Billy Rose
speaker
210 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Jan 2025
Billy Rose’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah, so as the, you know, As my dad was building the company, the early 80s came up, and the interest rates went to double digits. So I'm graduating from high school, and his advice to me was the following. Whatever you do, go to college and don't get into ag. But what had happened at the same time was a couple of our friends with their family farms, they lost their farms.
Double-digit interest rates, it just ate them up. And I was scarred for life. And I didn't realize until probably 15 years later after we built two successful companies helping farmers profit and thrive that my wife said to me, you know, Billy, the reason that you have such passion is you were scarred from that, you know, your friends going bankrupt.
And I then committed my whole life to, hey, if it's not good for my friends in Dyersville, Iowa, and it's not going to help our farming friends survive, mitigate this risk, then why are we doing it?
And so, thus went to college at Iowa. The first company we created was a company that provided operating loans. Okay. Okay. We did about $140 plus million worth of operating loans. We also did great marketing advice. We also became, back in 1996, when the CRC revenue insurance came out, that was the first way to do a revenue protection policy. Gotcha. And we built that company, sold it to DTN.
I woke up, said I'm too young to retire, so what am I going to do next? Serial entrepreneur is what we have. And with that, we said, what if we could improve the crop insurance delivery system? And so we went to the USDA. We laid out a plan. It was back in the Internet days, and we said we could use technology, efficiencies, and we could pass a savings to the American farmer.
USDA had great fortitude. They approved the plan. We saved American farmers over $50 million just by using technology efficiencies. Awesome. Yeah. Wow. So we grew that company to $300 plus million, sold it to Farm Bureau Mutual. It took us 12 years. Yeah. But it was a hell of a run. Wow. Yeah.
Yeah. You're trying to protect the margins of the producers. And in today's environment with these... bumper crop coming out, commodity prices going to all-time low for a cycle that we don't even like to talk about, right? I mean, I would rather just bury my head in the sand, but we can't. We have to deal with this, and we have to look at it and go, all right, I've got a good operation.
I've got a 220 APH on my corn. You know, I'm doing everything right, but I'm not making money because of those commodity prices. So how are we going to do better? And we've always seen this issue of this problem called the yield gap. And at the right time, I'd like to talk to you about that yield gap.
Yeah, so we named it this gap where crop insurance doesn't cover, but it's the last 15% from 85 to 100 of your historical yield. Okay. Okay, so it's this gap. And you can't get any coverage, yet that gap, is the difference between a profit and loss. Yes. It's the difference between going on a vacation or not. Yep.
It's the difference between, can my wife, you know, stop working in town and come work on the farm? Yeah. And so we said, this problem, this universal problem for 160 million acres of corn and soy, how could we solve it? And for years, we couldn't. And one day, we started doing all the seed trials across the Midwest, testing every variety and hybrid on these seeds.
Sea trial plots, where we had specialized four-row planters and combines, and we got the scientific data. And I have a question for you guys. If I planted 100 different varieties in the same field, okay, side by side, same plant date, same environment, same harvest date, what do you think on a normal 200 APH corn field we might see in yield difference just in the top 30?
I'm going to let Dave answer because I know the answer.
So 30 bushel is 15% is what you're saying. Yeah, 15%. We were finding up to 20%. That's just in the top 30. There you go. So imagine if we could bring this information back to our farming friends where they just drop a pin on their field and this, you know,
AI algorithm goes out, compares all the seed trials, brings them all in, grabs the same soil, same maturity zone, same practice, same rotation, whatever you're doing, and says, here is a list. I call it the David Letterman's top 10. Okay. Here's a list that if you buy off of this top 30, you're going to improve your yields by that 15% to 20% and solve your yield gap. Okay. Okay.
Yeah, so now take it to, and let's say you're brand loyalists. Let's say you're loving your DeKalb and your Pioneer or your Wiffles. We even allow you to sort by those and do side-by-side comparisons. And our new Yield Optimizer, which is the name of the tool that's coming out here in 2.0 this fall, we're going to allow you to take your favorite, Dave, plug it in,
and do side-by-side comparisons to understand the why.
Okay. Because we signed up a bunch of farms, a lot of progressive early adapters and ROI farmers last year. Okay. And right now I just talked to one of them on the way in this morning. He's running 255 plus. Okay. That's good. Okay. And he had nothing but a big smile, and he said, Billy, now work some magic and get those prices back to $5. No kidding. Okay?
Your yield optimizer is going to have to become a price optimizer next.
But let's add a twist to it. Okay. Okay. You know, I have 10 guys come down my lane. Every day, 10 different salespeople, and they're all trying to say, try my brand, go with my hybrids, trust me. Does any one of them ever say, I will guarantee up to five times what you pay me that if you don't get these yields, I'll write you a check?
Guess what? Well, you must need to work on your seed dealer a little bit.
Showing 141–160 of 210 · page 8 of 11
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