How a Vibecoded Newsletter Is Making the Hay Market More Transparent

The hay market is not a transparent market: It is very fractured by types of hay, whether it is alfalfa or clover hay. There are a few opaque, illiquid markets like this — scrap metal for instance — that require some hands-on investigating to figure out. Aiden Johnson is co-founder and CEO of the HayWire newsletter, which aims to make the hay market more transparent: He and co-founder Cole Glasgow use an AI model to mine public data sources — like USDA reports on auction prices across different regions — to produce a weekly newsletter on the hay market. On this episode, we speak with Johnson as he explains why he chose hay over other kinds of markets, how HayWire was made possible through vibecoding, networking with hay farmers, why the ROI of owning a horse is dropping with hay prices spiking, and why hay demand keeps on tightening. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Joe Weisenthal?

  There are some market stories where you want every detail. Tracy and I have made quite a few podcasts on that basis, but sometimes you've only got 10 minutes and need to know what's moving markets and why. That's the Barclays Brief Podcast. Every week, experts from Barclays Markets and research get you up to speed on what matters and what to watch next, about the time it takes to grab a coffee. So, search Barclays Brief wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Business Week's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk, and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs, and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw, innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting and hiring practices, but according to recruiters, advisors,

• 1:11Speaker 01

  and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company, and Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates, quote, "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at chatgpt.com.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news.

• 2:06Tracy Alloway?

  Hello and welcome to another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

• 2:10Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Wasenthal.

• 2:12Tracy Alloway?

  Joe, I was lurking on the Homestead subreddit recently, as one does.

• 2:19Joe Weisenthal?

  As Tracy Alloway does.

• 2:22Tracy Alloway?

  There have been a number of posts recently about hay prices and hay getting more expensive. And the craziest thing is, there's one guy, one poster, who keeps talking about hay prices. And on one of his posts, someone came in and said, they commented, "You should go on All Thoughts."

• 2:40Joe Weisenthal?

  I love episodes that come about that way. All right, can I make a little confession here?

• 2:44Tracy Alloway?

  Please.

• 2:45Joe Weisenthal?

  I've done no prep for this episode. I mean, I, you know, I'm often not as diligent as you are. But I was just like, you know what? I know that hay exists. I've seen it in bales. I figure something is dried. I know it's consumed. I have done no research.

• 3:01Tracy Alloway?

  You know a little bit.

• 3:04Tracy Alloway?

  You know a little bit about hay, though, because we spoke with, that was in New Mexico or Arizona now? I can't remember. The farmer growing alfalfa.

• 3:11Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah. It's like fermented, right? Isn't hay like, sort of like fermented and dried or something?

• 3:16Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, something like that.

• 3:17Joe Weisenthal?

  I mean, I guess we'll learn.

• 3:18Tracy Alloway?

  But one of the reasons it's good to grow hay in the desert is because you don't have to worry about it getting wet in the drying process.

• 3:24Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah. Oh, right. I did, we did learn that.

• 3:27Tracy Alloway?

  All right. So that's the one hay fact that we all know. So we're going to be talking about hay prices today.

• 3:32Joe Weisenthal?

  Great. I can't wait.

• 3:33Tracy Alloway?

  But beyond that, I find the hay market really interesting because there are, no, seriously.

• 3:39Joe Weisenthal?

  No, no, I believe you. I believe you.

• 3:41Tracy Alloway?

  There aren't that many markets out there nowadays that are like, non-transparent, I want to say.

• 3:47Joe Weisenthal?

  Do we have any hay indices on the terminal?

• 3:49Tracy Alloway?

  There's a PPI index.

• 3:51Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, it is?

• 3:51Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 3:51Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 3:52Tracy Alloway?

  So you can look up like alfalfa hay PPI.

• 3:55Joe Weisenthal?

  So how's that been looking? I assume, I mean, everything is up. I just like, if you name something that exists in the world, it's probably up. But what is US?

• 4:07Joe Weisenthal?

  Hayseeds. Yeah. Well, no, I don't know. Is this even up to date? I can't even find one.

• 4:12Tracy Alloway?

  I don't know. But this is what I mean. Like, it is not a transparent market. It's very fractured by type of hay. So I didn't realize this, but there's like Timothy, there's alfalfa, there's supreme hay.

• 4:25Joe Weisenthal?

  Um, so I'm just gonna say, like I said, I haven't done any, I don't know anything about hay. I just said I would just learn it all on the fly. But I also, I did do a little bit of research about our upcoming guest, who you identified.

• 4:38Tracy Alloway?

  The guy posting on Reddit.

• 4:39Joe Weisenthal?

  The guy posting. And I have said this, his business is very cool. And we'll talk about it. But I just want to say, the business that he has built in terms of like becoming the man who knows about hay, is advice have given to young journalists who have like asked me like for career. I've literally said this, and I'm gonna drop some alfalfa. No, I'm gonna drop some, that was in, I'm gonna drop some alfalfa alfalfa here. And but now it'll be commoditized by the time I say it. I've always thought that one way you could like build a business as a young journalist or someone is, find a, find a piece of public data that exists, that is out there, that is consumable for free, that nobody is regularly looking at.

• 5:23Joe Weisenthal?

  Gather it, become the central repository for it, and then occasionally comment on it. There's all kinds of data in the world. A million public agencies of all sorts are producing monthly reports on this or that in PDFs that nobody is looking at. And if you say, you know what, I want to learn about X, and I want to end a newsletter, write, update what X is doing each week or month or whatever, you can become the man, the ax on this topic. And the guest that you have found for today's episode, I think has done exactly what I've told numerous young individuals to do. So we'll see if this, I'm curious about hay, but I'm also curious about this individual's business model.

• 6:04Tracy Alloway?

  It's a good market structure story and I guess technology story.

• 6:07Joe Weisenthal?

  And a media story.

• 6:08Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, exactly. All right. So without further ado, we do in fact have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Aiden Johnson. He is the founder of, can you guess? Well, you know what the company is.

• 6:18Joe Weisenthal?

  Haywire, right?

• 6:18Tracy Alloway?

  Haywire. It's such a good name for what this company actually does. So Aiden, thank you so much for coming on All Bots.

• 6:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, I appreciate you guys having me on.

• 6:28Tracy Alloway?

  So why don't we start with the basics? What is it that Haywire is actually doing?

• 6:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, so essentially what we are doing and kind of what we built our business around is pulling public data, just like Joe said, and kind of putting it all on plain English newsletters for our subscribers. So, I mean USDA publishes reports weekly, bi-weekly, and then even monthly depending on region. So we kind of built a system and a technology and our model to kind of do all the hard work for us and then analyze it and put it onto plain English. So it's been a great, great, I don't know, like lesson, I guess, learning, going through the flaws, making sure we're producing the most accurate data. But no, it's been fun.

• 7:13Joe Weisenthal?

  Well, let's go into this a little bit more, and I'm sure that AI makes the process of collecting and absorbing the relevant data easier. But what are these reports out there that you're able to mine? Who's producing them? What are the, what is the sort of the, the public data source that you're mining? And what can you pull from it?

• 7:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we actually have a direct API integration with the USDA. So we get live feed strictly from them. And that basically funnels into our four system type of, I guess you could say, verification. And so we're mining that, which publishes every week. But the problem we're kind of running into is that there's USDA data.

• 7:55Joe Weisenthal?

  Sorry, when you say we're mining that, what is this report? Let's go step by step. What is this report that the USDA publishes every week?

• 8:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, so USDA is publishing basically auction prices throughout the region, throughout the countries. So every auction house will report kind of what they're paying or what they're seeing on their ground there. And then it will be put on a PDFs, but buried in PDFs. So it's kind of hard for people to find.

• 8:19Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 8:19Tracy Alloway?

  So you actually call up some of the auction houses. By the way, I didn't even realize there were auctions for hay. But you call them up to get additional pricing information as well, right?

• 8:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we actually have Rock Valley Iowa, Rock Valley Hay Auction as our primary data partner, which is one of the biggest hay auctions in the country. So having them to kind of get intel from what they're seeing on the ground to kind of cover the gray area between the USDA data and then the live market, what people are actually seeing on the ground. And we are actively trying to, you know, branch off a network to more auction houses throughout the country to different regions, so we can kind of get a forecast of what's actually happening there.

• 8:59Tracy Alloway?

  Joe, this reminds me of the old scrap metal market, right? Where like you had a broker who actually had to call up all these junkyards and ask what price they were selling.

• 9:08Joe Weisenthal?

  Well, I don't know if that's still the case, but it might actually still be the case. That if you, like, and I remember 11 or 12 years ago, like very early on, when I joined Bloomberg, talking to one of our reporters, she was based in London, who was covering scrap metal. And she talked about that part of it was essentially calling up the scrap yards and say, what'd you price for? And of course, you know, it's not that different from LIBOR, right? It's not like we think of something like these very opaque, illiquid markets like scrap metal. But that fundamental idea of we're going to ring people up or get an email or something and then triangulate the data is how some of the most, you know, famous liquid markets there are.

• 9:47Tracy Alloway?

  That's the alpha, alfalfa.

• 9:48Joe Weisenthal?

  That's the, that, yes.

• 9:50Tracy Alloway?

  Calling people up.

• 9:51Joe Weisenthal?

  Calling people up. Wait, so just on these reports that the USDA publishes, I assume, A, it's not, is it just a hay report? And do they just publish price data or volume data or quality data? Is there anything else that, like, what are the, what is the context with which you pull this data from?

• 10:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, so there's many sources that we can pull our data from, but specifically on the USDA data, it'll show the region, the type of bale, the weight, you know, the quality of hay or alfalfa that's producing. So, and that automatically goes into our database. And it kind of makes it easy for us, so when we take on-ground intel, that we can put it through our data wheel and it's able to, you know, cross-reference it with the USDA data and the table, it kind of presets. So we're able to make sure it's not the data that's coming from the ground. Is valuable and actually not hallucinations, I guess.

• 10:45Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, I know we're going to get to hay specifically, but just as we're talking about sort of this business model. There have been some really successful, you know, I think like it might be Flight Radar 24. One of these other things that was worth a lot of money was essentially some people who found a really good way to visualize or present.

• 11:03Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 11:04Joe Weisenthal?

  Data that was already public, but it's opaque, et cetera. And so I'm very fascinated by this business model of like, there's all this data out there. And if you put a nice skin on it.

• 11:14Tracy Alloway?

  User interface still matters.

• 11:16Joe Weisenthal?

  User interface and actually like, let me just see the price or let me just see the map that it's moving on can suddenly be a very monetizable thing.

• 11:25Tracy Alloway?

  Well, I expect with vibe coding, it's going to become more common as well. So Aiden, why, why did you decide to get into this particular project? If you don't mind me saying so, like you look, you look very young. I assume you're a young founder of Haywire. Why was this your, your first project? Yeah, your passion project.

• 11:47Speaker 03

  Oh, man, well, if you were to tell me this last year, I wouldn't believe you because the idea was kind of thrown out by my dad, who was actually looking to start a startup company for alfalfa cubes. And throughout that process, he kind of needed, he was crunching numbers and he asked the question, what is the cost of hay? So, you know, find that raw materials price. So that's kind of how it all started and he's like, Aiden, you know, you should probably like start this. It's a great idea. And, you know, at the time I'm like, okay, come on, I'm 19 years old. I'm a college basketball player. I don't really care about hay.

• 12:19Joe Weisenthal?

  Which year was it?

• 12:21Speaker 03

  2025.

• 12:22Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay. Oh, okay.

• 12:23Speaker 03

  So this, this conversation happened in 2025 and at the time, you know, I'm, I'm a college basketball player. I don't really care about hay, but you know, I always knew I wanted to kind of get into entrepreneurship, I guess. And I'm like, dad, you know, you know, you know, I want to run a business, but you know, hay is definitely not going to get me a girlfriend. So that's kind of how it started and that's kind of how it started. And, you know, as I got. Got to college, I was introduced to kind of AI, which kind of started out as, um, you know, vibe coding websites for local businesses. And then I actually, my co-founder Cole, who is very intelligent with the AI, we kind of just started working together about it to get to

• 13:05Speaker 03

  the more agentic and automation type of AI. So that kind of started a rabbit hole. I'm like, which kind of started out as a vibe code project with no infrastructure or no system at all, kind of turned into something we thought, uh, we knew that was reachable. So we kind of got into that, um, you know, just we, we basically hop on a call every day, deciding how we can improve our product, improve our technology. So we can produce the best volume. And you know, the hay market is very untransparent, I guess you could say. So we found a problem, uh, you know, first week of college classes in the business class, you're going to learn, okay, you need to find a problem and then a solution to start a successful business. And, uh, that's kind of how it all came about. And, you know, we've been kind of attacking it every day. And I'm very grateful

• 13:50Speaker 03

  for my dad to ask the question, what is the price of alfalfa in hay?

• 13:56Joe Weisenthal?

  Uh, do you have a girlfriend now? Did you get one yet?

• 13:59Speaker 03

  Uh, absolutely not. So I, people ask, um, what type of business you run? And I just say, I try to, you know, mask it as something really intelligent, like, yeah, I run a market intelligent, AI infrastructure company, not just a market, hay, hay market company. So, no, um, in the process.

• 14:17Tracy Alloway?

  All right. Well, all thoughts listeners in Minnesota.

• 14:21Joe Weisenthal?

  Eligible young bachelor, uh, 20 years old. Um, just, uh, we're, we're just putting it out there. Maybe we'll do, uh, we could do some matchmaking for you. Um, just, um, had your dad had this idea, I don't know, had this been 10 years earlier, like orders of magnitude, would this have been doable at all to you and your co-founder in a real way prior to AI and vibe coding as we know it?

• 14:47Speaker 03

  Oh, no. 10 years ago, I don't think I would even scratch the surface of getting to the death I am here now. Um, and that's just simply because I think the infrastructure of AI is getting smarter and smarter every day. And it makes it able for, you know, two young 20-year-olds like me and my co-founder Cole to, you know, mess around and create a whole company and platform. So, um, yeah, I don't, I don't think it would be, um, it would probably take a big team, uh, 10 years ago.

• 15:12Joe Weisenthal?

  Tricia, I already want to be Aiden Johnson. Like, everything about this is just like so cool to me. Like, in my next life, this is my plan.

• 15:20Tracy Alloway?

  Well, go out and find that niche market, Joe.

• 15:23Joe Weisenthal?

  Find your hay, you know?

• 15:24Tracy Alloway?

  That's right.

• 15:25Joe Weisenthal?

  Find your alfalfa. Yeah. What is your hay?

• 15:27Tracy Alloway?

  Pursue your Timothy dream. Um, okay. Well, why don't we actually get to hay prices? So first of all, if I try to look up hay prices, I'm definitely going to Haywire. But setting Haywire aside, what am I trying to find? Is there a benchmark hay price out there the way there is? You know, when we talk about US stocks, we talk about the S and P 500 or another index like the Dow Jones. Is there a particular hay price I should be looking at?

• 15:55Speaker 03

  You know, not really. Um, the USDA NAS S is what it's called. Will, you know, produce kind of an average cost of hay. So right now I'm looking at, hey, for April, it's $180 per ton, which is up $167 for March. And then for the alfalfa side of things, it's $185 a ton, which is up from $175 since March. So essentially I was talking to Levy Russ at Rock Valley and I was kind of, kind of explaining this issue. And I'm like, how do people really know what they're paying for hay? And like, what do they benchmark it against? Cause you know, people aren't really going into those USDA PDF files unless you kind of have a, a degree in economics

• 16:40Speaker 03

  and, you know, have the time to find it. So I kind of talked to him and he's like, yeah, actually we have a lot of people in our region, uh, Rock Valley specifically is in the Midwest, um, use their auction data as the benchmark of kind of what hay is going for. So the crazy thing about the hay market Is what I realized is not just one market. It's like fragmented markets across the whole country. Every market, every regional market is very hyper local, simply because transportation costs are a lot. You can't domestically transport it across the country. And then you you think like there's so many inputs on how it affects the quality of hay to, you know, produce the output, you know. Minnesota hay may not be the same as California hay in terms of price,

• 17:25Speaker 03

  because it's just all hype, very hyper local markets.

• 17:43Tracy Alloway?

  There are some market stories where you want every detail. Joe and I have made quite a few podcasts on that basis. But sometimes you've only got 10 minutes and just want to know what's moving markets fast. That's the Barclays Brief Podcast. Every week, experts from Barclays Markets and Research get you up to speed on what's happening and what to watch next. Concise, focused, and brief. Search Barclays Brief wherever you get your podcasts.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Business Week's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw, innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting and hiring practices.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  But according to recruiters, advisors, and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company. And Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Effective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates, quote, "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute, brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at ChatGPT.com.

• 19:33Joe Weisenthal?

  Just on the girlfriend thing, you're 6'6" and you can dunk a basketball, I see on Twitter. Okay, sorry.

• 19:39Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, you're really doing all you can to help here, Joe.

• 19:41Joe Weisenthal?

  I'm looking at his Twitter profile and you can dunk. I'm really impressed. I wish I couldn't.

• 19:48Speaker 03

  Appreciate that, appreciate it.

• 19:49Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, no, it's really cool. Let's talk about these, to what degree, all right, there's this lack of transparency and there's this wide variety of prices regionally, which again, isn't not unlike many other commodities. I mean, even oil, obviously, has regional price variations. The cost of shipping is going to affect it, but you know, we talked about this with lumber, with Stinson Dean as an example. To what degree are they generally correlated across the country? Like, will they generally, will prices generally rise and fall around the same time, even if there are wide gaps in the, you know, wide spreads from one region to another?

• 20:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, so there is a bunch of different factors to kind of how different regions can, you know, be affected by markets. I mean, you think of what's kind of going on in the West right now with the drought kind of going on, 46% of the US alfalfa acreage is actually in a drought. So you might see some demand coming from the West, maybe moving east, but actually, I was kind of looking into this the other day and it's, I was like, kind of looking at the East Coast kind of, because I don't really, like, there's not really much out there, I guess, for, hey, I mean, there's a lot hobby farms and it's like small square markets out there, but it's kind of its own ecosystem, because it's cool, because it won't really feel the effects of the drought from the West, simply because transportation

• 21:16Speaker 03

  A big factor in that because you're not going to ship or transport hay that far.

• 21:21Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 21:21Speaker 03

  Because it just, it will eventually cost more than the actual value of the hay. Simply because, you know, these brokers, these dealers will charge anywhere from five to eight dollars per mile to have it shipped. So that can easily average to be more valuable than hay. So it's, it's kind of, it's kind of weird. So yeah, um, I guess.

• 21:40Tracy Alloway?

  So if I'm in a location, one of the drought stricken, uh, states, drought stricken states, that's hard to say. Um, I'm reading the USDA, one of the USDA reports right now, and it says hay prices continue to increase as ranchers search for hay. Are you seeing people who are trying to like bulk buy or secure supply ahead of more price increases?

• 22:05Speaker 03

  I mean, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm seeing right now and you know, just talking with farmers, kind of networking across the country. I'm seeing people are trying to get their stockpile for summer. I'm hearing that first cut is being extremely light. The yields are not really producing at a volume and carryover from 2025 is essentially gone.

• 22:23Joe Weisenthal?

  Sorry. Well, I actually did find, uh, if you search on the terminal, Tracy. If you search USDA hay prices by state.

• 22:32Tracy Alloway?

  Oh.

• 22:33Joe Weisenthal?

  Then you can find some fairly regularly updated price indices. So I have to say, like, I mean, I understand you have a great business going, but if any listeners just want to spend tens of thousands of dollars out of Bloomberg Terminal, they can also.

• 22:46Tracy Alloway?

  Any farmers out there.

• 22:48Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah. Bloomberg actually offers a, uh, a haywire competitor. You just get a bunch of other stuff. You're probably not, uh, interested, but no, but this gets to my, so like, this is another important business question. Anyone can collect data and produce it. Then you have to find people who will purchase it from you. And this is the other half of business. Some people in the house produce and some people sell. How did you, how do you go about, um, finding farmers or growers or anyone in the business? Anyone in the chain? How do you get them to discover haywire?

• 23:25Speaker 03

  I guess just networking, obviously discovery, a big part of that has been on the homestead Reddit, uh, where Tracy kind of found everything, but you know, just actively reaching out to them, I guess. Kind of just showing them, okay, this is what we're trying to do, trying to, trying to be that transparency layer. Just to kind of make your guys' local markets a little easier for you and not kind of guessing and buying blind and selling blind. So we're, we're basically going to them and we're like, okay, this has no cost for you. Just like, kind of tell us what you're seeing so we can provide that clarity and transparency for, you know, hay prices. You know, we're not going to fix the whole transparency issue. Like we're going to try, but we probably won't. Um, but we, we just at least want to make it a little more transparent for your local region, you know?

• 24:08Speaker 03

  These farmers know their regional market like the back of their hand. And it, especially these old gen farmers, they're not really going to adapt to technology like that. So it's been kind of difficult trying to get them to adapt to be like, okay, like this is technology nowadays. Like this can actually really help your business. So I'm honestly just networking with them, providing, um, you know, kind of the data we're seeing and kind of the value and see, telling them that there's no really cost to just kind of sharing me your data.

• 24:37Joe Weisenthal?

  Um, so Tracy mentioned the sort of timing of purchases or people trying to accumulate or stockpile. At times of high stress, when prices are really high, again, maybe due to a drought or whatnot. Do you see farmers essentially expanding their geographical search? So such that they start buying hay from an auction house or a hay farm or whatever? That wouldn't normally be under typical conditions economical for them to purchase from.

• 25:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, I, I actually had this question the other day and I was on a call with Rock Valley, my, my main go-to guy. And I was like, are you guys seeing any shipping or any transactions coming from more west of you?

• 25:19Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 25:20Speaker 03

  I just kind of, I was kind of testing the hypothesis of, okay, so the drought is very tight over in these western states. Are buyers coming over to these eastern states and producing it? Cause we did see a spike kind of in auction data. We kind of covered it a Little bit, maybe on the Reddit, but it we called it kind of the Missouri pattern. It was kind of hypothesis we were test testing. So it basically is so after we figured out that the drought and you know, it's supply is very, very tight there in the Western states. We started watching those Western Midwest states. So we, we saw demand in or prices in Missouri go up. And they're like, okay, well, we'll keep an eye on it. And then the next week we saw um Rock Valley's prices kind of spike a little bit.

• 26:03Speaker 03

  And they're like, okay, so maybe there is some demand coming over from there. And then the next week we saw, you know, get go up a little, a little bit again. So it's kind of what we're seeing right now. I can't confirm fully if it's true because Auction House we track in Missouri posts their data monthly. So and then Rock Valley is weekly. So it's just a kind of cool, like, I guess I'm kind of, it's like a Lego set. I'm kind of just like building piece by piece and it's like a puzzle, trying to solve the puzzle.

• 26:31Tracy Alloway?

  Okay, so talk to us, I know you're not in agriculture directly, but I'm sure you've heard some things about this. Talk to us about the second order effects of higher hay prices. And here I got to shout out our fellow Bloomberg podcaster Katie Gryfeld, um, who has a horse.

• 26:50Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 26:50Tracy Alloway?

  And so I asked her if she had like noticed any changes in hay prices. And she said, like, the cost of boarding had gone up because of hay prices.

• 26:57Speaker 03

  Boarding, oh, yeah, yeah, right, right, right.

• 27:00Tracy Alloway?

  And then I saw another headline just before we recorded this podcast about a horse sanctuary in Texas on the brink of closure because of rising hay prices and also gas. So are people feeling the effects of these higher prices?

• 27:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. I'm just talking with farmers and you even horse owners across the country. I personally, my family owns horses, so I can kind of see this firsthand. But yeah, I I've been talking to a lot of farmer or horse owners and they're basically saying, we love our horse so much. But the return on investment on horses right now is just like, it's too, it's too expensive. No, I'm paying so much to maintain the horse and we don't know like exactly what, what we're gonna do because it's so expensive, but. And then on the other side of things, some dairy houses, um, these, these dairies are going to be the ones buying the higher quality R F V alfalfa. To um, you know, feed these cows that are producing eighty pounds of milk a day. And they're actually taking that high, higher quality R F V.

• 28:00Speaker 03

  And then mixing it with lower quality R F V to, you know, um, control their rations and you know, maybe create a little more. Volume. So especially with these crazy high prices, they can kind of control their, their volume a little more. And then. On top of that, I was talking to a farmer. The other day and he said, so he went to go put his hay up, uh, up in the auction. But he actually pulled it back because the demand for hay was getting so increasingly like. It was getting really tight and he needed the hay. So he's kind of predicting it to get even tighter. So. Yeah, as I can tell, a lot of people are kind of feeling the out, out, outcomes of these high, high hay prices.

• 28:40Joe Weisenthal?

  Just to back up for exam, uh, so you mentioned horses, cows also eat hay, right?

• 28:46Speaker 03

  Yes, yes. So cows will eat, there's different types of qualities. I guess you could say.

• 28:50Joe Weisenthal?

  Walk through us these quality. Did you see something like R F D? What was the term used? Like higher? What was it?

• 28:57Speaker 03

  Uh, R F V, uh, relative feed value, um, which basically is. Which could, I think I'm pretty sure it, it, it controls or it. It, it gets the protein contents and the fiber in the, the hay and it's, it's a base of a hundred. So anything like a hundred fifty, I think is pretty good. Below that you can see the lower quality hay. So like I said, the dairies are going to be, um, using that higher quality alfalfa and supreme hay, higher R F V. To have their cows on the best. And then you're going to have the, the econ people, the horses also using this higher quality stuff. Because they love their horses and they only want what's best for their horses.

• 29:39Speaker 03

  And then you have the lower quality type of stuff, which is going to go to like the utility and fair, which is going to go to your beef. Which are, it's just a cheap way to, you know, beef up your cow for a cheaper price instead of paying the premium alfalfa. And then, yeah, there's, there's, there's so many different qualities.

• 29:54Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, yeah. Just real quickly. So hay made out of alfalfa is high quality. What is low quality hay made, made out of?

• 30:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, so low quality hay, which will be lower RFP, I'm pretty sure, you know, I'm not a farm kid, but I'm pretty sure it's the amount of dryness and the protein contents. So when it rains, rain affects a lot. You have to have a dry, a dry week or forecast to produce or cut hay. And if it rains, rain can decrease the protein and nutritional value in the hay. I think the lower quality stuff is drier and doesn't have the leaf content that the higher quality stuff does because that's where the protein is in the leaf and then the fiber comes from the stem.

• 30:55Speaker 01

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• 32:18Tracy Alloway?

  Are you seeing anyone devote more acreage to growing hay as a result of these high prices? Cause I'm kind of thinking, I got, I got two fields.

• 32:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, you could be a hay farmer.

• 32:28Tracy Alloway?

  They're not doing anything except growing invasive weeds at the moment. Maybe I could rent them out for hay production.

• 32:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, I'm not, I'm not really seeing that, but um, I'm, I'm not really sure on that one. If I'm seeing people do that, but I actually was thinking about this other day, kind of driving past 20 minutes south of me. I was driving on the highway and I, I realized that Google was actually going to build a 482 acre data center 20 minutes south of me. And I was like thinking, how will this affect the agricultural land? I mean, you know, it's already, not a lot of people are, alfalfa is kind of in a weird spot in hay because they're already competing against the other crops. You know, the more stable crops like corn and soybeans. So how are these data centers gonna, you know, they're gonna go in agricultural land. So kind of vice versa, you were saying, how are they going to take away this agricultural land?

• 33:17Speaker 03

  And you know, I was kind of thinking too, the 482 acre data center, Google's building here is going to be cooled by air. But what if you put those kind of in the western states and where the drought conditions are? And alfalfa is already a very water intrusive plant. So then alfalfa is going to have to be competing with these big data centers for water. I, I really, I really, I'm really seeing kind of the flip side of it, kind of, kind of just what I'm seeing personally. So, but yeah, you did mention you had certified acres and I think you do have four different options from what I know. That's kind of the next niche I kind of want to get into because once again, it's kind of like the hay, not, my dad's kind of going through the same process.

• 34:00Speaker 03

  He just closed on 164 acre farm here and he had the question of, I don't really know what to do with it. But I don't know, I'm not an expert on it yet, but um, I do know there's a couple of options. You can rent it out to your farm or to farmers, basically like rent per acre. And then you can, the USDA will basically pay you to conserve it. And then the, the downside of that is you probably lose your land or access to your land for 25 to 35 years. Uh, and then the third choice. Is kind of the money crop right now. I guess you can these solar panel companies are coming in to maybe place solar panel panels on your fields. Um, for a huge chunk of change, but also are you okay with, you know, putting solar panel on appreciating farmland?

• 34:45Speaker 03

  So I mean, there's, there's a couple of options and like you said, you can also grow, start growing hay or grow ever crop is producing the most money, I guess. So there's some options that that's as much as I know right now, but yeah, it's pretty interesting.

• 34:57Joe Weisenthal?

  Tracy, have you considered putting a data center on your land? You know, uh, is that something? So you, you know, you could put maybe half the land solar panels and then they could power a data center on the other. So many, it's like a jackpot episode of like things that we're interested in.

• 35:15Tracy Alloway?

  Well, the solar panel thing is true because in the Northeast where I'm

• 35:19Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 35:19Tracy Alloway?

  Based some of the time, um, I see a lot of farms that are now like just solar panels, huge fields of solar panels. Yeah.

• 35:27Joe Weisenthal?

  Wow.

• 35:27Tracy Alloway?

  They're so big. In fact, whenever I drive past one, it's so big. It looks like a body of water off in the distance.

• 35:34Joe Weisenthal?

  That's kind of beautiful. I don't know. I mean, it's interesting.

• 35:37Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, it's interesting.

• 35:39Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, it's interesting. Um, how big is the hay market? Uh, just generally like, what do we like? Again, I don't, I don't know. Like, yeah, how big is it? Volume wise, dollar wise, all that stuff?

• 35:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the hay market is actually a pretty, pretty dang big. I mean, you, you have hay acreage covering forty nine to fifty million acres across the U S. And itself, alfalfa itself is producing eight billion dollars per year, which is the fourth most valuable crop. And that's kind of brings my question back to, so it's, it's pretty, pretty big, you know, market commodity. And there's not really a firm transparency layer. So yeah, it's, it's really big.

• 36:21Tracy Alloway?

  Are you still in college?

• 36:23Speaker 03

  Yep, I just finished my first two years at the University of Jamestown, going into my third.

• 36:27Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, wow. Okay, so what do you, you know, you're juggling a business as well as college. What's next for Haywire? You mentioned like maybe evaluating different options for land owners, but where do you want to take this?

• 36:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I guess, like I said, the main goal is kind of be on top of, you know, the kind of hay chain, you know, you got your producers, your farmers, and then you got your brokers. We kind of want to be at the top, you know, being the benchmark data for these prices regionally. So we just want to be that information layer on the top and, you know, just providing this information to these farmers so they can kind of make better decisions based off a timing and then based off of what the market is actually seeing in their region. You know, I would, I like the newsletter. I kind of like hearing people connect, connecting to people. I love answering my emails and kind of picking people's brains. And then we would, we would eventually like to also be, you know, just kind of more the business side of things,

• 37:24Speaker 03

  you know, give someone maybe our API database and they can use it for their website. You know, that's kind of a business plan, not necessarily what we want out of the hay market. But yeah, that's kind of what we want to do. Just build that transparency layer a little better.

• 37:38Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, we work for a company that sort of, I mean, really, this, I started under like the same premise. So like that you literally, you know, you could, you could want, this could one day be a Fortune 500 company for you. I mean, this, the idea of like,

• 37:51Tracy Alloway?

  Agricultural database.

• 37:52Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, find some data niche, make it built layer on top.

• 37:56Speaker 03

  I have a confession.

• 37:58Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 37:59Speaker 03

  Um, so when I started, started first planning this business, our motto was the Bloomberg for hay.

• 38:05Joe Weisenthal?

  There we go, there we go. You know, we've had, so can I say something? We've had people come on, I've seen the Bloomberg of X, Bloomberg of Y, people always say this. This I find to be legitimate. You know what I'm saying? Everyone wants to be the Bloomberg of something. But when I think about how you're like building this from the ground up, et cetera, like you didn't even have to say it. It was like you're building the potentially the Bloomberg of hay and one day you may have a TV network.

• 38:30Tracy Alloway?

  Do we have hay futures based on if we had benchmark prices?

• 38:33Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, well, like, so that's a question. I mean, this is, that's clearly a theoretical way, which is like, you can't have a hedgeable, tradable, financialized market until you first have that index, right? Something that everyone agrees on as a reference price. At night, when you dream about the future, like, could you see, have you thought about the possibility of essentially, okay, this could be something that financial exchanges could now benchmark something against?

• 39:01Speaker 03

  You know, I have thought about it, but it's also very tricky because you have to have Mother Nature on your side to kind of standardize the, or like, make it more stable, I guess. It's very unstable. I mean, too much drought, too much rain, you know, too much heat, like, all these different inputs can really have effects on the outputs. That just makes it so unpredictable, you know?

• 39:23Joe Weisenthal?

  But this is why, yeah, this is why we need a, this is why we need a hedgeable instrument, precisely because of this volatility. So I think, I think there's-

• 39:33Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, there's something there.

• 39:34Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, there's something there for sure.

• 39:37Speaker 03

  I would, I would love to be the guy that does that then.

• 39:41Joe Weisenthal?

  So, from your perspective, let's say, like, you know, opacity is a friend to some people in any business, right? There are a lot of businesses that sort of, you know, they can have higher margins because their customers aren't aware of the prices available, like, the, and, you know, obviously, the consumer wants more transparency, but some people benefit from the opacity. Is there anyone in the supply chain of hay, et cetera, or in the market for hay, that theoretically stands to lose out if customers are, and farmers are more informed about prices?

• 40:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. So, this kind of ties back to my dad, working for a private brokerage here in my hometown, and I was actually talking about this with him. I said, who kind of, who kind of loses out on this? And he says- Typically in business, especially commodities, the middleman will always feel the uh out or the outcomes of more transparency because they're the ones making deals, uh especially in the haymarket, kind of blindly and kind of just guessing. I mean, I call I I witnessed firsthand my I I sat there and someone called the owner and was just like, um, can I do 157? This is an example. Can I just do 157 dollars um per ton for, you know, X amount of bales or tons?

• 41:00Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 41:00Speaker 03

  And he was like, yeah, yeah, that works. So we're not going off anything here. There's no transparency and that can either work for the broker or that can, you know, maybe make margins a little slimmer. So I I do think that the middleman will always, you know, have something to lose with more transparency.

• 41:16Tracy Alloway?

  All right. Aiden Johnson of Haywire. Thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots. That was really fun.

• 41:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, I appreciate you guys having me on.

• 41:36Tracy Alloway?

  So Joe, that was a really fun conversation. I mean, it is fascinating to see someone like vibe code this kind of database, right? And it does seem like low hanging fruit for a bunch of other different markets. What I will say though is whenever we do these like agricultural or food episodes, there seems to be this overriding theme in recent years, which is volatility.

• 41:58Speaker 03

  Volatility, yeah.

• 41:59Tracy Alloway?

  We're getting these big spikes. Sometimes we're getting big drops down, although often the drops are not as big as the initial spikes. And so you can see like, there is a need here, not just for price transparency, but also potentially for some sort of hedging instrument.

• 42:13Joe Weisenthal?

  Totally. I absolutely, I do think there's a lot of, uh, probably a lot more data out there. I also just think this is like a very interesting AI story specifically, because it's a very clear example of here is a new type of business that might not have been economical to run. Like, you know, maybe there's not tons of subscribers willing to pay up.

• 42:35Tracy Alloway?

  For sure. You wouldn't have been doing it while you're in college.

• 42:38Joe Weisenthal?

  No. So the pro version, so he has a free version of. Newsletter, which I'm going to subscribe to. And there's a pro version and you know what? I'll subscribe to that, too. It's just $14 a month. But, okay, $14 a month is like not a ton of money. Even if you have like, you know, a thousand, you know, it's like, it's not a ton. But if you could do it with two people and if you can automate a really big chunk of it.

• 43:00Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 43:00Joe Weisenthal?

  And automate it only because AI makes it really easy to do things like ingest the data, turn them into pretty charts and so forth, keep a database, give people AI access. Suddenly there's all these new market that markets that theoretically could become unlocked simply because here is data out there and you could put it in a usable form in a way that would have just been too laborious prior to it.

• 43:27Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, laborious.

• 43:29Joe Weisenthal?

  Too laborious.

• 43:30Tracy Alloway?

  Bales of hay. No, that was a bit forced. I'm sorry.

• 43:32Joe Weisenthal?

  But it's a, it is a, it is a clear example of like, okay, this is a productivity unlock.

• 43:38Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 43:38Joe Weisenthal?

  And I've no doubt that it works. There's, you know, some things with AI like don't work as what, but I'm pretty sure.

• 43:44Tracy Alloway?

  You're scraping.

• 43:45Joe Weisenthal?

  But automated, you can feel pretty confident that that's something that you can build, et cetera. I'm, I'm very, I think it's really cool. Oh, the price of being a founding member is going to rise to $17 a month after June 30th. So get it.

• 44:00Tracy Alloway?

  Rising along with the hay prices.

• 44:02Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 44:02Tracy Alloway?

  All right, shall we leave it there?

• 44:04Joe Weisenthal?

  Let's leave it there.

• 44:04Tracy Alloway?

  This has been another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.

• 44:10Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart. Follow Aiden Johnson. He's at Aiden Johnson underscore. And check out Haywire, haywireag.com. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armad, Dashal Bennett at Dashbot, Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano. And for more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com/oddlots. We have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all these topics 24/7 in our Discord, discord.gg/oddlots.

• 44:39Tracy Alloway?

  And if you enjoy All Thoughts, if you like it when we talk about hey prices, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

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