How a Vibecoded Newsletter Is Making the Hay Market More Transparent

**SPEAKER_2** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:18)
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:22)
And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:23)
Joe, I was lurking on the Homestead subreddit recently, as one does.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:31)
As Tracy Alloway does.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:33)
There have been a number of posts recently about hay prices and hay getting more expensive. And the craziest thing is, there's one guy, one poster, who keeps talking about hay prices, and on one of his posts, someone came in and said, they commented, you should go on Odd Lots.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:52)
I love episodes that come about that way. Can I make a little confession here?

**Tracy Alloway** (0:55)
Please.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:56)
I've done no prep for this episode. I mean, I'm often not as diligent as you are, but I was just like, you know what?
I know that hay exists. I've seen it in bales. I figure something is dried. I know it's consumed. I've done no research. You know a little bit.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:15)
You know a little bit about hay, though, because we spoke with that. Was it New Mexico or Arizona now? I can't remember. The farmer growing alfalfa.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:22)
Yeah. It's like fermented, right? Isn't hay like sort of like fermented and dried or something?

**Tracy Alloway** (1:27)
Yeah, something like that.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:28)
I mean, I guess.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:29)
But one of the reasons it's good to grow hay in the desert is because you don't have to worry about it getting wet in the drying process.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:36)
Yeah. Oh, right. I did. We did learn that.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:38)
All right.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:38)
So that's the one hay fact that we all know.
So we're going to be talking about hay prices today. But beyond that, I find the hay market really interesting because there are no, seriously, I believe you, I believe you. There aren't that many markets out there nowadays that are like non-transparent, I want to say.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:58)
Do we have any hay indices on the terminal?

**Tracy Alloway** (2:01)
There's a PPI index. Oh, it is. Yeah.

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:03)
Okay.

**Tracy Alloway** (2:03)
So you can look up like alfalfa hay PPI.

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:07)
How's that been looking? I assume, I mean, everything is up.
If you name something that exists in the world, it's probably up. But what is US hay seeds? Yeah. Well, no, I don't know. Is this even up to date? I can't even find one.

**Tracy Alloway** (2:23)
I don't know. But this is what I mean. It is not a transparent market. It's very fractured by type of hay. So I didn't realize this, but there's like Timothy, there's alfalfa, there's supreme hay.

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:37)
So I'm just gonna say, like I said, I haven't done any, I don't know anything about hay. I decided I would just learn it all on the fly. But I also, I did do a little bit of research about our upcoming guest who you identified.

**Tracy Alloway** (2:49)
The guy posting on Reddit.

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:51)
The guy posting. And I have said this, his business is very cool. And we'll talk about it. But I just want to say, the business that he has built in terms of like becoming the man who knows about hay is advice I've given to young journalists who have like asked me like for career. I've literally said this, and I'm going to drop some alpha.
No, I'm going to drop some, I'm going to drop some alpha, alpha, alpha here. And, but now it'll be commoditized by the time we say it. I've always thought that one way you could like build a business as a young journalist or someone is, find a piece of public data that exists, that is out there, that is consumable for free, that nobody is regularly looking at.
Gather it, become the central repository for it, and then occasionally comment on it. There's all kinds of data in the world. A million public agencies of all sorts are producing monthly reports on this or that and PDFs that nobody is looking at. And if you say, you know what, I want to learn about X and I want to end a newsletter, update what X is doing each week or month or whatever, you can become the man, the X on this topic. And the guest that you have found for today's episode, I think has done exactly what I've told numerous young individuals to do. So we'll see if this, I'm curious about Hay, but I'm also curious about this individual's business model.