How a Vibecoded Newsletter Is Making the Hay Market More Transparent

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Hello and welcome to another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway and I'm Joe.

Wasn't thal Joe?

I was lurking on the homestead subreddit recently, as one does.

As does.

There have been a number of posts recently about hay prices and hey getting more expensive. And the craziest thing is there's one guy, one poster who keeps talking about hay prices, and on one of his posts, someone came in and said, they commented, you should go on All Thoughts.

I love episodes that come about that way. All right, Can I make a little confession here please? I've done no prep for this episode.

I mean, you know, I'm often not.

As diligent as you are, but I was just like, you know what, I know that hay exists. I've seen it in bales. I figure something is dried. I know it's consumed. I have done no research.

Yeah, you know a little bit about Hey though, because we spoke with that was in New Mexico or Arizona. Now I can't remember the farmer growing alfalfa.

Yeah, it's like fermented, right, isn't hay like sort of like fermented and dried or something.

Yeah, something like that.

I mean, I guess.

But one of the reasons it's good to grow hay in the desert is because you don't have to worry about it getting wet in the drying process. Yeah.

Oh right, I did. We did learn that, all right.

So that's the one hay fact that we all know. So we're gonna be talking about hay prices today, but beyond that, I find the hay market really interesting because there.

Are no seriously, I believe you.

I believe you, there aren't that many markets out there nowadays that are like non transparent.

I want to say, do we have any hay indices on the terminal?

There's a PPI index? Oh it is, Yeah, okay, so you can look up like alfalfa hay.

Here looking I assume, I mean, everything is up. I'm just like, yeah, if you name something that exists in the world, it's probably up.

But what is us hay seeds? Yeah? Well no, I don't know. Is this even up to date? I can't even find one.

I don't know. But this is what I mean, Like, it is not a transparent market. It's very fractured by type, of hay So. I didn't realize this, but there's like Timothy, there's alfalfa, there's supreme Hay.

So I'm just gonna say, like I said, I haven't done any I don't know anything about Hey. I just said I would just learn it all on the fly. But I also I did do a little bit of research about our upcoming guests.

Yeah, you identified the guy posting on rad the guy.

Posting and I have said this. His business is very cool and we'll talk about it. But I just want to say the business that he has built in terms of like becoming the man who knows about Hey, is adviceive given to young journalists who have asked me like for career. I've literally said this, and I'm going to drop some alpha. Uh No, I'm gonna drop something that was an I'm gonna drop some elf alfa alpha here, but now it'll be commoditized by the time we say it.

I've always thought that one way you could like build a business as a young journalist or someone is find find a piece of public data that exists, that is out there, that is consumable for free, that nobody is regularly looking at. Gather it become the central repository for it and then occasionally comment on it. There's all kinds of data in the world. A million public agencies of all sorts are producing monthly reports on this or that and PDFs that nobody is looking at. And if you say you know what I want to learn about X, and I want to end a newsletter update what X is doing each week or month or whatever, you can become the man the acts on this topic. And the guest that you have found for today's episode I think

has done exactly what I've told numerous young individuals to do. So we'll see if this I'm curious about. Hey, I'm also curious about this individual's business model.

It's a good market structure story and I guess technology story in a media story. Yeah, exactly, all right, So, without further ado, we do, in fact have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Aidan Johnson. He is the founder of Can you guess? Well, you know what the company was. It's such a good name for what this company actually does. So Aidan, thank you so much for coming on All Bloods.

Yeah, I appreciate you guys having me on.

So why don't we start with the basics, what is it that Haywire is actually doing.

Yeah, So essentially what we are doing and kind of what we built our business around is pulling public data, just like Joe said, and kind of putting it all on Playing English newsletters for subscribers. So, I mean, USDA publishes reports a weekly, bi weekly, and then even monthly depending on region. So we kind of built a system and a technology and our model to kind of do all the hard work for us and then analyze it and put it onto Playing English. So it's it's been a great great I know, like lesson I guess learning going through the flaws, making sure we're producing the most accurate data. But no, it's been fun.

Well, let's go into this a little bit more.

And I'm sure that AI makes the process of collecting and absorbing the relevant data easier. But what are these reports out there that you're able to mine, who's producing them, what are the what is the sort of the public data source that.

You're mining, and what can you pull from it?

Yeah, So we actually have a direct API integration with the UCA, so we get live feed strictly from them, and that basically funnels into our four system type of I guess you could say fair faitic and so we're minding that which publishes every week. But the problem we're kind of running into when you say data.

Sorry, when you say we're mining that. What is this report? Let's go step by stuff. What is this report that the USDA publishes every week.

Yeah, so the us DAY is publishing basically auction prices throughout the region, throughout the countries. So every auction house will report kind of what they're paying or what they're seeing on their ground there and then it will be put on a PDFs but buried in PDFs, so it's kind of hard for people to find.

Yeah, so you actually call up some of the auction houses by the way, I didn't even realize there were auctions for hey, but you call them up to get additional pricing information as well.

Right, Yeah, So we actually have Rock Valley, Iowa Rockveay hay Auction as our primary data partner, which is one of the biggest hay auctions in the country. So having them to kind of get intail from what they're seeing on the ground to kind of cover the gray area between the USDA data and then the live market what people are actually on the ground, and we are actively trying to you know, branch off a network to more auction houses throughout the country, to different regions, so we can kind of get a forecast what's actually happening there.

Joe, this reminds me of the old scrap metal yeah market, right, where like you had a broker who actually had to call up all these junk yards and ask what yeah price they were selling.

I don't know if that's still the case, but it might actually still be the case. But if you like, can I remember eleven or twelve years ago, like very early on when I joined Bloomberg talking to one of our reporters, she was based in London who was covering scrap metal, and she talked about that part of it was essentially calling up the scrap yards.

And say what you price for?

And of course, you know, it's not that different from liboar, right, It's not like we think of something like these very opaque liquid markets like scrap metal.

But that fundamental idea of.

We're going to bring people up, We're going to an email or something and then triangulate the data is how some of the most you know, famous liquid markets there are.

That's the alpha Alpha yes, calling people up.

Calling people.

Wait, So just on these reports that the USDA publishes, I assume a it's not is it just a hay report? And do they just publish price data or volume data or quality data? Is there anything else that like what are the what is the context with which you pull this data from?

Yeah, so there's many sources that we can pour our data from, but specifically on the USA data, I'll show the region, the type of bail, the weight, you know, the quality of hay or alfalfa that's producing. So and that automatically goes into our database and it kind of makes it easy for us. So when we take on ground intel that we can put it through our data wheel and it's able to you know, cross reference it with the USDA data and the table kind of presets so we're able to make sure it's not the data that's coming from their ground is you know, valuable and actually not hallucinations.

I guess, you know, I know we're going to get to hay specifically, but just as we're talking about sort of this business model, Yeah, there put some really successful you know, I think like it might be flight radar twenty four one of these other things that was worth a lot of money was essentially some people who found a really good way to visualize or present data that was already public but it's opaque, et cetera. And so I'm very fascinated by this business model of like, there's all this data out there.

And if you put a nice skin.

On the user interface, still.

Use your interface and actually, like let me just see the price or let me just see the map that it's moving on, can suddenly be very monetizable.

Yeah.

Thing, Well, I expect with vibe coding it's going to become more common as well. So, Aiden, why why did you decide to get into this particular project if you don't mind me saying so, Like, you look, you look very young. I assume you're a young founder of Haywire. Oh why was this your your first project? Yeah? Your passion project.

Oh man, Well, if you were to tell me this last year, I want to believe you, because the idea was kind of thrown out by my dad who was actually looking to start a startup company for alfalfa cubes, and throughout that process he kind of needed he was crunching number and he asked the question, what is the cost of Hey, to you know, find that raw materials price.

So that's kind of how it all started. He's like, aiden, you know, you should probably like start this. It's a great idea. And you know, at the time, I'm like, Okay, come, I'm nineteen years old, I'm a college basket player. I don't really care about Hey.

This was what youp five Okay, oh okay.

So this this conversation happened in twenty twenty five, and at the time, you know, I'm I'm a college baskett player. I don't really care about Hey. But you know, I always knew I wanted to kind of get into entrepreneurship, I guess. And I'm like, Dad, you know, you know, you know I want to run a business, but you know, Hey is definitely not going to get me a girlfriend.

So that's kind of how it started. And that's kind of how it started. And you know, as I got to college, I was introduced to kind of AI, which kind of started out as you know, vibe coding websites for local businesses. And then I actually my co founder, Cole, who is very intelligent with the AI, we kind of just started working together about it to get to the more agentic and automation type of AI. So that kind of started a wrap hole like which kind of started out as a vibe code project with no infrastructure or no system at all, kind of turned into something we thought we knew that was reachable. So we kind of got into that, you know, just we basically hop on a call every day deciding how we can improve our product,

improve our technology so we can produce the best volume. And you know, the haymark is very untransparent, I guess you could say, so we found a problem. You know, first week of college classes in the business class, you're going to learn, Okay, you need to find a problem and then a solution to start a successful business. And that's kind of how it all came about. And you know, we've been kind of it every day and I'm very grateful for my dad to ask the question what is the price of alfalfa?

And hey, do you have a girlfriend? Now? Did you get one?

Yet?

Absolutely not? So people ask what type of business you run, and I just say I try to, you know, mask it as something really intelligent, like, yeah, I run a market intelligent AI infrastructure company and not just a market hey market company. So no, in the process, all right.

Well, add thoughts listeners in Minnesota.

Eligible young bachelor twenty years old. We're just putting it out there. Maybe we'll do we could do some match making for you. Just had your dad had this idea, I don't know. Had this been ten years earlier, like Orders of Magnitude, would this have been doable at all to you and your co founder in a real way prior to AI and vibe coding as we know it?

Oh No, ten years ago, I don't think I would even scratch the surface of getting to the death that I am here now. And that's just simply because I think the infrastructure of AI is getting smart and smart every day and it makes it able for you know, two young twenty year olds like me and my co founder Cole to you know, mess around and create a whole company and platform. So yeah, I don't I don't think it would be probably take a big team of ten years ago.

Truth, I already want to be Aiden Johnson, Like everything about this is just like so cool to.

Me, Like in my next life, this is my plan.

Well, go out and find that niche market share.

Find your hay, find your yeah.

Pursue your Timothy dream. Okay, Well, why don't we actually get to hay prices. So first of all, if I try to look up hay prices, I'm definitely going to haywire. But setting haywire aside, what am I trying to find? Is there a benchmark hay price out there? The way there is? You know, when we talk about US stocks, we talk about the S and P five hundred or another indux like the Dow Jones. Is there a particular hay price I should be looking at.

You know, not really? The USDA NASS is what it's called, will you know, produce kind of an average cost of hay. So right now I'm looking at Hey. For April it's one hundred eighty dollars per ton, which is up one hundred and sixty seven dollars from March. And then for the alfalfa side of things, it's a one hundred and eighty five dollars a ton, which is up from one hundred and seventy five dollars since March. So essentially, I was talking to Levy Russ at Rock Valley and I was kind of kind of explaining this issue, and I'm like, how do people really know what they're paying for hay?

And like what do they benchmarket against? Cause you know, people aren't really going into those USDA pdf files unless you kind of have a degree in economics and you know, have the time to find it. So I kind of talked to him and he's like, yeah, actually, we have a lot of people in our region, Rock Valley specifically is in the mid use their auction data as the benchmark of kind of what Hay is going for. So the crazy thing about the Hay market is what I realized is not just one market. It's like fragmented markets across the whole country. Every market, every regional market is very hyper local simply because transportation costs are a lot.

You can't domestically transport it across the country. And then you think, like there's so many inputs, how it affects the quality of Hay to you know, produce the output. You know, Minnesota Hey may not be the same as California Hey in terms of price because it's just all very hyper local markets.

Just on the girlfriend that you're six if you can dunk of basketball, I say on Twitter, I'm.

Just, oh, you're really doing all you can to help.

Here, Jah. I'm looking at is and uh and you can dunk. I'm really impressed.

I wish I couldn't appreciate that. Appreciate it.

Yeah, no, it's a it's really cool. Let's talk about these to what degree? All right, there's this lack of transparency, and there's this wide variety of prices regionally, which again is not unlike many other commodities. I mean, even oil obviously has regional price variations. The cost of shipping is going to affect it. But you know, we talked about this lumber with US Cinton Dean is an example. To what degree are they generally correlated across the country, Like, well, they generate well, prices generally rise and fall around the same time, even if there are wide gaps in the unh you know, wide spreads from one region to another.

Yeah, so there is a bunch of different factors to kind of how different regions can of, uh, you know, be affected by marcus. I mean, you think of what's kind of going on in the West right now with the drought kind of going on. Forty six percent of the US alfalfa acreage is actually in a drought, so you might see some demand coming from the west, maybe moving east. But actually I was kind of looking into this the other day, and it's I was like, kind of looking at the East coast kind of because I don't really like, there's not really much out there, I guess for Hey. I mean, there's a lot of hobby farms and it's like small square markets out there, but it's kind of its own ecosystem because it's cool because

it won't really feel the effects of the drought from the west, simply because transportation is a big factor in that, because you're not gonna ship or transport hay that far because it just it will eventually cost more than the actual value of the hay, simply because you know, these brokers, these dealers will charge anywhere from five to eight dollars per mile to have it shipped, so that can easily average to be more valuable than Hey. So it's it's kind of it's kind of so yeah, I guess.

So if I'm in a location one of the drought stricken states, drought stricken states, that's hard to say. I'm reading the USA one of the USDA reports right now, and it says hay prices continue to increase as ranchers search for Hey, are you seeing people who are trying to like bulk buy or secure supply ahead of more price increases.

I mean, yeah, I'm seeing right now, and you know, just talking with farmers kind of networking across the country, I'm seeing people are trying to get their stockpile for summer. I'm hearing that first cut is being extremely light, the yields are not really producing at a volume, and carryover from twenty twenty five is essentially gone.

Sorry, I actually did find if you search on the terminal Tracy, if you search USDA Hay prices by state, Oh, then you can find some fairly regularly updated price and disease to say, Like, I mean, I understand you have a great business going, but if any listeners just want to spend tens of thousands of dollars on the Bloomberg terminal, they can also.

Any farmers out there.

Yeah, so the.

Price Bloomberg actually offers a hey Wire competitor.

You just get a bunch of other stuff. You're probably not.

Interested, but no, but this gets somebody. So like, this is another important business question. Anyone can collect data and produce it, then you have to find people who will purchase it from you. And this is the other half of business. Some people are in the house produced and some people sell. How did you how do you go about finding farmers or growers or anyone in the business, anyone in the chain. How do you get them to discover Haywire.

I guess just networking obviously discovery A big part of that has been on the homestead Reddit where kind of found everything, but you know, just actively reaching out to them, I guess, kind of just showing them, Okay, this is what we're trying to do. Try trying to be that transparency layer, just to kind of make your guys' local markets a little easier for you and not kind of guessing and buying blind and selling blind. So we're basically going to them and we're like, Okay, this has no cost for you, just like kind of tell us what you're seeing so we can provide that clarity and transparency for you know, hay prices. You know, we're not going to fix the whole transparency issue, like we're going to try,

but we probably won't. But what we just at least want to make it a little more transparent for your local region. You know, these farmers know their regional market like the back of their hand and especially these old gen farmers. They're not really going to adapt to technology like that, so it's been kind of difficult trying to get them to adapt to be like, Okay, like this is technology nowadays, like this can actually really help your business.

So honestly, just networking with them, providing, you know, kind of the data we're seeing and kind of value and seeing telling them that there's no really cost to just kind of sharing me your data.

So Tracy mentioned the sort of timing of purchases or people trying to accumulate or stockpile at times of high stress, when prices are really high again, maybe due to a drought or whatnot. Do you see farmers essentially expanding their geographical search so such that they start buying, hey from an auction house or a hay farm or whatever that wouldn't normally be under typical conditions economical for them to purchase from.

Yeah, you know, I actually had this question the other day, and I was on a call with Rock Valley, my main go to guy, and I was like, are you guys seeing any shipping or any transactions coming from more west of view? Yeah, I just kind of I was kind of testing a hypothesis of Okay, so the drought is very tight over in these western states, are buyers coming over to these eastern states and producing it? Because we did see a spike kind of in auction data.

We kind of covered it a little bit maybe on the Reddit, but we called it kind of the Missouri pattern. It was kind of a hypothesis we were text testing, so it basically gets So after we figured out that the drought and you know, supply is very very tight there in the Western States, we started watching those western Midwest states. So we we saw demand in or prices in Missouri go up, and they're like, okay, well, we'll keep an eye on it. And then the next week we saw Rock Valley's prices kind of spike a little bit, and they're like, okay, so maybe there is some demand coming over from there. And then the next week we saw, you know, get go up a little bit a little bit again. So it's kind of what we're seeing right now.

I can't confirm, folly if it's true, because auction house we check in Missouri posts their data monthly, so and then Rock Valley is weekly. So it's just a kind of cool, Like I guess I'm kind of it's like a lego set. I'm kind of just like building peace by piece and it's like a puzzle, trying to solve the puzzle.

Okay, so talk to us. I know you're not in agriculture directly, but I'm sure you've heard some things about this. Talk to us about the second order effects of higher hay prices. And here I got to shout out our fellow Bloomberg podcaster, Katie Greifeld, as a horse and so I asked her if she had noticed any changes in hay prices, and she said, like the cost of boarding had gone up because of hay prices.

Boarding the horse.

And then I saw another headline just before we recorded this podcast about a horse sanctuary in Texas on the brink of closure because of rising hay prices and also gas. So are people feeling the effects of these higher prices?

Yeah? Absolutely, just talking with farmers and you even horse owners across the country. I personally, my family owns horses, so I can kind of see this firsthand. But yeah, I've been talking to a lot of farmer or horse owners and they're basically saying, we love our horse so much, but the return on investment on horses right now is just like it's too it's too expensive. No, I'm paying so much to the horse and we don't know like exactly what what we're gonna do because it's so expensive.

But and then on the other side of things, some dairy houses, these these dairies are gonna be the ones behind the higher quality RFI alfalfa to you know, feed these cows that are producing eighty pounds of milk a day, and they're actually taking that high, higher quality RFI and then mixing it with lower quality RFI to you know, control their rations and you know, maybe create a little more volume. So especially with these crazy high prices, they can kind of control their their volume a little more.

And then on top of that, I was talking to a farmer the other day and he said, so he went to go put his hay up up in the auction, but he actually pulled it back because the demand for hay was getting so increasingly, like it was getting really tight and he needed the hay. So he's kind of predicting it to get even tighter. So Yeah, as I can tell, a lot of people are kind of feeling the out out outcomes of the high high hay prices.

Just to back up, for example, so you mentioned horses cows also eat hay.

Right, yes, yes, so cows will eat There's different types of qualities. I guess you could.

Say walk through.

Did you say something like RFD What was the term used, like higher? What was it.

RFV? Relative feed value which basically is which could I think I'm pretty sure it controls or it gets the protein contents and the fiber in the hay, and it's it's a base of one hundred, So anything like one hundred and fifty I think is pretty good. Below that you can see the lower quality. Hey, So, like I said, the dairies are going to be using that higher quality alfalfa and supreme hey higher RFV to have their cows on the best, and then you're gonna have the the e kind people the horses also using this higher quality stuff because they love their horses and they only want what's better for the horses. And then you have the lower quality type of stuff which is going to go to like the utility and fair which is going to

go to your beef, which are is just a cheap way to you know, beef up your cow for a cheaper prices set of paying the premium alfalfa and then yeah, there's there's there's so many different qualities.

Yeah, yeah, just.

Real quickly, So hey made out of l Felfa's high quality? What is low quality hay mode made out of?

Yeah, so low quality Hey, which will be lower RF feet. I'm pretty sure. You know, I'm not a farm kid, but I'm pretty sure. It's the amount of dryness and the protein contents. So when it rains, rain affects a lot. You have to have a dry a dry weak or forecast to produce or cut hay, and if it rains rank and decrease the protein and nutritional value in the hay.

I think the lower quality stuff is drier and doesn't have the leaf content that the higher quality stuff does because that's where the protein is is in the leaf and then the fiber comes from stem.

Are you seeing anyone devote more acreage to growing hay as a result of these high prices, because I'm kind of thinking I got two fields they're not doing anything except growing invasive weeds at the moment. Maybe I could rent them out for hay production.

Yeah, you know, I'm not really seeing that, but I'm not really sure on that one if I'm seeing people do that. But I actually was thinking about this other day kind of driving past twenty minutes south of me. I would drive on the highway and I realized that Google was actually going to build a four hundred eighty two acre data center twenty minutes south of me, and I was like thinking, how will this affect the agricultural land?

I mean, you know, it's already not a lot of people are I fought is kind of in a weird spot. And hey, because they're already competing against the other crops, you know, the more stable crops like corn and soybeans. So how are these data centers gonna you know, they're gonna go on agricultural land, so kind of vice versa.

You were saying, how are they gonna take away this agricultural land? And you know, I was kind of thinking too. The four hundred a to two acre data center Google's building here is going to be cooled by air. But what if you put those kind of in the Western States and where the drought conditions are and alfalfa is already a very water intrusive plant, so then alfalfa is gonna have to be competing with these big data centers for water. I really, I really, I'm really seeing kind of the flip side of it, kind of kind of just what I'm seeing personally. So, but yeah, you did mention you had signify acres in I think you do have four different options from what I know. That's kind of the next niche I kind of want to get into,

because once again it's kind of like the hey not, my dad's kind of going through the same process. He just closed one hundred and sixty acre farm here and he had the question of I don't really know what to do with it. But I don't know. I'm not an expert on it yet, but I do know there's a couple options. You can rent it out to your farm or to farmers basically like rent per acre, and then you can the USDA will basically pay you to conserve it. And then the downside of that is you probably lose your land or access to your land for twenty five to thirty five years. And then the third choice is kind of the money crop. Right now, I guess you can these solar panel companies are coming in to maybe place solar panel panels on your fields for

a huge chunk of change. But also are you okay with you know, putting solar panel on appreciating farm land? So, I mean there's there's a couple of options, and like you said, you can also grow start going hey or growevery crop is producing the most money, I guess, so there's some options that. That's as much as I know right now. But yeah, it's pretty interesting, Tracy.

Have you considered putting a data center under Yeah? No, is that something?

You know?

You could put maybe half the land solar panels and then they could power a data center on the other. So many it's like a jackpot episode of like things that were interested in.

Well, the solar panel thing is true because in the Northeast where I'm based some of the time, I see a lot of farms that are now like just solar huge fields of solar panels. Yeah.

Wow, they're so big.

In fact, whenever I drive past one, it's so big it looks like a body of water off in the distance.

It's kind of beautiful. I don't know, it's interesting.

Yeah, it's interesting.

How big is the hay market just generally, like what do we like again?

I don't know, Like, yeah, how big is it? Volume wise, dollar wise, all that stuff.

Yeah, so the haymarket is actually pretty pretty dang big. I mean, you have hay acreage covering forty nine to fifty million acres across the US and itself. Alfalfa itself is producing eight billion dollars per year, which is the fourth most valuable crop. And that kind of brings my question back to So it's it's pretty pretty big, you know, market commodity, and there's not really a firm transparency layer.

So yeah, it's it's really big.

Are you still in college?

Yep. I just finished my first two years at the University of Jamestown going into my third.

Wow.

Okay, so what you know, you're juggling a business as well as college. What's next for Haywire. You mentioned like maybe evaluating different options for land owners, but where do you want to take those?

Yeah? So I guess, like I said, the main goal is kind of be on top of you know, the kind of hey chain. You know, you got your producers, your farmers, and then you got your brokers. We kind of want to be at the top, you know, being the benchmark data for these prices regionally. So we just want to be that information layer on the top and you know, just providing this information to these farmers so they can kind of make better decisions based off of timing and then based off of what the market's actually seeing in their region. You know, I would I like the newsletter. I kind of like hearing people connect, connecting to people. I love answering my emails and kind of picking people's brains. And then we would we would eventually

like to also be you know, just kind of more the business side of things. You know, give someone maybe our API database and they can use it for their website. You know, that's kind of a business plan. Not necessarily what we want out of the hay market, but yeah, that's kind of what we want to do. Just build that transparency layer a little better.

You know, we work for a company, then, I mean really there's I started under like the same premise, so like that you literally, you know, you could you could want this could one day be a fortune five hundred company for you.

I mean, there's the idea of.

Like agricultural data, find.

Some data niche make it built layer on top.

I have a confession. Yeah, so when I started started first planning this business, our model was the Bloomberg for Hey, there we.

Go, there we go.

You know, we've had so can I say something. We've had people come on, I've seen the Bloomberg of ECS, Bloomberg of waty. People always say this.

This I find to be legitimate. You know what I'm saying.

Everyone wants to be the bloomberg of something. But when I think about how you're like building this from the ground up, et cetera, Like you didn't even have to say it. It's like you're building the potentially the bloomberg of Hay.

One day you may have a TV network.

And hey, future is based on if we have.

Ple like so that's a question.

I mean, this is that's clearly a theoretical way, which is like you can't have a hedgeable, tradeable, financialized market until you first have that index write something that everyone agrees on as a reference price. At night when you dream about the future, like could you see have you thought about the possibility of essentially, okay, this could be something that financial exchanges could now benchmark something against.

You know, I have to about it. But it's also very tricky because you have to have mother nature on your side to kind of standardize the or like make it more stable. I guess it's very unstable. I mean too much drought, too much rain, you know, too much heat, like all these different inputs can really have effects on outputs.

That just makes it so unpredictable, you know.

But they why, this is why we need a this is why we need a hedgeable instrument, precisely because of this volatility.

So I think, I think there's yeah, there's something there.

Yeah, there's something there. For sure.

I would I would love to be the guy that does that.

Then, So from your perspective, let's say, like you know, opacity is a friend to some people in any business, right, there are a lot of businesses that sort of, you know, they can have higher margins because their customers aren't aware of the prices available, like the and you know, obviously the consumer wants more transparency, but some people benefit from the opacity. Is there anyone in the supply chain of Hey, et cetera, or in the market for Hey that theoretically stands to lose out if customers are and farmers are more informed about prices?

Yeah? Absolutely. So this kind of ties back to my dad working for a private brokerage here in my hometown, and I was actually talking about this with it. I said, who kind of loses out on this? And he says, typically in business, especially commandies, the mentalman will always feel the out or the outcomes of more transparency because they're the ones making deals, especially in the haymarket, kind of blindly and kind of just guessing. I mean I called I witnessed firsthand. I sat there and someone called the owner and was just like, can I do one hundred and fifty seven? This is example? Can I just do one hundred and fifty seven dollars per ton for you know, X amount of bails or tons? Yeah? And he was like, yeah, yeah,

that works. So we're not going off anything here. There's no transparency and that can either work for the broker or that can you know, maybe make margins with a little slimmer. So I do think that the middleman will always, you know, have something to lose with more transparency.

All right, Aiden Johnson of Haywire, thank you so much for coming on odd Laws. That was really fun.

Yeah, I appreciate you guys having me on.

So Joe, that was a really fun conversation. I mean, it is fascinating to see someone like Vibe Code just kind of database, right, and it does seem like low hanging fruit for a bunch of other different markets. What I will say though, is whenever we do these like agricultural or food episodes, there seems to be this overriding theme in recent years, which is volatility.

Right, Like we're.

Getting these big spikes, sometimes we're getting big down although often the drops are not as big as the initial spikes, and so you can see like there is a need here not just for price transparency, but also potentially for some sort of hedging instrument.

Totally, absolutely, I do think there's a lot of probably a lot more data out there. I also just think this is like a very interesting AI story specifically because it's a very clear example of here's a new type of business that might not have been economical to run. Like, you know, maybe there's not tons of subscribers willing to pay up.

I think, sure, you have been doing it while you're in college.

No, so the pro version.

So he's a free version of his newsletter which I'm going to subscribe to, and there's a pro version, and you know what, I'll subscribe to that too. It's just fourteen dollars a month. But okay, fourteen dollars a month is like not a ton of money, even if you're like, you know, a thousand, you know, it's like, it's not a ton. But if you could do it with two people, and if you can automate a really big chunk of it, Yeah, and automated, and only because AI makes it really easy to do things like ingest the data, turn them into pretty charts and so forth, keep a database, give people AI access. Suddenly there's all these new markets that markets that theoretically could become unlocked simply because here is data

out there and you could put it in the usable form in a way that would have just been too laborious prior to it.

Yeah, libelious. So that was a I'm sorry, but.

It's a It is a It is a clear example of like, okay, this is a productivity unlocked.

Yeah, and I have no doubt that it works.

This is you know, some things with AI like don't work as well, but I'm pretty sure automated. You can feel pretty confident that that's something that you can build, et cetera. I'm very I think it's really cool. Oh, the price of being a founding member is going to rise to seventeen dollars a month after June thirtieth, So get it.

Rising along with the hay price. Yeah, all right, shall we leave it there?

Let's leave it there.

This has been another episode of the Odd Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway and.

I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart. Follow Aiden Johnson He's at Aiden Johnson Underscore and check out Haywire haywireag dot com. Follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Erman Dash, Ol Bennett at Dashbot, Calebrooks at Keilbrooks and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lisano and from our odd loads content. Go to Bloomberg dot com slash odd lots or have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes and you can shout about all of these topics twenty four seven in our discord Discord dot gg slash odd lots.

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How a Vibecoded Newsletter Is Making the Hay Market More Transparent

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