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Episode 5 | Michelle Klieger
66 Plays1 year ago
Michelle Klieger is an agricultural economist, educator, author, and speaker. Michelle is President of Stratagerm Consulting, LLC, and Founding Partner of Helianth Partners. She is also a co-host of the podcast “The Grower and the Economist.”
Michelle on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelleklieger/
Michelle on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MichelleKlieger
Stratagerm Consulting, LLC: https://www.stratagerm.com/
Helianth Partners: https://www.helianthpartners.com/
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Overview
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you
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Welcome to another episode of the ag show podcast. I am your host Johan aka Doc Buck Joining me today is Michelle Cleager correct Michelle it is okay and Michelle your description on LinkedIn is ag economist educator author and
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speaker, and I'm sure there's some other things you left out.
Career and Business Ventures
00:01:07
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So as a way of getting started, Michelle, would you tell us a little bit about yourself? Sure. I like to describe myself as an agricultural economist.
00:01:17
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I have my own business. I actually have two businesses right now, so really trying to make the brand identity a little confusing. But about five years ago I started my own firm. I moved to New England and I didn't want to work on one crop or one part of the supply chain or one part of agriculture. I really get excited on those deep dives.
00:01:44
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into different aspects in how the whole system works together and so I took this as an opportunity to start my own firm which gave me the opportunity to look for projects all over the place. I have done a lot on how we produce crops and if we wanted to grow them
00:02:07
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differently, use less water in Arizona, have more diversity of crops in the Midwest. And that got me to thinking about where those crops go when they leave the markets, sorry, when they leave the farm and the supply chain in the markets.
Helianth Partners and Podcast
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I then about a year ago started a second company with a food systems expert, Helianth Partners. And so that is sort of looking at that whole system from the farm to the end user.
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And you and I met because through my first company, Stratagerm, I joined up with Peter Kojonen, who is a research grower in my area. And we have our own podcast, The Grower and the Economist. And so in that we talked to or about four small and medium sized growers that are trying to understand and improve their business from both an
00:03:09
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agronomic and an economic perspective because in agriculture, you need both of those things to be successful.
Managing Multiple Projects
00:03:15
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Coming back to what you said, I think you and I are similar in that respect in that the way you described it as being interested in all different areas of agriculture. Being a recent business owner, solopreneur, when I'm asked, so what are you working on or what do you do? Well, what day and what hour is it?
00:03:34
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one minute i'm focused on alfalfa and the next it could be point city is there some greenhouse crop so yeah it's it's a joy so how do you keep those how do you keep those straight i don't know i guess i would say
00:03:50
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I think that the first question is, are you the type of person that can read more than one book at a time, right?
Cross-sector Learning in Agriculture
00:03:56
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So there are a lot of people that feel like they need to be dedicated to that book and they can only read that one book or they'll get lost or confused or miss something. For my first pushback to most of those people is how many TV shows do you watch at a time and can you keep track of them?
00:04:12
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So I am the person who reads more than one book at a time. And I actually think that you end up reading more because the hardest part of reading a book is picking the next book or getting into it. And there are some times when you're too tired to read or you only have a few minutes. And so I have one book that I'm really interested in, one book that I can read 10 pages for before I go to bed. And so
00:04:40
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It's very much the same in my business, right? I've got different projects, different collaborations at different places.
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And I don't know, I think that the break, the switching, the learning from other aspects is huge. And in so much of agriculture, it is siloed, pun intended. And so we don't actually have these cross of ideas. And so if I am working with distribution and meet and can explain how the warehouse works, it's the same thing for a seed company. But those two firms have probably never talked to each other.
00:05:16
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That's a great litmus test, because as soon as you describe that as the litmus test, I'm looking over across at my bench.
00:05:26
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I have two books in my Kindle and I'm reading three books. I'm like, okay, I could check that box. It must be, it must be, yeah.
Journey to Ag Economics
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And so we met face to face a couple of, well, yeah, about two months ago. So before that, we had spoken on your podcast, The Grower and the Economist, which is a great podcast. I encourage anyone and everyone
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to listen to it you produce episodes i think every other week and the episodes run generally thirty to forty five minutes or so and your your partner dear friend of mine dr peter conjoined great co-hosts so i encourage you all to check out that podcast
00:06:09
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So during the interview, I mean, it was really focused. So we talked about, I think, about biostimulants and didn't have a chance to really chat. Small talk, but we met at the Grow Executive Summit here in Arizona a month or so ago. And you didn't start off as an ag economist, right? A little bit more, but how did you, what attracted you to ag economics and have you already always been involved in agriculture or was, did you have your sights on something else?
00:06:39
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I did not grow up on a family farm. My connection, my closest connection growing up to agriculture is my dad and grandfather were butchers. So around the meat system, you know, the food system, meat, distribution, restaurants, so forth. I grew up in Florida. So after a hurricane, my dad was the first one back to work because he supplied the hospitals.
00:07:01
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Um, so that, and I rode horses and went to a horseback riding camp. That is my extent of agriculture, but I wanted to be a wildlife veterinarian.
Influential Internship in South Africa
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I went to the University of Maryland as an animal science major and they
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pretty much tell you the first day that 90% of you aren't going to be veterinarians and you've got a whole room full of 18 year old overachievers that know the whole world and they are convinced that they are each going to prove you wrong. My soft my junior year, I did a internship in
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South Africa, where I worked as a veterinary technician at a wildlife rehab center. It was super interesting. I have great pictures. I was friends with a hippo. But I really got to see the conflict between the land we have for wildlife and the land we have to produce and grow food. So both livestock and crops. And
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As much as I love wildlife, I can completely understand where that farmer is coming from when the wildlife are eating their crops or killing their livestock. And when the choice is feeding your family or this animal, you know, it is not surprising that conflict. And I was part of the effort to relocate some of these animals, but there's, you know, there are a lot of challenges there.
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I was not super excited about four more years of veterinary school when I got home and I felt like my communication and conservation and skills would be better off if I could
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you know, think about this how we have enough land to grow food and leave land left for wildlife.
Education and Early Career
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I then became interested really in how we grow and sell food like truly the economics of it that comparative advantage if the places in the world that were with the best at growing blueberries grew with blueberries for everyone else.
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and sold them, then we wouldn't need to grow blueberries where they're not so good, and we could leave that land wild. And so that trade. So I worked for ag consulting firms in DC for a while. I did a lot of projects all over the world, which is what I loved about the firm. I worked for the American Seed Trade Association, promoting US seeds all over the world, and did a lot of federal agriculture policy in the United States.
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And then I got a Master's in Agriculture Econ from Purdue and an MBA from Indiana University. And the funny thing is Purdue was one of the schools I looked at as an undergrad.
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And I went back to your did you grow up on a farm. I went for like a preview weekend or something. And everybody in the room said that they were FFA president and did six different types of 4-H. And my mom leans over and goes, what's FFA? It also snowed in April. So it was like a lot for a Florida kid.
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and I bought the swag at Purdue but I quickly learned when you visit college you can't buy the swag everywhere because you're only going to go to one school and now you have a closet full of clothing from schools you're not going to go to. Except I kept that hoodie from Purdue and 10 years later ended up wearing it all the time because I ended up at Purdue at a time I didn't expect.
Challenges in Veterinary Science
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Why is the attrition rate so high with wildlife veterinary science?
00:10:45
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Well, it's not just wildlife. It's just veterinary science in general. There are very few programs. The acceptance rate is under 10%. So it is harder to get into medical school. I had several friends that their backup plan was medical school. So the coursework
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I don't know. In some level it's harder because you have to know the systems in an animal, but you have to know avian and you have to know monogastrix and you have to know multigastrix. So there's more to know, but really there are very few schools. And Florida had one of the biggest ones and a hundred people a year. Maryland and Virginia share a program with 80 people a year. So across the United States, Canada and the Caribbean, there's just not a huge graduating class.
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I see. Okay.
Founding Stratagerm and Helianth Partners
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And so you go to school and then you ultimately land in starting, you said two companies, right? You have Stratagerm and Heliant Partners. You started those, would you say five years ago? I started Stratagerm in 2018. I was leaving the seed industry. And so one of the things I was interested in and how I met Peter was I was interested in vertical farming and ag tech. And
00:12:02
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I met a bunch of people in that space that knew a lot about widgets and how they were going to automate these plant factories and how they were going to have Asian style plant factories. And they did not know very much about the plants themselves. And like my conversations would be about seeds. And do you know if you're making seeds for
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sandwiches or for field greens that you're going to sell at a farmer's market. What are you going to do with this? And if you picked the right seed for your operation, it could improve your profit profitability.
Innovations in Controlled Agriculture
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You could sell it for more. You could have a better yield.
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I learned pretty quickly that when you spend $10,000 a month on air conditioning, you don't actually care how much your seeds cost, at least not at the point that the industry was five years ago when I was having these. And there are very interesting conversations between vertical farms and seed companies and understanding what
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what traits they're looking for. One of the pieces that I found really interesting is when you're talking about field agriculture, you really need to focus on the disease resistance, the pest resistance, the
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maybe drought tolerance or moisture tolerance. And what happens is anything that doesn't meet that profile is taken out of the catalog. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. There are shelves and catalogs of seeds that are not commercial right now. And so if in controlled agriculture, you could take out all of that environmental pressure and say, I really want to focus on flavor, on texture,
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how long it will last after it is harvested, could you get better crops? And that conversation, when the industry matures, I think would be really powerful. And so I was at a hydroponics aquaponics
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seminar in University of New Hampshire and Peter was the post.
Value of Partnerships
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Peter was one of the lecturers and I went as a student to sort of get into agriculture more in New England and the topic seemed really interesting.
00:14:14
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two years ago, I started helium, I just, I like having partners, I like having people to talk to, I like having people to share. I'm in the middle of this project. And if I could just explain it, I can get to a better solution, I could finish it. And so the the appeal of having partners that in some kind of structured way was really appealing to me. And I think that bringing that
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farm economics and food system and operations and finance from my co-founder, Fonshir, is really powerful. And so now together we get to bring both sides of this and have conversations we're both excited about.
Entrepreneurial Mindset
00:14:57
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Did you always want to run your own business and do your own thing, and what opportunities led up to that, or what was that moment that was like, aha, I can do this, or now I have this opportunity? When I finally started Strategerm, I do not think that my intention was necessarily to start a business. I do not think that I ever had this lifelong career to start a business.
00:15:25
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think that in a lot of cases my brother will probably work for himself someday. I don't know that that would have been used to describe me, but if you look back at my track record, I kind of always had a project or was always doing something. And so whether it was my dad let my brother and I run a green market stand in the 90s selling his meat or
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I built websites for a little while in college or I did lots of just random things that I kind of always did by myself. My dad and I looked at making a online distribution for some of his specialty meat products. So I worked on the website and did all these things.
00:16:12
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that self starter aspect of it, the always looking for the new idea, I think probably hinted that this was in the cards for me. But I couldn't see it myself.
Teaching and Credibility
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It was
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Again, we were leaving DC. We wanted to be closer to family. My brother lived in Massachusetts. My husband got a job that he was super excited about in Boston. So we decided to move. I looked for some jobs and there wasn't anything that really stuck out to me. So it was kind of like me, you know, did all the budgeting. How much money do we need? How much money? How long can we test this out for the first year?
00:16:56
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It was slow and complicated and meeting new people. Most people that start their own business strongly advise that you consult back. You get a part-time job from your previous employer. It didn't work out for me. So it was trying to find those first few things. About a year in, I had a conversation with
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a mentor and he said, What do you need? I know you can do this. But what do you need? Do you need context? Do you need stability? Do you need? What do you need? And I, I realized that part of it was I needed some structure. I was working, you know, by myself at home most days, set it up set up our lives here in Massachusetts, which was great to have the flexibility. But
00:17:46
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I ended up applying for a job as a professor at a local university teaching economics. And when I got that university email address and started getting just staff emails or this event is Saturday night or, you know, lunch is this day, like that connection really gave me a place. Like I had to go to the office two days a week. It kind of just gave me enough guardrails to move forward.
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teaching also gave me credibility and so forth and access to a university library system and a 401k and a bunch of other things that were super helpful. But that was a big one. And I think as I started to notice that I started to look for partners on projects. And I got back to a place where I had
00:18:36
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Someone to send that interesting article to like, Oh, I just read this today. Johan would really like it. I'm going to text him the article and we talk about it for three minutes, like getting that community back in my own business, like after starting my own business.
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was huge. And then, you know, I talked to a lot of people, they said by two years, it really picks up, I was still not convinced. And by two years, I had doubled my DC salary. So I guess it worked out. Do you still do you still hold that position? Or are you completely focused on your on your business? They this is the first week in four years, I am not teaching, I think the semester just started. And
00:19:20
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Yes, I took I took a step back from teaching for this semester I don't know if it's in the cards in the future one of the
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those long-term stability things.
Technical Assistance and Grants
00:19:31
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And that I said to, I started every semester by saying, this is why I teach economics and this is why I think it's an awesome time to be an agricultural economist and wanted to give that context to the students. And one thing is stability. Every university in the world offers intro to economics. And so being able to teach that means that I always have that option if I need it. Um,
00:19:59
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And I've talked and, and so, so yes, I have taken a step back, but I've also tried to find ways to continue with that academic and sort of teaching mentality or I don't know, piece of my business. I liked working with kids. I liked getting that feedback, that different perspective. So.
00:20:20
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I've mentored some businesses locally, some food businesses that have gone through food accelerator programs. And a decent amount of my work right now is on technical assistance. So I have this contract in California where they're trying to get more diverse applicants into a state grant program. And part of it is,
00:20:46
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that discovery, that understanding what are the barriers to entry for people to get into the program, so some of that research conversation that I love. But then technical assistance, what documents, what trainings can we put together, what resources are needed to help get those individuals and organizations over the hump so that they can apply. And so a big piece of how I have transitioned from teaching
00:21:15
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Is this technical assistance and being able to explain the ideas and so forth? Which is very much like education I found through doing technical services and technical assistance over the years. It's very educational oriented. And that's a great segue into my next question, which was, is
00:21:34
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What service, what types of services do you provide through your company?
Exploring the Fiber Sector
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When, what projects do you look for? And what do you provide so that those listening, they're like, oh, Michelle sounds like a good fit for what I need. Yeah. The first thing that came up is one of my goals this year is to have some kind of fiber project. So one of my, like, I don't think it's pet peeves, but one of the things I think about is we talk about the food and agriculture system.
00:22:04
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And there are a lot of things that come out of agriculture that are not food. And some of them, like fuel, so ethanol or biodiesel, are big enough that they have their own advocates.
00:22:19
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So so they've got their own advocates. So I feel like they're taking care of even the feed is again big enough that it's got its own. But fiber doesn't really have the language and it kind of gets lumped in with food. And I feel like it's really underserved. And I'm really interested in doing some work in that space. Part of what got me there was I did some work for
00:22:48
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Ben and Jerry's a few years ago on understanding why milk was so much more expensive in their program than the rest of Unilever and they have a whole caring dairy program that does increase a lot of costs, but
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the added cost of that Caring Dairy program is only on the milk itself.
Collaborating with Ben and Jerry's
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And I really think that to make the price more competitive, that they need to be thinking, and it's not just Ben and Jerry's, right? It's all sorts of these types of operations, but it's not just milk that comes off the farm. You have your cull cows and you have your hides and you have these other products. And so if you could add Caring Dairy to all of those,
00:23:32
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and increase the price, it wouldn't put so much on the milk. And so I think that for fiber too, the fiber is something that you can often get in the case of sheep while you're raising them in these other fashions. And so how do we build supply chains to work?
00:23:49
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So in that type of thing, a lot of research and discovery, understanding what the system is today and understanding why it is that way.
Research and System Barriers
00:24:00
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Somebody wants to change something is generally why they've called me. So if we wanted to see something different, what do you want to see? What are the barriers? People love to say they want market-based solution, but the market right now has taken us to this point. So what do you need to change?
00:24:17
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or what needs to be changed to get to a different endpoint. And then the next phase would be that developing a project of what does a pilot project look like? What is the feasibility studies, the due diligence, all of those business plan developments? What can we build out to support the research that was just done?
00:24:38
Speaker
And then that implementation of watching the firm, helping them, advising strategically throughout the process. So that's kind of the model I take for everything, whether it would be building a, you know, working on the feasibility or due diligence for a wool scouring plant, but also recently more conversations in the ag tech space again of
00:25:02
Speaker
We have this technology. We want adoption. We obviously want big adoption, but we like to talk a lot about how we're going to help everyone. And so what are those challenges to getting to small farmers? What are those challenges to getting to veterans, rural, BIPOC, whoever it is that is not your main farmer that's going to go to a big trade show or whatever it is. How do you connect with those? What do they need?
00:25:33
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That builds in a lot to where Peter and I work on how do you get information to these small and medium sized growers? What do they need? Is it all big companies develop
Niche Markets and Diversity
00:25:45
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a product and then there is a light version for small ones or can we collectively say here's what we need? Can somebody build it for us? Of the projects you've worked on,
00:25:57
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What has been one that stands out to you that you saw to completion? They thought, wow, this was a great project. I don't know. I like so many of them. And the longer you do this, the more projects you have to talk about. I mean, I will say that the first one of the first projects I did with the Walton Family Foundation on how do we diversify agriculture in the upper Mississippi?
00:26:24
Speaker
Like it was sort of this wish list of like, what could you do? And so we broke it down by, you could do something really easy and we could have a big impact. Like just give out buckwheat seed. It's easy to grow.
00:26:39
Speaker
And people will do it and there's lots of uses and like don't don't ask them for proof that they've planted it. Don't ask for anything like the economists in with me was like, if you give it out, people will plant it. And somebody will say, hey, I can make buckwheat pancakes. And somebody else will say, hey, I'd like to export to Japan. But like, by and large, those markets are not big enough to support themselves. So don't force things into it. But
00:27:07
Speaker
Buckwheat's easy to grow. It's popular in organics. It has beautiful flowers. It'll attract pollinators. You could do lots of things. Let the market figure it out in five years and let those people put that sweat equity into developing those markets because right now, today, from an economic perspective, they don't exist.
00:27:28
Speaker
And so really pushing this idea of like me getting to say like, okay, well, we could do this and you could get buckwheat on 9 million acres and it would have all these benefits. On the other end of the spectrum, you could plant orchards of peaches because they grow really well in Illinois and you know, there's diseases in South Carolina and we know they're moving and we sell a lot to
00:27:52
Speaker
Canada so it makes sense so it was that first time where I really got to see the food system and say We can do a lot of different things and then start to think about what it would take and it did turn into an opportunity to do some contracting for
00:28:09
Speaker
a food company that wanted specialty sunflowers. And so like how then do you get the specialty crops off the farm and into these companies? And so it wasn't one project, but I love when one project opens doors to another one and the middle tier. So there was the buckwheat and the orchards and the middle one was mechanized pumpkin seeds. Um, so actually Indiana and Illinois both have
00:28:38
Speaker
So Indiana, maybe surprisingly to most people, has a huge processing tomato, and Illinois has pumpkin seeds. And really what makes them special is they are for canned tomatoes or processing pumpkins, and they're mechanized. It doesn't have to be perfect, it's machines, and so it fits in really well with that landscape.
00:29:03
Speaker
And so what are those other things? And that led me to a lot of conversations about right-sized agriculture, that it doesn't need to feed everyone, but you need to fill this niche, which I don't know, I could, which then like led me to where are small, where are regional food systems?
00:29:26
Speaker
And with the pandemic, so many people talking about regional food systems. And again, you don't need to feed everybody, but like you have this capacity locally and you have trucks locally. And I have gotten to do a lot of work. New England has a goal of feeding itself 30% of food produced and consumed domestically or like in the six state region of New England.
00:29:53
Speaker
And so what would that take to be possible? And so for me, it's not necessarily one project, but the evolution of how they all fit together. And I start asking questions and push and pull and see where I go. You just pull on that thread and see where it goes.
00:30:12
Speaker
leads to more questions, more projects. That's really neat. So let's talk about Ag Economy now since we're in 2023.
Ag Economy Outlook for 2023
00:30:22
Speaker
And I'm drawing on our experience at the Grow Executive Summit, which for those listening, Grow Executive Summit is an event hosted by Meister Media. They have many different publications. I think Vegetable, Grower News, Greenhouse Grower, many different publications.
00:30:41
Speaker
and Grow Executive Summit is a greenhouse controlled environment ag focused. And the economy was on a lot of people's minds. Labor was discussed quite a bit. And you, Michelle, and then the other economist there is Dr. Charlie Hall from Texas A&M. And I hope we're going to pause. OK, we reconnected. I had another technical issue. So I'm going to keep going.
00:31:09
Speaker
We're still recording the economy, the CEA industry. It's on everybody's mind. We've now had almost two months since that event. What is your outlook for 2023, considering that we're not even out of January yet, but as an ag economist, what's your outlook and what are some of the indicators that you're looking at?
00:31:35
Speaker
Overall, I think that the that prices are going to be higher than they were before the pandemic and supply chains are going to work less smoothly than before the pandemic. And for those reasons, you're going to have less choice and probably more inventory. But we are off of our peaks and all of those. I mean, energy prices, while painful, are lower than they were at their peak last summer.
00:32:03
Speaker
that translates to lower fertilizer prices, transportation prices, both moving trucks around the country as well as ocean transport are again off of their peaks. I think that a lot of companies took the opportunity to say, and at the beginning of the pandemic, I use this example a lot,
00:32:25
Speaker
If you think about how many different lines of Coke, how many different lines of soda Coke was running, right? If you go to the store, you can get the miniature cans and you can get the miniature bottles and you can get the full size can and the 16 ounce bottles and a two liter bottle. And so if they had five or six different sizes, and I'm guessing there's more, it's just what I can come up with on the top of my head. And they have how many different products, right?
00:32:52
Speaker
Coke and Cherry Coke and Coke Zero and Cherry Coke Zero and Diet Coke. And every single one of those was made in five different sizes. And like, that's just a lot of changing equipment. It's a lot of managing inventory. And we expected it. And we got to enjoy that as consumers for a long time, this amazing diversity of offerings that was always available.
00:33:18
Speaker
And when they couldn't run the facilities all the time, or they ran into these challenges, they said, these are the five products that are most important. We wanna do Coke, Diet Coke, and Coke Zero. And we're cutting everything out and we're only doing three choices.
00:33:33
Speaker
And that's what you're seeing a lot more of. I'm not convinced they're going to go back to a hundred different products. I think they'll narrowed back down, stay maybe more than again, the minimum during the pandemic, but not the extreme of how many we had. And so I think that's a big place. I think that it's as much in our personal lives. I can tell you that in the last month, I have not been able to find
00:33:57
Speaker
any kind of child's fever medicine. My mom has complained endlessly about having no Robitussin. There are a lot of things that just aren't always available like we were used to. And I think that for me, one of the extremes is everybody's favorite topic, whether you're an ag economist or not right now, is egg prices.
Egg Prices and Grocery Strategies
00:34:21
Speaker
I was going to ask you about eggs next. I'm so glad you said that. Tell us about eggs because we consume a lot of eggs in our house. And I paid $7 for a dozen eggs last week. I mean, they are. And I mean, so egg prices are really high. And in some cases it is avian influenza that has caused some culling. In some cases it's I don't know.
00:34:49
Speaker
Logistics, it's everything else. In some cases, there's not a lot of market players and there's some pressure there. A lot of grocery stores have kept prices down using them as a loss leader. It is fascinating that grocery stores, they don't make money based on one item you buy, they make money on your basket.
00:35:10
Speaker
And I said this at the conference and I got a lot of not so happy people, but we saw last summer that keeping lettuce stocked and at a reasonable, probably elevated price was really important to the grocery stores because people go in looking for lettuce and they will either take a very low margin or a loss
00:35:34
Speaker
in order to make sure that you are purchasing the tomatoes and the croutons and the salad dressings. Because those shelf stable items, not the tomatoes, but the rest of them are really where the store makes their money. And if you were expecting to make a salad and that grocery store doesn't have lettuce, you will probably shop somewhere else next time and they'll lose the rest of the items.
00:35:54
Speaker
And so the same thing is happening with eggs, which is why when you ask people, the prices are all over. Like I have seen $7 eggs, the national average is four something, but there are still discounts and sales that are used to get consumers in the store.
00:36:12
Speaker
Um, so I think you'll see more of that, but on the other side, boneless, skinless chicken prices are dirt cheap right now. They, I, I do some work with a distributor and he is like, please more boneless, skinless out the door. And part of it is seasonal. Whether we think that we eat seasonally or not, we still do by and large this time of year, you're selling a lot more roast. You're a lot more whole chickens.
00:36:38
Speaker
In the summer grilling season, you'll have more of your boneless, skinless chicken breasts. You'll have more of your hamburgers and sausages and stuff that you're going to grill. And so it's not a hugely popular item right now, even though chicken generally does well in January because of New Year's resolutions and being a low fat protein. So you've got like chicken breast that's super cheap and chicken eggs that are super expensive. And I think you're going to see more of that, that just it's not
00:37:07
Speaker
everything moving together. Yeah, these prices, the eggs stay up. My wife has said no, but I keep saying, I'm going to get some chickens. We're going to have some eggs.
00:37:16
Speaker
They're not very friendly. Do you know what you're getting yourself into with chickens? Yeah, I say that, but half in jest, but yeah. The first week that chickens' eggs that we noticed were really expensive, my husband offered to make hard-boiled egg. I said I wanted egg salad, and we bought eggs, and he was going to make hard-boiled eggs, and he let the kids eat them. I have two and five-year-olds.
00:37:43
Speaker
And they ate six egg whites and left the yolks. And I was like, you are hurting my soul. Do you know how much we just paid for these eggs? But... Yeah. Yep. Nothing goes to waste. The hard wild eggs are good. So in that case, it sounds like for 2023, it sounds like we're coming out of the pandemic. There's geopolitical issues.
00:38:12
Speaker
There are other circumstances causing some chaos with inflated prices on eggs, but overall, to me, it doesn't sound like all doom and gloom.
Optimism for 2023
00:38:23
Speaker
I mean, it could change from month to month, but my sense is, agriculturally speaking, farmers, growers across different
00:38:33
Speaker
aspects of agriculture seem to be a little more cautious this year. And I guess maybe right sizing is the word to use, you know, that maybe because they're in greenhouses, maybe it's because of not having the access to the amount of growing medium that they need or plastic pots. But I think overall, it doesn't seem all doom and gloom. It's just a little bit more cautious this year. Is that is that a fair assessment? I think so. One of the things that
00:39:02
Speaker
I learned recently was like from a investment side from a building a brand or trying to get farmers everybody to adopt things.
00:39:17
Speaker
It's a slower sell. It is a harder sell to get a farmer to adopt something new. And if you think about it, you only get so many seasons, right? And so each season is huge. And how much risk are you taking that your plants aren't going to grow or your livestock's not going to grow? So that adoption is rough in the beginning. But once you get the adoption, it's a very loyal group.
00:39:40
Speaker
Um, and so I think that, that I would say that that's sort of how I think about the last couple of years, that there's been a lot of ups and downs in the beginning of the pandemic and maybe with shortages in the last year, a lot of greenhouses, a lot of growers were forced to try new things, get creative.
00:40:00
Speaker
manage their labor differently. But now that they've had that opportunity and they got to, they were forced to try things they didn't expect to, they now have more data points to make new choices. And so that's, I think we're still in the middle of that shakeup that like the immediate crisis is over and we're not desperately trying everything we can to get through the season, but like,
00:40:26
Speaker
the ground hasn't totally settled yet either. Nobody's really gotten into this is how we do it. This is how we've always done it type of thing. And so I don't know, I kind of feel like it's a fun time to have those conversations and whether it's we have to do things differently because of how climate is changing, right and what you can grow and where you can grow it. If it's
00:40:53
Speaker
you know, different requirements for energy usage or fertilizer application, phosphorus, all of these regulatory implications that are causing farmers to change. Like they're all still there and still coming. But I feel like everybody feels a little battle tested right now. So cautiously optimistic, I would agree.
00:41:17
Speaker
Yeah, good. And I've found now that I'm growing older and have more experience in the industry, agriculture is a pretty good industry. It has its ups and downs. We all have to eat at least three times a day. And flowers are important. They're very integral in our lives, bring joy. And so it's good to be diversified.
00:41:44
Speaker
But yeah, I think cautiously optimistic is how I would describe it and being a first year business owner.
00:41:52
Speaker
three months into it, I figured, well, if I can be successful during these times and hopefully that trend continues when it's not so cautiously optimistic. If the R word leers its ugly head, then so be it. But from what I found, there's tremendous amounts of opportunities just from my personal perspective and experience so far. So I'm looking at 2023s. Okay.
00:42:20
Speaker
Economically, personally, yeah. Do we spend more at home? Fortunately, we as a family have the means to do so. Not everybody does. When I started seeing those grocery receipts increase, did I express my frustration? Yeah. Then I checked myself. Gosh, other people are feeling this a little bit worse than we are. How can we
00:42:46
Speaker
How can we contribute to easing that pain? You've got to think about others. And so hopefully this corrects itself pretty soon and takes the sting out for others. So I know we set aside 45 minutes to an hour. We're approaching that. I want to ask you, Michelle, is there anything I didn't ask that you think I should have asked or anything you want to cover that we haven't covered?
00:43:09
Speaker
I don't think so. It's been an interesting conversation. I'm not normally the one doing all the talking, so it was a nice role reversal. I don't know. I think it left me in that place that you just mentioned. I like my work. I am cautiously optimistic about the world right now.
00:43:32
Speaker
I've been having a lot of conversations with people like you about goal setting and what that means for small businesses. And I don't know, I feel in a good place to tackle 2023. And I don't know, that's scary to put out there in the world because it's not always easy, but there's just a lot of good opportunities. And whether it's a lot of grant money available to kind of push a lot of these ideas,
00:44:00
Speaker
really interesting new consultants to partner with or conversations about food systems that haven't happened in a long time. All of that is really positive. Yeah, and I'd also throw in there just an observation. During tougher, more challenging times, I relate it to fitness and just life in general. You don't grow unless you're challenged or challenge yourself.
Innovation from Agricultural Challenges
00:44:25
Speaker
So if things are good and going along,
00:44:28
Speaker
you're not as likely, I think, to shift and with challenges, be it economic or otherwise here in Arizona, water, for example, farmers, growers, they begin to look at, okay, I may not just be drought, I may not have this water. So if I have access to 20% less water, how do I maintain?
00:44:54
Speaker
And it gets them looking at, oh, you know what? Maybe that drip irrigation is, maybe I can make that work economically. Or maybe it leads to grants that become available that ends up shifting into things that we should have been doing long ago anyway.
00:45:09
Speaker
but economics gets in the way and rightfully so like i don't i don't i don't pay anything for my water i don't need your irrigation with that you know that ultimately changes so try to look at the silver lining even though it's a little bit. There's a there's a pain to that but i think that ultimately the challenges leads to hopefully more often than not positive changes and results looking at water shortages leads to is alfalfa the right crop.
00:45:38
Speaker
forest in Arizona be growing are there other alternatives that's just one example automation in other areas so i enjoy this conversation as well so i'd like to wrap it up with this how can people learn more about you and your companies how can they stay in touch
00:45:59
Speaker
LinkedIn website newsletter, et cetera. Again, the podcast is the grower and the economist. You're on all different sources. I'm everywhere. Spotify's everywhere. Yeah. So how can people stay in touch? I am most active on LinkedIn. So LinkedIn slash Michelle Kleeger.
00:46:18
Speaker
I have connections on both Stratagerm Consulting and Helianth Partners. I am kind of active on Twitter, so Twitter slash Michelle Klieger as well. And I do have a weekly newsletter that goes out and I really enjoy writing it. It is sort of five things I'm thinking about. So one big picture item, one podcast I've listened to, so I can't wait to feature this one in it.
00:46:46
Speaker
one article i read an episode of the grower in the comments it's either new or relevant and then where i will be this week so i'm trying to give them some times but.
00:46:59
Speaker
So I can, if you email me or go to my website, it will ask you to sign up for the newsletter and I hope you do. Wonderful. Well, with that, we'll leave it there. Michelle, thank you so much for joining me on this episode of the Ag Show podcast. And for those that want to reach out, reach out, stay in touch with Michelle, check out the podcast. And until next time, we are out in three, two, one.
00:47:28
Speaker
you