The 24 Hour Butcher Shop with Jacob Wolki

This week on the podcast, our guest is Jacob Wolki, owner of Wolki Farms and a 24-hour contactless butcher shop.

Initially, Jacob took over his father's hobby farm to provide his family with fresh eggs and beef, in a shift to a healthier lifestyle and better-quality food .

"I've always been plagued with skin issues and respiratory allergies and stomach issues my whole life,” says Jake. “And my wife, who's very conscientious and very healthy, said, well, maybe it's time to stop stuffing your face with iced coffees and KFC and honey chicken at the local noodle box and start eating a bit better.”

"I thought, "I'm going to try to raise a bit of my beef," because I wasn't satisfied with the local beef that was available to me. I wanted grass-fed and finished. I wanted it from animals that hadn't been dependent on pharmaceuticals that include drenching, and I just couldn't find it.”

Jacob finished his first beef cattle and was inspired to do more. “When I went to process my first body of beef and put it through the local butcher shop, I realised, maybe I'll do two and try to sell the second one, and it’ll pay for the processing costs of the first one. So I guilt-tripped, I begged, I pleaded, I forced all my friends and family to buy that body of beef off me,” he explains. “And you know, that was my first foray into farming.”

As he delved deeper into livestock management, he realised the farm could be a profitable venture. "It became very apparent to me very early on that processing was an enormous bottleneck.” As Jacobs's client list grew, he needed to use multiple abattoirs to fulfil the orders.

“I didn't want to be trying to manage meat coming out of four or five different boning rooms, everyone packing it differently and cutting it differently. So I knew if I wanted to have a go, I'd have to be able to process myself and package it myself. And I think it's a unique selling point for the business. I don't know anyone else that has done this." That meat is now sold to high-end restaurants, boutique grocery stores, through online sales and most impressively, through his 24-hour contactless butcher shop.

The 24-hour butcher shop, a reflection of Jacob's innovation, operates through a walk-in vending machine system and a simple app. Jacob uses the same technology 24-hour gyms use, which we think is pretty ingenious, and the sales are proof that customers like this accessibility, too.

Jacob's story underscores the importance of continuous learning and innovative thinking to turn a personal passion into a profitable venture.

Find out more about Wolki Farms here:
https://wolkifarm.com.au/

Head Shepherd is brought to you by neXtgen Agri International Limited, we help livestock farmers get the most out of the genetics they farm with. Get in touch with us if you would like to hear more about how we can help you do what you do best - info@nextgenagri.com.

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These companies are leaders in their respective fields and it is a privilege to have them supporting the Head Shepherd Podcast. Please consider them when making product choices, as they are instrumental in enabling us to bring you this podcast each week.

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Transcript

M: 0:05

Welcome to the Head Shepherd podcast. I'm your host, mark Ferguson, ceo at Next Gen Agri International, where we help livestock managers to get the best out of their stock. I want to take this opportunity to thank our friends at MSD Animal Health in Orflex for sponsoring Head Shepherd again this season, and I'm also excited to introduce our mates at Heinegger as brand new sponsors of the show. Msd in Orflex, or perhaps better known as Cooper's Animal Health in Australia, offer one of New Zealand, australia's, largest livestock product portfolios, with a comprehensive suite of animal health and management products connected through identification, traceability and monitoring solutions. Like us, they see how the wealth and breadth of information born out of this podcast can help their men and their farming clients achieve their mission of the science of healthier animals.

M: 0:47

Heinegger will need a little introduction to our audience. A market leader and one-stop shop for wool harvesting and animal fibre removal, together with an expanding range of agricultural products and inputs, the Heinegger name is synonymous with quality, reliability and precision. The Heinegger team have a deep understanding of livestock agriculture, backed by Swiss engineering and a family business dedicated to manufacturing the best. It's fantastic to have both of these sponsors supporting us and bringing Head Shepherd to each week, and now it's time to get on with this week's episode. Welcome back to Head Shepherd. This week we have Jacob Wolke on the show. Welcome, jacob.

J: 1:21

Morning Heidel.

M: 1:22

Yeah, great mate, and you're there at Wolke Farm in Aubrey. I got it wrong in the first cut of this, so we'll get it right this time. Aubrey, in New South Wales. And yeah, really interesting story of getting to where you are now, which is selling meat direct to consumers. It'd be really cool to hear your back story, how you ended up where you are today, and then we'll get you.

J: 1:44

Yeah, sure, really quickly. I finished school in the year 10, I wasn't interested in doing a minute longer in a classroom than I had to. My father had a record store so I went and did four years with my father selling CDs and DVDs and I really look at that as my retail apprenticeship, where I'm third generation merchant. So we're salespeople bricks and mortar salespeople. That business collapsed. My family owned 15 music stores between my uncle and my grandpa had the rest of them and illegal downloads came in and just nuked that industry and that and I we worked out the lease. We got rid of all the staff and worked the lease out and closed that, and in 2011 we purchased a bicycle shop together. In 2014 we purchased the local bowling club, which was a derelict building and we demolished it and we built a purpose built building for our bicycle store in place, a 1200m square building there, and we opened up our cafe in that building which is a seven day a week breakfast, lunch cafe and about sort of 2018, 2019 I became, I got married and first kid came on the way and I became more interested in what I was eating.

J: 2:58

I've always been plagued with skin issues and respiratory allergies and stomach issues my whole life and my wife, who's very conscientious and very healthy, said well, maybe it's time to stop stuffing your face with iced coffees and KFC and honey chicken at the local noodle box and start eating a bit better. And I was on a bit of a journey at a few different levels at the time. I was starting to get right into, I guess, animal welfare and watched a few of those factory farm exposés that you see kicking around on the internet and thought, you know, I understand it's not all like that, but you know, especially for extensive grazing and things, but the things like intensive farming, chickens and pork, just about all of it is like that. And you know, a bit of a health journey, a bit of a value journey, everything. I once and I thought I'm going to try to raise a bit of my own beef because I wasn't satisfied with the local beef that was available to me. I wanted grass fed and finished. I wanted it from animals that hadn't been dependent on pharmaceuticals that includes drenching and I just couldn't find it. You know, through the local butchers, through the farmers that were at our small farmers market, I couldn't find it.

J: 4:11

My dad had a hundred and twenty acre, a hundred and ten acre Pobby farm. You know that's a postage stamp of a property here in Australia. It's in our street. All our neighbors run ponies out on their hundred acres. Dad's always just backgrounded 40 cattle, get his yielding steers in and fatten them up over Spring and summer and sell them off.

J: 4:29

And I said to dad oh, I've got all this great ideas about how I could put the cows moving every day and I can chase them with your chickens and we can do this and do that. And it was just to grow my own eggs and grow my own beef. And when I went to process my first body of beef and put it through the local butcher shop, I realized, you know, maybe I'll do two and Try a silver second one and I'll, you know, pay for the processing costs of the first one. So I guilt-tripped, I begged, I pleaded, I Forced all my friends and family to buy that body of beef off me to and got the two through. And I got a bit of Good feedback about it and I thought, well, maybe, maybe I'll have to go at this. And you know that was my first foray into farming. That was 2019 for them. You know, no agricultural experience, grew up on a hobby farm, just use it to ride motorbikes around. Yeah, and it's been a whirlwind, whirlwind journey since.

M: 5:27

Excellent. So, yeah, four years in the farming and, yeah, lots of, lots of experience, I'm sure, and that last in it in this four years, yeah, I guess that there's really novel ways that you've gone about Getting that produce to market. One of them is obviously your, your staffless, staffless butcher, where, where people can can get there made any time of the day and, yeah, be just interesting to explain that concept. I think it's a, it's a really good one.

J: 5:54

Sure well, it became very apparent to me very early on that processing was an enormous bottleneck. You know we're lucky to have a pretty good abattoir locally and I've been working with them really well over the last few years. But I was getting my bodies broken down and packaged at local Butcheries. And you know, first I was like Jake, we can't do more than a body a month. You know that that sort of taps us out and they all had a similar attitude and I wasn't interested. I knew doing 12 bodies of beef a year was a pitons of the business. You know I was never gonna pay the rent doing that and I didn't want to be trying to manage Meat coming out of four or five different boning rooms, everyone packing it differently and cutting it differently. So I knew if I wanted to have a go I'd have to buy my own boning room. So it builds a butchery that closed down 70 year old building so I've inherited everything that comes along with that.

J: 6:49

And, yeah, we set this up and I had no inclination of doing a storefront. It was purely a boning room where I can get my own butchers in and we can bust down our own. And now we do lamb and pork and chicken and everything else. And I Just kept looking at this front of house going. You know there's got to be something useful. It's got a storefront. You know it used to be a normal bricks and mortar butchery and one of the local small goods guys that I was chatting to Said when you're opening up that storefront? I said oh never, you know, it's not not something on the radar. And this was in. I think it was in November 2020, and he said you'll have it open in three months. And I thought you mongrel, because he's dangled this goalpost in front of me and I said I didn't want to do it. But he laid down this challenge and I opened it in three and a half months.

J: 7:33

But I knew it wasn't gonna work. You know how the revenue of our little fledgling farm business that year was going to be about 450 grand Gross revenue. So to open a shopfront and that was all already being sold elsewhere through my you know, subscription boxes, in the little organic supermarkets, old supplying, in the couple cafes, old supplying. So even if I cancelled all my accounts and funneled it all through the front of house, it made no sense to pay someone minimum wage, you know, 60 grand a year to stand there and sell it and, you know, take all my net profit out of the whole operation. So I thought, you know, the only way it's gonna work I just did a little balance sheet on the back of an envelope is if I could get rid of that wage liability. You know, it actually would make a bit of sense.

J: 8:20

So I thought what I need is basically a walk in vending machine. So I got online and I did a bit of research and I patched together a few different systems. So essentially it's a 24 hour gym we system where you can turn up this pin code on the door, you can enter in the unit, pin gain access, everything's cryback packed into portions and frozen. We sell all of our meat frozen. We do literally zero fresh and it's all. It's all labeled and priced and then the customers download a App onto their smartphone. They take photos of through the app, of all the barcodes, which adds up a tally in their shopping cart, they hit pay, which it debits their credit card, and then they leave the building and it's all under surveillance. Now we've had, we've been running like this for three years now and it's been running really well. So that's a little bit about our 24 seven butchery.

M: 9:16

Yeah, excellent. So yeah, I guess it makes sense there here. The tools are there for an on 24 hour gym, so no reason it won't work for a butcher shop. The are they, so they're obviously locals to get many people driving From distance to access it, or do they access it otherwise?

J: 9:33

There are a few customers that I use Aubrey as their shopping hub and they drop in once a month and do a big shop. I do get customers from Melbourne, sydney, messaging saying, hey, we're gonna be through on Tuesday and I'll set them up with a one-time code or I'll meet them here If maybe there's someone working here that can let them in. But we also, you know, we've got our dot-com and we ship orders. We shipmate to Perth, adelaide, melbourne, canberra, sydney, brisbane and you know all the sort of surrounding Metro region. So there's there's plenty of ways people can touch our products.

M: 10:10

Excellent. So one of the things I've always wanted like growing up on a farm where we only ever ate oh, I meet that had been frozen. It always amazes me that there's sort of reluctance of the restaurant trade to to take frozen products, whereas I mean all the snow, it's the same stuff. But so you've obviously overcome that and been able to educate people to buy frozen.

J: 10:34

Yeah, the first two years it was really challenging. I always is coming up against it. You know every which way. Every conversation and the last two years it's been barely a conversation it almost never gets brought up. I sell into a lot of restaurants. You know it's all fine dining stuff. You know to chef hat what a good, good local restaurants and it means absolutely nothing to them. Like they've got freezers full of Inventory anyway. You know you don't destroy me by freezing it, you just destroy it by defrosting it wrong, so like if you mark your way the piece of meat to defrost, it's slimy and tough. We just defrosted in the fridge or on the bench, there's no problem. So it's not something I come up with anymore. I definitely think my throughput would be higher I had fresh, because there'd be more off the street adoption. You know a lot more convenience buying. People have to plan ahead to eat our stuff. Yeah, but as it is, we're selling everything we can we can possibly process at the moment. So it's it's not a massive consideration for me.

M: 11:36

Yeah, I can. I could count several dozen times where I've chucked a froze, a bit of meat in a In a sink of cold water to get it defrosting relatively quickly. So you know, after not that much prior planning required. But the it is a yeah Seems always has straight same strange to me. So it's awesome to hear that that people are Rethinking that, and I think it was a long time ago now since I've visited San Francisco Farms markets. But a lot of that product which would sort of align with your sort of value systems around your product, we're all frozen just because of fair, because of the nature of the beast. You can't that. That's small worth to report. It's hard to how to to have fresh broke the whole time. So in terms of production system, your Still just doing the bay for new source. The rest, or that all on, is it all Coming from you now, farming cooks and sheep and and everything and yeah, so we do all of it in-house.

J: 12:36

We do beef, lamb, pork, chicken, eggs, little bit of honey. We spread pretty thin across all that. I have just started onboarding Protein from local farmers. You know, when I started it was because I couldn't find grass-fed and finished beef that hadn't been medicated, hadn't been drenched, but that was just at a retail level. Now that I've been involved in the local farming community, you know, in a reasonably public way the last four years I've met dozens of amazing local farmers farming at all different scales that have Grass-fed and finished unmedicated beef going. You know, all the way direct to market. Plenty of you know Plistic grazes and things. So I've just onboarded my first three producers and I'm buying lamb and beef over the hook from them and we're, you know we're currently working behind the scenes to add them, as you know, the Wolkie farm family on our website to keep the transparency going through to our consumers.

J: 13:38

But I really look at this whole direct to market space. You know it's challenging and all like growing the stuff, the easiest bit, and I know that probably offends farmers. But if you go to a farmer with all the challenges in farming and all the variables, if you say to a farmer. I need you to produce a thousand lambs that hang at 23 kilos. They'll do it. You know they're sophisticated enough, they're clever enough, their resource enough that they can make it happen.

J: 14:01

But you know, saying I'm gonna take those same lambs and direct market them, it's an absolute nightmare getting the slaughter, getting the processing, getting the packaging, getting the freight logistics and then finding the sales. And I'm really finding that you know my skillset and my inclination, you know suck it being the sucker for punishment that I am is I can facilitate All those last pieces of the puzzle. So it's not all about me, it's not all about getting my stuff through. You know, now we're having a lot of fun supporting other local farmers. They're helping us scale faster because you know I can't acquire land, I'm fast enough to keep up with the demand ramp for our products and you know we're able to Onboard other locals. So we just started doing that. I.

M: 14:42

Yeah, excellent, I guess, and I like the concept of everyone staying in their lane a bit too. So it's, it's awesome. You do what you're good at and other people do what they're good at, and and that's sort of how the world generally works. So it's definitely as a Would assist scale, rather than having to build up the slow way. What's the? So your standard consumer of all of the, I guess, aspects to your mate, which is high welfare, low chemical, I guess, has that transparency through to where it's coming from. There's a whole range of things that align with Current trends. What do you have any inclination for? What of those aspects is the strongest or is it all? Is it all part of the story that they buy?

J: 15:27

It's the, it's the clean meat. All my consumers searching out what we call healing food, people that are wanting to eat, you know, just pure, unadulterated meat, and they know what's in it, which is nothing, and it's everyone coming from a health aspect. You know they, but it's the whole package because, like I don't think you can raise chemical free meat without having high welfare levels, you know, without Working with your environment on your farm in a holistic way. You know it's all sort of wrapped up a one big envelope, but it's all health conscious consumers.

M: 16:02

Excellent. So what's the when you sit down on the back of the envelope these days, what's the? What does ten years look like? What a? What are the? The hairy, audacious goal for for walkie-farm.

J: 16:15

Well, we need our own abattoir. We're on tender hooks. When I started four years ago there was three local abattoirs that were servicing lamb kills and now there's one. There was two that were doing pork kills and now there's one. I've got a drive to Melbourne to get chickens processed. So that's two trips. That's a trip down, leaving at midnight to get them slaughtered and a trip down two days later to pick them up, a refrigerated truck. So you know we need our own slaughtery. So that's what you know. We're hoping to get something like that in the next couple years.

J: 16:47

There are some local mobs that are looking at you know, sort of possibly doing their own. I don't want to own an abattoir, I don't want to operate an abattoir. I just need more options and what I've got so happy to work in with anyone else on that as well. But look, I've got relatively small herds and flocks. Like we're running about a hundred and sixty-headed cattle at the moment, maybe 120 years, with lamb at foot, and you know I'd like to see them. You know I'd like to have 500 cows in the paddock. I think If I could grow to 500 breeders in the next three or four years, I think I'd have no problem selling all that meat. The way things are going and you know, similarly with with sheep, I don't want to manage Little piddly five acre paddocks and little hobby blocks like we'd like to see some real scale coming behind this business.

M: 17:38

Yeah for sure that I guess you are certainly not the first to have a crack at certain director sales in in this meat game, but I think Probably the first one. Not the first, but but coming at it from your angle is a very different angle. Often it's farmers who decide they're gonna sell direct to consumer, and that's not always their skill set, but with a sales background and and obviously plenty of tenacity, it's that seems like a pretty good, pretty good model to To and then that passion for passion for the product, as well as all part of all part of the winning, winning model. A Quick interruption here to remind you of head shepherd premium and our consulting services at next to Niagara International.

M: 18:20

If you love this podcast and want to hear more of them, visit the hub next to nexthernagrycom and sign up for head shepherd premium and get an extra podcast each week. If you're listening to this and thinking you really do want to maximize the genetic gain of your livestock and feel more confident around the decisions You're making on farm, then send me an email at mark at next to nexthernagrycom and we'll get in touch and see see where that takes us. I Guess on this podcast we talk a lot about genetics if you Delved into genetics of eating quality or any of that sort of stuff yet or is it all more about what happens Regardless of the DNA? At this stage it's? It's more about how it's treated.

J: 18:56

Look, I'm not. I'm not super sophisticated when it comes to that sort of thing, like the first few batches of lambs I did. I was just trading in store lambs and finishing them off. So I was buying, you know, marino, dorset Suckers and finishing them off. And then I went and got some you know some shedders and finish them off and you know the feedback from the consumers is it all? They always seem happy. Very rarely like that with beef. You know, sometimes it's short horn, herford, angus, freezing crosses, jersey purebreds, like we've got a real mixed bag in our mob and the feedbacks Always consistently good. It's not always consistent because the size of the cuts changes and the color of the fat changes and everything. You know we're processing different breeds all throughout the year and you know the customers are just sort of we've, I guess, trained them to come along on that journey with us.

J: 19:51

The first sort of two and a half years of the farm I ran my numbers and it made no sense to breed anything because buying animals was so cheap. And then when we saw all the prices pump, you know, during the last couple years and made I couldn't. I couldn't buy a yielding steer and fatten it off and process it. There was nothing left in it for me, they were so valuable. So then I got pushed into breeding and when I'm my own little journey around that and you know now I'm now I'm buying a heap or animals because I'm trying to dollar cost average my entry because I bought at the absolute height of the market. Yeah, so you know I I guess I come at it at a different way because the way I look at it is might offend listeners, but I sort of feel why the whole industry has a lot of their Decisions made for them. Like if you're a cattle producer and you're not doing a black cow, you're at a bit of a detriment. And if you're a sheep producer and you don't have a white sheep, you know you get, you get sucker punched at the yards and the way an animal looks means nothing to me in terms of a revenue sense, because I'm a price maker. So when I had to buy some animals I did a bit of research and you know, things that are really important to me and my customers is is animal, animals being purpose and, and you know, being able to look after themselves. So we're currently breeding in Gooney cattle on our farm, which is a South African breed. You know Australian farmers think that they're a bit of an odd choice.

J: 21:20

I love absolutely everything about them. They're small, you know. 400 kilo cows, 450 kilo cows. You know one of my biggest challenges in my whole business is my labor in the butchery does not want to be busting down 280 to 320 kilo carcasses. It hurts them but they're challenging and when I put an Ingooney steer through in a ways that are 190, they absolutely love it.

J: 21:45

I walk into the boning room and they're all whistling and it actually makes my life a lot easier having these smaller animals. You know, let alone the efficiency gains in the paddock. You know they're very fertile, very docile and even though they're not a super high marble scoring meat, you know we've done a bit of. I printed off the MLA marbling scorecards off the website and I scored a few bodies in my boning room myself and you know we sort of came up with threes Like it's nothing fantastic but the flavor's amazing and we've been able to convince customers to buy it, to give it a go, because they trust us and what we're trying to achieve. So you know the Ingooney is what we're going down and we're breeding up over retired Jersey cows. So everyone that's listening going Jake's crazy using these African Zulu cattle.

J: 22:31

How about I bought five Ingooney balls and I'm breeding them over eight year old chopper Jersey cows. You know how's that for a strange thing to do. But I can buy these Jersey like I'm land limited right. So I can buy these Jersey cows for 900 bucks. I don't have to grow them, I don't have to feed them to grow any bone or wait for maturity. They're called for infertility because they've missed a couple of AI's. I'm fine with that. I do a two month joining. I just tested my last batch and we had an 80% join rate and the 20% that are dry come straight through the butchery and we dry age the Jersey carcasses old, mature cows and we sell them as aged Jersey beef and I've got a cult following for it.

J: 23:12

You know the eating quality of Jersey. I would go out on a limb and say it's the best meat I've ever eaten. Eight year old Jersey cow, as long as it's been fattened in the paddock properly, you know being treated in the boning room properly. So that's a bit about what we're doing with cattle genetics. I guess With sheep where we've got a Aussie shedding genetic called Catalyst from a farmer, andrew Freshwater, I've been really happy with those used they're. You know I'm on unimproved pastures. You know we manage our pastures with grazing but I'm not sowing anything down and those things. It doesn't seem to matter what they eat. They stay fat and happy. And you know they've been fantastic. And I just bought a heap of Demarius, got them for $25 each, just to dollar cost, average my entry and grow my herd and I'm using my Catalyst Rams over my Demarius just to, you know, push a bit more fleshing into them.

M: 24:04

Yeah, cool, there'll be someone listening that I'm sure there's about on those. There's a lot of people over my time who are a little bit more of rattle on about how we should just get into Jersey meat production because of because I've had a few experiences eating Jersey and there always been good ones. And if you get over the fact that fat's yellow and the meat's a bit dark, it eats wonderfully. So I've often had that conversation over a couple of beers with people. So great to hear that your hook can end up hulking into that model Cause I think it's.

M: 24:32

It's gotta be a winner, particularly where you've got trusting consumers who don't have to go into a supermarket and see this different product. They'll get it out of the, they'll defrost it and I'll eat it, and they won't, and they won't think twice. And and you get the, you get the beta carotene from the yellow fat as well. It's a win-win with Jersey, I reckon. So, yeah, I can definitely see how that's a winning model. Haven't had much to do with the Goonies, but obviously and I guess we never consider that labor around a small burning room in terms of, yeah, carcass and that sort of thing the efficiencies are always focused on on the big ended town. So, yeah, it's interesting how you've had to kind of re rethink the industry, to to build it from ground up, which which is always really intriguing and and makes us, yeah, I guess, second guess everything about, about how we go about running the meat industry. So it's, yeah, it's really interesting.

J: 25:26

It will. I've had multiple staff quit because they're sick of phoning out big bodies of beef. You know, like when I, when I process, when I finish one of my short horns or one of my herofids you know I like to get them up to 320 kilos on the hook you get a really nice big steak with heaps of marbling in the good fat cap and you know none of the fats wasted for me. We trim it all off and we do rendered tallow for sale and all that. But when my work it was hard enough to find butchers that actually you know had a butcher. They're all you can find qualified butchers now that have never bone to body a beef in their lives. You know they just all slice and box meat. It's hard enough to find the labor and then you burn them out and destroy their bodies with big bodies of beef. You know it's a nightmare.

J: 26:06

So these little, ingoony, have been fantastic. You know everything about them. You know one of my cows in the paddock. She's eight years old, just about to have a seven calf. I just see longevity and fertility. She's never been medicated, she's never had a vet Look at her. Never been drenched, never had a carpool. That's just all it's science to me.

M: 26:26

Yeah, excellent. That's an intriguing business model. So you're associated with supply in terms of total production system. It's local cafes, restaurants and then obviously boxed frozen stuff into direct to consumer as well as direct to restaurant in the capitals, and then through your local, through your 24-7 butcher shop, Any. I guess you've got all aspects covered there, really.

J: 26:52

Well, look, we do way too much, we raise too many different types of animals and we sell produce too many different ways. I would not recommend anyone do what I do, but I've just thrown everything at the wall and I'm just seeing what sticks. You know, I've got no agricultural experience. I've got no experience boning animals. I've got no experience shipping frozen produce around the country, dealing with restaurants, like. Everything that I've learned has been through hands-on in the last four years and now we're starting to get a really clear picture of what people want, what's easy, what's achievable.

J: 27:27

You know, like when my first cows that I bought were short horns because I thought, you know, did a bit of research, lovely eating, good temperament, color, nice, pretty hides I thought I could tend some hides, value-adds, some hides, and the animals are just too heavy. You know they destroy my pasture, they're too hard on the butcher. So we've had to pivot and you know it's lesson after lesson. We're definitely leaving efficiencies and our money on the table because we're spread too thin. But you know that's just been part of our learning and seeing what works for us in our area, with our customer base, and you know we're working on refining those things as we speak.

J: 28:00

So you know you said what's gonna be for Walkie Farm in 10 years, like I hope we always still supply a few Gucci restaurants and a couple Boutique organic supermarkets and that stuff. But you know, I think 80% of our sales are always gonna be coming through our website, which we only started six months ago, because it just makes things so much easier. You get paid upfront instead of 30 days late. You know we do mixed boxes so we get to choose what goes in the box and control our inventory. You know all these little things that it's hard to take into consideration early on.

M: 28:31

Yeah, excellent, so obviously probably not a lot of time for sleep at the moment. You'll be flat out. I think as soon as you get off here you'll be packing boxes with your sister. You've just grabbed out of school so you've put plenty on, and I guess that's part of the entrepreneurial journey. Always there's not a lot of time for snooze, but I guess ultimately, as you grow, you'll be able to get a few bodies around you to help manage that workload.

J: 29:01

Yeah, I've got two full-time farm hands that run the farm so I don't get involved in farm chores very much. I haven't for a couple of years at this stage. You know I go out when we're building new enterprises, when we're doing new infrastructure. If there's yard work, drafts and cattle, you know I'll be out there. But I spend most of my time at the woodcherry, you know, driving sales and facilitating orders and that sort of thing. At the moment there's a few of us here and it's just, it's a constant yo-yo.

J: 29:30

I go out the farm to ramp up production to meet sales. Then all of a sudden we're over producing and I've got to come back here and try sell the stuff.

M: 29:39

Yeah, yeah, and such is the joy of a small business. But, yeah, no, it's off to the tenacity and the hard work. It's great to see that any businesses which are completely vertical and can see both ends of the value chain really clearly, I think it's there's a lot we can all learn from those businesses. So it's great to hear your story and definitely wish you all the best for a growth path that sees you supplying product into lots of different places. But I will let you get back to boxing that meat up.

J: 30:14

Cool. Thanks for having me Cheers, mate.

M: 30:17

Thanks again to our mates at Heinegger, who are proud world leaders in the manufacturing and supply professional sheep shearing and clipping equipment. They understand that their customers rely on the quality and performance of their products each and every day. Also, thanks to our friends at MSD Animal Health in Orflix, they offer an extensive livestock portfolio focused on animal health and management, all backed up by exceptional service. Both of these companies are wonderful supporters of the Australian and New Zealand livestock industries and we thank them for sponsoring the HLP podcast.