Latest / The Vance Crowe Podcast / ATR: Grain Storage Woes, China Faltering, CA farm values plummeting @DamianPMason
Transcript
- Speaker 1 0:00 The Ag tribes Report is brought to you by farm test, a field trial design, execution and analysis service that makes it easy to ask your fields which management practices perform best to start your field trials. Visit farm test.ag, and legacy interviews, a service that video records individuals and couples telling their life stories so that future generations have the opportunity to know their family history. Here's legacy interviews. Guest Phil Bender on how the experience allowed him time for personal reflection and an opportunity to honor his parents. What Unknown Speaker 0:38 was the experience like of being interviewed Speaker 2 0:41 at this depth, very rewarding, very refreshing. You know you're just your sense of interest, and the depth of the questions was really impressive, and you stayed present through the whole thing, because I pay attention to that kind of thing, you really were walking with me through it. This is a keepsake for me, but also a great way to honor my parents. There are a couple things about my dad you drew out today that I don't know if, if I've said, said that to him. I think it's a moment in time to reflect, engage, deepen your perspective on what you've accomplished, I am reflecting on my version of what I saw, what I felt, how I responded to it. That is a legacy that's valuable. Speaker 1 1:38 Welcome to the Ag tribes report a breakdown of the top stories affecting the culture of agriculture with your host. Vance Crowe, the report begins in 321, let's begin. Speaker 3 1:52 Welcome to the Ag tribes Report. I'm your host. Vance Crowe, each week I bring on a co host to represent the perspectives of the one of many ag tribes that collectively make up US agriculture. This week, I am joined by the one and only Damien Mason. Mason is a businessman, agriculturalist, speaker, podcaster, author and consultant focused on the two subjects. He knows the most about business and agriculture since 94 he has spoken to more than 2400 audiences in all 50 states and seven countries. Damian's a graduate of Purdue University with a degree in agricultural economics. He studied comedy writing and improvisation at Second City, and is a member of the Screen Actors Guild. Damien, welcome to the Ag tribes report. Thanks Unknown Speaker 2:40 for having me Speaker 3 2:41 on Vance, okay, on this week's episode of the Ag tribes report, we're going to tackle the storage, shorter shortage affecting grain farmers in the Midwest. We're going to talk about how China's recent economic stimulus could impact us agriculture. We're going to talk about the plummeting land values in California's San Joaquin Valley, and with a little bit of time left over. We're going to talk about the farm assistance and revenue mitigation act that's going to maybe bring some checks to farmers. We're going to do all that. Then we're going to talk about the Bitcoin land price report. We're going to talk about Damien's Peter Thiel paradox and find out who his worthy adversary is. And we're going to do it all in just 30 minutes. So let's jump right in. We're going to start off by talking about something I saw on x, which is a giant storage shortage that's starting to put a hurting on grain farmers. We entered this year's harvest, there were a lot of farmers that were still holding on to last year's grain, hoping that markets would improve, and now we're piling on new grain with this bumper crop, I saw this clip from Paul R Anderson, nd, corn farmer on x. I think it's worthwhile from Speaker 4 3:48 Selby, South Dakota. This corn pile here is two miles north of town, because their regular bunker is full. They're filling this is an abandoned gravel pit. That's what we got here that they're filling corn in. If you wonder why your corn basis is so poor right now, Corn Belt, these operators got to have an extra 30 cents a bushel to justify putting this stuff on the ground, paying the farmer. And they got to pay the interest on this corn while it's being piled here and sitting there waiting to Speaker 3 4:30 so I Paul goes on to talk about how thing is that farmers are sitting on their combines selling either a contracted or spot price, and they're trying to pay down their 8% interest operating loans. So they're just trying to get it out huge supplies. Damien running out of storage, filling up things like grain or gravel quarries. What do you think is this going on with grain farmers? Where you're at in Indiana? Yeah, Speaker 5 4:54 the harvest is coming in. Where I am in northeast Indiana, on corn. I just drove by three feet. That had combines running beans are a little ahead. We haven't had rain here since August 1. We've probably had eight tenths of an inch. So yeah, despite that, we're going to be okay on storage here more than some places, because of the rain deficit. So when you don't get August rains and September rains, you don't fill the pods. So we're talking, you know, I got a field right outside this window here. I'm at, I'm at my sister's home where, actually, this is the field where I was raised. We did 45 Bucha, 42 to 45 bushel soybeans. It's not great ground. It's not the best in the county, but it sure is health better than that. We just missed out. Because when you don't get rain for three months, and they go in late because of the wet spring. We're not going to have the grain storage problem here that other parts of the traditional Corn Belt are going to have. Vance. They sat on too much inventory. These guys and gals said, You know what? Grain prices are plummeting. We're just going to sit on storage and we're going to hold out. And then they held out. And they held out. This is on stuff that wasn't already contracted, of course. So they were already coming into it with some some beans and corn in the bins. And then you start talking about 184 Bucha, a record corn projection. USDA, numbers using there. And 53 I think, is the number on beans projected nationally. You're just talking about a glut. We've got 45 to 50% more corn and soybean production than we had just 2025 years ago. We didn't increase grain holding capacity by 25% let alone the carryover from last year. So this is these pile stories are going to be around, maybe not in my county, but they're going to be around, Speaker 3 6:37 yeah, I mean, and for people that that are outside of Ag, you maybe you don't think, well, piling actually happens quite often. But from what I'm hearing, these piles are bigger than they've been. They're starting to find new space for them. And it wasn't the only granite quarry I've heard about getting filled up with with grain. How does this all get cleared off? Part of the problem is that the Mississippi River just isn't able to hold as much grain as those barges go down in low water, did trains and barges catch up with this pretty quick? Or how long does it take for it to to clear out? Yeah, well, they Speaker 5 7:07 always talk about, if it can't go down the Mississippi, then they start switching over to trains. And then if it can't go on trains, they go on trucks, which all that becomes more expensive. The cheapest way to move grain is on a barge down the Mississippi. The second cheapest way is on rail. The third cheapest way is a truck. Fourth cheapest way, I guess, is you put it in the trunk of your Ford Pinto. But being funny there anyway, the tough part is, where is it going to go? You know, when you've got other countries that are also pushing out record amounts of volume, we're just glutted. And I know that ahead of time, I told you, if you wanted to touch on the over supply issue, we don't like to admit it in agriculture, but it's a it's a real it's a real boondoggle. We're amazing at productivity. Our product, product capacity is unrivaled, and we've only got so much demand. There's just only so much that the world can eat, that the world can consume, and then we're figuring out ways to put 40% of our corn crop in our gas tanks as ethanol. You know, we're going to be here for a while, and I feel like the negative Nancy telling my ag crowds this Vance, but I don't see, I don't see where this gets improved in three months, six months, three years, where our productive capacity is too great, and our demand is stagnated. That whole thing we were told about for our whole lives, that we're going to have 11 billion or 50 billion people, and we're all going to starve. It's just not true. It's not materializing. We're capping out on population, and humans can only eat so much, and not to mention with ozempic and those kinds of things we're consuming even less rapidly here, Speaker 3 8:42 I think you are dead on. And this one of the stories you sent me about China, we're going to lead right into. But they actually are waiting months, you know, two months longer than they normally do, to start buying grain because they're getting it from somewhere else. But speaking of China, this comes from Reuters. There's a big rate cut in China. And what does this mean for our key trade partner, the one year prime rate was lowered by 25 basis points, from 3.1 to three from, I'm sorry, to 3.1 from 3.35 they are slashing bank reserve requirements by 50 basis points, which means banks don't have to hold as much money in order to be able to lend out more. They're trying to get them to stimulated. And officials addressing a press conference on Friday expressed confidence in the economy that they can achieve the government's full year growth target around 5% when they're not achieving that when they're not growing that means they are not buying as much. What is going to happen to the US farmer if our Chinese trade partner, not only is buying from Brazil, but also doesn't have the kind of economy to be buying grain from us. Well, they Speaker 5 9:47 continue to buy less. They hit the high water mark around 2021, 20.2 in terms of being our customer, in terms of dollar value, they're going to be like 1/4 or 1/5 as much of a customer this year as they were at their high. Watermark, because a commodity prices are down by 40% so therefore the dollar amount is going to be less. Secondly, they've found other suppliers, which I always told my audiences they've been trying to do since 2013 when they set up the new Belt and Road Initiative, where they're spending literally billions and billions of dollars in developing countries to create new supply channels from countries they can control. They don't want to be our customer. They want to be our replacement. So this is actually where two things fuse together. Vance, they wanted to not be a US customer long term. Anyhow, they wanted to use us until they could ramp up their own more controllable supply. And more importantly, their economy has actually got some problems. There are already, you know, pretty well known economists starting to make the comparison between China today and what Japan was 20 to 30 years ago. Japan was going to be the dominant economy in the world in the 80s, if you're old enough to remember that they were manufacturing everything. They had all the technology, they had all this capital. But then they had a little problem. They didn't have an expanding economy anymore, and they started losing population. China's got the same thing going on on a much larger scale, almost 10 times as many Chinese as there are Japanese. But the situation is that China is not going to be able to keep ramping up consumption of our goods, because A, they found their place to get it, and B, they're not consuming any more goods. They're not consuming anymore, AG, products they're starting to eat less because their economy has problems. Speaker 3 11:26 Yeah, I remember when I was in graduate school, I studied underneath the Chinese professor, and he had this analogy about China's economy. He said it's like the bus from the movie Speed, and if the economy does not continue to grow, it's like that bomb that goes off underneath it, and big, bad things start happening in their economy. And just like you point out they are not increasing their population, they've tried everything else. Just like every other western country, we won't see consumption increase from them anytime soon. Speaker 5 11:55 One quick note on that, remember if the Chinese miracle if they doubled caloric consumption per person, which they almost did in the last 20 years. Think about that 1.3 billion people increase their caloric consumption, and not just by calories, but also by quality. To you know, from rice to more pork, from pork to steak, that was really good for the United States of America agriculture, but you knew it was destined to stop, because they can't double their caloric intake again. You know, they'd all weigh 900 pounds, and it's just not going to happen. The other one, that's kind of a neat story. No, most people are keeping up. Infrastructure was overbuilt in China for a long time. Chinese Communist Party economic practice was to stimulate infrastructure, to keep a bunch of people employed, and keep this this illusion that we're a massively improving global superpower. They've got bridges to nowhere, and they've got houses with nobody living in the Wall Street Journal Article Two weeks ago, 91 million vacant residential units Now, granted, you're talking about a lot of population, 91 million on an average of two and a half people. Vance, you're talking about like 140 million folks, you know, could, could they've got apartments with no one living in them, houses, no one living in them. This thing's about to, it's gonna make our 2008 property bus that happened in the United States, you know, look like a flu. Well, I Speaker 3 13:16 mean, as as much as we don't want to be replaced, it's not good when one of our largest trade partners is suffering. So it's not good for us. All right, we got to keep moving, because headline three, I think, is one of the most under reported stories, maybe in the news right now for agriculture, the Turlock journal Caleb Hampton wrote an article the land values plunge as groundwater laws dim farm prospects, the value of farmland in parts of the San Joaquin Valley, this is California's agricultural heartland, has fallen rapidly this year, as prices lag in implementation of the state's Sustainable Groundwater Management Act impacts the future of farming in the region. Janie Goetzman of getzman appraisal presented data showing that hundreds of real estate transactions show that San Joaquin vineyards, Nut Tree orchards have declined in value by 25 to 50% within the previous eight months, almond orchards without reliable surface water in the Valley have lost more than half their value in some pistachio orchards have sold this year for a quarter of what they were worth last year. Behind the decline in land values is a growing awareness that the SGMA is leaving certain properties with limited farming capacity. Groundwater has supplied 40% of the water used in California and typical years and as much as 60% in drought years, but now pumping to supplement the water surface water is getting tightened. And how can you grow perennial crops when they are not allowing these aquifers to be tapped? Damian? Is this a passing phase, or is the San Joaquin Valley not going to be where we get our fruits and nuts from? It's Speaker 5 14:59 not a pass. Phase. It's been in the works for a long, long time. The productivity of California, with its climates and its its other unique characteristics mean that it will still be around for a while. It'll probably be around forever as an agricultural producer, but it's going to sort out, and water will start to have an economic value more than it already does. It's been kind of bastardized Vance because of the politics. Whoever's in office, whoever can lobby the hardest when it gets to air, and I believe that it will, water will be just like a pound of fertilizer or a gallon of gas, where, truly, we understand, in this part of the world, it's worth this much. Not so much here in Northern Indians, we get lots of precipitation on a normal year out there, it's going to have a tremendous amount more value. Why would you grow lower value products in California, example, why is it the number one dairy state? Why is 20% or 18% of our country's dairy still in California, when it's such a water intensive product to produce milk, why don't we put the milk back in Wisconsin, and then put the almonds in California, and it relieves some pressure. And that's already happening, by the way, so I think that we're probably going to sort it out economics, if they're allowed to, without the political thing, will work themselves out. And the reality is, some of that land was overvalued because it was predicated on, yeah, we could get water didn't have a cost to it. And now, when water has a cost, if this, if you notice the old side of algebra, you're smart kid, if this side of the x, or this size of an x and a algebraic equation moves the other one can move the other way and still get the answer on the side of the equal sign. And that's what's happening in California Land Values. Speaker 3 16:40 I think you're exactly right. And as my good friend Lyle Benjamin pointed out, water needs to become that hard money commodity, really people valuing it for what it is. It's bound to happen, because it is a finite resource. I'd love to stay on this some more, but we do want to touch on the big news coming out of DC, the farm assistance and revenue mitigation Act, otherwise known as the farm Act, has been introduced to Congress to help offset some of the financial pressure from tight margins and the farmers that are continuing to wait on the farm bill. It's been authored by Representative Trent Kelly and presented to the Ag Committee, the House Ag Committee, and it offers payments assistance to eligible farmers. All Crops are eligible for payments. Those payments are calculated in different ways, but the eight major crops listed are all going to use the listed price. And then there's another formula. Damien, the government sends checks to farmers to keep them afloat during down commodity prices. We all know this is going to cause inflation. Why would anyone except the guy getting the check want those checks to go out? Two Speaker 5 17:46 things for sure. First off, yes, it will be inflationary, but the amount of farmers receiving the money compared to when we did the COVID Relief were of our country of three, 30 million people, more than a couple 100, I think the number is, got checks for a long time. When you throw money to 200 million people, things get inflationary fast. When you throw money to what, 1,000,000.9 farms, and then maybe a third of them won't get any things. You're talking one and a half or so million farming operations get some checks. Is it inflationary? Not as much because of the sheer scale. The other part of that is, where are they going to spend that money? It's probably on obligations. So you're not talking about money that came into a consumer's hands and they went and decided, let's buy a jacuzzi, because we're all stuck at home with the COVID thing. Let's buy a new jacuzzi and put in a pool. This will be paying for obligations that are already there, such as crop inputs. So it's probably not inflationary to that regard. Second part of this is, who wants it? Other than the farmer. Will probably not most taxpayers, but there still is a pretty big sentiment in the United States that we're an agrarian country, and we do have food as a national security so usually payments to farmers don't irk the political establishment and the electorate as much as some other things do. In other words, payments to Exxon would be way, way hostile, hostilely received. They would not be so much paying farmers. Not that I'm for Dennis. I'm just saying. And the third part of this, of course, is usually when there's a downturn in the ag economy. Ever since the 80s, the government's come in and picked up the pieces and throwing money back at AG, Speaker 3 19:29 yeah. I mean, I It's always hard to say in front of an ag crowd, but I mean, every business is struggling during these hard times, and it's hard for me to justify why we would do that, whether they're we're an agricultural or agronomy company country anyway, but this is just the way things are. Any last comments on the farm act? Speaker 5 19:49 I need to read through what the parameters are. But the thing is, if you've studied this long enough, and I have a brother that works for United States Department of Agriculture, they've fashioned things Vance for so. Long they call it the loan deficiency payment was a thing for a long time, and I remember when I finally dug into that, and I said to my brother, said, So when does the loan get repaid? He said, Well, it never does. I said, so it's not really a loan, it's just a deficiency payment. This is not new, and I again, I'm with you. Our farm friends don't like it when we point this out, but if I've got a dry cleaners in town and I'm struggling, the USDA doesn't funnel money to me. So this has always happened, and we use the guys of we got to keep a food supply that's stable, and we got to keep food as a national security and that's been the justification for 40 years on farm subsidies. Unknown Speaker 20:32 Well, I Speaker 3 20:33 want to, I appreciate your comments here, and we are having, we're going to move on from the headlines. If you have news headlines, Damian provided a bunch of them tonight. We got something from Paul Anderson. You can send them to me on x at Vance Crowe, moving on to the Bitcoin land price report, Damian, where are you living right now? And how much does an acre of good, high quality farm ground cost there? Speaker 5 20:59 I'm in Huntington County, Indiana. We're about 30 miles from Fort Wayne, Indiana, the northeastern part of the state. This is where I was born and raised. I own about just shy of 300 acres, not all of its tillable mine would what mine is, what you would call average Mine's the kind of stuff that you can buy, not the kind that stuff in fifth generation. Because I didn't come from much. My ground is not worth what the high is. But I asked my friends at Haldimand real estate and farm management, I said, I think it's around 14 to 15 grand for the best stuff in the county. And they said, You are exactly right. 14 to $15,000 is the is the high is the would be the high quality farmland. And there's a good bit of that in parts of Huntington County, just not the stuff that I own. Well Speaker 3 21:39 tonight, the bitcoin price as as of press time, was $68,485 so it is really close to an all time high. So if we were going to take $14,500 per acre and turn that into Bitcoin, it means a little less than point 211, Bitcoin would buy you an acre of high quality farm ground in Huntington County, Indiana. In other words, if you had one Bitcoin that would buy you 4.7 acres there Damian, how does it strike you the pricing of land in terms of Bitcoin? Well, Speaker 5 22:13 I don't keep up with Bitcoin as much. I wish that I understood it better. You know, it's a new asset class, and I just heard a discussion between two talking heads on Business Media, and they said, Is it a commodity? Is it a currency? Is it a an asset? And it strikes you that it is an asset, because someone will pay you for it. It's limited on how you can utilize it. So I'm a little still out here. And heck, it's been, what, seven years now, 10 that Bitcoin, 15, yeah, yeah, cryptocurrency has been a thing. I'm just not sure that I, I guess because I'm a late adopter on some things. I'm a little bit of a late adopter on cryptocurrency. Speaker 3 22:52 Well, I think it is all those things. I think one of the most beautiful things about it is it's, it's a storage of energy, right? We're converting energy into value, and that's something that it requires work to do, and it's finite. And I think one of the best comparisons for Bitcoin is it's closely aligned with land, right? You can't make more land. You can't make more Bitcoin. All right, moving on to the Peter Thiel paradox. This is where I'm going to ask Damian, what is one thing that you believe that most of your ag tribe disagrees with you on Oh, Speaker 5 23:24 it's not just my ag tribe. It's probably almost everyone in the United States of America. I have a struggle believing that the United States government, and at NASA ever actually put a man on the moon in 1969 I was born in 1969 as 55 years ago, I know what the technology was. My God, we almost lost me as a child. You know, because of what healthcare looked like back then, in 1969 you couldn't hop in your Chevy Nova and drive from Indiana to California without a very good chance it would break down, overheat you would. You really talk about cars that usually lasted about 40 to 50,000 miles, and it was time for the junk heap. We had tremendously poor technology for communication. We still had party lines in much of the United States of America. Our computers were the size of the building I'm sitting in right now. I believe that we've been told since the time we were kids, it's very jingoistic to be all about America. Wave your flags. Yes, we were the only country to go to the moon. And nobody has ever asked, well, how is it that we were the only country to have ever gone to the moon when Russia was 10 years ahead of us going back to Sputnik, Russia sent German shepherds to space before we ever did. How is it they never made it when they spent so much their money as a Cold War operative to for for global domination. They didn't make it, and we did. And you say we had better scientists, I still question that. You know, we only got better scientists at the end of World War Two because we stole them from Germany. So I've always questioned that. The other part I've questioned is, if you look at what if you love history the way I do, the United States was coming apart at the seams in the end of the 1960s Vance, John F Kennedy, a very popular young president in the early 1961 upon his inauguration, pounded on that podium and said, and by the end of this decade, we will put a man on the moon. Here you are, summer of 1969 there are people being shot at universities in Ohio, kids. There are movements against the government that would actually scare you, right? Detroit's burning down. You've got the hippie movement. You've got a counter culture movement. By God, we need something. We need something to bring this country back together, or we're going to lose it and revolt into civil war. You know what we do? We go back to that popular president and we deliver on his promise five months before the end of the 1960s we're going to do what he said, Because he said, by the end of this decade, we're going to put a man on the moon. And I don't believe that it ever really happened, if you ask any and I've seen studies about this, go to Poland and ask educated Polish people, do you think the United States put people on the moon? 20% say yes. 80% say no. But the United States, because of indoctrination we've been told is absolutely unquestionable. It's vertical knowledge. It's right there with everything else you've been told to believe. So Speaker 3 26:08 I'm going to just give you huge props for saying something that's dangerous to say. And I have to say that during COVID, when there was a lot that the government was willing to tell us that wasn't true, it makes you say, Well, what else? And I've definitely heard this idea percolating up. I don't know whether it's true or not, but I absolutely think it's okay to question and I'm really glad you brought it up. I'm going to give you a brilliant score of 8.5 because I think it's dangerous to say something like this, and it seems like you are a guy that has looked into it pretty deeply. So Speaker 5 26:39 Maria, one more. Just the fun of it. Every elementary school, from mine Northwest Elementary School in Huntington County, Indiana, to the one you probably went to had rocks that were brought back from the moon. If you go to the Smithsonian, as I have a number of times, the space landing craft is about the size of a shrunk down Volkswagen, and we're to pretend that they brought back two train loads of rocks to put in every elementary school. Speaker 3 27:00 I definitely know who looks like. We gave some of those away during diplomatic missions, and they find out, no, that's actually a petrified rock or petrified wood. So I'm with you on that. I definitely think there's some shenanigans going on. All right, we are moving on to the final segment of the interview. This is the worthy adversary section, where I asked Damian, who is somebody out on social media that you respect but you totally disagree with? Speaker 5 27:26 So a guy named Bruce Turkel that you may or may not know, he's an author of books, he's a branding guy. He's all about marketing, and he speaks for a living. Has written books, and also he ran an ad agency in Miami, Florida. To say that I totally disagree is pretty close to true, but I do respect him, because also we've done business together. He and I have done some business together. He is extremely liberal. He is a vegan. He's married to a vegan. He's married to a vegan, and they have a daughter who's a vegan that like shows up at protest and talks about meat being murdered, and I think she wears the outfits and does all the stuff. I couldn't disagree more. I'm a dairy farm kid, steak eating, conservative guy that drinks whole chocolate milk every morning of my life. I'm a I'm nowhere close to that. I respect him because he's a brilliantly driven guy to ask what's next to provide something of value, and that's what you and I both do. Vance, we provide something. We wake up every day and we pound the coconuts together and hope that $1 falls out. And we're doing that by serving clients. And he, if he's in his 60s, still comes up with brilliant ideas, still creates good writing and still makes you ponder and think about your position in the marketplace as a marketer, and why brands do what they do to stay relevant and in demand. I respect him for his mind and his hard work ethic. I do not agree with almost any other thing than that. Well, Speaker 3 28:49 Damian, that is great. I'm so glad you were willing to take a position. When people come on and they're like, Ah, I don't want to say anything bad about anybody. The truth of the matter is, you got to have people you disagree with, otherwise you don't stand for anything, and you, sir, definitely stand for something. You're always willing to take a position. Thank you so much for coming on tonight. If people wanted to learn more about you, your speaking, your consulting, where should they go? Speaker 5 29:11 Go to Damien mason.com, and from there you can find me on all my social media. I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on Facebook, I'm on Twitter. I and have quite a good YouTube thing that I'm ramping up now, and I release the business of agriculture podcast every Monday, both as an audio and a video. Interviewer 29:27 I also want to thank our sponsors, farm test.ag which allows you to test your own field so you can find out if those guys that are selling you their farm products are actually delivering on what they say they are, and legacy interviews, where we sit down with your loved ones to capture their life stories so that you can have a video that captures them as they really are. Join us next week when we have clay Conry coming on, we're going to do the show a little bit earlier, because it is Halloween and I've got two little girls that are dying to dress up as a. Wrath, and as an Egyptian mummy princess, and I want to be there to see that. So thank you so much, Damian for coming on. And as always, feel free to disagree.