How a Vibecoded Newsletter Is Making the Hay Market More Transparent

Summary

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Odd Lots Podcast Summary

Episode: How a Vibecoded Newsletter Is Making the Hay Market More Transparent

Hosts: Joe Weisenthal & Tracy Alloway (Bloomberg)
Guest: Aiden Johnson, Founder of Haywire
Date: June 12, 2026

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Episode Overview

This Odd Lots episode dives deep into the world of hay—yes, hay—exploring how a previously opaque and fragmented agricultural market is being transformed by digital innovation and public data. Joe and Tracy interview Aiden Johnson, the 20-year-old founder of Haywire, a newsletter ("vibecoded" with AI) that compiles, cleans, and disseminates hay price data to make the market vastly more transparent. The conversation is a lively blend of market structure analysis, entrepreneurial advice, and a surprisingly relevant dive into the intersections of AI, data aggregation, and niche information services.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Opaqueness of the Hay Market

• Why Hay?
  • Hay is a critical input for livestock and horses, but its market is fragmented by region, type, and quality, and lacks central price benchmarks ([04:03]).
  • Publicly available data (via USDA reports) is often buried in hard-to-use PDFs, with little real-time transparency or aggregation ([03:32], [07:53]).

2. Haywire’s Business Model & Origin Story

• Aggregation & Translation:

  • Haywire uses a direct API integration with USDA to pull weekly auction data, then cleans and translates it into plain-English newsletters—bridging the gap between raw data and actionable insights ([06:26], [07:27]).
  • Aiden adds value by also networking directly with auction houses for more immediate, on-the-ground pricing info, striving to cover regional disparities in supply and demand ([08:21], [08:50]).

• Entrepreneurial Genesis:

  • Aiden, a college basketball player at the time, launched Haywire after his father needed reliable alfalfa price data, recognizing a pain point that technology could address ([11:38]).
  • "I don't really care about hay, but, you know... hay is definitely not going to get me a girlfriend. So that's kind of how it started." —Aiden ([12:14]).

• AI and 'Vibe Coding':

  • The recent explosion in AI tools made it possible for a two-person team to build a data aggregation platform that previously would have required a whole department ([14:38]).
  • “Ten years ago, I don’t think I would even scratch the surface… AI makes it able for two young 20-year-olds… to create a whole company.” —Aiden ([14:38]).

3. Market Structure: Fragmentation and Benchmarks

• No Single Price:

  • Unlike stocks, there is no universal hay price. Instead, regional auctions like Rock Valley (Iowa) become local benchmarks ([15:46]).
  • “The crazy thing about the hay market is what I realized—it’s not just one market. It’s like fragmented markets across the whole country.” —Aiden ([16:17]).

• Regional Variations:

  • Transportation is costly and often exceeds the value of the hay, which reinforces regional supply/demand imbalances and price disparities ([20:18]).
  • Drought in the West can shift some demand East, but economic/geographic barriers limit cross-country trade ([21:29], [24:55]).

4. Transparency, Technology, and the Farmer’s Dilemma

• Getting Farmers Onboard:
  • Adoption among older-generation farmers is slow, as many are accustomed to traditional, “call-and-guess” dealmaking ([23:12]).
  • “These farmers know their regional market like the back of their hand… these old gen farmers… it’s been kind of difficult trying to get them to adapt.” —Aiden ([23:12]).

5. Supply, Demand, and Second Order Effects

• Downstream Impacts:

  • Rising hay prices are passed onto horse owners and dairy operations—affecting boarding costs, the viability of sanctuaries, and even livestock nutrition ([26:45]).
  • Dairies adapt by blending higher and lower quality hay; some producers pull hay from auction to hoard for future scarcity ([27:03]).

• Types and Quality:

  • Relative Feed Value (RFV) measures hay quality for use cases (higher for dairy/horses, lower for beef), which makes apples-to-apples pricing difficult ([28:33]).
  • Rain and crop conditions further fragment quality and pricing ([29:50]).

6. Land Use and Competition

• Farmers’ Choices:
  • Rising prices haven’t yet led to evidence of sharply increased acreage dedicated to hay, but farmers weigh options between hay, more stable crops (corn/soy), and even land conversion to solar/data center projects ([32:57]).
  • Anecdotally, large tech projects (like Google’s 482-acre data center) increase competition for land and water, especially in the drought-prone West ([32:57]).

7. The Vision: Toward a Bloomberg of Hay

• Expansion & Benchmarking:

  • Aiden aspires for Haywire to become the regional price benchmark—the “Bloomberg of hay”—a central information layer farmers can rely on for better decisions ([37:04]).
  • “When I started first planning this business, our motto was ‘the Bloomberg for hay.’” —Aiden ([38:23]).

• Financialization?

  • Conversations about the creation of tradable hay indices or futures contracts highlight the precondition of robust price benchmarks—but the volatility and unpredictability of hay remain obstacles ([38:56]).

• Winners and Losers from Transparency:

  • Brokers/middlemen may lose information rents as pricing becomes more accurate and less subject to “gut” negotiation ([40:00]).
  • “The middleman will always feel the outcomes of more transparency because they’re the ones making deals blindly… and that can either work for the broker or that can, you know, maybe make margins a little slimmer.” —Aiden ([41:05]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “I’m going to drop some alpha. No alfalfa. I’m going to drop some alfalfa Alpha here.” —Joe Weisenthal ([04:35])
• "Hay is definitely not going to get me a girlfriend." —Aiden Johnson ([12:14])
• "Find your hay, you know, find your alfalfa." —Joe Weisenthal ([15:14])
• "It’s not just one market. It’s like fragmented markets across the whole country." —Aiden Johnson ([16:17])
• "You didn’t even have to say it. It was like you are building the potentially the Bloomberg of hay." —Joe Weisenthal ([38:28])
• “You can’t have a hedgeable, tradable, financialized market until you first have that index, right?” —Joe ([38:56])
• “In business, especially commodities, the middleman will always feel the outcomes of more transparency because they’re the ones making deals, especially in the hay market, kind of blindly and just guessing.” —Aiden Johnson ([41:05])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Hay Market Opaqueness & Indices – [03:32] to [04:17]
• The Haywire Model & Data Sources – [06:26] to [10:36]
• Origin Story & Starting Up – [11:38] to [14:38]
• How Fragmented is the Market? – [15:46] to [17:35]
• Regional Disparities, Drought, and Supply Chains – [20:18] to [24:55]
• Effects on Boarders, Dairies, and Supply Chain – [26:45] to [28:33]
• Hay Types, Quality Metrics (RFV), and Pricing – [28:33] to [29:50]
• Land Use Competition (Solar/Data Centers) – [32:57] to [35:20]
• Business Building, Vision, and Bloomberg Parallels – [37:04] to [38:53]
• Futures Market Discussion – [38:56] to [39:56]
• Winners and Losers from Transparency – [40:00] to [41:05]

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Episode Tone & Takeaways

• Tone:
  Casual, good-humored, curious, and entrepreneurial—with a genuine enthusiasm for quirky markets and underexplored corners of the economy.

• Takeaways:

  • Even quirky, “unsexy” markets can be revolutionized by aggregating and translating public data.
  • The intersection of old-economy agriculture and new-economy AI produces unexpected opportunities for transparency, entrepreneurship, and efficiency.
  • Building the ‘Bloomberg for hay’ serves as a model for leveraging tech in any fragmented market where information is power.

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For the Curious

• Haywire website: haywireag.com
• Aiden Johnson on Twitter: @AidenJohnson_
• Odd Lots Newsletter & More: bloomberg.com/oddlots

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Transcript

[Joe Weisenthal]

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[Tracy Alloway]

IBM Small businesses are the pulse of every community. They bring people together, create opportunities and drive growth. Chase for Business helps business owners like you with personalized guidance and convenient digital tools all in one place. With that guidance and your determination, you can take your business farther and and help build a brighter future for your community. Learn [e-mail] business chase for business Make More of what's Yours the Chase Mobile app is available for select mobile devices. Message and data rates. May apply JPMorgan Chase Bank NA Member FDIC Copyright 2026 JPMorgan Chase Co.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts Radio News.

[Tracy Alloway]

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

[Joe Weisenthal]

And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

[Tracy Alloway]

Jo I was lurking on the Homestead subreddit recently as one does, as Tracy Ellaway does. 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 Odd Lots.

[Joe Weisenthal]

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, 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 know a little bit. I've just decided yeah, you know a

[Tracy Alloway]

little bit about hay though. Cause we spoke with that. Was it New Mexico or Arizona? Now? I can't remember the farmer growing alfalfa.

[Joe Weisenthal]

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

[Tracy Alloway]

Well, yeah, something like that.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I mean, I guess we'll.

[Tracy Alloway]

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.

[Joe Weisenthal]

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

[Tracy Alloway]

All right, so that's the one hay fact that we all know. So we're going to be talking about hay prices today.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I can't wait.

[Tracy Alloway]

But beyond that, I find the hay market really interesting because there.

[Joe Weisenthal]

No, seriously, I believe you. I believe you.

[Tracy Alloway]

There aren't that many markets out there nowadays that are like non transparent. I want to say.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Do we have any hay indices on the terminal?

[Tracy Alloway]

There's a PPI index.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Oh, it is?

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah. Okay, so you can look up like alfalfa.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Hey, here we go. So how's that been looking, I assume. I mean, everything is up. I just like, if you name something that exists in the world, it's probably up, but what is? Us hayseeds. Yeah, well, no, I don't know. Is this even up to date? I can't even find one.

[Tracy Alloway]

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.

[Joe Weisenthal]

So I'm just gonna say, like I said, I haven't done any. I don't know anything about hay. 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 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. No alfalfa. I'm going to drop some alfalfa Alpha here. 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 update what X is doing each week or month or whatever, you can become the man the ax 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. But I'm also curious about this individual's business model.

[Tracy Alloway]

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 with Aiden Johnson. He is the founder of. Can you guess? Well, you know what? The company is so good.

[Joe Weisenthal]

It's so good.

[Tracy Alloway]

Such a good name for what this company actually does. So, Aidan, thank you so much for coming on oddlauds.

[Aiden Johnson]

Yeah, I appreciate you guys having me on.

[Tracy Alloway]

So why don't we start with the basics? What is it that Haywire is actually doing?

[Aiden Johnson]

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, I mean, USDA publishes reports 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 plain English. So 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.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Well, let's go into this a little bit more and I'm sure that I 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. 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. Sorry, when you say that data.

[Joe Weisenthal]

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

[Aiden Johnson]

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 will be put on a PDFs, but buried in PDF, so it's kind of hard for people to find.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah.

[Tracy Alloway]

So you actually call up some of the auction houses, by the way, I didn't even realize there were auctions.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I didn't either.

[Tracy Alloway]

For hay. But you call them up to get additional pricing information as well, right?

[Aiden Johnson]

Yeah. So we actually have Rock Valley, Iowa, Rock Valley 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 COVID the gray area between the USDA data and then 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 the country, to different regions, so we can kind of get a forecast what's actually happening there.

[Tracy Alloway]

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.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I don't know if that's still the case, but it might actually still be the case case that if you like. And I remember 11 or 12 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'd you price for? And of course, you know, it's not that different from Libor, Right. It's not like we think of something like these very opaque, illiquid 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.

[Tracy Alloway]

That's the alpha alfalfa.

[Joe Weisenthal]

That's the. That. Yes.

[Tracy Alloway]

That's calling people up.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Calling people up. 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 we can pull our data from, but specifically on the USDA data, it'll show the region, the type of bale, the weight, you know, the quality of hay or alfalfa that it'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 the. The data that's coming from the ground is, you know, valuable and actually not hallucinations, I guess.

[Joe Weisenthal]

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 have been some really successful, you know, I think like it might be Flight Radar 24. 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.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah.

[Joe Weisenthal]

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, user interface still matters. 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 Alloway]

Well, I expect with vibe coding it's going to become more common as well. So, Aidan, 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. 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 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 numbers 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 Hay.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Which year this was. What year?

[Aiden Johnson]

2025.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Okay. Oh, okay.

[Aiden Johnson]

So this, this conversation happened in 2025. And at the time, you know, I'm. I'm a college basketball player. I don't really care about. Hey, but, you know, I always knew I wanted to kind of get into entrepreneurial ship, 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, you know, Vibe coding websites for local businesses. And then 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. 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 attacking it every day. And I'm very grateful for my dad to ask the question, what is the price of Alfalfa?

[Joe Weisenthal]

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

[Aiden Johnson]

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.

[Tracy Alloway]

All right, well, odd lots listeners in

[Joe Weisenthal]

Minnesota, eligible young bachelor, 20 years old. Just. We're just putting it out there. Maybe we'll do. We can do some matchmaking for you. Just 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. Ten years ago, I don't think I would even scratch the surface of getting to the death. I am here now. 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 yeah, I don't, I don't think it would be. It would probably take a big team. Ten years ago, Trish, I. I already

[Joe Weisenthal]

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.

[Tracy Alloway]

Well, go out and find that niche market.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Find your hay, you know, find your Alfalta. Yeah. What is your hay?

[Tracy Alloway]

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&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. The usda. Usda? N A S S 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 alfalfa side of things, it's a hundred eighty five dollars 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? Because 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. Rock Valley specifically is in the Midwest, 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. It's like fragmented markets across the whole country. Every market, every regional market is very hyperlocal 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 hay may not be the same as California hay in terms of price because it's just all hype. Very hyper. Local markets,

[Joe Weisenthal]

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[Aiden Johnson]

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[Joe Weisenthal]

just telling the girlfriend that you're six' six and you can dunk a basketball. I see on Twitter. Okay, sorry, I'm just.

[Tracy Alloway]

Oh you're really doing all you can to help here Joe.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I'm looking at his Twitter profile and you can dunk. I'm really impressed. I wish I couldn't appreciate that.

[Aiden Johnson]

Appreciate it.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah, no, it's 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 with lumber, with Stinson Dean as an example. To what degree are they generally correlated across the country? Like will they. General prices generally rise and fall around the same time, even if there are wide gaps in the, you know, wide spreads from one region to another.

[Aiden Johnson]

Yeah, so there is a bunch of different factors to kind of how different regions can, you know, be affected by markets. I mean, you think of what's kind of going on in the west right now with the drought kind of going on. 46% 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 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 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 five to $8 per mile to have it shipped. So that can easily average to be more valuable than hay. So it's kind of, it's kind of weird. So. Yeah, I guess so if I'm in

[Tracy Alloway]

a location, one of the drought stricken states. Drought stricken states, that's hard to say. 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, 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. 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.

[Tracy Alloway]

Any farmers out there.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah.

[Tracy Alloway]

So want to look up prices.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Bloomberg actually offers a. A haywire competitor. You just get a bunch of other stuff. You're probably not 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 finding farmers or growers or anyone in the business, Anyone in the chain, how do you get them to discover haywire?

[Aiden Johnson]

I guess just network and 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 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. We're going to try, but we probably won't. But 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 I'm honestly just networking with them, providing, you know, kind of the data we're seeing and kind of the value and telling them that there's no really cost to just kind of share in me your data.

[Joe Weisenthal]

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 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 test 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 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, 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 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 piece by piece and like a puzzle, trying to solve the puzzle.

[Tracy Alloway]

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 has a horse. 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.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Boarding. Oh, right.

[Tracy Alloway]

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. Just talking with farmers and you even horse owners across the country. I personally, my family owns horses, so I can kind of see, 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 maintain the horse and we don't know like exactly what we're going to do because it's so expensive. But. And then on the other side of things, some dairy houses, these, these dairies are going to be the ones buying the higher quality RFE alfalfa to, you know, feed these cows that are producing 80 pounds of milk a day. And they're actually taking that high, higher quality RFE and then mixing it with lower quality RFE 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 outcomes of these high high hay prices.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Just to back up, for example. So you mentioned horses, cows also eat hay, right?

[Aiden Johnson]

Yes, yes, cows, cows will eat. There's different types of qualities, I guess

[Joe Weisenthal]

you could say walk through us these qualities. Did you see something like rfd, what was the term used? Like higher, what was it?

[Aiden Johnson]

Rfv relative feed value, which basically is, which could, I think, I'm pretty sure it, it, it controls or gets the protein contents and the fiber in the, the hay. And 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 using that higher quality alfalfa and supreme hay, higher RFV to have their cows on the best. And then you're going to have the, the equine people, the horses also using this higher quality stuff because they love their horses and they only want what's best for the horses. And then you have the lower quality type of stuff which is going to go to like the utility and fare 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 alfalfa. And then yeah, there's, there's so many different qualities.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah, yeah. Just real quickly. So hay made out of alfalfa is high quality. What is low quality hay made out of?

[Aiden Johnson]

Yeah, so low quality hay which will be lower rfi. 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, when it rains, rain affects a lot. You have to have a dry, a dry week or forecast to produce 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 that the higher quality stuff does because that's where the protein is, is in the leaf and then the fiber comes from the stem.

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[Joe Weisenthal]

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[Tracy Alloway]

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. Maybe I could rent them out for hay production.

[Aiden Johnson]

Yeah, you know, I'm not, I'm not really seeing that, but 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. I was driving on the highway and I, I realized that Google was actually going to build a 482 acre data center 20 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. Alfalfa is kind of in a weird spot. And hay, 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 going to, they're going to go in agricultural land. So kind of vice versa, you were saying, how are they going to take away this agricultural land? And I was kind of thinking too, the 482 acre data center Google is 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 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 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 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 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. The downside of that is you probably lose your land or access to your land for 25 to 35 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 farmland? So, I mean, there's. There's a couple options. And like you said, you can also grow. Start growing hay or grow. Every crop is producing the most money, I guess. So there are 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? You know, 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 is like a jackpot episode of, like, things that we're interested in.

[Tracy Alloway]

Well, the solar panel thing is true because in the northeast, where I'm.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah.

[Tracy Alloway]

Based some of the time, I see a lot of farms that are now like just solar panels. Huge fields of solar panels. Yeah.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Wow.

[Tracy Alloway]

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. I don't know. I mean, it's interesting.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah, it's interesting.

[Joe Weisenthal]

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.

[Aiden Johnson]

Yeah. So the hay market is actually pretty. Pretty dang big. I mean, you. You have Hay acreage covering 49 to 50 million acres across the U.S. and itself, alfalfa itself, is producing $8 billion per year, which is the fourth most valuable crop. And that's 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 Alloway]

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 Alloway]

Oh, 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 landowners, but where do you want to take those?

[Aiden Johnson]

Yeah, so I guess Like I said, the main goal is kind of be on top of, you know, the kind of hate 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.

[Joe Weisenthal]

You know, we work for a company, that sort of stuff. I mean, really, 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 500 company for you. I mean, this, the idea of like, find agricultural data, find some data niche, make it built layer on top.

[Aiden Johnson]

I have a confession.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah.

[Aiden Johnson]

So when I started first planning this business, our motto was the Bloomberg for

[Joe Weisenthal]

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 X, Bloomberg of why 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 was like you are building the potentially the Bloomberg of hey, and one day you may have a TV network.

[Tracy Alloway]

Could we have hey, futures based on if we had benchmarks?

[Joe Weisenthal]

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 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. Yeah, you know, but this is volatility.

[Joe Weisenthal]

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.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah, there's something there.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah, there's something there for sure.

[Aiden Johnson]

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

[Joe Weisenthal]

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, you know, obviously the consumer wants more transparency, but some people benefit from the opacity. Is there anyone in the supply chain of hay, et cetera, or in the market for hay that theoretically stands to lose out if customers are. 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 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 call, I witnessed firsthand my, I sat there and someone called the owner and was just like, can I do 157? This is example. Can I just do $157 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 do think that the middleman will always have something to lose with more transparency.

[Tracy Alloway]

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

[Aiden Johnson]

Yeah, I appreciate you guys having me on.

[Tracy Alloway]

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 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.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Volatility.

[Tracy Alloway]

Right. Like, we're getting these big spikes. Sometimes we're getting bigger 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. 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

[Tracy Alloway]

been doing it while you're in college.

[Joe Weisenthal]

No. So the pro version. So he has a free version of his newsletter, which I'm gonna 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.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah.

[Joe Weisenthal]

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 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.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah. Labelious.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Two labelious bales of hay.

[Tracy Alloway]

No, that was a bit forced. I'm sorry.

[Joe Weisenthal]

But it's a. It is a. It is a clear example of like, okay, this is a productivity unlock.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah.

[Joe Weisenthal]

And I have no doubt that it works. This. You know, some things with AI, like, don't work as much, but I'm pretty sure scraping but automated, you can feel pretty confident that that's something that you can build, etc. I'm. I'm very. I think it's really cool. Oh. The price of being a founding member is going to rise to 17amonth after June 30th. So get it.

[Tracy Alloway]

Rising along with the hay prices.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah.

[Tracy Alloway]

All right. Shall we leave it there?

[Joe Weisenthal]

Let's leave it there.

[Tracy Alloway]

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

[Joe Weisenthal]

and I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart Follow Aiden Johnson he's at Aiden Johnson Underscore and check out haywire haywire ag.com Follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez Arman Armand Dashiell Bennett at Dashbot, Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano and for more Odd Lots content go to bloomberg.com oddlots 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 oddlots

[Tracy Alloway]

and if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you like it when we talk about Hay Price, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

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[Ryan Seacrest]

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