at them and you go, man, when's retirement coming for you guys? Because it's you can't do this forever and I don't really see you succeeding. But you just try to help everybody out. And what's retirement? Anyways, I should say, but no, it's just, we'll help each other around here. As I should say, but no, it's just we'll help each other around here.
Speaker 1:But it's one of those things where farming can be so stressful sometimes.
Speaker 1:And, like you said, you just compound these hours when you're working three, 400 hours a month and you can't stop because the weather's coming, or you know when, once you cut hay, it starts a clock and it's going to be ready to bail and there's a storm coming.
Speaker 1:So you're going, I have to get a clock and it's going to be ready to bail and there's a storm coming. So you're going, I have to get this up or else it's going to be ruined. And so now, no matter what you, how late or how many hours it's going to take, like that's what you have to do and where we can't find people to work hardly anymore, you just get. You think you're going to get bigger, better equipment to try to get rid of a worker, but when the equipment costs so much money, you're kind of like, well, I guess I'm just going to be double shifting, so you push through it. But now I can see definitely where that hotline is coming through, because you look at Klamath Falls where they tore the dams out and it just killed the farmers down there and they were half.
Speaker 1:They were forced to sell and now that your land has no water, your land value now is nothing, you know, I mean it's cut drastically back and I can't imagine that those guys down there that would just be. You know, every time I see a subdivision put up in here I kind of go oh you know, that's, that's my job, you're building on right there, but to each their own and everybody has their own property rights. But yeah, I just look at these places that are just getting hammered like that, like that Klamath Falls area, and I go, man, it'd be tough to to live through that, to think, man, I got to sell my family farm, that I'm, I'm the fifth generation guy and for my entire life I will. I've always said I will never sell this, my farm. I will never sell my property. I didn't buy it, I don't have the right to sell it.
Speaker 1:It's going to go to my kids and their kids and their kids and their kids and to have to be forced to do something like that. I mean, it's just, you know, sentimental value is something like that. It's like your favorite old gun or something like that that you got from your granddad or whatever. Or like an old watch from your granddad and you've got to go hack it off in a pawn shop because you can't make a rent payment or something like that. I mean that kind of stuff would dig on a guy and I could see where people would get pretty hard down.
Speaker 2:You know that Klamath Bas basin stuff is a grand experiment in in dam removal, in in like where we're going to place value as as a society, you know, or is, is it worth it to try to get fish back? Is it worth it to try to help this endangered species? And there's always going to be suffering, there's always going to be a side that loses and I hope that we evaluate the impacts of that um as honestly as as we can and and understand that there are people like what you're talking about who have been there for generations and and have now just lost yeah, they lost it for their family and that's how you feel.
Speaker 2:Yeah, um you know, you know, when I was younger and we were on pretty tough times here on the ranch, a realtor came by and said you know, I'll give you a million bucks for this ranch to my mom and she said no.
Speaker 2:And he's like, well, name your price, like what do you want? And she goes, it's not for sale, like we're not going to sell it. And this has happened to a lot of ranches all over, not just here and and farms as well, and I think it was really confusing to that guy that there wasn't a price, right? Uh, and I think it would be confusing to a lot of people and he could have said anything. He could have said anything and we would have said no, because there's just not a monetary value that you can put on it, because that debt that you're talking about is something that we owe to generations, to generations. You know who? Who am I? To look back at the hardships of my great great grandfather who walked here on the oregon trail and, you know, carved this out and made a living on it, and then every generation to follow and every bit of sweat and blood and labor that went into just holding on, like how disrespectful could I be?
Speaker 2:to lose this to to lose it or or to sell it yep, that's exactly how I feel.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's just yeah, I just think about. I'm like man my grandfather would roll over in his grave if I lost this place yeah and. But, like I said, and especially over something as much as I didn't want to live frugally, you know, I didn't want to just back her down a hair and butcher a cow and maybe live off the garden a little longer, and yeah and grow a bigger garden and just kind of go lazier about it and just keep praying it's going to work and it doesn't.
Speaker 1:And guess what? I lost it. And now just to look back and go, not only did I disappoint, but everybody else that was before that and along the way and and uh, that'd just be a burden to pack around.
Speaker 2:What are some other challenges that that people don't understand that you're facing?
Speaker 1:a lot of political challenges, I guess, because most of us can see what needs to happen to correct our side politically. Um, and the fact that there's, I guess, now a majority they say against kind of the things that I need to have happen to kind of bring us back into making it work, that's tough to me. But yeah, I mean it's just, it's money. You can't make enough money per acre to really justify even owning buying land. I mean I remember back when land was affordable and you could make it work, and now it's. It's blown so far out of proportion because they're able to get people coming in from out of here that they can put whatever price they want on there and there's people willing to buy it yeah so we're not only priced out of our land, but we're just getting priced out of everything, and it's getting so tough for everybody to to be able to afford even to be in the business.
Speaker 2:So you know where does that go from here. Does that mean that the food product needs to cost more for consumers at the store?
Speaker 1:You know, if I could raise my prices? Like I said, I have to sell to a buyer that comes in and tells me what my crop is worth.
Speaker 2:So vice versa, you don't know right now what that price is going to be when your crop comes out.
Speaker 1:I have a guess, but I don't have a clue.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So if I had something where, like a construction guy or something where he's competing against the next guy on building houses and you know there's people putting bids in, you kind of know what everyone's bidding and if you're that much better you can up your price. Well, when you're selling to these buyers, yeah, they're kind of telling you what it's worth.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And you can pick on them and say, well, I need a little bit more, and well, sorry, and you can get the next guy, the next guy and next guy, and if they've all are kind of the same, you're kind of screwed. So it's hard to pass your debt on like everybody else can when you're the bottom of the chain. So what I mean by that is if you were like I said, you're the builder and the price of boards go up, or nails, or you got to pay these guys now an extra five bucks an hour because minimum wage jumps up, well, you can just charge a little bit more on the top end and you can make that back on the buyer. I can't. So all my prices are going up and I have to take what I can get right, what I'm gonna get, and I can maybe bargain with them, but we're talking pennies on the dollar right, and so it's literally, literally, yeah and, like I said, yeah, when you're talking vol, you know a lot of money.
Speaker 1:It's kind of hard to just say, well, I don't know what to do, I'm gonna make. Nobody ever went broke making a profit. My dad's always told me that and I've always lived by that is if nobody ever went broke making a profit, as long as you can live within your means. So when you can get a good enough deal to where you can take it, you have to take it. You've made your money, you get your money, you pay off your debts, you're, you're done for the year. You just kind of go home and sit down and go, wow, we made it another one, yeah yeah, I started.
Speaker 2:You know, my first business was six ranch fly fishing, if you remember those good times.
Speaker 2:I started that with $600. And my one guiding principle? Because I knew nothing about business right, my education is in literature and writing and maneuver warfare and my one guiding principle was like, well, I just need to make more than I spent, right. And that one guiding principle has worked Right. You know, I made it. I think I can say at this point I need to keep it going, but I made it. And it didn't start with a lot but, man, I worked hard.
Speaker 1:And it's tough. You know it's tough for people to start a business that don't really have any idea on how a business works. And the fact of because I know a couple friends that well, I don't want to take, you know, I don't want to borrow money that just sounds scary to me and I go. You're never going to make money if you don't spend money. So if you can't borrow money to get going on what you're going to make money if you don't spend money, so if you can't borrow money to get going on what you're going to do, and if you don't have a business plan in front of you that's going to show that you can borrow this money and make more at the end, do not go into this because you've already you're proving yourself failed on the paper, um, but it like just like any business I mean fly, fish and take you didn't know how many clients you were going to get.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:You didn't know if you were going to get a client.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, it's like jumping off a cliff and building an airplane on the way down. Here you are getting everything Exactly.
Speaker 1:So you don't know what you were going to get or how it was going to turn out. It's a gamble. Owning businesses is a gamble and that's why you know I hear a lot of people complain about. Well, you get to write everything off, okay, but I'm the one taking all the risk.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I take every risk. I employ people, I provide a job, w-2s pay our taxes and I have to spend whatever amount of money it is every year so that I can write it off, which is the same as paying a tax. Don't get me wrong. But when I buy, say, a tractor, say at the end of the year, now I just produced a product, or I bought a product that someone else is producing, that I just boosted the industry, or, you know, I made the market. So someone else is working to build that next tractor for me the next year, and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1:So you hear a lot of this. What was it? Biden the other day saying we want a 20% tax on the wealthy, flat rate tax. Okay, well, what's the wealthy, you know? Are you going to take someone? I mean, just think about yourself If, if you went out and made a business that ended up being worth you know, $500 million and you just put all your sweat equity into that business and you worked it and you started it from ground zero, and now you're making it and you're like I've set my family up for life, and then someone's going to come in there and say, well, you've made too much money. We're going to just take 20% of it because you we think you've made too much.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean how's that fair to you?
Speaker 2:I would love to only pay 20% in taxes.
Speaker 1:So would I.
Speaker 2:That sounds pretty nice to me, but you know it's extremely tough. A lot of what people say in criticism of ranching is they're like well, you know, you're just being subsidized by the government, and they say the same thing about farmers. That is the farthest thing from true here, and that that may be the case in other places, but it is certainly not here and and it's not a sustainable thing. Like I don't want to see you know, tax dollars getting pulled out of agriculture, getting filtered through the federal government and then trickled back down in a way that's like oh, now you're being subsidized. Like, let's just enable farmers to be sustainable and to take care of land and to make a profit and to do so in a way that it's appealing to younger people to get into it, because right now that appeal is pretty low.
Speaker 2:And if, if you're a young person wanting to get into agriculture and you don't have land that's in your family that you can work on, you don't have equipment to be able to start working on it, you don't have the knowledge to start doing it. Let's, let's say you go to college and you you get a degree in it. Okay, now you come into college with your student loan debt and and you're supposed to take on you know, many millions of dollars in debt and purchasing all this equipment and getting leases or buying land, how are you ever going to take your razor thin margins on a good year and come out ahead? It just doesn't pencil out. And that's what scares me, because if somebody is intelligent and ambitious and they look at this from a business standpoint, it doesn't look good.
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 2:So who in their right mind is going to carry this torch and feed people for the future?
Speaker 1:You can't physically do it. This torch and feed people for the future you can't physically do it. I heard someone the other day said if you, uh, if your family didn't buy in the 1920s or you didn't win the lottery, don't even think about becoming a farmer or rancher.
Speaker 2:Tough thing.
Speaker 1:Tough thing to do.
Speaker 2:So so what's, what's the shining light? What gives you hope?
Speaker 1:You know, I just hope that. Uh, what gives me hope is that just thinking that it's going to eventually correct itself, because back when a family used to be able to make a living off 160 acres and we're not talking to the average family now of like two kids or whatever we are in the united states, we're talking families had kids of six, you four, six to six kids back in the day because that was their workforce and they could make a living off 160 acres. Now it's tough to make a living off I mean your thousand acres.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And why has everything inflated that much?
Speaker 1:That that's where we're at. Well, if you keep going at this rate and we're not talking a long time, I mean, we're maybe talking 100 years max here so, if you think about, if we keep going at this rate, eventually there's going to be one farmer here to make a living and it's getting scary. So eventually we have to have a big correction that is going to put us in reverse and I don't want to be alive when this happens, I think. But I'd like to know that someday my kid is going to have the same opportunities that they did back when it was feasible to do this. And yeah, I guess I just my children, I guess, is the only light I have that I can think of. I just want to make sure that someday they still have the same opportunities that I have and I haven't lost this. I've kept it there for them, um, and then hopefully it's corrected itself by the time that they get in there and they can actually step forward and maybe purchase some more land, if it's ever, you know.
Speaker 2:I I hope that your kids get that opportunity I do too and I hope you get rain every time you need it this summer and not a single time when you don't. Yeah, you know I, I would take rain on every monday and oh yeah, call it maybe every other monday. Every other every other monday would be good, but but no, it's, it's uh, I don't know it's, it's tough, it's a tough I don't know it's.
Speaker 1:it's tough, it's a tough, tough business. But, like I said, you either love it or you don't, and it's not for the faint of heart and and it's stressful. You know, it's hard for me to be there with my kids all the time. It's hard for me to be there with my wife all the time and in the winter time I mean got cows so you're feeding and calving those things out. It's kind of like it never ends and I mean I get a little bit of a break.
Speaker 1:you know I take hunting is pretty much my vacation of the year yeah so I go hunting that's my vacation and then I get pretty much from, oh, let's say, the first of december till march. I that's kind of my break for the year and I get to not—.
Speaker 2:Which isn't really a break. No, you're still working every day.
Speaker 1:But once you get used to it it's really not that bad.
Speaker 2:I guess you get a routine of anything. Well, it's just living. It's just living and it could be worse.
Speaker 1:Like I said, it could always be worse. So I'm not going to complain about how it's going, because I've been doing just fine and even though it's getting cut a little thinner every year in the old checkbook, it just kind of is what you do and you just hope that we have another couple good years or something.
Speaker 2:Well, if people want some fancy.
Speaker 1:Timothy rocket fuel for their horse or their camel, do they? How do they buy it from you? Well, get your checkbook out and I'm saying no, you can get hold of me on facebook or or whatever, and okay and uh, we can uh make something happen there cool.
Speaker 2:we'll, uh, we'll put a link to that down in the podcast description and, uh, yeah, it is a it is a tough job but it is a job worth worth doing and I'm glad that you're doing it and I'm glad that you're making that opportunity for your kids to keep carrying the fire. All right, thanks, tyler.
Speaker 1:Yep, thank you.
Speaker 2:I just want to take a second and thank everyone who's written a review, who has sent mail, who's sent emails, who's sent messages. Your support is incredible and I also love running into you at trade shows and events and just out on the hillside when we're hunting. I think that that's fantastic. I hope you guys keep adventuring as hard and as often as you can. Art for the Sixth Ranch Podcast was created by John Chatelain and was digitized by Celia Harlander. Original music was written and performed by Justin Hay, and the Six Ranch Podcast is now produced by Six Ranch Media. Thank you all so much for your continued support of the show and I look forward to next week when we can bring you a brand new episode.