Ep : 5 Ron Dingerson "I Work Cheap"

In this episode we sit down with Ron, and  talk about some of his unique experiences in the sheep and cattle industry.

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:02

Welcome to the wash rack.

SPEAKER_04 0:18

Well, good evening, everybody. Good to be gathered all back around together. How's the family back together? Um, I think we have a really good evening planned for tonight. Uh guest joining us today, Ron Dingerson. Welcome, Ron. Making a long trip. Welcome to you. Making a long trip from Woodland, Michigan to join us, along with grandson Charlie. Charlie Mattetis. I'm getting that last name right, correct, Charlie? Yep. Welcome, Charlie. Very good. Hey, we don't have to have the heat on. It's the first one. That is the first one we have not had to crack the heat on for. Sitting courtside with us, Justin Connors as well, our colored commentator. And then, as per usual, technical support, Trace Thompson. So, gentlemen. How are we doing? Always a pleasure. Hello. Good. Glad to have everybody here.

SPEAKER_03 1:04

I'm excited to have Ron on tonight. This is gonna be fun. A lot of family history, as he was mentioning before. I I cut him off because I wanted to make sure he told the story on the podcast. But a lot of family history between our families and uh a lot of uh miles traveled and and good stories we're hoping to hear tonight. So uh we're glad to have you. Appreciate you coming out. Thank you. And uh even got the Scales Farms hat on.

SPEAKER_04 1:30

I do. Still jealous of that. You you you you feed groups of sheep like Ron does, you'll get yourself a nice hat. I'll wear anything.

SPEAKER_03 1:38

We raise cattle together and I don't even have a hat.

SPEAKER_04 1:40

There's approximately two of those hats that have ever been created so far. There's more on the way, so that's a little, I guess what would you call that? A uh tease. A little bit of a tease about the teaser. Both of those hats are in possess possession of Ron and Julie Dingerson for good reason because they give me uh more than ample help. Um as I said before, they'll get themselves a nice hat. I work cheap. I'm scared. I got a bad feeling in the pit of my wallet whenever he tells me uh just I'll just tack it onto the building.

SPEAKER_01 2:16

Yeah, man, I'm afraid the bill's gonna go right out the window.

SPEAKER_04 2:22

Bounce that check.

SPEAKER_01 2:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 2:24

Yeah, you could bounce that one all the way to the bank, huh? So for those of you that don't know if anyone came and saw sheep of mine this winter or earlier this spring, uh the place, the the generosity that we were imposing upon was Ron and Julie Dingerson's there at Mud Creek Farms, which is had a variety of livestock there over the years. There's been purebred cemetery cattle, uh, there's been purebred Dorset sheep there for a stint, as well as probably I would I would say arguably what you're most well known for was the the weather type sheep there for quite a long stint.

SPEAKER_01 2:56

Probably about the last 20 years, I guess. Until seven, well, I guess we we didn't we quit lambing using 15. So and then my two grandsons, Charlie being one of them, Jack being the other one, Jack Jukes, they've decided that, you know, uh Grandpa can just take care of them when uh they're not lamb, uh, or taking care of all their new lambs and so on, which is fine. We our farm is just a grass farm anyway. We bought it for a grass farm. We didn't buy it for a row crop farm. You go broke row crop farm.

SPEAKER_04 3:37

So take us, I mean, on that little segue, take us way back when you and you and Julie were kind of a young couple and you and you purchased that farm, set the stage for us a little bit. What was going on, what precipated the move back to Michigan? Because I mean I'm jumping all around here in your storyline, but you guys had been in New York at that time, weren't you? Right.

SPEAKER_01 3:56

Yeah, when uh when I graduated, Julie and I got married in 68, and of course, uh anybody that knows anything about history knew there was a little conflict going on in Southeast Asia, and the government was more than willing to give me an all-expense paid trip to Southeast Asia. But that would have been a little uh a quaint little place called Vietnam, right? Oh yeah, it was yeah, or Laos Laos or one of those over there. So anyway, um we got married in 68. I graduated from MSU in 69, and then I went and did my military stuff. Um never went to Vietnam, but was in nine years in the National Guard and Army Reserve. And uh then got done with that, and uh Harlan called me, Harlan Ritchie. I was working for Michigan livestock, sorting pigs at Casopolis, which is a real wonderful job.

SPEAKER_03 4:59

My dad did that for a few years, too.

SPEAKER_01 5:01

Yeah, well, I'll tell you what, if you don't get die from asthma after about five years of that, you're lucky. And he asked me, he said, Well, what are you doing? I said, Well, right now I'm loading a semi. He said, No, I mean, really, what are you doing? I said, I'm loading a semi. That's what I pretty much do. And he said, Well, how'd you like to come back to school? I said, you know, I'm not much of a student. He said, Well, I know that, but but we're looking for somebody to run this project that uh we're gonna use this new compound that um Elk John's um has gotten out of pig pituitaries, and we think it's got a bright future to synchronize beef cows or cattle. I said, Well, that's all well and good, but most importantly, what does it pay? And he told me, and I the assistantship would pay more than than what I was making, sorting hogs, so it didn't take too long to decide, well, and in those days we could pack up and move in about two hours. We were living in some little rental house down there. So anyway, I came up and spent two years there, and that stuff that they brought uh from Up John's um was prostaglandin, F2L for prostaglandin, and they had extracted it from pig pituitary glands, didn't see. So we had a group of cattle that they just bred normally, put a bull out with them, a group that they heat detected and AI'd, and then a group that they gave them the prostaglandin, and then we bred them at 72 hours, and then another group we I don't remember what, but then there was another control group. So I did that for two years and finished up with a master's, and uh Harlan made it so I didn't have to do very much classwork. Perfect.

SPEAKER_04 6:58

So who was your was Harlan your master professor then through that? Yes, yeah. That's pretty cool. Him and Dwayne O'Lery. You remember Dwayne O'Lery? I didn't know, no.

SPEAKER_01 7:07

He was the the head uh he was the mineral guy. His he was uh he had I think he'd had cerebral palsy, so he was fairly handicapped. He didn't couldn't get around very good. But a brilliant guy and and very well. And he he uh so we did got done with that, and uh then I got a call from a guy named Erskine Cash, who uh happened to be on, he was on VPI's judging team. Or no, yeah. Yeah, he was on VPI's judging team when I was on MSU's which VPI was Virginia.

SPEAKER_04 7:46

Virginia Poly Technical Institute, which is now better known as Virginia Tech.

SPEAKER_01 7:51

Yeah. And he said, What are you doing when you get done with your master's? I said, Well, I'm certainly not gonna do a PhD. I barely got through this one. I'm not I'm way too dumb to be or smart one way or the other to get a PhD. He said, Well, there's a guy, a doctor up in and he lives in Morristown, New Jersey, but he's a neurosurgeon, and he started this beef operation up in the hills of upstate New York, and he's looking for a herdsman. I said, Well, I guess it sounds like fun. So I went out and met with him, and and he uh well the guy had way more money than well, and I can't say he had more money than he had brains because he was a brilliant physician, but like a lot of them, not terribly practical. And uh so anyway, Julie and I packed up and it took us about another three hours to required a few more things to take our dog and our cat and head to Smithville Flats, New York. And uh it was it was really a nice, nice, beautiful place, and they'd have and he had spent a lot of money like a lot of them do. Um of course in those days the tack law tax laws were pretty favorable for for those kind of guys.

SPEAKER_04 9:11

And uh so we stayed at there was a there was a lot of those kind of wealthy wealthy eccentric people that uh kind of hid a lot of money from the government purebred livestock in those days, right?

SPEAKER_01 9:23

Yeah, well mahogany farms right out there at Williamson, they were the leader of the pack, you know. They they figured out tax shelter way before anybody else did.

SPEAKER_04 9:31

Right.

SPEAKER_01 9:32

Of course, our neighbor out there was a guy named Jimmy Cagney. Have you ever heard of Jimmy Cagney? No, I never have. Oh, go back and watch some of those old gangster movies from the 40s and uh 30s and 40s, that was Jimmy Cagney. He lived down the road, he was in a wheelchair when we lived there, but so he was an upstanding citizen. Oh, he was a great, nice guy, great actor, made a lot of money, yeah. And uh, but he had hackney horses and pulled her for cattle. Okay. So and then another neighbor was a lady by the name of Peggy Rockefeller, whose husband was David Rockefeller, president of the World Bank. And so they lived on down the road. So we stayed there three years.

SPEAKER_04 10:12

They live in kind of a quaint little place.

SPEAKER_01 10:14

A little quaint place. And then David would come, her husband would commute to New York City on his helicopter. The helicopter would come in and pick him up and take him down downtown New York. So um so then, of course, like all those deals, you know, uh, the tax shelters kind of wore out, and so he decided he'd sell that place and move to Virginia. Well, that it was a beautiful property, but um it was right on the North Carolina border, and Julie was pregnant for Sarah, and it just she wasn't gonna ever be happy there. So then I when I left there, I hired a guy named Larry Fox to come and take over.

SPEAKER_03 11:02

I've heard of him. You heard of him?

SPEAKER_01 11:03

Yeah. Yeah. So Larry came and and uh we had well the other thing is in New York we had a beautiful house to to live in. Down there, this thing was like a you know like the worst tenant house you ever saw in your life. And heated with wood, and uh it just wasn't gonna be anywhere where we'd wanted to raise a family. So but Larry, he came down, he stayed, and I think he stayed there like a year, and then somebody from uh Penn State came down and took over. In fact, I asked Larry last time I saw him uh how long he was there and and then what happened after that. So yeah.

SPEAKER_04 11:47

I'll be darned. Things I didn't know about. So that was that's that's kind of that's almost answering the question I asked. And I there's you've skipped a bunch of cool part because there's a lot we can circle back to and talk about your time in New York. But so you guys had had to you were in Virginia then for just a short time after that, and then made the decision to come back to to Michigan. Was it that that move was kind of precipated by wanting to be closer to family? Was your daughter was Sarah born yet by then?

SPEAKER_01 12:14

Or no, she was in the oven. Okay. And I did have a I had a job offer. I'd kind of started figuring out that you know that wasn't gonna be a long-lived career out there. So I ended up applying and got a job as a ag agent uh with cooperative extension. Oh, okay. And so when I came back then, I took that job and did that until I went into the lending business. But anyway, yeah, when we bought that we didn't have that farm bought until after we moved back up here, and we lived in a house my folks owned. And uh and then we found that place, and the only reason we bought it is because it was rough, hilly, and cheap.

SPEAKER_04 13:02

Who was the folks that had who was the folks that had that place when you bought it, Ron? An old man by the name of Dylan Beck.

SPEAKER_01 13:08

Yeah. But uh he was renting a house, and I don't know how I ever convinced Julie to move into that house. I mean, it was a pit. You could throw you could throw a cat through the windows and and it was not in very good shape, but it was cheap. And uh in those days, cheap was good.

SPEAKER_03 13:27

Yeah, that still is today as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, sometimes.

SPEAKER_01 13:31

I don't think we'll ever see it that cheap again, but no, I'm I'm sure.

SPEAKER_04 13:36

Okay, so that brings us back around how Ron got back to Michigan. I want to back up just a little bit and touch on a few things he talked about. So, Prostic Lannon, I mean, could you imagine to try to synchronize and breed cows today without it? And there was our University Michigan State, kind of on the leading the leading edge of it, and I think that's an interesting I mean I've always thought really I've heard that story before, Ron. Um I've always really thought that was cool, is that you were right there watching that. I I mean that's uh as significant, uh one of the most as significant in my opinion as about anything we've we've come up with, because I mean now the dairy farms they would never subsist without it. Even the beef cattle operations, we rely on it so much. Um and you you mentioned a couple of the major professors there. And um who were at the same time that you were a grad student there, were there other other folks of note there at the same time? Who else would have been a grad student around that that era? Because realistically, like those the 60s, 70s, and 80s, as far as I'm concerned, were kind of the golden era of Michigan State Um at the time, and so they were churning out a lot of superstars.

SPEAKER_01 14:50

Well, part of the reason was the uh president. Um I can't spit his name out, I will in a minute, but the direct the head of the department was uh Ron Nelson. John Hanna was the president of John Hannah. And him and him and him and Ron Nelson were real big buddies, and they talk about they had funding because something they need something need money for something, and Ron had said, well, I bet I guess I better go up on a hill and talk to John. But the grad students that were there, like when I was on the Sunday 4-H judging team, and our coach, my coach then was Gary Manish, and then Harlan was coaching the the uh the college warrior team, and then uh they had a meats judging team. They had a guy named Dell Allen, Dr. Dell Allen, who graduated and then went to K-State and ran their meat deal forever. Mike Dijkman, he was another meats guy, but the other grad students that were there were very menish, and Harlan was he had finished grad school then, was on staff. A guy that some of you might know by the name of Bob Hines. He was doing his graduate work there. Um another guy, um, Dave Ames, who ended up being the uh the uh chairman of the of the um He was at Kansas State, wasn't he?

SPEAKER_04 16:25

Chairperson of Kansas State. Oh, Colorado. Oh Colorado.

SPEAKER_01 16:29

And he was also an NFL official and also happened to be the uh uh review official for the Rose Bowl. And then uh Tom Bidner, who was a his was all in Hogs. I don't know where he went to Illinois. He was on the and then a guy named Gary Liptrap, Jerry Lip Trap. And Jerry, Jerry's claim to fame was he figured out how to collect boars and artificially inseminate boars. Believe it or not, or sows, believe it or not, once upon a time, boars could do their own work. Yeah, you know. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 17:10

So he worked that was part of his project.

SPEAKER_01 17:13

That was his deal.

SPEAKER_04 17:14

Yeah, yeah. They used to have when the sows would lay down, they'd have litters of three and four.

SPEAKER_01 17:19

We had I don't know, my my I have a very limited uh experience in the hog business. All I know is we'd have a few hogs around there, and once in a while there'd be one that was a boar. And you'd go out there, we had those little smidley huts, you remember those little orange steels? Out in the field, and you'd look and say, Well, that looks like she's gonna have have a have a litter, and a few days later you'd go out and look in the smidley and see how many she had. And that was about wouldn't that be nice? Yeah. And we'd throw them up. You mean you don't have to cut them open and breed themselves and have their own pigs.

SPEAKER_04 18:04

And then they would lactate afterwards, too.

SPEAKER_01 18:06

Yeah, it appeared that way.

unknown 18:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:09

And then when they'd get, if you didn't get them caught in time, then you get to process and take care of 80 pounders, which is never fun.

SPEAKER_04 18:18

But yeah, we so you mean to say then they grew.

SPEAKER_01 18:21

Yeah, we uh wow. We had a real high-quality nutritional program.

SPEAKER_04 18:26

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 18:26

Ear corn and sow cubes. That was it. And uh every few days, if they got real hungry, that was better. Um so anyway, yeah, MSU was just loaded with within.

SPEAKER_04 18:40

Well, because I mean you you mentioned a couple names right off the get-go there. Ron Nelson.

SPEAKER_02 18:45

Yep.

SPEAKER_04 18:46

Who I mean he was one of the driving forces, probably the driving force behind the purebred herds. He and um why am I slipping his name now? Um Byron Good. Byron Good. Byron's exactly what you were thinking of. Um I don't know all these names. Yeah, well, folks should. Um But Ron Nelson hangs in the Saddle and Sirloin Club that was initially in Chicago and now's in Louisville. You mentioned Gary Manish was in grad school around the same time and he had helped coach the state 4-H team.

SPEAKER_02 19:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 19:21

Um, and he's went on to become head of the department of Virginia Tech and now hangs in the saddle and sirloin club.

SPEAKER_02 19:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 19:27

And then, of course, if you're a Michigan native, you should have heard the name of Harlan Ritchie.

SPEAKER_02 19:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 19:31

Who of, of course, I mean, service that he did to the they introduced crossbreeding to the um the cattle industry, bringing in the continental breeds, helping scale up the size of the cattle we had, and and again, hangs in the saddle and sirloin club. So there's three guys right off the bat that you rattled off that um were very prominent men and and were recognized as so nationally.

SPEAKER_01 19:54

And then Erskine Cash, he left Michigan State and went to Penn State, and he took over for Herman Purdy. You know, he was I remember that name. Yeah, he coached uh Penn State's judging team. Plus back in the day, Penn State had was were really powerful in the cattle and the sheep.

SPEAKER_04 20:14

They had some real they had a good Hampshire program, I think, didn't they?

SPEAKER_01 20:17

Purebred Hampshire fly. Yeah, and they had really good Dorsets, I remember that. Um so yeah, we just had a great bunch of of grad students and and uh and they all left them. I mean, they besides being you know excellent students and good at what they were doing, they were quality people. They were they were real they were real fun. I mean, like Bob Hines, I remember on the judging team, you know, we were working out and placed this class of hogs, and and he he looks at my card and then he goes, gives me the finger like this and comes come over. He says, What don't you like about that big? Well, you know, I just don't like the way he's balanced and how he ties in and up here. He says, Well, doesn't he have the biggest ham in the class? And I said, Yeah. He says, you know, without a ham it ain't worth a damn. So yeah, then at the beat barns, of course, Amos Fox was the herdsman when I got there. What year did you start at Michigan State? 1965. Okay. Fall at 65. And uh, and they had purebred shorthhorns, purebred Angus, purebred Hurford's, pulled Hereford's.

SPEAKER_03 21:40

I've got a photo with him of the uh one of the Hurfords they took to the state fair down in the basement, all black and white, and they're about I don't know, four foot tall up the middle of the bag.

SPEAKER_01 21:50

Yeah. And uh so yeah, and he was he was a great guy to work for. I never saw him get upset about anything. I mean you could get in there in the morning and the wheels were falling off everything and Amos would just kind of go, well, just we'll just get it straightened around here, not to worry. It'll be everything'll be alright.

SPEAKER_03 22:12

That was his whole persona that I remember. Yeah. Never got too worked up about much. He didn't.

SPEAKER_01 22:17

And then Larry Cotton was there.

SPEAKER_04 22:21

There's the name. Yep. Neil Orth. Also you mentioned it. Neil Orth, a recent inducted of the Saddling Service Club.

SPEAKER_01 22:28

He was there. Now I'm not sure what Neil really ever did there. But he was around there. Well, he was around there for a long time. And the stories vary as to whether he actually ever graduated or he just got tired of hanging out there and whatnot.

SPEAKER_03 22:45

Every one of us had one of those in our graduate art.

SPEAKER_04 22:48

Yeah, I can think of a couple. I mean Tyler Farrier's one. I'm gonna give him another shout out. He used to get famous on here. I think Tyler was there for six years. I mean I think Matt Ecky crammed a two-year degree into four, didn't he? I'm not sure on that. I think I think Matt might actually have finished up a five- I I wouldn't know. I can't remember. Um but I do think Tyler Farrier, I do know that he just had a two-year that he managed to stretch out over four. And I think he one time told me that he had taken every 200-level ag class there was to offer. Uh which included five. Which included most of I think their turf grass management courses as well.

SPEAKER_01 23:23

Well, see, in the day when I went, you could go there and and it didn't bankrupt you.

SPEAKER_04 23:30

I not not to ask too personal a question. What did it cost per credit hour in those days or per semester?

SPEAKER_01 23:35

I don't know for sure, because we had terms then.

SPEAKER_03 23:40

Okay. That's right. Three terms, or four terms, right?

SPEAKER_01 23:43

Yeah, four terms. But three terms, it was just a little over 700 bucks. For three terms. For three terms. Now that didn't include your books. But in the summertime, if I worked doing whatever it was, and I went to school in the fall and had a thousand bucks, I was in great shape. You know, I pay my tuition and and uh I know it wasn't by the credit hour because my roommate the first year there, there was a thing called the draft. And if you didn't have so many credits, your your draft board would knock on the door and say, well, you know, you're not your student affirming isn't good anymore. Well, poor old Russ, he he kind of didn't wasn't keeping quite close enough track of that. Yeah, well, he wasn't he wasn't going to class. That's what he wasn't doing. Well, he shows up in the fall and he says, you know, I've before the end of this term, I gotta have 31 more credits. And I said, okay. And in those days you had to go over into the pit, over in the men's IM building, and go down there, and it was like going to Walmart. You'd go around and say, I need that class. Now I need that one. Okay, I want that class right there. And they'd give you a card, and then you'd have to go find your other class, and when you'd then you'd go to the next place, and I'd say, Well, here's the only opening, but it was the same time as this other class. So that anyway. Oh man. Russ came back. I said, You get all your classes? He said, Yeah, I got I got 35 credits. 35 credits? Of course, his degree was radio and television. So they weren't very hard. Might not have been rigorous. And somebody said to him, he said, you know, you got classes all meeting at the same time. And he says, Well, that's okay. I very seldom ever go to class. And he passed them all off, so he didn't get drafted. That at least that quarter he didn't get drafted.

SPEAKER_03 25:52

Wow. That's funny. Overlapping classes.

SPEAKER_04 25:56

You go, well, like you say, he didn't go much, but yeah, you know, you so you mentioned Ron working uh during summers or through the school year and whatever else, too, to help you uh you know offset cost of schooling at the time. Um so being an entrepreneurial lad, I think always, did you and did you I think you used to trade some club calves back before trading club calves was really cool.

SPEAKER_01 26:23

Yeah, that was a long time after. That was after we basically after I we got back. Well, when I got about the time I was sorting hogs, I was trading calves.

SPEAKER_04 26:35

Okay, so that was after college.

SPEAKER_01 26:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 26:37

And who was that but just just let's just tell that story because I've teased enough into it. I'd like to hear the story of because I that was uh you're kind of a precursor to like what all the flat hats are doing now.

SPEAKER_01 26:49

Well, yeah, I'd my my wife is family's from South Dakota, so I'd go out there quite often, and I always loved hanging out at sale barns. So I'd go to the sale barn and say, geez, there's a bunch of pretty nice calves, you know. So I figured, well, let's see, if I could convince these guys to sort off three or four of them and give them a little more money than what they brought out of the scales, and they were in those days, they were more than happy to do that. There wasn't a club cat business as such, you know. We uh went looking for them. Yeah, we do well, like when we showed calves when I was Trace's age, we'd we just either raise them or go down the road and find them at the neighbors. We had none of this online sales, none of this going all over the country. But uh so yeah, we'd go out there and bring back a few and make a few bucks here and there.

SPEAKER_04 27:47

So what was the what would you say was the breed composition of them calves? You were when you would go through there and you were kind of sorting them out, what were what do you think they were sired by or what was the background of them? Were they continental cattle or what were they?

SPEAKER_01 27:59

Well, um right there around uh Hymore is where the Jennings brothers, Clayton and and uh his brother, um had their big Angus deal. And they were early adapters, and uh they'd gotten some seminol cena. Um when I was at MSU probably towards like when I was a senior or so, a guy by the name of Ansel Armstrong showed up, and he happened to be with I don't remember the name of the company, but uh it was Canadian because all those um European breeds that they brought in for exotics had to come through Canada. And he there were two Cimitol bulls in that had gotten imported into Canada. One was Parisian and if you look back and a lot of old Cemitole papers, he was he's there, and the other one was Sultan. Well, and he was trying to convince MSU that they ought to breed some cows, the Cimitol bulls. Well, they didn't want to breed any of those cattle there on campus because they didn't, you know, it was like, yeah, we don't want everybody to see our mistakes. So they were they were smart men, as you said before. They finagled some uh some semen and took it up to Lake City and bred a bunch of those research cows, and uh then figured out well these half blood cementels are pretty good cattle. But I was kind of there hearing the whole story, and I cornered him, and I got five straws of Parisian and five straws of Sultan. And we bred this bunch of whatever they were at home. They were mostly Herfords, a couple of orangus, and got some half-blood Cimitole heifers and and uh so you would say likely then from what I'm hearing, those were some of the first scimital sired cattle born in the country.

SPEAKER_04 30:10

Maybe not the first, but right at the at the front edge of it.

SPEAKER_01 30:14

Well, they were the first ones in Michigan, I'm pretty sure. When they were weaned in the next spring, some guy came knocking on the door and said, I understand you got some half-blood Cimitol heifers. I said, Yeah, I do. And uh we got them registered, joined the Cemitol Association, did the.

SPEAKER_04 30:32

What was your what was your Simi number, do you remember?

SPEAKER_01 30:34

Uh 71.

SPEAKER_04 30:36

71.

SPEAKER_01 30:36

That's pretty early in the deal, I would say. And uh he said, You want to sell these things? I said, not really. He said, I'll make you a pretty good offer. Well, he made a good enough offer.

SPEAKER_03 30:49

Everything's for sale for now, price.

SPEAKER_04 30:51

Now, not to ask too personal a question, but what was a pretty good offer in those days?

SPEAKER_01 30:55

Five grand a piece for those things. Nope, we sold five of those little half-blood heifers for $25,000. I just sold them too.

SPEAKER_04 31:04

Yeah, my dad's. I just sold them like that today. And when you go, but what year would this have been? That would have been about 1970, maybe. So what's the inflation rate from 1970 till today? Somebody okay, we got our tech support working on that one. He'll get back to us shortly. Yeah, and uh I'd I'd probably sell a group of heifers today for 5,000 apiece. I would live.

SPEAKER_01 31:29

I'd sell you heifers for 5,000 apiece. Well, then we've enaggled some more semen and uh and had some operating capital at that point, right?

SPEAKER_03 31:38

Yeah, well then all of a sudden, you know, about so that would be close to $214,000 in today's money. So divide it, divide that by five. So like about 40 grand apiece. Yeah, I just sold them.

SPEAKER_01 31:55

That was him and hawn, my dad grabbed me by the nab of the neck and said they can die tomorrow in front of them.

SPEAKER_04 32:02

Roger Leland always told me that Roger Nichols had a saying that when uh somebody presents you with a coupon, do not fail to clip it. Yeah. And by and by over the years, that has proved out to be pretty damn true.

SPEAKER_01 32:16

Well, and the thing is those early seven-tall bulls, they didn't come out of the cow very easy. We had a bunch of big old commercial, well, big old Hereford cows, and they pooped them out, but we pulled more of them and they were ever more natural.

SPEAKER_04 32:33

These bulls would have been red and white, Ron.

SPEAKER_01 32:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 32:36

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 32:36

Now Parisian, he was solid red. Okay. No, no, no. Sultan was solid red. Okay. He was a non-diluter.

unknown 32:45

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 32:45

And Parisian made them all different kinds of color. He made out of the black ones, they'd be gray, rat-tailed gray calves. Um and then about five years into the thing, we had quite a few of them, and nobody wanted to buy the black ones. We had some some black ones out of out of Angus cows. Nobody wanted them. They wanted the big, tall, yellow and white ones. So towards the end, we took those half three-quarter blood black ones and and uh bred them for club calves and they turned out really nice.

SPEAKER_04 33:25

What were you using for club calves sires then? The Keania bulls?

SPEAKER_01 33:28

Well, we tried that until we figured out that you just couldn't live with them. Crazy. Oh man. And any of the bulls, then we figured out if they're if the if the bull was sire, if his name started with an F, like Friggio or Fargo or whatever they were.

SPEAKER_04 33:52

Our tech support's been over here working. They pulled up a picture of the old Sultan bull.

SPEAKER_01 33:56

He's pretty good looking. Yeah, he was. Yeah, he was he was the right bull. Parisian wasn't the right bull. But then when I decided to get out of the Cemitol business, is I we had this seven-eighths heifer born, and she was just all legs. I mean, she was and she was for the day, she was prototypically what they wanted.

SPEAKER_04 34:24

What set the stage for us a little bit, Ron. Give us a little context. What roundabouts, what year would this have been?

SPEAKER_01 34:30

That would have been oh about 1978, maybe.

SPEAKER_04 34:35

Okay. So that's when they were about tall enough to shit on your hat or not quite.

SPEAKER_01 34:39

Well, we sent a heifer with a fitter out of Ohio.

SPEAKER_04 34:44

And you're not gonna say his name?

SPEAKER_01 34:46

Oh I don't know if I should her. Anyway, he wasn't it wasn't anything illegal or immoral about it. He wanted he wanted to take her to Denver. He took her and showed her at the Ohio State Fair, and she was like reserve junior champion heifer or something. So he took her to Denver. And uh he called, and of course they measured him and weighed him, and she weighed 1785 pounds and was 72 and a half inches tall. Six foot. That'll be your hat. And then he called and said, Well, she stood third. And I said, Well, what was wrong with her? Well, she ain't big enough. And then she calves, she has this little rat white calf, and I have more milk than she does, and she'd eat a bale of hay and a five-gallon pail of grain every day, and never put on an ounce. And at that point in time I thought, this ain't good. This these are, and I had a bunch of them that were about like that. You know, you just couldn't feed them enough. And um somebody came along, the fitter that took her to Ohio, he broker the deal and sold all my high percentage ones. And I said, goodbye. We'll see. And you kept the half bloods. Yeah, we kept what nobody else wanted.

SPEAKER_04 36:08

We kept the you kept the Simitalangus ones.

SPEAKER_01 36:11

Yeah. The the grays, which you could breed to a and then there was starting to show a few black bulls were starting to show up, percentage black bulls. And we'd breed them, as long as you bred them to a non-diluter black bull, you'd get a black calf. And uh and then all of a sudden, voila, you know, maybe they don't need to be seven eight inches. And uh pendulum always swings back. Yeah, they didn't sell them by the inch, you know, you sold them by the pound, but they were just were not f functional cattle, you know. All of them at that point were, you know, the Angus had gotten tall and pencil gutted and fine boned. And the Cementols were were worse. They were like Yeah, they were like Angus on steroids. The biggest ones were these Charlets. I remember going to to Louisville and seeing these people by the name of Herbert's, if I got the name right, out of Illinois, and they had a whole string of high percentage ones in there. And I'm telling you, this one bull, if he wasn't six and a half feet tall at his shoulders, he wasn't an inch. You know, the purebreds didn't seem so crazy, but uh if you'd cross them up, those half-bloods, you those half-blood shars? Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_04 37:34

Oh yeah, they could be even today, uh I've I've been worked over by a half-blood share. Um, I didn't I remember so Steve Fitzner, another neighbor down here, one of his first jobs at a college was working for Premier Beef, who I think at that time was being managed by Larry Cotton, who you mentioned earlier, um who's very significant with cotton associates on the purebred livestock stage, particularly with the Angus cattle. Um but uh he was working for Premier Beef and they had a Charlet bowl that to fit to fit his top, Steve, who's not a very tall guy, but had to stand on a stepladder to to fit the top on him. That's I mean a grown man couldn't see the top line of him to trim on him.

SPEAKER_01 38:20

Well, if you see all of the uh champion steers and and champion breeding cattle in those days, well Gary Minish is not very tall. He might be five six, maybe. And there was a picture of him with a steer, and I don't even remember where it was, maybe Indiana State Fair or something. And he they couldn't see him, so he had to stand in front of the steer. And uh, I don't know, they you gotta about ruin this stuff before you can fix it, I guess. And they they did a pretty good job of ruining it before they started to bring it back down.

SPEAKER_04 39:05

When I was in college there, I was more in uh I guess curiosity always killed the cat, but somehow I got assigned a job of helping to straighten up a storage room under classroom, one of the meat labs classrooms, 1300 or something, I think it was. And there was a bunch of old magazines and trophies and just everything you could imagine. So I didn't get a lot of cleaning done, but I did do a lot of reading. Um, and I was flipping through one of the cattle magazines at the time because we're talking about how bad the cattle were. And we always like we think back, like I was I remember sitting like in the Block and Bridal Club room talking to like Brad Chaff and some of these other guys, like, man, these guys are so how are they so stupid as to let them let that happen? And uh somebody had there was a picture in one of the articles of a three-quarter rear view of all these cattle standing there, and they were huge topped and huge butted, and I mean had some shape of cage and stuff to them. Now, I mean, from the side you'd look at them and think like, man, there couldn't have been anything to those cattle to speak of. Um but uh like that three-quarter rear view, like Bret, I kept it and went and showed Brad. Like, see, this is what they were looking at and thinking, like, man, we're making them really, really good. Such a high percentage of lean and muscle.

SPEAKER_01 40:24

Well, they had to change, I mean, they the cattle in the 50s and 60s, early 60s, they were well, you've seen pictures of them where they're bedded in straw and you can't even see under them. And a normal-sized guy stands next to them and they come up to their belt buckle. Belt buckle cattle, baby bees, yeah. Yeah, they had to change them. Yeah. And uh just went too far. Yeah, just like everything, you know, they go from one extreme to the next.

SPEAKER_03 40:54

Those are the pictures I remember, like the ones that seeing grandpa with those those herfords that were you know belt buckle, belt buckle high.

SPEAKER_01 41:02

Well, the same way with the sheep, you know. That Jim Cretcher was the uh the shepherd at the sheep barn when I first went up there. And I worked over there some. I had never been around very many sheep, but he was he was a super good guy. I mean, he knew the sheep business, and plus he was like Amos, you know, nothing nothing was a crisis. We'll just, you know, we'll just go about this and get it taken care of. And and like MSU had champion weather at the international, and that had to be in the early 60s, and he weighed 107 pounds, and it was a little self self-down by him, and he just was just about as round. His legs he didn't have four inches from his belly to the ground. And uh, well the Wetzel girls, you know, the Wetzel girls.

SPEAKER_04 41:55

Oh, I know who they are the Wetzel girls, Linda and uh um Judy and Judy, those were and there's another called Sally.

SPEAKER_01 42:04

Well, they always they always had the champion carload of lambs at Louisville. Well, it was in de it was in Kansas City or uh Chicago down. Chicago, yeah. Yeah, they closed that down in 75, but yeah, those girls they and the average weight was about 105 pounds. And if you cut them open, we'd see them in the meats lab. We'd work on them. You know, their loin eyes were about an inch and a half with about an inch of fat on them. But more fat than muscle. Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_04 42:35

Well, that's a Leland remembers being at Mason at the Michigan State Sheep Show, not the Michigan State Fair, but there was a state sheep show at the time that was funded through Paris Mutual funds. Uh the horse racing tracks. And I can't remember who the judge was now. Gosh, he would know if he was here. We should have brought him on as a guest tonight. Um, but the fellow made some mention of uh used a sheep down in class and used one that was a little taller, growthier, stretched out more, got to that one that was second, and said that's a nice sheep, too much white muscle. And gosh, I can't remember. Ah, she's right now on some of this. There was a it was a prominent breeder of I think Oxford sheep here in Charlotte. Man, if I had a second to start rattling through names, I'd probably come up with it. But anyway, he was just outraged that that sheep got beat. Couldn't see how it could possibly happen. But that was the when the winds of change were starting to starting to blow.

SPEAKER_01 43:34

Well, and then they did the same thing with the sheep. They took this you know, this when the king showed up at MSU. What did they pay for the king? They pay twelve thousand for him? I I think so. And the queen then, she showed up the next year, and uh then they proceeded to totally ruin the Suffolk sheep. I mean, between this fact that they bred all of the muscle out of. And uh fine boned, bad hipped. They weren't bad mothers. That's the one thing they did do, is they did melt pretty well, but but they were little bitty, small feet, bad, bad foot shape, plus and so you know they they totally ruined the suffix, and they've never come back, the the purebred suffix, as best I can tell. And that they did the same thing with all the rest of them. The Dorsets, our Dorsets, we we had a really nice set of Dorsets, and then they weren't big enough.

SPEAKER_04 44:37

Well that was that wasn't all that wasn't just the King and Queen, was it? You're talking about like down the down the years after that. I mean, they got to work, probably the King and Queen were about where they ought to have been.

SPEAKER_01 44:48

I mean, they were nobody could believe, I mean, when the king showed up out at the sheep barns, it was like uh Yeah, but wasn't he like 32 inches tall? Yeah, 32, 30, 35, maybe.

SPEAKER_04 45:01

You think he was 35? I always thought he was I always thought he was about 33 because uh just for like a perspective of size, um Wheaton's Ram, the big chill, stood exactly 33 inches tall at his shoulder. And everybody today thinks he was a big sheep. Barely legal a couple years before that stood 36. Well, I know. And they were and they were buying rams, like the ram called stilts, I think that Leland bought stood 39 and a half or 40. So I mean he started that's a six-inch difference. He stood half a foot taller at least, compared to like the big chillin' things today. And I re I just remember like Leland saying, like the rams that we thought were big in the 70s and early 80s were nothing compared to the extremes they would push them to in the 90s. And that he's always said that when the quality started to go out of them is when they started to judge them just with a measuring stick. I mean, any idiot could go in there and say that one's taller than that one, so he wins.

SPEAKER_01 45:55

That's right. Yeah, I know I know the king was so big that he didn't even jump when he served us Jews. Really? He just kind of walked up to kind of walked up and stood on top of them. You know, and and then they took them all the way to the far extreme, you know. And now I think at least well, there aren't really any purebred sheep left.

SPEAKER_04 46:21

Maybe I I don't know what were there ever even any purebred sheep there?

SPEAKER_01 46:24

Oh yeah, I think there were. Those little suffix. Well, those suffix might have been, but I don't think the king was a purebred suffoc. I think he'd gotten on the wrong side of the mountain with a couple big ramble a his mama with a big old ramble ram. I mean, but anyway, they're they're trying to salvage some of these breeds, but the club lamb guys, you know, I mean, those are pretty functional sheep, most of them. Some of them are getting way too little and way too round and weight when they show them when they're a year and a half old and they weigh 130 pounds, that that can't be a real good thing.

SPEAKER_03 47:03

No, they're doing the same thing in the pigs, though. Older the better.

SPEAKER_01 47:06

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_03 47:07

Yeah. When I was a kid, they showed January pigs and heaton county here now. I mean, if you don't have a November, yeah, you're behind.

SPEAKER_04 47:16

I want to I want to take a second and back back way up though before we lose lose part of this thread. Um, and go back and talk a little bit about your club calf venture of buying these club calves and bringing them back. Who was riding with you when you would when you were going west? There's a particular story I want you to tie into and tell.

SPEAKER_01 47:35

Well, that was when Gary Minish was here as a grad student. And I had had just gotten off the state 4-H judging team. And if you ever knew Gary Minish, he was kind of like the Pied Piper. He he was a super salesman. Well, the I had I wanted a really good steer to show at State Fair. And I knew Gary's family had really good ones. In fact, John, they had the champion steer at Chicago on a Hereford steer that was different than he wasn't a giant, but he wasn't one of those little ground pounders. So I talked to Gary and said, you know, is there any chance I could get a steer from your dad? He said, Well, yeah, we're I'm I'm gonna put together some and bring them back. Okay, well, the first year he brought them back, and I got one, and he was a good her first year. Everybody that ever saw him said, oh man, you know, he'll win state fair going away. And uh and I'd like to do it. We we were wetting them out, we were rinsing them and putting them under fans and putting them outside way before everybody else did. And that steer then we got to Detroit, and the one-armed calf roper, R.B. Warren, who was the extension beef specialist at University of Nebraska, and the judging team coach, he he put him second. Alright, well, whatever. Then the next year I said, I need another steer. He said, Well, I was gonna talk to you. You're I know your dad's got a brand new pickup. How would you like to go with me and we'll go out and you can pick out a steer? I thought, man, this is a cool deal. So we get out there, I find the steer I want. He was a full brother to the steer from the year before. And get up in the morning, and and you gotta realize this is a half-ton pickup with a stock rack on it. Gary showed seven of these cabs on there. Now they weren't big, but they probably weighed 450, maybe 500. In the bed. And the back end of this truck. And we start for home. Well, we made it all the way to Morris, Illinois, before the tires all blew and rolled it over on Interstate 90. And my dad had a toolbox, a toolkit behind a seat. So he he grabs the wire cutters, takes off on the dead run. I'm laying on the truck rolled to the left. We went on down the road, you know, and these scams all got pitched out, and they're running down the side of the road. So he's got the wire cutters, he goes down to where the viaduct is, cuts the fence, gets them off the off the interstate into a somebody's pasture cornfield there. And luckily this guy just a little ways away had a had some cattle, and they all just drifted over there. Well, so we got that steer home. One of the steers broke his leg. And I well, he ran around in the cornfield for multiple days, but I called my dad, and my dad was he was a great guy. I mean, and he put up with a lot of crazy shit that my brother and I did. And I called him and say, uh, we got a little problem. Well, what's the problem? Well, we just wrecked your pickup and these scans are running all over. Just don't bother calling me Trace. And he uh he said, Okay, well, I'll get Eerie Lighty and we'll we'll head that way. Well, he got out there, we'll brought him back. I long story short, took the calf to the state fair the next year. He wasn't near as good as the calf the year before. And since this is probably past the statute of limitation, in those days you didn't know who was judging or anything. And then those days there were 300 steers at the state fair. And uh I told my dad, I said, Well, go up and see who's up there in the ring. Goes up there, guess who the judge was? John Minish. And we had a pretty good day. He ended with the junior show champion and sold him for $2,400 to Farmer Jack Supermarkets. So that went a long way towards my college education. Of course, you could buy a brand new Chevrolet pickup for $2,500. No. The insurer. We kept that truck, and Gary had decided that the only thing he wanted this dry molasses, and you could only get it out there in Iowa. So we had uh two 50-pound bags of dry molasses in the front end of that pickup. It wasn't an extended cabin, but they were just laying down on the floor.

SPEAKER_03 52:44

What year was this again?

SPEAKER_01 52:45

Oh, it had to be about 1967.

SPEAKER_03 52:48

Okay, so this is all okay.

SPEAKER_01 52:51

Yeah, the statute of limitations way past. Yeah, you're safe. Yeah. And uh that truck, yeah, it ended up getting in the in the heating system and the whole nine yards.

SPEAKER_03 53:02

So the whole you kept the pickup, you said? Yeah, yeah, they fixed it. But every time every time you drove it, it smelled like molasses.

SPEAKER_01 53:08

Smell like molasses.

SPEAKER_04 53:12

Well, that's some good stuff there. And you know, speaking from experience, my dad could probably, if they could visit, would probably say he's had a few phone calls from me that weren't quite so different. My mom and dad have put up with a lot of crazy ideas at different times, as you as you know, Ron, you've got to spend a little time with them and so on. But um I think we're coming up about halfway point. I've got to use the facilities quickly, and I think our guests here look like they could use some extra refreshments.

SPEAKER_03 53:41

So we're gonna uh throw a little word into our sponsors. Uh Scales Farms.

SPEAKER_04 53:46

Scales Farms Equity Showpigs, I think, uh, contributed towards tonight. Good thing. Um and I think Mud Creek, Mud Creek Farms as well. Unless you've got a different name that you'd like to uh to toss in there. Uh Mud Creek is Charlie now. Oh, Mud Creek's Charlie. Oh, thank you, Charlie. That's very good. Thanks for contributing. Thompson Brother Showstar. What is it uh what is it uh um uh JR uh JR Ag Consulting?

SPEAKER_01 54:11

Just JSR Financial.

SPEAKER_04 54:13

JSR Financial. We appreciate their their kind contributions and support as well. So uh without further ado, we'll uh we'll be back in a bit. You will never even know where we're going.

SPEAKER_01 54:33

I'll be a cowboy. I love a cowboy wave.

SPEAKER_04 54:42

And we're back. Nice quick little break. You didn't even know we were gone, did you? I forgot to pee. Ah, dang it. We'll have to take another break now. We got Ron Dingerson sitting with us here this evening and Charlie. Ron, I want to circle back around if we can, and uh we touched on it a little bit and discussed them, but I think we kind of we skated over your time in New York. We go back and um tell us again about what this doctor was doing and the breeds of breed of cattle he had up there, like you know what what you guys were up to at the time.

SPEAKER_01 55:22

Well, we uh we had line one Herford's.

SPEAKER_04 55:25

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 55:26

And he this and Doc was raised in Idaho, and he uh he always wanted to be a cattle guy. And uh so anyway, he went to Wyoming and bought a slug of these, uh probably 25 line one Hereford heifers and a bull. But then he kind of got fascinated with these cementones. Well, the Hereford cattle, there wasn't enough depreciation in them. He had to get where they cost more. Now that was all what it was all about. It was how much you paid for them and what your tax basis was. So he got, and I don't even know how he got on this, but he um bar five Cementols in Karsten, Alberta, Canada, they had some of the very first purebred Cementol cattle born in the North American continent. So anyway, somehow he had talked to those people, and here's the first purebred Cementole bull in the North American continent, and he's bound and determined he's gonna buy. But he eat it, so you know he thought it was a pretty good uh tax shelter, and so he said, Well, you gotta go up there. So I f it was fun. I flew up there and they got this big production sale going on, and uh here's this bull. And I well I saw the calf when I got up there, and I told him, I said, I called him. Not on my cell phone in those days. You had to go down the road to find a payphone. I said, Doc, this calf is horrid. He said, Well, that's okay. I mean, yeah, he says, I'd already made, I already we made a deal. I'm gonna give a hundred, you're gonna give a hundred thousand dollars for him. Now you figure a hundred thousand dollars in 1973 for a bull and figure out where that is.

SPEAKER_04 57:30

Where's our where's our tech support on this?

SPEAKER_01 57:32

Already on it. And uh anyway, yeah, so he bought bought this bull, and they called him 100 grand. He went to ABS's stud. And then to make insult to injury when he was old enough to collect, then we had to AI everything on our property to this horrible piece of crap.

SPEAKER_04 57:55

And uh so anyway, yeah, and then So he wasn't he you weren't impressed at all.

SPEAKER_01 58:02

I was less than impressed.

SPEAKER_04 58:03

Um $100,000 works out to three quarters of a million.

SPEAKER_01 58:09

Yeah, probably. And then Peggy Rockefeller had talked to me and said, if you go to their sale and you find a find a heifer that you really like, if she's good, you go ahead and buy her. Well, I found a heifer I really, really liked. And uh I gave 17.5 for her, and she got back to this United States and she went to Peggy, and I convinced Peggy not to mess with her, just get her bread and get her cab. And at one time she had four different bulls than AI stood. She was a really good heifer. And then Doc, he made a d another great deal for a purebred heifer up there that was even a worse piece of crap than them. And uh then he we get her down here, and I say, well, Doc, we just need to grow her out and and get her bred and get her calved, and then he's he wanted to he was excited about embryo transplant. He wanted to get her flushed. I said, uh, in those days it was quackery at best. I mean, it wasn't very good. The drugs messed them up and they didn't get very well anyway, he sent her to someplace in in Kansas. I don't even remember the g where what it was, but anyway, she was there for two years. They never got an egg out of her, viable egg. So then he sent her back to the farm, and she ran with a bull, and every 21 days she'd get covered, and she never did concede. When I left, I think she was four and a half, five years old, never had a calf. Great. Your own in it. But she was a great tax shelter.

SPEAKER_04 59:57

Yeah. So were you guys doing some showing at the same time or on? Or were you or were you stuck were you at the farm all the time being the cow guy? Did you guys did you have somebody else that was taking the showstring on the road?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:08

He wasn't big on it. We went to the New York State Fair a couple different times. Okay. And then we consigned some stuff to uh Pennsylvania Cemitole Association sale. But Doc wasn't a big, big show guy.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:23

He he just was in the You should have presented him with a tax shelter that the showing provided.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:29

Yeah. But you know, it he was he was a great surgeon because we had all of these peppers bred to these big Cimitole bulls, and it just got where we pulled every one of them. And some of them were successful and some of them weren't. Well, all of a sudden he decides, I'll I don't know. He went up to Cornell's vet school to learn how to do a Caesarean, and he came back and he said, those guys are butchers. He said, Nobody sews muscle to hide all in one suture. You gotta sew it by layers. Well, whatever. I've never, you know, so he decides a way to get around that calving the problem is to just put a zipper in the side of them. Well, no, he just brought up this whole truckload of surgical equipment. I mean, he had the lights, the the all the tools, the whole nine yards, and he'd come up about on the every weekend when we had a bunch of them that were gonna calve, and he'd just do the cesareans. Successfully? Well, most of them, yeah. A lot of times those heifers though, and then except those calves. Yeah, you'd they were you'd put that calf by them and they'd look one take one look at it. We learned not to turn them out because you wouldn't they just take off on a dead run.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:47

You wouldn't leave the calf behind.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:49

Here's the calf laying there. We had a lot of pale calves, but we didn't kill all the heifers anyway.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:56

So I guess there was some goodness in it. I'll be darned. C-sections before c sections were cool.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:06

I'm telling you, Ron was a trendsetter. He was he was trading, he's buying and selling club calves. I mean, what were you what were you buying them for out there in South Dakota?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:14

Oh, well, you gotta remember about in those days, the bat cattle were the the well when when the PBB hit, you guys are way too young to remember the PBB.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:26

No, that's uh what what is it? The s uh the bitter the bitter harvest or something like that.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:30

Watched that movie several times at school.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:32

Well, I went to school with those Halbert boys.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:35

Did you?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:36

They're right over here by Battle Creek, right? Yeah, yeah. Right by uh or Penfield. Yeah, and that yeah, over on 37. And they uh well Rick was the uh valedictorian of the class ahead of me. Okay and uh he got a degree in chemical engineering. So anyway, he was the one that figured out that what PBB was. I mean, they had people running all over, they had every nutritionist and vet and so on, and it was He actually figured it out. Yeah, well yeah, he sent the sample off to his buddy that was an analytical chemist and said, There's something in this damn feed, figure out what it is. The guy came back and said, Well, there's about 500 times more bromide or 5,000 times as much bromide as what should be in that feed, and that's when they tracked it.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:27

And they figured it from there to what it was.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:29

Yeah, coke cows were 17 cents a pound then, because you you had to get the fat biopsy and get them cleared, and then you could sell them. And so I'd say I bought Kaz for $300,000, $350, and sold them for $500. That was a big profit margin.

unknown 1:03:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:47

But gas percentage wise, that's a good one. Yeah, well, gas was 25 cents a gallon, too.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:52

It didn't cost you Yeah, what'd it cost to what did it cost to go buy a cheeseburger?

SPEAKER_01 1:03:56

Well, Ritzy's in Battle Creek. Okay. When I was in high school, I had a friend that was bigger than Charlie, and he he claimed we bet him one. He's he claimed he could eat eat eight of those. And they were 25 cents a piece. Two dollars worth.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:13

Did he do it?

SPEAKER_01 1:04:14

Uh he did. Now that they he didn't make it all the way home. He didn't. He held them for quite a while. He was a little on a miserable side, but but uh no.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:30

So then uh Ron's a little bit like the forest gump of the agricultural community in some ways, I feel like, because he's always kind of to me had a had a seat like just right to the left of wherever wherever shit's happening. Right there, right there for the discovery of Lutalice. Right there for kind of front row seat to see what was happening with the bitter harvest and all of that. Kind of at the forefront of the craze of the purebred cattle industry when the scimitols were getting hot and taking off and getting first scimitole born in Michigan. Getting getting great big, and then kind of realizing like this kind of for the birds. I'd better I'm gonna cut back to some that are short enough that their calves can nurse off them. Um so we've yet what we've yet to talk about much is Ron's experience or livelihood in the sheep business. And so, fast forward and way ahead, Ron. You've gotten rid of most of the high percentage cemital cattle, and you've still got, I presume, some kind of half-bloods going around. What led you and Julie to decide to finally liquidate the balance of the cattle herd and and start to focus in on sheep? Or I guess, yeah, I mean you mentioned earlier that your folks didn't really particularly care for sheep. You didn't raise sheep much as a youngster c growing up. So far, we've talked a lot about cattle background, cattle stories, cattle guys. Um what led to your transition uh into the old vines.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:04

Well it was um a matter that I had taken uh uh a job that required me to be gone a lot and cows and cows and little young girls aren't necessarily a great combination so Sarah had her s decided she didn't want to show steers because she got beat up so her and Uncle Doyle cooked up this scheme to uh to get in the sheep business and then she gets two two weathers close to the county fair their champion land and champion pepper lands this is from these were from Uncle Doyle Dingley right downhill over here in Bellevue they were the Bellevue specials head of the Bellevue Mafia yeah and uh so that's what started it and then she wasn't gonna show cattle anymore now later and when she got older then we did we did uh she did show some steers we we'd used you managed to convince her to give them a try again yeah but you say Sarah when she made up her mind was pretty tough to yeah she's not Miss Flexible no she uh she's pretty rigid and so the girls all showed a steer or two um and had real good luck at the county fair and and uh but then when Maggie got old enough to show she didn't she didn't want to show anything that her sister was showing you know so she wanted Dorsets she decided she liked Dorsets and so we bought a we bought a few and then Wilmer French that's a name from way back and Wilmer had a nice flock of Dorsets and he decided to sell them. Well we bought his Dorsets and uh and then they were really good productive sheep. They they were really seasoned polyester so we left for State Fair while I was cleaning orange in the spring. So I turned this buck out with these ewes that we'd just weaned and I thought well they're not ever going to get bread. Came home from we left for State Fair and I knew they some of them had gotten bread. Got home and 13 of them had lambed out in the field and had like 18 lambs everything's peachen and um but then we proceeded to wreck them um went down the big well Maggie was a premier breeder at State Fair for a couple years with Dorsets. And then of course well they're not big enough we gotta find a big one we bought the reserve national champion Dorset buck. From Sedalia no we well we bought a buck from Elderbrox in Sedalia and he was pretty good cheap. This one we bought at the spring Dorset sale they had in Eaton Ohio okay and he came from Maple Line who was they were the cutting edge of Dorset sound so yeah we start to use that buck and we get horns which wouldn't terribly be unusual for Dorsets you can get some horns which that was eating then we got black spots and we got black feet and almost every one of his ULAMs before they were five months old they'd all prolapsed just everyone prolapsed and uh you know so just like everything you know when you when you chase that trend that you you know better is not because the girls had champion Dorset weather at State Fair four or five years in a row if we'd have kept those and uh we'd be in a speckle business oh man right now did you have an influence of South Downs in there too for a little while oh yeah that was Julie's deal yeah we had some South Down ears Julie loved South Down sheep so we got some south downs so once upon a time we had we had and and then and then Abby Charlie's mom he got some uh she and Judy Moore cooked up this deal where Abby was gonna get some hamps from Judy to show and so at one point in time we had we had some suffects papered suffoces Dorset ewes Southtown ewes and Hampshire ewes now when Maggie left to go to college the her sheep were worth pretty good money and I said we just can't do this four breed crap and uh they were worth the most they were worth the most and then uh the Southtowns we kind of kept because Julie really liked them and you know things kind of work out that way with what mother wants mother generally gets and uh and then the rest of them yeah the rest of them then were just a bunch of hodgepodge of black faced sheep so we decided oh we'll make these into some kind of club lamb sheep so then uh yeah you know then we had we were famous for those tubi black ones we bought a ram from uh Middlesworth that was he was about as tube and hard muscled as as you've ever ran across and uh yeah with we sold a crap out of those things they were popular weren't they yeah they were and you couldn't just kids would say how do I feed them well you just feed them as much as you can possibly sta stuff into them because you're you're never gonna get one fat.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:04

No those are the sheep I remember yeah that was that was my era I never showed sheep early early on that's what I remember those were the ones to to pick to win those are the they were hard muscled tight gutted it was that was a reason to use them if they were if they were hard hard gutted it was I can't remember what term they used to describe them in a positive light that way um but yeah if you were too deep bodied it was a reason to get beat oh yeah yeah oh yeah they they wanted them with no guts no fat no guts no fat no bone and lots of daylight under them so as time's gone by here Ron I mean would you we've talked about how much we've uh we've screwed up the the cattle at different times how much the pigs have and are by the way screwed up hey we just had a we just had one pharaoh out 14 is she do is she did she ferrow yet yeah oh okay okay yeah she's a crossbred oh okay yeah okay cool she farrowed then yeah we can talk about that yeah well wait a minute how old is was she when you bred her the first time let's not go there we'll save we'll save that for another time they're gonna they want to talk about form to function you mean bred her the first time when she stuck or bred her the first and second time when she didn't and the third time I don't know or when she finally pharaoh that those are all different numbers right yeah wow boose counting right yeah yeah minor details but so my point being Ron is that you know I think that in general we've made the we've made the weather type sheet gener weather type sheet better in general oh yeah over the years in in many ways compared to where they started even 10 12 years ago as you look back at like photos that that we took that we thought like man that was that's really a good one and then you look at him today like man he he probably wouldn't cut the mushroom the top end of a class oh he he'd be a bottom feeder now I mean there's no sh now shag you know you guys really like shag that shag's worth a lot you know when you well you you've never had you've never had my shag soup yet Ron when I when I get that all seasoned up right and boiled up good I mean man it's I'm looking forward to that's gotta be worth a lot but anyway I'd say I'd say most of them are are uh pretty functional now yeah they're we'll find a way to screw them up before it's over well they you know when you when you show them in their yearlings when when you show them in July I would say all the species are the grow we've bred the grow out of them as Snud would say it's yeah well and that's there's a lot of truth in that I mean you know sheep of mine that used to I mean gosh when I was a kid we used to show February born lambs February and March born lambs at our county fair when I was a kid growing up was Labor Day weekend basically and uh they'd be 140 145 pound lamb and we wouldn't be necessarily nervous that they'd get there and uh now you know don't like necessarily like to admit it but I've got some December born lambs that are hovering around 110 pounds that I'm that we're you know feeding awfully hard um to uh to to keep doing that and they're not gonna be I mean you know MLE is the goal with with some of these and they're very good sheep but they're not gonna be much bigger in 125 130 pounds that's that's about it and I mean I guess um up a pill that that has to be swallowed is understanding that they don't have to be I guess as big as they they used to be and uh and we can be mowing it and and and trust me I wish they would perform a little bit better but uh that's unfortunately the world we live in well you know I've been caretaker for these catadans this is my second year of raising catans for the custom growers are those are those aren't mine I want to be very very clear I don't own a hair sheep custom grower for wheat and hammer for the wheat and and I I went out to find them today they never come to the barn those sheep well they don't go in a barn probably never seen one of them well you gotta you got these ones are more domesticated than the ones you had last year in some ways because well they revert to their feral ways in a in a big hurry because like the ones that of Leland's that we're feeding back in his pasture I've got to feed them every day to make sure they keep coming in when you feed them you dump the grain open the gate and you run and hide because if some of those old ewes see a person there they'll stand there and they'll blow at you they'll stomp and they'll blow through their nose they won't go in there if they see you. If you get behind a tree and wait till they go in and kind of get their heads in a feeder then you can sprint up fast. That's how I get my I've been really working hard something I think it's called hit training high intensity interval training is I sprint to a tree and I pant for a second watch till the last one runs in and then I sprint back and close the gate real fast.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:28

And then and then you see stars because you're starving for oxygen.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:31

Yeah well I'm not quite that bad we got it it takes a second where it's like there I got you guys in some little oxygen out these Julie has just gone crazy that she's convinced these sheep aren't drinking them. Well there's a water we got a water tank out there for them.

SPEAKER_04 1:17:49

And she told me the other day that she she goes out to check the water every single day because Julie is a I I'm not I don't know how good of a stockman Ron is or isn't but I know that's better. I know that Julie is one hell of a stockman and uh and she knows how much water those sheep are drinking and she informed me very seriously that they have not drank one inch of water.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:07

No they drink out of the swamp back there. Just just an old cattailed swamp.

SPEAKER_04 1:18:12

It's it's where they're happiest because you got to keep in mind that group that that we bought they say they told me that they ran them into a catch pen. They ran them off a thousand acres into a hundred acre catch pen. And then a hundred acres and then funnel them down into a 10 acre handling facility and got them run into a truck from there. So they are self-sufficient.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:35

You can't kill them with a club I'm not saying I've tried I don't know not that I haven't allegedly it would be interesting you know I haven't ever I've never obviously ever landed them or been around them when they land but if as far as animals that know how to take care of themselves they sure do.

SPEAKER_04 1:18:53

And they and they did impress me they did impress me as recepts I I would say two thirds of them two thirds of them lambed way easier than I expected because I thought we were going to be trying to drag these big hamp lambs out of them and they're you don't realize it when you're way back off the side of them when you get up over the top of them they are exceptionally big hipped and big pinned and it's you know for anybody out there that's ever tried to lamb or calf or ferrow anything length of hip actually does help a little bit I think yeah I think there's some form to function to that. And uh so and they are and they lamb fast um I've I've been around that for quite a while and ordinarily I think I can I can glance around and she's gonna do it in the next hour or so. Get within an hour. I can probably get within an hour I'm not gonna say I can tell you which one's gonna lamb today tomorrow or the next day but an hour generally so I go through and do chores in the morning and you'd look out there and I don't think anybody's doing much so you go to the other barn and spend some time looking at lambs and bed and pens and come back there'd be two or three of them would land. I mean because they when they decide to do it and that's uh a couple of them I've seen them they decide to do it they just back away from the feeder lay down shovel or they back away from the feeder shovel to water bag lay down there's a lamb following about two minutes after that. I mean they do it fast. So I wasn't I wasn't pressed with them that's but no don't worry we're starting to show them oh we're gonna show oh they show katan we we aren't wheat and hamsters is not well but there is a there is a segment of the cataton breed that is showing them and I right now they're very good sheep but give them enough time open them out yeah they'll they'll figure a way to do it but and just you know consequently I think like if you if all you do is just strictly chase performance of them and data on them and you don't pay attention to the feet sheep on the hoof in front of you you run into the same issue and the the cattle guys have seen that I mean the ones that are just strictly performance cattle and they don't pay attention to the to feet and legs and structure they're they're in just as bad a way as the guys that are that are breeding the club calves that that are too straight and can't walk too yeah um there's not there's none of those out there no that's true no that's true there were there was probably even back when you were loading hogs Ron the bottom of a load you probably found the ones that the reason they were the last ones off is because they were the straightest ones that's about right the thing too you know the these hair sheep they really used to discriminate against them when you took them to the market. Now I don't know how fast they grow but I bet they grow about as fast as some of the polyglots they grow fine to about like 60 days and then after that they kind of slow yeah they peter out just a little bit there's no big discount for these hair sheep anymore no not anymore I don't know if I was 25 years younger I might get in the cut go wash your mouth out wash your mouth out seriously your buddy down in South Carolina he's got some pretty impressive ones Andrew Weaver Andrew yeah no Andrew's got some very nice ones I agree I listen I I don't hate them as much as I used to uh but they're hard to come by because they have become exceptionally popular in the southern states or any place south of the Mason Dixon line where they face excessive parasite pressure um and because of that I think it you would probably remember this I mean didn't when black height cattle became a premium didn't that all of a sudden make some like didn't that make the black Angus cattle worse? Because guys were keeping them just because just for black height cattle. Yeah feet and legs went out of them and stuff and I I've heard several guys say that if the if the black Angus had made as much progress in that same 20 year stretch as the red Angus had for actual you know structure and body and so on and so forth they'd be a lot further ahead.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:53

Well yeah the black heided cattle one in 1976 South Dakota just had a terrible drought and my friend Phil Higby he was buying cattle for Premier's feed lots and he's in South Dakota and he calls up he's a it's it's probably the in August and they just don't have any feed. And he calls from the sale bar and he says you got feed I said yeah we got feed he said I can buy you a load of these short two cows confirm bread for 230 bucks a head so that sounds good. So anyway we buy a semi-load of those cows I think there were 40 of them and we did turn on some wheat stubble that had clover in it and then turns out they're bred the Brangus bulls interesting and I'd been calving all of these ones that you had to watch every minute and then go get the puller and then get it delivered those brangus calves were probably about like these cataton lambs I mean they just sort it out that O'Cow would turn around once and then you'd see a water sack and she'd turn around the second time and the calf was on the ground. And they were getting up about as soon as you could get there and I'm thinking you know we're doing something wrong with these rest of these things.

SPEAKER_04 1:24:24

There is something to say about vigor no doubt. So to back way up Ron and go back to your college days I think you may have been a grad student around this time. I think there's something to be you talked about for a little bit about the the brilliance of some of the men that you were surrounded by at the university at that time I can remember you telling me and I've been privileged to visit with Ron quite a lot and hear a lot of good stories. This one's a favorite of mine. I'm gonna try to tease it out of him if I can these were undoubtedly very brilliant men that you were surrounded by. But there is still something to be said about know-how and common sense. And so I think there was a time you were working there in the summer with a friend of yours and they had just something to do with silage corn and maybe a new chopper.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:14

Is that the story right well yeah that it's like in August and the uh farm crew went on strike so the corn silage king was a a professor by the name of Hugh Henderson and he was he did a lot of the research on this Michigan 1% diet were of course those cattle in those days were quite a bit smaller framed and they could finish them on corn silage and 1% corn. So anyway somebody called I don't remember who it was said well we gotta we gotta get this corn chopped and the farm crew's not here.

SPEAKER_04 1:25:55

You guys want to come up and help yeah sure let's it pay and we were making it was more than you were making working for free so yeah working for my dad yeah I think it was a whopping three dollars and fifty cents an hour.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:11

So anyway we get up there and you better not brag about a profit like that well yeah but the cost of living was a whole lot different yeah and um anyway we go out in the field and here's Professor Henderson giving us this lecture on how to get this chopper set up. And he's this was one of those old fox you'll see him sitting in the fence rope. Yeah and uh so uh on how to tighten the chains and get everything ready to go and everything grease and and um so he said he said he said well I guess we're ready to go to work so anyway I was standing there with this good friend of mine and his toolbox is sitting right down in front of the chopper and I said Gary do we should we tell him that there's toolboxes there he says he's a PhD he ought to be able to figure this out revs that baby up and runs that toolbox right toolbox right through that chopper. There are pieces flying all over did it take a little while to did you have to stop and and check any chains after that well then you know I don't know how he finangled it but a new fox chopper showed up a day later but I think the company would had brought them out you know because they wanted a a demo yeah they wanted a university to show these things off well they don't they don't show up tools very well yeah yeah and even as much as I liked Harlan Ritchie and a great guy but uh his first wife Lou she was a sweetheart she uh she'd let us he'd recruit us to go help him do something and then she'd feed us Well anyway, he had this bright idea. He had a tree in his backyard that needed to come down. And uh this friend of mine, Gary Gowell, he's from Atlanta, Michigan. He's a wood, his family's wood ticks. Like Gary, you said? Gary. Okay. Well, Terry's brother. Yeah. Older brother. I've heard of Terry. Yeah. Terry's. They're just like peas in a pod. But anyway, Gary and I were. Harlan gets us, convinces us, you come up and help me take this tree down. We will cook you supper. Yeah, that's all it needed for us, so we go up there.

SPEAKER_04 1:28:34

You did say at the beginning of this, Ron, you work cheap.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:36

I did. I work for you.

SPEAKER_04 1:28:39

I think you work cheaper for David than I. Yeah. Anyway, oh let's keep the heat off of me a little bit, all right. I'm going home here in the next week or two. I'll get plenty.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:49

I'm not sure Dave Hawkins wasn't involved in this story, too. He was a grad student when we were there. Was he really? Yeah. And uh anyway, Gary Also in the Saddling Silence. Well, Harlan, he's got this figured out. This tree's gonna drop right here, right next to his garage. Between this tree and his garage. No, you can see where this is going. Gary cut a lot of trees in his day, and we're standing there watching. Gary says, that tree's going right on that garage. Sure enough.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:28

So you were part of the reconstruction of Harlan's garage. No, I wasn't. I was part of getting the tree off the roof. The demolition of Harlan's garage.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:38

Did it wreck the garage? Didn't do it bad. He kind of hit it on the corner, thank goodness. He'd missed only by about four foot, so it only got the back corner of it. No. So it's solid. Yeah, it wasn't.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:52

That's kind of the way you had so Ron, you'd mentioned something about a shorthorn bowl earlier the day. I kind of wanted to hear that story.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:00

Well, I was working Dave Musy. You guys know Dave Musy. I heard that name. I know. Yeah, he's he's a sheep in the sheep business, yeah. And he worked for Upjohns for a long time. Well, there's a way it's now. But anyway, um we live we were living in the in the beef barn. I'd rather live in the sheep barn. The sheep barn in those days was brand new.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:21

Well the beef barn was the little apartment in the hallway, right? Yeah, it was.

SPEAKER_04 1:30:25

And I I was gonna ask you, you were now I could be wrong, but I think maybe the first inhabitant of that new sheep barn was Lee.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:30:33

And I think you moved in right after.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:35

We were close, yeah. And uh so anyway, Missy and I are living in the sheep barn or in the beef barn, and it was after Denver time, and I guess the university had bought this shorthorn bull out in Denver. And the trucker dropped him off during the night. And uh so we hear him. We well, we knew he was coming, so we get up and we put him in a pen that's all ready for him anyway. Get up in the morning, go to do chores, walk down there, and this bull looks like he's got a pair of real baggy nylons on him. I mean his li his legs are all all wrinkled and there's stuff coming out of the out of his eye. You can you can oh boy, see his so get on the phone, call Amos. Amos, go and look at this bull, there's something wrong with him. He gets over there. So, oh shit. Well, he didn't say shit because he never really, I never love the man cuss. Anyway, he gets on the phone and by then the whole the whole committee is there, and they're going, oh, this bull is filled with oil. That's oil. We see the whole man. But yeah, no, I never in all the time I ever worked there, or knew Amos, I never heard him heard him cuss a little bit.

SPEAKER_03 1:31:52

Yeah, I don't know. I I can't say as I had either, but uh I I do remember riding around in that university van quite a bit pulling that set of scales, and actually his last set of scales resides right down the road down here, and I'm I'm uh I'm promised first option on them if they ever sell. Who has those? Uh Matt Miller. Oh, former guest Matt Miller. Actually, Trace's very first deer that we took to the county fair, wait on them scales. Yep. Miles. Miles.

SPEAKER_04 1:32:19

Remember that was when I first started hanging around. I kept a main heifer over here. Main and Jew. That was Ron mentioned on the break that the one breed of cattle I didn't mention was main and Jew. We've got it. Well, and limousines. I didn't mention that's right. Didn't mention limousines.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:35

Well, this cancel Armstrong when he came down, you know, they had semen on all of them. He says, Well, here's the way it'll work. Says the kenaninas will jump over the fence.

SPEAKER_03 1:32:45

That's no lie.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:46

And the main and jewes will run through it. The limousines will turn around and run the other direction. He said, probably the seminals are the best disposition on the bunch. But I remember seeing uh Cuna. You remember ever hearing a Cunha?

SPEAKER_04 1:33:03

Wasn't he the first purebred Charlet bowl that was first purebred Mania Jew bowl? Mania Jew, that's right. I haven't heard of that.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:11

I've I've heard of the old Cunha bowl. A lot of these main pedigrees now go way back to him. But I swear to God, he weighed three when I saw him, and I don't even remember, it was some some uh viewing of of these things. If he didn't weigh 3,000 pounds, he didn't weigh an ounce. I mean they had him fat, but he was his ass was as wider than twice as wide as this table.

SPEAKER_03 1:33:39

But when what was his era? When would he have been well that would have been late 70s? Okay.

SPEAKER_04 1:33:49

I think there's a lot of his sons. Well, you can still buy Cunha Siemen, can you? Yeah, I saw it, I saw it in a sale here, some online sale, you buy it for about five dollars a unit. But he's he still exists out there.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:03

Yeah, he uh I just said man, I don't I got enough trouble getting these cementhole cans out of these cows. I don't think I'm quite up for trying these manes.

SPEAKER_04 1:34:13

They'll eat you now. As we're winding down a little bit, Ron, we've this has been a terrific conversation. I've had a lot of fun, and I hope you guys have as well. Um there have been a couple core questions that we've asked a couple times um to various guests, and I want to ask a few of them to you. Um I've always felt that at some point in time in the livestock industry, everybody gets it gets an opportunity or a big break. Um was there ever a time like that that stands out to you where someone really did you a good turn that that you remember or a big break that kind of helped cement your path?

SPEAKER_01 1:34:54

Well, the guy came along and gave me 25,000 for those first five Cemetole heifers. That was that well when we we moved to uh where we are now. I don't know how I ever got Julie to move into that place, but it was 132 acres, and we paid 81,000 for it. I'll give you double that for it today. And and then we're scratching trying to figure. There were times when it's like, well, our payment was 525 bucks a month, and we were scrounging up popcans. I mean, yeah. Um it's all relatives, you know what I mean. And uh but that kind of helped along the way. And you know, I'll just have to my my folks, my dad especially, he was just always supportive of my crazy ideas. It's like I'd run something by, and he'd just say, Well, you think you can make it work? I said, Yeah, I think so. He said, Well then go for it. You know, it's it's okay. If it doesn't work, try something else. Um and then Julie's put up with an awful lot of crazy ideas over the years, you know.

SPEAKER_03 1:36:09

Still does a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 1:36:11

And she's got me pretty well roped in now. I'm I'm too old to get in too much trouble anymore.

SPEAKER_03 1:36:17

You know, like you hang around David, you got a chance. Yeah, I know. He's a bad influence.

SPEAKER_01 1:36:21

Yeah. But Julie really likes him. You know, Jack thinks he's my favorite grandson. I don't know.

SPEAKER_04 1:36:27

I actually heard Jack say that. Yeah. What uh maybe I should be concerned for myself a little bit, but I think Julie says that uh I remind her of Ron. Maybe that's why she likes me so well.

SPEAKER_01 1:36:40

Yeah, you do.

SPEAKER_04 1:36:41

You got enough crazy ideas to- Well, if I can make as many of them, half as many of them work as you have, well, then hopefully I'll be alright.

SPEAKER_01 1:36:51

I I always thought I could m you know make a living and do everything I wanted to do in the livestock business. Well, that's a tough, tough road. With you know, even back then it was even easier because when Sarah was born, I paid cash for her birth, and it was 700 bucks. And we we w we didn't have any life insurance or any health insurance of much consequence when she was born. Now, you know, I mean if you would if you don't have a job where you get some benefits, you know, these families are paying $2,000 a month for minimal health care.

SPEAKER_02 1:37:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:32

And daycare, we had a lady down the road, old Beulah, she watched the girls, and I think we paid her $50 a week. And uh you know, so it's I don't I wouldn't know how you would start just in the pure livestock business and make a goal of it.

SPEAKER_04 1:37:55

You know, it's there's a lot of sh a lot of stuff has to go right, that's for sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:59

Well, there's only two ways. When I was in the lending business, these young guys like you would come in, David, and say, well, uh this is my plan. I want to buy this farm and I'm gonna raise this and do this, and look look at their financial statement. And they'd they'd have about 50 cents to their name, and I said, There's only two ways to make this future in uh livestock or crop business or dairy business work. And that's either marry it or inherit it. Starting from scratch is a tough, tough deal.

SPEAKER_04 1:38:39

That it is. You know, I think Ron, Ron, you've told me before that uh in the lag ag and ag lending business, you've seen enough examples that you could write 101 ways to go broke in agriculture.

SPEAKER_01 1:38:53

Yeah, I'm gonna call it the first chapter is called Unsuccessful Farming.

SPEAKER_04 1:39:03

Well, very good. Nick, do you have any other questions that we normally ask that I don't know if I'm missing that I'm skipping over here?

SPEAKER_03 1:39:10

The one that kind of comes to mind to me, Ron, is we we've asked in the past is uh you know, what's the best piece of livestock you've ever seen in your life? Now it doesn't have to be relevant to today for its time, you know, for its era. What was the one that you looked at and you were like, wow, I'll never see one that good again.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:30

Well, that the steer that John Minish raised, they called him the real McCoy. Yeah. Me being the I'm just a sucker for people talking me into helping doing stuff. Well, that Gary Minnesota. That's evidenced by David. Yeah. God. Now I need some something to occupy myself, but I think shuffleboard at the Senior Citizen Center is that great a deal. But anyway, Gary Minish says, well, my sister showed this deer at the Iowa State Fair, and he won his class, but he was pretty green and pretty young. But he said, I think he's really good. My dad says he's super good. So he said that we're gonna try to get him in. And it was it had to be before 1975 because he was at at Chicago when it was still still at Chicago. And he um he cons me into helping him. He said, My dad's gonna get him on a hog truck and send him this direction. So it's about four o'clock in the morning. He rolls me out of my bed and says, Well, you gotta come and help me get this steer. We go over there, get this steer off the truck, and I mean he's on the bottom deck of a hog truck, and he is just covered. Well, he it was in November, and he goes Hereford's in those days, grew a lot of hair. So we get him home, get him over there, get him to the wash rack. He was real quiet. Just you could walk him anywhere. Yeah. Wash him out. I don't think we had blowers even in those days.

SPEAKER_03 1:41:08

The old electro groom, probably.

SPEAKER_01 1:41:10

Yeah, all right. And uh and then O'Gary he conned somebody else, one of his buddies that's a good fitter, into starting to carve on him, and by golly, there's a heck of a good steer under there. Well, he ended up when in the in those days they showed him the Herefords. There were only the Herefords, shorthorns, Angus. There weren't any crossbreds. Okay. And uh he won the Hereford show, and uh, by then all these people are starting to show up to look at him. And he was just kind of a he was big but not big, moderate frame, just really correct, had a lot of muscle, really a pretty beast, and and I just I still got the clipping of of uh when the real McCoy wins the Chicago International. In those days, the Chicago Merck used to buy the champion steer every year. Uh-huh. The price was 10,000 bucks. They just always gave 10,000 bucks for him. Okay. And that was, and I he was the he was the beast. He was the beast.

SPEAKER_03 1:42:12

Yeah. That's cool. I love hearing those stories. And it's it's it's interesting how many people have like there's that one that sticks out in your mind. I'll never forget when I was on the judging team for a while there that uh I saw a shorthorn heifer in Texas, and uh that one still is stuck in my mind. And as a lot of you know, I mean, I've grew up around the shorthorns quite a bit, but they're not my favorite breed. Yeah, um, I have a I have a respect for them, but um, but no, that one was that was one that sticks in my mind.

SPEAKER_01 1:42:43

Um well then the other one I saw that was changed the whole industry was about three years after that. And maybe it was when I was on a judging team. We were in Chicago, and the the talk is there's this crossbred steer gonna win Chicago. He's gonna win the thing. He is a good beast. And Herman Purdy was the oh no, it was a good boy it was the Don Good who was the head of the department at Kansas.

SPEAKER_04 1:43:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:43:14

And Les Real from Conquerville, Illinois, brought that steer. And I think he'd changed hands two or three times by then. But um his name, they named him Conoco, I think.

SPEAKER_03 1:43:28

Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:43:29

And I saw him, and and he was he'd be a good steer today.

SPEAKER_04 1:43:34

I've heard people say that before that heard that too. If that steer was around today, he'd be good today. Yep. He was a little bit straight on both ends.

SPEAKER_01 1:43:43

That's a show steer, though. Well, maybe that's what they gotta be. Anyway, he really impressed, but he was he was pretty good. He was a Charlie Hangus. Smoky, black, smoky colored. He was a really good beast.

SPEAKER_04 1:43:57

And he was the first crossbred to win the international.

SPEAKER_01 1:44:00

Yep. I think we've talked about him.

SPEAKER_04 1:44:02

We have Matt Miller missing him, and I'll I'll mention you mentioned Neil Orth.

SPEAKER_02 1:44:06

Yep.

SPEAKER_04 1:44:07

Um, he was around that time frame, he was working for what became Drover's Journal. I don't think it was Drover's Journal then, but he was going kind of door to door selling subscriptions. And he had a reputation for, and maybe you can confirm or discount this, but he had a reputation for having a pretty good eye for livestock and being a good fitter. And uh this family asked him to come back and take a look at these steers they had. And went back and looked at them, and oh, these are the ones we have for state fair, these are our county fairs. And uh this one we're thinking about taking for the uh the carcass contest at the county fair. And that was the steer that went on to be Conical. And he said, I don't think I would. I don't think I'd knock his head off. Don Good's coming to Judge International. That one could could hit him right between the eyes. And uh I've just always kind of you know, the good boys were from from here in Michigan. Neil Orth uh was a graduate attended attended attended Michigan State. Oh well, he had a red shirt here or two. Well, we we talked about the influence of that that university had, just some of the people that got churned out. I mean, the first crossbred steer that went that wins the international had some wasn't necessarily bred or came from Michigan, but there were some strong Michigan roots that that guided him along to get there.

SPEAKER_01 1:45:32

So anyhow, this was pretty cool. Yeah, the the Cinopel thing, the guy that drug out all those giants was a guy named uh oh yeah, I just was gonna say it from Illinois, uh Nick Overpeck. Okay. And he showed a lot of the champion steers at Chicago for during those decades. But he uh the hef the two heifers that beat my giant heifer in Denver, come to find out, were Nick Overpeck projects. Okay, uh and their sire was maybe a red hole steamboat. That was kind of allegedly.

SPEAKER_03 1:46:15

I think the statute of limitations is okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:46:17

Yeah, that was kind of the uh that was the word on the street at the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:46:24

They were a little angular, but so Ron, as you think back over the over the years, and I and you've had a whole nother, we could do a whole nother podcast and probably will just discussing some of your stories and experiences in the ag lending world, um, but specifically related to the livestock sector, is there a person you can point to as being the most influential to you over that time?

SPEAKER_01 1:46:53

You know, uh when I worked for Farm Credit, um the original guy that they see, I had no experience in finance. My the president of PCA of Lansing happened to live down the road from us, and his kid and I were good friends, and I was extension agent, and old Carl, it's about this time of the year, and Carl pulls in the driveway, and I thought, you know, what the heck? And he says, Well, you ever think of going to into the lending business? I said, Carl, you know, I've always been on the short end of this lending thing, you know. And I he says, Yeah, but we want to hire somebody that's got an agricultural background. Uh somebody we can send out and they can say, yeah, those are gilts and those are barrows and those are cows and those are steers. We're we're that and we'll teach you this lending business. You know the part we don't know. Yeah, it's not that tough. And uh so anyway, the my boss at that particular time was a guy named Bill Henquinette, and a little short, sought-off guy from Wisconsin, and he he kind of here's what he'd say. He'd say, now I'm gonna send you out there, and you figure out what to do, use your best judgment. If you screw up, shame on you. But you know, he'd give you enough room. He wasn't micro, he'd never micromanaged anybody, anything. And so I learned an awful lot, I learned a lot. I mean, it was and then when I went into special credit the last five years of my career with Farm Credit, that I got a PhD in bankruptcies. That was what they dumped on it. And so me and Dingman, we kind of had a vertical integrated deal. I'd foreclose on them and he'd liquidate them. But you know, the 80s, that wasn't bad management. Tough. I mean, those guys were they didn't do anything wrong. They just got themselves leveraged up too high, and that's what I see right now. I mean, you there's some ground up there not too far from us about ten thousand an acre. Now I'm no math wizard, but house of cards, isn't it?

SPEAKER_03 1:49:25

Pardon? It's a house of cards.

SPEAKER_01 1:49:27

Well, how do you pay 5% interest on $10,000 an acre ground? That's $500 an acre. You want to pay it off in 20 years, that's another $500 an acre. So that's a thousand, and then you want to pay some taxes, so that's another hundred. And then you gotta take care of some tile and do that.

SPEAKER_03 1:49:47

Maintenance, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:49:48

Yeah. So that and then you this year you're gonna get to raise, say you're really good, you raise 200 bushel of four dollar corn. It just costs you. $300 an acre to own that ground. Now, ground's appreciated. I'll give you all kinds of credit for that.

SPEAKER_03 1:50:08

But you can only do that for so many years.

SPEAKER_01 1:50:12

Yeah. Now if this real estate market buckles, it's gonna get okay. And that's what happened in the 80s. There was ground up in Gratut County that sold for $3,000 an acre. And uh Dingman liquidated a ton of that for five and six hundred dollars an acre in the middle eighties after the bottom fell out of it. Well, it was the interest rate. I'd come out here and say, David, you know, you got this operating loan. And last year, you know, you were paying uh seven percent. Well, this year you're gonna get we're gonna give you a deal. You're only gonna have to pay 19 and a half on that one. When the pride went to 21 or 22 percent.

SPEAKER_03 1:50:58

Well yeah, and at that point your your hands are tied, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:51:01

You're you're in it. Yeah, you they're it's like swimming in an ocean without a life preserver, you know. You just I mean you just can't do you just can't keep it out of it. And uh and tractors were 400,000. Right combines worth 700,000, and planters were 350,000. And I mean you can get as get as run it as fast and hard as you possibly want, but that's a tough deal to keep ahead of. If you got a ton of real estate all paid for, that gives you some room to wiggle, but you know also some room to get yourself in trouble. Well, yeah, you leverage it out. Yeah, that's why the insurance companies, you know, I did quite a bit of work for Prudential. And now, you know what their loan to value is? 40%. At $10,000 an acre of ground, you go ahead and buy it, but I'll loan you $4,000. You come up with the other six thousand. Either you give me enough ground to collateralize it, or you write me a check, and they could give a crap less if you ever pay for it. They'll take it for that kind of money.

SPEAKER_04 1:52:17

So I've got one more question, Ron, and then we'll let you go for the night because I know Julie's probably missing you.

SPEAKER_01 1:52:22

She is, she's cooking supper. I'm missing my supper.

SPEAKER_04 1:52:24

Well, gosh, I don't want to see that happening.

SPEAKER_01 1:52:26

Plus, I've got to feed your rotten sheep yet.

SPEAKER_04 1:52:29

Julie, I know Julie, she's probably already been down and fed the sheep. And petted them all. Probably, yeah. Looked at all her favorites.

SPEAKER_01 1:52:36

By the way, when are some of those rotten things gonna leave?

SPEAKER_04 1:52:39

I'm counting the days.

SPEAKER_01 1:52:41

You're counting the days?

SPEAKER_04 1:52:43

I might come over and grab a couple.

SPEAKER_01 1:52:45

Yeah, we got maybe. The other day he brings, he comes over, he gets one, and leaves four.

SPEAKER_04 1:52:52

Well, that's sheep. That's only three, uh.

SPEAKER_03 1:52:55

That's sheep math. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:52:56

No, we're we're getting ready to go down in a hurry here. We'll leave the sale group down. We'll leave the sale group down here. That's a little plug for the sale group that's coming up here for this fall. The dates aren't officially set yet for the scales farm. Exposed ULAN sale, but but follow along with us for that. Because I think it'll be an awfully good set of them. Ron lost. Ron lost William and I go through them the other day. And I can I thought last year we sold a really good set of them. And I'm gonna at risk of sounding like Brad Chapman. Wait a minute.

SPEAKER_03 1:53:24

I'm gonna guess. This year's year's is the best I've ever seen. These are the best ones.

SPEAKER_04 1:53:28

Yeah, no. But do you think a livestock breeder ever had? Mostly, mostly if your last name's Chapman, though, it seems like that's that's a dig directly after. By the way, I want to congratulate Brad and Kristen Chapman on uh the arrival of their daughter, Amber. So you gotta wait for that. They gotta get that. Hopefully, there was a Facebook post on that one now.

SPEAKER_03 1:53:50

I texted Brad the other day and I said, Congratulations on becoming a father. It's the coolest thing you'll ever do, and also one of the most frustrating things. Yeah, there you go.

SPEAKER_04 1:53:59

But so I'm supposed to be using this time for questions, so here it is. Um Ron, in the live focusing strictly on the livestock side of things, when you were, oh, I don't know, roughly my age or so, um, who were the program, what was a program that you looked up to and really admired? Um, like who were the big players at the time? Like, you know, and you were you were more heavily involved in the cattle industry, but who were the who are the names that you like think back to that you remember that that stand out?

SPEAKER_01 1:54:29

Well, and I probably that's where I made a very big mistake is I I looked up to like mahogany farms and high point herfords and Grand Valley, and then I didn't really realize those were all those were all backed by millionaires. And actually people that just made it from their own hard work and was and you ever heard of Ansley's over there by us? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, good cattle.

SPEAKER_04 1:55:07

Oh yeah, they're still there.

SPEAKER_01 1:55:08

Yeah, they've they've had those. When I was probably younger than Trace, the first one showed up out there, and my dad says, We gotta go see these cattle. I mean, they're we wanna look, you know, I I knew Bob Ensley and Gordon is one son, and I were classmates, the the grandfather of all of them now. And we go out there and it's like, geez, these things are different. And they all came from South Texas and they all had a dose of Brahma in them, and they were crazy. Yes. Um But anyway, those, and they still they run.

SPEAKER_04 1:55:46

Oh yeah, they got them yet today. I mean, when I was on the when I was on the judging team, which we we went to we went to Ensley's and and sorted through a they had like 90 bulls on feed or something like that. Then they were they were loading them all on, they were all getting them all sold.

SPEAKER_01 1:55:59

Well, they haul them to Texas, every as long earlings, and they've somehow they've got a connection down there. They still do it. The cows are on Charlie can see their cows from his house on that one farm there on Coast Grove Road.

SPEAKER_04 1:56:13

But they've pipe down Charlie, your grandpa's telling the story.

SPEAKER_01 1:56:16

Yeah. No, they're they're good, really good livestock people, and and I you know I I don't know how calving goes, but when you look out there and there's fifty cows and fifty calves, you have to see. They gotta figure it out somehow, don't they? When all right. I think they've got the calving trouble out of them, and the dispositions are probably okay. And and they're actually you know, they've that family's made a living in the livestock business. Now they feed heifers and they do some other things, but they're good people.

SPEAKER_03 1:56:52

Well that's the I mean that's the thing about the livestock business, is right like a lot of folks that you know are successful, they're not too proud to do some things to make ends meet. And I think that's what's you know admirable about it is you know yeah, we you know, like my son sitting here, he wants to sell the the next greatest one, you know, and there's all that. But the cool part is is like there's kids that need $300 county fair pigs, too. And there's nothing wrong with that either.

SPEAKER_01 1:57:20

No, if you can sell ten of them out of every cell, that's selling ten for three hundred dollars is probably better than selling two for eight hundred dollars. Where I'm just I mean, yeah, yeah. Yep.

SPEAKER_03 1:57:34

Quick math. Quick math, yeah. That math makes sense to me.

SPEAKER_04 1:57:37

So but well hey, well, this has been a lot of fun, and I think that's a good good place to wrap up on, too, with a little bit of a rah-rah for one of our you know, halfway local Michigan breeders with ends of Charlets. Yeah. Ron, I've had a good time this evening. I hope you've had fun.

SPEAKER_01 1:57:52

Yeah, been a pleasure having you. Well, we could say that.

SPEAKER_04 1:57:59

I would say that I was really trying to tease a few out here and there. So I'll have to bet the girls and see if they they maybe will give us each an approved story to try to get out of you.

SPEAKER_01 1:58:08

Yeah, maybe, but you don't want the wrath of three daughters and five granddaughters.

SPEAKER_04 1:58:13

Not all at once, no.

SPEAKER_01 1:58:14

No.

SPEAKER_03 1:58:15

Well, hey, I think it's time to feed Jimmy. Yeah. Yep, it's about that time. So have a good night, everybody. Yeah, this has been the wash rack.