Dairy, Food Safety, Trade, Market Expansion All Tied Together for Gregg Doud

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[Yeager] Let's go global and talk trade. Factors important to American farmers and consumers around the world. And what is a big deal for those other countries that we trade with. We're going to look at policies and how they impact many of the commodities on the farm. We'll talk about beef and grain and the hog market, crude oil, the impact there and what that's happening. But also the dairy market. Gregg Doud is with the National Milk Producers Federation. But you've heard that name before because he's been the chief negotiator of agriculture for the United States before in the Trade Representative's office. He's also been in many other commodity groups. So he understands trade from many different angles. We'll get into that. We'll talk about dairy, some of the challenges with Canada and their United States relationship. We'll get into many other things with this Kansas native, including his father. Well, I'm going to tell you about his father, who used to watch Market to Market, we hope you watch the show each and every week or this podcast, which comes out each Tuesday. I'm Paul Yeager, this is the MToM podcast, which is a production of Iowa PBS and the Market to Market TV show. Let's get to Gregg Doud now and talk some trade as well as some dairy and milk. I got to ask you, Gregg, are you the most famous resident of Mankato, Kansas?

[Doud] I have no idea. But, you know, I'm, well known guy out in Kansas for, being in DC doing ag stuff, but, how many people in Mankato, Kansas would even know who I am today? That's the question. That's the right question.

[Yeager] Well, of the 836 or something, it's, Isn't that considered a big town for Kansas?

[Doud] Well, it's the biggest town in Jewel County, but, Jewel County now is down, what, 28, 2900 people.

[Yeager] So what was the life like growing up there? You were on the farm?

[Doud] Yeah. So, we, had, I don't know, we fell out about $40 a month year round. Had about 50 head of cows farmed over, you know, a little over 1000 acres or so. So my job was the hogs. So I was you know, played sports and was in FFA and forage. But, my job was to take care of the hogs and, and, that, you know, you knew if you ever messed up when you went to college that you would be home back hog farming again. So it was pretty good incentive not, not to goof around too much in college. Back in those days.

[Yeager] The Manhattan nightlife has to stay away. You have to get back to focus?

[Doud] You know, Manhattan, I think was pretty good to me. A bachelor's and master's degree in Manhattan has served me very, very well over the years. Absolutely.

[Yeager] And and I forget the Flint Hills kind of end before Manhattan. Is that right? So you're not really in the Flint Hills?

[Doud] So, I make it. It would be two hours north and west of, Manhattan. So it's right in the middle of the state. Right up on the Nebraska border. Right off up. We were right off of highway 36. So 60 miles straight south of Hastings, Nebraska. Most people know that more than they do any landmark in Kansas.

[Yeager] So that's true when you look at that border, between those two and how one maybe I'm not saying, identify, I'm not going to try to get you in trouble with anybody, but it's just easier to say, because I-80 does swoop down on the South. And we know those points as we go from Iowa to Colorado. What's there now? 

[Doud] And, you know, I can still recite the towns as you go across on highway 36 and in the county seats in the northern interior counties of Kansas. But most people don't have any idea where that is.

[Yeager] So, you know, I like Highway 36. It's a nice, it's a nice slice of the state there. So you go Kansas State economics. Did you ever have the visions of coming back to the farm after the degree?

[Doud] No, I don't think, you know, I was pretty encouraged, to, to go out and make a run of it. I actually wanted to be a green merchandizer and ended up my first job was with U.S. Wheat Associates in Portland, Oregon. So it was 1991. Things were pretty tough in farm country in those days. And so I ended up with U.S. Wheat in Portland. And then a year later, they brought me into DC as their analyst. And, a couple of years later, I ended up marrying the local doctor in Annapolis. And the rest is history. So I've been out here 33 years now.

[Yeager] What have you, I mean, you've had very varied work in commodities, from the early 90s to now. What's been the biggest change in DC's view of rural America and all those different commodity groups?

[Doud] You know, that's a great question. And I would say, honestly, there are far fewer farm kids in DC today than there were back then. Far fewer. And, you know, it used to be even when I was on the Senate staff of the Senate Agriculture Committee, 2011 1213, the senior professional staff on the Senate committee, Republicans and Democrats were farm kids. Very tough to find a farm kid up there anywhere today. And so things I would say just in the last ten years, all have really changed a lot on, on Capitol Hill. And, and, I find myself, you know, still explaining how things work in production, agriculture. And I would say in particular, what I see is very, very few people in this town understand the livestock, dairy and meat industry at all. You know, the grain guys have farm programs and, you know, people are more familiar with all of that very little acumen on the livestock side of the equation in this town.

[Yeager] And, and I would imagine you kind of answer what I was going to follow up with is it makes your job difficult because I'm guessing you start having a conversation with the staffer and you say, well, I'm with dairy. And they'll be like, oh, so you're from California or Wisconsin? And it is a much bigger picture than that.

[Doud] Is that it isn't that. It's, you know, I've had funny conversations with reporters over the years. I remember when I ran the Commodity Markets Council dealing with futures markets, and when we were talking about what an end user does in terms of trading versus a speculator. And at the end of the conversation, the reporter asked me, well, what do we do with soybeans anyway? And then the question you get today is, why do we export milk? Well, we actually don't export milk. We export cheese and skim milk powder and whey and lots of lactose and lots of other products. You find yourself just explaining basic things. You know, we don't spray glyphosate on the wheat kernel. You know, this this is how production agriculture works at a fundamental level. And I will tell you, with RFK, JR in town, there is more need for that basic understanding than ever before. My goodness.

[Yeager] You act like you've been reading our Market to Market Twitter feed right now talking about glyphosate, because that is, I'm not saying a lifeblood, but it is an important tool in the box for a whole lot of people.

[Doud] Well, you know, the job I had before this, I worked for, eight point research, tremendous team that had the pleasure of helping assemble, work with the three West Point graduates. Brilliant. folks. And we did a report for Bayer on, they asked us to to, analyze and more. Game out. A simple question. What happens if we take glyphosate off the market? They like that report so well that it's still on the Endpoint website. You can go, you have to search around a little bit so that you can find it. And I would encourage everybody to read it. It's it's a remarkable answer to the question. And the answer is, you know, that technology is in its waning days. It's been around a long time. It still has a lot of value, but we've got some new products coming to, that that eventually, over time, will replace it, I think. I believe they will, but it's like, you know, a lot of old chemistry. It still has value. And, you know, I completely do not agree with any of this notion that anything we use in terms of, technology in agriculture is a threat to food safety or human safety. That's just really upsetting me that people would say that. And we fight that conversation. I find the conversation and dinner parties with professional women here in our neighborhoods where we live in, that south of Annapolis, Maryland. people really struggle to understand the food that, you know, that is produced today, how it's produced. And, the whole supply chain.

[Yeager] Okay. So does that make your job the hardest it's ever been? No matter what commodity you're with right now, it sounds like one of the hardest battles you've had.

[Doud] it is. And in fact, I harken back to a year of my life, 2019, as the chief negotiator for the United States. I spent 33 negotiating sessions, hundreds of hours having this exact conversation with the vice minister of agriculture of China, who is now the Minister of Agriculture of China. This is how our food production system works. This is how we regulate it. Their regulators in China believe that we regulated things the same way that they did. We spent hundreds of hours explaining how we regulate things and what the differences are and why not, you know, better or worse, this is why our food is safe. The interesting thing is, at his level, he understood this. It was helping the Chinese bureaucrat that had no access to it. When I was in conversation at a junior level on the meat side of the equation, and our Foreign Service person said to her Chinese counterpart, well, if you want to know more, just Google it. What did her Chinese counterpart say? What's Google? We assume things in this country then, and foreign regulators in other countries assume things about how food is produced, even at that level, that you have to have this conversation constantly to help people understand how it works. So I'm used to having this conversation, whether it's internationally or domestically. You know, some of us have gotten pretty good at it, but it's just it's a constant battle.

[Yeager] Do you find that it changes? Has it changed more in this country than it has in other countries in having these conversations?

[Doud] Well, I think first of all, I would say every country in the world is protectionist towards their farmers. Every country in the world sees their own regulatory, our regulatory system, through the eyes of their own regulatory system. Every country has these assumptions, you know, and the Europeans are unbelievable and saying that they do it better than we do. That's absurd. Saying, you know, there's this notion that we use more pesticides in other countries. That's absurd. We lose use fewer than any other country by acre. But there's no question about there's data on all of this. So it's just and then other countries say, well, we don't want Chinese products. So we put up a regulatory fence to keep it out. Sometimes we get caught in the fence and we have to have these conversations with these countries to say, hey, we don't do things like that and you bring them over here. And sometimes that's the great benefit is bringing folks to this country, going out and showing them in Washington state how an apple orchard works and how our traceability works. And you walk them through that and they're like, Holy mackerel, this is amazing. We want your apples. We really like what you guys do here. And so it just is a constant battle and conversation. And it's something that, just every day we find ourselves having these conversations. I will tell you right now, all of the conversation that I am just baffled by is this raw milk conversation. It makes absolutely no sense to me.

[Yeager] Okay, so you open the door a couple places here. Yeah. because, I often talk about this. I usually when I have a conversation with Iowa Secretary of State Mike Naig, we drive through the Iowa State Fair that is urban, rural together, having pork chop on a stick, egg on a stick, a milkshake, whatever. There. And it's city people. It's rural people, but they clearly don't know how to talk to each other. But I bet if I stop people and I say to someone, talk about raw milk, I'm sure I'll get an earful. And it might not be the most educated. What drives you? What's top of the list there? When raw milk comes up for you, what gets you going?

[Doud] Well, what gets me going is that somebody is going to get really sick. Somebody is going to get hurt here. You know, we've been pasteurized milk for 100 years. You know, if you go back 100 years, the number four cause of morbidity and mortality in America was food borne illness. We know how to prevent that from happening. I mean, I understand the sentiment of it, but you got to understand that it's really dangerous. At the end of the day, if you don't know what you're doing. And again, I'm not, you know, the vast majority of dairy farmers, the milk coming off, that is fine. But, you know, the average consumer puts that in the refrigerator and treating it like it's a pasteurized product. Holy moly. You're going to have all kinds of problems here people. You know we have to it's a constant education. There's a reason we do what we do in terms of food safety. I bet you if you interviewed a thousand people at that state fair, 1 or 2 of them may be able to explain to you what that means? Hazard analysis, critical control point, how we keep me safe from the time we convert it to an animal to the retail shelf, what the scientific basis of how we regulate and how we do that is superior to any place else in the world. By the way, here's an interesting thing. The first research to to make that transfer to what we do, to have supply who was who did that initial research way back in the 1970s and 1980s?

[Yeager] That's a great question. Who was a check off?

[Doud] It was the beef checkoff that that's the initial investment made on. How do we do a better job with dealing with E.coli and making meat safer for people to eat? Today we take it for granted. Everybody takes it for granted.

[Yeager] But Gregg, there's so much pushback from people who look at, whatever the organization is, it doesn't have to be agriculture. It can be anything that you're only pushing things for your special interest. You're only doing it so you can benefit. And what you're telling me is there's a reason these groups do these things. It's for the betterment of all, not necessarily the betterment of a pocketbook.

[Doud] Well, and I would say the other way too, is the challenge that we have today is we have this influencer thing in America. You know, we're on a podcast complaining about podcasts, but but, you know, we have these folks that are influencers out there that have a beef and they have an agenda. And they if you listen to their language and how they use things, well, this may cause this or this might cause this, they're out there stirring the pot without really understanding how we got here. But, you know, there's a very good reason why we do what we do in terms of the food industry today and to to make food safe. And, you know, I've traveled in 44 countries. In a couple of instances over the years and being out of the United States, probably close to 100 times, I've gotten really, really sick. Once you get that happen to you. And once was raw milk in Mexico, once was eating a raw vegetable in Colombia. Holy mackerel. Once you do that, once you like, ‘no, no, no, no, no.’ We're going to adhere to safe practices here in what we do in the United States. You know, we don't I know people don't eat raw poultry in this country. Well, there's a reason for that.

[Yeager] My father and I'll tell you a great story about that sometime next time you see him. Let's discuss if we could trade with Canada when it comes to milk. Because that's not necessarily a food safety thing. That is more of, helping the farmer in Canada, helping the farmer in the United States. Each side has different ways they go about it. What's been the biggest conversation you've had in this position with Canada when it comes to dairy?

[Doud] So can we have a second here? Can I tell you a funny story? Go for the very first conversation I had with Robert Lighthizer the first day on the job at USTR, we talked about this issue, and Bob said, and I love telling the story. He said, well, before we get started, I just have one question, and I tell this to farmer audiences all the time. He goes, explain to me how a U.S. dairy farmer gets paid. And as I do that, every dairy farmer in the audience breaks out laughing because no one can really explain it. It's not really possible. Well, we attempted that day. Bob got so frustrated with us, he kicked us out of his office. He was like, you're my ag team and you don't know how dairy farmer gets paid. We came back the next day with a long, drawn out explanation. He kind of looked at it, almost laughed under his breath. He goes, well, this is a little more complicated. More, I thought he knew the whole time. He was just messing with us to make a point. The point is, this dairy conversation is really complicated and it you know, the Canada system is a supply control system. They have a quota. The value of the quota of the cow is worth more than the cow. They control the system. The problem is the demand for butter in Canada is such that they overproduce to meet that butter demand, so they don't have to import butter. They have skim milk powder excess, which is the byproduct from making butter that they put on third country markets. And you can talk about whether or not they dump it or not. Back several years ago when we first started this conversation, they were so that's their system. It wasn't long ago, you know, 20 or 25 years ago in the United States, we kind of had a similar view is we didn't really were interested in exporting dairy. We just kind of wanted to have our own contained system that's evolved today where we export somewhere around 16, 17, 18% of U.S. milk production is exported as cheese, skim milk powder, etc.. So, and in fact, today, you look at what's going on, our dairy exports, I'm looking at the screen - they are up 14%. Our cheese exports, dairy exports to Japan, up 33%. The cheese demand in the world is growing like crazy. We have 10 billion in new investment in dairy processing in the United States. Unbelievable investment in new dairy processing. And there's a very simple reason for that. But if you look around the world in the future in terms of who can make more milk, it's right here and the whole world knows it. New Zealand is maxed out. The Europeans are flat, they're shrinking. Australia is kind of like Canada. The only place you can go is here. And our industry is growing and changing rapidly in that regard. And it's really amazing thing to see how we're going to evolve and change. We already are, to meet that demand domestically and globally.

[Yeager] Well, I think of the time growing up with the, you know, the dairy, the dairy farmer that had 12 cows or maybe 20 cows, add zeros to that now, or two zeros to it because it's automated and it's big production. 

[Doud] Well, I mean the small guy can still work. He may have a robot though. I mean, right. And and have a really cool ice cream business model thing going on. There's all kinds of different business models that work. That's the amazing thing.

[Yeager] And so those are local products being put together. And they find because man we certainly love a good story about this is from a family farm. I bought this from the Hansen family dairy, the Johnson family, the whatever cheese made in whatever part of Wisconsin and or Oregon or those stories are good for agriculture to tell. Are there more of them coming, do you think?

[Doud] I do, I really do. It's a function of who, as our system get, the technology gets more sophisticated so that we can do it safely. You don't need a gigantic $100 million facility to do this. you know, you can do it at a local. I know so many dairy folks all around the country that are doing this at a local level that are amazing. But then on the other side of it, you see Chobani, out there in New York trying to build a $1.2 billion facility that's going to cover 20 acres or something under roof. I mean, it's and that's built for domestic demand and global demand coming. So so the. Yeah. And the point I would argue is all of these business models are going to work. If you if you've got you're on your game in terms of how you market your product.

[Yeager] Well, let's go back to our days on our Iowa and our Kansas farms. Gregg, as kids, I didn't know of many farmers that did that type of thing that they do today.

[Doud] Did you know, but a lot of these farmers today are college educated. They understand the business world, they understand the marketing side of it. And the other cool side of it is with the internet. You can sell a product online today and sell things all over the United States that when we were kids, that just wasn't. You didn't have an ability to have that kind of reach. So that technology in that regard has changed everything as well, efficiency wise.

[Yeager] That's been happening. We've been watching the class three milk price here lately, and the story that we keep hearing about is there's been less cattle. And we faced a couple of challenges, whether it was the bird flu getting into dairy. And that changed after a cycle. Then you have the ridiculously high prices, that for a feeder cow and for a cow to go to. I mean, all of that has impacted the dairy farmer too, right? Any one of those stand out more than the other two.

[Doud] It all goes together. So let's talk through that. You know, there's been a big conversation about. Well, milk production is kind of flat. Yeah, but if you look at on a solid basis or a solid adjusted basis, just this year, I just asked will the number this morning. So far this year we are up on a solid adjusted basis. Milk production is up 1.9%. So there is a big difference there between, you know, pounds of milk. And then when you do the solids adjustment and that means that you get more pounds of cheese out of that pound of milk than you did ever before. And that's really what we're after here at the end of the day. But, I was up in the northeast here not long ago. That black day old calf is bringing $1,300. And I worked for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association as their chief economist for many years. Let me tell you something, ladies and gentlemen. That beef on dairy thing is a game changer for the livestock industry. The cattle industry in the United States. Though you can sell those calves for certified Angus beef. The dairy guy everywhere in the United States knows all about that now. And what that is done. I will tell you a great story about, you know, that had, Jersey show heifers and, and one of them came up to one of the calves, came out black. And when she found out what she got for it, she said, well, maybe I don't need to be in the show calf business anymore. This is really that source of income for that dairy farmer. It isn't just that black cow, it's that methane digester. It's his ability to, you know, sell carbon credits. It's, you know, what he can do with the manure there. There are all kinds of other kinds of revenues, streams and different business models that really do work. for the dairy farmer today. You know, when we talk about all of these issues on the sustainability side, I've been amazed the dairy industry has gone from no man's land to being a way out at the tip of the spear on all of this stuff. These guys are making money doing this, and, they're going to be successful going forward. That the entrepreneurial spirit of the U.S. dairy farmer, to me is maybe one of the most amazing things that I've learned in a year and a half here.

[Yeager] I told your staff I was going to do this, so I hope it's not a super surprise, but let's put your trade hat back on. You already mentioned Bob Lighthizer. Let's go back to those days, discussing China and what is our discussion right now with them? When you look at trade, is that going to be something that these two countries, how long is it going to take for us to have fruitful negotiations are going to help both sides?

[Doud] It's a great question. It's a tough question. I'll just give you my own personal view of all this. You know, I know Jamison. Well, he was our chief of staff when I was there. He's a very good friend of mine. He's very capable trade lawyer. Really smart guy. You know, so, you know, at USTR, you have to understand, somebody has to parse out every word in every sentence of a, you know, a hundred page deal, and you argue and negotiate over every single sentence. This is very tedious. This takes a lot of time, hundreds and hundreds of hours to do that. 23 pages with China in Phase One. Here's the problem, Paul, we were talking with China every single day after we did that deal. We were fixing lots of little problems. And the day that we left on January the 20th of 2021, the Biden administration came in, shut down all the conversations. To me, that was just a huge mistake. And so the first thing we have to do is, you know, and the Chinese, you know, say, look, we have a deal. We have an agreement that fix the vast majority of this stuff. You just need to adhere to it. China, and you've got to go back and hold their feet to the fire, and you've got to have a dialog and a relationship. We're the two biggest economies in the world. You have to talk to each other. I don't mean, doggone it, we're not you know, we're going to be really tough competitors here. And I hate to use the word enemy, but I mean, we're going to be, you know, folks would be the way I would say it. But you got to talk. And, how long this takes, I don't know. I will tell you, the other entity in the world, we have a $23.6 billion agricultural trade deficit with the European Union. Our exports to EU haven’t had an increase in 45 years. I've made this point repeatedly. We have never, ever sat down and hammered out agricultural conversations with the Europeans in all my years. This is our opportunity. I don't see how we can do anything with Europe without agriculture. And for my part, we're going to, I'm going to, hold everybody's feet to the fire here to say, look, agriculture with this kind of trade, if you want to talk about trade deficits, we are the poster child for trade deficits with what's going on with Europe. We got to have this conversation. This is absurd.

[Yeager] What's always been the hurdle with Europe?

[Doud] They're just straight up protectionists, you know, they conjure up every single thing you can think about. You know, the first original WTO case, the first ever WTO case was the beef hormone case. We won the case. Europe has never complied. Today they come up with these notions. Well, you can't call parmesan parmesan. You can't call it cheese. You know, you got to say it's this because we make it. And even though you make exactly the same stuff, you can't call it that, that’s protectionism. Straight up. I don't care what you want to call it. We need to fight them tooth and nail on this. They come up with all of these crazy food safety notions that are just absolutely absurd and ridiculous, process based, to keep us out. And that's what has happened over time is especially in the livestock industry, they're less and less competitive. They have less and less ability to compete with us in the world market, which makes them even more protectionist. At the end of the day.

[Yeager] Oh, well, let's go for a minute, though, when you get the sense there's supposed to be something that happened yesterday and there's the sense of urgency to get things done with every country on this planet. You know, it takes hours, days, months, years to get there. How do you balance the urgency to get something done versus the reality to get what I push back on is a good deal, not just a deal.

[Doud] And that's exactly right. I would caution everybody, do not be, you got to be patient here because, you know, going back to Canada in dairy. The argument is that Canada has the ability to allocate their tariff rate quota to a processing group that is owned by Canadian dairy farmers that have no intention of ever importing from the United States because of that. So they pigeonholed it, the allocation, and it's very cleverly done. There's one sentence, one sentence, and this document I can get over here, it's a book this thick that is Usmca. There's one sense in there that we argued, I vividly remember with Harvard trained lawyers. Does this sentence keep them from doing this? And the answer was yes. We took it to the very first dispute panel. The dispute panel said, well, technically, no, it really doesn't. You have to have everything just right or, you know, you the way I describe it is you can't write a law that prevents somebody from robbing a bank.

[Yeager] Yeah, I've heard that one before. Yeah.

[Doud] Right. And so this is what we run into in these trade deals. If somebody is going to cheat, they're going to cheat. And you know you can't solve every loophole. but you've got to be very vigilant and try to really think these things through legally. And you know, with the Chinese one night we got into our argument over what one word meant because it meant something very different in Chinese than it did in English. And I think before we had this conversation.

[Yeager] Gregg, I think I've heard you speak about this before, at a couple of events where you have talked about words matter, actions matter, a bow, a handshake, a phrasing, an introduction can derail all that work. You did for all those nights. All those weekends that you've lost. Undone by just one little thing. So knowing that we still want to, need it fixed now in our society.

[Doud] Well, society is that way. You know the president his his objective is I'm going to throw you know, we're going to open it all up at once, and we're going to find out who's really willing to work with us and who isn't, and will work very quickly with those countries that are willing to work with us and, you know, we sort out the wheat from the chaff, and then we find out who the problem children are. And then we go to town on and, I will tell you, I think we're going to see some really good successes here. when we've got some great trading partners out there, Canada and Mexico. I think we can sort this out. Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and the Philippines. I think the Europeans are difficult. The Indians are impossible. They are. That's impossible.

[Yeager] But that is one of those markets where I hear commodity groups tell me that is where they think they have the best potential. Looks like you're telling me no is what I'm hearing.

[Doud] I, we, Ted McKinney, Bob Lighthizer myself. I can't tell you the time. We would sit here and talk for an hour about India. I had dinner with Dave McClellan, former CEO of Cargill. A whole dinner conversation when I learned about India and agricultural trade and how Cargill worked to trade openness. I had lunch yesterday with Senator Roger Marshall from Kansas. We have a standing steak dinner. Bet that I have told him, Senator, we have been mining for agricultural gold in the hills of India for 40 years, and we still haven't found any. It is very, very difficult. I don't want to go into the reasons why. I understand why. Maybe someday, but probably not in my lifetime would be my answer to that and I'm 58 years old.

[Yeager] So if India is not necessarily, I won't say, viable, but not as much potential there as could be. Do we have to put our eggs back in the China basket and hoping something happens there?

[Doud] So my answer to that is, is really important. Well, you can do free trade agreements with the rest of the world. It does not replace Chinese demand for agricultural products. They import more food from the world than total U.S. ag exports. And what has been happening since Covid is their economy is just way off kilter. Demand is poor. The Chinese economy has been in really bad shape. We're only just now what we're noticing is in dairy imports. They were just off the radar for like 3 or 4 years here. We're seeing signs of them finally starting to come back a little bit. The whole key is you look at their hog market. Half the hogs in the world were in China. If pork production in China is not growing, that means the Chinese consumption of, you know, their whole thing just is pretty relatively flat. I like one thing on top of that for us in terms of U.S. exports to China. I don't worry about the whole 1.4 billion people. I focus on the 300 million at the top that are middle class consumers by global standards. They're the ones that have the, you know, the disposable income to buy our beef, etc. and economically, they have just been flat on their back here for the last several years. Disposable income in China has been way off the mark. And that's what we've got to see. Come back. And and if it does, it'll be a huge help to not just us, but to global commodity prices for every commodity. In my opinion.

[Yeager] Are they off kilter because of relations with us or just the way they had set up an economy, and we're just coming in at the right time? 

[Doud] They've taken their economy, they were never able to get their feet under a mat for Covid. And in my if you look at real estate values, if you look at, you know, the key signals of trade and what's going on in China, I, you know, after spending, you know, all the time, I, I watch that very closely. The official data in China I don't trust at all. You have to look very closely to see if you can pull out things that are happening. that it's been rough over there for quite some time, but I would say that there are signs and the I have conversations with really good. Come on. The analysts that are really good friends of mine in the meat side, grain side, etc., we're beginning to see some signs, finally, that maybe, maybe things are turning well.

[Yeager] And that's the question I've been asking our analysts. What's that sign?

[Doud] And it's a good question. I don't know that there is any single silver bullet or sign. I think we just have to watch collectively here to see what we can see. That to me, the leading indicator for commodity price. There are two leading indicators for commodity prices in the world oil prices and what's going on in the hog market in China.

[Yeager] So you're telling me I need to spend more time on the hog market discussion at the end of the show, and not just give it 30 seconds, I need to be at least 90 or I'm going to get in trouble because I get in trouble when I skip hogs or give it little time.

[Doud] Yes. The other thing I would say is an old cattle guy is, you know, I, I recall here post-Covid, these conversations about the cattle market was broken and everything, you know, beef demand was, you know, everything was messed up. And I said, just be patient. This, you know, this thing will come around, but I will say this, if you had told me five years ago that we could have taken that steak in that restaurant here in DC from 30 to 40 to 50 plus dollars and not had an impact on demand, I would tell you were crazy. But we've done that.

[Yeager] Yeah.

[Doud] And that has been bad. Plus, the international marketplace and the demand for beef has made all the difference. And that beef thing has been, you know, it's been a huge help for all of us in agriculture. In my opinion.

[Yeager] Very good. Gregg Doud. I appreciate all the insight. Thank you so very much for the time.

[Doud] My pleasure. Thank you.

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