Tanner Winterhof

Good question.

Yeah, so we started out with Nottoway Valley Feeders, and Christy and I got that started, I think that was 2002.

Yeah.

So we would have been 29 years old and we got the bank to give us a big loan and got down to 15% equity.

Can you imagine what the bank thought of that at 29 years old?

No co-signer, which was kind of interesting.

I don't know.

I still don't know why Tom Langemeyer gave me that note, but he did.

And, uh, so we built the feed yard from scratch down there and we don't farm.

And that probably, it was the best decision I ever made and probably one of the roughest decisions I ever made.

Cause we did it off a heart, not off of financial great decision.

So, but we got that going and, uh, it kind of turned me into an investor feeder.

You know, since I couldn't rely on my farming, making up for any of my mistakes.

I mean, cattle in, cattle out.

So we did some custom feeding.

And you had to source your own feed.

Had to source everything.

Yeah, you weren't growing it.

Everything was about contracting.

And I knew looking around, if we were going to compete with all these local guys that had lots of equity and buy land over the future, it's like we had to out-market them because there was no way of.