e145. Another Income Stream from Land Use with Nic De Castro

Transcript generated by Podium.page Help us spread the word by tweeting about us at @podiumdotpage and including us in your shownotes! https://podium.page NOTE: There were 2 speakers identified in this transcript. Speaker separation errors can arise when multiple speakers speak simultaneously. 0:00:00 - Cal Welcome to the Grazing Grass Podcast, episode 145. 0:00:04 - Nic This is going to be a great way to stack another enterprise on to an operation. As we know, you kind of have to do to be profitable, and it's something that you stay in control of. 0:00:15 - Cal You're listening to the Grazing Grass Podcast, sharing information and stories of grass-based livestock production utilizing regenerative practices. I'm your host, Cal Hartage. You're growing more than grass. You're growing a healthier ecosystem to help your cattle thrive in their environment. You're growing your livelihood by increasing your carrying capacity and reducing your operating costs. You're growing stronger communities and a legacy to last generations. The grazing management decisions you make today impact everything from the soil beneath your feet to the community all around you. That's why the Noble Research Institute created their Essentials of Regenative Grazing course to teach ranchers like you easy-to-follow techniques to quickly assess your forage, production and infrastructure capacity in order to begin grazing more efficiently. Together, they can help you grow not only a healthier operation, but a legacy that lasts. Learn more on their website at nobleorg slash grazing. It's n-o-b-l-e dot org. Forward slash grazing. On last Wednesday's episode, we had Taylor Morger on to share about what's happening on his farm since we last talked to him and how he's utilizing land trusts to have another income stream for his farm. Nick DiCastro and we talk about his journey to land trust and what it's doing for landowners as well as for hunters or people who would like access to land. I think it's very interesting. I think it's a very valid avenue for some enterprise stacking to get another income stream. So I hope you find benefit from it income stream. So I hope you find benefit from it. 0:02:29 - Nic Yeah, I really appreciate having me on Cal, and I know we're both. We got a bit of a cough going, so I got little kids that are, of course, in school and you walk into the school. It sounds like an infirmary, so I'm I'll try to be good on the mute button. Appreciate it, that's right. I don't think you get it that way. I was born in Southern California. I just turned 37 years old. I grew up hunting, fishing, surfing, spearfishing just a bunch of great stuff. You know I got I feel like I got the end of the golden age of Southern California before they, you know, put 15, 20 million people down there community and, yeah, then went to school in the East coast lived in the cities. I was a sales guy for a long time so I was kind of playing streams and automobiles for the first, you know, for most of my twenties, and then moved to the Rocky mountain West and moved to Boulder, first when I was working for a startup, and then in end of 16, I moved to Bozeman where I was living up until about two months ago. So that's very quick high level on me. Yeah, I mean I think my I'm pretty sure my earliest memory is, you know, dove hunting with my dad when I was like three and a half years old in the deserts of Southern California, close to the Mexico border. I mean literally 150 degree heat, it's. I think it's my earliest memory. I was like three and a half years old in the deserts of Southern California, close to the Mexico border. I mean literally 150 degree heat. I think it's my earliest memory. I've been fanatical about hunting and fishing since I was little. I would always say when I was little I want to be a professional fisherman when I grew up. Didn't work out but yeah, worked more in the marketing and advertising technology space so I did a lot of ad sales. I was kind of early in the YouTube world when YouTube was starting to get going and get more mainstream, and so, yeah, I did a lot of that and I like, I mean I love business and just kind of it's a never ending problem solving. So I've enjoyed it and obviously I've been, you know, running a company now for almost six years, landtrust that is. It uses technology to serve. I don't I don't like to call us a technology company, even though, yes, technically you know, we have a website and a marketplace and all that. But we feel, and I always kind of emphasize, that we're very service oriented, but, yes, technically it is a technology company. So when I moved, as I mentioned, I did a ton of traveling as, just as a sales guy in my 20s, so I didn't actually get to do a whole lot of hunting and fishing, it was just mainly, you know, flying between all the major cities and selling advertising, and so in 16, when I moved to Bozeman, I figured, hey, I want to live close to my passions. These are always there for work. If you need to fly to them, they're there. You know, I moved, I moved into 16 and then you know, kind of was immediately confronted with what today is land trust, which is in the West that we there's a ton of public land and public lands are fantastic resource. But you know I still found myself wanting to get out and hunt, fish and you know, kind of explore private ground and there's a ton of amazing private farms and ranches in and around the Bozeman area and across, obviously, montana and there just wasn't a great way to figure out how to do that, how to act it. Door knocking is kind of what it's always been. I'm sure a lot of your listeners you know door knocking has changed. You know, on the on the door knocker side it's a much lower percentage. You know thumbs up rate from landowners and I don't blame them for that, just because there's a lot more people doing it and it was just always I felt I found it kind of awkward. You know you're walking up to a stranger's door and especially in agriculture they're working. They're working all the time and so you're interrupting whatever they're doing and you both know what you're there for. But you're both, you know, like you're kind of trying to do the pleasantries and how's the weather and you know all that until you can go and do this thing on your property for free. I don't know it, just it't. It wasn't a great transaction. And so, you know, I had been an early host on Airbnb when I was living in New York city and just kind of started to get an experience of what that sharing economy felt like. All this is kind of the sharing economy. Hey, I have this asset, I'm not using it. You can use it, you know, for some amount of money. And so, you know, my mind immediately went to like there's got to be a better way. There's obviously a lot of supply. There's a lot of land out there that isn't being leveraged for, you know, recreation at all times. A lot of these farms and ranches are, you know, they're production agriculture, that's what they do and there's clearly a ton of demand, whether it's hunting, fishing, for whatever it might be. There's a lot of different user groups who really want access to more and more land just to do the things they're passionate about. There's just got to be a better way to, you know, bring these two together. And so that's what's on the path. I didn't actually. I was working for another company at the time, so I didn't actually start it right away. It was a couple of years before I actually said, hey, I got to build this thing and I I talked to entrepreneurs today, or maybe even aspiring entrepreneurs at college or whatnot, and I just I warned them not to do this thing of entrepreneurship, of trying to start a business unless they can't not do it, you know, unless it's burning a hole in your head, you know it's. It's a pretty tough journey and the same thing I mean farming and ranching pretty tough journey. A lot of people romanticize it. You know a tv shows. Honestly, we're both entrepreneurs, you know it's just mine's kind of on the technology side and farmers and ranchers is on the agriculture side and basically the land business and it's tough, it's stressful. There's not a lot of money in it. Theoretically you could make some money doing it, but it's, you know it's, it's a tough. So I always kind of tell them to heed the warning of like unless you truly, truly, truly are passionate about this thing, do something else. A lot more work than a nine to five. It's a lot more work than a nine to five. No, I was. I found the company before in my early twenties, when I was much younger, dumber, more ego, all that, which is a great mix of things. So you know, worked on that and you know it was one of those things was the right idea. It was just I wasn't ready for it yet. I made a ton of mistakes and, you know, learned a lot through all those mistakes. So I yeah, I had started a company before and, you know, worked on it for a few years, never took the full dive, though I never burned the ships, and I think that's also an issue. I tried to kind of side while I was making money doing other stuff, and you know you can spread yourself too thin. And you know you can spread yourself too thin. And you know I definitely learned that lesson too. Like if you're going to do something this hard I mean if you know how to do it on the side, please tell me how to do that, cause it would be nice to make a nice normal salary and be able to do this. That's right. That's right. Mine too, mine too. And and look, I'm not saying like the moment you have an idea, quit your job and or, you know, like there's obviously that kind of tapering off, but there has to be a point where you burn the ships and like this is it? There's no net and I'm on the tightrope. You gotta figure it out, that's right you can't. 0:10:44 - Cal That's right Okay. 0:10:58 - Nic Definitely not an engineer. I wish I was would make my life easier. I'm a sales guy, you know that's just kind of how I've made my living up until this point. So you know you have to. I mean, the good thing about sales is everything is sales. But you know you have to sell. You have to sell your initial employees on the idea that you're working on it's worth taking a risk on and spending some time on. Sell investors that this is the right idea to invest in. Even in your personal life you have to sell your wife on the idea that you're a good wagon to hitch, hitch themselves to Right. So for me it was idea. I had a co-founder originally, we were working on this and then you know, yeah, go find the engineering talent who can actually build the website, cause I can't do that and just start working on it. We raised a little bit of money. So in June of 19, we raised our first $100,000 of investment and then, july 1st of 19, I quit my well-paying job and you know that was kind of the burning the ships moment. August 5th, we had our first daughter. So with no insurance, it cost $12,000 to have a baby at a hospital in Bozeman, just FYI, but yeah, so we took that first $100,000 and started paying developers to actually build the product, and then October 2nd of 19 is when the actual website went live. Yeah, it's probably the latter. This was the. You know this idea clearly, I mean almost. I mean it's the right, it's the right idea. Ideas, by the way, are worth. Ideas are worth nothing. Execute. Execution is everything. This isn't my idea, it's just an idea. I'm just going to be the guy, hopefully, that executes it best. It's funny, over the years, the amount of people who've called me up and said, oh man, I had that idea and I go. Well, what did you do with it? So I always clear this is not my idea. The idea of land trust is just an idea. But yeah, I mean, I knew I was going to work on it. That first $100,000 of investment was the gave me the ability to say, okay, I ha, it gives me X amount of months of runway and I knew I was going to. I was going to raise more money. That was just the first bit of money. So it was okay, now's the time. But it wasn't like if I don't raise this money, I'm not going to do this thing, I'm going to do it either way. Oh yeah, so that summer before. So we launched a website October 2nd of the summer, july, august, september I was, you know, while the developers were building a website, I'm hustling around trying to beg, borrow, steal for any landowner to list their properties. So LandTrust is a two-sided marketplace, a supply side and a demand side. Marketplaces are really difficult to get going because in the beginning it's a chicken and the egg problem, right, landowners don't want to be there unless there's guests there and guests don't want to be there unless there's landowners. So you got to try to basically, will it? So, funny enough, we actually launched LandTr trust in New Jersey. So we were, I was based, you know, we're based in. I found a New Jersey farmer and if you guys have never been to New Jersey or listeners, you know New Jersey doesn't look like Newark. Most of New Jersey it's the garden state, like it's beautiful, it's a, it's, you know, serious farm, serious farm country. So we found a farmer he's probably around my age, you know he's kind of taking things over and he's like I got, you know, seven, I think. He has seven or ten farms, anywhere from like 60 to 180 acre all over kind of central new jersey. He's like all right, I'll list you. And so we had seven, eight, nine listings. And so we, you know, went and posted on hunting forums in New Jersey and you know, once the site was live well, setting the site live was like the day the night before. I'm thinking to myself what the hell did I just do? Like I left it. I left a good, paying job. I have a month old, two month old baby, my first, our first kid, and I'm like this is not never going to work. This is never going to work. It's, I mean, like, especially like those those doubt moments, those fear moments, you know they hit you acutely before, something like discreet, like that, like you can kind of tell yourself, oh, when the website's live, it all go well. But then when you're like pressing go, you're like this isn't gonna work. Oh, it was excruciating. It was two, I think it was seven to fourteen days for the first booking to come through. I mean, it was amazing when it happened, but it just excruciating. You're like, oh, my god, what am I gonna do? Yeah, yeah, excruciating, excruciating, yeah. And you know it was cool that first booking happened and the review came in, and it was amazing review and you're like, yeah, this is it, this is the right thing. Now we need to do a lot more faster, dude. So I'll start by saying today we're around a million and a half acres, we're getting real close to a million and a half, like 1.4 something, and we're in 42 states. Most of our landowners today are owner operator production agriculture, meaning you know, multi-generation farm and ranch families who live and work the ground. That land landowner, you know we found our way to them. We tried a bunch of different types of landowners in the beginning, like you're just trying stuff, right, who's this going to resonate with essentially? But we found our way to them and so you know I set that stage. So for that type of landowner, especially because it's really the heart and soul of who we serve today not saying we don't have other types of landowners too, but historically, like they're running a business operation. As you know, farming and ranching it's a business, it's an operation, it's got to be profitable, they got to make money. So, historically, if you just take hunting now of course we do more than hunting, but if you just take hunting, a farmer or rancher who has ground that has, you know hunting value the way they would be able to monetize that in the past is essentially through leases, right? So you do a hunting lease for a year, multi-year, whatever it is, whether it be to individuals, an outfit or a club, whatever it might be right, and so you know the benefit of it is is you get a check. Hey, here's 20 grand and you know, for the year, or whatever it might be, that's great. But what we have heard hundreds now thousands of times from these production ag landowners is, yeah, the check is great, but then we just sold a property right away. A couple of things. One if someone hands you a check we've heard this a bunch like, hey, if someone gives you 20, 30,000 bucks, it's not, that's not nothing they start to feel like they're owners in the land. You know, at the time, a lot of times I remember my wife's from Kansas and I went down there to start getting Kansas ground on and the farmers would tell me that like, yeah, the guy wrote me a check for 20 grand to hunt deer down here, great. But then he's like telling me to change my ag practices. He's calling my, like my hands to go put stands up or move cameras. Like that's not what. This is right. This is just you just paid for access to my land to hunt deer, if they're there. You know that was an issue. But then there's also the other issue of, again, you sold a property right away. So your kids yourself, your friends, your family, your neighbors they don't get to use that resource now because you sold the right away. And you know most of our landowners are in rural small communities and that tension is real. Like people understand, you need to monetize and make money or else you're going to have to sell. So they get it. But at the same time it's like, hey, we used to be able to go hunt the Johnson's Place on opening weekend and now we can't, and so that tension is tough. And so what they love about Land Trust is they stay 100% in control so they can block out the first week or the week in November or whatever. Or they can say, hey, look, my family, we really like to hunt whitetails, but we got turkeys and ducks, we got a farm pond, you can fish, you can come camp, whatever. There's all this other stuff you can do. So they get to really just retain control and then monetize whatever you know they don't use, and that's like a really big factor for them. Yeah well and the same thing. And you know that what I often say is someone who books three days, you know, hunt or whatever on your property through land trust. They don't feel like that in their property, like it's very clear, like, hey, this is just, we're just get an opportunity to come out and enjoy ourselves on a piece of ground and have it to ourselves for a few days. The expectations are much different than if someone writes you a 15, $20,000 check for a year, a couple of years. You know that's a very different relationship. That's a good question. So of course it started with hunting and, and I always knew, like we're not a hunting company, we're a land use company. Right, hunting is a very big kind of pillar but we're getting into camping, people book foraging, shed hunting, birding and birdwatching is something that you know, I think is an area of opportunity, expansion for us as we continue to grow. And then you know the category that I think I'm most excited about is what we call farm and ranch experiences. So in different regions of the country, I think you know they'll look differently. So in Montana we've had people offering kind of regenerative grazing tours or, you know, brandings or stuff like that. That's more cattle operation oriented. I was just down in one. We have a beautiful new property in Southwest Louisiana. There are 6,000 acres of rice so they do rice production and then they put crawfish on it during that time of year. So we were down there gator hunting. But a property like that can do gators, waterfowl birding and then do rice kind of rice tours. And when I say tours that's maybe not even the right, more of like an experience. This is not ticketed. It's not like there's 60 people who bought tickets and you can take a tour. This is like one, one group, one family or, you know, a group of friends is booking. You know this experience. You know I think today, more so than ever, people are more interested in where their food's coming from and kind of like what it takes to do production. And then you know that same property is going to do crawfish experiences during crawfish season where you could go book, you know, book it for a weekend, go out, pull your own. You know crawfish traps, do a boil, drink some beers, learn about the whole thing, have a great time. I think that farm and ranch experience is going to be probably one of the biggest categories. I love it for our landowners. Because, one, it's profitable Like if you think about what they sell, what they get per pound for crawfish in that example, you know, in the commodity markets versus what they'll make per pound at a booking, like you know, it's orders of magnitude bigger. But two, it's reconnecting the non-producing public with the producers. And to me, like from an ethos perspective, like yeah, of course I want to build a big, profitable business, but I also, at an ethos level, would love to just continue to see us bring that, bring the non-producing public back together with the producers to understand them, see all the great work they do. You know there's so much BS that's put out in kind of mainstream media about farming and ranching, killing the planet, like it. It just it's absurd. And the best way to kind of defeat those narratives is to go out and actually like see the ground, meet the people and hear from themselves. You know there's a lot of like lobbying advocates how they say it in DC and like I guess that's a necessary thing, but what could be better than one-on-one, you know, spending time with people? Absolutely a day, two days, exactly. 99% of us in the US yeah, it's 98 or 99% of us that aren't NAG, percent of us are nagged At Redmond. 0:24:25 - Cal We know that you thrive when your animals do. 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You know, if a landowner is listening they say, oh, I want to do farm and ranch experiences on my place, I would say absolutely, come and list it with us and we'll market it. But you know, we're still learning those businesses and how to generate demand for them. So you know. But if you know, hunting and fishing is like straightforward, we got that down pretty well. But for a landowner it's like it doesn't cost you anything to kind of work with us. We're business partners. We don't sell you anything. We, you know we sit on the same side of the table. So we only make money when you do, we make commission on bookies. That's a good question. The answer is it depends. It depends right. Again, we're in 42 states. Now you look at a state like Montana, which is our most mature state. I think we have, I don't know, 150 landowners, probably a half million acres there, maybe more. It's a mature market and so you know those landowners are probably doing more bookies than when we get like our first property in a new state. Now I will say we have 30,000 sportsmen. I think they represent every state in the country who use land trust. So now we are getting much better and faster at producing bookings for landowners when they come on in new states. It all depends on what they want to offer, like you know, and what the pricing is like. It's a real pure market dynamics here. So let's just say if you had five acres and you wanted to offer squirrel hunting and you wanted to charge ten thousand dollars for it, you'll get zero bookings, you know. So it really it's hard to answer that question because it's really truly. What does the land offer? How you know, what experiences are you willing to let people have? What pricing do you have? Do you have lodging? So there's a lot of that that makes it hard to answer that question. But I mean, I think on average, our landowners like an average landowner is earning like anywhere between $5,000 and $10,000 a year Our best landowners I don't want to say best our best performing landowners are I think last year is up to $90,000. Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. Because here's the thing With a marketplace like ours, there's what's called network effects, and so if there's only one farm and ranch experience listed on LandTrust, it's much harder to generate demand for it than when there's a thousand, and so what I would say is you know, if it's interesting to you, call us and talk to us. By the way, like we're people, you don't have to go figure it out on your own on our webs. We have an onboarding team who are awesome. They do everything for you. We talk to our customers and our landowners every day, all day. So we're and I don't really like to refer ourselves as a technology company we're much more of a service oriented business. You know, my point is, while I wouldn't say hey, we're going to give you the $20,000 of bookings today, the fact that you're listing it's free to list, we'll build it for you. It doesn't cost anything. The more people, the more that offer those farm and ranch experiences, especially in specific regions, the more we can generate demand for it. So that's what a network effect is. Sure, I hate to give you the it depends again, but it does depend. So you know, look, you could have 10 acres, but if you have a three acre pond with great shooting and a little place to camp and, you know, timber around it with a couple of tree stands, like you could absolutely list that I think regionally it's different, right? So it's about what does the land have access? Or maybe you're you know you're 10, 15 acres and you back up to a big section of public land so you know that could be base camp and then you can go and access and have fun on the public land too. So it's really not like acreage minimum. Now a half acre was probably, you know, again, probably not not going to do it. I'll never say absolutely not, cause again, I don't know what's on that half acre, but you know I wouldn't say if you've got 15, 20, 40 acres, that you shouldn't be considering, and it all depends on what's on it. And we have people who are listening to that kind of stuff and maybe they have 10 acres of timber and it's really productive. There's they've got turkeys and whitetail and they've got a pond right there, say, like it's kind of like Airbnb, right? I explain it like this it's a marketplace. So Airbnb has everything from a $20 a night hostel to a $20,000 a night castle, as long as breadth of range on supply is important. And so you know we'll see $25 bookings come through and we'll see $15,000 bookings come through, and you know it really depends. So you know, people might book something to go squirrel hunting. We got a guy he books squirrel hunts all over the country with us. He just like he is rabid, a rabid squirrel hunter, yeah, those are small bookings and he doesn't need you know huge acreage. And so I, you know, really it totally depends what the property is itself. Properties are really unique. You know, yeah, yeah, do some doves. I think, right, yeah, yeah, I mean, we've had. You know, what we're talking about is land use, and so if you started thinking about it broadly like that, I mean we've talked to people who film commercials for you know the big truck makers, you know, you see that that new truck come out and it's on some rugged piece of undeveloped land. They got to shoot that somewhere, right. We've talked to film offices where you know, cause, if they're to film on public land, there's all this permits and all that kind of stuff, right. So private land is much, much more preferable because they don't have to go through all that permitting process. Now, I'm not again, I'm not saying we're going and actively developing those you know, markets of demand. I'm just we've even talked to military units. Those guys would come to us and say, again. We want to do training and same thing on public land. There's a bunch of restrictions. Want to do training and same thing on public land. There's a bunch of restrictions. So when you think about more broadly land use, it opens it up. Photography is a great one, for sure. 0:32:42 - Cal Yeah I would say, you know, if any of this sounds remotely, interesting, do you think? 0:32:58 - Nic Yeah, I would say. You know. If any of this sounds remotely interesting one, you can go to our website, landtrustcom. There's a landowners page. There's a lot of landowner testimonial videos there. They're also on our YouTube channel so you can hear from other landowners all over the country what their experience has been. You know working with us for years, and then you can call us or text us and again, we're real people. There's no like AI chat bots here and just talk to our team, ask them the questions. We know that there's always going to be questions, and especially other family members. We understand that. Never one person's decision. It's always at least a couple people involved in this. So we know that process. We've done it a lot over the past five, six years. And yeah, there is no. You know there's no cost to start working with this. If it, if you get the green light from whoever it is the group that gets to say yes for something like this on your land, then you know we will kind of ask you a bunch of questions about your property. We'll build out a draft of your listing. We will build digital maps of your listing so you know the people, the guests who book it. We work with Onyx Maps and HuntWise, a couple of mapping companies, and we'll, you know, you can basically tell us, hey, these couple sections here, you know, here's the house, here's the gate, here's the. You know, we put waypoints, we put property boundaries, we put no-goes in, so full digital maps of your property and then you get to review it and if it looks good, we set it live and we start marketing for you immediately. So we'll send out new property emails to our. We have a database of 75,000, 80,000 people. Hey, there's a new Oklahoma property that's offering turkey hunting and fishing. And here it is. That's our job, right, we're business partners with our landowners. Our landowners own the asset. It's our job to build the technology and to market it Really. Just, they didn't even just know their land, which is pretty straightforward, especially the owner operators. So you know, just know what's there, what resources are there, and our team is good at asking questions to elicit the right kind of answers we're looking for. And then, honestly, photos. We need to have photos of a property. It don't have to be, you know, works of art by any mean, but you know, to have photos of a property it don't have to be works of art by any mean, but getting photography of the property and then at least having a smartphone. So once it's set up, you can run this. You can run Land Trust from your phone. You'll just get text messages from us. Hey, nick wants to come out and use these dates for $2,000. You can text me back and forth from your phone. You can give me a call and talk to me. Everything is a request. People can't just book your place. It's always comes as a request and you can say no for whatever reasons you want. It's not like a hotel where it's like, oh, they just booked it. I have no say. Again, it's all about control or no? Yeah, absolutely. And then you can also look at that sportsman and that guest and their ratings on Land Show. So after every trip, just like Airbnb or Uber or whatever, you both rate each other so you can see their past ratings from other landowners if they've, you know, booked trips with us before. So we try to just add a lot of transparency to the process. Yeah, no, you don't. So you know part of our terms of service and we can. I'm sure we'll talk about kind of like safety and liability and all that, but our terms of service, is a platform that you, the landowner, nor us land trusts are responsible for, that guest being fully legally licensed to do whatever activity that they're booking. That's that onus is on them, not on you or us. We also we handle kind of, like you know, season dates, all that kind of stuff. But I mean this is obviously a very big deal. So I think we'll take it as this kind of. We start at the top level. So 34 of the big ag producing states have some version of state agritourism liability limitation. I'm almost positive. Oklahoma is one of those states, but essentially the state. Everything we're talking about if it's happening on production ag ground is agritourism. Even if it's hunting or fishing or horseback, whatever it might be, it's ag tourism. The states want to incentivize this activity because they know it brings money onto farm and ranch. So unless there's gross negligence, the state is going to be protecting you from liability in an instance like that. Now you have to do certain little things In a lot of states you have to post some signage, almost like workers' comp right, it's like they have some boilerplate language you post in the barn or wherever. So there's a couple little things you got to do there. So then you go to us. So first any guest who ever books anything with you are accepting your terms of service digitally. So when they create their account with Land Trust they're saying hey, I hold all the landers harmless for anything I book through our platform. Then we do ID verification. So we're using a third party who collects either a driver's license or a passport. They take a picture of themselves. We make sure you are who you say you are Paying with a credit card up front, a hundred percent. Then you get to general liability, carry a million dollar per incident general liability. And then we carry participant insurance. So, like in the case you mentioned, where someone breaks their leg or something on your property, they're liable for themselves. But if they want to be a pain about it, they can come to us and we carry participant insurance. So we'll cover up to $10,000 in medical bills. And then we have property protection which we self-insure. I think that's $10,000 for incident. And then in a lot of states we're partners with farm bureaus and a lot of farm bureaus have an insurance arm. Not all, but a lot of farm bureaus have an insurance arm. Not all, but a lot of them. Farm bureaus have an insurance arm and a lot of times they'll sell if you really want a belt and suspenders it like a agritourism rider. I think it's a couple hundred bucks a year. So we we try to approach it from all directions. I think you as a landowner you get to rate them afterwards, they rate you so you kind of weed people out that way. But I can't getting close to six years. We've never had an incident. You know, knock on wood, absolutely. 0:39:34 - Cal Yeah. 0:39:38 - Nic That's right and this is what marketplaces are good at. Marketplaces are good at adding transparency and trust into transactions that used to be have neither right. The fact that we're doing id verification you're not anonymous. Look when I, when I first started this and I was talking to landowners, I heard the same story, no matter where it was in the country. Well, we used to let people come out and then something bad happened. Right, eight or nine out of 10 people were all great, it's the one person, the two people, and so when you really strip that away, it came down to that person being anonymous. It was someone who knocked on your door, you know, and they did something wrong and you have no idea who they are. There's no recourse, nothing. So anonymity truly was like the biggest issue if you really looked at it. So we immediately take that away. No, everyone on our platform is we have a government ID, you pay with a credit card and you're going to get raided afterwards. All that just kind of like the kinds of people who would kind of do the crappy stuff. They avoid us, and I remember in the beginning we'd have guys say, hey, can I just pay cash? I don't want to do that. Like nope, you can't do that, because this is all part of trust and safety right. Sure, sure, yeah yes, yes, we, we definitely have signage. Now, if you're in a brand new state, for us we obviously don't have signs yet. And and honestly, a lot of this is, I mean a lot of the regulations are hey, it has to be printed in one inch tall letters. And again, it's like it's like a worker's comp style thing that you post in a. If you had to do it yourself and it cost you five bucks, I don't know, it's not, it's not crazy, but um but so every state has some current little flavor of that. But it's think about it almost like a worker's comp style posting in the, into a barn or an area like that. No, not at all. So if they've got you know they have lodging, essentially, is what you're saying. So it's a good question. So land trust does not require lodging. We're about land sharing. So access, exclusive access. I will say, when you list with land trust, our expectation is that when you accept a booking, that that group has exclusive access to the land for the period of time, whether it's a day, the week, whatever. Now, of course, you as a landowner can still go about your day. You're not like hey, cousin Rick's going to be out there too. You know like, hey, cousin Rick's going to be out there too. You know, right, it's exclusive access. So it's about that first. So some of our landowners don't have any lodging. Come and use it and when you're done at night, go into town, stay at the motel and come back out in the morning. That's fine. Then you know lodging when you add lodging to your land trust listing, you can make more money. So lodging could be you're allowed to tent camp, you're allowed to pull your camper, we have a little pad or we got full hookups, we've got a little hunting shack or a barn or a nice house you can rent. And what I will say is you will make more money on land trust with your lodging because it's being added on to the main event. Right, people are booking land trusts for the experiences and you package lodging onto that. You make more money. You know. So the farmhouse that might get a hundred bucks a night on an Airbnb, that'll be packaged into a land trust listing and you'll make 1500 bucks for a booking because they're booking the experience, what they're booking your land, and then just adding that on on top. You know. But you can do both, like we do have landowners and you know during certain times a year if they're not going to offer certain things. Hey, you just have to make sure your calendars don't conflict, right, make sure you don't double book. All right, I'm a talker, told you it was a sales game and they're ready to like yeah, so what they'll do is any of our landowners can go look at the site from the guest side too. You just go to landtrustcom, you can do a search, hey, and wherever I'm at in Oklahoma, what's around me? Or I'm looking at Montana, that'd be cool you can go look at all the properties. It's kind of like Zillow or Airbnb, whatever right. You look at a bunch of listings. It's kind of like Zillow or Airbnb, whatever right. You look at a bunch of listings and then so for the guests, if they find something they're interested in, they can just contact the landowner. And so they say I want to contact you and see that you offer spring turkey hunts. Let's say so. Hey, you know, cal, I see you had that, saw some pictures you had. I just had a couple of little questions and so they can send. We encourage our landowners. They often talk to people on the phone, right, whereas other platforms like Airbnb, they really don't want you talking to each other because, oh yeah, they'll strip your phone numbers out of if you try to pass a phone number through. We trust our landowners. The reason Airbnb does that is because they don't want to get cut out of the transaction. We trust our landowners. We're business partners. They're honest people so we encourage them. Hey, if you're on the combine or you're doing something, just call them and if they don't sound great, say no. If they do say yes, yeah, you can contact landowners, ask them questions and if it looks good, attend a bookie request, get accepted Again. The acceptance kind of like the acceptance email that we send has the digital maps, has your arrival instructions from the landowner, like all that stuff, right, the landowner's information, their phone number. We don't show our landowners like last names or any of their information until you've accepted a booking from somebody. And then you know the other piece too, that we're always trying to make it easier for landowners to just, you know, have less generic questions like, hey, how's the turkey population or whatever. So we created what's called field notes. In field notes you can almost think like Instagram, but for your land, when you're out on the combine or you're driving around and you see stuff. You can take video like oh you know, a bunch of bucks jumped up out of the corn as I was going through, or saw a bunch of turkeys or the snow's coming in, or whatever, and so you basically do property updates through field notes and people can follow it. And so now people can follow your property on land trust and see those updates as they come in. And we just have examples of a guy in Eastern Montana said 7,000 geese just showed up on my winter week and people are booking in, you know. So it's like you're broadcasting, right, that kind of thing can happen. Or we're getting ready for branding, or hey, we're. We just, you know, are going to offer a new archery hunting package or a new fishing thing. So you can just kind of do property updates and people can follow you. 0:47:33 - Cal Tamal milk. 0:47:34 - Nic Okay, all right, yeah, absolutely. So if that landed on our list of camel mil milking experiences, you'd be booking, you'd be there. I mean you joke, but it's honestly like those are interesting things, right, and I and I often tell our landowners your everyday chores are interesting to people who didn't grow up doing that. That's what it is. That's what I like about that kind of farm-ranch experience stuff is it could be anything Now again unclear if it's interesting, but we try it. Now I'm interested, though I've never even thought about milk-crate camel, and now I'm kind of interested in the process too. Really, look, I, I knew that. Like said, if any of this sounds remotely interesting, you can just call us and talk to us. I mean, or text message us. If you'd like to text, I mean, we'll sit and talk to you guys. We've had thousands of these conversations and we'll see if it's a good fit for you. Like I said, it's free to try. There's really not a lot of downside there. You know our team prides ourselves on customer service. Our landowners are very happy and stay with us for a long time. Most of the time if we see a landowner leave, it's because they sold the land or something. It's not because they weren't happy. I think that this is going to be a great way to stack another enterprise onto an operation, as we know know you kind of have to do to be profitable, and it's something that you stay in control of. It's something that also, like it could bring a kid back. You know, if a kid wants to come back to the farmer ranch, an extra $15,000, $20,000 a year profit could do it. It's something they can manage very easily. So, yeah, give us a call. Like we're. You know we're service-oriented people and love to talk to people. That's all we do all day is talk to our landowners and guests and you know, yeah, I would say call us. Yeah, thank you for having me on it's been a great conversation. 0:50:19 - Cal Ken Cove Farm Fence is a proud supporter of the Grazing Grass podcast and grazers everywhere is a proud supporter of the Grazing Grass podcast and grazers everywhere At Ken Cove Farm Fans. They believe there is true value within the community of grazers and land stewards. The results that follow, proper management and monitoring, can change the very world around us. That's why Ken Cove is dedicated to providing an ever-expanding line of grazing products to make your chores easier and your land more abundant. Whether you're growing your own food on the homestead or grazing on thousands of acres, ken Cove has everything you need to do it well. From reels to tumbleweels, polytwine to electric net water valves to water troughs, you'll find what you're looking for at Ken Cove. They carry brands like Speedrite O'Briens, kiwi Tech, strainrite, jobe and more. Ken Cove is proud to be part of your regenerative journey. Call them today or visit KenCovecom, and be sure to follow them on social media and subscribe to the Ken Cove YouTube channel at Ken Cove Farm Fence for helpful how-to videos and new product releases. Transcribed by https://podium.page