From Merinos to Marketplace Mogul with Dwain Duxson
Jul 08, 2024Season 2024
Mark Ferguson
What happens when a Merino sheep farmer turns into a digital marketplace mogul? Our guest this week, Dwain Duxson, founder of Farm Tender and The Farmers Club, shares how and why he switched career paths.
While Dwain enjoyed his time farming and breeding Merino rams, in 2011 he decided a change of gear was in order. “For me, [selling rams] was pretty restrictive in how many customers you could serve. I wanted to serve a lot more customers. I had a bit of an idea of what I wanted to do when the internet was kicking into gear. So that was the main reason we left the farm. We just wanted to try something else and service more people.”
After a few different business ideas, Farm Tender was born. Farm Tender is an online platform for buying and selling agricultural products across Australia. And, with over 72,000 members and around 40 new members joining daily, their database is huge. Dwain wanted to help farmers get the best deals and also provide them with the top-notch customer service he was accustomed to giving when selling breeding stock.
Launching an online platform, however, came with its fair share of obstacles. In the podcast, Dwain discusses the early days of establishing Farm Tender and the challenge of trying to break into the American market.
Dwain also talks about his latest venture, The Farmers Club, a daily newsletter that provides agricultural news and articles. This is where Dwain shares his insights on the current landscape of Australian farming. After years of running agricultural businesses, Dwain has realised that writing is what he loves. Through Farmers Club, he can make the dream of writing about agriculture - every day - a reality.
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
Thanks to our sponsors at MSD Animal Health and Allflex, and Heiniger Australia and New Zealand. Please consider them when making product choices, as they are instrumental in enabling us to bring you this podcast each week.
Check out Heiniger's product range HERE Check out the MSD range HERE Check out Allflex products HERE
What happens when a Merino sheep farmer turns into a digital marketplace mogul? Our guest this week, Dwain Duxson, founder of Farm Tender and The Farmers Club, shares how and why he switched career paths.
While Dwain enjoyed his time farming and breeding Merino rams, in 2011 he decided a change of gear was in order. “For me, [selling rams] was pretty restrictive in how many customers you could serve. I wanted to serve a lot more customers. I had a bit of an idea of what I wanted to do when the internet was kicking into gear. So that was the main reason we left the farm. We just wanted to try something else and service more people.”
After a few different business ideas, Farm Tender was born. Farm Tender is an online platform for buying and selling agricultural products across Australia. And, with over 72,000 members and around 40 new members joining daily, their database is huge. Dwain wanted to help farmers get the best deals and also provide them with the top-notch customer service he was accustomed to giving when selling breeding stock.
Launching an online platform, however, came with its fair share of obstacles. In the podcast, Dwain discusses the early days of establishing Farm Tender and the challenge of trying to break into the American market.
Dwain also talks about his latest venture, The Farmers Club, a daily newsletter that provides agricultural news and articles. This is where Dwain shares his insights on the current landscape of Australian farming. After years of running agricultural businesses, Dwain has realised that writing is what he loves. Through Farmers Club, he can make the dream of writing about agriculture - every day - a reality.
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
Thanks to our sponsors at MSD Animal Health and Allflex, and Heiniger Australia and New Zealand. Please consider them when making product choices, as they are instrumental in enabling us to bring you this podcast each week.
Check out Heiniger's product range HERE Check out the MSD range HERE Check out Allflex products HERE
Speaker 1:
Welcome Dwayne Duxon to Hedgehabit. Thanks very much, Ferg. Thanks for having me. It's great to have you here, mate, and yeah, we've got a few questions to run through but I'm sure we'll get off track a few times. But your journey started out at Glendamah, manu, right in the middle of a heap of merino studs back in the day. It'd be interesting just to hear your perspective on that early part of your career farming and it was in the Jim Watts era where changing the merino and throwing caution to the wind was sort of very much part of what was going on. It would be interesting to hear your story of those days.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, they were actually wonderful days. I remember them like they were last year and obviously my brother's still at it at the farm at Glendamara. I'm sort of no longer involved in the business but definitely grew up there until I think I was there until the age of 35. And yeah, jim Watts, that was a wonderful area. Jim was sort of you know, he was a wonderful scientist and a great marketer and he certainly took, you know, our stud to a next level and much higher profile and a lot of others and you know some of the highest studs Merino studs in Australia, are now sort of Jim Watts disciples.
Speaker 2:
But yeah, we did a lot of weird and wonderful things. I think we used a lot of fin genetics back then for cundinam and yeah, they were interesting. The crosses and we had a bit of luck with the Rambouillet cross out of the US and managed to breed a sire called Brown Six and I was looking back not so long ago we sold over a million dollars of weather semen from that guy. So it was pretty amazing. But they're really out there genetics, I can tell you.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, yeah, indeed. So yeah, it'll be interesting. I guess obviously family succession, whatever people need to move and make room. So you made the call to change gear completely and get out of farming and stay very much an ag, but not directly on the tools.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, it was interesting, like being involved in that Merino stud game. You know where you're dealing with customers and clients and what have you and I just you know, for me it was pretty restrictive of how many customers you could serve, so I wanted to serve a lot more customers. You know, through a particular business that I had a bit of an idea of what I wanted to do and when the internet was kicking into gear. So that was probably the reason, main reason, we left the farm. We just wanted to try something else and, you know, service more people. So, and you know, we had a wonderful succession with my brother and father, so we, you know, initiated it early and it went really well. And you know now the best thing we have Christmas together and all those sorts of things which a lot of people don't, because succession goes bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah 100%.
Speaker 1:
The big question for the day is one we're asking commonly now, which is what is the last thing you changed your mind about?
Speaker 2:
Oh, ferg, good question. That sheep farming is really bloody hard. Because what we did when we moved off the farm, we went and lived in a place in New South Wales. Victoria bought a place called Yarrawonga for 10 years and we've probably lived in six or seven other places since, but we lived in sort of rentals and things like that. But three years ago we got back into farming in a small way, much smaller way than Glendamar, but we started running sheep again and we just found out how actually hard it is. It's amazing. So, you know, now I've got a couple of businesses on the go, you know, finding the time to run the sheep and just the physical hard work. I've decided to give it away and give it to a young bloke who's adjusting it now. So I found that, yeah, I've worked it out after a while.
Speaker 1:
It's very hard, yeah yeah, worked it out after a while. It's very hard, yeah, and that would be a confronting job to let someone else take over your land.
Speaker 2:
No, it's quite enjoyable. He's a young guy, you know, he's a young builder that loves agriculture and he's, yeah, really excited about his future and obviously wants to get out of the building game, get more into ag, but he's a first-generation farmer, so to speak so he's going to have to build up the way first generation farmers do Excellent.
Speaker 1:
So, yeah, farmtender was at least one of those things you hooked into when you were leaving the farm, and it's your online marketplace. It's a well-known name in Aussie, ag. I'm not sure if those in other places would know it, but it's got a massive membership now. 72,000 members is huge, and I think that's about how many farms are on Australia, so that's a big cut through. Yeah, talking through the early days of setting that up, the internet was just kicking away. I remember you chipping away at it. Yeah, I mean, it would have been hard yards early, no doubt.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, it was, and when we left the farm we never really actually knew we were going to do that, so we never had that as a you know, we never pinpointed that as a business we're going straight into. We actually tried a few other things that sort of never really got going. And farm tender as a business, it originally was a, um, a buying service. So how that worked was a farm will go on the list, you know, let's say they wanted 200 ton of MAP fertilizer and then suppliers would just go on the list. You know, let's say they wanted 200 tonne of MAP fertiliser and then suppliers would just go on quote. But after sort of you know a supplier losing five quotes in a row, they'd say, stuff, this, I'm not going to do this anymore.
Speaker 2:
And all of a sudden the business didn't really make sense. So we were at a field day once and one of our customers came up and said to me at field days, why can't I sell shit on your website? So? And then I thought about it for about 10 seconds and I thought why can't? So we, you know, spent the next two or three months with our developers turning into a selling service and probably since that day it's. You know they talk about pivoting and things like that, but since that day we've never really looked back.
Speaker 1:
Excellent, so maybe just yeah. For those that aren't Aussie, just explain what the platform is these days.
Speaker 2:
As you said, it's an online marketplace for farmers. So farmers can go and buy and sell items online and basically a farmer would go and list something like a tractor and then other farmers would go and inquire on it through the website. We don't put contact details on the listing, so people have to inquire through the website. And then we also have people sitting in the background, you know, helping facilitate the deals. You know facilitate the buying and selling process.
Speaker 2:
So when I first started out by myself, I wanted to make sure that you know that, like we did with the stud game, you know we have to service people and build relationships and earn trust. So I wanted to build that into an online business right from day one. So hence the reason why we have people in the background helping. So these guys you know we've got 15 staff at the moment and these guys are sitting in the, you know, working from home, sitting in front of the computers and screens like we are now Ferg and just basically talking to customers on the phone, helping them through the process and building relationships and trust.
Speaker 2:
So the marketplace we deal in used machinery, grain, hay, livestock fertiliser, livestock equipment, trucks anything that's ag-related, you know, we'll have a crack at. So yeah, so you know, like from the start of it from scratch, lucky enough to have a reasonable database to enter into the game with. But it's all like everything ag, it grows incrementally and it's all sort of one new member at a time, you know, one listing at a time, one sale at a time. That's how it worked right from the word go, and now you know that's how it still works to this day.
Speaker 1:
And obviously it's been at a time where I mean farmers, if we want to pigeonhole people, which is always dangerous, but like aren't necessarily that tech savvy but I guess since every farmer's got a phone in their pocket, has that been the change. Once people, once internet was really on your phone rather than on a screen and that changed the game.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, and it made a massive difference really. You know, like if someone's got a tractor over there, they can just take photos on their phone, look it on the website, you know, and within a minute it's up there and you know you're not going to sell it in the back of the shed, so you've got to put it out there and make sure people see these things. So, yeah, the phone has definitely been a big part of it and a lot of our customers are doing business through us on their phone. So, yeah, it's been a big part. We've still got a lot of the market we can penetrate. We aren't as big in Queensland and Western Australia, so we've got a lot of work to sort of find new networks there.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, you must be pretty proud of how it's gone, though.
Speaker 2:
It's gone well yeah no well, as I said, it started with me originally and we've bootstrapped the business all the way along so we've never taken any sort of investment type thing. So basically, I run it where you know, we build it up, we make enough money to employ another person, and we make enough money to employ another person after that. So that's how it works. But, like as I said, in agriculture everything's incremental. So you know, and you look at our growth over the years and sort of at like a 30-degree angle just slowly inching up.
Speaker 2:
But you look back, you know we've been in business 12 years now and you look back and you think you know it's come a hell of a long way. So, yeah, it's been a wonderful journey and, yes, we are very proud.
Speaker 1:
Yeah yeah, excellent. A quick look at your LinkedIn profile would suggest you definitely get the label of a serial entrepreneur 55 Farms of Lape, the Farmers Club and then obviously Farm Tender as well. Yeah, obviously not into that. Maybe not that label, but yeah, what do you think it drives you to in your belief of a potential, of a better way? There's obviously something, a spirit of entrepreneurism, somewhere in there.
Speaker 2:
There is and you know, as I said, we're lucky enough to have an audience and a database so you can actually try things. You know you can put it out there to the database and they'll sort of vote with their feet whether something's any good or not Of those businesses. 55 Farms was our American experiment. So I went to America, myself and my son there for a couple of months to just do a bit of a fact-finding mission whether we could take our farm tender model and work it over there, whether it would work over there. And we sort of came back thinking, yes, we could. So we went and lived there for 12 months and tried to get it going over there, but we just couldn't get it going. So yeah, we sort of gave it, we wanted to give it 12 months, we gave it 12 months and we just couldn't penetrate the market. Not that I think it wouldn't work at the moment Like now this is seven years on but yeah, we just we just found trouble sort of trying to get into that market.
Speaker 2:
They sort of everything's the same but different over there. So they do it everything, this, everything looks the same and acts the same but they do it differently. So, like with the used machinery model. What had happened? Over there? They, they don't sell on farm, whereas we sell on farm here. They'll go and sell in, you know, through on consignment, through the dealers or through an auction system, whereas over here we're happy to just walk out, you know, rent in the shed, and take a few photos and list it online, which is um makes sense to us, but it doesn't make sense to them yeah, and there's well, there's several businesses, even even across the ditch between like kW companies trying to set up in Australia and vice versa.
Speaker 1:
It's tough going once you change geographies.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, 100%. You just can't. I've worked out over the years and we've seen it with other businesses out of, let's say, the US and come to Australia and trying to replicate their model and it never works and they end up, you know, like we did, retreating and going back and just concentrating on what you do. So it is difficult to, yeah, replicate a model and go to another country and expecting it to work.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I mean there is another quote, but it's something like yeah, if you want to have more success, you've got to have more failures. There's several quotes around that, like the only way you out-success people is to out-fail people. So it must have been. I mean you obviously go to proper crack going and live there, but you'd be pretty happy that you made the call rather than try and drag it on for three or four years and then retreat.
Speaker 2:
Well, yeah, I was happy to make the call to say we failed and come home, but it was also a wonderful learning experience.
Speaker 2:
You know, starting a business over there. You know, just things like opening bank accounts are so much different. You know, talking to people on the phone, like I'd get on the phone and talk to the American farmers and they'd just say, hey man, I can't even understand you, you talk too fast. You sort of didn't really get a crack at it. And then I worked out that I had to employ Americans. And then, you know, I think the first five I employed and sacked, employed. And you know, I think the first five I employed and sacked, employed and sacked, employed and sacked. Until I found someone that I thought was half reasonable and you know he was making a little bit of progress, but we just couldn't get there. I can see it was going to be a big waste of time and money. So we thought we'd come home and concentrate on what we, you know our core, and trying to bring sort of new products to the you know, australian market, to the you know Australian market.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, yeah, no. Excellent. You're a self-diagnosed agricultural enthusiast, which I think is a pretty common theme for everyone. On Head Shepherd, we're all pretty passionate about the game.
Speaker 2:
What do you love most about ag? It's diversity, and there's always something going on. That's probably the thing that I find. I'm an avid reader, so I get up pretty early and start preparing my Farmers Club newsletter, which I send out six days a week, and so I read lots of you know different articles and lots of blogs, and lots of you know Twitter feeds and LinkedIn feeds and things like that. So anything I can get my hands on that's related to ag and there's any particular day. You have no trouble finding information that you know. We collate a lot of this information, then put it together in a newsletter and send it out. So, yeah, that's what I love about ag there's so much going on and you know nothing's predictable. I'm sure a farmer wakes up every morning sort of half knowing what they're going to do, but it never really goes to plan all the time yeah.
Speaker 1:
No, I don't think we've ever had a day go to plan on farming no, not this time. Yeah, I'm intrigued that you recently discovered what you really want to do, and that's to write. You definitely have your own style, a no BS style that would resonate with farmers 100%. At a time when print media is getting decimated, it's hard to know where AI starts and human stops. Talk us through that newfound passion of riding and what your vision for the Farmers Club is.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, it's an interesting one. I've sort of been lucky enough to build the farm tender business to where it is today, where it doesn't require my attention all the time, so I've put people in positions where they can sort of run the day-to-day side of it, which is what, you know, every business owner wants to sort of strive for in the end, I think. So that's allowed me to sort of do things like the Farmers Club, which is a newsletter that I send out six days a week, goes out at 5am Australian time every morning and, as I said before, we collate information around articles and news items and blogs and, as I said, social media feeds, and we just put it all in the newsletter. I also write three articles a day that we put in there as well, and we get probably between 20 and 30 replies to our articles every day. So we put anonymous replies in there as well, so you can hear what you know the farmers are actually saying. So that's been going probably since september last year and, um, we've just started. It was a it's free, so we just started to put it under a subscription model, so, which is a great way to sort of keep refining your audience. So, yeah, it's.
Speaker 2:
Not everyone wants to pay for content and that's fully understandable and we get that. But, um, it's something that I'm very passionate about now and I've worked out at the age of 54 that I want to actually do that for the rest of my life. And it sort of stemmed from I used to write sort of little gossip columns and things like that back when I was at Manu about the cricket club and you know about people and you know started a lot of nicknames by just naming them in the press. You know, starting a nickname and that sort of went really well. And then we went when we went and lived in Yarrawonga.
Speaker 2:
I sort of continued that on through the cricket club up there and we actually put that in the newspaper, the local newspaper, which was a pretty widely read thing, and people loved it and yeah, and then the editor got to it and said, oh, you can't put that in, you can't put that in. So I sort of gave up in the end. But that's where my passion for riding fuel from, and because I've been involved with ag on the farming side for the first 35 years of my life and through FarmTender I can sort of I'm lucky enough to be able to resonate with the farmers and they really enjoy the content that we send out there.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, excellent. Is there an English teacher at Storle High School or somewhere that would be amazed to see you writing a newsletter.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, probably I wasn't the greatest student and I don't know whether, yeah, I wasn't the greatest student, but what gets me by Ferg is the use of Grammarly. I don't know whether you know what Grammarly is.
Speaker 2:
It's a yeah very much so yeah, yeah, you cut and paste your bit in there with lots of um mistakes and grammar errors and put it in grammarly and then you can go and correct it and then you, you copy it and put it back in the system and no one would know any different. So I used to get, before grammarly came along, I used to get a lot of replies from the you know people making mistakes, from me making mistakes, sorry, with my writing. So they used to police that pretty hard. But now I haven't had one for ages. So, yeah, no writing I actually love and, as I said, I want to do that for the rest of my life. And, you know, grow the audience and work it from there.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, excellent, great to see. I've just signed up. I haven't signed up to the paid version yet, mate. I've just signed up the other day, so I started to get my. Well, it's a 3 am prompt here, yep.
Speaker 2:
No, it's all going well. I'm surprising how many are actually, you know, on the paid side of things. So it's going better than I thought. Yeah, cool, but I've got sort of you know incremental targets over. You know the targets aren't that big, but yeah, no, it's going really well. I'm surprised by you know, it's just going better than I expected. Put it that way.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, and I guess that whole realm of media is changing and which creates opportunities, which is great.
Speaker 2:
I think you know you mentioned about AI and there's a lot of that coming into play with you know writing a lot and the media side of things. But I reckon AI is going to be great but I think it'll make human written content more valuable if it makes any sense authenticity. They want to hear what a particular person's got to say. That'll just make the human content much more valuable.
Speaker 1:
I think we're saying that already, like I've seen some punters out there who've published stuff that's been clearly written by Chate GPT.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, and you can just yeah you can tell immediately and yeah, and I think that's and people, yeah, it's quickly turned off by that sort of generalised type writing, whereas, yeah, it's boring, yeah, yeah, opinion piece type stuff Like, yeah, you can never you can read it. Yeah, no, ai model. Well, yeah, I can't see it being able to write authentically like a human can no great for boring stuff like legal stuff and accounting and things like that Great for that.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, yeah yeah, writing manuals and things like that, but not for creative writing and, you know, opinion pieces and things like that.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, you attend a lot of events. I saw you maybe at Beef and, yeah, you're around the place. So your fingers and through, obviously, all your things you do your finger's very much on the pulse for a lot of things. There's no doubt that 2024 probably gets etched in the memory of Australian farmers for some time to come. What's your take on the current landscape out there, and either Australian or global, however big you want to go?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, obviously we're going through some tougher times with higher interest rates off the back of, you know, increasing land prices. I can only speak for Australia here, but you know people have sort of geared themselves up a little bit, so you know, and paid a lot of money for pretty expensive land. So there's a few farmers, you know, probably didn't realise that interest rates were going to go to where they are now and perhaps they're doing a little bit tough. We've got issues with governments I think it's happened in New Zealand as well trying to push us around a bit and make it hard to farm harder to farm, so to speak. Yeah, and you know like the sheep industry has gone through a pretty tough time in the last two years with the price you know prices going down after some pretty good years before that and probably a pretty good 15 years for, you know, lamb prices and sheep prices. In Australia Wool prices are a little bit different. They had that burst for a while, which you know. I think the sheep prices and lamb prices will go back up. But I think what will happen is, you know, people have probably lost a bit of confidence in the industry and getting that confidence back is going to be pretty hard, even though you know we're going to see good prices again. But I think people don't. They're going through some pain now. They don't want to go through that again. So we could see a little bit of a drop off and with sheep numbers, you know, in Australia at the cost of cropping and this is not to say it's not going to happen to cropping either. But yeah, I just think that's just a point that you know. I think sheep farmers, you know some, will drop off out of the system just because of that, because they don't want to go through this sort of pain again.
Speaker 2:
I think what? Yeah, we do attend a lot of events and you get some pretty good stuff from some of the events, get some pretty ordinary stuff because you know we're clearly focused on the farmer side of things. So go to a lot of these events and you know some of them aren't very farmer focused. So these events and not, you know some of them aren't very farmer focused. So, like I think, um, elon musk's bloody, what is it?
Speaker 2:
The phone to satellite thing coming at the end of this year and into 2025 will change the the landscape in australia. So every, every farmer will have mobile access and already has internet access, but mobile access, which which will change the face of Australian farming. I think that's one of the big changes we've got coming and it'll probably be the biggest change in the next 10 years. I think what's the Amazon guy, jeff Bezos, said to focus on things that won't change and don't focus on the things you think will change in farming. So you know, we're still going to be growing wheat, we're going to be running sheep and cattle and doing all those sorts of things in 10 years' time. But I think you know, obviously we can along the way, we can get much better at those sort of industries.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, yeah, no, definitely, and I can't remember who makes the quote, but I've got it in my presentation. I'm giving in Ballarat, I know that, but. But I've got it in my presentation. I'm giving in Ballarat, I know that. But the fact that we're likely to well, the expectation is that this century we'll see 20,000 years of change at today's rate, and so we're in for change.
Speaker 2:
Well, we are. And you know, if Elon gets his satellite to mobile, it'd be good for face recognition and shape.
Speaker 1:
That's right. Yeah, there's so many things that become enabled once you have connectivity. You also have some productivity issues. Any farm I work at which has mobile reception, it seems for young blokes at the back of the race on Tinder rather than focused on the job, but that's not universal. But, yeah, it'll be interesting. Once everyone is connected It'll be disruptive on a range of fronts mostly good, nice, yeah. And I guess if we end this is connected, it'll be disruptive on a range of fronts mostly good, nice, yeah, yeah. And I guess if we end this story where we started, back at Glenomar, it's now in the heart of a cropping zone, really, with a handful of other industry stalwarts like Wolloo Park and Glenomar, whereas growing up well, I know, growing up further north in the Sandia country, manu was the great sheep country, yeah, so we have been a big change there and I guess across all the Wimmera really those fence lines are a bit harder to spot these days. It's a big change, I guess. Yeah, it'd be interesting how that trend plays out for the next 10 years.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, look, I think, like where we are situated, which is sort of southeast of Marnoo, most of the most of the farmers there regained that sort of mixed farming enterprise. So there's still a lot of sheep in that area and, um, yes, yes, there's probably a little bit more cropping, but it hasn't gone like like up where you are, where you were in the Mallee, where it's pretty much wall-to-wall now cropping and and you know they've learned how to how to conserve moisture and you know know they do it very well. It's gone from a marginal cropping area into a sort of mecca really, and similar to the Wimmera, where the soils are a lot more clay-based and hold moisture better. But, yeah, definitely the Manu area has changed a little bit, not as much as most Like, as I said, most of the enterprises around there are still running that mixed operation with a combination of cropping and sheep. So, yeah, they're all doing well.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I guess it's. When I drive in there. It's coming from the north often and you don't see too many sheep until you get to Marnie. No, no, that's right yeah.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, they're still there. And you know, obviously, when I was a young fella, there was probably 15 or 18 studs there and it's probably narrowed down to six or seven now. But that's just the way you know. That's just the way it works. Consolidation yeah.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, no for sure. Thanks, mate. All the best with the Farmers Club, really. Yeah, yeah, great to be having something out there telling the story authentically, I think. Yeah, I guess you'll have to work out like that will come with an expectation that people are reading. I mean, it sort of brings its own pressures, I suppose, in terms of your voice starts to matter more and more the more people are listening. So I'm sure you're up for that challenge.
Speaker 2:
I am, but it is a lot of work, you know I probably spend. You know I've got a day-to-day business in farm tender to run so this has done sort of outside hours as a side hustle and I probably spend five or six hours on this project each day, so I've got to get up fairly early Now. It's been great to chat Fergan, but can I just have one request? Yeah, go for it that you get David Thompson on the…. Oh no, it's been great to chat Fergan, but can I just have one request? Yeah, go for it that you get David Thompson on the.
Speaker 1:
Oh yeah, we should definitely have David Thompson.
Speaker 2:
I mean, you've had him on, but what an entertaining podcast that would be if you got him on from Mujibin WA.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, yeah, no, we'd get David. We haven't had David. Have we Did, we do both.
Speaker 2:
No, we haven't had David. Have we? Did we do both? We just had Hamish. We wouldn't need a more passionate man in ag. Remember back at those Mujibin Ram sales where we used to spend three days there and it was thoroughly entertaining, wasn't it?
Speaker 1:
Definitely entertaining. Lucky, we're here to tell the tale.
Speaker 2:
That's it. I reckon that would be a must listen if you've got old Grinner on.
Speaker 1:
Yeah well, I'm a would be a must listen. If you've got old Grinner on, yeah well, I'll lock Grinner in for, yeah, I'll just listen to him on ABC on the weekend. Actually, yeah right, yeah, awesome, mate, we'll do that for you and yeah, thanks very much for your time. Good on you, ferg. Thanks for the opportunity.