2025 Hay Outlook

In this episode of AK Podcasts, Mike Donaldson engages with Brett Mortenson, a Regional Manager at Agri-King, to discuss the intricacies of commercial hay growing. They explore the evolution of hay production, the dynamics of the export market, and the innovative Silo-King Hay product that enhances hay quality. The conversation delves into the challenges faced by hay producers, the importance of quality versus quantity, and the future outlook for the hay market amidst changing economic conditions.

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Transcript

Chris Radke (00:01)
Welcome to AK Podcasts where we explore science and nutrition behind livestock care and management with the best and the brightest in the business. I'm your host, Chris Radke, part of the Sales Department here at Agri-King. And with me today, as usual, is the Director of Field Services and a Member of the Sales Management Team, Mr. Mike Donaldson. Mike, how you doing, buddy?

Mike Donaldson (00:21)
Very, very well, Chris. Actually getting almost into spring now. We don't seem to be able to warm up during the night, but the days are starting to be kind of nice. So, nope, doing very well.

Chris Radke (00:29)
Started to get there, yeah.
Good, good, good. Hey Mike, what are we talking about and who is with us?

Mike Donaldson (00:36)
Well, Chris, today we're joined by Agri-King regional manager, Brett Mortenson. Brett's out ⁓ west and is going to give us an overview on commercial hay growing, hay growing in general. Welcome Brett, and please tell us about yourself.

Bret Mortensen (00:52)
Thanks Mike, thanks Chris. It's good to be with you and always fun to talk, hey, a little about myself. I met Agri-King probably around 2018, something like that. I was ⁓ managing a hay export business where we were shipping hay mostly to China. And I was at a hay show in Reno, Nevada. I met Anna Foley and was really interested in the Silo-King Hay that was really just kind of in its infant stages at that point. But at that point, we were exporting a lot of hay, ⁓ most of it just right out of
East Idaho, the facility was in East Idaho and we were kind of a young company then as well. Four or five years later I was ⁓ looking for a change and immediately thought of Agri-King. I had actually brought, now I re- kind of regret the fact that I had brought a competitor into our marketplace that was doing a similar type thing. But there was just so much value to treating hay and what it could do that ⁓ I had helped facilitate that. And then I reached out to Agri-King looking for a change and here I am. And I'm super excited. I've been able to work with a lot of the same hay people and new hay growers and it's just exciting what we can do. So, a little bit about me.

Mike Donaldson (01:57)
you

Well, we're awfully glad that you're here. Now, if you go 55 years ago, I considered myself quite an expert on hay only because I could stack small square bales on a wagon and they didn't come off on the drive back to the farm. So having been from the Northeast and Midwest, my experience with hay was generally somebody
you know, baling all their part of their crop to feed to their own animals. And, and there was something called Western hay. And all I really knew is it came from somewhere West of me. I don't really know any more about it. ⁓ can you give us an overview of what commercial hay growing looks like in your world?

Bret Mortensen (03:08)
Yeah, absolutely. It's really fascinating. We used to be ⁓ a lot of small bales put up in the area and that really changed.
20, 30 years, it's really gone the other direction to where almost exclusively it was all large bales. By large bales, three by four and four by four, anywhere from 1,300 to 2,000 pounds depending on what type of hay and what you were doing.
That's actually changed a little bit recently. There's been a little bit of a shift back to the smaller bales as well. But really it's been driven by the market and commercial alfalfa growers are, you know, their goal is to meet the market demand. And when so much of the demand was going to dairy and large volume, it just made sense to put up big bales. And even with the export, ⁓ so much volume being exported, at that one hay press that I managed. Our highest ⁓ output for a year was I believe 21. We shipped just, it was around 85,000 metric ton of hay. To put that in perspective that...Everything on that international site is metric, but let's put it back in our world. That's over 90,000 short ton or standard ton for us. And if you break that down, that was basically 15 semi loads a day coming in and going out. And all that hay came from within an hour and half or two hours of just our facility. And within that area, there were three other presses, multiple hay cubing facilities.  These hay pelleters. So just kind of give you an idea. There's a lot of alfalfa grown here. I believe I haven't seen the total 2024 statistics yet, but I think in 23, Idaho was the number one alfalfa state with right around four and a half million ton of hay produced in the state. just a lot of hay, but we'll do everything from the, like I say, the dairy is a huge volume. Export was a big volume that's obviously ⁓ in a little bit of turmoil right now. The retail market has really driven a demand for small bales again and they're actually bundling those. We send a lot of hay out of Idaho, Nevada, ⁓ Washington, Oregon. It'll go to California to the retail market. It'll go to Texas, to Oklahoma, to Kentucky, Florida, New York. A real high demand on the horse market there. it really, what farmers are doing is they just try and create those relationships ⁓ where they can kind of have a niche if they can and send it out. There's everything from, there's a company not too far from me that they use quite a bit of poor quality hay in a bear bait that they manufacture. ⁓
Anything from really from chinchillas to to camels if it'll eat hey, there's probably somebody in Idaho sending it that way

Mike Donaldson (06:39)
⁓ Well, let me back you up just a minute, because one of the more intriguing things for me to learn about is this whole world of a hay press and the concept of making big bales and selling something slightly different to the market. Could you just take a quick or however much detail you want, overview of what you mean by a hay pressing facility?

Bret Mortensen (07:05)
That's a dangerous question to ask me. I could talk for a long time about it. But yeah, a friend of mine who I had given a tour to some high school students of his, he would call it the hay smash. Because essentially that's what we would do is we would bring hay bales in and really the whole goal is to condense them, to make them more dense, to maximize the weight.

Mike Donaldson (07:20)
Okay.

Bret Mortensen (07:32)
per volume going on a trailer or a container that's gonna get shipped overseas. So we would take a four by four bale the way or 1800 pounds, we'll say, and we would take and it would go through a process. It would actually kind of slice it and put it in almost the size of two string bales. If that's something you can get in your mind. There would basically be four of those and it put them in a bundle.

Mike Donaldson (07:57)
Yeah, okay, yep.

Bret Mortensen (08:03)
So essentially you'd end up with the size of four two-string bales with a plastic wrap around it and that would weigh right around a thousand pounds. we would get a, there's a tremendous amount of pressure. It would really condense those down, but it would stay in flakes and everything. And so it was, it really was like four two-string bales getting squished down together to be a thousand pound little unit.

Mike Donaldson (08:31)
Wow. So you referenced all the different places that, that hay could wind up. And I mean, my, spent most of my working life trying to convince people to make better hay, best hay, make that haylage early. You nothing but top quality knowing that it would rain, something would come along. We would get all the average that we wanted by accident. All we did was try to push for best, best, best.
In your world, as you cater to specific markets, is there a difference between always trying to get the best and what a different market might call for?

Bret Mortensen (09:11)
Yeah, absolutely and it also depends upon ⁓ market price as there's more variation in the grades as far as price goes there's more ⁓ motivation to put up that best quality. Two, three years ago when hay prices were extremely high here, we used to say if you could get twine around it, it was worth 300 bucks a ton. If it could not outrun the baler, we were chasing it down and trying to get twine around it, because it was valuable that year. But.

Bret Mortensen (09:50)
there was very little the spread between that top grade and if it couldn't outrun the baler it was pretty narrow that spread was so the the motivation was much more on the side of just let it grow we're gonna we're gonna get tonnage and and we're gonna capitalize on on our revenue by getting tonnage versus quality it's not very often like that but there are occasions where we have that narrow spread between the supreme quality and the lesser value performing haze. so there's usually enough spread there that there is motivation to really try and to get those higher dollar values because they are worth more. And so putting up the better quality hay, it's a good strategy.

Mike Donaldson (10:48)
You, you mentioned the export market and the ups and the downs. And you know, right now there's a lot of uncertainty with everything concerning exporting and importing, but it, has always for some reason, I think it's because I'm not used to a two, a two string bale weighing 250 pounds that I just can't quite grasp that. But the idea that hay was going on to a container being put on a ship and going to Asia seem like, okay, this is this, this can't be happening really. ⁓ How long has there been that huge aspect, even taking current time, if you want to talk about last year and earlier or something, but how long have we been sending hay across the water?

Bret Mortensen (11:43)
boy, that's a really good question. I've been familiar with it for probably 10 years. really got, when China got into the market, it really changed things. It changed things because of the volume. ⁓ Such a high demand of just getting a huge volume of hay over there. And it really is a fascinating thing because,
It's hard to grasp the concept that we can ship hay that far around the world and it be economically feasible. here's how I view it. That ocean carrier, that ocean freight industry is very, very, very subsidized. ⁓ Those foreign countries, their economic...

Mike Donaldson (12:17)
Mm-hmm.

Bret Mortensen (12:38)
stability depends on them shipping stuff to us and us buying it. So really those containers, they just want the containers back and it's beneficial if they can have some weight in them because they do lose containers, especially if they're sending ships full of empty containers, they will lose containers off those ships.
 So if they can get some some hay going back, it's really a benefit. Here's one way I view it. I spent about 20 years working for a feed manufacturer in Utah and we would ship hay up here, excuse me, our feed up here to Idaho. Hour and a half, two hours away. And that would cost about $20 per ton on the freight to ship that a couple hours. Those containers, going from California to Asia could ship for less than that. They were just, they just wanted them back, yeah. Roughly $400 for a 25 ton container on the ocean. The expensive part was on the rail from Idaho or Utah to California. That's the expensive piece of that puzzle. But once it gets on the water, that's it.

Mike Donaldson (13:35)
Really?

Bret Mortensen (13:56)
It's really not very expensive, but like I say, it was less to ship a one ton bale of hay over the water than it was one ton of bagged feed from Ogden, Utah to Pocatello, Idaho.
So that ocean freight is really an interesting thing. Now with tariffs, when the trade war happened, with COVID, with shipping issues in general, things change. It's not always that cheap, ⁓ it's really inexpensive for the water part of shipping hay overseas. there's a lot, I tell people, I've never been involved in a more complicated, simple business. I mean, you bring hay in, you smash it, make it as small as you can, and you ship it out. It is so complicated with just the export documents and all the requirements, even dealing with people with a different mindset. It was extremely hard for me as a feed salesman.

Mike Donaldson (14:43)
Yeah.

Bret Mortensen (15:07)
before being involved in the export world. ⁓ I ran around, I did a lot of work with lot of nutritionists and ran around with them, everything from dairy to horse nutritionists. And I really was familiar with nutritionists, think performance and high performance and value and all those things. Once we started, I started shipping hay, ⁓ especially to China.  The thing they trusted most was their eyes. So the greener the hay, the better the hay, which doesn't compute in a lab or performance or the milk tank or anything, but that was the only thing they really trusted. That's starting to change. There's still a lot of truth to that, that they believe in color.
So when hay farmers would start growing hay for export business, was very important to put up green hay. You really wanted to minimize the amount of time it was laying in the windrow, because the sun would bleach it. Once you got it put up in a stack, you really wanted to get it covered, wrapped, protected, because again, whether it was sun, wind, whatever, even a little bit of discoloration because of that type of bleach.
Even though nutritionally it probably wasn't affecting very much, it impacted greatly ⁓ the value of it overseas. So really a fascinating approach, which again leads me to my passion and belief of Silo-King Hay. One of the odd dynamics is they wanted you to guarantee, technically, we're asked to guarantee that the hay that we shipped over is less than 12% moisture. And then they come over and they start talking about leaf retention. There's no leaf retention. It's too shattery. It's too this. We're like, which do you want? Do you want 12% moisture or do you want leaf retention? You can't have both. And so it's an interesting dynamic trying to.

Mike Donaldson (17:02)
Okay.

Yeah.

Bret Mortensen (17:22)
to make hay that way. In comes Silo-King Hay and we can use a little bit more moisture. We can handle that. We can preserve it. Also, we make softer hay. It's better quality. They're digesting more. That was a huge thing for me is if we could get overseas dairies to understand the value of Silo-King Hay that we can make every mouthful of hay that they spend a lot of money shipping overseas make it more nutritious. This is a big thing. There's a lot of milk cows in the world that don't have access to what we're doing that could really benefit from it. So hence, when I first met Anna who...

Mike Donaldson (18:01)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.

Bret Mortensen (18:15)
has done a fantastic job with this hay and developing this market and all those things. I just immediately am like, wow, this could have a huge impact globally on how we feed cows and the value that people recognize that they can get out of alfalfa and those things and create milk with it or whatever it is that they're doing.

Mike Donaldson (18:42)
and i i don't think it's fair to say ⁓ How I put it, it can be tricky to say Silo-King Hay is the only thing that does this or nothing else does this. I mean, it's fine for us to say that. don't expect anybody to believe me maybe, but explain if you would, how you would talk to a hay producer about the things that Silo-King Hay is bringing to the table and maybe starting out with the fact that so much of what we compete against is an acid based product.

Bret Mortensen (19:18)
Sure, sure. It's interesting, acid comes up in the export world and the last thing that somebody who is opening a container that has been, it's basically in an oven for 30 days on the water baking and you open a container that has hay that has some acid in it, it will knock you down.

Mike Donaldson (19:48)
Yes.

Bret Mortensen (19:48)
And so that smell and the things that the acid does, now acid's great at preventing spoilage, right? We can all say, yeah, it has its place there. But we now learn we can do that and do it in a much ⁓ kinder way is what I would say. Not only to the equipment, to the animals that eat it the humans that are around it, ⁓ we can do the same type of thing and like I say, do it in a much more pleasant way. ⁓ We've got those mold inhibitors and preservatives that are more along the lines of what's used in the food industry and in the safe feeds, safe foods world we live in, it's...that's appropriate, it's necessary. So we've got those things to provide that, the oxygen scavenger effect to help remove problems before they start. Then in addition to that, we've got all the enzymes in there that help to ⁓ wick out the moisture as well. You know, these swathers today run real...fancy conditioners that crimp that the stems to try and help reduce the moisture and get that to dry out quicker. Well, we're doing the same thing, ⁓ a similar thing with our enzymes where we're in a biologic way where we're actually help unravel those stems, which helps wick out the moisture in addition to creating a more digestible product.  And so the benefits are just full circle around there. ⁓ And those don't come cheap. We have never professed to be the cheapest product on the market. But as far as value, that is a huge thing. ⁓ It's huge in the dairy industry. You can see the results in the milk tank. It's huge in the horse industry. ⁓ So much of that horse feed is fed one flake at a time. people, ⁓ you can turn Tony the pony into secretary real fast if you have a mistake with feed. people love their horses. And so with this silo king treated hay, ⁓ again, even what it's doing biologically, you are making a softer.

Mike Donaldson (22:22)
Okay.

Sure.

Bret Mortensen (22:38)
better hay and people still buy hay. They feel that it's nice and soft. It's got all the things they're looking for for them and that's what they want to buy for their horse as well. depending on whatever market you're going into there's great value from the Silo-King Hay that we have.

Mike Donaldson (22:59)
That's interesting that, ⁓ I've, I've been with Agri-King 32 years. I've seen animals help me make a point by what they do. I have never once seen an animal write me a check. They almost always have a person involved with that buying decision. It is never left completely up to them. So whether I'm down the road from you in Idaho or whether I'm in central Michigan, like I am.

Bret Mortensen (23:16)
You

Mike Donaldson (23:29)
Uh, some of the basics for making a quality hay are going to ring true everywhere. Uh, what would you take? Suppose I, let's put me in Idaho for the moment and I just bought a 2000 acre ranch. And with my background, yeah, I've made some hay, but it's not like I'm going to be doing now. Walk me a to B to C. through how you would coach me to make good quality hay. And since I'm gonna be in Idaho, I'm even curious how you would have me irrigate that. When do I start putting water on? When do I choose the water? How am I gonna decide when to cut? just, basically I bought a place, I'm putting you in charge of making it work right.

Bret Mortensen (24:21)
⁓ First thing we're gonna do is we're gonna pray. We're gonna pray a lot. we, in the hay world, we need Mother Nature's help. And we also, we're kind of picky about Mother Nature's help. We don't just want, want...

Mike Donaldson (24:24)
That's

Bret Mortensen (24:36)
enough moisture we wanted at certain times right and we wanted to shut we wanted to shut off the natural sprinklers about a week before we're gonna we're we're gonna start swathing hay but i laugh about that but but there's a lot of truth to that there's there's a lot of things ⁓ when it comes to manufacturing hay that are making alfalfa the at the highest quality we can that we can't control

Mike Donaldson (24:39)
Sure.

Bret Mortensen (25:05)
One of the great things about Idaho is our climate and really in lot of places in the West, we're at elevation. We don't get as just brutally hot as some other places do. That temperate climate, it's kind of like...Smoking a roast you low and slow if we can grow hay if we can grow hay a little bit low and slow on the temperature side We make really good hay it helps the leaves to grow and it reduces the amount of lignin in the stem The faster that that alfalfa plants growing the more stem It's got to lay down the more lignin It's got to be it's nature's way of protecting itself of keeping it alive and having it stand up So in our hottest months, we don't make it

Mike Donaldson (25:27)
Okay.

Bret Mortensen (25:54)
as much high testing hay, but in these cooler times, when it's growing slow, that's when you really wanna do everything right. ⁓ Mother Nature will also tell us year to year when we wanna start watering and how we wanna do that, how much water to put on. And then one of the things that is different ⁓ at the hay press,
That was a joint venture between some Idaho farmers that were big potato and sugar beet farmers. One of the things that's different about hay is we want to shut that water off about a week before we're going to cut it because we want it to do a little bit of standing so it'll dry faster once it's laying down, especially when color is a big issue. So we want to do a little bit of drying in the field before we cut it cut it and then get it dried as quick as we can. And every, it's amazing. I can go an hour south of me and an hour north of me and it's almost like a completely different climate. It's, the science and the art are different on each farm. And it really is that putting up quality hay is as much of an art as it's ever been and they can't get away from that. When we're talking to new people about putting Silo-King on, it's not magic. It's not a silver bullet. It's not gonna take all your problems away. You do what you do. You know your farm. And then we're just gonna expand your window of, you can handle a little more moisture than you've ever done. You can do, you can bale a little sooner, maybe a little later. Now  there's a reservoir south of me a little ways and there's a lot of potatoes and a lot of sugar beets grown there. They take a lot of water.
They those farmers have pivots on they've got their sprinklers on all the time the reservoirs right there It's got its own kind of ecosystem there of high humidity that the farmers there that are putting up hay they they have too much dew by 9 10 o'clock at night Where you go an hour north of me and 9 10 o'clock at night the farmers don't have enough dew That they that they're comfortable yet that it's still too dry. So they're trying to get a little

Mike Donaldson (28:05)
Mmm.

Bret Mortensen (28:24)
do on it. So putting up real quality hay is an absolute art and those guys that are good at it are fantastic and it's fun to watch them and the other thing that they are is they are very resilient because Mother Nature very rarely cooperates fully and especially on these large large operations they there comes a point

Mike Donaldson (28:50)
But what, a number, that's the other thing I think is sometimes interesting to people outside of a given world. Put a number on what large is.

Bret Mortensen (29:00)
⁓ It's very relative. mean, depending on how much equipment you've got. mean, a thousand acres might be really large if you don't have very much equipment. A thousand acres isn't very big if you've got a fleet of balers that... One day Jason Alson was with me out here.

Mike Donaldson (29:06)
Okay, okay. Okay.

Bret Mortensen (29:26)
Director of Silo-King he's great guy and he was with me and we went to a farm and we were working on a baler and and I was I was pretty nervous because I didn't like tying up the baler and I knew they were getting ready to bale and And the owner said it's okay. We're gonna roll into this pivot, you know, it's 150 acres They will have that thing baled in way less than an hour Because they were rolling into that field with a bunch of balers. So us working on one really wasn't that big of a deal to them. But I remember Jason, I think he was kneeling down, he was on the baler, he's doing something and they said less than an hour and he pops his head up and he looks at this field and he's like, there's no way you can do this in less than an hour.

Mike Donaldson (29:57)
my.
Yeah.

Bret Mortensen (30:16)
Absolutely, it was way less than an hour. They roll in and it's done. So I guess to answer your question, it is relative to like, are your capacities to deal with acres? These guys that have a fleet of 10 balers, they can bale it up pretty quick and they cover a lot of ground. And those guys, you know,

Mike Donaldson (30:17)
Hehehehehe.  Okay, okay.

Bret Mortensen (30:43)
it may be it's sometimes it's more difficult for them to ⁓ deal with Mother Nature because they've got thousands of acres that they're trying to get through and when that's growing and and Maybe you've shut the water off, you're doing whatever you're doing, and you know you've got your year planned out. You're either trying to get three cuttings or four cuttings, depending on the area you're out here in Idaho. Some places can get more than that, but our climate doesn't let us. And so you've got to, you know you've got to get that hay off and get the next cutting growing. And so there comes a point where it's like, you know what's gonna rain, you gotta go and again, that's a place where Silo-King has helped out, guys. It's not my preference to use it that way in a situation where you know you're baling and it's too wet and you're you're crisis managing at that point. It is a tool, it does work. It's not the way I like to use it, but it.

Mike Donaldson (31:49)
No, I think any of us, anybody who works for Agri-King has their own way of explaining exactly what you just explained very well. There's how we would like to see Silo-King used. There's the ability to use it in an almost emergency situation because of the weather that's going to come. And then there comes a point of having to say it just isn't going to work. I know the kind of feed you're trying to make. I know it's going to rain. I'm not saying you can't put Silo-King on it, but we have to be extremely realistic. This is not going to be, we can help keep it from  being a complete catastrophe, but this is not going to come close to what you would like to make. And we just need to be upfront and communicate that.

Bret Mortensen (32:39)
Absolutely. Absolutely agree with you.

Mike Donaldson (32:42)
So I understand if this question was really easy to answer, you would be incredibly rich and I would quit my job and just drive you around in a series of brand new cars every month. So the question is, may a hundred times worse because of tariffs coming going, what do you see this year for the commercial hay grower, what their markets are likely to be? Cause they've got the fields planted, they're in what they're in. You said you're gonna aim for generally quality over tons, but with the wild card of it, you're gonna be able to export everything. Is it gonna be a drought somewhere in the United States that soaks up all the hay that used to go to China, but what's your crystal ball tell you now, Brett?

Bret Mortensen (33:14)
Yep.
First of all, to make sure everyone knows that I'm not filthy rich and you're not driving me around in new cars. So, so that being said, this is just my opinion. And I do, am pretty connected to a lot of people in the market.

Mike Donaldson (33:40)
There you go. That's fair.

Bret Mortensen (33:56)
In the hay market in the West, there's a report called the Hoyt Report. Josh Kellan has that and it's really good. It really is a good guide to what the hay market is doing and kind of forecasting in a way. He always does at the beginning of the year, well, April 1st, he always compares in the Imperial Valley in California what... supreme export hay is going for and he looks at that trend year over year and it's really a good guide year over year Not what the price is going to be but kind of what the direction of the market is This year in 2025 it was up about five dollars over 2024 ⁓ As I talked to a lot of brokers and and ⁓ exporters even the kind of the general consensus is everybody feels like we've probably hit the bottom of this market. ⁓ Does not mean that we're coming crawling out of it right away. ⁓ Anybody that tells you this can be a great year for hay growers, that's the kind of optimist you want as a friend because the glass is always half full.

Mike Donaldson (35:15)
HaMm-hmm.

Bret Mortensen (35:19)
the market's probably gonna be pretty tough for another year. And then who knows going forward after that, depending on these tariffs, exactly what it's like going forward. We just don't know. There's been a lot of orders canceled out of China. But yet there's, my one exporter friend had people from China here this last week looking at, hey, cause they felt like...it wasn't gonna be a real long carried out process. there's just so many variables. ⁓ My one friend that is a hay broker, I talked to him yesterday, he had just got home from California on a trip where they were selling hay and buying hay. And he said kind of the consensus was probably a few dollars higher this year than it was last year.  They felt like a lot of their inventories that they were carrying over had gotten used up, which is a good thing for a lot of us to hear, because we've carried some inventory over the last few years and it's been pretty substantial. We'll see. It also depends on how does Mother Nature treat us? How does...

What kind of crop do we put up? What kind of yields do we get? And what are we looking at? But I would say the brief answer to your question that I managed to turn into a really long answer is ⁓ I think we've seen the low. I don't know that it's coming up real fast anytime soon. I think we're another year away from better times in the hay world, but I do think it's going to be improved this year.

Mike Donaldson (36:59)
That's great. That's wonderful. This has been one of our best podcasts, but I'll tell you that upfront. Any parting thoughts you want to add onto the topic?

Bret Mortensen (37:09)
No, you know you're a hay nerd when you walk into a hay barn and you just love that smell and I can say I honestly do love that smell and I love these guys that put up hay. It's a great industry, they're great people and I'm glad to be a part of it and I'm glad to be a part of Agri-King because I think there's a lot of value that we can continue to bring to people.

Mike Donaldson (37:32)
That is wonderful. Brett, thank you so much for being with us today. Chris, what'd learn?

Chris Radke (37:38)
Hey, ⁓ I know I continually say this, but my big takeaway, well a couple of them here, is Brett, you are a hay nerd. And I love it, but it's just interesting to see like your passion about hay is just reflection of just Agri-King. Like you're passionate about it, and then you get to help other people with that passion. I think that's just something incredible. I also learned that if the economy is just right, that if Brett is ⁓ baling we should just have to outrun that baler. So that's all we have to do.

Mike Donaldson (38:05)
Ha

Bret Mortensen (38:06)
You

Chris Radke (38:06)
Otherwise I could end up in there. Nah, that sounds horrible, so...

Mike Donaldson (38:08)
Yeah, I don't like, I've seen how that goes. I don't like my chances of staying ahead of the baler.

Bret Mortensen (38:14)
You

Chris Radke (38:14)
Yeah, it doesn't sound like good day. Alright, if you like what you heard, can find us on any of our socials. If you have any questions or things you'd like us to talk about, can find us at podcasts@agriking.com. can also find us, we're now on our website, agriking.com. Brett and Mike, thank you so much for who you are. Thank you so much.

Mike Donaldson (38:37)
Thank you guys.

Bret Mortensen (38:38)
Thank you.