Speaker 1: This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listeningcast.
Speaker 2: You can't predict anything.
Speaker 1: The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light.
Speaker 1: Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting
Speaker 1: for elk. First Light has performance apparel to support every
Speaker 1: hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light
Speaker 1: dot com. F I R S T L I T
Speaker 1: E dot com. Okay, everybody, this episode is dedicated to
Speaker 1: Doug Durn. Oh oh, he's gonna eat this up, this
Speaker 1: whole thing. Oh dude, stuck Durn's dream. That's because this
Speaker 1: is a special edition called Ask a Farmer, but it's
Speaker 1: not any farmer. We're joined by Will Harris, fourth generation
Speaker 1: farmer of white Oak Pastor in Georgia, now author of
Speaker 1: a book, A Bold Return to Giving a damn One Farm,
Speaker 1: Six Generations in the Future of Food. Will Harris is
Speaker 1: the owner of White Oak Pastures, a holistically managed, regenerative
Speaker 1: ranch and farm in Georgia's semi tropical coastal plane. You
Speaker 1: guys raised how many different kinds of animals? Ten lay
Speaker 1: them out for me.
Speaker 2: Real cows, hogs, sheep, goats, rabbits, and five poltry species chickens, turkeys, skinners,
Speaker 2: and ducks.
Speaker 1: And you run your farm like a like an ecosystem.
Speaker 2: Here is an ecosystem, yes, and.
Speaker 1: You live recognizing that and you were We're gonna get
Speaker 1: into great detail on this. But you guys, family's been
Speaker 1: on the farm since eighteen sixty. Yeah, I'm the was
Speaker 1: it eighteen sixty or sixty six.
Speaker 2: Sixty six? I'm the fourth.
Speaker 1: Generation, never left, never sold. You guys just been.
Speaker 2: There, We've been there. My daughters are the fifth and
Speaker 2: they've got five little beady children who are the sixth.
Speaker 1: So the sixth generation is on.
Speaker 2: But the six year Russian hadn't contributed it.
Speaker 1: They don't do nothing nothing. It's just a testament to
Speaker 1: kids these days.
Speaker 2: Right, But their parents, their parents are producers. Got it?
Speaker 1: Our connection? We have the same agent, Mark Gerald.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's great.
Speaker 1: Did Mark find you?
Speaker 2: He did? He contracted us.
Speaker 1: That's happened to me twenty some years ago.
Speaker 2: And I told him that I couldn't write a book.
Speaker 2: I didn't know how to read a book. But he persisted,
Speaker 2: and finally going to stop him. No, he don't stop him.
Speaker 2: He's in it to win it. Man.
Speaker 1: So when I met Mark, I thought I had it
Speaker 1: all figured out. I was living in uh I was
Speaker 1: living in Wyoming at the time, and I was already
Speaker 1: writing a book and and I got a call from
Speaker 1: my editor outside magazine. She said, hey, there is this
Speaker 1: agent looking for you. I was like, shit, already got
Speaker 1: an agent. And he was persistent.
Speaker 3: Man.
Speaker 1: He got a hold of me and he's basically, here's
Speaker 1: how we're going to do this.
Speaker 2: Yeah. He hasn't changed a pit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and he's like, this is And I was like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe someday I won't do that. He goes, no, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: no, no no, We're gonna do it right now, strictly like
Speaker 1: week one, this will happen, Week two, this will happen,
Speaker 1: Week three, this will happen. I was like, let's see.
Speaker 1: I actually told starting to be like work.
Speaker 2: I actually told him no, thank you, I'm not interested.
Speaker 2: Really didn't. He talk to my daughter and she was
Speaker 2: interested and had me become interested.
Speaker 1: Mark went to my bachelor party, did he I had
Speaker 1: a week long bachelor party.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I don't know those glomorous.
Speaker 1: I wasn't either. So we're gonna get into all that. Uh,
Speaker 1: and it's gonna be big time, asked the farmer. I
Speaker 1: got some real farming questions for you. Yeah, about land management, uh,
Speaker 1: animal wealth, fair, why things? Why things were done the
Speaker 1: way they're done in the agricultural landscape for a long time.
Speaker 1: Why the agricultural landscape changed so much in the mid
Speaker 1: nineteen hundreds.
Speaker 2: Right? Have I got the answer for you?
Speaker 1: Why did things? Why did agg change so much in
Speaker 1: the mid nineteen hundreds, And why are farmers some farmers
Speaker 1: now beginning to look and think that maybe we had
Speaker 1: things more figured out in the old days than we
Speaker 1: do in the modern days in some of the trade offfs. First,
Speaker 1: we got to talk about a couple of quick things,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to ask you about just general wild wildlife.
Speaker 1: I'm a cow's not cow's not condos kind of environmentally,
Speaker 1: I'm not you know what I mean. There's like this
Speaker 1: whole faction of environmentalism that are anti Kyle. I'm not
Speaker 1: among them.
Speaker 2: Good.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm like, I'm too much more pragmatic than that.
Speaker 1: I want to talk about wildlife onregenitive farms, clean farm practices,
Speaker 1: dirty farm practices.
Speaker 2: Right up my alley.
Speaker 1: Great, we're gonna get to all that. Yanni. First, Yann,
Speaker 1: you want your daughter got her first buck. My daughter
Speaker 1: got her first buck.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yours after you kind of gave her first opportunity
Speaker 4: away to your son. What do you mean she got mad?
Speaker 1: That's what she likes to think happened. Is not what happens.
Speaker 4: That's not what happened when you told the story. That's
Speaker 4: how I understood it. The buck was kind of getting away,
Speaker 4: did I tell the story? Yeah, but her and yeah,
Speaker 4: and as the book is kind of getting away and
Speaker 4: as opposed to being like, Okay, we're just gonna let
Speaker 4: him go over the ridge.
Speaker 1: We already did that one.
Speaker 4: We're gonna get on him again.
Speaker 1: That already happened once.
Speaker 4: Okay, but you could do it.
Speaker 1: How many times you go bump a buck over ridge?
Speaker 1: Go find it again?
Speaker 4: Listen? I don't know. But but instead you said Jimmy
Speaker 4: and shoot him. Hadn't even come out of your lips,
Speaker 4: and the gun went off, and what she thought was
Speaker 4: her buck was now Jimmy's buck.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: He's kind of a wild bill though, you know, like
Speaker 1: if you say get him, he's gonna get him.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I understand. I understand. So you took her out again,
Speaker 4: and she got her first buck.
Speaker 1: Didn't even let her big brother come. I brought her
Speaker 1: and her little brother. I brought her and her little
Speaker 1: brother out and we had a great little hunt. And
Speaker 1: on her sixth day, her sixth day of kind of
Speaker 1: more than that if you count just camping traveling, she
Speaker 1: put in her sixth day of actual like real good
Speaker 1: wake up before it gets light out hunting, got a
Speaker 1: buck and she was ecstatic. The one mistake I made,
Speaker 1: she hit a good hitting lungs, ran up there too quick.
Speaker 1: I should have said, let's just sit and wait to
Speaker 1: come minutes.
Speaker 4: Oh it's still, because it was still.
Speaker 1: Then you get up there and it's like an know
Speaker 1: what I mean, right, anything takes a minute to die, sure,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know usually and she hit it right,
Speaker 1: you know, she hit.
Speaker 2: It through the lungs.
Speaker 1: I just said, okay, now you wait a minute, then
Speaker 1: we'll go up and have a look. And she'd gone
Speaker 1: up and been like dead in the door nail. But
Speaker 1: instead we hustled right over there and she caught it,
Speaker 1: and you know, you know then I'm like this always happens.
Speaker 1: It's just it's it's like normally people wait and they
Speaker 1: don't even see that it happens. But we came up
Speaker 1: and it's it's just it happens. They're gonna breathe for
Speaker 1: a minute and they're gonna expire. And it's not that
Speaker 1: you did anything wrong. You did everything right, but you
Speaker 1: just witness the thing that would normally be out of
Speaker 1: sight because it ran over the hill or you wait
Speaker 1: a minute.
Speaker 2: She got over it.
Speaker 1: She's pretty upset.
Speaker 4: Because she.
Speaker 1: Wounded it extra harm, didn't hit it right, because she
Speaker 1: just thought they'd go like in the Westerns, you know,
Speaker 1: the guy falls off the railing and he's just never
Speaker 1: even twitches. I think that's what she was expecting.
Speaker 4: Any tears, yeah, the ones associate with that moment or
Speaker 4: the tears of getting her first buck.
Speaker 1: No tears of that. She didn't hit it right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it made it softer. Yeah, but then.
Speaker 4: Because I kind of started crying a little bit and
Speaker 4: I was like, oh no, what happened? What's going on?
Speaker 4: And she's just like, I just I can't believe I
Speaker 4: did it, you know, like pure joy, you know, but
Speaker 4: tears of joy. So no, yeah, she I was texting
Speaker 4: with Corinn earlier about it, and she's she said, well,
Speaker 4: did any mixed emotions as none whatsoever, just like cools
Speaker 4: of cucumber, happy and boked by it up to and
Speaker 4: it was like, great, take some pictures, pet it, check
Speaker 4: it out.
Speaker 5: You know what.
Speaker 4: I've a couple of takeaways. This is fresh in my
Speaker 4: mind because it was not even twenty four hours ago.
Speaker 4: Is how when kids are around these dead animals, they've
Speaker 4: seen a lot of them alive. They've seen our kids
Speaker 4: a lot of them have seen a lot of them dead.
Speaker 4: But they go up to them and they are just
Speaker 4: touching and feeling and checking from one end to the other.
Speaker 4: You don't know the tale, just like so. And I
Speaker 4: think I don't know why, But as adults, maybe it's
Speaker 4: because you know, you've already done it, seen a thousand times,
Speaker 4: and so you kind of skip that part. But I
Speaker 4: didn't have to tell her to like, oh, take a
Speaker 4: minute and enjoy the moment, like it was just naturally.
Speaker 4: She was just doing it. You know, look at the hide,
Speaker 4: look at the collar. Look how it's ten different colors,
Speaker 4: but when you stand away from it blends into one.
Speaker 4: And you know, just all these observations and you know,
Speaker 4: my daughter, you know, and she gets going. There's a
Speaker 4: lot of words coming out of there.
Speaker 5: Maybe she's a future scientist.
Speaker 4: Yeah, artists, we'll see at some point.
Speaker 1: My kids are always really eager to see what's in
Speaker 1: the stomach. Oh, and no amount of checking is going
Speaker 1: to ever convince them that.
Speaker 4: It's the same.
Speaker 1: Totally look like it's gonna look like someone pull up
Speaker 1: a bunch of the slaughter.
Speaker 4: She pretty much it herself. I did the I busted
Speaker 4: open the sternom for so that it'd be easier for
Speaker 4: her to see what she was doing, right, Because at
Speaker 4: first I said, yeah, just reach in there, grab the track,
Speaker 4: you cut it off with your other hand, and yank
Speaker 4: it all out, and she's like looking in there, and
Speaker 4: you know you can't see anything. It's gonna be all
Speaker 4: done by hand. So then I said, all right, let
Speaker 4: me cut it open. Then you can see what you
Speaker 4: got going. But yeah, she does the whole thing, and
Speaker 4: she's like, all right, let's get the heart and the liver.
Speaker 4: So she got that. I point her in the right
Speaker 4: direction there and it's all said and done. Buck splayed out,
Speaker 4: letting him drain. I'm getting ready to go get the
Speaker 4: uh of the truck, and she's like, oh, can I
Speaker 4: cut the stomach open now?
Speaker 1: Like it's like this to find like a little person
Speaker 1: in there.
Speaker 4: Or yeah, I don't know what it is, but it's
Speaker 4: great to see that that curiosity.
Speaker 1: No, uh, I had so many observations helping my daughter,
Speaker 1: but the main one is, wow, stuff gets away.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, that wouldn't have gotten away.
Speaker 1: Normally, no opportunity.
Speaker 6: You know what do you know what?
Speaker 1: Oh, just you name it, you name it. It's just
Speaker 1: a lot, it's a lot online. It's just get you know,
Speaker 1: it's like it's over there and you gotta remember this.
Speaker 1: And then we did the thing too, dry firing, dry
Speaker 1: firing on it.
Speaker 4: On the animal, just everything. Yeah, no, it's a great,
Speaker 4: great thing.
Speaker 1: We saw some you know, something dough too far away.
Speaker 1: We just dry fire on it just to Yeah.
Speaker 4: It's just it's anything that you do that's uh, I
Speaker 4: don't know a skill like that. In the beginning, it
Speaker 4: seems like it's so complicated. There's so many moving parts.
Speaker 4: There's so you know where you and I just will
Speaker 4: naturally just shift our whole body as you shift behind
Speaker 4: the gun. But for them it's just not natural, right,
Speaker 4: It's it's that and it's just refinding the animal and
Speaker 4: the scope and I mean she's an hour into the Huh.
Speaker 4: She's like, I think you would have already shot one.
Speaker 4: I'm like, yeah, maybe, yeah, there's just there's just a lot.
Speaker 4: But I think I noticed that too. But at the
Speaker 4: same time, I was watching her yesterday and I'm like, man,
Speaker 4: her muzzle control is I don't want to say impeccable,
Speaker 4: but it's getting there. And just like the way she
Speaker 4: handles the firearm is getting really good. Like there's no
Speaker 4: like looking at the bolt and going how does this
Speaker 4: thing work?
Speaker 2: Again?
Speaker 4: Right, there's just been enough repetition where it's all clicking
Speaker 4: right along and you can see and even like dealing
Speaker 4: with it. Even though she's never gutted one, she's been
Speaker 4: part of that enough and she's skinned enough and done
Speaker 4: all those little pieces that it didn't take us that
Speaker 4: much longer. You know, then I would have gutted it.
Speaker 4: I mean maybe twenty minutes instead of ten. But you
Speaker 4: can see. I think down the line it won't be
Speaker 4: too long until hopefully, if they keep practicing it, that
Speaker 4: you won't even need to say anything.
Speaker 1: Just hold a leg. You know, when you get into
Speaker 1: a hunting technique, there's all these things like you can
Speaker 1: go on and you hear people talk about, you know,
Speaker 1: people instructional people to be like, oh, there's like fitness,
Speaker 1: you know, there's marksmanship. I mean there's a lot of
Speaker 1: other stuff that no one's put a name to and
Speaker 1: no one talks about. But it's just how to be like,
Speaker 1: what does a deer look like? That ain't gonna stop?
Speaker 1: What's the deer look like? That's gonna stop in a second?
Speaker 2: Yeah, you should be ready to shoot it.
Speaker 1: It's just all this stuff. You're like, you realize, like,
Speaker 1: no one's ever put this in the way. No one's
Speaker 1: ever put in the words like what is a deer's demeanor?
Speaker 1: You know that deer is heading this way and he's
Speaker 1: clueless that deer does that? Does that see about something
Speaker 1: that happened a little while ago and he's kind of
Speaker 1: getting over it?
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 7: I always have a I don't know what it was,
Speaker 7: but when I was at hunting last week or the
Speaker 7: week before, it's like every every buck was kind of
Speaker 7: like tuned up, and every time I'd be like he
Speaker 7: sees us, and I'm like, no, he doesn't. He's just
Speaker 7: you know, but it was upset about something earlier, right,
Speaker 7: Or he's just keyed up and he happens to be
Speaker 7: looking in that direction, and I happened to be there.
Speaker 7: And you watch him for a minute, and then all
Speaker 7: of a sudden, he's looking somewhere else and he's given
Speaker 7: that bush the same look that he just gave me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we would get into that a lot. He was
Speaker 1: looking she's looking at us. I'm like, well, she is,
Speaker 1: but she's not. Yeah, right, that's exactly. She's just looking
Speaker 1: at something past us.
Speaker 4: But if you wave your arms right now, right at.
Speaker 1: Us, it won't be coincidental. I had some other observation.
Speaker 1: I was just saying, Oh, did you carry your daughter's gun?
Speaker 2: I did not.
Speaker 1: I have okay, Ina, See, I'm so much meaner to
Speaker 1: my boys than my daughter. So I was carrying my
Speaker 1: daughter's gun and my older boy found out. I heard
Speaker 1: him like, I heard him like, he carried your gun?
Speaker 1: Are you kidding me?
Speaker 6: Well?
Speaker 1: Yeah, nicer to hear her name to you real quick.
Speaker 1: On the subject of land ownership. So to return to
Speaker 1: my favorite subject, We've gotten more mileage out of the
Speaker 1: Wyoming Corner crossing case than any other thing to ever happen.
Speaker 4: I've gotten a lot of great feedback from that podcast,
Speaker 4: just text saying how great a lawyer. Yeah, with a lawyer.
Speaker 4: How great it was to hear him lay it all out.
Speaker 1: You know a lot of people I was noticing because
Speaker 1: we have the video of that on YouTube. A lot
Speaker 1: of people watch that on YouTube. The corner crossing lawyer
Speaker 1: speaks out. Someone wrote in this is a land surveyor,
Speaker 1: wrote in backing me up on a point. I got
Speaker 1: one guy taking me to task, and I got one
Speaker 1: guy backing me up and response, this is him writing
Speaker 1: in response to your recent episode with the lawyer from
Speaker 1: the Corner Crossers, I think it's important to get a
Speaker 1: little insight from a land surveyor my profession for quite
Speaker 1: some time now. There's something Steve said in that episode
Speaker 1: and several other times discussing this issue that cannot be overstated,
Speaker 1: he continues, and that's that this was a surveyed and
Speaker 1: verified corner, Meaning the much debated, contentious corner in Wyoming
Speaker 1: that led to this corner crossing case, who knows could
Speaker 1: wind up in the US Supreme Court, was a certified
Speaker 1: and verified corner. So when these individuals use this ladder
Speaker 1: to jump corners and stay on public land while crossing
Speaker 1: over two corners of private land, they were doing this
Speaker 1: on a survey and verified corner. This individual, the surveyor,
Speaker 1: goes on to say, when most of the section corners
Speaker 1: were set in the eighteen hundreds, it was marked by
Speaker 1: either a nearby rock which was then carved and engraved
Speaker 1: in a specific way, a pile of flat rocks they
Speaker 1: found and stacked one on another, or they would cut
Speaker 1: off a branch from a nearby tree and bury that
Speaker 1: sticking out of the ground and dig four holes round
Speaker 1: it one due north, east, south and west. Many of
Speaker 1: these original section corners have been replaced with more modern monuments,
Speaker 1: most often a three inch aluminum cap on either a
Speaker 1: pipe or a piece of rebar pounded in the ground.
Speaker 1: You see these quite often, but others have not knowing this,
Speaker 1: unless you know exactly what you are looking for, and
Speaker 1: more importantly, where you are looking for it, you are
Speaker 1: not going to find the section corner. In his career,
Speaker 1: he's dealt with the buried branches sticking out of the
Speaker 1: ground and has noted they last about a year or two,
Speaker 1: you think. Also on Cal's comment of the surveyor's thinking
Speaker 1: when setting a corner, a surveyor saying to himself, there's
Speaker 1: no way anyone is going to use this. He says,
Speaker 1: that does happen, and I found record of at least
Speaker 1: one instance where the surveyor quite literally said about here
Speaker 1: surveying sections is supposed to be a perfect grid with
Speaker 1: lines running true north south in east west, with intersections
Speaker 1: every five, two and eighty feet, but that is never
Speaker 1: ever the case. Finally, on the comment, he says, I
Speaker 1: can't remember who said it of on X not being
Speaker 1: one hundred percent accurate to take you to the section corner.
Speaker 1: I personally have witnessed on X being forty feet off
Speaker 1: their sectioned corners. But what he goes on to clarify
Speaker 1: not is gonna. I'm gonna. I'm gonna paraphrase him. This
Speaker 1: isn't even a non X issue. Your phone isn't Your
Speaker 1: phone isn't that accurate. Your smartphone isn't really accurate much
Speaker 1: better than a sixteen foot radius. So for you to
Speaker 1: be jumping corners based off of your phone, or to
Speaker 1: be trusting fences, there's how I accurate the information and
Speaker 1: how I accurate the phone. Sincerely, Lanserver. Another guy reached out,
Speaker 1: I was saying that I could always look at a
Speaker 1: feller and.
Speaker 4: See hold on, I got a quick little retort to
Speaker 4: him or retort him. Not so much that, but I
Speaker 4: just wanted someone to clarify this. When I read that email,
Speaker 4: I got to thinking, well, if the landowners there have
Speaker 4: set fences, aren't they in some way saying this is
Speaker 4: where I believe this corner is and sort of setting
Speaker 4: a precedent of where this corner is and has been.
Speaker 4: They're not.
Speaker 1: No, I saw a fence the other day that was
Speaker 1: wildly off because for him to make it on his
Speaker 1: borderline like in this case, it was to the advantage.
Speaker 1: It was to the the advantage of to the advantage
Speaker 1: of was it. No, no, no, no, Sorry. We were where
Speaker 1: BLM came up against the ranch yep, and it was
Speaker 1: a bunch of it was a bunch of bad lands,
Speaker 1: and he owned a bunch of the bad lands. But
Speaker 1: just ran it sure along the bench and there was
Speaker 1: corners in there, and it was like and you went
Speaker 1: up to it thing and and it was just a
Speaker 1: matter of convenience where you run fences. So I don't
Speaker 1: think that. I just think that, like these things weren't
Speaker 1: on anyone's mind, you know, no.
Speaker 4: One hundred percent. No, I'm just trying to figure out
Speaker 4: like in because everybody because they're saying, yeah, don't try
Speaker 4: to cross this corner unless you have go and have
Speaker 4: it surveyed. Right, But I'm just saying, if it was
Speaker 4: let's say it wasn't bad Lands, and you're in a
Speaker 4: prairie and someone has set these this corner to the
Speaker 4: best of their knowledge, can we always agree that it's
Speaker 4: to the best of our knowledge you're going to cross
Speaker 4: the corner where the corner is.
Speaker 1: In looking at what these fellas are going through into Wyoming,
Speaker 1: you would the assumptions about anything.
Speaker 5: But I think what Yannis is, what Yanni is saying
Speaker 5: is that, like if whether that placement of the fence
Speaker 5: is in actuality, uh, the right corner or not, the
Speaker 5: point is that that landowner, whether it's to the benefit
Speaker 5: of the public or to the benefit of himself, put
Speaker 5: something there that is like the physical signifier to anyone
Speaker 5: who might be thinking to cross that. That's right. So
Speaker 5: it's like the intention behind it, right, You're not to understand.
Speaker 1: But if you're going to go into a court in
Speaker 1: this case, going to Wyoming, and there's a guy saying
Speaker 1: that he's taking you to civil court over seven million dollars,
Speaker 1: I'd like to think that I was on a surveyed
Speaker 1: corner and not have an added wrinkle beat buddy, that
Speaker 1: that fence and even on my corner you can have
Speaker 1: the landowner to Yeah, I mean I think there's two landowners.
Speaker 7: I mean the fence thing is like completely arbitrary, Like
Speaker 7: you could you could just build you know, if you
Speaker 7: owned a ranch, you have every right to build a
Speaker 7: you know, a section of fence wherever you want on it.
Speaker 1: Right, and in this corner was this morn is not even
Speaker 1: fence that we're talking about.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And it's so it's not like it's you can't
Speaker 7: just assume that because the fence exists, that's where the
Speaker 7: private landowner believes the boundary is.
Speaker 1: Like, that's a pretty big leap of Maybe it's his
Speaker 1: neighbor spence. Yeah, might be his spence, or it might
Speaker 1: be the governments, or.
Speaker 7: The previous owner built the fence, and the previous owner
Speaker 7: didn't know.
Speaker 4: It's just you seem to see who they sort of
Speaker 4: eventually they're gonna have to say, hey, it's someone's responsibility, Yeah,
Speaker 4: to get these things surveyed.
Speaker 1: I can see all kinds of implications. One of the
Speaker 1: implications I can see down the road is if this,
Speaker 1: if this goes and it gets like just settled in
Speaker 1: some outright way, Yeah, I'm not doing any corner crossing
Speaker 1: because I'm too it's too it feels too up in.
Speaker 2: The air.
Speaker 4: Until it's further settled.
Speaker 1: I'm saying, if it ever got settled, if it was
Speaker 1: just settled and the courts decided and it was lit
Speaker 1: gated and the law the land was laid out, that
Speaker 1: corner crossing is legal, I would think that, like I
Speaker 1: would be, I would be raising money. I would be
Speaker 1: raising money to survey strategic corners, like to to find
Speaker 1: to codify in very strategic locations those places. But I
Speaker 1: just keep as people are getting in, you know, pushing
Speaker 1: these boundaries. I just think it's I keep reminding people
Speaker 1: that where this happened was a surveyed corner and that
Speaker 1: you can't go by h you know, to really actually
Speaker 1: be like placing your feet is very precise.
Speaker 4: Have you heard from like any of our game warned
Speaker 4: buddies here in this in Montana if the if corner
Speaker 4: crossing or trespassing is on the rise in like this hunting.
Speaker 1: I haven't heard of anybody prosecuting it this year, and
Speaker 1: there's no way it didn't happen this year, but I
Speaker 1: haven't heard of it. Good would be a good question.
Speaker 1: I want to move on. You find randal. Yeah, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: there wasn't. There was a case up in h up
Speaker 1: By Towns in a corner crossing case.
Speaker 7: Yeah, there's and there's some other you know, like some
Speaker 7: claims were made that the individual had trespassed. It's kind
Speaker 7: of I think it was still the details were fuzzy
Speaker 7: for a little bit while the while the legal system
Speaker 7: sorted things out. I think the charges were dropped, but
Speaker 7: that was like in the in the headlines, it was
Speaker 7: sort of a corner crossing.
Speaker 1: Related dispute.
Speaker 7: But I don't really know enough about it to get
Speaker 7: into the details.
Speaker 1: Now, I know in this state there is an organization
Speaker 1: gearing up to fight corner crossing mm hmm. And there
Speaker 1: they're getting ready to spend spend money on a public
Speaker 1: campaign to turn people off to the idea that you'd
Speaker 1: be able to corner across. I have posited, is that
Speaker 1: the right use of that word?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: But I can look at a fell and tell these
Speaker 1: snores now with with nine accuracy, do you think will
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna do that? Well, I found out recently
Speaker 1: that I was at a ear nose and throat doctor
Speaker 1: and they measure your neck and they're measuring my neck
Speaker 1: like like you're at a tailor. And I said, what
Speaker 1: do you measure my neck for it? And they're like,
Speaker 1: has to do a sleep apne issues. I'm like, what
Speaker 1: do you mean? They said, a sixteen inch neck, A
Speaker 1: sixteen inch neck is more likely to have sleep apnea?
Speaker 5: Wait, is that like on the smaller end or the
Speaker 5: larger end, like I gather it's larger sixteen inch neck
Speaker 5: like around or like six inch circumference.
Speaker 1: You know your waiste measurement from your parents, right, so
Speaker 1: that's how Yeah, they just put it. They put a
Speaker 1: tape around your neck and I was like, why the
Speaker 1: hell are you doing that. Will's button his shirt up
Speaker 1: and they were saying that that's a that's a they're
Speaker 1: trying to they're looking at how likely are you to
Speaker 1: sleep apnea? And they said a sixth that they take
Speaker 1: notice at a sixteen inch neck, So I thought was
Speaker 1: really surprising.
Speaker 4: And but it ends there or goes sixteen in up
Speaker 4: sixteen and up got it?
Speaker 1: Okay, Greater than sixteen is like some marker for them
Speaker 1: to be like, oh, let's ask a bunch of questions
Speaker 1: about sleep apnia.
Speaker 4: Average is fifteen according to the Internet.
Speaker 1: Now, this guy says reaching out because Steve mentioned in
Speaker 1: an episode that he can now look at people and
Speaker 1: guess if they have sleep apnea or suffer from snoring.
Speaker 1: It's not all that far off. This is from a
Speaker 1: dentist a dds. While we definitely see a correlation with
Speaker 1: next circumference in sleep apnea snoring, one can also see
Speaker 1: snoring in sleep apnea in the shape of the jaw,
Speaker 1: which I didn't I also didn't know that's what I
Speaker 1: was looking at him. Out over the past one thousand years,
Speaker 1: we have seen that about twenty five percent of the
Speaker 1: population has seen a gradual decrease in jaw size, both
Speaker 1: maxillary and mandibler mandibular.
Speaker 5: I think it's mandibular. He also didn't cite the source, but.
Speaker 1: According to archaeological evidence one thousand years. Well, I know
Speaker 1: it's getting a little science y. I really got you, Phil.
Speaker 8: Well, it's just it's mainly because Krein has it in
Speaker 8: the notes that like, please say, this is just a theory.
Speaker 1: Well, it's getting a little sciencey because over the past
Speaker 1: one thousand years we have seen that about twenty five
Speaker 1: percent of the population has It's like, who a thousand
Speaker 1: years ago? Oh, I guess skeletal remains. Okay, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: take it him at face value. He's a sign, he's
Speaker 1: a doctor. Well, dyes, you know. According to archaeological evidence,
Speaker 1: he goes on. One thousand years ago, there was much
Speaker 1: more room for teeth, including wisdom, and there was not
Speaker 1: as much crowding in tea as we see now. The
Speaker 1: working theory is that because we have domesticated the majority
Speaker 1: of our food supply and have selectively bred for hyper
Speaker 1: palatable and easily chewed foods, the body no longer needs
Speaker 1: to build a large lower face to support chewing dense materials.
Speaker 4: If you're wondering what that is, that's that plain ass,
Speaker 4: boring chicken breast that we get served all the time.
Speaker 1: I'm finding myself clenching right now. Accentrate my jaw.
Speaker 4: You don't have to because you chew on elk so much.
Speaker 1: I can't read like this. So the smaller jaw and
Speaker 1: increase in overall size of the human Oh so, okay,
Speaker 1: we've gotten bigger, jaws have gotten smaller, has created a
Speaker 1: mismatch that's interesting and has pushed the tongue into the
Speaker 1: back of the throat, thus creating a more collapsible upper airway.
Speaker 1: This produces snoring and sleep apnea. We treat the disease
Speaker 1: with either a sea PAP or what I do, a
Speaker 1: mandibular repositioning device.
Speaker 5: Hope this helps, which is a night guard.
Speaker 4: I wonder if that tongue going farther back into your
Speaker 4: airway there, if that makes it harder or easier to
Speaker 4: to uh what's the term when you're diving and you
Speaker 4: gotta oh clear clear.
Speaker 1: Yeah. This is an argument that if you want to
Speaker 1: stop snoring in this country, cut your jerky with the grain,
Speaker 1: not against the grain, you know, get in the gym
Speaker 1: and do whatever.
Speaker 7: You get some you know, like a those band, the
Speaker 7: resistance band, and train your jaw.
Speaker 1: Yeah, or just put jerky in the gym.
Speaker 2: I'm just I'm just hypothesized, and that that may be
Speaker 2: why y'all talk so funny.
Speaker 1: Nailed it, Okay, last bit of last bit of feedback,
Speaker 1: and then we're gonna get onto it. We're gonna give
Speaker 1: our guests is due, is at this point overdue a
Speaker 1: lotment of time. Here's my thoughts on why Steve is
Speaker 1: wrong about gluten allergy and conservatives. Now, I was recently.
Speaker 1: I have been saying for years, and I've been stating
Speaker 1: it as though it was a fact that I felt that. Well, no,
Speaker 1: I acted like I had read this somewhere.
Speaker 4: You ready in your diary.
Speaker 1: I felt, just by my exposure to the world that
Speaker 1: I felt that the gluten allergies were decided, like like
Speaker 1: the left leaning people had a far greater likelihood I
Speaker 1: had in gluten allergies, so much so that I didn't
Speaker 1: bother to look it up. Well, Spencer looked it up.
Speaker 1: And conservatives are more likely to believe in ghosts, also
Speaker 1: surprise me, And the conservatives are far more likely to
Speaker 1: order their steak medium rare, and they're no more likely
Speaker 1: to have a gluten intolerance. You're at the medium rare thing.
Speaker 1: The medium rare thing is overwhelming medium rare.
Speaker 5: But you know, all of like well, in at least
Speaker 5: in South Africa, everyone likes their meat cooked.
Speaker 1: Probably because probably because of food handling. And you know,
Speaker 1: I mean anywhere you go in the in the can
Speaker 1: you still say developing world? What are you supposed to
Speaker 1: call it?
Speaker 5: I think so.
Speaker 1: Anywhere you go in the developing world, man, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of overcooked stuff.
Speaker 4: Yeah for a reason, Yeah, fall on the meat temperature scale.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, he just said what the most common
Speaker 1: so in in the most common ordered steak is medium rare.
Speaker 1: But it winds up being that like like conservatives or
Speaker 1: sixty four do you remember what it was? Sixty four
Speaker 1: percent more likely to order a medium rare steak. Anyways,
Speaker 1: this guy goes on to say I didn't know this.
Speaker 1: He says, there's a conspiracy theory floating around or No, no,
Speaker 1: there is a conspiracy theorist level correlation. I got to
Speaker 1: unpack that sentence. Yeah, Krins trying to throw in hyphens
Speaker 1: to make it may more, just to put some she
Speaker 1: just randomly throwing hyphens in there. There is a conspiracy
Speaker 1: theorist No, you did the hyphen in the real place, right,
Speaker 1: There is a conspiracy theorist level correlation between the consumption
Speaker 1: and exposure to glyphosate commonly marketed as round up. Is
Speaker 1: that is that? Farewell? Did I say that?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: That glyphosate is round up? It is round up? Uh,
Speaker 1: the only widely available glypho say, or is it just
Speaker 1: that's just a product name?
Speaker 2: They had.
Speaker 3: They had the the patent that molecule for a long time. Okay,
Speaker 3: and I think there may be some knockoffs, but yes,
Speaker 3: they own that market.
Speaker 1: So like round up, you would say is gleipel.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which used to be Moncente. There's now bear, got it?
Speaker 1: Bear? Mhmm, there's a Okay, and I can read that
Speaker 1: part again. To my understanding, the more exposure to round
Speaker 1: up you have. Now this now we are way into
Speaker 1: areas where I am not here to verify any of this.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying it's just because I'm not saying this
Speaker 1: from a legal exposure standpoint. I'm just saying this from like,
Speaker 1: I don't know this. This gentleman, uh Whalen. Of course,
Speaker 1: this guy's name was Whalen. I love this guy. To
Speaker 1: my understanding, the more exposure to round up you have
Speaker 1: the higher chance of developing a gluten allergy. Then he
Speaker 1: goes down to say, if we are making far fetch correlations,
Speaker 1: to which I would say, are we? If we are
Speaker 1: making far fetch correlations, then it is easy to assume
Speaker 1: those in rural areas, farmers, land managers, and general folks
Speaker 1: living around farms and ranches are at a higher exposure
Speaker 1: rate of glyphosate due to farming practices and availability of
Speaker 1: the chemical. I once walked into our local egg office
Speaker 1: to get some mean chemical that you needed a permit
Speaker 1: to buy the nice. This is not me, this the
Speaker 1: gentleman that rode in. The nice lady asked me what
Speaker 1: account to put it under, and after listing four different farmers,
Speaker 1: we found one that had a permit. After I paid,
Speaker 1: I called my buddy whose account it was on, to
Speaker 1: tell him what I did, and his response was, I
Speaker 1: got a barrel of it. You should have come and
Speaker 1: gotten what you needed from me. To wrap up the correlation.
Speaker 1: If we believe, if he says, if we like bringing
Speaker 1: me into this, if we believe that roundup causes gluten intolerance,
Speaker 1: and by which he means it, he believes roundup is
Speaker 1: widely available for rural folks. Most rural folks are conservatives,
Speaker 1: then it's easy to see more conservatives would have a
Speaker 1: gluten analergy. My source on my theory.
Speaker 8: Here we go finally, his mother in law. Of course,
Speaker 8: no one person, one subject, my source on my theory.
Speaker 1: My mother in law spent twenty years living in a
Speaker 1: bottom surrounded by crop farms. Now this is this is
Speaker 1: the best detail of this whole letter their guard. This
Speaker 1: is incredible. What they would need to tarp their garden
Speaker 1: when the surrounding farmers were spraying crops because wind drift
Speaker 1: would kill the garden. He goes on to say she
Speaker 1: has a gluten allergy. What else could it cause that?
Speaker 1: And she goes on to say that in terms of
Speaker 1: her political leanings, she has three flags, a du flag,
Speaker 1: Old Glory, and a Trump twenty twenty case closed. That's see,
Speaker 1: he's just a scent that instead of sending to us,
Speaker 1: he should have sent that to the journal science.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think the USDA.
Speaker 1: Maybe he could have gotten that. He's just sent that
Speaker 1: to a peer reviewed.
Speaker 2: So then you know, somebody should calls attention to the
Speaker 2: fact that golf courses, municipalities, parks tremendous amount around up
Speaker 2: as she used in the non ag sector. Incredibles, they're
Speaker 2: labels for it either, they're not AG labels. So yeah,
Speaker 2: I'm sure more of it she used in the fields,
Speaker 2: but a lot of it she used in municipal situations.
Speaker 1: Since ron that subject, let's talk about I want to
Speaker 1: ask you some questions about herbicides. Uh, just on the
Speaker 1: thing of Ronald, I have one's had it. Tell me
Speaker 1: a guy, tell me and you might be able to
Speaker 1: tell me how true this is. That one roundup became available.
Speaker 1: Its promise was that it was that it was less
Speaker 1: toxic than coffee, absolutely, and someone saw me that you
Speaker 1: that that that people would take a sip.
Speaker 2: I've seen the Monsanto rip take a sip. Yes, okay,
Speaker 2: so that's true in the early seventies. Y, yes, I.
Speaker 1: Heard that was true. And that was the thing is
Speaker 1: like if there was dangerous you know what, I do this.
Speaker 2: Well, but nobody really worried about it being dangerous in
Speaker 2: that era, but they would do it just to show
Speaker 2: how safe and uh benign it was. Yeah, I remember it.
Speaker 1: You probably used it in your career quite a bit.
Speaker 2: Oh yes, a lot. And we're not without gloves or
Speaker 2: masks or goggles or any of the covering. It was
Speaker 2: just a matter of fact. I was in the custom
Speaker 2: spraying business for a period of time when I was
Speaker 2: uber industrial spraying crops, and I had people hired to
Speaker 2: sprayed round up another purposide and such as pecicide you
Speaker 2: know what side means, right.
Speaker 1: And fanticide, fracture, sideticide, homicide, kill kill, you know, we
Speaker 1: ought to start besides the round up as I think
Speaker 1: we should start with the history of you guys, your farm.
Speaker 1: That probably be a smarter place to start because you
Speaker 1: made a very deliberate You brought your family farm through
Speaker 1: a very deliberate transition. Can you lay out the trajectory
Speaker 1: of your family farm over time, sure, and how it
Speaker 1: naturally evolved and how it evolved somewhat forcefully under your tenure.
Speaker 2: So my great grandfather came to that farm in early
Speaker 2: County Georgia in eighteen sixty six and farmed it, followed
Speaker 2: by his son, my grandfather, who farmed it. If they
Speaker 2: would have farmed, we don't know too much about the
Speaker 2: way they farmed, other than just anecdotal what people did
Speaker 2: in those eras, but it would have been multi species
Speaker 2: with a lot of certainly without dependence upon chemistry. My
Speaker 2: dad took over the farm. He's born in nineteen twenty.
Speaker 2: He took over the farm in nineteen forty five, after
Speaker 2: the World War Two, and that was when farming really changed.
Speaker 2: My dad was part of the leadership in our part
Speaker 2: of the country that industrialized, commoditized, centralized agriculture. It was
Speaker 2: very successful with it and went from a monoculture of
Speaker 2: a lot of different species of plants and animals to
Speaker 2: a monoculture of monoculture today of only cattle, coastal monoculture.
Speaker 1: You're from with poly demono.
Speaker 2: Poly demono. My great grandfather and grandfather would have had
Speaker 2: a lot of species. So my dad ran the farm
Speaker 2: all his career. I was born in nineteen fifty four,
Speaker 2: went to the University of Georgia in nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 2: major National science. My dad industrialized the farm. I came
Speaker 2: home and further industrialized the farm and ran it that
Speaker 2: way for twenty years, and it was financially comfortable in
Speaker 2: the mid nineties for a number of reasons, I started
Speaker 2: to rethink things pretty quickly and did, and for the
Speaker 2: last twenty five years I've been running it in a
Speaker 2: man of that without intentionally copying them. But a mound
Speaker 2: that resembles what my great grandfather and grandfather did a
Speaker 2: hell of a lot more than it resembles what my
Speaker 2: dad and I did.
Speaker 1: What was the what was the trick? Like? What were
Speaker 1: the things you were seeing on your family property that
Speaker 1: that prompted you to rethink your approach to agriculture, and
Speaker 1: it also you might as well define define your approach
Speaker 1: to agriculture. I mean, we can say stuff like regenitive agriculture,
Speaker 1: and to be honest with you, I hear that all
Speaker 1: the time. It took me a long time to figure
Speaker 1: out like kind of what it meant. And you, I've
Speaker 1: even heard you. I was reviewing some of the talks
Speaker 1: you've given and I've heard you say that you anticipate
Speaker 1: that term being hijacked. Yeah, so that it'll become like
Speaker 1: other catch other agricultural catchphrases that that have a sort
Speaker 1: of that their meaning becomes diminished as it gets appropriated.
Speaker 2: Today we call it regenerative. That has not been co
Speaker 2: opted much yet. And to me, that means emulation of nature.
Speaker 2: So the the natural cycles, the industrial agriculture that I
Speaker 2: used to use running a monoculture of only cattle break
Speaker 2: those cycles. I ran the farmers of monocultural cattle industry
Speaker 2: for twenty something years and was financially comfortable. I got
Speaker 2: dissatisfied with it when I came to see the damage
Speaker 2: I was doing. The admission is that while I was
Speaker 2: a very industrial cattleman, I always opted on the high side.
Speaker 2: If the label rate said two c c's per hundred.
Speaker 2: I probably gave them three secs per one hundred pounds
Speaker 2: of body weight. I said, a paint to the acre.
Speaker 2: I probably put a cort to the.
Speaker 1: And I guess mean like if one's good, two is better.
Speaker 2: One's good, towo's button threes really good. And it worked
Speaker 2: for me. But because I was so heavy handed, I
Speaker 2: came to see the unintended consequences and it kind of strangely,
Speaker 2: it manifested itself. On the animal welfare side.
Speaker 5: In.
Speaker 2: Nineteen ninety five, I was loading a truck load of
Speaker 2: cattle to ship to the west for feeding. We did
Speaker 2: that a lot. These would have been five hundred pound caves,
Speaker 2: so there would have been about one hundred album on
Speaker 2: the truck. So they were going to be on that
Speaker 2: truck going to Nebraska for thirty hours. It got Nebraska,
Speaker 2: that's where these were going. Although that's not the only state.
Speaker 2: We feds. That's where these were going. That was about
Speaker 2: as far as we went. Took thirty hours to get
Speaker 2: to Nebraska.
Speaker 1: You're basically moving them to the corn exactly.
Speaker 2: It's cheaper to move the cows to the corn than
Speaker 2: the corner of the cow. So they would have been
Speaker 2: on the now for thirty hours with the ones on
Speaker 2: top urinating and defecating on the world was on the bottom,
Speaker 2: without food or water or rest. And I had done
Speaker 2: it dozens of times, but all of a sudden that morning,
Speaker 2: it just didn't feel good. So it made me start
Speaker 2: thinking about all the things I was doing that were
Speaker 2: financially working for me but needed rethinking, and the animal welfare,
Speaker 2: which is that was an animal welfare issue, quickly led
Speaker 2: me to the environmental side. I mean, it was just like,
Speaker 2: if this is wrong, this is wrong. So I fairly
Speaker 2: abruptly ceased using chemical fertilizers, pesticides on my farm, de wormas, antibiotics,
Speaker 2: anosaors on the cows. I only had cattle at the
Speaker 2: time and tried to make a living like that, and
Speaker 2: it was not nearly as financially rewarded, but it felt
Speaker 2: a lot better, and it started me on this journey
Speaker 2: that I've been on for twenty five years, and it's
Speaker 2: really been good for us in many ways. We probably
Speaker 2: have not made as much money, probably left some money
Speaker 2: on the table that we could have made if we'd
Speaker 2: operated more industrially and within the system. But the land
Speaker 2: is way butter off the livestock is way butter off.
Speaker 2: I think we've got even more. It may not be
Speaker 2: a more profitable business, but I think it's more resilient.
Speaker 2: And two of my three daughters and their spouses came back,
Speaker 2: and I'm pretty sure they would not had I continued
Speaker 2: to farm industrially. So it's been way more good than bad.
Speaker 1: They might not have been drawn to it.
Speaker 2: Oh, they would not have been. You know, I never
Speaker 2: wanted to do anything but run that arm. But my
Speaker 2: daughters were raised the way people raise children in the
Speaker 2: eighties and nineties, and you know it was it was
Speaker 2: about ballet and gymnastics and karate and soccer and softball.
Speaker 2: And they they would not have come back to the farm.
Speaker 1: Uh, here's gonna give you a question about raising cattle.
Speaker 1: I've picked up a handful bit. I know a little bit. Primarily,
Speaker 1: I know stuff about raising cattle is from hunting on
Speaker 1: people's farms and ranches. And you always go like, so,
Speaker 1: what's that that you know? I have zero background and
Speaker 1: egg I've just picked stuff up through exposure. When we
Speaker 1: talk about the system, you've now you're now capturing the
Speaker 1: entire system, meaning you've got Kyle's that will they'll be
Speaker 1: bread and born on your farm and you'll sell the
Speaker 1: burger at your start.
Speaker 2: And we have and we have a slaughter plant on
Speaker 2: the floor as well.
Speaker 1: That is yeah, you're running the whole damn deal vertically.
Speaker 2: Drew.
Speaker 1: Let's go back to when when you were a boy.
Speaker 1: Tell me what portion of that process you were capturing
Speaker 1: as a boy, just so people can see a little
Speaker 1: bit of this. What portion of a cole's life were
Speaker 1: you in charge of as a boy, And then what
Speaker 1: portion are you guys doing now at waite Oat pastures.
Speaker 2: My dad and later me had mama cows only that's
Speaker 2: the only uh crop we produced was cattle. We had
Speaker 2: mama cows. We bred them initially naturally, later on through
Speaker 2: artificial insemination, we gave birth to the cavs and we
Speaker 2: weaned them at about six months of age and shipped
Speaker 2: them through the feed lot area like we just discussed.
Speaker 1: And then now talk about the transformation you've had just
Speaker 1: just in just in terms of cattle, because just.
Speaker 2: In terms of cattle, we we've gone from being a
Speaker 2: little snippet in the huge beef production system to be
Speaker 2: in a tiny, tiny, little beef production system. We own
Speaker 2: the mama cows. We have the caws. We finish the
Speaker 2: caves on grass only grass, hey before no corn, and
Speaker 2: then we slaughter them and then we sell them. We
Speaker 2: sell them some wholesale to grossers, some through our little store.
Speaker 2: We've got a little restaurant.
Speaker 1: And then you're just selling cook product too.
Speaker 2: We know it's small. Yeah, well it's it's three meals
Speaker 2: a day, seven days a week, but we don't feed
Speaker 2: that many people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's you know, we're but it's possible to for
Speaker 1: a person to go and eat a burger.
Speaker 2: It's probably probably probably.
Speaker 1: We're we gotta eat a burger that was produced right there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we got one hundred and seventy employployees and it's
Speaker 2: twelve miles to the nearest place to eat, and it's
Speaker 2: a fast food place. So we you know, I put
Speaker 2: in the food service to feed my employees, but we've
Speaker 2: expanded it. It's not big, but we do cook twenty
Speaker 2: one meals a week and it's good.
Speaker 1: What the economics change completely? Right?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, And I went back and looked. I
Speaker 2: never from the time I graduated at University of Georgia
Speaker 2: in nineteen seventy six until I started changing the way
Speaker 2: we raised cattle in nineteen ninety five. I never lost money.
Speaker 2: I paid taxes every year. Now we didn't make we
Speaker 2: didn't make a hell of a lot of money, but
Speaker 2: we lived comfortably. They were consistently profitable. I had a
Speaker 2: number of years of losses when I was transitioning over,
Speaker 2: and I was very fortunate. I had inherited a nice
Speaker 2: paid for a farm, and made a little money my own.
Speaker 2: So we were able to survive it. But we had
Speaker 2: to survive it.
Speaker 1: Now, what do you guys do talk about how you compost?
Speaker 1: I understand it's be true for your book, do you guys?
Speaker 1: Instead of sending ship off to a rendering plant, you guys,
Speaker 1: are you guys are handling that too?
Speaker 2: Yeah? We are, Yeah, so we generally.
Speaker 1: How does that even? How does that work? I mean
Speaker 1: I could picture dragging it out, letting it rode.
Speaker 2: You wouldn't do that, Yeah, But.
Speaker 1: I mean I don't picture even I can't. I don't
Speaker 1: picture what it even like composting a carcass.
Speaker 2: It's very different. So well, of course, well there are
Speaker 2: some whole carcasses, because when we have death loss, we
Speaker 2: compost them too, But most of it is packing plant waste.
Speaker 2: That's what USDA calls it. That would be a viscert, hooves, feathers,
Speaker 2: gut fill, whatever's not marketable, skulls, central nervous system tissue
Speaker 2: which we can't harvest. It's got brain spin core. So
Speaker 2: but we generated about nine tons of day, five days
Speaker 2: a week, and we compost it.
Speaker 1: We nine tons a day.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that sounds like a lot.
Speaker 1: Pick up a cow stomach. Well yeah, and.
Speaker 2: It's a lot of moisture. I mean there's as far
Speaker 2: as dry material, it's probably eighty percent moisture. I see,
Speaker 2: you got to deal with it. But that's so we
Speaker 2: do compost. Composting is taking a nitrogenous material animal weight
Speaker 2: remains and a carbaceous material in our case to be
Speaker 2: peanut shells or wood chips or whatever people give us.
Speaker 2: That's not homeowners but you know the asplunt or the
Speaker 2: peanut shelling plants and their rules.
Speaker 1: You go and you say, you mean the treat the
Speaker 1: big power line tree company, Yeah, Asplin and I know
Speaker 1: that outfit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they they dump those wood chips. We make it
Speaker 2: available not for anybody, but for people that we trust
Speaker 2: to dump carbaceous material via.
Speaker 1: I tell you quick little side tidbit about ask So
Speaker 1: you know they do those big power line gas line projects.
Speaker 1: I used to sell firewood and when they would go
Speaker 1: through a big land owner, I'd go in there and
Speaker 1: broke or deal to get all that. I'd sell all
Speaker 1: that shit.
Speaker 2: That's that's the same thing I do.
Speaker 1: Like mostly cut up and I would go in there
Speaker 1: and bucket into the sixteen inch lengths and split it
Speaker 1: and sell it, and people be glad I did it.
Speaker 2: Well, I'm glad I found them too. And there are
Speaker 2: ratios of not try material and carbaceous material that you mix.
Speaker 2: They are rules you go by. You We have a
Speaker 2: thermometer with a five foot handle, probe on it. We
Speaker 2: stick in there or my guys sticking.
Speaker 1: Are you grinding up the cow?
Speaker 2: Not anymore? I used to I have a grinder, but
Speaker 2: we said we struggle to keep it going. And really,
Speaker 2: except for the bones, uh, it's it's this. It comes apart.
Speaker 2: The bones become very porous. I should tell you this.
Speaker 2: It takes six to seven weeks to compost that animal material,
Speaker 2: but it has been recommended to us that we let
Speaker 2: it sit for a year. If you let it sit
Speaker 2: a year, the compost becomes less bacterial and more fungal
Speaker 2: and it's better for the land. So we let it
Speaker 2: sit a year, and not only does it become more
Speaker 2: fungal and it's better fertilizer, but those bones become porous.
Speaker 1: You got you gotta give it to me, like you
Speaker 1: gotta give this like you're you're like like you're gone
Speaker 1: out of town and you're explaining to me on the
Speaker 1: phone what I need to do.
Speaker 2: Okay, So my guys put the carbaceous material peanut shells
Speaker 2: or wood chips into long windows. Okay on the surface,
Speaker 2: not no, no, on the surface okay. And by the way,
Speaker 2: we move this operation around the farm. You don't want
Speaker 2: to sit in one place too long. I fear it
Speaker 2: might be too much at some point, so we move
Speaker 2: it around every year or so. But we uh uh.
Speaker 2: The animal material goes onto a little dump truck right
Speaker 2: out of the plant or right out of the plant
Speaker 2: every every day, maybe twice a day, at least once
Speaker 2: a day, and they'll take it up to the composting
Speaker 2: area wherever that happens to be right then, and they'll
Speaker 2: take a big caterpillar front end loader and build kind
Speaker 2: of a bed of the carbaceous material to back the
Speaker 2: truck up and dump it in so it's dumped on
Speaker 2: twenty four inches of carbaceous.
Speaker 1: Material, peanut shells, wood chips.
Speaker 2: Got it. They dump it. Then they cover it up
Speaker 2: with more of the same again, eighteen twenty four inches.
Speaker 2: And here's a little fun fact. If we do a
Speaker 2: good job covering it up, you never smell it and
Speaker 2: you never see buzzards or vulses.
Speaker 1: What's my next question, My next question, it's gonna be
Speaker 1: about buzz.
Speaker 2: All right, So let me tell you. Sometimes something happens,
Speaker 2: you know, the load is thrown up or whatever, and
Speaker 2: we just can't get it covered up as quickly as
Speaker 2: we want to. When that happens, you can see those vultures,
Speaker 2: either red headed or black headed, just stacking up there.
Speaker 2: So we we keep it covered, which.
Speaker 1: We do, and that's and then you let it sit
Speaker 1: a year.
Speaker 2: Well you've got to you've got to mechanically stir it
Speaker 2: and take temperatures and record the temperatures. But as long
Speaker 2: as we do that in six eight weeks, it will
Speaker 2: become posted. And then we let it sit a year.
Speaker 2: We pile it up and let it sit for a year.
Speaker 2: Then we spread it on our pastures. I've got a
Speaker 2: spread truck with a forty eight inch bedchain so big
Speaker 2: bones can come out of the back of it. We
Speaker 2: put two tons to the acre and it is seriously
Speaker 2: where it's magic is good. You're feeding the micro You're
Speaker 2: feeding the mic That compost is feeding the microbes and
Speaker 2: the soil. This is important. It's feeding the plant that
Speaker 2: feeds the animal. It's turned into feces or put back
Speaker 2: through the plant. So it's like magic.
Speaker 4: When something has gone through the process of being composted
Speaker 4: in those first six weeks, exactly what happens. It goes
Speaker 4: from what to what.
Speaker 2: It goes from guts and wood chips to compost, which
Speaker 2: is a stable not hot anymore, stable maistubsorbing plant food
Speaker 2: that contains nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium and in this
Speaker 2: case a lot of phosphorus and calcium because of the bones.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's what is supposed to happen. You know,
Speaker 2: the buffalo dies and rots and it grows grass.
Speaker 7: What are the what are the temperatures you're getting in
Speaker 7: those piles as it's working.
Speaker 2: Yeah, one hundred and fifty degrees and if it's not,
Speaker 2: if it's not hot enough, they stir it and oxygenate it.
Speaker 2: Take the front end the load on. They make some
Speaker 2: really great, expensive machines that do that. I love to
Speaker 2: have one. I ain't got one.
Speaker 1: But does that does that process costing you money or
Speaker 1: saving you money?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Which pile is bigger?
Speaker 2: Yes? No, Well it's the right thing to do for
Speaker 2: a lot of reasons. Sure.
Speaker 1: No, I love it. I mean I love it like
Speaker 1: just as a non farmer. I love the sounds of it.
Speaker 1: I'm just curious, like, is it like a is it
Speaker 1: a cost sink or is it a great way to fertilize.
Speaker 2: It's a great way to fertilize. It costs money. We've
Speaker 2: got some equipment and a couple of guys you know,
Speaker 2: dedicated to it, and that has a cost. But the
Speaker 2: uh plant, fertility, land, fertility that I get out of it,
Speaker 2: you can't even you can't whe you couldn't afford to
Speaker 2: buy it. God, it's wonderful, it's great our. We can
Speaker 2: talk about this later. But the organic matter in my
Speaker 2: soil on my farm has gone from a half a
Speaker 2: percent over five percent, ten x more carbon in the soil,
Speaker 2: and that no shit, I think, no shit, I think
Speaker 2: there is some shit.
Speaker 1: When's when do you think that? Okay, let's say we
Speaker 1: knew that that if you went back to if you
Speaker 1: went back to nineteen twenty three, Okay, so we go
Speaker 1: back a century. Yeah, you think that it might have
Speaker 1: been around five.
Speaker 2: I don't know. I mean, that's a great question. I've
Speaker 2: asked some people, but I don't know anybody that was
Speaker 2: doing much carbon sampling in nineteen twenty thing. I guess somebody.
Speaker 1: You would need a thought to look right.
Speaker 2: Somebody's something we're probably who knows, But the practices that
Speaker 2: my dad and I did, the tillage and use of
Speaker 2: nitrogen fertilizer, maybe pesticized. I don't know if it affects
Speaker 2: it much, but certainly tillagen, use of nitrogen fertilizer burns
Speaker 2: up carbon in the soil, just just makes it go away.
Speaker 2: So when you've got soil that's a half a percent
Speaker 2: organic model, which is what mine had gotten to, it's
Speaker 2: a dead mineral medium. So let me tell you this
Speaker 2: one percent organic model I'm told will ab solve a
Speaker 2: one inch rain event. So on an acre land, a
Speaker 2: one inch rain event, it's twenty seven thousand gallons of water.
Speaker 2: So my farm now will absorb I believe five times
Speaker 2: twenty something five percent organic amount of times twenty seven
Speaker 2: thousand cows. That's a lot of water, and we get
Speaker 2: a lot of water. I'm in, Uh, I'm about eighty
Speaker 2: miles from the Gulf of Mexico. You know. We get
Speaker 2: fifty two inches a year, and a lot of it's
Speaker 2: in big rain events. Not unusually have a five inch rain,
Speaker 2: but I got five percent organic model. That don't mean
Speaker 2: it all soaks in because it comes too fast, but
Speaker 2: if it came slowly enough, we'd absorb it all.
Speaker 5: And the benefits of that compared to soil that's minerally,
Speaker 5: that pretty much what just like sifts through water and now.
Speaker 2: The water just percolects. You know. I'm in the Gulf Coast,
Speaker 2: the Gulf Coastal region, which is an ancient seabed, so
Speaker 2: the soil is pretty sandy compared to what you've got here,
Speaker 2: and just it won't hold the water and it doesn't
Speaker 2: have the minerals. We're putting a lot of minerals out
Speaker 2: there because of all that, the bones and whatnot. It's
Speaker 2: one of the uh, the best things I ever stumbled onto.
Speaker 9: You know.
Speaker 2: We we when I first built the slaughter plant, getting
Speaker 2: rid of a viscilant and animal waste was a problem,
Speaker 2: and we had to pay somebody to come get it,
Speaker 2: and I didn't have a big enough plant for them
Speaker 2: to come every day. That meant I was going to
Speaker 2: have to refrigerate it. They just had a lot of problems.
Speaker 1: Were you were refrigerating that stuff?
Speaker 2: No, No, I never did. I was going to have
Speaker 2: to got it the people do refrigerated. Of course. It
Speaker 2: takes a lot of room and it's nasty, you know,
Speaker 2: it's it's a lot of it's not the actual blood
Speaker 2: is not in it. We drained the blood separately, which
Speaker 2: we also use is fertilizer, but it's it's different. But
Speaker 2: there's a lot of manure, a lot of fresh flesh,
Speaker 2: and a lot of it's just there's just still blood
Speaker 2: in the cars.
Speaker 1: Uh walk me through moving just from beef production into
Speaker 1: producing poultry and other red meats. Was that because he
Speaker 1: thought it'd be fun or did you need to do
Speaker 1: that to try to hit the same finances like you could?
Speaker 1: You couldn't make it work.
Speaker 2: With beef b so, but it wasn't just financial, I
Speaker 2: mean it was it was certainly financially. Everything I do
Speaker 2: is financial because I got to make it work. But
Speaker 2: when I changed from the industrial production model that I
Speaker 2: was deeply entrenched in to this model that I'm in now.
Speaker 2: I didn't realize I was gonna have to add other species,
Speaker 2: but I did. Yeah. I started having weeds that I
Speaker 2: you know I was previously. I sprayed it with grays
Speaker 2: on p n T, which is another herbicide that we
Speaker 2: didn't talk about. Uh, I had insects. I sprayed it.
Speaker 2: You know. I used all the sides.
Speaker 1: To just get what you wanted out of the land
Speaker 1: and nothing else.
Speaker 2: That's right, that's right. So what we probably will talk
Speaker 2: about eventually here is monocultural production. Monocultural production is bad.
Speaker 2: It's what modern food production is based on. But nature
Speaker 2: are bores of monoculture. I mean, I don't believe you've
Speaker 2: been all over the world. I don't believe you can
Speaker 2: name an ecosystem of the world that's a monoculture. I
Speaker 2: don't think it exists in nature. You know, nature wants
Speaker 2: a smallish board of animals and plants and microbes living
Speaker 2: in symbiotic relationships with each other, and that's what we
Speaker 2: try to do. But I didn't know that back then.
Speaker 2: So I was going to have I was going to
Speaker 2: continue my monoculture of cattle. I was just going to
Speaker 2: give up those technical tools that I keep naming, and
Speaker 2: I found out that I couldn't do it. You know,
Speaker 2: the weeds came and smothered my grass. First of all,
Speaker 2: the grass that I planted was Tifton eighty five permuta grass,
Speaker 2: which is a super hybrid permuta grass bred by the
Speaker 2: University of Georgia that requires incredible amounts of nitrogen to live. Now,
Speaker 2: it grows like crazy. It just takes a lot of nitrogen.
Speaker 2: And when I quit putting chemical nitrogen out there, I
Speaker 2: started losing that stand you know that trall. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: then all kinds of crap came. And instead of using
Speaker 2: grays on P and D to take to kill the crap,
Speaker 2: I didn't. I didn't have that anymore. So we added
Speaker 2: sheep and goats, which are ruminants like cap.
Speaker 1: Because you needed something to eat all that jont correct and.
Speaker 2: The later I added poultry and it was poetry is tough.
Speaker 2: Now we're struggling with poultry. I'm not sure how that's
Speaker 2: gonna work out.
Speaker 1: But we uh, what's tough about poultry being able to
Speaker 1: charge enough to make it worthwhile?
Speaker 2: Yeah? That so my beef probably cost about thirty percent
Speaker 2: more than industrial beef. We could argue about it, but
Speaker 2: that's close. My poultry probably costs three hundred percent more
Speaker 2: than industrial poultry.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: Because when we the smaller the specie, the more handilyd
Speaker 2: lent itself to industrialization. So when we industrialize cattle, which
Speaker 2: my dad was part of that movement, put them in
Speaker 2: big hundred thousand head feed lots. He never had a
Speaker 2: hundred thousand head, but they do. He had a five
Speaker 2: hundred head field. Put them in those feed lots and uh,
Speaker 2: you know, and and take cost out of production. So
Speaker 2: we poultry, they're so small they lent themselves to that industrialization.
Speaker 2: You can put thirty thousand of them in a chicken
Speaker 2: house and one guy can probably handle x chicken houses
Speaker 2: because it's highly mechanized. So we just took so much cost.
Speaker 2: I was in Bold of Colorado, had the Boulder Rama
Speaker 2: Hotel years ago, the Boulder Rama, and I say, it's
Speaker 2: something like that. This is the Cowboy Hotel there comber
Speaker 2: Landmark and I ate supper now. And I had just
Speaker 2: built my poultry business and spent a million million point something.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna put something million dollars on the processing plant,
Speaker 2: and it wasn't working financially, and I was worried about it.
Speaker 2: And I was waiting on my waiting on bringing my supper. Y'all,
Speaker 2: don we eat supper?
Speaker 1: No, I grew up eating supper. Now I had listen, man,
Speaker 1: I had to make a decision when I started college.
Speaker 1: I had to train myself to stop saying supper. Because
Speaker 1: I noticed that no one said that.
Speaker 2: We have a different I had to be like, we
Speaker 2: had the same college experience, we had different decisions. I
Speaker 2: went to the University of Georgia with a bunch of
Speaker 2: my buddies. I mean just seemed as soon as we
Speaker 2: got there, they say, hey, you guys want dinner. What
Speaker 2: happened to y'all won't supper? So I doug a little deeper.
Speaker 1: It's so funny. I don't know, man, I grew up
Speaker 1: in a weird little supper corner of the Did you
Speaker 1: guys say dinner? Supper? We did not say dinner.
Speaker 4: We said, but Midwest, there's supper. It can't be that.
Speaker 1: We do it.
Speaker 2: We do it noon every day.
Speaker 1: So we DIVI didn't do that. We had breakfast, lunch,
Speaker 1: and then you have supper. What's what supper time, breakfast
Speaker 1: still supper.
Speaker 4: Was Have you ever had lunch?
Speaker 1: I didn't like it.
Speaker 4: At what point in your life did you realize that
Speaker 4: there's this other thing called lunch was the same thing
Speaker 4: as dinner for you?
Speaker 2: I mean, I could reading write, I knew what he
Speaker 2: was talking about. I I talked real slow, I think
Speaker 2: pretty slow, but I put that dunel thing because so anyway,
Speaker 2: I lost my trader thor.
Speaker 1: You were you were had just spent at one point
Speaker 1: something milly plates and you had ordered up some poultry
Speaker 1: in the restaurant, or no, you had ordered your dinner waiting.
Speaker 2: On my something in the boulder. They had they had
Speaker 2: a menus framed from like nineteen twenty three or something.
Speaker 2: I got a picture somewhere in my phone and it
Speaker 2: said beef plate, beef dinner privately, Uh, ninety nine cent
Speaker 2: pork dummer nine and nine cent chicken dinner A dollar
Speaker 2: thirty cents.
Speaker 1: So you know, at some point in time, before.
Speaker 2: We industrialize, we took all the costs out.
Speaker 1: But now now that would say thirty nine dollars, yeah,
Speaker 1: thirty seven dollars, nineteen.
Speaker 2: Dollars yeah, right, something like that, so we uh, anyway,
Speaker 2: that's uh. We we we struggle with poetry.
Speaker 1: So that was like when you saw that thing, though,
Speaker 1: it hit you something about the eye of wackedness of
Speaker 1: where we've gotten with cheap poultry.
Speaker 2: I would say, shit, I wish I hadn't done that.
Speaker 2: I wish I hadn't built it. I wish I hadn't
Speaker 2: built that plant. And you know we're fixing do We
Speaker 2: were cutting back on our poetry because we have lost
Speaker 2: so much money. I still want to do it, but
Speaker 2: I'm not sure how it's going to look.
Speaker 1: So you haven't turned it around.
Speaker 4: And you can't find a market that will that will
Speaker 4: pay enough to keep it going.
Speaker 2: Not on enough birds. I'll tell something else. I don't
Speaker 2: think I'm a very good poetry farmer. I'm a I'm
Speaker 2: a I'm a really good beef guy. You know when
Speaker 2: I got when I when I moved from beef to sheep,
Speaker 2: that was the first specie I bought. I said, you know,
Speaker 2: they just like little cows. I can't do that. They're
Speaker 2: not like little cows. But it's hard. So then, you know,
Speaker 2: but we got reasons for good and hired some people
Speaker 2: to help us. Then they got ready to put goats
Speaker 2: out of there, because you know, goats and sheep are
Speaker 2: both small ruminates. But sheep eat forbes, goats eat scrub.
Speaker 2: For the most part, you need both of them. I
Speaker 2: got goats, I said, you know, I've learned how to
Speaker 2: run sheep. I can run goats. So then we got
Speaker 2: birds and I don't know how to do that, and hogs.
Speaker 2: I didn't know how to do that, and I'm still not.
Speaker 2: I don't think I'm real good at it.
Speaker 1: But is the hogs making money?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, the hogs are making money.
Speaker 1: Is goats making money?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, yes, let me see, you know. And the
Speaker 2: reason I'm the reason I'm that says yes. But the
Speaker 2: reason I'm not saying hell yeah is we you know,
Speaker 2: in a in a farm like hours, where everything is
Speaker 2: integrated and working together, it's really hard to identify a
Speaker 2: single line. So let's let's talk about the difference in
Speaker 2: linear and cyclical. We do that. Yeah, most businesses are
Speaker 2: very linear. You're just next, next, next, next. A farm
Speaker 2: is meant to be cyclical. It's close to nature. You know,
Speaker 2: the inputs it's spent, It goes around and around the
Speaker 2: waste stream coming off of a cyclical business like a farm,
Speaker 2: it's a very small hour. But the complexity of it
Speaker 2: is it's really hard to know. So I told you
Speaker 2: I'm losing a lot of money on poultry, and I
Speaker 2: am don't believe it. Talking of my accountant, but he's
Speaker 2: not accounting for the additional fertility that birdman you puts
Speaker 2: out all the feathers and carcasses. That I that that's
Speaker 2: an extra income stream that's not showing up on my financials.
Speaker 2: So it gets very difficult. You know, there are reasons.
Speaker 2: There are a lot of of cyclical farms that are
Speaker 2: on the Stock Exchange. It's so it's you know, it
Speaker 2: doesn't manifest itself in monthly reports or quarter the reports
Speaker 2: or annual reports. It manifests yourself generationally.
Speaker 1: Help me understand that.
Speaker 2: Say that again, so most linear businesses, uh, you know,
Speaker 2: you can pull a monthly report or quarter the reporter
Speaker 2: now you're report and get a pretty good indicator of
Speaker 2: how your business is doing financially. Can I understand I'm
Speaker 2: saying in a farm, I may show I'm losing money,
Speaker 2: but if I'm moving it from a half cent organic
Speaker 2: model to five percent organic model, it's not on there. Yeah,
Speaker 2: if my herd went from being uh, where you probably
Speaker 2: could report the numbers. I don't, but you could, But
Speaker 2: the productivity of your herd doesn't show up on that.
Speaker 2: I understand.
Speaker 1: I can just that all that stuff's not getting capture.
Speaker 1: You're rehabilitating the landscape future generations. That's not showing up
Speaker 1: in your quarterly.
Speaker 2: Report, and it manifests itself as wealth generationally. We we
Speaker 2: we got a little management team. I used to run
Speaker 2: that farm absolutely autonomous, just me, and as it grew,
Speaker 2: we've we've brought other people in management, and we have
Speaker 2: a meeting once a week Thursday afternoon my office, and
Speaker 2: we talk about things we want to do. And it
Speaker 2: never pays off in the month, a quarter, or a year.
Speaker 2: It's all very long term, very generational. I love that,
Speaker 2: but it's very problematic.
Speaker 1: Since you're selling all the stuff that you produce, and
Speaker 1: you know how many acres you got, you kind of have.
Speaker 2: A rare.
Speaker 1: And I know this goes against a little bit of
Speaker 1: what you're just saying that you don't do a quarterly report,
Speaker 1: but you probably wind up with a kind of rare
Speaker 1: glimpse for an egg producer into this acreage spins off
Speaker 1: this many dollars worth of food because it doesn't get
Speaker 1: lost in some broader equation, meaning if you grow corn
Speaker 1: and you're selling corn for ethnol, you're selling corn for feed,
Speaker 1: You're never you would never answer the question like, oh no,
Speaker 1: my corn helped produce x gallons of ethanol gasoline, and
Speaker 1: my corn helped produce x pounds of beef down the road.
Speaker 1: But at the end of the year, you you know,
Speaker 1: like like you know how many dollars worth, how many units?
Speaker 1: However the hell you want to measure it? You know
Speaker 1: what came off that place?
Speaker 2: You know we do, and we know that we got that,
Speaker 2: we got, I gotta, I got.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's got to be an interesting number. Do
Speaker 1: you does that number? Does that ratio as you've become
Speaker 1: better and learned this has that like dollars of off
Speaker 1: put per acre of land? Have you gotten better at it?
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, a lot better. And I can I mean,
Speaker 2: I don't even need to look at those finacials. I
Speaker 2: can tell that riding around in my jeep. I mean
Speaker 2: it looks better. I mean, I mean I can, I
Speaker 2: mean it looks better.
Speaker 1: Years ago, I was with my friend Kevin Murphy down
Speaker 1: in Kentucky and we were driving around hunting cottontail rabbits,
Speaker 1: and he was telling me it was gonna be a
Speaker 1: good day at hunting because we were going to an
Speaker 1: Amish farm. And he said, that's where the game is at.
Speaker 1: The game is on the Amish farm. And he pointed
Speaker 1: to a number of farming practices. And this is gonna
Speaker 1: sound like horror. I don't mean, you know, it's gonna
Speaker 1: sound like I'm generalizing. He had a call. You just
Speaker 1: got there. Looked different. He's like, their practices are different,
Speaker 1: the equipment uses different, the philosophy is different. They're they're
Speaker 1: they're hell on predators, they have dirty fence rows. It's
Speaker 1: just different. And you go there and and all the
Speaker 1: time running around, man, the only quail we saw.
Speaker 2: Heck yeah, was on that Armish farm.
Speaker 1: And he'd point around and be like that, that that.
Speaker 1: But you just knew when you got there, You're like, wow,
Speaker 1: it is a different looking for so absolutely yeah, because
Speaker 1: you'll have the vocabulary for it.
Speaker 2: Well, so there are One of the most beneficial creatures
Speaker 2: on my farm is a dung beetle. It's a beetle
Speaker 2: that is flighted beetle that is drawn to fresh manure,
Speaker 2: particular calmnure, and when the dung beetle gets there, it
Speaker 2: somehow gathers the most nutrient dense part of the feces,
Speaker 2: and that fresh always went as fresh. If it's been
Speaker 2: there a while, they don't go to it. And it
Speaker 2: digs a vertical eighteen inch shaft into the ground about
Speaker 2: as big as that pencil, and the dirt comes up
Speaker 2: in the top of the menu and it packs. It
Speaker 2: lays its eggs in the bottom and packs that tunnel
Speaker 2: with the most nutrient rich part of at manure.
Speaker 1: I know the animal, but I didn't know they did that.
Speaker 2: Oh man, it's wonderful.
Speaker 1: I can pay someone to do that.
Speaker 2: Well, guess what I said. We saw dunge beatles when
Speaker 2: I was a kid. I didn't see them anymore. There
Speaker 2: was a few give cattle wormer to kill the worms
Speaker 2: in the system. It's toxic to the dung beetle when
Speaker 2: they lay the eggs and the feces. No kidding, really,
Speaker 2: So when I saw dung beetles, I can I know
Speaker 2: right where I was. I was driving along. I saw
Speaker 2: that dirt at the top of that fresh cavity, and
Speaker 2: I slammed on brakes and backed up, and it was
Speaker 2: dung beleaedles. I got you. Yeah, and now I got
Speaker 2: a lot of them, and it stratify.
Speaker 1: It keeps thee because uh sorry about that, it keeps
Speaker 1: the nutrients from stratifying.
Speaker 2: You're just being on the top with the manua goes
Speaker 2: the water can go down in those holes. I mean,
Speaker 2: it's just and the horn flies and face flies, which
Speaker 2: are a horrible blood sucking insect for cattle raised in
Speaker 2: that fresh cattle manule. That's where they leave their eggs too.
Speaker 2: When they those dung beetles aerate it, you don't get
Speaker 2: the horn flies the face flies production. So it's like
Speaker 2: it's like a gift from God in terms of insect control, fertility,
Speaker 2: land management. We killed them and spent money to buy
Speaker 2: cattle worma to kill them, and and list goes on.
Speaker 2: And there's dozens of technology products that I spent money
Speaker 2: for that that did more harm than good. You know.
Speaker 2: That's that's the way I really think that's the way
Speaker 2: that works in higher culture. I'm not speaking out of
Speaker 2: the other areas. I got it. I had the first
Speaker 2: drum of anybody I know, and we don't know about
Speaker 2: our either third or fourth one. I love. I'm not
Speaker 2: opposed to technology. That's a good cell phone. I flew
Speaker 2: down there because I kept beeping. I love I mean,
Speaker 2: I love technology, but technology in a complex system does
Speaker 2: not work well. In a complicated system that works great.
Speaker 2: So we have to very judiciously decide.
Speaker 1: Uh, when you moved away from de Warmer? Did you
Speaker 1: move away from you? Don't do any kind of hormones
Speaker 1: on here? We're don't And that was the That was
Speaker 1: the implant hormone, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, mostly there are a number of them, but the
Speaker 2: most common one goes in the skin behind the ear
Speaker 2: and it slowly releases over about a used to be
Speaker 2: one hundred days. I ain't used it for a long time.
Speaker 2: I don't know what you got now, Jude.
Speaker 1: I got more and more friends doing that. Man, you
Speaker 1: don't do that too it would you do it?
Speaker 2: I did do it for a year.
Speaker 1: You and you they do it in their butt. No,
Speaker 1: you know you guys know about this.
Speaker 4: No, I can guess who you've been hanging out with.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you who later. He's he's really on the
Speaker 1: fence about it because he's got friends.
Speaker 2: What look like I do.
Speaker 1: He's got friends, and there's a lot of he's got friends.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of guys that are getting a little capsule.
Speaker 1: You cut the skin on your butt and you put
Speaker 1: this little capsule in there, and then and then you're
Speaker 1: you're and then you're and then you're like you know, you're,
Speaker 1: you're whatever. You're more of a superman.
Speaker 2: This this this, I hope this doesn't take too long.
Speaker 2: I'll try to make this short.
Speaker 1: But you wouldn't do that.
Speaker 2: I would. Hell, I went to university. But I'll tell
Speaker 2: you this. When I was at University of Georgia in
Speaker 2: the seventies, uh, steroids which just just a rumor, and
Speaker 2: I heard about them, and I told my guy that
Speaker 2: I thought Mike could get me some steroids, give me
Speaker 2: some of that for you. Yeah, And he didn't. But
Speaker 2: I happened to have reproductive physiology that quarter. There's a
Speaker 2: quarter system back then. And one of the things we
Speaker 2: did is we had one hundred mail chicks, little yellow chicks.
Speaker 2: You have to have them sack. Somebody got it to
Speaker 2: notice what they're doing. These were males and we divided
Speaker 2: them up into ten little pens. It was not going
Speaker 2: out of my welfare. And every day for that quarter,
Speaker 2: somebody had to inject all one hundred. You signed up.
Speaker 2: You know, I'll take these days and you take those days.
Speaker 2: And we didn't know what we were giving them. All
Speaker 2: of them got the same dosage of whatever was on
Speaker 2: that bottom on top of their pen. And at the
Speaker 2: end of the quarter we killed them and dissected them
Speaker 2: and weighed their test and I was really starting to
Speaker 2: want some steroids because those on the end they had
Speaker 2: a you know, the comb that dropped off. Oh yeah,
Speaker 2: and when you when you'd opened, when you open the pin, they.
Speaker 1: Come at you on the other end, souped up chickens.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they were just still a little yellow up. They
Speaker 2: would run from you. Said, oh hell yeah, that's that steroid.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna kick me some of that step. I can't wait.
Speaker 2: So the last well, I hadn't got it yet. Last
Speaker 2: day we killed them and dissected them, and those little
Speaker 2: birds that run from you on that end, it was
Speaker 2: different doses all the way up from zero to whatever.
Speaker 2: The testicles that big, those down there, they had the
Speaker 2: comb dripping down. I couldn't find them a little a
Speaker 2: little little gobble fat that I guess must have been it.
Speaker 1: So I told them, my guy, I don't want to
Speaker 1: get into this too long. But There's a couple of
Speaker 1: details I got to add in here about this is
Speaker 1: the guys I know are post reproductive age. I caught
Speaker 1: wind of this and I told my wife, I'm like, listen,
Speaker 1: if these people that I know do this and they
Speaker 1: can start smoking me up a hill, I'm gonna have
Speaker 1: a hard time not doing it. Really, Yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: want what I don't want to get smoked up going
Speaker 1: up a hill.
Speaker 5: Is this human growth horm? Is this steroids?
Speaker 1: It's probably I could start gaming people, but I don't
Speaker 1: want to name them. But if they can, if it
Speaker 1: turns out that they went from me being able to
Speaker 1: smoke them up a hill to them smoking me up
Speaker 1: a hill, it's gonna be very hard for me to
Speaker 1: stomach this.
Speaker 4: A little way to go.
Speaker 2: Years old, How quick you get up at hell, you're
Speaker 2: gonna wish all your stuff is still away.
Speaker 1: There's there's a conversation often having my kids. My kids
Speaker 1: will laugh about you know, we'll laugh about stuff like
Speaker 1: my dadd used to love to tell the story that
Speaker 1: when he was in the in the military, and you'd
Speaker 1: get your c rations, there'd be three cigarettes in there, right,
Speaker 1: and you talk about that, you'd be on a forest
Speaker 1: march and they would call a cigarette break right, and
Speaker 1: then you know, and we laugh now like, oh, how stupid.
Speaker 1: And I'm always telling my kids, I'm like you right now, us,
Speaker 1: right now, we are doing things right now, maybe some
Speaker 1: things that we even think are good that your kids
Speaker 1: will sit and laugh about. How in the world could
Speaker 1: we have been so stupid?
Speaker 2: Absolutely?
Speaker 1: What are some of the things that you look at
Speaker 1: in our agricultural practices? What are some of the things
Speaker 1: that you look at in the one hundred years, I'll
Speaker 1: be like, can you believe those idiots? Not only did
Speaker 1: that mean?
Speaker 2: I used to so I used to artificially or artificially
Speaker 2: insumminate my cattle. I would buy a semen, pay for it,
Speaker 2: and then put it in the in the cow when
Speaker 2: she was in estras or heat. And the semen I
Speaker 2: was buying were from these big, monster, non natural bulls.
Speaker 2: They had a you know, their claim to fame is
Speaker 2: they had a RUBI that big, And it was like
Speaker 2: that was the only thing that mattered, you know, And
Speaker 2: today you know I close. Not only do I not
Speaker 2: buy semen anymore, I closed the herd. It's a I
Speaker 2: don't bring animals in now. I saved my own bulls,
Speaker 2: and I've been to that for ten years. The herd
Speaker 2: is so much better. You know, we we put up
Speaker 2: you know you may have I'll get these numbers confused.
Speaker 2: But a friend of mine had a herd of a
Speaker 2: hundred and something one hundred and ten or something cows
Speaker 2: that he artificially assimilated with different bulls, and he was
Speaker 2: selling bull purebred bull calves. So he had to know
Speaker 2: who the daddy was. I don't ever do. So he
Speaker 2: take hair from the tailhead and send it off and
Speaker 2: they genetically sex record tell who the bulls. And he
Speaker 2: had done that with some natural breeding, put ten bulls
Speaker 2: in with one hundred and twenty cows, and one bull
Speaker 2: had like fifty six calves, one had twelve, and then
Speaker 2: some four and ones and twos and c rood. Well,
Speaker 2: now I want my in my herd. I want the
Speaker 2: bullet got fifty six calves. I don't care if it's
Speaker 2: real by it's this big or this big. I want
Speaker 2: that libid that that you know that bull felt good.
Speaker 2: He was eating well, he was a fishing. He had
Speaker 2: it going on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's like on the mountain around the prairie or whatever.
Speaker 1: At a time like you'd have.
Speaker 2: Been siren, Siren the buffalo herd or what. So you
Speaker 2: know that I'm I'm telling that story and reference to
Speaker 2: you about the silly things we do, and and there
Speaker 2: are a bunch of others. But you know, just now
Speaker 2: that was the wrong thing, ending money too, not improve
Speaker 2: my herd.
Speaker 1: So that's not so much an issue of that's not
Speaker 1: so much an issue of AI. It's an issue of
Speaker 1: the source for the semen.
Speaker 2: Right. No, well, I mean, are those AI I've learned
Speaker 2: as artificial intelligence when I when I was, it's always
Speaker 2: been an artificial insemination to.
Speaker 1: Me, Oh, I still think that's what it means. Good
Speaker 1: for you.
Speaker 2: Younger than you must be.
Speaker 1: But in the argument for it, though, the argument for
Speaker 1: artificial insemination, as I understand it, you can crack me
Speaker 1: on this. An argument for it is that you can synchronize, correct,
Speaker 1: you can synchronize so that your cows are calving within
Speaker 1: a very narrow window of time.
Speaker 2: Those two shaparate things. So I'm confusing stuff. Okay, you know,
Speaker 2: I mean, it's all right, I get it. But they
Speaker 2: do use hormone implants to synchronize the cow. And but
Speaker 2: they could they could still breed them naturally. That's a
Speaker 2: separate shot that.
Speaker 1: Okay. Yeah, so you can use a hormone to bring
Speaker 1: them into estrous heat. Okay, so that you then because
Speaker 1: they have the same the gestation period is pretty.
Speaker 2: Fixed two eighty six ages.
Speaker 1: Okay, So you use a hormone to bring them in
Speaker 1: at the same time, and then you can breed them
Speaker 1: naturally or breed them with artificial essemination to make sure
Speaker 1: that then you're when it comes to calving time, you
Speaker 1: have a narrow window, a narrower window of calving time
Speaker 1: and requires less of your attention to be around to
Speaker 1: make sure everybody births out.
Speaker 5: You also don't do that, right.
Speaker 2: Don't so that and and you know it does everything
Speaker 2: say is true, But mostly people do that so they
Speaker 2: can put together the truck load of same size, same
Speaker 2: sex cattle. Sex is that doesn't control sex, but you
Speaker 2: and that doesn't mean anything to me because we slaughter
Speaker 2: cows fIF to two weeks a year. Uhh.
Speaker 1: So that, yeah, that's interesting. You've kind of pulled yourself
Speaker 1: away from.
Speaker 2: That need everything. We pulled ourself away from everything.
Speaker 1: You don't need to have everybody on such and such
Speaker 1: day always six hundred pounds.
Speaker 2: Don't want it, don't want it. I want to have calves.
Speaker 2: We were so we have a herd where we are
Speaker 2: are finishing our animals on grass, and once a month
Speaker 2: we shut that herd up and pull out everything visually
Speaker 2: that we think is big enough ready to slaughter. And
Speaker 2: that's how we do it. And I don't want to
Speaker 2: have all of them one month and eleven months nothing
Speaker 2: going on.
Speaker 1: Does anybody hunt on your farm?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I did an employees hunting. I was. I was
Speaker 2: an avid hunter all my life. That that that and uh,
Speaker 2: uh cease to do that when I got so involved
Speaker 2: in my career and I still have employees at hunt.
Speaker 1: Uh, that's funny mentioned that because I was like being
Speaker 1: brought up, we hunted different farms in our community, and
Speaker 1: my dad was it was just an explaining why. I mean,
Speaker 1: at that time farmers did hunt. I mean they did
Speaker 1: not hunt in our area. My Dad's like, the last
Speaker 1: thing these people want to deal with is a dead animal.
Speaker 1: It's like it's just like the last the end of
Speaker 1: the day. And he went going have another dead thing,
Speaker 1: you know what, You got to mess with it because
Speaker 1: it's just not like a fun thing for him.
Speaker 2: The way that worked in my community growing up here,
Speaker 2: when when we were kids, we were avid hunters and
Speaker 2: fishermen and trappers because that's what you did. My dad
Speaker 2: didn't know how to play baseball. He wouldn't gonna be
Speaker 2: able to tell me how to. You know, that wasn't
Speaker 2: something to happen. So the way we kids spent our
Speaker 2: time was and the television was a black and white
Speaker 2: television by Dead Big and I'm gonna watch said. So
Speaker 2: we hunted and fished and trapped, and at a certain age,
Speaker 2: your daddy said you're coming with me tomorrow ten, twelve, fourteen.
Speaker 2: Depends on the kid and the daddy. And then you
Speaker 2: were working. And you know, I mean, it wasn't that
Speaker 2: I didn't have time to hunt or fish. I did.
Speaker 2: I just had my interests.
Speaker 1: And oh you mean when he said you're coming with me,
Speaker 1: he meant working, Yeah, not hunting. Yeah, he's pulling you
Speaker 1: off hunting. Correct, that's pulling you off of hunting and
Speaker 1: fishing to get working.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And I could still have hunted and fish, but
Speaker 2: by that time I wanted to run the farm. That
Speaker 2: was that was my my goal.
Speaker 1: When you look at yeah, I don't, I know, I
Speaker 1: don't I'm not asked. I don't want to embarrass you,
Speaker 1: but you've been public about how many acres you guys
Speaker 1: have under control.
Speaker 2: You sharing, No, we own about two thousand acres inherited
Speaker 2: about thoules Makers. I bought about fowles Maker. We rent
Speaker 2: a little over a thousand acres and then we graize
Speaker 2: soul of otake or raise about two thousand acres, so
Speaker 2: it's a little over five thousand acres total.
Speaker 1: As you've gone through this process, and have you seen
Speaker 1: what have you seen in terms of wildlife?
Speaker 2: Yet?
Speaker 1: You have the dung beetle example, but what have you
Speaker 1: seen in terms of wildlife habitat? Does it wind up
Speaker 1: decreasing because you need to use so much because you
Speaker 1: found ways to use so much more of the landscape,
Speaker 1: meaning your goats and cheap have replaced deer.
Speaker 2: You know, that's a good that's a good question. And uh,
Speaker 2: but the wildlife has increased. But the sportsman and you
Speaker 2: it's not going to like this much. When you manage
Speaker 2: for the benefit of a specie, you do so at
Speaker 2: the detriment of the other species. Now, we don't see
Speaker 2: many deer on our farm. A lot of them passed
Speaker 2: through because it's open.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: They they're on their way somewhere else. But there's a
Speaker 2: tremendous amount of life on the farm. I started mentioning
Speaker 2: this to you. I was I was driving down a
Speaker 2: paved road that bisects my farm three four years ago.
Speaker 2: And it wasn't late in the afternoon. I'm dusk, but
Speaker 2: it wasn't raining. And I went through a place of
Speaker 2: the road was wet. I said, what was that? And
Speaker 2: I backed up and there were millions of little toad frogs,
Speaker 2: I mean, fresh hatched toad frogs crossing the road. And
Speaker 2: since then, I've seen that probably three for sure, or
Speaker 2: two maybe three other times. And that is I hadn't
Speaker 2: seen that since I was kid.
Speaker 1: No, I can back up on this. That's changed everywhere.
Speaker 1: And what I mean, I said, I can back up
Speaker 1: on that. Like amphibians. Yeah, it's just changed.
Speaker 2: But I got. What I'm saying is I got them. Yeah, No,
Speaker 2: I'm with you here, and they've been calm in their back.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: I was raised frog gigging and catching crawfish and you
Speaker 2: know the other things. And the amphibians, you're right, Amphibians
Speaker 2: like the canary and the coal mine to be indicator
Speaker 2: that it ain't right, and they're back on my farm.
Speaker 1: Of the side.
Speaker 2: We had seventy eight bald eagles on my farm. They
Speaker 2: were killing me. They were eating my chickens. And I mean,
Speaker 2: I told you chickens has not been a good deal
Speaker 2: of for us. That's not even counting this. But there
Speaker 2: was seventy eight. That's the d n R guy made
Speaker 2: that estimate. I don't know how you tel, but that's
Speaker 2: what he said. There's a bunch of them and they
Speaker 2: were about to put me hide the chick post pasture
Speaker 2: poltry business.
Speaker 1: And we are very because you got your chickens running
Speaker 1: around out in the opening.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's I mean, and you know it's not like
Speaker 2: an eagle would go in there and get a bird
Speaker 2: and eat it. I don't I don't mind. It's like
Speaker 2: tithe into nature, you do that. But they would land
Speaker 2: and just kill and kill and kill and eat the
Speaker 2: ain't us out and kill another one and eat the
Speaker 2: ants and kill another one. So a very talented polstry
Speaker 2: manager that I had hired figured it out and our
Speaker 2: eagles losses went way down, so we u we fenced
Speaker 2: them so I have guardian dogs h anatole and shepherds
Speaker 2: and ockbosh and great Pyrenees and combinations there, and they
Speaker 2: work great on nocturnal predation, but in the daytime they
Speaker 2: go to the woods and go to sleep, and that's
Speaker 2: when the eagles come. So my postry guy figured out
Speaker 2: how to put up that electrified webbing around the Polsier
Speaker 2: house so they can still get out, but they can't
Speaker 2: the dogs. It wasn't to keep the chickens in, it's
Speaker 2: keep the dog from going to the woods. And it
Speaker 2: was it was. It was very effication.
Speaker 1: He was fencing his dog, fencing the dogs.
Speaker 2: Literally, and it worked worked very well. We still have
Speaker 2: some eagles and some predation, but it's not debilitating the
Speaker 2: way it was.
Speaker 1: So, how tell me about the process of doing your book?
Speaker 1: Did you write it?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Uh so uh the Mark Mark Gerald.
Speaker 2: Contacted me about solicited writing a book about us.
Speaker 1: Did he make you your proposal? All that?
Speaker 2: He didn't? Hm, it's in honesty, h h he uh
Speaker 2: we we. I talked to him the first time. I
Speaker 2: told him, I said, I can't write a book, you know,
Speaker 2: I just not the way that works. I had never
Speaker 2: read many books, and he uh ultimately found a wonderful
Speaker 2: person to write it in the lady name Amy Lee Grave,
Speaker 2: and who her we fell in love with. She's a sweetheart.
Speaker 2: She's by the same age as my daughters, and and
Speaker 2: uh and my daughter got involved in it, and she
Speaker 2: wanted the book, so she I worked for my daughter.
Speaker 1: So then you were able to start downloading all your knowledge.
Speaker 2: And we had a phone call every Friday afternoon for
Speaker 2: two three four hour phone call. And she's bread. You know,
Speaker 2: she would have a list of questions. She started asking
Speaker 2: her questions and she would challenge you. I say, I'd
Speaker 2: be telling my story. Responded to whatever she could asked about.
Speaker 2: And she said, wait a minute, you told me so,
Speaker 2: and so I said, I say that on July fifth,
Speaker 2: you told me.
Speaker 7: Getting cross examined.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I see that ain't the same thing I told you.
Speaker 2: You know, it was different, you know, but she she,
Speaker 2: you know, she when when I read the book, I
Speaker 2: couldn't believe how right she got it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well no, I mean it really. I mean it's like
Speaker 1: it's like you're telling the stuff.
Speaker 2: It's all my stuff.
Speaker 1: But I should know if you needed someone to help
Speaker 1: you with the organ Yeah.
Speaker 2: That's back on that linear cyclical. Yeah, if I start
Speaker 2: telling you a stir, I'm probably gonna get off on
Speaker 2: something else. Probably we know, we'll we know, we'll finish
Speaker 2: that one unless you remind me and that that that's
Speaker 2: the way this would have been.
Speaker 1: How many people come you know, because how many people
Speaker 1: come to your place every day? Like if people are listening,
Speaker 1: they just go it. If they're in Georgia, they just
Speaker 1: go to your place right and tour and eat and
Speaker 1: see everything.
Speaker 2: We uh, we got an open gate policy that you
Speaker 2: can go. We we do tours, we know, and I
Speaker 2: really will them do that, but you know they can't.
Speaker 2: You know, they show up thirty minutes after you did
Speaker 2: a tour, and my daughters do and when they got
Speaker 2: people that work with them, that do them, but they
Speaker 2: we we let them go in. We got maps, We
Speaker 2: give it to you. You go anywhere you want to
Speaker 2: ask anything, you want to Well, you know we are
Speaker 2: we're under so much competition of greenwashed product by big companies.
Speaker 2: That transparency is that the soul We've got to use God, yeah,
Speaker 2: short to him. You look at it. You know, well,
Speaker 2: we'll ask you a question and sometime.
Speaker 1: Meaning there's no like whatever terminology you can use to
Speaker 1: describe to a consumer what it is you're doing. You're
Speaker 1: going to see that terminology mimicked by someone who picks
Speaker 1: up that word.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. Let me give you an extreme example. I'll give you.
Speaker 2: But uh, in this country, you can import grassfeed beef
Speaker 2: from twenty other countries and label it product of the
Speaker 2: USA legally on the package. If value is added here,
Speaker 2: it's cut or wrapped or ground. Is that right? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Man, if you want to put product of the USA
Speaker 1: on a piece of sown fabric, I'm not sure. Shit's
Speaker 1: a lot higher bar than that.
Speaker 2: Well, I'm telling you the law got changed. I think
Speaker 2: it was twenty fifteen. We were doing pretty good and
Speaker 2: the law got changed, and the suddenly you know, we're
Speaker 2: not doing so good anymore. Huh. We had a we
Speaker 2: had a big wholesale customer last week that my daughter
Speaker 2: was talking to and they had a I wasn't meeting
Speaker 2: at a video meeting online. I mean they showed you know,
Speaker 2: the stats on how much they've drown, and you customly
Speaker 2: picked up this was this grocer, that grocer, the other grocer.
Speaker 2: They got down to the plan said they're going to
Speaker 2: buy the same amount of product from us. They bought
Speaker 2: the previous year, and Jenny's it's pretty tough. She said,
Speaker 2: wait a minute, you just showed all these new customers
Speaker 2: you got you gonna buy the same amount of product.
Speaker 2: Where are you getting it? Because there aren't that many
Speaker 2: large grass fed beef producers left in this country. And
Speaker 2: they didn't say anything, and she just sat there and waited.
Speaker 2: She said, are you importing grass fed beef? And they
Speaker 2: didn't say anything. And finally what I said, yeah, yeah, okay,
Speaker 2: we import a little bit. So why hadn't we talked
Speaker 2: about this before? And I can tell you the name.
Speaker 1: Because they're chasing that name grass fed beef, well, not
Speaker 1: chasing the implication, like what the implications are?
Speaker 2: They let the assumption be it's American. They are in
Speaker 2: America's got a very American name, headquartered in Texas. You know,
Speaker 2: it's a very god him.
Speaker 1: Do you do you do you worry that the whole
Speaker 1: thing is gonna go could put some's gonna have to
Speaker 1: go back the other traction?
Speaker 2: It's going it, Yes, And I worry about it a lot.
Speaker 2: And I really think we okay, I mean White Opa,
Speaker 2: we've been doing it longer than the others. And we
Speaker 2: started twenty five years ago. We sell twenty five million
Speaker 2: dollars stuff a year. We're vertically integrated. We it could
Speaker 2: we're not doing very well, but it's okay. We got
Speaker 2: we got we got some debt, but we got a
Speaker 2: lot of assets. And I think we gonna be okay.
Speaker 2: I got friends and and people I care a lot about.
Speaker 2: That it has not been okay, and that bothers me
Speaker 2: a lot. I thought, not day one, Day one, I
Speaker 2: just want to raise kays different. But at some point
Speaker 2: in that journey, I came to believe that I was
Speaker 2: an early innovator that was helping figure out a better
Speaker 2: way to produce at least beef, maybe maybe meet in general,
Speaker 2: at least beef. And I liked that. I wasn't living
Speaker 2: for it, but I liked it. It's not it hadn't
Speaker 2: worked out that way the and and I had I changed.
Speaker 2: I went from I've never been a sales when, I've
Speaker 2: never tried to talk people into changing up. But if
Speaker 2: somebody came to see me and said I'm thinking about
Speaker 2: going to the grass fed beef business, I said, get
Speaker 2: in the jeep, come on, I show you something, and
Speaker 2: I show them and kind of promote it, and I consciously,
Speaker 2: consciously made the decision. I got quit doing that because
Speaker 2: the people got in trouble and then it could happen
Speaker 2: with us. But we're in you know, I mean, I
Speaker 2: think we'll be all right now. Enough enough, I allowed
Speaker 2: two daughters to come back and have babies on the farm,
Speaker 2: so I thought, you know, you know, if you're in
Speaker 2: business for yourself, you never I know this is gonna
Speaker 2: be fine. That doesn't how you know.
Speaker 1: The sad part is there'd be a bunch of people
Speaker 1: happy if it didn't work, because they're sitting there and
Speaker 1: it's like, man, this is kind of challenging that here
Speaker 1: he is talking about a bunch of stuff I'd rather
Speaker 1: not talk about drawn making us, you know, people questioning assumptions,
Speaker 1: and then if it didn't work, they'd be like, ah, good,
Speaker 1: you're right, because that was getting uncomfortable.
Speaker 2: And of course, of course, the you know, the large
Speaker 2: multi national meat processes are so big and so powerful,
Speaker 2: and we're they're not worried about how much I sell.
Speaker 2: They spill more than I sell, ye, but they don't
Speaker 2: want people asking the questions. And we talk a lot
Speaker 2: about how we do it. It just be better than
Speaker 2: I talk about that so, and they've done such a
Speaker 2: great job again that group. The term green washing, I
Speaker 2: didn't come up with it, but I used it a
Speaker 2: lot because it very accurately depicts what happens in the market.
Speaker 1: Police years ago, I had a we were interviewing a
Speaker 1: bison producer, and that's kind of a in the West,
Speaker 1: that's a little bit of a touchy subject, like beef
Speaker 1: versus bison. And they're talking. He's talking about a lot
Speaker 1: of the heat they get, you know, the cattle and
Speaker 1: the things. And he had an interesting statistic where he's like, man,
Speaker 1: there's two million cows in this state. I got four
Speaker 1: thousand buffalo. But the amount of the focus out that
Speaker 1: is f Like, let's just look at the numbers for
Speaker 1: a minute here.
Speaker 2: I don't have that prejudice, but I got I got
Speaker 2: one hundred and fifty something miles of fence on my
Speaker 2: farm because we got it cross fenced into the thirty
Speaker 2: acre paddocks. It's not just and uh when and I
Speaker 2: used to be the president of the American Grassfeld Association
Speaker 2: way back a long time ago, and the bison producers
Speaker 2: in there, and those poor folks couldn't hardly give away bison.
Speaker 2: But I started tess one tile of grill and seeing
Speaker 2: other things, said, you know, I believe this bison thing
Speaker 2: might might be all right. And I was adding those
Speaker 2: other species. I said, maybe I'll add bison. So it's
Speaker 2: a guy in Alabama had a herd of bison he
Speaker 2: wanted to sell. I rode up there by myself one
Speaker 2: Sunday afternoon, and I didn't want to talk to him.
Speaker 2: I want to look at him. And I start there
Speaker 2: and looked at those bison and I looked at that fency.
Speaker 1: Looked like something from a prison.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and uh, I said, you know, I'm too old
Speaker 2: to start building one hundred and fifty something mile. I
Speaker 2: still I still win it from the first time I
Speaker 2: built it. I can't start by again. You never reminded
Speaker 2: me of going seeing Daddy.
Speaker 1: Really well, man, I do uh one. I hope your
Speaker 1: book does good. A bold return. Make sure I get
Speaker 1: a bolder I want to get the subtitle Bolder Turn
Speaker 1: to giving a damn One Farm. Six Generations in the
Speaker 1: Future of Food by Will Harris from White Oak Pastures.
Speaker 1: I hope your book does good. It's really it's really interesting.
Speaker 1: It's a it's an interesting informative read from someone who
Speaker 1: observes agg agriculture from the outside. And that's me, right,
Speaker 1: Like I spent a lot of time on farms and ranches,
Speaker 1: have friends at farm and ranch, but I didn't. That's
Speaker 1: not how I grew up. I just grew up in
Speaker 1: proximity to it. So there's always more to learn, I
Speaker 1: think from a perspective of Obviously, consumers, you know, uh,
Speaker 1: we catch or shoot all the meat weed, but most
Speaker 1: people in this country buy meat. So it's a great
Speaker 1: window into what you're buying the history of what you're buying,
Speaker 1: what you're paying for when you buy it. Reading the
Speaker 1: book too, just when you're driving down the road and
Speaker 1: you're looking out the window and you're driving through farm country,
Speaker 1: you'll be like, oh, that's why that's that way. It's
Speaker 1: just you learn a lot about about food production. And
Speaker 1: then you also learn a lot about when you're when
Speaker 1: you're looking at farms and ranches, how to kind of
Speaker 1: interpret what it is you're seeing, and when you're looking
Speaker 1: at those price discrepancies, when you're looking at those price
Speaker 1: discrepancies in the grocery store attached to different descriptors, why
Speaker 1: that might look the way it looks because there's a point,
Speaker 1: like you said with chicken, you know, I mean, there's
Speaker 1: a point you're gonna someone's gonna walk walk in. The
Speaker 1: consumer is going to walk in and they're going to see,
Speaker 1: you know, chickens on sale for like a buck of pound,
Speaker 1: or they're like, well, how why is this? Holes are
Speaker 1: selling his chicken for eight dollars a pound or whatever
Speaker 1: the hell it is. I'm not telling you don't I
Speaker 1: don't know how you're going to break on that buying decision,
Speaker 1: but at least you won't feel like it's robbery. You'll
Speaker 1: feel like, oh, that's for that, that's where that money goes,
Speaker 1: Like that's why that's that way.
Speaker 2: Well, there's a lot wrong with the way we produce
Speaker 2: food in this country, sadly, and I was part of that,
Speaker 2: My dad was part of the leadership, and my made
Speaker 2: the decision to go on another way and have really
Speaker 2: been pleased with the results, but ready to admit that
Speaker 2: the financial benefit is not going to make room for
Speaker 2: a lot of people to do it. It's sad. I
Speaker 2: hope that changes. I don't know whether it will or not.
Speaker 2: In this book, I tried to be as clear and
Speaker 2: honest on that as I knew how to be and uh,
Speaker 2: people have to make their own decisions.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it's it's it's I mean, even just talking
Speaker 1: you today, you're I'll tell you one thing you're not.
Speaker 1: You ain't a huckster.
Speaker 2: M hm.
Speaker 1: Like you seem pretty you seem pretty open to the
Speaker 1: trade offs, you know. You know, but I think that
Speaker 1: if we had more time, I think we would get
Speaker 1: into and probably could just touch on it for a minute.
Speaker 1: I mean there's also a gamble here and and and
Speaker 1: you explained that if when people look at regenitive agriculture,
Speaker 1: organic agriculture, whatever, and you can make the claim like, well,
Speaker 1: how are you going to feed eight billion people on that?
Speaker 1: And you raise some questions like, uh, I don't know
Speaker 1: that we should feed eight billion people. And the earth
Speaker 1: has it's not debatable there is a carrying The Earth
Speaker 1: has a carrying capacity. There's a point at which the
Speaker 1: Earth will not support some number, and there's gonna be
Speaker 1: a limiting factor on how many people the Earth can feed.
Speaker 1: If it winds up being that the limiting factor is acreage,
Speaker 1: traditional industrialized farming is gonna be the way to go.
Speaker 1: If the limiting factor winds up being soil, water, on
Speaker 1: and on and on. We're gonna have to rethink ship.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: It's just like like what is gonna be the thing
Speaker 1: we run out of?
Speaker 2: You know, you know, the the the there's so many
Speaker 2: losers in the food production system that we have.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: I've been criticized for being critical of the farmers. Really
Speaker 2: don't intend to be. They came up in an industrial
Speaker 2: food production system and embraced it and got good at it,
Speaker 2: and it's taken risk and that's the way they produce
Speaker 2: food and they see nothing wrong with it, and I
Speaker 2: didn't either, But there there are downsides and there are risks,
Speaker 2: and there are problems with it and their environmental you know,
Speaker 2: I don't even talk about health and safety and all that.
Speaker 2: I talk about the things I know about, which your
Speaker 2: environmental out of the welfare and the rural economy, and
Speaker 2: the way we've been producing food since World War Two
Speaker 2: has been devastating in those three areas. Some other things too,
Speaker 2: But I don't get into that. That's not my expertise. So,
Speaker 2: you know, should we produce food differently? I think we should?
Speaker 2: Are we going too? I think we are soon a
Speaker 2: little later.
Speaker 1: It's gonna be forced down at at some point.
Speaker 2: I don't know how how bad it's got to get.
Speaker 2: You know that, you know the UH. I quit using
Speaker 2: the term organic because you can legally have certified organic
Speaker 2: vegetables grown in a house with artificial lights and high
Speaker 2: high gris panically no soil. It's certif out organic. Now
Speaker 2: there's a lot wrong with that, and we could we
Speaker 2: could go down a whole long list of things that
Speaker 2: we do that are I think disingenuous and wrong and
Speaker 2: and damaging and unhealthy. But until the consumer decides to
Speaker 2: change it, change won't come from the government. Change won't
Speaker 2: come from big multinational corperations. Change won't come from land
Speaker 2: grant universities. I can give you a bunch of other places.
Speaker 2: Change won't come from the usda UD. If change occurs,
Speaker 2: it'll be because of consumers. And then it won't And
Speaker 2: it won't happen with consumers until things get really bad.
Speaker 2: The food costs more, I mean, my food costs more.
Speaker 2: I hate that I do, but I can't help it.
Speaker 1: You wish it was cheap?
Speaker 5: Oh?
Speaker 2: I wish? You know A question I hate is I
Speaker 2: can be telling people, a group of people, what I
Speaker 2: think we ought to do to farm to make food better.
Speaker 2: For that where the land and the animal and climate
Speaker 2: and rural communities and whatever else. And I think I
Speaker 2: did a good job. And they say, but what are
Speaker 2: you gonna do about all the people that are starving?
Speaker 2: How about you handling that? I got a good idea.
Speaker 2: Let that be your project. You know, I corrected a
Speaker 2: bunch of stuff. You take you take that one. I
Speaker 2: don't know, and you know I'm a I'm as sensitive
Speaker 2: about people being hungry as anybody else. But the fact
Speaker 2: is I simply don't have that ausole. I wrote down
Speaker 2: all the answers I had in this book, and it's
Speaker 2: a great start. But h you know, I can't solve
Speaker 2: world hunger, world peace either.
Speaker 1: Man. I hope you. I mean, it's a great book,
Speaker 1: but I hope you're keeping more detailed notes too, because
Speaker 1: if it's all, uh, you know, if in a hundred
Speaker 1: years people like, holy shit, we should have listened to
Speaker 1: that guy from Georgia, I hope he wrote them down
Speaker 1: eighteen inches of peanuts shells, dead cow.
Speaker 2: I give you my word. I hadn't written much. Now,
Speaker 2: I promise you that.
Speaker 1: How did how do identify a dung beetle when you
Speaker 1: see one? You know, well, thanks for coming on the show,
Speaker 1: and thanks for doing the book.
Speaker 2: Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed it.
Speaker 1: This is fun. Uh, you're gonna hate me because, uh
Speaker 1: but what what is the pup date?
Speaker 2: Sipton last September, last September.
Speaker 1: Scrub that out, Phil. I just wanted to make sure
Speaker 1: I had it right with available.
Speaker 5: Now, very very available now.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, if you don't, if you don't believe it.
Speaker 1: Available, get it anywhere anywhere boats are sold. Boulder turned
Speaker 1: to giving a damn one farm six generations in the
Speaker 1: Future of food, Will Harris. If you get into the acknowledgments,
Speaker 1: you'll see our good friend Mark Jerald listening to the acknowledgments.
Speaker 1: Mark's good guy. But don't don't everybody go send the
Speaker 1: Mark your proposals.
Speaker 2: Don't.
Speaker 1: Yeah, don't send them all your proposes. It's just I
Speaker 1: don't know. I don't know if he digs around, you know,
Speaker 1: and publishing lingo. They call that the slush pile, and
Speaker 1: and and I don't know that they. I can't make
Speaker 1: any promises that he's going to dig around through his
Speaker 1: mail and find your stuff. So if you don't hear
Speaker 1: from him, it's not that it wasn't a good idea.
Speaker 1: It might just be that he never looked. All right, well,
Speaker 1: thank you man, and uh wait, Oat Pastures. They go
Speaker 1: on your website obviously, right pastures dot Com. Make an order. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: they can go down there, they can look around. Please,
Speaker 1: they can tour the compost site.
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
Speaker 1: I might go in there and you might see me
Speaker 1: out there kicking through those peanuts shells trying to find
Speaker 1: out what exactly is going on under there.
Speaker 2: Everybody, everybody wants to see it. It's just beautiful grass.
Speaker 2: It's just high I mean yeah, really, yeah, it's great.
Speaker 1: A lot of a lot of possums.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, we talked about that. If you keep it,
Speaker 2: if you keep it covered, it's incredible. How few apostles, bobcats,
Speaker 2: raccoons very few?
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, there's no vultures undercover. If there's no vultures,
Speaker 1: If there's no vultures, I believe it. All right, thank
Speaker 1: you very much for coming on, and everybody go check
Speaker 1: out the book. Thank you, thank you. All.
Speaker 9: The sun is rising, a light up the coach making
Speaker 9: a stand all day. There's a cold case, a long
Speaker 9: storm out over under seven hundred second half. Please round
Speaker 9: the dogs to the northwest corner the creek. If the
Speaker 9: water rained down season comes, we'll find someplace to hunt. No,
Speaker 9: they're gonna miss this ground. We're selling the farm in
Speaker 9: the morning, all the words and the fields and the fence.
Speaker 9: And I wish somebody could help me in a way that.
Speaker 6: It all made sins while we're raising hell and night,
Speaker 6: even if it's the very last.
Speaker 9: Time, So long to the good days, because the room
Speaker 9: has been taken it hard.
Speaker 6: It's been fifteen years since she.
Speaker 9: Cried our hear of birth, young who loves after the
Speaker 9: lamb went to sleep last night and he died.
Speaker 4: Id eyo stew the farm in the morning.
Speaker 6: All the roads that we made in the mud, we'll
Speaker 6: be leave been.
Speaker 9: A lifetime behind us. The generation texts us blood.
Speaker 6: Over raising hell and night, even if it's the very
Speaker 6: last time, and.
Speaker 9: So much for the good thing. There's a new bunch
Speaker 9: of deer in the bottom. I promise to my daughters
Speaker 9: and sons. Don't know how I'm gonna make up the memory.
Speaker 6: I won't stop until I'm done. Don't know what time
Speaker 6: we gotta leave here, tomorroom.
Speaker 9: Don't know what I'm gonna say s to them? How
Speaker 9: for upond by tonight. But we're gonna be burning one anyway.
Speaker 9: We're selling the farm in the morning. All the bucks
Speaker 9: send the snacks in the hogs. It's a world, this
Speaker 9: passion memory shift in a couple of saddle songs, Well
Speaker 9: were raising hell the knife, even if.
Speaker 6: It's the very last time.
Speaker 9: And then don't give up on the good days.