Jason Mauck
Appearances
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
If I can produce the same amount of wheat bushels as bean bushels in that 70, 70, 80, 80, then each bushel that I sell as a commodity is worth 2x of that of corn. So if I do 150 collectively, that's the same as 300 bushel corn, and I can grow this for half the cost of 300 bushel corn.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
And I know I'm getting way ahead of your simple question here, but I can get ahead on the water curve to where I have a water equilibrium. And that's what actually makes plants grow well is balance much more than throwing the kitchen sink at things.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
we would rather be on the edge of dry yes not not drought but edge of dry yeah so you're short season corn and then you plant lower population wheat in strips and we've been on 60s i might change that up a little bit more narrow i think 30 is too narrow and it's all a shadow effect where i'm you know six foot tall my shadow is going to cast so far so wheat's only about 32 inches tall or whatever it is so it's going to cast so big of a shadow
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
Now, when you put it in the big wide strips, it changes its motive because no longer it has to grow up to compete against all the other wheat, it can grow laterally sideways. And that's where we create the additional yield is capturing the drivers in different shapes and lengths of time.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
So the wheat is, each plant is gonna tiller and the tillers in the competition of field can't go up and actually reach that sun So it actually drags energy down where the tillers can go out and figure out a way to capture light. And then that brings that back to the plant. So, you know, I'm only putting like $15 worth of wheat out there.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
And then it all works off of a proxy system where it's like our mics. If you went out there 200, 300 yards, you couldn't hear me anymore. I want to put that bean right off that big root mass so far. So the wheat isn't the beans aren't the bitch again of the wheat. Right. But it's in a.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
favorable position where it can breathe but then have access to more of a reservoir of water so that's just taking time of messing with the densities messing with the how much i push the wheat because all this stuff if you get too aggressive of one thing you can have your ego ruins it because you're so worried about impressing someone on the first part but then you the bed on the second part so there's no reason to do it in the first place we plant the beans in between there we get a big solar corridor
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
And that's changed over the years. Early as of cereal as possible, the better. Full season beans, big splits. And, you know, we've raised really good soybeans this way. And if I was in a yield contest, I would start with strips of cereals, if nothing else, just to reflect the sunlight off the ground.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
Or are we making more money? We spend a lot less money on the makers and we produce just as much or more revenue than high yielding corn that gives everyone boners. Gotcha. So like you get, It has to be the perfect year to get that field average of corn up there to 50 to 75. Like you can't have holes. You can't have yellow spots. You can't have deers procreating in the corner.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
And if I go out there and I put $15 a week, I can lower my herbicide. I get good full season, full yield beans. Then you add those two togethers and I do all my costs. The other thing with corn that people rarely talk about and it's getting worse and worse is, You know, we had a feed mill two miles north and we take most of our corn, but that's kind of going away.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
A lot of people have to truck their corn 20 miles. And you take the logistics of drying all those bushels, moving all those bushels multiple times and all the work. I mean, that can add up to 50 to 100, $150 an acre and less bushels. What I, my formula is, is if I can produce the same amount of wheat bushels as bean bushels in that 70, 70, 80, 80,
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
then each bushel that I sell as a commodity is worth 2x of that of corn. So if I do 150 collectively, that's the same as 300 bushel corn, and I can grow this for half the cost of 300 bushel corn. So $200 to $300 per acre pretty easily.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
Yep. Well, no, I was actually injecting a knife. Really? I took off every other knife. So I was taking 60 inches – And just driving as fast as I can, blowing as much as I can. But the wheat was coming off the splash plate. And I had a, yeah, I had a Gandhi box that was dropped, and I splashed it into the closing wheels. Yep.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
Planted, yeah. So it'll be just a single row of wheat? Well, no, it'll be 15 inches wide.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
Right now it's 60 and 22 inches wide with my drill.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
Yep, yep, and we're probably going to go to zero space soybeans to where this is all an evolution of eventually, and it might take two or three years... to where we do it. If you remember, I think it was Chuck Woolery on Love Connection. You guys are probably too young. I don't know that. Nope. Okay.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
You always say I'm back in two and two and I always like two plus twos, but basically making a machine that seeds, sprays, tills, side dresses all in one pass. Because looking at this, I can, if I design the right equipment, I can make this less work than monocrops simply because I'm managing the landscape with plants. Seeds, sprays, tills, and what was the fourth one? Back rubs. Back rubs.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
It fertilizes all the time. Imagine you've got these wheat strips. You come out there. You're doing...
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
like a little concave disc out ahead that cuts up right up to the wheat, and you have some kind of hoe drill that places the soil in the ground and does a little bit of shallow cultivation behind it, a little bit of ETE leveling, and then you've got a Y-drop that's putting nitrogen on your wheat and then your hood spraying behind your beans.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
So if you zero-space them and you plant zero space in only like 45%, 50%, 60% of the landscape, then those plants will expedite canopy closure. It'll have the ancillary benefits of the wheat, and then that'll make you to harvest, and then we're clean slate.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
Because my problem is I'm spraying my beans, my monocrop beans, at least three times, if not four times, because I'm trying to get a baby from birth, from the fetus to the baby, and it's six weeks before I have anything significant out there as far as defending the soil surface. So that's the whole point to me on these multiple crops is let's get
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
Reduce densities, but things out there to manage what?
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
45 inch zero space so then you're going to have beans that fill up the gap in between yeah yep and the great thing about that is at every inch is different so when i'm right in the center of the row i have the most water availability yes so those beans will grow the tallest right out of the gate the ones close to the wheat will be like you know it's kind of down but when the wheat dies that day like in june 20th it's like hell yeah it's like home alone like
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
The kids are gone, the ice cream's full, and the freezer, hell yeah. And those beans live in the corpse of the cereal, and they turn into these, like, Gary Coleman on roids, like these little midget beans with 300 pods. We're getting canceled for this show. And it turns into this beautiful algo.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
And you're like, you're looking at the weed like, okay, the weed only made $70, but I only had, you know, $80 in components.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
total cost that's harvest and everything so i have a contribution margin here i take my contribution margin and i compare that to any inflection point on the soybeans and then i overlay my cost of production on soybeans and a lot of times the cost of production savings is much over than the inflection and then you add the contribution margin that's where we come to 200 300 easily but the whole manure application in the fall if i can not lose that value get it in a plant and morph it
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
that's so does this only work for those that have access to manure no and i and i do a lot of acres without manure just to prove and it's actually easier to grow better wheat because i don't have those like cocaine rails all over the field where i have this crazy bushed out weed it's kind of not uh not ideal because i have to worry about lodging so i might even cut it back even further on my manure wheat i i would rather use uh you know regular nitrogen and have
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
That's the biggest pushback. If corn's six bucks, then I could have a call center just calling and sending out letters. Hey, I'll pay you $400, $500 cash rent. Everything's cherry because I have equity at Grandpa. I have crop insurance coming in. I can back up the shortstop here, there, and there. But when corn goes to 325 and it's not candy land anymore, it's like I got to be resourceful.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
that would you know that's trial and error we didn't have any equipment the first few years and then we teamed up with a company called flexi finger there's a pad that goes on to my cutter bar so i basically make the beans do a limbo and i have pushed that when we had the 108 bushel soybeans they were over two foot tall and we bend them down to six or eight inches to bring those wheat heads in and they'll bend and they'll come back but it's just managing your uh combine traffic so you know
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
the people on Twitter really gave me shit early because I had my, all my kids crayons out, but my kids were, you know, nine months old when I'm doing all this early stuff and you have to draw out the schematics and have a, you know, you have to be a year or two ahead of what you do in the field and figure all that out.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
Cause the last thing you want to do is go out and plant a bunch of stuff and then figure that out. That's everything.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
Yes. A lot of a lot of chalk talks. I don't do as much as I used to, but I especially before I got in the meat stuff, I was really trying to figure out what industry I wanted to get in and, you know, the cropping stuff. And you got you got to do that.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
I mean, I encourage everybody, if you've got a group of creative friends, start writing stuff down, because a lot of times you'll get on the tangent and you need. The best friend that you have is like, hey, this won't work because of this. You know, you don't think of it.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
No, not really. Man, it was quite the life in my 20s because I could just kick ass for like three or four months. And then there's so much more time for vacation and golf and all that stuff. So that's the one thing I do miss about life outside the farm.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
Yes, yes. And my kids are eight and nine now, so they're out there playing. And that's really fun. How do you have time to maintain a golf course?
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
uh knowledge i mean uh i i what what's again what's bad is good all the golf courses have went belly up around me so the i have auctions and we can buy all these like i have three 17 foot reel mowers so i can mow uh like eight acres of fairway and like two beers basically i like time with beer it becomes a hobby right i just know what it takes to maintain a green and yeah
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
so my hose never shuts off from like mid-may till september i just if we run over a few with the semis um i might get a hole in one but i just have like 15 from rural king and then i got a route i'll put it around my gator and i'll drive around this tree and i just drag a hose and it's just always on but make sure green's receptive so you can score well that's true that's very true we
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
but i just know you you got to mow those every day at least every other day at least yeah you can let them go a little bit longer if you want but i got a rider now i i did i had like uh six different walking greens mowers they were all kind of pos's but i kept them up and i just leave them outside next to a tree next to a green it wasn't too hard so i enjoy it let's talk about some of your failures because i know you didn't just do the relay cropping and wheat and beans you had some corn stuff wide wide rows the meat business uh where where do you want to start there
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
I don't know. I, the, the meat thing was maybe a little ambitious. I I'm glad that I did it. You know, a lot of people will run away from failure, but I think, I think it's very good to get people together on an idea.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
Uh, there's a lot of people that I work with that I still talk to today and I think there'll be something else, but we gotta have, we gotta have people that are willing to fail to figure things out because I'm not as, uh, religious of community centric as maybe I was three years ago. Cause I see the pain involved, but we've got to get more food on a local level of distribution infrastructure wise.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
So we bought a company during COVID that basically is called Muncie Meats from 1957. They had the McDonald's contract. They had the Burger King contract in the sixties. They were doing like 15 million in the seventies. And then the guy stuck around and,
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
and uh basically held on to all the local restaurants but covid happened and all the restaurants were closed so he was old and he wanted out so we bought it for like next to nothing and i was pretty ambitious i wanted to kind of create a slaughterhouse constellation stars for farmers to connect farmers to consumers and use the restaurant business as a node to gain economies of scale to build the infrastructure in place and the and the connections to make that
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
a reality for farmers and I thought I could leverage my social media to to help facilitate brands for people because you know if you if you make a good brand and you're connecting people across state a lot of it's going to come where you got to distribute that we made a run we were at it for three years but we were a USDA facility so we had an office there.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
And if, you know, whenever I thought I had money in the bank account, the, you know, the guy would come out and say, Hey, you need to spend a hundred thousand fixing this or we'll shut you down. You know, it was just like being married to a gold digging. It was tough aside from the, uh, from the personnel there.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
Yeah. Once the people started doing it, it was intimidating at first. That was the biggest hurdle is they had to be aware. They had to know how it worked. So you were kind of in your own fishbowl, and you needed to make your fishbowl bigger of awareness. But we called it the automated farmer's market, and people would order online. We would put it in the machine.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
The machine would actually send a QR code via text and email to the consumer. And we were moving over 10 orders a day. Our average order was $80. So it was decent revenue, but it was a spoke of a much bigger business. And the much bigger business was more into wholesale with smaller margins and scale. And it's just hard to get the transactions of the Meijer and the Walmart.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
Thanks. I've just been looking forward to this my whole life.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
If you had 10% of their meat transactions, you would have it made.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
Yes, yep. And I went over 100 several times with relay crops. And I always, if you get in good soil types and you're conservative with your wheat, you can actually raise better soybeans. And it's a function of exponential math and crop architecture. And I ripped up a bean plant over there to just show people what a bean is capable of, where he ran them over and it had like a foot or two to live.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
And that's the whole name of the game with all this polycropping is build these plants and focus on the plant yield and the time sequences and the perceptions.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
I mean, I, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of humility told you so's, but, uh, I feel like people have my back a little bit. So when there's still people that challenge you. Oh yeah. There's not enough people to challenge me. I mean, that's, That's that's what's more concerning for me. I love I love criticism. I mean, that means people are awake and they're and they're engaged.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
And I think that's the number one problem is we've just kind of taken a backseat and said, hey, industry, you you tell us what's new. We're here for you know, we're here for the trip, you know, and and I love these events like you guys are here today. I mean, this is this is good stuff.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
Just communication on social media. I mean, me and Zach have communicated for several years before even stockcropper. And he kind of called me one February when him and Lance and Sheldon were all putting this together. And I was like, that is absolutely brilliant. And I think that first I was working on the chicken tractor concept. So we kind of did it.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
on our own ways and both arrived that this is actually magical. Now, I don't know if we're going to get the whole landscape of the Corn Belt to do it, but it works.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
That's very cool. Speaking of what works, right, the relay cropping works for you. Yeah. Do you do that on every acre? I hope to. We've got a family dynamic to it. My grandpa just passed this year, and, you know, I love him to death, but he's kind of,
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
rain me back a little bit and and you know if i would have went after this just balls deep six or eight years ago when i didn't understand it would be a train wreck and i think sometimes it's good to fester on things this will be my 10th year and i'm not saying i understand it inside and out but i you know i am comfortable doing it on every acre but at the same time you know you you can't have 16 combines we're not running dallas we need everything's timely
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
So I think that's even the wrong goal. If we can get to 25% of our acres, then I can get small grains every four years. That's kind of my goal. I'm getting pretty close to that now. But, you know, everything has to be timely. I think that's something little talked about, and people don't want to say this. They say you need to be at your family.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
Okay. Who's Jason is a 43-year-old white male, lost 24 pounds this summer, eating clean. I've Yeah, so I'm a family farmer. I think I'm the fifth generation. I get curious. Sometimes it hurts me a little bit. I did a meat company deal a few years back. But we've got about 3,000 acres we farm, a lot of pigs, a lot of manure.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
But I think, you know, sometimes you need to not sleep, Bob. You need to sleep for two days.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
Yeah, I mean, my big push, I'm a board of director of a big feed mill, and we bag a lot of feed. And, you know, looking at barley, you know, getting that more into value-add stuff. But looking at some of these small grains as a feed,
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
feedstock and started and replaced some corn and corn gets that price point down the other gets price point down and you can justify that but you know any any cereal but the oats is pretty interesting out here i think he can do some modifications getting the oats in earlier out earlier some fuller season beans and it's going to be very profitable with this processing in the in the region yeah the covers that my in-laws use is rye and so we like trying to find locally sourced rye and
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
that's true i'd be pushing it when you guys it works for you guys because you're taking it off for feed yeah yep yeah same thing we're planting beans back first week or two of june yeah um i mean you could definitely really crop it for sure and i'll try to get zach to do it the other method is the over the top like a stripper header and a lot of these big combines put a track on them and then you get a big 45 or 50 foot head you're only running over like five percent of the surface area so you could
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
I'd probably be some kind of bird in a warmer climate, I'm guessing, or an apex predator of some sort.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
No, no. We're going on a men's trip called the Ron Jeremy Invitational coming up next week.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
It's got some pretty good propaganda going floating around there for the guys. But Northern Michigan, you cannot beat Northern Michigan. The color of the water and the hills and everything. Wow.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
Looks like he's got a five iron. Can we have a handicapped event and a win them, take them all event? Oh, yeah. I think you could. Okay.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
I get, this time of year, I'm pretty much scratch. Oh, wow. I won't get scratch strokes in Michigan because it's a lot tougher. But if you take me at a local course, then I don't shoot par. I'm pretty bad. You'd get me then.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
What makes me weird, if you will, is my mom said, hey, there's no money in farming. Go get a real job. So I got a marketing degree, went to the city, suit and tie, learned how to sell, started a business, and then my dad passed of cancer, and they just ripped me right out of that world into the farm world.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
Oh, man. I mean... As you're on a nine-day away from family trip. Well, just make everyone in the family know that they're number one. Be there everything that you can. And also communicate when... You have to be away from them. Why you have to be there and make it a priority and knocking it out. Everything just boils down to touch point and communications.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
As long as you're in communication with people and you're honest, then everything takes care of itself. From what you post online, you take your boys with you a lot during work. They're with you a lot.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
No, I just, I always tell people to, to try things on their farm because everything's a two or three year process of making it comfortable yourself. You got to sell yourself before anyone else sells you. And then when that knowledge base is so invaluable when we get adversity, so get hard.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
Any other platforms? That's the best one to hit. You can follow me on Facebook, but I'm just a crop dork and family man. That's pretty much it. I love it.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
So it's just 10 years of different experience brought into that, just probably the root of the weirdness.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
david so tanner what i really gotta know is the juice worth the squeeze and tanner all right it's about time to wrap this baby up they're my favorite like farm for fun it's time to put aside the stress of the work boots sit down grab your favorite adult beverage and listen to the boys from farm for profit yay it says applause
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
Yeah. When I was, I mean, I was a pretty hardcore landscape contractor in my twenties. I took my sales skills and I got people on paper and I built a pretty decent business with a lot of college kids employment. I had a lot of horsepower and we did a lot of landscapes. And then, like I said, I just, I was ripped out of, I had about a
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
$600,000 book of business with a group of friends and then they said, hey, farm 3,000 acres. And dad was here and gone and it was my crop. And pain teaches, that's the thing. And I think a lot of times we meet at places like this, hey, crops look like crap, everything looks good or bad. And I had some really bad crops that I was responsible for early on from weather.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
And intercropping, relay cropping to me is a way to use my useless skills of landscaping and farming. And as I've became experienced in it, I really feel like I have a somewhat of a handle when mother nature goes crazy a little bit. So that's why I love it. And just the productivity and efficiency that I see in a lot of things, a lot of things.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
So when was it that you came back and took over the farm? 2010 was when we found out my dad and he was, he passed April of 2011. So over the course of that fall and then, uh, 2011 back home, just short story. It was like the worst monsoon ever.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
We got like 50 inches of rain and, uh, I, I couldn't get a wheel turned and I ended up planting in the mud and the people that like waited had a decent crop and then 12 was a drought. Uh, so it was just like, You know, I helped out on the farm. I was the dumb cowboy sort board guy in the pig barn. So that was kind of my skill and helped out.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
But it was just my crop to screw up or whatever because my dad was such a leader. He was such an asshole in a good way. But he kept everyone like if you screwed up, you would know about it from my dad. And he was gone. So they kind of looked at me to figure it out.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
Yeah. I mean, Constant Canopy is basically the Twitter-like manifestation of the relationships and stuff like that. And I met a guy locally. And the name actually came from Joe Bassett when we were first kind of drinking beer and hanging out and stuff. And it was part of another. I was going to call it Occupy, this idea of cover crops and cash crops always kind of occupying the space.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
And it was constant canopy unleashes progress. And he's like, constant canopy, that's it. So that's just kind of how that started. And now I talk about like making gaps so it has some, it's not a full canopy all the time.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
I'm a dork. Like my oldest is a dork like me. I would lock myself in the room and like remember baseball cards and stuff. And then as the internet came along, you know, I'm that rare age where I had the old school, like castrate pigs and throw testicles at your cousin to like, we're like AI everything. Now this election cycle is crazy with all the AI and everything.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
Anyway, like I came on when the internet was coming. So I came in love with computer models for weather. And I just became so dorked out on predicting my own forecast.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
And that manifested into the cropping system where I enjoy chaos and I like to look at chaos and I like to look at the response of not just the plant, but the soil and the grasshoppers and the winds and the sun angles and the shadows and like where the frost melts off and how the shadow. And I'm just always in this, my own little,
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
weird dorky world and i found twitter as like i'm gonna get really weird on you here but when i was little i had an imaginary friend named poe that lived at my belly button and when i was doing my dorky shot poe i think the twitter thing is like my poe okay i'm like i'm out here thinking about this stuff i might as well make a video yeah and my wife was like when i first got on twitter she's like you are doing this all wrong no you are weird
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
No one wants to listen to you for two minutes and 20 seconds. And I just kept doing it.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
Or were you weird and then Twitter? No, I didn't really have any social media. And then I started doing that. Okay. And then I started meeting all you yahoos and traveling around and. It's just been fun.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
So the definition of relay cropping is basically starting another crop while another crop is growing. Relay. I mean, poly is growing basically two at once. And, you know, it's a sequencing. And from a marketing degree or economics degree, you know, I loved economics, the supply and demand curves.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
And I think a lot of our problems are we're not reflecting on our landscape, what's happening with the weather and our precipitation and our heat and everything like that. So for me, relay cropping is being in position. I may be too colorful for this, but I hate being a bitch, if you will. I feel out of place if I don't have a crop that's rooted into the ground to kind of play off of.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
And when I was a landscaper, you know, I had hundreds of acres of turf and beds and And I had to keep everyone's place upkeeped. And I see what happens with waterhemp, especially the last three or four years. It's like our tools are just turning into like air BB guns anymore. And I think it's going to go back to the basics of longer rotations, of canopy, of suppression.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
And we've got to kind of solve these problems like old school because... Our new school only lasts like three or four or five or six years, and then it's like nothing.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
And in a way, it makes all of this stuff, a lot of this stuff that you'll see today that you can scale easier because, I mean, look at that. You can spray dicamba 2,4-D, Roundup. You can spray metrotrion on beans soon. Mezotrion, yeah. Yeah, like the corn herbicide.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
So this stuff isn't really that complicated, but it goes back to harvesting the water and the sunlight, these free things that there's no reason why you should have a field day to sell air. or time or space or water or hog shit or how to use it more effectively. But to me, um, going back to my story, my family is the most conservative family, like squeeze the Buffalo and make it fart.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
You know, like anything I spend any money with grandpa, it was just impossible. So I just learned how to, you know, ask for forgiveness way more before permission cause it would never happen. So, um, The relay cropping is like, I have an idea to solve a problem, whether it's not have the water wrecker crop or stop the water hemp from spraying.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
I'm going to go out on a limb and try this and figure it out. And then eventually the people that, especially my direct family or locals, they'll eventually start doing it. And we're seeing that.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
So ideally how we set it up, we grow primarily corn and soybeans and we've got wheat acres. But we'll plant an earlier maturity corn. We're 20-inch corn, and we found that we can raise a little bit earlier corn at higher densities and get that yield right up there with a full-season corn. So we try to get that off at 23%, 25%, shell it off late September, and then we're planting wheat and strips.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
And I've done a million different ways. We primarily drill the wheat. We're going to be planting it with a planter this year, but I've planted it also with our hog manure tank and planted it. above the manure, which I think is a fantastic idea. I just need Bill Gates or somebody to cut me a check to actually design a manure seeder.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
But basically what we can do with our hog manure is we have a static, very fertile soils. You know, even if we don't put manure on it for 10 years, our P and K levels are going to be up. So we can basically just put nitrogen where we want to kind of foster tillering of the wheat. Sometimes we follow manure, but most of the time not. And we plant reduced populations.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
And that's a big thing that I learned as a marketer. And I think America is this, sorry if this hurts anybody's feelings, but the whole marketing circus is just with holidays and everything. It's just to corral people to exploit, you know, fireworks and just up the valuation of everything. Just make sure everyone does their routine. And agriculture is no different.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
And we meet at all these field days and figure out, you know, how can we gain five to seven bushels with a monocrop? And what you can do with slope curve is you can do exactly what you can do with selling fireworks of saying, I'm going to buy this cheap Chinese piece of crap firework for two dollars.
Farm4Profit Podcast
Farm4Fun - Jason Mauck - Constant Canopy
And I get people horny enough June 31st to come here, June 30th and spend, you know, 500 percent more than I paid for it and exploit that. And we can do that with a single seed where if we plant like 25% of the wheat, I can get about 75, 80% of the yield. But what I am more interested in is consuming and getting ahead on the demand curve of water.