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Eggheads is the go-to podcast for egg industry professionals who are interested in leadership and innovation in the egg world. Host Greg Schonefeld explores the evolving world of modern egg farming, from the latest in cage-free innovations and organic certifications to navigating the economics of large-scale production. Whether you're an egg producer, supplier, or involved in poultry genetics, this show provides the insights and expert discussions you need to thrive in the industry. Crack open the science, strategies, and stories behind the egg industry’s biggest challenges and opportunities.
Logan Webster:
As far as the risk and financial success or lack thereof of a farm, it's more than keeping your head down and just sweating all day. My dad, hardest worker I'll ever know, he loves what he does. He tends to his broiler houses and he's in his 60s now and a good day for him is hard work.
Greg Schonefeld:
I'm Greg Schonefeld and this is Eggheads. We've spoken an awful lot about the broiler industry on this show, but one thing we haven't really done is spoken to someone who works in that part of poultry. Well, that changes today as we welcome Logan Webster to the show. Logan is someone who's worn many hats throughout his life. He's worked as an intern for a US senator in Washington. He worked in PR at Tyson Foods. He currently works on his parents' broiler farm in Arkansas. And on top of all that, he's an entrepreneur working on an exciting new app that could be a helpful new tool for folks in the poultry industry. And his roots in that industry run very deep.
Logan Webster:
My family actually started with eggs going all the way back to the '40s and of course, before that. But they were just doing it to survive, not thrive. Coming off the depression, my grandmother grew up in a sharecropping family in Southern Arkansas, and obviously poverty was a big deal back then. And the story goes, my grandfather came back from the second war and was able to drive big trucks, thanks to his time serving. And he started driving feed trucks to deliver feed to these farms and saw the poultry business as one he wanted to be a part of and continued offering more and more services in that world. The company he started was called General Farm Services, in fact. And that started with feed truck delivery. And he got into the chicken side of things, like I said, eggs at first. And my family was actually involved in the egg industry up until about 2002, 2004 is when we shuttered those operations.
Greg Schonefeld:
They might've been out of the egg game, but the Webster's broiler operation flourished and Logan literally grew up alongside it.
Logan Webster:
I grew up on a broiler farm in South Arkansas. That's all I've known. I remember as a young kid working in the chicken houses, putting out feed.
Greg Schonefeld:
But despite growing up on the farm, Logan never planned on going into the poultry game himself.
Logan Webster:
I had no interest in having anything to do with a poultry farm as many do when they move away from the farm. I wanted to work in the energy sector actually. I had some studies in geology, and I had my major in public relations and advertising through a journalism degree with the University of Arkansas. 2014, 2015 is when I graduated. And for anybody familiar with the energy sector, you know that there was a big dip then and they weren't hiring, they were firing at the time. So right here in Northwest Arkansas, in my backyard, Tyson Foods reached out with a job offer and I went to work for them in communications for about five years. You talk about seeing this industry through two different lenses. Before that, I should say, I took an internship in DC working for the Senate for then US senator, Mark Pryor. And ag and policy are huge, and seeing policy happening at the Hill was also invaluable.
Greg Schonefeld:
Logan has that rare combination of experience working in the public sector, the private sector, and then firsthand experience running a broiler operation. It's given him a really unique and holistic view of the industry. And today, we're going to get into all of it starting from the beginning. So when the eggs didn't work out for your family and you shifted to broiler, what was different there? What allowed your family to compete or at least to sustain a living in the broiler market?
Logan Webster:
The biggest benefit of working as a contract broiler grower is how you're insulated from outside factors. You're not that much on your own. You're not on this little island. Things like commodities, prices, the price of feed that's provided to you by the integrator and just go down the line. At the end of the day, the bird's health is really the variable that you're most concerned about. Obviously, there's things like a cold winter or a hot summer is going to cost you on the utility side of things. But the broiler industry, especially back in the '90s when we were, I would say, all in on it, that was a really good time to get into that business.
If you were to go in off the street and ask for a loan to start a business that was equivalent to that of building broiler operations, you wouldn't be able to get it as an individual. And obviously do your homework, talk to a financial advisor if you're in that situation and make sure it's a right fit for you. But as was in the '90s, as is today, if you were looking to start pretty substantial commercial operation business and have cash flow day one, broiler industry provides that in a big way.
Greg Schonefeld:
In that environment, in the broiler environment, do you feel are you almost an employee or you feel more like a separate kind of farming entity?
Logan Webster:
It's definitely contract work. Not to equate obviously livestock to people who are in housing communities. But when I was in college, I worked doing some property management and got to know what that world looks like and there's a lot of similarities. I'd get calls at 10:30 PM to go fix something in a rental house. And then chicken houses, we get the automated calls at 2:00 in the morning to go fix something. It's the same relationship then, it's keeping your tenants, if you will, happy and healthy. And that's the life of a broiler farmer.
Greg Schonefeld:
When you went and worked under that senator in DC, was that specifically an agriculture lens or it's kind of a broader lens, but you kind of saw it through the lens of somebody with an ag background?
Logan Webster:
I think most of my time was spent kind of through that constituent relations and PR, public relations side of the office. But coming from Arkansas, agriculture is the number one economy here, so you can't have Arkansas in the sentence without focusing on ag. Arkansas's biggest export is rice, huge row crop state, and I don't know where poultry ranks on the list, but it's up there obviously. So those issues would come across the desk.
Greg Schonefeld:
So those two combined, and maybe at Tyson. Do you have any specific things you noticed during that time that kind of struck you?
Logan Webster:
Gosh, it was a lot. The company had five CEOs in my five years there, which was pretty remarkable for a Fortune 100 company. As a grower, during my time, there were some initiatives to bring growers more into the conversation. And the fine line though is, the question you asked me, it's a pretty notorious question in the broiler industry, which is are you a contractor or are you an employee? And defining that line is a tough one. And on the grower side, you have growers who want the benefits of being more formally employed and you have the ones who like more of the contract side of things, being able to take their operations wherever they see fit.
And there's pros and cons to both. I'm not here to speak on behalf of any major integrator. I'm not here to speak on behalf of all the growers either, but it was good to see those initiatives during my time at Tyson. The then CEO of Tyson, it would've been the second one there during my time, actually took the initiative to fly down to my family's farm and spend a day with my dad working on the chicken farm. And that was really cool. That was really special.
Greg Schonefeld:
That is really cool.
Logan Webster:
Yeah, that was, I don't know. The image in my mind is a feed driver pulls up to deliver feed from Tyson and starts delivering the feed and gets out and starts talking with him and stuff. And I've got a photo of my dad, the grower, the feed truck driver, and the CEO sitting there having a conversation and they drive off and stuff. And dad told me later, he said he just introduced himself by name and had a conversation with him and the driver drove away that day having no idea that he was chatting with the CEO. And no, he wasn't there, obviously wasn't there to, it wasn't like a shadow audit or anything. It was just seeing what the reality of it is. And then the other moment was my mom and my dad sitting at the dinner table with him over lunch and just talking about the reality of it all, what the day-to-day looks like. So that was something that definitely stands out.
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah, yeah. I respect that move, I guess, as being a business owner. And I've made mistakes of not spending enough time on the ground floor and learn that and really today know and see the value of being on the ground floor. And so I think that's cool.
Logan Webster:
I did really enjoy being able to communicate all the initiatives we had for growers. Now, Tyson Foods is involved in much more than poultry. They're one of the world's leaders in pork and beef, so had plenty of other issues come across my desk. But it was interesting to be a part of certain meetings and have some perspective from the farm and be able to speak as someone that had experience on a farm, I should say. Yeah, being able to provide that perspective was really cool. I don't know if it was always appreciated, but I took it upon myself to bring some perspective to the table when I saw it was necessary.
One thing that, and this isn't exclusive to the position I was working in. But when you hear somebody speak on behalf of a demographic that isn't a part of it, that never goes over very well. And the few times people did speak on behalf of growers, I had questions, what growers are you talking about? What's their situation? Just like I'm not going to sit here and say that I'm speaking on behalf of any major integrator or a collective of growers. It's a very sensitive conversation to move around.
Greg Schonefeld:
I sometimes wonder just in general, what kind of ceilings are on farmers? And this applies to, I think, all markets because sometimes the value of the farming operation is in the brand. These specialty eggs like pasture-raised and those kinds of things, you're marketing the farming practice. And that practice can kind of be outsourced to someone else who does the day-to-day. So then the question sometimes in my mind is how much the farmer that works hard every single day, how much should they get of the pie? How much can they get of the pie?
Logan Webster:
Yeah, and this is getting a little philosophical, but that really comes down to how much risk you're willing to take as a grower. There's nothing stopping you from moving forward with supplying directly to a buyer for poultry. But you have to source the chickens yourself. You have to source the feed yourself, and there's nothing stopping anybody from taking on that risk. And obviously, you get a larger piece of the pie when you do that. You have to do it at scale, you have to do it at volume. The American food system is consolidated in every conceivable aspect, not just with the growing operations, but also with your supermarkets where anybody gets their food from. There's consolidation on that front too. So you've got less people asking for more, and it's tough as a supplier, if you will, to those customers to meet needs that will be sustainable for business practices.
Greg Schonefeld:
To be successful as a grower requires a ton of hard work and dedication. But what Logan came to understand through his years working in the industry is that sometimes hard work isn't necessarily enough. And that a grower's chances of success or failure can be impacted by variables that are mostly outside their control.
Logan Webster:
As far as the risk and the financial success or lack thereof of a farm, it's more than keeping your head down and just sweating all day. My dad, hardest worker I'll ever know, he loves what he does. He tends to his broiler houses and he's in his 60s now, and Lord knows he could stand to hire more people than he has over the years. But a good day for him is hard work and who can't respect that? And I think he's a good symbol. To answer your question, somebody who in his young 30s started broiler farming and that's 30 years, 35 years later, I think this is 35 years broiler farming for him. He's still doing the same thing and he loves it. It fits his lifestyle well. But keeping your head down working hard doesn't change the bills that you have in the mail, unfortunately.
As I mentioned earlier, we're probably most vulnerable to something like a spike in utility bills, operations expense on the farm. That's a big one for us. And not being able to cover your electricity bill because, and I'm not calling anyone out in particular, but poultry farmers and many farmers, you might have a good year and buy one too many nice shiny toys. And I'm not saying that you shouldn't have a good work-life balance and enjoy the fruits of your labor by all means, but there is a crunch. And something like a spiked utility bill or the birds that flock just didn't perform like you hoped they would, one bad flock, you can kind of take that on the chin.
And there's actually some insulation provided by our integrators to help that. They do an average of past performance that will basically void a mulligan, if you will, for one bad flock over a time. Well, when that stacks and you have a few ill-performing flocks, that's where that ripple effect as an operation can start to bind you a little bit financially. And I'm not here giving advice as to how to avoid that, but it is good to know when that ripple starts to gain momentum, if you will. And something like financial tracking and planning is a big part of that.
Greg Schonefeld:
What can cause you to have a bad flock?
Logan Webster:
Bird health, y'all have talked about high path AI, obviously, that's probably the poster child for it. But there's any number of illness and ailment. When I was working at Tyson, I would talk to people who were proponents and I'd talk to people who were detractors of the industry that I worked for. One analogy I would often give is when people criticize the conditions of the birds and the houses, you've got sick birds in there and they show me a photo or video of some sick birds. My response to that is show me a town of a few thousand people that there's an empty hospital that nobody's sick. Animals get sick and we take care of them. That's a part of the practice. Now obviously, birds, anything in a CAFO, confined animal feeding operation, is going to be more susceptible to contagion, to anything that's contagious and get sicker faster.
And to an extent, the farmer's job is to keep an eye out for that. Look at things like your key health indicators for the flock, water consumption, feed consumption, and nothing will ever substitute walk in the house as a grower and seeing the birds moving, interacting with each other and what that looks like. And my dad, after 35 years, he's got quite an eye for it, even a nose for it. He claims that he can smell when the birds are sick. And I've gotten more close with the operations of our farm in recent years than now as an adult having a better idea of what questions to ask him about the way he does what he does. And looking at the health of the birds for example, and being able to pick up and clue in on them. It fascinates me what he's able to pick up on. And even in these last couple of years, what I've been able to pick up on. And I can't even imagine where I'm going to be at when I'm as far down the line as he is.
Greg Schonefeld:
So knowing that a few bad flocks can be financially devastating for growers and that too many of them aren't keeping meticulous records about flock health and financials, Logan wanted to create a tool to help with that. So he came up with an app and called it Chicken Sheet.
Logan Webster:
I call every user that downloads and registers with the app, Chicken Sheet, and have a conversation with them. That starts with thank you for downloading and using the app. I introduce myself, ask them if they have any questions for me. And I obviously, have a few questions for them as it pertains to the app, some feedback, and we end up talking about chicken farming. But when you talk about finances, it gets a little quiet. And that is a job in and of itself on the farm. And it's not a task I'm taking on, but I'd love to see some more resources out there for growers to have some better financial and business acumen. For most growers, you're getting anywhere from three to four flocks a year, so let's call it three and a half flocks a year.
So one bad flock, like I said, there's some protections from the integrator to kind of void that, and that's obviously great, but if you were to have just a rotating list of problems that led you to an entire year of poor performing flocks, that's going to stack up. And you can keep your head down and work as hard as you can, do everything that you're told to do and still have a bad flock. And that's incredibly discouraging. The beautiful thing about it is though, when one flock ends, another one begins. And you can walk away from that past flock. But it's not healthy to just forget about it. You want to take notes from it. You want to learn from what happened right, what happened wrong. Not just that flock, but the two flocks, three flocks, four flocks before it.
And while I agree it's healthy to step away from a flock at the end of a flock, but there are things I wish I'd have done differently. There are things that were notable about this flock, whether it be an illness or a higher demand for utility. And there are things that I don't want to forget about, and that's something that every grower I talk to could do a better job of. And now time for the pitch with Chicken Sheet, that is one thing that you can do is it's all about record keeping and being able to recall the success or ill success of the last flock. And that's anywhere from the numbers that contributed to ultimately what you got paid or even we've added a notes function based off user feedback for your historical flocks to give you kind of a debrief.
So that's anywhere from last flock. Here's some things I forgot to do in getting ready for that flock. And it's usually things like just deferred maintenance. Something broke down in the middle of the flock that's like, yeah, I should have serviced that before the flock. All the way to, "Hey, this is my first hot flock, if you will. This is the first flock of summer for me. What do I wish I would've done last year at this time?" And just strive to not be left with the same mess you were.
Greg Schonefeld:
So I guess, I'm getting that there's a piece of this that tracks the variables in your farming operations and is there a financial side to this also?
Logan Webster:
Yeah, so Chicken Sheet is built to collect, aggregate, and analyze data points across three different parts of poultry operations built for broilers. That's the world I know, that's the world I come from. I am told that pullet farmers and some turkey operations have found it useful as well as is, but I would in the future like to build it specific for their needs as well. But I just need to be more knowledgeable about what those needs exactly are before I feel comfortable doing that. Flock, finance, and personnel are the three categories that I've found growers want more insights on. Flock is health indicators mainly, it's more of your day-to-day stuff, so mortality including cold birds, and then going on to water usage and tracking that day to day. And I should note that there are controllers in poultry houses that give you some insights to this, but they don't do a very good job at aggregating that information over time. And Chicken Sheet, the smartphone app, is not meant, by no means meant to replace those controllers.
Those controllers do what they do. They're very much a system status type device where it's like, "Hey, here's what's happening real time at your farm." It's what's sending out, in most cases, alarms to the farm owner or hands and Chicken Sheet is companion to that type of system. So I'm not sitting here telling you to scrap what you're using currently. Chicken Sheet will not tell you what's currently going on in the house, temperature-wise, ventilation-wise, any of that. It's meant for you to plan for the short and long term based off the past and present data that you have. So day-to-day, that is the same thing that's on your mortality sheet. You go into any broiler farm in America and you'll see a mortality sheet. Chicken Sheet provides a digital version of that for you to drum up at any time, whether you're the one logging that data or if you have farmhands logging that data across multiple operations. And it's a more seamless way of communicating that data, whether it's daily, weekly, or monthly. And it also graphs it out that information.
So over time, your water consumption, the numbers just eyeballing them may not seem like there's that many ebbs and flows, but taking a step back, setting your date parameters on Chicken Sheet and looking at what the water consumption has been over the span of 14 days, if there's dips or spikes in that, and then how the subsequent mortality deaths of birds on the farm follows that trend. Visualizing that is pretty cool to see and not only for your current flock but for past flocks. And being able to filter it out not just for the whole farm, but even to the specific house and seeing maybe what your problem houses are. And is there some correlation there with a spike in external temperature and then that house maybe isn't getting the static pressure and temperature controls that it needs. If that's what it takes to help a grower make the decision that they need to make a change on the farm to better take care of the operations, but also and ultimately the health of the bird at the end of the day.
Greg Schonefeld:
It sounds like a great product that can really help farmers. And it sounds like with time you may be able to adapt it to more and more types of farming, which is great. I'm curious, I guess, it sounds like this isn't your first innovation. You did some things in hunting and you were innovating over here, over there, and then you've got this as well. What do you think drives that innovation?
Logan Webster:
One word is passion and it's passion for the stories that people have to tell. I'd say that storytelling is the biggest driving factor of the hunting business that I started. It's the equivalent of a eBay marketplace for the hunting industry, so a website where people can buy and sell outdoor goods. And it started with a blog telling the stories that my dad and my uncles had to tell through their favorite hunting jackets, hunting hats. I was in my late 20s and I'd heard just about every story that they could remember to tell at that point in life. And I found a key to unlock a door one day sitting with my uncle and he was wearing this hat he's always worn and it had a rip inside of it. I said, "Uncle Randy? Where'd that rip?" I just thought to ask, "Where'd that rip come from?" And it goes down this rabbit hole of a story about where he was.
I get to hear this hunting story that I'd never heard before. I was like, "Well, that was something new. I haven't heard a new story out of them in a while." And then I explored that further. Again, that was a blog, published the blog. People liked the stories okay, but they wanted to buy the stuff. And obviously, Uncle Randy's jacket isn't for sale, but it's like, well, what if I provide a marketplace where people can buy and sell their goods with the backdrop being the stories that these goods have to tell? And that's what Camoretro.com has been about. Moving into Chicken Sheet, the smartphone app, there's a passion for helping broiler farmers do what they do to the best of their ability and continue doing it for a long time. And a successful day of Chicken Sheet is when somebody's life is made a little bit easier, even if just marginally. Because they were able to gain an insight, or collect some data, or be able to stay on top of their operations in a way that they weren't able to before.
And that's been the most rewarding aspect you'll see on some of our marketing materials that Chicken Sheet is free to use, it's easy to use and it works offline. The works offline piece is incredibly important. It is a native smartphone app, meaning that it lives on your phone. It's not just you used to access some website, meaning you can store your information on the phone, plug it into your phone or tablet. And it stays there until that device is connected to a network, be it Wi-Fi or a cell network. And investing in that technology wasn't easy. You're basically spending 800% more on a platform that has native capability as opposed to just a web proxy app. Just because I knew at the end of the day, there's at least one farm, because I know them. I've talked to them. There's at least one farmer somewhere that would be alienated from using this app because they don't have a cell or Wi-Fi connection at their operation.
Greg Schonefeld:
On Eggheads, we love sharing as many stories direct from the farmer as we can. While Logan doesn't work in the egg industry, you can see the common thread of a farmer's approach. One of our previous guests, Glen Hickman, said that if a farmer's lot in life is to push a stone uphill, then that's what they're going to do. Farmers aren't afraid of hard work and Logan is no exception with his farm upbringing. On top of the hard work, I find it inspiring to talk to someone like Logan who takes things to the next level with problem solving and innovation. It was fascinating getting an inside look at how the broiler industry functions and learning about his really unique career, which is still in its early days. He's young and he's got a lot of success in innovation ahead of him. And while I was glad to finally get a voice from the broiler industry on the show, this being Eggheads, you already know where we had to end things.
And I've got one last question for you, Logan. How do you prefer your eggs?
Logan Webster:
I've been working with red chili flakes a lot on basically everything I cook, but avocado oil, spray some of that in the pan, cast iron of course, and throw some red chili flakes on there. I love an egg over easy, and so just flipping it at the right spot is important. But yeah, getting those chili flakes in there with the avocado oil, it's really good.
Greg Schonefeld:
Make sure you follow Eggheads on Spotify or Apple Podcasts and be sure to leave us a review. You can connect with us on Instagram and LinkedIn too. If you want to be a guest or have topic ideas, please send us a message. Until next time, I'm Greg Schonefeld and we'll talk to you soon.