Controlling your controllables with Ken Solly

Input costs continue to rise, but according to Ken Solly, that is no excuse for standing still. In this episode, Ken joins our new host, neXtgen Agri CEO Mark Ferguson, to discuss why producers need to understand their own rate of inflation, benchmark their business against itself, and continually look for gains in productivity rather than relying on strong market prices to protect margins.

Drawing on decades of experience working alongside livestock producers, Ken explains why the businesses that thrive are often the ones that spend less time worrying about factors beyond the farm gate and more time measuring, questioning and improving what happens inside it.

This episode is proudly brought to you by neXtgen Agri, in partnership with Meat and Livestock Australia.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to the Productivity and Profitability Podcast, brought to you by Meat and Lifestock Australia and Next Gen Agri International. I'm your host, Mark Ferguson, CEO here at NextGen Agri. This podcast is all about the Australian red meat industry, bringing you the latest information, practical tips, and stories from people doing remarkable things across the industry. There's no shortage of great people out there, and my job is to bring some of them into your farming day. Okay, let's get into this month's episode. Welcome to this episode of Productivity and Profitability. Today's guest is Ken Solly, one of Australia's most respected farm business advisers, who has spent decades working with sheep and beef producers to help them build businesses that are only productive but also genuinely profitable. Ken's focus has always been on the fundamentals, understanding your numbers, making decisions on value rather than hope, and control what you can control. That last point is exactly where we're headed today, controlling the controllables. Great to have Ken Sully joining us here on productivity and profitability. Welcome, Ken Sully, to Productivity and Profitability. Thanks, sir. Good to have you along, mate, and uh yeah, one of the stalwart of the industry there in well, South Australia, a lot of your career in Victoria now, and we'll start in Victoria in the good old Melee. Obviously, we've got an environment out there where import costs have surged. We've got good returns at the moment through good prices, but we know that that's got some volatility around it always. Yeah, so I guess today we really want to talk about controlling the controllables. Oh yeah, I guess set the scene for us. What's what does that look like at the moment? Why is that conversation important right now?

SPEAKER_01 1:40

Well, some of the cost increases are astronomic. You know, I always believe that every year you've got to try and beat inflation. Like most important thing is to realise that the national inflation rate and the farming inflation rate are two entirely different things. And quite often our inflation rate can our farming inflation can be considerably higher. And when you sort of try to quantify that, you've got a million dollars worth of costs and you've got a 5% inflation. Well, it's $50,000 extra you've got to find from somewhere to maintain the existing margin. So yeah, it's important that every year you have a strategy for beating inflation. But if and then if you want to increase your margin, you've got to increase the margin on top of that. So thank goodness the prices for red meat are are at uh a level that can offset it a little bit, but we want to try and make hay while the sun shines when the prices are high. We don't want to have to just get it in one end and lose it out the other.

SPEAKER_00 2:46

Yeah, and I guess it brings it into real focus when you think about it in those terms where you've always got to find that money just to basically stay afloat. And I guess is that something that you see lots of producers sort of thinking about in that way, or are they often sort of not so worried about real terms and well don't under yeah, but maybe don't watch the real terms and just sort of hope for the best?

SPEAKER_01 3:10

Yeah. Well, I come across a lot of producer well, I don't think any producers actually try and quantify their own inflation. Like if you take the half a dozen major costs, don't worry about doing the rest, but half a dozen of your major costs will make up 80% of your total. And if you just work out what it was last year and what it is this year, and then do a percentage increase on that and extrapolate that over the entire cost, that'll probably be as close as you can get. And, you know, if you have a million dollars worth of cost at 5% inflation with the extra $50,000, that's 200 lambs at $250. Well, you'll never you'll you most people with that cost structure probably won't increase by 200 lambs. They'll make smaller increases in lots of other areas in the business that build it up to the requirement. I I still see a lot of people who are quite satisfied with what they got last year in terms of a lambing percentage or a survival percentage, and I don't think that's good enough. I think uh you've got to push harder than that.

SPEAKER_00 4:22

Yeah, really good point. We might go into that productivity piece in a minute, but if we sort of zero in on the cost side at the moment, when you sit down with a producer and we're thinking about pulling apart their costs, how do you sort of structure that conversation? What are the main buckets you're looking at that where they need to sort of zero in on some of that some of those costs for that inflationary pressure?

SPEAKER_01 4:47

Once you've got the whole of business, the ratio of your your individual costs. The important thing is to, you know, the engine room of the business are the enterprise costs. There's quite a few costs which I call parasitic costs. They suck money out of the business, but they don't actually contribute to the um production and the profitability of the business in lots of ways. So we've got to make sure that we're very efficient with our enterprise costs. Yeah. And then once we've got our cost structure from a whole of business point of view, we can then move to, you know, drill down inside the enterprise and look at the you know, the stocking rate, the s the scanning percentage, survival percentage, weaning percentage, post pre and post, growth rate, you know, price and cost, all those sorts of things. There most of those are within your control. And as much as you might find it hard to improve them, but um you we can. There's usually a couple there that that you can you can do something about. So yeah, once you've got that enterprise and the whole of business thing, you've got a a pretty handy picture of of the whole thing, and you can perhaps drill down. And a lot of the time you need that third person to be able to look at the data and and and pull it apart and help you. Um, we're quite often blind to our own shortcomings a lot of the time, or we think that we're we're doing as good as we possibly can, but uh, you know, we can still do better in in some areas.

SPEAKER_00 6:31

Yeah, good point. So I guess uh I spend a bit of time standing in front of crowds, and one thing I ask pretty much every crowd these days, since since lots of time spent with you, is do you know your cost of production? And I d struggle to get many hands to shoot up still. And I think what I always say, thanks to you, is yeah, it's about the journey, not about the number, and and yeah, I think ha having having the discipline to do it means you know your numbers better, and then you've got your subconscious mind ticking away on those numbers, which is all powerful, really. So yeah, I guess people shouldn't be scared of what their number is or even I was gonna say don't care about what the number is, but the actual yeah, the actual number you calculate might might be scary, and if it is that that means you've got a lot of work to do, but it it might be a nice number, but it's still there's still be some opportunity. And I guess the beautiful thing about cost of production is it's a it's a ratio, and so you can either decrease cost or increase production and and make it a better number.

SPEAKER_01 7:27

Yeah, I think a lot of people think, you know, when they look at cost, they think, oh it sort of has a connotation of being something you you should avoid. But with budget side change the titles from cost, just wipe the word cost out and put investment there, and then you start to look at each input in terms of what what return you're going to get from it. And most of them you won't be able to work out uh what their return is. But if you ask yourself the question and you dig deeper and things like that, you you will will improve.

SPEAKER_00 8:02

You make a good point around the input costs or input decisions being made on value, not on cost. So yeah, what is the what is the value? And that's something that's a bit hard to do in practice. And I guess there's some costs that we kind of see as maybe fixed and we can't get around, but I guess there's always always flexibility around what we invest in and and important that we don't just try and sort of save our way to prosperity as well. Like you have to uh like sometimes it you gotta make money, we've got to spend money to make money, and it's about how you spend that money.

SPEAKER_01 8:34

Yeah, well I I don't know too many businesses that have that have uh grown over long term by being defensive all the time. You've got to have a go. And uh one of the things out of uh the Western Victoria where I live is the last two autumn and winters being very dry. There's certain elements of sort of they take a conservative approach and you go to a lot of properties where you know probably their stocking rate is back a little bit, but over the longer term they're probably losing a fair bit of opportunity by being being conservative going forward. But yeah, when you talk about it's most inputs are not necessarily just a singular issue. They're they're you know, when you look at say your fertilizer bill and you're trying to work out what return you're getting on your fertilizer, it's not just dependent on that, it's it's also dependent on other other inputs combined to bring it bring about that outcome. But I think it's important to have the concept of the law of diminishing returns in your mind with every input, because overall, you know, like if you took a fertilizer bill for 90,000, we'll all know that the first 30,000 will be critical. And then the second third will be probably essential. But what are you actually getting for that last third of every input you're putting into the business? That's that's where losses and gains are mostly made. And going back to your cost of production is that I I think most of the reason why a lot of farmers don't do a cost of production is they actually don't have their data in a good form to be able to easily load or input it into the into a cost of production calculator, which is a bit crazy because I understand it takes a fair bit of work initially, but it's like everything. You do the thing, you get your spreadsheets or your data organized and in a good form in the first instance, and then you've got the system in place that you can use on an ongoing basis. And once once you do your cost of production, you can do a lot of what ifs with it and look at, you know, once you know that, you know, if your cost of production for lamb is seven dollars or whatever, and you know that you've got 70,000 kilos of carcass weight, as soon as you spend another 35,000, you know that you're adding another 50 cents to the cost of production. So you've got to make sure that that 50 cents has been far more rewarded on the income side to justify doing it. Now, in a drought situation like we've had we had in 24 and 25, um, you know, those those costs, like, you know, spending a hell of a lot more money on on fodder, it becomes a different decision. It's not only just about the production, but it's about the long-term stability and viability of your enterprise. And I I think some of that uh uh fodder cost should not be mentally seen as a cost for that year, but it's a cost that should be spread over the next, say, three years so that you're actually maintaining your flock. Like everything you do on a farm has two costs it's the cost of doing it, and then it's the cost of not doing it. And what are you missing out? And through through the drought, I had lifetime U groups. A lot of my lifetime you groups have employees or sons and daughters, not necessarily the decision makers on the farm. And they do their budget and they should increase the uh the feed ration by two megajoules, and you know, you go home to dad, and dad wouldn't have a bar of it, and you come back the next time and the condition score dropped 0.1 or 0.2. And uh I I found it hard to convince them that they should be doing it just on the on the basis of buying maybe more feed and doing it. But the thing was that once I did a budget and showed them what the cost would be of not feeding, you know, in terms of more U deaths, lower lambing percentage, or a lot more lamb loss, then carcass weight being down a couple of kilos, and then you have to retain more replacements to cover the extra U losses and that. And in my budget, I only had $125 for lambs, and uh, you know, it came out at about $50,000 worse off per thousand composite years. So once I'd done that, it started started to sink in. The fact that, you know, the condition score was really important, and um we're trying to take the bumps out of out of the business. So um yeah, yeah, we always remember that every every decision has two costs, one of doing it and one of not doing it.

SPEAKER_00 13:50

Yeah, that's a that's a really good point and a really good way to approach it. And I and I really like that idea of knowing the scale of what if you know you've got 70,000 kilos, then you know that that yeah, if you add fifty cents on that's a $35,000 onto your cost of production. And so, yeah, knowing kind of being able to scale those costs in your own head is is really important to so you can kind of say, well this is a this is a big decision or need to think about it harder, or it's a it's a it's an easy decision 'cause it's not going to have any major impact. I c I think the other point you made there around sort of putting those costs across a few years, I can always can't remember who said it to me. It might have been you, might have been Bill, could have been anyone, but that yeah, try and keep the year of the drought or the impact of the year of the drought to the year of the drought, or um it's that if you don't get up to speed for three or four years in terms of you numbers, then you've yeah you've sort of decapitated the profits for a long period of time versus just that that year. So it's kind of having that longer term view as well, which has always hurts at the time and and might be a bit hard to when you're stirring down the barrel of extra feed costs, but will be repaid like now if you've got ewes and lambs and whatever, it they're all worth good money.

SPEAKER_01 14:55

Yeah, the other thing is that uh after the 2006 drought when I worked in the southeast of South Australia, you know, containment at that time was was a very, very small amount of it done. And uh you saw so many perennial pastures just grubbed out tabilio, and then when they wanted to get back to where they needed to go, they just didn't have the pasture base. And uh, you know, if you look at, you know, repasturing going forward, that can be quite an expensive exercise if you're gonna be spending 150 bucks on seed and then another hundred bucks on fertilizer and the machinery costs and that sort of thing. And then you've got the loss of grazing while it's trying to get established and that, and I'd do an internal rate of return on pasture development using those costs. And if you're ever going to repasture, you've got to increase your stocking rate to pay for it. And uh, so therefore you've got a cost of extra stock and that sort of thing. So the economics of that can be quite good over 10 years, but in the short term, it probably takes four or five years to get to break even uh from the extra income to cover the extra c cost. So it's um and I suppose one of the good things about the recent drought is that it's actually taught a lot of farmers the value of of containment and getting that feed wedge ahead of the use in in and in winter.

SPEAKER_00 16:28

To what extent does knowing your numbers, so knowing things about your business like cost of production and and some of these proportions of your costs that that are fitting into these various buckets and sort of having a bit more detail in your business, is that I'm thinking that helps you focus on the controllables because you've actually got numbers on the controllables. Like it's easy to kind of focus on what the government's up to or what the price cycles are up to or what some foreign government's up to, but um what the oil prices up to is sort of the current conversation. But yeah, I guess the one of the things we really wanted to drill in today was that that focus on the stuff that you can control, and I and it's really hard to focus on something you don't have a number on. It's it's you actually need that number to to to get get you uh get you laise a focus on that on that issue.

SPEAKER_01 17:15

Yeah, well, you know, most all of us humans are either left or right brain, and if you're left brain, you'll be right into the numbers. And I'm one of those. I'll I'll give my rocks off on a spreadsheet. And uh, but we've got to make sure that we're developing the other side of our brain as well, which is the creative side, because that's where we then can use those numbers and and come up with a solution that we may not have even thought of before. So it's really important that if you're a very left brain, that you are trying to do as much as you can to improve the right, right side of your brain. And that's where I reckon if you've got a good consultant, quite often you you buy in that right brain, and uh they can make opportunities out out of your numbers. The other thing is we've got to make sure that we're making good long-term decisions or got a good long-term strategy, because that can help actually help your short-term tactics or decision making. In this case, you know, in terms of fertilizer, you might, you know, that's the controllable. You get your nutrition or your ulsen or coal pea up to a good level, not over the top, but a good level. And, you know, when fertilizer does what it's done in the last uh six to twelve months, you may then pull back in that area and and enable you to maintain your margin. All right, you might mine your reserves a little bit for for one year, but you can afford to do it because it's it's in there. And uh so that that's that's an important that that's a controllable. But when we look at, you know, it's mainly in there in the area of enterprise costs that are controllable, but a lot of your enterprise costs almost become fixed costs because you've got to spend them to make the money. So they're they take on the nature of a fixed cost to um to get them through. But for instance, if you're spraying out a pasture or something like that, you've got to use the recommended rate. You know, trying to skimp on the on the chemical might mean the whole thing's a waste of time. So that that takes the nature of fixed cost, like shearing is almost a fixed cost, although you still have the ability to negotiate maybe a better rate, but that's usually only a very small amount. You can always possibly get another contractor that might be cheaper. But we've got to remember that any spend that you ever do should be made. It's not about cost, it's about value. It's what you get for what you spend. And uh something that's $1,000 can be terribly dear, whereas something $10,000 can be rather cheap when we look at it from a value point of view. And you look at all the other enterprise costs like uh freight, there's very little gain to be made there. You can't screw that too too much. But um, you know, when we get to fodder, yeah, that you've got an ability to move things around a little bit there in terms of your options with urea and gibberlic acid in the winter, uh, rather than um feeding out uh more expensive grain and and hay and that sort of thing. So you do have flexibility there, but when you get into the overheads of the the accountant, it's pretty hard to you might get that down a bit, but I'd be more keen for to spend if the accountant had his marbles and and I think one of the issues I'd like to see more farmers do is do a management profit and loss rather than a tax profit loss. So, you know, the accountant becomes more valuable to you in terms of the advice they're giving. So uh, but you can't make huge inroads in in accountancy fees. Insurance, well, usually the year you knock it off is the year you need it, but over time you look at world events and insurance and things like that. Yeah, so before you cut any cost, I think you've got to know, you know, you've got to look at what what the scenario might be without it, and uh that can help you balance the decision.

SPEAKER_00 21:36

Yeah, good point. So you talk about identifying the cash cow in your business and protecting it at all costs. What does what does that mean?

SPEAKER_01 21:43

Well, it probably it's just a broad saying for the enterprise that serves you the best in in your business. And I don't want to see people cutting costs in that in that enterprise and then suffering Substantial losses because that's going to have the biggest impact on you across the board. You know, usually we've got land classes on our property, and say you've got three land classes when it comes to enterprises. The cash cow is usually on the best, best land. And you've got to make sure that you're making decisions like your lowest class land, that might be the land that might not get the fertilizer or might cut back. And I know a lot of really good operators, they're picking up this little 1% here or 1% there. And you know, like with fertilizer, for instance, there used to be an old rule that where you put out a kilogram of per dry sheep equivalent. And once you get your Olson P up into the high teens, then maybe when fertilizer is expensive, you can just drop that back to about uh 0.8 of a kilogram, and that means you've got a 20% saving in your fertilizer because your long-term strategy has been sound that it then enables you to do make these short-term decisions.

SPEAKER_00 23:11

Yeah, and I guess we kind of without uh going too crazy on overdoing the point, but to know your cash cow, you're kind of getting in a need to know your numbers because you need to know I mean you can kind of know that that's your good dirt and that's your not so good dirt in terms of stocking rate, but unless you know what your spend is and what your profit is from what your income and spend is on that particular class, you won't know like that light country that you got a lot of might actually be your cash cow if you're sp overspending on the on the good country. I guess there's there's that's possibility as well. Yeah, sure. I guess we've covered it, but yeah, there's that sort of counterintuitive idea that it yeah, you need to spend more on the stuff that's going to make you a margin as long as there is a margin in it. That's and that's making sure there is that margin before you spend the coin.

SPEAKER_01 23:55

Yeah, well, every business, whether you're running a pie cart on the corner or you're running Woolworths and that, it's every every item in business, it's about the margin, you know, like you get poor country, you know, got a very low cost input structure at a low output, and it's it's so it's the difference between the two or the margin that's that's really important. And you know, as a farmer or a livestock producer, the vast majority of commodity producers say uh they're it's an undifferentiated product that they're producing. And like take lamb, for instance, being sold on on fat and weight. The good thing as we go forward, I can't wait for more specs to be put into the lamb industry and you know, with the eating quality and intramuscular fat and all that sort of stuff, and trying to get farmers to be paid for it. But whilst it's a commodity, you've just got to focus on producing more of it more efficiently. And you can only make so much of a margin per hectare, you can only push that as far as you can, and that's why people buy another farm, because they then multiply that margin again and again. And if you do things right, uh as you expand your business, you're uh uh you can drop your unit overhead cost by about 20% if you do it, because as you increase your scale, you might double your production, but your things say your accountancy fee might only go up, you know, 10 or 20%, not double. So we've got some savings there.

SPEAKER_00 25:37

Yeah, and I guess we've seen that scaling. I was at home recently, and Dad was sort of doing the calculations and worked out he's about the only one left of his vintage. Uh everyone, everyone has been moved out, and that's been through people scaling, I suppose, and those like what used to be miles square blocks back post-war or whatever, and now kind of been probably got five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten of them put together to to make a viable unit where we grew up. But yeah, and that's that that scaling to get to get that efficiency. You talk about, I guess, a profit for me linking stocking rate right through the way to dollars per hectare, and I I think it's helpful to kind of think about that KPI chain. Can you explain that a little bit more?

SPEAKER_01 26:16

Uh yeah, well, if you work an example through, you go say if you're running five years to the hectare and you've got a you might be running first cross of composite, you might end up with a scan of 170%, and then you have a survival of 80, 85 or whatever, then you've got a weaning percentage of 140, and then your your growth rate pre-weaning might be, I don't know, f 350 or 400 or whatever, and your post-weaning weight might be similar or a little bit more or less. You may have a weaning weight of uh say 45 kilos, and you've got seven, because the five U's at 140 gives you seven lambs to the hectare. You've got seven lambs um multiply by 45, and then you can put your own dressing percentage on that, and then uh that's 43 or 4, and you can end up with your carcass weight per hectare, uh, multiply that by the price, average price that you would receive, and then look at what your costs are per hectare. And as you work your way across there, there'll be one of those that each of them will have a slightly different impact on the final outcome, but I'm sure there's an area there that one or two areas that require attention more so than others to get a better outcome at the the long run.

SPEAKER_00 27:50

Yeah, yeah, excellent. You've worked with lots of different businesses multi-generationally in in some instances, in a few instances. Uh the and we're not all born wanting to know this stuff or not, as you've already talked about, left brain, right brain. I mean, I love spreadsheets, but I love genetic spreadsheets and don't necessarily love financial spreadsheets. So even within within our particular bent of loving data, you can sort of love different data. Is have you seen a way that's helped like if someone's out there listening today and they're wondering, they're sort of hearing this and they're going, yeah, yeah, I've heard it before, but we need why would I do it kind of thing. Is has there been any way that you've coached people to kind of and they've gone from not wanting to do it to wanting to do it? And have you seen any commonality between in those circumstances?

SPEAKER_01 28:32

Yeah, I think one of the really important things, when I I was consulting, I did a lot of my consulting with a computer PowerPoint projector, and I'd be facing the family around the kitchen table, and I'd be developing gross margins up on the wall, and I'd involve them in that. And then one thing is developed a gross margin is what can you do? It's in that that you actually capture the the interest and the imagination of the people. And I think as a to be a reasonably good consultant, it's uh the quality of questions that you ask them about that gross margin and and their understanding of it, and you and you get them really owning the whole thing. I've seen a lot of and I've been guilty of it myself, is you grab gather a heap of data and you go back to the office and you create all the all the gross margins or or budgets or whatever, but you haven't involved them and you've got to involve them if particularly if they're not switched on to it. And uh, you know, I think the other big picture questions you could ask them is, you know, where do you want this business in in um, you know, where do you want to be in 10 years' time? And they say, Oh, we want to buy another block. So you say to them, Are you bank ready? Uh and you know, I've been involved in this with banks where you put up your case for the expansion of the business and you have all the scenarios there presented to the bank, and then the bank gives you provisional approval to spend up to 10 mil or whatever the figure might be, but it's a provisional approval, but that's really critically important because you know, if a block comes up up the road, you know, the reason that most land prices increase over time is you've got neighbors competing against one another. And if a block comes up for private sale and you are bank ready and you can knock it over in two or three days, you've got the final approval from the bank. You know, I've come across a lot of clients, particularly at recent time, where you know they've put up a proposal and they're still waiting two or three weeks later for approval, and it's just bloody they've missed the opportunity. So I think I'm encouraging all farmers to be, if they've got a long-term goal of expansion where they're going to require funds that they they are bank ready for it.

SPEAKER_00 30:59

Yeah, great point. One sort of final area I wanted to uh chat about, and then we'll sort of get towards wrapping up. But the diversification's kind of a double-edged sword. We hear some people lots of people saying do one thing, do it well, other people saying you've got to diversify, you've got a bit of this, bit of that, you can sort of make the most of various price cycles. What what have you seen? I guess you've seen lots of various success across the mixed farming and stuff. Where have you seen that kind of pendulum swing?

SPEAKER_01 31:28

Yeah, I've I've seen on some farms where diversification has become diversification, in that um, you know, I I've been on some farms where I've had to do 14 gross margins. They've had that many bloody enterprises. And even with sheep, you know, I see a lot of farms where they have Merino U base, and then they've got the the border rams producing first cross, and then the lower order merinos that go into a uh terminal, and um, you know, they've got these little mobs here, there, and everywhere. And uh I reckon when you get past two ram mob uh mobs on the farm, you know, you're starting to water down the benefit of of diversification. But um, and it, you know, when you look at some country like in Western Victoria, if you go through the Western Plains region, sort of uh it has the ability to grow five or six ton crops on annual and on good years do even better than that. But um I think you've got to have a relativity between stocking rate and and yield. If you're going and you look at most of the country, cropping country that used to run sheep, when we drop from 180 million back to what we've got now, a lot of those sheep come out of cropping country, and now they've got that much money invested in in machinery, they need every hectare they got to put that machinery over to get their unit cost down there. So, and now in most farms they've let the fences go, the sharing shed go, and therefore the idea of going back into sheep is is just too costly. So they're they're stuck in that, which I think is a little bit sad. But I think there's also a psychological benefit of having livestock on a cropping farm. There are there is a place for them there, but you know, I think having a different enterprise also helps you think a little bit differently and you mix with different people. And like I had a mate that was outstanding beef operator, but he used to go to chicken industry conferences and things like that because there was still meat production, but it made him think differently about his about his beef. Whereas if he had to go on to a beef one, he'd probably come home thinking, well, that was a waste of time.

SPEAKER_00 34:00

Yeah, it's a great point. It's always that, well, there's lots of sayings and lots of knowledge around the only as smart as the room you're in or or the people that you surround yourself with, and you only get odd ears from the stuff you surround yourself with. And I guess that's the kind of point of podcasts like this, is to get different information to people's different people's ears. But yeah, definitely a great opportunity to learn from other industries or and yeah, having a couple of enterprises that that keep and often there's different people in a business that can kind of a bit wide in in one way, one one likes the smell of diesel and one doesn't, and a few things like that that kind of um yeah that help give both people ownership in a business. Yeah. Ken, you got lots of pretty nice wine liners, which I've stolen a few of them over my over my career, but but I guess if you had a couple two or three top ones, what would be some good wine liners for us?

SPEAKER_01 34:45

Oh I reckon um, you know, because land is perceived to be expensive, and we've say we saw it when when things are good, everybody's competing against each other. So the saying is when everybody else is running, you walk. When everybody else is walking, you run. So don't feel like timing isn't something, it's buddy everything. And particularly with land acquisitions, like land never gets super cheap or anything like that, I don't believe. It's always on an upward trend, it has some dips down, but uh yeah, you've got to be can be a little bit patient. I prose another one. Um, success for a lot of farmers is not how high they fly, but it's how well they bounce. So, you know, the really poor years, it's how you come back off them. That and you know, if you're down and out and you've grubbed your pastures out and you've um, you know, and prices are for commodities are really high, then uh, and that's part of the reason why they're high now, too, is that um, you know, it's a supply and demand industry. And uh, you know, for another favourite one of mine, which Trumpy runs out all the time, is the biggest gain most farmers can make is stopping what's slipping through the fingers. And out of adversity comes the seed of an equal or greater opportunity, which I I totally believe in, you know. And if things are going bad for you, there will always be positive things happening somewhere along the line. And every farming group that I work with, first up, start of the day, right, tell me something positive's has been happening, and we try to feed off each other's good fortune or or whatever's happened.

SPEAKER_00 36:39

One of my favourites, I reckon, is change is not compulsory, but neither is survival. I reckon that's a yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:44

I'm glad Peter Treefort taught me that long many years ago.

SPEAKER_00 36:49

Yeah. And I think uh in and and I know that everyone, every generation's been through lots of change, but I think I feel like and maybe every generation's felt the same, but it feels like things are changing extremely rapidly, and and with that comes lots of threats or but also lots of opportunity, and I guess if you're those people that are willing to kind of run with the change in a in a sensible way, it will we'll reap the benefits and and uh and be able to control their controllables. Yeah. Ken for productivity and profitability, we're gonna have a a final question that we ask everyone, and that one is what is the best piece of advice you've ever received?

SPEAKER_01 37:24

I've r received hell of a lot of lot of advice, and I'm not sure which one's the best. But I think at this stage of my life, because I hope for giving a lot back to that in the industry, is that the saying goes something like the character of an individual can be judged by the what he does for so many other people, knowing that they'll get he'll get nothing in return. And uh I don't really believe that you get nothing in return. I reckon nearly every situation you get something in return. And my school board is not financial now, it's sort of more seeing the development of the mentees that I work with and their growth and development in their businesses and their lives and their families. So uh yeah, it's just and a lot of people think, oh, why do you do it? And I think uh it's doing more for me than it is for them, really, that they think think the other way around.

SPEAKER_00 38:22

Yeah, no, that's that's really, really good points. And yeah, we very much appreciate your generosity, Ken, and all that you do for lots of young people out there and and some of us old buggers as well. Yeah, it's uh yeah it really is fantastic and a great great career. It influenced a lot and lots of farming families and that and lots of professionals as well, which which we all appreciate. Right I mate, we'll wrap that up, Soul, and uh look forward to catching up. And that's a wrap on another episode. Thanks for listening. We truly hope you got something out of it. Head over to the MLA website for tools and resources to help you be at your best. Links are in the show notes. If you're after some more listening, I also host the Head Shepherd podcast, where we go deep on genetics and livestock management. Search for Head Shepherd wherever you're listening to this. See you next episode.