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[Music] the business of agriculture podcast is brought to you by the georgia agricultural commodity commission for milk did you know it takes seven cups of broccoli to get the same calcium as eight ounces of milk greetings hey thanks for joining us here on the business of agriculture podcast it's me your host damian mason but you knew that because it said so in the introduction we got a great show for you today because we're talking about a product of agriculture that you probably don't think a lot of but you probably enjoy a great deal at least if you're like me we're talking about one of the ingredients in one of my favorite products of all time of course the coors banquet i'm talking about hops today we're talking about the production of hops we're talking to the executive director of hop growers of america her name is anne george and we're talking to a hop producer out of idaho her name is michelle gooding we're going to get right into them but before we do so i want to remind you that this episode of the business of agriculture is brought to you by my good friends a harvest profit nick horeb started this company because he thought there needed to be a better software solution for people in the business of agriculture a software solution to help you manage your inputs your outputs your flows the the inventory your farms everything you have the millions of dollars in your operation that need to be managed with a software solution will help you be more profitable check out harvestprofit.com for your free trial of their software okay ann george executive director of hop groups of america thanks for being here good morning damian how are you i'm amazing thanks for being on the podcast and then michelle gooding of gooding farms thank you for being here yeah good morning thanks for having me okay so the the way this came about dear viewer and listener and i said viewer because do not forget that this episode like all of them for the last year is not just an audio it's also a video that's right go to the damien mason channel on youtube just go to youtube type in damian mason channel and you can see as well as here the business of our culture podcast so if you're not watching right now ann has a as her backdrop a bunch of hop fields and then michelle is sitting in her um in her office there in idaho at her farm office and the way this came about on january 21st i'm going to be the keynote speaker for a virtual meeting for the hop growers of america i had my conference on my setup call with ann and i said you know what can we please do a podcast because this is a fascinating business so on january 21st i'm gonna be speaking to this organization and i thought man let's share this with all my viewers and listeners all right and real quickly give me the quick and dirty on hop growers of america good morning so hop grows of america has been in existence since about the mid-1950s and has worked over that period of time to help promote the the different programs that are to benefit hopkers in the united states and also internationally we have a number of different programs our promotion or foreign market development program we have a best practices food safety program we've got a plant protection program whereby we seek internationally harmonized mrls maximum residue levels for the plant protection products that are used for hops and that's very important because we export about 60 percent of our crop on an annual basis and then we also participate in the international hop growers organization on behalf of the u.s hop industry we do some congressional work and try to represent our our growers in washington dc and elsewhere on issues that are important to hop growers so it's it's a pretty uh robust program and we've got excellent growers on our board of directors representing the hop industry from across the united states all right so uh i this is fascinating to me and i all of my beer drinking friends are going to enjoy this as well as all the people in agriculture that are you know hog farmers in iowa or cranberry producers in massachusetts are going to be like wow i didn't know that much about this you told me when we had our planning call some quick numbers about hops and i think it's also important the very number one rule tell the listener about hop versus hops and that way we can start with that so producers in the pacific northwest where about 98 of the crop is grown in the u.s refer to hop production in a singular form it would be just like potatoes i am a potato grower i grow potatoes i am a hop grower i i grow hops sometimes you'll hear people talk about being a hops grower or this is the hops industry and the pacific northwest growers really don't utilize that vernacular it's it's the hop industry we produce hops so we do grow as i mentioned about 98 percent of the us crop here in the pacific northwest this has been the major production region in the u.s since the early 1900s and we produce about 40 percent of the world's supply a little over 40 in a normal year and like i mentioned about 60 percent of that is exported to between 60 and 70 different customer countries worldwide hops are produced in exportable quantities and only about a dozen different countries around the world and that has to do with the fact that it's a very day-length dependent crop so you will find hops produced around the world in the same basic latitudinal band as you would find wine grapes produced so the closer to the 45th parallel the higher the yields so that that tends to be where the hot production regions are in the northern and southern hemisphere hops as i mentioned are very day length dependent when your lengthening day kicks over to become a shortening day at the summer solstice the stronger that signal to the plant the heavier the bloom set so by being close to that 45th parallel that is the location on the planet where you see that strongest signal that strongest daylight signal to the plant as we switch over from lengthening days to shortening days so once you've hit that bloom set then that determines your yield for the for that particular crop and to give you a little bit of an idea of just how dramatic that can be in the pacific northwest the average yield runs about nineteen hundred to two thousand pounds to the acre of dried ten percent moisture hop cones when you go down let's just say to the san diego area we have some growers that produce um small quantities in that region for local breweries and a lot of those brewers or a lot of those growers sell to the brewers wet hop cones and so i think a lot of people are familiar with with fresh hopped beers that may be available at harvest time those are actually the wet 70 moisture hop cones that would be harvested and go into brewing before they're actually dried and baled and go into the normal sales channels that most of our growers utilize so again keep in mind about two thousand pounds of the acre of 10 moisture hops at the 45th parallel or close to it let's just say 35 to 55. versus san diego one of my growers uh indicated that he gets about 400 pounds to the acre wet so that would be about 100 pounds to the acre dry there you go that's what by the way i know that i always have to rein in people like ann because she knows so much about uh the hops industry that uh she probably lost a few of our people let's go through those numbers and i want to talk to michelle sixty percent of the united states crop is exported we have about 60 to 70 countries that are our customers you told me that germany is the second biggest producer in the world behind the united states you said that the united states grows about 40 of the globe's hops are grown right here and what's interesting is while there's somebody like a friend of mine say well isn't michigan a big producer as you pointed out there's like 900 acres in all of michigan compared to the pacific northwest meaning idaho oregon and washington which grow 98 of the u.s crop you talked about then the acreage the the yield per acre 2 000 pounds per acre is the average up in the pacific northwest and that's of a dry product meaning of about 10 moisture as opposed to the specialty niche producer you mentioned in southern california they get 400 pounds per acre of wet which would equate to only 100 acres dry so you're talking about amazing amount of difference in terms of productivity from where they are to up where michelle is those are the right numbers right correct and one of the things that we've seen quite a bit of research because there are southern tier farmers who are very interested in producing hops there's actually quite a large research program in at university of florida right now where they're attempting to grow hops under grow lights and that's actually been one of the production regimens in south africa for many years because there that's really been the one historic growing region of the world where we have seen hops produced at closer to 30 degrees latitude as opposed to the 35 to 55 range and so adding those grow lights has allowed those south african producers to see something closer to a normal crop and that's what florida is now experimenting with in their their research they're doing that indoors or they're trying to use outdoors under lights um they're they're doing it both ways but they do have about a 10 acre hop yard that they have set up under grow lights from what i understand all right we've uh talked for a long while now and we haven't heard from our girl michelle michelle gooding gooding farms idaho welcome to the business of agriculture yeah thank you and also give me some scoop you're a 31 year old woman you are in the business of agriculture background yeah so i grew up on the farm um i'm actually a sixth generation hop grower so we started growing hops in 1895 uh in the willamette valley actually in oregon and then we moved to idaho in the mid-40s and have been here since my dad is starting to really enter retirement um and i have two sisters who help run the farm with me alongside our farm manager and we have a great staff here so um yeah we definitely have been in the business for a while um i'm sure i give you all the numbers dating back from the highs and lows the hot market historically um is a little bit like a roller coaster so uh we're really fortunate to have weathered some of those pretty significant storms and um i don't know i'm really excited to carry on the family legacy we right now we farm about a thousand acres of hops okay that's the big sea remember remember my ag people they love production and i tell them all time sometimes they love production more than they uh then they uh then they do promotion uh they all do and so i'm like you love growing remember we gotta sell this stuff so we get into let's talk about the production you have 1 000 acres of hops what else do you have on your farming operation um so we are actually implementing a regenerative agriculture approach on our farm so we have started bringing animals back to the farm we have about 150 head of cattle uh we've got close to 200 ewes and then we have about 200 laying hens on our farm for the person that doesn't know because a friend of mine in evanston illinois probably knows this when you said use you don't mean y-o-u you mean e-w-e-s that means female sheep okay so you've got 200 sheep uh mother sheep female sheep use you 150 cattle and you got chickens tell me about their application uh so what we're trying to do and we'll probably get into this in a little bit is we're trying to minimize our costs so grown hops for a long time we're trying to do it more efficiently and uh based on international shipping and mrls harmonization we're basically trying to make it so we could be as flexible with the crop that we grow and also grow it still at a very high quality but do it maybe at not as expensive as a rate synthetically okay so you're using the animals to do pest control you're using the animals to do vegetation control you're using them as a source of revenue selling calves and the eggs and tell me the whole uh idea here yeah pretty much that's everything you summarize well um yeah and we we're trying to basically we're trying to make it a full circle self-sustaining system that's really our goal you know we want to we've got a little farmer's market too that we opened last year so we're trying to you know while hops is our bread and butter that is the thing that pays the bills um we're trying to diversify ourselves um and and do that as best as we can 1000 acres of hops what else do you have at gooding farms um so we've got about 300 acres of pasture and then we do some row cropping uh about 50 acres or that not tons of that when the hot market was very bad that's actually how my dad got through everything he had a few acres of hops but he predominantly row crop to to make everything make ends meet okay so this is not a small operation you and two of your siblings as well as your father who's phasing out uh just for the fun of it because people are my midwestern people are saying wait a minute a thousand acres of corn and soybeans that's still i have a job in town and my wife works because that's not enough for all of us but a thousand acres of hops obviously is a much different revenue stream would you mind telling me like in a year like 2020 what does a revenue picture look like for 1 000 acres of hops well 2020 there's a little asterisk you know planted there um i would say next to it but for us we're you know as far as budget wise we're we're operating on about a 10 to 11 million dollar budget is really what we're doing and um you know you really hope that you can have your ends meet and things will work out good that's part of farming and we saw some challenges this year with weather as well as covid that we were down we were down i would say about 10 percent verse projected but then we were able to make ends somewhat meet thanks to anne's hard work with the cfap too um so hops were included in that and then also uh september 9th there was a like eight or ten hour 30 to 50 mile hour windstorm um that idaho endured so we have some insurance claims related to that because we self-insure our crop oh you self-insure okay so real quickly for the listener or viewer that doesn't know cfap2 meant coronavirus food assistance program and there was monies thrown at agriculture uh you know right or wrong but there was money thrown at a lot of different things through all of the federal uh stimulus and whatnot in 2020 so dear listener if you're wondering what she's talking about uh the federal government gave money to farmers and you know you can disagree with that as well you may but remember it's because we need to keep these people in business so that we have food and beverage 10 to 11 million dollars in a normal year and then again my my friends in indiana are saying good god 10 million off of a thousand acres of course you've also got the regenerative stuff going with the livestock etc etc which is starting to i'm sure ramp up you got a high cost business um and and anne talked a little bit about this so let's go back to ian tell me about some of the expenses that your members and the hop growers of america first off it's labor intensive right is that the first one the biggest expense for these farmers yes labor intensive so labor costs are very high the next category would probably be plant protection it's a very long season crop the hop rhizome system or rootstock is a perennial but the big binds that you see behind me uh going up to an 18-foot trellis are annual and those begin to emerge in march uh generally the crop bearing binds would emerge along about mid april and so it's full on plant protection from that point in time until harvest in september through early october let's get let's go real quick real quickly remember we got folks that we got we try to always be educational here on the business of our culture um so somebody says i'm a little bit familiar they're essentially and if you're not able to watch but you're listening a hop field looks like an overgrown vineyard in some regards right you've got this trellis system but what you just said was the roots the rhizomes for those who are not plant and botany type people that's the thing that's n the ground and then the vine comes off of that you said one of them is a perennial which means it's there every year and then the part that goes up the trellis is an annual that's the part that gets harvested every year correct correct and that whole entire bind and it is a bind not a vine due to the the structure of it spell it spell it because people are saying what it's b is in boy bine b-i-n-e so that that entire bind that 18 plus foot long piece of plant that comes up out of the soil every year is cut down at harvest and then generally the the most common harvesting facility for hop industry in the pacific northwest is a stationary picking machine so that entire bind is hauled into a stationary picking machine where all of this the cones and cones which are the flowers and all of these binds are female the crop is born on the female plant so if we end up with male plants in the field through random pollination and seed drop those are rogued out so we don't want seeds in the cones that increases weight and decreases the quality of of the cones or the flowers of the plant and the cone or the flower is the crop that we're growing so the leaves and the the cones are stripped from those big binds and then separated so that the ultimate crop that we're marketing is 99.9 pure hop cones without any stems or leaves uh in in that so so within that growing that 18 to 20 foot long bind every year first of all you've got the trellis structure so for a grower to go to a new piece of ground and establish a hop field which would include building the trellis establishing the drip irrigation system the pumping station and so on and then buying the planting stock because these are either planted from other rhizomes or from potted plants that come from a virus free propagation program they are not planted from seeds you plant seeds you get 50 males roughly we don't want males we only want females so they're vegetatively propagated plants so just the mere establishment of a hop yard is uh an eight to ten thousand dollar an acre venture not counting not counting the price of land and without counting the price of land and not counting the production costs for that first year of production on that that's just buying the polls buying the wire the labor to put the structure up buying the rhizomes planting them or the potted plants and setting up the irrigation system okay so you've got rolling and that does not any of your return on labor nor does it count any of your cost of of acre of the actual land okay no and it also doesn't include your harvesting facility and so every one of these growers so to put this in perspective michelle mentioned they have a thousand acres of hops michelle is a spot on average size top grower in the pacific northwest our average hop grower and there are about 80 hop girls in the pacific northwest oregon washington idaho the average hop grower is a thousand acres we've got them running basically from 500 acres up to about 4 000 acres of hops and they you know are obviously diversified with some other crops as well so with this hop production unit has to have a harvesting facility so you know many of your listeners may be familiar with the cost of a new green combine and those certainly aren't cheap anymore but michelle not only has to have a stationary combine or picking machine but then she also has to have a kiln because as we mentioned earlier in the broadcast we're going to dry all these cones from 70 moisture down to 10 moisture and then she has to have a bailing system we we then compress those dried hop cones into a 200 pound bale and wrap those with with a burlap or with a polycloth burlap and then that's how they leave michelle's farm to go to the the um cold storage facility all of these hops are then stored at 30 degrees or less fahrenheit until they go into processing into pellets or extract and then that end product the pellets extract or other downstream products are also held in cold storage so there's a lot of expense in cold storage warehousing and then just the picking facility for an average hop farm if you had to go in and rebuild a picking facility today from scratch you would be looking at probably ten million dollars five to ten million dollars and you use that facility for 30 to 45 days a year okay you know a small picking facility for our pacific northwest growers would be a five to six million dollar investment so all right now uh michelle you just gave a bunch of people stickers and just gave a bunch of people sticker shock so let's talk a little bit about what happens there at gooding farms uh you're the average pacific northwest size she says there's 80 producers in those three states averaging 1 000 acres we have 80 000 acres uh we are all all of us that love beer are dependent on those 80 000 acres we're depending on people like you you have 60 000 acres damien 60 000 acres in the us okay about 60 000 in in the in all of the us in all the u.s okay and obviously most all of that principally 98 of that is in the northwest pacific northwest okay 60 000 acres um you've got this massive amount of stuff going on so let's start in the spring um kind of just walk me through this because i think everybody wants to know what happens start with uh start with your season yeah so we'll just start in january that's all right got banking taxes right now and um we are doing a lot of maintenance uh historically in the past few years we've been putting up new trellis so what ann was talking about um if the weather cooperated um and then we'll roll into the end of january february we will be digging roots so we'll dig those rhizomes if we're going to self-propagate fields for new acres i mean you are you're trying to expand acres so the new trellises and the rhizome would be we're going to go put in 50 more acres or something right yeah or rotate out some old fields i mean the thing is this trellis is a huge investment but it lasts for a significant amount of time so we've got some old fields we're rotating out some trellis doing some repairs maintenance um you know improving them maybe shifting the field three feet one way or something like that so that all happens in spring we also in the springtime uh we use the h2a program so our workers will arrive in february and we will be essentially planting new fields we will start to as the hops begin to emerge we will start to potentially prune them depending on the variety uh we'll plant cover crops that's something that a lot of farms do is plant cover crops in the springtime depending you know on the weather very weather dependent and then we will start to roll into the busy season so april april through i would say the end of september it's pedal to the metal um you're really trying to time these things uh to where you're you know you put your string in so you you restring every year you're stringing that 18 foot hot buying every single year and that's a huge labor investment because it's something that's not automated and it's done by hand and um that's a they're working on on automating that potentially that happens during what time of year michelle uh typically that's april okay so in april what you're saying is you said restringing so we've got this trellis system are we talking about taking the bind and and attaching it to that string so it can climb is that what's happening so that's called training so you have to have a string there first to train and then hops have kind of a little prickle similar to a raspberry so when you train them that prickle um essentially sticks to the twine fairly well um and then they'll start to grow so for most people that probably don't know the majority of us hops are grown i would say in the yakima valley so down here in southwest idaho we're a little bit more south so we have to be very cognizant of the timing of when we train things because hops grow based on day length and that's why they do really well right in the pacific northwest we've got these long summer days so what we're trying to do is time it so that if maybe we get a cold snap in june it's not thinking oh crap i'm i'm your harvest i got a bloom right now the days are you know they're getting shorter so that's something that we have to be really careful about um and we train and then it's really simple you know you just grow them right so you just spray you fertilize water um and that's spraying is as ann mentioned that is a very significant cost for growers we fight two spotted spider mites downey and powdery mildew are i would say our main three things that we combat with spring and you spray that aerially or are you spraying that because you got a 20 foot tall plant are you going over that with a aerial application of a crop duster so it kind of depends um it depends on the label i would say first of all and then second of all you're really wanting coverage so if you're spraying a two spotty spider mite you like you want to really get that that that bind covered right so it's we use a lot of people will use uh rears airblast sprayer similar to that they use in tree fruit um or there's like the electrostatic versions um so typically it's sprayed from the ground up okay and then uh they will do foliar applications through the airplanes um i think a lot of people are getting more kind of into that um but the other they haven't really tried i don't think any drone anything like that okay so wait a minute now uh we we recognize all manner of agriculture you just talked about you know mites and some things than fungi and funguses that you're you you deal with and the need to spray can you grow hops organically i assume you can but i'm sure the yield cut has to be significant based on what you described maybe ann can take that one yeah and so on average i would guess that the organic production yield is about 60 to 70 percent of a conventional yield and of course as we all know um organic does not mean that it has not been treated with pesticides it's just treated with organically approved pesticides so instead of being able to use some of the conventional products that might have a longer residual where we could potentially spray every 14 to 21 days with an organic system of course you're having to go in and spray maybe every three to five days and continue to stay on top of those pests and one of the downsides of having to spray more often with hops is the fact that as you can as you can manage it or excuse me as you can imagine with an with a rears type air blast sprayer there's a lot of air damage to the plant and so every time you go through the field and have to use an air blast application you're going to damage part of the crop so that's also part of what takes that yield down on an organic system but we do have a very robust organic production sector of our industry uh it's not huge but it's it is growing and i think we do have customers who are starting to appreciate the um the additional costs associated with organic production and are willing to pay for that if indeed that's the type of of product that they want fantastic so real quickly and we'll go back to michelle i love this discussion and yes this is going to be a longer episode of the business of agriculture because it is amazing coverage before we ask the next couple of questions and ann george want to remind you that this episode of the business of agriculture is brought to you by my good friends at harvest profit harvest profit is a fargo-based software company but it doesn't matter where they are because they can serve you anywhere they're in 22 states growers agricultural enterprises in like 24 states and four provinces are using harvest profit go to harvestprofit.com for your free 14-day trial first off dear listener viewer you heard something very valuable right there just because something is labeled organic or says it's organic does not mean that it does not use organically approved pesticides and herbicides you can still use chemicals in organic production you also heard that we're going through there a lot more uh when we grow them organically because you don't have the residual of the products used and then you are damaging the plant more about one less yield on organic operation how many acres do you suppose of the 60 000 acres in the united states are organic ops i would guess roughly a thousand okay so a few percent okay michelle take me to summer so we're doing a lot of work in the spring we got a lot of labors you mentioned the h2a program for a person that doesn't understand that that is so it's a worker visa program that allows them to come and fill essentially jobs that can't be filled by domestic workers here in the united states so we advertise you know we try to get these jobs filled and try to get the work done but to be totally honest people don't really want to work on the farm anymore so um especially out in parma that's not where a percent epicenter of people is so yeah um the hoa program has been an investment for us um it's not cheap how much do how much speaking of cheap you know there's a lot of people that think it's just terrible that we're out here in agriculture where uh they think it's the old plantocracy system and it's really not because i can speak from experience that a lot of the farm workers i know in the dairy sector they do quite well grant they put in long hours but they get housing in like 14 bucks an hour to start what are your people making uh so pretty similar to that so we have to provide housing transportation for them and then um we are paying it i think they have it i think the wage is still locked for right now um but like last year it was like 1362 in idaho um and then we actually farmed some in eastern oregon as well so over in oregon they were getting like like 15 something so these workers are getting 13 60 to 15 an hour plus housing and transportation and then they are working quite a bit because it's hard work and take me to then late summer fall when it comes the the bounty we're gonna take these what happens then yeah so so harvest harvest is definitely probably my favorite and least favorite time of year simultaneously um so i run our dryer so i oversee that as part of harvest along you know just like other farms people wear a lot of hats um but basically what happens is you you know you talk about the 18 foot tall binds so on our farm they go through and they cut the bottoms mechanically with like you could think of it but like scissor hands on the front of the tractor and then as they go through and they cut the tops um directly from the wire up in 18 feet they fall into a truck that has kind of like a big side bed you've seen these dump beds things like that it's kind of similar to that and then they are transported to our stationary harvesting facility which where each vine is hung upside down and then goes through we have what are called don howard machines which is you know pretty standard there's some other german types of machines from that point they are sorted from the leaves and stems and i'm making this sound really simple it's a lot more complicated that's like so much like oh well we run the con we run the combine through there and we get soybeans like oh that's all there is to it like well actually there's a hell of a lot more to it but you know what we'll just uh let's stick with that so they go through these you know you're taking this 18-foot thing that's in a hopper truck into your stationary what does it call it the don machine is a picking facility a picking machine essentially so it's probably it's the cotton gin it's the combine it's an amazing piece of equipment and it separates all that stuff right yes and and it's it's really amazing if you ever you know if you're ever wanting to see anything like that we have some i think on our video on our website we have some footage of it and i don't know and might have some on the usa hops website too um washington hop commission as well um it's really amazing it's it's just the engineering and i mean a lot of these were developed in 60s um the the basic you know engineering of it so we've modernized it some but it's it's pretty neat it's really something to see but from the picker is what we call them the picker they are taken to uh the dryer via conveyor belts and are dried depending on the farm from i would say six to 14 hours the art of drying is something that is is i feel like can really make or break the farm um because you have to essentially you know you're you're targeting that eight and a half to ten and a half or eight to ten mark of moisture and you you know maybe they're coming in at 75 moisture so you have to really manage fans and heat and it's it's really a complex thing and from there they get bailed and that way we're taking this now it's a dried product and then we're bailing it just like a bale of hay but does that happen at your place or do they go somewhere else so it happens at our place i will back you up though there's a very important step in between the dryer and baler and that is cooling cooling the pile so basically you know just similar to hay if you're bailing wet bales you could have fires hops are similar sense in that way just because of the oil complexity that the cones have within them and cooling is something that you know we try to cool between i would say 18 and 24 hours is normally standard on our form on our farm but in order to do that you need space right so you've got huge essentially piles of hops that are just sitting there that are cooling and and homogenizing because the room is different it's not you know it's not a german style where it's a continuous dryer so you've maybe got a little bit of water spots here or some drier spots here and and that helps even them out to make this are we doing that are we doing that outside on a slab of concrete we're doing that in a barn that's in the barn okay a very safe barn a very big barn are we using a payloader to turn the pile you know because you know we've all we've all eaten you know eat around the edge because it's cooler there is that what we're doing are we just is that what happening um so for us we don't we don't disturb them once they're in the pile until we go to bail them we let them just because they are such a delicate flower we really try to maintain the integrity of the cone so we just let them cool and then we scoop them and place them um essentially in like a it's kind of like a big hole in the floor and they go up conveyors and into the bail box okay they get put into a bail bail is how big um on our farm where the standard american bail which is 200 pounds 200 pound bail from there they go to ah and then and if you're watching this and i encourage you to watch this one because uh anne has changed her backdrop a couple of times she's now showing us a bale it looks like it's a great big uh rectangle and a burlap uh sort of uh wrapping then they go from there to a pro further processor that pelletizes them is that right yeah typically then at that point they are taken to cold starch and then the processor will then take them to pellets and it there is one stage further they can go into extract as well so that's kind of the alpha aroma difference there and the average brewer whether it's anheuser-busch or joe joe and and bob's micro brew down the street they get this product typically as a pellet because it's more stable it's easier for them to handle am i right craft beer is definitely committed to the pellet um and the anaheim bush as well as well as you know a lot of brewers it's predominantly how hops are used but extract has been used for a very long time and would probably know how long they've been using extract oh anne doesn't need to tell us that necessarily what she needs to tell us is uh more importantly they're not all the same hops you know my favorite beer of all time coors banquet got it in the kegerator also i like a micro brew once in a while i like an ipa i like a christmas ale different hops along with other things change the flavor so is that what i'm hearing that's correct and essentially all of the different hop varieties fall within two classes we'll refer to them either as aroma hops which tend to be lower in alpha acid content which is the bittering substance that gives beer its base bittering flavor or bitter flavor and then the bitter or alpha hops and those are grown specifically for the production of that alpha acid so your average alpha acid hop would be producing something in the range of 16 to 20 alpha content which goes back to michelle's comment about making sure that those bales are dry because you have not only a compacted crop like you would with a bale of hay but now you add 15 to 20 percent oil and resin to that crop and then that really increases the flammability so we're very careful about the drying of these these cones because of the fact that not only can they self-heat from moisture but once that starts you've got a very flammable product that's got up to 20 oils and resins in its content so within those two classes of hops we probably produce i would say that our top 10 varieties make up about 50 to 60 percent of our acreage but overall we produce over 60 different varieties in the u.s and there's over a hundred different varieties worldwide every one of those varieties has its own unique flavor profile and aroma profile so you've got quite a bit of variability we are after all the business of agriculture let's talk about some business things here and again i i know dear listener and viewer this is a longer episode than usual but it's the best subject i i've covered in a while here i've got to tell you man because you know if you like a good cold beer at the end of the day this is our episode uh and i should also remind you you know i've been saying it for years if you eat it drink it or smoke it agriculture produced it right so we're talking about the drink side of agriculture if you um if you want to change out a field um this is a long-term thing you know putting those rhizomes in the ground etc so i'm assuming uh michelle you've got a contract and a brewery um or a brokerage says you're gonna get paid to grow this stuff it's not just like hey we decided we just go ahead and throw this kind of hops out there and and um what do you think anybody want it tell me how the whole business part of it works yeah so contracting is something that we've always encouraged with brewers obviously there's things like covid in 2020 that kind of throw curveballs into the whole business of everyone but historically what we've done on our farm is we try to be in a more heavily contracted position so you can grow hops on the open market um that's just something that uh is a little bit riskier and we're a little bit more conservative i would say on our farm so we try to be fully contracted every year um and if you know something does better than normally averaged and that's great we've got some extras um but it also can be a little bit complicated because there are proprietary varieties um so that's just a little thing that i'll throw in there without going too far down that rabbit hole um but for us i would say our average contracts are two to anywhere from two to four years um and my sister diane that's really her bread and butter on our farm she manages all the sales and has done so for a better part of a decade now what are you what's your hey what's your role my role i'm the ceo so i do all the stuff diane doesn't want to you're about the production and the operation and all the moving parts she's about the money and the biz right then you got third sibling what's with what's what's the third siblings role so our youngest sister andrea just came back and she is managing more on the marketing side right now and she's kind of overseeing our new endeavor with our farm stand ah good deal all right so how many different varieties do you grow so we grow 14 different varieties on our farm and your customers are um so we have i would say a mix so we we do some small dealers uh you know you're looking at people that are maybe in canada or uh montana we use all different sizes so you've got small mid and large steelers large dealers you're looking at hopsteiner uh or as a steiner you're looking at barthols group and uh yakima chief uh ranches i would say but none of your stuff goes directly with a contract to um you know miller brewing or something like this no we do have some direct contracts so we work closely with founders brewing um out of michigan and then we also work with got it and then anheuser-busch used all our stuff too and talked about the wet hop so we'll do wet hops with our local breweries near boise and then um we'll do you know some direct contracts with those guys as well all right so we've been on a while we've covered a lot of ground and there's probably a couple things i'm missing and what thing am i missing that that somebody needs to know that we didn't talk about well i'll just throw out a few fun facts here let's go back first we were talking a little bit about the economics so about every five years we do uh an enterprise budget with washington state university just last week i got the document that we created with input from our hop grows of america board of directors in 2020 and according to that particular cost study the current total cost of producing hops in the pacific northwest is a little over 13 dollars an acre now that's an annual operating cost that not only includes your cash costs however that does also include your um amortization of your land and your your plant equipment so so that is kind of the figure that our growers need to be looking at long term to be able to have a successful operation on a short term basis they may be able to take a little lower price or take different prices on their different varieties because you need to make sure you have a very robust mix of varieties as michelle said because you don't want to be growing the entire farm on one with one variety that has to be harvested on september 10th you need to start harvest the last week of of august and go through the first week of october so you need a variable group of maturities so anyway our growers are going to be keying in on that figure and again going back to what i mentioned earlier with an average yield of 2 000 pounds to the acre that gives you a pretty a good idea of what our growers need to look at as a break-even cost for long-term success in this industry most of our growers are third to seventh generation and you know we talked about the six million dollar investment a new picking machine some of our bigger operations are looking at more like 12 to 20 million dollars for an investment in their in their harvesting facilities and you can't do that overnight so most of our growers are using as michelle mentioned they're using picking facilities that originally were built in the 1960s and over the years they've you know they've replaced this piece in one year and another year they've upgraded that piece and a year later they might do a piece over in the back and so there's a continual improvement of of these facilities and you know you really oftentimes don't get a new one unless something catastrophic happens and you burn down the old one so it's it you know unfortunately that's just the reality of the business the um going back to talking a little bit about uh some of michelle's discussion of our spring activities i think one fun fact is that we talked about the twining the pudding of the twine in the ground every year and tying it to the trellis at 18 feet tall so just doing a really quick calculation on 60 000 acres of hops let's just say on average there are three strings per hill 889 hills per acre and if you do the math on that that works out to about almost 620 000 miles of core coir twine which is made from coconut husks or some girls use a paper twine basically a twisted craft paper twine so we're putting in about 620 000 miles of twine each year and as michelle mentioned that's all done by hand it's tied to the trellis at the top by hand it's punched into the ground into the hill by hand so you said 100 how many how many miles just per acre well i i didn't actually break it down for acres right but you're talking about a hell of a lot of miles of of the twine per acre and by the way how many employees during your busy season michelle how many employees are out there covering that thousand acres for us we cap out typically at around 120. 120 that's labor and then does that also include i'm sure you've got a couple of just people are there year round because keeping the machines going etc then what's your full time uh full-time people we have about 30. 30 full-time people and then 120 labors yeah total so you got 150 people not not mentioning the office staff which is you your your money hungry sister and then the little one which let's face it youngest usually don't do anything i mean let's face it you know i'm kidding of course i'm the youngest i did everything but um so 120 workers 30 people that are there year round you got a lot of stuff going on can i ask you a question michelle did you make money last year did you break even or did you lose money as a at gooding farms well so there's a few ways to look at it i would say everything whole picture we broke even if you took away the assistance uh we lost money yeah if you if it hadn't been for cfap two you'd have lost money the ppp and um the insurance claim that we're working through right now um i mean it was a rough year it was really hard 2021 look for you it looks good i think we are in a good position on the sales side diane's doing a good job there and regenerative ag is starting to show the perks there so we're pretty excited about that that's good eternal optimism that's why you're in the business of agriculture last thought then uh ann anything that we need first off if anybody wants to learn more about this than they learned on our podcast they can go to your website and that is usahopps.org and we do have videos we have just a wealth of information on the website for people who are interested in learning more about hops i i think this is just a neat neat thing for me and uh if they want to find out more about gooding farms they're in what is it parma idaho yep parma okay we wanna what's that goodingfarms.com goodingfarms.com and you know back when i used to travel for my business uh which i think is going to happen again come summer uh i work in idaho sometimes so i'm intrigued maybe we'll have to swing by and see what's going on there so you got hops usa.org or gooding usahopps.org usahopps.org or goodingfarms.com uh this has been a fascinating topic i really enjoy it i will remind everybody that if you are in the hop hops industry and you're a hops a hop grower please please consider uh checking us out on january 21st i'm going to be the keynote speaker and i think i'm kicking off the entire online conference am i not you're going to be our thursday morning keynote to kick off that day um thanks to covid you would have been kicking off the whole conference but we took heart on our attendees and we've spread it over five days instead of a couple so that we don't have to have 12 hours of zoom programming each day and so you're actually going to be on the third day of the conference okay so i'll be on thursday the january 21st in the morning and i would like you to be there i i i would love for you to hear my message i'll be talking about big picture business of agriculture stuff trends outlook uh consumer issues and other items that are impacting the industry of food fuel and fiber michelle ann you're awesome i uh i gotta tell my listeners real quickly that this episode was brought to you by harvest profit go to harvestprofit.com for a software solution that'll make your agricultural enterprise more profitable thank you for being here thank you so much thank you very much you know what i think i speak for everybody that's just enjoyed this podcast all this talk about hops made me thirsty for a coors banquet all right thanks for being here until next time it's the business of agriculture the business of agriculture podcast is brought to you by the georgia agricultural commodity commission for milk reminding you that energy drinks are chock full of caffeine and sodium soft drinks and juices are loaded with sugar what are you feeding your family 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