Mark Boyden / Boyden Farm
Start Here Podcast | Episode #82 | 10/19/2023
From cow to consumer, Boyden Farm does it all. Farmer/CEO, Mark Boyden, takes us through his entrepreneurial approach running the fifth-generation farm. Boyden Farm does everything from feeding their cattle with Boyden crops to selling their grass-fed beef at local stores and restaurants. Whether you want to grill at home or enjoy a night out at the Burger Barn, Boyden beef will not disappoint. By the end of this, you’ll crave a burger just like we did.
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TRANSCRIPT
Mark Boyden 00:00
I literally bet the farm on this I leveraged myself right to here and said we’re gonna go for we’re gonna go for it spent a ton of money, spent a ton of money but when I looked at what she asked for, I knew it was a deal. So it was like a reverse acquisition. We went from a $2 million business to a $6 million business just like that. And we’re expanding beyond that.
Sam RG 00:21
from Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies at start here, a podcast sharing the stories of active aspiring and accidental entrepreneurs. Today we sit down with Mark Boyden, the fifth generation Cambridge based farmer that is reinventing natural healthy. Welcome. This is Sam Roach-Gerber. And David Bradbury recording from the Consolidated Communications Technology hub in downtown Burlington, Vermont. Hi, Mark.
Mark Boyden 00:45
Hello, thanks for having me here.
Sam RG 00:47
I can’t believe I’m finally meeting the absolute infamous Mark Boyden.
David Bradbury 00:51
The Mark Boyden and yeah
Mark Boyden 00:53
I don’t know about don’t believe everything you hear.
David Bradbury 00:55
got the capital “the” you know, for you, Mark. And thank you for making time today to help us understand what it’s like growing and raising stuff.
Mark Boyden 01:05
Very busy. But I think it’s important to make time for this. There’s a lot to talk about. It’s quite a story involved. And from where we started, where we’ve been and where we’re going.
Sam RG 01:14
Love that. I mean, first thing first, though, I’m almost terrified to ask but what is it like to have David Bradbury as a fraternity brother?
Mark Boyden 01:22
So Dave, and I go way back, not only fraternity brothers, we were saying pledge class, as fraternity. So we go back to 1985.
Sam RG 01:29
Listen, thanks for taking him under your wing, because I’m not sure this Massachusetts boy would have lasted without your friendship.
David Bradbury 01:36
85 you make me feel old.
Mark Boyden 01:38
Everybody’s old, but me. At 52 I started going backward. So I actually turn 47 in my years last year. That’s my story. I’m sticking to it now, but in 10 years, when I’m 37, it’s probably not gonna be working very good.
Sam RG 01:53
Well, well, we’ll cross that bridge. When we come to it. I think you’ll look great. So tell us about your family farm. Your fifth generation, is that accurate? Actually furth, my kids are fifth. Your kids are fifth. Okay, awesome. And are they involved?
Mark Boyden 02:07
No, no, I have three daughters, and they all are doing different things. One is a physical therapist in Montana. One works for sun common and she’s actually at 23 years old. Our state rep in Montpelier.
David Bradbury 02:19
Yeah, we talk with her she’s awesome.
Mark Boyden 02:21
then my youngest daughter, Rachel is a junior at Roger Williams in Rhode Island.
Sam RG 02:25
Awesome. Yeah. Well, there’s, there’s still hope that that one of them will step up right?
David Bradbury 02:31
it’s it, that’s fine. It’s, it’s, you want you to you want your kids to be successful and do what they’re gonna do. And I don’t want any of my kids to feel like they have to do it, you know, and that’s kinda Did you feel like you had to go back?
Mark Boyden 02:45
it was subconscious. I never really realized that there was a pressure on that. But growing up, you’re the eldest son, and it was a successful farm business. And it’s always a subliminal message that, you know, this is your responsibility to do it. And I never really questioned that part of it goes across, I enjoyed doing it. It was a good life, we worked hard. But every year, at the end of the year, you had income and you had taxes, you’d buy a tractor, you’d buy this and it was it was uplifting. So I was at that young, impressionable age when things were good and I was never been afraid to work hard. When you work hard, you see the fruits of your labor, and things are good, you get into it, you know, but then fast forward to us getting out of college and all of a sudden the whole commodity world you know, started going down down down and margins shrinking in the world that I faced was a world of, of very slim profits and much higher volume. So we’re in this, you know, hamster wheel thing of you got to get bigger to be profitable, and all sudden, by the time you start to get that paid for it, it’s not big enough to get bigger again. It’s a never ending hamster wheel.
David Bradbury 03:48
and this is when you were predominantly just a dairy farm. And Mark was the only graduate from our class at UVM to go back to the family farm
Mark Boyden 03:57
existing dairy farm, my buddy started his own farm but
David Bradbury 04:01
dude you cannot, don’t correct a host, this is our podcast.
Sam RG 04:07
What do you think? I’m curious? Because, you know, it sounds to me like you knew you’re going to take over the farm at some point. Like, did you want to go to UVM for the social aspect, or was there something that you felt was missing? Yeah, yeah,
Mark Boyden 04:18
I was a very type A extrovert social butterfly, you know, big man on campus in a fraternity Yeah, yes. Yeah. So, but I also wanted to go for agriculture to learn the newer proper techniques and business stuff and all that. It’s rather ironic when I went to UVM was for animal science and agriculture, but by junior year, also, I was bombarded with real classes biochemistry, anatomy, physiology. And I was like, there’s like real work here. And but it wasn’t stuff I was ever going to use. So I went to the dean of agriculture and I said, I want to be a self Design major. And I ironically named it from How to consumer. So I took marketing classes, public speaking, small business, entrepreneurial stuff, all that stuff. And the Dean have asked us like, we’re so glad you’re doing this, most people do it to get out but get out of biochemistry, pulled the wool over their eyes, big time. Fast forward to where we are now. And I’m doing exactly that. And I always thought I would do something in dairy, like make cheese or out to fluid milk, I was looking to put my own bottling plants, I used to work at the UVM plant where they bottled milk and all that. But then, as we got into dairy, I can just see the whole dairy thing was going down, not so much down in down, but it was changing rapidly in a way that I didn’t want to do. You had to get bigger, bigger, bigger. And I just didn’t really want to do that. I always wanted to market our own product. So in August of 2000, we decided to sell the Holstein milking herd. And after they were sold, it was kind of a transition where at that point, my dad let go of things. It was my new boy and farm LLC that ran the place was kind of a changing of the guard, and also as a way to step back, but now what do we do? And we did the horse hay for a while
David Bradbury 06:03
did popcorn did you try popcorn I tried to grow from my popcorn because
Mark Boyden 06:08
you can’t compete with it. Same thing with edible beans, I was the largest edible drawer of edible beans like black beans can eat beans and cranberry beans in New England. And I lost more money than on edible beans, anybody New England to dance, you’re not competitive, you know, it’s just yeah, there’s really you get right down to it. There’s nothing that you can grow in Vermont, that you can’t make cheaper somewhere else loaded on a truck and bring it period. And you have to accept that, you know, so I did that. So that’s what got me more about let’s do it from a marketing perspective. Because if we can’t produce this cheap Well, we do have going for us number one, we’re in Vermont, you know, the the great image we have, and and also our proximity to Boston, New York, and the whole east coast. So that’s what we can we can beat the Midwest lawn all day long. So if we can get into something where our costs are comparable or not too awful bad, but use our marketing advantage, then we’ve got some that’s where beef fits because beef may cause us it definitely causes more to do here that does like my buddies in Minnesota and Nebraska. But, but we have Boston, New York and all that in our backyard. Now they have the Boeing farm label, we have our new trademark grass plus beef program, we got distributors, well now we can compete, you know,
David Bradbury 07:19
what’s the grass Plus program so
Mark Boyden 07:21
everybody knows grass fed beef. Everybody wants grass, but you see it all the time? Well, everybody wants it to be market that’s also saturated. Everybody like me is doing grass fed beef and sell now, the problem with grass fed beef is the quality of it is really marginal. Sometimes it’s good. Sometimes it’s not. It’s never consistent. It’s always lean. The animals are older, it’s darker, it’s tougher and all that I did it one year because I felt I had to for marketing reasons and it was a train wreck. They just poor quality animals that were small. And I was like This is This is stupid. This is just not the right way of doing it went back how I always used to do it where we feed them predominantly grass, but some corn grain and now since then we’ve added some flags to the diet. And what that does it increase the Omega three levels in the beef. So it’s its proprietary product we get from a guy who beat I could call it super beat but one of the guys in there for marketing remember market? Plus, so we’re going out of this untapped market where you have grass plus on one side Yep, you know, Holly marble fatty commodity stuff here. We’re right smack in the middle. No one else would do that.
David Bradbury 08:25
I fucking love your stuff, though. Yeah, like if you’re gonna buy hamburger unless it’s yours. But yeah, that’s awesome.
Sam RG 08:36
So I have a quite I mean, you’ve just mentioned a couple of really kind of fascinating pivots of of business. How do you stay up on all this stuff? What like, what do you use to educate yourself? Is it a network of other farmers? Are there certain its resources?
Mark Boyden 08:52
Well, this crazy thing called the internet hit Oh, I mean, I still have my little black book in my desk somewhere. I used to have phone numbers of people I would call and I would just, you know, it’s one guy said I was calling the guy in South Dakota was about beef that goes well, you’re burning dimes, aren’t you and you pack the day of dimes in a payphone. And, but I mean, I researched a lot of this myself and in talking with the customers, what they’re looking for the meat buyers, and I’m pretty good visionary person. That’s how I got to where I am, is I’m able to see what’s going on what the trends are. Where do I get to be at the right time? Yeah, like, like anybody entrepreneurial? You better be.
David Bradbury 09:24
I mean, as a as a farmer. I mean, again, you get the land and seasons and livestock like can you change that quickly? I mean, when you say quick change, is it like five years or is it six months?
Mark Boyden 09:37
I mean, like anything on the beef, you can change I wouldn’t say in a week, but you can change over a year’s time, maybe less. Like for example, we used to be non GMO verified, withdrawn non GMO crops. And we ended doing that because just too cost prohibitive. regulatories were hard, and we shifted this program, it took a long time to get my label approved through USDA. Once that was approved. It was really as I was working with other farmers, I bring the cattle to me for the last 60 or 90 days really put the flags to them to get the Omega three levels built up to where it should be. And we already had it lab tested to verify that. And then once that’s gone, it just rolls, you know, but it’s mattered but to finding out to answer your question, how do you find out about that? Well, it’s a lot of phone calls, looking, you know, looking online to find a products, but a lot of phone calls and talk with people to see what works. What doesn’t. For example, the first flags we got was from Alberta, mega high omega three levels of beef great and all that. But guess why we sell to healthy living, or other stores around and within a week’s time the meat was turning brown will come to find out grass fed beef is notorious for turning brown, there’s a chemical reason it happens. Well, we raise your Omega three so high and in the wrong way it was doing that. So I got rid of them got the guys from Kansas, who verified that I won’t do that. And we feed extra vitamin E to help offset the oxygen, the oxidation. And now we got a great product, great part
David Bradbury 10:57
of the vacuum biochemistry class that you’ve never went to.
Mark Boyden 11:01
You don’t need to be sitting in a classroom to know this stuff.
David Bradbury 11:04
so true. I have courses from college. I’m like, like I took forestry 101 at night because I wanted to ski all day. And it was like a night six o’clock class. I remember. I still use it. It was really interesting.
Mark Boyden 11:15
you remember Robbie Davis? For sure. Yeah. From Fiji. He said to us never let college get in the way of your education. Words to live by right there.
David Bradbury 11:25
Is there any chance you’d come in and just run VCET for us?
Mark Boyden 11:29
I’ll tell you how about we switch? You deal with my headaches. Alright, I’ll deal with this. You don’t want the headaches I have.
David Bradbury 11:34
Oh, no
Mark Boyden 11:35
A meat processing facility. Now you want to talk headaches?
David Bradbury 11:37
Yeah. So you still got the farm in Cambridge, right? How many acres is that?
Mark Boyden 11:41
so we do. We own like 500 tillable acres, we rented a couple 100. So it’s about 700 tillable acres. And we have pasture, we have a sugar with I rent out to a local sugar, sugaring guy. And we keep about 200 head of cattle on hand. So we actually sell most of our feed. So the 200 cattle even sounds like a lot but that’s not a lot today. So we bought we work a lot with other farmers around Vermont to get the cattle big to us. We put the flag to him for the last part get him out the door. So it’s a constantly revolving door. Every week cattle come in cattle. Because I tried doing all myself, buy him his baby calves raised them all the way through for 19 to 20 months. Never again, a lot of bonds a lot of work baby calves. Yeah.
David Bradbury 12:26
Yeah that’s what the goat farmers here right in Central Vermont, use a similar model where they put out the the youngstock to other farms that want it and they bring them for finishing and processing and all the rest. So really cool. Can you just talk about other Vermont farms and farming today? Like? Are there any risks that just aren’t the obvious ones that we read about every day? Like for for business viability? And that requires a big upfront capital equipment tractor. Oh, yeah, and all the rest.
Mark Boyden 12:57
Well, I think the big thing is, you know, what is truth? Well, what is truly viable? What is truly not I mean, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of talk for years about the working landscape in Vermont, well, what is the working the working landscape to someone that lives in a very expensive house, in Charlotte overlooking the lake, their idea of working landscape is very different than someone that lives up in Barton, Vermont, trying to make a living, you know, so and that’s, that’s where I tried to find some common ground is we want to keep Vermont open, keep it looking good. But we got to have this where people can make a living here. And that’s what gets neglected a lot of times on things and there’s a lot of help through working lands, grants, and all that to get people doing this than the other. But really, it has to be a business that is viable at a scale big enough to work or else if it’s smaller, that can have the margins make work. Like if like, it’s great for someone to have, okay, I’m doing organic mushrooms, but you can do that on one acre two acres probably do pretty well. Something small, it’s higher value, and you’re marketing yourself trucking around. But what I see a lot of times is people trying to get into farming, and it’s just never gonna be a scale that’s really gonna make it and it happens all the time on things. So you really, you really got to be like really small and be like the small organic specialty something or you’re, if you’re in the middle, you better have like your own truck to deliver or using a lot of your own labor or you’re going to be bigger, and like like the modern dairy farms are nowadays, you know, extremely capital intensive. But it does work. You know, and it really should talk a lot about if we got to talk about you know, iron culture in general, you have to talk about dairy, because dairy is, is the biggest agricultural force in this state. It always has been and it will be long after long after I’m pushing the daisies up.
David Bradbury 14:50
You told you getting younger, right? Yeah. Okay. All right.
Mark Boyden 14:54
That math isn’t always gonna work all right. So, but when you start when you look at the 1000s of acres that’s kept open in Vermont. It’s vastly the vast majority on Sunday 80 or 90% of it is either from a dairy farm or crops going to a dairy farm route. And we have to recognize that because I think dairy has been has had a really bad, you know, hit in the face about how it’s dying. It’s a dying industry, they’re not going to make it. And it was really bad for a while. But then you talked to some dairy farmers, sometimes it still is. But we’re at a point now where the ones that are left, they’re in it for the long haul, they’re milking 400 600 1000 2000. They’re in for the long haul. And there may be times when they’re not making money, but there’s some times we’re making really good money, and they’re gonna make it now we’re at a point where things are quite stable. And if one that’s milking 400 isn’t going to make it, the one down the road, milking 100 will now be 1200. And that’s not a bad thing. When you start pricing, what this equipment costs and the infrastructure needed. You need to do that. In fact, a lot of the ones that look big now at four or 500, they will be consolidating a lot of those to the big rotary parlors, they’re doing 2000 or 3000 cows at a shop. I got friends in Minnesota and look at 100,000 right now. Multiple barns, multiple barns.
David Bradbury 16:09
How do you remember the names?
Mark Boyden 16:11
These guys are amazing. But that that’s really something that you know, people have to keep in mind. A lot of my business is with the dairy farms. And believe it or not, the beef we get is almost entirely from the dairy cows where they’ll take their cows and breed them to an angus or limousine cross. You get that calf that’s half beef, and you feed them properly. And they look just like a full beef and they make really high quality beef because the holstein in there actually makes better marbling on the on the steaks than angus alone will do.
David Bradbury 16:44
I can’t wait to go to the supermarket, Sam and just look.
Sam RG 16:48
I just I learned something new every day. This was so cool. You gonna go?
David Bradbury 16:53
No, I want you to ask a question. I mean, I’m catching up with Mark, but.
Sam RG 16:57
I’m I’m just so intrigued. I like how you kind of laid out like you, you sort of have to specialize, right? You really need to kind of zone in on what makes you different. And one of the things that you’ve, you know, mentioned a few times is the marketing piece of it and how important that is. Can you talk a little bit about how Boyden’s marketing has evolved? You do it in house? Do you hire someone to help you do it? And like how do you suggest other farmers kind of focus on that because obviously that’s a very different skill set then running a farm.
Mark Boyden 17:26
Oh very much so. I have a lot of farmer friends who are great farmers that would never want to be doing marketing. Yeah, you know, it’s a whole different world. I mean, like in my case, I started it mostly myself. I mean, I started myself but then I also met with please creative and they helped develop they did develop the logo that I have now.
Sam RG 17:49
Which is a great logo.
Mark Boyden 17:50
Thank you the blue plaid. In fact, we’re about to be doing more business with them again, very soon. We just received a USD Value Added Producer Grant.
David Bradbury 17:59
Can we please buy like the first two hats you sell? Come on.
Mark Boyden 18:03
Okay, okay.I will put that in my notes. Everybody’s been telling me to sell hats.
David Bradbury 18:09
Alan Newman was running magic hat back in the early days, I believe he made more money from his T shirts than he did the beer.
Sam RG 18:17
we’ll have to fact check that one.
David Bradbury 18:18
We’ll have Alan call in.
Mark Boyden 18:21
so um, yeah we’re inlove with Place Creative and about the work and again cause we just rolled out a line of boiling farm grass plus hot dogs. Oh these are good. And we just started we have we have pigs growing for us we have a new just starting next week a Boyden farm flax fed pork program coming out so we got the beef, we got the pork, we got the hotdogs.
David Bradbury 18:44
Do you do like a CSA for all this stuff.
Mark Boyden 18:46
I’ve never done a CSA. I’ve never even done farmers markets. I’m totally bypassed that whole thing.
David Bradbury 18:51
No I don’t see you doing well at a farmers market. Yeah you’re too chatty. You got to process the people get them through.
Sam RG 18:58
That’s where you hire Dave.
Mark Boyden 19:01
At farmer’s markets? Yeah.
David Bradbury 19:02
I like my Sunday mornings. What’s the role of or how do you need to inset young people to get into farming? Or you have a view on sort of like how do you, if it’s not being passed down to like the next generation? Right? How do you get folks to sort of pick up the working landscape?
Mark Boyden 19:23
Well, right now as we speak, I have a young guy that’s my farm manager, who is 24. You know gung ho to get involved in the business and we’re in talks about how to structure this to do it. I mean, the devils in the details on this, of course. And, and I had that he has a couple of friends also interested too. So you know, we’re talking amongst ourselves how to structure this. It really comes down to finance and timing on all this to to make it all work. And I’m 57 now, it’d be simpler if I was 47. That’s for sure. Yeah, but at least I’m not 68 or something either. There’s efinitely young people who want to do this stuff. You know? It’s just so cost prohibitive to get I mean, how do you do that save your young person? And, you know, if you don’t have your parents that can help you out or some kind of nest egg to help you out. And how do you get started in all this? You know, a tractor, I bought a tractor last year used it was $140,000. Used, you know, you know, now they’re pushing 200 grand. This knob you can you can hook it into GPS. Well, you can you can bet basically, you hooked the auto steer with GPS, so it will stear itself around fields and all that. This is high tech stuff here.
David Bradbury 20:46
I kind of want to get one. Can we come up for field trip.
Mark Boyden 20:49
I still like the old one my grandfather bought in 1950.It runs awesome. Like a dragon just can’t do much with it. Because it’s so small and so slow. But boy, you look at that. It’s like I wish everything was as simple. So I get this. And I say that as I drove my 2006 with and to get here, which I hope my dirt bikes and motorcycles that has a diesel in the hand crank windows, you know?
Sam RG 21:15
Hey, if it ain’t broke.
David Bradbury 21:16
love him. Right.
Sam RG 21:17
I know big fan.
Break 21:19
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Sam RG 22:00
So you casually mentioned a slaughterhouse situation, allegedly, let’s get into that. I mean, come on.
Mark Boyden 22:07
I’m either really smart, or I’m really stupid. And I haven’t figured out which one it is or his combination of the both. But as I’m getting older, don’t you want to slow down on that as well. We were we were at this crossroad a year and a half ago that if we didn’t get our own slaughterhouse or butcher facility, we were going to be done. Because with COVID Every place during the butchering workforce was imploding, losing the help, and they were getting filled with all the people that wanted their 123 or four down walls sudden, nobody wanted to do Mark Boyens, you know, 10 or 12 Beef a week? Because they could they could just do the small stuff. And do it simpler and charge more for it? Or if you do it for me, I’m pretty picky. A woman packaging done right? I want it done this way. I want it done on time. And the plates were not did not like that. I received an email the Monday before Christmas, December 14 2021. Thank you for your years of service affected today. Do not bring any more cattle. Yeah, I went tomorrow, I went ballistic and got nowhere with that. And basically I called a guy in New Hampshire up and who I know of and said, Look, you get me in on this. And I’ll give you a business 52 weeks out of the year, no questions asked. He said Mark, bring him tomorrow, we’ll put drum. I brought him there. I never missed a beat. Six weeks later, he died. And it’s a nice facility in northern New Hampshire with a great staff on board all the permits and all their customer base. And after we get out of respect, let the dust settle. And then we met with a widow who said you know, look, we’re about to rent a facility in Claremont. That’s just process only. But if you want to sell this, which is slaughter and process, I want to buy it. And through a lot of tears, she said yes. And then fast forward through many, many months of m&a, you know appraisals, dealing with lawyers and accountants and all that and begging and borrow and pleading to the banks and I literally bet the farm on this I leveraged myself right to here and said we’re gonna go for it, we’re gonna go for it, spent a ton of money, spent a ton of money but when I look at what she asked for, I knew it was a deal. And I dhikr on everything. I’m even my kids go to college, I dhikr on what I pay, and I win I didn’t dhikr, it looked like a lot of money but i knew it was a good deal. And choose who to choose again, their price, I’ll take it, you know, and then got to closing and here we are. So now since November of last year, we own a facility in northern New Hampshire. That’s got a lot of potential a lot of potential. I get some of the great staff, great crew already on board that are fully trained. We got all of their accounts for beef and pork. So it was like a reverse acquisition. We went for the $2 million business with $6 million business just like that. And we’re expanding beyond that.
David Bradbury 24:47
That’s great. How many people are in the empire now?
Mark Boyden 24:51
25 or 26 employees over there and two people in Vermont.
David Bradbury 24:55
Do they all have the new hats too?
Mark Boyden 24:56
No. There’s montshire packing over there We rebranded that to monshire farms for that account and the business is montshire packing. They have Boyden farms so I have like the Boyden Farm label which is the grass plus and all that then the montshire farms, which is just good local stuff, so I can keep it kind of two tier price system that way, and it gives us more availability with the cattle.
David Bradbury 25:17
Pretty smart guy. Right Sam?
Sam RG 25:20
smartest guy that came out and UVM.
Mark Boyden 25:23
I was smart, I would have gone to law school or med school or something. But here I am.
Sam RG 25:27
Smartest guy from the class of 88
David Bradbury 25:30
We have so many we have so many former lawyers sitting out here that are startups or they they wanted to be an entrepreneur, they kind of, the law helped but they abandoned it at some point.
Mark Boyden 25:41
I believe that.
Sam RG 25:42
I’m gonna have Taylor edit this so that you can really hear my dig at Dave, anyway. Oh, I missed it. Yeah, it’s fine. The people know, people know people know, Mark, it sounds like you’ve made some great decisions over the years.
Mark Boyden 25:57
But I’ve made some bad ones too.
Sam RG 25:58
Let’s get into that. That’s what I want to hear.
Mark Boyden 26:01
I’ve almost gone out of business. I don’t know how many times and I know everybody who’s in Silicon Valley to brag about how much they fail. Well, I guess this is my turn on that. It’s, you know, I did the edible bean thing But at least that was at a time I was younger. We were still milking cows. It was. It was a bummer. Yeah. I lost, that you pick yourself up and move on. It was expensive experiment. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t like a wasn’t gonna kill me on that part, you know. But boy, getting into the beef thing, you know, I got too big too fast to try raising everything myself from baby calves all the way through got horribly over capitalized. Not enough money. And not enough planning. I was not. I’m a typical farmer, you know, running 100 miles an hour this that and the other and needed to spend a lot more time on the QuickBooks with the right people on the planning and accounting. And at the time, I had a guy doing some stuff for me. It really wasn’t very thorough. So I got myself in a big mess real fast. Luckily for me, I have a friend of mine who did very well. In fact, Dave, you met him years ago, he stayed at our fraternity house years ago. Um, you’re not gonna. You’re not gonna, you’re not gonna remember this. One of my best friends is he was an exchange student when I was in high school. He’s German. His name’s Taurus Aziz. And kind of a tale of tail of two kids. We were kind of competitive in high school calculus, you know, I’m gonna do better you this. He did better than me. I went to UVM for AG, he went to Germany’s Aachen school like MIT, you know. And he did very well. He ended up being the number one heart researcher in the world. Dr. Jarvik, one of his head researchers he turned him down. He started this little thing. He ended up merging with this company called Abiomed. If you Google Abiomed, yeah, a big deal. Yeah, he is on that. He is 90% of their business.
David Bradbury 27:56
why is he helping you with cows and beef.
Mark Boyden 28:00
so years ago, he’s atmy house. So it’s just meeting the right people and knowing the right people. And this is, this is kind of shit ass luck, too. But we’ve been best friends ever since that um kinda getting choked up on this
David Bradbury 28:16
that’s really cool. Really, really neat
Mark Boyden 28:18
So he was at my house. He’s like, I’m making all this money. I don’t trust these investors. And I want to do something and I’m like yeah right. Well, then, you know, a year or two later, I was like, you know, I’m gonna take him up on this, you know. So that’s how we’re at where we are today is he’s he’s in with me on this whole thing on this journey. And now we’re at a point where our business is really growing. And we’re, we’re we’re presenting a pitch deck to the right people to see what we need now to bring investors in because we don’t want to keep going to the bank all the time. Now the beside the point where you mark boyden brought it here, let’s really grow this business with Mark with the board of directors and really grow this from a $6 million business to a 20, 30 or 40.
David Bradbury 28:57
You know we look at pitch decks all the time.
Mark Boyden 28:59
Well, you’re about to see one real soon.
Sam RG 29:01
Where do we sign?
David Bradbury 29:03
We’ve heard from Mark a few times over the years. I was just like, hey, you know, talk things through and that It’s so great to have a team with different skills.
Mark Boyden 29:10
I was hoping to get them involved, but I wasn’t ready. Now. We’re at a point where I have it because I also have a business advisor from Montreal who is absolutely brilliant. And him and I get along great. And he has been instrumental in us getting the acquisition of monstre packing and building the business up doing the projections, the forecasts, coaching me on how to manage my people to get my team set up the whole thing. Right, well exactly. And in fact, that’s our job this weekend is get the pitch deck finalized so we can present it to the right people and really grow the business because because the reason we’re doing this now is we’re you about about to be getting a USDA grant of about $5 million to grow the business. That’s a big deal so when we have the grants in there with the business in how we’re set up with the distributors for growth to supply the cattle. We have the right team at the montshire packing. I have the right marketing team, we have the all the piece of the puzzle here. Whereas, but years ago when you’re talking, I didn’t, I had a dream of it. But now we’re here in some place. So now it’s time to actually talk right people that pitch deck and execute on it.
David Bradbury 30:18
Yeah, I’m not saying we’re the right people, but
Mark Boyden 30:20
Well no but everybody knows everybody. That’s how this works. You know?
David Bradbury 30:26
Damn, you’ve been busy. Good
Sam RG 30:28
Very busy,
David Bradbury 30:30
Any resources in the state that have been helpful in the journey, you know, the extension center or VEDA or Yeah,
Mark Boyden 30:38
The Vermont working lands program has helped that we receive receive one of those grants, which clearly helps. Because I’ve been paying a huge amount of money on getting the right accounting, counting people to merge the business together, my business consultant. So really, why looking into the montshire facility, it was that cost plus all the other costs to bring the business force, you know, so it’s really both combined. And without the grants, it’s really hard to do. So the Working Lands has been helpful. haven’t done much with VEDA. Extensions been some help. But a lot of this is, you know, we talked before, calling people talking and just figuring it out.
David Bradbury 31:17
And on the sort of science side of things, right. Are you still working with UVM? Or other center?
Mark Boyden 31:24
Not much with UVM. Like on the beef thing, we’ve had some lab tested, but it’s the labs they use where they’re from, I mean, beef, you deal with people in Kansas and Nebraska on that. You know,
David Bradbury 31:38
I don’t think I know anybody in Nebraska. I’d like to, I’d like to, I’m open to it.
Sam RG 31:48
One thing I wanted to ask you about, I asked you a little before we started recording, and I realized I should I should ask again, is just the impact of this summer’s flooding on you because I drove by and I it didn’t look great from where I was, and so no, not pretty.
Mark Boyden 32:04
Yeah. For all you don’t know me, I live in Lamoille River Valley, we farm. Well, almost all 700 Acres is in that valley. So we probably have between myself and my neighbor, Jason in the we probably have the most flooded areas in the whole state of Vermont, or close to it. And I’ve gone through a lot of floods since I started, you know, my working career in 1988. And, you know, my dad before me and my grandfather before that, they would have a flood once in a while. It would be the spring for the snow runoff and maybe an oddball one once in a while. But, and even my dad was saying before he passed away as I just it seems like we get floods all the time. Now you never know what’s gonna happen. It could be July, it could be August, you just don’t know. This. This last one was a doozy. It was the biggest one since 1927. And unfortunately, it was at a time when the corn was at medium height h is fine. And once it did, I was like, wow, it’s bent over maybe it’ll come back up. But it was all snapped between all the no growing points, and it just did not. Never popped back up. Oh, it’s all done. So we lost most of the corn. Now ironically, the soybeans were at a different stage of growth. They were at a more vegetative, younger phase. They bent over, they’re bouncing back up and they look great. So corn is like a racehorse, everything has been just right, it’ll perform like crazy it is it’ll perform like crazy, but one little piece isn’t there it falters horribly. Soybeans, you can beat the heck out of them. And they like it. It’s like like you prune fruit, you prune grapes, you prune apples, it’s the same with soybeans, there’s farmers in the Midwest that go through with hail simulators to beat the soybeans and just stress it to you know, make make calls in the reproductive phase market when stressed out, it tries to set more fruit. So soybeans will actually yield more. Corn, you beat up corn, you got shity corn. Wow. So I mean, do you just leave it? Yeah we’re going to plant some winter rye as a cover crop. We’re gonna try to harvest and salvage what corn we can. Yeah, it is what it is. Yeah.
Sam RG 34:15
So I mean, it just sounds like it’s part of life of a farmer Yeah.
Mark Boyden 34:20
You buy crop insurance for a reason. Yeah. You know, luckily, I upped my policy a little bit this week. There must be a little voice in my brain saying, you know, we have had a bad split in a while. Let’s go back crop insurance kind of aiming to do you increase your coverage this year? No, I forgot, but I’m glad I did. That’s insane. So we’re gonna do okay. Yeah, you know, we’re gonna do okay. You know, it’s I told people I work with, you know, if we can do okay, financially on the worst year I’ve ever seen, then that’s a pretty good proof.
David Bradbury 34:49
Yeah, totally.
Sam RG 34:51
And one of the things I would ask you is you I know y’all do you have the winery and you do weddings and all that. Is that part of the business as well or is that separate?
Mark Boyden 35:00
The wedding is us. My wife Laurie runs the wedding process. Boyden Events So that’s her LLC. So she and I own that and the farming operation together. My brother owns the winery himself and his wife. That’s separate.
Sam RG 35:12
Okay, that’s awesome.
David Bradbury 35:14
Hi Laurie.
Sam RG 35:16
It’s It’s such a beautiful farm it is
David Bradbury 35:19
We work hard at it. It’s a lot of work.
Sam RG 35:20
It’s it’s so beautiful that it’s like, are they working? Because it just looks like so beautiful.
Mark Boyden 35:26
Why do you think it looks that way?
Sam RG 35:30
No, it’s It’s the type of farm that looks like it’s just it’s built for events. But really, it’s
Mark Boyden 35:36
That’s the struggle. Yeah. Is is we keep it looking good for events and my brothers for the winery. Yeah. Meanwhile, back at the ranch I’m doing Beef and crops. I don’t make anything off that. I’m gonna interrupt you through my wife’s wedding thing. Yes. But it’s a constant struggle of okay, what days we clean the barn? Are we spreading manure? We’re not spreading it on a Friday. Or if we’re trucking their way where are the trucks going? It’s it’s, it’s we have to watch that.
Sam RG 36:00
See I knew it. I knew it. I could tell it’s too good looking!
Mark Boyden 36:04
We’re still farming, there’s still corn. You know, hey, soybeans, the beef it’s just we balance what we do around that. Making sure we don’t make a mass. Don’t have the dust flying everywhere.
Sam RG 36:16
I’m sure it’s you learn each year how to tweak it and improve.
Mark Boyden 36:21
Oh believe me, I’m still learning. I still have a lot to learn for sure.
David Bradbury 36:25
Did you spray manure before wedding once? Is that how you?
Mark Boyden 36:28
Oh No, I watch that like a hawk. I watch that like a hawk. And we spread the manure first thing is spring. So early May. It’s all done. So she’s doing events by mid May. I think that’s all done. I tuck it away after that. So yeah,
David Bradbury 36:39
I love it. I love it. We only have a couple minutes. Yeah, no. I’m starving all of a sudden. I’m definitely gonna have beef today. Do you have a favorite recipe will beef Mark?
Mark Boyden 36:53
I like it all.
Sam RG 36:55
How do you take your burger?
Mark Boyden 36:58
Rare to medium rare. Never well done. Never have beef well done. Or even medium.
David Bradbury 37:05
Cheese? Do you put cheddar on it?
Mark Boyden 37:07
Yeah, of course. Yeah.
David Bradbury 37:12
It’s kind of fun in Vermont to go around and ask for yellow American cheese. People’s heads fall off. I don’t like I don’t ever want it but just like give me yellow American. Try that. All right, Mark. Sam. Any last questions for Mark because we probably won’t see him again. He’s so darn busy.
Sam RG 37:30
No I’m gonna come visit though for sure. A little team trip. Yeah, I’m not too far from you. I live in Essex town.
David Bradbury 37:37
Yeah, you took the little one your your son would love it.
Sam RG 37:41
Yeah he’s a big old MacDonald fan right now.
Mark Boyden 37:43
Go to the burger bar in jeff.
Sam RG 37:47
Yeah I’ve always wanted to go there. Is it Boyden?
Mark Boyden 37:52
Oh it’s all Boyden. That’s why they get so much traffic there people. It’s good. It has to be the busiest burger place in the state, it is insane. It’s a little food truck three miles off the road from me in Jeffersonville. People literally drive from Milton Burlington and Shelburne. All the placs. Hardwick Vermont and drive there. They have like, 30 different burgers there.
David Bradbury 38:12
say, just say Mark sent you.
Mark Boyden 38:13
Yeah because it’s all Boyden Farm beef.
David Bradbury 38:16
Anything we didn’t ask you that you wanted to share about your journey. As a entrepreneur? We think you’re an entrepreneur. Are farmers entrepreneurs?
Mark Boyden 38:23
Farmers are entrepreneurs. Yeah, even if you’re a dairy farm, and you just focus on making milk, you’re still entrepreneurial. You don’t have to be marketing entrepreneurial. Because the truck comes in every day and they give you a check twice a month is it’s your there’s no marketing, but it’s still production based, you know? So you have to be very entrepreneurial to know what to do as far as land crops, you know, to expand do I do this, whatever. I mean, in my case, I’ve always been very, always been very marketing oriented.
David Bradbury 38:51
Right, right. We tell folks, you know, you need three personalities in a company, right? Need a hustler. The Hustler the sell it, a hipster to make it really, you know, desirable and marketed. And then a hacker to build it.
Mark Boyden 39:05
I never heard that. That makes sense. Yeah, I got all of that plus, a little more.
Sam RG 39:09
I’ve heard it a few times.
David Bradbury 39:11
Should I stop saying, Oh, well. My bad.
Sam RG 39:15
a first timer for Mark
David Bradbury 39:16
Is it Groundhog Day for that? I’ll stop.
Sam RG 39:18
No, it’s okay. It’s all right. Well, we’ll pull the crowd and see what they think.
David Bradbury 39:22
Yeah, our instant feedback on our podcast. Sam, give him the last question please.
Sam RG 39:26
Okay Mark, if you could change one thing about Vermont today what would you change?
Mark Boyden 39:30
boy. Oh, boy. I kind of long for the old days when it’s not gonna happen. I mean, you know, when I was growing up, there was like 32 Farms in town that were milking cows and it was still a farming base place. And there was less people less traffic. You know, we didn’t have the cell phones this that and the other, but it is what it is. I mean, I’m talking back to the 70s here or early 80s It’s, it seems well, I noticed that almost daily, I go to New Hampshire, like at least three days a week and you cross the river, you’re in a different world. I mean, used to be very similar that, but we were more agrarian, they were close, but but now politically, socially, culturally, it’s a whole different world. And I’m a kind of a libertarian standpoint, kind of, you know, I’m an old school Vermont Republican, right? What the hell is that nowadays? Right? You know, the Republicans in Washington, I’m sorry, they’re nuts. You know, and then, on the Democrat side, it seems like it’s gone too far to left. And I feel like I’m like, a lot of the majority of America that’s stuck in the middle level, well, what the hell am I, you know, and I kind of feel it that, that Vermont, you know, I just, I just wish that as we go forward in our policies, and how we look at who we are, that we don’t lose track of the roots of what made Vermont, Vermont. You know, we were, we were we were, you know, the old school Vermont Republicans were financially shrewd, but had a social and moral compass and conscious on things and I think that’s lost a lot nowadays on things and I just, I just wish that that Vermont was more that way or maybe we could we could think of that more as we go forward. I told my daughter Lucy all the time about that.
David Bradbury 41:14
Would you give up your cell phone for that to happen?
Mark Boyden 41:17
Absolutely not. But that’s that’s what I get. The old good old days weren’t all that good, it’s just, you can see changes happening, but it’s as long as we don’t lose track of our routes, I think we’ll be set.
David Bradbury 41:31
The traffic, yeah you notice that daily. Mark Boyden thank you so much.
Mark Boyden 41:38
Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
David Bradbury 41:39
This has been start here a podcast sharing the stories of active aspiring and accidental entrepreneurs. This series is supported by the Vermont Technology Council and Consolidated Communications. Sam, let’s go have a burger.
