Protein sovereignty: autonomous chicken tractor

Shay

Foulk: Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of the Ag View Pitch. We have Zach Smith with us today talking protein sovereignty. And Zach, I looked up sovereignty on, on the way here this morning, and I'm going to read the definition. Sovereignty is the supreme absolute and uncontrollable power by which an independent state governs itself free from external control. That's a, that's pretty bold. I don't know, it seems pretty bold when you think about protein sovereignty.

Zack

Smith: It is, but, uh, I love it. And when I use the phrase, it, it does connect with people instantly, at least they have some understanding of the definition. And there's definitely a trend toward people wanting to take, you know, the production of protein back essentially into their own, own hands with the, the crazy world that we're living in right now.

Shay

Foulk: And so what we're talking about today is the Stock Cropper, which is a brainchild of you and some others and a process that's been going on for, I don't know, what is it, 5 years now, 4 or 5 years now?

Zack

Smith: We're in our 6th year. We started about this time in 2020. So it's been a long time.

Shay

Foulk: Yeah, it seems like a long time. And you've had many different iterations of what we're going to talk about today, but If you would, please, as a brief introduction, we had done another podcast here a few weeks ago around water quality. But for those that didn't have a chance to listen to that, can you just give an introduction to who Zach is?

Zack

Smith: Yeah, so Zach Smith, I'm a 46-year-old farmer from northern Iowa. I farm right in between Minneapolis and Des Moines on the Iowa-Minnesota border, just 20 miles west of I-35. I've spent most of my career. I got a degree in agronomy from Iowa State. Go Cyclones!

Shay

Foulk: Hopefully they—

Zack

Smith: we both got hats.

Shay

Foulk: We both got hats on today.

Zack

Smith: So we're representing. Yeah, hopefully they can keep making a run here in the tourney. And then I spent essentially the next 15 years working in ag retail sales in various forms. But lastly, as a Pioneer seed dealer, and then I retired from that because I had the opportunity to farm full-time in 2021. And then the Stock Cropper had happened in 2020, and I wanted to spend more time focusing on that. And so for the last, since 2022, I've been a full-time farmer and then working on developing this, this wild thing called the Stock Cropper and taking it through the various iterations and pivots that we've, that we've made. And, yeah, and so I, I do this and I'm a dad to two daughters, both at Iowa State. And I think that's me, unless you thought I left any details out, Shane.

Shay

Foulk: No, I just— two quick things. If people are listening to this, we have a full presentation that we're going to kind of walk through today just with pictures and visualization. So, you know, if this is the right time for you to pause and go over to YouTube and take a look at it there, I think people will really enjoy the visuals that you have put together on this. And then the second thing is The last episode that we did was episode number 751, talking on water quality. You know, they're in Iowa, but just kind of some general management procedures. And I think that would give people a really good perspective on how you think about things, what you're passionate about, what's important to you, and really what we feel is important to the future of agriculture here.

And I think a lot of these systems, you know, I think the water quality pairs well with stock-cropper, not only for land use efficiency, but looking at nutrient management. Did you have all of those goals kind of in mind, or is that, you know, is that how some of this came to fruition, or is it more like, hey, this looks like something cool, we should, we should think about doing this?

Zack

Smith: Yeah, no, it was, it was, uh, all of that was rolled into it, you know. And so, um, you know, our origin story, I've told it a million times, but it's a good one. You know, we were— it was 2 or 3 farmers that were passionate about all this stuff. It was 3 strip tillers originally, myself, Sheldon Stevermer, and Lance Peterson. And, you know, the genesis of— we wanted to create a system that was better for soil, water, communities, you know, rural America in general. That was kind of the mission in the winter of 2020. And we were trying to, trying to do something with strip intercropping to make it better. That was the goal. And the idea was shared instead of, you know, doing crops just like corn, soybean, corn, soybean, or corn, you know, hay or some other thing. What if we injected livestock back into a field like corn?

And it was a wild idea, but we were, you know, our imagination took off. And, you know, what if it wasn't just one species of livestock? What if it was a whole wagon train of multi-species? So we know that we don't have enough biodiversity on the landscape, and there's value to different gut biomes and manure sources. And And so what if we created a device that could carry, you know, multiple things, and it could be solar powered, and it would carry enough food and water onboard capacity, and we could do it in the strip intercropping thing so that we could create a perfect rotation so that where the animals go one year, the corn then would be rotated in, and you could minimize your nutrient load off the farm to bring onto the farm.

And, you know, so the animals are there to feed the soil., and the corn is there to be produced to feed the monogastric animals that exist, that aren't ruminants, like the pigs and the chickens that we have. And so that was the idea in 2020, and thankfully, Sheldon was, he's a brilliant ag engineer, still producing awesome products today that I use on my own farm beyond StockCropper, but he, He and I designed this, what you see on the screen, and we launched it in the field in 2020. And it was on from there. We put it on the internet and got attention from folks. And yeah, the system was kind of born and we've been rolling with it ever since.

Shay

Foulk: So on the screen, for those that are listening, what's the way to describe that? Is it like a back-to-back reverse mono slope roof that feeds water would have solar panels on top and then like basically two mobile pens. Is that a good way to describe it?

Zack

Smith: Yeah, so for those that are listening, we called our creation the Cluster Cluck 5000 because it was essentially, you know, a three-ring animal circus on wheels rolling through a cornfield. And so there's a leading pen. So the idea is that we want all of the animals to be able to touch the soil and touch the forage. So The leading pen is for the ruminants to, to hit the, the pasture as the barn moves. Uh, I didn't say that before, with an electric winch is how we advanced it the first year. Um, and then we have a central barn that has the, the carrying capacity of shelter, um, the carrying capacity of feed, a raised tenderfoot floor so that in inclement weather the animals can be up and out of the mud. Otherwise, or for like with pigs, we can lock them in so that they don't destroy things., if we see fit.

And then behind what you don't see in this picture are chicken tractors that were attached through a hitch system. So we had 4 different species of livestock— sheep, goats, pigs, and chickens— that were kind of moving in this, this wagon train with the power of a winch in between, within a strip intercropping dynamic system of 20 foot of crop, or 20 foot of corn, 20 foot of pasture, 20 foot of corn. In that kind of rotational pattern across the field.

Shay

Foulk: And this is getting a little ahead of myself, but I'm curious 'cause I've watched the different iterations, if you will, or the different models that you guys have kind of worked through here. How do you think about the right width? Because we're gonna talk about some of the PTI data here later on, but what's the right width for a system like this when it comes to transport movement, livestock health, How do you think about that?

Zack

Smith: Yeah, I think, you know, we had no idea what was going to be right our first time out. But I think what we came up with the first time, like, if this was actually something that you could— that would be scalable, like, across the, you know, the Midwest or whatever, it would be this 20-foot configuration. It's not as efficient for the corn. So if you're trying to maximize for corn yield, you know, the narrower the better. So like with what you alluded to at the PTI farm, they use 10-foot windows. And so So we've tested everything and built barns for everything, uh, over the last 6 years, from a 10-foot barn to a 20-foot barn to a 30-foot barn. Um, but probably from the cost of the fixed infrastructure of the barn, uh, and when you do the economics of what you're able to cover and the stocking rates that you can put in, the 20-foot is probably the right dimension.

It also matches up better with, um,, you know, common, commonly used equipment, especially for the corn side of things. An 8-row corn head is still, you know, pretty easy to have. A 4-row, not, not as much. So it doesn't— I mean, I guess you could use a 12-row head and take 2 strips at a time if you're going to harvest corn that way. But, but yeah, so that's, that's what I would say to that.

Shay

Foulk: So let's, if you want to move to any of your other slides while we're talking here that you feel is relevant, the different iterations, I mean, that, that had to be a learning process because you guys were I mean, there's, there's welding, there's wood, there's— you got electrical drives, you have— I don't know if you ever had any hydraulic components, but you got solar, you got GPS, you know, talk about some of that.

Zack

Smith: Yeah. So this slide is the first year of the site that we had. This was a very, very small thing. And that's the thing I want to be clear on. Like, we've done this basically at test plot level. So, you know, at our largest, we're at about 5 acres. So a lot of people think I'm doing this on like thousands or hundreds of acres. And, uh, no, it's not like we've been— it's, it's— we've been trying to develop it and figure out what works and what doesn't work on a small scale. So this is the setup in 2020, what it looked like, uh, sitting on about 2 acres. We had 3 different strips. And like you said, it's all, you know, we didn't know like what, how the pasture was going to react, uh, with the mix that we put out. So we planted a cool season mix And we started through it in the first strip, it worked pretty well.

But then we had too many oats in it, and the oats started to mature, and they choked everything out underneath. And so this picture over here to the upper right where you see it really bare, it was really bare because, you know, the oats, we had to basically cut the oats and, and then feed hay through the strip because there wasn't anything came up other than the, you know, the, the golden oat straw there. So So the first year we learned a lot about like timing of the seeding, the species mix. We figured out that we needed to probably have two different seedings, a cool season seeding and then a warm season seeding after that. But we learned, we learned an incredible amount of what works and what doesn't work that first year when it was, when it was really, really small. And then we scaled up to the larger plot that you see here.

This is where we had the barns running from 2021 to 2024 on my family's home farm on State Highway 9 here in northern Iowa. And this shows, you know, the system with all 3 iterations of widths. So a 30-foot over to the left with the Max9 version. We called it that because it was the same year the X9 came out from Deere and we thought it was funny. So there's always a little bit of sarcasm in everything we do with this project. And then we have the 5,000 here, the original one in the middle. And then the— that what would become the Nano, which you see in the lower right hand. So you can see in the pictures that, you know, we were using tractors to pull them the first year because we didn't have all of this— the technology in 2021 figured out, like with the GPS and the solar power and the automated winches. That stuff all came later. But in 2021, we did develop this.

This was built in the lower right. This is our first attempt at automating this with GPS autosteer. This is called the Cluster Cluck Nano. This is a 10-foot version, the original one that we debuted. This is at Jason Moxfield Day. This was done in conjunction with Joe Bassett at Dawn Equipment, made in Milwaukee. And we had this one, yeah, 2021 we made that one. And then you can see the Max 9 up here. We launched that on the 4th of July. We put the American flag up and This one had cattle and hogs in it, which was really interesting. This was probably one of the funnest uses of PPP money that anyone spent in 2020, 2021 is making this boat anchor to pull across the field.

Shay

Foulk: So, so are all these, are all these iterations still in the countryside today or, or what have you, what have you done with them?

Zack

Smith: Yeah, so all of the iterations exist. The Max 9 is still at my place. The Cluster Cluck 5000 now is out at Rick Bieber's farm. The fields of Sinsinawa in southwestern Wisconsin. And the Nano, this Nano is broke in my yard in Iowa because, long story, we ordered motors from China. They were like really super expensive and they're too expensive to fix. And so this is like a lot of prototypes. You have a graveyard and this one sits in the graveyard. It's an expensive graveyard, but we've had fun nonetheless. And then— or go ahead.

Shay

Foulk: Well, I think there's a point there that I wanted to ask you about. I didn't mean to interrupt your train of thought there, but the, the process that you're talking about of you try something, pieces of it work, pieces of it don't, then you try something different, then you try something different. I mean, the iterations that you've gone through here, I, I guess I, I would say that I just, I really respect that. And I think it's so critical for people to think about, like, within their farm operations, because what we're— what you're presenting here, and I've been following you for several years, so it's not like new to me, but what you're presenting is a very new concept to a lot of people. And it's something that, like, hey, maybe we haven't had livestock in a long time, and, you know, the, the possibilities— people's wheels are probably churning here.

But one thing that I really respect out of what you and the team and the different people that you have worked with over time have done is you just try new iterations. And I think the more at-bats that you have, the higher likelihood you have to, to find success and find what works. And I hope that's an encouragement to people of trying new things on the farm, things that are, you know, even as far out as a stock cropper, but how can you do things in your current cropping system or your current management that I just want to encourage people that as we're coming into the 2026 growing season here, try new things, do something, do something different. So sorry to, sorry to interrupt your train of thought there. But I really like that about this process.

Zack

Smith: Yeah, no, it's a great point. I'm glad you paused me or to talk about it. Because that was the thing, like it was 3 farmers trying to come up with, instead of just beating our heads against the wall, raising corn and beans and being pissed off at the world about you know, the hamster wheel that that business is, you know, and our dependence on government programs and all the things we don't like about it. Like, what could we do differently? And that's, you know, we thought differently. And yeah, people thought we were batshit crazy when we like first put the— we, we were kind of scared to put it on the internet with how much we were going to get made fun of for doing this wild idea. But we did it, and it resonated with a lot of folks, and, and it's manifested a whole lot of stuff that we haven't talked about yet that we can get into later.

But, um, you know, one of the things I wanted to show on this slide here, since I was thinking about, um, to show kind of the idea of the system that we learned from the first year into the second year, was this idea of creating a racetrack pattern. Um, so when you see each one of these barns, there's essentially two strips of pasture here. Uh, if you look at the center one where the green one So you can see there's the dark green strip of pasture, uh, on the right, uh, as it's going down, and then we have corn and soybeans and an intercrop in between there. But this— the barn started on that first really dark green spot in the bottom of the picture, and then it moved down, and then we turned it on, on the end there, and then came back to where you see it right now.

So you can see the, uh, the progression of grazing all the way down to the ground and then the recovery And then, you know, from a nutrient standpoint, which you touched on, you literally can see the nutrients in this pasture from where the barn has been versus where the barn is going. So when we talk about things, you know, like we talked about on the last podcast with manure in the state of Iowa, you know, getting applied to ground without any type of living root, and it ends up, you know, some of it likely ends up in the tile drainage systems. This farm's got 60-foot tile, pattern tiled underneath it, but you can visibly see what we're doing with you know, the urine and the feces that are coming out of the back end, they're getting converted back into organic stable forms of, uh, you know, of plant material to hold those nutrients.

And then, you know, the idea is that in the next year that will be slow release back to the crop that we plant where that goes. So the idea with the system is, you know, we figured out that about a 750-foot lane, uh, with a kind of a turn lane in the middle so that you can essentially run over the same acre twice within the growing season is about right. And when you do that, it only takes about 0.82 acres for this 20-foot barn to exist on and produce a hell of a lot of protein. And in the meanwhile, you're putting nutrients down that you can reduce for the next year. It's about 75% reduction in nutrients because it's coming out the back of the animal, and then we can plant corn into that the following year.

Shay

Foulk: So when, when I think about this picture, that racetrack that you refer to, it's almost like a self-sucking vacuum. You know, you just, you're going back around on that same acre. A few questions I want to ask just out of my curiosity that I haven't asked you in the past is when do you, when are you able to get the livestock out on this? I'm thinking your climate, you know, Northern Iowa, do you have a cool season mix from the prior fall that you can get out there in April?

Zack

Smith: No, it probably wouldn't be that soon for a couple reasons. You know, it You got to think about this. You know, you've got water systems that are outside, and there's no way to get heat to them. A lot of people think, well, you can just use your solar. Well, heating elements take a ton of solar energy. And so our solar is focused on just the movement of the barn, whether it's a winch or for the drive system, that power has got to be just for movement. So, you know, you need to wait till it's warm enough for that, for not having water freeze, and then also get the— have the animals finish before the water freezes again in the fall. And so the idea is to You know, you probably the earliest you could get out there would be maybe the 15th or 20th of May.

Um, and, and part of that is that, you know, uh, you're going to have young animals that are more susceptible, specifically, you know, specifically with chickens, um, you know, and even small feeder pigs, uh, you know, they don't probably like 30-degree nights, um, yeah, you know, as well as much, uh, and so, uh, so the idea is kind of it's a, it's a warm, you know, a 3.5 to 4-month warm season type of process to, to introduce the animals and move them, you know, essentially from June through the end of October, early November.

Shay

Foulk: And the chickens that are going out there, these are, these are meat chickens, right? People aren't putting their hens out there. I mean, that's not—

Zack

Smith: you could, but you could, but the dollars are much better with meat production. Okay, system.

Shay

Foulk: So you said 0.82 acres for a 20-foot barn. How frequently are you moving that? And then what's your, what's your date stamp on the back end? You know, if you're middle of May, are you going until September 15th, October 15th?

Zack

Smith: No, it'd be to the end of October.

Shay

Foulk: End of October. Sorry, you might have said that and I just missed it because I was taking some notes here. So, um, so I mean, what kind of, what kind of protein are you producing in that, uh, time period then?

Zack

Smith: Yeah, so let me just flip ahead here. I'll get through some. And this is the Max 9.

Shay

Foulk: And don't let me forget, I want to ask you about some of the seeding stuff here later on, but let's, let's talk on this first. Yeah.

Zack

Smith: So this is the, this is the breakdown of what I was just talking about. So the 5000 runs on a little bit more than 3/4 of an acre. We, we hit the same spot twice in the year. From that we're producing 10 hogs, 8 ruminants up front, whether it's, you know, lambs or goats, and then 250-unit batches of chickens. So you'll have 2 growth cycles of chickens throughout the, throughout the season. And what that has the potential of generating is if you use average USDA pasture-raised pricing, so this is not using commodity pricing like what you would sell out of a CAFO or chickens from a Tyson barn or whatever, but if you use average USDA pricing, it's about $15,000 an acre of gross revenue for what this barn is producing. And then in between, you know, our corn yields in 2023 when I put this data together, that was— we hit about an 8-row strip, we hit 305 for our average yield.

And that our normal corn for comparison, that was like literally 60 feet away in regular 30-inch strip-till production with commercial, you know, full rates commercial fertilizer. That was about 235 or 240 that year. And so but like where we've been doing the stock cropper for a couple years, we haven't put any dry fertilizer on it. And so we've got about a 75% reduction from the nutrient credits that we can get from the manure. We're really only putting on some additional nitrogen to be able to drive that high corn yield potential that we have within the strip. You know, but the difference between just growing monocrop corn or monocrop soybeans, like what everybody else does, or what we do too on our own farm, we've 10x the amount of biodiversity with the additionality of the, you know, the 4 different species of livestock, and then, you know, 6 to 8 cover crop mix on top of that.

So we have a much more biodiverse system in general.

Shay

Foulk: So, so that 305 bushel an acre, just because I know people always get bent out of shape about how you calculate this, that's on the footprint of where the corn actually is. And so the benefit is to the outside rows from manure, biodiversity, sunlight. Talk to me about that a little bit.

Zack

Smith: Yeah, it's just all those things. The edge effect, the edge effect is a lot of it. But there's an obvious benefit to beyond the edge effect to the biology. We see that in the PTI data that we'll share here shortly because there's— they had been doing the same intercropping system with corn and beans, and that was their highest stuff before we came. And then there's an obvious bounce to the biology portion of this as well.

Shay

Foulk: So talk to me about the seed cost. You mentioned like a 7 or 8-way cover crop mix. I'm a seed guy as part of what I do. And so I, you know, I get all amped up when you're talking about the cool weather, the warm weather, You know, I— we do soybeans and small grains, and I like doing that, but some of this other stuff is kind of exciting. So talk to me about like seed cost mixes. How do you think about timing? Because the— and I'll preface this by saying my biggest question is, okay, the grazing that you have here and in the picture you have on the screen is there's not a lot going on behind that. Do you have to go back and reseed that, or does it just depend on the mix?

Zack

Smith: It depends on the mix, um, and what species you have. I mean, a lot of people will look and say, oh, you just way overgrazed this. You know, and yeah, it's intense. The pigs are the biggest part of the problem. They do the most amount of disruption. But, you know, if we flip back to, let's see here, I get back to the right one. You flip back to this picture. I mean, you know, it comes back pretty good. Like a lot of this is warm season sorghum sudan and Japanese millet, I think if I remember right. We, I, you know, but it will depend like if it's too much and it seems thin, like we have gone back and reseeded. You know, behind it to make sure that we've got plenty. Um, I can't tell, I can't remember the cost of my mixes.

I mean, the seed is such an inconsequential part of the— if you're generating $15,000 of protein, whether it's $30 per seed or $70, it doesn't make that much of a difference in the grand scheme of things and the profitability. The most important thing is to make sure that you have the right mix at the right time. So what we usually, uh, what we, what we did, or this, this was in 2021. And in, I think, '22 and '23, we went to seeding a cool season in the first lane, and then we waited a little bit and then put in a warm season mix like the first week of June that we would seed into the second lane here.

So, and then if the cool season, we would always have some warm season in the cool season, if it wasn't thick enough, then we would come back and seed more warm season directly into that that stand to get to make sure that when the barn got back there in, you know, 45 days or whatever, that, that we had plenty for the ruminants to, to live off of.

Shay

Foulk: So, and were you just broadcasting that?

Zack

Smith: Uh, no, I had a little, uh, I bought a, a 10 or a 15-foot tie drill that I had modified down to a 10-foot so that I could go out there and, you know, something, a $1,200 drill just to, to be able to put it in there.

Shay

Foulk: So yeah, that's awesome. Anything else on the, um, like the seeding or the mixes that you think that people have asked you questions on that I might be missing there, Zach?

Zack

Smith: No, I mean, yeah, we have so many variables here. Like, everybody wonders, like, we really had that part dialed in. I'm not claiming we did, you know. I, again, when we started this, like, we didn't know what was going to work and what not to work. And I didn't have, you know, I don't have the capacity to have all the replications of every different seeding mix to try it out. Like, a lot of this is just trying to figure out the first principle stuff. And, um, you know, like, that's the thing I tell people too, like, it's pretty incre— I mean, I'm not trying to pat ourselves on the back too hard here, but it's pretty incredible what we've achieved with how little capital and like talent and, you know, available to do this. I mean, I've been developing this while still farming full-time and having a lot of other things going on.

And if, you know, I think I, I— my hope is that, you know, that, that someday, you know, somebody can give this thing some real oxygen like we give capital to a lot of other things in this business that aren't as promising as what this is.

Shay

Foulk: And well, and I think point there is it works, you know. Yeah. And, and that's the cool part about this is you don't— you guys maybe didn't have it all figured out. You had an idea, you said, hey, let's, let's get this seed out there, we'll figure out what works or what doesn't work. But the point is you're raising livestock, you're on the land, you have that, um, you know, manure piece right there where you want it. How frequently were you moving these? Once a day? Twice a day?

Zack

Smith: Yeah, I, I keep failing to say that. So it all, it's all, it's, it's, it's not linear, right? It's kind of, if there's a curve on the need, because when the animals are small and when the, uh, you know, depending on the size, size of the forage for what's available, you kind of, it's, there's kind of an art to it. But typically 2 times a day when they're small is good for like the first rotation, and then we'll speed up to 3 times a day because on the second turn the forage isn't as thick in a lot of the cases. And so because of, you know, the hogs killing stand in some, in some places. And so, you know, that was another thing, like with hogs, you know, when they root, it's— they do a lot of good, but they also can screw things up. And so we, you know, we had to experiment with like ringing hogs for the first time. And wouldn't say we're over successful with that.

I didn't have an old boy to come show me how to do it the right way. I put a bunch of, you know, rings in the nose, but within 2 weeks a lot of times they'd fallen out and then they're back to rooting again. So yeah, um, you know, just things like that that you think in the wintertime, oh yeah, that's easy, we'll just solve that by doing that, and then it doesn't work and you're like, well, shit, what do I do now? You know?

Shay

Foulk: So, well, the, the, the reason I was asking about the movement is you had kind of referenced that, uh, 750-foot racetrack, and that was— is that total, like, total distance?

Zack

Smith: Uh, no, that's one way.

Shay

Foulk: Okay, so, and And when I do the math on that, so I'm thinking, you know, here in the I-states where these square 160s or 80s, you got quarter-mile-long rows, that's 1,300 feet. Do you think a system like this is easier kind of set up in blocks to where you would turn around halfway across the 160? Or do you try to go the full quarter-mile length?

Zack

Smith: No, no. So yeah, I mean, I thought about all this when we were designing like what this could look like in the square grid of Iowa. Here. And so yeah, you would split a half-mile-long field into 3 blocks, essentially, you know, if you figure there's whatever, 2,500-foot length and a half mile. Yeah, split it up into 3 blocks of 750 feet. And yeah, so you would just have a block of each. And that's how it would work.

Shay

Foulk: Last question I had on the seeding side is people worry about weeds. What do you see for weed control? Or did you have to do any management on that end?

Zack

Smith: I mean, in the pasture stuff, as long as you get stuff established early, you know, and get it off. I mean, the other thing is that like the goats will eat anything. So there is a biological control. Yeah, I mean, I'd be lying if I didn't say we had, you know, escapes of waterhemp or lamb's quarter that, you know, come through if you don't get the seeding right or if it doesn't rain. But then you have the livestock to come through and clean that up at the same, at the same point. So I honestly think like a system like this could be really, really powerful, like an organic setting, especially now that you have things like Carbon Robotics with their laser weeder that you could come through in the corn because we were still using herbicides to control weeds in the corn.

It was a very delicate situation, you had to like 6:15 in the morning, you had to be out there with, you know, air inducted tips to make sure we weren't drifting into where, you know, the livestock were going to graze. So, but I think with some of these other technologies that are coming to market, could be a really, really interesting thing in conjunction with this.

Shay

Foulk: So for weed control, let's move to some of the PTI stuff if you want to go to your slide there and talk about what is, or if there's something that you want to hit on beforehand, that's, that's totally fine too. But like, you know, what is PTI? First of all, how did you get involved with that process? And then where are we at today?

Zack

Smith: Yeah, so, so Jason Webster is the guy in the middle there. And he runs Precision Planting's PTI farm in Pontiac, Illinois, which is just, I know, down the street from you. But it's essentially a 500-acre agronomy testing or 500-acre agronomy testing farm, where they, they evaluate similar probably like to Beck's PFR You know, farm or something like that, where they evaluate a lot of different products and a lot of different technologies for to see what the impact is on yield and then farmer profitability. Those are kind of the two metrics that they look at. And the thing I appreciate about Jason is Jason is an outside-of-the-box thinker and he doesn't have any rules as far as what he can bring onto the farm, which is crazy because I'm— in 2022, I was headed to the Farm Progress Show with Sheldon to go down and look at stuff.

And I get— my phone rang and like, hey, this is Jason Webster. And I'm like, okay, I wasn't expecting that phone call. He's like, we've been watching what you're doing on the internet. And we think you're onto something because we've been doing the same thing with strip intercropping. And that's how we're getting our highest corn yield and highest farmer profitability. But the soybeans suck. And we need to find something to boost that in the middle. And we love the idea of putting livestock. So could you send us one of your prototypes? And so We had just made in 2022, uh, two of the new versions of this, the Cluster Cluck Nano, which is the barn that you see behind, which was a redesign of that first one, um, you know, which was originally a dual species, so just sheep and poultry, and we've since then added in hogs, so it's a full, a true three species.

So we put, sent this in 2023, they set up a stock-cropper plot there at PTI, um, to basically copied the system that we'd created. And they ran the barn the first year on the pasture strips. And then in 2024, they planted corn into the pasture strips for the first time. And right out of the gate, I mean, the previous all-time production record at PTI was 403 bushels an acre. And in— let me get to the results slide here— and in 2024, we came in and rang the bell at 434.9, broke the yield record by 32 bushels right out of the gate. And so And when you look back, so you can see like the yield level, they always have a control of like what is they and they what they call like standard Illinois production. So still a really good yield of 250 bushels an acre. But, you know, we were just a lot better than that with kind of the unique arrangement and the power of biology adding to that.

And, and so then we followed it up last year in 2025, where they ran it for the second year in a row and We came in again, we didn't break the all-time record that we set the year before, we were pretty damn close. So at like 426.7, almost 427 bushels an acre. And we had the— when they did all the profitability farmer ROI, you know, we were the most profitable system, you know, for a farmer, if they were able to scale this and sell the livestock for the prices that we talked about, you know, kind of rolled coal on everything in agriculture that they tested it against. So a pretty neat opportunity that he gave a weird idea like this. And he, I mean, Jason catches a lot of flak for this, but because stockcropper is one of the toughest things for his interns to do. I know his interns hate my project there for all the things that can go wrong.

But Jason loves it because he's a pure agronomy guy. And honestly, Jason, I give him a ton of credit, like he's probably one of the only mainstream people that works within the confines of big ag that is giving these farm weird concepts that like Stock Cropper or a lot of the stuff that Jason Mock or others have been doing in this gap arrangement or yourself even what you played with Shay like of doing these weird techniques. And it was wild when I went to their results show to see our product, you know, they say essentially winning there. I mean, the other thing that was winning a lot was the gap arrangements and like, you know, 2 rows of corn, you know, a row of beans and like, all of these other weird things that a lot of people would write off. But in this day and age, when like people are looking, how do we, how do we have a chance of profitability here?

It's these farm weird things that are giving the biggest responses. It's just a matter of whether or not people can allow that to creep into their head and have the curiosity to flesh it out and see if they can work, make it work. Is it all easy? No, it's not. But that was one of the things that we said when we started StockCropper. It may not be StockCropper that scales and wins just because there's a lot of obstacles, you know, to it. But like, what are the other concepts that this system will teach us that we could scale across crop production to make things better than what we have so that farmers could retain more value instead of having to, you know, rely on somebody to come with the next, you know, bug in a jug or solution to give us, you know, a few more bushels an acre?

Like, what are, what are the transformational things that we can do for free, which is the power of arrangement to you know, to produce it ourselves. Yeah.

Shay

Foulk: The first of all, I just want to make a comment. When you went back to the Nano there, I love the engineering, the look of this. I mean, whoever, whoever's building this stuff, I don't, I don't know who it is on the team that's building it, but like, that's beautiful engineering to me. I mean, I've always liked the appeal of the design and I don't know if it's the powder coating or whatever, but I just want to make a comment there. It's not like a you threw a bunch of 2x4s together. And not that there's anything wrong with that from a cost or a protein sovereignty standpoint, back to the, the human component of this. But man, those, those designs are awesome. And I think there's a lot of ingenuity that goes into that.

Zack

Smith: I don't know if you have any comments on that, but yeah, no, this is, uh, so the Nano, both of the Nanos are co-designs by me and Joe Bassett, uh, from Dawn. And yeah, and Joe designs beautiful things, and that was one of the things that we said is that we're going to make beautiful design with, with this. It doesn't— yeah, because in order for it to be credible— I mean, there's enough reasons for the people are going to be critical of this. At least it needs to look good, uh, but it goes, goes across the field. So that's been kind of the central mantra of everything that we've done with it.

Shay

Foulk: So, so, all right, talk to me— if this is a natural point, talk to me a little bit about the, um, the autonomy of movement, uh, the GPS, because like you said, it's it's not necessarily less work. And I think that's why a lot of people got away from livestock. And I'll pick on myself too. I grew up around livestock and the manure management piece is what is preventing me or has prevented me from getting back into livestock just because I don't like that component of it, of how do you, how do you manage all that? There's a lot of, you know, issues that go along with, with that too. So it— there's, there's work in raising livestock, as there should be, you know, I think that's kind of, you know, by design. But there's ways that you guys have looked at making this way easier from autonomous movement, GPS, where are you at on that today?

And kind of what have the iterations of that looked like?

Zack

Smith: Yeah, so there's a lot of challenges to doing this out in the confines of the corn. It looks easy and sexy on a slide presentation. But there's a lot of— we've gone through a lot of pain points trying to figure out what works and what doesn't.. So the Nano that we have on the screen here, this is equipped with 2 solar panels, 24-volt battery system, and then we have wheel motors on each one of the wheels that you can't see that are tucked inside of the frame there. And then we also, if you look on top of the panels, you can see a couple pucks. We've got multiple GPS pucks as well as a cell modem for being able to get like, say, RTK picture signal, you know, so that you can have— what's the term? Well, basically RTK.

Shay

Foulk: Sub-inch accuracy with straight directional alignment. For those that aren't familiar with RTK, I mean, you're down to centimeters of accuracy and then over, you know, long periods of time, even as all the satellites in the sky move, you're down to that sub-inch accuracy.

Zack

Smith: So we developed essentially our own autosteer system and software you know, with the help of the guys at Don in 2021 and 2022. You know, it, it kind of works. But for the budget that we have, it worked probably better than it should have, considering how limited we were on things. But there's issues, you know, you know, one of the issues that we ran into, especially is when you get into wet weather. And a lot of people ask this question, what happens when it rains? When you're just driving off of wheels and it gets really slimy and you're driving on top of residue, you can spin out and have issues. And we definitely have had that problem. And so I think what I would say about like if this was done at scale, what I would say is it probably won't require autosteer. I could see other ways of guiding.

This would be much, much simpler with much fewer problem rates that you can have with, you know, the system dropping or, you know, if you were relying on Cores RTK or something like that and the system is down, well, that doesn't work, right? And so what we— what I really could see if you had like a whole field of these, like, you know, 160 acres of them, I think what makes more sense would be having autonomous winch systems like what we, you know, where there'd be a huge winch cable and a central motor so that it was time to move the barns, the barns would be physically connected and just pull in a straight line, or maybe would have some other source of like feeler directional control that they could maybe self-steer a little bit if they were getting off or if they were on terrain or something like that. Because the winch always works.

Even, I mean, I've moved with a winch, I've moved, you know, 3 hours after a 5-inch rain with a winch. But when you spin out, you're dead in the water. And, and so I think from a, it definitely helps to have good soil health. And so if you've been managing stuff, not doing a lot of tillage, so that the barn would just sink to China down to the tillage depth, if you have that established before, that's really made a big difference too.

Shay

Foulk: So yeah, and the, uh, first of all, the fact that you guys put that together and the team at Dawn and whoever, I think is really cool and, and should be encouraging for people that as we have the development of these technologies and, you know, open-source software and the ability to create these tools through cheaper electrical and electronic components, I, I don't know, I just, I think that's amazing. And I think there's a lot of opportunities in agriculture as we move forward with some of that is, you know, one thing that you had talked about of like, and how I've thought about it too, is like a train, you know, could you have a train of these and 2 or 3 in a row and then you're moving 80 feet at a time with a winch system?

Does it make sense to have more animals in the same pass or more animals on different strips that are adjacent from a management perspective if you were to do this at a, at a field scale?

Zack

Smith: Yeah, I think more animals across instead of all stacked because the density of animals, you just do too much impact and then you don't get the recovery. So the whole idea is you want to hit it, impact it for a few short hours and then constantly keep it moving and get the animals off so that you don't do too much damage. So the, you know, the, the pasture can come back essentially. So like, like I said, I think, I think about it when I was a kid and we had a Fairwing house with a scraper system underneath it, you know, you would go and hit the, hit the lever and all of the scrapers would pull from underneath the crates. To the pit. And it would be the same type of thing, just at a larger, a larger scale where you would have some infrastructure in the middle of the field, you know, kind of similar.

It's kind of a similar concept, like the 360 Rain, you know, type of deal where you think about like what they say the 50-yard line for the machine to come back to and turn around or whatever, and something similar to that.

Shay

Foulk: So okay, cool. Let's, let's talk a little bit about, I know you have some slides here on like arrangement of systems and things like that. Talk to me about how do you think about this moving forward based on what's been successful or, you know, whatever comes to mind from an arrangement standpoint.

Zack

Smith: So, so yeah, so then I, in 2022, I started experimenting with other concepts outside of stock cropper for like broadacre implications with 60-inch twin row corn, 90-inch twin row corn, 120-inch twin row corn. Essentially trying to figure out the different combinations. This is a hybrid test plot at 3 different planting populations at those different schematics compared to 30-inch corn. We just put a ton of work into this. On top of stock cropper, we had about 14 other tests that we were trying to, you know, find iterations that would work. I really like the ability. I think there's a ton of potential with twin rows to do some really, really interesting things in small use of canopy with something else growing short next to it, especially in for people that have cattle. I think this is a huge opportunity in that space.

And so in order to do it right, I bought a twin row gap planter is what I call it. It was an old 12-inch Stein planter with twin row units on it, and I can basically create any type of twin row configuration. So I've done 60s, I've done twin 72s, I've done 90s, I've done 120s. I basically just slide the units to wherever I want them. On the, on the shaft to make the alignment. It's a big pain in the ass to do it. But yeah, it, it's been a fun, it's been a fun tool to have on the farm to do some, some wild, wild stuff with that. And yeah, so these are just some of the pictures of, I think these are the Twin 72s that we did in 2023.

And then this is some of the, what I call the quintuple bio pass that we did last year in '25 with twin 60s that you can see with a single 30 in between, and then having a lane in between for doing forage for green chop or a small grain, like I'm, I'm going to be growing oats for the first time this year with the new oat plant I'm delivering to. And so I was trying to come up with a unique solution where we could use arrangement to crank a tremendous amount of corn yield out of a condensed space and then create avenues to intercrop between that are, that are really interesting. And I could talk for half an hour just about this piece, but this worked incredibly well. We compared this system of growing corn versus 30-inch with the same amount of plants, the same amount of nitrogen, and we grew 72 bushels an acre.

We like 270 corn in this system, uh, for the same, uh, with the same amount of plants and animals. Versus 198. And that was loaded with Southern Rust this year. We didn't have fungicide on this plot. Because so, and we did it, and the cool thing is it sits on about 78% of the footprint of what the other yield comparison was. So really, really neat stuff that I've dorked around with outside of the stock cropper with this farm weird spacing stuff.

Shay

Foulk: So are you planning to frost seed clover into those then and have that as kind of a pathway then? You'll follow that with corn next year, or what's the intent?

Zack

Smith: Yeah, yeah. So we would rotate and put the corn in between. And the thing I like about this is, this is, if you follow Jason Mock, he and I, you know, he talked a lot about alley cropping corn this last year on X. And it came from this idea that I had last March. And he just had, you know, he doesn't have a twin-row planter, he's got 20s. So he set his up on, I think it's 4 or 5 20s that he did with a gap in between. So I did mine selfishly because I wanted to grow oats in between this.

But I'm also going to do an iteration of this where I cut this pass down in half to just be a straight corn play with like a 2-row, a 2-row 30-inch gap in between the strips of corn with this, this 5 rows shrunk down into 3 30-inch rows, essentially, to see what we could do from a yield standpoint and be able to cut inputs back, and then have the forage for if you had cattle or something to graze, you know, in the fall. So again, like the whole idea with Dorkin around this is that stock cropper is hard to scale. And we haven't talked about this yet, because there's not an independent meat processing system to sell the livestock into. It's a great system, it works, But it only works for the farmer if they can sell and get the meat to a consumer that'll be willing to pay for it. That's the biggest limitation. And so that's why I'm doing this other stuff.

And I'm interested is like, what are things we can do where we can take the lessons of what we learned, get more biology with diversification out and actually be more profitable? That's the name of the game.

Shay

Foulk: But from a protein sovereignty standpoint, I mean, you look at what— whatever the math was there, 10 hogs, you know, 8 sheep or goats, and then the chickens there. I mean, that's enough for 2 or 3 families from an independent production standpoint on an acre or 2 acres or whatever. I mean, that's, that's fascinating.

Zack

Smith: Yeah, I think, I mean, so from a family level, yeah, you could, you could have a small plot of this. And we could make barns for people to do that. You know, it's just the idea of getting investment at this point to scale that out when there's a hard ceiling on the scale of productivity. It don't, you know, so that works if you have a local butcher that can handle 10 hogs, you know, at a time, or you decide to butcher them themselves. When you get beyond that, with the— we just don't have the regional processing capacity to do large amounts of this. And that's the biggest limiting factor. It's, it's neat, it's cool, it sets records, but very well aware of the limitations that we have on scaling it.

Shay

Foulk: So, so let's talk about, um, you know, kind of the final topic here on, on where you've been then of making some changes and how you approach the production of products from StockCropper, you've moved a little bit to more of a single drive unit. And that was based off of my understanding, you know, the production outlook like you just mentioned, scalability, size, capital invested, you know, who's the, who's the consumers of these products? Talk to me a little bit about how you think of where you're at with that today.

Zack

Smith: Because of what all I just said there with the challenges, in, uh, probably 2023, I made the decision to pivot, uh, so that we could get to a place where we could take what we learned with moving animals autonomously in a cornfield into— instead of a top-down approach of feeding the world, how do we teach people to feed themselves and empower them with autonomous technology for more people to, to grow their own protein? And so that's where we really had this focus. You've used the term a couple times, protein sovereignty. And this is a picture of me and my daughters, you know, back when they were, I mean, my daughters are in college now, but this is, you know, probably 10, 12, I don't know, maybe 15 years ago. Time goes by so fast. My oldest turned 21 yesterday. And so it's just wild. But she's the one holding the chicken there. Yep.

But we've been a protein sovereign family since 2008 or '09 when they were like 3 or 4. We started butchering chickens. That's when we 2011, we added hogs. And we've— they don't know anything else other than every year we're butchering chickens and we're, you know, in the summer, and we're butchering pigs in the fall, and we fill our freezer, and we don't buy meat at the store. That's just, that's just the way we do it. And so with, especially after COVID, and like last year with the bird flu, where people are seeing, you know, that we live in a fragile food system. There's a, there's been every time those like world events happen, what do people do? They go and they buy chicks at Baumgartner's or Tractor Supply because they want to have that hedge.

And so we had this idea of trying to expand or make it easier for people to grow their own protein, specifically chickens, because that's the biggest opportunity that's easy for people to get access. They don't take a lot of space. But the problem that exists with it is that if you're going to try to keep them, you can either free-range them and be open to predators, or you have to— if you want to be making really healthy meat, you need to have them moving all the time so they're not sitting in their own shit in a coop constantly and having to clean it out. And so people make these chicken tractors, right? So these are mobile devices that you go and you pull or yank around. And so our idea was, is to make this a much simpler process.

So on a Saturday morning, like when we're recording, if you had a few too many whiskeys, the last thing you want to do at 7 AM is go out and move your damn chicken tractor. So what if you had a chicken tractor that would have a solar-powered drive unit on it that, that you could either move manually instead of having to go out and pull it physically and having somebody strong enough to do that? What if you had something you could control with a wireless key fob or just have control on your phone app and program and say, hey, I want you just to move automatically at 7 AM in the morning. And so this unit will be attachable to any existing piece of infrastructure that you have. Like here, this is attached to a Joel Salatin chicken tractor, where you just bolt it to what you have.

And as long as it's on wheels and under 600 pounds, this thing will, this thing will move it across, across the landscape here. And yeah, so it's simple, smart, and safe. And we can attach it to any type of pen that's out there right now.

Shay

Foulk: So the simplicity of this, I, first of all, I love it. And I think it was a great Great pivot. I think it's, you know, great from the market outlook for you guys to get into this space for the right reasons. Now, the manual piece on this, you would just walk up to it and there's controls on it that you could manually move it. Do I understand that correctly?

Zack

Smith: It's a wireless key fob. So just— it was with 4 buttons up, down, forward and backwards. Yeah.

Shay

Foulk: Well, you can't run yourself over that way though, Zach.

Zack

Smith: Yeah, that's right. We actually— it's not, it's not pictured here. We actually have an obstacle avoidance piece so that if it runs in anything, it'll stop. This thing moves super slow. It's like a quarter mile an hour. Okay, I've got, I've got a video here that I can show, I think here. That's— yeah, this is simulating an autonomous move. This is on our engineers' farm in central Illinois. So the barn raises itself up, we have our chicken fluffer in the background here, scaring the chickens away from the back. That's patent pending as well. So we gave it a 6-foot move here in this case. So you can see the chickens moving ahead with it. It's like about 2/10 of a mile an hour, this thing's advancing. And then it stops and lowers itself back down to the ground. And then the solar panels, you know, just keep harvesting sunlight to recharge the battery we have on board.

And it's that simple. Pretty much it.

Shay

Foulk: And it can move some significant weight. I forget what you had told me offline here. But you know, it can attach to many of these different, you know, like The picture that you're sharing here was a $200 hoop that I had bought from a family that, similar to you, had been protein sovereign and had kids that were in 4-H, and they were, they were done using it. So me and the girls went over and picked this up on Sunday before the snowstorm came in here. Get it attached to something like this.

Zack

Smith: Yeah, so up to 600 pounds is what we've designed this, this unit for. We could make bigger versions of it down, you know, in the future, but I think for our ideas is like, we're not trying to make devices that you can put 1,000 chickens in. We're making it, you know, protein sovereignty in our business is how do we help people feed their family and not much beyond that. Because once you get beyond that point, there's a lot of problems, you have to have a place to, you know, butcher that many animals, and then you have to get them marketed. And in some cases, that works out well for people, but more people than not to get into the chicken business figure out that it's not much of a business. And so the idea is, is like what you're doing with your kids at the perfect age, teach them lessons and go out and do chores.

You know, this thing still needs, you know, you still have the chore element. You can give them the assignment of going out and moving, moving the barn. But it's accessible. I mean, you could send, you know, your cute little daughters out there with the key fob and they'd love to run the damn thing, you know, and it would be, it would be a safe operation. It's not like you're having them hook up a PTO shaft or something like that. But, but yeah, so like this contraption right here, all you would have to do is put a couple of wheels here on the door side and then on the far side you would attach the drive to— you would probably need to put one 2x4 in between that center link so that you have a framework and you bolt it on and it starts lifting and moving the thing around.

Shay

Foulk: Yeah, that's awesome. The next slide that I have here was actually the day after, and this was— that's our chicken coop.. It was an old dryer shack building for a seed corn blower fan that we had that we moved 2 miles up the road on a gooseneck trailer. It was very, very redneck. And then we put a chicken run on the outside of it, but nice little 4-foot snowdrift outside of there after we went and picked that up. So that, you know, the inclement weather piece, I think that's the other thing that you guys are very, very aware of. And, you know, it's not a— it's not a year-round, it's not a constant thing. We talked about that May to October time frame, but to really capitalize on that, you know, 6-month— call it 6-month window there for a lot of people, there's a lot that can be done in, in half a year.

Zack

Smith: Oh yeah, you can grow a ton of meat. And so, you know, the biggest limiting factor is how big is your freezer, and that's, you know, but I— a family of 4 or 5 people, you know, if you've got a couple, you know, couple freezers in the basement, you can more than take care of your needs with, you know, if you want to grow a pig. And that's the idea, is like with the drive, that's not going to be just for chickens. If you want to have a small pig pen that you have a pasture that you want to yank it around and put 2 or 3 hogs in, it'd be very, very easy to do that with this, this idea.

Shay

Foulk: So, all right, um, I know at the end of the slide deck here, is there anything else that we missed as far as slides that we haven't hit on here, Zach, that you think is important?

Zack

Smith: Uh, the only other thing is this one here. Oh yeah, uh, yeah, so I didn't talk about the PICO. So the— we're coming first to market here, uh, this next year with the Drive. Uh, uh, so our first commercial run will be next spring in 2027. We'll have a limited production run with these going out, and then the year after that will come with our— the Cluster Cluck PICO, uh, which is the soup-to-nuts solution. So if you don't want to go to Home Depot and build something like this, you want something a little bit sexier, that has gotten my 30 years of growing chicken expertise built into the design. Like, I built this device for my wife. She hated ever having to walk into a chicken coop to like feed or water them.

Because usually what happens, you know, if you're a farmer, you get this, like you wake up at, you know, 4:30 in the morning to go get the spray sprayer loaded, you know, to be able to start. And the last thing you think about is doing the damn chicken chores. And so you text the wife at 6:30 when you're blowing off your first load and you say, hey, can you move the chicken tractor for me? And she's got her work clothes on and she's mad as a hornet because now she's got to go walk through chicken shit to get the, you know, and she's— so anyway, this barn is designed to be toured from the outside, water, food, and then egg collection as well. This barn can have both meat birds and layers in it, either one you'd have to pick. But just a lot of things that were pain points that we tried to make a beautifully designed product. So the drive will power the PICO.

So this is an earlier prototype version of the drive, but the new version will be attached to this. And so we'll plan to have this as a full delivery product in 2028.

Shay

Foulk: Yeah. And I know I got signed up for the preorder list on— I don't know if it was both of them or one of them for sure, but I don't know. That's it. It's exciting. And, you know, that's kind of where I wanted to wrap up here is if people are interested in the StockCrapper and I know there will be tons of interest, where do they go? How do they check this out? And I know I got some slides there at the end too.

Zack

Smith: Yeah, so the best thing is to go to our website, thestockropper.com. If you're interested in what we're talking about specifically with the Drive and the Pico, we do have the ability for, for to get in line for the deposits list or just general reservation specifically for the Pico. We have a lot of interest in both right now. So if this is something you really think you'd want, we will have a pretty limited run versus what we think demand will be in 2028. So feel free to put a deposit down and hold your line. Specifically for the drive, that would be great. Otherwise, if you want to see more of this content, you can go to the Stock Cropper YouTube page. Just search Stock Cropper on YouTube. On X, I have two different profiles. My main one is @zebulusprime, and that's the one I started it with when I didn't think this was ever going to amount to anything.

And now we actually have, if you search Stock Cropper, @stockcropper, that one we're starting to share more on as well, and I'll probably transition the account there. But we've got Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, all of, all of the things were on all the platforms.

Shay

Foulk: And when you go back to the website slide there, just so that we have that one pulled up real quick.

Zack

Smith: Oh yeah, sorry. Yeah.

Shay

Foulk: So yeah, thestockcropper.com and like you said, X and Facebook there. So Zach, parting thoughts on Stock Cropper as we record here in early 2026. There's a lot of excitement around it. I know there's a lot of, there's a lot of stress associated with this too, just because it's a lot going on. You farm full time. Where are you at right now? What are your thoughts with StockCropper? I know, I know I'm excited, but where are you at?

Zack

Smith: Yeah, I mean, it's been a hell of a roller coaster of ups and downs over the last 6 years. I think any time you have a startup, whether it's a startup or it's some type of new venture, you're just trying to figure out. And there's a lot of pain and a lot of fun at the same time. And, you know, I'm— how do I say this? It's— I've met a ton of great people along this. I have zero regrets for even the days that absolutely suck because there's been so— the good is so much outweighed the bad in these experiences. And I'm as bullish as I ever have been right now with the— I think we finally have a good product to come to market that has a ton of potential. And I've got a fantastic team and we just— it just feels like we finally are here where it's going to finally happen. And I'm just really— 2026 is going to be an incredibly stressful and hot-hitting year.

But I'm— I haven't had this much fun over the course of a winter doing stuff is what I have this year. So I'm really excited and I appreciate the support of people continuing to, to believe. And, and, uh, you know, I know it's taken a lot longer than what I had hoped originally, but, um, this isn't easy stuff that we're doing. And especially when you're doing it on a shoestring budget, it just doesn't happen, you know, like that. So, um, but, but yeah, but I appreciate your support. You've been an awesome supporter. I love how you're like doing your own iterations of the Farm Weird Stuff on your farm and sharing that with people. That's really the spirit, what this whole it's about is sharing with other farmers. Don't have any ego about it. Don't try to protect it. You know, there's not a lot of patentability in this stuff anyway with arrangement. That's what makes it beautiful.

Shay

Foulk: So, well, I appreciate, um, I appreciate your spirit. I appreciate your, uh, work that you're doing. I think it's going to have a dramatic impact in agriculture, um, not only in the immediate future but kind of long term here. So, uh, thanks for everything you're doing, brother, and, uh, appreciate the time. Uh, what do you got?

Zack

Smith: One more shameless plug. Yeah, I will be, I will be at Jason Mock's field day with the Cluster Cluck drive and the Nano on June 27th in Gaston, Indiana. So I got to give my boy Jason a shout out. And so if you want to, especially if you're in the eastern part of the Corn Belt, Jason's field day is one of the best field days that you can go to, period. And the people you'll meet there are fantastic. And I'll be there with my stuff and I'm really excited about that too.

Shay

Foulk: Yeah. So, so June 27th, Gaston, Indiana. Hannah and I went last year for the first time. It was awesome. Great crowd of people, awesome presentations, live demonstrations of, you know, the products that we're talking about here. And just to get to see Jason's Beautiful Mind do his presentations and all the other great people that are there, I highly recommend that. So, Zach, thank you so much for the time. I really appreciate it and looking forward to see where StockCropper goes.

Zack

Smith: Thanks, Jay.

Shay

Foulk: And thank you everyone for listening to another episode of the Ag View Pitch. We will catch you next time.