Special Edition: Feed Central’s Next Chapter, with Tim Ford

Jon Paul Driver 0:05
Welcome to the Feed Central Hay Matters podcast, your go to source for all things hay related in Australia. I’m your host, Jon Paul driver, and in today’s episode, we’re joined by Tim Ford, managing director and owner at Feed Central, and we’re going to talk about something new and exciting today. Welcome to the podcast.

Tim Ford 0:25
Thanks, JP, great to be here. Look forward to talking to you and sharing with you and sharing with our clients and listeners. Yeah, something really, really exciting. Something’s very exciting to us, and hope it is to the clients as well. So what’s the news? Well, the news is that on the 29th of January, Feed Central is launching a new platform, which we’re calling LocalAg, what is LocalAg? yeah, look in simple terms, LocalAg, it’s a safe and secure marketplace where buyers and sellers come online see each other’s products and can connect directly with each other and secure transactions, including payments online, using their smartphones, using their PCs, using their tablets, whichever way they like to do business, and what categories treat on LocalAg, oh, obviously, obviously hay. So we’ve got approximately 200,000 tons of hay listed fully inspected and feed tested on the feed central website now. So obviously, we will take a fair proportion of those listings over to LocalAg, with the client’s consent, of course, but also grain, seed, fertilizer, livestock and farm machinery will be the main categories that we get started with on the 29th of

Jon Paul Driver 1:45
January. Tim, how long have you been working on this? It’s been a long

Tim Ford 1:50
time. JP, part of me thinks that it’s been 20 odd years ago, and it may not have been the right time, because, you know, there’s few unique parts about LocalAg where buyer and seller get to meet each other and talk to each other and and that on LocalAg. And that will unpack that as we go in the podcast. But when you and I were traveling around Australia, regional, Australia, visiting clients and so forth, what was that 18 months, two years ago? You know, we were talking about that. We talked about that in the car a lot. And, you know, we’re talking about how clients businesses are changing, and about how we’d seen a difference in the way clients businesses were changing. We’re seeing, you know, we met a lot of really young farmers that had been to university, and they were coming home with, you know, iPhones glued to their hands, and in all the GPS, driverless technology that’s that’s either in the tractor or coming, means that these, you know, these clients, have got more time to be on social media and more time to be on the phone, and then the desire to take some interest up and down the supply chain by clients. So all of those trends have been coming for a long time, and we’ve seen them coming for a long time. I think we started really getting serious about this in in 2020, and we started devoting resources to it. As in all small business, you have some false starts. Either we’d probably go back to 1718, we had a concept, but the drought was so fierce and the high trading business was so busy, we had no chance of pulling it off. And then you go into 2020 and you know, we were spending a few hours a week on this. We’re having really significant brainstorming sessions and strategic planning sessions, probably back in, not in 2020 talking about the changes that were coming and what were experienced in the industry. We had a major hiccup in 2022 with, you know, our general manager, Kieran Maxwell, getting, you know, getting so unwell, so fast, and that had a major jolt in the business, and had major flow on effects into different areas of the business. We sort of during that period of time we were prior to that, we were investing more and more resources into what we now call LocalAg, I think back then we were calling it the JetStar project, and we had all sorts of nicknames for it. We probably didn’t have a brand name for it at that stage. So then Cieran got sick in in 2022 you know? So life got in the way, business got in the way, and had all these distractions. So it’s probably from around the time you were here. So the concept been developed. There’d been a lot of strategic planning. You and I were traveling and talking intensively in the car about the changing net landscape of agriculture and how things were being done 18 months ago. And so from when you were here to now, we’ve got deadly serious about it, but there’s been just years of strategic planning and SWOT analysis and and discussions and beers and coffees and everything else around this idea for what seems to me to be like a decade. And that’s one of the reasons why, you know. It’s taken a long time. There’s been a lot of money put into it, or at least a lot of money for us in our budget, there’s been a lot of money put into it. And like for you know, to actually be ready to launch it on the 29th of January. 2025 is pretty exciting, you know. And it’ll be a it’ll be a great day when it finally gets launched, because it does feel like a 10 year project. To me. It’s certainly been a couple of years of pretty strong investment and huge amount of resources going into it. So a couple

Jon Paul Driver 5:26
of things. Then, what would you say to your team about the development of this product now, and what would you say that you learned along the way?

Tim Ford 5:33
Let’s start with the team. What would we say to the team? I think that say to the team is that, you know, you’ve been on this journey for at least, you know, at least a year and a half, as we’ve been working towards LocalAg, we can say to the team that it’s, it’s not going to be easy. There’s going to be some trying moments. There’s going to be, you know, as we build up between now and launch on the 29th January and post launch, there’s going to be some trying times where we know we’ll be ready, we know that our team’s capable of it, and there’s going to be some trying moments, but I reckon we can have some fun along the way, and and I think we’re going to have lots and lots of fun as we go from as we launch the new marketplace. And most importantly for the team, it builds a more sustainable business feed. Central has been very invested in hay and yeah, it builds a it builds a more diverse, more sustainable business for our team, and that’s that’s important for all of us. Now, what

Jon Paul Driver 6:28
would you say to your to your customers, your existing customers,

Tim Ford 6:32
the customer base has been, along the way, at times, profoundly invested in feed Central. We’ve got many clients that we have done business with for over 20 years. There’s many clients. When you open their account, and there’ll be 2122 years of feed testing data in their in their account records. A lot of that time, it’s continuous business due to drought and seasonal fluctuations and growing conditions. All the rest of it’s not always seasonal business, but, you know, there’s a, there’s sort of a large and profound group of clients that have been really invested in feed Central, and they’ve followed our journey and our development and so first of all, you know, thank you for that. I mean, that’s a really, a really special spot that that we do find ourselves in from time to time when we’re dealing with those clients and the feedback along the way has always been really honest and occasionally blunt about what feed central needs to do to get better and how the system needs to get better. We’ve had a couple of cracks that, you know, we launched some pretty crappy code from time to time, and we’ve had some, you know, the switchboard sort of lit up, but, but people haven’t abandoned us. Largely, you know, like we’ve, we’ve had some classic mistakes, but we’ve had some, we’ve had some classic wins. And all the way along the way, there’s just this group of clients that have just been there, and they just keep supporting us. They ring us up, they encourage us and and I think, you know, that’s why, largely, we feel confident that LocalAg’s Going to, going to, you know, going to be successful, and really just encourage the key mesh to those clients is just stay on the journey with us like we really appreciate it. There’s going to be, you know, part of our business is going to go across the LocalAg platform. LocalAg is going to be just a new way of doing business for and it’ll suit many so, you know, bottom line is just, guys, thank you, and please stay on the journey with

Jon Paul Driver 8:20
us. We really appreciate it now. Tim, what does this mean for you personally,

Tim Ford 8:23
I suppose for me, I sort of got a saying to myself that I’ve made so many mistakes along the way that, you know, almost feel as though you know what you’re doing. You know, 22 years ago, you know, we’re a startup, and it, you know, feed central developed, you know, at times, into quite a successful business at times. There’s been some horror years and where everything’s been on the line to keep going, like so many businesses in rural and regional Australia, you know, we’ve had the ups and downs and the seasonals and the fires and the floods and everything and everything else so and we’ve put a lot of work into the tech space. We’ve put a lot of work into personal client relationships across the country, and that’s, you know, largely been reciprocated incredibly generously by our clients. For me, it’s bringing all of that, everything we’ve learned, to date, and putting it into a new platform and making the best of it. You know, the mission of LocalAg is to take the very best of feed Central and to create a trusted and fair marketplace. Everything we’ve learned along the way is all wrapped up into this, and we’re really invested in making it, making it successful. And I think, you know, financially, you know, a lot of our clients listening to this, you know, talking business all the time that you know we’re talking to business people. Our clients are generally really serious business people, serious farmers. We need to diversify our business our you know, Megan and I have got four kids that are that are certainly coming through the ranks and growing up, and a lot of our clients have seen those, seen the kids grow up. And that’s a that’s a great experience to share with you know, clients. To become friends over time. And so what’s important, we need to diversify the business financially. It’s the right thing to do. The kids are really interested in the business which which creates a whole new opportunity, and they’re interested in seeing it successful. They’re certainly, you know, working in the business, part time and casual, in and out of uni and in our school and all of that. So, you know, it’s getting that, you know, taking LocalAg, as a startup, as a family friendly business, and keeping it family, and keeping it wrapped around family and wrapped around, you know, local business and farming in rural Australia. You know, if we, you know, keep all of those principles there where, you know, it’s that’s important to us, and we’re going to have a successful business if we, if we can do that and add value to our clients businesses along the way. As

Jon Paul Driver 10:50
we have regular listeners to this, what should they expect to see in the coming weeks and months?

Tim Ford 10:55
LocalAg, will be, will be a significant change or upgrade to the way we do things, you know, be interesting to sort of explain why, you know, some of the trends and so forth we’re seeing. We’ll do that in a couple of minutes with you. Jon Paul, fundamentally, LocalAg, will be a place where buyers and sellers will meet each other online, whereas feed Central is a place where, historically, the seller has been anonymous, and that option will certainly exist through through feed central going forward into the future, but it’ll be a place for our clients and agribusinesses and so forth around the country to build their profile a little bit similar to social media, but without all the junk of Social media. So clients will be able to build their profile, meet each other, online, chat and talk to each other, online, form a relationship and do the deal. And in that process, a contract gets formed between the buyer and the seller. And then just by following the steps, there’ll be prompts for payment, and the payment will transact through a secure escrow based system. And when the payment is received, the seller will be notified, and the products can be released. And it’s all within a relatively simple chat format, and it’s within a relatively simple process where the conversation starts, the con, the contract gets formed, the payment happens, and the delivery happens. There’s a lot less rules around it, like feed central really developed through its quality assurance process. The quality assurance process will still exist. Really formed with feed central as a traditional trader, and when you’re a traditional trader and you have a principal responsibility for the product that you’re transacting in, over a period of time, there’s been lots of rules coming to feed Central, and that clients can do this, and clients can do that, that’ll all still exist through feed Central. On the LocalAgplatform, there’ll be a lot less rules. It won’t be necessary. It’ll be preferred that the product is quality assured. It won’t be essential for the product to be quality assured, and there won’t be strict requirements about contracts being signed, because all of that will be confirmed on messaging and on chats. It’ll be more it’ll be more relaxed, modern way of doing business, on LocalAg, and that really suits the psyche of today’s farmer, I think.

Jon Paul Driver 13:21
What are the trends that you’re seeing in the marketplace, that facilitators are encouraged the development of this system?

Tim Ford 13:29
Yeah, when we toured, what was that a year and a half, two years ago? And every time I get out onto farm, and every time our team get out onto farm, you know, we’re hearing about, you know, sheds being built. Our clients have got trucks. They’ve got drivers. They’ve got trucks. So I don’t know they’ve got a fancy name for it. The Aussie farmer won’t have a fancy name for it. A few of the corporates call it, you know, supply chain management, and, you know, supply chain integration and multi supply chain investment, investing upstream and downstream and all that sort of stuff. But so many of our clients are just doing it. They’re not giving it a fancy name, but they’re essentially, you know, we’re seeing that our clients are becoming a marketing company. They’re becoming a storage and warehousing company on their own farm with the investment that have gone into sheds and silos, and we’re seeing that they’re becoming transport companies, you know, like, we’ve got a lot of clients that have got at least one truck, and you know, a lot of our clients, there’s two or three siblings in the business, and one of them in charge of hay making, one of them will be charge of harvest and planting the crop, and one of them in charge of the transport arm. And you know, like, it’s not the majority, but it’s, it’s certainly, it’s certainly happening. But you know, the number one trend that we’re seeing is that wanting to build profile and wanting to build direct connections with the end user. This system will allow them to do that. This system will allow them to build direct connections with the. End user, to receive direct feedback from the end user, and to be able to do business directly with a quality assurance system, with a contract system, with a payment system, if they choose to operate that way. So we’re seeing farmers wanting to develop their own brands. We’re seeing farmers they don’t know that they’re calling they’re calling they’re not calling it a branding strategy like we would in the corporate world. But they, you drive around, they, you know, the lots of clients have got their got their logo on their shirts. They’ve got high vis safety shirts, or they got their RV sellers shirts, or there are RM William shirts, and they got their company brand on it. They got their company brand on their vehicle, they’ve got a Facebook page, they’ve got a Twitter account, a lot of them have got a LinkedIn account. And so they’re building their brands. And this is another opportunity for LocalAg, will be another opportunity for our clients to build their brand. And from a buyer’s perspective, we’re seeing buyers, many, many buyers that are building their brand because they’re wanting staff to work for them. They’re wanting growers to contact them directly. They’ve got environmental legislation they have to comply with so they don’t want neighbors complaining about environmental issues. So we are seeing our buyers, our end users, for all sorts of reasons, building their brands. They don’t call it a branding strategy, as I said. They just call it, you know, they’re just building their profile there being good corporate citizens there. It’s great for attracting team members. It’s great for attracting customers. So the days of just having a nice mailbox and a pretty entrance have have certainly gone, you know, they’re building these online profiles and and LocalAg, will just be another way to do that. And, and to allow commerce, you know, the exchange of goods, services and, and a safe way to make payment. I think in rural Australia, you know, we do a lot of business over the fence. There’s a lot of business happens over the fence, and that’s increasing. The rural Australians, they’ll be there to fight the fire. They’ll be there to help each other during flood. You know, they’ll trust each other with their life. They’ll trust each other with their wife. But occasionally, when it comes to payment, we, you know, we might have some reservations. So this system allows that to, you know, to allows all of that to come together.

Jon Paul Driver 17:16
What’s the outreach going to look like outside of the hay world? You’re very connected. That’s what the podcast does. That’s what your interactions with Afia does. It gets you connections within the hay world. What does that look like for the rest of Ag?

Tim Ford 17:32
For the vast majority of our clients, like 99% of our clients, hay, is a minor part of their business. You know, we’ve got over 200,000 tons advertised on our feed central website. Now, the support that we’d really love from our clients is for them to list their second hand machinery list, some grain list, some seed they might be trying to market. So I think one of the reasons why this can be successful is the is through our existing client base and encouraging each one of our clients to list something on the platform. You know, so many of the clients have built a relationship with us. There’s a vast majority of cases, there’s a really strong trust with feed central in terms of the money, the payments, in terms of the transaction, in terms of the transport, and the personal relationship between feed Central and the client. Now, staff and and the client and so forth is so strong. So, you know, we would like to see all of our clients, or, you know, a good number of our clients list something else on our system as soon as, as soon as they’re invited to and as soon as it’s launched, you know? So that’s the fact that there’s such a that for the majority, vast majority of our clients, hey, such a small part of their business, they can just add something else on and and list something else on the system. And take that, take that feed central relationship the next step into LocalAg.

Jon Paul Driver 19:01
For those who prefer account managers and people who are actively watching the hay marketplace, is that going to go anywhere?

Tim Ford 19:09
Oh, no, that stays, that stays exactly where it is. JP, it’s a really important part of our business. It’s, it’s where we’ve come from. You know the feed central business, the feed central people are exactly, you know where they are, where they need to be. Their expertise around the hay market will absolutely stay in place, and they’ll be available on the phone, on the text, on the emails. You know, we’ve got nev sitting up in his office, his home office, these days, and his his main role is customer service and and, you know, I don’t think you get a more experienced hay salesman anywhere. You got Anthony in the office here in in Toowoomba, almost every day, and then traveling around, traveling around clients. You’ve got Dave, who’s, you know, traveling more and more as he manages the sales team and gets a on the farm and so forth as a. The National Sales Manager. You got Alex in the south service in the southern clients, and then you’ve got Steve traveling all over the country. And then we’ve got a whole team of what we call rover inspectors that are that are part time in fully trained inspectors, you know, for Hey, the feed, central e commerce platform, hey, trading platform. There will be some listings that aren’t suitable for feed central that will go across to LocalAg, and you know, we’ll manage that process really smoothly. So, yeah, good question. The feed central team’s absolutely there with full expertise and knowledge around that hay market, absolutely.

Jon Paul Driver 20:38
And then are you expanding that expertise and knowledge to the other parts of ag that you’re now serving.

Tim Ford 20:44
You know, I think the bare brutal facts around that JP is this is a big investment. It takes a lot of coin and a lot of cash flow to get to get this up and running. We’ve got a really strong commitment to the existing team as LocalAg proves successful, there’ll be additional team members added to support the support the ongoing development of feed central and LocalAg, for the time being, the team that’s in place is a great team and full knowledge there’s capacity there. They’re ready to go. They’re ready to grow and and they’ll be able to service the clients more than adequately.

Jon Paul Driver 21:21
Are there any logistics involved with that logistics facilitation that feed central does? Does that carry over to Local?

Tim Ford 21:30
Yeah, yeah. There will be on on LocalAg, there’ll be an option for for clients to be able to either organize their own truck, use their own truck that you know a lot. As I said, a lot of them have got their own transport. So that’ll be available to them. They can use their own transport. There’s no rules around that. If they don’t have their own truck or it doesn’t suit them and they and they want some help, they’ll certainly be an option to to phone us and to or to connect to us through the platform for us to organize the transport. You know, we’ve got, we’ve got carriers all over the country with the hay business, and we’ve got people dedicated to transport and logistics, so it’s a relatively simple process for us. So that’ll certainly be an option for transport and logistics. Definitely.

Jon Paul Driver 22:12
understand that there’s someone named Kev who is that?

Tim Ford 22:16
Ah, Kev, he’s an interesting character. So Kev’s our robot and and he’s a robot with a personality. At the moment, when I am talking and interacting with Kev in the test sessions, to me, he’s like a junior trader. You know, you get that junior trader, and he’s not quite sure who the buyer and who the seller is, but he’s this robot that’s just getting smarter and smarter. And so as we, as we test him, he’s learning when Kev is ready, I think I’m pretty sure it’ll be for launch, then Kev will be introduced to our clients. And so he’s the chat function. He’s the robot in the background. And so Kev is going to be pretty, pretty cool, because when clients are chatting, if something is going a bit haywire. And, you know, say, for example, two clients have agreed on a price, but there’s no delivery date. Kev will come into the conversation and say, Hey guys, great to see that you’ve got a price. You know, you’ve agreed on price, but you know what delivery date and who’s doing the transport. And so Kev will ask those questions to keep the conversation going. So it’s not just like a, you know, a Facebook marketplace chat where, where you do the deal on Facebook marketplace, but no one knows when they come in, when they’re picking up, and then Kev develops the contracts. So kevs this like, let’s call him a junior trader at the moment, in a historical sense, but he’s learning, and he’s becoming smarter all the time, and his job is just to guide that contract through and they develop the contract and send it out to people. Of course, Kev will be monitored by humans here in the background, our trading team will be keeping an eye on him, and if there’s anything that’s not quite right in kevs conversations, the sales team will intervene and everything will be corrected. So I reckon Kev is going to be a huge amount of fun, and we’re going to test him and get him right

Jon Paul Driver 24:03
LocalAg comes with AI integrated.

Tim Ford 24:06
Yeah, I suppose you could say that, yeah, like, but it’s not scary AI, you know, like, it’s, it’s useful AI, so he’s learning the whole time. He’s going to take the, he’s going to take the conversation to chat. So, yeah, yeah, no, he comes, it comes with AI integrated, yep. And we’re going to keep, we’re going to keep really close on it and make sure that it’s working properly along the way.

Jon Paul Driver 24:25
The example that you gave with Facebook marketplace, I have this problem all the time communicating with customers, and the conversation just drops. You’ll be messaging back and forth, and you have a price and a time and a date, and then they never show up. It seems to me that having something to facilitate that conversation and keep poking the participants and engaging the participants will will help facilitate those relationships and agreements. Yeah, well,

Tim Ford 24:56
Yeah well this is what’s really unique with LocalAg and we couldn’t find a chat bot anywhere in the world that we could just buy off the shelf, because some of the code, you know, as you might know, JP, some of the code, you can sort of go and buy it off the shelf. Or you’ll get some, you know, you’ll get someone in Uzbekistan or someone to develop it. But all our codes been developed in Australia and by local people here in Toowoomba, Kev the chat bot. We couldn’t find him to buy him anywhere. We had to develop it ourselves. And the unique thing about Kev is that it’s a three way chat, so buyer, seller and Kev having having a chat. If you think about, you know, Facebook, marketplace and everything else, it’s just, you know, two people having a chat. This is three people having a chat. But it’s also where, you know, our team can see and monitor the chats. And you know, it will be widely advised when people sign up to LocalAg and they’re involved in LocalAg, and as the conversations are happening and people are interacting that our team will be monitoring those conversations. And you could say that’s big brother, but I think just it adds so much security to to the system. So if there’s, you know, if there’s someone on there scamming it, our team will recognize that, because they’ll be monitoring it. If there’s somebody and and Kevin Kev will have some smarts built in to monitor for those schemes as well. But most importantly, we’ve got the human eye in the background, keeping an eye on those cats, keeping on those chats, keeping an eye on the contracts, keeping an eye on the transactions to make sure that they’re all responding properly. It’s agricultural trade. It’s agricultural commerce. Stuff does go wrong. There are rain events. There is weather damaged product. You know, cattle do all of a sudden they’re in the yard, but then the gate breaks so they’re not in the yards. Stuff happens, right? And we all know that. So when things go wrong, our phone number and a help desk and and even the contract dispute resolution will be all part of LocalAg, so the team of people behind it, we know, we know that stuff goes wrong, and, you know, there’ll be a first touch point that people can contact us when stuff does go wrong, and then we’ll take that to the next level with a contract and dispute resolution process. It’s not just another marketplace with, you know, there’s people, everyone in our business has been in the been in the agricultural trade for a long, long time, and we know that stuff can go wrong. And subsequently, you know, we’ll, we’ll have the system, the manual system, the IT tech in place, but most importantly, the manual systems and the human oversight, just to, just to, to overcome any of those obstacles that may present themselves in the physical day to day, transaction and delivery, execution, contracts, etc. But where’s the name come from? So you know you’re going back to Kev, JP, it’s a good question. I think in 2021 we were sitting in this room, in the office here, and we were developing the concept of LocalAg, we were developing the concept of a chat bot that helps and we’ll, we’re throwing designs for the logo around between us, because we’d had some early designs of The logo come in and our, our our marketing manager at the time, runs a successful marketing business in town. Now, Maddie, and a lot of clients would would have had a lot of interaction with Maddie over the years. She did a lot of different jobs. And we’re throwing this idea around, and the team is saying, So Tim, you know, what do you want the chat bot to do? And I was like, we can’t have a typical chat bot, you know, like it’s got to be personalized in this is sort of, you know, 12 months, 18 months before that concept of AI came in and, you know, saying it has to be personalized. It has to know about hay, and it has to know about farming, and it has to know about, you know, rural Australia. We can’t have some just robot just answering questions willy nilly, and then it has to be authentic, and it has to be friendly, and it has to be really, really useful and really informative. You know, it has to know about our river systems. It has to know about our soil types. It has to know about our tree types. It has to know where our towns are, the team are going, you know, something called AI, it’s coming. It’s coming. You know, we might be able to link into that. And then at the same time, you know, that week that we’re having these meetings, my father was, was dying in the hospital, which is sort of, you know, 10 minutes from the office. And dad had worked in the business, you know, with quite a few of the staff members over the years. And, you know, they were telling stories about my father, whose name was Kevin, who just passed on all this knowledge. And he really, you know, spent a lot of time here, did all our gardens, did our mowing, and worked in the hay shed and helped clients. And. But he’d spend a lot of time just talking to the team, and he’d take new team members out on farm, because him and mum did a lot of inspections when they were when they were a little bit younger, as the business was going that, you know, their gray Nomad traveling the country experience was inspecting hay for feed central as we were getting going, and supporting Megan and I as well, starting this business and having a family and all that sort of stuff, and the team are going, so you want a robot that’s that’s Kev. And I said, Yeah, we want a robot that’s Kev. And then Maddie said, Let’s just call him Kev. Let’s call the robot Kev. And I’m like, I’m not sure that that’s appropriate. And we went through it and like, the team was like, yeah, the robot has to be kept. The robot has to be kept. The robot has to be kept. So, you know, it was a really a special name, I suppose, because, and it’s a name held isn’t in highest regard, because a lot of our clients, like dad, was played footy, played AFL footy all through New South southern New South Wales and Victoria. As a young bloke, he was a well regarded farmer down there. He was well regarded farmer up in Queensland. He then come into feed central in his retirement years in a voluntary role, you know, inspecting and sweeping our floors and mowing our grass and driving the kids to school and all that sort of stuff when we were too busy. And he just knew all this stuff, and he was really friendly and and and could answer lots and lots of questions. So the team sort of decided to name it Kev the night decide the name the robot. Kev, so, yeah, he comes from a really special place the Kev, the Kev name, so, but it also emphasizes just how important it is for this robot to be friendly, smart, useful, answer questions, appropriately. And so that’s going to be cool to see that take off, that that’s going to be really, really fun to watch that, watch that grow. We call him a junior salesman at the moment, but we’ll see. We’ll just, we’ll keep him closer on him and and train him and teach him, and we’ll see where it goes.

Jon Paul Driver 32:01
What a wonderful story. We’ve talked about a lot of things in this episode, but if there’s three things that you want to leave in a listener’s mind, what are those three things?

Tim Ford 32:10
Oh, yeah. JP, it’s been a great opportunity to talk to you today. Couple of key takeaways. Is LocalAg, is a new, safe and simple marketplace, really simple to use, and it’s got a lot of safety features built in. Most importantly, I think it’s backed by real people. The team here, the traditional feed central team, are going to put their full elbow grease behind it and make it work. And if something goes wrong, there’ll be a way of sorting that out. And I think that’s really important to people. And there’s a real Aussie family behind it, you know, like my wife and I and and the kids and the whole feed central team and all of their families are absolutely behind it and backing, backing right into it. And, you know, the final point is that feed central continues here. Business is normal for feed Central. So, you know, I think it’s, you know, great, great, new innovation coming to AG, and it’s business as normal for for feed Central and the team so and with a whole whole heap of excitement thrown in for 2025

Jon Paul Driver 33:05
Tim, thank you for sharing these stories today. Again, I’ve been joined by Tim Ford, the managing director and owner Feed Central and now LocalAg, a big thank you for joining us today and sharing this exciting update. This podcast is proudly presented by feed Central. Stay tuned in for upcoming episodes.