Matt Nicoletti, Business Development Director for Fresno's Penny Newman.
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Transcript: Translated by Artificial Intelligence
Two Guys Regenerative Farming
Craig Scharton: [00:00:00] Matt Nicoletti is in charge of business development for penny Newman, which we established, we think is the second oldest business in Fresno. Uh, Fresno ag has you beat by two years. Pretty close
Matt Nicoletti: though. You, you,
Craig Scharton: you still
Matt Nicoletti: look pretty young.
Paul Swearengin: So how, how old, how old is his number? Is the number two oldest company in the history of France.
Matt Nicoletti: I'd have to do
Craig Scharton: subtraction, but it's 1878.
Matt Nicoletti: So let's see. So is that one 42, one? Uh, yeah, 142 years. All right. And your,
Craig Scharton: your younger brain cells worked very
Matt Nicoletti: well. Yeah. Um, well it's, uh, yeah, um, phone number. I should be tracking readily able to answer. Um, but, uh, yeah, no we're, um, penny Newman, um, uh, uh, like we said, was founded in 1878 and it was an agricultural dry goods store.
It wasn't all too different from Fresno [00:01:00] ag in that respect back in the day. Um, but evolved into a commodity trading business, marketing of grain. Um, uh, marketing of planting seed, um, and then it evolved into a feed business. As the livestock sector really exploded in California and the production of grain and feed type of ingredients really declined significantly in California.
So that industry became more heavily reliant upon industry structure, um, that was owned and operated by companies like penny Newman. That could bring in large quantities of grain and feed type of ingredients from out of state where, which are the largest production, larger production sheds of those types of agricultural goods.
It's kind of inverse of what you would think of California, because we're such a net producer, net exporter of agricultural goods. Um, but these types of commodities that make up penny Newman's core competencies were very much a net deficit state.
Craig Scharton: And yeah, he had to keep buying bigger and bigger quantities, which is kind of an unimaginable volume.
I just can't even picture it [00:02:00] when we were talking about it the other night. Um, but we are a huge producer of dairy products. And so you've got to get the grain into them. Right.
Matt Nicoletti: Indeed. Yeah. And we they've th the, the California produce stuff that the dairy sector consumes here. It's mostly byproducts almond, wholes, obviously being a really popular one.
We just harvested our largest almond crop ever, you know, 3 billion pounds, um, byproducts from the food processing. You know, we've got a lot of grapes and the great pumice from the winery sector, the, um, bakery waste, the mill feed bride products from all the flour milling that we have in the state. Those are.
Those are very much, you know, staples in the dairy ration, but the, the most th the, the most high value, um, commodities in the dairy ration are for the most part coming in from either out of state or even overseas.
Craig Scharton: Yeah. And what, and what we wanted to kind of jump to was I was really excited to hear
Matt Nicoletti: about,
Craig Scharton: uh, your, uh, interests in, [00:03:00] um, In regenerative ag.
So we kind of nerd it out about that, uh, through our mutual friend and, uh, your employee fan Telus, and I, um, Uh, had a beer in my backyard a week or two ago. And, uh, we just, we really went pretty, pretty far off the nerd cliff, uh,
Matt Nicoletti: for most people,