Latest / No Dirt No Flowers Podcast / Trust Through Daily Discipline / Ft. Mathias Gargus

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Trust Through Daily Discipline / Ft. Mathias Gargus · No Dirt No Flowers Podcast

• 0:00
  Hello everyone and welcome back to episode 22
• 0:02
  of No Dirt, No Flowers. Today's guest is a longtime
• 0:05
  friend of the farm, Matthias Gargis of D &M Chem.
• 0:09
  Matthias and Roy Farms go back decades and we
• 0:12
  have worked with, beside, and, in Mike and I's
• 0:14
  case, for Matthias and his brother Dee. Matthias
• 0:18
  provides a different perspective giving insights
• 0:20
  into past and current pests and diseases hop
• 0:22
  growers face today. He also shares with us the
• 0:25
  important life lesson he learned from a bleach
• 0:28
  blonde Mike back in the day. Enjoy the pod. Here
• 0:40
  we are with Matthias Gargis from DNM Chemical.
• 0:45
  Hello, everybody. Thank you for having me in
• 0:47
  here. I mean, this has just put a smile on my
• 0:50
  face ever since you agreed. I ghosted you for
• 0:54
  two days after you asked. Yeah. Just no response.
• 0:57
  I was like, maybe this will go away. Yeah. Nope.
• 1:00
  It didn't go away. And then when I texted you
• 1:03
  and said, see you at nine on Friday, you're like,
• 1:05
  nope, didn't go away. It's here. It's here. So
• 1:08
  here we are. It's about 915. And here we are.
• 1:11
  See, I think this is great. You're like our guinea
• 1:14
  pig for branching out into like. in ag but not
• 1:19
  farming um i guess we had uh mason on too we
• 1:22
  had mason but that's kind of but this is a little
• 1:24
  different i mean you've been around the block
• 1:26
  for a while a little bit yeah a little bit we've
• 1:30
  uh known roy farms for a long time more than
• 1:32
  half my life my brother started in the industry
• 1:36
  in 1989 he started consulting and hops and that
• 1:41
  that window opened up because of Our competition,
• 1:46
  we had competition in the field, our current
• 1:48
  competition. We didn't have any competition then.
• 1:50
  So Dee and I were mowing lawns, and we thought
• 1:52
  that was as good as it got. You made $100 a week
• 1:55
  apiece. Couldn't spend that. You couldn't spend
• 1:58
  that much money. We were in high school. Well,
• 1:59
  you could spend it on jail audio systems from
• 2:02
  what I remember. Yep, you could absolutely do
• 2:04
  that. But we were always. Fairly entrepreneurial.
• 2:09
  D was first to a lot of it. He was older and
• 2:12
  he was first to it. Our dad always encouraged
• 2:15
  us to work for ourselves. And the harder you
• 2:17
  work, the more you could achieve. And that was
• 2:19
  instilled in us at a very young age. And so we
• 2:24
  had transitioned. D had transitioned in 89. Started
• 2:27
  with no industry knowledge other than our dad's,
• 2:30
  which was a lot of industry knowledge. He was
• 2:32
  always in wholesale chemical. He had dealt with
• 2:36
  a lot of retailers in the Valley, which put him
• 2:38
  in contact with a lot of hop growers. And he
• 2:40
  loved dealing with the hop growers. It was a
• 2:42
  different crop than he had grown up working in,
• 2:45
  in Southern California. And he loved to learn.
• 2:47
  And so he gravitated to the hop growers. He knew
• 2:50
  a lot of them. And so that was a point of entry
• 2:53
  for D and I. D started in this in a service only
• 2:59
  capacity. And so all he did. was learn from the
• 3:03
  growers what pests they had, what problems they
• 3:06
  had. And he contracted with some early growers.
• 3:09
  William Gasling Ranch was the very first one.
• 3:11
  Leo Gasling and Sons was the second. And then
• 3:14
  we got introduced to Leslie Roy. And from Leslie
• 3:17
  Roy came Ken Deserult, came Rich Van Horn, came
• 3:21
  Demery Ranches, came a very young Eric Demery,
• 3:25
  which was basically our age. I think Leslie,
• 3:29
  when we started working with Leslie, he was probably...
• 3:31
  mid 40s late 40s d and i were 18 and 20 21 what
• 3:37
  was leslie like back then he was he was the same
• 3:40
  he's in better shape today than he was then that's
• 3:43
  i've said that to him really he's in better physical
• 3:45
  shape today than he was then because he's i mean
• 3:48
  in your 40s you're in a different mode you're
• 3:50
  building things you're just chewing up business
• 3:53
  and you're just chewing up food and a lot of
• 3:56
  different things he was never i mean but he was
• 3:58
  just He's always been a dynamic, amazing person
• 4:03
  to be around, to listen to. So when we built
• 4:07
  our business, I'm jumping around and I will jump
• 4:09
  around a lot. My wife does remind me that I tell
• 4:12
  stories like the Willy Wonka elevator. It's not
• 4:15
  up and down and it's not sideways. There's going
• 4:17
  to be some diagonals in there and you're going
• 4:19
  to have to reroute me every once in a while.
• 4:21
  But he's always been, from day one, someone that
• 4:24
  we looked to. We listened to, and he's just always
• 4:32
  been a friend. And I mean, it was neat. I don't
• 4:33
  see Leslie very often anymore and just got to
• 4:37
  walk in his office 20 minutes ago. And it's just
• 4:39
  awesome to still see him, but he's always been
• 4:42
  a version of himself. He's always been dynamic
• 4:44
  and he's always been looking ahead. He's never
• 4:49
  been stagnant. So pretty amazing person to be
• 4:51
  around. We'll keep talking about Leslie. Oh yeah.
• 4:54
  I mean, he is amazing. I have never heard dynamic,
• 4:57
  but that's a great word. Yeah. That is a really
• 4:58
  good word. It's a very positive way of describing
• 5:01
  his squirrelness. How would you call it? There's
• 5:04
  nothing negative about it. There's nothing negative.
• 5:06
  Well, if you're in a hurry. If you're in a hurry.
• 5:08
  That is a hyperactive brain that he's able to
• 5:12
  focus and a pretty amazing tool. Yeah. One person
• 5:17
  described him as a one -man flock of seagulls.
• 5:21
  Without the hair. Yeah. I think so. Okay. So
• 5:26
  got into hops. Your brother got into hops. Brother
• 5:29
  got into hops. We were service only. So all we
• 5:32
  did was literally contract by the acre with growers.
• 5:35
  And we said, listen, for this many dollars per
• 5:37
  acre, we will be responsible for every acre on
• 5:40
  your farm. We're going to walk them weekly. We're
• 5:42
  going to report to you weekly. And we're going
• 5:44
  to talk about what the pests are that are your
• 5:47
  biggest pests. So with my dad's knowledge, with
• 5:49
  the grower's knowledge. We were able to identify
• 5:52
  the biggest pests that they had in those years,
• 5:54
  which are a different set of pests than we have
• 5:56
  in these years. And my brother aggressively walked
• 6:00
  those fields. He over -walked them. He over -reported.
• 6:04
  And it was just a really good service. And it
• 6:07
  wasn't tied to chemicals. So that was kind of
• 6:08
  a relief to a grower. Because prior to that,
• 6:11
  a grower would go to an agronomist and say, what
• 6:14
  is my problem? The agronomist would say, your
• 6:16
  problem is this. And by the way, you're going
• 6:17
  to buy your chemical from me. And we're going
• 6:19
  to kind of tie those. prices in together and
• 6:21
  so there's a so that not to cut you off but there's
• 6:24
  a lack the problem right was there there was
• 6:26
  a lack of transparency and probably competing
• 6:28
  agendas potentially potentially and i mean and
• 6:32
  that's that comes down to the individual field
• 6:34
  person they're still to this day they're field
• 6:36
  people that fill a tank full of surfactants and
• 6:38
  there's those that act like they're part of the
• 6:42
  farm and so that just comes down to the individual
• 6:45
  So that was kind of a relief for the grower.
• 6:47
  The grower was able to say, hey, listen, these
• 6:49
  are my problems. These are my potential solutions.
• 6:52
  Now we're going to figure those out together.
• 6:53
  It also kept my brother and I theoretically around
• 6:56
  longer. We were able to stay all summer. We were
• 6:59
  able to stay until we went back to college in
• 7:01
  the fall. And that sometimes was a little longer
• 7:04
  than a field man was willing to stay after he
• 7:07
  sold his last drop of chemical and had no reason
• 7:10
  to really hang out. And I mean, once again, those
• 7:12
  are individual field men. Some would follow a
• 7:15
  field all the way through harvest. Others would
• 7:18
  go on fishing trips. And those fishing trips
• 7:20
  are what gave the little crack in the universe
• 7:23
  that allowed my brother and I to enter into this
• 7:25
  business that frustrated enough growers to where
• 7:29
  they said, we want to know order. on nuggets
• 7:32
  what order do you want me to pick my nuggets
• 7:34
  in my galenas my tetanus my sods i'm not going
• 7:38
  to just pick them in industry order i want to
• 7:40
  know within those seven fields which ones are
• 7:42
  a mite problem an aphid problem and what do i
• 7:45
  have to go after first i'm having a flashback
• 7:47
  because i i remember that we used to and we'll
• 7:50
  get into this later why i use the word we but
• 7:52
  we used to line fields up for growers for harvest
• 7:56
  like hey this is the order like pick this block
• 7:59
  first this one second this one third based off
• 8:01
  pest pressures which is kind of interesting because
• 8:04
  we don't do that as much these days with i guess
• 8:08
  maybe the advancement in cultural practices and
• 8:11
  protectants and whatnot like yeah there's always
• 8:14
  something right it's like hey this yard's bad
• 8:17
  we might need to pull that off early but there
• 8:18
  isn't like this list this plan going into harvest
• 8:24
  based off pest pressures anymore no not by any
• 8:26
  means you guys are testing more for quality and
• 8:29
  peakness of quality and that was a whole different
• 8:31
  set of rules we had very few that the alpha hops
• 8:35
  that were in the ground were nuggets and so i
• 8:38
  mean there was no symphony there was no ctz back
• 8:41
  then and so yeah symphony we can get into that
• 8:44
  one too so there was a different there's always
• 8:47
  a different set of demands i mean these very
• 8:49
  first year of checking fields for William Gassing
• 8:52
  Ranch. They literally sat him down and said,
• 8:55
  these two fields are the thing that's financing
• 8:58
  the rest of this ranch. So that was a whole different
• 9:01
  set of fields, a whole different set of reasons.
• 9:03
  Those were Aquila's back in the day. And that
• 9:06
  was some of those direct contract Anheuser -Busch
• 9:08
  in the late 80s, early 90s. So you were working
• 9:11
  with Bob and was PJ back by then? PJ was before
• 9:14
  he went to the military. So PJ was young on the
• 9:17
  farm, off to the military, best thing ever, PJ.
• 9:20
  And then back, So Bob Gasling, once again, was
• 9:23
  a great early lesson learned. Dee and I were
• 9:25
  probably in year three. We've now gotten some
• 9:27
  more business. We've got some Leslie Roy acres,
• 9:30
  a lot of street credibility right there. So we
• 9:33
  go into Bob Gasling, and we said, Bob, we've
• 9:37
  been charging you $8 an acre. We think we're
• 9:40
  worth $9 an acre now. And Bob looked straight
• 9:43
  in our eye and said, fellas, I cannot afford
• 9:46
  that service, so I will not need that this year.
• 9:49
  And so you have two brothers that are looking
• 9:50
  at each other going, oh, how about 850? And Bob's
• 9:54
  looking at us going, no, that is a service that
• 9:56
  I can't afford. So that's a really good early
• 9:59
  lesson that you need to know what the market
• 10:02
  times are like. You need to know what pressures
• 10:04
  people can receive at different points. Those
• 10:07
  are some of the worst years in hops. And just
• 10:09
  because D &I needed more money or thought we
• 10:11
  did to cover the bag phone. And I say that, I'm
• 10:15
  serious. We had a bag phone. We didn't even have
• 10:17
  portable flip phones. So when we were first getting
• 10:20
  into business, our dad had bought us an old Land
• 10:22
  Cruiser. And we still have that old Land Cruiser.
• 10:25
  We still have both of our original Land Cruisers
• 10:27
  that our dad bought us to get into business,
• 10:29
  a 68 and a 76. Whoa. And we've restored them
• 10:33
  completely. Michael used to use them. Well, in
• 10:36
  all fairness, you would let me drive one of them.
• 10:40
  One of them. And that's D's, not mine. Yeah,
• 10:42
  I think I drove the blue one. The one that you
• 10:45
  guys didn't care about. The 68. And he would
• 10:48
  put Chiquita banana stickers in the window every
• 10:51
  day after he would eat his lunch. But we are
• 10:53
  bouncing around. This is prior to. So either
• 10:56
  way, the early lesson was that was an incredibly.
• 11:01
  depressed market and um and d and i pressed bob
• 11:05
  gasling a little too much and we it took us years
• 11:07
  two years to get bob back maybe and i might be
• 11:11
  off on the details but i mean to this day i get
• 11:14
  to work with pj gasling still to this day still
• 11:17
  a customer that was 1989 and today we're looking
• 11:20
  at 2026 Little side note, I think the first time
• 11:24
  I met you was at PJ's. Was at PJ's. We both had
• 11:27
  more hair, I think, at that point in time. And
• 11:30
  we met at PJ's out in the driveway. Yep. That
• 11:34
  was the first time. I recall. So that was early
• 11:38
  on some of the first business pressures Dee and
• 11:40
  I had. Once again, we had a bag phone. And so
• 11:43
  we only had two or three customers, but we still
• 11:46
  were so service oriented that we thought, okay.
• 11:49
  While we're walking these fields for an hour
• 11:51
  apiece, when we get back, we need to see if anyone's
• 11:54
  called for a specific request, whatever that
• 11:57
  was. And so we would get back and we would check
• 11:59
  and there was a call -in service for messages
• 12:02
  back then. And our first month's bill was like
• 12:04
  $500 because we got charged every time we checked
• 12:07
  messages. We had no idea that bill was coming.
• 12:09
  And I remember Dee and I looking at each other
• 12:11
  going, this is not sustainable. $500 a month?
• 12:15
  Oh, wow. How are we going to keep doing this?
• 12:18
  I would give anything for a $500 bill today.
• 12:21
  Right, Michael? Yeah. We don't have very many
• 12:23
  of those. No. We usually have an extra zero applied
• 12:25
  to the end of them at a minimum now. Absolutely.
• 12:28
  So fast forward a lot of years of building a
• 12:32
  clientele just through service only. So that
• 12:38
  is from 89 until 1997. Along that way, D &I.
• 12:44
  outgrew our clientele outgrew our feet and our
• 12:47
  ability to walk acres so that's when we started
• 12:49
  to need help and so internally you go to your
• 12:53
  great growers and you go to them and you go i
• 12:55
  need help you know anyone good that can help
• 12:57
  me out so we went to leslie and so we got this
• 13:00
  young guy named michael roy to start helping
• 13:02
  us yeah yeah he's like oh boy do i have a guy
• 13:06
  all that he had a guy and so this is kind of
• 13:09
  like I don't even know what that would be, like
• 13:12
  a reform? No, I'm kidding. No, it was awesome.
• 13:16
  So we were roughly the same age a couple years
• 13:18
  apart, and none of us knew what we were doing,
• 13:22
  really. We were just figuring it out, and Michael
• 13:25
  came on as one of our first employees, and that
• 13:28
  was obviously prior to D &M Chemicals. So once
• 13:32
  again, still service, Michael Roy. And the only
• 13:37
  problem was... Our little headquarters where
• 13:40
  we would meet in the morning was pretty close
• 13:42
  to Leslie's house. And Michael sometimes occasionally
• 13:45
  would not make it to our headquarters in time.
• 13:48
  And so Leslie was nice enough to leave the back
• 13:52
  door open. And so for a lot of years, I would
• 13:55
  just walk into Leslie's house. Sometimes Betsy
• 13:59
  was in the kitchen in the morning and I would
• 14:00
  walk right by her and go. upstairs to wake Michael
• 14:04
  and Andy up. And I said Andy because Andy also
• 14:07
  walked with us. And to be clear, Andy was definitely
• 14:10
  the worst offender by far. I mean, I had to get
• 14:14
  in bed with Andy, literally spoon Andy. I was
• 14:17
  the big spoon. Andy was the small spoon. Naturally.
• 14:21
  A long time. And he wouldn't wake up. And sometimes
• 14:24
  I don't know if he was playing possum and just
• 14:26
  didn't want or wasn't awake. Maybe he was comfortable.
• 14:28
  I think he was. Sometimes he might have been
• 14:30
  awake. I don't know. But anyway, so it's always
• 14:34
  been a really, it's been a very familial, open
• 14:37
  relationship with Roy Farms. They've helped us
• 14:41
  build our business in a lot of ways. And I mean,
• 14:44
  I can keep going on. The next step is, okay,
• 14:48
  Michael's in college. Michael's through college.
• 14:50
  Michael's doing different things. We need more
• 14:52
  help. My next step is to go to Narciso. Narciso
• 14:56
  was one of the people that I reported to at Roy
• 15:00
  Farms for. 20 years he ran the west end of the
• 15:04
  farm uh yeah yeah Narciso ran the west end of
• 15:08
  the farm and Carlos Gutierrez ran the east end
• 15:12
  of the farm and so naturally those two foremen
• 15:14
  were people that I dealt with on a weekly basis
• 15:17
  I had a ton of respect for both of those people
• 15:20
  and they were the first two that I would go to
• 15:24
  and say hey my brother and I need more crew help
• 15:27
  this summer we need more good people that know
• 15:30
  what a work ethic is like. And so from Narciso
• 15:34
  came his grandsons. And so all three of Narciso's
• 15:38
  grandsons all have walked hops with me. Two of
• 15:42
  them still walk hops with me. One of them, Javier
• 15:46
  Pena, has now transitioned to a completely different
• 15:49
  role in my company and has proven to step up
• 15:54
  to any challenge we've ever given him. And so
• 15:55
  he now runs. All kinds of different facets of
• 15:59
  my company. He's now internal in the office and
• 16:01
  thriving. It's incredible to watch him. Matthew
• 16:04
  Pena still leads the field crew. So take a pause
• 16:09
  right there. So just for context, let's say you
• 16:12
  rewind to just you and D and then bringing me
• 16:15
  on board as one of your first employees. How
• 16:18
  many employees are there now in the company?
• 16:20
  30. That company is now drastically different.
• 16:23
  That company is 30 employees. Dee and I now have
• 16:26
  grown a company to maturity and as of two years
• 16:31
  ago, sold that company. So there's a lot of emotion
• 16:34
  and there's a lot of intricacies into that entire
• 16:38
  story. And we have retained probably 95, 98 %
• 16:43
  of our employees through that transition. That's
• 16:45
  really cool. And the accumulation, the best part
• 16:49
  of our story. And if you have Dee in here and
• 16:51
  you'll have a totally different story, we've
• 16:53
  lived. Different lives. We've lived same lives,
• 16:56
  similar lives, but he'll have a different story.
• 16:59
  And part of my story that I want to tell is the
• 17:02
  accumulation of people that trust two young brothers
• 17:06
  that say, hey, we're going to sell chemical.
• 17:09
  Come work with us. Trust us. This is going to
• 17:11
  work. And that accumulation, and I mean that
• 17:15
  in the most respectful way, that accumulation
• 17:16
  of friends and family and people. I mean, I can
• 17:19
  keep going on. Carlos Gutierrez, our first driver
• 17:22
  was his son, Herman Gutierrez. Carlos was an
• 17:25
  employee of this farm. Oscar Leal, one of our
• 17:28
  key employees to this day and someone that is
• 17:31
  very integral from D &M Chemical that helps with
• 17:35
  Roy Farm's success on a daily basis. Oscar Leal
• 17:39
  was walked into our office by Manuel Leal. And
• 17:42
  so once again, I would go to people that I respected
• 17:45
  and people that I knew worked hard. and say,
• 17:48
  do you know someone? And they would walk them
• 17:51
  in the front door. And it's been a really interesting
• 17:55
  journey to see who trusts you, who comes to work
• 17:59
  with you, who stays with you. And the most rewarding
• 18:04
  part is to see what becomes of their lives and
• 18:09
  how they've sustained their own livelihood. what
• 18:14
  their work ethic looks like, how that plays out
• 18:17
  and what kind of life they make. Jeez. What year
• 18:21
  did you guys go into, um, selling chemicals?
• 18:25
  97. Oh yeah. You said that. Yep. 97 D my brother
• 18:28
  was, was my brother's always taking care of me
• 18:31
  and, and he's always been my brother and I love
• 18:34
  my brother. We are two totally different people.
• 18:38
  D finished school. And Dee and I were always
• 18:41
  kind of actively, towards the end of both of
• 18:43
  our college careers, we're actively talking about
• 18:45
  what's the next stage. You can only walk so many
• 18:47
  acres, and that's not sustainable forever. And,
• 18:50
  I mean, there's a cap to the size of the industry,
• 18:53
  how much you can charge per acre. We wanted to
• 18:55
  expand somehow. Once again, my dad was always
• 18:58
  in wholesale chemical. And that gave us an entry
• 19:02
  and a thought. of the ability to get into the
• 19:06
  chemical industry at a relatively low cost we
• 19:09
  didn't have the money and capital to just start
• 19:12
  a storage building and and start a retail chemical
• 19:15
  sale so we went into business well once again
• 19:18
  where's your first retail location our first
• 19:21
  reload retail location was the best deal we've
• 19:25
  ever gotten in business leslie roy once again
• 19:28
  um, leased an awesome building to us on Sharon
• 19:31
  road. And it was called the Sharon killed Jerry
• 19:33
  Roy welded security gates. This one right down
• 19:35
  here. Absolutely. Okay. My brother and I would,
• 19:39
  we had no office staff. So we had cell phone.
• 19:43
  We had portable phones at that point in time.
• 19:45
  So we were mobile. We were rocking and rolling.
• 19:47
  So we could walk fields all day long, take orders,
• 19:49
  meet growers back there and load growers with
• 19:52
  chemical life is good. Another tie -in is about
• 19:55
  to come. This is pretty neat. So one day D and
• 19:57
  I were, loading a farmer with chemical. His name
• 20:00
  is Mike Sanders. And he's a foreman, awesome
• 20:04
  foreman for Moyer Ranch back then. So we were
• 20:06
  checking Moyer's hops, and this guy named Mike
• 20:08
  Sanders was the foreman. So Mike came by to pick
• 20:11
  up, I think we were trying to kill worms back
• 20:13
  then. I think he was picking up brigades. So
• 20:15
  we're loading Mike with chemical, just having
• 20:18
  another afternoon. It's probably 4 .30 in the
• 20:20
  afternoon. We load Mike up. Life is good. And
• 20:23
  so Dee and I were probably three quarters of
• 20:25
  the way through our first year of business at
• 20:27
  that point. It's midsummer. Then all of a sudden
• 20:29
  we get this notice from the county that says
• 20:31
  you can no longer do retail business on AgZone
• 20:36
  land. Dee and I didn't even know that that was
• 20:38
  something you even looked into. When a farmer
• 20:41
  says, hey. You can have this building for an
• 20:44
  extremely great deal. And he wants to help you
• 20:47
  get into business because that Leslie Roy says,
• 20:49
  these guys are honest. All they want to do is
• 20:51
  service the grower. I want to help these two
• 20:54
  young brothers get into business. Well, some
• 20:56
  of our competition, which I was going to ask
• 20:58
  who ratted you out, took, took black and whites
• 21:01
  of us doing business. They actually took black
• 21:04
  and white, black and whites, turn them into the
• 21:06
  County, sign the documents of the complaint.
• 21:11
  Might have copies of that. Not sure. Anyway,
• 21:14
  sign the copies. Sign the complaint. And D &I
• 21:18
  had to immediately move business. And so that
• 21:23
  was competition, and that's how much they did
• 21:25
  not want us disrupting their perfect nest that
• 21:28
  they had. D &I, once again, it's relationships.
• 21:31
  D &I needs somewhere to move. We moved directly
• 21:34
  to downtown Moxie to what was a cement figurine
• 21:37
  place. And it was out of business and it was
• 21:39
  an empty shell of a building. And we rented from
• 21:41
  an old guy named Fred Young. And he owned a lot
• 21:45
  of downtown Moxie at one point in time. He owned
• 21:47
  what was the Simplot that just went out of business.
• 21:51
  He owned our building, which was the first Simplot
• 21:54
  when it was built because it was on the rail
• 21:56
  system and it was built over there for dry fertilizer,
• 21:59
  rail. So anyway, we rented from Fred Young as
• 22:04
  we're building our business. And Fred Young leased.
• 22:07
  to my brother and I, and he was 90 -something.
• 22:09
  All these years that we rented from him, and
• 22:11
  he would always tell us, you need to own this
• 22:15
  building, and D &I couldn't afford it. So we
• 22:16
  just maintained doing what we could afford, which
• 22:19
  was leasing that building. Fred passed away,
• 22:22
  and after Fred passed away, in his mid -90s,
• 22:25
  his kids, which were in their mid -70s, came
• 22:27
  to D &I and said, you know, our dad always told
• 22:31
  you that you need to buy this property, and he
• 22:34
  always wanted... this dollar amount for the,
• 22:36
  for the property. And we said, yeah, you know,
• 22:38
  and we just could never do it. And they said,
• 22:40
  uh, our dad put every one of those lease payments
• 22:43
  towards the principal. Oh my gosh. Why don't
• 22:46
  you go ahead and give us the difference and you
• 22:48
  can have this property. So it took a lot of help
• 22:51
  and a lot of people to a point of entry. I have
• 22:54
  never heard that story. Dude, that brings emotion
• 22:58
  to the eyes there. Holy smokes. Yep. Isn't that
• 23:01
  crazy? So Fred did that for DNA. And so from
• 23:05
  Fred's estate, we ended up buying the other parcels
• 23:08
  that matched up to us to complete that whole
• 23:10
  triangle. And those are those gifts that help
• 23:14
  people stay in business and those bits of advice
• 23:18
  from the Leslie Roys and the Fred Youngs that
• 23:20
  you are hot, you've walked fields all day long,
• 23:23
  but you sit and stare and you listen and you
• 23:26
  actually hear the words. That's awesome. So the
• 23:29
  adjacent parcels was there is one to the east
• 23:32
  there. Yep. Right. There were actually three
• 23:34
  parcels that were to the east of our triangle,
• 23:36
  three separate home lots. Yep. Oh, cool. Yep.
• 23:40
  I have so many questions. I think we were talking
• 23:43
  about when you transitioned into selling chemicals
• 23:45
  was the original. And that was it. And so that
• 23:47
  was the transition. So with that, I mean, with
• 23:49
  that point of entry, now we have a place to do
• 23:51
  business. Now we have to. Find someone to man
• 23:55
  an office. We're getting big enough in year two
• 23:57
  and three of selling chemical. We need to have
• 24:00
  a walk -in. We have an office space now. We need
• 24:03
  someone. We had someone for about a year. He
• 24:06
  found a happier spot to be. And at that point,
• 24:09
  we had found out that Mike Sanders, the person
• 24:14
  that we were loading with chemical the day that
• 24:16
  we got the black and white pictures taken of
• 24:17
  us. He was a foreman on a hop farm, and Dee and
• 24:20
  I had a lot of interaction with Mike while he
• 24:23
  was employed on that hop farm. Mike and the hop
• 24:26
  farm had gone their separate ways. Dee and I
• 24:28
  knew that, and Dee and I went to Mike's house
• 24:30
  on a random whatever night, and Mike still lives
• 24:34
  in that same home. Dee and I went to Mike's house,
• 24:37
  walked in, and said, we need someone to be a
• 24:40
  front desk person, someone to... answer phones
• 24:43
  and i mean mike didn't do that mike was a foreman
• 24:46
  on he was a farmer he had spent his life on a
• 24:48
  tractor and with dust and chemical and everything
• 24:51
  else and he had farmed for all these hop farmers
• 24:53
  out here for his entire lifetime and he's now
• 24:56
  in his mid -40s he's changing careers and d and
• 24:59
  i as 220 some year olds walk into his house and
• 25:02
  say trust us this is going to be awesome will
• 25:05
  you come work with us and he actually after a
• 25:08
  long conversation and several questions said
• 25:10
  i'm gonna do it That night, we wrote a contract
• 25:14
  out on a napkin. Love the napkin days. The napkin,
• 25:18
  the contract was written on a napkin. That napkin
• 25:21
  was put in his safe, and neither of the three
• 25:23
  of us, D, me, or Mike Sanders, have read that
• 25:26
  contract since then. But Mike fulfilled a 25
• 25:29
  -year career with us and retired a few years
• 25:33
  ago. And that makes me emotional, too, because
• 25:36
  Mike is family. Mike hits. Hi, Charles and Sally.
• 25:41
  Hi, Nancy. That's my wife. My two kids. I have
• 25:44
  to say hi to all of them. My two kids have to
• 25:48
  differentiate between Uncle Mike or Mike Sanders.
• 25:51
  So Mike is part of my family. Once again, the
• 25:54
  accumulation of people that trust you and that
• 25:57
  put their life in your hands and that you do
• 26:00
  it in opposite directions that help you build
• 26:03
  a life and a livelihood. Jeez. Not to spend too
• 26:07
  much time on that topic, but it was really interesting
• 26:09
  to see. Mike's transition from farming to basically
• 26:14
  manning the phone and orders. And he was amazing
• 26:18
  at it. Amazing. It's amazing. It's really interesting
• 26:24
  because not everybody could make that transition.
• 26:26
  And under massive stresses, Mike gave a calmness
• 26:31
  and he gave a freedom to D &I to be able to go
• 26:34
  do business and not worry about anything. So
• 26:37
  when you can trust someone like they're your
• 26:39
  brother. or they're your brother, and you can
• 26:42
  turn your back and you can go do business all
• 26:44
  day long. That's what Mike gave us, which is
• 26:46
  irreplaceable, let alone his ability to go from
• 26:50
  handwritten invoices. I don't even want to talk
• 26:53
  about the dollar sales, but, I mean, D &I's first
• 26:55
  year in business, our entire sales were an accumulation
• 27:00
  of what we can put on one truck today and send
• 27:02
  to a farm. But by the end of Mike's career at
• 27:05
  25 years, Mike was running a massive amount of
• 27:09
  business and he had transitioned from handwritten
• 27:11
  invoices to complex computer systems to multiple
• 27:16
  field men between apples, between hops, and those
• 27:20
  are other sidebars. As we grew our business,
• 27:23
  he grew along with the business. And I mean,
• 27:24
  there were early points in times where he was
• 27:27
  rinsing shuttles between fertilizers. He had
• 27:30
  a wireless phone up against his ear because we
• 27:34
  didn't have a cell phone for him. And he's taking
• 27:37
  walk -in traffic at the same time. So that went,
• 27:40
  the business always grew organically and it always
• 27:43
  grew as we needed to. And we never did expand
• 27:48
  beyond our means. There were probably multiple
• 27:50
  times we squeezed things too long. But I mean,
• 27:54
  Mike Sanders was built for that squeeze and he
• 27:56
  put up with the squeeze. was a major major part
• 28:01
  of how we built our business i mean the hard
• 28:03
  part is i can talk for three hours about just
• 28:05
  building our business and the neat people that
• 28:08
  help build the business and i don't want to leave
• 28:10
  people out but i mean d and i transitioned into
• 28:13
  into tree fruit by 1999 98 we're in tree fruit
• 28:18
  we were able to buy a wolfkill branch up in cowichie
• 28:22
  and along that have come employees that are amazing
• 28:26
  co -workers that are still with us I mean, Chandra,
• 28:29
  1998, Chandra, she runs billings and invoicing
• 28:34
  and an amazing part of our office. She's been
• 28:37
  with us since 1998. It's a long time. Well, it's
• 28:42
  interesting as you talk about trust, and I think
• 28:44
  Mike was a perfect employee and an extension
• 28:48
  of that. Because, I mean, you know, farming in
• 28:52
  general is a roller coaster every year. And to
• 28:56
  go into... your vendor, and sometimes probably
• 29:02
  needing something that's related to a high -stress
• 29:05
  type situation. So to have an even -keeled Mike
• 29:09
  Sanders in there that was nothing but pleasant
• 29:13
  and helpful and communicative helped a lot. It
• 29:19
  is everything. Customer service is such an important
• 29:22
  thing on your end of the business, on my end
• 29:25
  of the business. That face, I mean, people don't
• 29:30
  come into our office needing, in a good mood.
• 29:35
  They're having to spend money. They're under
• 29:37
  pressure. They have a pest that's taking out
• 29:40
  what they're growing for their livelihood. And
• 29:43
  so it's always a high, and it needs to happen
• 29:45
  right now. I mean, the world of chemicals and
• 29:48
  fertilizers and growth regulators that we live
• 29:50
  in are so specialized right now that things have
• 29:53
  very specific timings, delivery. We have to be
• 29:57
  an Amazon that is able to deliver things on weather
• 30:01
  -dependent days. And so it's a pretty complex
• 30:04
  world. And once again, not to focus on Mike Sanders
• 30:07
  too much, but it's people like him that are able
• 30:09
  to adapt and that customer service and that bridge
• 30:12
  between the person that is slinging fertilizer
• 30:15
  and chemical to you and you as the consumer and
• 30:18
  the grower that need things now and you need
• 30:20
  them in the right way, you need them translated
• 30:22
  in the right way, and you need them. Applied
• 30:26
  in the right manner to be legal, to be legal
• 30:29
  to ship your product to wherever you're in products
• 30:32
  going. There's a lot of intricacy to our business.
• 30:35
  It blows my mind. Random question. So I know
• 30:39
  the listeners will not see or hear this, but
• 30:43
  at times you can have some anxiety, correct?
• 30:46
  Really? I'm curious because the people that you've
• 30:55
  surrounded yourself with are maybe on the other
• 31:02
  end of that spectrum most of the time. Do you
• 31:05
  think that's on purpose or on accident? That's
• 31:07
  my question. It's totally, totally on purpose
• 31:11
  because I don't think, you know, my wife and
• 31:15
  kids, once again, I love them very much, but
• 31:17
  they've reminded me that two of me in the same
• 31:21
  spot would not be a very, Very good idea. Channeling
• 31:25
  it in the right direction. I think about this
• 31:30
  a lot, but the freedom of my job has also given
• 31:33
  me the freedom of being a little bit crazy too.
• 31:35
  Not being in an office space, being able to talk
• 31:38
  to plants and be outside and talk to really dynamic
• 31:42
  people. The growers that I deal with, they're
• 31:44
  crazy too. And so it's fun to talk. I know one
• 31:47
  of them is. The growers, the clientele that we,
• 31:54
  once again, have accumulated, they're all different
• 31:56
  people, and it's been fun to watch everybody
• 31:58
  change and not change. You had a couple questions
• 32:04
  that you jotted down there. Anything you want
• 32:05
  to jump in on? Oh, yeah, I'm saving them. Okay.
• 32:08
  I got a question about when you transitioned
• 32:10
  into other crops outside of hops and what that
• 32:14
  first crop was and then how that has expanded.
• 32:21
  So that's a great question. And we had reps early
• 32:24
  on. Reps would question D &I on what products
• 32:28
  we were going to sell. And they would corner
• 32:31
  us and say, you're only in hops. You guys have
• 32:33
  to expand beyond. You need to get into tree fruit,
• 32:36
  too. You need to get into more crops. And so
• 32:38
  we would hear that. But, I mean, we could only
• 32:39
  concentrate on what we were doing at the time.
• 32:42
  And an opportunity came up. Once again, our dad
• 32:45
  was in the business. He was in. He worked at
• 32:47
  UAP, and he heard and had a heads -up that the
• 32:52
  Wolfkill branch up in Cowichie was up for sale.
• 32:56
  And at that point in time... Dee and I were still
• 33:01
  with UAP. That would have been 1998. And we approached
• 33:04
  UAP and said, listen, this is a really good deal.
• 33:07
  These are really great people. They already have
• 33:09
  established business. They already work with
• 33:11
  good established customers up in the Upper Valley.
• 33:14
  And we think it's a great deal. UAP backed us
• 33:16
  on it. And we immediately expanded our business
• 33:19
  into about a 50 -50 split of tree fruit and hops
• 33:23
  at that point. Whoa, you went 50 -50 just overnight.
• 33:26
  Dee and I weren't that big in the hops, so it's
• 33:28
  easy to go 50 -50 on anything. And you already
• 33:30
  have the Rick Florines and the Mike Ellingsons
• 33:33
  and the Marty Kers. And those were all field
• 33:36
  men that were established tree fruit field men
• 33:38
  at that branch. And so they had, once again,
• 33:41
  it takes a lot of faith. I mean, these are people
• 33:43
  that are well into their careers. They have two
• 33:46
  young brothers talking them into, hey, this is
• 33:48
  going to work out. UAP backed us, and we doubled
• 33:53
  in size pretty much overnight. And by 1999, that
• 33:57
  was the year that D &I, so to back up a little
• 34:00
  bit, UAP, in helping us get into business, did
• 34:03
  what they called a dealer alliance back then.
• 34:05
  And so for a percentage of the gross sales. They
• 34:09
  handled a lot of things for you. They handled
• 34:10
  accounts receivable. They handled accounting.
• 34:13
  They handled the clunky parts of business that
• 34:16
  were going to be too expensive for us to the
• 34:18
  infrastructure early on. And so that was a great
• 34:22
  relationship until our sales became high enough.
• 34:25
  And that gross number did not make sense anymore
• 34:28
  to pay UAP that much money for the alignment.
• 34:30
  And that's when D and I went to a banker at Key
• 34:34
  Bank. Red Byerly, our crop duster friend, gave
• 34:37
  us a name to go to, and we went to that banker,
• 34:41
  and he had faith in us, and he gave us a bank
• 34:44
  line and a loan, and that's when we were completely
• 34:47
  independent. And that independence, it's still
• 34:51
  to this day, even though we've sold, who did
• 34:54
  we sell to? We sold to McGregor Company, and
• 34:56
  they are a family -owned independent chemical
• 34:59
  and fertilizer company, and that is for a very
• 35:01
  specific reason. When D &I went to sell our company
• 35:05
  after a 25, 30 -year run, we methodically went
• 35:09
  to different people. We went to those audiences.
• 35:12
  We went to an M &A company to do that. And when
• 35:16
  we went to the different potential purchasers,
• 35:20
  it was super apparent that we were not going
• 35:23
  to sell to a corporation, that we were going
• 35:26
  to sell to a family -owned business. And in selling
• 35:29
  to McGregor, That was done methodically because
• 35:31
  after meeting with four different people, once
• 35:34
  I sat in the room with McGregor and I sat in
• 35:36
  with Ian McGregor and I knew his dad a little
• 35:38
  bit already and I knew Ian a little bit, that
• 35:41
  mentality is still a family -owned business.
• 35:44
  There's no corporation to deal with. Did I meet
• 35:48
  his dad when you guys brought him out during
• 35:50
  Harvest? Yeah. Yep, they would have been down
• 35:52
  here. And they're going to come back down for
• 35:54
  some other special meetings that they don't know
• 35:56
  of yet. So stay tuned on that one. Yeah, they
• 36:00
  seem like a really nice group. They are integral
• 36:02
  in keeping water in the Northwest. They are integral
• 36:07
  in working with legislation to keep the farmers'
• 36:11
  interests taken care of. They are great people
• 36:15
  to deal with and great people to work with. Okay,
• 36:18
  so what year did the powdery mildew outbreak
• 36:21
  happen? That was going to be my question. Love
• 36:23
  it, love it, love it. So college. I go to college
• 36:26
  and I take... Horticultural technology. Where'd
• 36:29
  you go? You go to WSU? Central. Oh, Central.
• 36:31
  Everybody else went to WSU. I went to Central.
• 36:35
  Why? My brother went to Central. It's just what
• 36:37
  you do. My brother went there. It was close.
• 36:39
  I liked all of his friends. My friends were going
• 36:41
  there. So I go to Central. Central doesn't have
• 36:43
  an ag degree, but they used to offer a horticultural
• 36:45
  technology degree. So that offered the same basic
• 36:49
  biology classes. And I started to run out of
• 36:53
  classes because they didn't have this ag. degree.
• 36:57
  And so I ended up filling in with a bunch of
• 37:00
  mycology classes and I thought, okay, I have
• 37:02
  to take these. And so I took a bunch of mycology
• 37:05
  classes towards the end of my career. And mycology
• 37:08
  is the study of fungus. So they were purely just
• 37:11
  filling by, they were filling. What type of fungus
• 37:14
  were you focused on? Fungus among us. I was focused
• 37:17
  on college and finishing college, whatever that
• 37:21
  meant and whatever form that was in. So I finished
• 37:23
  college. And my time there and walk out of college.
• 37:29
  And that's when D and I are literally signing
• 37:32
  the deal to start D and M chemical. Here we are.
• 37:36
  And it is 1997. Yeah. Yep. And symphonies are
• 37:42
  in the ground. Yeah. I mean, I, that period of
• 37:46
  life is a little fuzzy for me. Was it 97? Because
• 37:51
  of a different type of fungus? It was psilocybin.
• 37:56
  Powdery mildew. Yeah, that could have been your
• 37:58
  fogginess. So right when I walk out of school,
• 38:04
  literally when I walk out of school is when we
• 38:06
  get powdery mildew. And that came, the first
• 38:08
  variety was Symphony. And I literally am looking
• 38:11
  at something that I already knew and that I had
• 38:13
  already studied. Once again, I don't know much
• 38:15
  of anything. I'm fresh out of school. We're scared.
• 38:18
  I'm scared. We're starting a brand -new business.
• 38:20
  The sales end of it. Yeah, I mean, not only the
• 38:23
  impacts to your business, but at the time, like
• 38:25
  I said, it's a little fuzzy, but I remember my
• 38:27
  dad talking about it, and I understand the impact
• 38:30
  of Powdery Mildew. But at that point in time,
• 38:33
  the industry didn't know what they were looking
• 38:36
  at. I mean, they knew what they were looking
• 38:38
  at in terms of, okay, this is a... like in terms
• 38:41
  of like what the disease was but they didn't
• 38:44
  know how it's going to impact the industry and
• 38:46
  everyone was saying this is the end of the u
• 38:49
  .s hop industry you just saw me looking around
• 38:51
  and i was looking around for a reason sitting
• 38:54
  literally where we're sitting right now yeah
• 38:56
  peter darby peter glendening We were both out
• 39:00
  of the UK. Out of the UK. Your dad was here.
• 39:02
  I think Mike Smith was in the room. I think Ken
• 39:05
  Deserault was in the room. And I think that Dave
• 39:07
  Wyckoff was in the room. And those guys were
• 39:09
  sitting at the other end. And this is just pure
• 39:12
  luck and being in the right spot at the right
• 39:15
  time. Peter Darby or Glenn Denning was describing
• 39:19
  this 400 -year problem that England had had and
• 39:23
  this one -year problem that we had just gotten
• 39:26
  and telling us that. Most likely it was going
• 39:29
  to take out a pretty good portion of our industry
• 39:31
  that they had worked on it for however many generations.
• 39:35
  And it is going to drastically affect our industry
• 39:38
  and could take us out of the industry. And he
• 39:42
  started talking about how we differentiate, how
• 39:44
  we identify different powdery mildew. And I'm
• 39:47
  23 in the back corner of the room, 20 whatever,
• 39:51
  in the back corner of the room. And he was talking
• 39:53
  about. really specific things about spores and
• 39:56
  powdery mildew. And he was talking about how
• 39:58
  you differentiate them. And he tripped on his
• 40:00
  words for a second. And he said, well, the way
• 40:02
  we can tell the difference between species is
• 40:04
  by the spore. And he tripped on his words. And
• 40:07
  I mean, before I know it, I'm saying out loud,
• 40:09
  spore ornamentation. I had just gotten done studying
• 40:12
  this stuff. And he looks at me like, who's that
• 40:16
  guy? And I got to say that and do that in front
• 40:18
  of the Mike Smith, the Dave Wyckoff, and the
• 40:21
  Leslie Roy. instant street cred for those guys
• 40:25
  that was a neat point i'd rather be lucky than
• 40:28
  good anytime and i was really really lucky that
• 40:30
  day and i was sitting probably i think i was
• 40:33
  right there and i think that darby and glenn
• 40:35
  denning were at the far end and they were straight
• 40:37
  out of england and i mean the high horsepower
• 40:40
  of the hop industry which were the names i just
• 40:42
  gave you were the ones that drug in the industry
• 40:45
  experts from england i mean they were that proactive
• 40:47
  we have a new problem bring in across the world
• 40:50
  the people that know what they're doing, and
• 40:52
  let's figure this out. As an industry, it's been
• 40:55
  awesome to watch it evolve and watch it figure
• 40:58
  out. The first year we had that powdery mildew
• 41:00
  in symphonies, our solution, the industry solution,
• 41:03
  cut them at the base and let them hang for the
• 41:06
  rest of summer. These are 18 -foot full vine
• 41:08
  symphonies that are coned out, fully loaded with
• 41:12
  powdery mildew, and I'll never forget Butch and
• 41:14
  Ben Berlotte and Prosser. In Wistrand, they cut.
• 41:18
  hundreds of acres and and that got replicated
• 41:21
  up the valley people just cut them like listen
• 41:23
  if we if we kill the host at least we'll stop
• 41:26
  the powdery mildew so that's where we started
• 41:27
  with powdery mildew and then we and then our
• 41:30
  next step was okay let's get a fungicide label
• 41:33
  for us and on that note did we do that this year
• 41:35
  that year did we cut ours i don't remember i
• 41:38
  don't remember whether they did or not there's
• 41:40
  some of that is just like selective memory of
• 41:43
  just tragedy that you cut out but i remember
• 41:44
  specifically seeing in wistrand butch and ben's
• 41:48
  um symphonies hanging just in the wind just dried
• 41:51
  out and so i mean from that you know you start
• 41:56
  to get to industry experts in other industries
• 41:59
  how are we going to control powdery mildew rubigan
• 42:01
  was the first fungicide that we had for hops
• 42:04
  so we have a labeled fungicide on hops and we
• 42:07
  start to spray hops with rubigan it turned them
• 42:10
  hermaphroditic it made male parts on non -triploid
• 42:13
  hops so we knew at that point because a lot of
• 42:15
  those are have um Growth regulators. Growth regulators
• 42:19
  in them as part of the way they function as a
• 42:21
  fungicide. So, I mean, it was years of research.
• 42:25
  And, I mean, once again, with awesome partners.
• 42:28
  Walt Mahaffey was one of the first ones that
• 42:30
  we did research with for a few years. Did awesome
• 42:33
  research to try to get a grip on things and how
• 42:35
  things spread. And then since then, we've had
• 42:38
  David Gent, and he's awesome. He's great to work
• 42:41
  with, great to talk to. He's open. He doesn't
• 42:44
  have an ego, and he doesn't have an agenda, and
• 42:47
  he is nothing but help for this industry. We
• 42:50
  got to get Dave on the show. We do need to get
• 42:51
  Dave on. He's great. 100%. Yeah. He is just a
• 42:55
  smart, nice individual that will not cuss on
• 42:57
  your podcast. I don't think you've cussed at
• 42:59
  all yet. Yeah. What's up with that? I haven't.
• 43:01
  I don't know. You guys are doing something right.
• 43:03
  I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, and so you
• 43:08
  had the opportunity to work through that industry
• 43:11
  -wide problem. How long did it take? We're still
• 43:15
  working on it. Well, I mean, like from the absolutely
• 43:19
  obliterating crops to... Five to seven years,
• 43:23
  I bet. I bet you would still deal on a lot of
• 43:25
  luck with weather, whether that would reduce
• 43:29
  it by the end of the year. Variety selection
• 43:31
  has changed the dynamics of powdery mildew a
• 43:34
  bunch in the industry. That's changed a whole
• 43:37
  bunch, but it's just been amazing to watch powdery
• 43:40
  mildew adapt to us too. How many old varieties,
• 43:43
  their resistances break down. So it keeps you,
• 43:47
  I mean, anything that has 1 .9 billion spores
• 43:50
  per square inch has a lot of replication and
• 43:53
  a lot of gene recombination. So we will always
• 43:56
  be fighting powdery mildew. Those things are
• 43:58
  crazy to look at under a microscope. They look
• 44:00
  like they're like a pillar of stacked balls,
• 44:03
  which are spores, right? And then that pillar
• 44:05
  falls over, and then all those spores create
• 44:08
  new pillars. Individually, they just grow up
• 44:10
  in chains of eight, I think, from memory. I don't
• 44:13
  know if my memory is that great. And the end
• 44:14
  one is the most ripe. And when they are ready
• 44:17
  to go, the wind takes them away, any mechanical
• 44:19
  mode of action. And it was interesting to watch.
• 44:22
  I mean, these guys are all related. The whole
• 44:24
  industry is related familiarly somehow. Oh, yeah.
• 44:28
  And the first years, I mean, it's tragedy. There's
• 44:31
  some that branched out. A couple. And, you know,
• 44:35
  the first years, it was crazy. You would see
• 44:36
  people that were cousins blame, you know, hey,
• 44:39
  my mildew came from him. No, my mildew came from
• 44:42
  him. And it's, once again, anything that is that
• 44:45
  volatile and that can replicate that much, we
• 44:48
  now know this mildew is here to stay. We grow
• 44:53
  its host really well, and it's good at overwintering.
• 44:56
  It's very specific to the hops, and we provide
• 45:00
  a good winter home for it. So it'll be here for
• 45:03
  good, and our game then becomes to economically
• 45:08
  grow that hop to use fungicides that don't leave
• 45:14
  residue and to use integrated pest management
• 45:19
  and to reduce. The tractor trips per field, per
• 45:24
  acre. That was a horrible sentence. That was
• 45:26
  a horrible sentence. That was a crap sentence.
• 45:29
  Edit that. You hear that, Andy? Okay, so I got
• 45:34
  a handful of questions out here that, one, I
• 45:38
  don't know what order to go in. Okay, first,
• 45:41
  I guess, what are the biggest challenges that
• 45:44
  you've seen since you've been, let's call agronomic
• 45:49
  first. besides and leave the economic one out
• 45:52
  agronomic challenges since you started doing
• 45:55
  this obviously powdery mildew has to be somewhere
• 45:58
  towards the top of that i would say i would say
• 46:02
  the very first one we ran into and it was obviously
• 46:05
  because it was powdery before powdery mildew
• 46:07
  were mites so we had no great miticides we had
• 46:11
  no good miticides well i shouldn't say that but
• 46:14
  we didn't have very efficacious miticides back
• 46:16
  then and we get this brand new one I'm going
• 46:19
  to be off on the year, I think it was 89 or 90,
• 46:21
  we get this brand new miticide called Agromech.
• 46:23
  And it was unreal, but it was 700 and some dollars
• 46:27
  a gallon. And the rate was 16 ounces to the acre.
• 46:30
  And it worked incredibly. One shot worked all
• 46:33
  summer long. But once again, that was a really
• 46:36
  bad downturn economically in the hops. And the
• 46:39
  first thing the growers did were go, okay, 16
• 46:42
  ounces worked all summer. let's see what 12 ounces
• 46:45
  do and we started seeing rates as low as three
• 46:47
  and four ounces of that miticide go out and still
• 46:51
  work for a few years but when it crashed and
• 46:53
  resistance happened it happened wide ranging
• 46:58
  across the entire industry and that was the first
• 47:01
  real agronomic lesson that my brother and I got
• 47:06
  to see that if you abuse a chemistry, and it
• 47:08
  was industry -wide. I mean, we had no other alternatives,
• 47:11
  so we used that one great chemistry. And once
• 47:14
  again, if it works great once a year, these mites
• 47:18
  were not getting exposed to any other active
• 47:20
  ingredient other than that one, and we saw that
• 47:22
  crash by... coincidentally, the late 90s. And
• 47:27
  as soon as that crashed and we find some alternative,
• 47:30
  and we still don't have amazing alternative miticides,
• 47:34
  and that's a whole different subject, is new
• 47:37
  discoveries that are made by main manufacturers
• 47:39
  now are less than they used to be in the 80s.
• 47:42
  I can't remember. Was Agromech bad on predators?
• 47:46
  I think it wiped out the predators, didn't it?
• 47:49
  Well. Two different answers. When you talk to
• 47:52
  anyone that sold you agramec, they said, no,
• 47:55
  it's not bad on predators. In reality, it's bad
• 47:58
  on predators. So, you know, once again, people
• 48:01
  sell you things. People have different ulterior
• 48:03
  motives for selling chemistry. Some of the manufacturers
• 48:05
  have different motives than the salespeople do.
• 48:08
  And the salespeople have different motives than
• 48:11
  the grower does. So there's a chain in there.
• 48:14
  But at the end of the day, agramec. Probably
• 48:19
  was hard on predators too. Pretty tough to count
• 48:23
  predators when it took out all the prey. It was
• 48:25
  awesome at what it did. It was a fantastic miticide.
• 48:29
  Took out all different generations of mites and
• 48:31
  it worked great for us. It would have been interesting
• 48:33
  to see how long that miticide would have stayed
• 48:37
  effective if people would treated it like they
• 48:41
  treat chemistries today. Or I guess the majority
• 48:43
  of the industry treats chemistries today, which
• 48:46
  is... cycle different chemistries hopefully only
• 48:50
  use it once a year maybe don't even use it every
• 48:54
  year things like that to where you at least slow
• 48:57
  down the cyclical nature yeah the the you slow
• 49:01
  the cycle of of how it how it spins out We are
• 49:07
  way better at that today, and a lot of things
• 49:10
  have contributed to that. Because of Agromech,
• 49:13
  we're better at stewarding products. But Agromech
• 49:15
  is not totally, and here's the Paul Harvey rest
• 49:17
  of the story, Agromech is not the grower's fault
• 49:20
  completely. What happened with Agromech also
• 49:23
  was the carrier that is used within that chemistry
• 49:26
  to carry the active ingredient was switched by
• 49:29
  the manufacturer one winter. I forgot about this
• 49:32
  because they had some liability with that carrier
• 49:35
  on another crop, that crop being pears. And so
• 49:39
  that manufacturer quietly said, Hey, we're going
• 49:41
  to safe in it on pears. And we're going to change
• 49:44
  the carrier group that carries that active ingredient
• 49:47
  in agri -mech. And we're going to just keep marketing
• 49:49
  it to the same market. And so you have a coincidence
• 49:52
  of people using lighter rates, the product may
• 49:57
  be having less efficacy with a different carrier.
• 50:01
  And then there's a perfect storm. And then you
• 50:03
  have resistance happen. And I believe, I forget
• 50:06
  the real number, I think it takes six times the
• 50:09
  lethal dose of Agromech to kill a laboratory
• 50:12
  population of mites today. So the lethal dose
• 50:15
  of Agromech used to be 16 ounces to the acre.
• 50:18
  So 6 ,000 times that, and you should be able
• 50:20
  to control your mites today. What was the carrier
• 50:23
  difference? Um, I believe they went to a water
• 50:28
  base from a xylene base to a water base. And
• 50:30
  once again, someone listened to this is going
• 50:32
  to catch me on detail, but the, the base, the
• 50:35
  alcohol, let's say there was an alcohol type
• 50:37
  of base and it left a tobacco stain on pears,
• 50:40
  which was another crop that had might pressure
• 50:42
  that agramec would work on. They changed that
• 50:46
  carrier. Now, did they advertise it? They might've,
• 50:48
  but I mean, no one thought it was a big deal.
• 50:49
  Well, it ended up being a big deal with efficacy
• 50:51
  and whether that was a coincidence between, you
• 50:54
  know, our rate, Changes that the growers were
• 50:56
  doing and the carrier. But either way, lessons
• 51:00
  like that over the years get you to really pay
• 51:03
  attention to chemistries. And so the value of
• 51:07
  what we do today is help steward chemistries
• 51:11
  for the manufacturers to the growers. We help
• 51:15
  the growers grow the best, cleanest, highest
• 51:18
  quality crop that they can. And we try to, once
• 51:22
  again, steward those frat groups. Frat groups
• 51:25
  are the active ingredients that different chemistries
• 51:27
  are made of, whether they're fungicides, miticides,
• 51:30
  different insecticides. We cannot use the same
• 51:34
  active ingredient back to back to back, or that's
• 51:36
  where resistances build. Can you talk more about
• 51:40
  that for listeners who don't maybe know how resistance
• 51:44
  happens? When a population of pests is exposed
• 51:50
  to the same active ingredient too many times
• 51:53
  and you have too many survivors within that population
• 51:56
  and their genes, for lack of a better term, become
• 51:59
  survivor genes and they're able to pass those
• 52:02
  survivor genes on, eventually your entire population
• 52:05
  gains a resistance to whatever active ingredient
• 52:09
  that you're trying to put on them, whether that's
• 52:11
  a miticide for mites, whether that's a fungicide
• 52:13
  for powdery mildew. All of our pests that we
• 52:19
  compete with for your crop, God made them really
• 52:24
  good at what they do. And so we have to be not
• 52:28
  better. We just have to be able to coexist with
• 52:31
  them. So we're never going to beat the pests.
• 52:34
  We just have to coexist with them in a world
• 52:36
  that allows you to sustainably produce a crop
• 52:40
  that you can make money from, that we can make
• 52:43
  money from while we're delivering the inputs.
• 52:46
  and that everybody can make a living on. I think
• 52:48
  that's an important word, coexist. Because if
• 52:54
  you rewind back to, you know, when you started
• 52:58
  and what I remember is that people wanted to
• 53:01
  see zeros. Like if you went in and you tried
• 53:04
  to control a pest or a problem, you wanted it
• 53:09
  to be zero when you're done spraying. And I think
• 53:12
  these days we're looking at a way to coexist
• 53:14
  and we're looking at just controlling things,
• 53:18
  right? Absolutely. Steering them in the right
• 53:20
  direction. Steering them in the right direction
• 53:21
  and using all the tools in the toolbox, you know,
• 53:24
  protecting wise and also the tools that you have
• 53:28
  in the field, predators, et cetera, et cetera.
• 53:30
  And so I think that the. The tolerances have
• 53:33
  changed quite a bit over the years. And on the
• 53:36
  growers' end, the tolerances have changed. On
• 53:38
  our end as field people, they've definitely changed.
• 53:40
  And so, yeah, the mentality of what your end
• 53:44
  product is, it still changes. It changes all
• 53:47
  the time. I mean, I have different mite mentalities
• 53:50
  on different regional areas and different farms
• 53:53
  that changed last year. I mean, last year was
• 53:55
  2025. I started doing this in 1991. I learned
• 53:59
  something brand new about a mite population in
• 54:01
  the Harrah area, treated them totally different
• 54:04
  last year with complete success. Success I hadn't
• 54:07
  had for years ahead. I've always had enough success
• 54:09
  to have them as a client, but found a whole new
• 54:12
  success just in tweaking something new. And I
• 54:15
  mean, once again, we change things all the time.
• 54:17
  When we first started walking, the graves piece
• 54:20
  of Roy Farms was the first drip that Dee and
• 54:23
  I ever walked. That was like walking in a park
• 54:25
  because before that. William Gasling Ranch, Leo
• 54:27
  Gasling and Sons. Oh, real? That was seven by
• 54:29
  seven spacing. Dude, I remember walking through
• 54:32
  talcum powder. Talcum powder or mud to your knees.
• 54:35
  And those aren't like old war stories, but we're
• 54:37
  still, I mean, I have a collection of horseshoes
• 54:39
  at home, mule and draft shoes at home because
• 54:41
  we walked in such worked up ground that we would
• 54:45
  find the old draft shoes all the time. I probably
• 54:47
  have 30 or 40 of those things at home from 150
• 54:49
  years ago from when these guys started breaking
• 54:52
  their farms open. You don't see that anymore
• 54:54
  because everything is, farmed differently and
• 54:57
  not disked and cross -disked. But on that same
• 54:59
  note, technology has brought different challenges
• 55:03
  to us. The technology of drip is awesome. We
• 55:06
  could not get away in a world with real irrigating,
• 55:09
  flood irrigating hops anymore. The soil management,
• 55:13
  the water management, we couldn't do that. So
• 55:15
  we have to be on drip irrigation. But it was
• 55:18
  an awesome thing when we first got it because
• 55:20
  of the management, how we could manage irrigating
• 55:23
  so many more acres with less people. And it was
• 55:26
  a great tool. And it still is an amazing tool,
• 55:28
  and it's the only way we can irrigate hops. But
• 55:31
  with that technology came new challenges. We
• 55:34
  have more anaerobic diseases. Anaerobic diseases
• 55:38
  occur when we overwater a plant. Oh, now you're
• 55:41
  getting into my love language. Isn't it weird
• 55:43
  that we went from farming them like a rice paddy
• 55:46
  and flooding the entire field, and we never had
• 55:49
  anaerobic diseases or waterborne diseases? But
• 55:53
  now we farm them on drip on these perfect little
• 55:55
  rows. And now we induce this anaerobic disease.
• 56:00
  And the reason is, is when we worked the ground
• 56:03
  as much as we used to work the ground, we would
• 56:05
  give the ground time to rest and dry out. So
• 56:07
  we would irrigate them for three or four days
• 56:09
  straight. And aerate, oxygen. And aerate. So
• 56:12
  once they dried out for four or five days, the
• 56:15
  first thing a farmer did was disc and cross disc.
• 56:17
  There's your aeration. That root system got to
• 56:21
  completely dry out, get thirsty again, and then
• 56:23
  we reintroduced it with water. It's human nature
• 56:26
  now. We have this tiny little drip system. And,
• 56:28
  I mean, everybody works against what I'm about
• 56:31
  to complain about. But when it gets hot, that
• 56:35
  water runs for 12 hours a day on a drip system.
• 56:39
  Not 12 continuous hours. Sometimes 12 continuous
• 56:42
  hours. It runs a lot of time. We can't pull this
• 56:45
  off on a house plant. And yet we expect it to
• 56:50
  be pulled off in a field with variable soils
• 56:52
  across 30 miles of growing region. And we hope
• 56:56
  that we don't overwater them. We're going to
• 56:58
  do that every time. So technology sometimes brings
• 57:01
  new challenges. We have more root disease and
• 57:06
  more anaerobic disease today than we did when
• 57:10
  we were doing this with mules. Well, and I mean,
• 57:14
  yes, we got new challenges and we're looking
• 57:16
  at new technology to solve those new challenges.
• 57:19
  Shout out to Vital Agronomics is working on that.
• 57:21
  That's awesome. It is. I mean, if it's a real
• 57:24
  meter that can measure real moisture, that's
• 57:28
  very valuable. It's not easy, but there's ways
• 57:32
  to do it. Other agronomic challenges that are...
• 57:37
  different that come out of nowhere. I mean, mites,
• 57:40
  they've always been in the hops. Powdery mildew,
• 57:42
  if you're in England, they've been in the hops
• 57:43
  for 400 years. If you're in the United States,
• 57:45
  they've been in the hops for 25, 30 years. We
• 57:48
  can manage powdery mildew. We've got really good
• 57:51
  chemistries. Once again, the main manufacturers
• 57:53
  have come up with some pretty great fungicides
• 57:56
  that help us manage powdery mildew pretty well
• 58:01
  today. So we've got good game plans going into
• 58:03
  a growing season. And then you have a season
• 58:07
  where five or 10 years ago, the vines are getting
• 58:11
  chewed up. And this is just a weird thing. Why
• 58:13
  are these vines all getting chewed up? This isn't
• 58:15
  anything that we've looked at for 25 years and
• 58:17
  it becomes a vole issue and whatever selection,
• 58:22
  whatever winter happened for whatever reason,
• 58:25
  the rats of them happen and the voles come out
• 58:28
  and by variety select and decide to eat our hops.
• 58:32
  I just had a little bit of PTSD. Exactly. And
• 58:35
  then the state was like, do you guys really need
• 58:38
  this label for rodenticides? And I'll never forget,
• 58:42
  I took the regulator that day up to Holy Rosary
• 58:45
  Cemetery and looked over this valley. I was like,
• 58:47
  what do you think? And he said, oh, my Lord.
• 58:50
  I said, that is a citra variety. And they went
• 58:53
  to that because they got done eating that variety.
• 58:55
  They're not eating that one because it's not
• 58:57
  as desired right now. It was crazy. You never
• 59:01
  know what's going to come. I don't think any
• 59:03
  grower that's ever grown hops has ever had voles
• 59:05
  be an issue. But, I mean, they were such an issue
• 59:08
  that year. What was that, $3 million -ish in
• 59:11
  damage? I mean, I stopped calculating on our
• 59:16
  own farm when I got to like $4 million to $5
• 59:18
  million of damage that year. That's a big number
• 59:20
  for a tiny creature, lots of them. So, yeah,
• 59:24
  by the end of that year, working with growers,
• 59:26
  working with the state, working with regulatory.
• 59:29
  we get a label for rodenticides. So those are
• 59:33
  the active things with communicating within the
• 59:36
  community. And I think we had a little bit higher,
• 59:39
  higher of an impact because of some of the no
• 59:42
  -till practices. Yep. Maybe. Yep. But everybody
• 59:45
  was impacted. It was bad. Yeah. Oh yeah. This,
• 59:48
  that, that actually leads really well into another
• 59:50
  question I have for you. Although I've always
• 59:52
  wondered, although it led to the harvest posters,
• 59:54
  it did lead to the harvest post. So maybe, maybe
• 59:58
  we've, We know there's no ROI on that. Eh, I
• 1:00:03
  don't know. Maybe. I've always wondered this.
• 1:00:07
  How, as a chemical supplier in a very niche industry,
• 1:00:16
  how the hell do you interface with the manufacturers
• 1:00:23
  and the research teams at Bayer or whoever, you
• 1:00:27
  know, is producing these chemicals? Do you go
• 1:00:29
  to trade shows or like, how do you find what's
• 1:00:32
  next and how do you prove that it works? And
• 1:00:35
  like, that seems like a real task when you're
• 1:00:40
  looking at crops all over the world. And I assume
• 1:00:43
  there's a lot of actors in that space. I don't
• 1:00:45
  know. There's a ton of actors in that space.
• 1:00:48
  And so the manufacturers that we deal with send
• 1:00:52
  reps our direction and those reps are different
• 1:00:54
  levels. You'll have factory reps that come. introduce
• 1:00:57
  chemistries to you they will tell you about numbered
• 1:01:00
  chemistries that are down the pipeline and so
• 1:01:04
  there's let's say we're down to five or six main
• 1:01:06
  manufacturers now and they do a depending on
• 1:01:10
  the manufacturer they do a job of putting reps
• 1:01:13
  in front of us as retailers like pharmaceutical
• 1:01:15
  sales type thing very similar so when you sit
• 1:01:18
  in a doctor's office and one after another in
• 1:01:20
  a suit come walking in to talk to your doctor
• 1:01:22
  while you're waiting to talk to your doctor Very
• 1:01:25
  similar to that, not as common. But, I mean,
• 1:01:27
  we know our reps. We get regional reps. They
• 1:01:29
  come in. They educate us on what's new, what
• 1:01:32
  chemistries they're working on, what number of
• 1:01:34
  chemistries they have. I think the bigger thing
• 1:01:36
  that we depend on are the David Gents of the
• 1:01:39
  world, the people that are in the pipeline that
• 1:01:43
  actually look at the chemistries in the field.
• 1:01:46
  And so, luckily, by cooperating with state -level
• 1:01:51
  regulatory people, With the people like the David
• 1:01:55
  Gents, we get early looks at chemistries, not
• 1:01:58
  by the manufacturer, but by people that are testing
• 1:02:01
  them against real world scenarios. And so that's
• 1:02:06
  the data that we look at ahead of time. So the
• 1:02:08
  education comes, it depends on the different
• 1:02:10
  manufacturers, with all due respect to them,
• 1:02:13
  it comes from different angles and in different
• 1:02:16
  forms. Once again, if I remember every day that
• 1:02:20
  I'm dealing with a pharmaceutical company before
• 1:02:22
  I'm dealing with an ag chemistry supplier, that's
• 1:02:27
  a pretty good mindset to get in when we talk
• 1:02:29
  to them. Everybody wants something. They want
• 1:02:31
  their pound of active ingredient on the ground.
• 1:02:34
  And all I want to do as your supplier of Roy
• 1:02:37
  Farms is make sure that when you're spending
• 1:02:40
  that money with me, that it has efficacy for
• 1:02:43
  you and it is making you money. Not all manufacturers
• 1:02:45
  have that in mind. And it's nothing against the
• 1:02:47
  manufacturer, but that's just the way business
• 1:02:49
  is. They want to sell you something. So there's
• 1:02:53
  less innovation today in chemistries. There's
• 1:02:58
  not as many new chemistries being produced today
• 1:03:01
  as there was 35 years ago. Why? Because of the
• 1:03:05
  regulatory. And it's for a good reason in a lot
• 1:03:08
  of ways. And, I mean, we have a lot more restrictions.
• 1:03:12
  a lot more restrictions of what chemistries,
• 1:03:14
  what residues we can have when we send them abroad.
• 1:03:18
  We have safety issues for the last, you know,
• 1:03:21
  50 years where we discover maybe this isn't the
• 1:03:24
  best thing for people or maybe this is okay for
• 1:03:27
  people and it just has a bad name. So, I mean,
• 1:03:29
  it's hard to be in the chemical business. And,
• 1:03:32
  I mean, if I'm in Seattle and I get introduced
• 1:03:33
  to someone. And, you know, and they say, what
• 1:03:36
  do you do? So I sell chemical and fertilizer.
• 1:03:38
  Oh, you kill people. And they look at me sideways.
• 1:03:41
  Well, do you sell anything organic? And I smile
• 1:03:43
  and I say, absolutely, I do. And well, how much
• 1:03:46
  organic stuff do you sell? I sell tons of organic
• 1:03:48
  stuff. Well, how many organic growers do you
• 1:03:51
  have? Not very many. I sell a lot of organic
• 1:03:54
  stuff to conventional acres because it helps
• 1:03:56
  me break up conventional chemistries. It helps
• 1:03:58
  me stay away from conventional chemistries. It
• 1:04:01
  helps me finish a season without having to deal
• 1:04:04
  with. Oh, yeah. Minimum residue level, which
• 1:04:06
  is something all three of us deal with, with
• 1:04:08
  the residues of chemistries that are on our hops
• 1:04:11
  when we market them overseas. So I sell a ton
• 1:04:14
  of organic chemistries, and they're not always
• 1:04:17
  to organic acres. They help me get through a
• 1:04:20
  conventional acre in a conventional season. And
• 1:04:23
  it's not to pick at people, too, but, I mean,
• 1:04:25
  when they say, well, what about an organic acre
• 1:04:28
  of whatever? And I love selling things to organic
• 1:04:31
  acres. But an organic acre takes three and four
• 1:04:34
  times as much diesel per acre to travel across.
• 1:04:38
  It's not from a carbon footprint perspective.
• 1:04:40
  It's not. We're not having that conversation.
• 1:04:42
  It's not. And so that's where I will throw that.
• 1:04:45
  I don't throw that in people's face, but I just
• 1:04:47
  go, you know, think about this perspective. That
• 1:04:49
  organic might be, in your mind, cleaner residue
• 1:04:52
  level, but. Unfortunately, we don't have a certification
• 1:04:57
  program that plays in the middle. It's black
• 1:05:00
  or white, conventional or organic. So I have
• 1:05:03
  a question about that. So over the years, whether
• 1:05:06
  it's regulatory or other, maybe it's a certification
• 1:05:11
  program, we've seen some shift to pure organic
• 1:05:15
  production, but we've also seen a shift to more
• 1:05:19
  of a sustainable way of farming. conventional
• 1:05:24
  acres how have you seen that landscape change
• 1:05:27
  benefits negatives you know maybe with a program
• 1:05:31
  like salmon safe or something like that where
• 1:05:35
  it kind of is attempting to play in the middle
• 1:05:37
  there and there's chemistries that you aren't
• 1:05:40
  allowed to use there's chemistries that you can
• 1:05:42
  get an exemption for within a growing season
• 1:05:46
  Yeah, no, what's your thoughts on all of that?
• 1:05:47
  I think that thinking about what we put on every
• 1:05:50
  acre of what we produce is an important thing
• 1:05:52
  that we always need to do. I think that whatever
• 1:05:56
  organization that we're part of as a grower or
• 1:05:59
  as a retailer of chemical, I think that we should
• 1:06:03
  demand from those organizations, whether it's
• 1:06:06
  Salmon Safe or whether it's OMRI certification,
• 1:06:09
  if we are going to put in a... Third more cost
• 1:06:14
  of production per acre. You have to be able to
• 1:06:18
  market for us and return that for us because
• 1:06:20
  we can't just do this for exercise. We do do
• 1:06:24
  a lot of it just to feel better, and we do do
• 1:06:26
  a lot of it to steward the environment. Absolutely,
• 1:06:30
  but we have to get rewarded for that. Some of
• 1:06:33
  those organizations that we've talked about have
• 1:06:35
  not. I haven't seen, in my experience, I haven't
• 1:06:38
  seen a certification return, higher dollars.
• 1:06:43
  for some of these certifications. It's nothing
• 1:06:45
  against those certifications. I just wish that
• 1:06:47
  the end consumer would pay more for it or they
• 1:06:52
  could pay for more. It's really hard to ask anybody
• 1:06:54
  to pay more for anything right now. Oh, yeah.
• 1:06:56
  And I understand the brewer has their own cogs
• 1:07:00
  to consider just like we do. And the end consumer
• 1:07:03
  is more of the mindset of what you just talked
• 1:07:07
  about, which is, oh, is it organic? Is it not
• 1:07:09
  organic? Totally. complicate that conversation
• 1:07:13
  with everyone's view on alcohol these days. And
• 1:07:15
  that is, that is different too. I mean, once
• 1:07:18
  again, I was at dinner the other night with my
• 1:07:21
  wife and there's a young couple behind us and
• 1:07:23
  the girl went to order a second drink and the
• 1:07:27
  boyfriend was like, well, no, we took two separate
• 1:07:29
  cars. You can't have two drinks. That conversation
• 1:07:32
  never came up 25 years ago. No one, I mean, they
• 1:07:35
  stopped at one drink because they were driving.
• 1:07:38
  They didn't have two drinks or three drinks.
• 1:07:40
  I don't know about you guys, but I think we used
• 1:07:42
  to have a few more than that before. Yeah. You
• 1:07:44
  have to function. Yeah. A little bit. Once. Drew?
• 1:07:51
  Well, I was going to say even as recently as
• 1:07:53
  three days ago. Right. But I mean, isn't that
• 1:07:55
  mindset is a real spreading mindset to where
• 1:07:58
  people are. I have heard more of that. It's crazy.
• 1:08:03
  Yeah. Like don't go have six. beers, but you
• 1:08:06
  have two or three over a couple hours. I mean,
• 1:08:08
  I thought that was okay. Better yet, let's go
• 1:08:10
  have three light beers. The good news is athletics
• 1:08:12
  in every restaurant you walk into now, they're
• 1:08:15
  using hops. Dude, they're on such a crazy growth
• 1:08:19
  trajectory. I can go into 90 % of the restaurants
• 1:08:21
  I go to and ask for an athletic, and it is more
• 1:08:24
  common than a Coors. It's crazy. Everywhere.
• 1:08:28
  It is wild. But it's a good trend. They're still
• 1:08:31
  using hops. How many hops per gallon are they
• 1:08:36
  using compared to? Athletic? Yeah. As an example?
• 1:08:39
  It's pretty similar. Yeah. They buy a lot of
• 1:08:42
  hops. So have you, well, in your world, have
• 1:08:46
  you seen any change? What type of change have
• 1:08:50
  you seen as the industry has evolved from kind
• 1:08:55
  of an alpha world into craft beer and where we're
• 1:08:59
  at now? When we were in an all alpha world, powdery
• 1:09:03
  mildew was our main pest, our main problem. And
• 1:09:07
  that was years of figuring out, once again, like
• 1:09:10
  we talked about earlier, figuring out the most
• 1:09:12
  economic way to grow a hop, to grow it with the
• 1:09:16
  least amount of powdery mildew. And then as we
• 1:09:18
  transitioned into the aroma world and the craft
• 1:09:22
  brew world. With a heavy focus on cost. With
• 1:09:25
  a heavy focused on cost. That was, we are growing
• 1:09:29
  these things as dirt cheap as possible. Alpha
• 1:09:32
  was worth nothing. Those were the years that
• 1:09:35
  Butch and Ben Berlotte were out of business.
• 1:09:38
  And I mean, those were big farms that went out
• 1:09:39
  of business when it was heavy to alpha. And that
• 1:09:42
  would have been, once again, late 90s. And then
• 1:09:47
  once we transition into the aroma world. Things
• 1:09:53
  changed. I mean, now we go from very few varieties
• 1:09:56
  in the ground to name varieties, numbered varieties,
• 1:09:59
  brand new varieties. And then the world opened
• 1:10:02
  up a lot with the, when aroma came in and changed
• 1:10:06
  the dynamics of the acres, powdery mildew became
• 1:10:09
  less of a pest. Because you reduced, just reduced
• 1:10:13
  the amount of host out there. Absolutely took
• 1:10:15
  the amount of host. Now those dynamics have changed
• 1:10:17
  a little bit when. like a cascade a cascade for
• 1:10:21
  years and years was not susceptible to powdery
• 1:10:24
  mildew and then once they got hammered by enough
• 1:10:27
  inoculum they became susceptible and so we've
• 1:10:30
  always changed we've always have one or two new
• 1:10:32
  varieties a year that'll become a little more
• 1:10:34
  susceptible to powdery mildew we have to change
• 1:10:37
  how we treat them a little bit but the world
• 1:10:39
  changed because once again when everyone's flying
• 1:10:42
  in from out of town they want to see the terrar
• 1:10:45
  of hops that they're about to get for their specific
• 1:10:47
  brew the economics changed of the hop world people
• 1:10:51
  people changed their inputs people experimented
• 1:10:54
  more people wanted to tweak little changes more
• 1:10:56
  and it's a fun time it's a fun time to be in
• 1:11:00
  an agronomist because you're not talking about
• 1:11:03
  down to the down to the very last cent and i
• 1:11:06
  mean yeah now we're talking about progressive
• 1:11:08
  fun things fun things how to make the best possible
• 1:11:13
  Best possible product. Who's going to win the
• 1:11:15
  Cascade Cup this year? I mean, it is literally
• 1:11:17
  who's going to win these. It's a different scenario.
• 1:11:23
  You can take this all the way to fruition at
• 1:11:26
  the end. Four days ago, I'm in this farm, which
• 1:11:31
  I love this farm. Four days ago, I bring Oscar
• 1:11:34
  Leal on this farm to talk to your CFO to try
• 1:11:37
  to keep as much business as I can possibly keep.
• 1:11:40
  We're all friends, and we all love each other,
• 1:11:43
  and we're all interconnected as a spider web,
• 1:11:45
  but we all have to live through the current time.
• 1:11:48
  So I can tell you all the neat old stories. Which
• 1:11:50
  is back to, in a lot of cases, cost right now.
• 1:11:53
  It's down to cost, and that's all it is. It's
• 1:11:55
  not down to friendship. It's down to how much
• 1:11:57
  is a roll of toilet paper. That's important.
• 1:12:00
  We understand that as people that serve you.
• 1:12:04
  Friends are friends. Survival is everything.
• 1:12:07
  Those different sigmoid curves that we've lived
• 1:12:10
  through have been fun stuff and fun marketing
• 1:12:13
  stuff. And now we're here and we're all in it
• 1:12:18
  together and we're having real serious conversations.
• 1:12:21
  Yeah. Do margins on fertilizer and chemicals
• 1:12:24
  change significantly in cycles or is it more
• 1:12:27
  a volume game? They're on their way trending
• 1:12:29
  downward because there are less suppliers. They
• 1:12:32
  look over the fence. They all want your business.
• 1:12:35
  There's less farms surviving on a daily basis.
• 1:12:38
  They all want to stay in business. So it is more
• 1:12:42
  competitive on the farm level than it's ever
• 1:12:45
  been since Dee and I have been in business. When
• 1:12:48
  you talked about the sale to McGregor, was that
• 1:12:53
  more of a where you guys are at in your life?
• 1:13:00
  Or was that also looking at the future and kind
• 1:13:03
  of some of the headwinds that were coming? And
• 1:13:05
  saying, you know what? Like, maybe it's time.
• 1:13:08
  I had run a bunch of spreadsheets. And I had
• 1:13:10
  done a bunch of metrics on it. And no, kidding.
• 1:13:16
  I was going to say, what? D &I sold. Based off
• 1:13:24
  my dashboard. He's looking at me like, what?
• 1:13:27
  I was thinking, wait, this is going to. McGregor's
• 1:13:30
  is going to be like, wait, you set us up for
• 1:13:33
  this? No. Very nice people there, by the way.
• 1:13:36
  They're awesome. They're amazing. Here's the
• 1:13:38
  real deal. The real deal is that you have two
• 1:13:41
  brothers that started a business that hoped that
• 1:13:43
  it would just keep running. And it kept running
• 1:13:46
  and it kept building. And it accumulated, once
• 1:13:48
  again, a bunch of amazing people that trusted
• 1:13:51
  us and came to work with us over. 20 to 30 years.
• 1:13:55
  And now we look at each other. We're in our 50s.
• 1:13:58
  We've got four kids between the two of us. All
• 1:14:01
  of them are driven to go in different directions.
• 1:14:03
  We didn't breed them to take over the family
• 1:14:06
  business. It wasn't even discussed. They just
• 1:14:08
  all did their own deal. And so now Dee and I
• 1:14:11
  look up. There's no succession plan. There's
• 1:14:14
  a bunch of amazing Oscar Leals. And I mean, all
• 1:14:17
  the people, all the people that work with us
• 1:14:18
  that have put all their faith into their whole
• 1:14:20
  future. what are you going to do? You're going
• 1:14:23
  to run it till you have enough money and then
• 1:14:24
  turn the lights out and say, thanks everybody.
• 1:14:26
  And so we were never going to do that. So we
• 1:14:29
  wanted a home for DNM and we wanted a home for
• 1:14:32
  everybody that put their faith in us forever.
• 1:14:34
  And so that was the motivating reason to sell.
• 1:14:37
  So for the record, when DNI sold to McGregor
• 1:14:40
  and we said yes to selling to McGregor, you guys
• 1:14:43
  were still happy. I mean, we were still all in
• 1:14:47
  a chunking upward mood. Apples have always had
• 1:14:50
  a cloud and, hey, how are we going to fix this?
• 1:14:53
  How are we going to grow less boxes? How are
• 1:14:55
  we going to get this done? We had no clue what
• 1:14:59
  was coming around the corner. So none of that
• 1:15:01
  was like, hey, this is our escape pod. We're
• 1:15:04
  doing this. So now, now. You want to talk about
• 1:15:07
  responsibility. It's different to run a business
• 1:15:10
  when if you mess up, it's just you and your brother
• 1:15:12
  in the room. You can reconcile that in that room
• 1:15:15
  and go, OK, it won't happen again. Now you have
• 1:15:17
  the pressure of running that business for somebody
• 1:15:20
  else. Sure. So now I have more pressure. I mean,
• 1:15:23
  this is just me personally and the way my brain
• 1:15:25
  works. I have more pressure on me performing
• 1:15:27
  for somebody else than I did just with my brother.
• 1:15:30
  We could fight about it, talk about it, hug about
• 1:15:32
  it or whatever. Now it's for somebody else, and
• 1:15:35
  you have a potential of getting questioned by
• 1:15:37
  someone else, why did you do this? I don't like
• 1:15:40
  that. But it's a new reality, and it's awesome.
• 1:15:43
  And so once again, I'm glad that we have the
• 1:15:46
  strength and the size that we do going into this
• 1:15:49
  environment that we're in right now. We have
• 1:15:51
  a lot of competition against us, and we have
• 1:15:54
  national competition. So once again, Dee and
• 1:15:57
  Matthias sold their business to another family
• 1:16:00
  -owned business that's strong and is big. And
• 1:16:02
  it's got a great set of ethics. And they are
• 1:16:04
  amazing. And they're a family. Now we're all
• 1:16:07
  one family. We're competing against national
• 1:16:10
  competition that wants business, that now has
• 1:16:13
  some fears of fertilizer supply, has fuel cost
• 1:16:17
  supply. So we've got big competition. And the
• 1:16:22
  only thing that keeps us competing against them
• 1:16:25
  is caring more or the perception of caring more.
• 1:16:28
  And it's not a perception. It's bred into all
• 1:16:31
  of us, and we work hard. And it's because of
• 1:16:35
  families like Roy Farms and families like this
• 1:16:38
  family. I mean, Leslie taught us a lot of what
• 1:16:41
  we needed to listen to early with business, and
• 1:16:44
  we've listened to him, and it's worked. Was there
• 1:16:46
  any point along the way where you and Dee just
• 1:16:52
  thought, this might not work out? The $500 bill
• 1:16:56
  on the bag phone early on. I was like, this is
• 1:16:59
  not. This is not sustainable, D. No, there's
• 1:17:03
  never, there've been some horribly stressful
• 1:17:07
  points in our career, late in our career, not
• 1:17:10
  even early, like late in our career, massively
• 1:17:12
  stressful events that when you don't, when you
• 1:17:17
  don't give yourself the option of failing, then
• 1:17:21
  you don't have the fear of failing. You know
• 1:17:22
  what I mean? You don't have an, I mean, I don't
• 1:17:24
  have an option to fail. There's 30 other families,
• 1:17:26
  so we're not going to fail. So this is incredibly
• 1:17:29
  stressful and incredibly hard. How are we going
• 1:17:32
  to fix this? What do we have to do to fix it?
• 1:17:33
  I think you and I have talked around a specific
• 1:17:36
  episode that happened later on in your guys'
• 1:17:39
  career, but I don't even know if you've ever
• 1:17:40
  told me the whole story on that. Not getting
• 1:17:42
  that one. Nope. Nope. Massively stressful. The
• 1:17:46
  world gets even and life goes on. I have about
• 1:17:53
  just for the. for those, I mean, we've been going
• 1:17:55
  for about an hour and a half, so we're doing
• 1:17:56
  really good. However much longer we, we go, I
• 1:17:59
  have some, some funny stories to, to ask questions
• 1:18:02
  about that we can weave in, but I can save those
• 1:18:06
  till you're done. I was going to go into when
• 1:18:10
  we got out of business, I was going to go into
• 1:18:12
  some more funny questions. Yeah. Do you have
• 1:18:15
  any more business related questions? Cause I
• 1:18:17
  think we've covered, I mean, it's been great.
• 1:18:18
  I think we've, I've just been checking stuff
• 1:18:19
  off at the business. Yeah. I guess one more just
• 1:18:26
  tying together the relationship that you have
• 1:18:30
  with all the farms and the good times and the
• 1:18:34
  hard times. I've got a good story for that one.
• 1:18:40
  Cool. Really good story for that one. And it
• 1:18:42
  has to do with the good and the bad because a
• 1:18:47
  really neat moment for D &I was selling our business.
• 1:18:51
  I mean, when it was finally a done deal, I think
• 1:18:54
  February 21st of two and a part years ago, and
• 1:18:59
  I knew that it was, okay, this is going to be
• 1:19:01
  a public thing. I talked to Dee about it, and
• 1:19:04
  I said, Dee, we need to let growers know that
• 1:19:06
  we're sold. It had been a month of people kind
• 1:19:09
  of talking about it a little bit, and it's just
• 1:19:11
  me and my weird mentality. I went to our hop
• 1:19:15
  growers in the exact same. order that we started
• 1:19:18
  our business with. And so I went to William Gassling
• 1:19:21
  Ranch first. I went to Leo Gassling and Son next.
• 1:19:25
  I went to Leslie Roy, Van Horn, Morford, worked
• 1:19:31
  my way down Fort Road with the Gamashes that
• 1:19:34
  are still in business and talked with them. And
• 1:19:36
  so the good times and the bad, the good times
• 1:19:40
  have come. During different times, the good times
• 1:19:46
  have also come during bad times. You appreciate
• 1:19:49
  the different flows of things that come to you.
• 1:19:52
  I mean, I remember asking my brother, what in
• 1:19:54
  the hell are we doing this for? When it's 105
• 1:19:56
  degrees and you're in a Land Cruiser, you've
• 1:19:59
  got a big bucket of water, you know, an igloo
• 1:20:02
  cooler. And I'm like, why are we doing this every
• 1:20:04
  day? And I didn't know at the time. I knew that
• 1:20:07
  it was just work and you got paid to do it. But
• 1:20:10
  I didn't know the discipline of doing something
• 1:20:12
  that is bothersome and hot and tiring and for
• 1:20:15
  somebody else would eventually pay off over time.
• 1:20:19
  So the early times weren't stressful, but they
• 1:20:21
  were bad times. They weren't stressful. Later
• 1:20:24
  on, you know, you've got all kinds of support
• 1:20:26
  staff, but you can have bad times because different
• 1:20:29
  stresses come on. You know, I mean, different
• 1:20:31
  stresses, whether they're money or people, those
• 1:20:34
  are. Those come at different times. So my stresses
• 1:20:37
  and good and bad times have come at different
• 1:20:39
  times than the industries have. Sometimes they
• 1:20:42
  don't coincide. Interesting. Yeah. That must've
• 1:20:45
  been a pretty cool full circle slash emotional
• 1:20:47
  moment to go back and talk to the growers that
• 1:20:52
  you started doing business with. I cried. I cried
• 1:20:54
  talking to Morford. I mean, I absolutely did.
• 1:20:57
  And that's what happens when you have kids and
• 1:20:58
  you lose family. And so you can cry a lot easier,
• 1:21:01
  but I mean, I'm sitting there curling a lip.
• 1:21:03
  Talking to Morford, I mean, Gary Morford was
• 1:21:06
  40 -some years old. I mean, the other day, just
• 1:21:09
  to really tie crud in, the other day I was coming
• 1:21:11
  down to this farm, and I just needed a break,
• 1:21:14
  so I went into the backside of Field 23, back
• 1:21:16
  by the pond, back the little irrigation pond.
• 1:21:19
  That was one of our little hiding holes. It's
• 1:21:21
  exactly where it was. I went back there. That
• 1:21:23
  might have been just an old, huh. Anyway, I went
• 1:21:26
  back there, and it was nice, and I just sat in
• 1:21:28
  my truck, and I didn't want to see anybody, and
• 1:21:31
  I hear a tractor coming. I'm like, dang it. somebody's
• 1:21:33
  coming of all people it was rafael on a backhoe
• 1:21:36
  and i mean rafael is a guy that's worked on this
• 1:21:39
  farm he's 60 some years old he's worked on this
• 1:21:41
  farm forever and he still has a dark goatee and
• 1:21:45
  mine is white at this point in time but he doesn't
• 1:21:48
  age he doesn't age at all i mean he should have
• 1:21:50
  been a model in a different life and a different
• 1:21:52
  career the guy should have been a model but he
• 1:21:53
  comes around the corner and i just thought what
• 1:21:56
  a cathartic Just an awesome moment. I came back
• 1:21:59
  here for some quiet, and I ran into one of the
• 1:22:02
  first people I'd ever see when I'm just out slugging
• 1:22:04
  it through these hop yards, disc 7x7 in a Land
• 1:22:09
  Cruiser. And here we are both kind of doing the
• 1:22:12
  same thing, finding a quiet corner. He was actually
• 1:22:14
  working, fixing an irrigation system. But I started,
• 1:22:20
  the weird part is I got on the phone. So I go
• 1:22:22
  from a quiet moment, I wave at Rafael. I get
• 1:22:25
  on the phone and then I start moving because,
• 1:22:27
  oh, here's business. And I start moving and going.
• 1:22:30
  And then I thought, nope, stop. And I stopped
• 1:22:33
  and I got out of my truck and went over and shook
• 1:22:35
  Raphael's hand. He was like, what are you doing?
• 1:22:36
  I said, I'm just busy. I'm going and doing stuff.
• 1:22:38
  But I said, I just wanted to say hi to you. And
• 1:22:40
  so I went over and saw Raphael. And those are
• 1:22:42
  the neat things that remind you that a lot of
• 1:22:45
  time has gone by, but it's still the same sounds,
• 1:22:48
  the same blackbirds in the pond. It's the same.
• 1:22:52
  irrigation wear box that you hear the water running
• 1:22:54
  over the wear box. And a lot of things can change,
• 1:22:57
  but it's still the same. Do you find that after
• 1:23:00
  going through the cycles of life, good and bad,
• 1:23:04
  that you enjoy those times more? It's kind of
• 1:23:06
  a corny question. It is not a corny question,
• 1:23:08
  but I mean, the older I get, the more I said
• 1:23:11
  this to someone the other day, if a kid. could
• 1:23:14
  enjoy just sitting in silence without a phone
• 1:23:16
  and just hear like the sound of a grocery bag
• 1:23:19
  the rustle of a grocery sack or something of
• 1:23:22
  just it's just kind of silence and it's just
• 1:23:25
  kind of being in yourself and with yourself I'm
• 1:23:29
  not good at that I'm obviously a social talky
• 1:23:32
  person but I mean something that I envy and something
• 1:23:34
  that I want to do is just be able to be still
• 1:23:37
  And it's something that we're all old enough
• 1:23:39
  to remember. You didn't always have entertainment.
• 1:23:41
  So you had times where you had to just be still
• 1:23:45
  and wait for a pickup or a ride or whatever.
• 1:23:48
  And it's neat to get a little more time to get
• 1:23:51
  those moments again. You're still fly fishing,
• 1:23:54
  yeah? Yeah. What happens when you're out there
• 1:23:57
  on the river? Do you find yourself being more
• 1:23:58
  present with just being there? Here's the crazy
• 1:24:02
  one. My wife's going to love this. The most present
• 1:24:04
  I can be anywhere. I'm admitting this publicly
• 1:24:07
  to dance lessons. Oh, you told me about this
• 1:24:10
  the other day. Nancy after years got me to finally
• 1:24:13
  start taking dance lessons with her. I don't,
• 1:24:16
  I'm the guy that would, I would go roll a vehicle
• 1:24:19
  over at the wedding to not be dancing. I don't
• 1:24:24
  want to dance. I don't want people to look at
• 1:24:25
  me. And finally, after probably enough tragedy,
• 1:24:29
  I said yes to dance lessons. I'm sure I messed
• 1:24:31
  up multiple times. So I said yes to dance lessons.
• 1:24:34
  It is something I'm not good at. It is something
• 1:24:36
  I have to completely concentrate on, and it is
• 1:24:39
  the most zen -like state because I can't think
• 1:24:41
  of a phone call. I can't think of anyone because
• 1:24:44
  I'm the lead. Or else you're stepping on her
• 1:24:46
  feet. I'm stepping on the instructor. I'm taking
• 1:24:48
  him out like Godzilla. It's horrible. Where do
• 1:24:51
  you do dance lessons at? We'll cover that later.
• 1:24:54
  This is a good plug. I think it's called Hot
• 1:24:57
  Dance. Super nice guy. Hot? Yeah, hot. Not spelled
• 1:25:02
  hot. H -A -U -T -E, I believe. The cool way.
• 1:25:04
  Oh, the cool way. Yeah. Anyway, the point is
• 1:25:07
  doing something foreign, doing something that
• 1:25:11
  takes total concentration, something I'm not
• 1:25:12
  good at. Pretty good zen moment. It's a little
• 1:25:17
  better than fly fishing because I get pissed
• 1:25:19
  at fly fishing when I don't do it well. Isn't
• 1:25:22
  that funny? Oh, I understand that one. Climbing?
• 1:25:25
  Climbing, yeah. Climbing. You're competitive
• 1:25:26
  with it. Oh, yeah. I used to watch Michael climb
• 1:25:31
  the wires. He would climb the anchor, the 45
• 1:25:34
  -degree anchor wire, just by hand and then cross
• 1:25:38
  20 feet and then cross another 20 feet and then
• 1:25:41
  climb down the wire. Yeah. This is actually one
• 1:25:45
  of the questions that I have. Tell me about a
• 1:25:48
  young Mike Roy and Andy. I would like to know
• 1:25:52
  both of these. Take us there. I had the privilege
• 1:25:56
  of having them with me. Who did Dee check with
• 1:25:59
  then? Did you guys ever ride with Dee anywhere?
• 1:26:03
  Tim Dufault was around. Maybe Tim. But I mean,
• 1:26:06
  when we started, it was you and I. Dee was kind
• 1:26:09
  of, I assume because Dee had other business stuff.
• 1:26:12
  I think he was on his own. He was just on his
• 1:26:14
  own. I think Dee was on his own. So that was,
• 1:26:16
  so Michael and I for years, it was just the two
• 1:26:20
  of us. And I mean. Once again, we grew up together
• 1:26:23
  in a hotline cruiser with no air conditioner
• 1:26:25
  for years. And so Michael not only checked Roy
• 1:26:30
  Farms hops, but he was an employee of what was
• 1:26:32
  then called Garavine Incorporated. That was before
• 1:26:35
  D &M Chem. That was our original business. And
• 1:26:38
  it came from an old family name and a combination
• 1:26:41
  of vine and old family name was Garavine. So
• 1:26:44
  anyway, Michael was with us then. It's cool not
• 1:26:51
  knowing what you don't know. I mean, I didn't,
• 1:26:53
  I mean, Leslie Roy, I knew that Leslie Roy was
• 1:26:55
  a big hop farmer and my dad had a lot of respect
• 1:26:57
  for him, but I mean, you don't know whose house
• 1:26:59
  you're walking into when you're picking up Michael
• 1:27:01
  Roy, you know, at the end of it, but it was,
• 1:27:04
  it was a neat, it was a cool process because
• 1:27:06
  Michael and I and Andy and I have different relationships.
• 1:27:10
  There are different levels of goofiness, different,
• 1:27:12
  different, different key points and different
• 1:27:15
  funny things we can talk about. Not all on air.
• 1:27:18
  We were in college. But anyway, they were always,
• 1:27:22
  it was funny because you would get some grower
• 1:27:24
  pushback. I remember a grower say, well, you
• 1:27:26
  know, I don't know if I want Michael Roy checking
• 1:27:28
  my hops because of who his dad is. I was oblivious
• 1:27:31
  to this all by the way. You kept me pretty much
• 1:27:33
  in the dark. Totally oblivious. But this is one
• 1:27:35
  of those people, with all due respect, that was
• 1:27:38
  always worried about what everyone else was doing
• 1:27:40
  and not worried about what he was doing. So he's
• 1:27:43
  no longer in the industry. And that he hasn't
• 1:27:46
  been in the industry for like 20 years, but he
• 1:27:47
  was one of the ones that pushed back. Like, you
• 1:27:49
  know, I don't want this kid reporting back to
• 1:27:51
  Roy farms, what I'm doing. Guess what? Roy farms
• 1:27:54
  is 10 years ahead of what you're doing. So. Well,
• 1:27:57
  plus like it's interesting because at the time,
• 1:27:58
  like I, all I was concerned about was doing a
• 1:28:00
  good job for you guys. Like I literally like
• 1:28:03
  that. I. There was no ulterior motive and no
• 1:28:07
  one was asking him. So, I mean, it was, it's
• 1:28:08
  a neat. Checking hops is a great thing because
• 1:28:12
  you have to start obnoxiously early in the morning.
• 1:28:15
  There's a pattern to it. I remember like two
• 1:28:18
  or three days ever that we took off, and one
• 1:28:20
  of them was from too much rain. We hung out in
• 1:28:22
  the baling string room and waited out a rainstorm.
• 1:28:26
  And then when it stopped raining, then you'd
• 1:28:28
  hold the reports upside down so they wouldn't
• 1:28:30
  get wet when you're taking leaf samples all day
• 1:28:32
  long. There's just that much dedication to this
• 1:28:35
  is a pattern that we're on. We cannot deviate
• 1:28:38
  from this pattern. If we say we're checking field
• 1:28:40
  31 on a Monday, we're going to check it at some
• 1:28:43
  point in time on Monday. And it felt a little
• 1:28:45
  bit like going to war in the morning. Like it
• 1:28:47
  was like open land cruiser driving down the road,
• 1:28:52
  just shivering, like driving down to the lower
• 1:28:55
  Valley. And we would literally commute those
• 1:28:58
  land cruisers down to Wyckoff. I mean, we were
• 1:29:00
  checking Wyckoff then and we were those land
• 1:29:02
  cruisers maxed out at 60 miles an hour. Pools
• 1:29:05
  hanging out the back. Dangerous conduit. So back
• 1:29:08
  then we didn't even have extendable poles. So
• 1:29:10
  we had Don Gasling take electrical conduit and
• 1:29:13
  at the end of it would weld the sickle. The hop
• 1:29:16
  triangle sickle blade. Yeah, the sickle blade
• 1:29:19
  at the end of it. So this thing is dangling by
• 1:29:22
  six feet out the back of the Land Cruiser every
• 1:29:25
  morning as we would go down to the lower valley
• 1:29:27
  to accomplish what our goals were. It's just
• 1:29:31
  funny because you see kids show up now at 18
• 1:29:33
  years old for their first day of checking ops
• 1:29:35
  and you meet at 4 .30 in the morning at the office.
• 1:29:37
  So that kills people. I mean, that 4 .30 is just
• 1:29:41
  shocks. Day one, it's kind of still like camp
• 1:29:44
  and fun. Day two, they're in shock. Day three,
• 1:29:46
  some want to quit. But the doing things that
• 1:29:52
  are uncomfortable over and over again, doing
• 1:29:55
  them for somebody else. It's not even for your
• 1:29:57
  own money. It's because you've contracted with
• 1:30:00
  someone and you've said you're going to be there.
• 1:30:02
  Those disciplines. I don't even, I don't even
• 1:30:04
  think you didn't pay us by the hour. It's kind
• 1:30:07
  of a, it was a pre, it was like, you're like,
• 1:30:09
  I'm going to give you this much money for the
• 1:30:10
  summer. Yep. All right. That's literally how
• 1:30:13
  DNI had it broken down too. We were like, okay,
• 1:30:15
  we're checking this many acres. Let's split this.
• 1:30:19
  And the rest is going to go to, I mean, we, it
• 1:30:21
  wasn't even, that was before child labor laws.
• 1:30:23
  I mean, we were barely not children at that point.
• 1:30:26
  Michael's younger than us. And I mean, getting
• 1:30:29
  in an unbelted set land cruiser, cruising down
• 1:30:31
  the road with Leslie Royce kid, taking him down.
• 1:30:34
  And he was sitting on the gas tank because the
• 1:30:36
  passenger is where the gas tank is. So he was
• 1:30:38
  sitting on the bomb. So that's, so Leslie gave
• 1:30:42
  us our little boy or his little boy to go abuse
• 1:30:46
  for years. And then he gave us Andy, which was
• 1:30:49
  reviews, reverse abuse because. That was Andy.
• 1:30:53
  Andy, I had so much fun with Andy, and I think
• 1:30:56
  about Andy all the time, just the perfect imitations
• 1:31:00
  that guy can do and the perfect fun, and he looks
• 1:31:03
  at life once again from a different angle. He's
• 1:31:06
  just happy. Oh, yeah. I like it a lot. I had
• 1:31:11
  a lot of fun with Andy. Now let's talk about
• 1:31:13
  what do you remember about Mike's character appearance?
• 1:31:19
  Mike's appearance? Was he like... Mike was alternative.
• 1:31:23
  Does he have like eyebrow piercings and things
• 1:31:25
  like that at this time? I think he might have
• 1:31:27
  had an eyebrow piercing. He definitely did not
• 1:31:31
  have the world's finest mustache, which he has
• 1:31:34
  today. Oh my gosh, that thing is fierce. It is
• 1:31:36
  a broom. He can grow it overnight. He can come
• 1:31:39
  right to work with a full prepared cut mustache
• 1:31:43
  with a trim level on it. He didn't have that
• 1:31:45
  then. He had piercings. He had different colors
• 1:31:48
  of hair. Fingernails. Black, I think. Black fingernails
• 1:31:55
  every once in a while. Every once in a while.
• 1:31:57
  Liz, you've got to find pictures of this, please.
• 1:31:58
  The person that was concerned about it the most
• 1:32:00
  was me. And I mean, I was close with Michael,
• 1:32:03
  but I also was just like, I don't know how these
• 1:32:05
  farmers are going to deal with it. So I, on purpose,
• 1:32:08
  would go in and report to farms for years. I
• 1:32:11
  mean, Michael was with us for years. I'd go in
• 1:32:13
  and I would leave Michael in the truck. With
• 1:32:15
  the truck air conditioner on, I think. Yeah,
• 1:32:17
  he just kind of treated me like a dog. That was
• 1:32:19
  when we had a truck of his Land Cruiser. It was
• 1:32:21
  just open, hot Land Cruiser, and there's your
• 1:32:23
  igloo cooler of water. And that was it. But for
• 1:32:27
  years, I did that. I remember, too, you just
• 1:32:29
  never really said anything. And you're just like,
• 1:32:32
  yeah, just wait in the truck. And then after
• 1:32:33
  a while, we'd go through. You'd be in there sometimes
• 1:32:36
  for half an hour, an hour. At least. And I think
• 1:32:39
  probably when I got more comfortable with you,
• 1:32:40
  I was like, so why can't I come in? And you gave
• 1:32:45
  me some kind of generic response like, oh, well,
• 1:32:47
  some of these growers just aren't comfortable
• 1:32:49
  talking to a lot of people at the same time.
• 1:32:52
  Yep. And that was absolutely me. And that was
• 1:32:55
  absolutely my fault. And one of the proponents
• 1:32:58
  for Michael was my dad. He was just like. what
• 1:33:01
  are you doing and eventually the kevin reels
• 1:33:04
  of the world demanded that they wanted to talk
• 1:33:06
  to all the people that were looking at their
• 1:33:07
  fields and not get a translation from me and
• 1:33:10
  uh kevin then realized how great michael roy
• 1:33:13
  was in his life yeah it's funny ken kevin will
• 1:33:15
  still to this day say you taught me a valuable
• 1:33:17
  lesson never judge a book by its cover that is
• 1:33:19
  for sure that is for sure and i've not always
• 1:33:22
  been great at that too and i mean i knew michael
• 1:33:24
  i knew what michael was but I was also very cognizant.
• 1:33:27
  Is this going to affect my little business? And
• 1:33:29
  so that's my fault. Completely my fault. I love
• 1:33:33
  it. Yep. One of my finer moments was going down
• 1:33:37
  to the Berlotte property. With Lester Roy. That
• 1:33:43
  is Leslie's dad. That is your grandpa, which
• 1:33:45
  you obviously know. Speaking of street credibility,
• 1:33:48
  when you can say that you have shot birds out
• 1:33:51
  of a Jeep Grand Cherokee with Lester Roy, and
• 1:33:56
  he drops you off at the front office and 20 -gauge
• 1:33:59
  shotgun shells roll out, you know you've made
• 1:34:02
  it, and I did make it. I got to do that with
• 1:34:04
  your grandpa, and that is a proud moment in my
• 1:34:08
  career. Neat guy. His little playground down
• 1:34:12
  there? Yep, that was his playground. Beto was
• 1:34:14
  his right -hand guy, and they ran cattle still
• 1:34:16
  down below 789 on your bench. They did some dumb
• 1:34:19
  stuff down there, too. Waterways. They helped
• 1:34:22
  the waterways. Drove his Jeep Grand Cherokee,
• 1:34:25
  like, into the water. The backhoe into the water.
• 1:34:29
  The backhoe into the water. Fried the engine.
• 1:34:32
  Had his swans down there. Had David Roy go try
• 1:34:36
  and collect the swans, and he had to end up punching
• 1:34:39
  the swan in the face because it attacked him.
• 1:34:41
  It beat him up, and some of the swans ended up
• 1:34:43
  at Gary Morford's island ranch. Remember some
• 1:34:46
  of those swans? Oh, I don't remember that. Those
• 1:34:48
  swans ended up at Gary Morford's ranch, where
• 1:34:50
  a lot of people have been married. Yep. Interesting.
• 1:34:55
  Shotgun shells falling out of the... He would
• 1:34:57
  roll around at the end of Lester's career. He'd
• 1:34:59
  cruise around just shotgunning birds and shooting
• 1:35:01
  stuff out of the Jeep Cherokee. It was magic.
• 1:35:04
  Most of it was away from the farm. I mean, you
• 1:35:07
  get to see different people in different points
• 1:35:10
  and times in their career. My exposure to Lester
• 1:35:13
  Roy, Lester was 65 to 70 years old. He's got
• 1:35:16
  Leslie firing on nine cylinders, just screaming
• 1:35:19
  out of this office building. He's got Jerry Roy
• 1:35:22
  building CAs. He's got Mark building orchard,
• 1:35:27
  paving roads up through the orchard. And he's
• 1:35:30
  got everything going. So I got to see him in
• 1:35:32
  that point in time in his career. So the Lester
• 1:35:36
  Roy I saw was shooting birds and hanging out.
• 1:35:38
  That's not the Lester Roy that was 20 years before
• 1:35:40
  that, making all of them dig ditches and farm
• 1:35:43
  hops. And so the moment in time you get to meet
• 1:35:47
  people also is the experience you get with people
• 1:35:49
  too. So I got a neat window of time with Lester,
• 1:35:52
  and I still get a neat window of time. What's
• 1:35:55
  still impressive. is if I go to a funeral or
• 1:35:58
  I'm at something big in Moxie and I look over
• 1:36:00
  and there's Emma Roy and when she says, hi, Matthias,
• 1:36:03
  how are you? At 96 years old. Goodness gracious.
• 1:36:07
  That, I have, I mean, that is amazing. I mean,
• 1:36:09
  she is still a striking woman and very present
• 1:36:14
  and honored to know her too. And it does, I mean,
• 1:36:18
  it gives you pride when someone like that says
• 1:36:19
  hi to you. You're like, that was Emma Roy. She
• 1:36:22
  just said hi to me. She knows who I am. It's
• 1:36:25
  big stuff. So I got Roy the rock stars everywhere.
• 1:36:29
  Oh, yeah. They were a major part of why I'm sitting
• 1:36:33
  here and having this conversation. That means
• 1:36:35
  that whole weaving of a story that I gave you
• 1:36:39
  of all the people that we currently employ that
• 1:36:42
  came from a relationship with Leslie Roy. That
• 1:36:45
  relationship came from my dad's relationship
• 1:36:48
  with Leslie Roy. Us being in the hop industry.
• 1:36:51
  It came from my dad's relationship with farmers.
• 1:36:53
  He liked farmers. He was in the industry. And
• 1:36:56
  I'm glad that my dad was not a computer tech.
• 1:37:00
  I can make a compelling argument that the reason
• 1:37:02
  that I'm here and married is because of Leslie
• 1:37:06
  and Lester Roy. How wild is that? That is. You
• 1:37:09
  can. I forgot about that connection. Yeah. Wild.
• 1:37:15
  So I got a couple of memories. I'm glad you brought
• 1:37:18
  up Kevin Reel. and leaving me in the truck i'm
• 1:37:21
  sorry um and the dyed hair and then coming in
• 1:37:25
  and waking us up in the morning at my parents
• 1:37:27
  yep i remember when i first started checking
• 1:37:32
  with you you're like all right here here you
• 1:37:34
  give me a piece of paper and you're like okay
• 1:37:35
  here's the field and you drew out the field you
• 1:37:37
  know because you had all the field angles and
• 1:37:39
  everything and you would draw it out and you'd
• 1:37:40
  be like here's your walking pattern and you said
• 1:37:43
  all right we're gonna take whatever it was like
• 1:37:45
  you know but whatever 20 some or whatever 30
• 1:37:48
  30 counts five on the corners i think it was
• 1:37:52
  no four on the corners and three on the way out
• 1:37:54
  so you're like all right here's your walking
• 1:37:55
  pattern you draw this diagonal line and then
• 1:37:58
  back out to the edge of the field and then go
• 1:38:00
  the next corner diagonal in out to the out to
• 1:38:02
  the side and you're like i'm gonna go do this
• 1:38:05
  field and you're gonna do this one and so i start
• 1:38:07
  you know, just, I didn't know the pace that we
• 1:38:09
  needed to go. So I just start casually walking,
• 1:38:11
  you know, just doing a really good job. And then
• 1:38:14
  I come out, you know, after like basically probably
• 1:38:17
  only covering about a quarter or a half of the
• 1:38:19
  field that I come out the side and you're there
• 1:38:21
  picking me up with the truck. And I'm like, what
• 1:38:23
  in the world? Like I just did that so slow. And
• 1:38:27
  then Mike, Michael's weighing about 155 pounds
• 1:38:31
  ripped in shape in college climbing. I'm rolling
• 1:38:36
  around a 260 ish, maybe, you know, pretty, pretty,
• 1:38:40
  pretty confident in my own abilities to gain
• 1:38:42
  weight. And that's about it. And, and he now
• 1:38:45
  go ahead and finish. And so I'm like, I go, man,
• 1:38:49
  I go, I just, I really just didn't do a good
• 1:38:52
  job on that field. And I'm just internalizing
• 1:38:55
  all this. And then Matthias picks me up and we
• 1:38:56
  kind of like, you know, spot check the rest of
• 1:38:58
  the field and move on to the next one. And. So
• 1:39:02
  then this next one, he does the same thing. And
• 1:39:03
  I'm like, all right, I'm just, I'm going to,
• 1:39:04
  I'm going to hustle on this one. And I started
• 1:39:06
  hustling. I make it a little further, but same
• 1:39:08
  scenario. I didn't cover the whole field and
• 1:39:10
  he picks me up. And then, and then this like
• 1:39:14
  goes on for however many fields. And finally
• 1:39:16
  I'm like, what is happening? I go, oh, so I get
• 1:39:19
  to the point where I'm like sprinting, like,
• 1:39:22
  like a hundred yard dash sprinting, like between
• 1:39:26
  sample points to try and like get around the
• 1:39:28
  field. Like just through the field, like, and
• 1:39:32
  it's hot outside. And I finally asked with eyes,
• 1:39:35
  I'm like, dude, what is going on? There's no
• 1:39:37
  way that you're, that you're getting all that
• 1:39:39
  done while I'm only making it about three quarters
• 1:39:41
  of the way around the field. He's like, well,
• 1:39:43
  and then, and so like things have changed a lot,
• 1:39:48
  but at that point in time, like we had so many
• 1:39:51
  acres to cover. There was a bit of art involved.
• 1:39:54
  There was a slight amount of art. So Michael,
• 1:39:57
  to interrupt Michael, sorry for interrupting.
• 1:39:59
  Michael really took literally when I drew a hash
• 1:40:03
  mark into the dead center of that field, that
• 1:40:06
  guy was finding the dead center of the field
• 1:40:08
  before he would hit a 45 -degree angle and exit
• 1:40:11
  the field. So we always had a very specific pattern,
• 1:40:14
  which was going in at a diagonal. You would take
• 1:40:17
  four counts and then you would hit a 45 degree
• 1:40:20
  and head straight out of the field. It helped
• 1:40:22
  you walk out a row. You weren't beating across
• 1:40:25
  these rows of hops. And so that's seven counts.
• 1:40:28
  You did that times four and that's 28 times.
• 1:40:30
  And so I would get 28 counts, but I would maybe
• 1:40:34
  not make it as many feet into the field. So Michael
• 1:40:37
  was definitely overachieving as a young trainer
• 1:40:40
  and doing a fantastic job. I was accounting as
• 1:40:43
  many, many, many counts. But possibly not as
• 1:40:47
  deep as Michael and coming up with the same accurate
• 1:40:49
  numbers. Thank you for an agronomic recommendation.
• 1:40:53
  Like I said, things have changed a lot. And we
• 1:40:56
  did well. We did well at what we were doing.
• 1:40:59
  But it was just funny because I was taking your
• 1:41:02
  drawing literally. It was incredible. And, I
• 1:41:06
  mean, he was just beaten into the ground. What's
• 1:41:08
  funny, to fast forward a little bit, is umpteen
• 1:41:11
  years later. We still have annual conversations
• 1:41:13
  with the field men that are still with us. These
• 1:41:16
  are Gavin Shin. This is Ramon Ortiz. And this
• 1:41:20
  is Oscar Leal. And they've been with me for 16
• 1:41:24
  to 20 years. And they're full -time, full -tilt
• 1:41:26
  field men to this day. They're agronomists, and
• 1:41:28
  they're amazing. And we still niche around the
• 1:41:31
  corner of, hey, should we do this on four -wheelers?
• 1:41:34
  We can cover a lot of acres on four wheelers.
• 1:41:36
  And I've always demanded that I rather hire brand
• 1:41:39
  new kids that don't know what they're looking
• 1:41:41
  at and don't sell chemical and don't have any
• 1:41:44
  bad habits and teach them to walk right alongside
• 1:41:47
  us and be responsible for what is actually going
• 1:41:50
  on in that field. As you're walking through the
• 1:41:52
  tempo of that field, the slower tempo, it takes
• 1:41:55
  more time, takes more people. But it's a better
• 1:41:58
  look at a field. So I've always fought the quicker
• 1:42:01
  way of doing it on a four -wheeler. The pests
• 1:42:03
  that we have in hops, we can't go to a trap and
• 1:42:05
  see what coddling moth are there. We have to
• 1:42:07
  physically count what's in a hop field. So still
• 1:42:10
  to this day, to alleviate the pressure that Michael
• 1:42:14
  and I used to have on ourselves, being two people
• 1:42:16
  that had 4 ,000 acres, and you've got to cover
• 1:42:18
  the cross sections, you've got to cover all this
• 1:42:20
  ground. Now we hire up with bigger teams of people
• 1:42:23
  to help us walk through fields. Those teams are
• 1:42:26
  with the four and five people that have done
• 1:42:28
  it for 20 years. And we literally walk side by
• 1:42:31
  side lengthwise through fields to get the same
• 1:42:34
  aggregate counts that are in the fields. We've
• 1:42:37
  always told farmers pay us by the acre. We'll
• 1:42:40
  be responsible for those acres. Obviously we're
• 1:42:42
  not going to walk every acre out there. There's
• 1:42:44
  not enough time in the day, but we are going
• 1:42:46
  to walk cross sections enough and we're going
• 1:42:48
  to map and show you where those pests and problems
• 1:42:51
  are. And so. In my nudge back on technology,
• 1:42:55
  I always wanted to have it handwritten because
• 1:42:57
  it made you purposefully handwrite and think
• 1:42:59
  about what you were doing when you were reporting
• 1:43:01
  to the grower. The last nudge that I got from
• 1:43:04
  Oscar and Ramon and Gavin was we need a better
• 1:43:07
  trackability and computer system. We need to
• 1:43:09
  be able to really monitor where we're at. And
• 1:43:11
  so they implemented with the company out of the
• 1:43:13
  Midwest a brand new checking system. So that
• 1:43:18
  every time that every one of us are in the field,
• 1:43:20
  and that's every additional employee that helps
• 1:43:22
  us, if they have a phone, they're reporting on
• 1:43:24
  that phone, which then gives the GPS location
• 1:43:26
  to every field that are mapped. And so technology
• 1:43:30
  has helped us, but we're still not broken out
• 1:43:33
  of the boots on the ground. There's a lot of
• 1:43:37
  value to that. And I still think that there's
• 1:43:39
  a lot of value when Michael looks out and I get
• 1:43:42
  to come walk out of the end of a field and he
• 1:43:44
  sees me still walking his fields. from 1989 until
• 1:43:47
  2026 i personally think there's a lot of value
• 1:43:51
  in that and that's that's the main value that
• 1:43:53
  i carry for my company is being out in the field
• 1:43:57
  and seeing what's out in the field and seeing
• 1:43:58
  the growers yeah because there's yeah there's
• 1:44:00
  a ton of experience that you've amassed so it
• 1:44:03
  is a good thing good bad and indifferent so i
• 1:44:05
  had two more so there was the so i remember not
• 1:44:10
  only related to just uh trying to run between
• 1:44:13
  checks in that scenario but You know, you get
• 1:44:16
  tired, you're moving fast, and it seemed like
• 1:44:19
  every year it was inevitable. You're either going
• 1:44:22
  to get the hop scratch across the mustache or
• 1:44:26
  the eyelid. It's the worst. It's so bad. I don't
• 1:44:31
  know how many of our listeners have been scratched
• 1:44:35
  by a hop vine, but it's the most irritating thing.
• 1:44:38
  And then when you have to continue to work. in
• 1:44:42
  the summer heat and sweat it is wet and hop scratch
• 1:44:45
  it's the worst combination the eyelid one was
• 1:44:47
  the worst the worst on the eyelids the worst
• 1:44:49
  before the goatee before the goatee i was going
• 1:44:52
  on a first date and i'm nervous and i was on
• 1:44:55
  your conawak fields of all things i was on your
• 1:44:57
  conawak fields and this is before i met my wife
• 1:45:01
  long before i met my wife um i'm walking a hop
• 1:45:04
  yard and i am not even four hours before this
• 1:45:07
  date and i've made it through an entire day without
• 1:45:10
  looking like I've made it, like I've had a machete
• 1:45:12
  fight. So no scratches anywhere. And I have no
• 1:45:14
  facial hair at this point in time. And it's a
• 1:45:17
  windy day and I get the full bandolero across
• 1:45:20
  the upper lip underneath this prominent nose
• 1:45:22
  that I've got here. And it literally just saws.
• 1:45:26
  And so I go on that date with a Ronald McDonald
• 1:45:28
  bleeding smile. It was the worst thing ever.
• 1:45:31
  The one thing I didn't want to happen. And I've
• 1:45:33
  got to try to play it cool with a bleeding mustache
• 1:45:35
  where there wasn't a mustache. I have a lot of
• 1:45:39
  resentment towards hops and hop scratches. And
• 1:45:41
  it's something that's another funny thing. You
• 1:45:43
  sit back and quietly look and you see all these
• 1:45:46
  new people that you hire every season. And, you
• 1:45:49
  know, we get a lot of returners, but inevitably
• 1:45:50
  there's two or three young 18 -year -olds that
• 1:45:52
  are coming to walk hops, seasonal job, and here
• 1:45:55
  they come after the first day. First day is not
• 1:45:58
  bad because they're still short, but when it
• 1:46:00
  starts to get a nine -foot hop. And it's starting
• 1:46:02
  to arm out a little bit, hopefully not too much
• 1:46:04
  at nine feet. But when they start to arm out
• 1:46:06
  and they get caught the first time, they're just
• 1:46:08
  in shock going, where is HR and where's the hospital?
• 1:46:12
  And I still wear shorts just because my mentality
• 1:46:16
  is I would rather have scratched legs than wet
• 1:46:20
  pants all day long, especially in the fall when
• 1:46:22
  the dew, you know, not to go off on diatribes,
• 1:46:24
  but those are the neat, those are the neat parts
• 1:46:26
  of my job is the seasonal reminders. This time
• 1:46:30
  of year, you open your truck door and you smell
• 1:46:32
  purple mustard. And it's just, oh, it's spring.
• 1:46:35
  You hear robins and you smell mustard and it's
• 1:46:38
  spring. It's go time. What about the alpha days
• 1:46:40
  when people were really concentrated on costs
• 1:46:43
  and you would have like a. a nine foot tall piece
• 1:46:47
  of kosher that you'd have to battle through.
• 1:46:49
  That's horrible. Anybody, any of the kids, any
• 1:46:53
  of the people that have had allergies and worked
• 1:46:56
  with us, I tell them, I'm like, you know, there's,
• 1:46:58
  there's some points in times where allergies
• 1:46:59
  get pretty bad. And our, our very first employee
• 1:47:03
  before Michael was my wife's cousin and his name
• 1:47:07
  was Luke. And Luke's one of my best friends.
• 1:47:09
  And Luke was checking hops for us that very first
• 1:47:11
  summer. And he said, my allergies are getting
• 1:47:13
  really bad. We were walking Leo Gassling and
• 1:47:15
  sons. And he goes, my allergies are getting really
• 1:47:16
  bad. I'm like, Luke, we've got two more fields.
• 1:47:18
  Let's just get these fields done. And bad economics,
• 1:47:22
  kosher is six feet tall and it's in full bloom
• 1:47:25
  where it's just puffing the yellow pollen everywhere.
• 1:47:27
  And, and I tell Luke, we just have a few more
• 1:47:30
  fields and he comes walking out of the next field.
• 1:47:32
  And I said, I think we're done today. Let's go
• 1:47:34
  home. And he goes, why? He looked like a human
• 1:47:37
  version of Charlie Brown. His head had gotten
• 1:47:39
  so round. From the anaphylactic shock that he
• 1:47:43
  was in, I was like, I think we're going to head
• 1:47:45
  down lateral lane now. I think we're going to
• 1:47:47
  be okay. Let's go. Get you a napkin. But with
• 1:47:51
  those hard times, we had something that would
• 1:47:54
  really just soothe us and close out the day well,
• 1:47:57
  didn't we? We did. We did. And, you know, nothing
• 1:48:00
  soothes the savage like music. And I think it
• 1:48:06
  was Jewel's smile that brought us together in
• 1:48:09
  the car. It was her smile. And her personality.
• 1:48:12
  But we've worked together so long that we both
• 1:48:16
  appreciated Who Will Save Your Soul from Jewel
• 1:48:19
  at the same time during the summer. We appreciated
• 1:48:21
  her music and her artistry more than anything.
• 1:48:24
  So you had a compact disc or a tape player? That
• 1:48:29
  would have just been radio play. That would have
• 1:48:30
  been Cats. Todd Lyons with Cats would have had
• 1:48:32
  that on a pretty good repeat. Or a CD. It could
• 1:48:36
  have been tool or helmet or jewel. Yeah, there
• 1:48:39
  was a broad spectrum there. But there was tool.
• 1:48:44
  Yeah, there was tool. But some days it was jewel.
• 1:48:47
  It was jewel. When we needed peace, we played
• 1:48:49
  jewel. Yeah, you know. Had a long day driving
• 1:48:52
  back to the ranch. A little who could save your
• 1:48:55
  soul. Yeah. I wonder if we could get her in here
• 1:48:57
  for a podcast and we could talk about how she
• 1:49:00
  helped us through the hard early days of check
• 1:49:02
  and field. I'm sure she would. I'm sure. I'm
• 1:49:06
  glad that we contrasted that with tool because.
• 1:49:08
  Yeah. That's the change in a day. You go from
• 1:49:12
  tool to jewel in a day. Didn't even know that
• 1:49:15
  was going to rhyme. That's crazy. That's crazy.
• 1:49:17
  Yeah. That happens. Well, that's a two -hour
• 1:49:20
  mark. Wow. That's a long show. That was a long
• 1:49:23
  show. I didn't know if we were going to do 30
• 1:49:25
  minutes. No, dude. Everybody says that. Everyone's
• 1:49:27
  like, I don't think I can talk for 30 minutes.
• 1:49:28
  And then you just blow past over an hour. Oh,
• 1:49:32
  we could have still kept going. Oh, yeah. That
• 1:49:34
  was great. Yeah. Really appreciate you coming
• 1:49:36
  on. It was awesome. Very much. That was fun.
• 1:49:39
  Now I'm going to go drive around, go out in the
• 1:49:41
  hop yard for a while, hang out. All right. All
• 1:49:43
  right. Thanks for that. Thank you guys very much.
• 1:49:45
  That was a lot of fun.