How a Vibecoded Newsletter Is Making the Hay Market More Transparent

Listen to Odd Lots on Apple Podcasts
Listen to Odd Lots on Spotify
Watch Odd Lots on YouTube
Subscribe to the newsletter

The hay market is not a transparent market: It is very fractured by types of hay, whether it is alfalfa or clover hay. There are a few opaque, illiquid markets like this — scrap metal for instance — that require some hands-on investigating to figure out. Aiden Johnson is co-founder and CEO of the HayWire newsletter, which aims to make the hay market more transparent: He and co-founder Cole Glasgow use an AI model to mine public data sources — like USDA reports on auction prices across different regions — to produce a weekly newsletter on the hay market. On this episode, we speak with Johnson as he explains why he chose hay over other kinds of markets, how HayWire was made possible through “vibecoding,” networking with hay farmers, why the ROI of owning a horse is dropping with hay prices spiking, and why hay demand keeps on tightening.