America’s Land Auctioneer
Captivate and celebrate the dynamics of rural America, American Agriculture and inspire and teach others how to live a bold and abundant life in rural America. Background: The intrigue, endless opportunities, and romance of rural life in America have never been more on the minds of Americans. The recent pandemic and civil unrest have Americans of all ages earning for a more peaceful, less hectic life. Even billionaire Bill Gates is now the largest crop landowner in America. As many Americans look for peaceful refuge in the rolling hills and wheat fields they are faced with a richness of opportunities. But where do you begin to look? This show will highlight and feature endless opportunities in every state. What is it that is so unique about rural America, the land and what it produces? How can I live that life? The American Land Auctioneer will tell stories and weave into those stories a place for you to dream, live and enjoy the abundance of all that rural America has to offer.
America’s Land Auctioneer
Bridging Worlds: Mikkel Pates on Agriculture Journalism, Faith-Based Ventures, and Reporting Challenges
Ever wondered how journalism can bridge the gap between agriculture and the everyday world? In our latest episode, we sit down with Mikkel Pates, a seasoned journalist whose career spans over four fascinating decades. Inspired by his father’s work in agricultural communications and his upbringing on a ranch, Mikkel embarked on a journey that led him to chronicle the stories of rural America. From his first role in Worthington, Minnesota, to the playful yet impactful rivalry between SDSU and NDSU, Mikkel shares how these experiences shaped his unique perspective on agriculture journalism.
Explore the intriguing world where faith intersects with business through the story of a Jerusalem artichoke venture in Minnesota. We dive into the complexities of a business that used religious beliefs as a marketing strategy, only to spiral into controversy with its pyramid scheme-like structure. Mikkel sheds light on the motivations and vulnerabilities of those involved, revealing the untold stories behind this faith-based endeavor. His approach to gaining trust and encouraging openness from interviewees offers insights into the human side of journalism that often goes unnoticed.
The episode takes a sharp turn towards the challenges faced in the evolving landscape of agricultural reporting. Mikkel reflects on the transition from traditional media to the digital age, where sensationalism often eclipses the substantive reporting. We journey through pivotal agricultural events like the farm credit crisis of the 1980s and the rise of co-ops in the 1990s, leading to the modern cautionary tale of Hunter Hansen's grain trading fraud. As Mikkel enjoys his retirement, we celebrate his lasting impact while extracting valuable lessons from his storied career.
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Welcome to America's Land Auctioneer. I'm Steve Link, broker for Pfeiffer's Auction Realty. We're glad you could join us today. Don't forget you can catch up on all our past episodes by visiting Pfeiffer's website at pfeifferscom and clicking on America's Land Auctioneer to access all our podcast library on Apple and Spotify.
Speaker 2:Before we get into today's show, I want to thank America's Land Auctioneer sponsors, pfeiffer's Auction and Realty and Pfeiffer's Land Management. Pfeiffer's team of land and equipment auctioneers, real estate agents and land managers will give you a free consultation on selling your land and equipment or managing your farmland. Nobody does it better than the team at Pfeiffer's when it comes to selling your land and equipment or managing your farmland. All right, today I'm thrilled to welcome a legendary figure in agriculture journalism, mikkel Pates. 44 years, mikkel has been the voice of agriculture community, sharing stories of farmers, ranchers and the industry that sustain us all, and has been a trusted writer and correspondent for Ag Week, delivering thought-provoking commentary and deep insight into the world of ag. Mikkel. Welcome to the show. Well, I'm happy to be here, mikkel. How did you get started in this industry, in this business?
Speaker 3:Well, I grew up in Brookings, south Dakota, where my father was an agricultural journalist. He worked for South Dakota State University in the extension service, in charge of the department that did brochures, publications, news releases and eventually radio television for the Extension Service and the Experiment Station. And so he had grown up on a ranch in western South Dakota and I had three brothers and we lived in this town of Brookings but we worked on farms. In the summertime I worked with a custom baler and eventually it was time for deciding what to do. I had a thought that I might go into music, but then I decided journalism was a thing.
Speaker 3:Watergate had happened. I saw the impact of journalism and I thought, well, I'll try that. And ag economics the agriculture was thrown in there because my dad suggested that, because I had experience on farms and ranches, I knew more about agriculture than 90% of the kids in America, which sort of astounded me. But then I got into that and my first job out of college was working with the Worthington Minnesota paper as their ag reporter, which I thought I knew nothing about. I had an internship with a farmer magazine in the cities and traveled Minnesota and the Dakotas a little bit trying to figure out whether I was a fraud in journalism. Well, in agriculture, because there's a lot to know about agriculture, but that's kept it very interesting over the years, just because farmers and their work, as you know, are very. It's a fascinating business. It involves people, their story, their family story, their business sense and then a lot of other things, including politics and whatnot?
Speaker 2:Sure Yep. Okay, let's back up a little bit. So you grew up in Brookings, dad worked for SDSU, and we'll fast forward. Now you're in the Fargo-Moorhead area and NDSU is such a big part of this community are you still a Jackrabbit fan?
Speaker 3:Well, I am a Bison fan, unless they're playing the rabbits. And it's funny, because people will ask me who I'm cheering for and I say, well, I love the Bison, but I will not cheer against my rabbit, that's right. That's right.
Speaker 2:And I don't blame you. You know you grow up in a community and that sense of pride and ownership is apparent and then you go to somewhere else and you can appreciate the fan base. But you know SJSU and NDSU has been a fun rivalry. Ndsu got the better of them this year in the two games that we played them, but SJSU had their number the last two years and you know it'll be fun to see that rivalry going forward. Many of the listeners probably are aware of NDSU and UND was the rivalry and still is a big, big rivalry, and so you've got to be careful on what colors you wear to a point.
Speaker 2:But, it's all good fun and you know there's so many similarities to SDSU and NDSU and their programs and their administration and how they run an agricultural university like those both do so it's fun to see it on the sport level, but they have a little bit of a rivalry too on their academics, from what I've noticed. University like those both both both do so it's fun to see it on the sport level, but, um, they, they have a little bit of rivalry too on their academics, from what I've noticed. Um, they're they, they want to be the best in their field, um, and they're both doing an excellent job and uh, and so I'm really really proud that this region can, can, can have those two great institutions and they're not that far apart. What, how many miles is it from fargo down?
Speaker 3:to Brookings. It's about three hours to get down there, depending on how fast you want to go, but I've made that trip many, many, many times.
Speaker 2:And I've had the good fortune to be around SDSU's administration and do different seminars and speaking engagements and NDSU and, like I said, there's so many similarities and so many parallels that it's really fascinating.
Speaker 3:The land-grant colleges and how they've supported agriculture and engineering and things like that are such a tremendous asset to this country. I think we don't realize what they've contributed.
Speaker 2:Yep and SJSU. They're doing some programs that deal with real estate and agriculture real estate, and so I'm following close on that and see when we get our next budding stars to come work for us. All right, you talked a little bit about the Watergate story. That intrigued you when you started. What are some of the first stories that you covered for agriculture?
Speaker 3:Well, you know, when I was working with the ag magazine, the farmer magazine, the farmer magazine, basically, I was trying to learn more about the you know just how people grow things, and so you know, I remember one of the first trips had to do with coming up to the Red River Valley and I met Hiram Drocky who was at Concordia. It was a business guy that was connected with Ron Offit. He eventually wrote Ron Offit's biography, but one of the first people I met was Ron Offit and then went up to write a story about a hog testing station north of here. A little bit which was news to me Went up to bluegrass seed country up in the Roseau area, and so I was just learning how people were actually farming and everything was new to me and so I would just tell people. Well, you know, bluegrass isn't my big you know knowledge thing. You know, I don't know, and so please explain it from the beginning. And it turns out after a while you do enough stories and you accumulate some things. You do enough stories and you accumulate some things.
Speaker 3:But at Worthington, my first job, I sang in a church choir and there was a guy in my church choir, lyndon Olson, who was quite an expert on hog production production and there was, um, he taught me about you know how farm programs worked, which is another whole thing, but he also it was. It was a time when rhinovirus was going around and people were crushed from from a disease and had to depopulate and and uh. But my first big you know thing, uh was um, covering the jerusalem artichoke story, which was a kind of a big pyramid scheme. That, um, you know, in the 70s everybody was making a lot of money, or fence row to fence row, and it was a pretty overheated economy. Inflation was happening and then when things changed and inflation changed the value of land, people really were not going to do well into the 80s, but we didn't really know that. But what I was learning was that they wanted to keep making money and this Jerusalem Martichokes was what was being promoted.
Speaker 3:And I wrote a story that got the attention of the people I was writing about because they had a 25-point retraction demand, otherwise they would sue us. And uh, um. So it wasn't the first time I'd been threatened on us on a, with a lawsuit, but it was the first time that they said if I didn't retract things by a certain date, they would sue us. Sure, and uh, it happened to be a month before I was married and we took a honeymoon trip up to Winnipeg camping and stopped at the Fargo Forum where they were also being threatened with a suit from the same company, but in the meantime they had been indicted by the minnesota attorney general and the editors at the at the forum told me, uh, they probably wouldn't have time to sue us. Wow, because and they I think two or three of them went to jail and there have been books written about that yeah, mickle, I want to.
Speaker 2:I want to to talk about this in more detail in the next segment and because all the stories that you've talked about I've gone back and read when I got into this business 20 years ago. We're on our 25th anniversary as a company and I go back and I try and read those old articles because history seems to repeat itself and those are invaluable and you did an excellent job closing covering those. So, but as we close out our first segment, I want to thank our sponsors pyfers auction realty and pyfers land management. Pyfers team of land and equipment auctioneers, real estate agents and land managers will give you a free consultation on selling your land and equipment or managing your farmland. Nobody does it better than the team at Piper's.
Speaker 1:We'll be right back after these messages $50,000,. Where's $1,750 here now, Dude? So where's the $1,750?
Speaker 2:no-transcript. Visiting piper's website at wwwpiperscom and clicking on america's land auctioneer to access our podcast library on Apple and Spotify. Ok, after that, closing out that first segment, we're talking about the Jerusalem artichoke and you know, like I said, history seems to repeat itself, and when I first came to the Red River Valley to to do real estate, I spent a lot of time reading a lot of your articles and other industry articles that would talk about the soil. You talked about the bluegrass up in Roseau and the grass farming up there. That was a little bit of my history.
Speaker 2:I handled native grass, seed and things like that, and so I found it fascinating what crops the potato crops and stuff and what soils they were attributed to. So I really leaned in on your articles but I drew some artichoke story. It is really easy to understand when you have a situation like we did in the 70s and 80s, with high interest rates and low commodity prices and farmers and producers were faced at losing their farm and they needed they needed to swing big for the fences, they needed to find something that was going to carry them through. And when somebody comes with a, with a product, um that that that feels like it can save their farm. Um that, the the producers and farmers some of them really latched on to that, but it it turned out to burn them, didn't it?
Speaker 3:yep, and you know, you the psychology of farmers. Then you know you had this idea of ethanol and I started my first job in 79, my first full-time job, and the the idea of ethanol was being developed with some people at south dakota state university, but they were the idea initially. That people probably forget is that they were talking about ethanol and on-farm ethanol production to produce fuel, because one of your higher costs was this fuel and you thought about that. The Middle East was screwing us over on fuel, so let's have our own. And so that was one of the first ideas. And then the first real corn processing to do these things on a large scale was at Marshall, minnesota, which was a corn fructose I think it was fructose down there corn wet mill, and so I went to the groundbreaking for that.
Speaker 3:But these guys with this Jerusalem artichokes had. You know you're talking to people about prosperity, christianity, which is something that people need to be careful about, because I have my own faith, which is important to me, but when people link Christianity with their business, it can play mind games on people. And so you have this company that was at the little town of Linde, minnesota, south of Marshall, and it had a defrocked lawyer from South Dakota. It had this contractor that had some money, and you had a preacher from Minnesota that was running nursing homes or something like that, and they together got themselves hooked in with somebody that had a little pseudoscience as far as what you could do with sugar beets or not sugar beets, but these Jerusalem artichokes and you had this wonderful name of Jerusalem artichokes, which sounded very kind of religious and important that way. And then you had the Red River Valley that had just gone through this phase where farmers up here had purchased in a co-op a sugar industry that was, you know, revitalized farms up here, yep. And so you had people that had still had money from the 70s, they had this faith in something. And then you had these guys that, I mean, I think they had well, I know they had several airplanes that they would fly around and do these little revival meetings, and it was a red, white and blue Christian emphasis that we're going to do this with this Jerusalem artichoke thing, and they were paying $1,000 an acre for seed to do this at the top of the pyramid. Well, it turns out it's like a lot of things that you do in a pyramid style. It's harder to do it as the pyramid gets bigger. It as the pyramid gets bigger. And what they didn't really ever game out was that nobody was making ethanol out of Jerusalem artichokes, and so their kind of theory was you get a big enough pile of it and somebody's going to make something out of it.
Speaker 3:And I had, I remember, going and interviewing the guy that was the vice president of international marketing for this organization and he was a preacher that had connections family-wise with the company and he had a big picture of Christ going up Golgotha behind him and big speakers with gospel music and little messages of salvation and so on around. And I said, well, I see, you know that. You know, religion is a big part of your marketing here. And he looked at me and he said well, christians believe in something they can't see, so they're more susceptible to this idea. Oh, wow, and I said I stopped him and I said I repeated it back to him and yeah, that's, that's it and that was one of the things that that they wanted retracted. But I just thought it was astounding that that that was what he tried to do.
Speaker 2:So that okay. So in that instance you had you, you were fortunate to get him to open up and and and talk to you, and I and I've noticed that throughout your career you've you've had that talent and that skill to go into people's kitchens and, and I'm sure the people that that invested in in in something like that you know are a little bit embarrassed and don't necessarily aren't proud of what they did, but they also probably want to tell the story so somebody else doesn't make that same mistake. But how did you approach those people so to make them feel comfortable to open up to you?
Speaker 3:Well, I guess I, first of all, people usually do what they consider to be reasonable things, you know, whether it's if they're motivated by, you know, religion, or whether it's you know, their business. People do things for good reasons, usually for several kinds of reasons. And so you, if you just really listen to people, if you just ask them questions and let them know, for some reason people realize that I am interested in why they do these things. And, uh, uh, I think, um, I don't know if, if, there's something special about what I do. I don't necessarily see it that way, but but people, uh, uh, I happen to be able to let people know that I'm I really am interested in them.
Speaker 2:Well, I think what I've learned from reading your articles over the years is the fact that you can I don't know if you have a sense of who the good people are, and you're great at highlighting those good people and then the bad apples. You're not afraid to bring them to the front page and you know, for instance, in that Jerusalem artichoke story, I'm guessing that company was not happy that you had them on the front page in the light that you did, and I'm sure they went after you in probably legal sense. And that's tough. I mean, you have to go back to your family and explain to them what's going on in your day and why you're not sleeping at night.
Speaker 3:Yeah Well, with that case I had a very good boss, who you know, because I had not been threatened by anybody in a company that had millions of dollars behind him, you know. And the boss explained to me. He says well, mikkel, he says they're not suing you, they're suing us, we're the ones with the money. And basically he also told me you can't be afraid of people suing you, because people will sue you over a lot of things. But he says you have to just know that if they're going to sue you, you're going to win. And so there's a whole set of processes and procedures that you know. A lot of times I laugh when I hear people talk about the fake media, because the media really does have a set of procedures and things to protect them from lawsuits. If they really were fake, people would be suing them and winning all the time, and, as it turns out, they don't.
Speaker 2:All right. As we close out this second segment, I want to thank our sponsors, pfeiffer's Auction and Realty and Pfeiffer's Land Management. Pfeiffer's team of land and equipment auctioneers, real estate agents and land managers will give you a free consultation on selling your land and equipment or managing your farmland.
Speaker 1:Nobody does it better than the team at Pfeiffer's Stick around for our third segment.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to America's Land Auctioneer. I'm Steve Link, broker for Pfeiffer's Auction and Realty. We're glad you could join us today, don't forget. You can catch up on all our past episodes by visiting Pfeiffer's website at pfeifferscom and clicking on America's Land Auctioneer to access a podcast library on Apple and Spotify.
Speaker 2:Ok, we just got done in segment two, talking about you know, on how how the media has changed a little bit over the over the recent times, and that's one of the things that you know. We're talking about a sensational story, that Jerusalem artichoke thing. But I remember all of your stories that I'm going to call the meat and potatoes it talked about. You know the success stories of the co-op, of the sugar beet co-op, the. You know just how farms are run and animal agriculture and just regular corn and soybeans and the different things like that. But in today's world we are now susceptible to clickbait and we need to have those sensational stories that talk, that give people to open up the newspaper and well, now it's online and to click on it. Tell me, what have you, over the 44 years, seen as the biggest change in agricultural reporting?
Speaker 3:agricultural reporting. Well, you know, when I started in 79, and you know there was, there was the tractor, caves were starting and things like that. But I went into this ag journalism thinking I was going to write about people producing things. And you know how do you grow another bushel of soybeans or whatever it is, when do you replant after hail. You know how do you grow another bushel of soybeans or whatever it is, when do you replant after hail. You know stuff like that and I was learning all that from scratch and I was. You know.
Speaker 3:The idea was you were thinking of the success of agriculture. That was happening and it was very apparent in the 70s, the go-go 70s apparent in the 70s, the go-go 70s. Then there was the 80s. That was the farm credit crisis, which had its own, completely different emphasis. In the 90s you had your people trying to recover and revive and feel better about agriculture and co-ops was a big thing in our part of the country where people were trying to own their own, do more on-farm processing.
Speaker 3:And then you get into the 2000s and there's other things. The media has changed incredibly. You know farm magazines were the big thing that everybody read farm magazines, yep, and everybody read newspapers, and the television was, of course, concentrated into two or three major networks, and I had the experience of being in western South Dakota to visit relatives where they would only get one station yep and uh. So now uh, and, and of course radio was has always had a a presence in in in the ag media, and now it's all different, with, you know, everything sliced and diced, and here we have a company that's doing your own radio program, right, and then people's access to it is it's a whole different program than it used to be.
Speaker 2:Yeah, let me remind everybody, we're talking with Mikkel Pates, who's been in the industry for over 40 years, and you recently retired, is that correct?
Speaker 3:I retired from full time, as I said, in early 2023. Sure, so I've. I've been trying to be a good retiree. I have a daughter in England and a son in Kentucky, and so we have traveling and visiting relatives who I promised to go and visit and never really thought I would, and now I've been doing that. So that's my main focus.
Speaker 2:So are there some stories that just stick out, that were probably some of the toughest to cover, that you just were a little bit tough.
Speaker 3:Well, um, tough, yeah, there were things that I figured were important but uh, you know they, you know you just cover them as time goes by.
Speaker 3:The most memorable stories have to do with, you know, big crimes or people who had big bankruptcies or you know things you know. There's the Hunter Hansen story in recent years Yep, story in recent years and sometimes, well, I covered a huge drug bust one time over in Minnesota, New York Mills. It turned out to be the biggest marijuana bust in the history of the country. That was based on a bunch of people out of Kentucky coming and starting a marijuana farm at New York Mills and I was the ag reporter at the forum and got thrown into it because it was every six weeks. I was the general assignment reporter covering cops and stuff like that for the forum and so I rolled on that. So I mean there have been weird stories. There were weird stories out of the 80s farm credit crisis times where somebody gets in trouble with the production credit association of the farm credit administration now and wanted to dig a trench around their farm to prevent the pca from, um, uh, repossessing their equipment.
Speaker 2:Yep and uh, and there were, oh, that's incredible like that yeah, oh, there's some things on package there, so so that that drug story which I have not read and I may have to go back. It's funny. You fast forward a few years and now, um, maybe their production is what is legal now and people are producing, uh, legal marijuana on on farms and and that's been a new thing up in this region and growing hemp just for rope and fiber and things like that have been happening over the last decade. But yet you have that story of a drug bust in little New York mills and there's probably some movies and some movie scripts that people maybe read your article and used some of that material from.
Speaker 3:Well, there's been a book about it, it's called the Cornbread Mafia. Okay, and it's about this guy, johnny Boone, who was from south of Louisville, that his family had been in the moonshine business and then, after Vietnam, people were interested in marijuana. So he and his tight little group of Kentuckians were producing a lot of marijuana and when they got in trouble around there, when they'd get out of jail, then they decided to disperse this elsewhere in the country and they put operations in different places, including Nebraska and in Minnesota. And over here in Minnesota they started planting marijuana in the middle of the field and then they put corn around the outside of it to hide it. Sure, and eventually this was noticed. Yeah, and they, you know. It all kind of relates to your agriculture, because these farms up here were available because of tough times in the dairying industry, which turned out to be into the whole herd buyout in 1985.
Speaker 3:But I think this was just prior to that, maybe 84. And the, and all of a sudden, on the news on Friday afternoon there was this idea that they were looking for suspects. Sure, they had 17 guys on the loose that they were going to chase down, and I thought, well, I better go over there and find out about this, and because I was supposed to go to work the next day, I'm not going to wait until tomorrow to go to work and try to catch up with this story. So I went down and covered that. But the story was the headline. Headline was they farmed.
Speaker 2:Funny because they and that is such a true thing. I mean, you go to every, every coffee shop or elevator and, and I don't care, you can be the best, um, you can be the best farmer out there and all your roles are straight and you have zero skips. But people is, people notice. If there's something unusual out there, they'll notice. And there's not a lot of uh, a lot of news in some of these small towns and so you talk about it.
Speaker 3:Oh my yeah, you know, I one of the things that you know. Eventually, when we started doing tv, you know you would. If you were going to be to you know, some small, smaller town, you know you would stop on the main street and do a some b-roll of the shooting the the main street. Show us something. You know and I always uh timed how long it would take for me to set up my camera before someone would come up and want to know everything about me, everything.
Speaker 2:What was going on? What did my neighbors do? Or why are you here? Why are you?
Speaker 3:here and they have such a wonderful folksy way of asking these questions and unassuming but probing.
Speaker 2:Yep, yep. And then do you still sing in a choir? I do.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I sing in a choir at Olivet Lutheran Yep.
Speaker 2:Yep, and so that gets you out and about too, and yeah, you're really talented on that level too. So we will close out this third segment. And before we close it out, I want to thank our sponsors, piper's Auction Realty and Piper's Land Management. Piper's team of land and equipment auctioneers, real estate agents and land managers will give you a free consultation on selling your land and equipment or managing your farmland. Nobody does it better than the team at Piper's.
Speaker 1:We'll be right back after these messages for our fourth and final segment.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to America's Land Auctioneer. I'm Steve Link, broker for Pfeiffer's Auction Realty, and we're glad you could join us today. Don't forget you can catch up on all our past episodes by visiting Pfeiffer's website at pfeifferscom and clicking on America's Land Auctioneer to access your podcast library on Apple and Spotify. All right, we're here in our last segment and I'm still here with mickle pates um and just learning all kinds of things from his over 40 years of experience in the? Uh, in the? Uh in the business of agriculture, journalism and uh. You mentioned a name that popped back up in the news recently of hunter hansen, and he? Um was basically a grain trader, if I understand. I should let you set this up, but he was recently on the list to be pardoned. I don't know if that happened or not, but what do you remember about that story?
Speaker 3:Well, that was a case where somebody calls me and says oh gee, do you hear what's happening up at Devil's Lake? And usually farmers hear something before you do. And what it was was this company was not paying its grain bills. And I think I said well, how much are we talking about? Oh, a couple of million, which has seemed like a lot. And then you found out that the person was being looked into by the Public Service Commission, which is something I it's a routine. I've, you know, gotten used to watching and pattern Over the years.
Speaker 3:Somebody isn't paying their bills, so the Public Service Commission comes in, looks at books and decides if that's correct.
Speaker 3:And so they had descended on this office.
Speaker 3:And over the next couple of years, I learned a lot about this, which was that this young fellow, fresh out of high school, had gotten into this grain trading business and, through the aid of a broker an introducing broker got connected with a number of farmers.
Speaker 3:Initially I thought he was doing a lot of this work through internet knowledge, but somehow that maybe today's younger farmers were doing more learning about him through that. But really what he was doing was he was offering people a slight premium, and then they were needing this and then he would offer to come and pick up grain on their farms and then he would give himself more time to pay them than he was needing to get paid. He was essentially saying I'm so busy it'll take me 30, 40 days to pay you, but he was taking it to the same markets that they could have sent it to, getting paid right away and accumulating a pile of money, and it was essentially kind of a pyramid or a Pon of money and it was essentially a, a, a kind of a pyramid or a, you know, a Ponzi scheme.
Speaker 2:Right, cause he would pay some of the first people or the loudest people or the people that would. They wanted their money, they demanded their money, but the rest of them that were that were maybe not quite as forceful, he pocketed that and never paid them Right.
Speaker 3:And he worked with elevators, people that were smart people in the business of grain trading. But uh, what that tells you again is you know, people see dollar signs and uh, they'll, it clouds their vision. You know, one of the farmers I remember saying, um, you know, I talked to my co-op and talked about how much he was paying and and they said, well, we, we can't pay that, but he had a need to get rid of some stuff that was going out of condition and and pretty soon, the truck is rolling down the road. Well, this kid 19, 20 years old, with no formal training in grain marketing, grain business. He traded $23 million worth of grain oh my and ended up over about two years, 18 months or so, he owed $11 million to people and a lot of that is unaccounted for.
Speaker 2:That's right. So, yeah, so he did this in a short period of time, amassed 11 over 11 million dollars of missing money. Um, went through a trial, was convicted, um, and I'm going all this up by memory, so I encourage people to go back and and uh and read mickle's uh reporting on this um, and then um, and, and it was currently serving, but just recently made it on the list to be pardoned. And part of his sentence I read too, is the fact that he's supposed to repay that. But if you're in your 20s and you have $11 million to pay back and you're sitting in jail somewhere, I don't see how that can be repaid. And even if you get out, I don't know how that's going to be repaid. And the heartbreaking thing about this is there are some farms that sold to them and it might have been the last straw that they just couldn't overcome, and so those farms have since sold out and those producers are no longer farming, and that's really a sad story.
Speaker 3:One of the people that gave the impact statements that they have at the end of the trial said you have murdered me financially and you know. The thing with Hunter is you know he had a very was obviously very capable of doing many good things because he was able to organize a lot of transportation and keep a lot of balls up in the air, especially without any real training. He had a lot of native ability and in fact I think a lot of the people that looked at that story were kind of impressed with him because of what he had done, even though it turned out to be wrong.
Speaker 2:Yep, yep, yep, yep. Well, and we talk about these stories again, like we we mentioned earlier, not to necessarily, um, you know you have to, you have to name the names, but, um, really you want to learn from it. And so the next time something um comes before you that might be too good to be true, um, you really got to do your research. You know you don't want to lose out on opportunities. You know some of these, some of these opportunities that maybe felt far-fetched with different production. You know the sugar beet co-op and things like that. I'm sure glad that the region invested in that and that really shaped the Red River Valley.
Speaker 2:But some of these too-good-to-be-true stories are too-good be true and and it just um, it just really really shaped an area, because I was up in that area here just recently with for for a land sale and and we talked about that with some of the growers and producers and there has to be a sensible reason why somebody is paying a premium for your, your, your product, and if they are, um, you know it'd be a good idea to get that check and cash it before, uh, before too long. So well, we're running short on time. It has been really fascinating, but there's a couple of things I wanted to talk about. If somebody wanted to get into into into agriculture journalism now, listening to this, what, what, what words of advice would you give them?
Speaker 3:Well, I think agricultural journalism is a fascinating career. There are many ways you can go in it.
Speaker 2:And.
Speaker 3:I chose to stay in a private enterprise, working for privately held companies that are family owned. And there are other places you can go. And there are other places you can go, and you know, if you're willing to be a communicator, you can even be a grain broker, who does? Or a land broker who does radio shows Exactly. But you know, agricultural companies are looking for people too that can communicate. You know their company story, can communicate, you know their company story, and so there's lots of ways and it's a good career to have, or to start with, if you're trying to get into something in business.
Speaker 2:That's a great point. Yeah, no matter what business you are, you need to communicate and, of course, the platforms are changing and ever-changing. Right now, you know, maybe the old newspaper is not as prevalent as it was in the past, but Twitter's and X and all of the social media stuff is, but their base is the same as your base was. You needed to write, you needed to be accurate for people to follow you and continue to listen. Are you still singing in the quartet too?
Speaker 3:The quartet is not kind of COVID and some health issues for some of us have changed things, but I still sing in a choir and enjoy that.
Speaker 2:Well, if you ever do a revival on the quartet, I encourage people to listen to you guys because that was so much fun. You've been out to our community out in Castleton a number of times and you're always a good draw and people walk away smiling and thank you. Thank you for your service in this industry and being a promoter of agriculture and I wish you well in your next endeavors. Thanks a lot. Thank you for joining us today with the conversation with Mikkel Paitz. Don't forget to catch up on past episodes at America's Land Auctioneer by visiting pyferscom and accessing our podcast library. Until next time, I'm Steve Link. Stay tuned and look forward to seeing you down the road. Thank you.