Shawn Feikema
speaker
152 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Shawn Feikema’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Not like it used to be 30 years ago. When you weren't in the house or in the office, you weren't connected. So you could just ignore it now. You're connected all the time. It doesn't matter. Your phone starts beeping at 6 a.m. and it don't shut off until 10, 30, 11 o'clock at night. And so I think it's just a matter of, there just comes a point where you do, you just have to put it down.
Woo-wee. Thank you, guys.
Yeah, you did. You're one of the few. Mostly it's fecuma or some crazy thing like that. You nailed it.
But it was a Grand Am, Pontiac Grand Am.
That was my dog. He was sitting nicely, but somebody apparently has walked in the office in the conference room over there, so he just... He doesn't like it when somebody else shows up. On point. I thought he'd lay there quietly. Hopefully he will from now on.
Max.
Okay. So, um, yeah, you mentioned anything that we're a third generation on under this location.
My family's been farming for as long back as I can recall, but so yeah, we, my brother, it's my brother and I that own it and our wives, my uncle, I have two uncles that work with us here yet that they, you know, that generation, as you guys probably are well aware of, they just can't quit because it's really farming is what they do. And yeah, what they do.
So, um, we got, uh, six full-time employees. Um, So, yeah, we crop farm. We do corn, soybeans, and we do quite a few small grains, strip-till, no-till. Yeah, dabbling a little bit in a lot of different things. We have a feedlot, so we market 5,000 to 6,000 head of fat cattle a year. Yeah, we row crop a little over 7,000 acres.
Yes, finally. Yes, yes. Yep, yeah. Finally, we feel like the cattle market is... is rewarding us for the years and years of just
eking by it's like oh well at least we got some manure out of the deal there you go that's when you start talking about the value of manure which it is a big value but it's like it is it is yep yep so so yeah that's a little bit of uh kind of what we what we do um trying to think if there's anything else you said wives do you have a couple of them or just just one wives yeah uh you know i i have one official wife okay yeah
Yeah, so no, it's my wife and my brother's wife are pretty heavily involved as well. So we do monthly board meetings. We meet with our CFO, our tax people, and all that stuff. So everybody's in the room and going through financials and all of that stuff too. So that's how everybody gets a little involved and gets a way for us to keep communicating. And so we're all on the same page.
Yeah, fractional. Yep, yep. Actually, we hire their firm to do all of our tax stuff, and then they also offer CFO service. So he does it for a few other operations and not necessarily all ag. Most of them somehow related to ag, I think, but I don't know all of the other operations he does it for, but...
Yes, absolutely. I would never, ever. I, you know, when I, when I went, I went to a two year college, Ridgewater college in Wilmer, um, came back to the farm thinking, you know, farming was, you know, we're going to haul manure. I'm going to combine and I'm going to plant. And, uh, it didn't take me long into it to realize that, you know, there was more to farming than just pulling planters.
And, you know, it was a business, right. And, and my, my dad and my uncle already had the operation at a sizable spot. I think they had 2,500 at a cattle on feed and stuff like that, but hog business, different things like that. But, uh, Kind of started realizing I needed to focus on some business stuff and ended up going to TPAP. I don't know if you guys are familiar with TPAP out of Texas A&M.
It's called the Executive Program for Agricultural Producers. It was started by Danny Kleinfelter. And it's a one-week, it's a two-year program. You go there for a week of intense business stuff. And I went down there the first year, decided it was something neat and kind of, I guess opened my eyes to the agriculture business world. And so that's when I went, you know what?
I don't have the brains needed to run my operation where it needs to be from the financial perspective. So, and that all worked together with us going through our transition from one generation to the next. And that's how we kind of ended up where we did just because we started down the transition path. And then as we did that, I'm like, Hey,
We need somebody who understands financials really, really well and how to really set us up well for the future. And so that's kind of how it started. And that was probably 14, 15 years ago. So, yeah, because I think I went to TPAP in 2006 and 2007. Yeah, kind of just been doing that since then. Yeah.
Yeah. I don't think Danny Kleinfelter – oh, don't quote me on this. I know he had some health issues, so I'm not sure. He's not involved anymore. They've kind of taken it over, but it's like Dick Whitman, several university-type people are all involved with it. I know Mike Bolche from Purdue used to be involved. I'm not sure he is anymore. It's an amazing program when it comes to just –
dialing in it doesn't talk about production it doesn't talk about any of that so it's all about business and managing businesses for the next generation and beyond hell it sounds like a mini series yeah there's probably enough content yeah there yeah you'd have plenty of content there's a lot of uh a lot of great people involved with that or if that with that organization so so you said third generation at this location where were you guys before that
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