How a Vibecoded Newsletter Is Making the Hay Market More Transparent

June 12, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

Aiden Johnson was a 19-year-old college basketball player when his dad asked a simple question: what is the price of alfalfa? That question led to Haywire, a newsletter and data platform that pulls public USDA hay auction data, cross-references it with on-the-ground intel from auction houses, and publishes it in plain English for subscribers. Johnson and his co-founder Cole built the entire operation using AI and "vibe coding" — a term for rapid, AI-assisted software development that lets non-experts build functional products. The result is a business that would have required a large team a decade ago but now runs with two college students and a direct API integration with the USDA.

The Hay Market's Opacity Problem

The hay market is enormous — alfalfa alone is the fourth most valuable U.S. crop, producing $8 billion per year across 49 to 50 million acres. Yet there is no single benchmark price. The USDA publishes auction data in PDFs that are hard to find and harder to parse. Regional markets are hyper-local because transportation costs are prohibitive: brokers charge $5 to $8 per mile to ship hay, meaning it can quickly cost more to move than the hay itself is worth. "It's not just one market," Johnson says. "It's fragmented markets across the whole country."

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What you'll learn

1 (01:48) **Introduction: The Hay Market Opacity Problem** - Tracy and Joe set up the episode: Tracy found a Reddit poster obsessed with hay prices, and Joe pitches his theory that finding a niche public-data source and becoming the go-to analyst is a viable business model.
2 (06:10) **What Haywire Does: Mining Public USDA Data** - Aiden explains the core business: pulling weekly/bi-weekly USDA auction price reports and translating them into plain-English newsletters.
3 (11:14) **Origin Story: From Dad's Question to Vibe-Coded Startup** - Aiden describes how his dad needed hay prices for an alfalfa cubes startup, leading to the idea for Haywire.
4 (15:12) **The State of Hay Prices: Fragmented Markets** - Aiden explains the lack of a single benchmark price and the hyper-local nature of hay markets.
5 (20:25) **Regional Dynamics: Drought, Demand, and the "Missouri Pattern"** - Aiden describes how drought in the West (46% of alfalfa acreage) is pushing demand eastward, creating a detectable price wave.
6 (26:27) **Second-Order Effects: Horses, Dairies, and Rationing** - Aiden explains how high hay prices ripple through the economy.
7 (33:38) **Land Use Competition: Data Centers, Solar, and Conservation** - Aiden discusses how agricultural land is being squeezed by competing uses.

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

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.

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