Clink Fischer

speaker

107 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Oct 2024 last heard Oct 2024

Clink Fischer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Farm4Profit Podcast · Strategic Succession Planning & Profit Growth with Brain Trust Ag · 7 Oct 2024 podcast

I'll retract. I'll retract. Everything's generic, I said.

So Yesterday, we had what we call a soil gathering, which is just members getting together talking about some topic. Yesterday's topic was opportunities for first generation and next generation farmers. And so a specific example is a gentleman in Minnesota who he's trying to build up his farming operation.

the question of how the heck can I specifically find people to custom graze my row crop farm. So their row crop operation, they've got a lot of corn stalks and a gentleman from Kentucky said, hey, here's what we do. And specifically described the model, all the points of their contracts, and how they custom graze corn stalks in Kentucky.

And then that gentleman in Minnesota said, hey, I also want to do this with sheep. And how can we kind of reframe this thing? And so I sent him some who I know in the sheep world, and the member in Kentucky sent him his spreadsheet of here's how we value custom grazing for fall grazing, for winter grazing on corn stalks.

And what it allowed him to do, or hopefully will allow him to do, is to take productive ground, corn stalks and figure out a way to charge per head per day to graze on that ground. And those are the types of connections.

Those are the types of discussions that I like to get into the weeds because I'm, I'm, I'm this, this weird blend of, yes, I like the legal side, but I also just like the entrepreneurial side. And so I'm, I'm just here looking at things saying, how do we get people to, Looking at ways to insulate us from commodity, traditional commodity markets and how that impacts our businesses.

A specific example that just happened yesterday.

But that's the thing that we talk about, Tanner. Okay, so what are the barriers to making that happen? One is fences. The other thing is water source. And so we can get granular about that and say, all right, what's it going to cost? Is it going to cost two bucks, two and a half bucks a foot to put up an appropriate fence?

What's it going to cost to put up a water tank and to haul water or to find a water source? And are those things going to outweigh the potential income, the cash flow that comes from custom grazing some, you know, all quarter of corn stalks.

Yeah, so I started it just about a year ago as kind of a way to share what I do daily from a tools and resources standpoint. And, yeah, I'm – frankly, guys, I'm just figuring this all out as I go.

Okay? And I'm – what do they say? I'm just the – Everything from the bathroom cleaner all the way up to the head chief in charge. And it's not my day job. I don't make a ton of money doing it. But it's a way for me to be actually involved in agriculture and provide a service that I think is valuable. to folks.

And as soon as it becomes not valuable, I'll just shut it down and I'll just go to being an attorney and move along with my life.

For the time being, it's got some value there. And I'm just figuring out as I go.

Are you guys good if I share two bits of wisdom that are going to upset 90% of the egg crowd?

Yeah. Number one. And both of these came from my egg finance instructor at SDSU. Number one is that the vast majority of actual production farmers should just be employees. What does that mean? That means that they should be renting out their ground to somebody who understands the business side of the operation and they should be collecting a paycheck plus a rent check

to somebody else because they are really good at steering a tractor. They are not great at spending time in front of a computer, understanding the break evens and the budgeting and the P&L and the balance sheet and how are we running this thing from the back end standpoint as a business. And if I say that out on Twitter, people are going to get all worked up and upset because

And that's fair. So that's number one. Number two is that the vast majority of people who are a farmer, rancher, egg business owner, spend too much time working on the $30 an hour jobs versus the $150 an hour jobs. And what does that mean? That means that, kind of similar to what I just said, is... we're looking at marketing, we're looking at What is our insurance policy?

And can I shop that around and find somebody who is going to be more cost effective and more efficient from a cost saving standpoint? What is my marketing plan? What is my cost of production? What are my inputs at? And can I shop that around? And those things all are in front of a computer screen with a spreadsheet and a phone in your hand.

And man, that is different than a lot of people who think that farming is greasing a piece of equipment or fixing fence or, you know, changing the oil in their ranger. And I think that those two kind of concepts, and this is, again, I mean, I was an undergrad 20 years ago. But those things still apply today. And I find those two pieces of wisdom applicable, but it offends people.

And why does that offend people? Because we're treating ag operations as lifestyles versus businesses. Which, to tie that back into my day job as somebody who works with farm families through that transition process I look at, all right, which operations have been most successful?

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