Joanna, hello, everyone. You are listening to the regenerative by design podcast where we will be getting to the root of health, climate, economics and food. I am your host. Joni quinwell Moore, join me on this journey as we explore the stories of individuals and organizations who are working to realign our food system with both human health and the health of our planet. Welcome to the regenerative by design podcast.
We're doing a Saturday recording here in Drury, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, today, and I've got my friend Keith mortar joining me. Welcome Keith. Thank you. Glad to be here. Yeah, I'm happy to have you. We've been trying to do this for like, couple years, I think, yeah, it's been at least a couple years. Yeah, I wouldn't do it at first, and I finally said, Okay, I'll do it. So yeah, yeah, it's gonna change for me. I know. Well, you've got a great story, and I think more people
need to hear it. And for our listeners out there today, you know, there that are familiar with our content on regenerative by design, we're always trying to unpack these concepts around the design thinking that is needed to create a regenerative world. And when you look at agriculture and you know, field management, there's always this constant conversation we're up against with folks. And when I'm talking about regenerative out in the market world, and they say, well, there's no way we can
feed the world with this regenerative ad thing. That's impossible. We're going to lose all our yields. And, you know, it's this utopian thing. But, you know, I've Keith, I've been to your farm, and I I've seen what you and Austin do, and I want you guys to tell your story and but first, let's just get started and let us know a little bit about your farm. Where do you farm? What makes it different. It's a desert out there and and that's another really important part of the
story. So take it away for a minute and let let our listeners know a little bit about you. Yeah. So we farm north central, eastern Oregon, about an hour south and maybe a little bit west, or Hermiston, Oregon. We farm about 4000 acres of tillable land. Total land owned is about 4500 acres. We raise a few cows. We are primarily a wheat farm. For the most part. We do raise sorghum, some
sorghum, some sunflowers. We used to raise barley, but the price of barley has been so bad, we just can't afford to take the loss on the on the income. My parents bought the farm back in 1961 raised I got two older brothers, an older sister and two younger sisters, and four of six of us are in agriculture in one way or another. My parents are pretty fortunate. We we all got college educations of some kind or another. They kind of
stressed education to us kids, is was a good thing. Yeah, we so went to college, like most people do, came back to the farm, and I guess the summer of 91 after I graduated college from Keith, where'd you go? Just a community college. That's awesome. Community College, educated group. I'm just gonna stop for a quick second and say, like, I talked to a lot of farmers and you guys are one educated lot. It's incredible. Yeah, by trade, I'm a mechanic. That's and I really like to do that.
Unfortunately, my body is broke down and and doesn't allow me to do that as much as I used to. But I got a young son that has kind of taken that over, but so came back to the farm, got into the farm, and think as a partner with my dad and one of my older brothers about the same time we were partnered up until about 2006 and then families and everything that's involved with families kind of split up the farm, and they went their way, and I went my way. Where I currently farm is what we call
our home ranch. We had another farm that was a little ways away. My other brother gotten the separation, and then so we were farming conventional. My dad farmed what we call conventional agriculture, where they go out and they actually chisel plow the land. Back in the day, they chisel plot twice, and Rod weed it, put their fertilizer on at some point during the year, and then then they would seed it. That was the
program, and that's what they were told to do. That's what the universities were promoting back when he started farming. Um. Also, what insurance and all the other structures, there wasn't any insurance back then, was the thing. I mean, you're talking to 1960s 70s and 80s. There was no insurance. Yeah, insurance didn't come around until, for us, anyhow, it didn't come around till the 2000s basically, I think you
could get some insurance, but it was cost prohibitive. Basically, I mean, you know, what you get in return was, was not that much for the cost of the insurance. So most people didn't take, we didn't realize it was that recent, yeah, within the last 25 years, wow, that wide scale crop insurance was available, as in disaster. Crop insurance is what we call it not
hail. And hail insurance has always been around. Fire Insurance has always been around, but not drought insurance, basically, is what, what we're insuring against, really, yeah, so, so in 2009 I made the switch constant, that the switch to direct seeding. And I thought, well, direct seeding will solve a lot of the issues that we were we were running into and direct seeding for direct seeding, yeah. So in our area, we only get about six to 10
inches of rainfall annually. It really, really, really varies. We're in one of the lowest rainfall areas of wheat production in the world that's cost effective to farm. It just a little ways north of me in Washington state, is, is what they call the horse heavens. And that was declared the driest place in the world that we just is raised. You know, 20 years
ago or something, anyhow. So we, we started to get into direct seed, which is direct seed is as you put the seed without any cultivation, right into the soil, with all your fertilizer and all the plant needs right there at planning. And typically we're a fall planted weed area in this area of the state, and it's going right into the stubble, right like into the stubble now we have to, we, we summer fall that ground using
chemical chemicals to summer fall that gland. We, we don't plow it under like we used to. It gets rid of that tension on the surface of the soil that allows that makes the water want to run off of a conventionally fallowed field in the
summertime. And so we did that for a couple years, and then I got really into variable rate seed grabber, rate fertilizer got really into for about 10 years, got really into grid sampling, which is where you take your field on a on a computer, you break it up into these, these sections that are similar to one another, and you go and you pull soil samples out of those areas. You send it to the lab, you look at it, you put those values back into the map. You look you take your yield
data, you lay your yield data over that also. And then about five years into that, I got a grant to get a protein monitor, so we start laying protein quality of the grain over the top of that. Yet we also did East EC mapping, electro conductivity mapping, and so we laid that map over the top of that yet and continue to build these maps on top of one another. And I think we probably had five or six maps we were using to try and help us gain on our yield. And we you could see
where our better better. Our better soils were at more poor soils were at initially, and my goal was, is that I our yields will vary so much under under our environment. I always think about physics class when I was in high school and learning about sine waves from my physics teacher, and our yields are like a sine wave. They just go up and down and up and down and up and
down. And some years they go way high, and then a year later they'll just drop like a rock back down to, you know, say, 10 bushel acre you might have had cut 71 year and 10 the following year. That is a crazy, crazy variation, yeah, and so, so it's, it's hard to financially get stable in a system like that, because got good, good crops one year and bad crops the next, you know. So it's really it was really tough, you know. So the whole goal was trying to flatten that sine wave
out. We could still have variation, but we were trying to prevent that real bad drop. But yet, maybe we weren't getting a maximum amount of yield, but we weren't getting the least amount of yield a couple years or the next year, either because we. Were eliminating that. We were trying to just limit our fertilizer from damaging our crops. Fertilizer is what was really, is what really damages the crop.
Fertilizer was actually damaging your practice. Not we know that, but it takes a certain amount of fertilizer. That's something most people don't I mean, like, I talk to you a lot in our community, so I'm familiar with this concept. But honestly, the first time I heard that, I think it was maybe 2018 2019, probably at one of the conferences with you guys. I it was a mic drop
moment for me. I was like, Wait, did I just hear you? Right? I think, I think it would be really important for our listeners to have you unpack that a little bit more, because a lot of people, this is where the hang up is for people when we think about this regenerative by design process, I think that the general sentiment out there is, like, more is always better, you know. And like, the more you dump on the on to the field, the
more it's going to produce. And you guys know, and you have proof that that is not true. Yeah. So in our area, we always, we always try to just fertilize
for what we thought the crop was going to be. So and my dad, my brothers and I never had been really big fertilizer consumers, I guess, on our soil to start with, and and so I don't know how to exactly explain this Johnny, but when you put an extreme amount of fertilizer On a field or on an acre, that plant pulls all that fertilizer up into the system, takes it'll, it'll raise a really robust green, dark green plant with
lots of on wheat. We call it tillers. It'll look really great, and everything and and that's what that's what nitrogen fertilizer does for a crop. It just makes it look green, gives it lots of foliage, but it doesn't grow any roots. Is the biggest problem with that whole system. And when it does this, and you have a lack of moisture, and you got all this foliage, something, something has you've burned up your basically, your soil calories, your moisture. Moisture is is everything when
it comes to raising any crop, I don't even in your garden. If you don't have good moisture in your garden, you don't get a good crop out of your garden. Yeah, it's a limiting reagent. Always, it's a limiting it's a limiting factor in our area, there's no doubt about it. And so you get a great big plant of wheat out there, and then you don't get any rain, say, in the spring of the year, and you've got lots of nitrogen on there's two things happen. One, it starts pruning the plant back to
what it thinks. It can actually, actually produce seed for the moisture that's left. And so you it dries out, and then when it gets closer to actually making the seed, it will continue to prune that down, and will even prune in the head the number of seeds that the that the head will actually produce. And so, wow, what we were trying to do is pick a rate of seed and a rate of fertilizer, with our variable rate according and based on our variable rate maps, basically, and knowledge of the
soil. I mean, I'm 55 years old. Been driving tractor since I was 12. How many times I've been over that land I couldn't count on. I have no idea how many times I've been over that land,
how many times I cut it probably four years. Yes, you know the length, intuition and just innate wisdom about it, and then you're coupling it with computer, yeah, which helps you see things that maybe you just couldn't see before, or maybe, you know, there was some sort of bias, or lack of being able to pull those variables together. Really cool. How sophisticated farms are these days, yeah.
And so we did that for eight years, I guess. And so I'm a member of the Pacific Northwest right Seed Association and I am the president for this year next year. I don't know if that's good or not, but anyhow, I think it was in 2020, let's see. It was prior to pandemic, and my brain's a little fuzzy on when the pandemic was but, but it was like two years before the pandemic. We brought Joel Williams down, and Joel Williams was talking about fertilizers and and a whole bunch of things.
And these, these soil health guys get, get you to start to think. And started thinking a little bit about crop rotation. Association couldn't, you know, didn't know where to go with it. Because there was nobody really out there that I could really ask in the area about, you know, what they had did or what they had seen there. There was one guy that had played around with some stuff, but, but not on a serious scale of any, any size, you know, and so not on 4000 acres a lot,
correct? So we so went to the conference the following year, and they brought in John Kemp and, and for those of you who don't know who John keaf is, he's, he's a soil health guy out of Ohio. He's an Amish guy. So I'm sitting in the audience, and he brings up on the screen, you know, basically it's in Genesis where, you know, it says that, you know, man is put on the earth to take care of the Earth and all its beings. And, boy, that kind of hit, hit home with me a little bit, you know, kind
of a religious person myself. And I sat there and shook my head that he'd have guts to do that. And, yeah, but I was, I was at that conference, I remember that. Yeah, he, before he put that up, he says, No, I know that there's a lot of farmers out there, and a lot of you are good Christians and and if you're not a Christian, this isn't meant to upset you, but it just wants you to make make you aware of this or something, but
something to that being. And John can probably tell you the exact wording you used, knowing John probably used it before, probably used it before, which, I think it's a good way to start off his conversation with you, where he comes from. So we listened to his day, that whole day, and it was all about crop rotation and what you're actually doing to the soil, and what's your why you're doing it, and cover crops, what they do.
And we just proceeded down this my wife and I were flying out to see our daughter and son in law in Omaha the day after the conference got over, and we were staying at the hotel, and John just happened to be flying out the next day too, and we sat in the restaurant and had like, a two hour conversation, best two hours time I could have ever spent with somebody, yeah, any. And he started to convince me more and more that I needed to be trying something, and that that that did it for me. That's
that's when I said, Okay, I'm gonna go home and do this. So our, our fall wheat crop. I kind of like I said, this is all pre pandemic. So that fall wheat crop had been planted conventionally, with all conventional fertilizers and everything. But I had really under fertilized it because we
didn't know what the spring was going to be. That that's kind of I was always in this I'm going to do two passes of fertilizer on a on our conventional system, before we went regenerative, we're going to do two passes of fertilizer, one in the fall, wait and see what spring brought, and then put on what we thought the spring was going to be after that. Well, we did
that. We put on what we thought would get us through the spring, and then the spring, we totally changed our whole mode system to a regenerative system in the spring, which I don't really recommend doing if somebody is going to go down this regenerative you want to make that change when that crop is planted, and I learned that. I've learned that over the last couple of years. That makes sense. It does make a huge
difference. And so we've basically been trying to raise our crop regeneratively ever since, and John got me interested in raising all these crops that I would have never thought, like I said, sunflowers and sorghum and and I've thought about other things, like fava beans and some of that kind of stuff, but I can only take so much risk and market there's just no market development or value added processing for diversity out here, so that, yeah, I was gonna get to that a little bit. So the
first couple years, we raised sunflowers and sorghum. We had a pretty good market for it. We could, we could put it into it. And so unfortunately, two years ago, we raised some sorghum and some sunflowers, and we're still sitting on it. It's a bad deal sitting on, you know, 30, $40,000 of this crop we can't move it. Is what it is. I think we might have the sunflower sold here, which that'd be great. If we do the sorghum, I wanted to haul it far enough, I can probably get rid of it. Yeah, it
that the trucking is just that's our biggest issue. Yeah, it kills. It is exactly right. Mm, hmm. So two years, three years ago, we started using the California what do they call it? California Commission, wheat labs down in California, the Claudia Carter, yeah, and she was on season one for people who are listening Claudia, we had a really awesome session couple years back. So, yeah, I've never met her. John Kemp gave me her contact information,
and I called her up, and we started talking. So I decided to send her down some some samples. And she calls me back and says, What are you doing to your to your wheat? And I said, Well, what do you mean? What am I doing on my wheat? And she goes, Well, some of this is the highest stuff we've ever seen tested in this lab for baking quality. And so I, when I started getting hold of Joni here, and said, Hey, I got this. And Johnny's been marketing around and and it's just really
tough. And when you have, you know, mortgages to meet and everything, sometimes you got to sell a product you really don't want to sell into the open market. And I always wondered, you know, like most of the wheat in the Pacific Northwest gets, gets shipped out to the the Pacific Rim countries of of Asia. A lot of wheat goes into Japan and South Korea and the Philippine Islands and Malaysia and and and those countries over
in there. And I always have wondered, you know, you haul in, you know, 30,000 bushel of of wheat that is off the charts for baking, and they start milling it, and it screws up their whole mix that they're doing, because all of a sudden your baking quality is way higher than what they are anticipating. Yeah, yeah. And you always, I guess, I've always kind of wondered
what they what they think when that comes through there. It's like, you know, it's as time has gone by and we've, we've continued to do this over the last three years, we have found some mills that are interested in what we're what we're doing with our wheat and and it's big, it'll be good for us if we can continue to do, do the flour mill thing within the states here. But markets. I can't stress this enough to raise some
of these other crops that that I would like to raise. I have to have the market. We had to have coordination between market development and development of programs at the field level, so that we're driving diversity in the field. But that's not going to work if
we're not driving diversity on the market side. And that's what's so frustrating about this whole regenerative thing, is any and all of the investment that's gone into the regenerative movement all goes to the farm or like certain parts, but nobody wants to invest in developing market side. I mean, I've learned that the hard way. And, you know, there's just no no no reward for it. And so that's what puts a stalemate in the
entire system. And one of the only people out there really trying to work on it can't get investment money, so you end up working for free, you know, like you're just a philanthropy person without anybody, yeah? Like nobody, you know. I mean, I spent the better of four years trying to raise money to really do this, and couldn't get anybody interested. Yeah. I mean, we raised a tiny bit of money, but not enough to actually really get, get what we needed to get done, done. You
know, it's just frustrating. Didn't raise a dime this year, not one penny. So it's, it's just, you know, no matter how much we go to these, you know, investors and whatnot, we're like, look, you know, we've even starting to get interested parties, but you can't. If you don't have any support financially. You don't have any staff. You don't, you know,
like, can't really get the thing done. So we've got to have the world wake up and go, Okay, if we're going to make this regenerative thing work, we have got to figure out how to bridge the gap between the market and the in the fields, and that involves value added, processing and orchestration of supply demand within the system so that it's creating a holistic model that supports regeneration. We absolutely do not have that
today. It doesn't exist. Well, here in another month, if I can raise money, we will have it. But we just need, if we need investors, to actually lean in and get this done. Yeah. And you know, what really irritates me is everybody thinks it's really easy to be a regenerative grower, you know?
And when we spend a lot of time, there's a lot to it. We spend a lot of time on testing, we spend a lot of time sitting our butts in the sprayer, because instead of putting all your nutrients in your soil, which we don't do anymore, and we basically fully
are applying in the nutrients. It, it, it's just a tough business, you know, to keep I mean, I like knowing you, all of you regenerative folks in the Inland Northwest, like you guys invest an incredible amount of time in learning and conferences and podcasts and books, and I mean, you guys are very voracious learners, and I feel like you guys also really paid attention to the nuances of your plants, SAP testing, like a whole nother level of soil testing, and that's that is time and money
that is invested into your farm. Yeah. I mean, I'll spend all week at this direct Seed Conference. And anyway, in January, it says 6/7, and eighth and and, you know, I'll come away with some new idea that we'll want to try, you know, but our our agronomists that we really rely upon, has has really helped a lot, because, yeah, it's applying it, it's understanding exactly what
you're doing. And then you can't just find the ingredients that we need by going down to the local fertilizer shop, because they're not going to help you find these ingredients. These ingredients. It takes a special it takes a special person or special nice facility to do what we need to a has a line of products. There's a couple of different lines of products out there that are really good products, but there's an expense with with these products too, and they're really they can be
really expensive. Yeah, the banks don't always want to cover it either from what it's it's not like in the normal prescription, you know. And so that's starting to change somewhat at the banking level, at the national level, at the national banking level, they're starting to starting to get an understanding that maybe, you know, some of the same exactly healthy for the environment and
the people. And they've got people on both sides of the of the street, the health conscious people, and then the farmers that they're also loaning money too, and they've got stockholders and everything else. So there the banks, some of the banks and national banks are starting to change. We're trying to get more data to show that the investments in these regenerative amendments and management interventions are actually de risking the farms, you know, overall loan for the
year, because there's a lot more resiliency. There's a lot more drought resiliency. There's a lot more stability with, you know, making sure that you're going to get a crop against all odds. And so, you know, as we start to develop more robustness around those kind of, basically, data frameworks that can support the hypothesis. I think that's where we're going to see a lot
of change in policy around banking and insurance. That's like, hey, actually these regenerative methodologies, there's an upfront cost, but boy, it's in the long run, it's de risking the investment overall, like you're going to have more success the whole point in regenerative agriculture really is, is to get your biology and your microbials and your fungi to actually work for you. You know, everybody talks about storing carbon, you know, and the farmland is some of the biggest sink for for
carbon there is. But the problem is, mainstream agriculture, every time there, there's some kind of a plant ailment out there, it's all about spraying that problem instead of asking, you know, why is that there? Why is that weed there? Why is that there? Well, the reason that that disease is there is because you have an unhealthy soil that allowed that disease to creep in on that plant. And the same goes the same goes for weed in our area, probably the biggest four weeds we have to deal with are
Russian tussle kosher. We call it marestail, and then prickly lettuce, or China let us Whichever name you prefer for for that one, but and they're all there for a specific reason. And when we went to regenerative agriculture, not that we don't have Russian Tesla anymore, but it is pretty low on the totem pole from where it used to be when we started into the direct seed thing. Now, our mayor's tail and our prickly lettuce are
probably some of our biggest ones. And if you really deep, do a deep dive into the soil, the reason that they're there is because through chemicals that we've applied to the soil, and the way that certain chemicals react in the soil, they've tied those micronutrients up in the soil. And if you take a plant SAP analysis on prickly lettuce, throughout the year of its growth, it contains very high levels of micronutrients in the
plant. So it is mining the micronutrients out of the plant or out of the soil, which are tied up due to the chemistries that we have applied over the last 70 years of chemistries being used on the soil. Very important point, Keith and so if you think about weeds as weeds, and you think they're bad, and you just go spray them with Roundup. I'll just use Roundup, because that's the one everybody knows. If you go out and just spread with Roundup, and you think that's going to kill it,
well, certain weeds now are resistant to Roundup. And you ask, Well, why are they resistant to Roundup? Well, they've developed an internal clock. They've changed genetically to be able to ward off the micronutrient in the plant that they are actually that that chemical actually
targeted in order to kill that plant. And so these micronutrients, least on wheat, we are finding micronutrients are the number one problem with the wheat crop we're raised, and I don't care what micronutrient is, not that we still don't apply nitrogen, but we're applying about third or less of the amount of nitrogen we used to apply. It's it's one of the lower input costs we have to deal with today. But on our farm anyhow, our biggest micronutrients that we're having
to put on are zinc, copper, molybdenum, nickel. Those are some of the biggest ones we have to apply just about every time we're applying fine. Your area naturally low in those or is it more tied up to, you know, tied to the fact that they're chelated with chemicals that are there from previous to do with their chelated with the chemicals in the soil and and so we have found, by putting that on there and not putting on so much nitrogen, that we're not having to spray for things like
rust. Well, how do you get rid of us? Do you spray a fungicide on and get rid of rust? And, you know, I went to a seminar here the other day, and they're talking about spring fungi on and, and the guy that was talking about it says, you know, there's some people out here that are saying, you know, you want to be careful of this, because you're doing a lot of damage to your soils. And he says, there's a valid point in this. You are doing damage to your soil. You know, fungi are
where the carbon stored at. And so if you're looking at a carbon contract and you're saying, well, they're, they're going to pay me $50 an acre for this carbon to be stored in the land, you know? And you're in a conventional system, you might be like some foreign farmer in Iowa that took a big contract from General Motors, and then all of a sudden he can't meet his carbon contract. Now he owes General Motors money. Yeah,
exactly. And so just you want to be cautious of that type of the system until you know how you're able to store the carbon, yeah, and you've got that microbial ratio, you know, only towards a regenerative balance, correct? And our goal is to to actually get to the point where maybe we're only having to apply one or two micronutrients a year, and they may not ever be the same one from year to year, but for some reason, we're not able to extract it out of the
soil. You know, we we had Christine Jones at a seminar down in Colton, Washington this year. Yeah, mind boggling lecture, I have to say that was the biggest thing. She said is quit putting phosphate down and put putting fungicide on your seat, and you will get your fungi. You'll get your phosphate out of your soil. If you quit putting it down and you and you quit putting fungi on, fungicide on your seed, yeah. And everybody goes, well, how do you
get away without putting fungicide down? Well, we're using a worm castings extract, and we apply the worm castings extract with a couple other things on the seed, and that protects the seed. And you. Within 24 hours, in general, in our area, we can get our seed sprouted, and within 48 hours we got the end of sperm coming out, the radical coming out, and the roots are going down within within 48 hours of germination. And that's pretty beautiful soil aggregation around those roots.
You've sent me pictures a few days after they're planted, and it's like there's so much exudate that's protecting that delicate little root. And that delicate little root journey is what, well that, yeah, that's what they're delicate. That's what the fungi attached to, is that delicate little root, you know, and I'm not an expert in that. I mean, there's a lot of people that are can better explain what actually takes place than what I can
explain happens. But to me, it's all about the root. I think it was, I don't know if it was John Kemp with sand, or Rick Clark or who, or somebody else that I've listened to over the years. Basically, you whatever you have above the ground, you want one or three quarters of that below ground. So if you have six inches of plant on top, you want 18 inches of root below that well, and they say you can actually get more roots in that if, if you do everything perfect. And so that's our goal
is, is to get more root down on the plant. It's all about the roots that you can get the in my area, I can raise a good wheat crop if I can get that plant to root down, yeah, yeah, which is like, the opposite of what we you know, the goals were 30 years ago where people were actually kind of like, oh, that's just a waste of metabolism effort, you know, developing all these big, deep roots and, you know, we don't want the plants secreting all their sugar into the
rhizosphere, because then they're wasting energy that they could be putting into yield. And, you know, now we, we're looking at it so differently.
So, you know what, really, what really irritates me is, is, you got 10s of 1000s acres of solar panels out there, you know, and you're gonna, you're gonna save all this carbon going in the environment, you know, from not burning fossil fuels anymore, but yet they go out there and they sterilize under those solar panels and kill everything out from underneath those solar panels. Yeah. So if a fire comes through, they're not burning up their solar farm, and they're capturing the sunlight, just
like my wheat plants do. The cat, that wheat Croc, is a big solar panel, is what it is, yeah. And so, you know, it's pulling, it's pulling in the sunlight, making chlorophyll. The chlorophyll is pulling in the carbon, and the plants are exuding the carbon out the roots into the soil, defeating all the, all the little animals that are in the soil, and then the plant exudates oxygen, and yet they want to put in all these 1000s acres solar panels on all those good, good producing
farmland. And people need to be worried about that who consume food and rely upon farmers to to to produce it solar panels going on good, viable farmland, because, like you said, they're just nuking it underneath with toxic chemicals. I mean, voltaics, like that. I get like that can be great, especially for crops that need a little shade, you know, like, or you're doing some grazing underneath, yeah, but to just go out there and nuke it chemical warfare style, then put a bunch
of solar panels on top, just to me, seems completely asinine. It just doesn't make sense to me. It is roofs and asphalt parking lots that could have them on there. You know, exactly, exactly every, every house and you know, in these cities, these needs to be, have solar panels. Yeah, manufacturing malls like you, think about all the parking lots cool, put solar panels on top of there. That's a win win for so many reasons. But going out to viable farmland and making it unusable is crazy.
Give you a context about how much power, how many acres it takes to make one megawatt of power. It takes six acres. I this is what I heard a while back, and I'll probably be told I was wrong on this, which that's fine, but it takes six acres of solar panels to make one megawatt of power. So we're where we live, to the north of us and a little bit east. They're putting in 40,000 acres of solar panels. Wow. And they're paying the growers
enough money that the growers say that they cannot. Farm that land and make that much money farming the land. So when people talk about the high price of food, if agricultural land keeps getting shoved into industrial electrical stuff, just so people in town can turn in their lives and feel good about, you know,
being being green all the time. Well, they can do the same thing if they want regenerative and store that carbon, yeah, in the soil, using nature, yeah, even the nature you know, you know, it's you need to bring it back to a nature based
system, and that would correct a lot of the problems. But so many of these, you know, so called solutions, are so reductionistic and still so completely side of nature based systems and nature based solutions that God only knows what other externalities will come from that, because it's not thinking holistically. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, the other thing is, on a, on a bad solar day, on a, you know, bad sunlight day, they're not making
one megawatt on six acres. You know, it's only on a good, good, clear day that they'll make that kind of production. It's kind of like, when I on our farm, I'd rather have wind towers, and the ugliness of a wind tower versus that, at least I still can use the soil for something. Yeah, you still have good, usable land that can be productive, growing food and sequestering carbon, and, you know, creating systems, you know, like, that's the thing is, once you kill all that land and
you make it a desert, rain falls. It just, it doesn't absorb. It just floods off of it, and it causes erosion and like, there's just so many externalities associated with it that people don't think about that worry people like us. And I mean, you're one of the guys. I have a quote of you that I I have somewhere. I don't think it's on the website, but it's a great quote, and it says to send it to you, but it says, and I have a recording of
you saying this. You're like, well, you know, I realized one day, do I want to be a slave to the soil, or do I want to be a slave to the chemical companies? And I just decided I want to be a slave to the soil. I always thought that was such a great quote. Well, I still believe that today, I'd rather be a slave to the soil than the slave to the chemical company. Yeah. So yeah.
I mean, just back to this power thing for a second. Yeah. It takes one acre of land, if you include all the road and everything for a wind tower to get two and a half megawatts of power to, I think they're up to two and three quarter megawatts. That's more than and so, so that's 12 acres of land that that you would have that's over, that's almost 3014, about 15 acres of land that you'd have to take out of production and put solar panels on to get the same amount of production, power
production. Yeah, and I totally agree with why aren't these cities got solar panels on every building? Why isn't there a tax incentive for these homeowners solar panels on everyone? Yeah? But, but. And in some areas, like down California, it's required, when you build a new house, to be putting these solar panels on. I have a real problem with making things that are mandated. You know, I guess I'm too conservative when it comes to that, make it in a tax incentive on their property
taxes. Yeah, incentivize it through a tax reduction that means something to them, not just on their income taxes, but have it on their property taxes or something. Yeah, that will get people's attention quicker. That'll get people's attention quicker than anything. Yeah, I think so too. I don't know if you've ever been to this air Nevada brewery, but they have, like, the solar panels
over their parking lot, if I remember correctly. And it was so cool, because it was like, it it made it to where I think their brewery, in the summer months, anyways, was Net Zero. Like, it didn't need to pull any power, pulled it right off the parking lot. It wasn't really cool. I think that all these big parking lots, you go around, all these big manufacturing facilities, and they got acres and acres and acres of parking lots, you know, yeah, you're like, you know,
that's just dead soil underneath there. How about we use the sunlight, you know? Yeah, heating and all of the stuff. So yeah, provide state for people's vehicles and everything else. I mean, I just sit as a good win, win. Yeah, it is getting some traction. People are starting to realize maybe the saying is wise is what we want stock. And people ask, Well, why? Why aren't we placing solar panels on. In on unused land. Well, it comes down to the Endangered Species Act.
Now, there are some areas that would be perfect candidates for that, but there's regulatory things that prevent it. So, yeah, I know this is really sticky for sure, yeah, and it's the cost of building power lines into some of those places too. You know, where there's 40,000 acres of solar panels is going in. I mean, they've already got high voltage power lines coming
up there for windmill production. They're hooking onto those high voltage power lines, and you're just going, Okay, well, I can understand it, but I think it's totally ridiculous, well, and this is the whole design thinking process, like, you know, and that's why we call this show regenerative by design. It's like, how do we really think through the design theory of all of these things so that we're truly considering the true cost, you know, all these externalities. Like, does it
make sense? Is this resilient? Is this realigning our systems with positive human health outcomes and climate resiliency, you know? Like, literally, the resiliency picture, like, Does this make sense on a long time horizon, and so many of the things that we do don't, they've clearly not been thought out
through a long time horizon, and it's frustrating. So, yeah, so that kind of, you know, you were talking about human health there, you know, this human health thing is really, you know, yeah, it's a big deal people, the cancer rates and at least the United States, or through the roof the diabetes rates, or through the roof. That's, you know, I'm in no way an environmentalist, but it worries the hell out of me, because I'm looking at, I got grandkids, you know, I've got a
niece is a diabetic. You know, I've got several cousins that
are diabetics. I know a family that they have two young kids, when they were, like, two years old or three years old, found out that they were each each of these kids were diabetics, both in the same family, auto immune response to things, and all of those things are skyrocketing, type one, Type Two, chronic inflammatory disease, cancer rates, and we're really reacting to a very toxic environment, and it's time we did something about it.
Yeah, and so I look at what I try, what I'm trying to do by raising a much healthier product for consumers, whatever the processors do with it. I mean, if I ever had the opportunity to talk direct to a flower company, I'd say, Look, I'm raising a superior product. How about we try to market this as a superior product? You know, here's the you got, you got somebody that
wants to mill this. You're the you're the name brand. How about, instead of milling down my product to meet your spec by dumping a bunch of garbage into it, you actually just mill my product straight through and call it a platinum flower or something like that. Value that it is, yeah, yeah, exactly you know, because Claudia wouldn't call me up and say, you know, hey, what are you doing different that this week's off
the charts, you know? And and Andrew Ross Oregon State University, who does a lot of testing for new varieties in the Northwest on their milling qualities. I showed him the the printout that Claudia gave me, and he goes, he grabs, after I showed it to him, we talked a while. He grabs by the arm, and
he says, you know, that's very unusual. What you have, that's when, when, when, when you get another person that that's what they do, is they test all the flowers, yeah, for, for, for basically all the Northwest. That's telling me I must be headed down the right road, yeah, well, the question I sent your specs off to a Miller. He goes, where did you get this? This is really remarkable, yeah, and 18 months
to get there. But, you know, early on, I was hitting the COO and the and the CEO, you know, to try to be like guys like that, you know, I know it's a ways away from your current mill, but you need to be paying attention to this. And then yesterday, I talked to a flower brand that is going to be buying through that whole chain. And I was like, Look, we've really got to differentiate this and and help you guys get there so you
can make that commitment on the branded side. Because on the branded side and on the market side, these are the things that a lot of folks on the supply chain side don't understand fully. Is that you can't release a product if you can't scale it. Really do. I mean, like, they're like, so it's, it's this delicate balance of bringing to. Gather the supply and demand and making sure that it's scalable, because the unit economics don't actually work to create a product with a very limited
amount of it. If you're going to go into retail distribution, the only way you can do that is a one off thing online or Amazon, where you can toggle switch it on and off based on availability, which can drive premium because then it's limited edition. But we have a massive disconnect with the consumer channels. So if you're trying to go into national distribution and you're like, This is a special we it's really
high quality, we think people are going to love it. Well, the retailer is going to say, Well, what's going to happen when you run out? Because we're not going to let you just run out and have an empty shelf slot without charging you, because realtor real The reality is, is that grocery is a real estate game. It's not a quality game. And so these are the pieces of the puzzle that have to be brought together to solve this issue.
And you know, we're working on all of that, and we're getting closer all the time, but, you know, it was a real wake up call, you know, in marketing your wheat to bakeries that they were like, well, this is a finite amount, you know, like, like, it just the reality is so much more difficult. I was shocked because, boy, I spent a lot of time circulating that. And, you know, I never, never was able to get anything to the finish line. So it's, you know, it just was a bigger lesson to
me of what we're up against from a systems level perspective. And hence, that's why I'm shifting my work to doing what I'm doing now, to try to bring that together and create some
digitization around it. But it's, it's really a major hurdle we're up against with the food system, because we're never going to have a healthy one if we're still using this broken rule book of how the markets work and the disconnect between quality supply chains and quality food products, that's why we have a garbage in, garbage out system that's making us sick, right? I mean, think about this. You know, you hit it. You hit
something that was very important. It's economy of scale, yeah, and I'll just give you an example people, people don't probably real, really realize this. So where Nabisco makes all their cookies that plant here in the Northwest produces 15,000 cookies an hour. So you figure out how much, figure out how much raw product has to move into that plant every day to make 15,000 cookies an hour is unreal, yeah. And you just sit down. If there's 45 cookies in a bag, just sit down
and figure out how many bags a day are leaving there? How many truckloads of cookies are leaving that facility in a day? And so, you know, I don't have the marketing ability to go out here and put in a million dollars worth of infrastructure to clean that flop, to clean that wheat, to to buy a mill, to buy a mill, stone mill, grind it, bag it, and then sit on Yeah, that much product, no, and then hope to market it through a 365, day a year. No, you
can't. It doesn't even make sense. It's like, that's why we have to have aggregated infrastructure that still can maintain provenance and quality. You know, there's, there's, there's some really new ways emerging where we can get this done without having to put the pressure on farmers to be vertically integrated, because that does not economically work very well. It's really tough to pull off. Some can do it, but
most it's it's really a huge heavy lift. But speaking of Nabisco and these big CPG companies, they have lost a lot of market share because people are starting to lose their taste for super hyper processed garbage. And whether it's because of the injectable weight loss drugs like the GLP ones, or if it's just a shift post COVID and a younger generation coming in saying we don't want to eat that garbage, like Keebler doesn't do it for us, like they're going to have to make a
change. And that's where I'm focused, is like, how can we approach these larger companies and go you guys have a problem. A, consumers want a better quality product, but they still want it to be affordable, so we need to do it at scale. B, you guys have a terrible climate footprint, your externalities and your impact of greenhouse gas emissions is insane. Because you're while we're shipping our wheat to Asia, that plant here in the Northwest is buying all their wheat from Kansas,
probably. So think about all the unnecessary trucking that's due to just a lack of coordination and planning. And so if we really focus on those two market pressures that they're going to have to respond to to keep in the positive on their P and L, because that's going to tank them eventually. You know, they're going to have to make that switch. And so that's where right now, like, we're like, okay, how can we be an asset to
them? How can we can come in with our teams and say, Hey, we've got this incredible network of farmers that have been doing it for a long time. They're at scale. So they're, they're they have proven that the methodology is there to produce higher quality food with lower chemical footprint and a
better environmental soil footprint. You just need to buy it, and we need to coordinate it to get through the value chain using good positive unit economics, like you know what we know for efficiencies, but we're going to maintain that focus on effectiveness. We're going to balance efficiencies and effectiveness at the same time, and that way, we can empower the people like Nabisco, who have distribution all over the freaking world to actually deliver a product that's not
killing Americans. That's the problem. Yeah, it's the scale tech. I don't want to be a farmer that claims to be a farmer and I sit in my office all day, every day. I'm not that kind of person. Drives me crazy. I can't stand to sit in and at
the end of the year, let alone 365, days a year. And I'm more concerned about soil and having something to pass on to the next generation right now, and and, and as long as I have a generation that's wanting to, that's coming up, wanting to take it over, which I'm lucky I have my son, and all of my brothers and sisters have family members that want to take it over, take their operations over. You know, that's a rare,
rare thing anymore. You know, kids get waves on a farm, and they think there's easier fish to fry than sitting on a tractor 14 hours a day for two or three weeks. Or community, too, very rural community, you know. But to me, I like that kind of an area. Yeah, I go to Portland, and it just drives me nuts, yeah, it does, you know. Unfortunately, Spokane does too,
you know. And it's not nearly as big as Portland is, you know, it, you know, I guess I'm trying to provide a good product for for for the mother out there that that wants to feed their their kids, a whole grain product, that is that they know was not sprayed with Roundup in the crop here, that knows that I Did my absolute best to eliminate, at least on the crop, any kind of of chemical products going on that crop, to raise that crop, sort of minerals that the body needs, and, and, and,
you know, the body needs a certain amount of iron, it needs a certain amount of calcium, it needs a certain amount and needs all these micronutrients that currently our flowers are kind of missing, and I really think that that's why our baking quality is through the roof. Is we're providing that plant everything it needs, and so in turn, it bakes at a higher quality. Yeah, and I think the mill we're hauling going to
start hauling weed into here in about a month. I'm really hoping that when he gets the second mill built, that that that his people that he's selling to takes a good look at what we're doing, and everybody wants a certification. Everybody wants you to certify certification. I think certifications have went over the top. You know, organics came out. You know, they kept weakening the organic criteria over time, and now organics
really aren't the organics that we started out with. You know, the restrictions on organics aren't the same as they used to be and become so industrialized, yeah, yeah. And I would rather somebody buy a bag of flour and have the QR code on that thing that says where that flower was bought at, and you could go to the next page and actually see what was all put on that bag of flour at the farmer level, so that you
know what you're buying. Yep, I would like segregation to get to that point to where, to where the consumer knows exactly what they're they're buying. And if the commercial guys don't want to do that, then allow the little the little producers of of the little mills to do it and fill that market, because there's going to be a certain amount of mothers out there and
dads too. Quite often, if mother's very health conscious, the father is too, if they want to spend the extra $3 a bag on a five pound bag of flour, because they can put their phone up to read that QRS code, go to the next page. See that Keith mortar raised that weed. Here's everything he sprayed on that crop. This is how that crop was raised. Click on a little video. Oil that shows this is how our crop was raised and be off with
it. Yeah. In my area, we still have to use some some chemicals to make summer fall, but from what we're being told, the more the soil changes, things changed where we might not be having to use chemicals in the future to maybe control some of our weeds. Yeah,
and I think that's where the market could also help. Because if you know, if you have more market paths for diverse crops, and you know, can actually have summer planting, and you don't have to have that summer fallow anymore, because you can plant something like pros and millet, suddenly, suddenly, you don't need you've just eliminated a lot of the chemical and follow time. So, you know, the other thing, Johnny, most people don't realize is, when you mill a wheat product and you put it in
a bag, it is oxidized within two days where it's lost. All of us are the quality has went down on it. Yeah, and that's a bad deal. And the other thing people don't understand is you can go to the USDA agriculture department, and if you know where to go, you can actually print off a wheat flour label, right off their website that's accepted by USDA whether that bag of flour even meets that criterion. And I hope, I hope that Robert Kennedy throws
a bunch of that stuff out. I hope that's not allowed anymore. Yeah, I hope that they actually have to spend the money on the testing and change their label instead of you go from bag to bag in the store and it's all the same damn stuff, prohibitively expensive for companies trying to do it, especially startups like at that requirement, we would have not been able to even start snack devices because we didn't. I agree with that. But how are you going to get society to change Exactly?
Well, that's why we need we need to have more access to cost effective testing. I mean, when we got started, if we were doing testing on our ingredients. It would have cost us just to do a run, you know, like 1000 pound run. It would have cost us 1000s of dollars in testing. So now your price per pound is like, you know, sky high, yeah. So because it's plant SAP analysis that we use on the crop, there's two labs in the world that I trust. And then
there's a third one I wouldn't trust at all. And I mean, one of them's in the other ones, and ones in Michigan and and, you know, the costs aren't bad. To have a test for what you're getting out of the out of the test. We need good testing to come down in price. I mean, it's luckily, like it's radically changing, like in the last year, but, you know, it hasn't historically been something that even the big
companies could justify, like it was very expensive. You know, what really gets me is that the these big food companies got labs themselves. So I kind of, they don't want people to know, because they're not selling something great, but little companies like us who are like, we're buying, you know, we, you know, like on our batches of sorghum that we've purchased and, you know, we're already, we're barely able to get within a price point that's even close
to acceptable by the public. You know, you throw on another $1,000 of testing per lot and whoa, that you're done. You know, there's just not enough people who care. But I think that's changing too historically, there's not been enough people who cared. I think in the next five years, least the next four years, we're going to see some serious changes come out of USDA on food, food processing, food, food requirements, you know, and reporting on exposure to toxins like desiccants and
stuff. And you know, what's frustrating is, last year, I spent 18 months building the technology needed to deliver a fully QR code connected experience. And unfortunately, that isn't available now due to some unfortunate circumstances that were outside of my control. But you know, we're, we're,
we're putting that back together. So by the end of next year, we should be able to offer that full digitized transparency to a QR code and the story and yeah, so if you're the praying type, say a prayer that we can finally get the money behind us. Money behind us. We need to get this done, and we we can have all this. It could be a reality. We have all the technology needed. We have all the design frameworks in place. We just
need the money to build it and get it done. It could totally and then when you can partner with labs that are doing this kind of testing, and then you have an aggregate like, so that you can have better, approachable pricing, you know, because you're like, hey, look, you know, we've got these 500 food companies that all want this kind of testing, you know, can we bundle this and we're going to report it via QR code so that it's live reporting. Then you can start to move the
needle. You just can't do it on a bootstrap budget. It like, you know, oh, hi, we're gonna, you know, like, save up a couple of bucks for, like, weekend work and get this done. It just doesn't work that way, right, correct? No, I really understand that. So it's so frustrating, because we could have all this stuff, like, we've already built it, and it's just right at the tip of our fingers, you know. So, you know, it comes back. It comes back to the market. You know,
does the market? Is the market willing to change, you know, um, to where I think there's some people coming into USDA that through federal programs of farmers, yet that could change how we look at agriculture altogether here in the next four or five years, what farmers are required, I think we're gonna see the biggest change in our lifetime, about the same age as you Are, Keith and you know, couple years younger, but you know, like in our lifetime, I mean, we've seen
the kind of development of policy and culture around food and food quality through the 70s, 80s, 90s, and I think that we're going to see more change in the next five years than we've seen in the last 50 and in a Good direction of like, going back to the basics, and that reprioritization of like, what
is the point of calories? And what is the point of, you know, feeding the world, if what we're feeding the world is killing us, causing an epidemic of cancer and diet related disease that's costing trillions of dollars and impacting our GDP and our quality of life, like we've we've got, we've lost sight of that, especially when it's trashing our farmlands to boot.
So it's happening. I mean, I this is why I wanted to have you on the show, Keith, because you and I, you're a good friend of mine, and we, we, we spent a lot of time solving this stuff over the phone, so I'm glad we finally got to unpack on the on this podcast, and we are going to wrap it up. We might have to do another second session at some point. One thing to say here, mothers out there to think about this a
little bit. They've got kids in school. So when the when the Obama administration came into power back in 2008 one of the things that they changed with the lunch school program, and he was supposed to be healthier and all this kind of stuff. And,
and, you know, I didn't think too much of it. I guess I'm too much of a Republican for that matter, and, and so I didn't really think too much about it. And my kids came home and they were saying, Oh, the cook's homemade ranch dressing is they won't let her make it anymore at the school, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you get they have to buy this ranch dressing that tastes like crap. You know, that's terrifying. And so, you know, when I was in school, the cooks made all the soups, the
cooks made all the bread. The cooks were cooks. They weren't just food warmers. Now, all they are is a Food Warmer. And and my daughter come now, my because of economic conditions, her and her husband live with us right now temporarily, and my daughter's all the time making homemade bread and and all this kind of stuff. Homemade cinnamon rolls. I remember his kid, we'd get cinnamon rolls the school that the cook would make. I mean,
great stuff. You know, all of it was probably better for you than all this processed food that the kids are getting in the school system today. So just even though the preservatives alone, you know.
So I think if parents want a healthier program, they need to be going to their their schools, demanding that the launch program, where you reworked at the federal level, they need to be going to their senators and representatives and said at the federal level, and saying your senators and representatives go to them when they have a meeting and say, I want the school lunch
program reworked, because that is not the food that I ate. You know, they talk about diabetes and all this stuff and kids, well, they ever think it could be coming partially from the school for what they're having to put down those kids, provide those kids? My kids won't eat the school I live in Idaho, and we're a very conservative state, and our lunch programs, here are some of the worst in the nation. Um, there's no scratch, I mean, very little scratch cooking that happens. It's just heat and
serve. And it's getting worse by the year. Like back before 2020 there was a lot more fresh prep, prep cooking happening. And it's like gotten worse and worse. So, and it's a state, it's a blend of state and federal oversight, I've really taken a deep dive into school lunch programs in the last few years. And it's it's interesting because, like, California passed an initiative where they're pumping a bunch of money into reinstating actual
fresh commissary. And so all the people who are doing food, you know, work like. Like me and sactis are really focused on California markets right now because they're actually willing to pay for higher quality food for school lunch programs, but states like Idaho still won't touch it. So it's there's a lot of state regulation there too that we need to really get
focused on. Because if I were in charge, not only would it be fresh, basic, scratch cooked food, but we'd have kids in there learning to cook and serving their their fellow students, and learning to be part of the food system, not just showing up and getting a tray and walking away with it, but actually being through the process from, you know, in the school garden to doing bread making days for the third graders, like they could totally do that, and they would be so
proud of it. And there's what they could do that doesn't involve a sharp knife or a hot burner. There's so much cool hands on stuff that they could do. And it's just a shame that we've lost the nation bring back. I totally, I totally agree with that. Yeah, parents, parents need to be aware of what their kids are eating at school. It's not all healthy for them.
Oh no. It's total garbage. My kids won't eat it. Sometimes they take pictures of it and text it to me, and they're like, you're not going to believe this mom on that note, but Keith, I do have to wrap it up. And speaking of the kids, they are wanting to come down the stairs pretty soon, and they know that mom will be very upset with them if they come down the stairs
while I'm recording a podcast. So since my studio is in the living room, which is always kind of a funny deal, but for those of you who are listening, I'm really glad you joined us. This is probably the longest podcast we've ever recorded on the regenerative by design podcast show, but this is fantastic. This again, yeah, I've been wanting to have Keith
on here for years. So Thanks Keith for joining me, and I knew we'd have a lot to unpack, because you're a really great thought leader in our region when it comes to this model and really making those impacts to food at the field level and at the soil level. So thanks for all you do, and we're if people want to reach out to you and harass you, or say they want to reach out and ask you a question or whatever. How can they reach you? Where's the best place contact you? Contact me, and I'll
hook them up. Yeah, okay. Well, if I have your permission, and somebody's like, hey, how do I get in touch with Keith mortar, I will make sure they've got your information. Yeah, yes. Well, cool. And, you know, I don't have a natural farmers. Yeah, you guys are pretty low profile, you know, for folks who are on the Inland Northwest too, if they want to learn more about this, you know, Keith is the president of the Pacific Northwest direct Seed
Association. And you guys have really great conferences that I'm not a farmer, and I've gone to it before and gotten a lot of really cool information just about how agriculture works and why what you guys are doing is different than just regular, conventional systems. And so you guys have a great conference in January. So for people who are interested, um, we'll put a link to the Pacific Northwest York Seed Association website so
people can follow. I just want to explain that a little bit Johnny before we get off the air here. Yeah, that conference in the winter time is kind of split between regenerative guys and conventional guys, so there is a little bit of both sides. So if you do come, you know, look at the schedule, see what you want to attend for a meeting. And then we have another conference coming up in June that's strictly about soil health, yeah. So, so we do have
two conferences a year that we do put on. Thank you for clarifying that they're both great. Um, the summer one is fantastic. Um, I was really lucky to attend. For those people who have never tried Johnny's brownies from snack to this, they're the kids will love them, and they're healthy, yeah, sugar, so I wouldn't call them healthy, but you know, at least it's good quality grains, and, you know, we don't add any garbage and all, it's all regenerative, organic sugar. So
you are getting some sugar, but it's really high quality. So thanks for the plug there, Keith and um, thank you again. We take them to our church. So that's the first thing that's gone. Oh, nice. You've got, you've got the congregation trained. I love it.
Yeah, exactly. Well, so much fun. Thanks again, and we'll for those listeners out there, if you love this podcast, please take a minute to share, rate it on Apple podcasting, and just make sure you're talking about the future that we could have. So on that note, have a great day, and thanks for joining this episode of the regenerative by design podcast is brought to you by snack device nation elevating climate smart crops and regenerative supply chains through innovative products and
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