How Brad McIntyre Built a Direct-to-Consumer Livestock Operation

0:00 Today our guest is Brad McIntyre, he is a fourth generation regenerative farmer from Caldwell, Idaho just outside of Boise, Idaho. He is married to his wife Jill and together they have six children. He works alongside many family members including his father Loren and his brothers Ben, Brian, and Spencer. For the past 15 years they have been practicing no till and 90 years ago they began to introduce cover crops. They pasture raise a whole lot including beef, pork, chicken, turkey, duck, and eggs while producing clean seed for the cover crop industry. Brad has a passion for soil health and that's why he's joining us here today. He loves teaching and helping people.

0:48 Thanks for the opportunity to be here. Can you see him? Does it look good? Yep, you can see it. Okay, all right, well I appreciate the opportunity. Yeah, Brad McIntyre here in Caldwell. Me and my family, I've got six kids and my brother has four that work full-time on the farm. Then I got some other brothers, Brian currently works with us and brings his kids off and on. So the whole goal of this farm at this point is to get that next generation going, so my kids being fit. And our goal is to keep that going through generations and that's the whole reason why we're doing what we're doing.

1:41 I've been asked today to talk about marketing and finances and selling direct to consumer, and that's something we've been focused on since 2015. We got started pretty slow. 2018 is when it really got going and we really dove heavy into focusing all our efforts on direct marketing. So I'm going to run through kind of the product lineup that we have and then I'm going to talk about how we get these products moved.

2:15 Two years ago we decided to build a packing facility and an on-farm store, and that's really been a springboard for us. We're Caldwell, which is about 30 miles outside of Boise, so we're in the Treasure Valley. It's really all the city's touch now. There's not too much separation by farms. A lot of the farmland has been taken up and so we have a good base of people in the Treasure Valley that we can market to. So our farm is quite a ways outside of the heaviest of population of our customer base, but we initially built the store for packing. That was the main thing—getting all of our freezers and everything put in one spot and being able to pack orders efficiently. And then we had the store up front. It wasn't an afterthought, but we were like, oh, we'll have it small. There's not going to be too many people that are going to want to come out and shop like a normal grocery store, but when they're here picking up an order, if they want to pick up a few other things, a few random things, people will stop in. That's what we kind of built it for.

3:26 Well, we had our opening day and it blew our minds how many people showed up on opening day, and then it just continued. And we still have had continued growth on the on-farm store. So we ended up expanding it a little bit, making it a little bit bigger and putting more freezers and fridges in. We still have a little bit more that we want to do there. So the on-farm store has been a big thing for us. Like I said, it was June—two years that we've had it open. But it's that's the hub of our business now. All in this on-farm store is where everyone can come and pick up their stuff.

4:05 A few other pictures of that. But we have shipping containers that are freezers outside of the building. That's where we store everything. We have three of those to keep the poultry, pork, and beef all separated, and that's been a big blessing for us here on the farm. So we do grass-finish beef, 100% all the way through. We used to have a cow-calf herd. We've actually sold the cows off of and partnered with a couple different.

4:31 Ranches to provide six to eight weights on the farm whenever they get weaned, some in the fall and the spring. So we bring them in and we do all the pasturing here. We also, in the offseason in the fall and the winter, do cover crops grazing. You'll see some weird horned ones in there that is just my brother's ornament. We call them pasture ornaments. He was going to give rides on them, but the horns are big enough on those Watusi that I think they'll hurt people, so that idea has been scrapped. Now they, we actually use them as our leaders in the new groups. We now have a heifer group and a steer group, and so they get separated. One stays with the steers and heifers, and then they teach the new group on how to come through the fence and get moved easy. So that's been a big blessing that way.

5:22 So we sell the beef. Pigs have their own little section that we have them in, but we rotate them daily on pasture, and then they're on their own acreage. That way they, they were just too destructive for me in the fields. In my paradigm, I didn't want to control the destruction, and I didn't want to have them on every acre.

5:50 So we do the pork. The one limiting thing in our valley—everybody's going to have their own unique opportunities and unique issues in their own areas. One of those issues we have is through our USDA processing. We don't have any local that kind of stuff that you really need to move the pork through. We don't have that ability, so we struggle getting bacon made. We send it to Oregon and Washington, and we still struggle with some of that. That's an issue we have. We're working on that, but it's an issue we have.

6:29 Sophie, I see that I had a connection warning. Do you want me to stop my video and just share the screen?

6:37 Yeah, you can try that. Yeah, I think you sound pretty good now. It was maybe just a little bit of a rough patch, so I'd say keep going, Brad. If you just want to go back, I feel like people have questions on this. You started talking about your USDA inspection on bacon. What exactly is it that is prohibiting you for being able to offer that product?

7:01 They don't have it inspected USDA. They'll do bacon at that facility and ham, but it's all state inspection, so I can't sell it on the individual cut to each consumer. So if they get a pig butchered, their hanging, they can get bacon, but I can't take that package back and sell it. So like we sell raw belly, it's cut up like bacon, but it's just raw. Nothing done to it. Then people have to do their own stuff to it. So it really limits us on belly, which is like the main thing. So that's one of our next goals: to get USDA cure in our own facility and be able to take those bellies, make bacon and ham, and get that to the people. But that is the one limiting thing that we struggle with.

8:05 Yeah, definitely. Thank you. I'm going to just back out here a second because I'm struggling to hear you.

8:33 All right, is that better? Yeah, you sound pretty good. We'll let you know if there's any issues.

8:42 All right, so we built these movable coops. They hold about a thousand birds. This is how we do our laying hens, so they travel behind the cattle and we move them. A lot of our land on some spots is sloped, and so we have them in as many areas as we can without breaking eggs. That is an issue, but we move them, you know, three to four days behind the cattle trying to clean up fly pressure, larvae, and they do a pretty good job of moving those paths around and getting them to dry out. The one thing we do struggle with is dung beetles. I think they clean a lot of.

9:26 Our dung beetles up so that's kind of a catch 22 but it makes really good eggs, and we're able to make pretty good impact on flies. It's not perfect, they still have fly pressure but they knock some of it down. And so we sell those in individual dozens and also in cases to restaurants, individual dozens to people and also in retail where they can be resold, and then to the restaurants.

9:57 We also do meat chickens that started three or four years after we got going. We didn't do those right off the bat but we do meat chickens. We've built these houses ourselves as well so they're really low to the ground, really windproof. We've never actually had any accidents with them moving. We don't stake them down but they got a drill stem base and then we bend these hoops so they're 15 by 60, and we pull them the 15 foot direction so the birds don't have to walk as far. Most of the industry pulls them lengthwise and those birds get really tired especially when they get up into weight, and so we turned the idea on its head because we're like we're tired of moving these birds forward every single day, and so we switched them up and started moving them this direction and that's been a big help.

10:56 This is an idea that you guys can take but we've had really good success with these birds. We started with 1200 in the brooder. We have six of these houses but we divide the 1200 into 400 when we move into the pasture and so each house starts with roughly 400 birds in it. That's just an outside view when we got one of those built, and so that's how we can roll up those sides and keep good air flow. We don't do misting systems. Right now we're over 100 every day and all we do is keep those sides up but it's blacked out and it's low enough that air flows through there pretty good. We have no misting systems in there and we just flush water a couple times a day when we're this hot and those birds stay really comfortable, so that's been a big thing for us.

11:49 I always put the feet picture up because it grosses people out but we sell a lot of chicken feet into stock and a lot of ethnic people buy a lot of chicken feet which is kind of crazy. We do turkeys for Thanksgiving. We also, one of our limitations in this area is with poultry. We don't have our USDA processor do sausages or grind and so we just do turkeys for Thanksgiving and that holiday time because we can't do the ground turkey and all those other issues with other products.

12:29 One of the reasons we are looking to putting in a USDA facility to be able to take poultry and grind and do the bake and do those other products and diversify our product lineup, and then we could raise turkeys more often. Turkeys are actually a lot of fun. They're like the dogs of the poultry world but we have a good time with them and they're real social and they eat a lot of bugs and so it'd be fun to have them different times of the year instead of just in the heat of the summer and the fall because they do a good job of moving around the pasture and affecting more land than the broilers. The layers do decent too but the broilers are pretty well stuck in that area.

13:20 We do a limited amount of duck. We used to do more ducks than we do now. We had a couple chefs in town and this is one thing is like you really have to move with the market. We had a couple chefs that bought a lot of duck from us and they both moved and so that next year not as many ducks sold and so we have to pivot. We don't have as many this year. We were raising 500 to 800 depending on the year and now we're just down to a few hundred. It's one of those things that in this business of being small and local, you really have to keep your thumb on the heartbeat of what's going on with your chefs.

14:05 With your customers, and this is one we've had to change. Just knowing that the local people buying at the store don't buy that many whole ducks and the chefs were the big buyers for those, so we just have to move around with what is needed and wanted in our area.

14:26 Ducks are amazing too. They're probably the best forager that we've ever had on the farm in the poultry realm. They will go in and mow stuff down. This pasture is too big for them at the moment, but anybody that's raised animals in pasture has these ebbs and flows, especially when we're trying to irrigate around things. But they'll still take all that pasture down every day, sometimes multiple times a day. We got to move these guys because they're just taking so much down.

15:04 Part of having the animals and having the on-farm store, we do a lot of agritourism. Yesterday we gave two personal tours on the farm. We keep that open because agritourism is really important to us. When we're bringing these customers out, we want to teach them why agriculture is important, why the way we raise the animals is important to them, how it matters to their health and to the health of the animal. So we try to make a lot of opportunities for customers to come to the farm, to see the animals, to get close to them, touch them, do all these things.

15:41 Some people have biosecurity concerns, but we would rather have the customer on the farm getting inoculated with good bacteria and all that biology than trying to keep it sterile and keep them out. We find a lot of good that comes from keeping those customers on the farm and learning rather than keeping them away and being scared of it. So agritourism is vital to what we do and why we do it.

16:21 We try to provide picture opportunities for them when they come to the store and just make it inviting for them to come out. This is one other way we graze it down in the fall with whatever the cattle can get out of it. This is a pivot corner that we did this on.

16:52 Part of this, when going back to all these different animals and how to market and how to get started, we started small like everyone does. But the big thing, if we had to do it all over again, is we would market and tell our story more and more often and stronger than we ever did. Getting the customers to understand your story and why it's important that they become your customer is the most important thing. When we're dealing with these customers coming straight to you, they need to understand why.

17:42 We're soy and corn free on the pigs, we're soy free on the birds. We don't certify organic, but we do a lot of organic practices with them. So them understanding why we are the way we are, why we've chosen to do what we've chosen to do, and we just constantly tell that story—the good, the bad, everything that goes with it. That comes through social media a lot and email. So if you are getting started in this, collecting emails, getting on your social media, and getting that going, even if you don't even have any product yet, that is the most important thing. Marketing—you can't short-change that. You have to market. I've had a lot of good friends try to get started doing what we're doing, and they miss the marketing. They have excellent product, they do a fantastic job with the pasture, but they don't tell their story.

18:45 Just eventually the customers leave you. Got to constantly be in front of them telling them why they need to come and buy from you because we're not as convenient as a grocery store. We're far away from the city, they have to meet us at certain times to pick up their orders, they have to get online and order it. It's just more work for them, and so we have to constantly remind them why they need to come support us and why it's important that they help this little niche of agriculture.

19:18 So that's the number one thing. Even as we've gone down the road as far as we can, if we send out an email we see enough ticking orders. It's Clockwork, and so it's really important to focus on this part of the farm. It's probably the one thing that, besides finance, it's probably the one thing that gets ignored the most, and it's so important. Finances and marketing — if you want to sell meat direct to the customer, you better figure out how to do it or you better figure out somebody on the farm or hire somebody that will do it.

20:03 I will tell you that the farms that are most successful, the marketing story is coming from a family member or somebody really connected right there to the farm. That story needs to be told. Someone that is really close to the heartbeat, and that way it's more believable. Even though the same message could be shared by an outside marketing agency, it just doesn't come across as well. In the beginning stages, they really want to hear from that farmer, and so don't lose sight of the most important thing of telling your story and you'll be a lot more successful getting going that way.

20:42 Ways that we're marketing — I've said a few of them, but we are getting product to the people via our farm store. And then we have a website through Grace Cart that people can get on and place their orders. They can pick up at the store, or we have six or seven other locations that they can pick up at, and those are specified times during the month that we will meet people there. They will have their order ready, they just meet within a half an hour window. We offload the product to them and away they go.

21:22 And then we also do home delivery. Once a week we actually have a local kid that will come and pick up all those orders around 2:30 in the morning. He goes out throughout the Booy Valley and delivers those. They have coolers on their doorstep that he offloads the product into, and that way when the people wake up in the morning they can put their product right in the freezer before they go to work. We have very little issues doing it that way. When we deliver during the day, product would get hot and spoil, and so early morning has been the best thing for us on home delivery.

22:06 We have everything in freezer bags. If they don't have a cooler on their porch, we will leave the freezer bag and then we will charge them for that freezer bag. When they return it they get the credit back, and that way we just don't start losing bags. But we just load his car full of these freezer bags with their names on them and we get it to them through the home delivery. That's been our currently, besides the farm store, that's been our fastest growing sector — is that home delivery. People are all about convenience. After a few times shopping at the store, we see them transition to home delivery. They'll still come out here and there to the store, but they want that convenience of just getting it right at the house. So home delivery, we're actually getting ready to add another day of the week, and so he doesn't have a bigger vehicle, so it's just we'll do another day and then he'll get it done. We pay him by the drop and it works out.

23:08 Home delivery has been a good thing because of that convenience factor. We do retail wholesale to the retail stores and then wholesale to the restaurants, and that's mainly cases and then some dozens that they resell in the store. It's not our main thing that we focus on, especially on the meat side with the margins the way they are. We don't have a whole lot that we can give them, so we don't limit but we just don't give them as big of a break on the meat side as we do on the egg side. We do move some meat in that manner but just not as much as we do with eggs. It's not something we want to focus on either. We really want to focus on that individual consumer. That's our best margin and they tell the story really well. They share it with their neighbors and here and there we will incentivize them to share with their neighbors as well and get something for free or a discount if they bring a new customer to the store. There's just ways we have to get creative to keep them sharing the message. Their typically our best advertisement is the customer, so our whole goal is to get all the product moved through the customers. We're about 75, 80% at the moment, but that is the end goal, getting it to that individual customer.

24:47 We don't do very much shipping. One of our disadvantages is dry ice in the Boise Valley. Dry ice, I haven't checked for probably six months, but it was around two bucks a pound when you need 68 pounds of dry ice to ship that package. It just starts getting really expensive. We do ship some if people want to pay the full cost, but giving free shipping, we would really have to jack the price of our meat up to offer like free shipping or a discounted or flat rate just because of that dry ice. We're just not in a great area for that. We've really focused on the Treasure Valley and focused on our local customer, keeping the price as good as possible for them. If somebody wants to pay for the shipping and that full cost, they can, but it's just not something that we have focused on as a farm at this moment. Something we're going to look into again and see if we can kind of expand that way, but it just hasn't been one of those things. We've been more focused on that store, home delivery, and that's been growing really well. That's kind of where we market and why.

26:03 On the finances of all this, I will give a little bit of caution or warning. It's expensive to get all this going when you look at investing in cattle and in pigs and getting all that investment and all the equipment ready to go and do a business like this. There becomes a lot of overhead. I just want you to focus and look at the finances before you just dive in or build it really slow. We had the benefit. We were a big custom farm. We were doing a lot of custom hay, around 5,000 acres of hay every cutting. So we had a lot of equipment and we were able to sell some of that equipment and purchase animals and equipment that would build this business. We had that blessing that was an advantage I had from my father to be able to sell some of that equipment and invest. If you're starting from the ground up, I would start with a species or two and just start really slow and organically build it organically because the overhead can really weigh you down and really cause a lot of expense. You got to worry about the overhead anyways, but it just can really strap you down. With that is looking at your margins. We've paid to have a company come in and help us really dig in and really understand our margins because we had the experience to a degree but we just needed another set of eyes to make sure that we are truly gaining what we needed to gain.

27:55 To really keep building this business, Kitchen Table Consultants, I'll give a plug out to them. They've done a great job coming in helping us figure out that story and really understand our margins and know what we need to keep gaining a profit. And it's so important because you don't need to be working for free. You don't need to be giving people cheaper meat than what it cost you, and you know, hurting your family in the end. So just truly build some spreadsheets. Get some spreadsheets from other farmers, but really understand what it costs to grow these animals, to produce the meat, the eggs, and whatever it is—if it's honey or flour, whatever it is that you're trying to sell direct. Really understand your costs because they're typically higher than you think they are, and your margins are lower than you think they are.

28:58 And so that is the word of caution that I would say right now. The finances is something you don't want to worry about, but you got to worry about it. You got to make sure that you're staying healthy financially and providing this good, healthy product to your community. Because if you're not, then you're going to go away and then they're not going to have the ability to support you.

29:24 Kitchen Table always is pressuring us to raise prices, get better margin. And when we have raised prices, it's very daunting—it just consumes me. But when we do, we haven't really seen a drop-off in the customers. You can't get real crazy, but you always need to be kind of moving the prices up. Because if you do real big jumps, that's when you see the problems. But if you just slowly kind of move stuff around because you're keeping a good eye on it, then that's when we've seen very little push back from the customers—just that slow increase.

30:06 So Sophie, I don't know if there's anything else. That's kind of how we built the business. We just, from 2018 to now, we've just grown it, and that's the base of what we're doing. Stop if you want to stop sharing your presentation and then put your video back on. Then we can get into the Q&A section.

30:29 Sounds good. Yeah, yeah, that's all really great information. I think you have a really interesting model. I have a load of questions, so I'll try to be somewhat organized with them. So you talked about how you were able to create relationships with chefs, which was like a really good market for a product like duck. How are you going about meeting those individuals and developing those relationships? Did you guys ever go to a farmer market at some point, or did you just start with the farm store? Or how did that develop for you?

31:03 Yeah, so the Boisey farmers market was essential for our beginning. So we were selling right off the farm when we were starting small with laying hens and beef. I was kind of just doing everything right there off the farm with the GraceArt website, and it was growing, but it was just kind of slow. And Boisey has a really great farmers market, so we went and joined that, and it was just like gang busters from that point on. There was only one other pork producer there, there was a couple bees, and only one other chicken. And so they were sold out of eggs by 9 o'clock in the morning. And so we were able to take all our eggs in and whatever other meat we had in the freezer. And that really was a springboard. What really also propelled us is when COVID hit the market was just starting again for the year, and COVID hit. And so as everyone knows, everything went online. Well, we were the only meat producer at the market that had an online presence. And so those customers from the market—the market ended up starting an online store, but it took them a month to get going. And so when people would call the market and say, hey, where you know.

36:49 We have a lot of native birds they carry the black head with them and so it spreads into the turkeys anyways but it's just a slow process. The other thing we use, we work with Pell and we actually have a mix, it's an organic mix of like cayenne pepper and some clay, there's a few other things in it that we keep the turkeys have access to in their feed.

37:15 So we, once they go to pasture they get access to that mix and sometimes mix it in their feed and that has kept blackhead almost to zero. Doing that mix it helps shed those, the disease in their intestinal tract and they just poop it back out. And so we gained all that from ABPA. Yeah, we didn't, you know, that knowledge came from there. So yes there is issues mixing them but we still get it from the native birds so you can't get away from all of it, you just have to have prevention methods.

37:53 Do you have any issues with predation? I mean it looks like your meat chickens are pretty much enclosed so maybe not with them but are you having predation issues with any of your other birds?

38:05 We do. So all of our pastures we chose to net it off and then we have hot wire down pretty low so we keep and we have dogs with all the poultry so we keep most of the bigger foxes and coyotes, local dogs, that's been pretty easy. Where we run into problems is our biggest problem is owls and Hawks. Not barn owls but it's the great horned owl that we have out here. So our Landhans get locked up every night, there're we don't do any netting besides the outside border and then our Lanhans get locked up at night, the turkeys get locked up at night and then the broilers are already in their enclosure. We've had a few weasels get into the broilers but pretty minimal, we're able to find those. We have some skunks that get into the lane henss at night and we've kind of fixed that but the aerial is our biggest problem now.

39:13 When it comes into the fall when they're migrating, it's just sometimes we just have to go in early. I mean it's so bad we're in a protected zone, a birds of prey zone, and so a lot of it is they're trying to build it and so we're in a pretty heavy hawk area and it just gets to the point we could have up to 50 hawks in the fall circling those lane henss. And so when it gets to that point we just have to go in because the dogs, we haven't got any dogs that will go after the hawks, they just let it happen and I don't know, I wish they would do it different but I haven't got a good dog to do that yet. And so then we just move into our winter house.

39:59 The turkeys get big enough we don't have a problem with aerial predators in the fall but that's how we've managed the predation and then bouncing back to marketing quick, I'm just curious, you said it's really important to collect emails, I definitely agree with that, how are you going about collecting emails from customers?

40:21 Our website, we just have a prompt that comes up if they're new to the website that it'll collect their email that way. If they put it in at the market we just actually had papers and every person we checked out we said hey, are you on our email list? And not then they would put it down and we were very vigilant about asking about that email list. And anytime I'm out in the public and talking about it I'll try to collect their email, hey give me your email, text it to me whatever, and we'll put you on that list because sales are directly tied to the email, it just works. And so we're just really conscious about asking and people are most of the time very willing and got very very few people cancel off the list. It's just the list just keeps building.

41:21 You're selling sales promotions or sending sales promotion emails. Every week we send at least one email. And then if we have sales promotions we'll do that midweek, but every Sunday morning we send an email out to that main list. And then we have a drip that when somebody signs up, every couple days they get emails. We've done the drip thing and just kind of that customer building, that relationship, telling them the story of who we are and all that. We didn't have that in the beginning but we have that now.

42:00 Yeah, I think that's one of the crucial steps to really building a customer base and retaining people over time because if you're interacting with them at the farmers market or maybe you're speaking somewhere, they have that one touch. And then if you can get their email, you can nurture that relationship with that customer over time and then hopefully retain them or convince them to make a purchase at some point. And then the quality of your product speaks from there.

42:28 All right, well I'll take a couple questions from the audience. Barry Dole from Boise, Idaho is asking: you've had multiple years of no tail on the pasture, have you ever used a penetrometer to test for soil compaction? If so, what has been your experience? He's also asking if you've ever used a field aerator to address that same potential issue.

42:57 Yeah, I actually carry a soil penetrometer everywhere I go. This year, so last fall and then this spring, we've had really heavy rains, more than normal, really pounding rains. And so this spring I had some of the tightest soils in that top couple inches. You get down below it and it was good. So every year gives you some problems. I don't know if we kind of moved calcium because of those heavy rains, we flush calcium or something, but this year we did have some problems in that top inch on fields on my row crop fields. On my pastures, I haven't had that experience this spring. But yeah, we do get compaction, something we definitely have to watch out for. I haven't used a field aerator. I've been tempted to but I haven't used it yet. Try to keep the water getting in. We irrigate and so trying to keep that water flush going on. But there are some fields that probably would benefit from some type of aeration where the cattle have overgrazed at times.

44:15 Did you ever use a penetrometer to test for compaction? Yeah, I do. The soil penetrometer, I do use it all year long. And I do have some fields that have compaction levels in it and I'm trying to work through that with cover crops. If it gets to a point where I can't seem to make progress then we'll have to do something, but at this point I haven't had to do any tillage.

44:40 Barry's also asking how you maintain species diversity in your pastures and then kind of give an example of what the ideal species diversity looks like for you. It's kind of changed over the years. My main pasture, I'm actually taking it out and putting a cover crop and some corn in it and just kind of renewing it because in my area, at least, over time the pasture tries to go back to fescue, a native fescue of some sort. And so even though we're moving them frequently, it's just over time that seed bank takes over. I really like chicory and plantain, clovers, diversity of grasses. But all those seem to only last so long and then we're having to reseed. I try to have success frost seeding clover. I drill anytime I'm drilling anywhere in my pastures, I'm always throwing a little chicory and plantain in. And you get it in pockets but it is hard. That question is what he's asking.

45:54 Is very hard without doing a full seed on the pasture. It is hard to get those other species back in and keep maintaining that diversity. It wants to just go back to grass, and so it is a struggle. If other people have any ideas without just taking the grass all the way out, it seems to try to get back to more grass. In my area, some of the clover stays in some spots, but they kind of go away too, so it is a struggle and we just renew it with more seed.

46:30 At some point I think it was Nicole Master suggested adding chicory seed to mineral, have you, well to like the cattle's mineral, to then pass through the rumen and then seed that way. Are you testing anything like that or have you tried something like that? I haven't. I haven't done it with chicory. We did it with clover a long time ago, and then the next year I just let the clover head out and then went back after we irrigated a couple days, and there was clover sprouting out of the cow manure. So I know it passes, I know it does the job. I just, besides the one year on the clover, I've never done chicory, but some of the seeds pass. I didn't think chicory would, but there are seeds that will get through the rumen and stay viable.

47:19 Chicory is really known for its deworming property. Are you guys doing any type of deworming protocol, or are you using any specific plants to help with that? One of the main reasons I like plantain and chicory in the pastures is so they can select it. No, we don't do any wormers. If we have an animal that just looks real tough, we will treat that animal, and then I have a feed lot that I can rent and I'll put that animal in there and feed them for 30 days. I don't want any of that getting on my land because I'm really trying to build my dung beetle population, but it's been slow. So I'm sure my chickens are harming me more than anything. But if that animal does get real rough, we'll put them out and then we'll ear tag them separately. Animal welfare is definitely important. I don't want something that's got a bunch of issues. But the other reasons why we try to graze high and keep away from a lot of that stuff. I won't allow any of that to get to the pasture.

48:36 Another person is asking about how many head of cattle or pounds of beef are you currently selling direct to consumer, and the same question for pork. I'm sure people would be interested to learn about birds as well. All right, so currently we're processing about 200 head of beef every year. We do 200 head of beef, 300 head of hogs. This year we'll have 9,000 broilers, 500 turkeys, and we have 3,000 laying hens.

49:16 For the birds, I know you're not able to do sausages or any of those types of products, but are you doing individual cuts for the birds or are you doing whole birds? We do wholes and they will cut up the birds into different breasts, leg quarters, all those different things. We just can't do the grind. That's our only limitation. On beef and pork, we do sausage. They do grind in the sausage, but we just can't do the cured products like bacon and ham.

49:51 Another person is asking how are you able to pull the chicken tractor sideways, and then what is the water setup in them? It looks like you had those water feeders hanging from the roof of the tractor. So if you can imagine the base, 15 by 60, so on the base every 15 feet there is a runner, call it that, that is on the ground. That's what gets pulled, and then we have a cable that goes to every one of the runners on the ground. So when we pull, every one of the runners has an equal pull coming from it.

50:32 And then the outside base that the hoops are connected to just sit on those runners and then it just pulls forward inside on all the runners and then around the whole edge we take belting like an 8 inch wide belting and put that on there because the first house we didn't do that with and it sucks chicken's legs in that round we use 2 and 38 pipe and that round pipe just going right beside that chicken walking if it catches a toe it'll just pull the whole body under it's crazy so we put that belting so it kind of keeps them from getting close to the pipe and then it also is a deter on the outside from predators trying to get in.

51:19 That's awesome that's a good tip. I've moved chicken tractors before and we have to go in like maracas and shake them and keep them away from edges so they don't get run over so that's a good tip.

51:29 Yeah one other thing with that is we use a winch on a pickup that's a Bluetooth type winch and so one person can move them. We have chickens hate flags like cattle flags more than like the rattles and so we just walk on the outside we don't even go in the house and we use that Bluetooth winch and we move it forward and we walk down those edges keeping them off the back wall because the back wall will still suck them under if they stay there long enough and so we just move them out that way and just keep it moving forward.

52:06 Awesome. Another person is asking how many acres approximately do you have devoted to the farm to consumer enterprise. In season it's 200 acres and then in the fall we'll move those cattle onto our cover crops on the cash crop acres.

52:27 That sounds good. Well we're getting close to the end here. One of the themes that we have of our soil health resource guide this year is talking about legacy. It sounds like this land has been in your family for four generations your kids now being the fifth generation and you've gone through a massive transition of being more of a custom hay operation transitioning to now like a direct consumer diversified animal operation what does that mean for your family's legacy and the type of operation that you're then passing on to your children?

53:03 Hopefully it's a good thing. It's definitely a lot more hands-on physical work than what it was before. I mean it was a lot of hours before but it was a lot of just driving tractor and so I know some of the kids it doesn't meet what they want right they would rather be on a tractor some of some of them love the animals but still being a bigger farm we found around that acreage still they get a little bit of both and so my hope and dream is that a couple of them want to continue it on. I have a couple boys that have voiced a desire to keep it moving but just having the legacy is important but what brings me some of the most joy is on those days when the customers come to the farm my children really get into that and they will go and they will tell the story direct to that customer and having a little eight to ten year old kid tell that customer why it's important that they're there at the farm that is when it's full circle for me and hopefully for my dad as well and he loves telling the story too he'll do the tractor rides all day he loves that but just seeing those kids get engaged and understand why it's important to soil why it's important to their health and how that all affects I mean it just brings me a lot of joy and that is what is the full circle for me.

54:33 Yeah yeah that's awesome. Well thank you everyone so much for joining today this was a great presentation. Brad thank you for taking the time and you shared your contact information so people can go back and look at that and reach out if they have any questions or if they're in your area they can sounds like they can come visit the farm as well so that's great.

54:56 Always open. Excellent. Awesome well as always all of these webinars are recorded and available on our YouTube channel so you can always go back and watch them or send the link to a friend. Thank you so much for joining today and we'll look forward to seeing you guys next time.