Episode 45: Angie Setzer, @GoddessofGrain

Angie Setzer, a grain marketing specialist you probably know by her twitter handle, @GoddessofGrain, joins GrainWaves to talk farmer mindsets, the future of ag transportation, and digital media as a powerful tool for education.

TRANSCRIPT 

Rodney Connor: Welcome to GrainWaves, bringing data insights to your grain marketing decisions.

Aline Pezente: All right. Hello. Welcome to GrainWaves, and we are here talking about the different ways technology and innovation are moving the agribusiness forward faster. We are excited to be joined by Angie Setzer, a grain marketing specialist you probably know by her Twitter name, Goddess of Grain. Angie's been helping farmers market their grain for some time and now runs her own advisory business. Angie, thank you so much for coming to the show today, and we are really happy to have you here.

Angie Setzer: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. It's still weird when you say I'm now running my own advisory business because I just had the one month anniversary and I'm like, "I am. I am running my own business." So it's funny to hear.

Aline Pezente: You are an entrepreneur now in this industry, right? It's really great to have you here, and I'm excited to say today that the girls are taking the control today. This is really special show because it's me with the control. We have Robbie here.

Rodney Connor: Still here. Still here, yup.

Aline Pezente: He's still there asking some question, but he will going to be in the backseat. So Angie, when I look at the agriculture community, I see you as one of its biggest influencers, you advocate for farmers, who really recognize how challenging it can be to sell grains, especially mentally, right? That's not covered nearly enough. Your approaching humility and humor also shine through on Twitter, which is why you have gained such a big social media following. I would love to talk about social media as a new tool for sharing grain marketing sites, also, any content in general. You run a blog and run a blog podcast, and now you're also advisory for... Let's talk about how digital media changes the learning curve for those topics and how an advisor can run the business, especially when marketing can be so complex. So to start with, over your career, what stands out after helping hundreds of farmers get a crop sold as far as their mindset when getting started?

Angie Setzer: Yeah, I think the biggest thing that stands out is the emotional connection, and I mean, that's obvious, right? You have mud in your blood when you farm and you're part of agriculture, when you're all of these things, you're you're obviously going to feel extremely emotional when it comes to just the production agriculture side of things, but I joke with a lot of my growers, and it's funny how it's resounded with a lot of them is that they're raising bushel babies. And so as a woman, who happens... I have a son who's five, and... You know what I mean? For me, I understand it. I have nurtured and I took care of... And they always say that a woman becomes a mother as soon as she finds out she's pregnant, right?

Angie Setzer: Well, a farmer becomes a mother to his bushel babies January 1st of every year when he starts to think about what kind of fertilizer application and what kind of seed. And that's not to take away. I'm not trying to make it humorous by any means. It's legitimate. And so I think the more that you understand that from a grower's perspective and you really understand that a feeling of mistreatment to their bushel babies. They have to go to the Ivy League school, you have to sell them for the best price that you possibly can, or else they're going to figure out that you didn't love them. You know what I mean? So from a farmer standpoint, I think the emotional attachment to the crop is something that we underestimate, and I think for the longest time, the first 10 years that I did this, this has only just been recently where it's hit me so hard and maybe it is because I became a mother. I don't know.

Angie Setzer: For the longest time it was like you can't be emotional about your marketing, man, you have to kill the emotion, you have to be dead inside, blah, blah. That's not going to happen. So the biggest thing for me that I've really worked with my growers on and really I think has struck a chord with a lot of the growers that I talk to on a day-to-day basis is that emotion's not going to go away, but you need to recognize what the emotion is, what it tends to do to you when it comes to making decisions, whether there are good emotions or bad emotions, and how you can address the good stuff and build on that. What are the good emotional attachments? What are the good emotionally-driven decisions that you might make, and what are the bad ones?

Angie Setzer: And then really spend a lot of time kind of focusing on harnessing the emotion, using it to your benefit, but I think for a lot of folks, that's really a hard process or a hard thing and that's really what limits our ability in a lot of ways, from my standpoint, when working with farmers to be successful marketers is we let the emotion win instead of recognizing that it plays a role, and making sure that we're using it to our advantage.

Aline Pezente: That is amazing, Angie. And embracing these emotions, you find farmers making better decisions in your perspective?

Angie Setzer: Yeah. I mean, I think the biggest thing that we do in my role has always been to subtract the things that you don't need to be emotional about. Okay, you know you have 100% of a crop or X amount, you have an APH, you have a certain amount of bushels that you need to market, you know you have a certain level that you need to market them out in order to cover costs and things like that. Those are the things that we pull out, we extract, and make sure that we're making smart decisions, we're recognizing, again, that emotion, but we're also knowing when we're gambling, we're knowing when we're not gambling, we're trying to take into consideration what the black and white pieces of the marketing component are, but also recognizing the gray. And so my growers will laugh at me a lot of times because I'll say the market will tell us what it wants us to do, and they'll stop and be like, "What?"

Angie Setzer: And I'm like, "No, you just have to listen. You have to listen to the cash market. You have to listen to what is taking place in the futures itself. Don't listen to the people telling you what they want you to know think the markets doing. You have to listen to the market itself," and so that's been one of those things too that we've really kind of embraced is more of the... I say it's the hippie side of me where I'm just like, "Man, you just got to let the market tell you what it's going to need you to do." But it's true and my growers that kind of subscribe to that sort of approach where we were pragmatic about costs and we're pragmatic about the things that are non-negotiable, space at harvest, cash flow, things of that nature, those are the non-negotiables. We're pragmatic about those, but then the rest of it is painting, it's art, and so we have to be able to use that and really roll forward.

Rodney Connor: Man, I wish I had a dollar for every time I told a farmer, "The market is telling you what it wants you to do." You're exactly right. Inverses, ARIES, basis, everything. But what I've always struggled with is yeah, there's those guys that subscribe to that and they say, "I get it. I understand. I want to do this." There's also some subset that sometimes thinks the market's trying to trick them like, "Hey, market. You can't tell me that it's an inverse. I'm going to carry this thing out into the next year and teach you."

Angie Setzer: Because if they're paying this much now, just think of what they'll be paying in six months. Yeah, those are my tinfoil hatters. I say that with love, but there is a whole subset in agriculture that that is, "They're trying to trick me," but I'm going to be honest, that's human nature because how many times did you... Last year, I sat here all obstinate as all get-out when you saw these big commercials taking their hedges out to the July or rolling their... You know what I mean? And you saw things happen in the cash market, and I sat here in my own stupidity and stubbornness and was like, "What are they doing? Why would they do that?" Well, they're doing it because they know, they're listening to the market. I'm sitting here being stubborn. And so I totally get it. I've done it, and I have the battle scars to prove it. It can't be that easy, can it? But it really can if you listen. Like you said, if you're listening to the market and not ignoring, it can be that easy.

Rodney Connor: Yeah, it takes time to pick up on those signals, to learn those signals. I don't think we asked at the beginning, How long have you been doing this, Angie?

Angie Setzer: 16 years.

Rodney Connor: Oh, man. Same as me. So you started in Katrina? Katrina was your first year?

Angie Setzer: Oh, yeah.

Rodney Connor: Oh, man. Where were you at?

Aline Pezente: What a great year to start.

Angie Setzer: Right. Central Michigan. I was in Central Michigan. I had no idea what I was doing. I got an English degree with a psychology minor. I was going to be a high school English teacher with the ultimate goal of becoming a middle school counselor.

Aline Pezente: Tell us more, Angie. I'm curious. Honestly, I am a big fan of you and I have following you for quite some time on Twitter. No, honestly. True. I mean, before coming to Indigo. And tell us about your journey on social media and especially how the Goddess of Grain title emerged in this process.

Angie Setzer: Oh, man. I don't even know. I used to joke. I graduated from high school in 2000, so I come from that generation of the feminism that was Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears, and I'm the goddess and you should... So I used to joke in-

Aline Pezente: Girls in power.

Angie Setzer: Yeah! We used to be... And I don't know if you remember, but they used to have these stickers and people would put them on their windshield, and mine was goddess. It was just like, "I am a goddess." I'm really not. I guess it's kind of ironic in a lot of ways and maybe sad. So I'd always be like, "I'm a goddess." And so, 2012, my coworker at the time was like, "You really need to get on Twitter. You're missing out on a lot of information. There's a ton of insight, there's a ton of farmers. You need to get on Twitter," and I'm like, "There is no way in heck I need to get on Twitter. I'm busy. I'm building my own business," because I'd started at The Elevator and was really in the process of trying to get that squared away, and what I was doing there launched and there's no way. And he's like, "No, no, no. Just jump on." All right, fine. And so I get on, and I'm like, "I need a handle?" I'm like, "Uh. I'll be the Goddess of Grain."

Angie Setzer: There was really no... It wasn't like this moment of brilliance. There was no fireworks. It was just like, "That's available," and so I got on, and I don't even know how... I mean, I can remember when I hit 100 on followers, and I was like, "I have 100 people that follow me." And I'd be excited when there was three likes, and then I remember when Chip Flory followed me. And I'd always read all of Chip Flory's stuff. He really was instrumental in a lot of ways of building how you analyze markets. Because when you started in 2005, information still came via fax. Yeah, you didn't have much in the way like grainmarket.net and AgWeb. You know what I mean? So you didn't have resources. So Chip Flory was one of the very first market analysts that I had learned from and kind of grew on, and so I remember when he followed me on Twitter, I was like, "Oh, my God. Chip Flory's following me," fangirled.

Rodney Connor: And for the younger folks, when you were reading Chip Flory then that would have been on a DTN satellite box, right?

Angie Setzer: Yeah, basically on the box.

Rodney Connor: Yeah, this is not the internet.

Angie Setzer: No, no. This is the box that beeped in the office. I was not afraid to say the things that I was thinking, and I was lucky, I was working for someone who is fiercely protective of independence. My former boss never, ever would say... I think maybe once he was like, "You probably shouldn't tweet that," and I was like, "Yeah, you're probably right." But out of everything else, he was always very much okay with me being me, and I'm blunt, I guess, to a certain extent. I'm going to tell you what I think, I'm going to tell you how I feel, you're never going to have to kind of guess, and I think that that resonated with folks. And somehow my market analysis caught the attention, I got on U.S. Farm Report with Tyne, and some other things, and slowly started to pick up some more followers doing some radio things and doing stuff like that.

Angie Setzer: And so I always kind of joke, "I'm not your grandfather's market analyst," because I'm not. I'm going to come up with some stupid analogy, or something of that nature to where I try to make it to where the farmer gets it because I think one of the things that's maybe somewhat successful is that I'm not the smartest person in the room. I'm not going to pretend I'm the smartest person in the room. The farmer, I think, to a certain extent has grown used to market analysts and communication being very much talked like they're going to talk from a position of power and greater intelligence, and instead of helping the farmer understand. If they confuse the farmer, the farmer is easier to sell to.

Angie Setzer: And so I think there's been a whole entire existence that has been built on maintaining ignorance in agriculture. And so, one of the biggest things I say right now is we're unveiling concepts and we're building this new business that we're building, and all of this is ignorance is where the margin is made in agriculture, farmer ignorance is where the margin is made, and ignorance cannot be confused with stupidity. Ignorance can be fixed via education, and in agriculture, we've really done a disservice in educating the farmer because we like them to remain ignorant. And so I think me being willing to say that an able to say that in the most respectful way possible, and still work to build a business... Because in the meantime, as Twitter's growing, I'm taking Citizens, the elevator that I was working for, from about three and a half million bushels of handling to about 14 and a half million bushels of handling.

Angie Setzer: For a rinky-dink four location elevator just outside of Lansing, we built this direct-ship business. And so I'm also able to put my money where my mouth is because I'm legitimately turning physical bushels into cash as well, and so I think that helps too, I guess. I don't know why I'm popular on Twitter. I'm like, "I am a dumpster fire on wheels. What are you... Is it because you guys like train wrecks? What is this?" But I look forward to being able to use it to my advantage when it comes to changing really how we approach helping farmers market in the future.

Aline Pezente: This is amazing. And one of the things that stands out, I mean, what I like when I read your Twitters is I really like your honesty, sincerity, and I love your sense of humor. It's so much... A lot of it... One of those things you posted, which I was laughing, like the office jokes. Oh, my God. But I wanted your perspectives about something, because one of those days, I found super interesting. I read that data from Twitter that they said that 40% of the Twitter users, they say they have made a purchase as a direct result of a tweet from an influencer. That's a big deal when we think about farmers making decisions to market their grains based on a tweet, right? And how do you do deal with the challenges of expressing an opinion through this media and then having the market to go in a different direction?

Angie Setzer: I mean, I could easily tell you all of the times in the last 10 months that I have been wrong, and I think one of the most important parts too that maybe sets me apart is there is a level of humility for me. I hate it. You don't like to be like, "Well, I'm bearish wheat at 598," and now it's 720. That's definitely not a comfortable thing, and people will throw it back in your face and be like, "See how wrong you were?" I'm like, "Yeah. I am aware. I have the positions to show for it. I'm the one that's going to have to work through a lot of this stuff." Yeah, I think the biggest thing for me that I also try to express is that my role in all of this is to try to make sure that I am giving insight that I feel is important to the customer, important to the farmer, but that things can change relatively quickly.

Angie Setzer: I will say though, over the last few months, this market run has provided me with an incredible dose of humility, and with is great as our business has been in the launch phase right now... Like I said, I'm 30 days in, I have some awesome customer... I mean, the majority of my customers that I was working with at Citizens have followed. We're building a national sort of presence, we get a lot of stuff that we're working on, and so if it weren't for this giant heaping scoop shovel of humility that I have been choking down for about the last 10 months to a year, I'd probably be unbearable. You know what I mean? Because you'd just be on such a hot streak, how would you even stop? And so I'm actually a little grateful for... Not grateful for it, because I wish I'd had just listen to my gut and been like, "Blow out of all of your positions. Get your farmers even." There was one morning where I was like, "This thing's going to get nuts," but I didn't do anything about it. Now, here I am.

Angie Setzer: And so I think that's important for everyone, right? I think it's important to see it. I would never go back and delete past tweets, and if someone shares with me, "Look at you being stupid," I'd be like, "Yes. Guess what? It happens to all of us," because I can guarantee you that there's someone out there that maybe is quietly watching, that is seeing maybe how I am or how someone else is handling, again, this giant scoop shovel full of humility, and they can recognize that, "Okay. Well, stuff can go really bad. You can be really wrong, but that doesn't define the rest of your existence."

Angie Setzer: And so I think that's one of the things, focusing on mental health and focusing on some of these things that I've tried to focus on with growers, and making sure that people are aware that they can talk about the screw-ups and learn from them versus giving up, I think is huge. So I actually think it's kind of beneficial to have it and have the world watch me. I don't want them to. I hope like hell it's only 3% of the time. I hope most of the time I'm right, because otherwise, ugh. But I'm not going to hide from it, right? Yep, I was wrong. It happens.

Rodney Connor: Well, and just from an emotional standpoint, I know you like to focus on that a little bit, I do as well. I think marketing grain is all about emotions. Couldn't agree more with you there, but what doesn't feel emotional is not thinking about it at all, not having a bias, not doing anything, and then just being forced to sell grain at whatever price, it doesn't matter. When you do that, there's no benchmark. You don't look back and say, "I could have done better. I could have done worse." You only had one decision you could make. So to me, that's really easy whether profitable or not. And I applaud you and anybody that sticks their neck out to somebody and says, "Hey, this is my opinion," and you only know what you know the day you make it. I mean, the funny thing about the market... Going back to what we talked about earlier where, yeah, the market wants me to think this because they're going to trick me. I mean, the market is what everybody thinks. You cannot be smarter than the market today because the market is the market, that's everything.

Angie Setzer: The market's a being. The market is a living, breathing creature, and I think the more we understand that... No, you're not going to outsmart the market. You can only use the information that you have to make the decisions that you have, and if I were to be plucked out of this time period and thrown back into last June, I'd have done the same stuff. Now, if I could take some knowledge with me and be like, "Oh, I don't want to do that," it'd be a different story. But based on all of the things that we were provided from an information standpoint and all that we had... One of the hardest parts... I've been doing this for 16 years. My first job was to write what the LDP was. Okay, for you young kids listening, LDP was loan deficiency payment, meaning that if your loan rate was $1.86 and your local cash price was $1.40, your LDP was 46 cents, so you could call the FSA and they would send you a check for the 46 cents on the bushels that you had in the bin if you hadn't already claimed LDP.

Angie Setzer: There was legitimately one year in my career where we used LDP and soybeans as a marketing tool. That helped enhance, okay? So we were looking at that possibility. If you're talking 3.2 billion bushels of corn carryout, you're looking at a really ugly world. Now we can say now, "Well, obviously that was stupid. It wasn't going to be blah, blah, blah," but no. I mean, I'd also preached for five years prior that the USDA numbers were the USDA numbers, and all of a sudden, the USDA was like, "Thanks for believing in us, Ang. By the way, we're going to go ahead and remove 2 billion bushel from our initial carry out to our most latest one. Congratulations! I hope you like it."

Angie Setzer: I mean, I think about it and it is, it's a living, breathing creature. You can never try to out-guess it, and you just hope like heck that you're right in a lot of it, which is part of why we're really working to build an approach to marketing that's more heavily, "Where are your costs? What is your cash flow? What are your space needs? Where are you sitting from a percent contracted? What's your weighted average of those sales? What are your next steps to take?" And so like I was saying before, the pragmatic side. After the past year, one of the biggest things that I've kind of learned is we need to focus more on the pragmatic side and the art side is going to be there, and we're going to use it, but we definitely have to be making decisions that are going to be more business-oriented than anything else.

Rodney Connor: Doesn't $7 corn make that harder?

Angie Setzer: Oh, yeah. Yeah, no one cares.

Rodney Connor: That's the problem, right? This summer, everybody wanted to know what their breakeven was. How many breakeven calculations did you do in June?

Angie Setzer: Oh. Yeah, nine this year. A year ago, all of them.

Rodney Connor: I'm sorry. Yeah, June 2020. Yeah, exactly.

Angie Setzer: Yeah, June 2020, I mean, everyone was, "Oh, my God. It's 350, and we're 320," and so like I was saying, I mean, I've told a lot of my customers, "I could have went into a coma April 1st of last year and stayed in one till about February 1st, and I'd done better for you better as a result," and the funny part is, and maybe they're just saying it to make me feel better, all of them were like, "No, we'd have still found someone to sell to for those levels. That's not your fault that we have low price contracts on because 380 had been a great price for three years."

Angie Setzer: So in a year like this one, you want to be able to say, "Oh, I nailed it. I nailed it so hard," but the reality is if you're actually operating from a business standpoint, you have sales on that are going to be less than desirable. But I will tell you this much, this is about the third time I've experienced this where we contract lower and the market goes higher, and it's still better than when we don't contract enough and it goes to 320 or 330. And so I'll stand by that. So it's been a fun experience of being extremely vocal and wrong for the last 10 months.

Rodney Connor: I collected a few checks in 2012, I imagine you did too, right? Short fall grain, collecting those checks, and that was painful. All insured, at least in my experience. So they had crop insurance, so it wasn't the end of the world, but it wasn't great. Those folks that oversold got burned, did not sell one bushel of $7, $8 corn are the best marketers I still work with today. Do you have that same experience?

Angie Setzer: Yeah.

Rodney Connor: They learned from it. They knew what they were doing. They're in much better shape.

Angie Setzer: Yeah, they're much smarter, they feel more comfortable now. I mean, they're going to deliver some 380 cash this fall, but they're also going to deliver some 610 cash this fall, and they're going to average at a very nice level because they scale sold and, it didn't stop them from marketing, and they were still willing sellers when we were at six and a quarter versus trying to figure out what they were going to do when we bottomed out here a couple three weeks ago at 502, but yeah.

Rodney Connor: Yeah, that's right. Hey, Aline. I feel like I jumped in on ladies' night here. Sorry about that, I got talking.

Aline Pezente: No, this is perfect. No, I'm listening here and learning a lot from you guys, and I also want to... I'm curious, because since we are talking about merchandising, one of the hot topics in the merchandising community right now is how new affordable software can change merchandising and how the merchandising business is done. That insight can be pulled faster and may not need big resources to do it, and one of the points that, Angie, you touched is educating farmers, the need for that, give more data to farmers. I also believe that velocity of this data, it's also the other dimension that we need to solve to help farmers to be more educated in the right time. So what are the changes that you see coming to this industry with new technology? I mean, what are bad sort of things that you are seeing or you don't see that is going to happen with this community towards technology adoption?

Angie Setzer: I think one of the biggest things that we really need to build and what we really need to do as a whole, for one, is to pin down farmer transportation, loads off the farm into the end-user, tracking tickets, tracking drivers, tracking all of this, because right now, I would say the biggest thing that you run into in managing, especially the direct ship book. So like I said, I mean, I built an 11 million bushel direct ship book. That doesn't sound like a lot, but for one person-

Rodney Connor: Oh, that's a lot. Yeah, I've read direct ship books. That's a lot.

Angie Setzer: And so you're managing all the logistics and you're managing the farmers and you're keeping everything straight, and you're selling when you're buying, you're buying when you're selling, and blah, blah, blah. And I would say that the problem you always run into his maybe so-and-so grabbed a load off the farm and didn't leave a BoL, didn't leave their bill of lading, or the farmer's like, "Well, wait a minute. I should have had 35,000 and you're paying me for 323," and so you're like, "Well, did you write down the trucker?" "Well, I think I have everyone." And so I think one of the biggest things in the ag-space that is needed is the ability to really kind of provide the farmer a way of tracking every load that goes out of the system.

Angie Setzer: Now you can say, "Well, that's what a scale's for, and that's what this is..." But a farmer, they don't have the ability to put in a 40 foot scale or whatever you might need in your neck of the woods at every farm, and so that in addition to the access to GPS that we have now and all of the other abilities, I think that's huge. I think that's really kind of one of the next steps. And that's not to be confused with making sure that the end-user, one of the commercials... That's not to be confused with commercial ticket tracking because we know once the load gets to the elevator, it's at the elevator. What the concern is, is if it doesn't get to the elevator.

Angie Setzer: And so I think that that putting the dispatch in the hands of the farmer is probably, in my opinion, the next step because I feel that one of the things that you're going to see genuinely is a continuation growth in on-farm space, and that's going to pressure the elevator, the commercial, the middleman. And so I think one of the ways that the middleman can remain relevant is what I have done with the direct ship, but you have to be able to handle the logistical portion and make sure you're tracking every ticket, or you will completely implode a direct ship business within two months.

Angie Setzer: First time you lose a load, you're never getting that guy's business again. Not ever again. And so I think as the industry changes and transitions more from farmer Fred showing up at harvest time to the elevator with his gravity wagon or his hopper, and transitions more into farmer Fred managing an elevator, because that's what farmers are doing with this space now, you need to really kind of put the power of tracking what's going out of the elevator in the hands of the farmer without requiring them to invest in a large piece of equipment, i.e. a scale, and you're not relying on something that can be easily lost, or mishandled, or whatever via the BoL. Everything else is his rolled over and technology, and we're still handing guys a carbon copy paper with a number on it. So I think that's huge. I think CRM-

Aline Pezente: Do you think that the big merchants, they are going to facilitate this process, in your perspective, Angie?

Angie Setzer: They should. I don't know if they will. I mean, I feel like there's an incredible detachment from what the farmer wants to what the big merchants think the farmer wants.

Aline Pezente: Yeah, true.

Angie Setzer: So I think that'll be interesting to see. I mean, like I said, if anyone that's going to build any sort of direct ship... And so that's going to be the hard part in the elevator industry is we're going to hold on to the old way of doing things, and I think a lot of the large ag-tech firms are relying on the commercial to bridge the gap between them and the farmer, and it might not be the relationship that you want it to be. You know what I mean? I think the farmer is the one that's going to be looking for ways to empower him or herself, and so they're not going to wait for the elevator to go through 77 layers of management to do it for him.

Aline Pezente: Absolutely. I completely agree with you. And also giving the light to the perspective that you brought before any, just thinking about the role that you also do here in the Twitter, on giving more data or giving more advisor, unbiased at least, advisor to those farmers, which it is different from how some of those big merchants, they can perceive in this industry, and technology is facilitating that. I mean, one of the parallels, which I always make is what happened with the financial industry.

Aline Pezente: If you look at the financial industry in the past, you have the brokers or the financial advisors from the banks that would come to you and say, "Oh, invest in this fund, or that fund." Of course, they have some bias, some agent bias because they are incentivizing because they want people to put their money there. Not necessarily this is the best for them. But platforms like Twitter, YouTube, started to have those independent community of advisors be more, and they are giving free high quality content instantaneously, and then you would come to a premium version of it they want to make tailor-made. In your world and perspectives, from your community of followers, Angie, how do you perceive the relationship between merchants and farmers being impacted now with the emergency of these new types of forums and tech-enabled advisors community?

Angie Setzer: Yeah. I mean, I think it's going to be a struggle for an originator that is not willing or able or capable of changing their approach to working with a farmer. I think from an elevator standpoint as a whole, there's going to be continued consolidation, there's going to be some continued change in the industry, and so I think if you're not able to adapt and provide the farmer with the insight that they're looking for... Because that's what the farmer wants now. The farmer's been educated, and when I say that the farmer has an elevator, most of my customers that I'm working with... Now, maybe Michigan's slightly ahead of the curve, but I can tell you that speaking to the growers that I've spoken with across the countryside, they're not far behind. They're building space that rivals the local elevator and so they're going to figure it out. They're going to find a way to learn how to merchandise.

Angie Setzer: So there are people out there, myself included, that are like, "Hey, you want to learn how to trade like an elevator, I get it. I got 10 years of experience, my partner has 10 years of experience, my other partner has 14 years of experience. Come with us. We'll tell you everything you need to know about recognizing basis and spreads, and what that means for you as a hedger, approaching this market as a hedger now, instead of a cash trader or a farmer."

Angie Setzer: And so I truly believe, and this isn't me speaking my position by any means because I wouldn't be going down this road if I didn't think it was the road that's the next step. I truly believe that over the next 10 to 20 years, you're going to see the entire complex of ag, especially when it comes to those smaller elevators that aren't really providing much in the way of service other than being open from 7:00 to 10:00, October through November, it's going to get harder for them. I don't want it to. That's part of my desire and what I'm doing is to provide, "Hey, this has worked for me in finding relevancy in the industry. This has worked for me in building a book that I shouldn't have built."

Rodney Connor: Oh, Angie. I know exactly... Yeah.

Angie Setzer: You know what I mean? This is how I did it, and I think anyone can do it, but you've got to be willing to change how you approach your customer and you can no longer rely on farmer ignorance to provide you with substantial margin, because the more the farmer learns, the more he or she is realizing that you're relying on farmer ignorance and you're gouging them for that 30 or 40 cents, or your elevations are 90 cents. The whole buying retail selling wholesale thing only works for so long before you see people take power back, and so my entire desire in all of this, if I can say nothing else, it's like that I can be able to put power in the hands of the grower, in whatever means possible. If that's a gif, a Simpsons gif on Twitter that helps them to put two and two together, then cool.

Angie Setzer: But when it comes down to it, the world is changing, COVID and all of these types of things have had influence on how we approach things. It's really made it more possible to where you can communicate openly with producers from across the country too, like a Zoom meeting with a farmer in Kansas now. They don't have to discuss what they have going on, I don't have to get in a plane and travel to... And so it's opened them up to so much more in the way of resources too. The biggest thing is just making sure that they're accessing the resources that are actually looking out for them, and they're in that whole entire circle of trust, and all of these things, but that's what the farmer wants. That's what the younger generation in agriculture wants, and that's the generation that's taking over.

Angie Setzer: And when it comes down to it, looking at your customer base in a small country elevator, it's shrinking. It's shrinking every year. You're losing two to three, five, depending on your reach of the old timer farmers that just want to drink coffee somewhere and dump grain and throw it on DP for 10 months. That's gone. I've got guys now that we're sitting down and we're discussing spread and basis gain possibilities, and what that looks like from a cost of carry standpoint, and what we're really going to gain on if it comes to storing wheat until January versus putting beans in the bin, and all of these factors that are coming into play now.

Angie Setzer: I'm an agent for my grower, and they love it, and I think that there's a whole entire market structure that can be built around this same relationship. And so, I'll be excited to see what it looks like in five years, but I can tell you if it's anything like the last five weeks have been, hell yeah. Sorry for cursing, but I don't know if that counts as a curse, but heck yeah. That's where I just had to go rated R now because...

Rodney Connor: Yeah, you're so right on the relationship thing, right? I've had so many conversations with people and Indigo can be a hot topic on the relationship thing because we're a tech company, and I know we've had some messaging in the past that obviously I wish I could take back in a bunch of ways because that's not how I think, but you say it like, "Hey, is this tech company going to take away the relationship?" And the answer is no. If the relationship was, "Hey, this guy shows up and drinks coffee in my facility every day, and I think that's a relationship." Guess what? That is not a relationship.

Rodney Connor: A relationship is helping a farmer manage his business in a much better way, and one of my favorite things, and I'm sure you've experienced this was farmer saying, "Man, how do you know about this? How do you know how to read the market like this? How do you know inverse is the thing that, for whatever reason, the farmers just can't wrap their head around?" So that's why I bring it up, but like, "How do you understand inverses like that?" And I say to these guys, "Look, I do this every day of my life. This is what I do. I don't have to do seed selection, I don't have to decide what to spray on my field. This is all I do. So you can get really good at it really quick," and I think that is actually the relationship these guys want. I don't think technology is ever going to replace that relationship. However, I think you need technology to broaden the relationship to where it's got to be at, right?

Rodney Connor: I worked for a company in the past, people can look it up, that wouldn't let me be on Twitter on my own, wouldn't let me be on Facebook on my own, and wouldn't let me be on YouTube on my own, and so it was like, "Okay, my hands are tied. I'm going to use the phone to call these people." But when I switched to a little more progressive company that was like, "Hey, go do whatever you want to build this business," you better believe I went straight to how do I get this information to as many farmers as I possibly can. I'm aging myself, at the time it was YouTube, it certainly wasn't Twitter, but it worked. And I think that relationship is never going to go away.

Aline Pezente: Okay, but here is my question to both of you about relationships and technology in that process to argument the information, which is that had an asymmetry in the past of how the farmers would access that and now is going to be gone. How arbitrage, right? Do you believe that this is giving more arbitrage opportunities to farmers instead to the buyers? I mean, will farmers been playing at the same level as the merchants, as the merchandisers, or this is in fact going to narrow the arbitrage opportunities and just convert big merchants to just pure logistics service companies? What are your thoughts about it?

Angie Setzer: Well, that's a good one. That's really good. I mean, I think that to a certain extent, that's really all these big companies need to be, right? Let's move the grain from where it is to where it needs to be. Does it really need to sit in a big bin somewhere? I mean, obviously, there's a need for space. Obviously, there will always be a need for space, and obviously, the market will always provide some level of that need, but when it comes to your big dogs with the export facilities and things of that nature, do they really need to spend a whole bunch of time trying to teach the farmer, or are they better just originating bushels and allowing someone else to spend that time to have the relationship with the farmer? And is the farmer further ahead to make sure that he or she is signing on with an independent agent who is looking out for only their farm, and paying a fee, who's helping them be contacted or working directly with this end-user that is able to disseminate or throw the bushels out to wherever they need to go?

Angie Setzer: I think that you can completely turn... This is my opinion obviously, but I think you can turn the industry on its head to a certain extent to where you do give relevancy to the small elevator or merchant. Your local merchandiser still has value, but he or she has to be able to provide that value, and it ends up being a different resource than what it has been for the last 100 years. Instead of piling all that grain at harvest time, maybe now we cut out that that handling. I mean, it makes sense financially. Why would you want to handle grain three or four different times? Let's teach the farmer why they should be the one to store it, let's put the quality risk in their hands, let's put the basis risk in their... But then let's teach them how to avoid the pitfalls in those risks and make it to where, again, you're empowering the grower, you're providing the global market resources, but you're also doing it in a way that is more streamlined and efficient.

Angie Setzer: I mean, we have these conversations about carbon and we have these conversations about efficiency and all of these things, and we're still throwing grain into an elevator that's going to another elevator that will go to another elevator before it's the end of it. Let's think about this for a minute, guys. And so I think that, honestly, I feel like I'm lucky. I feel like it's stupid in a luck or whatever you want to call it. I don't know. But I feel like I've stumbled on what the future of agriculture looks like, but it's going to be very difficult to have folks recognize it because there's so much in the way of what we've always done it this way. This is how you have to do farming, and it's like, "No. No, it's not." There's so many other ways, and you can put so much more money in your pocket for less, less capital outlay and some of these other things, and we just have to be able to provide the grower the ability to do it.

Rodney Connor: Yeah, I'll add to that. I actually don't think even in a perfect marketplace, even if we're so wildly successful what we're trying to do here that it's like a super liquid market, everybody knows everything, I still think that arbitrage exists because of what happens behind that transaction. Yeah, so my bid and ask is really tight, and that's what I envisioned, Angie, with marketplaces, super tight bid and ask everywhere. But I don't know the interest costs of this guy. I don't know the quality concerns of this guy, or whatever. So I think what it ultimately does is lets everybody take advantage more efficiently their own arbitrage opportunities, where they show up and I think it leads to multiple arbitrage opportunities, where everybody's able to make more money, and frankly, to your point, just do it a whole lot more efficiently. Let's not run the same scenarios in a calculator every day when we wake up, let's just have it tell me what to do.

Angie Setzer: I could tell you stories of cotton, how many people have bought cottonseed from between North Carolina and Central Michigan, and some of these other things where you're just like, "Okay, so everyone's taking five to seven bucks margin on that," because you know they are per ton, and then the farmer is like, "Well, I guess that's all I can sell." It's just an amazing, amazing thing the amount of time we run stuff through the same pipeline. Yeah, I like the idea of providing the grower the ability to arb on their own, and that blows their mind. Arbitrage, you can have a whole podcast on how arbitrage works.

Aline Pezente: Yeah, and that's just a good idea. We should have another one to specific about that, right? But for this to be true, one of the things that needs to happen is exactly farmers adopting this new model in a more large scale. Farmers coming to use technology, or data, or independent advisors like yourself, and trusting on them to make those decisions. Some of the biggest debates in the ag-tech community is whether these current generation that we are going to have in the farmers community, it is going to change. And perhaps we're in the tipping point that they are going to that direction that we are just discussing here, or whether just the Gen Z, when they grow up and take the farmers that is going to happen. I don't know. What are your thoughts about it? I mean, in your world, Angie, and in your community, because you're growing your community base every day, every month, do you see this is a true? Do you see that this is still a struggle for farmers to go into that model, and why is that?

Angie Setzer: I think for certain farmers, there's a bit of a difference. It's not going to be anything they do going to that other model. And I do think it's a bit in the way of the... It's a generational thing to a certain extent. I'm thinking back on some of the customers that I worked with at the Elevator, and over 10 years, they're producing a relatively large amount of bushels, you could say, as a whole. Some guys, I had one customer, I mean, he's bringing 75 to 100,000 bushels plus into the elevator every fall. He's almost larger than some of the guys that I'm working with off-farm, and I'm thinking to myself, "Dude, you're throwing away tens of thousands of dollars because you're not actively learning how to better market in 2019 or 2020, or whatever," and so there'll be time over the years where I'd be like, "Let's have a meeting. Let's sit down. Let's go over some of the things we can do."

Angie Setzer: Flat out, "No. I don't want to change this. I'm growing my crop, I'm going to produce my crop and I'm going to bring it in at harvest time, and again, like I said, I'm going to throw it on DP, throw it on delayed price, and she'd sit there, all the whatever." And then they don't even care what your delayed price value structure is, or any of that, until they go to cash it out, and then they realize that you charge them a buck in storage, and they watched the market drop, some of these things. And so there's certain growers out there that they're flat out, they'll never change. And I said it's generational, that's not always the case. There's some younger folks that maybe it's they work in town and they do the farming on this, and they're just never going to build space, and they'll market across the scale or whatever, and they'll be fine. They farm a couple hundred acres of owned ground and whatever.

Angie Setzer: And so that's why they'll still always be the arb and the elevators and some of that stuff, but as time goes on, you are going to see this sort of transition into a younger generation, and I do feel to a certain extent, especially as we start to see... I'm excited to start to see the generation come in, because my generation, I'll be 40 next year, I'm a 2000 graduate. We're like Hotmail, CQG, or not CQG, ICQ. You remember that?

Aline Pezente: I actually do, yeah.

Angie Setzer: ICQ, that was the first where you're in high school, you're chatting with your friends, or MySpace. You know what I mean? We're the Oregon Trail generation, so technology was slowly introduced into our lives, but it really didn't take over our lives until we were adults. I'm really interested to see what happens as the 20-somethings come up that have never lived without smartphones, and some of these other things that have this whole entire astronomical opinion when it comes to tech in their lives, and how willing they are to embrace it and what it means. But the thing that I'll say more than anything though, I don't care how much technology you introduce, they're still going to need a person to talk to because it all circles back to that emotion trope, and they need someone who understands what they're trying to accomplish, what is happening on their farm directly, and can help them embrace, work through, utilize to their advantage that emotion. And so that's I guess one of the beauty parts is no matter how technologically advanced we get in this, it all still will come back to, in agriculture, in my opinion, to relationships.

Rodney Connor: I agree, and I also think there's less good people joining this merchandising business. The good people just have to be able to work with more people, I think, to make this work. That's what I think is the biggest struggle. Man, I live in Dwight, Illinois. I love Dwight, Illinois. Yeah, it's one of the best places on Earth. I love everything about it, but my God, it's hard to... If I was running some big grain elevator out of Dwight, Illinois, it is awfully hard to find some 30 year old kid that wants to live in Dwight, Illinois for the rest of his life.

Rodney Connor: That's where I really think these... Yes, relationships are important. Yes, I think there needs to be a healthy balance of value between the merchandisers that are going to build space, really provide assets for these communities, that help out the 200 acre farmer that you're talking about that is also super important in this industry, and make that farmer smarter, but I don't think we're going to be able to do it without having technology that allows people to cover, I mean, literally 10x what they're dealing with today. Angie, how many customers can you deal with today in a real way, if you don't mind sharing?

Angie Setzer: In a real way, I mean, at The Elevator, I was dealing with a couple hundred throughout the year. I feel like to provide the relationship that I want to be able to provide, I don't really like the idea of handling more than 45 or 50 directly. I do think though if you're able to generate a nice CRM level to where... And I don't mean CRM in the, "Well, Joe's wearing blue socks today." I hate those types of CRMs. I mean, recognizing how many acres a farmer has planted, being able to track where they're at from a percentage sold standpoint, knowing what kind of space they have on their farm, those types of things, where their breakeven structures are and some of that. It really helps to enhance and build to where you can work with 60 or 70 people.

Angie Setzer: I think one of the biggest disservices that we have in the industry at this point in time is, like you said, it's going to be difficult to get someone to come to Dwight, Illinois, but I think at the same time, I think we've bastardized the training process for young people, and we want a bunch of yes men, and so the guys... And I say, "Guys," I mean, you could sprinkle a couple ladies in there that are high ranking in big companies, and I don't want to take away from that. It's definitely grown since I started, but a lot of it's still your old dude club that are retiring. They were smart. They were geniuses. They knew more about the market than anything, but they wanted to promote people that agreed and helped them and did all these things, and so now you're discovering this whole entire role in management is just a bunch of yes men who have never had to really know what they're doing.

Angie Setzer: In addition to that, you continue to bring in people like, "Well, we're going to hire a full-time farming relationship coordinator." Get out of here with that! What the hell is that? You're going to have someone who's never worked with a farmer tell someone how to work with a farmer? Just throw burn your money because you're going to come up with some sort of matrix that they're going to have to check. I mean, our big egg corporations are doing themselves a tremendous disservice by not providing independence to some of these young people and teaching them in a way that is better, to challenge the authority and ask the questions to some of these things. And so I think you really will struggle. I have one of my brokers that I worked with has been on the Chicago Board of Trade. I mean, he's third generation, I think. So it was his great grandpa, or his grandpa. It was his grandpa, and then his dad, and then him, and now his son. And he handled the cash grain great delivery. So he did a bunch of stuff in Chicago on delivery.

Rodney Connor: Well, that's a rare bird right there. That's a rare bird.

Angie Setzer: Yes, and so he has taught me so many things and it's been so cool to learn from him. But last year, we got... I don't remember if we delivered. Well, something had happened to where he's like, "No, this is a good spot to be in. Let me go ahead and make some phone calls, blah, blah, blah." And he called me back, and he's like, "No one knows what they're doing anymore. No one knows what this... Even the delivery market, no one knows. It's a bunch of 45..." He says this. He's 75. He's like, "It's a bunch of 45 year old kids. They have no idea, and they've just been promoted because they know how to say yes." He's like, "And that's the most frustrating thing in this industry." And so I think, for me, I think one of the biggest things too is to provide independence. And like you said, if you want to get on Twitter, and I understand that there's reputational risk that comes with letting someone say whatever comes to their mind, get it-

Aline Pezente: No, but I think you hit an important point. As you said, those companies, they are building a culture around politics instead of information-driven. And as you said, instead of burning this money to educate your customer, you're putting more people around yourself, and just feeding on machine, which drives us that we need to change and we need to do. We should a new different business model, we need to communicate in a different way. I mean, people like you that uses Twitter and all those platforms to drive high quality important content to this industry and this community is extremely valuable and very rare. I hope, in fact, Angie, this gets scaled. And really, I mean, we are in a similar mission as well to build the technology that we can help farmers should take more actionable decisions with their merchandising through data. Data, it's what is the power part in this industry.

Aline Pezente: And look, I can't end this show without asking you another question. Having women in this industry is a very rare thing already. Having women that knows how to merchandise and merchants, like yourself, is even more rare. And I mean, I'm not even talking about... There is another segment of influencers in the egg which is very few. You count people that has meaningful, relevant content that are not using the platform just to promote them as like a blah, blah, blah entrepreneur about to talk to the community in a meaningful way, which is your case. Tell me what is to be, Angie, because I mean, to be a woman in this context. I mean, what are the challenges, or if there is any challenges, what are the hopes also that you have as being a woman in this industry?

Angie Setzer: Yeah, I always joke that everyone wants a powerful woman until they have to go home to one, and then they're like, "Could you just not for a minute?" And so it is one of those things, it's kind of a fine line. I think one of the challenges in the industry, or one of the challenges as being a woman, especially one that's outspoken, is that there's still is a certain level of, "Get in the kitchen and make me some pancakes," sort of feel where you'll be... I know I have had to explain my experience far more than any man that I've seen that will say something similar. It doesn't faze me. I'm willing to put my experience up against just about anyone's, especially when it comes to building relationships with growers and those types of things.

Angie Setzer: So that part doesn't faze me, but the biggest thing that I would say right now, for me, my biggest desire in building this business and providing an opportunity for other independent folks to kind of come in underneath the umbrella of our big business, and provide them with resources and network and connections, and provide them with the opportunity to become an independent manager of their own business probably in a way that they wouldn't be able to do otherwise. I'm not just solely seeking out young women and doing this. It's all about talent, but if there's someone out there that's watching me, that's 17, 18, 28, 38, 40, I don't care. If they're watching me, and it provides them the ability to embrace themselves, because I think that's one of the biggest things that I will... I'm unapologetically Angie Setzer, right? If you don't like me, that's fine. I will think about it probably far longer than I should, but eventually, I'll forget about you and I'll move on. You know what I mean?

Angie Setzer: But if I can help to empower other women in the industry to stand up and to say something, and to make sure that they're able to embrace their level of intelligence and their communication and use it to their benefit. You know what I mean? I think that's my biggest thing. Challenges are challenges, I'm going to face them no matter what as a woman, as a female in general. Agriculture is slightly behind to a certain extent, but not like it was. One of the funniest stories I have is when I was hired at my first business, there was a gentleman that I don't think he knew that I could hear him, and he asked my boss, "Why on earth would you hire a woman? I'm not going to work with a woman. Why would you hire a woman?"

Angie Setzer: He's a consulting customer of mine. He writes me a check now to provide him information. And I bet if I were to ever even... I would never, ever say it to him because I'm sure he doesn't remember it. But when I started, there was two or three women that I knew of that were merchandisers in the industry, in the State. Now, there's a whole slew across the country, but I would say one of the biggest things is just having someone message me and say, "Thank you for making me feel comfortable and standing up for myself," or whatever that may be.

Angie Setzer: And so, I always kind of joke that sometimes people struggle, especially in this industry, with a woman that can stand around the tailgate and drink beer with their customers because that's what they want to be able to do. And so you'll see some of the suit and tie guys really have a hard time with someone like me and just recognizing why is, I think, one of the most important things. And generally, it's just because they wish that they could be genuine. Yeah, I guess that's it. I mean, I think the biggest challenge is just kind of making sure that you're on an even playing field as best you can. And then the second thing is just really making sure that that everyone understands that they have the power to embrace themselves more than anything. Don't try to be something you aren't because people will see through that.

Aline Pezente: Wow. Angie, thanks inspiring. Thank you so much for joining. Any closing remarks, Angie, Rodney, that you would like to make?

Rodney Connor: I have. Angie, before we let you go, what is this business? So I've heard a little bit about it on Twitter, but what actually are you accomplishing with this business?

Angie Setzer: Yeah, so it's Consus, C-O-N-S-U-S, and most people will be like, "What?" You can find us at consusroi.com. Consus was the Roman god of protecting grain and storage, so that is-

Rodney Connor: Oh, you had to dig deep for that one, I bet. That wasn't easy to find.

Angie Setzer: Oh, my God. It was seven Google searches down. It was definitely one of those where I was like, "Oh," and then we found it and we're like, "Oh!" It was like this moment. So I teamed up, Boyd Brooks. It all started with me calling him a year ago and being like, "Let's start a business," and he's like, "Excuse me, this is the wrong number. What are you doing? What are you talking about? You're crazy." He has been doing his own independent cash broker advisory service since 2018, and so I was like, "Let's do something. I love how you think, I love how you interact with customers. Let's put something together," and I swear to God, everything's kind of fallen into place.

Angie Setzer: We met Brady Hess is a third partner, and he has a background in cash grain in Iowa specifically. He spent quite a bit of time trading the river market for some large corporations, he's run some ethanol plants, he's run a couple co-ops. He's our CEO, we joke. He's got the CEO brain. And then Adam Kramer. Adam Kramer was the 2020 International CCA of the year, and so Adam is doing some cool stuff with regenerative ag, and not just regenerative ag, he is taking into consideration the investments that folks are making when it comes to adding these additional tools in, what it's doing for the soil health, what it's doing for the cost of production. He's able to drop the cost, increase yields. He's doing all of these things that he has data behind it, and he's just phenomenal. He's crazy. He'll read the NRCS playbook, and he's helping his growers kind of figure out how to utilize that.

Angie Setzer: And so for us, the four of us came together with the same idea, which is we need to empower the grower in order to continue to keep strength in small communities because obviously, as ag continues to consolidate and we start to move out those direct connections that we're seeing and some of these other things, you're losing the small community. And so how do you keep the small community strong? Well, and that's by empowering its members, especially when it comes to agriculture across the heart of the Corn Belt.

Angie Setzer: And so that was our first like, "All right, this is what we're going to do." And so the way that we're going to do it is really provide a newsletter. So we're going to have a large amount of content that goes out that's heavily focused on cash grain marketing. So I don't think there's anywhere else in the industry that you're going to see someone provide you with insight, not only into what basis is doing, but why and what it means for the grower. So we'll have regional basis insight, we'll have spread talk, we'll have my morning market commentary where I deliver yesterday's news in only the way that I can. Boyd brings in a technical perspective, and then we'll have a weekly newsletter with Adam.

Angie Setzer: We're working on partnering with someone in Brazil to bring us a Brazilian insight each week. It's super important. Yeah, that's a whole other podcast. And so the newsletter will be very basic, and then from that, we want to be able to provide the growers access to the cash grain merchandising consulting, to where we're working very, very closely with our growers utilizing the technological platforms that we've been developing to really kind of give them insight into all the things that I've been talking about.

Angie Setzer: And so the four partners are really going to do that, but then we're also going to provide an umbrella under which other independent consultants across the country who have a cash grain background and maybe are working with customers in a similar situation, or maybe trapped in a box of a large corporation and not free to kind of do and say the things that they feel they should do and say, we're going to provide them an umbrella under which they can operate, create a network, and our goal is to really just keep everyone independent, but doing it together, right? Everyone can still operate and manage their farmers and help empower their growers, and we all have to have the same mindset and all have to maintain their focus on the grower and benefiting the grower, but we're all going to do it together.

Angie Setzer: So I'm kind of pumped. It's definitely been... And then on top of that, we have a whole other like I said before with some of these smaller elevators and groups out there, if they're really trying to seek relevancy and figure out what they need to do with their growers in order to build relationships and stuff like that, we offer a whole consulting arm on that side because all four of us have basically been able to go out and build their own relationships and create something that these large corporations are really trying to figure out how to nail down.

Angie Setzer: And it's really not hard, but I think one of the biggest struggles in ag, especially in tech companies or startups or whatever, is they're relying on consultants who have no experience in agriculture to tell them how to handle agriculture, and that's where you're failing with messaging and that's where you're failing with product launches. And so I think there's a whole entire aspect there that we're really trying to make sure we keep pinned down, I guess. Yeah, it's a lot. It's unfolding every day. It's something new to where we're like, "Okay. Well, let's do this." "Does it benefit the grower," is always the question we ask when the four of us are together, and if the answer is yes, then that's the next step we take. It's pretty cool. I'm excited to see where it heads.

Rodney Connor: Yeah, that's great. I'm excited for you. Angie, can't say enough about how much fun this was for me. It was nice to meet you. We've never met, I can't believe that, but we have never met.

Angie Setzer: Nice to meet you guys.

Aline Pezente: Thank you so much for joining.

Rodney Connor: Yeah, since it's ladies' day, I think we're going to let Aline close this out for the first time.

Aline Pezente: Oh, yeah. Thank you. Amazing. That was awesome. Thank you so much for joining GrainWaves, and we hope to talk to you soon again. And stay tuned for the next program, guys. And I hope that we're going to bring back Angie one day to talk more about arbitrage and more about her endeavors in this industry.

Angie Setzer: I'm game. You just let me know.

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