Latest / Beyond Labels Premium / Episode 9: How to Find “The Best” Meat with Rancher Glenn Elzinga

Transcript

Episode 9: How to Find “The Best” Meat with Rancher Glenn Elzinga · Beyond Labels Premium

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_03: I used to work on soybean and cornfields in the Midwest.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_03: Spent a lot of time there, both in harvesting and tillage.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_03: Walking across a field, I remembered there was no sign of not only intelligent life, there's no sign of life.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_03: See, okay.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_03: It looked like Mars.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_03: And it was because there was a complete absence of biological material.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: Hi, thanks for joining me.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Dr.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: Cena McCullough.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: And today I'm so excited because we are speaking with an actual full-fledged rancher.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: His name is Glenn Elzinga.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: He's the owner of Alder Spring Ranch in Idaho.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: He runs the ranch with his wife and his seven daughters.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: On their ranch, they utilize a unique style of ranching that involves cowboys, the full-fledged cowboys that we're going to talk about.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: And their unique style of ranching results in nutrient-dense and flavorful meat that actually will dwarf any meat that you're going to find in the grocery store.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, Forbes magazine has declared Glenn's ground beef to be perhaps the best burger that you will ever eat.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: The Wall Street Journal has declared Glenn to have the best ribeye.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: And even Dr.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Oz cooked one of his ribeys on TV and declared it to be incredible.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: Now, in addition, Glenn's ranching methods prove that cows do not always have to contribute to climate change because ranch actually has a negative carbon footprint.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Or in other words, we'd say it's a carbon sink.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: So we're going to cover all of these topics.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: But first, first I want to welcome Glenn to the program.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome, Glenn.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: We're thrilled to have you.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_03: This is going to be a lot of fun.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, yes.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so excited.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: So in true beyond label style, we're going to begin with the how, and then we're going to explain the why.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: So the question for today is how do you find the best meat?
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: The answer is simple.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: You buy and support from ranchers like Glenn.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: If you live in the United States, you can actually buy Glenn's meat online.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: His website is www.alderspring.com.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: That's A-L-D-E-R-S-P-R-I-N-G dot com.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: I'll also include a link in the description.
• 2:21
  unknown: Okay.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_02: Cool.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: In addition to beef, he sells organic lamb, chicken, pork, cheese, butter, and even pet food.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so now we're going to jump into the why.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: Why should we buy your meat?
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: So, Glenn, the first set of questions comes from me.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then the second set of questions are going to come from my co-author, Joel Salatin, who can't be here, but he had nothing but great praise to say about you and your family.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: And he submitted some questions that I'm going to ask you.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, first question: why does your meat taste so good?
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_03: So I think it boils down to the fact that we we've just kind of boiled everything down to two essentials.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_03: And one is sunlight and the grass that grows on the soil beneath the sunlight.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_03: So I mean, when we think of what we do, we're thinking, we're always thinking about solar collection and we're thinking about gathering sunlight and trying to maximize that.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_03: So when you boil everything down to that basis, that elemental form of healthy soils, healthy grasses, and healthy livestock walking on there in that biomimicry, that perfect biomimicry.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_03: Because, you know, this has been happening for millennia.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_03: This has been happening in Europe on the European continent with the native aurochs that ran there.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_03: It happens in Africa with those huge herds of, you know, things like Cape Buffalo and water buffalo that roam that continent in our North American continent, it was bison and elk and deer.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_03: Those things have been harvesting and building soils underneath their feet from these grasslands for millennia, long before we showed up.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_03: So we found that if we can return to that, if we can return to that form of biomimicry, we're gonna win.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_03: And I know we're winning because it all started at a farmer's market one day, about oh, probably, I guess it's almost 20 years ago.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_03: We were uh serving beef at the Capital City Farmers Market in Boise, Idaho.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_03: And one thing I realized that brought people in right away was have something cooking, you know, just have some beautiful, fragrant burgers cooking, or you know, maybe even a roast that we cut up or whatever.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and it's just simmering there, and people can just grab a toothpick and grab a bite.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_03: So one thing I saw right away, it first day I noticed old people would stop and savor.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_03: They take that toothpick, put it in the beef.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_03: They're they're already savoring the fragrance, all right?
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_03: They put it in their mouth and they just roll it around in their mouth.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, about 50% of them seen a close their eyes.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, they close their eyes, and yeah, you know that you know, uh smell is the number one uh sensory associated with memory.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, and so they were getting transported, and right away I wanted to know where.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_03: I said, I want to know where you're going.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_03: Where are you going with your eyes closed?
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_03: And almost invariably, those older people, this didn't happen in the younger generation.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_03: The millennials were out generation, Xers were out, even most boomers were out, early boomers did this, um, but nobody in later part of that century was doing this.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_03: And they said, I'm being transported to my mother's kitchen back in the 40s because they said this is what I remember beef tasting like, and I haven't tasted it since, and I forgot that it tasted this good, this satisfyingly good.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_03: And the reason it's satisfying is, well, you know, you're a nutritionist, and I know just through experience, because I'm watching these animals all the time and learning from them.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_03: All right, it's because it resonates with your palate because inside your body, your body is saying, here are certain things you need, and I'm gonna train you to gather them.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_03: You know, think of you know, like ancient humans, the things they ate were the things that were most attractive to their palate.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_03: And it it was because there was linkage between their nutritional needs and what their palate was telling them to eat, you know, and science has proven this.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_03: There's a lot of publications associated with linking palates with nutrition in humans and animals.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_03: So um that's the bottom line.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_03: It's the flavor.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_03: The flavor is conveying to people that there's incredible nutrition and there's pleasure to be found in kind of meeting those needs.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_03: So I saw those old people doing that and I got it.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_03: All of a sudden it started clicking in me.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_03: It's like, wow, we have kind of brought cattle and beef raising back to their ancient kind of biomimicry patterns, you know, where they were actually tied with the landscape, tied with the soil underneath their feet, tied with the grass that's growing underneath their feet, and ultimately tied to being solar collection devices.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_03: So when you tie all those things together in a very simplistic way on regenerated soils, where you're gonna create flavor and you're gonna create incredible nutrition.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_03: So that's why.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_03: That's why it's so different.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's beautiful.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: You just you gave me goosebumps.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and what I'm reminded of is it's true that most of us, you know, my generation included, don't know what good meat tastes like.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: Oftentimes they're um they're fed on on their fed grain in the feedlot, you know, for the last remaining days of their lives, which changes the nutrient value value, uh the nutrient content of that meat.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then you have you know, chlorine.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: The nutritional content of that meat and that poultry.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think that I strongly encourage people to kind of step outside of the grocery store box, you know, go to Glenn's website, order something, just try it.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: So you can taste the difference for yourself.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: Like I know for and and I'm going to do this when we get off this podcast, I'm placing an order.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: I have not tried Glenn's beef yet.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I get my my meat and my chicken from Joel's farm.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and there's, I can tell you with 100% certainty, there's a complete distinction between his meat and what's in the grocery store.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: I don't even have to put seasoning on my meat.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: I put a little bit of salt and we're good to go.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: And my kids love it.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I'll I'll get a chicken, um, I'll grill it.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, like even out there on the barbecue grill, we'll just put some real salt on top of it and my children devour it.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's so flavorful.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: So what you're saying really resonates with me.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I encourage everybody to step outside that grocery store box and just try one purchase.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: And you will, I'm telling you, you're not going to go back once you try it.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I want to dive a little bit more into your ranching practices and what makes these so unique.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: What is um, well, first of all, your your cattle are actually raised on how many acres of wild land?
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so um they get about 70, 70, you know, right now it's winter.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_03: I was out um with the cattle this morning.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_03: It was right around zero.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, so nothing's growing right now.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_03: It's zero.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and uh so we're feeding them stored um nutrition in the form of hay.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_03: So we gather hay off our place during the summer, and then we feed that out.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_03: And so they're doing that, and they're still grazing, there's still grass out there for them to graze, but you know, probably 60% of their nutrition comes from that bale of hay, and the rest they pick, you know, through the big pastures that they're on.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_03: But during the summer, during the green growing season, about 75% of that time, they're up on what we call the range.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_03: And the range is 70 square miles or 46,000 acres.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_03: It's kind of a solid block of country, and it starts at about 4,000 feet elevation, it goes all the way up to about 10,000 feet of elevation.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_03: There's about 55 miles of native perennial creeks up there that have trout in them.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_03: There's uh probably 20,000 acres of forest lands, and then um there's probably 20,000 acres of sagebrush, and um oh, probably six, seven thousand acres of straight grassland, a lot of rocky canyons, big mountains, sweeping vistas, and um, it's all surrounded by about 55 miles of barbed wire fence that we got to maintain.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_03: So, so it's big country, and um, as a result, um, what people have generally done ever since settlement in this country, which was around 1855, um, was they would just turn their cattle out in the springtime, basically open a gate and turn their cattle out there, and then they would go find them in the fall.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_03: And eventually the cattle, uh the mama cows got kind of trained to that and would start actually working their way down when the snow flies, knowing that there was a hay pile waiting for them back at the home ranch.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_03: So um we actually kind of ran into trouble with that paradigm.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_03: And there are several reasons we ran in trouble.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_03: One, our cattle weren't doing that great because toward the end of the year, you know, when it started to get dry, we live in a semi-arid, uh rain-shadowy climate that's really determined by huge peaks and valleys.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_03: Like right now, I can look out my window and I can see 11,000 foot peaks that have five feet of snow on them.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_03: And here in our valley, we have virtually no snow.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_03: And it's just because, I mean, those mountains are so close, they're within 10 miles of me, and they have five feet of snow, but it's just because of their elevation that they gather all this precipitation.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_03: So there's this huge rainfall precipitation gradient, and we live in a pretty arid rain shadow environment.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_03: So as a result, you have to um move those cattle across the landscape to maximize their productivity because our cattle, remember, weren't doing really well.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_03: They would end up in a creek or a canyon bottom where there was some green grass, they would eat it all down, and then it's like, well, now what?
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_03: You know, they would actually start losing weight late in the summer.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_03: So we realized we need to hack that better.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_03: We need to figure it out.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_03: The second thing that was happening with that conventional management that's been happening in this country for about 100 years is that uh we're seeing some of our grass communities up there.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_03: These are all natural plant communities that have been here since the last ice age.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so there's extensive grasslands all through here with native species.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_03: My wife is a PhD botanist, Carol, and she has identified about 2,200 different species of plants up there.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_03: So there's incredible diversity already up there.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_03: But the thing that we're finding was that um some of our plant communities were starting to change and they were starting to get altered by years and years of continuous grazing where the cows picked their way across it and actually made all the decisions for us.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_03: So we kind of went back to that ancient pastoral thing of living with our animals and herding them intentionally across the landscape.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_03: And the thing that, you know, we've been thinking about that for a long time, Cena, but the there was something that pushed the envelope on us, and it was wolves.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_03: Wolves moved into our country starting in the late 90s, and they grew like wildfire.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_03: And it was because there are so many elk and so many deer here.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_03: When the wolves came in, and they were actually released here in a reestablishment program by the U.S.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_03: Fish and Wildlife Service, they did so well, they blew, they blew the doors off of anybody's idea of how well these wolves would do, and they just took off and they were eating um elk calves, elk mamas in the deep snow of winter, just very, very efficient pack hunters.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_03: Now, just in our area of Idaho, there's um over 2,000 head of wolves in this place where you know, in a place in a place in the central Idaho Mountain, there's 2,000 head of wolves and about 200 people.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_03: So they outnumber people by 10 to 1.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_03: So um, so it's it's kind of a really crazy deal.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_03: And when that started happening to us, you know, wolf predation, uh, we you know, we were losing one or two or three or four head um a year, you know, and we're like, you know, we can almost live with that.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_03: But one year we lost 14.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_03: And it, you know, uh with our value of what we sell that beef online, you know, we're looking at just having$35,000 fall out of our pocket.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_03: And when we came back for an arrangement that year, Carol and I had a lot of soul searching and said, you know, we we can't do that again.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_03: We can't turn those cattle out there again.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_03: So that's when this whole paradigm of herding, this ancient thing that had been going on for millennia, right?
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you you read in all these old literature pieces about people living, shepherds living with their animals.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, you know, in the Bible, uh shepherds washing their flocks by night, okay?
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_03: That's real what we realized we had to do.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_03: And we called it inherding because um there was it was herding, but it was a brand new kind of herding that was intentional and intensive.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_03: So we thought, let's call this in-herding because we're gonna live with these cattle, we're gonna actually herd them across the landscape.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_03: We're gonna basically take the old cowboy and reincarnate them in our crews.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_03: And it started with my daughters, my seven daughters.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_03: I when I broke the news to them that we're gonna move up there and live with the cattle, they were like, Yes! They actually, they actually don't want to go do it, you know, and um and they still want to go do it, but we had no idea um that all this knowledge about the art and science of shepherding has been lost, and we had to reinvent it.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_03: One thing that helped me was a book, and uh I think you can see it here.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_03: It's called The Art and Science of Shepherding.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_03: It's by a friend of mine.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, his name is Fred Provenza.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_03: He co-authored it with this uh French expert on herding, Michel Muret, and they actually kind of jumpstarted a lot of my thought process about how to do it because this exact same thing is happening in France and Italy, Switzerland, and Spain.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_03: They're actually reinstating shepherds back to the landscape because they're realizing that not only could they get better animal production, but they're realizing just like Carol and I did, that we got incredible ecological benefits when we actually manage our cattle.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_03: So, like up there now, Cena, there's beavers in that 50 miles of creek.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_03: When we started this, we had no beavers.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_03: The beavers have actually recolonized those landscapes because our creekside areas, our riparian vegetation and habitats all got restored.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_03: And the beavers came in as soon as our woody plants started coming back.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_03: We started getting aspen trees coming back, which they love.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_03: They love to eat the bark off them and they'll winter on them.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_03: And we start to get avian life coming back.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_03: We start to see fish where we never saw fish before, and it was because our creeks were running clean and they're running beautiful, and all our native plants were rebooting.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_03: And I wish I could I could show you this right now.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_03: Unfortunately, it's covered with about four feet of snow, but it's it's transformed.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_03: It is a major transformation landscape, and it's the first thing you'll notice is the wildlife came back.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_03: And when that wildlife came back, I mean, we have every level of species up there now.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_03: We have wolves, we have mountain lions, we have bears, we have elk, deer, antelope, um, and then all these terrestrial smallies, you know, everything from like marmots to uh beavers, they have all kind of returned to a kind of a normal biodiversity level across the landscape.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_03: And that's so exciting for us because that indicates that we're actually practicing and meeting our desire for biomimicry.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_03: So that's why in herding, and that's why we do it different now.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: Beautiful.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: And that speaks volumes to why the quality of the beef of your beef is superior and why the why it's so flavorful.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, if you just look at the biodiversity that you guys helped create right there, that brings biodiversity to the soil.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_03: It does.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: And then and the nutrient content, right?
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: Because they have like a buffet to choose.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: And with you shepherding them along, they're now eating more, they're selecting more items from that buffet.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so that actually makes the meat more nutrient dense and makes the cows obviously overall healthier.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um and and and the the human that consumes that is going to receive more nutrient density.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: Right, and more microbial diversity, which is what we have we now know we need in order to build robust microbiomes so that we can prevent and reverse diseases.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: This is beautiful.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: This it's like a full circle that just benefits everyone and everything.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I know you even have pollinators, right?
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, bees from native, native pollinators.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_03: And it's not just honey bees.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_03: There's tons of native.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_03: We've actually made videos about it because it's blown us away about the amount of pollinators up there.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_03: You know, bees I've never really noticed before.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_03: And um now, you know, actually with in-herding, we're up there on a saddle horse and you're seeing all this stuff because you know, you're there's not much to do.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_03: So you're observing your animals and what they like to eat, you're observing plants that you've never seen before, and you're observing all these insects that wow, they're just teamy.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_03: And it's a native population, it's not altered by humans in any way.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_03: So they're intact soils up there.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_03: But we found we've been doing soil tests and we found that our organic matter is going up.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_03: And when your organic matter goes up, I think that means you can pick up more phytochemicals in your beef.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_03: You know, phytochemicals are basically plant micronutrients that density goes up as your soil diversity goes up and soil organic matter goes up, and that means our nutrition level goes up as well.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: That's beautiful.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because yeah, that's a that's a big component to like this regenerative farming or ranching, is to really increase the the carbon load in the soil to sequester more carbon, which brings me to my next question, which I find this fascinating because the mainstream narrative is largely that cows are bad for the environment, they're causing global warming or climate change, you know, whatever the new term is now, climate change.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yep, yep.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and that we need to have meatless Mondays and we need to um produce, you know, like synthetic meats made in a lab and you know, get rid of all the cows because they're burping.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: All this CO2 and causing climate change.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: Your farm, sorry, your ranch is living proof that cows don't have to be blamed for climate change.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, your website says that your ranch has captured at that time roughly 2,400 tons of carbon, um, bringing you to a negative carbon footprint.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: So, how are you sequestering this carbon?
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: How are you having a negative carbon footprint even though you're raising cattle?
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_03: So, um first let me back up just a little bit.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, there was um Ella de Generis actually put out a uh, you know, on her show, she mentioned that we should eat less meat or eat no meat, you know.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_03: Um and that made a lot of people in the meat industry very angry.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, you know, because she at that time she was super mainstream.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_03: Um I don't watch TV.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know how popular her show is now, or if it if she has a show, I don't know.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_03: But um I did know that you know a lot of people followed her and a lot of people just listened to what Ellen said.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_03: So I actually wrote her a letter shortly after that and said, Ellen, you know, I'm a beef producer.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_03: I make my living selling beef.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_03: Um and uh on one hand, I'm kind of disappointed that you you're an advocate of eating no or less meat.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_03: But here's a little bit of paradox going on.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_03: And I actually agree with what you're saying.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_03: If the beef you're talking about is feedlot beef.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_03: Because it's it's not good for you, okay?
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_03: It's just it's gonna cause health issues, okay?
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_03: Because I ate um that kind of beef, you know, a lot of times growing up.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_03: I wasn't always on a ranch or on a farm of our own.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and I wasn't eating wild game when I was young.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_03: Um, what got me thinking that meat was different was when I first started harvesting wild game.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_03: So, anyway, that feedlot beef is not only bad for us, it's also bad for the planet.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I mean it's it's the thing that's causing sedimentation in the Gulf of Mexico, is farming practices that basically feed feedlots is what's causing that sedimentation in the Gulf of Mexico.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_03: Um, I you know, I don't know if you're a believer in climate change, um, but it doesn't really matter.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_03: You know, if you think that conventional agriculture is not having a huge footprint, huge negative footprint on the environment, then you have your head in the sand.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_03: Because I'm seeing all this stuff happen, I'm seeing erosion happen.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_03: I'm it's easy to go to the state of Iowa, for instance, and find out what your topsoil loss has been over the past 50 years.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_03: It's incredible.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_03: You know, the dust bowl is an indicator of what conventional agriculture started to do.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_03: And um, we think, oh, we put those soil conservation practices in place after a dust bowl, dust bowl hasn't happened since, but no, it's still happening, it's just happening in other ways.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_03: So, and what we've also lost is a living soil.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_03: Now, largely agriculture is practiced on dead soils.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I I used to work on soybean and cornfields in the Midwest.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_03: I spent a lot of time there, both in harvesting and tillage.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_03: Walking across a field, I remember there was no sign of not only intelligent life, there's no sign of life.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_03: Seeing it, okay.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_03: It looked like Mars.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_03: And it was because there was a complete absence of biological material.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_03: The only thing that was out there was some, you know, extra residual uh biomass that came off the combine when it went through in the spring.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_03: You'd see little plants like chickweed come up and little nasty weeds that survive the chemicals.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_03: But you could actually put my hand in a lot of that soil in Indiana, 40 feet thick of blackish topsoil.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_03: You could put your hand in it and you could actually feel oil residue, petroleum residue in your fingers.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_03: And it was because, you know, we've been basically putting petroleum products on that soil for 30 or 40 years.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_03: So these plant-based protein folks who come along and say, oh, this is regenerative.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I go back to that and say, no, no, this is biological terrorism.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_03: This is an absolute blowout in terms of life.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_03: You have killed everything in these soils to produce your P isolates that go into like, you know, beyond food burgers or beyond burgers or impossible burgers and um soybeans and those kinds of things.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_03: I've worked on soybean fields.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_03: They're biological deserts.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_03: And so when people say um, oh, plant-based is the way to go, I'm like, I'll take you to a plant-based um you know protein farm and let's go look at the biodiversity above and below that soil.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_03: And it's crazy.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_03: It's crazy how much we've done and how far we've gone.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_03: So the whole feedlot paradigm is actually bad for you.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_03: So um Ellen was right, you know.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_03: But on the other hand, you know, when we raise cattle regeneratively, and regenerative is actually a very simple thing, and raising cattle in terms of thinking about biomimicry and mimicking what nature did before us actually builds soils.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, we've taken our soil organic matter.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_03: When we first got this place, we did soil tests, and most of our soils were under 2%.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_03: And now our average um organic matter is over six.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_03: And that's over just like 10 to 15 years, depending on which field we've tested.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_03: And with that, you know, we see these other manifestations.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_03: So that was like a scientific testing.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_03: We actually did a stratified random sample all the way across our place and found that we've built soils that much.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_03: But there's other manifestations that happen.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_03: The grass just looks better, you know, and we're picking up more biodiversity than we ever have.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_03: And then the other cool thing is we can run twice as many cattle on the same amount of pasture that we used to.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_03: And then the the third thing is that we have raised our average daily gains, which is a metric that every cattle producer knows about.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_03: It's called ADG, average daily gain.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_03: It's what you can gain on a given feedstuff during the summer, you know, if it's a growing season or in a lot, if it's a feed lot in the winter.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_03: So average daily gain is really big.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_03: And last year we just did the metrics very carefully to determine where we're at.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_03: And our average daily gain used to sit around two, two pounds a day.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_03: Last year, our average daily gain was in high twos, and we had about 70 head of cattle that were near finish, that were, you know, near 24 months of age and probably 1300 pounds that were getting around 3.7.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_03: There's feedlots, Cena, who do neg a day.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_03: Feed lots on corn.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_03: There's there's people who are finishing cattle on corn who can't get 3.7 pounds a day.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_03: We're getting it on grass.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_03: Most people I tell in conventional agriculture that that's happening do not believe me.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_03: They just say, well, that's impossible.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_03: That your numbers must be wrong.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_03: But they're not.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I could have shown them out there, these cattle, you know, taking them for a tour of these cattle.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_03: And there's indicators, you know, how the cattle look, uh, what their flesh level is, what their fat deposition looks like.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_03: And crazily, um, the number one um manifestation of weight gain is the consistency of the manure that's coming out of the backside.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_03: And if I could show them that and see that consistency of manure, they'd have to agree with me because they would know wow, these cattle really are really pushing the envelope on what we thought grass could produce.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_03: And the reason the grass is producing it is because the nutrition of the grass is like incredibly higher than it used to be, because we have this living soil underneath them that's facilitating all the uptake of these phytochemicals that make them do very well.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_03: You know, so there's all those kind of manifestations that say, oh, this is a better way to do it.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_03: And when we're doing that, when we're following all those principles, we're just building these soils.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_03: We're putting carbon in soils.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_03: When you look at black, black earth, say you're by um like the soil at the um, you know, the healthy soil that you're supposed to put your plants in to start your vegetables and stuff.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_03: Usually it's always black.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_03: When you see that soil, you say, Oh, the black stuff is the good stuff.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_03: And that's right, because of its humid content, you know, it means it's got a lot of organic matter in it.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_03: So when we're putting organic matter in the soil, organic matter simply means carbon.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_03: Carbon is black, so is organic matter.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_03: All organic matter is comprised of about 55% carbon.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_03: So if we're making our soils blacker, which we are, where I'm where I'm digging holes in my place compared to like my neighbor's place on the exact same soil types on the other side of the fence, our soils are getting blacker and blacker by the year.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_03: That means we're putting carbon down in the soil.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_03: So it's it's it's actually a really easy thing.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_03: You just mimic nature and you will build those soils.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_03: And a lot of people have lost that.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_03: You know, they've lost the mimicry because um, I think it's because agriculture has become a marginal enterprise for so many people.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_03: It's like, man, it is a razor-thin margin.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_03: There's so little money in agriculture.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_03: In fact, I will not even tell my kids that there's hope here.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_03: Go get a job in town, go to college, get a job in town because there's no hope on the farmer ranch.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_03: Leave because the the margins are too skinny.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_03: And when the margins are skinny, Cena, um people start operating out of fear and risk avoidance.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_03: So they start listening to people like county agents, they start reading Beef Magazine, they start reading about the reductionist paradigms of factory farming.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_03: And those are all supposed to be insurance mechanisms that prevent you from failure.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_03: If you follow these principles, you will be profitable.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_03: If you increase your economy of scale, if you farm your soils all the time and cause tillage, which actually is causing your loss of soil diversity, it's causing your loss of organic matter, it's volatilizing, you're doing all these negative things in terms of biological perspective, but in terms of production agriculture, you're supposed to be able to win.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_03: So when you present a conventional farmer with this premise of biodiversity and creation of biological material underground, they're like, wait, I can't do that.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_03: I can't risk my livelihood and risk my family survival on that.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_03: As a result, I can't follow you.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_03: I can't do what you're doing.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_03: Even though it sounds kind of neat, but I can't do what you're doing.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_03: Because following just nature is outside of my understanding, and because of that, I won't do it.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_03: And that's why we're in the boat we are today.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_03: It's because we as humans we like to control everything.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_00: I know that all too well, uh, the struggle with control.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_00: But yes, and this is one reason why I encourage people to get to know their farmer.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_03: Oh man.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_00: You know, for all the reasons that you're saying here.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um and it takes us it takes somebody with courage and conviction and strength and faith to follow the path or to forge in your case, to forge the path that you're forging.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, because it is it is tempting to choose safety over that.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's safety over freedom, you know, over that risk.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so I encourage everyone to get together farmer.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_00: And like what what he's saying, let me apply this to a consumer walking into a grocery store.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_00: So you're going and you're gonna buy an organic piece of meat, right?
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_00: And that's great.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's a step up from conventional, and I don't want to discourage people from doing that.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: But the issue, there's there's several loopholes in the organic label.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_00: And we'll just talk about one right here as it applies to if you to your ranching practices.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_00: In the organic tenant, right, the rules set forth by the government.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_00: Organic means you're supposed to um tend to the soil, you're supposed to regenerate the soil to help build the soil.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_03: It does.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_00: And the majority of organic produce and organic you know, meats and poultry are not produced that way.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_00: You know, some organic farmers are, um, and a lot, many of those are actually now joining the real organic project to distinguish themselves.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_03: We're on it, we're on it.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, it is.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_00: They want to distinguish themselves from what's being watered down in this organic label.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so um what so I think it's a great step.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_00: If you're a consumer and you're saying right now, what can I do to decrease my toxic burden and to support, you know, like what we're gonna call the good farmers.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you can easily go into the store and pick the organic over the conventional.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_00: All right, that's a great first step.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what I'm saying is once you've got that under your belt, see if you can challenge yourself to take the next step.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_00: That next step is to find a farmer like Glenn, which is really easy.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_00: You go to his website, you order right on the website, and you support those farmers, the ones that are actually regenerating our soil, that are bringing back this biodiversity that we all need to live, right?
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_00: We know that we need to eat this type of biodiversity, or if we're just staying inside the confines of these grocery stores, we are sterilizing our microbiomes.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_00: Because essentially practically every single food component in a grocery store, including produce, is sterilized in one form or another.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_00: So you're not only helping your own health, but you're helping the farmer, you're helping the planet when you support farmers like Len and like Joel.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so with that, I want to ask, before we run out of time, I want to get to Joel's questions.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_00: I've monopolized here.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, Joel has six questions.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_00: The first one is what is your number one pain in the neck or weak link in your business?
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_03: The pain in the neck.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_03: Um you know, it would have to be people, Sina.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I generally get along with the cows and with the horses and you know, with the cow dogs, but it it I guess it would be people, you know.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_03: And I mean I love people, but um, here's the deal there's a crisis.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_03: This is this is one of the formative crisis crises in American agriculture today.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_03: There's a labor crisis, there's a farm labor crisis, you know, and it's even made worse in the world of COVID.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so we have a very people-intensive operation in the summertime.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_03: Uh we have between 20 and 25 individual individuals working on our place.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_03: And um, so to find individuals who are willing to put it out there becomes more and more difficult.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know, the way we do it is is actually really extreme.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_03: We'll throw these kids, they're they're usually very young people, you know, between 19 and 23 years old.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and we throw them on horseback for the entire summer.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of days are 16 hours long.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you know, it's just unrelenting being a cowboy up there.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_03: And um, a lot of them don't know how to work, they don't have common sense.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_03: And it's just, you know, the paradigm we've raised most of our kids in these days.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_03: They don't have an opportunity to really gain those kind of skills, you know, even if it's just basic little mechanical skills or basic animal handling skills, um, they don't know anything.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, that I I I guess I wouldn't go straight to pain in the neck.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_03: I actually enjoy the education part, but it can be frustrating because you know, you hire these kids and we pick good kids.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_03: We have a lot of people apply.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_03: And man, I love every one of them, but some of them are like, wow, you I mean, you just barely learned to tie your shoes.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you just figured that out, didn't you?
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_03: And now you're gonna have to saddle a horse, you know, and it's like you're surprised about how little kind of intuitive sense they have about things.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_03: So, so that's you know, I think that's the crisis across all of agriculture, and we share it.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's um yeah, we're so far removed from our food supply.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, you know, and this is the reason we see mechanization, right?
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_03: We see bigger and bigger combines, we see all these, you know, we there's mechanical grape pickers, you know, that pick the grapes, you know.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_03: There's mechanical tomato harvesters, you know, everything's mechanical, and it's because they don't want to deal with the elephant in the living room.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_03: And the elephant in the living room is finding people to do the work, to actually do the on-the-ground work.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_03: And we you can't mechanize herding cattle.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I've seen people try it with drones and that that kind of rot, but um, there's nothing like being out there on horseback because when you're on horseback and you can get that under the skin of these good people we are, um, well, there's a whole bunch of things that happen in that synergy because they're not only you know connected with the horse, but they're also connecting with the cattle and they're actually living and working with the cattle, and they their learning roles change.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_03: You know, a lot of kids come here thinking, I shouldn't call them all kids, I mean they're young people.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_03: They come here um thinking they're gonna train horses and cattle.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_03: And what happens is the cattle and horses train them.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_03: And when they finally get their brain around that, like in August, when they're about to leave, sadly, they become really top hands because they're learning, they're learning every day by observing those animals that are teaching us, and that's that's pretty cool.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's beautiful, and imagine uh what they're doing to um to improve their microbiome just by being out there, breathing in those good microbes, being out with cattle and that diversity.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, my goodness, talk about building a robust microbiome.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_03: That's exactly no, you're right.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_03: And it, you know, and I see kids, you know, they're they're kind of living in the dirt, right?
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_03: Because they're they're taking a nap next to their horse, they're out in the sagebrush, they're living on the ground.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_03: Uh maybe there's some ants crawling over them or something, you know.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_03: So there's this, there's this direct exchange with the soil, and I think that's really cool, you know, and and I see them turn.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_03: Some of them are kind of like aseptic kind of people when they come here, they're like, I don't want to get dirty.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_03: And then toward the end of the summer, they'll drop their food in cow camp on the ground and they'll pick it up and eat it.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_03: It won't even, it won't even mean anything to them, you know.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_03: And what I know they're doing is it they're doing this great inoculation thing, you know, and they're they're so healthy because of it, you know.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_03: And we've raised entire, you know, generations of kids now that are living in this aseptic kind of um bubble.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_03: And as a result, they don't they don't have immunity, they're not safe.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, yes.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_00: I know when I go out to visit Joel at the farm, I do grounding uh, you know, directly on the dirt, and I rub the dirt on our skin and breathe in real deeply, and you know, it's just it's so it's just beautiful.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_00: Second question from Joel.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_00: What gives you the most pleasure in your ranch?
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_03: Um I'd have to say the people.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_00: The people are the pain in the neck, and the people are the pleasure.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_03: Well, they really are.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, they really are.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_03: I got seven daughters, and they're, you know, the youngest is 15.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_03: They're all they're all adults and young adults.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_03: And um, I'm seeing them just, you know, no pun intended.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_03: They're they're blossoming out here.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_03: It's just seeing, it's just beautiful seeing them grow and you know, being able to read the land, read the animals, understand the plants, and even understand the whole relationship with the whole thing, all the way through from the soil, all the way up through the grass, through the animals on it, all the way through to our customer base that we call not customers, we call partners.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_03: Because they're all connected.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's this big circle, and they're seeing it.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_03: They're starting, the kids are starting to get it.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_03: It's not only my kids, it's the kids who come out and ride for us in the summer.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_03: They, you know, some of them say at the end of the summer, yeah, this really hasn't changed me, but then they'll call me like in a year or two, and they'll say, you know what?
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_03: That changed everything about how I see everything.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_03: And that's beautiful.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_03: Because, you know, I mean, seeing a, you know, I'm 58, and who knows how many more years God's gonna grant me the ability to walk across this earth.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_03: Who knows?
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_03: But I know that, you know, that legacy of that connectivity and those ideals is getting transmitted to the next generation.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_03: And that's beautiful.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_03: That's that's what gives me pleasure.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_03: That's what gets me up in the morning, is that yeah, that's beautiful.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I love bringing my children to the farm, like all farms, you know, to meet as many different types of farmers and ranchers as they can to really connect themselves not only with our food supply, but with that basics of nature.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, yeah, there's just nothing like it.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_00: And once you go to that and you see them, you see those farms, you see those ranchers.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_00: You just walk away with this heart, like this sense of like warmth in your heart, and you know that's what you want to feed your family.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you you don't want to go back to the grocery store once you've seen it, once you've, you know, seen, you've put your hand in the soil and you've seen the earthworms and you've touched them and you know, you and you walk on it, and it's just it's just phenomenal, phenomenal.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_03: No, I think you're right.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_03: I think there's something that resonates in us.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_00: It does.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it doesn't, it's not something that can say mechanically describe or mechanistically describe, but there's there's a resonance there.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_03: That I think we're supposed to eat this way and we're supposed to be connected.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I think when you're there and you're experiencing it firsthand, I think that's your body communicating with you that yes, this is the way it should be.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_00: This is the way it's supposed to be, you know.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_00: Why, okay, third question from Joel.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_00: Why don't more ranchers do what you do?
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_03: Ooh, that's a really good question.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_03: Um you know, I I think we talked about it a little bit about the, you know, there's a um there's a marginlessness in American agriculture today.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_03: And with that, um, people don't want to go out of limb with the probable fact that the limb could break.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_03: And uh they they they perceive what we do as going out on the limb with trying these things, you know.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_03: And um, for us, you know, we had all these ideals, these attributes that we believed in, these core values that Carol and I believed in.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_03: Um and that took us into this new place.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_03: You know, we we didn't want to ranch, we didn't want to practice agriculture without being true to those ideals, you know.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_03: So that's why we're here.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_03: But they have been brought up in this paradigm, okay?
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_03: And to them it's very risky to go venture into a new place.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_03: And here's the other part of it um, there's difficulty in a new place, Cena, because guess what?
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_03: Guess what?
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_03: What's my pain in the neck and what's my greatest pleasure?
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_03: It's the people.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_03: So if you're gonna do this and do the kind of paradigm that we do, or what even what Joel does, why don't people embrace Joel's?
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_03: I think this the reason is the same.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_03: It's because, well, you got to invest in all those people, and that's risky.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's putting it out there, and that means you're gonna have to operate in a relationship.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_03: And a lot of us are kind of, you know, this COVID thing kind of brought it really underscored um a lot of people say, wow, COVID really changed us as a country.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_03: And I don't think it did.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_03: What it did was it it made manifest where we were as people already.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_03: The masks didn't do it, they were already there, you know.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_03: So um this the distancing and and the mistrust of people was already there, and now it's getting manifested by a thing like COVID.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_03: And it's because, you know, through social media and through just media, you know, TV, newspapers, all those things I think they strive to isolate us from relationships with each other.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_03: And so as a result, it's you know, what's interesting is when Carol and I go for coffee with to one of the old neighbors around here, guess what they talk about?
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_03: They talk about people they knew that lived on this ranch or that ranch, and they're married to so and so, and they're really they're always trying to connect dots of relationship.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_03: And I don't see any of our contemporaries, uh, people our age or younger doing that anymore.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_03: But in the older generation, they all connected dots.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_03: It was the life was relationship for them.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and so I think that's the second reason why people don't want to embrace it.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_03: It's because they have to go back, they have to go back to that relationship form of agriculture, you know.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_03: And it was human capital.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_03: It wasn't, you know, we think of agriculture in terms of soil capital, animal capital, um, the forage capital, but the human capital, you know, holistically thinking about agriculture is totally important as well.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_03: It's got the same level of importance as all those other things.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, well said.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_00: Well said.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_00: All right, I have three more questions from Joel, and we're running out of time.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_00: So let's try to do lightning rounds.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, what do you say to folks who charge you with being an elitist?
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_03: I have never had anybody do that.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_03: Oh you know, and I I mean, I I think I I see people who are like that in sustainable or regenerative agriculture to where people don't um they won't build a relationship with them because they perceive them as a leadist.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_03: But you know, like I talked about uh having coffee with some of my neighbors or something like that.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you know, foundationally, if I go back 30 years in what Carol and I practice here, we learned it from our neighbors.
• 48:59
  unknown: Yeah.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_03: You know, we bought a ranch from an old rancher who said, I don't want to ever leave.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_03: If you guys buy the ranch, can I stay here?
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_03: And I said, Absolutely, we'll give him a lifetime estate.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_03: And so I had coffee with him every morning and I learned everything from people like him.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm still learning from my neighbors today, even though, yeah, I practice a different form of agriculture, but there's so much wisdom that they have, you know, over generations of practicing livestock management and cows and and grass, that there's always something to learn from those people.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, I I get along with all my neighbors, um, you know, and I've never had anybody say, You're an elitist, El Zinga, you're an elite.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_03: And I've never had that.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_03: So that that would be kind of fun to have somebody do that because I say, yeah.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_00: So if somebody does charge you with being an elitist, then with us and tell us how you respond.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I guess my first question would be um, tell me what that means.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_03: Um you know, because I'm a person, you know, like this morning, um, I'm watching these cattle and we fed them hay above the ranch here, above the house here where we live.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm looking at them through the window.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_03: And this morning when the sun came up, they're they're on about a 300-acre pasture.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_03: They all moved from where I fed them last night, which I thought was a great place.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_03: It was sheltered.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_03: There was tall grass for them to graze while they were there, there was plenty for them to eat and hay.
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_03: It was close to the water, but guess what?
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_03: They all migrated down to a whole nother pasture that they grazed already several weeks ago.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm sitting there with a coffee cup in my hand, scratching my head.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_03: And I said to Carol, I said, Why did those cattle go there?
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_03: And she said, I don't know.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_03: And Becky, one of my daughters, walks over to me and she says, I think they're stupid.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_03: She's not gonna listen to this podcast, so she's all right.
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_03: But anyway, anyway, um, I said, Well, I think they know something we don't know, you know, and I guess that's what I'd say to that elitist.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_03: I'd say, I learn something from a cow every day.
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_03: How does that make me an elitist when I'm learning from animals?
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_03: I love that instead of people, you know.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_00: I love that.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_00: I tell people I learn, I have five dogs, I learn from my dogs every day.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_00: You know, my life is much better when I follow their, you know, like to a degree, to a degree.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_03: You don't want to go over that.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, but they're in the moment.
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_00: They they break, right?
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, they are always happy to see you.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_03: They're happy.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_03: They are happy.
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, absolutely.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so uh two more questions.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_00: Have you been able to see improvements in your ranch land?
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_00: And if so, how are you measuring these improvements?
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_03: Ooh, yeah.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_03: So I talked about um actually the technical scientific aspect of doing soil testing.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_03: So we've actually started to do that on the range.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, and which is which is something nobody has done.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_03: I I don't know of anybody who soil tests their rangelands.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_03: These are the dry native rangelands up there.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_03: So we started soil testing.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_03: We had a gal, her uh her name is Nicole Masters, and she is a soil expert.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_03: And she actually lived with us on the ranch for um a couple months this summer.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_03: She just pulled her camper in and uh she had a horse and we put her on a cow cow hand crew.
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_03: And um, we actually did some soil testing with her up there.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_03: And so it's actually blowing me away a little bit here, um, Cena, because I didn't think we're having these kind of soil effects with the way we manage our cattle up there.
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_03: And it turns out we have doubled our soil organic matter up there.
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_03: And what that means is that my 2400 tons of carbon is way low.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_03: I didn't apply it to the 70 square miles, I just applied that to the home ranch of 900 acres.
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_03: Wow, I didn't apply it to the 46,000 acres.
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_03: So we're like kind of getting blown away right now, you know, just by those kind of measurements, realizing that, oh wow, this in-herding, because we're like kind of, you know, very intensively and intentionally trying to practice holistic practices with our grazing up there in terms of not only our soil performance, not only our native plant performance and all the biodiversity associated, but also our cattle performance.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_03: When we when we're handcrafting that up there, we're actually doing great increases in our soil productivity and our carbon sequestration up there, you know.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_03: So that opened a huge door to us of opportunity, realizing that, oh man, you know, about a quarter of the United States is dry rangeland, is dry grassland, you know.
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_03: What if everybody did this?
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_03: What if everybody did this on these dry semi-desert lands that people say are wastelands?
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_03: What if we actually did this by using cattle very intensively and intentionally, moving across the landscape in a way that actually promoted this soil biodiversity and soil carbon sequestration?
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it it's it's like the sky's the limit on how much we could pull in terms of carbon in that soil.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_03: You know, so it was very exciting to us to do that, you know.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_03: So that's like the scientific metric.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_03: But then there's all those production things.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I talked about the beavers, you know, we're seeing all that, the biodiversity increase, but we're also seeing it in our animals.
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, our animals are doing better than they used to, health-wise.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_03: Our our uh death rate is under 1% per year, and it used to be uh between three and four.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_03: Our animal health rate in terms of what we have to do something to, where we got to intervene in terms of give an animal an antibiotic, fall to pull it out of the uh the organic program, that's under two percent a year now, and it used to be under six.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, those animal health kind of paradigms have also improved with the improvement of soil.
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_03: So those are kind of exciting things to see happening uh because they they kind of just make you go to bed at night realizing, yeah, you know, this has been a lot of work, and there's been a lot of stress, and there's a lot of things going on, you know, with people I talked about, and you know, you have failures, you have sometimes it feels like two steps back, one step forward in a day, but overall you see this and you're like, yes, this is right.
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_03: There's a rightness to what we do, it's beautiful.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_00: That is beautiful.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_00: And have you had your meat tested like for nutrient density, like a nutrient profile?
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so um we just started a study um with um, let's see, it's the Duke University, um, not the medical school, I guess it's the medical institute.
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_03: A guy named Dr.
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_03: Stephen uh von Vliet.
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_03: He is a um he's a human nutrition assayist.
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_03: So he's this biochemist that connects all those biochemicals with human nutrition.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_03: He actually um started a study with us.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_03: We sent him um, I think it was 36 pounds of ground beef.
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_03: And his first, the first level of the study was to assay all these phytochemicals in there and um and compare them directly to um Beyond Meats burger, you know, analogous to the impossible burger.
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_03: So it was very interesting when he when he he's got some preliminary results, but it shows the presence, I don't know how many you know, phytochemicals there were that were showing up in our meat.
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_03: It was an amazing amount of um, oh what he I guess his first the the first element of his study was studying inflammatory markers um versus not.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_03: So our meat had almost no inflammatory markers.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_03: Beyond meats had like it was a host of them.
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_03: It had like 50 different inflammatory markers associated with but beyond meat.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_03: And our beef didn't have it, had very few.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_03: There was like three or four or something like that.
• 57:29
  SPEAKER_03: And then the next essay he did was um just the these chemicals, you know.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_03: I I can't even pronounce a lot of them.
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_03: Um I could send you the data if you'd like, but it it names all these chemicals that are present in our beef that these animals were harvesting up on the wild country.
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_03: So he wanted to make sure that they all had been up there on our wild rangelands eating those 2,200 different plant species that he's talking about.
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_03: And um, so he wanted to see if they showed up in the beef, and indeed they are.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_03: So he's not final on it.
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_03: So those are really preliminary results, but it looks really cool, and we're really excited about it because it's really the first like complete assay type study on a grass-fed beef in the world, perhaps.
• 58:12
  SPEAKER_03: You know, there's been a lot of really specific um nutrition studies looking for omega-3 fatty acids and those sorts of things, but this is a kind of the first phytochemical micronutrient assay that's occurred, and it's it's so far, it's very exciting.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_03: So it's really cool.
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so when that's finalized, we'd love to have you come back on.
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_03: Well, you bet.
• 58:31
  SPEAKER_03: Well, we we can maybe maybe you should get stiff Stefan as well, because yeah, got he's he's great, and he's uh he's a great speaker, very interesting, super interesting.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe the four of us I'll ask Joel if he wants to come on.
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_00: That would be a good one.
• 58:45
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, that'd be wonderful.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_03: That'd be wonderful.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, final question from Joel.
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_00: If you could do one thing to fundamentally move your business forward, what would it be?
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_03: That's a good question.
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_03: Um so you know what?
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_03: If you looked at things, Cena, from just a business perspective, just the numbers, there's all kinds of things we could do to be more profitable.
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, we're profitable right now, but there's a whole bunch of things we can do to really move the needle profitability-wise.
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_03: But here's the deal um you have this belief system, you have this like this husbandry mindset, you have this stewardship mindset, uh, you have this regenerative mindset, uh, you have our family, you know, and and um not only supporting us economically and with good food, but you know, what about you know, emotionally, spiritually, um physically, you know, and and mentally as far as how we relate to all these different attributes of what we do.
• 59:52
  SPEAKER_03: So when you think of it holistically, I think we're kind of stuck where we are.
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_03: You know, we're profitable, and if it if you just boil it down to pure economic business, yeah, there's all kinds of things we could do to make more money, but we we won't do them because we have the its attributes that are more important than making money, right?
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_03: So, I mean, as long as you know we got clothes on our back, we got a place to live, and you know, we live in this beautiful place, we feel really blessed to do that.
• 1:00:20
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I I don't really feel like we need to do anything, but here's something that comes to mind that's like it's not only moving the needle, it's like moving business, moving our holistic view of business forward forever.
• 1:00:36
  SPEAKER_03: And it's investing in our family, investing in our young people, you know, and not only my kids, but the next generation.
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_03: And we've talked about that a little bit today.
• 1:00:47
  SPEAKER_03: That moves things forward because, like with my kids, they're all looking at different things now.
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_03: I get some kids that are probably not interested in continuance in agriculture, but most of them are.
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_03: Most of them like it.
• 1:00:59
  SPEAKER_03: And I tell them, you know, instead of sadly what my neighbors are often saying to them, my neighbors are saying to their kids, hey, go leave, get off the ranch.
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_03: You know, your inheritance is here, but your livelihood is not.
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_03: It is not.
• 1:01:14
  SPEAKER_03: Go work somewhere else.
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_03: Someday I'm gonna croak, you're gonna get it, and then you can just sell it and subdivide it, whatever you want to do, but do not think you're gonna make money in agriculture.
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_03: And instead, I tell my kids a completely different story.
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_03: I say, There's plenty of room for you on this farm, on this ranch.
• 1:01:32
  SPEAKER_03: Continue in agriculture, and so they're all required to leave for at least a year, learn something from somebody else.
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_03: So a bunch of them have already gone um through four years of college, gotten degrees, um, and they come back.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_03: And what's interesting is they're bringing new things to the table.
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_03: So new economic avenues, new hull-ons, as Joe would call them, to the table, new aspects of how we produce and practice.
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_03: And so that's exciting stuff.
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_03: That's because you know, that is moving our business forward economically.
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_03: Because within a paradigm we've got, you know, of these species we raise and what we do, yeah, there's income coming in, and you can always scale those up.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_03: But they're coming up with new, brand new ideas, brand new areas of expertise that can then sandwich on top of this what we've already got going on, this one piece of land in this landscape.
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know, a lot of it involves human capital.
• 1:02:33
  SPEAKER_03: Like uh, I got a couple of them that want to um invest in people coming out here to learn, um, or to just be with us and vacation with us, you know.
• 1:02:43
  SPEAKER_03: And um, and that's gonna be learning too, right?
• 1:02:45
  SPEAKER_03: They're interested in kind of telling the story and getting that conveyed because you know, people come here and they they get hope, they get excited, you know, that there's hope in agriculture.
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_03: So that's I think that's the business forward because it's a holistic business for it.
• 1:03:03
  SPEAKER_03: It isn't just money, yeah.
• 1:03:05
  SPEAKER_03: It's like the whole thing moves forward, you know, the sustainability, the regenerative aspect, um, and those, you know, familial aspects, relationship aspects, they continue to move forward.
• 1:03:17
  SPEAKER_03: And that's exciting.
• 1:03:19
  SPEAKER_00: That is exciting.
• 1:03:20
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, I think you captured it all when you said the word hope, because um, when I was introduced to you and I was looking through your website, that's really the feeling that I walked away with was hope that there is somebody out there that's producing great food for us and for the environment that's restoring and rebuilding the soils and the ecosystem that's helping them build robust microbiomes and the soil and the animals and the plants and us.
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so for me, it's just um you're a beacon of help.
• 1:03:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I really applaud that and I appreciate it.
• 1:03:59
  SPEAKER_00: I have so much gratitude and respect for what you do.
• 1:04:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I would like to close with a quote that is from your website.
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um, on the bottom of your website, it says, In our lives and business practices, we try to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ.
• 1:04:15
  SPEAKER_00: He tells us to love your neighbor as yourself.
• 1:04:18
  SPEAKER_00: We want our dealings with you to be marked by integrity, and we will always do our best to do right by you.
• 1:04:25
  SPEAKER_03: That's awesome.
• 1:04:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that says it all.
• 1:04:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's beautiful.
• 1:04:28
  SPEAKER_00: So I encourage everybody, please take a moment and visit Glenn's website.
• 1:04:34
  SPEAKER_00: Again, it's outerspring.com.
• 1:04:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'll have a link in the description.
• 1:04:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, if if you visit his website and it resonates with you, please consider supporting him by just making a purchase.
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_00: I'm telling you, just taste the meat.
• 1:04:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's like tasting Joel's meat.
• 1:04:49
  SPEAKER_00: You're not going to want to go back to the grocery store.
• 1:04:51
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Glenn, so much.
• 1:04:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm really excited to have you on next time with