SharkFarmerXM's podcast
Erin & Whitt Sorenson from Delta, Utah 6-26-24
[SINGING] Unstoppable, unshakeable. But it rolls out for town unfreakable. It's unavoidable. You saw a little berry between the lines. Start to loosen up your mind. Now welcome back into Shark Farmer Radio. Hey, I'm your host Rob Sharky. We're in the studio today just outside of Bradford, Illinois. Studio powered by Beck's High Bread. And we are really here. Yeah. We made it back. I tell you what, we had the most fantastic trip up to Vernal, Utah, and then down to Moab. I love Utah. I have to say that. I love it so much while you marry it. Oh, my word. I haven't seen such a beauty. I couldn't get enough. I almost cried when we left. You can't grow corn in that saying no. No, no, we would not thrive there. But I loved the beauty of it. So we got to speak in Vernal, which is where we met our guest today. And then when we were done, the day after you spoke with our anniversary, so we went down to Moab. And I'll have to say, we hired a couple that we had never met before because we could not get a rental car to take us from Vernal to Moab. Could have been serial killers. I literally took a picture of their license plate and texted it to our daughter and said, in case we are missing in eight hours, look up these people. She sent us a laugh emoji and she goes, I listen to podcasts about this stuff all the time. This is sketchy. They ended up being the most fantastic people. And they took us down nine-mile canyon. And we got to see petroglyphs and hear about all the history. That's like cave drawings that aren't in caves. Yeah, they're like the Indians drew pictures. They're like picture messages. It's like the movies back in a long time ago. But it really was fantastic. We saw wild horses. I mean, it was so beautiful. But they were like tour guides. They just told us all the details. So it ended up being fun. All right, let's get to today's guest today. We're going to go out to Delta, Utah. We're talking with Aaron and Whit Sorensen. How you guys doing? Doing well. Doing awesome. Well, great. So we're in a great state of Utah is the Delta. So if you go south of Salt Lake City about an hour and a half and then drive towards the Nevada border, we're right out there in the middle of the desert. So yeah, a lot like what the country you drove through the other day. Pretty desolate, but beautiful in its own way. Is that where you're both from originally? No, we both grew up. I grew up in Nephi, which is a little bit more central in the state. And I grew up in Agsel, which is kind of south of Nephi, kind of the middle part of the state. We both grew up where it was kind of green and pretty. Then we chose to move out to the desert. So you two are married. Where'd you meet? Nephi, what was a state officer? And then he traveled around, and we just kind of got to know each other. So it was fun. Into the blue jackets, I hear. An FFA. Really? You heard a buckle by me, so. [LAUGHTER] They love the corduroy. OK, so did you both have a farm background now? Yeah, so I grew up on a cow-calf operation. And then my dad farmed a little bit of everything. Alfalfa, corn, sorghum, milo. And then we ranched everywhere from Idaho to northern Utah in the central part of the state. So I loved growing up on a farm. Yeah, and my grandpa actually raised purebred sheep and was in the sea stock business forever. So we both kind of grew up around farms our whole life. All right, so when you guys went to get married and start a life together, and you realized there weren't places for you on each of your farms, you decided to start a new one. So tell us about what you guys are raising now. So we specialize in raising buck lands. So we are a seed stock operation as well. And really, we were gravitated towards that because the startup cost was relatively low for us. In fact, we were just like poor college students and couldn't afford to cash flow purchasing animals right away. And so we actually worked out an agreement with his grandfather where we would go through his coal use or the use he was getting rid of. And for every two years we took, we would give him back a healthy buck lamb in the fall and we would keep the females as replacement. So even though there wasn't a place for us on the farm, our families were great resources to us to help us do what we could to kind of get started. How do you go about finding ground out there to get started? So that's actually kind of like everywhere in the United States. Ground's kind of gotten really expensive. And out here in the West, water is a super valuable resource. So that's actually, my grandpa's always said that poor people have poor ways and we kind of looked at our options and realized we couldn't go out and buy a farm and water and everything and kind of do the conventional route. So that's kind of why we started in the sheep business because we wanted to continue to be in agriculture but it allowed us to get in with a relatively low cost so we could just buy some ground and kind of dry a lot this sheep and utilize some of the resources we have around here to feed them a little more economically than we could in other places. So we actually feed a lot of screenings from alfalfa seed cleaning and we kind of feed a lot of byproducts to our sheep to try to keep our cost of operation down just because trying to pencil out to buy ground and water to farm it out of the sheep makes it a lot harder. So we just try to kind of utilize the resources that we have. So like how many sheep can you put on per acre of the ground that you have out there? So most of them are around on permits and they'll be anywhere from 10 to 100 acres per animal. So when I say it's desolate, I mean it is desolate. So our sheep are actually dry-lotted most of the year. So we actually just feed them in trails a lot of the year and then in the fall we actually go out on the fields and clean up some of the stubble and residue some alfalfa stubble or some fall planted wheat. You can even go on cornstalk stubbles and feed them kind of through the winter until we start to lamb and then we bring them in and then we can lamb them in the shed. So we're kind of a unique operation. In fact, most sheep places run out about nine, ten months of the year and we actually keep them in the trail and dry-lot them for nine or ten months a year and only are able to graze them for about three months. I could see that with one to a hundred. All right. Today we're talking with Aaron and what Sorensen from Delta Utah. We're going to talk more about their operation right after the break. This segment is brought to you by Common Ground. Are you looking for an easy way to buy, sell, or lease your land? Well, check out Common Ground where they connect landowners and farmers and hunters too, by the way. Go to commonground.io that's commonground.io. How high is the water, momma? Remember that slide? What's up, Johnny Cash? Two food, high and rising. Yes, I think that was a Johnny Cash song. We've been dry. We've been really dry. And then when we were out on vacation-- Can you really say that after being in Utah? That we are really dry? I don't think we can say that. Oh, I'm sorry. I thought it was my show, but apparently we were dry. And when we were out there, we kept missing the rains. And then finally, finally came over and blessed. We got some land with it. We got some what I called muddled corn on the high spots, but I think it's obviously not a big deal. Yeah, I tell you what, our ground soaks up water differently. Utah, right before we got to Moab, they had just two inches of rain, which is basically what we got last night. And oh, my God, it about flooded out. Flooded out place. Which, you know, it's a flash flood. So by the time we got there, we didn't even know what happened. But I think it drowned out a lot of campers. They had to move their sights. And a lot of people had kind of left town, you know, to dry out. And then, you know, there was debris all over the, you know, the main street of town. The main street of town. They had all the sand in that. So our owners were like getting their brooms and getting them, you know, water out. It must have been really something taking a canoe down the main street. Yeah, that'll be fine. If you want an agriculture podcast, go to sharkfarmer.com under the shark farmer podcast section. We talked this week with David Hula, the king of corn. 627 bushels per acre. Good grief. Today, we're talking with Aaron and what Sorenson from Delta, Utah. They fell in love and for age because they're into corduroy. They were not a place to come back on their family farm. So what they do, they started their own a very unique way of doing it with the grandfather. So are both your family still farming? Yeah, so my family operation kind of split up in 2013. All of the pieces are still there, but being managed by different people. And then what family farm is also still operational? So it's kind of fun to see those continue. A lot of people will argue that it's basically impossible to start your own farm, but here you guys have it. Farm our ranch. Here you guys have done just that. What do you accredit that to? If someone asks you like, how do you even go about it? I mean, what's the general advice you give people? I'm just going to it super naive and optimistic because a lot of things have worked that shouldn't have. We've had a really great support system around us. Get involved in industry groups. A lot of our ideas aren't our own. We learn from other people and they're successes. And the second thing would be we have a lot of failures. You know, you try something for the first time and it doesn't go. Keep pushing and keep adapting. One of the things that makes us survive, I think, is the fact that we are agile and we can change directions really, really fast and we're willing to. I love my family. This is not a dig on them, but I mean, some things have been done the way that they've been done for a really long time. And while that is important, also recognizing where changes can happen to improve your business, not being scared to make those changes at that time can open up a lot of doors. Wait a minute. You're saying that a farm maybe sometimes just kind of says, oh, that's not the way we've done it before. That's a crazy talk right there. I've been called crazy a lot and it's fine. I kind of wear it like a badge of honor, but it actually worked out pretty good for us, especially with, you know, how we've marketed our Bucklands and then what we do with our wool too, that it's worked for us. Yeah. So tell us what you're doing with a wool because I love how you said, you know, so many people don't want to try new things because the worst is is to be laughed at at your local John Deere, but you're saying concentrate on the things that, you know, that you've messed up on or things that you could do better because it gives you a new revenue source. Have you found that with your wool? Yeah. So, you know, we also raise a protein and I hear all the time, you know, how little farmers are getting from the protein that they're producing compared to the other people involved in the food process, fiber's worse. I remember one time, I'm new to sheep, I wasn't raised around them, and we got this check in the mail. And I had just finished paying all of our bills for sharing, and we had just gone through that process and I get this check in the mail, and I take it inside and I asked, "What is this?" And he says, "Oh, it's our wool check from last year." And it was $180, and I was mad. It had cost us 15 times that just to get the wool off. And I just said, "There's got to be a better way of doing this." And his grandfather had helped start Utah Wool Marketing. It's a great, great resource for people. But I was like, "How do we do this differently?" And so we started searching for fiber mills to actually process our wool. And we don't raise high-grade wool. Our wool isn't going into something that you would wear necessarily against your as clothing, but it still can serve a valuable purpose. And so we started trying to figure out how to add value. And so we did that through things like marketing car air fresheners that were felted and making home decor garlands and dryer balls and all these things that were in demand but didn't need a high-quality wool product to make. And I remember the day I took over that first batch of wool. I hope I don't get emotional. To his grandpa that had been processed. And it still sits on his coffee table because it just had never occurred to them to do it. Not because they're short-sighted, not because they're doing things the wrong way. It's just that in order for us to survive making money off of our wool was absolutely necessary, whereas it wasn't necessarily for them. And so we do things differently than them, but that's turned into a cash stream for us that comes all year long, which is valuable to a livestock operation. I can't tell you how many people we've interviewed that have been successful. And they would generally say, "Well, we were broke. We had to do this." And doing that, they found something that they found quite a niche for. And it sounds like that was exactly in your case. Yeah. Have you ever thought about doing your own processing? Yes. We actually, that was my goal when we first went and toured the fiber mill that was going to do it. And I thought, "Let's jump in. Let's build all the things." And I went on a tour of a dairy that sells ice cream. And he doesn't make the ice cream himself. He produces the milk, and then he purchases ice cream to sell it a storefront. And I was talking to him, and I said, "Why?" And he says, "Because I don't want to make ice cream. I want to be a dairy farmer." Exactly. Unfortunately, we do got to go to break. We're going to pick up on this story right on the other side today. We're talking with Aaron and Whit Sorensen from Delta, Utah. We will be back after the break. This segment is brought to you by Common Ground. Are you looking for an easy way to buy, sell, or lease your land? Well, check out Common Ground where they connect landowners and farmers and hunters too, by the way. Go to commonground.io, that's commonground.io. You know, the petroglyphs, which are the Native Americans. They do the drawings. And they're thousands of years old. Who knows, right? That's what they say. Yeah. But they still, they're on there, and it's like somebody did it last week. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, some of them are a little bit harder to see. Some of them were up really high though, because I was questioning. I mean, come on, are they restoring these? Do they kind of help that out a little bit? Yeah. No, it was too high to reach in a lot of the places that we were looking at them. But then you thought maybe the ground had eroded. Yeah. When they did the road, maybe, I don't know, but super cool. Well, the neatest one was there was an owl, and above it, it said, "We want more of Will." Oh my God. It's odd a thing. Yeah. Well, what do you have for us today? Today, I am in Delta, Utah, which is the largest city in Millard County, Utah, located in the northeastern area of Millard County along the Sevier River, and is surrounded by farmland. Okay. Delta was originally a railroad switch called Aiken. In 1905, Aiken was renamed Melville when Millard County began plans to set up irrigation in a dam. People were able to purchase land for 50 cents an acre, as long as they agreed to develop a 40 acre lot. Oh my gosh. There you go. 20 bucks for 40 acres is pretty good. The name was then changed because of the similarities between Melville and Millville, another town in Utah. The name was changed again on the 12th of May, 1908, to Bertner, and finally, the name was changed to Delta on May 11th, 1911. Kind of indecisive, aren't they? Right. During World War II, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, tens of thousands of Japanese Americans were gathered up and placed in 10 incarceration camps to protect military installations from espionage. One of these camps... In Utah? Yeah. One of these camps was called In Central Utah. Was called Central Utah Relocation Center, was in Delta and filled with former residents of the San Francisco Bay Area. The Topaz Museum is located in Delta, and it works to preserve important sites at the relocation center, and to provide information on the history of the camps. You don't seem like a Topaz kind of guy to me. No. No. Okay. There's nothing wrong with it. But I would go to the Topaz Museum to learn about the internment camps. There you go. That was a big thing that we kind of gloss over. But another great attraction of Millard County's economy is the digging of fossils. There are trilobite fossils, very common in this region of Delta, and several local companies maintain fossil dig areas where they allow visitors to dig their own fossils for a fee. And finally, each July 4th, the Hinkley Lions Club sponsors a Demolition Derby at the Millard County Fairgrounds. I thought he was going to say a pancake breakfast. Well, that's before it. The Derby attracts crowds of over 3,000 people. It's one of the largest derbies in the United States with up to 11 rounds of competition, including pickup trucks, figure eight compact car competitions, powder puff, a championship round, and a wipe out round. Nice. I say we should sponsor a car next year. OK. All right. Well, thank you very much. By the way, what was it called? The Cattlemen's in Columbus Junction. The Cattlemen's something. Oh, yeah. It has the world's best breakfast, if you ask me. OK. So we crossed over into Colorado, and it was Fruite. Fruite. Fruite Colorado. Oh, you're right. I'm sorry. Right out of Colorado, just outside of Colorado Junction. Yeah. They had the cowboy channel on. Yeah. But they had-- it was literally-- they had the farmer's liar table in the middle. And the corner was the lady's Bible study. They were doing their Bible study. Yeah. It was awesome. It was like every stereotype. It was fantastic. I could have eaten there every day. Today, we're talking with Aaron and Wynton Sorensen. Did you guys learn much about Delta there in Will's report? I actually did learn something about Delta. I didn't know about half that stuff, so he done a very good job. Yeah, don't give him a big head, though. You know what I'm saying? All right, when we went to break, Aaron, you were telling us about the dairy farmer that hated ice cream. Yeah. No. He was a very, very nice gentleman, good ice cream. But I think what I needed to learn from him is that it's OK for us to focus on the parts of our business that we enjoy doing. I like raising sheep. I like having high quality sheep, and we like being seed stock producers. And while the wool is an important key element for us, I don't have to be a fiber artist, and I don't have to be a wool processor, because especially in such a small business, and we can't stick out our necks too far, right, where we are a startup, where we are trying to get our feet underneath us. It's OK to outsource the parts of our business that we're not good at, or that we aren't going to dedicate ourselves to pursuing. You know what's interesting, you bring up the fiber artists. We have interviewed people who are doing that and finding a little niche. Sounds like it's a lot of work, though. Did you consider doing that, or feel like the pressure to do something like that, and then realize, this isn't what I'm passionate about? Yeah, so actually, kind of when we started doing that, we were, you know, like everybody, we just jumped in and started doing some of the wool processing. And I was kind of naive enough to think, well, Erin doesn't have anything to do. She can just start knitting blankets, and making booties, and doing all this stuff. Exactly, yeah. Oh, they're fiber artists. It's a good man. What? Good man right here. We're going to sheep, you figure all this out, and we kind of had her eyes open to realize that we want to raise sheep, or sit there and knit booties, or, you know, talk about all the fibers. So we decided we kind of wanted to raise sheep, and we were just looking kind of for an outlet to bring a little more income to the farm so we could continue to grow and expand. So that was a really eye-opening experience to me, because I've always been in the mindset. You just do everything. You just work harder and work longer, but we realize that if we take that time that we could be, you know, doing the fiber artists and stuff, and work on marketing plans, and continuing to grow our sheep and the quality of our product, it'll get us a lot further than we would be just, you know, getting a ball of yarn and making booties for grandma out of it. Well, it's not even that. It's that we found our niche, and that's where our opportunity is. And what we're doing can benefit somebody else who's finding a niche, right? We supply wool to people who are tremendous fiber artists, who turn these things into art and a valuable product in a way that I couldn't. And so there's space for all of us, and we all feed each other's businesses and create opportunities for others elsewhere. You know, if you're going to have a fiber mill, they probably need more than just the wool we're providing them to be successful. And so just jumping in and helping to produce a quality product moved agriculture forward for all of us. If people want to find you guys on the Internet, social media, and that stuff, where would they go? So we have a website, Sorentsonsheepco.com, that's our retail space. And then we have Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, all under Sorents and sheepco. And that's S-O-R-E-N-S-O-N. Sorentsonsheepco.com.com. Well, it's very cool to meet you guys, and it's fantastic what you guys are doing. The story of a first generation farmer, no matter when, is pretty fascinating. And for you guys to be able to look outside the box and find opportunities like air fresheners and dryer balls, I've got to Google what a wool dryer ball is. It makes your clothes softer. Yes. Yeah. Aaron and Whit Source. And thank you guys very much. Really appreciate it. Do not go anywhere. He's not a fan of dryer balls. Told me that one time. We'll catch you everybody next time. [MUSIC] ♪ Go ♪