Dr. Eric Scherder
Appearances
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Yeah, I made home. Yeah, I made it home. And that's one of the things after being here, if we'll have our driver, we'll be here for a long time.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
You know, I don't have a desire. I mean, don't get me wrong. It's nice. I think I like, I like four seasons personally. I like having summer, winter, spring and fall.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Well, lately we've had multiple seasons in the weeks.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
I have no desire to move to Florida or somewhere south where you've got more people than you do square footage. I like having a little bit of open area. And that's what you get in Iowa. I mean, we're still in the benefits, the features of big cities, but you've still got country living. And that, to me, is what my wife and I kind of like.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
So at that time, it was Dow, who I was with, and DuPont would have been the other component of Corteva, yep.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
So, yes, that time I came back, I kind of left seed sales and went into R&D. Okay. So I actually did research and development just not too far from here, and, well, I did it all across the state, but I've worked on –
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Well, a lot of the products are like Instinct Next Gen that you all got signed there, worked on the original formulation, worked on products like Resicor, worked on those formulations, was on the biology team for the enlist weed control system, so corn, the trait, the characterization. A lot of the stuff that farmers are using today, we worked on back then from 08 all the way up to 17. Wow.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Well, the funny thing is, actually, before the merger, Pioneer actually paid kind of a licensing. So we were working with a lot of the same folks. Yeah. Working at Johnston and doing all that stuff. So, again, small world in ag.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
It was a lot of electric fence.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Oh, yeah. It had probably been, yeah, probably by the time you started adding up all the fencing everywhere and the two different farms, yeah, we probably had at least that.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
And dirt. And everything was kind of in and out. One fairing house would have been, I was thinking it was 16 or 20, and then you had another 10. So it was like 30 in and out every week, no matter what. Every week? Just in and out. You don't live or die.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Well, that's the one thing growing up. We were, uh, Northeast Missouri. We were in, we're in Amish country. And so we have, we, uh, have really good sawmills and that's what we as kids did. And my two brothers and my two cousins, not only do we build a lot of hay because we had a lot of head of cattle on shares back then, but we also, it seems like we built a lot of hog houses when it got slow, uh,
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
dad and Frank said, start building a hog house. So we just started building hog houses on skids and we built a lot of them. So, but yeah, it was a lot of, yeah. I don't know how you had time. You ground feed in the morning before you went to school and you ground feed at night.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
I had just alone myself, I had 40 sows for her to finish. Wow. Just in high school. And that was kind of my purebred and, you know, so my two other brothers and two cousins and then the herd. And then we sold a lot of hogs. Like I said, we sold a lot of blue butts through the sale. In fact, growing up, we guaranteed a 10 pig average on a gilt. And I never gave money back to a farmer ever.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Holy smokes. You know, on that. So we sold a lot of livestock.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Yep. So it was, you know, in our town is there, we had a lot of good families. I mean, in fact, I think at one point there was 200 and some shirters all in Pike County, Missouri, and all were in farming. I mean, all, all in livestock. It was just whatever, for some reason, our family's always been big in livestock.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
And, uh, Yeah, long days, but I learned a lot. You know, it's funny. That was one of the challenges I had to say growing, kind of moving back here to Iowa, you know, not having a farm to teach my kids. That was one of the things I remember talking to my dad is, how am I going to raise my kids? And he goes, well, what do you mean?
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
I said, well, I don't have the life lessons that, you know, growing up that, You didn't have the farm as that teaching mechanism that we just took for granted. In fact, you didn't even know you were being taught growing up. You were being taught and you didn't know it. Well, how do I instill those same things? And you find ways. You figure out ways.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Oh, yeah. My dad had a... He had a subtle way at times of proving a point. You know, like you sit down to meal and your plate's not there, and you go, well, where's my plate? And he'd say, well, you didn't think it was important to feel creep feeders tonight. They're not eating, so why are you?
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Okay. You go feel creep feeders and come back and you've got a cold plate dinner. You do it once and you learn the lesson real quick.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
You know, same way as straw, especially in the winter. You know, we never picked out much in the winter. We always picked out in the summer on Porta Hutts, stuff like that. But you start getting those fall nights. It starts getting cool, and you've got to make sure you're bedding down straw. I remember one night Dad just handed me a blanket and said, you can sleep out in the shed at night.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
It's not too bad. And I'm like, I'll freeze to death. He goes, well, he didn't think the hogs cared, so I don't think you care. You know, you learned your lesson as a kid real quick. And you didn't know Dad was trying to teach you something, but you got through it.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
That I don't know. I feel like I should look that up. You will find there's, as you travel enough across the United States, you'll see, like Bowling Green, everybody says Kentucky. No, Bowling Green, Missouri.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
You know, and there's, at least with Pike County, there's actually, I think it's, the cities for some reason almost do mirror each other going bass-ackwards away from the river, which is kind of interesting in itself. But, yeah, you'll find the same names almost in every state. Yeah.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Well, I'd say as far as game changer, probably the Enlist Wii control system. It's not new chemistry.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Actually, we were a couple years ahead always. It just didn't get approval. The Chinese approval is what really held us up. And we lucked the draw, whatever. Long story short, we're here and Dicam is not right now. Which, I don't want to gloat, because at the end of the day, that means farmers lost another tool. Yeah. And that's what's kind of interesting in our business.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Anytime there's negative press... It's not bad for one ag company. It's bad for us all. It's bad for all farmers out there. But I'd say that's probably the biggest impact I've seen, one in which, you know, as you think about how we're farming today, the challenges we're faced with as ag farmers, That's having a huge impact out there. I mean, we're on 65% of the U.S.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
soy market, about an 80% spray rate with Enlist. That means there's a lot of acres every day in the summer that are getting sprayed with Enlist. I'm not going to apologize for the price because it's a price where we have to have it to do innovation and R&D. Another statistic, we spend $4 million a day on R&D.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
$4 million a day. So when you think about that next seed bag or that next seed treatment, that fungicide, all that innovation, it's got to be, you know, I just did, I was doing a talk with Wilbur Ellis. It's kind of crazy to think about some of these numbers, but it takes almost 12 years to bring a new product to market. You know, a new concept, new AI, new mode of action.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
If you're bringing a new AI, new mode of action, it's about $360 million. You only have a patent for 20 years.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
If you've used up around 12 of that and you haven't even sold the first drop of it, you've got to try to hurry up and get your costs recouped just to get that, plus you're trying to reinvest back in your R&D effort to bring that next germplasm, all the stuff that we need to continue to grow yield. That's why we have to deal with what we have to deal with.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
The other challenge, too, is we built a lot into that formulation, you know, with Enlist One and Enlist Duo, that we don't have the registration concerns that, you know, that Dicam. In fact, we went through the first environmental ESA was our herbicides. We went through the second re-registration. And, you know, there's certainty about our products.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
And I take a lot of pride in that, actually, that we did our job, we did it well, and it's here to stay.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Well, and there's parts of the world where it's, I mean, it's diehard true. I mean, there are diehard dicamba folks out there, you know, for what, you know, for different reasons. And you'd ask those folks the same thing. They felt it was very safe and There's a lot of farmers probably this year going, man, what do I do?
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
You know, as we've all been around farming, I've got to change seed supplier, a trait, a herbicide. That's a lot of change in one year for any grower. It's hard enough to change over just to new hybrids with the same seed company, more or less. Right. A whole new germplasm.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
That's kind of why I got a lot of growers spooked this year, you know.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
So the best way to describe this is we've done a lot of things. And I'll put it in perspective. The regulatory atmosphere we're under in ag right now is under so much scrutiny. And it continues to get more and more. For the average person out in the world who doesn't deal with ag, they don't understand it.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
But a prime example is if we had to bring table salt through the same regulatory environment we have today, you would not have table salt on your table, guaranteed. Because of all the negative downsides, the LD50s, all the things that we have to deal with, you wouldn't have table salt. At all.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
You wouldn't have half the products we take that are all natural out there, like the ginkgo balboas and all that type of stuff. You wouldn't have any of that stuff. But the reason we built what we did is because we knew a mean, 240 amine, 240 esters, they can volatilize. And simply put, that means this. Good growers can follow labels. They watch the weather.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
They can make that application correct that day. But because of temperatures, because of environment, they don't want to get up. get off the float, or come off the surface of foliage or soil, and let's say the wind was blowing to the east, well the next day it's blowing to the west, and it just takes that product and just starts moving it.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
And it can end up on a susceptible crop, sensitive area, garden, you name it. And this stuff can move miles. You know, there's been, especially if you get down south in areas where the closest field that they've been documenting spraying was five miles away. And there's damage. So it's amazing.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
The other thing I don't think a lot of people realize, when I worked at Arkansas, we did a lot of studies. What they call Crowley's Ridge. It's basically you've got rice country going from Arkansas headed towards Memphis. And there's basically this ridge right there. And then on the other side, you've got cotton country.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Well, there's a no-fly zone for about 10 miles there because as you go up in altitude, the wind may be coming here at the ground out of the north. You may go up and it's coming out of the east. You go another 100 feet, it's going west. So it depends on what layer you get in. It depends on how far that will actually go. Well, we've developed 240 coaling.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Totally different salt, even though we know 2,4-D, and that keeps it stable. So we say near zero volatility because under normal agricultural practices, it's not going to get them volatilized. Right. I mean, I've had it under basically like a small hoop house where it gets up to literally 140 degrees, and it won't come up and hurt tomatoes.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Different salt that keeps it stable on the surface, but we also added in Colex-D, which What Colex D does is really stops those driftable fines. So as a farmer and you're applying, that's one that, you know, I don't care what product you spray, you're always worried about drift. Yeah. Right. That doesn't matter. Well.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
A lot of our drift reduction technology, all it does is take those, I would say for lack of words, that bell-shaped curve and slides it over to bigger drops. We were actually able to figure out how to kind of bring the tails in. So we have less fines and less big drops. And that gives us, when you couple that with the right nozzles, we're 90% less drift.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
And we also developed it so that it would mix better with certain other salt formulations out there. So you start bringing all that together. That's how we brought about Enlist One. And Enlist Two is just the same kind of product, but we also brought in the glyphosate component. There's still a lot of growers that like the convenience of a premix.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
If you're farming some smaller acres, are glyphosates still working? No. Hey, it makes sense.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Absolutely.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Yeah. Or in some places, really good surfactant.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
So I will kind of make this analogy between you two. If you look at your kids and you look at your kids, they have certain features of you. A hundred years from now, your great-great-grandkids are still going to look different from your great-grandkids. Well, that's how molecules kind of are.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
There are just certain things about dicamba, you know, when you think back, and again, not trying to disparage, because clarity's been around. Dicamba's been around a long time. Without some of these technologies, we wouldn't be where we are at today. So we do have to give it a little homage, but dicamba, the clarity, you know,
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Let's say its volatility was, starting at the floor, it was about knee-high. Then it started to worry about it. Then what was the next product we had? Status. It was an improvement. Had a little less volatility. We still use a lot of status out in corn today, but it may have brought it up to the waist on volatility.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Then we had the Batma salt or Ingenia, a whole new salt formulation, even safer than the other two, relatively speaking. Maybe it's 10 feet off the ground. Huge improvements there. 2,4-D was 30,000 feet above it. No matter how much you make improvements there on the dicamba, it's all relative terms. That's why, in general, 2,4-D is 236 times less volatile than dicamba.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
That's why we don't have some of the issues. The other thing is soybeans are very, very, very sensitive to dicamba. Cotton is very sensitive to 2,4-D. So there's some susceptibility to the crops out there. So when you think about our part of the world here in Iowa, it's corn, soybeans, alfalfa, maybe some grass. All those crops are not susceptible to 2,4-D.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
So that's why we don't see the issues like we see with dicamba cupping. Right. So when you look at that jug, you go, well, it's just a jug. It should have a bunch of bells and whistles and alarms going off. There's a lot of technology that we built into it intentionally to give farmers that freedom and flexibility so they could go out and make timely applications.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
We all know it's challenging enough just to find good days to spray.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Well, we built a lot of those things in there, so when you could spray, you knew you were going to deliver it on target. Right. And to me, I don't know, maybe that's good or bad, but it was a lot of fun developing the tech, that product.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Yeah, and that's the challenge. We've found, as our company, we've come out with a lot of new modes of action in insecticides and fungicides. The biggest challenge is it's – I'll put this in terms. We can find new modes of actions, and that's not a problem. Actually, almost every chemical company out here has found a lot of new modes of action.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Is that mode of action or is that active registrable? That's where we start to get in some of the kind of the fine details a little bit. A prime example is – I'd say HPPDs. If I said an HPPD, what's a product you think of? A bleacher that you use.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
No, that's fine. Or Callisto. Those types of products out there. We started looking at some HPPDs, and we found several early on in discovery. We had some that were just dynamite. We thought we had the right rates down. I'm talking low use rates, like ounces. An ounce. And we found out next year it killed all the soybeans. And we planted corn. Corn still looked good, clean.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Fourth, third year, still killed soybeans.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Still good weed control.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Okay, now we have a longevity problem. And you think back to what we're trying to achieve. This is why it's such – and it's kind of hard to think about. We're trying to give you just enough residual, everything you're wanting, not impacting the environment, not have all the bad negative carryover, that EPA and all the registration. It's a lot we're trying to ask out of chemistry.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Yeah. I packed two lunches to get here five miles away. You know, absolutely.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
and still do it all exactly the way we want it and not have any concerns. That's where the challenge really relies at.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
And that's one of the reasons why we launched what we call our Enlist Ahead. We launched that in 2012. That was long before we launched our herbicides, long before we launched our trade. It was all about folks. Let's be smart about what we're doing here. You probably hopefully have never heard a Corteva sales rep say use Enlist by itself.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
We want you to use it with a multiple mode of action. It's not that we want to try to drive up your price in a tank mix. We know, let's just be realistic, if glyphosate has lost some utility, what do you have left post-emergent beans today?
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Mufosinate. Mufosinate.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Like I just told you, Roundup's starting to lose it. You know, we've still got some PPOs out there, FlexStars.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
We can burn them, but the PPOs out there, we've got resistance. So if we don't couple these technologies together, we're not going to preserve either technology very long. And that's been our stance since 2012. Yep.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Mother Nature is always going to win, folks. It's just how do you work with her and try to, at the same time, kind of double down and triple down to give you that longevity.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Drive a Ford, don't you?
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
So the next, I mean, there's some other technology coming. We've got some HPPD tools coming in soybeans challenges. We've got HPPD resistance already out there. Again, we've got, uh, we're working with BSF on the new PPO trait. And what I mean by that is you think about the flextars, the cobras, those, and you go, well, Eric, we've got resistance now.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Well, if we can bring a new chemistry, which they're working on, that actually kills those weeds, but also has residual. There's different ways we can look at it. Now we're able to kind of revitalize that segment. So we're working on that trait right now in conjunction with BSS. So that'll be out here soon.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
maybe by 2030s yeah 30s somewhere there if we what's the end game though if we keep kicking this down the road seven to ten years you know eventually it's going to keep catching up to us are we going to have to start that's the problem that's the problem we're in right now is is it's always been let's think back and then you know you think back to the you know we had als days the amside days and i think back in this would be 95 96 somewhere in there we had a
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
I was on R&D tour, and they said, hey, this Roundup thing, we hear it's coming. That's like a flash in the pan. That won't amount to nothing. We've got 95% of this market. We're going to keep it. Well, when you do one thing and you do it over and over and over, you develop resistance. And we did. It was good technology. Still, we use it today, to be honest. It still has value. Yeah.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
But we just wore it out. And then we did the same thing with glyphosate. And we didn't learn a lesson. We just, let's get away from residuals. Let's get away from multiple modes of action. It just works so well. I mean, you can't blame a farmer when you kill everything out there in one shot.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Yeah. Well, that really kind of, I'd say it set us back because we had the Roundup generation. We had people that didn't even know how to weed ID. They didn't need to. And then now when you're talking about multiple modes of action, they go, what's multiple mode of action? So that's why we're re-educating everyone again. And that's hopefully why we're getting through on education.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
If we don't do something, You've got to preserve these technologies because it's taken us, not just us, the industry so long to get the next generation out. We're not able to bail your keister out this time. I mean, if you burn up resistance here, you're going to pay $70 to $80 to a hoeing crew to come out and do beans. And I don't think anybody wants to pay that if you can find the labor.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Seven miles away from the studio. Yeah, drive by it all the time and never really knew what all went on here. Hey, now you do. And I said, I know right where that's at. Never been there.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Or, yeah, just lost yield, yeah. Which then you're going to pay for it the next year in lost yield, even worse, because you've got more to deal with. So this is, I mean, and this year, like we all know, farming in 25 is going to be tough. Just with the economy, the prices, it's going to be a tougher year. Yeah. People are going to be looking for ways to, how do I save dollars?
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Well, if I can save $6 an acre across 1,000 acres, that's real money. That is. I don't blame a farm, but is that $6,000 you saved this year? Is that worth the next $20,000 you've got to spend for the next 10 years because of this? I don't have that easy answer, folks. I mean, that's a tough decision at times, but those are the conversations hopefully farmers are thinking about.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
I would say you have, for each company... I would say they have expertise in certain chemistries. Okay. You know, when you think about growth regulators, group fours, Corteva, Dow, we had a lot of chemistry there. We had a lot of experience. You think about HPPDs, originally that was Syngenta. Of course, you had, at the time, Monsanto, Bayer was glyphosate. Liberty's changed hands so much.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
ALS, it seemed like a lot of us had, AMSI had a lot of ME or ALS. DuPont had a lot of ALS chemistry. Mm-hmm. Everybody has what I call their experience in their chemistries. And what you're really trying to do is how do I mine that knowledge, that background to come up with something new, innovative, before you wore out that chemistry?
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Well, we do a lot better job of record keeping and data mining and all that. We can do a lot better job of that. The challenge is, a prime example, if you ask somebody, last time you remember spraying Basagran on beans? There are people that do it every year. And don't get wrong, but the mainstay knowledge is not there. It's not a normal mix. And it has value. Same way with resource.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Not a good product if you don't hear about it much. There's these little products that we all used in the 90s. Back in the 90s, it was classic Pinnacle and Assure was the Cadillac treatment. And it was, I don't know what it cost, but it wasn't cheap. And you had all these different mixes. I mean, you had to know what you were doing back in those days. I mean, you actually were kind of an artist.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Oh, gosh, yeah, for your audience. I mean, if you just... It might be a couple beers or bourbons just to take it all in around here. There's a lot of stuff, a lot of good memorabilia. I grew up on the farm, man. It brings back a lot of good memories.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
You went out and you kind of looked at the weeds and looked at the height, and you had to kind of up this rate of that, down that, add a little more of this surfactant, add this. I mean, it was kind of dialing the cocktail on the go.
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Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Literally. It wasn't just plug it in and go spray. And we didn't have – you had foam markers. You didn't have GPS and all that. I mean, you were kind of a craftsman out there a little bit trying to do good.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Well, the difference is we all have passion. You've got a passion for what you do. Now, what I've always amazed me, I've got a skill set for what we're doing here, but you think about the American farmer. I mean, they've got to be an amazing accountant. They've got to be an economist. They've got to be an agronomist. They've got to be a seed person, a soils person. They've got to be a mechanic.
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Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
And they've got to be damn good at all of it.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
The days of just being so, so.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Yeah. I mean, and even average anymore may not get you very far. So when you look at what some of our farmers are able to accomplish today, plus then be an IT person and hope that you don't lose signal. You know, I kind of laugh. I work with one of the guys. I ran a lot of ground from a local farmer. And like anything, Mother Nature comes up. System went down for whatever reason. Oh, no.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
He still at least had markers on his planter. Thank goodness. A lot of people don't even buy markers anymore on planters. He went out and said, I'm going to keep planting. I've got to plant today. Okay, go, man. Rock on. After he got done, he said, I hate that field. That's the worst planted field I've ever had in my life. I said, that's how your dad farmed for 40 years, man.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
That's what you get used to. I love what I do. Like I said, when you've got a passion for what you enjoy and you really can see the benefit, You know, when you can see growers and they come back to you in a year or two years later and say, that was, you know. I don't remember a lot of people's names. That's one of my downfalls. I suck at that.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
But I could tell you where I was at and I could tell you the conversation we were having, but I couldn't tell you your name.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
And when you do these field days or you do farm progress shows and you see this person two years later and they come back and say, hey, I talked to you two years ago. I don't know if you remember me, and a lot of times I kind of do. I don't quite remember where you were or what you were farming. But they'll say, boy, I did that recommendation. That worked. And you see their face light up.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
You made a difference in somebody's life. Just because you had passion, you love what you're doing. And that's what I was doing.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
I do a lot. I used to. I still do as much as I can. We're going to head down to Kamadi Classic here in a couple weeks.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Yep. We're going over to Denver, I should say. So, yeah. Yep. We'll be there. Yeah. I mean, I think that's one of the things I really enjoy is the education point of it. Get in front of a bunch of growers because – You can be 10 growers from the same county, from the same city, and they all farm differently. What works for one is not going to work for another one.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
And being able just to get down and diagnose some of those differences of why this didn't work or this did work, to me, that's enjoyable. That problem-solving.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Yeah, they've changed it this year, which I don't know why, but it is what it is.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Nope. Nope.
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Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
I'm pretty sure.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Um, yeah, it's all the above. Yeah. Uh, it's, you know, it's interesting. I do enough traveling that I know there's a few places I travel where they do have automated sprayers, you know, and they're not, they're not big booms, but I'm like, okay, I can see a benefit to that. You know, that makes sense. Um, Our data analysis is what's really revolutionized a lot of things we do.
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Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
I would say it's helped us in the ag chem. It's definitely helped us in the breeding side of the business where you can do that predictive analytics and know, think about a breeder's perspective. A prime example is, you know, it used to be, you know, you were out taking notes and I'm going to make this cross and make that cross. And well, now if I can take, it's a numbers game.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
That's what breeding is. It's a numbers game. If I could take computationally like a thousand different crosses and I can throw away 998 because those were never going to be good. Now I'm down to two.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
And do this with this germ. Now all of a sudden I've just amplified my power. Well, we're doing the same thing on our side for Ag Chem. So that's going to lead us down a road that's going to be interesting. Biologicals, and I'm going to just use that big term generally, that's a very unique opportunity coming on.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
As Corteva, we bought Symborg and Stoller, probably two of the gold standards out there in that business. There's a lot of value there. Explain how a biological would kill weeds. Well, and that's – the difference is this. When we think about true – when I say biological, what comes to your mind? I think bugs. Bugs in a jar. Yeah. Yep. That's what a lot of people – I want something living or that.
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Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
And that could be true. That very well could be true. But we may have something that may have been fermented. that is dead, but has a negative impact on a weed. So it may be biologically driven. It's going to be more challenging in weeds than it will be for diseases or insects. But a prime example, spinosad or spinosad chemistry. We've been selling that for 30 years.
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Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Highly used across a lot of industries. Not so much row crop, but all the vegetable markets. It's a natural fermentation process. I mean, we never sold it as a biological, but absolutely it was. We just sold it because it worked really well and it delivered what the growers were wanting.
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Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
So when you think about the nutrients, the biostimulants, all that category, the more we learn, the less we truly know.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Could be. It could be. You know, it's like anything. When we first had the first computer, it was huge and it was very slow. And then as time, it just kept getting bigger and smarter and faster. And seeing spray is going to go that route to a degree.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
You see, my wife, and I won't give her... She would just say I'm a hoarder by keeping some stuff around. But I think it's memorabilia. It brings back good memories.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
It's challenging when you think about that technology because it's not that the technology doesn't work, but when you can start manipulating how much you are going to spray or how sensitivity you're going to do, Yet, I'm the chemical company, and you want to hold me liable for what you spray. Oh. Again, there's some conundrums we hadn't thought about yet. Sure.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
And if I can't see every weed out there, let's say you just had some little waterhemp just pop up. It's not even half a centimeter out of the ground. Well, man, two droplets of rainwater would almost kill it. That's so easy to take it out then. If I was doing a broadcast, I would. But a seeing spray may not pick it up then. It's just going to get the one inch and above.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
I'm kind of making numbers up here a little bit.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
So we come back in two weeks, and you're saying, hey, I didn't get that waterhemp. Well, Waterham grows. I mean, it can grow. We've all seen it grow in the summer.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Again, I see the value of that technology. Amazing technology, folks. It really is.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Well, then there's the whole regulatory side of this too. You know, you know, you go across your field, uh, Baron and it's a hundred acres and you only really spray 30 of it. Right. And you can map it out. And it's going to tell you where that 30 of that acreage where you sprayed, but EPA looks as you sprayed a hundred acres. I've used that. So you're using enlist and glue phosphate.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
You made one application by EPA standard, even though he only sprayed 30 acres. If you come back and you spray another 30 acres a second pass, you're done with my chemistry, even though you've only sprayed 60.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
But here's the thing. You can't guarantee that you're not going to double and triple spray that certain square footage.
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Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
These are all things, again, we're in the infancy, relatively speaking.
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Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
That's just growing up on a farm. You don't know when you might need that again. Yes.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Well, and again, weird concepts. Not that we're, you know, maybe 10 years from now, you're going to come in and say Corteva. For $48, you get my chemical program, and we go, okay, we're going to guarantee that. You can choose from any of this, and you can spray it as maximum label through your seed and spray it. Oh, it's by the acre. Again, these are things we haven't thought of.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Some seed has gone that way, I guess. So maybe we go down that road here.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Yeah, so again, there's a lot of things that I think as technology continues to come on. I mean, let's think back, what, 15 years ago, you said auto steer. Everybody laughed at it with all the bolt-on gizmos on your tractor.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
One thing I wish we could get is, and you all know what I'm talking about, especially our planter tractors, we need to figure out some kind of one screen that has all the information on it. So you can't even see out the right side of a tractor anymore.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
But it used to be everybody had that. Oh, gosh, yeah.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Can you imagine if you didn't have auto steer how crooked your rows would be?
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Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Because you couldn't look at all the monitoring that you had to do and this and drive.
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Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
That's a good question. But they had it. But, you know, you start to think about like our grandpas in either 80s or 90s, now our dads or our grandpas, they saw it went from a horse to where we were at. I mean, that is crazy.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
And I think we're at the same kind of, I think our kids, they take a lot of stuff for granted, but I think ag is getting ready to take, we're in some of those leaps and bounds again where the technologies allow us just to drive some of this so quickly.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Boy, if you're not excited now, I don't know what it's going to take. I mean, you think about what we're bringing.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
You know, that's a great question. The land grant universities have a place. They absolutely do. I think we should be putting more stock in our land grant universities because, you know, they've always served as that impartial third-party group, okay? But when you stop and think about the land grant's mission and why they were started, I mean, let's put it in perspective.
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Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Are we still doing nitrogen rate studies at universities? Mm-hmm.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Yeah, we've been doing them for 60 years.
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Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Pretty much. On certain things. Man, they're light-headed. You've got to take the good and the bad with everything. But also, too, they've got to try to keep their programs running. That means they've got to get grant dollars. They've got to be innovative. So it's always a tug of war of their mission and what they do for their local farmers versus trying to keep everything going. But
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Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
When you think about what we're bringing, like we're getting ready to bring out here a couple third-generation, fourth-generation rootworm and some above-ground Bt that are non-Bt related. Everything we've been dealing with has always been protein-based. We're dealing with a whole new set of chemistry, back to longevity, resistance. I mean, we're trying to work smarter.
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Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
It's not easy, but we are trying to work smarter. Then you've got gene editing. Take your favorite hybrid out there, corn, and you can say, okay, what diseases is it? And if I could go in, for lack of words, with a scissors and go snip, snip, and knock out the sensitivity to gray leaf spot, anthracnose, and this, what would your yield be? Right. We're able to do that now.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Now we're trying to figure out, okay, what's that mean for registration, for foreign countries, all the other things you've got to deal with, which could take seven years to get through some of that. But that technology is here.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
But you have 6,000 stripped Allen wrenches. That's true.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Well, no, I think just certain cultural differences, I would say. Certain countries like Europe, I mean, you can shout from the rooftop. you know, non-GMO or GMO, and you're going to get half the group's going to agree with you, the other half's going to throw that at you.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
It's taken a while. But at the same time, I think it depends on what your benefit is. Okay? And I mean, like, think about some, like the golden rice that helped, you know, or some of these other GMO crops that helped eyesight or disease or something like that. There was a direct benefit for consumption of that.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
I think people probably were more accepted of that when the benefits just for you and me to make your job easier. And there's really no difference for the consumer. Well, that's just between you and me. And I don't, I don't really maybe want that as a, as an, I'm not saying they're not uneducated, but why, why? I mean, have you ever, we're all looking at our phones all time.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Do you have any idea how that phone works?
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
That's right. Yep. And if it doesn't work, I go to Verizon or sell it and they make it work.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
And that's kind of the point that I think humans, you know, they just want safe food. But what's the word safe? It's like, you know, I felt bad for a waiter once. He said, we have the best all-natural beef. I said, well, can I have some unnatural beef? And he kind of looked at me and goes, what do you mean? I go, well, it's got to be cheaper than all natural.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
What's all natural mean? Because I said, all beef is natural. You mean non-GMO fed, non-antibiotic? He goes, I have no idea. I was just told to say that. I was just told to say that. But that's your point. What's your trigger words? Mm-hmm. Again, all interesting things to talk about. Our kids are going to face this as they go through their lives, and they'll see differences in ag.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
But I think probably every generation has been through this.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
To an extent.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Yeah, so first off, pleasure to be here today. Eric Schurter, been with Corteva Agriscience here for almost 18 years. I was with the company as Dow Agrisciences and kind of even going back further. Fortunate enough, grew up on a livestock operation in Missouri. Didn't grow up in Iowa. We were very blessed.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
About two rounds, and that fun was about gone.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Didn't take out everything.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Especially side-dressing corn. I just figured just ripping down a little bit gets the merit.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Yeah, you might actually have a kid effect in certain eras of farming where that kid graduated and boosted yield right away. Right. It could happen.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
I'm not even in R&D anymore. I'm in marketing now. How does that work?
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Well, so when we joined the two companies together, that's one thing, I guess. I've had a lot of passions in a lot of different areas. I love meeting with growers. I like the research side of the business. I like the data side of the business. I've always liked marketing. I mean, there's not a side I don't like. I don't want to do any one side for too long.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Yeah. So if you had to do the same thing over day after day, like working on a construction line and an auto parts factory, man, that would drive. For a day, it'd be probably really cool. But after that, I'm the worst employee there. I can tell you that. I'm ready to leave.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Well, and that's what I kind of did is they said, hey, I still love R&D. I work with a lot of R&D folks every day still. They said, you know, as we brought these two companies together, would you come over to the commercial side, the sales side of the business, and help us bring these two portfolios together, help train, educate? And I enjoyed it, did that job for about two years.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
And they said, hey, would you go to marketing? They could really use your expertise over there and help them bring new products to the market and launches and
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Yeah, something like that, you know. And I still do that. And then they said, hey, would you manage the enlist team and help with that team? Sure enough. And I've always – it's like – I've had a lot of different job tiles. I don't know if my job's ever changed. I've reported up differently. I don't do research.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
I used to spray good grief back when I was in R and D I'd spray 30 or 40 acres by hand with a spray boom, you know, two row planter, you know, and I was, you know, I enjoyed it getting up at four o'clock in the morning, mixing up bottles and spraying, you know, we worked long days. I loved it. Um, I just have a different joy now.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
I get to see, I get to mentor a lot of our younger product managers coming in that maybe don't have as much time out in the field or working with sales reps or, you know, they always say, what's the difference? What makes you an expert? A lot of failure.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
You know, when you think back in the early 80s and 90s, where the farming techniques we had in Iowa, If it wasn't for your poor farming techniques, we wouldn't have had topsoil to farm in Missouri.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
That's the other adage. But I like the word failure because it means you learned something, hopefully, from what you didn't succeed at. And that's where I try to help some of our folks out. It doesn't mean what they were going to do is wrong.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
It's just, hey, have you thought about all the repercussions of this type of choice or how maybe the sales team would look at it, how a retailer would look at it, how's that grower out there going to look at it. Try to bring some, I don't want to say wisdom, but just some thought to it. Yeah. So, yeah, technically I'm in marketing now.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
We watch my wife's big Kansas City. We're Kansas City Chiefs fans. I know that's a lot of people hate them. And I understand. It's really easy to hate a winner.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
We've already set a record. I think we'll see what happens. So do you go to many games? We've been to a couple. The challenge there is we went to... I actually rather watch it on TV, to be quite honest.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Well, how do people just go up and tailgate for football games?
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
And just watch it on TV out in the parking lot. It's just as much fun. What we really enjoyed, last year we went down for the train camp, and that was a whole other level of fun compared to watching the game. You don't have near the crowd. You get to see the players. Yeah. I just don't remember we were looking at Chris Jones. He looks big on TV, but in person, he is really big. He is a big man.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Just seeing Patrick Mahomes and the whole crew, we actually got about this far away from Patrick Mahomes, and we were trying to stick one of my friend's sons up there, trying to get a signature, and we just couldn't get it done. But, no, it's fun. I love to hunt. We grew up hunting on the farm, did a lot of rabbit hunting, squirrel hunting, turkey, deer. I do a lot more bow hunting.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Now in the fall and then go to shotgun and then did a lot of duck hunting in the south when we were there. Of course, duck hunting is not the biggest thing here. Yeah. Dove hunting, that was one of the few days growing up where we actually, you know, that was like a true holiday. You didn't do anything but dove hunt.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Yeah, it was – we lived near river bottom ground, creek bottom ground, and it was just always covered with a good slime, a good silt loam. Thank goodness we had you all then. And then over the years, it actually got clean, and then we just had to really learn how to farm in Missouri. But we grew up, had purebred Simmental bulls. My uncle and dad farmed together.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
We've hunted with as many people, 100 people in the family, all first cousins, second cousins. You ever snipe hunted? No, we don't snipe hunt. No, no, no. No, but it's neat. That's one of the few times I try to get back. I still got a lot of good memories with my daughters hunting with me or hunting with my dad. So we got three generations, my brothers and their kids and friends.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
So it's always about family gathering for us.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Well, if you get down to Stuttgart, you've got to go to Max Prairie Wings, just on the north side, and just see all the, I don't know how many ducks are actually hanging from the ceiling. There's... I don't know, a thousand. It's quite impressive. But no, that area of the world is really... The challenge is when you get down to that part of the world, you get so many outside folks.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
And you get so... I mean, just stupid amounts of money. We've been to some private lodges and hunting lodges over the years and stuff like that with doing meetings and stuff. And some of the horror stories you hear from some of these guys were... Guys, bring a $4,000 gun. Can you put this together? I've never shot it. And you're going, oh, my.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
And then you look up and you see they've got steel plating around them and under them. And you go, I understand now why that's there after hearing some of these stories. You know, they say, all right, you ready to shoot? And they don't even point the gun. They just start pulling triggers. I mean, it's just craziness. But, yeah, hunting is, again, it's about friends, family, social gathering.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
You know, that's what we've always loved.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
No, I haven't. Well, with reciprocity rules, it's just too expensive. I actually hunt here in the state. Okay. Fortunately enough, I'm pretty close to where I can hunt. Yeah, it'd be wonderful to go down south. Don't get me wrong. They got bigger deer, more timber, bigger deer. But I've had an opportunity to shoot a lot of nice bucks.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
You know, anytime you're in that...
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Well, there's a horn right there.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Well, that's where mine are at. My wife's long-lost sisters, undoubtedly, because my wife said it ain't going anywhere in the house. My thing is, there's certain scores I want. I want a 148 point. I'm short of that one. I'd mount that, pull them out. Then I want the next one up to be a You know, you get to that 10-point, that 165 to 175 range.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
And I'm getting close, but you're always just, you know, there's certain years you just don't see deer worth shooting. And that's okay. That doesn't bother me.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Not a lot of, I would say, huge acreage. A lot of our fields were 40, 50 acres surrounded 100% by woods. And we were big into livestock for swine. So everything was fair to finish growing up. Uh, one of the things that it was big at the time, uh, we've gotten out of it since then, but our local FFA was had the longest running a hog sale in the nation.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
I shot a nice buck this year, and he was, unfortunately, way too close. Bow hunting. He was three yards in front of me, straight down. And he heard me flinch. He flinched, shot him high, and blood trailed him. And he went on a neighbor that just doesn't really allow anybody to go on him.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
And I couldn't prove that the deer actually went on him, even though I know he did from the hoof prints. There wasn't blood trails, so I'm sure he's laying dead in the woods over there.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
But that's hunting. It is. I hate it. I hate not retrieving an animal.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Well, the thing I'd say is you both are that generation where your kids are still very active.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
nah i'm i'm good you know i'm not getting up at two in the morning to go out and freeze my butt off you know eventually i'd like to again i remember we were uh one of my friends he lives just north of stuck garden and i we were doing research down there and i said hey my dad my brothers have never never thought every thought about duck hunting down here so i'll have them come down so they came down and we're in the blind and guys calling and my brother's sitting right beside him and
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
He's, you know, the farmer's not even shooting. His son isn't anyway. And my brother shoots, and he thought I was going to cripple it, so he wasn't pulling. He goes, no, he's yours. His dog went out, got that duck, and laid it in front of my brother, even though it was banded. I'm like, how do you get a banded duck your first time at 18 years old, and you never even shot a duck?
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
And on top of this, the guy's dog brought it to you, not to him. So there's a lot of luck involved.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Absolutely. I enjoyed it. No, anytime you can sit around and just talk about farming, talk about technology, talk about everything that's going on in the world. We never got into politics, religion, or any of that. Or our wives. That's our specialty.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
But not negatively. So as long as it's anything negative, we all can go home tonight.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
We did spring sales and fall sales, purebred livestock. So we had, I think at one time, 600 sows fair to finish on dirt, uh, seven purebred breed.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
If we want to talk about other subjects, folks, we can talk about it.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Breeds, because between my two brothers and my two cousins, we had purebred Durochs, Yorks, Chester Whites, Poland spots, and then every cross in between, we saw blue butts. We had more electric wires than Story County has electric lines.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
I mean, it was a full-time job just keeping up with that.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Well, that was the challenge. Every now and then, you're supposed to have a purebred Duroc, and it wasn't a purebred sometimes. So we didn't do a lot of artificial insemination.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
It was going on back in the early 90s, but it was... It just wasn't mainstay. So, you know, when we sold our local buffet, we had a lot of families, you know, and we grew up in Pike County, Missouri, which is really right across the river from Pike County, Illinois. Well, in fact, I think there's 28 different crops in Pike County, Missouri.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
So, for example, if you've ever eaten a Golden Delicious or Red Delicious apple, that came from our county. That's where that apple actually started was from Stark Brothers down the river. Right. we had so many diverse operations in our neck of the woods. We used to win the governor's trophy at state fair every year.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Cause we had so much livestock going there, but we did talk about artificial insemination. We did a lot of our purebred Simmental bulls was all artificially inseminated and, uh, almost all the ground, all the grain we farmed walked off the farm. We never sold it. It was ground. And we actually went up and did bean meal, extruded it and brought it back.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
I mean, that's everything literally walked off our operation, uh,
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
growing up but then of course in the mid 90s livestock industry with hogs fell apart yep uh we're still my uncle frank still got the cattle inside the business of course dad at that point said hey you know can't have a hog operation i gotta do so he's worked for the co-ops and he's now retired and uh we all went to school and that's where i kind of found my passion for ag was not growing up with it but you know when i got to college i
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Back in the day, it kind of dates me, but AmSci was still a company, American Sign-a-Med back in those days. And I, freshman, got my first internship with R&D, and I was like, man, you get paid to have a lot of fun. And it was. That's back in the days where we had Scepter, Pursuit, and Prowl, and Steel, and Squadron, and, you know, Roundup Ray technology hadn't been invented yet.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Why don't they name things like that anymore? Yeah.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Do they? I think we have more lawyers today than we did back in the 90s. Or there's a lot more patents or trademarks.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
I can tell you that.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
But I had a lot of fun, and that's what got me really to kind of went on. After that, I worked in corn and soybeans and wheat during college. Loved it. Went on to Arkansas to get my master's, Ph.D., in rice. Worked in a lot of vegetable crops. Just trying to get a broad experience. I mean, a lot of people say if I could go back, I wouldn't do it again. I had a great time.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
I loved what I did through high school and through college. Like a lot of us in ag, I don't care if you're on the farming end, if you're on a co-op side. I don't remember the last time I worked 40 hours. That'd be like a really short week, you know, but you don't think about it. You enjoy what you're doing. You get up, you do it.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
You know, a seven to five job is like normal, but you have fun during the day. And there's a lot of my neighbors that, man, they put in a lot of hours and they don't like their job. I do. I love my job.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
So that's how hopefully you end up kind of got roped in with some of their rice chemistry with Dow AgriScience. They paid for that. Or funded the university and then went on a hiring freeze. And I said, well, I got to have a job. And that's when I went to seed industry and worked for Agrigold for about five years. Was an agronomist for the southern U.S.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
At one point, I had the equivalent of 2% of the U.S. corn market I was actually working with just under the districts I worked with. So covered from southern Indiana all the way down to Louisiana and Texas. It was a grimy manager. I've worked across the whole U.S., farmed in 27 states, harvested corn in 27 states, looking at small plots. So I loved it. Loved it. The most addictive job I ever had.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Put 100,000 miles a year on a vehicle. Got a new truck every year because you were on the road. But it was just very addictive. You get around farmers. I don't care if they're in Alabama to Ohio to wherever. You meet a lot of good people. You meet a lot of good industry folks. Farmers are farmers no matter. They just have a little different twang depending on where you're standing.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
I used to get an oil change on Saturday and get an oil change on Saturday.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
No. So from then I was at that time, my wife and I, we'd had our two daughters were over in Southern Indiana, still had a lot of, you know how our business is. You can make a lot of great connections. It's one of the most weird businesses I've ever been in where your competitors are your friends.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
You know, I don't care if you are a farmer, you've got, you're competing against your neighbor, but they're still a good friend. And even in our business, I've got a lot of good friends that are competitors. Um, But anyway, we kept up, and one of the guys said, hey, I think we spent like $300,000 on your research.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
You can come up and have a cup of coffee and talk to us about maybe a job opportunity. And I'm like, well, I really like what I'm doing. No, you're going to come have a cup of coffee. He was over at North America and South America Research, and I said, well, I at least probably owe you that.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Long story short, it all worked out, and I said I could stay in southern Indiana or kind of move to Iowa, which wasn't home for either my wife or I, but she grew up in northwest Missouri, which is literally a rock's throw from Iowa. It was just kind of, I would say, get back to roots. I kind of came back to that what I call true Midwest, and we settled down here in 2008 and been here ever since.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Well, I married for money, so I married a teacher. She's taught in – I love my wife, thank God. She's very talented. She has taught in Missouri and Arkansas and Indiana and Iowa and taught almost every grade, I think, from just shy of kindergarten but up to junior high. So now she works in Ankeny. She works with the district office.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
She actually helps out a lot of teachers try to implement, I'm going to call it just new tactics, new ways to reach kids. You know, the way we probably learn when we grew up is not the same way teachers teach today. And that's probably good. You know, our knuckles in the back of our heads don't throb as much now like they did back then. So she tries to make sure all the kids learn.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Yep. There's a lot of nurses in our community. So that's for sure, too.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Well, and the thing about it is, as my wife will probably tell you, it's no different, I would say, than even an ag. There's some people that learn visually. They want to see a picture or something. Some people learn very well from reading something.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
To really reach the children and reach anybody, you've got to have two or three different ways of approaching it. You'll get a mass of people this way, but you've got 10% that need this and 10% that need that. And that's a lot of time for a lot of teachers. And then, of course, curriculums change and all that changes. It's just so many hours in a day.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
But I think a lot of our teachers are really trying really hard to meet. And the other thing is parents also got to want to parent, too. And you've got to work with your kids. I mean, it's a two-way street, you know. Yeah.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Oh, no. No, that's quite all right. I did that. I figured by getting a PhD, I'd get at least maybe two more weeks before they fired me. You know, that's what I really thought. A little more warning. Yeah, I got a little warning. They start down low. Maybe if I get two more weeks, heads up. But, no, it's, you know. I know a lot of folks have doctor. It doesn't mean a whole lot.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
So I went four years undergrad, two years master's, three years PhD. So you just didn't know what you wanted to do yet. I knew what I wanted to do, yeah. No, unlike my wife got her master's too, but in our field.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
Well, yeah. I want to be smarter than my wife, but I'm not. My wife is very smart. The nice thing about it, I'd say in general in ag, is you actually get paid to get your degrees because you're actually doing research on behalf of the university.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Hunting, Bourbon, and Ag Tech: Hanging out with a Doctor! - Eric Scherder
And so you get to make – it's one of the few fields that's very odd when you talk to other schools where you're making connections, that networking while you're getting your degrees, you're getting paid to do it, and you're learning. And you're also doing something you kind of enjoy, and that's not work. Yeah. Yeah, that's true.