Episode 140 – Ranching & Farming [5/7 Series] with Kacy Atkinson

Announcer:
This is The WealthAbility® Show with Tom Wheelwright. Way more money, way less taxes.

Tom Wheelwright:

Welcome to the Wealth Ability Show, where we're always discovering how to make way more money and pay way less tax. This is Tom Wheelwright, your host, founder, and CEO of Wealthability. We all depend on ranchers and farmers for food. What we don't always understand is the risks and the rewards of ranching and farming, and either from a financial standpoint or from a tax standpoint. I talk about it in my new book, the Win-Win Wealth Strategy. We're really going to get deep into ranching today because we have an literally daughter, granddaughter, great-granddaughter of ranchers, Kacy Atkinson with us today. Kacy, it is just absolutely delightful to have you here.

Kacy Atkinson:

Well, thank you for having me on. I'm always excited to get to meet new people and have conversations about the world that I live in.

Tom Wheelwright:

So tell if you would share your family history when it comes to ranching.

Kacy Atkinson:

My family's been involved in agriculture for a really long time. In fact, part of the ranch that we operate on today, my great-grandfather homesteaded back in 1895. He was there for a few years before he got around to homesteading it. We have been in the same place for a really long time. My great-great-grandfather brought his family over and got started in the agriculture business. We have a long history of being involved. We started way back when in the sheep business, eventually decided sheep were not meant for this country with all the predators that we have. Switched over into the cattle business and we're still here. We're still going and doing this. I'm very proud and excited to be the fourth generation on the same land, doing the same thing that my great-grandfather did.

Tom Wheelwright:

That's amazing. Yeah. That's why we get our sheep from New Zealand. Right? Because they don't have the predators.

Kacy Atkinson:

Well, I mean we do still have a pretty vibrant sheep industry here in America. Just not so much in this part of Wyoming anymore.

Tom Wheelwright:

Where exactly are you in Wyoming?

Kacy Atkinson:

I live in southeast Wyoming. If anyone has ever heard of Leramie Peak, it's kind of a giant mountain in the middle of nowhere, but that's pretty much where I call home.

Tom Wheelwright:

Awesome. I think most of us, so most of our viewers are entrepreneurs, investors, they're interested in that, but I think very few people really understand agriculture at all. I think we understand a little bit more about real estate and business and energy, things like that, but I don't think we have a whole lot of background anymore in agriculture. I want to talk about a little bit about what you go through. Right now I know you're going through a busy time right now, really appreciate you taking time out from what you're doing. Can you kind of walk us through a year in the cattle ranching business?

Kacy Atkinson:

Of course, depending on where you are, everyone's year is going to look a little bit different. Seasons don't necessarily line up. Some people calf in the fall, we calf the spring. I think I told you before we got started two days ago it still looked like January out my front door. We are still deep in winter. This is probably the harshest winter we've had in my lifetime in terms of it certainly putting down a lot of snow and staying. Normally we have green grass and bare ground like the rest of the world seems to have right now, but we're still buried in snow. Kind of typical year, if you start in January, January, February, most of March, we're just feeding cows, taking care of them, making sure we're meeting their nutritional needs. That's about all we can get done with the snow that we have on the ground.

We will start calving our very first calf heifers usually the end of March. Our cows start calving in April. That's what we're doing right now. We're trying to make sure they're not having them in snowbank and we can keep them alive and get them going. We will calve our cow herd primarily in April and May, June. Of course you're fixing fence and irrigating and all of this stuff while you're calving cows. It's a very busy season. June is really focused on irrigation, trying to raise our hay crop. We live at about 7,500 feet, so I've got a whole about 28 days worth of a growing season here where I live. I have a very short window to try to raise whatever hay crop I'm going to raise to try and get as much hay put up ourselves so we don't have to buy it. That's a major expense that we have to the ranch if we have to buy additional feed to get them through the Winter.

June, we're trying to raise that hay crop. July and early August we're going to harvest that hay crop and get it up and stored for winter. When we roll into fall, it's trying to catch up on any building projects. If you want to replace fence or fix pipelines or kind of do that stuff, you're also kind of focused on getting your cows pregnancy tested because you don't want to keep the ones that aren't going to have a calf. They're not paying for themselves, so they need to go and that kind of stuff. Really just trying to get yourself prepared again for winter, which can arrive in October again where I am. Winter can be a really long season. That's kind of just the high points of what we do. Of course, we can be busy every day. There's always more work to be done on a ranch I think than you can conceivably get done. Those are kind of the major seasons that we roll through here.

Tom Wheelwright:

At what point do you fatten the calves and get them ready for market?

Kacy Atkinson:

We actually don't do that here. Most of the ranching industry, if you're talking about the cattle industry is broken into three segments. You are either a cow calf producer, you are a stocker backgrounder, or you're a feeder. It takes between 18 months and 24 months to roll an animal clear through that process. We are cow calf. We have the herd of mama cows that we're running here on the ranch, and we keep those mama cows as long as they're productive for 10 years before we'll send them off to somebody who lives in a kinder climate or they will enter the beef chain themselves. We really focus on raising calves up to about 500 pounds for the first six months of their life. Then we sell them to the second phase. We'll have them roughly from April to October.

In October, they'll go to their second owner who will be the stocker backgrounder. They'll keep them from somewhere between 6 to 12 months probably, and they will put additional weight on them usually through grazing them. They try not to put a lot of feed resources into them other than what Mother Nature provides in terms of grass resources. Then they will sell them somewhere around 12, 15 months, usually probably 15 to 18 months to their final owner, which is the feeder, which is the fat cattle we think of that you then put on those final pounds, that final fat layer, which makes beef taste so delicious before they're then going to go to the harvester to end up on your dinner plate.

Tom Wheelwright:

Wow. That's quite a process. It sounds to me, so I'm just going to, let's look at your particular aspect of this ranching business. I just have always thought, it sounds like you've got a lot of risks in your business. Can you walk through some of the challenges that a typical cattle rancher is going to run into on a yearly basis when it comes to what types of things do you have to watch out for? What types of things could cause problems for you as far as the cattle themselves?

Kacy Atkinson:

Absolutely. Risks are plentiful. I think people in agriculture, we joke that we're just in the business of breaking even. Right? That's our goal, which is not most people's goal. Most people's goal is to make money. Ours is just to stay afloat. There are so many risks. First of all, you have risks for mother Nature. I think hopefully we all kind of remember Storm Atlas, which hit South Dakota a few years ago and wiped out massive numbers of cattle. My great-grandfather actually went broke and lost the ranch back in 1919. There was a massive blizzard that came through and wiped out every last one of his sheep. He ended up going broke after that. We constantly deal with Mother Nature in terms of we can't fight her. You have to try and work with her, but sometimes you can't work with her.

We lost a few calves early on just a week ago because we got nailed with another blizzard. Like I said, it still looks like January here. So we just didn't have anywhere to go or any way to do that. So you've got mother nature either on you in my case or she's droughting you out. The past three years, we've actually been in a pretty significant drought. Trying to have the feed resources available to maintain your cattle herd, you're not raising your own hay crops, so you're having to buy hay to feed them. That's a major expense. Those are certainly risks. You've got market risks that you have to deal with. What's the market going to be like? We don't really get to set the price for our cattle. We don't get to tell you what you're going to pay for it. The stocker backgrounder comes in and tells me what my cattle are worth and basically I just have to take it.

I don't really have any control over how much money I'm going to get for the product that I have produced and whether that's going to pay my bills or not. Some years it does. We figure in a 10 year cycle, three years you're going to lose money, three years you might make money and four years you're going to break even. The goal over that 10 year period is just to manage the years that you made a little money to counteract the years that you're going to lose money so that you can break even all 10 years across the board. Last year we had problems. We had a disease outbreak that we've never had before. We had something called diptheria, which is something we've never had to contend with in our cattle before, and we lost 20% of our calf crop.

Well, that's just 20% of my income that all of a sudden went away overnight. I still have all of the expenses coming in because I still have all of those cows. It didn't affect the cows, it just affected the calves. There's always something it seems like that you have to contend with. I think most of us hope that once in a lifetime we're going to have a good market, we're going to have a good calf crop, and mother nature's going to be kind to us all in the same year. You're going to have just this one super bright spot where everything really just came together for you. There's definitely risks associated with this industry that you have to be cognizant of and you really have to be managing for all the time and trying to prepare yourself for when those bad scenarios hit to make sure that you're going to be able to get through them.

Tom Wheelwright:

Have you had challenges over the years with insects, with disease in the hay itself? Those types of problems so it's not just the cattle, but it's also the feed?

Kacy Atkinson:

I would say we are so high and we are so cold for so long, we probably don't run into the typical insect problems that you might have say on the crop side. We do occasionally have a really bad grasshopper crop and a grasshopper crop can come in and wipe out a significant amount of the forage resources that you have. You could start thinking, “Oh, we're going to be really set.” Then a massive crop of grasshoppers comes in and eats half of the forage resources that you have available. And so that's probably from an insect perspective, mostly what we have to deal with. Whereas in different climates, if you were in the South, if you were somewhere hotter or humid, you're obviously going to have different insect problems we don't have here. We have not had to thankfully, knock on wood, any issues in terms of disease or whatnot in our hay crops, thankfully.

Again, other than the grasshoppers eating it or elk. I think that's another thing that people probably don't think of. We're not only responsible for managing our livestock, I'm also responsible for managing all of this significant wildlife population that we have. Deer, antelope, elk, bears, mountain lions, whatnot. We have a pretty significant loss in terms of the elk coming in and eating a bunch of our crop before we're able to harvest it and get it up where we can protect it. We just have to factor that in as well that the elk are going to come through and they're either going to smash it to the ground so you can't get it up or they're going to eat it. One or the other.

Tom Wheelwright:

Wow. How many head of cattle do you typically have and what acreage do you have them on?

Kacy Atkinson:

We run a herd of about 400 head of cows. We have shrunk that back some because of the drought. We haven't been able to run as many, but we definitely keep busy. I live in Wyoming, so where I live, it takes about 40 acres to run every single cow that we have, which would be wildly different than say West Virginia, where maybe you can run a single cow to an acre. We run on really close to about 16,000 acres. For most people, they would consider that a fairly significant sized operation to manage and take care of. Where we are, we just have to have that much land to manage the cows that we have.

Tom Wheelwright:

Then do you have a lot of regulations, particularly with regards to the mountain lion and the bears and the elk and so forth? When you talk about managing the wildlife, I presume that you have certain things you can do and certain things you can't do.

Kacy Atkinson:

Largely it's really just going to be focused around what's the legal hunting season to come in and try and do some population control. To hunt anything, you have to have a license. There's a certain amount, there's a specific time in which you could harvest those animals. If you're talking about mountain lion and bears, there's a limit, a quota on how many of those can be harvested in a year before the season closes, whether the time has elapsed or not. For us, it's more about probably hunters coming in than us personally doing any sort of population control. You just learn to deal with them. You just learn to manage with them because you have them. They're part of the natural landscape around here.

For the most part, we enjoy having them around. Maybe not the elk. They destroy a lot of fence along with the hay crop. We love having the deer, we love having the antelope and different things that kind of diversity around. Just trying to make sure that you've left plenty of forage for them to be able to consume as well. When you take your cows out of a place and whatnot, it's important to consider that too.

Tom Wheelwright:

Outside of Mother Nature, what would you consider the biggest risk to a ranch or the ranching industry?

Kacy Atkinson:

I think something that's very different for say even my dad's generation, he just turned 79 in January and it's he and I on the ranch, just the two of us managing all of this and taking care of this. I came home six years ago full-time on the ranch. We unfortunately lost my brother unexpectedly. He was the one who was going to be coming home to the family ranch to take over. When we lost him, I decided that I needed to come home and step up and step into this and whatnot. I think for the older generation, they lived for a really long time in this place where you just did what you needed to do. You knew how to do it, you did what you needed to do. People just went to the grocery store and bought beef and were happy to have it on their plate.

Well, we now live in this world of social media where information is transmitted instantly, where bad information could get transmitted much quicker, it seems like, than factual solid information. Now we kind of operate in this place where we almost need what we call a social license to operate. We have to have the public on our side, but we have a public that is many generations removed from the family farmer ranch. They don't know a farmer or rancher to ask their questions to. They're getting their information from the latest Netflix documentary because surely if it's on Netflix, it must be the truth. They're listening to what's on their Facebook feed or something that comes across the evening news, which unfortunately in most cases is not real accurate or not real factual. I think one of the biggest risks that we have now is how do we combat this snowstorm really of misinformation, of fear mongering, that's happening because it's an interesting dichotomy when you pull the public and you ask them, “Who do you trust?”

Farmers and ranchers are one of the only groups of people that end up on the positive side of that scale. We still have the public trust. Yet they're not necessarily coming to us for their information if they have questions about how their food is raised, probably because they can't find us or they don't know us. In order for us to continue to be able to make the decisions that we know are the right ones to make, because we understand how livestock work, we understand animal husbandry, we understand the land, we understand how crops grow, we really do need to address their fears and their concerns so they will allow us to continue doing what we need to do.

California, I think is a prime example with all of the propositions that have been passed in California where they've maybe lost faith in the people raising their food. They make all of these decisions that may or may not be in the best interest of raising food, but because they don't know, they pass these laws that then we have to contend with. I think for us, that's certainly a big risk moving forward that we have to be prepared to address head on.

Tom Wheelwright:

I'm curious just what are probably the top two or three pieces of misinformation that if you got to correct it to a large group of public, which is our podcast, what would you say? What would you like to correct out there?

Kacy Atkinson:

I think the first one obviously is we get hammered a lot from an environmental perspective in methane emissions. Well, methane emissions from ruminate animals are not new. We had buffalo in this country for hundreds of years that were ruminate animals that were emitting the exact same methane that my cattle are emitting today. My cattle aren't adding methane to the atmosphere. They're helping actually recycle it. Methane breaks down in 10 to 15 years. They graze plants which encourages those plants to pull that carbon back out of the atmosphere and destroy it underground to spread out to grow, to diversify all of those good things. It's part of this cycle that has been ongoing for hundreds and hundreds of years. What is new is humans and their carbon emissions, electricity burning fossil fuels and transportation, we waste 40% of the food that we produce in this country ends up in a landfill.

Well, when food rots in a landfill, it also creates methane that is methane that didn't used to go into the atmosphere. Understanding where these additional greenhouse gas emissions come from, and it's not my cows, I think would be one important thing. The University of Florida did this cool study where they found that you could eat beef for almost 40 years for the same environmental impact as using your cell phone for one year. I was raised before cell phones were a thing. I do know that we can in fact live without them, even though we don't think so. Using your cell phone for a single year, 40 years worth of eating beef. I think addressing that's important. I think another myth that I would like to probably do away with is this idea that agriculture is becoming corporatized.

The truth is that 98% of all farms and ranches in this country are family owned and family run. I think that's something that gets lost. People think big is bad. Well, I'm the definition of big by most people's standards. The average cow size in this country's only 25 head. It's small producers, it's people who are retired, they're doing it on the side in addition to a full-time job. Most of the beef in this country is still produced by people like me. Even though there's not as many of us that are large scale, we're still producing most of the beef, but it's me and dad out there every day and my mom.

Tom Wheelwright:

Not a big corporation. It's not Monsanto.

Kacy Atkinson:

It's not Monsanto. Yet on paper, we're an LLC because in order to-

Tom Wheelwright:

You need protect yourself. Yep.

Kacy Atkinson:

To pass it on and protect ourselves we have to be. I think people confuse the fact that we've tried to do appropriate estate planning to protect ourselves, to make sure that this operation can transition from my grandparents to my dad or from my dad to me as somehow being a corporate entity. No, it's still just me. If you're going to trust me, if you're going to believe what I have to say, and you're going to follow me on social media and I'm going to show you the good, the bad, the ugly my day so that you can see firsthand how I'm raising and caring for these animals, then you know, have to accept that I'm also big, but I'm not bad. I'm also technically a corporation because I'm an LLC, but I'm still just a family.

Tom Wheelwright:

Hey, if you like financial education the way I do, you're going to love Buck Joffrey's podcast. Buck's a friend of mine, he's a client of mine, he's a former board certified surgeon and he's turned into a real estate professional. He has this podcast that is geared towards high paid professionals. That's who he is geared towards. If you're a high paid professional, you're going, “Look, I'd like to do something different with my money than what I'm doing. I'd like to get financially educated. I'd like to take control of my money and my life and my taxes.” I would love to recommend Buck Joffrey's podcast, which is called Wealth Formula Podcast with Buck Joffrey. I hope you join Buck on this adventure of a lifetime.

You're not really big. That's the thing. This is where I think there's a huge disconnect right now in the public. It's like we want to tax the rich, but when they talk about tax the rich, a lot of times they talk about, “Well, we're going to tax people that make $500,000 a year because they're rich.” I'm going, “They're not.” $500,000 a year if you know have a lot of obligations. To me, that's not rich. Now, $10 million a year, that's rich, okay, right. But there's this misnomer between what's big and what's not big, what's rich, what's not rich. One of the things, so you bring up estate planning, it's one of the things you and I have in common. We both talk about estate planning for different reasons.

I'm a big fan of entrepreneurship, small business, family farms, et cetera. Can you talk about what you see as the threat of estate tax and some of these wealth taxes that have been proposed? I know there's been a lot of discussion, particularly from the senator next to you in Montana that has been really pushing back against his own party about these estate taxes and wealth taxes for ranching and farming. Can you talk about the threat that kind of policy has on family ranches?

Kacy Atkinson:

I think for years now, we have been in this situation, I can't tell you how many family ranches I've seen go to the auction block because they were still a sole proprietorship. There was no formal structure to try to protect them. There was no estate planning done. Then when the grandpa or the dad or whoever passes away, the son or the daughter or whoever grandchildren was there working in the ranch with the intention of continuing it can't pay the tax bill that's due to the government because one of the things that we have seen is land prices have become astronomical. When you look at the value, say of our ranch from an agricultural perspective, it is much less than its value as a wealthy person's paradise. Right? A hunting sanctuary or whatnot. When it comes time to pay that tax bill, they're not going to value it at it's agricultural value, they're going to value it at market value. Right?

Tom Wheelwright:

Highest and best use. That's the rule.

Kacy Atkinson:

Well, it's suddenly going to become worth millions of dollars. Did you hear me say I'm trying to break even? I don't have money in the bank. If you don't have large life insurance policies or some way to navigate that tax bill and you don't have a structure to protect yourself, most people are faced with no choice but to sell out. They can not hold onto it. They have to sell the land to pay the tax bill.

Tom Wheelwright:

Who do they sell to?

Kacy Atkinson:

Well, it's usually, in our case, whenever anybody sells out around here, it ends up being a wealthy multimillionaire who wants it for hunting, and maybe they'll lease the ground out to a neighbor or somebody to run some cattle on. The ownership is not typically someone who's going to have the intention to keep it in agriculture. That should be a concern to most people. There's no more land in this country. That is a finite resource. We know that we are losing hundreds of acres every single day of good quality crop land to grow crops on, not necessarily ranching land, but crop land in particular to urban development. They're putting up parking lots and malls and housing developments and whatnot. When you're taking this land out of agriculture and you think about how many people we have and how many people you need us to feed, we need to feed you. Well, I've got to have a certain amount of land to be able to do that.

Figuring out ways, I think it's so important that we work towards, and I mean, yes, I'm biased, but I would really like it if you would help me stay in business through good tax policy and understand that I'm not rich. I'm rich on paper only, and that's it. The only way that I can become rich is to actually convert my assets and sell them off. I don't have that cash sitting in the bank to be able to manage these large tax bills. The death taxes we call it, estate taxes are something that there are certain things that we can do. I'm always astounded by the number of people in agriculture who don't have an estate plan. Far more do not have than do.

Then they end up in these horrible situations where the kids have to sell out or everybody wants paid out. If you have multiple kids in a family and only one wants to come home and the rest, how do you pay them out? How do you navigate that? There's a lot of issues that a good estate plan is so important to protect yourself if you intend to stay in the agriculture industry and keep ranching or keep farming.

Tom Wheelwright:

Well, so let's go to how important maintaining that agricultural land is. First of all, how much beef does the average American consume in a year?

Kacy Atkinson:

Oh, I should know this. It's somewhere, I want to say it's somewhere in the 50 pound range per year, average.

Tom Wheelwright:

If it's 50 pounds, and then how many people are you feeding a year?

Kacy Atkinson:

I should know this as well. I want to say that the number somewhere around 170, that each one of us feeds somewhere around 170 people on average across the board, which is significantly more than even in the 1970s it was much less than that. As the population grows, that number continues to increase because it has, we used to say we represented 2% of the population in America. We now represent 1.5% of the population in America. I suspect in another decade or two we're going to represent 1% of the population in America. We have no choice but to figure out how to get better in how to do more with less, with less land, with less resources, with less availability because the population in America is going to continue to grow. Likely we are going to continue to decrease. How do you manage that? Well you have to get more efficient with what you have? You have to be able to produce more of less all of the time through research and technology improvements and managing what you have more effectively.

Tom Wheelwright:

The two big words, catchphrases in agriculture right now seem to be sustainability and organic. Can you educate us just a little bit on those two and what that means to you?

Kacy Atkinson:

If you ask anybody? I think in agriculture, if they're sustainable, my dad would say, well, we've been here for 140 years, so clearly we're sustainable. We have endured and we have continued. But I think there's so much more that goes into it from the public perspective, it's more than just enduring. I think part of the reason in agriculture, we hear the word sustainable and kind of our hackles go up a little bit because we think that that has to mean something big and flashy and fancy, and you're using some cutting edge technology. It's not. It's the little decisions that we make every single day to make us more sustainable. We have installed in the past probably 30 years, over 10 miles worth of pipelines across different parts of the ranch so that we can utilize the pastures more efficiently because cattle are only going to graze where there's close access to water.

Where there was no water available, the cattle weren't grazing there. Well, by providing water to those places, I can now use my pastures more efficiently. That allows me to be more sustainable. As research comes along or disease patterns change, am I making changes to my animal health protocols and making sure that I am giving my cattle the best vaccines available to help protect them against those things that's making me more sustainable. Those are little decisions that I'm making every single day that I don't maybe think about in terms of sustainability, but I would argue they are absolutely working us towards being more sustainable in the long run. Sustainability has to include the environment. It has to include your animals, but it also has to include you too. There's a very real, in order to be sustainable, you have to be able to stay in business. Can we do something to improve cattle prices? Can we do something to improve the death tax situation? All of those things working together I think make us certainly more sustainable. What was the second word?

Tom Wheelwright:

Organic.

Kacy Atkinson:

Organic, yeah. I think organic has a place, but I also think organic has kind of taken on this life where people don't really understand what it means. It's merely a growing practice that doesn't necessarily make it better than conventional or traditional. It certainly isn't safer. I will say that. I probably will take some hits that I don't even believe it's necessarily healthier because I think that those of us who are doing things in the traditional sense or conventional sense, we are still using the best research and the best technology that we have available that has been proven safe, that has been proven effective to get a product to you that we would serve to our family every day of the week and twice on Sundays. We stand behind what we're doing. I think organic has just sort of become this sort of trendy buzzword.

At the end of the day, I need people to understand it's just a growing practice. If that's something that makes you feel good about eating your food and you can afford it, I'm all for it. But don't feel like because you can't afford it, because it is more expensive that what you're serving your family is any less nutritional, it's any less safe. It's any less healthy because at the end of the day, it is just kind of a label and it's a choice of growing practice.

Tom Wheelwright:

I love it. Thank you. In my book, Win-Win Wealth Strategy, I talk about the tax benefits. The reason I'm saving this for last is because I've been in the tax business for 40 years and had ranchers and farmers as clients. I do know that the income tax laws are very favorable to ranchers and farmers. There's a reason for this, and that is you're in it to break even. Anybody else who breaks even doesn't have to pay tax. I do think there's also not just an incentive, we need the agriculture to grow food, but we need to be growing our own food as opposed to importing food. My last question to you is, how important do you see it from controlling what we eat, controlling what we can do to be producing agriculture in the US as opposed to importing it from other countries?

Kacy Atkinson:

Obviously I think it's important to maintain a growing system so that you have food. Right? I think that's important. Learning how to garden, have a rooftop garden, grow some lettuce hydroponically on your wall, whatever. I do think in America, imports are also very important. I think this is something that a lot of people in the cattle industry don't understand. As a producer, so we import less than 10%. It's like 9.3% of the beef that we consume in this country we import. 90% of it is what we call lean trim. Here in America, we eat overwhelmingly ground beef. We are a ground beef nation. Last time I checked, ground beef is one of the lowest value cuts of beef that exist. People eat it because it's cheap. We are not a steak eating nation. Yet because we have this feed yard system, we are creating the highest quality steak on earth, in my opinion. It's the highest value cut of beef.

I am producing something overwhelmingly that you aren't eating. I need a market for it. I don't want to grind up my rib eyes interesting and my TBOs and feed you ground beef because I have then slashed the value of what my cattle are worth like that. I can't live on less money. I'm already breaking even. I can't lose value in my carcass. I need to have export markets for that product. I need to be able to send my steak primarily to Asia, to Japan, to Korea, to Singapore, to all of these places that are steak eating nations and love our steak because I'm getting a premium for that. Then because in our feed yard system, we are at best producing what would create a 50-50 hamburger blend, 50% lean, 50% steak.

Well, when you go to the grocery store, you don't find less than 80-20. Most of you are eating 90-10 or 93-7 because you want that leaner ground beef. Well, a fat steer can't provide that to you. You're getting that out of our coal cows, our coal bowls, the dairy industry. I can't even produce in this system the ground beef that you want to eat. I have to import in that lean trim, I have to in order to be able to feed you and to maintain the value of my cattle. Every 500 pound calf that I sell off the ranch, about a hundred dollars that they are worth, let's say they're worth a thousand bucks off the ranch in a dream world. Right? A hundred dollars of that 10% of their value is strictly derived off of what their export value's going to be down the road. I can't lose that. I can't a hundred dollars for export value and I can't lose the value in grinding them up into beef.

Tom Wheelwright:

It's very important that you've got that commerce going back and forth is what you're saying between the countries. You're exporting what's good for the other countries, what they need. I can attest to that. I've spent years in Europe and their stake is not nearly as good as our stake.

Kacy Atkinson:

I agree.

Tom Wheelwright:

It's just not. They don't even know how to cut the steak right. They can't butcher it right. Seriously, if you're going to have steak, you want it to be either it's going to be the really expensive steak in Japan or it's going to be something that you get in the United States. Thank you very much, Kacy. I wish we could go on and on and on because I love this conversation. I'm such a big fan of American business in particular, but particularly the family owned business.

I grew up, I'm also the son grandson, great grandson of entrepreneurs, just not in ranching. We had other businesses. I'm a huge fan. I do think that what happens is when we put the small business out, the big business comes in, and whether it's the wealthy landowner or whether it's the Monsanto or Cargill of the world, they're going to come in because that's what your options are. It's just impossible. I'm looking forward to more conversations actually with you, Kacy, about how, actually, I would love to help you with the estate planning side because I do think that that's some education that could be hugely valuable to continuing the family farm and the family ranch and making sure, because it's so easy, once you understand it's so easy to do and we just need to get that education out. So thank you so much. So Kacy, if we want, I know you do a lot of speaking, so if we want to know, learn more about what you're doing, where would we go?

Kacy Atkinson:

The two best ways to find me, one, I have a website, which is kacyatkinson.com, and I'm sure you'll link that for them so they know how to spell my name. Then I also, if you are on social media and you want to see what a day in the life of ranching in the absolute middle of nowhere, Wyoming is like, I'd love to have you follow me on Instagram. My handle is, @10milespastnowhere. It's 1-0 for the 10 miles past nowhere, because that pretty much describes where I live.

Tom Wheelwright:

That's awesome.

Kacy Atkinson:

I love having conversations with anybody who has questions about what we're doing, why we're doing it, is your food safe? Whatever questions you have, I would love to have that conversation with you.

Tom Wheelwright:

Awesome. Thank you Kacy. Thank you everybody for watching, listening. This is so important. Just remember, agriculture is an alternative investment you might want to consider working with a family farm. You might always have wanted you retire, you sell your business, you want to start a family farm. I have a friend who just started a ranch up in actually Wyoming. I may have to connect him with you because you know way more than he does. He just started a cattle ranch. Very excited about this agriculture as I think it's so important to our country and it's such an opportunity for investment that we don't always think of. when we do look at these other ways and the things that the government incentivizes, we're always going to make way more money and pay way less tax. Thanks everyone. We'll see you next time.

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You've been listening to the WealthAbility Show with Tom Wheelwright. Way more money. Way less taxes. To learn more, go to wealthability.com.