(upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Welcome to "A Shot of Ag", my name is Rob Sharkey.

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

A lot of times when you think about farming, you think about corn and soybeans, stuff that you see driving down the roads.

But what about livestock?

Sometimes it does get ignored, but not today.

Today we're talking with Jake Perino from Deer Grove.

How you doing, Jake?

I'm good, how are you this morning?

- Pretty good.

You are a fourth generation farmer?

- That is correct.

Our family came here from Italy and my parents still live in the house that my family originally built in the late 1800s.

They built it while living in a box car on the railroad.

And my parents still live in that same house.

- Have they built onto it?

- Oh yeah, we've added on a couple times actually.

- Yeah, that's a lot of farmhouses out there.

It's like you have this one little tiny main part.

- Yep.

- And it just keeps ballooning outside of that.

- Yep.

(laughing) Is that where you grew up?

- Yes, that's where I grew up.

And I currently live just a couple miles down the road from where that farm is, my dad still lives there.

We got our shop there and that's where everything's based from.

- People where Deer Grove is.

- So Deer Grove is this teeny tiny little town on Route 40 in Whiteside County and we've got 50 people in that town, a restaurant, and an elevator.

- Don't you have a golf course too?

- There is a golf course north of town.

They have a lot of wedding receptions there too.

- Yeah.

Do you golf?

- I do not golf, I'm too busy to golf.

- Well, that's what you're supposed to do.

You're working so hard that you have time to golf.

I don't get it.

- You and me both.

Yeah, okay, grew up on a farm?

- Yep, grew up on the farm throughout all of high school, college.

I've fed cattle, my dad's fed cattle, been a grain farmer and I still have my first receipt from the first cattle that I sold in 2011.

I bought cattle for a dollar for a pound and I sold them for 97 cents.

- That doesn't add up right.

- No, it doesn't.

Back then I thought it was a deal and nowadays it's like, yeah, things have changed a lot since then.

- So tell me what you guys are raising.

- So currently right now on our grain farm, we've got corn, soybeans, wheat, alfalfa, and then we've got parent seed corn.

So we grow what commercial farmers will grow like yourself.

When you go get a bag of seed, we basically create the variety that's going into that bag and we grow for AgReliant, which if you get a bag of the LG seed, that comes from our farm.

- There's a whole lot of different farming that goes on with that seed corn.

- It is very different from commercial corn.

There's a lot of attention that has to be given to it.

You got to hold the tasseling process and then you've gotta destroy the male row so you don't harvest the male rows 'cause they don't have the genetics in it that the female corn does.

- You guys, what all are you responsible for, is it just the planting of it?

- So, the farmers like us, we'll go in and we will plant it.

- Yeah.

- And then after that, it's pretty much out of our hands.

But I help the seed companies.

Like we go in and we gotta cut the corn and then the tassels will grow up and then we gotta go in and pull the tassels so that the plants.

- So, you actually detassel it?

- With a machine.

- Oh, okay.

- Yeah, with the machine.

- Do they even use the the kids and the basket anymore?

- They do.

- Really?

- They do because the machine will get 99% of it and the kids are going to get what's left that the machines miss.

- It's not fair.

- No, I think it's fair.

- By the way, no, it's not.

We used to have to do, we would pull into a field that the machine went through.

We thought we were living La Vida Loca.

- You used to pick every plant?

- Yeah.

- My dad talks about those days.

It's like every plant you had to pick and now we get 99% of it with machine.

- It was such brainless work that you sat there and you wouldn't even look anymore.

And if you pulled something and it didn't quite pop off, you knew you're on a leaf, it's just horrible.

But you're cheating.

- So we go in with that and then we got the, after the corn is pollinated and there's no more pollen being thrown, we gotta go in and destroy the male rows that shed the pollen and we take a machine and basically run over those rows with a cutter on a metal wheel and it just chops that whole plant up in the rows that they're in.

- Yeah.

- And then the seed companies will hire a local farmer that has a ear corn picker and the dump carts and he'll go in and pick everybody's parent seed fields.

- Yeah.

- And then after that harvest process is done, we can go into do tillage.

Like we've already got our harvest done.

We were done 10 days ago.

- You little overachiever you.

(laughing) - So we got fertilizer down.

We're gonna start chisel plowing here once it dries out.

- Nice.

The peas at green beans, I mean, where does that go?

- So, we recently got into the vegetable production here three years ago and we started with green beans and we do green beans, peas, and sweet corn.

And all those crops go up to Janesville, Wisconsin.

And they all get trucked up there.

- Okay, does that work out pretty well?

- Yeah, it does, it works out very well.

It works with our crop rotation as well.

- Okay, so you said you've been feeding cattle for a long time.

What was the initial passion for doing that?

- It started when I was young and cattle is just something that I was born with and something that I've always enjoyed.

And I always thought that, the cattle need attention every day.

Twice a day you gotta feed 'em, we walk pens twice a day.

They always need attention, where a corn field, you might not look at a field for a couple days and it doesn't need the attention that an actual living animal needs.

- Which is the reason that most people stick with the corn, not the cattle.

- I know, I know I'm an anomaly.

But we've always had the cattle and my dad's had cattle and then our uncles had cattle and there was four uncles that kind of lived in the same area and they all had cattle, like in that one area, at one point in time there'd be over a thousand head of cattle.

But this is back in the seventies.

And then slowly everybody got outta cattle except my dad and his one uncle.

And we've just kept with it.

And we put up a monoslope barn back in 2017.

- Explain what that is.

- So a monoslope barn is, it's a single pitched roof.

And what it does is it manipulates the sunlight to help for cattle comfort.

So in the summertime when the sun angle is really high, the whole barn is shaded.

And all the cattle are, they don't get exposed to sunlight with a black hide, they get really hot, but then in the wintertime, when the sun angle's really low, that sun will go all the way to the back floor and it'll increase.

We've got a visor on the front of it, and when the sun hits that visor, it increases the internal air temperature 10 degrees.

- Really even in winter?

- Even in the wintertime, it just amplifies that sunlight.

And then we got a curtain we can drop on the north end.

So that curtain will knock down any wind that comes out of the north in the wintertime.

It keeps the snow off the cattle and it keeps cattle dry.

- So like obviously it gets below freezing in there though.

- It does, but it takes a windchill off of it.

If you imagine you're outside in the wintertime, if you've got a good warm jacket on and the wind's not blowing on you, and if you're dry, it's not that bad outside.

So our goal is for cattle comfort, we want their hides dry and we want the wind off of 'em.

If we can control those two things, the cattle will be comfortable in the winter and they can withstand the winter lows better than the summer highs.

- Oh, they don't wanna be hot?

- No, they don't.

They've got a fermentor inside them and when they digest their feed, they're always warmer.

So like the normal, like the normal temperature for a good healthy animal is about 102.7, that's hot.

But in the wintertime that fermentor inside of them that's digesting their feet, it'll keep 'em warmer.

- Okay.

A lot of people don't know that.

A lot of people think you just, I don't know, shove 'em in a barn and who cares what happens to 'em.

- Cattle comfort and cattle health are the top two things that we care about at our farm.

And every day is a good day to be an animal at our place.

That's how we look at it.

And we have our barn so that if anybody comes into our place for a tour, we're always ready for it.

- You actually have tours?

- So we sell private beef to a lot of people.

And these are more than likely city people and they don't know where their meat comes from.

And they're tired of going to a grocery store to get it.

So they'll come out, they'll bring their kids grandkids and they'll come out and look at the cattle, so we show the barn off, we show the cattle to 'em, see what we feed the cattle, where they live.

And we usually got a tractor to outside and we say, "Hey, you guys can go jump in the tractor, take it for a drive.

I'll go with you if you want."

- You let them drive it?

- Oh yeah, in the fall it's like.

- If they got an open field, then just go drive wherever.

- Okay.

I mean, do people come, I mean, 'cause it's a cattle farm, right?

You got poop and stuff everywhere.

Do they?

- It's normal, it happens.

- But a person that's never been on a farm before.

- They get to experience it so they know, hey, this is where our meat comes from, it comes from this place.

This is what they feed 'em, the corn came from the field across the road, the hay comes from the next field and the distillers come from the local ethanol plant.

So they get to see all these things that go into cattle production.

And I can say, "Hey, our cattle came from here," or this farmer," or, "This guy that raises cattle, you might've drove by his place."

So they can see all those things and see this is where your food comes from.

- Why do they like that?

I mean, what is the draw for someone to come outta Chicago to your farm and learn where their beef comes from?

- I think it's a chance for them to get out of the city.

And to see that meat doesn't come from a grocery store.

Milk doesn't come from a grocery store, milk comes from a dairy cow.

Meat will come from a place like ours.

People are just uninformed on where their food actually comes from.

And once they see where their food comes from, they can have that picture in their head and know that it's raised humanely.

The cattle are well taken care of, They've got fresh water and fresh feed.

It comes from a good place.

- Okay, I think they like that story too.

- They do and we're trying to get better.

And you see it on YouTube all the time, like people are always trying to tell their story to show where everything comes from.

And that's what we are trying to get better at too.

- There's farmers out there that don't think we should be telling our story.

Because like yeah, if someone came to your farm and they see cow poop, that they're never gonna want to eat a steak again.

- Well what else are they gonna do?

I mean, cows gotta do that.

- Some people don't know that.

- It's natural for 'em.

- Some people think that, I don't know, what they do, they're magic, they fly.

- I think it's that we have an uneducated consumer and I think we need to be better as cattle feeders and grain farmers to educate consumers on where their food comes from.

- Okay and you're willing to do that?

- Oh yeah every day.

- Oof.

- If anybody called me and said, "Hey, can I come look at the cattle at your place?

I wanna bring my kid or my grandkid, we would like to come see it?"

Sure, that'd be fine.

- On our other show we go on the streets of Nashville and then we show 'em a picture of a combine and they think it's like a goat or something, they have no clue, right?

And we learned early on that the last thing we need to be doing is making fun of people.

Because they legit just don't know.

And after if they completely get all these questions wrong and the cameras stop rolling, they start asking question after question because now they're interested.

Now they don't know where their food comes from and they wanna know all this stuff.

- So with the, so we feed about 130 families privately through seven different butchers in the northern half of Illinois.

And a lot of times people call me they say, "Hey, I got your number from a cousin or a brother or whatever, they got meat from you in the past."

And they ask me all these questions about cattle and what we do to 'em.

And some of the questions I get, it's just, I'm laughing inside, but I'm not because it's like, we gotta explain this to people, but they think that we just pump our cattle full of hormones to the point where they can't walk or that we just, we treat 'em inhumanely or they're eating all these GMOs all the time.

And it's like, let me just take a step back and explain to you what we do and why we do it.

But a lot of the things that they claim that we do, 90% of 'em are false.

They think we give our cattle antibiotics every day and I just pump 'em full of antibiotics.

And the thing that I tell 'em is, we gotta go back to relate cattle to humans.

Humans don't take antibiotics every day, right?

So why would we do that with cattle?

It's a waste of money.

I would go broke doing it because antibiotics are very expensive and it doesn't make sense to do.

But if an animal is sick, we'll give 'em the right amount of antibiotic to save their life, similar to a human.

If a human is sick, goes to the hospital, doc says you're on this antibiotic for a week.

Once you're done, you're done.

You should be fine, it's the same way with cattle.

If they're sick and ill and need a drug, we will prescribe that drug as our vet tells us to with the drug our vet tells us to.

And then once the vet says they don't need anymore, they're fine.

We turn 'em back into the pen and they're healthy.

- Okay, you're farming in Illinois, right?

The majority of the state is corn and soybeans.

Livestock, I would say has had a mass exit from the state.

Are you looking to expand your livestock?

- Yes, we are.

And we had plans to expand and those were recently put on hold.

But Illinois is really good at growing corn.

Cattle are really good at eating corn.

- I've heard that.

- So it's like, why wouldn't we feed the crop that we grow?

So we are going to expand and you're right, Illinois, a lot of livestock is left.

There's still a lot of pork production in the state, but there's not a lot of cattle production in the state.

And I think that with more younger farmers coming back to the farm, they can find the benefit in feeding livestock instead of buying that acre of land.

- We also run a whitetail deer outfitter.

So we leased a lot of the timber ground and that, which all used to be fenced.

And had cattle in it, but not anymore.

And I mean now it's just, it's a mess.

- So the grain farmer that farms in 80 might buy the 80 next to 'em.

And there might have been an old fence that separated the two farms.

Farmer goes in, tears all those trees out, pulls all the posts, rolls up the wire, and then he farms all the way through it so there's less fences.

So for me, if the cattle get out, nothing's gonna stop 'em for miles and miles.

(overlapping chatter) Oh yeah, cars, traffic.

- Yeah.

- Our cattle don't get out, but it's like there's no fence to stop 'em.

- Yeah.

- So you're right though.

You're right.

- Well, to step outside of Illinois too, I mean these grazing practices are important because you don't graze a timber patch in Illinois.

It's just gonna grow, it's gonna be a solid brush.

- Oh, it will.

And then it's harder to manage that.

And like guys like you that want to go out there and hunt, well now you got all this brush you gotta cut down 'cause your shooting lanes aren't good enough.

And even then you might not be able to see the deer or turkey as they walk through because it's so thick.

So that's why we need to, I mean, the guys that have these pastors and they do graze 'em well, they're just well managed, good looking for us.

They're very good looking.

- You've had some issues with the weather.

My gosh, what have you had tornado?

What did that take?

- So March 31st, we had an F2 tornado that pretty much hit our site head on.

And that week there were tornado warnings every week.

And we were watching the news and like nothing happened, nothing happened, finally, day four, we had a tornado and it came across and we were at supper.

It was lent.

So we were adding fish at our local restaurant and my phone just starts ringing off the hook and I'm getting text messages and neighbor called and said, "Hey, your barn is gone."

And "I'm like, that's not funny.

Like, what are you talking about?"

He goes, "Your barn is gone."

So we jumped in the truck and we went there and we pulled up and everything was gone.

The roof landed a mile away.

- Oof.

- Both silos were shot.

The wind just hit 'em and threw metal into 'em.

The roofs were caved in.

They were like a pop can that was squished.

Our commodity barn, the roof was peeled off of it.

Our feed mill where we mix all our ingredients, that had two by fours sticking through it, like toothpicks and a cake and it had nail holes all in it.

Our machine shed that's there, it's like someone just took their fist and just punched a giant hole in the side of it.

- Hmm.

- And no cattle got out.

No cattle died in the process.

- Really?

That's surprising.

- No cattle died, all the trusses were just gone.

And within an hour we had four semis and 20 stock trailers and about 80 people there helping out.

- Taking the cattle somewhere else, yeah.

- The miracle on all of this, the roof was still attached above our loadout area.

Nothing was damaged in our loadout area.

And we had people there with chainsaws, cutting through trusses and making alleys for the cattle to walk through.

And we take a couple cattle out at a time and we were able to load the semis and load the stock trailers.

And I just started making phone calls and no good cattleman has an open pen.

So I just started making phone calls and I finally got ahold of three different feed yards that were able to take the cattle from our place that night and take 'em to theirs.

And we were there until about 3:00 AM, all our neighbors came over.

We are very blessed and fortunate with our community, our neighbors, our friends, and our family that came and helped.

I had people that came from hour and a half north of us, hour and a half south of us and an hour west of us that just came and helped, "Hey, we heard you had a problem."

- Hmm.

Yeah, I've been there with a tornado.

And storm goes by and you walk out, we didn't have the barns, but we had green legs, green bins.

Your farm is just absolutely destroyed.

It's one of those moments where you keep telling yourself, "All right, nobody's hurt, nobody's hurt.

And then you just look at your farm.

All that work, everything and because we've built it and now it's just gone just like that.

- The oldest barn in the cattle side of the oldest barn, that was a sort of five years old, but the 50 year old barn, 100 yards to the south that we want to tear down in two years, not touched.

- Yes.

- And then we got a corn cob pile that we bed some of our cattle with, that corn cob pile not touched.

- Yeah.

- But the five-year-old barn, totaled, two silos, totaled.

It's like, you just can't explain that.

- Yeah, those tornadoes are, hmm.

So are you rebuilt?

- Yes, we got the barn rebuilt and everything got put back together and we somehow miraculously got done ahead of schedule.

Our building crew got everything done about a month ahead of time.

And we've got the barn full of cattle.

- Do you have their number?

- Yeah, you want it?

They did a very good job, everything went very well there.

And we were fortunate enough to get cattle at the right weight at the right time.

And we've got the barn full.

We've got a barn full of healthy, good looking cattle.

- You are the president of the Cattlemen's Association in Dutcher County?

- Correct, Whiteside County, I am the president of our Cattlemen's Association.

We have a very good group of people that also help out in there.

And I am on the policy side for the Illinois Beef Association as well.

- Okay.

So why do that, I mean obviously you're a busy guy.

Why take your time out and do this?

- Passion.

I'm passionate about the livestock industry.

So with the policy side, I work with legislators in Springfield and we help better educate them on why we do things in a certain way or if a certain bill is going to get passed, whether we agree with it or not, what's the benefits or ramifications of that bill passing and how will it affect livestock producers across the state, whether you're a cow calf background or feedlot.

We are trying to look out for all three of those segments in the policy side.

And then the county, our county association, it is basically, we're a scholarship fundraiser.

So everything we do in our county association, it's all for scholarships.

So all that money goes to kids in high school going to college.

- Let me hit you with this question.

It's probably not a fair question, but I'm gonna ask it anyway.

Nothing pisses me off more is when you see a video pop up, people mistreating their livestock, some of 'em have set up by animal rights group to make people like yourself look bad.

You had a chance to talk to somebody, that's their only view of how livestock is raised In this country.

What would you tell 'em?

(no audio) - I'd say come into my place and I'll prove you wrong.

I'll show you how cattle are really treated and then we can go to my neighbor's place and I'll show you how they treat 'em because if everybody treats their livestock, which cattle are very expensive, like we're not gonna inhumanely treat them, right?

They cost way too much money, it's not worth it to do that.

And at the end of the day, it's an animal, you gotta take care of it.

Like if everybody has a mentality that we're gonna treat our cattle better than we treat our dog, every feed yard would be a great place to go see.

And it's like that.

You might have that one video or that one photo you might see of somebody inhumanely treating an animal.

First off, I'd say that's not how it's done everywhere.

And the first thing that comes to mind is the Fair Oaks video that came out by that animal resistance movement.

- Yeah.

- And then they showed how they're inhumanely treating livestock.

And I know the manager of that place and I called him up and I said, "I can't believe this.

I'm sorry to see that, it's a shame."

He goes, "Those people don't even work here.

Like the people that are there, they were hired from this," the animal resistance movement, they called it armed, they were hired by that guy to go work there to expose them, but it was all a lie.

And all them guys went to jail.

- Yeah, you don't hear that.

- No you don't.

But you see the video and everything that happened and it's like, that's terrible.

That's not how it's done.

but then once you dig deep into it, well, it was all a lie.

- It's unfortunate because it's effective.

- It is, unfortunately it's effective, but it's like that's not how it's done.

And I'll prove you wrong.

- Okay, well if people want you to prove 'em wrong, are you social media or is there a way people can get ahold of you?

- So my wife was gracious enough to create a Facebook page for our feed yard.

- Is it too hard for you to do?

- I don't have time to do it.

She takes all the photos and she puts the posts out.

She's better at it than me.

- So what's the address to it?

- So on Facebook, our feed yard is called the County Line Cattle Company.

- Okay.

- So if you go on Facebook and look up County Line Cattle Company and if you go to the one that's in Deer Grove, you'll find us right there.

- Okay, well, very cool.

Jake Perino, Deer Grove, I love your passion.

- Thank you.

- And I love that someone like you is fighting for an industry that I'm involved in and you guys, yeah, it's unfortunate that there are people that want to stop what you do for a living because they don't understand it.

And like you hit it on the head, the best way to combat that is literally just, "Hey, come out, see what I do, and see that I'm raising stuff humanely."

So I encourage people to do that.

Go ahead and check his Facebook and yeah, thank you for being such a great ambassador and a great spokesman for agriculture.

Jake, thank you very much, everybody else, we'll catch you next time.

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