Welcome to the Si Farmer podcast, podcaster. We talk farming, marketing, business tactic strategy if it, you know, farmer to marketing. We're gonna talk about it here. And today is no different. I got asked a question the other day and I just thought it was a, it was a cool question. Just got me thinking about some of the old horses we've had. And my question was, if you could ride only one horse rest of your life, which horse that you have owned, would it be? And I, I thought about this for a while and I, you know, it, it, it was really a pretty simple question, but I thought, man, am I missing something? And it, it'd be my old stretch horse stretch, if you're listening to this. He's not pretty. You're not. Stretch is tall, big belly, high wither, long neck. Looks like he was put together by committee. But man, you throw a saddle over him, throw a leg over him. And he loves to do his job. I mean, he's always got a great attitude. He always wants to go, always wants to work hard. Man, you just, he's, he's the kind, he's the kind you want, but he ain't pretty. So, anyway, let's get into it. Today

I have a love hate relationship with marketing. Really, I've gotta do what all I wanna do

Is farm. Welcome to the Si Farmer podcast. If you wanna market your farm, farm-based business or craft food business directly to the consumer, this is the place for you. Welcome to the show. So, I gotta say it, you know, if you only had one horse to ride, which one would, Ben? It was, it was a pretty easy decision for me. I, I, you know, I was like, you know what, I, I, I'd like my old stretch horse. He's just a cool horse. I really enjoy riding him. He's got a great attitude, always wants to work. And I got to thinking about, you know, what would be your favorite tractor? Well, you know, I've got, had a bunch of tractors here over the years. I, I, I would pick my first tractor, which was, let me think back. It was a small 39 horsepower John Deere, a 45 10. So, I mean, it was, it was, I mean, like I said, I got into farming latent life, but my first tractor that I owned was a 39 horsepower. It was four-wheel drive, man. The thing was, I mean, it was bulletproof. I think the only thing I ever had to do on it was I changed the oil regula. I think I had to put a battery in it once in the 14 or 15, 16 years I owned it. And I'm pretty sure the only thing that ever went wrong with it was the tilt steering. It was an open cab, little open cab, tractor tilt, steering went out. I had a little front end loader, man, this thing would work, work and work. Loved it. But as you know, a tractor's just a tool carrier. So I started thinking, wow. What's your favorite implement? What is the, what's your favorite implement? Oh man, I started thinking about it. And you know, when you start farming, when you're new, you don't know. You're sort of learning your way around and figuring out what you gotta do, man implements. You think, oh, I'll just go down to the local farm store and buy an implement. Well, sometimes it works great. Sometimes you were better off to put a, a piece of tissue paper behind your tractor to scrape dirt. It's just, you know, implements. You can buy good ones or bad ones. But what's your favorite? And my favorite implement was, it was kind of a weird deal. I saw it at a, at a horse show actually. They were using it to work the arena. And I, you know, we had just built a new roping arena and I, I started looking at it as an arena tool. And so I, I, I ended up buying one. It's a company, I'm trying to think. They're a b i, they're sort of a direct to consumer company. They market their products. They do a real good job marketing their products, but they're a direct sales. So when you call them, they have a sales guy talk with you and then you figure it all out and then you buy the thing and they ship it to you. There's no middleman, there's no implement dealer. But, and normally I like to buy from a dealer, but they, this tool was, is really, really well built. And I wasn't expecting that when I bought it, it sort of, it, it actually impressed me. Still to this day, I use it, it is a great tool for gravel driveways. It's a great tool for work in a horse arena. It's a great tool for, uh, I actually used it. Um, we were building haystacks and I used this tool to, you could set it a certain way. It's called the TR three, and you can set it a certain way and you can scrape the top layer of grass off of, you can set that scraper. So it's just about an inch down and it perfectly takes the grass off without messing the dirt up. Too bad. Um, yeah, just a great, great little tool and impressed me. Always ready to work. It's really solidly built, you know, uh, but that, if you have to think favorite implements. And I ran it with a 40 horsepower tractor for years now. My smallest tractor, I think it's 105 horsepower and works perfect behind it. Never once been it up. It might be a little overpowered, might, might have a little bit too much tractor on it for what it is. But I've never been it up. I've never destroyed it. And I started, you know, the reason I was thinking about all of these things is most people don't like to market. They don't like to market their farms. They wanna talk about their farms. I mean, I've sitting, I've had conversations that will go on to hours about different farming techniques and how we run our farm and, you know, getting ideas from other farmers about how they run their farms and how it works. And you know, it, it's, it's interesting. But the marketing part, what's your favorite part about marketing? And people go, oh, I hate it. I don't like it. And it's understandable. It is. It's not, you know, take computer work. Most guys who are, you know, I think I'm, I'm a little bit odd. I like both sides of the business. I enjoy the computer work. I enjoy the, the video I enjoy working with. This is what I did for a career for, for a long time. But I enjoy it. I still like that part of the work, but I also want to turn it off and go get dirty. I wanna go out and play in the dirt. I want to, you know, just finished up, uh, in the process. We picked up some new ground. I'm in the process of turning all the corn vt and yet we didn't get it done in the fall. We had a really wet fall. And so, uh, been v ting fields. So I love that. I get out of this, get outta the studio and I go into that work. And I love that too. I'm just, I mean, I, I like both sides, but most people that you talk to, that I talk to anyway, when we start talking about the creative side of marketing and the technical side and the, oh, I've gotta be on the computer, man. It's just, it's just not what they like to do. And so they have to convince themselves to do it. And when something becomes like that, it's hard to motivate yourself to do it. Uh, give you a, a great good friend of mine. He, he's cowboy. That's all he is. I mean, he does not, doesn't, he doesn't like farming, doesn't like he's cowboy. He said they could make him the c e o of, of Ford Motor Company and he would make more in a year than he's made in his entire life. But he couldn't stand the step down in stature cuz you know, he's cowboy and that's all he is ever wanted to be. And that's a absolutely fantastic. But when he, you know, if you ever ask him to get on the computer, he's like, oh, dear Lord, no, nope. Don't wanna do it. Not gonna do it. Don't like it. And so how do you, how do you convince yourself to do the things we don't like to do? And I started thinking about it. You know what, I, this'll sound kinda weird, but I reward myself to do the things I don't want to do. When I was, uh, I was a musician and I played in studios, I was a session player part that you have to practice the most is the part that you do the worst. And convincing yourself and talking yourself into sitting and working on something that you don't do ba don't do. Well, man, it takes, takes a different, takes some motivation. So, you know, I've started thinking about these things that you really love, like riding my stretch horse man, anytime I get to throw a leg over stretch, I'm, I'm, I'm happy. But to do that, you have to do all the other things. Like you, you gotta clean a stall and you gotta feed him. You gotta do all the other stuff, which is fun too. It's its own little reward. But you also have to do the other parts, which is you have to make enough money to be able to feed him. So you have to work well, you reward yourself for it, and you make the things. And we've talked about it before. I think I did a, I did a whole talk, uh, the whole podcast recently on, um, you know, the, the idea of rewarding yourself internally so that you can do the things you don't want to do and make them enjoyable. Finding the little pieces of joy, finding the little things that you like about it in order to keep yourself motivated. Because marketing isn't something that you just flip a switch and then walk away. The vast, vast majority of times marketing's work. And it's, it's work that has to be tended to on a regular basis. And so, you know, we, we have to come up with ways to motivate ourselves. And one of those things is think about your favorite things that you like to do. On, on our farm, I have to say, one of my absolute favorite jobs is mowing hay. I love to mow hay. I do. We have a John Deere W 2 35 swather to 16 foot swather auto steer, the whole deal, man, when you get in that thing, it is an absolute joy to drive absolute joy. I mean, it's just fun. So it's not real. You know, you spend 12 hours in the day there and, you know, I listen to books on tape and I listen to podcast. Hopefully somebody's listening to my podcast. But you know, you, you find the pieces of joy in doing the jobs that we have to do. And so, started thinking about this list, favorite implements, favorite tractors. What are your, what are your favorite tractors? What are your favorite implements? My, I I've told you my favorite tractor of all time is that, you know, it was my first tractor that I owned. It was actually a gift. It was a Father's Day gift, a big one. But Father's Day gift. And man, not only was it cool, but I enjoyed it. I I, I loved running that tractor. It got to be like a, a glove. Put your hand in, you do anything with that little tractor? Go anywhere. Um, so, you know, we, when we talk about marketing our farms, what are the things that you like to do in marketing? You know, one of the things that I enjoy, I, I truly love doing it. And that's talking to people about our farm. You know, uh, I, I was talking with a cattle grower the other day, and he's super, he's a heck of a nice guy. Just, just really enjoy talking to him. He's just a good guy. In fact, he and I were, were messaging back and forth today, he worked part-time at a big auction house, and he was saying how much fun it is to go out there, you know, he goes out there and pushes bulls around and pushes during whatever sales they're doing and they're moving cattle. And I said, man, I wanna come play. And he said, he sent me back. He said, you know, it's a great conversation that we have about our farms. He does some things that I just think are cool, and I hope he's interested in a little bit of what we're doing. He buys, he buys a bunch of hay from us. So, you know, we talking about how we're growing our hay, what we're trying to do different this year versus what we did last year, how we're trying to improve our quality. And he's, that's marketing, you know, I enjoy it. So it doesn't seem like marketing. It seems like I'm just having a conversation, which I am. I mean, I really, I, I like this guy. I mean, he's good guy. I enjoy talking to him. But when you talk about your business and you're, you're e energized about it, and you, you know, now I'm always trying to learn. So I'm always asking. I sometimes I ask as many questions as I, I say anything, but I'm like, so what did, when, when you guys were bailing, Hey, how did you do it? How'd you store your hay? Did you stack your your bail machine? How'd you stack your bails? How do you, you know, all of the questions you ask, but that's marketing. Now, one of my least favorite things to do, one of my absolute least favorite things to do is dealing with the advertising part of marketing. Now I'm good at it. So I, I get a lot of work doing that for people, but I don't, it's not the thing I enjoy. It's very numbers oriented, very numbers crunching, and you're looking at trends and data and metrics and all of these things. That's not my favorite thing to do. The, the mechanical part of it, the strategic part of it, I really enjoy the mechanical part is it's tedious. It's, you know, there's all kinds of words. Tedious, arduous, painful. You know, you can't make mistake because you're entering numbers, but I don't enjoy that part of it. How do you convince yourself to do it? You do all the other things that you enjoy to doing. Sometimes you gotta do a little bit of what you don't like to do, not a big deal. You motivate yourself to do it and you keep going. But how do you, how do you motivate yourself to keep going in the things you don't like? Now, what, you know, I talk to a lot of people, they hate social media, hate it, don't like to be on, it doesn't matter what platform it is, whether it's Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or whatever media, they, they, they hate social media. And some of that you can understand. It has become divisive in some ways, and I don't like that. But in the modern world, it's pretty much a necessity that we need to, you know, to run our businesses and to communicate with our customers. We can't think about how we like to communicate. We have to think how do our customers like to communicate? And so you, you have to, you know, we have to deal with that, but balance that with another part of the marketing that you enjoy. Find a part that you enjoy me, I reward myself for doing the things I don't like to do. And sometimes that's just an internal reward of saying, okay, this part was kind of cool. So, example, I don't like to do the, the, i I, I don't enjoy the, the technical part of the advertising side, but I do it and I take, I actually get to where I enjoy the trending and building the strategic insights from trending that I enjoy. So I, I look forward to, I know that entering all of the data and doing all of this stuff is what gets me to the trending part into building the strategic plans and the long-term goals. So you reward yourself, even if it's just a mental, you know, a little mental attaboy. But it's tough to do. It's tough. Um, you know, I was thinking the other day about, you know, how do we get ourselves, like, there's parts of farming that I don't like. I, I, you know, there's parts of every job. I've never had a job where I liked every part of the job. You know, they, they, they, those jobs don't exist very often. You know, where you like every single part of the job, but you gotta, you gotta do the whole job. Otherwise it's like farming. It's like, I like every part of it, but seeding well, if you don't plant the seeds, you know what? You don't get to do any of the other parts. Well, uh, I know guys that they love farming, they love every part of it. But, you know, one of, I talked to a guy the other day, he said, you know, he hates harvest, hates it, does not look forward to it. He looks forward to spring and planting and all of the dirt work and the equipment prep and all of that. But when it comes to harvest, it is such a grueling, another big corn, corn and bean farmers, it's such a grueling, intense process harvest because you, you know, you're harvesting and you've got the green wagons and you're loading the grain wagons to the trucks from the trucks and figuring out the logistics of whether you're gonna put this in silos or whether you've gotta take it direct to sale. You know, take it direct to the, um, you know, uh, uh, to the sale, uh, whatever you've gotta do. It's a, it's a grind. It's a grind. And if you far, if you're a grain farmer, you know it, we don't, we don't farm green. Um, so, you know, I look at'em out there and think, oh man, that's cool. I'd like to try that once. But the, the idea is they don't like that, but they like all the other parts, harvest is what pays for all those other parts. So, you know, you convince yourself, okay, I'll do it. And, you know, you find the joy of it. Um, he was telling me his kids will bring him when they're doing overnights, when they're wor, you know, they're going round the clock. His kids will bring him his meals. And he said, that's cool. He, he looked forward to that meal coming out at, you know, there's nine, 10 o'clock at night, some something to, you know, break the monotony of harvest. But again, finding those rewards and the things we don't like to do. Um, my daughter, God love her. She likes certain parts of her jobs, her job, she's a nurse. I've told you that on this podcast. She's a nurse. There are the parts of the job that you don't like, but you know, the reward, you hope the rewards make up for the things you don't like. And marketing. If you don't like to market your farm, if you don't enjoy that marketing process, you know, you gotta figure it out. Find the parts that you like. I've said it on here before, that, you know, if you don't like social media, find a part that you do like, and maybe find a way to reward yourself for doing that part that you don't like, so that it gets to be where it's not as painful. It's not such a, an arduous task. And again, think about your favorite part of farming. Well, if this marketing is what helps us pay for farming. If you're farming and you're not making any money, that's called a hobby. And if you wanna make a living from it, we have to generate revenue. And if you're not selling something into a commodity market, like a green, like a corn, soy, anything that you're selling into a commodity market, you have to market your product. And it's general direct to consumer marketing. Like we're, we run a forage farm and we sell some beef. Um, I know guys that, that raise, uh, uh, a lot of honey and they create products that way. They do, uh, you know, they do bees and they, you know, there's guys that I know that are, all they do is cattle and they sell beef direct, but they gotta market. And you, you know, some of'em like it, some of'em don't. What tends to happen though, is if you can find the part that you like in the marketing, it can be fun and you can get some enjoyment out of it. And it, it does, it breaks up the grind. Farming a lot of times is a very monotonous task. Like from, you know, for, for our part of it, cattle are easy. Haze tough for us. I mean, it's such a grind from the time the grass starts growing. You're in this constant harvest cycle and you know, every three to every four weeks, six weeks, you're out there bailing and you've gotta, you bail and you lo you know, you stack and then you haul and then you stack in barns, and then you go back out and get more. And you do this over and over again all season long until it comes time to sell it. Well, most people buy their hay in September or October, November, and then you know it. So in that time, that's when you're marketing your farm. But you also have to be marketing your farm when you're doing the parts you like. And you, you, you may not want to be in that marketing phase, but you gotta do it. You have to tell yourself, you have to convince yourself or find a way to find the joy in marketing. And again, it can be enjoyable. There are things, like I said, when I'm talking to farmers about our farm, man, I, I love talking to farms. I love talking farming. You know, when we talk about how we grow and our strategies and what we're doing, and hopefully we're gonna have a cool guest on here in a couple of weeks, um, that, you know, we, we've kind of taken some, some notes from him and reusing some of their product. But you know, that, that strategy, I love talking about that. But that's marketing to the people who are potential buyers. So when you're talking to people, even just talking about your farm is marketing. Now think about talking to your, you know, if you like talking about your farm, shoot a video, tell people about your farm. There's your social media. Return on investment is something we talk about a lot. You know, we have to think about the return on investment amount of dollars we spend versus the amount of dollars we get back in return. Well, marketing is one of those things. And if shooting a video didn't cost you any, any money, you know, you've got a phone shoot video, just your time. And until you get to a certain point, sometimes you gotta eat the cost of that time. But the return is a business that starts to grow and starts to flourish and gets a little bit of regularity to it, where you start to build relationships with customers. And when you start building those relationships with customers, then you can start talking. You think about how do I expand those relationships? How do I reach people that they know? So, you know, all of this comes back, all this marketing talk that we do comes back to that letting us do the parts we love, which is for me's farming, I love it, but I've gotta be able to do the other part really well, because I don't sell into a commodity. I don't have a fixed price. I don't have a price for my product set by a market. Eh, you could argue my cattle, if I sell cattle at auction or something like that, or I'm selling cattle to a broker, maybe. But for the most part, I sell, you know, you wanna buy a whole half or quarter cow, you know, so I sell it at my price, but I have to market that cow. I sell my hay. I have to market my hay. And the marketing is what allows me to sell my hay at a fair price. And I have to find my competitive advantages against, I have competitors, I'm friends with'em. So it's a friendly competition. But I have to do this in this marketing part that we talk about in our community, and that I am, I am, I am driven to help. Whole reason we do this, this, you know, whole reason that si farmer exists is to provide encouragement, provide guidance, provide a little knowledge and insight to help farmers who may not be huge, who are in that starting out growing growth phase, figure out how to market their farms in a way that allows us to have success. Because America, we need small farmers. We need people to grow food that bypasses the supply chain that is direct from the farm to the consumer. We get better products, we get, we get a, a biosecurity. I've talked about that before. It's important for small farmers to be successful. It is the sa it is a, it is an absolute necessity. Plus if you, you know, if you farm, it is what a wonderful way of life. What an absolutely wonderful way to live your life. You don't get much better than that to have a job. You love to have, to be able to do the things you like in a, in a, you know, hopefully you're, you're blessed enough. Like I am to live in a place that I absolutely love. Where I live every day is a vacation. Every day. When I lived in a major city, I spend all of my time wanting to be where I am right now. Hard to li hard to complain about a life where every day is, is a vacation. And that's what marketing allows us to do. It allows us to grow a business to the point that it becomes, that we get to focus on the fun things. We get to focus on the parts of the business that we like. And that's why we created this whole platform is here to help get you from where you are in your farm and growing to the place where you want to be. And with that, I'm gonna get outta here. Call it today. Have a wonderful week. Have a blessed today. Good luck and God bless.