https://youtu.be/POM0_ABBHk4
Transcript
[00:00:00] Welcome to the Valorous Circle Podcast. Today, we are really privileged to talk to Ryan from Epic Nature in Wisconsin. And, uh, this is a special podcast for me because I’ve known Ryan for probably the last year, year and a half. And, uh, Ryan and I got to know each other through actually one of my hobbies. Uh, and that’s the hobby farm that my wife and I have.
And, uh, as such, I’ve gotten to know. Uh, know Ryan know his wife, Dean, and gotten to learn a lot more about their farm Epic Nature and the business that they’re running there. And today we’re gonna chat with Ryan and learn how he and Dean are really changing how we as consumers look at agriculture and how they’re growing their farm, uh, and achieving their goals.
So, Ryan, thanks for joining me today. I really appreciate it. Uh, anything in the intro that I missed that, uh, maybe you want to add and tell people a little bit about yourself. Well, we’re, we’re [00:01:00] not just farmers. I mean, so, I mean, we have a farm out here and that’s obviously, uh, what’s going on. As far as this interview, you know, about our, our business and how we’ve, you know, kind of changed the way that her family’s farm is being run.
But obviously, you know, I’ve, I’ve had construction jobs all along and my wife works full time. So. We’re hard working folk, uh, outside of the farm too. So, oh, very good point. No, I should have, should have mentioned that and that’s, that’s worth adding, tell us a little bit, Ryan, just to get us started. People obviously may not be familiar with Epic Nature.
Tell us a little bit about your backstory and how you and DNE, um, got involved in this and, and, and what some of your goals and objectives for the business are. Well, First, I wanna start out by saying that that no, no [00:02:00] single man or woman should, should look at what they’ve done as, as a success by themselves and where my wife and I are now is, is because of, you know, her parents, my parents, our grandparents, our great grandparents.
For having the initiative to, to leave Europe and, and come to the United States and come to Wisconsin and, and be pioneers on, on broken land. So, you know, this is just, this is just a continuation of, of a story of, of perseverance and, and really, uh, taking advantage of opportu.
So one of the things you mentioned, and I think it’s really critical. And, and one of the reasons I wanted to chat with you is I know you still, you know, have some other side jobs that you work on and, uh, Deanne works full time [00:03:00] while you guys are building up your business and the farm and all that. And I think that’s so typical of so many business people today that, especially when they’re starting their.
Their own venture, you know, it’s, it’s not just a matter of, okay. I, one day I’m gonna decide this and I’m gonna, you know, leave my job and I’m gonna start fresh and, and burn all the bridges. Uh, there’s a transition period. And sometimes that transition period is many, many, many years. Sometimes it’s even a lifetime as, as we do a side gig and leave it as a side gig and grow from there.
Tell me a little bit about how did you guys get started with the farm? Um, again, I know it came, if I’m remember. It was in D’s family. And then, uh, it, you guys were able to acquire the farm and go from there. Can you tell me a little bit about how did you and DNE decide to get into regenerative agriculture and, and what caused that, that desire for you guys?
So J you know, just, uh, so people know that, you know, what, what we’re doing here with [00:04:00] Regener active regenerative agriculture, and, you know, the, the broader. Project of, of turning this farm into something that can be managed by, by just a couple of people without the use of, of machinery or chemicals that this is not, this particular situation is not easily duplicated or easily scalable because yes, my, my wife was a, a trust fund baby, a land trust fund, baby.
That, like I said before, that this is an amazing opportunity that, that we’ve been given, that we didn’t have to go out and, and purchase land that we were, we were married in 2001, and the family was, was gracious enough to say, okay, if you guys, you guys wanna be, be farmers, then go ahead and. [00:05:00] Take the keys take the reins, obviously, after, you know, my in-laws gave us the, the property and the keys that, that our decisions were always questioned so, I mean, it was, uh, a true evolution, not just in how we’re managing the property, but in our relationship with the people that came before us and what they, what their visions were for the property and what our visions going forward.
We’re we’re evolving into. So for, for those business owners and, and just interested parties that are watching the podcast today, tell us what is Epic Nature and, and what do you guys do? And what is, tell me a little bit about the farm when I was, when I was graduating high school, um, Deanne and I were dating and I was looking for a dairy farm that, that this was part of our, you know, what we were trying to do is, is be part of agriculture.
I grew up agriculture. My wife grew [00:06:00] up, grew up country, not necessarily as a hands on, you know, running the tractor and, and, and making and stuff like that. But we both had, you know, uh, a desire, a passion for. Not necessarily simple. I mean, you know, farming is, is far from simple. It’s, it’s actually very complicated and, and scientific at times, but you don’t have to deal with as many people, you know, working out here on the farm.
You know, the only person I have to yell at is, is myself and the animals. So, you know, there is, there’s a lot of draw to that type of lifestyle for people where they’re like, Hey, you know, I don’t wanna have a boss. I don’t wanna have a commute. I’d like to get some land out in the country. The attractive part of being a landowner being in, in agriculture is, is what is, you know, for me and, you know, my family, my father’s family, they, they were always buying land [00:07:00] and farming.
It was, you know, my grandfather always said it, if you break even farming, you’re doing good job because you’re always appreciating your assets. Your land is always, you know, growing in value. So. Know, farming, just isn’t this one sided business model where it’s all about, you know, how much, how many pounds of, of, of rhubarb do I pick or asparagus, or, you know, for the other guys, the bushels of corn per acre, there’s a, there there’s a very, a very, uh, broad, um, business model where you’re, you’re, you’re watching a lot of different things and a lot of farmers.
In the area, they end up selling off their farms either to their children or to their relatives, or just on the broader market. And that’s their retirement. They didn’t make a whole lot of money while they were farming. They were just enjoying lives and enjoying, um, you know, the, the lifestyle and in the end, what they get is, is they’ve built [00:08:00] a Nast egg in land.
So one of the things I know you’ve talked about at Epic Nature is that again, that focus on regenerative agriculture, for those of us that are less informed. Can you describe what that means, Ryan? What, what is regenerative agriculture? So, you know, these are all very popular, uh, terms that people like to use to promote their farms and stuff like that.
Regenerative agriculture is in the same. Same line of thinking as sustainable, uh, a little bit like organic there’s, uh, a few of the key, few of the key things to regenerative agriculture are minimal soil disturbance. You, you wanna keep down, you know, the, the erosion. So, you know, pasture past rotational, pasture, you know, you know, grazing, these are all big parts.
Of regenerative agriculture. The other side of that [00:09:00] is you’re, you’re looking for land that has been worn down through conventional, through conventional needs. So if I take, you know, and I go by 40 acres of corn and beans rotation, the first thing I wanna do is I wanna bring back the health of the soil.
I wanna retain the, the moisture. I want, you know, clean, clean, uh, Clean filtration, the infiltration of the, the water. I don’t want it just running off my field, going in the stream. I want to actually kinda, you know, be percolating and, and going into the groundwater, the way that a natural system is. And that’s where regenerative agriculture is, is really focused on restoring the natural balance of how, you know, the relationship between the, you know, the rain, you know, the soil and, and the, uh, the broader environ.
Oh, well, thank you for that. That’s a, a great explanation. And in a moment, I’m gonna talk to you about [00:10:00] some of the marketing things you’re doing, but before we do that, talk to me a little bit about the products that you guys have. I know, you know, you and Deanna have got crops that you guys raise, uh, I’ll call them crops.
You may not, but I’m thinking, um, some of the things you raise, uh, as well as some animals, can you tell us a little bit about the, the types of things you’re producing on the farm and, and maybe why you even chose some of. Yeah. Um, we’ve, we’ve been out here for over 20 years and I’ve failed at, at growing a lot of different things and not just the failure to, to get it in the ground on time, or have the right fertilizers and, and, and all things that, that come into making a plant productive, but to actually get value from what you’ve.
What you’ve just planted and harvested, or the time involved in just harvesting a product and getting it to market may, may not be [00:11:00] worth what it, you know, what it takes to actually grow it. So, you know, there’s, there’s an evolution of, of business model where you start out, you’ve got big ideas, big dreams, you know, we wanted to have peppers and tomatoes and, and all the melons and all this.
So we started out, you know, this was, we. We’re 21 years old. We had lots of young friends, they were in college, you know, we’re, you know, big, you know, CSA style, community supported agriculture. Everyone’s out, we’re all growing all this, this produce and it’s great. We’re all eating great, but there’s a lot of time involved and, you know, zero, you know, zero income, your profit margin, you know, is zero because you’re not, you’re not actually taking to market.
So you you’ve gotta take. But you can grow easily adapted for your climate. We’re in Wisconsin, rhubarb. So 10 years in it’s like, Hey, the rhubarb, easy to [00:12:00] grow. PEs free. Let’s make a market for our rhubarb. So there wasn’t really a market for it because who wants rhubarb in bulk? It’s gonna be wineries.
It’s gonna be people that want rhubarb juice to add to different type of beverages as a natural. So now we’ve gotta, we’ve gotta come up with a way to get a marketable product from our rhubarb because Hey, rhubarb grows easily and it’s a productive plan and it’s a, it’s a perennial. And, um, it’s considered a heavy feeder, but you can grow it without, you know, adding too much, um, you know, chemical fertilizers or stuff like that.
So, We’ve done really well with the rhubarb. The profit margin on our rhubarb now is, is excellent because it’s already been planted. All you gotta do is go and pick it, you know, and then we’re working on these different animals. We had chickens and we started out with a dozen chickens and well eggs in the store.
[00:13:00] So cheap that, you know, your feed doesn’t make, make up or the, the product you’re selling the eggs doesn’t make up for the feed that you’re putting into it. So your inputs are as much. That’s what you’re getting out. Yeah. You get your eggs free for breakfast, but you still have to attend to the chickens and all that.
So scrub that idea in favor of hatching out the eggs. Well, there is some money in hatching out eggs, but you know, in Wisconsin you can only sell a thousand chickens without having all the testing permits. So you’re capped at. So we had hatched out a thousand chicks a year for a couple years and we’re selling bullets and eating all the, the bullets are the young females and we’re eating all the young males.
And that was great, except it’s, uh, it’s a intensive job cuz you’re running and incubator all the time. So, you know, you’re making $5,000 a year and it’s very labor intensive. So scratch that onto the [00:14:00] pigs. And this is just how, how people have. Start out with what works for your property and your market.
Obviously, if, if chickens are in high demand and you can get twice as much for a bullet that I can then, well, then you’re gonna be making $20 an hour doing your, your chicken incubating and where I’m making tens. So that might be a more profitable venture for you than it is for me here. Pigs work great.
Because one, we’ve got a. We’ve got a lot of Haws. We’ve got birds of prey. We’ve got the fishers, the mink, you know, things that like to eat chicken, eat duck. So if you wanted to be free range chicken out here, it’s, it’s not gonna happen. So that’s where the becomes more labor intensive over the project versus the pigs where you just, you Fe in 2, 3, 4 acres, uh, get ’em bread.
Let the Souths go out there. Like you’d mentioned earlier that we have. Heritage read [00:15:00] red water hogs, which do excellent bearing on pastures. So we don’t need all the infrastructure. We don’t need the barns and, you know, selling piglets has become our latest, you know, that’s our, our biggest seller right now is everybody wants to be raising their own portal here in central Wisconsin.
There’s a, we have a tough time selling. Pork chops because people wanna raise their own pig. They have, you know, either they have their own property or their, their parents or their uncles, or someone has property where the family wants to raise their, their own pork. And they’re looking for someone that has piglets that were born out on dirt and, and raised in a natural way so that they have something that fits with the, the model they’re running.
This is some advice I would give to anyone that’s looking for pigs to go out and find a breeder that is raising pigs. Like you’re raising them so that they there’s not as much [00:16:00] transition, not as much shock in the transit. Oh, great advice. And I, I mean, I appreciate you sharing that story cause it really demonstrates, I think how you need, no matter what type of venture you’re moving in on, you need to take a look at what assets you’ve got.
What’s gonna work well in your environment. And, you know, learning, as you mentioned that, you know, raising chickens outdoors, probably isn’t the best in, in central Wisconsin when you’ve got all those predators that certainly. A minimum makes for a lot more inputs that you need to put in for infrastructure security and work.
And that’s gonna obviously impact your profitability, uh, just because I have a passion for them. And, and you and I got to know each other through the red model, pigs, tell us a little bit about why you chose that and how that really fits in. You made a comment, Ryan, that it, you know, if you could sell.
Chicken for twice as much, you could make twice as much money. I know that one of the things that the reasons we wanted to raise red WATS on our hobby farm was the [00:17:00] fact that we could sell those hogs for a lot more money. Even as a meat hog, uh, we’re probably bringing 50 to a hundred percent more than market.
Um, because there’s a story that goes along with them. There’s people willing to pay for a hog that’s raised outdoors. That’s raised naturally. That’s not raised in confinement. Tell us a little bit about the red wa and why, why that’s making a good fit for your farm enterprise. So we. 20 years ago, we moved out here.
We got chickens. We, we got a couple of white pigs. We raised them up. Pork’s good, you know, nothing wrong with it, but there is, you know, infrastructure involved in all that. And we raised pigs off and on of commercial breed type. And, and first off, if you’re raising pigs in a, in a, uh, stress free environment in a natural [00:18:00] environ, You’re gonna have excellent work.
It it’s, the breed is not everything. The breed is, is probably less, less than 50% of, of what you’re actually, you know, tasting in your end product. It’s when I came out, when I came out and dropped out the hugs by you, uh, one of the first things I did was go over to your feed, pick some up and taste it.
Then I asked, remember that? Yeah. I said, would you eat. And, and I could taste that the feed was, was, uh, it was lacking some flavor and freshness and not to say that the feed was bad, but it wasn’t the best possible feed. And, you know, red wa were just the, the, the pinnacle that I was searching for. If I’m raising pigs, if I’m taking all this time and, and effort to, to, to grow my own.
Why would I want to raise, you know, it’s the same as [00:19:00] a tomato. Am I gonna raise a hybrid tomato? Or am I gonna raise an heirloom? Which one do I want? Sure. So it’s the same as the port. Do I want, do I want something that grows fast and produces a lot of meat? Well, there’s nothing wrong with it, but do I want my pork chops when I throw ’em on the grill and the in-laws, you know, come over.
That they they’re like, oh, is this your, is this your Jersey beef? You know that they have know that, that the pork is not just good, not just great, but outstanding the best pork possible. And that’s where I think that the red wa have a market and can demand a little bit higher price because okay. If you’re buying, if you’re out there buying like the sprint, if you’re paying 75 or a hundred bucks for a commercial feed, and then you’re gonna go and.
Three $400 worth of feed into it. If I’m asking you to pay an extra 50 bucks for a piglet, the total [00:20:00] of, you know, the total percentage of your input to get that premium piglet to start with is, is 10% or 15% of, of the total input. So that’s where people, you know, it doesn’t hurt to spend a little bit of extra money to buy a higher quality pig.
If your end product is gonna be, you know, 15, 20% more or in my case, and a lot of people’s cases where a heritage pasture raise fork is gonna demand twice as much from the end consumer. So you’re spending 10% more upfront for the piglet, but in the end, you’re fork is worth twice as much. Great business decision and, and a great story behind that as well.
So, Ryan, one of the things I know you’ve done a lot and you, and I’ve talked about this a lot over the last year and a half is marketed your business in a way. And if I’m not mistaken, I, I don’t know about all of Epic Nature, but at least from the, the hog perspective, it’s my understanding. You’re one of the largest [00:21:00] breeders of red waddle hogs in the nation right now.
How, how did you market yourself? How did you get your name out there? What have you done to promote that side of the business? Cuz I know, I see you driving literally all over the country, delivering piglets to buyers. Um, how, how did you move from some white pigs in the, in the, you know, in the past year, 20 years ago to, uh, a large herd now of a heritage breed that has a great story.
Cuz we know stories sell, uh, in. Extra value product of those Redwater hugs. How did you market that? How did you get your name out there? Ryan shameless self-promotion fair enough. Insatiable. Uh, my, my ego has an insatiable appetite. I mean, there’s, that’s, that’s kind of a joke, but there needs to be, there is some truth to being, um, [00:22:00] aggress.
In, in promotion, in, in business, in marketing, you need to have, you need to have a little bit of, of, of aggressiveness. If you don’t stand behind your product, if you don’t believe in your product, then it’s hard to be aggressive. When we first got our red waddles, they were born November of 2015, I believe is when our first ones were born.
We didn’t actually pick them up until it’d been January. Of 2015. I do. Maybe it’s 2016. I’d have to look at the paperwork, but it was, it was two, maybe three years before we had our first red water pork from our pigs, because now there’s a saying that a true farmer doesn’t know what good meat tastes like, because they’re always eating the animals that die on their farm and selling, selling anything that has value of farmer sell.
So. You know, the first pig we ate was a call sound. Otherwise we were selling off [00:23:00] all of the, the, the feeders and breeders. You know, we need cash flow. You know, we have outside jobs, but I don’t wanna be putting, you know, there’s, we can put a little money into the business to start, but after that, it’s, it’s gotta grow on its own.
So we’re, we’re cash flowing. We’re selling these animals. We have our first pig butcher and my wife and I are eating it, looking at each other like, wow, you know, here, here, We haven’t been promoting because we couldn’t, we couldn’t say for sure. We had had Redwater. But we couldn’t say for sure that our product was great.
And then as we have more pigs and we develop this consistency and, and I’m sure I irritate a lot of people out there in, in the social media world. With every time I butcher a pig, I’m posting pictures of my pork chops and they’re all red and they’re all marbled and, and we’ve got consistently excellent meat.
So that, that increases my confidence and it increases my ability to be aggressive at marketing and, and doing things like saying, Hey, [00:24:00] I’m gonna take my truck. I’m gonna drive out to, to Virginia and anyone along the way. I I’ve got room for, you know, 20 pigs on my truck. So anyone want pigs, I’ll drive ’em out there and, and we’re all gonna share the fuel so that people can get these pigs delivered to them.
And I’m not making any money on the delivery. I’m ma I’m losing money on the. But instead of being stuck in central Wisconsin market, now I’ve broadened my market to the entire east coast, the, the entire south. Okay. Wherever I’m going, wherever I’m going that now I’ve broadened my market size, tenfold 20 a hundred, you know, a hundred times, you know, the county I live in has 80,000 people.
Okay. If I’m driving down to Dallas, Fort worth worth, there’s, there’s a couple million. So that my, my market size just exponentially grows by saying, Hey, I don’t need to [00:25:00] make money on the delivery. As long as I can get, um, a premium on each pig, I can throw 20 pigs in there. If I can get double the price on my pigs down in Dallas.
Well, right now it’s gonna cost me a thousand dollars in fuel and I get a $3,000 premium on, on a truckload of just a pickup truckload of picks. So. Yeah. It all works out for you. Yeah. That’s, that’s why, that’s why I, I drive the miles I do, because it, it doesn’t necessarily make a lot of money. And this goes back to what I said in the beginning about farming.
Farming is not about making money. It’s about enjoying life. I mean, we all die in the end. Farmers usually die before other people, so I don’t need as much money as the rest of you. . Cool Ryan. One of the things I know you’ve done a lot of, and you’ve actually just kind of started launching recently, but I know you’ve been working on it for I’m guessing the better part of the year [00:26:00] is you’ve been leveraging video and showing people your farm and showing people what you’re doing, whether that’s, you know, bushels and bushels at rhubarb that are laid.
when you guys have harvested it or things about the pigs and or anything else on the farm that you’ve got. Talk to me about your strategy behind that. And, and if I can ask, why did you choose video as a way to get your story out? Well, tr transparency, when. If I’m buying something from someone, I, I kind of wanna know that they’re legitimate and if I can go on their social media and, and look that over the past five, 10 years, that this is exactly what they’ve been doing day in and day out, that there is no, you know, there’s, there’s no secrets where, you know, if I go to someone else’s Facebook and they’ve got a profile picture that they change once every five years and a picture.
Of the local, [00:27:00] uh, their, their, uh, professional sports team or something like that. There’s just no information. There’s nothing to back up. Anything that they say, whether the, you know, who they are. I, I see it a lot. People commenting like they, their professional pig growers, and you go to their personal, um, social media thing.
And there is not one picture of a pig anywhere. And it’s like, well, you, you can’t, you can’t be very invested in your pig venture. If you’re not taking pictures of it and you’re not proud of it, you don’t want people to see what’s going on, on your farm. So that’s, and the, the other thing is, as we sell more pigs, as we, we interact with more people that we’ve in the past five years, we’ve sold pigs to, uh, more than a, maybe 200 different people.
And we’ve delivered pigs to out of state when we get there, the [00:28:00] pens are not finished. So, you know, we made the mistake at a couple farms. We unload ’em into the pen. They’ve got, you know, two or three strand, hot wire, and I I’m delivering 50 pound pigs. And I’m telling ’em like, they are not gonna stay in there.
And before we leave, the pigs are already outta the pen. So by doing a little, little educational with the, the YouTube, you know, it’s like, alright, Here’s your introduction to hog fencing say right in the video, before I unload my hogs, you need to have this type of pen built, or at least some type of secured structure for them to go in.
And then when people wanna buy pigs, I can send ’em a link to the YouTube and say, watch this video. Okay. When you’re done watching the video, tell me that you have your pen ready, then I’ll deliver the. Excellent. No, it makes a lot of sense based on your experience, Ryan, I know, uh, you know, me, I’m, I’m a huge proponent of video in marketing.
Would you recommend it to other business owners? It’s something they do. I mean, do you, [00:29:00] um, I’m assuming you believe it has the value and is yielding those results. Is that something you’d recommend? People take the plunge on, and even though it’s hard, take that next step and start answering questions and, and doing things like that on video to share more about their business.
Well, it’s kind of a sensitive topic. Uh, if I was shooting video of myself 20 years ago and I had published it 20 years ago, I’d, I’d be ashamed and I would have regretted putting those videos out there because of just how, how clueless and not just from, from an experience just from being a, a young person.
You know, if you have, if you have no experience in what you’re doing, I wouldn’t recommend you out there taking videos and publishing videos of what you’re doing, because you, you really don’t wanna know if it is going to be successful. And like you said, we’ve been filming for a [00:30:00] year and you know, why do we fill film for a year?
Well, let’s, let’s follow these projects all the way to the. There’s nothing more irritating than when I go on to, you know, see something on YouTube. People are like, Hey, you know, we’re doing this, you know, like, like we did this, a video on a, you know, permaculture installation, all right. Show a permaculture installation where you just put in a bunch of perennial plants and no follow up, or at least not a clip of a video of what it looks like six months from now in there to.
This is what we started with, and this is the finished product, whereas like, yeah, anyone can go out there until a bunch of land, throw some season and say, look at this beautiful garden we planted. It’s gonna be all weeds in two months if you’re not after it and not doing the appropriate thing. So if you wanna use video for marketing in your business, make sure you have, make sure you have something that you can stand behind.
Be sure you. It’s it’s valuable to your customer, or all you’re gonna do is, [00:31:00] is you’re actually gonna be hurting people in the long run and hurting, hurting yourself and hurting your, your, uh, your potential brand in the future. What I’m hearing you saying is that video does a great job of amplifying and it amplifies expertise when you have it, but it also can amplify incompetence.
And so make sure you’re amplifying the expertise. Is that a fair thing to summarize what you’re saying, Ryan? That that’s that’s fair. That’s fair. Yeah. That’s that editing, editing, editing can only do so much. so true. So true. Well, Ryan, I, I really appreciate your time today. Is it okay with you? If we add some links to, uh, Epic Nature, your YouTube channel and things like that.
So our viewers can find you there as well. Is that all right with you? Absolutely. We’ll do that. One of the things I love to do is, and before we wrap things up here is I love to ask just a totally random question. Uh, and it’s something I didn’t prep you [00:32:00] for and I haven’t even figured out. So we actually go to a website, uh, to generate these.
And I’m just gonna go ahead and go random question generator. Let’s see what the random question of the day is. And some, we can have some fun with this. Sometimes it works out well, sometimes it doesn’t, but let’s see what we get on the random quest of the day. Oh, this is good for a farmer. So, uh, keeping it family friendly.
Uh, what’s the story behind any one of your scars? I’m assuming from fencing and pigs and harvesting and equipment, you’ve probably got a scar to you have any that have a good story. That’s interesting. Because, uh, life on the life on a farm is, is very, it’s dangerous. It’s very dangerous work. So I’ve been blessed to be relatively scar free.
I mean, I, I burnt my, my leg on a motorcycle muffler when I was, [00:33:00] when I was 12 ish dropped a piece of pipe on my hand. And my dad told me to have my mother sew it up with a fishing line. You know, there’s, there’s, there’s a, there’s a couple of, of minor, minor scars, but, but really nothing permanent. I’ve got a, you know, a twisted nose from, from being punched while I was in mixed martial arts.
Not really a scar, but not related. Not good story though. well, I was taking self-defense classes. You know, I, I wanted to see, you know, if I was getting my, my money’s worth, so get what better way to test out. Self-defense then get in, get in a ring with someone that wants to punch you in the face. Very cool.
Well, Ryan, uh, final question for you today is if you could give any piece of advice to, uh, anybody, whether they’re a business owner, whether they’re just somebody that’s out for a job, [00:34:00] they’ve got a desire. I know there’s a lot of people that go wow, that I’d love to have some land and I’d love to have, uh, whether it be a hobby farm, or, uh, as we’re trying to do on my side, move that hobby farm into a real farm that’s making.
If you had one piece of advice to give that person before they started, what would you advise them to do?
You, you need to have a, a professional attitude, no matter what you’re doing that success is success. Isn’t something that, you know, people, people aren’t just successful. You know, by, you know, it just doesn’t fall in your lap that this is something that must be worked hard at and you need, you need good teachers.
I mean, even, even the greatest minds in the world, I mean, Einstein [00:35:00] and, and Michaelo, these guys had excellent teachers. So if, if you’re going out there to do so. You have to have that professional attitude. And that includes seeking out individuals in those fields that can cannot just help you, but, but really mentor you.
And maybe you have to go and work for them. Maybe you have to, you know, you gotta put something into that relationship to get something back. And if, no matter what you’re doing, you know, Be a professional, you know, if there’s an opportunity that that presents itself, that you can’t be successful without going after that opportunity.
So, you know, seizes the day, you know, be about it. Uh, great advice. Great advice, Ryan. Well, again, I want to thank you for your time today. I know you’ve got a ton of things going on and there’s [00:36:00] always more jobs that need to happen. Um, but, uh, let me encourage anybody that’s watching. If you’ve been intrigued at all about Ryan’s story, about agriculture, or especially about the red wattle hogs, which I readily admit, there’s a, a tremendous story behind them and, and what, what type of hog they are, why they’re different.
Watch some of Ryan’s videos check out his website, learn from him. Uh, I have learned a tremendous amount as my wife and I have tried to build our farm and worked on that. I’ve learned just a tremendous from Ryan and Deanne about one of the animals we raise, which our red waddle hogs as well. So if you’re interested in any of that, take Ryan’s advice, look him up, follow him.
Uh, he’s truly a wealth of knowledge and always willing to share that. So, Ryan, thank you again. Uh, we’re so grateful for your time. Yeah, thanks, Jonathan.[00:37:00]
