Tracy Aloway: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Aloway.

Joe Weisenthal: and I'm Joe Wisenthal. Joe, I was uh lurking on the Homestead subreddit recently, [laughter] as one does, and

Tracy Aloway: as one, as Tracy does, um there have been a number of posts recently about hay prices and hay 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."

Joe Weisenthal: [laughter] I love episodes that come about that way. All right. Can I make a little confession here?

Tracy Aloway: Please.

Joe Weisenthal: I've done no prep for this episode. I mean, I, 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. I've just Yeah,

Tracy Aloway: you know a little bit about hay though because we spoke with um that was it New Mexico or Arizona now? I can't remember the farmer growing alalfa.

Joe Weisenthal: Yeah, it's like fermented, right? Isn't hay like sort of like fermented and dried or something?

Tracy Aloway: Yeah, something like that.

Joe Weisenthal: I mean, I guess we'll 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.

Tracy Aloway: Yeah. Oh, right. I did. We did learn that.

Joe Weisenthal: All right. So, that's the one hay fact that we all know. So, we're going to be talking about hay prices today. But beyond that, I find the hay market really interesting because [laughter] there are No, seriously. No, no, I believe you. I believe you. There aren't that many markets out there nowadays that are like non-transparent. I want to say

Tracy Aloway: do we have any hay indices on the terminal?

Joe Weisenthal: There's a PPI index.

Tracy Aloway: Oh, it is. Yeah. Okay. So, you can look up like alphaalfpha hay pi.

Joe Weisenthal: So, how's that been looking? I assume I mean everything is up. I I just like if you name something that exists in the world, it's probably up.

Tracy Aloway: But what is US hay seeds? Yeah. Well, no. I don't know. Is this even up to date? I 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 alalfa, there's supreme hay. Um, so I was just going to say, like I said, I haven't done any I don't know anything about hey. I decided I would just learn it all on the fly, but I also I did do a little bit of research about our upcoming guest who you identified

Joe Weisenthal: the guy posting on Reddit. 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 hay is advice I've given to young journalists who have like asked me like for career I've literally said this and I'm going to drop some alpha uh no I'm going to drop some that was an I'm going to drop some alalfa alpha here and but now it'll be commoditized by the time I say it I've always thought that one way you could like build a business as a young journalist or someone is find a 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, write update what X is doing each week or month or whatever, you can become the man, the axe 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 hay, but I'm also curious about uh this individual's business model.

Tracy Aloway: It's a good market structure story and I guess technology story and 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 Aiden Johnson. He is the founder of Can you guess? Well, you know what the company is, Haywire. It's such a good name um for what this company actually does. So Aiden, thank you so much for coming on OddLods.

Aiden Johnson: Yeah, I appreciate you guys having me on. 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 plain English newsletters for our subscribers. So, um I mean USDA publishes reports uh weekly, bi-weekly, and then even monthly depending on region. So, uh we kind of built a 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 plain English. So, it's it's been a great great um I don't know, like lesson, I guess, learning going through the flaws, making sure were producing the most accurate data. But, no, it's been fun.

Tracy Aloway: Well, let's go into this a little bit more. And I'm sure that AI makes the process of collecting [snorts] and absorbing the relevant data uh easier. But what are these reports out there that you're able to mine? Who's producing them? what what are the what is the sort of the the public data source that you're mining and what can you pull from it?

Aiden Johnson: Yeah, so we actually have a direct API integration with the USDA. So we get live feed strictly from them and that basically funnels into our four system type of I guess you could say verification and so we're mining that which publishes every week but the problem we're kind of running into is data. Sorry. Yeah. So, the USDA 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 the ground there and then it'll be um put on a PDFs but buried in PDF. So, it's kind of hard for people to find.

Tracy Aloway: Yeah. So, you actually call up some of the auction houses, by the way. I didn't even realize there were auctions. I didn't either for hay, but you call them up to get additional pricing information as well, right?

Aiden Johnson: Yeah. So, we actually have uh Rock Valley Iowa uh Rock Valley 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 intel from what they're seeing on the ground to kind of cover the gray area between the USDA data and the live market, what people are actually seeing on the ground. And we are actively trying to, you know, branch off and network to more auction houses throughout uh the country to different regions so we can kind of get a forecast what's actually happening there.

Joe Weisenthal: Joe, this reminds me of the old scrap metal market, right? Where like you had a broker who actually had to call up all these junkyards and ask what 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 and I remember 11 or 12 years ago like very early on talk when I joined Bloomberg talking to one of our reporters uh she was based in London who was covering scrap metal and she talked about that part of it was essentially calling up uh the scrap yards and say what'd you price for and of course you know it's not that different from liebore right it's not like we think of something like these very opaque illquid markets like scrap metal but that fundamental idea of we're going to ring people up or get 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 alpha. That's the that yes that's calling people up.

Tracy Aloway: Calling people of 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?

Aiden Johnson: Yeah. So there's many sources that um we can pull our data from, but specifically on the USDA data, it'll it'll show the region uh the type of bail, the weight, you know, the quality of hay or alphalfpha 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 it kind of presets. So we're able to make sure it's not uh the the data that's coming from the ground is, you know, valuable and actually not uh hallucinations, I guess.

Joe Weisenthal: You know, uh I know we're going to get to hay specifically, but just as we're talking about sort of this business model, there have been some really successful, you know, I think like it might be flight radar 24. One of these other uh things that was worth a lot of money was essentially some people who found a really good way to visualize or present Yeah. data that was already public but it's opaque etc. 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 it user interface you make a user 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 a very monetizable thing.

Tracy Aloway: 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? And if you don't mind me saying so, like you look you look very young. I assume you're a young founder of Haywire. Uh why was this your your first project? Yeah. Your passion project.

Aiden Johnson: Oh man. Well, if you were to tell me this last year, I wouldn't believe you because the idea was kind of thrown out by my dad who was actually looking to start a startup company for Alpha Cubes. And throughout that process, he kind of needed he was crunching number and he asked the question, what is the cost of hay to, you know, find that raw materials price? So that's kind of how it all started. And 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 on. I'm 19 years old. I'm a college basketball player. I don't really care about Hey, which year was it? This was year 2025. Okay. Oh, okay. So this this conversation happened in 2025. And at the time, you know, I'm I'm a college basketball player. Um, I don't really care about hay, but you know, I always knew I wanted to kind of get into entrepreneurialship, I guess. And I'm like, dad, you know, you know, you know, I want to run a business, but you know, hay 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 um 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 rabbit hole. I'm like, which kind of started out as a vibe code project with no infrastructure or no system at all. um kind of turned into something we thought uh we knew that was reachable. So we kind of got into that. Um you know just we 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 hay market is very untransparent I guess you could say. So we found a problem. Uh 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 uh that's kind of how it all came about. And you know, we've been kind of attacking it every day. And I'm very grateful for my dad to ask the question, what is the price of alpha alpha and hay?

Tracy Aloway: Uh do you have a girlfriend now? Did you get one yet?

Aiden Johnson: Uh absolutely not. So people ask um 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. Um, in the process.

Joe Weisenthal: All right. Well, odd thoughts listeners in in Minnesota, uh, eligible young bachelor, uh, 20 years old, um, just, uh, we're just putting it out there, maybe we'll do, uh, we can do some matchmaking for you. Um this [laughter] just um had your dad had this idea, I don't know, had this been 10 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?

Aiden Johnson: Oh no. 10 years ago, I don't think I would even scratch the surface of getting to the death I am here now. Um, and that's just simply because I think the infrastructure of AI is getting smarter and smarter every day and it makes it able for, you know, two young 20-year-olds like me and my co-founder Cole to, you know, mess around and create a whole company and platform. So, um, yeah, I don't I don't think it would be um it would probably take a big team uh 10 years ago.

Tracy Aloway: Tracy, I I already want to be Aiden Johnson. Like, I'm 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. Find your hay, you know, find your alpha. Yeah. What is your hay? Pursue your Timothy dream. Um, 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&P 500 or another index like the Dow Jones. Is there a particular hay price I should be looking at?

Aiden Johnson: You know, not really. Um, the USDA, USDA, um, NASS is what it's called, will, you know, produce kind of an average cost of hay. So, right now, I'm looking at hay for April, it's $180 per ton, which is up $167 from March. And then for the alpha alpha side of things, it's $185 a ton, which is up from $175 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 benchmark it against? Cuz you know, people aren't really going into those USDA PDF files unless you kind of have a 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, uh, Rock Valley specifically is in the Midwest, um, 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 it's not just one market. Um, 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 you think like there's so many inputs um how it affects the quality of hay to you know produce the output you know Minnesota hay may not be the same as California hay in terms of price because it's just all h very hyper local markets

Joe Weisenthal: [music] [music] just on the girlfriend thing. You're 66 [laughter] and you can dunk a basketball, I see on Twitter. Okay, sorry. I'm just Oh, you're really doing all you can to help here, Joe. I'm I'm looking at his uh Twitter [laughter] profile and uh and you can dunk. I'm really impressed. I wish I I couldn't. Appreciate that. Appreciate it. Yeah. No, it's uh it's really cool. Let's talk about these um 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 uh 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 with lumber with Stinson and Dean as an example. To what degree are they generally correlated across the country? Like will they gener will prices generally rise and fall around the same time even if there are wide gaps in the un uh you know wide spreads from one region to another?

Aiden Johnson: Yeah. So there is a bunch of different factors to kind of how um different regions can uh you know be affected by markets. I mean, you think of what's kind of going on in the west right now. Um, with the the drought kind of going on, 46% of the US alphalfpha 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 I don't really like there's not really much out there I guess for hay. I mean, there's lot hobby farms and it's like small square markets out there, but it's kind of its own ecosystem cuz it's cool because it 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 going to 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 $5 to $8 per mile to have it shipped. So, that can easily average to be more valuable than the hay. So, it's it's kind of it's kind of weird. So, yeah. Um I guess so.

Tracy Aloway: If I'm in a location, one of the droughtstricken uh states, droughtstricken states, that's hard to say. Um, I'm reading the USDA, one of the USDA reports right now, and it says, "Hay prices continue to increase as ranchers search for hay." Are you seeing people who are trying to like bulk buy or secure supply ahead of more price increases?

Aiden Johnson: I mean, yeah, I'm I'm I'm seeing right now and, you know, just talking with farmers kind of networking across the country, um, 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 2025 is essentially gone.

Joe Weisenthal: Sorry, I actually did find uh 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 indices. So, I have 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 a Bloomberg terminal, they can also any farmers out there want to look up prices. Bloomberg actually offers a uh [laughter] a haywire competitor. You just get a bunch of other stuff. You're probably not uh interested. But no, but this gets to my 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 in the house produce and some people sell. How did you how do you go about um finding farmers or or growers or anyone in the business, anyone in the chain? How do you get them to discover haywire?

Aiden Johnson: I guess just networking. Obviously, Discovery, a big part of that has been on the Homestead Reddit, where Tracy 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. Trying to 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 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. Um, but we 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 it especially these old gen farmers, they're not really going to adapt to technology like that. So it's been kind of uh 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 um honestly just networking with them providing um you know kind of the data we're seeing and kind of the value and see showing them that there's no really cost to just kind of sharing me your data.

Tracy Aloway: Um, so Tracy mentioned the sort of timing of purchases or people trying to uh 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 hay from an auction house or a hay farm or whatever that wouldn't normally be under typical conditions economical for them to purchase from.

Aiden Johnson: Yeah. You know, I I actually had this question the other day and I was on a call with Rock Valley, my my main go-to guy, and I was like, "Are you guys seeing any shipping or any transactions coming from more west of you?" 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 it we called it kind of the Missouri pattern. It was kind of hypothesis we were testing. So it basically is 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 um 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 it 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 fully if it's true because auction house we track in Missouri postes 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 piece by piece and it's like a puzzle trying to solve the puzzle.

Tracy Aloway: 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 Griffeld um who has a horse. Oh yeah. And so I asked her if she had like noticed any changes in hay prices and she said like the cost of boarding had gone up because of hay prices. Boarding. Oh, board 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?

Aiden Johnson: Yeah, absolutely. Um 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 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 maintain the horse and we don't know like exactly what what we're going to do because it's so expensive. But and then on the other side of things, some dairy houses, um these these dairies are going to be the ones buying the higher quality RF alalfa to um you know, feed these cows that are producing 80 pounds of milk a day. And they're actually taking that high higher quality RF and then mixing it with lower quality RF to, you know, um 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 outcomes of these high high hay prices.

Joe Weisenthal: Just to back up for uh so you mentioned horses. Cows also eat hay, right?

Aiden Johnson: Yes. Yes. So cows cows will eat there's different types of qualities I guess you could say.

Joe Weisenthal: Yeah. Walk through us these qualities. Did you say something like RFD? What was the term you used? Like higher what was it?

Aiden Johnson: RFV. a relative feed value. Okay. Which basically is which I think I'm pretty sure it it it controls or it it gets the protein contents and the fiber in the the hay. And it's it's a base of 100. So anything like 150 I think is pretty good. Below that you can see the lower quality hay. So, like I said, the dairies are going to be um using that higher quality alalfa and supreme hay, higher RFV to have their cows on the best. And then you're going to have the the e-cline people, the horses also using this higher quality stuff because they love their horses and they only want what's best for their 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 it's just a cheap way to you know beef up your cow for a cheaper price instead of paying the premium alalfa. And then yeah there's there's there's so many different qualities.

Joe Weisenthal: Yeah. Yeah. Just real quickly. So hay made out of alalfa is high quality. What is lowquality hay made out of?

Aiden Johnson: Yeah. So lowquality um hay, which will be lower RFV. I I'm pretty sure, you know, I'm not a farm kid, but I'm pretty sure it's the the amount of dryness and the protein contents. So when when it rains, rain affects a lot. You have to have a dry a dry week or forecast to produce um or cut hay. And if it rains, rain can decrease the protein and nutritional value in the hay. I think the lower quality stuff is drier and doesn't have the leaf content um that the higher quality stuff does because that's where the protein is in is in the leaf and then the fiber comes from the stem.

Tracy Aloway: [music] [music] [music] 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 I got two fields. They're not doing anything except growing invasive weeds at the moment. Um maybe I could rent them out for hay production.

Aiden Johnson: Yeah. You know, I'm not I'm not really seeing that, but um I'm I'm not really sure on that one if I'm seeing people doing that. But I actually was thinking about this other day kind of driving past 20 minutes south of me. And I was driving on the highway and I I realized that Google is actually going to build a 482 acre data center 20 minutes south of me and I was like thinking how could this affect the agricultural land. I mean you know it's already not a lot of people are alalfa is kind of in a weird spot in hay because they're already competing against the other crops um you know the more stable crops like corn and soybeans. So, how are these data centers going to, you know, they're going to go on agricultural land. So, Oh, yeah. kind of vice versa, you were saying, how are they going to take away this agricultural land? And, you know, I was kind of thinking too, the 482 acre um 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 alalfa is already a very water intrusive plant. So then alalfa is going to have to be competing with these big data centers for water. I 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 75 acres and um 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. um he just closed on 164 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 um 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 uh the USDA will basically pay you to conserve it and then the the downside of that is you probably lose your land or access to your land for 25 to 35 years. Uh 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 um for a huge chunk of change, but also are you okay with you know putting solar panel on appreciating farmland? So I mean there's there's a couple options and like you said you can also grow start growing hay or grow whatever 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.

Joe Weisenthal: Tracy, have you considered putting a data center on your land? [laughter] You know, uh is that something you you know, you could put maybe half the land solar panels and then they could power a data center on the other. You're getting like so many. [laughter] It's like a jackpot episode of like things that we're interested in.

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

Joe Weisenthal: It's kind of beautiful.

Tracy Aloway: I don't know. I mean, it's interesting.

Joe Weisenthal: Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, it's interesting. Um how big is the hay market? Uh just generally like what do we like? Again, I I I don't know like Yeah. How big is it volume-wise, dollar-wise, all that stuff?

Aiden Johnson: Yeah. So, the hay market is actually u pretty pretty dang big. I mean, you you have hay acorage covering 49 to 50 million acres across the US and itself, alalfa itself is producing 8 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.

Tracy Aloway: Are you still in college?

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

Tracy Aloway: Oh wow. Okay. So what you know, you're juggling a business um 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 this?

Aiden Johnson: Yeah. So, I guess like I said, the main goal is kind of be on top of, you know, the kind of hay chain. Uh, you know, you got your producers, your farmers, and then you got your brokers. We kind of want to be at the top, uh, 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 um what the market's actually seeing in their region. You know, I would I I like the newsletter. I kind of like um 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 a business plan, not necessarily what we want out of the hey market. But yeah, that's kind of what we want to do. Just build that transparency layer a little better.

Joe Weisenthal: You know, we work for a company that [laughter] sort of I mean really this I started under like the same premise. So like that you literally, you know, you could you could one this could one day be a Fortune 500 company for you. I mean this the idea of like find agricultural database. Yeah. Find some data niche, make it built, layer on top.

Aiden Johnson: I have a confession. Yeah. Um, so when I first started first planning this business, our motto was the Bloomberg for Hey,

Joe Weisenthal: there we [laughter] 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 X, Bloomberg of Y. 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, etc. Like you didn't even have to say it. It's like you are building the uh potentially the Bloomberg of hey, one day you may have a TV network and could we [laughter] have futures based on if we had benchmark? Well, 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 tradable financialized market until you first have that index, right? 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

Aiden Johnson: you know I have thought 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 it's very unstable I mean too much drought uh too 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, like this is why we need a this is why we need a hedgeable instrument precisely because of this volatility. So I think um I think there's

Tracy Aloway: Yeah, there's something there.

Joe Weisenthal: Yeah, there's something there for sure.

Aiden Johnson: I I would I would love to be the guy that does that then. [laughter] So from your perspective,

Tracy Aloway: 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 uh transparency but some people benefit from the opacity. Is there anyone in the supply chain of hay etc or in the market for hay that theoretically stands to lose out if customers are uh and farmers are more informed about prices?

Aiden Johnson: 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 him. I said, "Who kind of who kind of loses out on this?" And he says typically in business, especially commodities, the middleman will always feel the u out or the outcomes of more transparency because they're the ones making deals u especially in the hay market kind of blindly and kind of just guessing. I mean, I call I I witnessed firsthand my I I sat there and someone called the owner and was just like, um, can I do 157, this is example, can I just do $157 um per ton for, you know, x amount of bales or tons? 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 a little slimmer. So, I I do think that the middleman will always, you know, have something to lose with more transparency.

Tracy Aloway: All right, Aiden Johnson of Haywire, thank you so much for coming on OddLocks. That was really fun.

Aiden Johnson: Yeah, I appreciate you guys having me on. [music]

Tracy Aloway: So, Joe, that was a really fun conversation. I mean, it is fascinating to see someone like vibe code this kind of database, right? And it does seem like lowhanging 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 drops 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.

Joe Weisenthal: Totally. Absolutely. I do think there's a lot of uh 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 is 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 for sure you wouldn't have been doing it while you're in college.

Tracy Aloway: No. So the pro version. So he has 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 $14 a month. But okay, $14 a month is like not a ton of money. Even if you had 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 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 market that markets that theoretically could become unlocked simply because here is data out there and you could put it in a usable form in a way that would have just been too laborious prior to it.

Joe Weisenthal: Yeah. Leelious. Leelius bales of no that was a bit forced. I'm sorry. But it's a it is a uh it is a clear example of like okay this is a productivity unlock and I have no doubt that it works. This is you know some things with AI like don't work as much but I'm pretty sure but automated you can feel pretty confident that that's something that you can build etc. Um I'm I'm very uh I think it's really cool. Oh, the price of being a founding member is going to rise to $17 a month after June 30th. So, get

Tracy Aloway: rising along with the hay prices. Yeah. All right. Shall we leave it there?

Joe Weisenthal: Let's leave it there.

Tracy Aloway: This has been another episode of the Odd Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Aloway. You can follow me at Tracy Aloway. And if you enjoy OddLotss, [music] if you like it when we talk about hay prices, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg [music] subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely adree. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcast and follow [music] the instructions there. Thanks for listening. [music]

Joe Weisenthal: And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at the stalwart. Follow Aiden Johnson. He's at Aiden Johnson_. And check out Haywire. Haywire.com. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Arman, Dashel Bennett at D-Bot, Kale Brooks at Kalebrooks, and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano. And for more OddLots content, go to bloomberg.com/odlots. We have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes, and you can chat about all these topics 24/7 in our Discord, discord.gg/odlotss.