Because he owned one of the largest egg-packing operations in the county.
And for years, he'd paid a commercial waste contractor to remove mountains of shells from his processing facility.
What he didn't know was that the company hauling away those shells had recently been negotiating with the young woman standing in front of him.
His own discarded material could become part of the supply chain he had just ridiculed.
But that wasn't the biggest secret.
The young woman had spent months investigating why the county's egg producers paid increasingly high disposal fees even though the material might have legitimate industrial uses after appropriate treatment.
And she'd discovered something strange.
Several local farmers were locked into unfavorable waste-hauling agreements.
Some had been told that no alternative processing facility would be permitted in the county.
Others had received warnings that transporting eggshell waste to the young woman's farm would violate environmental rules.
And the heavyset farmer had unknowingly repeated those claims while the company collecting his waste profited from keeping everyone convinced the shells were worthless.
The man who had laughed loudest wasn't merely mocking her business.
He was also one of the people paying to supply the raw material another company hoped to control.
The young woman looked toward the waiting trucks.
Then toward the document in her hands.
For the first time since her father died, she felt that the strange plan he'd sketched on a stained piece of paper inside their old farmhouse might actually work.
But she hadn't reached that moment by accident.
Eighteen months earlier, she'd been sitting alone in a freezing kitchen, staring at a mortgage notice, when she discovered a cardboard box her father had hidden beneath his workbench.
Inside was a handful of broken eggshells, a photograph of an old chicken barn, and a notebook containing four words that had seemed completely ridiculous at the time.
Stop wasting the calcium.
To understand why that sentence changed her life, you had to go back to the last winter her father was alive.
The family farm sat on eighty-seven acres in rural southern Idaho, about forty minutes from the nearest large agricultural supply center.
It wasn't an impressive operation by the standards of the enormous farms surrounding it.
The property contained a modest two-story farmhouse, several fenced pastures, an aging dairy barn that had been converted for storage, two poultry sheds, a machine shop, and a narrow row of cottonwood trees along the eastern boundary.
Her father had purchased the land when he was thirty-two.
He had grown up helping his parents raise cattle on rented pasture and dreamed of owning property that nobody could take away from him.