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Analyzing Five Years of HortBiz Quiz Responses
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In this episode of Hort Culture, we delve into an analysis of five years' worth of HortBiz Quiz responses. We uncover trends and patterns that have emerged over time, revealing the evolving challenges and opportunities within the horticulture industry. For more details on the HortBiz Quiz, check out the resources available at the University of Kentucky's College of Agriculture, Food and Environment.
Questions/Comments/Feedback/Suggestions for Topics: hortculturepodcast@l.uky.edu
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Transcript
Introduction to Hort Culture Podcast
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome to Hort Culture, where a group of extension professionals and plant people talk about the business, production, and joy of planting seeds and helping them grow. Join us as we explore the culture of horticulture.
00:00:17
Speaker
We're here. We're back. We're ready to talk plants or specifically quizzes, but we'll get to that. Anyway, um, there will be no test today.
Bird Observation and Control: Fantasy and Reality
00:00:26
Speaker
This is random, but I, I'm seeing a bird outside the window right now and it's reminded me about the fact that I've made sort of friends. I don't know if I've made friends. They might try to kill me. There's with some blackheaded vultures. Uh, we have been in very close contact recently.
00:00:53
Speaker
I think that if I'm ever like someone who has control of birds, it will be
00:00:58
Speaker
of like, Ravens and crows. Is that like the superhero power that you've always dreamed of? I'm like smart like that. I will be sure about you want to be you are slash a falconer guy. Yeah, but I think I ultimately would love to have a murder of crows. Yeah, Corvids, man. Corvids are crazy. There's a whole there's a whole
00:01:22
Speaker
conversation happening between primatologists and, I don't know what they're called, corvid-ologists, about which one is more intelligent,
Exploring Animal Intelligence: Focus on Crows
00:01:35
Speaker
quote unquote. And like, there's this book called, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are, or something like that. Yeah.
00:01:43
Speaker
that I read, it's a pretty cool, it's just about animal intelligence. And there's all kinds of crazy stuff about crows. And I was talking to Annie, literally just yesterday, I was talking to Annie, I was like, so crows are super intelligent, and they're birds. It means that they are choosing as they fly over not to poop on us.
00:02:07
Speaker
Like, it's not random. I think crows probably do to make that choice, yes. They're choosing not to. Maybe they just don't have anything to give at that second, but would otherwise do so. That's true. Not everybody can, like, you know, spit out a dump on... But I mean, I feel like if they were, like, ready to go, and they're like, oh, this is the deal. I'm gonna go find someone. Yeah, I'm gonna go in here, and they don't... What if they're so smart that they're not letting us know that they're smart?
00:02:33
Speaker
I don't know, man. They're giving it away. They're giving it away. Yeah, they are very super. And they use, they have habits of tool use. Yeah, they use tool use. They have a sense of fairness, like when they do experiments where they give extras to one, they distribute. I've heard, like, if you have peanuts, like, I think they dig peanuts a lot, but like, I've heard
00:02:53
Speaker
I read countless anecdotal stories of people feeding them, and they will recognize that people chase dollar bills and money, and if you feed them, they bring you stuff that people like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a whole thing uneasy. I'm so excited. I'm throwing my hands around. This is why Alexis has been making friends with birds. With a vulture. She's throwing good animals up to it. Yeah.
00:03:17
Speaker
it's this little crow box that you can make where it is essentially when they put something in the little box and like you can adjust the whole so like they only can put like quarters or something like that size. And so they'll drop anything that'll fit in there. And once they drop something in, it releases like a little bit of cat food. And so like you they'll bring you things in exchange for the cat food or whatever it is that you put in there. But yeah, it's like this whole thing. And they recognize families. So like, they'll wreck like
00:03:47
Speaker
recognize your children growing and know that you're in the same household. There's this one, this person who studies them over in, I think it was in San Francisco, and they put those bird spikes, you know what I'm talking about?
00:04:04
Speaker
Mm hmm. Pigeon strips. Yeah, on this really tall building in the city. And, you know, crows didn't like necessarily ever nest there, really had nothing to do with them. It was probably for like the pigeons and stuff. Well, the crows find out about this injustice in their brain. And they went and tore all of them down for note, like they didn't come back and nest. They just would go through them onto the street.
00:04:29
Speaker
Because you can just imagine them like cussing and being like these sons of, you know, and just throwing these little things off. And then they would just leave and they're like, our work here is done. Ray, you mentioned them using tools. I've actually seen them use a tool to pry a window open. Okay, this just entered into Stephen King Caradoy. It was a chroma. Nice.
00:04:56
Speaker
I was going with a pub. It's the crowbar. We thought it was Stephen King. It went Stephen Carell. Oh, how the plot twists and turns. Just say earlier, we have to spread out the jokes further because people can't hear them over their laughter. That's one of the complaints we've gotten when people leave reviews is like, sometimes your first joke is so funny that I'm still laughing so hard, but I missed the second joke.
00:05:25
Speaker
I was like, another person saying that I get it a lot in real life. Sorry, everybody. It's it's a natural flow. We're just gonna pause for about two minutes after each joke. Totally like
00:05:47
Speaker
You guys ever listen to that, the power of being or something? Power of now, yeah. I only read it, but apparently in the audio book, he uses a lot of like gong chime kind of things. Maybe that's where if we ever get sponsored, we'll drop commercials in after a joke so people can just laugh.
00:06:08
Speaker
And not miss content. Drink your Ovaltine. Just like that.
Transition to Plant Topics and Hort Biz Quiz
00:06:15
Speaker
Just remember, Lexus, you started this. I did. I'm sorry. I know this is a plant podcast. I promise we're getting there. I hope you're not mad about the crow content. It was good content. I don't care what you think. It is. Anyways, speaking of tools, there are tools that we have talked about on here before that you don't like that segue. One of them that the Center for Crop Diversification has is called the Hort Biz Quiz.
00:06:39
Speaker
And I'm going to let the horror, the CCD ball boys talk to you a little bit more about that. Maybe you could kind of introduce the quiz a little bit because I was, I've only been there as a consumer of the quizzes data. Brett was there at its birth. That is the mother of the horror biz quiz. Exactly. That's much, you know, that's my, uh, Targaryen name, mother of mother of biz quiz. I hope to have a different arc from Danny.
00:07:09
Speaker
Uh, and uh, the crows, so it's appropriate. That's true. Yeah. Nice. King of the North. Exactly. So what does the biz quiz do? Give you good grades and make you feel good or what's happening? Well, it depends on whether you've been good or bad, Josh. Now the biz quiz was, was designed to address the question that
00:07:33
Speaker
We certainly receive, and I know that agents definitely hear quite a lot, which is, I just bought, or I'm thinking about buying five, 10 acres. What should I do now? I saw on a lifestyle blog that lavender is all the rage now, or I think I could probably do five acres of tomatoes and make this amount of money, et cetera.
00:08:00
Speaker
It was just a way, that's a big question when someone comes in and says, what do I do with- What should I grow? What do I do with the next 20 years of my life? Yeah, I have land, that's the only thing that goes into this, right? Or I have, you know. And so it asks a series of questions. We were trying to be a little bit more interactive, a la a BuzzFeed quiz of sort of, but not as fun because we are a university after all, just serious.
00:08:27
Speaker
serious business this podcast notwithstanding. And so we ask a series of questions that determine what your availability are or your availability is for your land, labor and capital.
00:08:42
Speaker
And so generally speaking, it kind of classifies people into for the enterprises, horticulture enterprises we're talking about, whether either a high level of capital, a medium level of capital, or little to no capital at all. Same thing for land, same thing for labor. And so the idea is the general idea is if you have no labor, you should not consider tomatoes, like on a large scale.
00:09:09
Speaker
If you don't have much land, then you probably don't want to do butternut squash or, uh, watermelons or something like that. That's really land intensive. So answer the questions. It spits on the back. It spits out on the back end. It looks like you have some capital. You don't have much land and you don't have much labor, or you, you have a little bit of capital, but you have a lot of land and not much labor or something like that.
00:09:34
Speaker
And it creates these typologies that then allows you to see where you fit within the conversation about what horticulture crops you might want to consider. And it gives you some things you might want to consider and some things you might want to avoid. You can then take that and have a conversation with your extension agent or just take it forth and kind of look through some of the crop profiles that we have, thinking about other things.
00:09:57
Speaker
in a little bit more structured way than just, I have 10 acres and what do I do with it? It's like, okay, I have some access to some money or I have this, you know, whatever your relationship is to this other variables as well.
00:10:11
Speaker
And so I think it's helpful in a number of ways. One, it allows you to start to narrow down the crops that you may or may not want to consider. It allows you in sometimes those awkward conversations where an agent or somebody doesn't want to ask, so how much money you got? It allows you to answer to a computer that then spits it back to you and then you can contact them further down the line.
00:10:35
Speaker
And I think for our side of it, it's been really helpful to see the people who are responding to see kind of where they are in relation to those different variables. Because to be honest, the type of programming that we offer,
00:10:52
Speaker
even the podcast episodes or whatever that we do or the educational classes that we put out or the new publications we develop are partially or in large part determined by need. And so the needs for someone who has plenty of money and just lacks labor are very different from someone who has some labor in some land but doesn't have much capital.
00:11:15
Speaker
And so understanding the cross sections of groups that we're talking to that are answering the biz quiz has been cool for us. And we've been able to pull some data, some like anonymized data out of these and explore them.
00:11:29
Speaker
And there will be a forthcoming extension publication that Josh has spearheaded and some other stuff. We've explored it a little bit in our newsletters, but we thought we'd talk through some of that today.
Insights from the Hort Biz Quiz: Land and Demographics
00:11:40
Speaker
And I think more broadly just trying to take a look at we are in Kentucky. What does it mean?
00:11:47
Speaker
A lot of us, I say we're in Kentucky. A lot of the people who answer the biz quiz are also in other regions. They're also international. But what does it look like to think so concretely about space-based enterprises like agriculture?
00:12:07
Speaker
things that have like these more material considerations like capital, things that are extremely labor intensive, which almost all horticultural enterprises can be. What does it look like to consider that and think about that? And what is the state of the hort biz quiz respondents? And yeah, we're gonna do that. And I think with a little bit of context, maybe from some census information as well.
00:12:27
Speaker
And just if you've been around, you have heard us talk about the biz quiz before. So we're just basically kind of giving an update, maybe a little bit deeper diver, deeper diver on the numbers and what we've learned since then. So you're not listening to the same episode again. And if you want more info on the work biz quiz, you know, check out that previous episode from, I think it was December. Um, but anyway, sorry, Josh.
00:12:52
Speaker
Oh, I just wanted to also kind of start off by saying, this thing was open and available to a global audience, right? So we had some respondents that were, I think the farthest one away was somewhere in Afghanistan took the Horviz quiz that is very Kentucky branded, kind of impressed that it was found and taken by somebody that far away. But we're also able to kind of isolate geographically where people were to kind of focus on Kentucky and regional responses and
00:13:22
Speaker
you know, just for some hard numbers is in the four years that responses that were analyzed globally, we had almost 1000 responses for 942 responses to this quiz. And that 43% of them came from inside Kentucky.
00:13:40
Speaker
And 60, a little over 60 came from either Kentucky or one of the states touching Kentucky. So a lot of these, you know, we definitely hit kind of our target audience and we aren't being, even when we look at the global data, it's not being skewed too far by these people from well outside the region with potentially different concerns and different access to resources.
00:14:03
Speaker
But yeah, that, you know, and so that puts us at a lot of Kentucky responses and we can focus on those and we can also broke them down by year, see if there were any trends and stuff like that. But I would say one of the things that popped out to me as I don't know if it's necessarily surprising, but the trend was really strong is that among these different
00:14:27
Speaker
types of growers based on their access to these different resources is that it was a relative minority of people that reported not having access to land or as we define that here having access to less than an acre and were interested in horticultural production. That was kind of it's important to point out you know like
00:14:51
Speaker
We had to kind of say, if you have more than an acre of land, we counted that as a yes, you have access to enough land to engage in horticulture or cultural enterprise commercially. And less than an acre was kind of a no. Similarly, the questions like those breaking points for capital,
00:15:11
Speaker
Let me pull this up here and make sure I'm not saying the wrong thing. Yeah, we considered you to have access to capital if you had at least $5,001 to invest in an enterprise.
00:15:26
Speaker
And then when labor came around, if you were the only one who would be working on the enterprise that was considered, you had little to no labor. Because the question was framed as, how much labor can you access besides yourself? So if you can bring somebody on with you, or you characterize that as a moderate amount of labor besides yourself, we said that that counted as having access to labor.
00:15:51
Speaker
So considering those, it is a minority of people, of respondents, both within Kentucky and the region who indicated that they didn't have access to the land to engage in horticulture. Like so I'd say, you know, kind of one of the take-home messages I got from that is that a lot of people interested in horticulture production are not limited by their land access. That's pretty interesting. It makes me wonder, I mean, which it, you know,
00:16:17
Speaker
there's probably different ways to analyze it, or maybe there's a lack of information to analyze it. But it just makes me wonder if people seek these tools out, having some land available, they seek tools out after they get an ideal, or do they have a blank ideal, and then they start seeking something as basic as land? What's the driving factor for seeking, I guess? And so that's interesting, the way that that data kind of fell there. To me, that's pretty interesting.
00:16:44
Speaker
Yeah, I do think that there is that reflected there, Ray, that like...
00:16:49
Speaker
I think the land acquisition for a lot of people is the most familiar part of the process because it's like, I've bought a house before, it's not that different. Whereas some of the other things of thinking about labor or thinking about committing capital to the venture is a little bit more in the managing a business mindset, which is something that's very different. And just to clarify something Josh said,
00:17:22
Speaker
In our data side, nerd side, we categorize people who have less than an acre as a no.
00:17:30
Speaker
we just call it no. Really what it means is you are relatively land limited. And so if you have less than $5,000 to commit to the enterprise, you are relatively capital limited. It's not to say we understand that there's a lot of horticulture enterprises that are less than an acre. And some of them are actually quite profitable if they're really intensive and a per acre basis can really make it an impact. And so
00:17:56
Speaker
Yeah, and I know that's not what you were saying, Josh, but just before that. No, it's important because when we think about analyzing this, we draw these binaries that sound stripped. Yeah, if you have less than acre, we're not saying you cannot do commercial horticulture. Yeah, you might find yourself looking at systems that have some constraints.
00:18:22
Speaker
Yeah and another one that was kind of interesting that stood out was you know among those different questions we also asked people you know if they had a specific market in mind how they would kind of rate their current knowledge of growing crops and things like that and a lot of these were very evenly distributed you know we had like
00:18:44
Speaker
There are a little over 10% of respondents in Kentucky that took this quiz, even though the quiz is about what should I grow, they already had a specific market in mind for it. And that they rated themselves as being at least more than a quarter of them responded themselves as having an advanced or even an expert
00:19:08
Speaker
knowledge of growing horticultural crops and taking the quiz. They felt very confident in their abilities and where they might sell. Interesting. That's not who I'm usually sending to the biz quiz, so it's interesting that there's that percentage taking it.
00:19:28
Speaker
Self-rating your knowledge is always a tricky thing. I'm an expert in podcasting. It's hard to know what's a 10 and what's a one. It's hard to know where you fall on the spectrum. If you're just one person, it's hard to rate yourself and place yourself on that scale. From your own perspective,
00:19:52
Speaker
What do you all hear as, you know, new people who are coming in interested in getting into stuff? What's been your experience? I know you all in some, the biz quiz has been, you've mentioned it's been helpful. That's not what I'm fishing for here. I'm more interested in, in like, what, what do you all perceive as kind of happening or their types of people or their moments where they typically come to you typically don't
00:20:17
Speaker
Sometimes it's a life event like a retirement that motivates it. Sometimes it's just a move into the area that motivates it or a little bit of disposable personal time to invest in something. I guess it's all over the board because sometimes it's someone that's very knowledgeable in production and they're looking to diversify. But other times, in a lot of cases for me, folks that come in like
00:20:43
Speaker
They don't have a real good grasp on how much labor it takes for that acre of tomatoes. So we spend a lot of time establishing a baseline, I guess. More often than not, I'm trying to establish some kind of ground rules and baselines for being realistic about certain things. Which that would track with the data. Like we talked about these different types and their responses.
00:21:05
Speaker
You know, the group of people who had land but were limited in labor and limited in capital, that was our largest type of response, a little over a quarter of all responses. They have an asset and they're wanting to explore what to do with that. And we see that a lot that they're like, well, we've got the biggest hurdle out of the way. We have land. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. I mean, in a certain logic that is true, but there are other barriers. Yeah.
00:21:35
Speaker
Yeah, especially if and it's not a bad thing, but especially if there's no production background, which is a good and a bad thing. It's good because there's not any habits to unlearn. It's bad because you simply just don't have any any background in anything. So yeah, yeah, I would say I get.
00:21:52
Speaker
Predominantly like kind of two types of people and I won't necessarily put like an age on them I you know, I get a few people who are retirement for for sure like younger retirement early retirement, but Lately and over the past few years. I've had a lot more people who are in their 30s and you know, I would say 30s maybe early 40s and
00:22:18
Speaker
are from out of state predominantly. And so they buy a bunch of land and usually from wherever they're coming from, land there is much more expensive. So maybe they sold a house and then to buy land in a home here is a lot less expensive. So maybe one spouse doesn't have to work anymore, but they wanna basically
00:22:42
Speaker
you know, homestead and make up that amount of money from the farm. And so I kind of, I've been getting a lot more people like that and they come in and they have done some research. Like the first group I have is they've done some research, but what they've not
00:22:59
Speaker
often done is the research for Kentucky. So they know everything they want to grow, but then they come in, I'm like, actually, you're probably not going to be able to like commercially grow figs unless you're growing them in a tunnel or just using that as example, they don't always have the, they're not quite there, right? Not quite there yet. And so then once you take some of those
00:23:19
Speaker
and dash their dreams a little bit. They're kind of left with, well, what do I grow then? And then we go to the biz quiz for that. And then the other set of people are right, have really no production background whatsoever, but they have some money, they have some land. And they say, what can I, I brought this, what do I do now? What do I grow?
00:23:41
Speaker
What do i do and so you're like okay what are you interested in and a lot of those initial questions that i would ask them i can now let the biz quiz ask them and then be able to start with them from a further point which is why it's a good base that's why i've enjoyed it so i think it like dreams out like it's like brett said like i'm not gonna probably i mean i would ask them but.
00:24:03
Speaker
uh you know about how much money but i don't know if they're like comfortable necessarily with telling me that uh and i just think it's a really honest tool without like it having to come from a person right like the computer can be honest with you and you just take that brutal honesty and it is what it is but like when i say it i have to say it in a way that's like
00:24:20
Speaker
not condescending and not dashing their hopes and dreams and trying to get them to a point. So if I let the computer cross their dreams, then they can come to me and we can rebuild them together. And so it paints me in a better light too. So thanks for that. Do you all feel like there's a group of people or like a set of needs in those different kind of typologies that you've experienced
00:24:46
Speaker
that you are in a better position to meet or serve or help or that you tend to have more success with them versus others? Like is it easier to teach somebody who doesn't have any production experience if they have money and land or is it easier to deal with somebody who has a little bit of land and some production experience but doesn't have much money?
00:25:13
Speaker
I don't know i guess that's a tough one for me to nail down exactly i've not thought about in those terms brat but i believe if i do you know do a good job with finding out what they need from.
00:25:27
Speaker
Why are they coming to me? Why are they wanting to do this? That reveals a lot of insight on what you're asking Brett. If they say, well, it needs to make money within the first year, or we're just doing it as a family hobby for homesteading, or it's okay if it's, you know, grapes and it takes eight years for a payback. You know, if, uh, if I do a good job asking them that I'll eventually get to that.
00:25:51
Speaker
point to where then we can do some realistic assessments. But it's like, I don't know, it's like a different scenario for every case. So that that's a tough one. I'll have to think about that. I would say there's always an exception to a role just like anything in life. But for me, at least the people that I've worked with,
00:26:09
Speaker
The people who go on to be successful and however they define success, it doesn't, you know, whether it's making money or homesteading, whatever, but the people who actually do it are usually the people that have, I feel like a little less money involved or at least less money to spend because when they do invest that money, they are invested, right? Like they have to do this. If they're going to buy 200 Blackberry plants, they got to commit.
00:26:37
Speaker
versus some of the people who have moved here and they're just like, I bought this land and I should do something with it. And like, you know, not to pick on them necessarily, but if they've got a lot of money to throw at it, they're, I think less likely to be successful over, you know, three to five years or do it at all. Because when it comes down to it, a lot of the time they realize how much labor is involved and they might not even go into it. But I think if we look at a three to five years,
00:27:05
Speaker
I see the most success in the people who have a little less money to invest. I feel like that tracks a lot. Yeah, I can follow the logic of that. I think we have seen, as you all are mentioning, lots of folks moving here. I would say I have met more than a few moved here from California specifically. Yeah, we have several.
00:27:28
Speaker
You know, and, and one of the things we have here that they don't have there is water, uh, which is good for growing crops for sure. We also have all the diseases. Yeah. Yeah, totally. Exactly. Yeah. We have a lot of assets here. Yeah.
00:27:44
Speaker
But I think in less expensive land, a certain reconnection with some idea where you're in range of mountain of like older mountains or forest or whatever, all of that has some cachet. I think, you know, there has been some people who are more or less a fan of this phenomenon unfolding. And I think, you know, something I was just to provide a little bit of context, I took a look at some of the
00:28:14
Speaker
the key findings or whatever you would say from the 2022 AG Census, which, you know, and with census data, it's always like one to two years after the name on the, or the date on the report. But from between 2017 and 2022, the number of farms in Kentucky decreased by 6,500. And that constitutes around 500,000 acres
00:28:42
Speaker
being removed from farming. And there are some other things about kind of the sale. Our overall sales increased by roughly a billion dollars across that five-year period once you've adjusted for inflation.
00:28:58
Speaker
Tobacco continues to decline drastically. There's now fewer than a thousand tobacco farms in Kentucky. And so I think that that's the, this is the broader context in which these, these things are developing, these things are happening.
Kentucky Agricultural Trends and Future Programming
00:29:13
Speaker
And so when I hear somebody say, Oh, I bought 10 acres or I bought a hundred acres or I bought 50 acres or whatever,
00:29:20
Speaker
It makes me think a little bit about this. So we're sort of like, while we're losing things as a broad phenomenon, we do have people who are interested in maybe coming in and being the small land holder, farmer, producer, whatever, and how we can support them. In some cases, I think they don't actually want to do it. I think they like the idea of it and they don't necessarily want to do it. But there are, I think, some people who do want to do it and are intrigued by the possibilities and put a little bit more
00:29:50
Speaker
data on it, maybe we can talk a little bit more about. So for Kentucky in 2022, the average, the mean farm size was 179 acres, but the median
00:30:02
Speaker
So the actual kind of true midpoint that reflects their being. Not being pulled by the outliers. Yeah. Is 64 acres. Oh, wow. Yeah. Big difference. That surprises me. I didn't realize it was that skewed. Yeah. And so as we lose more and more small farms, we're going to see
00:30:26
Speaker
Maybe see the identity of Kentucky agriculture change. I don't know that we necessarily will. I think, but just to compare that to the, the letter before us, the mean farm size in Kansas is 804 acres.
00:30:40
Speaker
But the median is still 164 there. So I think that there is still this role for small farms. And I think that that is part of the reason we're kind of investigating some of these Hort BizQuiz data is because we want to know how to support that type of work and support people in doing that. And the reality is people come to this work in very different ways. So there's some people who are
00:31:06
Speaker
rowcroppers or cattle for a long time and they're looking to diversify. There's some people, many of our clientele kind of come out of, they haven't been doing this before and they want to start.
00:31:17
Speaker
What does anything you know as far as the changes you all have seen or Any any reactions that some of the stuff I was saying here something that you bring up well like where people are coming from it made me Look at one of the first questions on the quiz, which is you know, are you currently growing horticultural crops and People who answered yes to that is almost half of
00:31:45
Speaker
Hey everybody sorry we had a little blip because you know it is storm season in Kentucky so we're going to jump back in with talking about biz quiz and the questions so I believe Josh we were talking about the first question on the biz quiz.
00:32:00
Speaker
Yeah, which kind of from Brett talking about things shifting in the landscape of these farms and their sizes. The first question on the quiz was, are you currently growing horticultural crops? Which I was kind of surprised to see that the people who answered yes to that was 46%, so almost half. It's split down the middle as people are already growing horticultural crops.
00:32:26
Speaker
And do you think that means that they're selling those horticulture crops or that they just like...
00:32:32
Speaker
got a big garden or grow for family or something like that. I don't want to assume, but the second follow up question to that is asking them if they want to grow horticultural crops as part of a business to make money and three quarters of them answered in the positive to that. Okay. Yeah. So odds are good that most of that 46% or whatever you said it was have some experience with selling
00:32:59
Speaker
a horticulture product of some kind is what we're thinking. Or at least they're curious about what are their other options in terms of what other crops to grow or what else they could get into.
00:33:12
Speaker
So I guess maybe my like sort of last question on this is, you know, you all said you have a pub that's about to come out with kind of results. Like what is there something glaring that you all have like learned from the data from the biz quiz that, you know, you're seeing reflected in the census or that is just something that CCD is going to focus on moving forward based on those results.
00:33:40
Speaker
I don't know if we're quite to the point of I think there's some like actionable station to have yeah about like how we might shift it because I mean others like this this publication is going to come out or it will be out at the time this air so right away it's a
00:34:01
Speaker
ccd fact sheet 28 uh the the official fund title is obstacles and opportunities in horticulture five years of responses to the hort vis quiz where you can kind of see the responses to all this and how it how it breaks down um but i think that it very very well have some influence on how we develop programming and if we kind of target different types of audiences with the understanding that there are different types of audiences based on what they have access to and
00:34:29
Speaker
how we approach production guides and things like that might need to reflect that. I think part of it could be, and this is something that we chatted about before, part of it could be more intense focus on some of the basics of starting and operating a business. Because I think if
00:34:54
Speaker
I do still think land access is a challenge in a number of ways, but we do have a critical audience at least who has surmounted that obstacle and are in the, in the, maybe they need more capital or maybe they need to figure out about.
00:35:09
Speaker
hiring their first employees or something like that. I think there's opportunities. There's some people who are already doing stuff like that, but to provide some more on ramps and more clear pictures of what that next part looks like. So the, you know, again, I said that buying the land is kind of a familiar process and the rest of it's a little bit kind of, I don't know. And with horticulture being
00:35:30
Speaker
essentially a labor intensive process, both in production and marketing a lot of times. I think that those could be aspects of future programming that we expand even more is supporting those business functions, business knowledge.
00:35:46
Speaker
et cetera, for those who are interested in making money. And something I will just point out, something I try to say as much as I can is that we are, in extension, we're here to help you do what you want to do. And so in some cases, people are wanting to make money or they're wanting to make a lot of money.
00:36:07
Speaker
And in other cases, people don't have an interest in that. They're interested in growing food for themselves or their families, or they're interested in supporting their communities. And these are all really valid ways to enter and participate in this horticultural stuff.
00:36:20
Speaker
Again, what is it, the joy in whatever of horticulture? I believe that's it exactly. The joy in whatever. So yeah, I'll just say that. But I think that it's a really good question, Alexis, as far as actionable next steps and something that we are intending to operationalize and put into practice.
00:36:41
Speaker
I love that the business of horticulture, right? So I think there's a lot to put out there and make it accessible to the people who speak the plant language. So that's great to hear that's on everybody's mind. And then the data is reflecting that too, because it's like, there's like the quantitative but the you know, the quality side of of that discussion. And it seems like those are meeting up and agreeing with each other. So
00:37:09
Speaker
Cool. Well, anything else about this will link that pub. And so if you're interested in, you know, maybe some of the downfalls or the positives or just what could be an issue that maybe you haven't thought about if you're looking into going into, you know,
00:37:25
Speaker
commercial horticulture production or expanding what you're doing already, then you can check out that publication. And of course, always feel free to shoot us an email if you have questions. If you're looking for the biz quiz, we'll put a link in that as well. It's still open and functional. Like you could still take it. We were looking back in five years, but it's still available. You can still do it. Yes.
00:37:48
Speaker
Yeah. You can listen to that other episode if you want more info on that and just talking about how that works and how we use it. You can feel free to do that. But it is a great tool and I have taken it more than once because it's fun. Sorry to skew the results, Josh. That's okay. It is fun to take, in my opinion, if you're into that, you're like, what could I grow? What does it tell me? That's always exciting if you're a plant nerd.
00:38:15
Speaker
Do that follow us on Instagram at work culture podcast. You can choose message on there. You can find great information from other Places will share on there as well. So hopefully it'll keep you informed enough today about things happening around Kentucky leave us a review if you're so inclined and Yeah, I almost gave my radio sign off just then but I'm gonna remember I'm on my podcast and not all
00:38:40
Speaker
never feel. So I hope that as we grow this podcast, you will grow with us and that you'll join us next time. Have a great one.