(upbeat rock music) - Welcome to "A Shot of Ag."

I'm your host, Rob Sharkey.

I'm a farmer from just outside of Bradford, Illinois.

I started a podcast which led to XM radio which led to me getting a national television show which led to me being right here, but today is not about me.

Today is about Tony Reed from around Effingham.

How are you doing Tony?

- Doing good.

Thanks for having me.

- Strasburg.

- Yep.

- Okay, what direction from Effingham?

- North, straight north basically.

- And for people that don't know, where is Effingham?

- Effingham is right where interstates 57 and 70 cross in, I call it, Southern Illinois.

Some people may call it central, but 100 miles straight east of St. Louis would be a broader picture for that.

- The people of real Southern Illinois, they get a little touchy about what you call Southern Illinois.

- Yeah.

(laughs) - Yeah.

I think most of the world thinks everything south of Chicago or maybe I-80 is Southern Illinois.

- Right.

- Metropolis would not agree.

- Right, that's correct, yeah.

I'm thinking you gotta get south of Decatur to get to Central Illinois, and then about Effingham, you get- We call 'em 618-ers down there.

- Oh yeah.

- That's where you're talking Southern Illinois, and I'm just on the edge of 6-1-8, 2-1-7.

- Do you have a 6-1-8?

- Nope, I'm 2-1-7.

- Oh, here I thought you were cool.

(men laughing) I had a 6-1-8 when I was going to Southern down there.

Yeah, I felt all important and that.

So like if you drive down to Metropolis at the border, how long does that take?

- Oh gosh, you'd be a good two, two and a half hours probably.

- Isn't that crazy?

- It is, yeah.

- 'Cause you're what, two hours from Peoria?

- Yep, sure enough.

- Man, that's nuts.

All right, you're farming down there.

- Correct.

- You're interesting.

I've had you on the podcast because you have seemed to find some success or some popularity on one of the social media platforms, the old Tik-Tok.

Who would have thought that?

- I wouldn't have, not in a million years.

Would have never guessed it.

Two years ago, I would have said you're crazy.

- That's kind of a young man's game, the Tik-Tok, and then all of a sudden, I see old people like you on there.

- Yeah.

(men laughing) - You're farming, but let's go back.

You were not a farm kid.

- Correct.

My parents did not farm, so my grandparents did farm, but they lived 30 minutes from me, so it wasn't like after school I could go to grandpa and grandma's and do whatever on the farm.

So luckily, I did have good neighbors that was always letting me help them and drive tractors and all that good stuff so I could get my fix after school.

- How young were you?

- Oh gosh, five, six years old.

- You said when you were young like that, you would hear a tractor and that you would jump on your bike and you would drive to where that tractor and you would just sit and watch it?

- I would, yep.

- For like how long?

- For just hours.

I couldn't get enough of it.

- That's like being ingrained.

That's like being bred into- - It is, it is.

- Usually, that is affiliated with being a farm kid.

I think it's really cool to see someone that wasn't and your parents that weren't.

Your parents had other occupations.

- Correct.

- To get that interested and just watching machinery work.

- Yeah, it's been that way my entire life from the time back to my very first memory, I was just ingrained in loving tractors and combines and everything that goes along with it, and that's where it started, and here we are today.

- Any of those farmers stop and give you a ride?

- Oh yeah, for sure.

- Really?

- Yep.

As I got, I don't know, five, six years old, you'd get to ride a couple of rounds with them 'cause I always felt like I was bothering them.

But no, by the time I was, I don't know, 10 years old, then it went from just riding to driving.

Here, you hop on, and I'll go do something else, so it worked out really nice.

- This was probably back before they- See, the cabs now, they've got the really nice seat, and then they've got the buddy seat, or they call it the banker seat, and it's pretty nice, too.

This was probably before all that.

- That was before all that, yep.

A lot of open-station tractors, riding on the fender or whatever.

- See, if I was doing something out in the field, and I saw a kid watching, I almost be afraid to have him a ride just because he would fall in the cab, and then bump his head or something.

You were writing on the fender above the tire.

We all did it, but when you think back now, gosh.

- Yeah, it's crazy.

- It's a tad dangerous.

- I cringe now thinking to let my kids do that, and we didn't think anything about it.

- Oh the things we used to do is crazy.

All right, so did you decide at a young age that you wanted to be in ag somehow?

- I did, yep.

I knew from the very start that I was going to do something, but with my parents not being farmers, I didn't know what that something was.

- Went out west.

- Yep.

- To do the custom harvest.

- Correct.

- A lot of people don't know what that is.

Can you describe it?

- Yep, so graduated high school May 15th, 1998, and May 16th, I was sitting in a little town called Beattie, Kansas, and I guess to preface that, I knew when I was a senior in high school that that's what I wanted to do.

As soon as I graduated, I wanted to get away from home, go out.

That's something I've always wanted to do, and I thought now's the time.

If you don't do it now, you're never gonna do it.

- How'd you hear of it because this was pre-social-media.

- And that's the craziest thing.

So that was when the Internet itself was very new.

I don't think in high school I ever actually used the Internet at school.

It was that new.

Now, shortly thereafter, I did, but I was talking about it to my FFA teacher, and somehow, I guess we would call it a chat room now which kids probably don't even know what that is today.

- A chat room.

You sound so old.

- Exactly, and so I think he got on some room or forum or whatever you wanna call it an explained he was an FFA teacher, had a student that wanted to go on wheat harvest and just kind of threw it out there, and some random guy out of the blue replied back on there that hey, these guys had done some harvesting for us years ago.

Here's their phone number, give them a call, see what they say, and so I did.

Didn't know these people from Adam, and they just immediately hired me over the phone, and the rest was history.

- Sounds perfectly safe.

- Yeah, exactly.

(men laughing) Yeah, mom and dad were thrilled to drop their 17-year-old son off 500 miles from home and let him travel all over the Great Plains.

- How'd you gt out there?

- Mom and dad took me out there.

- Oh, they drove you out there.

- And then from there, after we got to their place, we loaded machinery and then went to Texas and started cutting and working our way north then.

- Okay, this is before like all right, you can't just text your parents, right?

Things aren't working out.

Come get me.

You'd have to wait till you got to the next town, the next restaurant, get the payphone, find one that works.

- That's exactly what it was.

There was times they would go six, eight weeks and never hear from me 'cause I wasn't anywhere near a phone.

I would talk to 'em one week in Texas.

By the time I get back to 'em, I'm in Nebraska now.

They're trying to figure out all this is working.

- Were you nervous?

- No, actually I wasn't.

I was sitting at a new John Deere combine, and it was just the greatest thing in the world.

And people often asked me.

They're like, "Didn't you get tired of running a combine "day after day after day," 'cause I think from may till December, I think we had five days off.

But no, to me, it was the greatest thing in the world.

Just couldn't get enough.

- So out there, you've got bunch of wheat farmers, and then instead of kind of out here in the I-states where you and I own combines, and we combine or we harvest our own crops, they have crew.

So you you've got, I don't know, two to three to 10 combines and a crew.

They come in, they knock out a field for the farmer, and then they move on to the next one.

They start down south and they go up north.

- Correct.

- Why do you think that hasn't been adopted out here?

- I don't know.

I know out there, too, not all, but a lot of the people we cut for had other crops, like the guy in Texas was the largest seedless watermelon producer in the US, and the wheat was just in the corners of his pivots that they couldn't irrigate that was planted to watermelons, so he's like, "I don't really wanna invest all this money in machinery, "trucks, people to harvest this wheat when it's basically "just a crop that I'm planning to maximize every acre."

His money was in the watermelons, and so it was easier to just hire it done.

Now, as you got farther north, it was a little bit different story, but I think too that out there, a small farmer was 2,000 acres where around here, that's a large farmer.

So I think when a guy stopped in and ran the numbers on it, if you had to go out and buy two or three combines and semis and all the logistics to make it happen, it's like I can just pay these guys to come and do it, and it's done and move on.

- So like the big one, John Deere X-9.

Two heads, corn head, bean head.

What's that cost, a million bucks?

- That's what I've been told.

Yeah, it's a million-dollar setup.

- That's what I don't get as sometimes I look at that.

Now granted, that is that's the biggest of the biggest.

That's the Cadillac, but yet to invest $1,000,000 just to harvest your crops where that combine could start down south and go all the way up north, my philosophy on why this doesn't happen in the I-states is because I-state farmers are grumpy.

- Exactly, there's no two farmers that can get along.

(Tony laughing) - No, no.

I'm uncomfortable right now because I think we've agreed on too much.

- Right.

(men laughing) - All right, so you did that.

You enjoyed it.

- Yep.

- Just did it the one year?

- Just done it the one year.

- Okay.

What happened when you got back home?

- When I got back home, went to work for a local co-op, Effingham Equity in the southern part of the state.

There's a big co-op, several locations, and went to work for them driving a semi hauling grain.

Started out, done that for a few months and switched to the feed mill side of things.

Hauled bulk feed to dairy and hog operations, and that was when custom anhydrous ammonia was getting real popular back about that time.

- Okay, and so that is when people see the white tank being pulled in the field, you're pumping anhydrous gas.

- Correct.

- Into the ground.

- Yeah, for corn, nitrogen source for corn.

- Kinda dangerous.

- Yeah, it is kinda.

- You gotta respect it.

- Yes, you do.

- Every person that's put that on has got a snout full of that stuff.

- Yes, definitely.

- Nothing clears your sinuses like anhydrous.

- That's right.

That's one smell you will not forget once you've smelled it.

- That's absolutely right.

So you're doing that.

- Yep, so that's when they got in the custom ammonia business, and they come and hit me up.

They're like, "You're always wanting "to farm and drive tractors.

"Would you like to run a custom ammonia tractor?"

I thought well yeah, that'd be great.

Run a big, new tractor and get paid to do it and what not, so I done that for, I don't remember now.

It's probably been three or four years that I worked for them and kinda bounced around whatever they needed, run sprayers, spreaders, the whole gamut of things.

- This is the co-op on the tractor.

- Correct.

- The co-op owned the sprayer.

- Yes.

- Yeah, so you were just the operator.

- I was just an employee.

They owned all the machinery, and everything was custom work.

- That's a tough gig.

- It is.

- I mean, the anhydrous is when you go, you go, it's nonstop.

The spraying though, I guess at this point, I don't know if I'd wanna be a custom sprayer because that's a young man's game.

- That's exactly what I was gonna say.

It's a young man's game, and every year, it just seems like- Like back when I'd done it, you basically had your fall ammonia, spring ammonia, then you had your spring spraying.

Corn and soybeans in our area, but now you've got fungicide and double-crop beans, and it just it's like it never ends.

About the time you get down spraying, it's time to get everything ready for fall, so you get like a three-week window as a pause in August, and then you start right back up again.

You can make money, but it's definitely a young man's game.

I mean, it's hard to have a family and live that lifestyle.

- So we said that you're a farmer in the beginning.

So how does someone go from a custom applicator working for a co-op to being a farmer?

- Okay, so when I was working there as a custom operator, we'd done a lot of work for a bigger farmer in the neighborhood, and they were looking for help, and he told me, he's like, "Hey, you already know how to drive tractors, "sprayers, all that.

"We're looking for someone just like you.

"Why don't you come to work for me," and I was very skeptical at first just because you're going from a big company where you've always got a job there, it's very secure, to an independent farmer, and it's like man, what if something happens to him, he falls over dead or an accident or whatever.

Now, where am I at?

And so I was a little leery at first, but I wanted to farm, and I was young, didn't have a family.

So I thought, you know what, I'm just going to go for it.

If it doesn't work out, I can go back to the co-op and just that's where we'll go from here.

So I went to work for him.

I don't regret it at all.

Worked there three, four years, and turns out the guy that I'm working for now or with or however you wanna word that, he's a neighbor of theirs and has always had a big gun shop, and that was his bread and butter.

That's what he wanted to do, and it just consumed all of his time.

It got really big and that's where his money was being made, and he's not married, no family, no children or anything.

So he come to me and said, "Hey, why don't you come to work for me, "and when I'm ready to hang it up, "then you can just take it over, "and this'll be your gig from then on."

So that's where we're at today.

- You've been in agriculture at this point for quite a while.

We've all heard stories.

This type of thing gets promised, and there are some bad situations where it does not come through.

- Correct.

- Were you worried about that?

- I tell you, from the word go, I really wasn't because he's a man of his word, and he's been successful, and I think too, with him not having a family, it's not like where he had a son that moved away and didn't want nothing to do with it, and then all at once, he sees farming's good, so it's like, "Hey, I'm gonna come back to the farm," and so next thing you know, you're just the hired man again, and that's where you stay.

So, no, it was just something different with him that I knew when he told me that that's the way it was gonna go, and it has.

- Okay, so you trusting him aside, right?

Taking that big of a jump financially, the risk of it, of being your new career, that had to be scary.

- It was, yeah, it was, and I guess when I went to work for him, it started out as more money than what I was making with the other farmer anyway.

So it's like, well, I guess at the end of the day, 'cause he doesn't farm near as much as what the other guy did, so it's like, well, at the end of the day, I guess I am making more money to farm less acres and put in less time to do it.

So it's like, why not?

At least this could potentially have a pay off at the end where the other one, I was always gonna be a hired man there, and not knocking them.

It was just that's just the way it is.

- We talked about that on the podcast, the hired man.

Farm manager, hired man, hired help.

I mean, it has lots of terms.

It can be a very good way to make a living, but it seems like there's always that desire to have ownership in a farm.

It's to look out on a crop and say, you know, that's my crop or half my crop or whatever is different than being that hired hand.

How important do you think it is to move from one to the other?

- I think it's extremely important because I guess I've always been one that did care whether it was my crop or not.

I've always been that way with people just 'cause I like farming and I take it very seriously, but it is different when you actually have skin in the game then because I guess your attitude does change.

Now, we're really gonna do this right.

Not that you weren't before, but you wanna go the extra mile and see everything succeed.

- You want it to look good from the road.

- Exactly.

(Rob laughing) - So you've transitioned over now.

How many years ago?

- I started at the farm I'm at now in February of 2008.

- And then, when did you start actually that was part of that was your crop?

- Let's see, it'd been four years ago, I farmed just a little bit of some ground that he was wanting to give it up anyway, and then we decided, well heck, why don't we just let you farm it, meaning me.

- So this is rented ground?

- Yes.

- Okay, gotcha.

- And so, done that, and then it'd been three years ago, I rented all of the land that his brother owned which was 250 acres or 350, whatever it was, and then the following year, I took everything that his sister owned.

So basically as he's winding down in retirement, rather than him go from a nice farming income to nothing all in one year and me going from very little expense in farming to a bunch, we've stair-stepped it down to where it helps him bring his down where mine can stair-step up, and so it works out better for both of us.

- I was gonna to say, that's probably mutually beneficial.

- Yeah, it has been, it really, really has been.

So come the 2022 season, I will be farming, I think, close to 900 acres myself, and he's gonna keep some ground that he owns just right around the house just as one more year to step it down, so he'll have 250 acres or something like that.

- So you did it.

From the little kid at the edge of the field watching the tractors, you're a farmer now.

There is a lot of people that will sit and tell you that to do what you do, you had to be a farm kid.

You had to have a family that help you or somebody help you get along.

Here you are, proof that that's not the case.

- Yep, that's right, and it's a very rare circumstance that I'm in.

I get a lot of messages through Tik-Tok, Instagram, and places where people are in a similar situation, but they're still kinda hanging out in limbo.

It's like, "This guy told me "that he's gonna let me take it over," but I've always got that in the back of my mind when I read them messages.

It's like, yeah, it's always the next year or the next year.

Until it actually happens, you gotta kinda be careful on that deal, but it can be done.

- I remember the first time you told me that story, this first thing that popped in my mind.

I was like, oh, how many times have you heard someone getting dinked over by that?

So I'm glad.

I mean, it's good to hear a good story.

- Yeah, it is.

- Advice for someone that is getting into that with maybe someone that isn't as trustworthy as a person you were dealing with?

- I think if you're gonna do that, you gotta set a timeline as to where, and you pick your poison on whatever timeline you want, but it's like, okay, if I come to work for this guy, and he tells me that I can take it over, and in eight years, this gentleman is 75 years old and he still hasn't turned loose, it's like we gotta put a timeline in here to where it's time to walk away 'cause it just goes on forever.

So I would encourage that.

Set a timeline, and then you gotta be prepared to walk away unless you just wanna be the hired man.

Then that's fine, too.

- We've interviewed a lot of people in ag, and you talk to 'em after the interview.

People in their 70s that are the farm son still not making decisions on their farm.

That doesn't do anybody any good.

- No, it doesn't, and that's a pet peeve of mine.

I wish some of these guys would get out of the way and let the boys take it over and start making some decisions.

I'm not saying shove everything across the table to 'em or anything, but I can name several families where the dad is 75 years old, and the two boys are in their mid 40s, and the dad's still getting half of everything, and the two brothers were still splitting a half, and it's like I don't know why they just don't get out of the way and turn it over to them.

- Old people, am I right?

- (laughs) Yeah, you said it, not me.

(men laughing) - No, I mean honestly, that is a minority.

For the most part, the successful farms, and I know this is other business, too.

The successful ones are the ones that understand the transition has to happen and are very aggressive about that, but it is, it's sad to see.

All right, Tik-Tok.

(men laughing) You're you're naughty on there.

- Yeah, we get a little carried away, I guess.

It's definitely not for your children.

- I can't believe you've gone this whole interview, and you haven't cursed yet.

- I know, it's tough.

- So if someone's to look you up on social media, I would say that they probably should have the volume down if there's children around.

- Yeah, don't be opening anything around your children involving me on an app.

- Do you think by the time this airs, you'll still have an account?

- I think so.

I'm gonna tone it down a little bit just because- - [Rob] He's gonna tone it down a little bit.

- A little bit.

(men laughing) - It's very entertaining.

Why do you think the draw is to you because for people that haven't seen your social media, it's basically you just taking your phone and kinda telling what's going on in the farm in a very, very, very crude way.

- Right.

(Rob laughing) I think people wanna see real.

So many times today, we get a new reality show on TV that is anything but real, and it's all scripted, and even if you get some of the big YouTube farmers on there, they get these endorsements, and rightfully so.

I mean, a company's paying you X amount of dollars to behave on there, you're gonna toe the line.

That's the way it works.

- Hey, you're preaching to the choir, buddy.

- Exactly, so I think people are just ready to see real, and because I think the way that I portray my Tik-Tok channel is real to a lot of people.

There's every company out there it makes good products and bad products.

I don't care who it is, and it's too many times, we only see the good side of that stuff to where I show the bad side and what I don't like about it, and it is what it is.

- You're gonna be hit up.

I mean, I'm sure you have already, but there's gonna come a time where a company is going to offer you something very nice, and you always say it.

"Well, I'm gonna say just the way it is," and they're like, "No, you're not."

- Right.

- Is that a trap you're worried about?

- That's gonna be a problem because I won't let the cat out of the bag, but there's some tire manufacturers that I'm not a fan of.

- [Rob] You heard it here first.

(laughs) - And if they come to me and said, "Hey, we will give you 50 grand a year to A, shut you up "and endorse our product," I'm not gonna do it, and I know that sounds crazy, and people say, "Oh, you will, too if they wave the money "in front of your face," but I don't roll by the way, and I'm not.

I don't believe in that.

- You know, to not share the magic here, we shoot several episodes a day.

The guy after you that runs the Gleaner Combines.

(Tony laughing) - Can we get him on now?

Can we bring in another chair and we could just hash this out?

(laughs) - I don't think that's a good idea.

And he's used to it, too.

For the people that don't know, right?

You've got a John Deere, you got Case, IH.

You've got the Klaus, you got these big kind, then there's Gleaners, and they're fine.

They're fine, they work, but they do get made fun of by certain people online relentlessly.

(men laughing) But yeah, if Gleaner came to you and said, "Hey, you wanna run a new combine," you'd almost have to do it.

- I guess I would have to do it for the fact that I've never ran one, but I guess my words to them will be, that's fine.

I'll run it, but you better be prepared to take the heat, too 'cause I will call a spade a spade.

If it's great, I'll tell the world it's great, but if it's not, then you better be prepared to take it on the back end.

- A new combine's gonna be good no matter what.

Yeah, a lot better.

When you were out West doing the custom, what machines were you running?

- We were John Deere.

- Okay, so the late 80s or late 90s, you were what, 9500s, 9600s?

- Yep.

- Okay.

Those were good combines.

- Yeah, they was.

- Yeah, they still are.

Still a lot of people use them, but a new Gleaner is probably better than that 9600.

- It probably is truthfully.

(men laughing) - It's all in perspective.

If people wanna find you on social media, and my friends, I will say this again.

Tony is a fantastic follow, but when you look him up, make sure that the kids aren't around, but where can they find you?

- Tik=Tok, and the name is Growing Corn 2020.

YouTube is Growing Corn, and Instagram is also Growing Corn 2020.

- Not real original, are you?

- Nope.

We pretty much keep it all- - This is this year's crop?

- That is.

- That looks fantastic.

- Pulled that this morning.

- I would say you're going to do very well, and the prices are good, so yeah, you can buy two new Gleaners.

(men laughing) Well Tony Reed from Effingham, from Strasburg area.

I think it's been very cool what you've done with social media and with agriculture.

You've definitely fit a niche that we didn't even know we had, so thank you for that.

- Thank you, appreciate it.

- And thanks for being on.

- Thank you.

- You can cuss now.

- (laughs) Yeah.

I think we better not.

- Okay.

Tony, thank you very much.

Everybody else, we'll catch you next week.

(intense rock music)