Cody Turner was just a Southern Idaho farm boy. Although just a farm boy, he had big dreams for the impact he would make in agriculture and in the dairy industry. Cody may have grown up on a farm, but he started from scratch to build what he has today. Early on he changed his focus from building a business and making money to building something that other people can benefit from. He has kept his focus on two things, feeding the world and providing opportunities for his employees to develop their talents and become their best versions of themselves.
What Benefits and Differences Have You Noticed With Organic vs Conventional Farming?
We do have 3 organic dairies and 1 conventional dairy. Some history that’s important, I originally started conventional 10 years before becoming organic. It’s not an easy transition back to organic, and I say back to organic because up to 50 years ago everyone was an organic farmer whether they knew it or not. That’s what organic is, returning to the most natural way we know how to farm. When I decided to become an organic farmer, I spent a lot of time talking to older farmers about how they used to do things.
Conventional Farmers have a lot of reset buttons. Organic farmers must be proactive and progressive. You have got to understand the bug cycles and you have got to understand the weed cycles, and how they strengthen each other too. It’s about understanding how the ecosystem works naturally. Through all of that we can meet or beat most county yields for conventional crops. What’s really cool is the most noticeable change would be our corn silage. There are years we would have an organic crop with conventional on all 3 sides, the Seed rep would inspect our corn field and would comment, “What’s going on with your corn fields?”
For all the years I was a conventional farmer it was normal to me to have the corn plants burn off the bottom leaves to fuel corn production. In our organic corn silage that doesn’t happen anymore. In fact, the corn fills out the end of the shuck every year even though we are not able to use fertilizers.
Overall health of the soil converts to healthy plants. We focus on doing healthy things for the soil and that converts into healthier plants. Which then results in healthier cattle. We can maintain respectable numbers on health, cull rates, and death loss on our organic dairies that would be comparable to a conventional dairy even though we cannot use even a single stich of medicine. Those things have been really cool things to learn.
What Benefits and Differences Have You Noticed between your Organic vs Conventional Dairies?
It is kind of intriguing, the way to manage organic is quite different than managing a conventional dairy. I don’t know maybe it’s because I have only known poor conventional dairymen, but it seems like on the conventional side we were always retroactive. We didn’t worry until cows were getting sick, and then we would do something about it.
In the organic world because it’s not possible to just jump on top of treating. We have made environmental changes to help combat that. One thing we have been really excited about, we can use vaccines and probiotics. Things that offer preventative maintenance to the animal, and we have been able to see that brings a lot of benefit for the cow. We have seen a real improvement by utilizing those things correctly and to their full potential.
How Is Your Labor Availability, And What Do You Do To Coach And Train Your Employees?
The most interesting thing, if you ask anyone who has had employees in the last 3-5 years, most will say it is hard to find people that are willing to work, and people who are good help, that care and are committed to their job. I’ll say just the opposite. We have more good, qualified people than we can use.
We have a tremendous amount of A+ people and enough once in a lifetime employees to supply a dozen businesses. I would have to take it back to this basic principle. A few years back I noticed in the Ag industry we have a really interesting situation coming at us. When you look at the statistics, most farmers are 60+ and nearing retirement age. Of those nearing retirement age, a huge percentage are actually 70+ and are still in the environment because they haven’t found a way to get out yet. There is no real retirement plan when you own an ag business if there is nobody that can take it over.
So that’s what I noticed a few years ago, and I was like Holy Smokes! We are going to have a huge avalanche of farmers that are going to need to quit and don’t have someone to pass it on to. I realized at that time, there will be more opportunities for growth than we will be able to take on. I determined it would not be the opportunities that would prevent our growth, or money that would prevent our growth. I think money is a make-believe thing, I have always been able to come up with the money for what I need. What would determine our ability to grow would be the quality and abilities of our management team.
We are only as good as the people that we have. We started having a morning devotional 2x per week at 6 a.m. Everyone is invited but it’s mostly the management team that shows up. We read self-help books, educational books, management books, but 90% of the time it gets tied back to God and how to be a better person, community member, better parent, etc. A big focus in our operation is holding ourselves and each other accountable to become the best version of ourselves that we can be. We have seen tremendous growth in our people by focusing on that.
Because our focus is on becoming the best version of ourselves that we can be, we attract so much higher quality people than we would otherwise because we are attracting people who want to learn and grow and become better.
When you hear someone say they can’t find good help, put yourself in the shoes of their employees. What does their employee have to feel when they hear their boss saying that about their team?
We have really changed our vocabulary, our outlook, and our focus to create a different environment. On top of that too, I have proven this to myself and to me team, and I say it about once per week, we are all sons and daughters of God and all of us being sons and daughters we have tremendous potential to become great. What we usually lack is someone to believe in us, push us, and hold us accountable for falling short. As we hold each other accountable, and as we push each other to make better decisions and to take ownership, all of us can grow and become better than we currently think we can.
I have seen so many of our guys that were just normal workers change. One example is Fidel. Fidel was just a milker. But now Fidel manages dozens of people. He trains, hires, and fires, and holds others to a higher accountability level than what he was even held to when he was a milker. He owns that job, and he takes high esteem to create the best team that he can because that is where his stewardship lies.
Our 2 newest farms are down in Preston, Idaho, 210 miles away. The teams down there are 100% green. The managers on both farms, have had 0 experience managing a dairy. I threw them at the wolves because I knew they were great guys and I knew they had potential to become great managers. They have all my confidence and trust and they know that. I work really hard at training and then empowering. I don’t micromanage, I let them run their own show and I try to let them figure out the good and the bad all on their own. I believe you learn from your own experiences not from the experiences of others.
How Has Adding A Commodity Mill Benefited Your Enterprises?
Originally that mill became certified organic because it has been my mill for something like 25-30 years. When I became organic, I urged the owner to convert to organic. Maybe that was a little bit selfish on my part, but it’s a smaller mill and I wanted them to be able to continue to work with them, so he did.
A few years later he reached retirement age and was looking for someone to buy his mill. I thought man, I don’t really want to own a mill. I don’t know anything about running a mill, but I also don’t want to go back to not having a mill to take care of me. There is no mill in the state of Idaho that could take care of us like, what is now called Wild Cow Commodities.
I decided it would be a great move to buy it and solidify it and even expand it. Now we broker quite a few organic commodities through there as a service to other organic farms. I think it is going to work out very well. There aren’t that many resources out there for organic dairymen. There aren’t mills, there isn’t people that just sell you ingredients, broker it, and figure out the logistics of trucking and storage for you. So that’s what we have been focusing on, not only for our dairies, but also any other dairy that can use that service.
On top of that we have really been able to dial in on the quality. It is important to have corn flaked or ground as optimal as it can be to get the most out of it for milk production. We rebuilt the roller mill and the grinder, and we have them on a maintenance schedule so we can keep the processing at optimum levels. Where we feed it to our own cows it keeps us on the hook. We aren’t doing a poor job for anybody as we monitor how the grain is feeding to our own cows daily. Every other dairyman that has their feed milled at our facility benefits from this optimum scenario.
In addition to the organic milling and commodity side, we bag conventional feed for over-the-counter sales. We make all sorts of different feeds, show feeds, chicken feed, hay bales, etc. We have customers that come from about 5 counties around us, and it has been a really good resource for the community.
Thank you, Cody, for sharing your motivation for feeding the world and for the betterment of your employee’s lives!
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