MSU Extension Animal Agriculture

So before we get started with this next session, our management session, we're actually going to have our lunch sponsor, Farm Bureau Insurance come up. They've got some really cool safety products. They've also got a few words they want to say before we get started. Check 'em out. Their table is out in the lobby area there. So I will welcome up someone from Farm Bureau. - Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Got here a little late, so I was out on a dairy farm in Hastings. I'm sorry, Saranac. I was in Hastings yesterday. Got here a little late, but I like seeing the audience that we have. A great turnout, and I think it's very important that, you know, we work to do things properly. I used to be president for Calhoun County Farm Bureau. I've been a third generation dairy farmer. So I got hired by Farm Bureau Insurance about a year ago to be on the risk and safety management side, on the insurance side, not Michigan Farm Bureau. And we've seen some things where we're having a lot of losses and claims, you know, with tractor fires, skid steer fires. So we came out with some free stickers that we have out on our booth available now that just came off the print shop for skid steer and track loader fire safety checklists, and then we have a farm combine one as well. So they're free, come out and grab 'em. And one thing that's nice with the skid steers, how many dairy farmers we have out here? Got some. You know, and we have 'em in Spanish as well, 'cause a lot of the skid steer operators we notice are Hispanic operators. So I think it's nice. My goal is to have every one of these stickers on a combine or a skid steer everywhere in the state of Michigan. Even if you're not insured by Michigan Farm Bureau, they're free for you to take, so please grab 'em. And they don't do no good sitting on a shelf. They do good sitting on here on a piece of machinery, and safety first, and doing preventative maintenance goes a long way. I know you all can attest to that. So thanks for your time. - All right, thank you so much. So we're going to get started with our management session this afternoon. The purpose of this session is to inform just on some of the bigger picture activities that are happening on your operation. Before we do that, we're going to go ahead and give Michigan Valley Irrigation a round of applause for sponsoring our session. So in this session we're going to hear from Kyle McCarty from the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development. He's going to talk about Right to Farm and the GAAMPs. We're also going to hear from James Snarski from Simon Brothers on employee training, and then Nate Baker from Border View Farms on engaging with the public on social media. So let's welcome Kyle to kick off the session. - How close do I...? Okay, cool. I don't have to go like right in. So Tess said we're a little early, so I have 55 minutes? (laughing) Perfect, because I don't want it either. So I work for Right to Farm Program, Department of Ag. I've been in this position a little over six years now. This presentation comes in a 35-40 minute version. For Tess we've cut it down to 15, so we're going to fly a little bit, but that doesn't mean that there's not meaning and there's not conversations we can have after. So if there's something you're confused about, we have a Q&A, but if we don't get it there, don't be afraid to reach out to me or one of my counterparts that's here. Right to Farm's been at some of these for quite a while. We've got myself, Erica, Steve, and a micro program manager that's floating around here as well too. So I wanted to start this to talk generally about the Right to Farm Act. Michigan's right to Farm Act is a little unique. Unlike other states, our Right to Farm Act is three and a half pages long. It's pretty short. The whole point to Right to Farm and Right to Farm Act is to solve nuisance. So this is an act that in essence deals with the circumstances in which a farm can be considered a public or private nuisance. So that is a mouthful, so let's break that down a little bit. We're talking about private nuisances, which are, what is it that you're doing on your operation that may have some sort of unlawful interference with the use and enjoyment of someone else's land. And when we talk about public nuisance, we're talking about the same concepts, but the public generally. So these take a lot of forms. At the end of the day, it's the court that would decide whether it is or isn't a nuisance. The beauty of Right to Farm is that we've got some standards and some clauses in our act to solve some of that without even showing up to court, in essence. So these things we deal with agricultural nuisance, they're pollutants, odors, noise, things like flies, aesthetic stigmas, and pollution. So there's a lot of pieces and a lot of parts and ways we can deal with all those facets on a farm. So with this act, like I had mentioned, it's three and a half pages. It was first passed in 1981 and amended in '99. This act establishes what we call the GAAMPs, Generally Accepted Ag Management Practices. That's an acronym. It is a mouthful. I didn't create it, but bear with me. We will come back and talk about one of them in particular, but they come in a document form in black and white for us. This act comes through and it sets some baseline definitions for using this act, 'cause at the end of the day, this act is meant to be nuisance resolution in a courtroom setting as determined by a judge. So with that, we have definitions. We're talking about a farm: the land, plants, animals, buildings that are used in commercial production of farm products. And commercial production is italicized over here on purpose. We're talking about a farm that's intending to make a profit. They're intending to sell something to make that profit. It's not about your own personal use. These farm operations, you know, there's general things that we deal with, the noise, odors, field preparation, management. Some of those basic definitions just lie within the act itself. And lastly, we're talking about producing some sort of farm product, a feed, food, fiber, or fur. This act does not get into windmills, it does not get into solar, because we're not producing farm products. So again, this act is meant to be some sort of affirmative defense. If you're doing certain things, you have this concept of an affirmative defense. So with that, I pulled a couple statements right out of the act that deal with this affirmative defense. One is that, in black and white here, a farm or farm operation is not considered a public or private nuisance if the farm or farm operation alleged to be a nuisance conforms to GAAMPs. So in other words, if you're following these agricultural management standards, a court can look at this and say, "Oh hey, you're meeting these standards. You're not considered a public or private nuisance. You're not affecting someone else's, you know, right to enjoy their land right off the top." The next one, in this '99 amendment of this state law, it included preemption language. And this is pretty powerful stuff, because June 1, 2000, it's expressed legislative intent that this act preempt any local ordinance, regulation, or resolution that, I'm going to paraphrase, in essence is more strict than what's in these GAAMPs. So we're talking about local zoning, we're talking about local nuisance mitigations, or hey, maybe your local zoning says you can't drive your tractor after midnight and apply manure to a field. Well, guess what? That's not in the GAAMPs, but we can use these GAAMPs to preempt that. So, with that, again we're talking about select local statutes. It does not preempt other state or federal statutes. That's a long list of things that's out there in other state laws, whether it's hemp, animals at large, road laws, road safety, animal abuse/neglect, state wine and beer laws when we deal with farm markets, or the big class that Laura really loves, NREPA, and everything that EGLE does. We do not preempt them because that's another state law. So with what we do, this act gives us a complaint response. So whenever Right to Farm receives a complaint, it could be from a general person, a neighbor, a township, someone with EGLE, we are going to require that we have some sort of name with that. If it's one of your neighbors that calls and makes a complaint, we have to get that person's name. And part of that is that after we meet with you as a farmer, or, you know, typically it's the farmers we're meeting with 'cause they're the ones that own the land and have the most skin in the game here, we're going to go chat and have that same conversation and do some sort of education with that neighbor. What actually happened? What is it that we're actually doing in ag that's a common misconception that that neighbor may have? I know someone mentioned this morning that there's eyes everywhere. Most of them are our neighbors and the people that live down the street or next door. So again, we're going to deal with those misconceptions. The most common nuisance things that we see is some sort of agricultural pollution concern. Doesn't mean that there's actually pollution happening, it's that there's some sort of general concern. And most of that is some sort of land-applied manure. It is worth noting that in the event of a discharge to public water, so manure that actually hits a stream, that is something that's going to be an EGLE-related thing because that's a NREPA violation potentially, so we have to pass the baton off to EGLE in those cases. I think that deals with everything there. So if there is an issue that we see on a farm, if there's something that, you know, hey, you spread manure and you didn't work it in as quick as the neighbor thinks it should have been worked in, we're going to identify that and we're going to ask some questions and say, "Okay, what did we do and how can we fix it?" And it's up to you as a farmer to have that timeline to figure that out. It your choice at the end of the day, and at the end of the day, we're also a voluntary program, so we can't make you do anything, but we're going to help you document that what it is we're doing here, here, and here is met, and eventually we would use that hopefully as resolved. If there is any technical assistance that you need, we can't do that. But we do have lots of folks within conservation districts, you know, the MAEAP program, USDA, MSU Extension, and a whole list of private consultants that's out there that can actually do technical assistance. So I'm talking about, hey, if you didn't have a recent soil test, someone from one of those individual places can help you do that. Most of the time in today's day and age, that's probably someone with your local, you know, fertilizer supplier that could easily do that. But again, the idea here is that we're going to collectively work together as a community to resolve these issues. So lastly, the whole point of this is to get to the GAAMPs. The GAAMPs have an advisory committee. They're comprised of a lot of folks within industry. It's a very large umbrella at the end of the day. MSU, USDA, EGLE, maybe part of some of these DNR township county officials, and a lot of our industry groups. And that is itself is also a long list. But at the end of the day, we currently have eight sets of GAAMPs. I say currently 'cause there may be one in the works, but we're here to focus on this one about manure management. Now some of these are interconnected. Manure management may relate to site selection when we're talking about new and expanding livestock or, you know, typically nutrient management, because it's hard to deal with manure and not consider fertilizer application as part of that too. But it's a wonderful web we weave. One thing that's worth pointing out, in these manure GAAMPs, it mentions that operations should have some sort of written management plan for manure. How much manure do you produce on a year? How much land-based do you have? What type of soil situations do we deal with? What types of crops are we growing? We want to talk about manure from the back end of whatever animal that produced it all the way to the crops we're harvesting. An operation should have those pieces. How often they're updated is really up to you, but things like soil tests, we have standards in here to say they should be somewhere around three to four years old at worst. If we do have temporary stored manure, there's some pieces and parts in here about standards. I know our KBS gentleman got into that, the weeds there a little bit, but we're talking on farmsteads. So if it's right off the back of the barn, we could store manure in that spot for a year. If it's on a field, we're talking six months if it's not covered, one year if it is. A lot of these pieces also have some rotational pieces. So if we do stockpile manure, let's not come back to that same spot until three or four years out, for that same nutrient piece we were talking about. These GAAMPs identify that manure cannot be applied or flow onto neighboring properties unless there's some sort of agreement there. You know, your manure needs to stay on your land. Same concept with rivers, surface waters. Your manure needs to stay on your land. It doesn't belong somewhere else. So with manure GAAMPs, there's some field scale standards that are here related to odor management. And three minutes. Perfect. That's fancy. So field scale things, right from the GAAMPs we're talking about manure that shouldn't be applied within 150 feet of surface water. So when we start talking about, yeah, we're going to spread manure, especially in cover crop situations where you may not have to work it in, we need to be at least 150 feet from surface waters or areas subject to flooding, unless we're talking about immediate incorporation. So when we're doing surface applications, we need to stay back from these sensitive water spots, because, you know, comes back to problem one. Your minority needs to stay on your own land, unless we've got conservation practices in there to prevent it against runoff. So maybe those are where the places where our buffer strips can help us, or take field slope into considerations, if that field slopes down but you've got to berm between that water spot. Hey, there's a conservation practice there. It's language that puts common sense into reality. The whole incorporation of manure, I know that came up earlier. The language we have is for nuisance, we want to incorporate that manure as soon as possible after application, you know, within 48 hours as weather conditions permit. That's a long sentence, but if our system's to do tillage, 48 hours, get it worked in. If it's a situation where we've got pastures, forage crops, wheat stubble, no-till, or we're retaining crop residue for erosion control, we may not have to work it in. But if your system, again, is to do some tillage, we need to come back and think about that as part of that solution. And then, again, there's a whole definition of what incorporation actually is here. We can save that for another day for the sake of time. Lastly, I have some pieces about application of manure for nuisance mitigation. Now, these are a list of things that could help reduce complaints and odors, but they may not be mandatory, but there's a lot of things we can do that are beyond the scope of just working our manure in to be better neighbors. Things like avoiding spreading when that wind is blowing toward a populated town, you know, especially on those fields that are right outside of town. Avoid spreading weekends and holidays. I've got a really fun story about spreading right before a wedding that you don't want to get into. (attendees laughing) Backyard weddings kind of suck when you have manure. Use weather info to the best advantage, spreading, you know, when we have these early morning warmups and wind turbulations that can come into that. And lastly, there are places where vegetated air filters, you know, planting a row of trees with certain neighbors can make a big benefit to both parties involved. Lastly, if you have questions about the act, the GAAMPs. michigan.gov/righttofarm is where you can find us. And if you need a picture of an email or something, you can find us if you don't want to just remember michigan.gov/righttofarm. I guess lastly, Michigan Department of Ag has lots of social media stuff that's kind of cool and entertaining if you want to get a hold of us. Thanks. - Amazing. Next up we're going to hear from James Snarski from Simon Brothers, LLC. He's going to talk about ongoing employee training that makes a difference. - One way or the other. - So we'll put that middle space there. - All right, thank you. I'll be talking about the training processes in which we have over at Simon Brothers Trucking. Simon Brothers Trucking, we're about eight miles to the west where we're currently sitting right now. Began in 1915 with one of the current owner's great-grandfather actually loading milk onto a wagon that was pulled by a horse. So we'd like to hold onto that. We were pretty close, right before we got out of hauling milk, to hauling milk for 100 years, which is pretty unique for a lot of people to say, especially within the trucking business. We're an agriculturally based trucking company, and what that really means is if it comes in or out of a farm, chances are we've hauled it before. So we haul everything from manure, which is one of our larger divisions, to apple juice, apple cider, we'll haul that from Lake Michigan back over to Lake Huron for processing. Grape juice, things like that. We also haul bedding sand into dairy farms that use sand. Grain obviously in the fall. We do a little bit of silage. We've got some agitation boats that kind of go along with the manure division. We run those and then obviously we need to train for all of those different divisions. So during this presentation we're going to talk about our onboarding process; the training kind of overall in general; some of the safety things that we get through along with the training; the maintenance, because we need to train people to understand what's broke, why it broke, and how we can not break it in the future; and then kind of just the overall company culture, and that'll kind of be spread thin throughout the rest of the presentation. So our onboarding process, when we looked back and we said, "Man, what's the biggest headache of trying to haul manure?" A, you usually have 5 months out of 12 to try to haul it. That's very weather dependent, it's very seasonal. You get a half an inch of rain, now instead of calling in 25 guys to work, now you're calling in nobody. So it's pretty hard to work with the schedule that is manure and agriculture, and then also trying to find guys who have the Class A CDL, because we are not a farm, we haul commercial plates, and so trying to find guys with CDLs that are willing to work around rain and seasonal type stuff. Like right now we don't really have any trucks going out, obviously with the field conditions, but the whole training process begins with the onboarding. So we're very upfront during the phone interviews, during the resume reviews, and then the in-person interviews, just say, "Hey, this is what we have. This is what all of our employees currently live with, work with," and we're very upfront with 'em right off the bat, 'cause not only does it take the right individual to be able to work these kind of hours, six days a week, 80 hours, you know, sun up to sun down, but also just being clear and transparent right off the bat kind of goes a long way, so that once we get that person in the door, they understand what the expectation is as far as the work schedule. Then as we're training them, we're not training a guy for two weeks, dumping a lot of energy and time into 'im, and then they say, "Well, that's really not for me." So our training process truly begins during the onboarding, like what I mentioned there. We also performed the pre-employment drug screen, background checks, driving record checks. Obviously if they're going to be hauling commercial in a Class A capacity, we need to to be able to do that legally. Training overview day one. So on the very first day when the employee comes in, they've already been hired on, we start training from the second they walk in the door. They sit down with the HR representative, so that would give 'em all of their regular clock in information, W-2s and all that fun paperwork stuff. They go through the billing process. Every facet of the company obviously we need to be able to bill for, and there are certain things, or certain divisions rather, that bill a little bit differently. So for example, we have an electronic billing system for anything in a super tanker, so that would be like our pool water our juice. We're starting to turn that over into more of our dirt side, so for cow sand, grain, things of that sort. And then we get 'em familiar with the facility. So we take 'em and walk 'em around. We've got two large shops. We do outside repairs, we do fleet repairs. Got an app store hooked onto one of our buildings. So we go through, because there's so many moving pieces that all need to happen so fast, we try to get 'em as much information as they can possibly digest before we just kind of throw 'em out of the cauldron into the fire. We get 'em familiar with the equipment that we have. We've got two different kinds of trucks. We have Western Stars and Freightliners, and the operation of 'em is the same, but they might look a little bit different. So we take 'em into each one of those semis to make sure that they're comfortable operating either one, and then throughout the rest of the training process they become more and more familiar until it's second nature. We'll walk 'em around into the repair areas that they should be familiar with. If they run into an issue out on the job and they need to park in this building, this base or this mechanic can work on it. It takes a lot of coordination, and it's easier to be out front with them and say, "Hey, this is the north shop pit. If you have this breakdown park, over here." And then it's just kind of easier to hit all that stuff up front. So on the job, hauling manure is very specialized in general, and then trying to do it in a semi that does not broadcast or apply is even more special yet. So you can see from the picture, that's actually relatively counterproductive. It's not just a trick of the picture. This particular day we got the field done a lot sooner than what we anticipated, so we brought it all back, and at the end of the day it just brought us with a pretty cool picture. But trying to get our employees on the same page all within a reasonable timeframe with such specific equipment and specialized equipment, it's pretty hard to do, so we've fallen back to three-step process, and this works pretty efficiently for the most part. We can take a driver that can float gears in a manual transmission, and usually within two days we can get them comfortable enough to go out and be driving on their own, which is very useful, instead of now in the past taking a week and then kind of throwing 'em out of the nest and see if they would fly. At this point we can kind of go over certain things like our SOG policies that cover everything from parking on the company property to shifting gears, to hauling dirt, doubles, water, juice, all of that stuff. So they get all the information right off the bat on a piece of paper, and then once they get that information, during each one of these three steps, they have that paper with them. So as they're going over and say, "Hey, this is why we need to pull the red button out when we're offloading." "Well, why do we need to do that?" As they're riding along, they can look through that sheet so as before they even answer the question, they have the information for the answer. So it's a three-part process right off the bat, and then once they're out on their own and can safely operate one of our semis or heavy pieces of equipment, we do a 30-day review at the end of that. And a 30-day review, we'll sit down with the FTO or the trainer, whoever trained them in that truck, and the new hire, and we say, "Hey, how's everything going?" They'll start off on the same jobs, drive around with each other. They should be pretty familiar. Within 30 days, it's pretty much the same after that. You go to a different farm, it might be different hours, it might be a different route, let's say, on the same farm, but at that point they should have a pretty good idea of what's going on. So through the training process, we consider safety to be pretty important. In the area of trucking that we're in, we're considered a heavy haul trucking. Our lightest plate trucks are at about 115,000, and our other ones are 161, so we can haul whatever Michigan's legal loads are, and then 164 and change whatever that is. But we're dealing with some pretty heavy pieces of equipment, pretty specialized pieces of equipment, so they need to understand what they're doing, so as they get into regular driving situations, they at least have the base knowledge and comfort to be able to operate that as it needs to be operated. So the safety is integral through the whole process, through the whole operation, and through that, you know, we'll do quality training at the very beginning so we can get 'em as much information as they can digest. 30-day review comes along, make sure that they can process that information and apply it through the day-to-day workday. We'll do an annual training. So as of last week, I've completed all the presentations for every division within the company. So that will conclude two manure presentations, one crawler presentation, which is our agitation boat, one for dirt and doubles, and then the other one for juice and water. And so all of our employees will actually sit in this room that we've booked out here in a couple weeks and we will do pretty much this. We'll all death by PowerPoint, everyone will get the SOGs, and it just tries to get everybody on the same page, 'cause obviously in agriculture there is some turnover, some turnover on there, so it's harder to keep everybody on the same page if you've got people coming and going. Obviously the goal is to keep people around and retention, but a lot of the annual trainings that are done keep everybody on the same page, and we'll keep people in the same room that have been here for 10 years, that have been here for two weeks. So QA, periodic ride-a-longs. We've got one employee that drives, that in his spare time will go out and drive with everybody, making sure everybody's on the same page, driving the equipment as we need 'em to. We take company-wide feedback. The management level, we're brushing shoulders with all the drivers throughout the day. I mean, in the office we're seeing, let's say 60% of the drivers on a daily basis, and then other managers like myself are going onto jobs. Trouble shooting things, fixing things, or also having the FaceTime with the driver. So if there are any issues that can be done, it can be communicated either in person or on the phone. I usually talk to, on an average day when we're hauling, I'm dispatching 25 to 30 people. And in that kind of timeframe there's usually a lot of back and forth letting me know how things are going, and then we can adjust them as we go forward. We do weekly management meetings, for example, we do a Monday operations meeting. So we sit down and kind of just overlook the whole company, and then we kind of dive into the rest of the week and how things are going, and we kind of adjust and pivot at that point. Along with the safety, we use the safety and the training kind of in conjunction. So the picture over here on this side, this is actually a format called Samsara. Oops, an app called Samsara that we also use on the desktop. But this is a GPS unit in the truck. You see we got an average speed, the unit number, we've actually got a snapshot of the camera the last time he stopped, and then it shows me that he's in motion. So these are on all of our power units. We can monitor and record data. If there's any issues, discrepancies on the road, if there's an accident, harsh turning, rolling stop signs, things like that, it sends management an alert. And then we can either call that driver and say, "Hey, it looks like you ran like five stop signs today. Is everything going okay, or like are we missing something here?" But we can address that immediately and efficiently with that driver, and so instead of being, "Well, you know, my neighbor saw you going around the corner a little too fast," it takes the subjective portion out of it, and so everybody's on the same page. So we use that for continuing training. This next slide here is a video, and I apologize if there's audio on there, and if the audio's not very good, but this is a camera view of one of our manure tanks. I'm not even sure I'm holding onto this. But this is from one of our manure tanks that was hauling manure down by Battle Creek. I was over working on a crawler, and I got an alert for a head-on collision, which is not something that we typically see. Usually like if the road is a hard 90 and it's a two-lane road, you'll kind of catch it here and there. But at that point you kind of see what the route is and can expect that. Where he was driving, I knew there shouldn't have been any near collisions within the route that he was hauling for that day, so it immediately popped up on my phone, and when it did, this is what I saw. So yeah, that's a little concerning as you're on a dairy farm about an hour and a half away, and you're like, "Ah, I'm not sure how that's going to go." But I'll play it again one more time. So he's maintaining his lane. I can see he's going 43 miles an hour. The car crosses the center line. Luckily my driver, who's fully loaded with manure, he's got about 9,000 gallons behind him at this point, does absolutely everything right. He veers off to the side, tries to delay contact. The miles per hour we've noted isn't real accurate. We guessed him to actually doing like 28 miles an hour at impact, but this collision we were able to see before he even called me. I had one of the crew leaders on site say, "Hey, this one driver was sideswiped by another guy. Totally wasn't at fault, but EMS is on the way." Everybody ended up being okay from this crash, my driver as well as the person who crossed the center lane. But something like this is huge, because four years ago before we had these Samsara units, he would've had to call me, "Hey, I got sideswiped." And then everybody's emotions go way through the roof. "Well, are you okay? I mean, where are you at?" 'cause you don't know where they're at at that point because there's no GPS. So this particular portion, or this particular GPS system has been awesome, and we use it every single day for people who are following too close to near collisions like this. I have this exact video in each one of my presentations for the whole company, show exactly what you should do and why you need to pay attention every day that you're out on the road, 'cause obviously we're putting miles on, we're performing a service for our customers, and we do that on the roadway, and this is how unpredictable the roadway can be, so. Does that work now? There we go. So there's a video of that. Scheduled maintenance, I'll kind of touch on this just a little bit, because as far as the training goes, our scheduled maintenance is half of the scheduled repairs that we do, if that makes sense. I might have confused the way I said that, but our drivers don't know it's broke if they don't know what it looks like when it's not broke. Sometimes it's pretty obvious, but you'd be really surprised. We got 30 units out on the road every single day, and you've got drivers who have driven for the last 50 years, and then you've got some kid who just learned how to float gears yesterday that's driving around with a trainer. So we fill out DVIRs every single day. That's another regulation from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration that likes to be nosy on what we're doing. But that's all good. Right here we've got a good example of a driver who's writing up stuff very accurately and specifically so we can get the issues addressed. We fill out the DVIRs every single day. We do mileages and formulas and stuff off of that. We've got a service writer on staff, so for anything that breaks down, to keep our guys moving, they would call them, they would get it addressed. We've got three licensed dedicated fleet mechanics on staff just for our units, early shifts, and weekends to make sure all that stuff gets covered in a timely fashion. This picture is just one of one of our shops. One winter we got together, well, every winter we do, but this winter I hopped up top and took a nice picture. We have some of the drivers come in, some of our crew leaders. We have five crew leaders on staff that have been with us for a few seasons, so they understand how the manure process works. And then also in the wintertime they double as some, not so mechanics, but people who are throwing wrenches around trying to fix stuff. So as they come in in the wintertime, they're troubleshooting and fixing a lot of these parts and pieces. So our mechanics will do everything from the fenders down, and then all air lines and electrical, and then our guys will do everything that's green or hydraulic related. So when our guys come in, they're understanding how all this stuff is fixed, what's broke, so that way when it goes out there and gets covered in manure again, and you can't see what's going on, they know, "Oh hey, I worked on that last winter. This is how that gets fixed. These are some of the issues that we typically run into that with." So that's a little bit of the preventative maintenance portion of it. Here's the contact information slide. My stuff's down there at the bottom. Yeah, I think that would be it on my part. - Excellent. Okay, so our last speaker for this session will be Nate Baker from Border View Farms. He's going to be speaking on engaging with the public on social media. - [James] Just a second. - I put that there so I have something for YouTube tomorrow. (participants laughing) Okay, good afternoon. My name is Nathan Baker. I farm with my family down in Waldron, Michigan. We're right on the Ohio-Michigan border. And I'm going to talk to you about engaging the public with social media. So why using social media matters? Well, there's a few different things. Has anybody ever, you go to a conference like this or have somebody tell you that you need to share your story before somebody shares it for you? Probably 10, 15 years ago when I was going to a lot of Farm Bureau conferences and different stuff, they talked about that a lot, where, you know, there was people that were anti-GMOs, or anti-big livestock farms, or whatever it was out there telling the public about how evil farmers are, and they said, "Well, we got to share our story for us." So that's part of my big picture is, you know, share our story and tell people how we do things in agriculture instead of letting people who aren't involved in agriculture tell that for us. You guys are the experts in it, not somebody that's never been on a farm before, right? So that team's going to come up a couple of times here, but, and another reason why using it might matter is if you're doing any direct sales. Anybody do any sell quarter beef or half a hog or any of that kind of stuff, social media is a great way to engage with your local community and to help you find some customers. So it's really a good way to help connect with your customers and to help drive some sales, so. We'll talk about my social media journey a little bit, and where I kind of started. Back in 2011, I started a Facebook page for our farm, for Border View Farms directly. Not my personal one, but the actual farm page. I started a YouTube channel in 2015, and back then this was a lot of just, you know, posting a picture of the combine in the field dumping into the grain cart, or a short video clip of a planter going or something like that. It wasn't quite what I'm doing today with YouTube, and we'll get into that in a minute. But started the YouTube channel in 2015 there, same type of stuff, short video clips to start with there. But sometime, well, it was in August of 2015, our local community has a plow day every year. Has nothing to do with our farms, just, you know, old farmers like to come and get their antique tractors out and plow fields for a day for fun, right? Well, one of my neighbors happens to have a Big Bud tractor with a 21 bottom plow on it. Here's an opportunity. So I went, I took my drone, which was fairly new at the time and took a five and a half minute video clip of that, threw it up on YouTube, and it kind of blew up over the next six months or something. So kind of got me interested a little bit more into figuring out how do I do this again? How do we make that happen, you know, a second time? I'm still trying to replicate what that first video did, but we'll get there. So somewhere around 2019 I started an Instagram page. I also kind of changed my format a little bit. That's when I started doing more of a daily vlog style video. What do I do every day on the farm type of thing. So if any of you guys have ever seen like Millennial Farmer, Brian's Farming videos down in Ohio, there's probably 100 of us now that make these kind of videos, but those were the guys that I kind of started watching, and I thought, "If they can do it, I can do it." Like we're the same type of farm, same people here, basically. There there's no reason that I can't do something like that. So that was kind of where I, you know, it all led from that. How do we share the big picture story to moving on, you know, the next step. And so that's where I sort of started with that. So now I make almost daily videos posted on YouTube. Basically any day that I'm working at the farm, I've got my GoPros, I've got my phone out, and I am trying to film what I'm doing. It's really easy from a cab of a tractor or combine, you know, 'cause autosteering, you just sit there and film it anyway. It's a lot harder in the winter when we're doing shop work and changing oils and stuff, trying to make sure that I capture enough or have interesting content to put on, but I try and do the best that I can. I also use Instagram and Facebook for some Stories, short form stuff, just to try and, you know, continue to build that following a little bit. But basically the goal is to show the day-to-day life on a modern row crop farm, in my case. I just, I want help people understand what happens every day, why we do the things that we do. Another thing I want to talk about is addressing controversial topics. Those things come up from time to time, not frequently, but enough that, you know, I'm not afraid to back away from somebody asking me, "Well, why are you spraying that field with glyphosate?" or, "Why are you using GMOs?" or whatever the case may be for our farm. And it's an opportunity for me to help people understand, you know, why it is that we do the things that we do. All right, so let's talk about choosing the right platforms. There's lots of different social media platforms, right? YouTube is obviously my platform of choice. That's the one that I have the biggest following on. That's the one that I post to the most frequently. Instagram is another really good one, tends to be a little bit younger crowd on that one. It's really good for helping to connect you with other people doing the same type of thing. Little different format there, mostly in pictures or short video, their Reel format. Facebook, obviously Facebook is kind of the one that everybody knows, everybody can use, and most people do use. It doesn't matter if you're a 15-year-old kid or you're a 70-year-old adult, everybody's on Facebook. So that's going to be your widest draw and pull. That's, you know, if you're doing direct sales and that kind of stuff, that's probably the best platform for that marketing aspect of it there. X, apparently now it's X instead of Twitter. I've never figured that one out. I do have a Twitter account for the farm. I haven't logged into it for probably three years anyway. I just, that one doesn't click with me. If it does, I know there's a lot of ag stuff on there, I just haven't figured out how to use it really well yet. TikTok, another one, that one's maybe even newer and more the younger crowd than Instagram is. Again, not a platform that I am on, but very much centered around the short-form videos, and I know people have gained some really big followings on that one as well. Snapchat. So Snapchat's a little bit different in how it works. I have that for personal. I've never done anything with the farm stuff through it, but I do know some other ag YouTubers who have started on Instagram, or, I'm sorry, on Snapchat. They were sharing stories on there, and it kind of blew up to the point where everybody was telling 'em, "Hey, you should start a YouTube channel." And they have, and now have hundreds of thousands of followers, and it's amazing how that transition can happen. LinkedIn's another one I'll just mention real quick. That's probably not, you know, it's obviously different than the rest of those. It's more of the professional side of stuff. If you're looking for a job, it's a great one to be on. If you're trying to promote agriculture, I don't know if there's a fit there for that one. Tinder is not the platform you're looking for. It's the wrong type of social media, so let's steer clear of that one. But one thing that you might do, or another thing to consider is starting a podcast, something like that. I know a lot of people that do that, so. Let's see. So how to get started. Well, what do you post? Well, there's a couple questions you got to ask yourself before you can figure that out, and it's who's your target audience? Are you doing the direct sales that you're trying to reach people in your local community that want to buy whatever product it is that you have for sale? What's your goal with it? Is it that increased sales, or are we in that big picture, I just want to put my stuff out there and help promote agriculture. When do you post? Well, a couple of things with that. One, it has to be sustainable. You can't do what I do and post every day. It's not sustainable, even though I've been doing it for four and a half years. You'll burn yourself out eventually. But I do think that consistency is key. Now, whether that's once a month, once a week, every three days, something like that, people come to expect your posts, and so they want to see it on a regular and consistent basis. And along those same lines, be predictable. I was researching some stuff preparing for this a little bit and somebody was talking about podcasts and how the majority of podcasts start and never even make it to 10 episodes, and then they just kind of sit there and never make another one. One of the things with that is it can be really hard to continually put out something every week, every week, every week, like especially a podcast that takes a significant amount of time to, one, record it, and then go through and do the editing process and all of that. But maybe start like a five-week series. Put one out every week for five weeks, take a two-month break, come back, do another five-week series where, you know, you address another topic for those five episodes or something like that. And then the most important thing for me is just find your style, right? For me, it's long form YouTube videos. That's what fits. I don't do a lot with the other ones. My Facebook and Instagram stuff, I post fairly frequently when we're in the fields, you know, in the fall and in the spring. I haven't posted anything on 'em for several weeks at this point. So it's just not my style. But there's also, you know, there's different styles of, I'll call it the YouTube videos, but any of these platforms. You can be the informative type, which is more what I do. I like to share the why's and the how's and, you know, how does this product work kind of stuff. There's a lot of other people that are much more entertaining than I am. That's not my specialty, but people still watch for some reason. Again, long-form versus short-form videos. And then there's another one, live videos. I try and utilize those at least once a month when we're not in the busy season, and try and do it once a week when we are more in the fields and stuff, and that's just a good way to connect with your audience, kind of have that instantaneous feedback where they can ask a question and I can answer it right then and there, so. And then the biggest thing with getting started is just kind of have to do it. I sat around for six months watching other people do this, like, "How do I start? I don't even know how to start doing this." And eventually I just kind of made that decision of, "We got to do it. We just got to start." So I made the first video, and it's been pretty seamless ever since. Hardest part is starting. Yeah. Okay, so I'll show a few examples of some posts. That one over there is a sample of a YouTube video, and that's what everybody is going to see, right? So there's two things in there that are going to make people want to click on it and watch my video. One is the picture, the thumbnail, which is pretty important, has to be something interesting. And number two is the title. If you don't have a good title, you don't have a good thumbnail, nobody's going to watch it. That's what I've learned. That one happened to do pretty well. That's a good picture, and the whole "Should have Got a 12 Row" thing. We run an S780 combine with an 8 row corn head, and I get comments about it all the time on how I should have a 12 row. I won't get into the reasons why it doesn't fit our operation right now, but that particular day was the one day this fall that I could have run a 12 row corn head and gotten a little bit more done, and so I kind of played off that a little bit. This middle one, that's a Facebook post from this fall. Probably was actually posted on Instagram, and then, you know, Instagram and Facebook are owned by the same company, so you can cross post. I post it to Instagram, it automatically goes to my Facebook page as well. But just a picture of the scene coming off a grain dryer there that fall. And then this is an Instagram Reel, that we were down at the National Farm Machinery Show in Louisville last year, and the John Deere booth there, they had a little pedal pull set up. And I, well, let's see, does this play? That video that I just, this kids doing (indistinct) I pulled my phone out real quick and the videoed it and threw it up there. His face isn't in it. Nothing. It somehow or another, that hit the algorithm, and it has like 1.25 million views. I try all day to get that one to do it, but no, it's this one where, you know, I get nothing for it, but it's just how it works sometimes. Things to post about, though. So if you were going to start doing something, you know, whether that's just a Facebook page or a YouTube channel or something, I mean, you guys mostly a livestock crowd from what I understand. They didn't tell me this was for the Michigan Manure Summit when I agreed to it, Sarah. I found that out afterwards. That's okay. I'm not a livestock guy, so I don't have that background or that content put out there. But, you know, feeding livestock and not just the, you know, the feed mixer dumping it into the bunks or however you guys do it. I don't know. But what are you putting in it? How are you mixing it? What's going into the decision making process on what you're feeding your livestock? I think people are really interested in that kind of stuff. Caring for the animals. You know, obviously we talked about that controversial topic stuff earlier a little bit. Antibiotics, vaccines, whatever, that's all controversial stuff, but tell 'em why. Because you're caring for your animals, you're taking care of them, right? Making sure they're not sick or whatever. Running a chopper. I've got a buddy that's a dairy farmer just north of us. I've come and videoed his chopper and that whole silage making process. People love that stuff. People love equipment, especially equipment that they've never seen before. And I know choppers are second nature to anybody in here that's doing that, but for most people, they're not, so showing that and how they work, that's a really good thing. One thing that I think would be really cool, show a time lapse of packing a bunker, all of the tractors with the blades, you know, dumping trucks and pushing that up. Show 'em covering it and putting the tarps and tires on and all that. I think that would make a great video. Hauling manure. I'm just sitting here at the Manure Summit. Again, why? Why are you hauling it? How are you taking precautions to take care of the environment? Tell 'em you're coming to this meeting to learn how to do that stuff better. All that is good things for that big picture, public image. Obviously everybody loves baby animals. But again, highlight the positives, you know, show the things that you guys are doing well and how your environmental stewardship practices are and the sustainability aspects of it. But again, don't be afraid to address the controversial topics, and explain why you're doing what you're doing, 'cause you guys are the experts at what you do. All right, so some tips for being successful, in my opinion. Be real, be relatable. Like people don't want to see fake stuff on the internet. Well, okay, I take that back. Everybody wants to see fake stuff on the internet. At some point, but what you guys probably will be trying to do or how to promote agriculture in social media. So, you know, humanize it. Be the face of the farm. Put your face out there if you're comfortable with it and show them that you are, you know, the person that's running this, and it's not some corporate world that, like everybody seems to think. Speak in easy to understand terms, which means don't get too technical, but at the same time, don't assume that your audience is dumb. Like if you want people to understand what you do every day and why you're doing it, you can't assume that they won't understand it if you explain it to 'em. And so trying to balance those two things, where it's, you're telling everybody everything, but at the same time, not making it so complicated that they can't understand it, because they're not from our world. Answer questions. Don't get into arguments. Those are two sometimes very difficult things to separate, but people are going to come and they're going to make comments and have questions, and some of them are genuine, like, "Why do you do this?" Those are the easy ones to answer. The accusatory questions that are like, "You shouldn't be doing that," or whatever, those ones are harder to (indistinct). But if you want this to be sustainable and be successful, you have to enjoy it. You got to really like posting and taking the videos and doing that stuff. And don't give up. You're not going to have that overnight success where all of a sudden you go from 0 to 100,000 subscribers overnight. If I wouldn't have had a pretty good start on YouTube with that Big Bud video that I put out there, I don't know how long it would've taken me to get to the point where I'm now, but I kind of already had a built-in subscriber base at that point. To handling the negativity side of it, we touched on just a second ago there. Just be professional. You know, attempt to explain why it is that you're doing what you're doing or whatever the negative comment was, but you have to control what you can control. You can't control what somebody else's attitude is or how they respond to you. You can control how you respond to them. And this is important. You won't change someone's mind if they won't let you, but other people are watching. So when somebody, several years ago posted a comment on my YouTube video, they went on the EWG's website and looked up the farm subsidies for Border View Farms over the past 15 years or whatever it was, and said, "Is it true that you've gotten X amount of dollars from the federal government?" Yeah, you can look it up as good as I can, man. I'm never going to convince that guy that the farm subsidies were there for a reason, or they were beneficial, whatever, but there's 100 other people that are going to see that comment, or 1,000 other people. Okay, and so everybody, there's other people that are going to see all of that, and you might not change the mind of the person that made the comment, but you will change the mind of the other 100 people there. So growing your following. Use multiple platforms and formats. You can use hashtags to help just kind of tag your pictures. You know, whether I post a picture of our John Deere and the 8RX, I'll kind of put that #JohnDeere and stuff, that way when somebody searches for it, my post will come up. Interact with your followers, respond to their comments, and ask them to follow you. The reason that everybody says at the end of a YouTube video, "Don't forget to subscribe and like the video," is 'cause people are dumb and they don't remember to do it unless you tell them to. More or less, when I ask for that, people click the Subscribe button. When I don't, they don't. A good way to do it is collaborate with other social media users, you know, other people that are doing the same type of thing, 'cause it exposes you to their followers and them to your followers. It can be mutually beneficial. So we're going to go through some of this here real fast, but what's a successful social media presence? How many followers does it take? Well, that depends on your goals, right? And they have analytics, metrics on all of these social platforms to tell how you're doing. And then you can go back to the goals that you set at the very beginning. Did you accomplish them? Are you increasing your sales of your quarters of beef or whatever it is? Real quick, we'll touch on monetization, because I put a lot of time into this, right? And so I'm sitting at somewhere around 27,000 subscribers on YouTube, and I put out a lot of content. It takes me a lot of time. It needs to have a little bit of a return for me. So yeah, you can make some money on it. With YouTube it requires 1,000 subscribers, 4,000 watch hours in the previous 12 months. Facebook is a little higher, with 10,000 followers and 600,000 minutes in the last 60 days. I have not made any money on Facebook. But other good ways, through brand partnerships, merchandise sales. I do have a site you can go and buy yourself a Border View Farm shirt if you really want to. And then affiliate marketing, things like using Amazon with an affiliate link, and anytime I have a product or something that I'm using, most of the time for me it's some sort of car wash soap that I'm using on the tractors that people want to know where they can buy it. I just throw a link there, they click on it, they buy it. I make like 2%. So in conclusion, you know, use social media to promote your farm and the industry. Be consistent, but don't expect to hit a home run overnight because that probably isn't going to happen. And one thing that I have learned is new opportunities can come out of nowhere. Like you'll just all of a sudden you'll get an email saying, "Hey, do you want to do this with me?" or some collaboration or something else, and you just never know where that next opportunity's going to come from. And enjoy it. So with that, that's my presentation. You can follow me on the following platforms there, all of them @BorderViewFarms, and website, borderviewfarms.com, and I have a seed business, xcelseeds.com there. Send me an email, borderviewfarms.com. There you go. - Kyle back up as well. We're going to go ahead and do some questions for our panel of speakers. Yeah, you can stay here. That'd be great. Keep it going for you, too. - Yeah. Turn it back on. - Yeah. So based on the presentations we had for management, what questions do you guys have? I'm also going to bring the mic to you so that we can hear you, not that that should deter you from asking questions. Any questions? - [Attendee] You covered things that you should post on social media. Would you like to cover things that you should not post on social media? - So I tend to be more of an open book than most people probably would. However, when it comes to, you know, personal financial or personal information, you should use some caution there, and that limit is going to be different for everybody. I'm fairly open when it comes to yields. As far as on a field basis, you know, we'll be in the combine and I'll show the yield monitor, I'll show the field averages at the end. Only thing I have never done and will not do is actually show farm totals, you know, for our entire farm operation on how much per bushel or bushels per acre yield or the total number of acres. So if you keep good enough track, you can get pretty close, but nobody will ever know exactly what our production is, at least not on social media. - [Erica] Great question. What other questions do we have? I need my steps today. There we go. - [Attendee 2] Kyle, what do you see as far as complaints? Is it going up or staying the same? What are you seeing? - Yeah, so the number of complaints we see statewide has actually been kind of stagnant, right around 200, 250 a year. Even with the disruption that COVID, you'd think more people staying at home would change things, it actually has stayed kind of steady for the last four or five years. What has changed, so we do complaint response, but we also do a farmer requested review. So if a farmer is going to expand a livestock operation, or even the smaller farm operations, the farm stores, the 30 chickens and a couple 4-H animals, that type of thing, that type of farmer requested review has doubled pretty much every year for the last couple years. So we're seeing about 100 of those last year. It keeps the four of us that do Right to Farm hopping. - [Attendee 3] This is for James. Are you comfortable sharing what GPS software you're using for your machines? - Yeah, absolutely. It's called Samsara. If you go onto either Android or the iPhone app store, type in Samsara it'll be one of the first ones. I know it's a per unit subscription. What exactly that is and further details I don't really know. I can see the backside of the interface for it. Even right now I can see whatever units that our company owns, where they're at, what the hours are, you know, diagnostics, all that stuff. (indistinct) - [Attendee 4] How are you doing? I'm with a couple of the other unions, as far (indistinct), does that have e-logs programmed into it, or is that just (indistinct) - So that's how we utilize it within our company. We've got enough heavier equipment or different units on heavy equipment that we have, like the agitation boats. We don't go out of state, and we don't require to fill out the e-logs or paper logs. So as far as that portion of it, I don't know. There is a spot within that program where I think we could integrate some of that stuff, higher offerings, lower offerings. Yeah, yeah, it can program it into it and be seen, but it comes back up and (indistinct) - [Attendee 5] Out of 250 complaints, how many of them were actual violations for concern? - I don't have that data in front of me. If I recall, the last time I ran data, not including this last fiscal year, I'd say the verified numbers for the ones that weren't meeting GAAMPs is about half, somewhere in there. So half the time we're asking that farmer to do some sort of correction. - [Attendee 6] I have a question all three of you could probably answer. How do you deal with, you know, how do you handle interacting with the public when there's that negative perception, whether something's actually happening or not, but how do you deal with that negative public interaction? How kind of like the best tips and tricks as you're kind of going about the world of, you know, the world of people right now? - I'll start and then I'll pass it off to you. You've got the bigger issue. For complaints when we deal with those, we're dealing with an individual that has general concerns, so that's pretty easy to have, in essence, an open conversation. I was able to work with this farm. They're doing all of these things right. If there's one or two things we're asking 'em to fix, usually they're pretty minded, and they're just generally interested on what's actually going on and what that operation is actually doing. And coming from a farm, too, that helps bridge the gap between all three parties that are involved. - Yeah, I will say this about negative comments to start with is when I started the whole YouTube the way that I'm doing it now thing, I don't know if my dad was 100% on board because of the negativity and just that potential feedback. 99% of all the feedback I get is very positive. I get very little negative, at least in what I'm doing. But when you do get some negative, I kind of go back to that you're not going to change that person's mind, but you are still setting an example for everybody else that's watching, especially with what I'm doing with, you know, comments that are on the internet. Those don't go away. It's there forever. And so it could be somebody watching that video two or three months later, and they read through the comments and somebody made some, whether it was about content in the video or not, how you handle that and react to it is always going to be there, and so I try to be as professional and positive as I can, but again, explain why we're doing what we're doing or why what that person is saying is incorrect, and try and show it in a positive image, because the rest of the people reading it, they're going to judge, is it the person making the accusation that's right, or is it the person that's responding, and actually the expert in this and doing it every day. - In my world, as far as the trucking industry, our largest division is our manure division, got 18 manure tanks, and we kind of made it sarcastically, but it's actually pretty true. So we have a sheet that sits on the counter in the office, and it's kind of bolted, and it's kind of all over the place, the break room, and where we keep the keys and all that stuff. And it's a list, and the first one says, "People don't like trucks." Second part says, "People don't like manure." "People don't like trucks hauling manure." "People don't like..." And then it keeps going down like that, but at the end of the day we have policies in place to try to mitigate some of the kickback from some of the people that we might run into. So like for example, like we don't drive over 35 miles an hour on dirt roads, A, for the dust, B, we're heavy, we're going to beat up the road, the slower you go the easier it is. And through some of the training, I hate to be that, but through some of the training the guys kind of understand that and be like, "Hey, you know, this is why we need to go slower. It's not just because of the road, it's a little courtesy for people living on the dirt roads." Where we're at, we're mobile enough and we move around enough to where we're usually not at the same field taking the same route for more than a day or two. Tops we're, depending on the acres there, (indistinct). And then I don't really preach it, but I think it's kind of common knowledge. You know, it's like if you don't like the smell of a landfill, don't live next to a landfill. Obviously it's a little bit harder to do, but you don't like smell of cows, you don't like tractors going up and down your roads, get some city street, some house for sale over there too. Obviously we don't tell people that, because of the public image, but it's lot of the training. It's the understanding kind of why we have the policies in place, but some of that stuff, so that's how we go about it. - [Attendee 7] James, I got a question for you, my man. How do you guys handle the unfortunate occurrence of having manure spill, and then what is the actions trainings in preventing it. Hopefully that never happens to you. - Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and there have been some circumstances in the company's history in which that's happened. So our company, we've come up with a spill plan in place. So our crew leaders are under the same impression. Some of our crawler operators are as well. Obviously all the newer rigs, the same fit to the crawler guys. But the crew leaders are all under the same impression. It's about chain of command and making sure everybody along the process understands what's happened, what's going on. So try to stop the spill. If there's any injury, you've got to take care of the people involved, make sure medical attention stuff needs to go forward. But if there's a little back and forth on who owns the manure, like legality of it, like once it's in our tanks does the farmer still own it. I know we're kind of going back and forth on that. So, but we still take full responsibility for what we have. We have a job to do. We have a service to provide. If that manure's in our tank, we see it as ours, so obviously we need to take care of it and make sure all the manure gets there. The leaks, so some of the piping off the back, we do that through preventative maintenance. So in the wintertime when stuff comes in we check it to a tee, make sure everything's operational, loose that should be loose, and stuff that's tight make sure it's tight, make sure that those gaps get the seals, stuff along that lines. And then as flow happens, you know, we mentioned Floor Dry. We've got a bag of Floor Dry in each one of our service trucks which can go out, and then we've obviously got the shovels and brooms and things like that. But having the plan in place prior to a spill, in our experience is the biggest thing. (gentle music)