General (00:04):

Angus at Work, a podcast for the profit-minded cattleman. Brought to you by the Angus Beef Bulletin, we have news and information on health, nutrition, marketing, genetics and management. So let’s get to work, shall we?

Shauna Hermel (00:28):

Hello, this is Shauna Hermel, editor of the Angus Beef Bulletin, and welcome to this edition of the Angus at Work podcast. We're here today at the Cattle Industry Convention in San Antonio. A little bit warmer spot than where we’ve been the last couple days! We are talking to Dave Weaber with Terrain.

So, Dave, can you give us a little bit of background on what you do there at Terrain and what the whole organization is about?

Dave Weaber (00:54):

You bet. Well, thanks for having us, and we're excited to join you here at CattleCon 2025. Getting to see lots of old friends and new friends here. Making the rounds.

The Terrain group is actually a jointly funded project between Farm Credit Services of America, American Ag Credit, Frontier Farm Credit and Ag Country — so four of the bigger farm credit associations. And our teams is up to 10 now.

Shauna Hermel (01:27):

Oh my.

Dave Weaber (01:28):

And we’ve got ... I call it everything from A to W because we cover animal protein. Don Close and I cover the animal protein space together. Mostly beef, some pork, a little bit of poultry ... He does a lot of more of the cattle feeding side of it. I’ve been working on some consumer demographics and consumer trends within meat spending here of late. We’re kind of tag-teaming what’s going on in terms of herd expansion and cattle inventories, kind of the news of the day that’s going on there.

We’ve got a couple of grain analysts that cover corn, soybeans, forages, sorghum, sugar beets ... I’m sure I’m missing a couple of crop products in the row crop space (Bree Baatz and Marc Rosenbohm).

We’ve got a macroeconomist; I call him our real economist. This guy, Matt Clark, works for us, lives down by Wichita, Kan. Spent six years at Kansas City Fed, so a real economist helps us  ... Matt covers interest rates, job force, big macro kind of trends. For a long time he was the guy at American Ag Credit and he covered all the space by himself, so he was pretty happy when we got there. The only thing, he came to me and said, “Hey, I'm here. Here’s your beef customers and your hog customers.” And we’ve got a dairy guy, Ben Laine, that just joined us as well and gave the dairy stuff to Ben. He said, “I'm going to keep sheep.” I said, “Buddy, you can have all the sheep you want!”

Shauna Hermel (03:00):

There you go.

Dave Weaber (03:01):

So that’s kind of our coverage. We’ve got a wine economist (Chris Bitter). Go try to hire one of those. There’s not very many of those in the country. We’ve got one because the American Ag Credit footprint covers the Central Valley, Napa, Sonoma, Temecula ... a lot of the great wine country in California. So he’s got a full-time job working on that.

We’ve got a specialty crop guy (Matt Woolf) that lives in Fresno that covers almonds, walnuts and pecans. Now that we’ve got New Mexico in the mix, he also covers artichokes, tomatoes and all the row crops/specialty produce kind of stuff for us as well. Talked about Ben Laine.

We’ve got an editor that helps us and lives up in Philadelphia. Oh, she’s the best gal ever. She makes us not sound like ... she’s got one job. Not to make us sound like economists - or rather not let us sound like economists. Heather Stettner, our communications manager manages that team. She does a great job helping us with getting speaking engagements lined up, is a great critique of speaking talent and makes us not sound like, in the oral form, sound like economists. And then we’ve got a guy, Dave Eckert, that helps us with graphic arts. So we’re all part of growing the economist union. There’s a set number of wine charts you’ve got to present with every year. His job is not to let us get past that number.

Shauna Hermel (04:24):

So now when you say your day-to-day role, what would that be?

Dave Weaber (04:28):

So we spend a lot of time ... Don Close, our former boss, and John Newton is our new boss. Their mission for us is don’t play in traffic.

Our job is not to replace a CattleFax or the newsletter you get from your brokerage firm if you’re talking about the row crop kind of things. Let’s go work on emerging trends, which I find fun. I’ve spent my whole career working in the beef and meat supply chain from retail, been a packer for a while, worked in retail grocery, did a stint doing consulting work on the procurement side for grocery companies and foodservice operations. So I look at my job and my job is tying all those supply chain data points and pieces together and really translate that back to production agriculture. So my passion, I grew up on a cow-calf/stocker/sometimes cattle feeding operation when we screwed some of the rest of it up and we had to feed them to make them make money. Which isn’t a good business plan. Registered seedstock Hereford and Angus program there. We had a flock of ewes and raised club lambs. We did a lot of different things. I’m not sure we did any of them really well, but that supply chain understanding it is fairly rare because we send a lot of kids off of ranches and farms in this country into industry and we never hear back from them.

And I was born in 1970, so I graduated high school in 1989. When my dad or when my brother went to college, my dad said,  “You need to go find a career if you want a ranch. Ranch on the side because I'm not sure this thing's going to survive this.” The 1980s were particularly difficult for everybody in agriculture. We’re blessed. Our ranch made it, but it wasn’t for lack of hard work on and off the ranch that saved it. My dad went from being a banker to a steel worker to a teacher in the junior college system back to ranching. He and mom are back on the ranch now and ...

Shauna Hermel (06:41):

They found a way.

Dave Weaber (06:42):

To get back to camp, their semi-retirement. I think he is on his third round of jobs, but he’s one of those guys who can’t stop. He’s got to have something to do. And so when we get back to what my day-to-day is, it’s taking those experiences and trying to translate them back into meaningful business information for not only bank or farm credit association customers and prospects, but our mission is to serve greater agriculture. That really appealed to me. I’ve been a college instructor and teacher and spent part of my career in grad school. And so I’ve got a passion for helping people understand those complex kinds of issues. To get them boiled down to what’s it mean for me.

And so that helps because that used to be what I got to work on Friday or Saturday in previous roles ... the fun projects. I’ve got a view to the future. Let’s begin with the end in mind and build a path on how we’re going to get there. And one of those things is what’s happening two years from now, five years from now, 10 years from now. And in this role, I can help talk to producers and say, “How do we position this ranch to not only survive but thrive in what's coming?” And if we don’t have a vision of the headlights, it’s hard to drive with taillights. They’re not very bright and they’re point the wrong direction.

Shauna Hermel (08:08):

And you can’t change the outcome.

Dave Weaber (08:09):

No. And if we’re just reactive in our business planning and strategy, we’re probably not making the most out of the opportunity that’s here today. We’ve got the best beef demand we’ve ever had. We’re selling the best product we’ve ever made as an industry to consumers that are willing to pay what looks like astronomical numbers to most ranchers. You’re like how? I’ve had the question 30 times today. I’ll guarantee you. When do consumers say no? How much? How high is too high? I don’t know. I thought it was $2 ago. Yeah, I thought it was $2 ago on retail beef prices at $6, now we’re over $8. They keep buying, they keep spending money. We keep sending fantastic product to the meat case. You can buy Prime, upper two-thirds Choice, Certified Angus Beef® (CAB®) brand spec product at pretty much every grocery store in the country. If your grocery store doesn’t sell it, you’re at the wrong grocery store is what I like to tell folks.

Shauna Hermel (09:12):

Well I agree with that one.

Dave Weaber (09:13):

I mean, I can sell some CAB product for you. I know some guys.

Shauna Hermel (09:20):

When we look at the future of this cattle supply, use your vision and where are we going with trying to rebuild that cow herd? And if we have such high prices that the heifers are going to town. We’re not putting them back in the cow herd. How are we going to build?

Dave Weaber (09:38):

Well, that’s a great question and I’ll probably just take us back and maybe do a little reset on the inventory report that just came out.

So we all kind of start in the same place. There’s no cow herd expansion going on nationwide. The cow herd declined about 150,000 cows from Jan. 1, 2024, to Jan. 1, 2025. About on pace, given what we saw in terms of beef replacement. Heifer retention that got started in the fall of 2023 got short circuited the beginning of 2024 when those producers that had retained those heifer calves said, “I might not need them for me, but my neighbors might need some beef replacement heifers.” And they kept some heifer calves back, might’ve had bulls, might not have had bulls come January or February. Their profit target was going to go spend a thousand bucks, maybe $1,200 extra to get her from A to B to when she’s going to be a bred heifer. That would’ve been the spring of 2025.

Dave Weaber (10:39):

Those guys want to make $200-250. Well all of a sudden, they can make $500 pulling the plug, putting them on the truck, send them to the feed yard, send them to town ... It changed the whole landscape. A lot of producers here have asked me, where are they? And I'm like, we just ate them for lunch. That’s where those heifers went. They went to the feedyard. It’s kind of a different, when I was a kid, we always thought a heifer’s default location was on a ranch. It’s not. It’s on a plate. It’s in beef supply. And really when you change your thinking around that, cow-calf producers have got to buy those heifers back from the feeding system. That’s more true today than it’s ever been. And so that’s part of the difficulty because my joke of the day is if it’s got two ears and a tail, it’s worth $2,000. Which isn’t far from the truth and there’s some of them that are worth a lot more than that.

Shauna Hermel (11:30):

That’s kind of amazing.

Dave Weaber (11:31):

You think about those calves today and they’re a revenue stream that this industry has never seen before. And then we get to the question, “Well, why if prices are record high profitability at the cow-calf level, even though we’ve got record costs, why haven’t we responded to the signal?” And I think there’s a really good reason. One is we need to get balance sheets healed up. I think if we go look at the financial piece and I go talk to our Farm Credit lenders and say, Hey, what’s going on in terms of ranch level economics and financial position coming out of the previous three year drought, four year drought, five year drought, depending on where you lived. We did a lot of balance sheet damage during that fighting the drought. So the ranches that emerged with the best economic position pulled the plug first. The ones that held on fed at least double the amount of hay of normal, had the financial prediction at a higher cost probably had lower reproductive performance at the range level because we didn’t, even though we fed double, we should have fed triple. So we had a bunch of cows not breed back. We had poor reproductive performance in the bred heifers. Not to mention all the fetal programming impacts that we struggle as an industry to even measure or talk about. Those heifers that are the product of a drought-impacted cow aren’t the best cows in the industry ...

Dave Weaber (13:04):

Regardless of what genetics we’ve got.

A lot of them don’t stay in the herd. They don’t breed back well, they don’t milk well.

It’s probably off topic for today, but it’s probably a whole other story. The whole ranch and range management story that goes with that is we’ve overgrazed a lot of ranches that are still in need of recovery. We’ve had about a year of El Nino conditions that had marginal results for ranches. I mean we at least got hay inventories kind of back into a manageable kind of place. But La Niña is on our way back. I mean we’re going to hear tomorrow from Matt Makens about his weather forecast. I’ve been watching it intently. He, Brian Bledsoe and the meteorologist from Nutrien. If you listen to any three of those guys, I think you’re in good hands. If you listen to them collectively, they’re all singing from the same hymnal. And if you’re somewhere between I70 and I80, that’s the dividing line. If you’re south of there, put your pants in your boots and get ready because it’s coming.

You’re not going to need it to fight mud. It’s going to be the rattlesnakes and the tumbleweeds and the drought that’s on its way. And that’s not a fun story to relay to producers. But one of my career goals is always call it like I see it. And that’s one of the pleasures of this job is we get to look down the road, call the ball and say, “Alright, if this is what is actually coming, how do we help prepare you financially, economically, risk management-wise, mentally and relationally?” There’s a whole bottle of wax there ...

That’s big territory that creates a lot of personal stress for these ranches. And my job is to help people look at that head on. Sometimes it’s not a fun message, but our goal is we’re going to deliver it compassionately and with integrity and say, “Hey, let us be part of the team that helps manage through this.” We’re going to come out on the other side. We’re all going to look different. But that’s one of our overarching goals is let’s look down the road and say where’s the opportunity? So one of the things we worked on last year was part of this consumer demand and spending thing.

That really is a leading indicator because we all understand ... And your brand with CAB in particular, probably ahead of some other breeds and organizations, even packers ... We understand that the revenue in this business comes from one place and it comes from consumers. If they don’t like our products, if they don’t buy it, enjoy it, rinse and repeat? We’re starting back at square one.

If we can get them to repeat and do it every week or every month, we’ve got a story to tell. We’ve got a connection with that consumer. They’ve recognized quality and value for their money because, honestly, you look at most family budgets and beef is a luxury item. And I’ve been looking at it as when are they going to say, “Uncle”? I mean economically, somebody’s going to have to do that. The value for the eating experience that they get today, I don’t know what that number is. A lot. It’s a high price because there’s economic pressure and stress in the system today. They’re absolutely unwilling to take beef off of the center of the plate, which is fantastic news. That’s a testament to how far this industry has come.

Shauna Hermel (16:54):

Yes.

Dave Weaber (16:55):

I started my career in 1996 - the year before the Blue Ribbon Commission came about - and it was to solve one problem. We had 25% of steak eating experiences that had a problem. They didn’t taste good, they didn’t retain moisture and they didn’t marble.

You wouldn’t pay $50 for steak and you sure as heck weren’t going to pay $13/pound (lb.) for them. And those would’ve been unheard of prices back then. We were talking about steaks that would cost $6 to $8/lb. and consumers were like, we're not. Absolutely not. We’re not participating in that. And we’ve spent 25 years fixing that problem. And now there’s other meat proteins - pork and poultry in particular - that are looking at the success of the beef business saying, “How do we replicate what happened over there?”

Shauna Hermel (17:44):

Pork in particular going to have to catch up on the quality.

Dave Weaber (17:45):

They’ve got a lot of quality catching up because the challenge for them - when you look at consumer spending - it takes pork and poultry spending combined to equal what consumers are willing to spend on beef. So on an adjusted for inflation basis, they spend about $35 a month per capita. So if you’re a family of four, everybody gets counted a month. $35. They spend about $17-17.50/month on those two products and they’re absolutely unwilling to kick beef off of the center of the plate to go eat another pork or another poultry meal.

Shauna Hermel (18:32):

Well, that has certainly helped to make a bigger pie to help spread the premium across the different segments of the beef industry.

Dave Weaber (18:39):

Absolutely. Yep. And there’s a lot of dollars. I mean, we look at that spending change this year to last year, not counting what we’ve done the previous four years, just this year to last year, the change in beef spending, it’s about $525 a head. Now cow-calf guys say, well yeah, but cattle feeders have been ... they’re pretty good about giving it back. If we look at what feeder cattle and calf prices are of late, they’ve been given almost all of it back through the system and that’s part of this market signal to get herd expansion off and running for the industry has not been enough. Clearly. Remember, we’ve just got no response out of the cow-calf segment in terms of growing inventory. I think that comes. We’re going to get there. We’ve been doing some math. We need about 2.5 million more cows in the next four years.

Shauna Hermel (19:29):

Just 2.5 million.

Dave Weaber (19:31):

Just 2.5 million.

Shauna Hermel (19:31):

Which sounds like a sizable number.

Dave Weaber (19:35):

It is. We need to go somewhere from 28.5 million beef cows to about 30.3 million beef cows. All that does is keep per capita supplies even with where they were the past five years. There’s no way to fix the next two years because we’re going to fall off that number just because we haven’t done any retention. And as soon as we start, that’s a three-year process, right? By the time we get her bred, get a calf and breed her next year to calve the following year, we’re lucky if we slaughter the first bull calf from her the year after that ...

It’s probably a year and a half after that. So once it gets started, it’s kind of like turning the Exon Valdez or the Titanic. You can have the helm over all the way. Nothing’s going to happen for a while. And so if you’re a producer, that means revenues are going to stay high, profitability is going to be good the next four years as an industry, we make that decision about once a year really in the whole grand scheme of things. Seventy-five percent of the calves are born in the spring. We make that retention decision in the fall. We made it this year. The votes were cast, nothing happened. We kicked the can another year down the road. So it’s going to be a long kind of protracted price cycle. Will prices go down? Absolutely. There’s probably something down the road here that comes in unexpected that’s going to price ...

Shauna Hermel (20:58):

For feeder calves?

Dave Weaber (20:59):

Feeder cattle, fed cattle, calves, fed beef, everything.

If we think about the real black swans, not the self-inflicted black swans, but the real ones. They come here and there. Is it African swine fever or something else? I don’t like predicting those because then they’re not black swans. They’re something we should have prepared for ... Foot and Mouth Disease, those kind of things. The industry’s been very proactive on working on some of those projects just to be ahead of it. ID traceability programs, all those things are part of that. That’s good news. The even better news is the opportunity that lays in front of us with this kind of revenue. Consumers spending these kind of dollars really rolls you back into thinking about when I talk to producers. Alright, so you haven’t made the decision to expand. Good. Let’s work on this business. Let’s get it financially healthy. Let’s work on our planning process.

And I spent a lot of time last year at NCBA Convention talking about risk management because that’s one thing, cow-calf producers ... it doesn’t matter if you’re a seedstock producer or commercial cow-calf man. On average, our business planning and risk management planning is weakest at that level in the industry. I mean, cattle feeders are pretty good hedgers stocker operators because it’s easier. They’re margin buy and sell guys. They have a better grasp on what that cost and breakevens going to look like. Cow-calf producers need to embrace things like Livestock Gross Margin for Cattle (LGM-Cattle) and Livestock Risk Protection Feeder Cattle (LRP-Feeder Cattle) policies and the tools that are out there. Are they expensive? Yeah, there’s some expense there. But ...

Shauna Hermel (22:42):

I was going to ask, how do you change that mindset of risk insurance being a cost?

Dave Weaber (22:48):

Well, I like to approach it a couple of different ways. One is that it’s not all or nothing. Risk management planning is a bigger exercise than just calling your futures broker or your crop insurance guy and saying, “Hey, I need this kind of protection.” If you don't know what your marketing plan is, what your herd retention or expansion plan is, all those other facets of the organization, a lot of people want to start with doing risk management when it’s actually the end of a long planning exercise of my nutrition plan, my production plan, my breeding plan, my financial plan ... Because if you’re a cow-calf guy and you just decide my risk management plan is straight hedging in the feeder cattle futures market and your banker doesn’t know this, there’s going to be a problem. It’s not when and it’s not if there’s going to be a problem ...

You’re going to get a margin call and he’s going to be surprised and nobody’s going to like the outcome. So let’s proactively pull that back into a broader discussion. We can’t manage it with just the checkbook and the back of an envelope. We need something bigger than that. And so we’ve spent some time and we’ve got some resources that last year actually Cattleman’s College thing I did was risk management planning. And it was none of the technical functions of how to go hedge or do crop insurance. It was this whole other planning discussion. It’s still out on the Cattleman's College website and folks can see the slides and go listen to it. The message is important today. It is more important today than it was last year because we’re another year down the road. Cattle prices went from record to record again, and now we’ve got more dollars at risk in the industry than we’ve ever had. And it keeps me up at night looking at operations that are walking around ... naked might be the right word. I’m trying to think of something else, but walking around, bearing risk, losing sleep at night that they don’t have to. So I just encourage folks, find a professional, find some intervention, whatever it’s going to take to have those hard discussions over the kitchen table with your spouse, with your brother that’s a business partner, whoever it is. Get started because we just got bought a whole other year. Don’t be complacent and say, “Hey, I got a whole other year to do this. You just were gifted time.”

Shauna Hermel (25:28):

Replacement heifers probably won’t be cheaper in two years.

Dave Weaber (25:31):

They’re not going to get cheaper. And I’ve had a couple of these discussions today about, “Okay, I’m in a spot where I think I might be in a forage position.” Especially guys further north. If you look at Nebraska, the Dakotas, you get further north? There are opportunities, probably the one that’s coming. I’ve got the opportunity. I wanted to go do something. What do I do? I’m like, Well, what's your price expectation? What do you think the market’s going to do in the next three, four or five years? Well, it’s probably going to go higher. And then at some point it’s going to turn over and we’re going to get cheaper. Well then what’s your exit strategy? If there’s a liquidation signal, what do you want to sell? Do you want to sell a 5- or 6-year-old cow or do you want to sell a cow that’s nearing the end of her production span and be able to recapture those dollars easier on her than selling a 5- to 7-year-old cow? So I’ve been saying, all right, let's go do the math. Is your operation really better off expanding numbers with a running age kind of cow and then you can exit at the top? I mean, we’ve seen a bunch of producers already pull the plug and do herd liquidations. What they thought were record prices last year. I mean, then we get into the whole discussion of generational turnover and estate planning, those kinds of things. Where does that discussion fit in the lifespan of this cow herd?

Shauna Hermel (26:57):

That’s a good question.

Dave Weaber (26:57):

Maybe we only need cows for three more years. Well, do you want to spend all the time, effort, labor and cost on a bunch of beef replacement heifers that aren’t even going to have a calf for three years to sell? Or do you want to short circuit that and buy some cows that have revenue this fall? So that’s part of that planning. I don’t have the answer for everybody. It’s different for every operation. Let’s sit down with the ranch manager and the banker and your seedstock or genetic supplier and say, “What fits for me and the plan for this ranch?”

Shauna Hermel (27:34):

So going into a banker hasn’t always been that fun for a cow-calf guy looking at expanding or ways of improving the cow herd. Is it a different story today?

Dave Weaber (27:46):

It is because there’s so many dollars tied up. I mean, there's so many dollars of opportunity, but there’s those same exact dollars that are also risk. And so it’s really a function of let’s just make sure our eyes are open in the downturn. Commodity cattle are going to be the hardest hit and our business has just changed. If you don’t know how your cattle feed, who bought them, where they went and what they did on the rail, we need to go figure that out. If you’re not part of some traceability program to go find that data or be working with a genetic supplier that’s participating with you on ... maybe you just partner on 10% of the pen, but you get all the data for the pen.

If that’s what you got to go spend to go get that data and understand what you’re sending into the supply chain, I encourage folks to go figure it out. Some operations it might be I’m solid and financially fit enough and I’ve got a good enough risk management plan that I’m going to go feed a 100% of these calves and I’m going to go figure out a way to sell them and sell not just this batch, but build a business plan that’s a marketing plan with that invested dollars of I know what these cattle will do from a genetic feeding performance on the rail in a box standpoint. Use this time to build the marketing plan for the next three rounds of cattle, not three rounds of this year’s production next year, the next three cycles of cattle. What’s the generational setup for this ranch and what we produce in our business? People say brand, and they think of a hot iron on a hide. I’ve got one. I love it. It doesn't mean anything to anybody else unless I’ve got that story to tell.

And what’s your ranch’s personal brand? Are you known for X?

Shauna Hermel (30:07):

Everybody’s got a reputation.

Dave Weaber (30:09):

Cattle you might sell at a livestock auction or private treaty. If you’ve got the same guy showing up at your ranch every year to buy your calves, he knows something you don’t know.

You need to go figure out what that is. Alternatively, if you don’t have that customer, there might be a reason for that. Somebody knows and we need to go figure that out too. And so I think that as we get people to be more forward thinking. That usually comes when they get to a place financially, that they’ve got a minute to stop and think. My dad was a business planner and worked as a banker, a college instructor and farm ranch management kind of guy. We knew the numbers on our ranch better than most all the time. But he always was like, alright, there’s two parts of ranching, right? There’s working in the business and working on the business. Robert Kiyosaki discussed rich Dad, poor Dad. I think that’s one of the lessons in that book is working in the business or working on the business. I think Dave Ramsey's stolen it or whatever. And it was a real thing at our place Sunday night, my dad was part of a farm ranch business accounting extension program where everybody did it together and they got together and they talked about what they saw in each other’s numbers and stuff. Well, he did that on Sunday night.

And we thought it was cool. He had a digital calculator in 1978 that had little blue numbers on it. It was a Royal. It probably cost an obscene amount of money, but it made him better. And we thought it was cool. Let us run the numbers. And he’d read off a number and we’d do the math and we’d read him back the number and he’d write it down. But that was him working on the business. There were a lot of discussions that were, when I was a kid, it looked like he was working in the business that was the equivalent of feeding cows or buying bulls or chopping ice or whatever. And there was a lot of that time that he was thinking about what happened on that night. And that’s my encouragement is help folks get in that space where they don’t have to be working in the business and making those knee-jerk decisions when they should be working on the business at a set time and with the right business partners to go do that. And if we can ever help you do that, I encourage you to call one of us because that's what we're waiting here for.

Shauna Hermel (32:35):

So now you have a website ...

Dave Weaber (32:37):

We do. TerrainAg.com. That’s open to the public. We’ve got lots of great content in there, some thought pieces, some quarterly market outlooks that we all put together. We encourage folks to ... if you see us on a flyer or in the country driving down the road ... We’re always happy to stop and talk and build those connections. And we value those invitations to participate in those discussions about people’s businesses. And I like to joke, it doesn’t do any good sitting on my desk if I can’t get it on your desk and in your head, we’re missing the boat and we got to figure out how to fix that. But always welcome those conversations over a cup of coffee or cold beverage some afternoon. We’re the Angus producers. We see a lot of them across the country and we're happy to do that.

Shauna Hermel (33:31):

Well, thank you for joining us this afternoon. I know, as you know from being on the podcast before, we like to end our discussions with something uplifting that’s happening in either your professional or personal life. Do you have a story to share?

Dave Weaber (33:46):

Yeah, uplifting things. I think as I look at business opportunities, our ranch is in part of that delayed estate planning part of the business. So we’re enjoying the fruits of some of these discussions, looking at other businesses, some stuff outside of within agriculture, but outside the beef business, trying to find a more financially sustainable path for a ranch that’s in 12 in. moisture kind of country. That might be an opportunity, might not. We’re exploring some of that. So just in the phase of turning over some rocks.

Shauna Hermel (34:25):

Okay. Alright. Well thank you again for joining us!

Dave Weaber (34:27):

You bet. Thanks so much!

General (34:31):

Listeners, for more information on making Angus work for you, check out the Angus Beef Bulletin and the Angus Beef Bulletin EXTRA. You can subscribe to both publications in the show notes. If you have questions or comments, let us know at abbeditorial@angus.org, and we would appreciate it if you would leave us a review on Apple Podcast and share this episode with any other profit-minded cattlemen. Thanks for listening, this has been Angus at Work!