Aiden Johnson

degree in economics and you know have the time to find it so i kind of talked to him and he's like yeah actually we have a lot of people in our region rock valley specifically is in the midwest um use their auction data as the benchmark of kind of what hayes going for

So the crazy thing about the hay market is what I realized is not just one market.

It's like fragmented markets across the whole country.

Every market, every regional market is very hyperlocal simply because transportation costs are a lot.

You can't domestically transport it across the country.

And then you think like there's so many inputs, how it affects the quality of hay to produce the output.

Minnesota hay may not be the same as California hay in terms of price because it's just all very hyper-local markets.

I appreciate that.

Appreciate it.

Yeah.

So there is a bunch of different factors to kind of how different regions can be affected by markets.

I mean, you think of what's kind of going on in the West right now with the drought kind of going on.

Forty six percent of the U.S.

alfalfa acreage is actually in a drought.

So you might see some demand coming from the West, maybe moving east.

But.

Actually, I was kind of looking into this the other day and it's I was like kind of looking at the East Coast kind of because I don't really like there's not really much out there, I guess, for.

Hey, I mean, there's a lot hobby farms and it's like small square markets out there, but it's kind of its own ecosystem because it's cool because.

It won't really feel the effects of the drought from the West simply because transportation is a big factor in that because you're not going to ship or transport hay that far because it just it will eventually cost more than the actual value of the hay simply because, you know, these brokers, these dealers will charge anywhere from five to eight dollars per mile to have it shipped.

So that can easily average to be more valuable in the hay.