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

My name is Rob Sharkey, I'm your host.

Sometimes in agriculture, if you come from a strong ag family, you feel like you have to live up to it.

Well, our next guest did just that, John King from Ankeny, Iowa.

- Yeah, thanks for having me today.

- You came from Ankeny?

- Yeah, this morning.

- How long of a drive is that?

- Like three hours and 45 minutes, maybe four with a few stops on the way, couple Casey's on the way.

- It's the home of Casey's.

- It is the home of Casey's.

Yep, formerly known of that.

- And for a while there, it was like the fastest-growing city in the whole country, wasn't it?

- Yeah, about third fastest growing city.

Yeah, it's a good, it's a good town.

We've got a lot of agriculture there.

We've got the John Deere factory, so yeah, it's a great spot.

- And if you drive up there, it's like you see these massive buildings.

You have both Facebook and Amazon, right?

- Yeah, there's, I mean, there's like six or seven different distribution buildings for Amazon there.

And then, actually it's in Altoona on your drive in, that's where they've got like a lot of the new servers, like all these mega server rooms and whatnot.

- They look like compounds.

- It's crazy, I've never seen anything like it in my life.

- And when I say big buildings, you're talking like 80-acre buildings.

- Yeah, they're huge.

- All right, you are the president of Michlig League Ag Solutions.

Now what do y'all do there?

- So Michlig Ag solutions, I would say the basis of what we do is it's a consulting business.

It's either a business-to-business consulting, or we do a lot of grower risk consulting as well, risk management consulting.

So work with them on crop insurance, work with them on brokerage, and then a lot of what we do too, part of that business is we have a daily information service that's called Ground Level Dispatch that we send out twice a day, and then once on the weekend for kind of a weekend read.

- Okay, especially in central Illinois, the Michlig name is pretty familiar, Michlig Agricenter.

I think I have, still have a few of these cups.

They do break if you drop 'em, I can attest to that.

- So I mean, the reason I had to bring this today was, and they asked me to bring something sentimental, and I was thinking, there talking to my wife last night, I was like, I'm not sure what I can bring that's small enough that's gonna fit on the desk, that's not looking clunky.

And I sat there and thought about it a little bit, and this coffee mug alone is probably 20 years old.

(Rob chuckles) And it's made, my wife and I have moved about four or five different times.

- Not looking bad.

- It's survived all the moves, all the kids, anything else in my life.

And I'm like, you know what, it's a good representation that the Michlig name always stands, so I thought.

- Is this the last one?

(cards tapping) - No, I think my dad's got a couple at his house, but it's the last one that I have in my house.

And when I was walking over here from the parking lot, I think that's the tightest I've ever held it in my life because I didn't wanna lose it this close to the studio.

- So your dad is?

- Don.

- Don King.

- Yep.

- And your uncle is?

- Harry McCune.

- Harry McCune.

- Yep.

- Okay, well, who is the Michlig?

- So the Michlig is my mother's dad.

So Joe Michlig started the business in the '80s, there in Manlius.

And it was really just started as a feed mill and a little local place to deliver grain and get feed.

And then we expanded it in the '90s to where it was full-service chemical.

We built the facility on Route 40.

And then in the mid '90s, my dad bought the business from my grandfather.

And instead of changing the name, it already had local value with the name that it was, he maintained the name, and then grew the Michlig Agricenter brand, really throughout central Illinois there until we sold the business in 2011 to Nutrien, and then maintained the grain business, and sold the grain business in 2020.

And then we're back in it today.

So it's a great, it's great to have the legacy still going.

- What goes around comes around, huh?

- That's right, that's right, it's hard to get rid of us.

- So did you ever work here at Michlig Agricenter?

- So I worked there from a, like as young as I can remember to be, so like growing up in the business.

I worked there a lot from, I don't know if it's legal today, but from age 12 on.

- No, they kind of frown on it nowadays.

- I always think.

- You're hauling anhydrous tanks when you can't look over the dash.

- I always think my dad had a couple good years where he got a good deal there.

But from age 12 on, I worked there every summer, and it was always me and a few of my friends, and we did anything, from cleaning elevators, cleaning bins out.

We waxed a lot of equipment in those days.

You go find a shade tree there in Manlius, and you go park the floater under it, and wax it, and be waxing it with few of the other guys, or clean out boot pits, but that's what we did all summer.

And it was funny, I swear all the guys waited all year long for the summer to-do list, as soon as me and all my friends got outta high school for the summer, and then the to to-do list was ready of all the stuff they really didn't want to do.

- Like clean rotten soybeans, and boots, yeah.

- Rotten soybeans, the feed mill basement, cleaning out the bin site, where we had all the government bigs.

- I'm not even around it, I can smell it right now.

- Oh man.

(Rob laughs) Well, down by you, Broadmoor, that was always a highlight of the summer.

- That was the, I think you guys bought that elevator off of Moses.

(John laughs) - Well, I can tell you that it held some water in the basement every once in a while, so we had to part the sea there.

- Okay, where'd you go to college?

- So I went to college, for undergrad, I did it at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois.

And I got a degree in accounting and entrepreneurship, and then I played baseball there.

- Oh, what position?

- I was a relief pitcher, so I was kind of like a setup guy, I was left-handed.

- You you just hung around.

- Pretty much.

- Like if you just come in at the end and throw three strikes, and then you were the hero.

- Yeah, it was like always, I was left-handed, so anytime you'd get a left-handed guy up there, you'd have a guy or two on, it always felt like that was when I would come in.

I'd get the one out, then here I come trouncing off.

So it was a little bit of a specialty situation.

But no, it was great.

It was a great time, had lifelong friends, and luckily enough to meet my wife there, and now we're blessed, we got three beautiful kids.

- Did to meet her at a bar?

- You know, maybe.

I'm sure it was somewhere like that.

She was in a couple of my classes, I might have needed some help at times and she helped me through it, so it worked out good.

- Bar.

Bar.

- Yeah.

- Where'd you go then?

- So after that, that's when I moved on and began kind of my journey through the wholesale fertilizer business, and started with United Suppliers in Ames, and then went on to work for a company that was a manufacturer in Kansas City.

And then I went on and worked in another manufacturing business that was more global, they had a global presence, and we were an import business, both the east coast and then through the Gulf and had a- - Gulf of what?

- Gulf of America.

(Rob laughs) New Orleans.

- Don't email me, I don't care, I don't care.

- So did that, and then, and during that time, I just still wanted to get back to retail.

So I had a good company, I went to work for retail for a little bit before I started the business.

And then, yeah, all through the time, I thought it was important, I got my MBA from Creighton, and decided to, it's unique, now you can get your MBA online.

I did my whole MBA process, I never even stepped foot on campus the whole time, so it was kind of a unique deal.

- Is it legit or just?

- You know, I mean, I got a piece of paper for it.

I had to pay the bill for it.

(Rob laughs) But I know that they still like that part of it for sure.

- You're going through college and all that, did you know what you wanted to do at the end?

- No, no.

- Or you just?

- So I mean, I got a degree in accounting.

And I always liked numbers to some degree, and I knew there was always a good chance to go back and be part of the grain business.

And I definitely thought that was an opportunity.

The only thing I would say about our grain business is we had like really good employees.

So there was, it wasn't that there wasn't a spot for me, it's just like we had great employees that were doing a great job, there wasn't a huge need for me to come back and do it without us really expanding the business.

So I always, I wanted to learn more about the agronomy side of the business, and the wholesale fertilizer business was something interesting.

I found out in college I didn't want to be an accountant, a CPA.

I liked accounting, but I didn't really want to do people's taxes and audits and stuff like that.

- You liked numbers, you just didn't want to commit.

- That's 100% accurate, yep.

So it worked out good.

The wholesale fertilizer business is a very dynamic business.

It's like commodity grains, and I enjoyed commodity grain business, but it's an unhedgeable, unprotected market, right?

So like that was.

- And it's expensive as heck.

- It is expensive, it eats up a lot of cash.

- My gosh, I mean, it is like, if you're growing corn, soybeans, it's the number one expense.

- Yeah, it is, for sure.

Yep, for sure.

I'd love to say it's gonna get better, but in the environment we're in today, we don't produce much of it.

We produce a lot of nitrogen here, but there's a lot of stuff we still import, so we'll see how it goes.

It's not getting cheaper anytime soon, unfortunately.

- That is not the answer that I wanted to hear.

- Yeah, I know, I know.

Ammonia's gonna get cheaper next summer, so that's good.

- Okay, that helps a little bit.

Well, a lot of the dry fertilizer, like the potash and that comes from- - Canada.

- People that don't like us right now.

- Yeah, pretty much everybody.

- Russia and Canada, right?

- Russia and Canada, yeah.

Which is, like the whole potash market's really interesting 'cause 80% of our imports come from Canada.

The other, we produce a very little amount domestically, but the remainder of it all comes from Russia or Belarus.

- Yeah, we don't really need it anyway, potash.

- I mean, you know.

- It's overrated.

- That's right.

(Rob laughs) Hey, I mean, it's whatever works, I guess - Yeah, as a farmer, that is the one thing that I'm really worried about, is what's gonna happen to that potash market.

- Yeah, you know what's crazy that, when you think about the potash market right now too, I'd call it six months ago we were within $40 of the 15-year low for potash prices.

- We were?

- Yes, yep, yep.

New Orleans barges were trading within $40 of the all-time low.

- Oh, still too much.

- Yeah, well the problem was is your phosphate prices had never reset in the last three years, they're still extremely high.

So the blended prices were all kind of really hurting everything.

But going forward, it's really hard to know what'll happen.

I think the administration will, they'll probably look at everything to say that potash isn't something that ends up coming on the list of things that don't get tariffed.

Again, since we domestically, we just don't produce any, it's a raw mineral you have to mine.

- Yeah, well, we should get some mines.

- Well, that might require us to have new territory then.

- We got the Gulf of America, I mean, we could.

(laughs) All right, so when did you go to the Michlig Ag, what are you doing now?

- So, with Michlig Ag Solutions, I started that company in May of '24.

And in a lot of my experiences, both on the fertilizer side and in my previous retail job, had a lot of experience around specialty products, so like nutritionals, adjuvants, all this other stuff.

Just saw that there was a big need in the market to help both ag retailers and farmers with those things primarily.

So like what we do through Ground Level Dispatch is not only do we write, we write daily comments about the grain markets and trying to keep people up to date.

- [Rob] What is that, Ground Level Dispatch?

- Ground Level Dispatch is our, it's not proprietary, but it's our market intelligence services.

So we, it's on Substack, anybody can subscribe.

What we try to do- - I don't even know what a Substack is.

- It's like a place where you can send emails.

- It's the internet.

- It's the internet, it's the internet.

- Just say the internet, man.

- It's a blog place.

- Okay, on the internet.

- On the internet.

- [Rob] I don't know why you're making this so difficult.

(John laughs) - So our goal is just to provide good information that like, so our daily comments, the goal of them is to be read within three to four minutes on the grain markets.

And then every Friday, we have something called Fert Friday, and we put out a little bit of a section on fertilizer.

And then once a month, we do what I would call as like a deep dive on the input markets, and we call it our Sunday Reads, so we put 'em out about 7:00 AM every Sunday morning.

And so we'll do something that's either once a month on fertilizer or once a month that's kind of a grain editorial.

And then we also try to bring just different things to people's eyes.

Like we wrote about John Deere's financials and then their outlook that they gave their investors the other day.

We've wrote about boron and the importance for your crop nutrition product process.

I think we're working on an article that talks about, and I don't know this 100% 'cause I have an employee that does a lot of this, who's a lot- - There we go.

- He's a lot smarter than me.

- Here we go.

- But I think it's a company called Boa Safra that works with new land purchases and the ability to write off some of the investment in order to get your fertility up to snuff.

- [Rob] Oh yeah, I've heard about that.

- So just different things that I would say are, in a farmer's average day, they got a lot going on, right?

They got employees they gotta manage, they got equipment, all this stuff.

So it's trying to bring stuff that maybe is not as relevant or not written about as much that, just bring some light to it.

- [Rob] Yeah, and I don't wanna read it.

- I don't blame you.

- I'm working on my planter, I'm working on whatever, and then I hate, I despise marketing my grain.

I've raised that crop, and now I've got it in the bin, and I don't wanna sell it for what they're offering me.

Some of these people that get so immersed in these markets, I just, I can't do it.

- Yeah.

- You know what I do?

Is I call your cousin.

- Donna?

- I say, "When do I sell my corn?"

- Yeah, that's always- - And she said, "Last week."

- Yeah, that's always the best, the best at.

Well, and she's brutally honest, so she's gonna tell you exactly what you needed.

- Well, that's what I want, literally just, all right, look at this, this, and this, and don't be stupid.

(John laughs) - Well, and that's part of what we do as well.

So Ground Level Dispatch, for us, is really a function of what we do for our grower risk management consulting.

And that's, we're trying to help, again, people that don't like marketing.

- Yeah.

- They don't like marketing.

- Do you gotta subscribe to that thing?

- Yeah, it's on Substack on the internet for, we charge like 250 bucks a year for it.

- 250 bucks a year?

- Mm-hm.

- What does Netflix cost?

- Less than that.

- Okay, oh, you think you're better than Netflix?

- Possibly.

(Rob laughs) Maybe it might be the same, I don't know.

It's less than YouTubeTV, I know that.

- I don't know, Emily pays the bills.

- I know, I know.

- But they get that "Ozarks" on there, that was a good show.

- Oh, it's a good show.

- Yeah, it's really nice.

- They got a few good ones on there.

- That's worth 250 right there.

- Absolutely.

- Yeah, okay.

Where were we?

(Rob and John laugh) So you're definitely, you're just looking for mainly the row crop farmers?

- Yeah, I would say, today, our focus is corn, soy, wheat, and then we do some consulting with other businesses.

And again, it's more, I would say around either their, like if they need grain merchandising assistance.

I have an employee who's, his name's Ree Strength, and that's really his special specialty is the grain side.

I'm kind of like you, I don't know if I'm really good at the grain stuff.

And then a lot of what I'll do is around the specialty product side of helping people plan strategy around what should they be selling to their farmers, what's their passion of, what they want to, how do they wanna build that market for themselves, that's a lot of what I focus on.

- And this company's based out of Ankeny.

- It is based outta Ankeny, yep.

- So it's curious to me, because the Michlig name, in central Illinois, is well known.

- Yep.

- And carries respect.

Now you just took it out to Ankeny, is that working for you?

- I would say it's been good.

I would say, when I, we lived in Ankeny, so it was kinda like we were already there, so that's how it ended up in Ankeny.

But like even for us, we had a grower meeting back at dad's shop here three weeks ago, three, four weeks ago.

So I do have an employee that works for us out of central Illinois too, that works with farmers on the same stuff.

- I wasn't invited to that meeting.

- I know, well Donna had the, was in control of all the lists, so I blame her.

- That's fine.

It's fine.

(John laughs) We can move on, it's fine.

You know, kind of takes me back to the fifth grade when John Boyer didn't invite me to his birthday party.

All the other boys in my class went, I was the only one that he didn't invite.

- Well, I knew I was gonna be seeing you in a couple weeks.

- It hurts, I'm just saying.

If you ever have a kid that has a birthday party in grade school, maybe make sure he invites everybody or just a few, kinda like your meetings.

- Kind of like my meetings.

- Yeah.

- We'll have another one.

- I don't care.

(John laughs) All right.

I don't even know where to go now.

(laughs) What do you think some of the struggles that farmers are gonna see here in the next little bit?

- Well, I mean it's, I would say the obvious one, obviously is tariffs, right?

Because it's so unpredicted, it's hard to plan for.

I think today, the one thing that, from a corn standpoint, that they've got a positive standpoint on is you got the crop insurance price that's higher than a year ago.

So, I mean, there's a little bit of safety there, but I think the tariffs thing is, it's definitely, it's hard to plan for.

But there's a lot of different things going on out there too, depending on the biofuels requirements, and what that may have to do for bean oil consumption, and on down the line.

I think those are things that are still moving in the positive light.

I think the administration is for the farmer.

I don't think they're gonna let the farmer fail.

I would say one thing that I would, the tariffs on certain goods, especially like we talked about with potash fertilizer, it's a scarce resource and we don't have any of it.

So like those are things to me, it's, from a free trade standpoint, that it's not really doing us any good.

So to figure out maybe, see some of that change as we go down the line here, to make sure that it's a little bit more competitive for our customers is for sure, would be a good thing.

The other thing too is obviously interest rates are, they're still where they're at, I don't know if that changes, we'll kind of see how that goes.

But everything's a little tighter than, obviously, it was a couple years ago.

- I insured my crop for the, what, 90% this year.

- Yep.

- Which we've never been able to do before.

It was an emotional decision for me.

It's because when I was, like in the '90s, and even just the first few years in the 2000, you went to these meetings with all the weather people.

- Yep.

- They always talked about the year 2025.

They said 2025 year is a, it's a 71-cycle drought or something like that, so it's like the bad drought, it's coming in 2025.

Then they stopped talking about it because I assume like maybe it's getting close enough and they don't wanna be tied to it or whatever.

But I always remember, and they pounded that in our head, 2025 was gonna be the bad drought.

So that's why I insured it for 90%, not because of fact or numbers, it's because of true emotion.

That, I am afraid, was what most farmers do with their decision, they're emotional.

- Yeah, and I would say that it's very true.

And I think that's like the exciting thing about what we try to do all the time, is take the emotion out of it.

Supply fact, provide them good guidance on, with what we're doing with our risk management strategies, and really provide a lot of that insight onto why things are doing what they are and what the outlook needs to be.

I mean, it's kind of like, even right now, the prices aren't great, but majority of the time, we're gonna see seasonal highs in the summer.

Those are still out ahead of us.

Every year's different, but those are the things I think about today.

There's still a lot of good opportunities.

It's like, I think this morning, beans were getting hammered.

- Thanks, I hadn't looked yet.

- Yeah, well, little tough.

But you know, when you look out at it from a fundamental standpoint, we looked at new crop, and the soybean stocks are gonna be extremely low, so at some point things will get better.

I think just where we're at right now, with all the new news on tariffs, like people are panicking a little bit.

- Yeah, well, that maybe could be your new tagline, Michlig Ag Solutions, we're void of emotion.

- That's right.

Absolutely.

- That's what your customers want, right?

- Yeah, yep, absolutely.

(Rob laughs) - What do you think is some of the mistakes that the farmers do when it comes to, not just selling crops, but the input side too?

- You know, on the input side, I think the biggest thing is, in rural America, there's less and less people that are, I would consider the trusted advisor.

And most people that you have in rural America that are the trusted advisor are few and far between.

I think the biggest thing that I see a lot of times, or I would recommend my people a lot of times, is find people that add value to operation.

Price is one thing, and it's an important thing, don't get me wrong, but like people that add value to your operation is an important thing that I think is something that everybody should find.

For us, we've got a good seed dealer back home, and I don't know if we could ever buy seed from anybody else other than him.

At least that's what Harry says.

- Oh, is his name Michlig?

- Yeah.

- Shocker.

- Yeah, yeah.

But like at the end of the day, he adds value to Harry's operation.

And for that, that's the way we continue to look and run our business.

I look at it for our business as well, that's our goal.

We wanna provide value to our customers.

We're gonna charge a fee for the value that we think we can provide, and that's what we want to do.

And I think in rural America, long term, there's a lot of things that have come out over the past, call it decade, with whether it's input buying at a discount, or online buying, whatever it may be, the problem, long-term is, in rural America, you still need those people that have influence and provide value.

I think in the last three or four years, in my positions, I've seen where those people probably shine more than ever now because they are adding value, and there's just less of them, so they're in higher demand.

- And I think the basics, just getting to the basics.

I can't tell you, it's multiple emails a day we get from microbial companies- - Yes.

- That want, "Hey, this would be a great guest on your podcast," or whatever.

We're seeing a three to five bushel bump, do I spray on this go-go juice on it and everything?

And I'm not saying they don't work, but I know what does.

- Yeah.

- I know potash, I need that.

This other stuff, hey, some years it's worked great, other years it didn't.

- Yeah, and I think that's, again, for me, it's back to the trusted advisor.

Like who is gonna be able to really help weed through the noise Of what that market is and then also have a touch on enough acres that are using stuff like that to provide, you can say like, "Hey, this is a product that I stamp certified, certified fresh as a good product that you should consider, and this is why."

Because otherwise, I think, again, there's just too much marketing, branding, internet jargon with this one product will increase your yield by 30 bushel, and you can cut all this other stuff, when in the reality is, for some of these people, even as landowners, you don't want rob Peter to pay Paul, that eventually, someday down the road, creates a problem.

So I think that's the biggest thing I'd say is, again, is like there's people in rural America that are good people that have really put a lot of time into understanding their market, those people are the people I would lean on, especially from the input side.

I think the grain market, in general, there's a lot of people with a lot of opinions.

You have to find people- - What?

- Yeah.

(Rob laughs) You have to find people that, one, you like to have a conversation with, that can really, kind of fits your style, and you gotta act on some recommendations every once in a while.

- Yeah, your grain people have to either be boring or mean.

- Yes.

- Because the show ponies.

If people wanna find out more about, or ask you a question at Michlig Ag Solutions, where do they go?

- I would say just go to www.michligag.com and get ahold of us.

- Okay, and it's you, it's Mitch.

Why don't you say Mitch Lig?

- Mitch Lig?

I don't know.

I mean, it's just pronounced Michlig, I guess.

- I mean, who made that decision?

- Somebody a lot older than I, than me.

- We had Donna, your cousin, on the show here.

That's been a while ago.

- Yeah.

- She did a really good job.

- I know, I'll never stand up, hold up to her standards.

You probably should have her back.

- First of all, no one was assuming that you did as good as she did.

(John laughs) If I could only hear the control room right now.

No, I think it's interesting.

When you have a name, like the King name and what he's built, it's hard to, it's hard to reach up to that level.

But you're doing a great job at it.

- No, I think the fun thing for me is, it is about what our family's done.

And again, it's back to rural America.

- Yeah.

Yep.

- And I think that's what we wanna stay focused on.

- Well, you're doing a fantastic job.

- Thank you.

- John King.

Thank you very much.

Everybody else, we'll catch you next time.

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