The Truth About Ag

The Truth About Risk Management with Dean Klippenstine

In this episode of The Truth About Ag podcast, co-hosts Kristjan Hebert and Evan Shout sit down with Dean Klippenstine, Partner and Business Advisor with MNP’s Agriculture team. Dean shares insights from his extensive career in agriculture and business, touching on risk management, succession planning, and how collaboration between advisors and producers can unlock growth opportunities. The discussion gets into critical topics like navigating liability in farming operations, preparing for generational transitions, and using operational adjustments to maximize efficiency and profitability.

Duration:: 1h 7m
Broadcast on:: 27 Nov 2024
Audio Format:: other

(audience applauding) - Welcome to the Truth About Ag. (upbeat music) Welcome to the Truth About Ag podcast, distributed under the real agriculture media network and powered by the Heber Group of Companies. Remember to like, share, comment, subscribe, wherever you might get your podcasts. And the Truth About Ag is also brought to you by Farmer Coach, the only entrepreneur producer coaching program in Canada that offers leadership, finance, and operational training from the dirt to the boardroom. As well as Maverick Ag providing you with the upper hand when it comes to financial and operational products. Let us help you build your legacy. All right, we got a special episode today. And I honestly wasn't sure how to title this. I was gonna call it three old recovering accountants, but I mean, who wouldn't want to listen to an agriculture podcast with three numbers guys on it? You could call it Golden Handcuffs, hey, heaps, maybe? - Oh, I think Colin Dean's special is about as good as you can name it. - So I'd like to introduce my co-host Christian Hebert as well as our longtime honorary member of the Heber Group of Companies, Mr. Dean Klypin Stein, M&P partner. - Morning solace. - All right, but I do want to start this with you Hebs. I want to know after the weekend, is the Hebert family, can I call you a Swiftie now or? - You know, I'll say we all support the hundreds of millions of dollars she could bring into a city in 24 hours. I was a fan of that. My wife and daughter went to the show and actually Tracy's not even the biggest, I wouldn't call her the biggest Swiftie fan, but she said it's more than just a show Grace. They had Wi-Fi LED wristbands that were lighting up as part of the music and fire so hot they could barely stay in their seat, she said. So it, yeah, what's on a good show? And I said, I like what she does for the economy, but Ben and I magically couldn't find tickets and snuck over to Ottawa for the Senator's Phillies game. - So let me write up his alley anyway. - Yeah. - Sorry, I'm gonna go ahead. - No, you go, no, no, you go. I texted Brooke, one of my key cohorts at M&P and she was at the show and I texted her, I said, did you see Travis Kelsey's girlfriend in concert yet? So I haven't talked to her how it was. - I wanna know how the gridlock in Toronto is when you shut down an entire highway going into downtown for her. - Hey, she gets a better escort than Trudeau. - Okay, and on the other side, Mr. Klippenstein, I mean, I know my accounting fees are high, but how was Barcelona? - Oh, well, I knew you were gonna beak me for that. I'll give you a bit of a background. Every six years and it started when M&P started in Brandon. Every six years the partners got together for an international, have one of their meetings outside international. And so every, the six year rotation and I'm an old enough dog. I was just excited about not having to go to the next one because international travel and I don't get along. So no one else was believing me, but I was complaining that what happened to go to Barcelona for meeting. - And I'm assuming back then there was what? A hundred partners and now we're 1500? - No, back then there was three. Myers, Norris, Penny started back then. So it's been a legacy going, but I do feel sorry for the poor people planning it because it's a bit of an undertaking when you have 1200 partners and there's significant others to travel across these and try to organize that. I don't envy their job. - Has anybody been able to take the torch for Don Penny's ability to play as hard as he could work? - No, Don's a legend and probably untouchable in that regard. - Yep. - So now back to the agriculture side. We do have a lot to talk about 'cause honestly heaps, it's been a couple of weeks without a guess here. So we're gonna, we're gonna start off. Obviously it's been hitting social media lately. The hub purchase of global egg risk. And I mean, both of you obviously this, you're both highly historical when it comes to the guard side. So somebody start off give me your take on how that happened and are we happy with it and the circumstances behind the deal. - Well, I'm pretty excited about it. Christian's been far more involved more recently. I tapped out and let those guys run the show and they did a heck of a job between heaps, the board Sullivan and Cozier. And Grant and I were fading off into the distance in this because we've had our run. And this was an opportunity that I thought was remarkable because it's a significant capital partner who incorrectly I thought they were publicly traded. Christian's corrected me that they're just a private equity fund, but they're substantial. They're owned by a private equity fund, but they're a substantial insurance entity. And I was pretty excited about having a significant international capital. Really put confidence in Western Canadian agriculture and this isn't their lost investment in Western Canadian egg and they're gonna continue to focus. So as a passive small shareholder, but an advocate of the industry, I'm pretty excited about it. Heaps? - Yeah, I think the number one goal and probably why both you and I ended up involved was that we believed the industry needs some other options when it comes to insurance. And then we'd like to see even more private show up in the next decade or two. So I mean, my number one thing is that for the partner this big, it kind of guarantees survival and probably tips the board more into a ability to thrive. I mean, startups are hard to start with and startups are real hard when your competitor, gets a $29 an acre subsidy from the federal and provincial government and you get nothing. Most people tell you you're nuts, but it fits a spot and the thing with startups and innovative companies is you can pivot and create new products and move around what's currently out there. So I think my number one thing is I'm just excited for the industry that it's gonna last forever with the company this size. Secondly, I think the synergies, what people maybe don't always understand about the insurance world is an insurance company has two customers, one in this case, the farmer and two is the reinsure because nobody's rich enough to insure all this. So you buy quota share or utilize reinsurance capital. So to have someone of hub size dealing with the reinsurers 'cause obviously they're insuring all kinds of stuff. When it comes to spread of risk and rates online will be great for the company. And then last, I think, I think a number of us hope that one day there will be a real farm suite of products for progressive farms. And those don't have to be large or small, they just progressive. So can I walk in and do a 20 minute questionnaire or even better a two minute questionnaire with 20 questions that really outlines my risk? And in my case, it's one liability. I got super bees on the highway. It's two, my production risk. So I got to look at crop insurance, gold, leg risk, egg, or stability. Three, it's PNC. Four, what do I need for my employees? And I would say hub is getting close to be in the company that can provide all those products. It's probably still gonna take some encouragement from folks like us. But I mean, that excites me 'cause I think right now it's a real issue on farms that we just get real busy and we don't even focus on. On the insurance side, specifically liability and PNC. - You talked about liability, Christian. We've had some discussions in the senior exec in M&P. Not from our own interest, but just from an industry perspective. And there's been a couple of public disasters out in the social media. And they happen on farming as farms get bigger. There's a population in Western Canada grows and as an example, one of my coworkers, one of the in the farm management consulting group, farms just had farms just outside of Regina at Richardson. And Sean said he had some stuff on the north of the number one highway that they subsequently give up. But he said he had to go seed, he had to take the drill across the highway, number one highway at three o'clock in the morning just to get it across because of traffic. Well, you talk about number two highway, you talk about number one highway in your farm and number one highway in Regina. Those are big risks and liability. And we don't give it, we including the advisors in M&P do not give it enough attention that it warrants because when it happens, it's life altering catastrophic. - Well, and I brought that up at the last farmer coach because obviously we've had these discussions, Dean and Christian and honestly, I asked them anybody even know what their general liability is and most couldn't give me an answer. And the ones that could said that they actually had to talk their local agents into increasing the number because they couldn't figure out why because no farmers around were doing it. So I mean, that shows a need in the industry but it also shows a big risk in the industry. - Well, yeah, go ahead, Tori, I mean. - And then I was just gonna say on the other side, I mean, I've had a dozen phone calls or so of guards, was it in trouble this and that? No, this was purely another company came in that had a lot of power and a lot of backing and it was the right decision for not only the board but the management team and everybody to get that kind of power behind the product 'cause we do believe in it. So just to answer that quick. - Yeah, no, and it talked about the industry not doing enough in the liability. I don't give a shit if my clients lose $100,000 auger. That doesn't matter. But if they have an air drill with two tanks on behind crossing number one highway and hit it, you get a 30 car pile up pretty quick, that ends two generations of wealth with three generations of wealth in one self swoop. - Well, and I think two, right? Having a quick comment on guards, yeah, for the listeners, probably just had its best two years ever, to be honest. So it, you know, and the management team's all intact, but come to liability and I'll go back to guards. So two pieces to this on the liability. One is a completely agree with Dean when it comes to traffic, the size of equipment, et cetera. Two is Dean and I have both seen a number of oil companies that have done really well that had a liability incident that like put them on their knees, right? 'Cause the one thing I probably got a couple of hard lessons when I was on the Board of Global Agresk is in a liability case or a lawsuit case, it's not always who's wrong, it's who's got wealth. And farms misunderstand a little bit sometimes, just because in a lot of cases they're cash poor, they're long on wealth. And so in a liability institute, in incident, there's a lot of lawyers that would jump on, sue in a farm 'cause there's deep pockets. And even though we're not long on cash, and you don't wanna think that way, but there is parts of our Canadian system that are becoming a lot more American. So not only is the chance of incident rate getting hired because of population and size of equipment and everything else, the second is is, you know, farms wealth and equity makes it an easy target in a liability situation. - Well, I know a lot of things, a lot of things they're not, they're not covering our other human resources side, right? Like when you talk about how many employees that these farms are getting, I mean, as consolidation occurs, there's more families, there's more employees, there's company trucks, there's a lot more risk that guys just don't factor in anymore. And it's becoming, honestly, it's becoming a monster. - When you talk about how about being there for the long-term offer in the suite of products, do you look at the options that Evan and Christian have available for farm protection, for farm profitability protection versus when, ask Louis what his options were 35 years ago, they were bugger all. And so it's super important that hubs in this for the long-term because if you took, you took global-like risk solutions as an alternative or an option to, out of your suite of services, if you took that away from most of our clients who have done that program, that would change the dynamic and their outlook entirely. Like it would be a cascading impact on agriculture and the confidence in it, Western Canada. - All right, let's pull out of this. Let's go back since we've had a few leadership changes in the industry a bit. Give me your opinion on the Saskatchewan election heap since it's been a couple of weeks since you and I talked. - Yeah, I mean, I think there's pros and there's cons, right? So I think the pro is, I'm still glad that in most cases in Canada, we have a two-party system so that at least when one wins, there is at least some movement forward. But I also think that having an opposition with seats is a good thing. It holds people accountable. It keeps you moving in the right direction and makes you hear all voices. You know, personally, I find the rhetoric around an urban rural divide, a crock of shit, to be honest. There's about 16 cities in Saskatchewan. Two of them voted really orange, right? The rest voted green. Now, to be honest, I think if you're, and I haven't pulled all these stats, this is a lot more gut feel, but I spend way more time looking at politics than I want. I would say we're really starting to build up a union versus non-union divide, right? Regina and Saskatoon between government health and education are probably the most populated union worker cities and personally, obviously, I'm not a big union guy, not a fan of them at all, but at the same time, everybody gets to vote. And so I think it's something that the governments need to get figured out, right? You got to fix it or find a way to work with it. And I think this election really pointed that out. But I mean, it's what five terms I think it is for the SaaS party. I mean, in the world of politics, it's almost unheard of, right? And in the world right now, people are voting for change. So I think we saw some change in Saskatchewan, right? Some key ministers didn't get back in. And I think that's a good thing for the province, right? I mean, sorry that they don't have a job anymore, but it means that we're gonna have some young, new people that got into politics, obviously, 'cause they loved it, in some good cabinet positions. And one, I'll use an example, maybe don't find him as young anymore, but Warren Cading. I mean, he was one of the best farmers I knew that retired, didn't have kids that wanted to took it over and sold it, and I think this is his second or third term. And he'll end up being the minister of TED. I mean, that's fantastic for trade and export, and it's fantastic for agriculture. So some of those types of people getting higher level positions, I think, is overall good for the province, let alone for agriculture. - And Dean, I don't wanna pull you into a political discussion, but I mean, you talk to a lot of clients. What's the feeling, I guess, in the industry of A, that there was a bit of a two party this time, it wasn't so clear cut. And at the same time, as Christian said, the rural urban divide that we're talking about, that may or may not be real. - Yeah, well, everyone knows my political stripe, I don't really hide it very, very, I'm not very good at hiding it. So thanks for trying to be politically correct, Evan, but there's no need for that. My issue, I'll take a little different twist on it. When you talk about the union shops, and I'm a strong believer in unions or allowing competitive negotiations, but what I'm fundamentally against is monopolies of any sort, whether they're government, whether they're for-profit, or whether they're unions. And having monopoly powers, monopolistic powers, make for real significant impact to the commerce, whether it's if you have one union controlling the trade, one union controlling the ports, or the rail lines controlling the rail infrastructure, or like I'm not, this is not unions versus capitalism, a private union, private capitalist capitalistic monopoly, it's not a good thing for industry either. We'd never give it one trucking company the entire rights that run the entire trucking system into Saskatchewan, 'cause there'd be no competitive forces to allow it to. So, and the other take on it, and this is more of a federal and is what I, and somewhat provincial, because no one ever promises that they want fiscal responsibility, right? In my view, there should be a mom in charge of every fiscal house in our nation, where if dad loses his job and the kids want a new trampoline, mom goes, no, you're not getting the new trampoline, we can't afford that. Dad lost his job, you're gonna go get a paper route, right? We don't have any politicians in Canada right now, and not picking on anyone. We need someone who doesn't care about getting elected to say, to give us the fiscal tell that we need to swallow, which is we're living above our means, we're fiscally responsible as a nation, and it's gotta be changed. But the problem is everyone wants, it's talk about Kennedy. Don't ask what the government can do for us, ask what we can do for the government, and that mentality's lost, and it makes me crabby. - Well, and the problem is, doesn't matter if we're talking federal or provincial, I mean, it's a rock and a hard place. I mean, we're expecting guys to come in and make huge scale changes, but we have to remember they want to last more than four years, and I mean, anybody at this point that comes in and does it is out in four. So what's the, not that I want to get philosophical here, but what's the answer? I mean, when we talk about the union side, I mean, is there a pair in the next four years, he's like, what's the answer? - I think the answer is probably a rich guy that doesn't need the paycheck, that actually wants to make change and doesn't give a shit about what anybody thinks. Not to mention any names. But I mean, one of the most interesting things to watch is gonna be the new department that Vivek and Elon are gonna run. Like, to be honest, you get two people that don't care, right? They weren't elected, and they're supposed to create governmental efficiency. And I mean, I don't know if you guys watch, I'll talk more about Vivek than Elon, but Vivek's one interview, when he got asked, like, how are you gonna do this without lawsuits? So I'm just gonna fire everybody with an even number social insurance number. Well, what if some of them are good? Well, that'll clear itself out because the odd numbers will be pissed, the good ones, and they'll run the bad ones off, and then they'll tell me which even ones to hire back. It takes about 90 days. I'm like, that's actually, that's actually kind of logical. - When you talk about Elon not caring about money, he doesn't even care about the advertisers on X. He said, you can't threaten me with money. The advertisers let alone the paltry salary he's gonna get as that. Quick side note, they are an engineering marvel. I, this is a blatant plug that are cabin, or second cabin. I know you're gonna be keen for that anyway. For a low labor power machinery guy, I'm falling off the wagon on that. - Yeah. - But we got Starlink on our cabin in Farkbell, and I installed it yesterday and mounted it on the roof. And their engineering is absolutely simple and flawless. It's remarkable how easy that was. It gives me, and you think those are details that don't matter, but I actually think Elon's involved in the details of his companies right from the ground up. Like it was, it was remarkable. And I'm not a very handy guy. For those of you who know me, I did absolutely farm until 2006 when we ran a backhoe business. But I was in our farm and our construction company. I was in charge of wrecking shit. Dad was in charge of fixing it. So we're talking no tangible skills and Elon, Elon Starlink installation was incredible. - So yeah, I got to watch a lot of TV this weekend, which is not an, not usual for my family home, but so I watched Tyson fight and literally had USA chants all across the whole stadium. I watched a UFC in which Trump and Elon and all of them were escorted in to Kid Rock music and the whole crowd was insane. And then I watched football yesterday and every stadium had a flyover and every stadium was, I mean, I've never seen the United States this United even though everybody tells us they're so divided. So on that scale, are we afraid of what's coming on the agriculture side? Because they are so united. And I believe that, like you said, Trump's gonna walk in and make large scale changes in the first 40 days. What's the risk to Canadian agriculture right now? - Yeah, I mean, I think there's gonna be large scale change, but I mean, Trump's a negotiator. And I mean, so anybody that negotiates, I mean, you try and anchor somebody to a worst case scenario that's even worse than you'd ever do 'cause then they think it's a possibility and he's a little crazy. So I mean, I'm gonna tear up everything. So then let's say specifically, because he mentioned it a number of times in the last and after the USMCA, Trump's not a fan of supply management. It's been mentioned, it doesn't matter where I stand on it even, he's mentioned it. So say that's what he wants to target. Well, if the choice is that or 10% tariff on everything, now you've turned it into a negotiation, right? So, I mean, I think when it comes to US agriculture, we have less to worry about currently than we maybe think. Kennedy gets portrayed in the media as just an absolute right-wing crazy guy, but if you actually follow some of his stuff a little deeper, it's pretty logical. He just wants testing. He's not against GMO, et cetera. Seed oils, and his argument on seed oils, him and I might disagree on some stuff, but at the same time, we have too much oil and a lot of people's diets 'cause they fast food all the time. So there's some logic to it too. But lastly, I would say that a good friend of mine right now is currently getting mentioned a ton to possibly be the US Secretary of Agriculture. A guy's name's Kip Tom, farm 16,000 acres in Indiana, and he's at another five or six in Argentina for 30, 40 years. So one of the best minds I know in agriculture, right? And kind of another guy that keeps getting mentioned is Ted McKinney, who's also, he's fantastic. So it's not that we're seeing horrible people get appointed. We're just seeing different people than maybe what the world thinks. And it's gonna be a negotiation. And if you pay attention also to Trump's last negotiator, Lighthizer, I mean, his big thing is trade deficits, right? He doesn't believe in global trade that you should just be in a wicked trade deficit. In general, Canada is in a slight trade deficit, but actually we do a ton of trade at the US. We're nothing like Japan, China, et cetera, that are in monstrous, monstrous trade deficits. So I think there's a way actually for Canada, if negotiated correctly, that uses this as a phenomenal outing, right? Like, just hook our small boat under the engine of the United States. Now, the harder question is, do I think we currently have anybody to negotiate that? So we'll leave that for another episode. - I was gonna say, are we gonna get to trim in on that too? It's your platform, go ahead. - My platform. Well, I think from a supply management negotiation, the writing's been on the wall there for quite a while, that there's lots of pressure in that sector. And as it gets more consolidated and concentrated, it actually has less political clout than it used to. So the chips will fall where they may or not. But the other thing is that I think tariffs probably, I haven't thought a whole bunch about this, but fundamentally, I believe tariffs are gonna affect the U.S. consumer more so than they're gonna affect Canadian agriculture. With a bit of a caveat on that for logistics, but you take China's, you take China's not allowing Vitera and Rich to move canola into. Well, it didn't change the canola trade, it just changed the dynamic in the path of the commodities. When it's all said and done, it still goes back to fundamental supply and demand with small hiccups. Because no government can control the supply demand equilibrium, that's the free market, and that's eventually gonna find it's equilibrium anyways. So I'm not too worried, other than the short-term hiccup while it adjusts. And with a bit of a logistical caveat, like I said, because the U.S. is so physically close to us from a transport perspective. What about shout, I think Canada and U.S. agriculture could both benefit by implementing Trump's idea of no taxes on overtime. How do people build more personal wealth? Go to work, not look for hand notes. And guess what, if you work 10 or 15 hours over time, you won't even pay tax on it. I love that one. - I don't disagree with you. I'm just back to your comment where I had to laugh. I'm a little timid that he's not just gonna walk over our negotiators right now, because we've created a wall that we believe we're actually against him. And I think that's the biggest mistake, is that we need to actually start making changes on our side of the border to actually be with him. 'Cause as a North American front, we need to ride the coattails in my eyes. - Yeah, I'm not a fan of Trump's style, but I think most of that's showing. But the actual fundamental mechanics of his fiscal platform are pretty sound and we need to learn from that, including what I think Christian talked about it earlier, $29 an acre subsidy on our current products. That's not gonna, if you had a sound fiscal conservative in charge of North America, that's not gonna be in the card's long term. We better make sure we're ready for that as an industry. - Okay, now, elephants in the room heaps, I know you wanna have this discussion with Dean, is why does a tax and accounting firm get into agronomy? - Yeah, so I'll give you this first, I don't care, 'cause last time I checked, there's a lot of agronomy companies out there, and if you don't like it, just don't use 'em, and I don't use 'em, right? But I'm gonna go straight conspiracy theory here. I read this one on Twitter. First of all, MNP lobbies the government to create egg or stability so that they can charge egregious fees for our risk management. Now, they buy an agronomy company so they can charge egregious fees on how to make us grow or not grow crops to file our risk management to charge us twice. So, I'll let Dean explain that, and in the back of everybody's mind, I'd like you to maybe ponder from an accounting side. This would be my question for Dean to roll in there also, 'cause I think accounting is one of the professions that should be nervous about AI, because bookkeeping and notice to readers and basic tax can probably be completely wiped out by AI in the next decade, and I would assume there's some talk at the partner group on how we pivot and do more consulting and thinking versus bookkeeping, because when I was still an MNP, people still brought in five gallon pales of receipts to find out if they made money on their farm, right? So, Dean, over to you. - Okay, so we're gonna go into the agronomy. First of all, make sure I look back to the AI and comment on making it obsolete. But here's where the true core of the matter started. Is I've been yelling at a couple of buddies of mine who run small agronomy practices, single single agronomy practices. I've been yelling at them for a number of years and say, you've got no succession plans, you've got no young people trained to pass your knowledge down to, and you've got no emergency contingency plan if something happens to you or both physically or mentally. And so they were talking to a group of them who merged about merging. And so we went down an 18 month path, and this was just me as an advisor trying to help them build their core business. And I said, you need to create an M&P for agronomy where you've got shared resources and shared technological strength and shared research. And then they got down into the weed after 18 months of a small group of the original partners. Got to the space where they're into the technical details of how do we split profits and who's in charge and who does marketing. And then they turned to one of our senior partners in M&P, a stupid person and said, well, Stu, you guys have all this built for professional services firm. Why don't we just merge in with you and become part of the professional service firm. And so that's where it took, so I'd love to think that we're such a giant profitable evil empire that we're just gradually slowly taking over the world. We're not that good. When it's all said and done, this was an accidental expansion into this market. But the key for me is that in a post-agritrend world and I'm not saying agritrend is all that in the bag of chips, but agritrend had a network that they got to share and gain strength from each other's knowledge and expertise and experience. And since then, there's been no consolidation in that. And the companies that have consolidated, they're not in the people business. 'Cause Christian doesn't use his agronomist because of some corporate empire. He uses it 'cause the boots on the ground, people know and help him build on his farm. And so I wish the industry had already built this and not and we didn't have to kind of restart it, rekindle it from scratch. But the cold hard reality is, is that there's a massive amount of agronomic horsepower that's gonna sail off into the sunset and we're gonna lose that. So that's, it's the continuity for the grower. It was really the core, my time arrives in the short anyways, so I'm gonna be gone before this thing ever hits full steam. But I really did want continuity for a bunch of my growers who use single shingle agronomist to if they were, if they hang up their quad or motorcycle, they're left out in the lurch and try to go train someone from scratch and all that knowledge goes missing. - And I don't disagree with you 'cause I think, I mean, agriculture producer side is no different. Like I see a lot of really good older producers that have a lot of knowledge. And even on our firm, Christian, I mean, some of our younger guys have asked your dad to start sharing some of his knowledge 'cause those transfers were running out of time. The average age of a farmer is over 60 now. And whether there's a succession plan or not, that's a lot of knowledge on the growth side and everything else from the past that we don't have on that side either. So I don't disagree with what you're saying. - Yep. And so that's the core on an AI perspective. And we had some backlash on that 'cause people thought we were trying to compete with them. But in actual fact, fundamentally, every one of the people that merged with us had more clients than they could service and we're turning down work. So it's really about building capacity and getting the next generation. 'Cause the other, and then I'll go on to the AI. But one of the main things that we noticed is that the industry has done a terrible job of maintaining and keeping young people in the agronomy advice business, right? You get a smart young lady, she comes out of university. She doesn't wanna go start her own sales force and go lead from scratch. And she wants to learn from a seasoned agronomist, seasoned service provider. And she goes into one of the big houses and the fertilizer chemical dealerships. And she's a rock star and she's good at these items and she's great at this and the customer's lover. What do they do? They pull her off into another part of the organization because their core business is not helping people get wealthier. And so my last rant on that, this excites me because now when we tell a grower, the problem is is that when we tell, if someone's in the M&P benchmark and we say, you do a great job of gross margin, well, then I stand and stare at my shoes and go, okay, well, now what? There's nothing I can do to help you go to the next level, right? Christian and Evan and their farm can't cheat off with the neighbors who aren't doing as well. They gotta find, it's hard to find neighbors who are doing better and you need to pay the folks who are the best at science to figure out what that plant needs to take it to the next level. And my golf analogy is one that always, my coworkers at M&P and lots of my customers are sick of me here and they're sick of hearing me talk about, but I'm a golf coach's dream. I shoot 110. So if I go into a golf coach and say, I wanna shoot 110 and I wanna shoot 105. Well, those are easy strokes to improve, right? You gotta stop shanking the ball, you gotta stop making stupid mistakes and doing bad pots and those are easy five strokes to gain. If you go into a golf coach and shoot and say, I'm shooting 77 and I wanna shoot 74, son of a bitch, that's hard to do. Like, while I'm assuming. I'm just gonna, theoretically, that sounds really hard to do. And that's what, that's what good agronomists, so those folks who are sitting out there and thinking they're already a great grower. That just means they need to work extra hard at trying to find the next 10% improvement. With AI, Christian, we've been bantering about that and whose quote is that people overestimate the short-term impact of technology and underestimate the long-term? I think that's where we are, right? We've said for the last 10 years that AI is gonna take our jobs and we're not gonna do anything bookkeeping related or compliance related. And an actual fact, that's not been the case, but if you take a simple T4, how many people it used to take their T4 and RSP slip to an accountant to do their year and to do their tax return? And soon it'll be automated that you won't even have to follow on that unless you got something outside the norm. And so we're probably in the first part of that under overestimating its short-term impact and we're really underestimating its long-term. Where's your head? Emma, you played on both sides of this? - Yeah, I mean, we've talked about the CRA side before. I mean, it's pretty simple for them to start taking away those simple T1s. I mean, that's probably step one. The bookkeeping, I mean, we have companies like HubSpot and other ones where it pulls straight from the bank statements. I mean, even from our standpoint, bookkeeping's gotten easier 'cause there's a lot of AI already doing half the work. You just gotta go in and double check and audit. Obviously, your specialist dean, that's not gonna change. I mean, the tax laws are gonna be the tax laws for the next 20 years. And from a consulting standpoint, they're gonna be required in the ag industry especially. I just think it's your core focus individuals that are just there to put the hours in and do the work. I'd be a little worried if I was a partner there just based on that because I do think that those core services like Christian mentioned, maybe not in one or three years, but I think it's the easiest route to go down when it comes to AI where the specialist jobs, I think are pretty secure. - I think, you know, and I think too, it's both the customer and the accountant need to understand the 10-year time horizon, right? So Evan said like our bookkeeping's probably went down from, I'd say 70 to 80% of time. They used to just be coding and matching her seats. And now that's all automatic. Now you do an audit and you pivot them. Well, now that same person that was doing that bookkeeping, Evan's trained doing the controller. Like she's doing my monthly statements and sending the variance analysis and starting to understand that. And so I think two things, you know, that the customers need to understand that if your fee doesn't change, it's actually a great problem. If only 20% of it was getting your stuff ready and 80% of it is you're working on stuff to make your business better. Where right now, if you have bad books, 80% of your fee is just getting it so that it's in a usable form for both the accountant, the government, and yourself. And 20% is for being better. So I think it's good for the industry if we flip that. And secondly, I mean, the world of accounting is just like the world of farmers. There's some really good ones on the business side and there's some really good ones on the production side. And so it'll take the good ones on the business side to help pull the production ones up over the next decade as that happens. Just like the farm side has to understand that it shouldn't take 80% of the time to clean your books up 'cause you shouldn't know whether or not you made money six months after a year end. You should actually know before that. And you know, technology, 'cause everyone would assume since I'm an accountant that I'm good at technology and good at administration and these two, my two good friends here, no, no, that's not the case. But my wife has even trained me into doing my receipts on zero, Evan by taking a picture. So when you talk about technology, this is such a transition that we're not talking about, you have to, back in the day, the only person who used computers is a computer engineer, right? Because they were cumbersome and hard to write your own programs and do all that. Well, now you can take a 85-year-old or 90-year-old and they're using a smartphone, which is basically a computer because the technology is so easy and intuitive. You got two-year-olds, five-year-olds doing it and you got 95-year-olds doing it. And so it's gonna get easier and gonna get simpler and regardless of how we want it to change its changing. - Well, I mean, having luck while Bentley's 12, I'd been late this year lots of times or where we were getting going in tough grade. It was dad and I, one other machine and my 12-year-old in a grain cart. Was he quite as fast as our 20 to 30-year-olds? No, but it sure wasn't 'cause of the technology. He was using machinery sink and right online, it was that he was way more cautious unloading, the pure operational side, right? The tech was easy, right? Running 120-foot sprayer with three other sprayers in the field, just part of the crew, the tech part's easy. It's the, can he get through drainage ditches? And in the old, you know, I would say 10 years ago, that wasn't the thing, right? It was the operation part, you could get really solid and the tech is what you were always worried about. And these kids coming now, the tech side, that's the easy part. It's, do they get enough time driving a quad and driving a skid steer so that they can get into a piece of equipment, then the tech side, the monitor, you know, they're teaching, you know, Bentley's, because he's played farming simulator, he's asking dad questions as he's running the X9 with my dad beside him. Hey, does this and this happen, just like farming simulator? Like, it's crazy. - This is a stupid question, 'cause I'm out of the day-to-day weed, Christian Evan. How much is that gonna be eventually done even remotely where you have your own tech support? So you'll have Bentley sitting in a room, watching the monitors of all the old guys who are running the thing and hop in and help 'em when they need help on their specific machine. How far is that away? - We're seeing it in the construction already. I mean, you're seeing the videos of the guys sitting in an office, 100 clicks away, driving the big rig trucks and stuff. I mean, we're probably there if it wasn't for regulations and other items that are still probably on the forefront holding it back a bit. I think you're 100% correct. I mean, the tech side, even now our lead operators do most of the setting of the combines and checking monitors and stuff. To run a piece of equipment, and I apologize for anybody on both the insult, but I could throw anybody on most of the equipment nowadays, and within a day or two, it would be second nature. It's not. The harder parts are actually the management side, and tying it back heaps to years how the technology's affecting. I'm also seeing the reverse on the professional side, and I'm seeing these kids come out with a whole bunch of technology, and then on their phones and been in computers, but you throw 'em into a boardroom, or you throw 'em in front of a negotiation, and it's like a deer in the headlights. So, I think we're gonna lose some of that side of it, which is the side I'm trying to get up on the farmer coach side is, 'cause that's where the big zeros are, but I am seeing the reverse when it comes to business, which necessarily is not a good thing. - Yeah, so I mean, on the farm side, Dean, I mean, I can go on my phone right now. I can RDA into every single one of my monitors. I have to walk them through to change the settings. On a combine, I can change a few settings, and I can lock 'em so the guys can't touch 'em. So, I mean, we're real close to everything being there. I mean, I'm not the big, in our area of the world, I'm not real keen on autonomy right now for the main operations, maybe for other stuff, but I keep pushing deer. I want a simulator machine in my shop that I can have cameras on my equipment that save all my fields, right? So, if I wanna train my 12-year-old or a new operator coming from New Zealand, I can put 'em in there for two, three days before we head out to the fields, and it's a John your cab, you're gonna see on the screen that's your field, all the buttons, and to me, that's where we go for autonomy. Hey, I got a guy in the field that has to run to a funeral for two hours. I can walk out of my office, jump in the simulator cab, run that drill for two hours, and there's three other drills in the field that if it's gonna cross the road 'cause I lost connection, they can kill it for liability, right? So, that's kind of my dream of where it's going. But yeah, we're well on the way of what you're talking about already, and I think Evan worded it right. I mean, I used to be one of those people too that thought all my best always have to be my operators. If you didn't grow up on a farm, you can't run anything. And now to be honest, if I use the combines, I need a really good tech and a guy that understands the combines in number one, and in number six, right? So, Josh is our guy in number one. Louie's our guy in number six. Anytime they have a problem setting a combine, Louie and Josh talk, right? Josh is really good at the tech. Louie's got years of experience. If they can't solve it, then they phone me to come jump in one to just end. It's not cause they probably don't have it solved. It's that they're the decisions of big enough dollar amount they want me to make it. Should we move up? Should we speed up a mile an hour and throw over an extra quarter bushel? Cause it looks like it's gonna rain. Like that's a Christian decision. And on the drills, we've done the same. Like you have really good, you have super strong operators on a 12 hour shift, and you split them up. So you got two on days and two on nights. And then you have the guys you're training, splitting the drills with those guys, and you overlap an hour when they get there and an hour when they leave. Like magically within four days, these guys are pretty good operators cause your strong ones can go do the tough part of the field where it's really wet until they get used to in power poles. And if they have any questions, they have somebody to talk to on the radio. So it's funny cause I know there's a lot of people out there that think that the only thing I care about is acres. And it's such a load of shit, right? - Oh, yeah. - I care maybe less about acres than anybody on earth. I just had this backwards theory that if I grew, the people would be easier. Now, there's two points to that. One, as we grew, we could pay them more. Cause I think one of the biggest issues in agriculture is in HR, is that we think people should work 3000 hours for 21 bucks an hour. - Not a couple days off. - Yeah. And then secondly, people don't, you know, say in my mechanic, he doesn't want to pull wrenches 365 days a year. That's probably why he doesn't do what he did, right? But at the same time, people do actually kind of like to know what they're doing 70 to 80% of the time and have 20% change. They don't want their job description to be, show up at 7.30 and we'll tell you what we're doing today, every day of the year. And we don't know when the day is going to end, right? So as we've got larger, when it comes to training, the ability to run bigger equipment, to be part of the drill crew, you know, the minute we're done seeding, we go to two day sprayer shifts. So you're on call one out of every two weekends. And you know that you're going to go 14 to 16 hour days for two days. And if you want the rest of the week off, take it. If you want to come get up to 50 hours, do that, right? But it's all in the schedule. It's made us way better at making more and more robust operators. - So speaking of the non-acre issue, I was going to chime in. How there's been way too much chronic addiction to people saying just set it to the setting and leave it all day and throwing out four or five bushelne acres. And we bust our tail all year to make five bushelne acre profit and we throw three of it out the back door. How are the new combines, are they getting so that their self, their settings actually do manage that? Well, Christian, Evan. - So the X's are the best I've ever seen for throwing over. No, I mean, I've thrown fans behind the dual rotor New Orleans in the cases too. But I mean, I think any type of a dual rotor specifically can really keep a lot of grain in. But I think the problem is this field to field in day to day, the mother nature is so much different, right? And that's where the settings have to change. So the combines are getting a lot smarter, I think on the settings. The one thing we found is it's the speed. So as you're going into, so we run on Harvest Smart, which is the automatic combine operator that basically just keep the seats which activate it and turn the combine around at the end of the field, right? We're in that 90% of the time. And the 10% is you're going into a really heavy spot or a light spot and the combine can't read that. But actually on the new 25 model, we demoed one this year. Two things they've got way better cameras, reading whether the crop's down or heavy. And they're actually pulling in NDVI imagery from two weeks to a month before Harvest. So you know the really heavy spots and the light spots 'cause two things happen in a light spot. You need to speed up because if the combine's not full, you're throwing it over and in a heavy spot, you need to slow down. You can't actually just set it. It's not only just setting your settings. You can't just set your speed at three and a half mile an hour and stay there all day. It's not doing what the combine needs. - It changes. Evan, you got some growers who use non-John Deere growers in your book of business. What are they talking about or what's your head on or on those? - We're finding the same thing, Dean. Obviously I'm pulling, I mean, a lot of them, whether they use green or not, they still have the green bubbles on. So I can still access into JD Ops on a lot of them. The biggest thing is you just got to use the combine for what its capabilities are. If you don't keep any of those combines, well, it doesn't matter if it's an X9 or it's a CR, whatever the new number is, 11, you have to keep them full. And if you're not keeping them full, it doesn't matter how good a operator you are, you're going to be throwing over. So it's a bit of an upside. The other thing, I mean, obviously I'm just getting into the combine data now, but pulling the data, we're starting to see some really big variances, not just between combines between operators, where if you don't trust the technology, you're actually going against the efficiency of the machine itself. So you might throw pans behind one combine, and yeah, they're set perfect, but if somebody's not trusting the tech and pulling back on the lever because a 50 foot header it, a certain amount of hours scares a few guys, you're actually hurting yourself because we just threw a pan and you were going the right speed and now you're going too slow. So that pan meant nothing. So it's more of trust the tech, use the machine to its full capabilities and make sure you have the right machine because I'm not saying that an X9 in Paul's country is the right machine because you can't cut fast enough. So it's a bit of a, your discussions around machinery now are becoming more complicated because it's not just what I want to drive. Oh, this is the best one. I have a belt buckle. I really like iron. It's, I'm in this type of geography and this type of the world, which combine best suits that type of geography? And maybe it's not the big one. Maybe you need a 40 foot head so you can keep the combine full. Like there are different discussions nowadays than we've ever had in the past. It was always just bigger, bigger, bigger. Now it's bigger the right. I mean, I had an operator take his 50 foots back and go back to 45s because with his little fields, it was taking him way more efficiency wise to pop the headers off every single move. So he actually downsizes combines because that was a better move for his farm. So it's those discussions that I'm having now where in the past it was just LPM, LPM, LPM. Now there's an operational component that's almost just as important on the efficiency side. - That's, and that's where I'm gonna give a plug for Maverick Ag and Farmer Coach because your specialty, Evan's specialty on big farms, the M&P database can take it to say your labor farm machinery is good or bad or awful. But really then that's only the start. The exercise then is what do we do to change it and improve it while still maintaining all the other stuff we do really well. And Evan has boots on the ground experience. And like I say, Evan's no good at it. He's just better than everyone else in the world as far as how to make those changes because. - Oh, big copy in our lines. - Well, I think too, right? It's what are the key questions. I mean, the X's have brought up a new thing on combines and 900 horsepower tractors have brought it up on tractors but sprayers have been the one for two decades, right? What's your nozzle on time? And most farmers will stare at me with a blank stare. They can tell me how big the tank is. They can tell me how wide the booms are. They can tell me whether or not it has auto on off, sexual control. They can't tell me how many of the engine hours it's actually spraying. So it's like you're gonna spend 800 grand on a sprayer but you don't know if your nozzles are only on 29% of the time or 79% of the time. And I remember it'd be four or five years ago now. We were doing a thing with John Deere North America. The average on time on a 49/40 at that time was like 49%, 46%, 46% of engine hours, right? And I think at that time, we were right around 68, 70 and we've been able to push it higher. And everyone's like, well, you can't only have nozzles on 46%. Well, if you don't have somebody mix and chemical for you and you don't have somebody bringing water to you, actually you can't. And sprayers trade by the engine hour. They don't trade by the nozzle hour. It's not like a combine that trades pretty heavily by the rotor hour versus the engine hour. Sprayers trade by the engine hour. So that cost in your LPM can be astronomically different and nobody talks about it. - Well, and this, go ahead. No, you go ahead. - I was gonna say what we're finding is that the financial side is what identifies the issue. So the LPM discussions, the different line items, it can identify, okay, we have an issue. But to actually get the solution 90% of the time it's not a financial solution, it's an operational solution. So like Christian said on the sprayers, it's not go buy a bigger sprayer 'cause I need more acres done. It's get somebody batch filling on the trailer or it's time your fills or like it's an operational change that then I mean, if you take a sprayer from a 36 or a 46% up to a 70, you might have just eliminated the need for a second sprayer. So then when we look at it from back to a financial aspect by changing operations, which was an easy change, you just saved yourself another million dollar sprayer which over 10,000 acres, I mean, the depreciation rate, like you're effecting the finance with an operational discussion. - And that is absolutely it. I always tell people that you can't yell at the scorecard. We didn't score any points in the third quarter. You don't point at the scorecard and yell at the scorecard. You say, okay, what do we need to do? We need to gain more re-ards on the first down. We need to block better. So we need to focus. Like you need to actually drive change and to be fair to everyone, the complexities of that are enormous and they change every year. So for example, if Christian and Evan have a, instead a two-field farm and one year they grow barley at the far farm and canola at their close farm, that changes the logistics on their harvesting a lot different from bin management to grain cart. Like these are constantly changing because the variables change every time versus the year when you have wheat at your close farm and canola at your far farm, there's constant. So not only do you have to be great, you have to constantly rethink it and it tweaks and change. And so that's what I love is actually operational changes to make the system work better. It's constantly improved 'cause we're never gonna have perfection. We just have constant improvement. - Well, and that's where the communication side comes in a lot being like we always preach on guys that having a family meeting or a team meeting once a year, that doesn't do it. And I'm not trying to harp on guys, but I mean, even if it's just father, son or daughter, mother, like you have to have constant communication throughout the year on these aspects because like you said, this is something as simple as if we grow wheat here, what's the logistics issue of having to haul it back or to the elevator versus a low-yielding crop? So these discussions don't happen if you only meet once a year. These discussions are weekly or monthly and they're ongoing because issues are gonna come up. Like you said, if we have a hailstorm here and the yield comes down, that changes our logistics plant. Like that's the problem with a lot of operations we're seeing is that they don't like communication. Family farms do not like to sit down with other family members and talk about the hard things. It's not a secret. - And it comes. - No, yes, and there is no boss. Like like if you pretended Christians, the boss of the Hebrew group of companies, he can't go in and tell all the people working in the system what the logistics affects every time it, right? You need the information from everyone in the entire group to then be able to reason improvements in the traditional changes. - Well, I think Evan, right, if you go to little stories on this one is, and I should've realized this when we were smaller 'cause we were so focused on efficiency in 24 hours, but which is really just logistics. You have to get to the underlying problems. So in agriculture, we talk lots about cashflow and that farms don't make presales when they know their bank loans are gonna be available. I mean, like if you came and looked at the one whiteboard on Jess Wall and this is for everybody to see, we have the months labeled and on what our expenses are every month. You know, so call it an average of a million and a half bucks, two million bucks and it shows or even a month. And then it has the loads for each month and where they're going and how much revenue it creates. So our guys know that in March right now, we don't have enough sold based on cashflow. So Jeff and I will make some sales because revenue doesn't meet expenses in those months. So they know that logistic problem or issue is coming and it all just, but it's the delivering of the grain that drives the cashflow, that drives the income statement. And so we're pre-selling as long as the revenue makes sense up to 18 months before we even grow it or 18 months after. And then I think on the statements, you get drilling into LPM. I mean, a couple of things I would talk about is when we get benchmarked, we'll look and say, geez, we actually think we're pretty good, but we rank somewhere kind of an average or just a little bit better than average where we get looking. It made us really dig into ours and the two things we found. We haul all our own grain and we do a lot of land improvement. But guess what? It forced us to go make a schedule on both of those. So when we haul a grain now, Jeff gets a custom quote and we compare the custom rate to what it's actually costing us and are our trucks making us any money or at least breaking even if part of the reason we want is full-time people. 'Cause if we're losing money on hauling our own grain, why are we doing it, right? So that was a good exercise for us. On land improvement, it's like, what's an acre worth? How much more efficient did we get on that field? And to be honest, we can do an exact calculation on land improvement and whether or not it was profitable to spend that money in the fall. And so every farm I think has an ability to pinpoint something and even just pick one a year to understand better and improve. - Well, I'm getting that from like, no. - I was just gonna ask you, give that example of the, you did a group meeting, if you can share it on HCV about how to improve and you put hooks on. - Hooks on the grain cart. - Oh, yeah, so, so I mean, I came from a 5,000 acre farm guys and I've told the story farmer go two million times is we weren't like HCV was. We were probably your average farm and, you know, focused on just getting the crop off and cropping. And I knew my numbers well, but from an operations standpoint, I'm not an agronomist, I'm not a farmer. So when I went out to HCV for the first time, the most interesting part to me was, was the ability to pull a combine out in under 10 minutes. 'Cause on our farm, that was a crisis. That was a, you stuck a combine in a slew. It was a four hour ordeal with get the four-wheel drive, get this. - High stress. - High stress and just a whole bunch of people standing around is what I used to call it. And at HCV, it was literally a process in place and everybody knew the process was, my job as a grain cart was to back up to the combine. The combine operator was already out of the cab, chain is on the back of the cart, hooks it up to the hitch on the combine. And by the time we had every set up, I mean, 10 minutes in and off, I don't even have to get out of the cart because the grain cart guy refolds up the chain, puts it back on my cart. So literally, there's no loss in productivity with the other combines because the grain cart was stopped for half an hour helping. It's, it comes down to processes and I don't, and I definitely didn't see that before I started here, is that it's people and processes. It's not, it's not the best machinery. It's not, there's a whole bunch of things we attribute to farming, growing good grain, all that stuff. The people in the processes are what actually separates the chaff from the seed, if you wanna call it. Is when you have the processes in place and the people understand them, it makes a significant amount of difference. - Yeah. And don't, and if I was gonna yell at my clients for one thing to take away from that is that, is that don't provide the solutions, get feedback from your team and as far as, they know the issues and there's lots of, there's lots of knowledge, brains and talent in your team, and utilize that to help improve your farm. - Well, I mean, use our seating example. So I mean, of course, the guys want a new shop all the time. In my argument though, it's like shops don't make me that much money. So I keep saying no, but the bet, you know what the best idea that came out is our seating meeting that we did with everybody? The rock picking crew asked if we could put a separate channel on their radios, 'cause they're usually seven or eight miles away, and so they get a lot of static and they have to listen to the seating crew, which is on the radio all the time, trucks and cedars and 24 hours. All they wanted was just to know that, could we just go to channel two, so our five rock pickers can talk to each other about what's going on and we can have some peace and quiet and it's like, so you just want to spend 150 bucks on radios? Just to put a channel, yeah, like, man, if you could do that and have an air compressor in the truck, we take out to fuel, it'd be perfect. Like we forget, if you're not there all the time, you forget what's really important and can make life easier and it might only cost you, like, so for $500 I can make the rock picker crew that much better for next year, right? I'm dreaming about AI and how we can only pick the rocks and not have to drive everywhere, and right now they just want their own radio channel and an air compressor. - Well, and the other interesting part I found is we went to Ag Days about two years ago and I'd never seen this from a crew before was, Christian, Jeff and I just sat in the bar for two hours because we set the crew out to go look at all the new machinery and come back to us with a proposal of, did you see something you like, how's it gonna make us an ROI or make our life easier? And we ended up buying a conveyor of a different color than we'd ever bought before, strictly based on what they told us because there was a business proposal and it's easier to clean out, it's easier to maintenance. And we shouldn't be the ones doing that. I mean, Christian should not be going looking at conveyors because to tell you the truth, he's not the one using it 24 hours a day when we're loading trucks and everything else. And I think that's another thing that we're missing is that your team probably has more information on operations than you do, and I'm not saying every idea, I mean, if I have to hear, we need a dozer one more time on the environment, I'm gonna jump out of the building, but 90% of the time the stuff they're saying is legitimate and it's easy to fix and it gives them some form of responsibility as well because we're taking what you're saying and we're making changes because you're that important to our farm. - I could empathize with that rock picker crew because first of all, I was no stranger to picking rocks. Second of all, if I'm on a group chat, the first six texts, I just snap and leave the group chat 'cause all that noise drives me absolutely nuts. So I can empathize with them completely. So how are we doing for time, Evan, or you? It's your fault for bringing on Christian and Dean for the same fall. - I know, I got the market of guys in the industry, but let's close it out with one question. 2025 going in and I've asked you already heaps, but I want you to give me a different answer. Dean, based on what you're seeing and what you're looking at, what are you most excited for for your farms and your producers that you run with, going into 2025? - Here's what, no one can predict the great years, right? And I don't believe we're actually talking at the marketing groups. I don't believe there's a strong correlation between February and November prices. And so everyone's talking about being a down year, no one can predict what years to come. You still have to do a great job. And so what I'm excited about is hub and investing in the industry to give us the good financial floors between egg stability and hub and crop insurance tools available to us, to set the financial floor to our business so that we've got a good escape hatch as far as if things hit the rail, but then give us unlimited upside. And because no one here, Warren Buffett lost left $20 billion in the table 'cause he sold, 'cause he sold Apple too early. But so Warren's a lot smarter than all of us and he can't predict that. And so none of us can predict fall commodity prices. So don't let that over be over emphasized in your head and your planning. You still gotta go do the best job you can because in a 40 year farming career, you probably make real money seven to 10 times. You don't know which seven to 10 those are. So you can't afford to miss it when mother nature and the markets throw in your favor. So that's what excites me. Seven to 10 and we just had, some farms just had three in a row. What does that mean, Dean? - Yeah, I don't know. - Go ahead, Eames. - Yeah, you know, I think on the farm for me, it's just a change of strategy, right? I like to be pretty heavily sold heading into harvest because we've been able to lock in two, three years worth of profits. And this year's gonna be one where you go in a little longer cash and you play the time value of money. I mean, we're not real happy with the markets right now, but the markets are showing full carry, which means they see upside or at least you're gonna get paid to carry, right? So you're gonna maybe have a little less sales upfront and have to do some more sales later on. So I mean, that's just a change of strategy. We're excited about every year. You know, I think in 25 for me, global I get a lot of times kind of over the last decade or so has had some heavy lift to it. So to have uptake that over is exciting for me. I get to spend even more time at hockey rinks, which is what I do most of the time when I'm not farming, but I think too, you know, I'm excited about Emmer Tech to fund launching in 2025 and not just in the egg venture cap space. I'm excited 'cause it's a scale up fund, not a startup fund. So let's find those companies that have kind of got passed. Hey, this isn't actually a pretty good idea. And now we maybe need some infrastructure and might actually be able to make some real change in the industry and find those ones 'cause I still think there's a lot of, you know, innovative things in the world of agriculture that we don't even need new stuff, which need to steal the ideas from other industries and find a way to implement it in agriculture. So that excites me too. - For me, I think, and this is gonna be a little self-serving, but there is a lot more than just farmer coach out there, but I'm starting to see the education side of agriculture come back and I think we'd seen it lost for a little bit of time here. There wasn't a lot out there, wasn't a lot available. I mean, there's still not tons, but we're starting to see an interest from not just the producers, but also the industry side. Some of the, you know, some of our dollars are going into that side of agriculture. And I think that's just gonna benefit. The numbers are bigger, the risks are higher. Guys need to know how to do more than just grow grain. They need to know how to manage multi-million dollar companies. And I think the industry has finally seen that. And I think there's a lot of producers, especially, I mean, like I said, I'm very thankful for us because we sold out all three cohorts this year, which would probably prove a concept that it's a wanted area. And if I could get government to put money into one place outside of VRM and R&D, that's where I would put it. I'd put it into educational programs, getting more business focused on the university side, as well as the old college and all those other vermilion and that. So for me, I'm excited because I think guys are finally starting to realize they need to improve their game on the continuous learning side. And the next generation, I mean, we're getting younger farms into these programs. I had a 17 year old sitting in on the farmer coach because his dad thought he should see this side of Ag. So that's probably where my focus in 2025 is. So all right, we are over time. Thank you, Dean, for sitting in with us as another co-host. - Thanks, buddy, appreciate the invite. - And that's the truth about Ag. [BLANK_AUDIO]