Ep. 508: Not Your Daddy's Farm

This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listeningcast.

You can't predict anything.

The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for elk. First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light dot com. F I R S T L I T E dot com. Okay, everybody, this episode is dedicated to Doug Durn. Oh oh, he's gonna eat this up, this whole thing. Oh dude, stuck Durn's dream. That's because this is a special edition called Ask a Farmer, but it's

Real cows, hogs, sheep, goats, rabbits, and five poltry species chickens, turkeys, skinners, and ducks.

And you run your farm like a like an ecosystem.

Here is an ecosystem, yes, and.

You live recognizing that and you were We're gonna get into great detail on this. But you guys, family's been on the farm since eighteen sixty. Yeah, I'm the was it eighteen sixty or sixty six.

Sixty six? I'm the fourth.

Generation, never left, never sold. You guys just been.

There, We've been there. My daughters are the fifth and they've got five little beady children who are the sixth.

So the sixth generation is on.

But the six year Russian hadn't contributed it.

They don't do nothing nothing. It's just a testament to kids these days.

Right, But their parents, their parents are producers. Got it?

Our connection? We have the same agent, Mark Gerald.

Yeah, he's great.

Did Mark find you?

He did? He contracted us.

That's happened to me twenty some years ago.

And I told him that I couldn't write a book. I didn't know how to read a book. But he persisted, and finally going to stop him. No, he don't stop him. He's in it to win it. Man.

So when I met Mark, I thought I had it all figured out. I was living in uh I was living in Wyoming at the time, and I was already writing a book and and I got a call from my editor outside magazine. She said, hey, there is this agent looking for you. I was like, shit, already got an agent. And he was persistent.

Man.

He got a hold of me and he's basically, here's how we're going to do this.

Yeah. He hasn't changed a pit.

Yeah, and he's like, this is And I was like, oh, yeah, maybe someday I won't do that. He goes, no, no, no, no, no, no, no no, We're gonna do it right now, strictly like week one, this will happen, Week two, this will happen, Week three, this will happen. I was like, let's see. I actually told starting to be like work.

I actually told him no, thank you, I'm not interested. Really didn't. He talk to my daughter and she was interested and had me become interested.

Mark went to my bachelor party, did he I had a week long bachelor party.

Yeah. I don't know those glomorous.

I wasn't either. So we're gonna get into all that. Uh, and it's gonna be big time, asked the farmer. I got some real farming questions for you. Yeah, about land management, uh, animal wealth, fair, why things? Why things were done the way they're done in the agricultural landscape for a long time. Why the agricultural landscape changed so much in the mid nineteen hundreds.

Right? Have I got the answer for you?

Why did things? Why did agg change so much in the mid nineteen hundreds, And why are farmers some farmers now beginning to look and think that maybe we had things more figured out in the old days than we do in the modern days in some of the trade offfs. First, we got to talk about a couple of quick things, and I'm going to ask you about just general wild wildlife. I'm a cow's not cow's not condos kind of environmentally, I'm not you know what I mean. There's like this

Good.

Yeah, I'm like, I'm too much more pragmatic than that. I want to talk about wildlife onregenitive farms, clean farm practices, dirty farm practices.

Right up my alley.

Great, we're gonna get to all that. Yanni. First, Yann, you want your daughter got her first buck. My daughter got her first buck.

Yeah, yours after you kind of gave her first opportunity away to your son. What do you mean she got mad?

That's what she likes to think happened. Is not what happens.

That's not what happened when you told the story. That's how I understood it. The buck was kind of getting away, did I tell the story? Yeah, but her and yeah, and as the book is kind of getting away and as opposed to being like, Okay, we're just gonna let him go over the ridge.

We already did that one.

We're gonna get on him again.

That already happened once.

Okay, but you could do it.

How many times you go bump a buck over ridge? Go find it again?

Listen? I don't know. But but instead you said Jimmy and shoot him. Hadn't even come out of your lips, and the gun went off, and what she thought was her buck was now Jimmy's buck.

Yeah.

He's kind of a wild bill though, you know, like if you say get him, he's gonna get him.

Yeah, I understand. I understand. So you took her out again, and she got her first buck.

Didn't even let her big brother come. I brought her and her little brother. I brought her and her little brother out and we had a great little hunt. And on her sixth day, her sixth day of kind of more than that if you count just camping traveling, she put in her sixth day of actual like real good wake up before it gets light out hunting, got a buck and she was ecstatic. The one mistake I made, she hit a good hitting lungs, ran up there too quick.

Oh it's still, because it was still.

Then you get up there and it's like an know what I mean, right, anything takes a minute to die, sure, I mean, you know usually and she hit it right, you know, she hit.

It through the lungs.

I just said, okay, now you wait a minute, then we'll go up and have a look. And she'd gone up and been like dead in the door nail. But instead we hustled right over there and she caught it, and you know, you know then I'm like this always happens. It's just it's it's like normally people wait and they don't even see that it happens. But we came up and it's it's just it happens. They're gonna breathe for a minute and they're gonna expire. And it's not that

She got over it.

She's pretty upset.

Because she.

Wounded it extra harm, didn't hit it right, because she just thought they'd go like in the Westerns, you know, the guy falls off the railing and he's just never even twitches. I think that's what she was expecting.

Any tears, yeah, the ones associate with that moment or the tears of getting her first buck.

No tears of that. She didn't hit it right. Yeah, it made it softer. Yeah, but then.

Because I kind of started crying a little bit and I was like, oh no, what happened? What's going on? And she's just like, I just I can't believe I did it, you know, like pure joy, you know, but tears of joy. So no, yeah, she I was texting with Corinn earlier about it, and she's she said, well, did any mixed emotions as none whatsoever, just like cools of cucumber, happy and boked by it up to and it was like, great, take some pictures, pet it, check it out.

You know what.

I've a couple of takeaways. This is fresh in my mind because it was not even twenty four hours ago. Is how when kids are around these dead animals, they've seen a lot of them alive. They've seen our kids a lot of them have seen a lot of them dead. But they go up to them and they are just touching and feeling and checking from one end to the other.

Maybe she's a future scientist.

Yeah, artists, we'll see at some point.

My kids are always really eager to see what's in the stomach. Oh, and no amount of checking is going to ever convince them that.

It's the same.

Totally look like it's gonna look like someone pull up a bunch of the slaughter.

She pretty much it herself. I did the I busted open the sternom for so that it'd be easier for her to see what she was doing, right, Because at first I said, yeah, just reach in there, grab the track, you cut it off with your other hand, and yank it all out, and she's like looking in there, and you know you can't see anything. It's gonna be all done by hand. So then I said, all right, let me cut it open. Then you can see what you

Like it's like this to find like a little person in there.

Or yeah, I don't know what it is, but it's great to see that that curiosity.

No, uh, I had so many observations helping my daughter, but the main one is, wow, stuff gets away.

Oh yeah, that wouldn't have gotten away.

Normally, no opportunity.

You know what do you know what?

Oh, just you name it, you name it. It's just a lot, it's a lot online. It's just get you know, it's like it's over there and you gotta remember this. And then we did the thing too, dry firing, dry firing on it.

On the animal, just everything. Yeah, no, it's a great, great thing.

We saw some you know, something dough too far away. We just dry fire on it just to Yeah.

It's just it's anything that you do that's uh, I don't know a skill like that. In the beginning, it seems like it's so complicated. There's so many moving parts. There's so you know where you and I just will naturally just shift our whole body as you shift behind the gun. But for them it's just not natural, right, It's it's that and it's just refinding the animal and the scope and I mean she's an hour into the Huh. She's like, I think you would have already shot one.

Again?

Right, there's just been enough repetition where it's all clicking right along and you can see and even like dealing with it. Even though she's never gutted one, she's been part of that enough and she's skinned enough and done all those little pieces that it didn't take us that much longer. You know, then I would have gutted it. I mean maybe twenty minutes instead of ten. But you

Just hold a leg. You know, when you get into a hunting technique, there's all these things like you can go on and you hear people talk about, you know, people instructional people to be like, oh, there's like fitness, you know, there's marksmanship. I mean there's a lot of other stuff that no one's put a name to and no one talks about. But it's just how to be like, what does a deer look like? That ain't gonna stop? What's the deer look like? That's gonna stop in a second?

Yeah, you should be ready to shoot it.

It's just all this stuff. You're like, you realize, like, no one's ever put this in the way. No one's ever put in the words like what is a deer's demeanor? You know that deer is heading this way and he's clueless that deer does that? Does that see about something that happened a little while ago and he's kind of getting over it?

Yeah.

I always have a I don't know what it was, but when I was at hunting last week or the week before, it's like every every buck was kind of like tuned up, and every time I'd be like he sees us, and I'm like, no, he doesn't. He's just you know, but it was upset about something earlier, right, Or he's just keyed up and he happens to be looking in that direction, and I happened to be there.

Yeah, we would get into that a lot. He was looking she's looking at us. I'm like, well, she is, but she's not. Yeah, right, that's exactly. She's just looking at something past us.

But if you wave your arms right now, right at.

Us, it won't be coincidental. I had some other observation. I was just saying, Oh, did you carry your daughter's gun?

I did not.

I have okay, Ina, See, I'm so much meaner to my boys than my daughter. So I was carrying my daughter's gun and my older boy found out. I heard him like, I heard him like, he carried your gun? Are you kidding me?

Well?

Yeah, nicer to hear her name to you real quick. On the subject of land ownership. So to return to my favorite subject, We've gotten more mileage out of the Wyoming Corner crossing case than any other thing to ever happen.

I've gotten a lot of great feedback from that podcast, just text saying how great a lawyer. Yeah, with a lawyer. How great it was to hear him lay it all out.

You know a lot of people I was noticing because we have the video of that on YouTube. A lot of people watch that on YouTube. The corner crossing lawyer speaks out. Someone wrote in this is a land surveyor,

See hold on, I got a quick little retort to him or retort him. Not so much that, but I just wanted someone to clarify this. When I read that email, I got to thinking, well, if the landowners there have set fences, aren't they in some way saying this is where I believe this corner is and sort of setting a precedent of where this corner is and has been. They're not.

No, I saw a fence the other day that was wildly off because for him to make it on his borderline like in this case, it was to the advantage. It was to the the advantage of to the advantage of was it. No, no, no, no, Sorry. We were where BLM came up against the ranch yep, and it was a bunch of it was a bunch of bad lands, and he owned a bunch of the bad lands. But just ran it sure along the bench and there was corners in there, and it was like and you went up to it thing and and it was just a

One hundred percent. No, I'm just trying to figure out like in because everybody because they're saying, yeah, don't try to cross this corner unless you have go and have it surveyed. Right, But I'm just saying, if it was let's say it wasn't bad Lands, and you're in a prairie and someone has set these this corner to the best of their knowledge, can we always agree that it's to the best of our knowledge you're going to cross the corner where the corner is.

In looking at what these fellas are going through into Wyoming, you would the assumptions about anything.

But I think what Yannis is, what Yanni is saying is that, like if whether that placement of the fence is in actuality, uh, the right corner or not, the point is that that landowner, whether it's to the benefit of the public or to the benefit of himself, put something there that is like the physical signifier to anyone who might be thinking to cross that. That's right. So it's like the intention behind it, right, You're not to understand.

But if you're going to go into a court in this case, going to Wyoming, and there's a guy saying that he's taking you to civil court over seven million dollars, I'd like to think that I was on a surveyed corner and not have an added wrinkle beat buddy, that that fence and even on my corner you can have the landowner to Yeah, I mean I think there's two landowners.

I mean the fence thing is like completely arbitrary, Like you could you could just build you know, if you owned a ranch, you have every right to build a you know, a section of fence wherever you want on it.

Right, and in this corner was this morn is not even fence that we're talking about.

Yeah, And it's so it's not like it's you can't just assume that because the fence exists, that's where the private landowner believes the boundary is.

Like, that's a pretty big leap of Maybe it's his neighbor spence. Yeah, might be his spence, or it might be the governments, or.

The previous owner built the fence, and the previous owner didn't know.

It's just you seem to see who they sort of eventually they're gonna have to say, hey, it's someone's responsibility, Yeah, to get these things surveyed.

I can see all kinds of implications. One of the implications I can see down the road is if this, if this goes and it gets like just settled in some outright way, Yeah, I'm not doing any corner crossing because I'm too it's too it feels too up in.

The air.

Until it's further settled.

I'm saying, if it ever got settled, if it was just settled and the courts decided and it was lit gated and the law the land was laid out, that corner crossing is legal, I would think that, like I would be, I would be raising money. I would be raising money to survey strategic corners, like to to find to codify in very strategic locations those places. But I just keep as people are getting in, you know, pushing

Have you heard from like any of our game warned buddies here in this in Montana if the if corner crossing or trespassing is on the rise in like this hunting.

I haven't heard of anybody prosecuting it this year, and there's no way it didn't happen this year, but I haven't heard of it. Good would be a good question. I want to move on. You find randal. Yeah, yeah, no, there wasn't. There was a case up in h up By Towns in a corner crossing case.

Yeah, there's and there's some other you know, like some claims were made that the individual had trespassed. It's kind of I think it was still the details were fuzzy for a little bit while the while the legal system sorted things out. I think the charges were dropped, but that was like in the in the headlines, it was sort of a corner crossing.

Related dispute.

But I don't really know enough about it to get into the details.

Now, I know in this state there is an organization gearing up to fight corner crossing mm hmm. And there they're getting ready to spend spend money on a public campaign to turn people off to the idea that you'd be able to corner across. I have posited, is that the right use of that word?

Yeah?

But I can look at a fell and tell these snores now with with nine accuracy, do you think will I'm not gonna do that? Well, I found out recently that I was at a ear nose and throat doctor and they measure your neck and they're measuring my neck like like you're at a tailor. And I said, what do you measure my neck for it? And they're like, has to do a sleep apne issues. I'm like, what do you mean? They said, a sixteen inch neck, A sixteen inch neck is more likely to have sleep apnea?

Wait, is that like on the smaller end or the larger end, like I gather it's larger sixteen inch neck like around or like six inch circumference.

You know your waiste measurement from your parents, right, so that's how Yeah, they just put it. They put a tape around your neck and I was like, why the hell are you doing that. Will's button his shirt up and they were saying that that's a that's a they're trying to they're looking at how likely are you to sleep apnea? And they said a sixth that they take notice at a sixteen inch neck, So I thought was really surprising.

And but it ends there or goes sixteen in up sixteen and up got it?

Okay, Greater than sixteen is like some marker for them to be like, oh, let's ask a bunch of questions about sleep apnia.

Average is fifteen according to the Internet.

Now, this guy says reaching out because Steve mentioned in an episode that he can now look at people and guess if they have sleep apnea or suffer from snoring. It's not all that far off. This is from a dentist a dds. While we definitely see a correlation with next circumference in sleep apnea snoring, one can also see snoring in sleep apnea in the shape of the jaw, which I didn't I also didn't know that's what I

I think it's mandibular. He also didn't cite the source, but.

According to archaeological evidence one thousand years. Well, I know it's getting a little science y. I really got you, Phil.

Well, it's just it's mainly because Krein has it in the notes that like, please say, this is just a theory.

Well, it's getting a little sciencey because over the past one thousand years we have seen that about twenty five percent of the population has It's like, who a thousand years ago? Oh, I guess skeletal remains. Okay, I'm gonna take it him at face value. He's a sign, he's a doctor. Well, dyes, you know. According to archaeological evidence, he goes on. One thousand years ago, there was much more room for teeth, including wisdom, and there was not

If you're wondering what that is, that's that plain ass, boring chicken breast that we get served all the time.

I'm finding myself clenching right now. Accentrate my jaw.

You don't have to because you chew on elk so much.

I can't read like this. So the smaller jaw and increase in overall size of the human Oh so, okay, we've gotten bigger, jaws have gotten smaller, has created a mismatch that's interesting and has pushed the tongue into the back of the throat, thus creating a more collapsible upper airway. This produces snoring and sleep apnea. We treat the disease with either a sea PAP or what I do, a mandibular repositioning device.

Hope this helps, which is a night guard.

I wonder if that tongue going farther back into your airway there, if that makes it harder or easier to to uh what's the term when you're diving and you gotta oh clear clear.

Yeah. This is an argument that if you want to stop snoring in this country, cut your jerky with the grain, not against the grain, you know, get in the gym and do whatever.

You get some you know, like a those band, the resistance band, and train your jaw.

Yeah, or just put jerky in the gym.

I'm just I'm just hypothesized, and that that may be why y'all talk so funny.

Nailed it, Okay, last bit of last bit of feedback, and then we're gonna get onto it. We're gonna give our guests is due, is at this point overdue a lotment of time. Here's my thoughts on why Steve is wrong about gluten allergy and conservatives. Now, I was recently. I have been saying for years, and I've been stating it as though it was a fact that I felt that. Well, no, I acted like I had read this somewhere.

You ready in your diary.

I felt, just by my exposure to the world that I felt that the gluten allergies were decided, like like the left leaning people had a far greater likelihood I had in gluten allergies, so much so that I didn't bother to look it up. Well, Spencer looked it up. And conservatives are more likely to believe in ghosts, also surprise me, And the conservatives are far more likely to order their steak medium rare, and they're no more likely to have a gluten intolerance. You're at the medium rare thing.

But you know, all of like well, in at least in South Africa, everyone likes their meat cooked.

Probably because probably because of food handling. And you know, I mean anywhere you go in the in the can you still say developing world? What are you supposed to call it?

I think so.

Anywhere you go in the developing world, man, there's a lot of overcooked stuff.

Yeah for a reason, Yeah, fall on the meat temperature scale.

No, no, no, he just said what the most common so in in the most common ordered steak is medium rare. But it winds up being that like like conservatives or sixty four do you remember what it was? Sixty four percent more likely to order a medium rare steak. Anyways, this guy goes on to say I didn't know this. He says, there's a conspiracy theory floating around or No, no, there is a conspiracy theorist level correlation. I got to

Right?

That glyphosate is round up? It is round up? Uh, the only widely available glypho say, or is it just that's just a product name?

They had.

They had the the patent that molecule for a long time. Okay, and I think there may be some knockoffs, but yes, they own that market.

So like round up, you would say is gleipel.

Yeah, which used to be Moncente. There's now bear, got it?

Bear? Mhmm, there's a Okay, and I can read that part again. To my understanding, the more exposure to round up you have. Now this now we are way into areas where I am not here to verify any of this. I'm not saying it's just because I'm not saying this from a legal exposure standpoint. I'm just saying this from like, I don't know this. This gentleman, uh Whalen. Of course, this guy's name was Whalen. I love this guy. To my understanding, the more exposure to round up you have

Here we go finally, his mother in law. Of course, no one person, one subject, my source on my theory.

My mother in law spent twenty years living in a bottom surrounded by crop farms. Now this is this is the best detail of this whole letter their guard. This is incredible. What they would need to tarp their garden when the surrounding farmers were spraying crops because wind drift would kill the garden. He goes on to say she has a gluten allergy. What else could it cause that? And she goes on to say that in terms of her political leanings, she has three flags, a du flag,

Yeah, I think the USDA.

Maybe he could have gotten that. He's just sent that to a peer reviewed.

So then you know, somebody should calls attention to the fact that golf courses, municipalities, parks tremendous amount around up as she used in the non ag sector. Incredibles, they're labels for it either, they're not AG labels. So yeah, I'm sure more of it she used in the fields, but a lot of it she used in municipal situations.

Since ron that subject, let's talk about I want to ask you some questions about herbicides. Uh, just on the thing of Ronald, I have one's had it. Tell me a guy, tell me and you might be able to tell me how true this is. That one roundup became available. Its promise was that it was that it was less toxic than coffee, absolutely, and someone saw me that you that that that people would take a sip.

I've seen the Monsanto rip take a sip. Yes, okay, so that's true in the early seventies. Y, yes, I.

Heard that was true. And that was the thing is like if there was dangerous you know what, I do this.

Well, but nobody really worried about it being dangerous in that era, but they would do it just to show how safe and uh benign it was. Yeah, I remember it.

You probably used it in your career quite a bit.

Oh yes, a lot. And we're not without gloves or masks or goggles or any of the covering. It was just a matter of fact. I was in the custom spraying business for a period of time when I was uber industrial spraying crops, and I had people hired to sprayed round up another purposide and such as pecicide you know what side means, right.

And fanticide, fracture, sideticide, homicide, kill kill, you know, we ought to start besides the round up as I think we should start with the history of you guys, your farm. That probably be a smarter place to start because you made a very deliberate You brought your family farm through a very deliberate transition. Can you lay out the trajectory of your family farm over time, sure, and how it naturally evolved and how it evolved somewhat forcefully under your tenure.

So my great grandfather came to that farm in early County Georgia in eighteen sixty six and farmed it, followed by his son, my grandfather, who farmed it. If they would have farmed, we don't know too much about the way they farmed, other than just anecdotal what people did in those eras, but it would have been multi species with a lot of certainly without dependence upon chemistry. My dad took over the farm. He's born in nineteen twenty.

You're from with poly demono.

Poly demono. My great grandfather and grandfather would have had a lot of species. So my dad ran the farm all his career. I was born in nineteen fifty four, went to the University of Georgia in nineteen seventy two,

What was the what was the trick? Like? What were the things you were seeing on your family property that that prompted you to rethink your approach to agriculture, and it also you might as well define define your approach to agriculture. I mean, we can say stuff like regenitive agriculture, and to be honest with you, I hear that all the time. It took me a long time to figure out like kind of what it meant. And you, I've

Today we call it regenerative. That has not been co opted much yet. And to me, that means emulation of nature. So the the natural cycles, the industrial agriculture that I used to use running a monoculture of only cattle break those cycles. I ran the farmers of monocultural cattle industry for twenty something years and was financially comfortable. I got dissatisfied with it when I came to see the damage

And I guess mean like if one's good, two is better.

One's good, towo's button threes really good. And it worked for me. But because I was so heavy handed, I came to see the unintended consequences and it kind of strangely, it manifested itself. On the animal welfare side.

In.

Nineteen ninety five, I was loading a truck load of cattle to ship to the west for feeding. We did that a lot. These would have been five hundred pound caves, so there would have been about one hundred album on the truck. So they were going to be on that truck going to Nebraska for thirty hours. It got Nebraska, that's where these were going. Although that's not the only state. We feds. That's where these were going. That was about as far as we went. Took thirty hours to get to Nebraska.

You're basically moving them to the corn exactly.

It's cheaper to move the cows to the corn than the corner of the cow. So they would have been on the now for thirty hours with the ones on top urinating and defecating on the world was on the bottom, without food or water or rest. And I had done it dozens of times, but all of a sudden that morning,

They might not have been drawn to it.

Oh, they would not have been. You know, I never wanted to do anything but run that arm. But my daughters were raised the way people raise children in the eighties and nineties, and you know it was it was about ballet and gymnastics and karate and soccer and softball. And they they would not have come back to the farm.

Uh, here's gonna give you a question about raising cattle. I've picked up a handful bit. I know a little bit. Primarily, I know stuff about raising cattle is from hunting on people's farms and ranches. And you always go like, so, what's that that you know? I have zero background and

And we have and we have a slaughter plant on the floor as well.

That is yeah, you're running the whole damn deal vertically.

Drew.

Let's go back to when when you were a boy. Tell me what portion of that process you were capturing as a boy, just so people can see a little bit of this. What portion of a cole's life were you in charge of as a boy, And then what portion are you guys doing now at waite Oat pastures.

My dad and later me had mama cows only that's the only uh crop we produced was cattle. We had mama cows. We bred them initially naturally, later on through artificial insemination, we gave birth to the cavs and we weaned them at about six months of age and shipped them through the feed lot area like we just discussed.

And then now talk about the transformation you've had just just in just in terms of cattle, because just.

In terms of cattle, we we've gone from being a little snippet in the huge beef production system to be in a tiny, tiny, little beef production system. We own the mama cows. We have the caws. We finish the caves on grass only grass, hey before no corn, and then we slaughter them and then we sell them. We sell them some wholesale to grossers, some through our little store. We've got a little restaurant.

And then you're just selling cook product too.

We know it's small. Yeah, well it's it's three meals a day, seven days a week, but we don't feed that many people.

Yeah, it's you know, we're but it's possible to for a person to go and eat a burger.

It's probably probably probably.

We're we gotta eat a burger that was produced right there.

Yeah, we got one hundred and seventy employployees and it's twelve miles to the nearest place to eat, and it's a fast food place. So we you know, I put in the food service to feed my employees, but we've expanded it. It's not big, but we do cook twenty one meals a week and it's good.

What the economics change completely? Right?

Oh yeah, yeah, And I went back and looked. I never from the time I graduated at University of Georgia in nineteen seventy six until I started changing the way we raised cattle in nineteen ninety five. I never lost money. I paid taxes every year. Now we didn't make we didn't make a hell of a lot of money, but we lived comfortably. They were consistently profitable. I had a number of years of losses when I was transitioning over,

Now, what do you guys do talk about how you compost? I understand it's be true for your book, do you guys? Instead of sending ship off to a rendering plant, you guys, are you guys are handling that too?

Yeah? We are, Yeah, so we generally.

How does that even? How does that work? I mean I could picture dragging it out, letting it rode.

You wouldn't do that, Yeah, But.

I mean I don't picture even I can't. I don't picture what it even like composting a carcass.

It's very different. So well, of course, well there are some whole carcasses, because when we have death loss, we compost them too, But most of it is packing plant waste. That's what USDA calls it. That would be a viscert, hooves, feathers, gut fill, whatever's not marketable, skulls, central nervous system tissue which we can't harvest. It's got brain spin core. So but we generated about nine tons of day, five days a week, and we compost it.

We nine tons a day.

Yeah, that sounds like a lot.

Pick up a cow stomach. Well yeah, and.

It's a lot of moisture. I mean there's as far as dry material, it's probably eighty percent moisture. I see, you got to deal with it. But that's so we do compost. Composting is taking a nitrogenous material animal weight remains and a carbaceous material in our case to be peanut shells or wood chips or whatever people give us. That's not homeowners but you know the asplunt or the peanut shelling plants and their rules.

You go and you say, you mean the treat the big power line tree company, Yeah, Asplin and I know that outfit.

Yeah, they they dump those wood chips. We make it available not for anybody, but for people that we trust to dump carbaceous material via.

I tell you quick little side tidbit about ask So you know they do those big power line gas line projects. I used to sell firewood and when they would go through a big land owner, I'd go in there and broke or deal to get all that. I'd sell all that shit.

That's that's the same thing I do.

Like mostly cut up and I would go in there and bucket into the sixteen inch lengths and split it and sell it, and people be glad I did it.

Well, I'm glad I found them too. And there are ratios of not try material and carbaceous material that you mix. They are rules you go by. You We have a thermometer with a five foot handle, probe on it. We stick in there or my guys sticking.

Are you grinding up the cow?

Not anymore? I used to I have a grinder, but we said we struggle to keep it going. And really, except for the bones, uh, it's it's this. It comes apart. The bones become very porous. I should tell you this. It takes six to seven weeks to compost that animal material, but it has been recommended to us that we let it sit for a year. If you let it sit a year, the compost becomes less bacterial and more fungal

You got you gotta give it to me, like you gotta give this like you're you're like like you're gone out of town and you're explaining to me on the phone what I need to do.

Okay, So my guys put the carbaceous material peanut shells or wood chips into long windows. Okay on the surface, not no, no, on the surface okay. And by the way, we move this operation around the farm. You don't want to sit in one place too long. I fear it might be too much at some point, so we move it around every year or so. But we uh uh.

Material, peanut shells, wood chips.

Got it. They dump it. Then they cover it up with more of the same again, eighteen twenty four inches. And here's a little fun fact. If we do a good job covering it up, you never smell it and you never see buzzards or vulses.

What's my next question, My next question, it's gonna be about buzz.

All right, So let me tell you. Sometimes something happens, you know, the load is thrown up or whatever, and we just can't get it covered up as quickly as we want to. When that happens, you can see those vultures, either red headed or black headed, just stacking up there. So we we keep it covered, which.

We do, and that's and then you let it sit a year.

Well you've got to you've got to mechanically stir it and take temperatures and record the temperatures. But as long as we do that in six eight weeks, it will become posted. And then we let it sit a year. We pile it up and let it sit for a year. Then we spread it on our pastures. I've got a spread truck with a forty eight inch bedchain so big bones can come out of the back of it. We put two tons to the acre and it is seriously

When something has gone through the process of being composted in those first six weeks, exactly what happens. It goes from what to what.

It goes from guts and wood chips to compost, which is a stable not hot anymore, stable maistubsorbing plant food that contains nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium and in this case a lot of phosphorus and calcium because of the bones. I mean, it's what is supposed to happen. You know, the buffalo dies and rots and it grows grass.

What are the what are the temperatures you're getting in those piles as it's working.

Yeah, one hundred and fifty degrees and if it's not, if it's not hot enough, they stir it and oxygenate it. Take the front end the load on. They make some really great, expensive machines that do that. I love to have one. I ain't got one.

But does that does that process costing you money or saving you money?

Yeah?

Which pile is bigger?

Yes? No, Well it's the right thing to do for a lot of reasons. Sure.

No, I love it. I mean I love it like just as a non farmer. I love the sounds of it. I'm just curious, like, is it like a is it a cost sink or is it a great way to fertilize.

It's a great way to fertilize. It costs money. We've got some equipment and a couple of guys you know, dedicated to it, and that has a cost. But the uh plant, fertility, land, fertility that I get out of it, you can't even you can't whe you couldn't afford to buy it. God, it's wonderful, it's great our. We can

When's when do you think that? Okay, let's say we knew that that if you went back to if you went back to nineteen twenty three, Okay, so we go back a century. Yeah, you think that it might have been around five.

I don't know. I mean, that's a great question. I've asked some people, but I don't know anybody that was doing much carbon sampling in nineteen twenty thing. I guess somebody.

You would need a thought to look right.

Somebody's something we're probably who knows, But the practices that my dad and I did, the tillage and use of nitrogen fertilizer, maybe pesticized. I don't know if it affects it much, but certainly tillagen, use of nitrogen fertilizer burns up carbon in the soil, just just makes it go away. So when you've got soil that's a half a percent organic model, which is what mine had gotten to, it's a dead mineral medium. So let me tell you this one percent organic model I'm told will ab solve a

And the benefits of that compared to soil that's minerally, that pretty much what just like sifts through water and now.

The water just percolects. You know. I'm in the Gulf Coast, the Gulf Coastal region, which is an ancient seabed, so the soil is pretty sandy compared to what you've got here, and just it won't hold the water and it doesn't have the minerals. We're putting a lot of minerals out there because of all that, the bones and whatnot. It's one of the uh, the best things I ever stumbled onto.

You know.

We we when I first built the slaughter plant, getting rid of a viscilant and animal waste was a problem, and we had to pay somebody to come get it, and I didn't have a big enough plant for them to come every day. That meant I was going to have to refrigerate it. They just had a lot of problems.

Were you were refrigerating that stuff?

No, No, I never did. I was going to have to got it the people do refrigerated. Of course. It takes a lot of room and it's nasty, you know, it's it's a lot of it's not the actual blood is not in it. We drained the blood separately, which we also use is fertilizer, but it's it's different. But there's a lot of manure, a lot of fresh flesh, and a lot of it's just there's just still blood in the cars.

Uh walk me through moving just from beef production into producing poultry and other red meats. Was that because he thought it'd be fun or did you need to do that to try to hit the same finances like you could? You couldn't make it work.

With beef b so, but it wasn't just financial, I mean it was it was certainly financially. Everything I do is financial because I got to make it work. But when I changed from the industrial production model that I was deeply entrenched in to this model that I'm in now. I didn't realize I was gonna have to add other species, but I did. Yeah. I started having weeds that I you know I was previously. I sprayed it with grays on p n T, which is another herbicide that we

To just get what you wanted out of the land and nothing else.

That's right, that's right. So what we probably will talk about eventually here is monocultural production. Monocultural production is bad. It's what modern food production is based on. But nature are bores of monoculture. I mean, I don't believe you've been all over the world. I don't believe you can name an ecosystem of the world that's a monoculture. I

Because you needed something to eat all that jont correct and.

The later I added poultry and it was poetry is tough. Now we're struggling with poultry. I'm not sure how that's gonna work out.

But we uh, what's tough about poultry being able to charge enough to make it worthwhile?

Yeah? That so my beef probably cost about thirty percent more than industrial beef. We could argue about it, but that's close. My poultry probably costs three hundred percent more than industrial poultry.

Wow.

Because when we the smaller the specie, the more handilyd lent itself to industrialization. So when we industrialize cattle, which my dad was part of that movement, put them in big hundred thousand head feed lots. He never had a hundred thousand head, but they do. He had a five hundred head field. Put them in those feed lots and uh, you know, and and take cost out of production. So we poultry, they're so small they lent themselves to that industrialization.

No, I grew up eating supper. Now I had listen, man, I had to make a decision when I started college. I had to train myself to stop saying supper. Because I noticed that no one said that.

We have a different I had to be like, we had the same college experience, we had different decisions. I went to the University of Georgia with a bunch of my buddies. I mean just seemed as soon as we got there, they say, hey, you guys want dinner. What happened to y'all won't supper? So I doug a little deeper.

It's so funny. I don't know, man, I grew up in a weird little supper corner of the Did you guys say dinner? Supper? We did not say dinner.

We said, but Midwest, there's supper. It can't be that.

We do it.

We do it noon every day.

So we DIVI didn't do that. We had breakfast, lunch, and then you have supper. What's what supper time, breakfast still supper.

Was Have you ever had lunch?

I didn't like it.

At what point in your life did you realize that there's this other thing called lunch was the same thing as dinner for you?

I mean, I could reading write, I knew what he was talking about. I I talked real slow, I think pretty slow, but I put that dunel thing because so anyway, I lost my trader thor.

You were you were had just spent at one point something milly plates and you had ordered up some poultry in the restaurant, or no, you had ordered your dinner waiting.

On my something in the boulder. They had they had a menus framed from like nineteen twenty three or something. I got a picture somewhere in my phone and it said beef plate, beef dinner privately, Uh, ninety nine cent pork dummer nine and nine cent chicken dinner A dollar thirty cents.

So you know, at some point in time, before.

We industrialize, we took all the costs out.

But now now that would say thirty nine dollars, yeah, thirty seven dollars, nineteen.

Dollars yeah, right, something like that, so we uh, anyway, that's uh. We we we struggle with poetry.

So that was like when you saw that thing, though, it hit you something about the eye of wackedness of where we've gotten with cheap poultry.

I would say, shit, I wish I hadn't done that. I wish I hadn't built it. I wish I hadn't built that plant. And you know we're fixing do We were cutting back on our poetry because we have lost so much money. I still want to do it, but I'm not sure how it's going to look.

So you haven't turned it around.

And you can't find a market that will that will pay enough to keep it going.

Not on enough birds. I'll tell something else. I don't think I'm a very good poetry farmer. I'm a I'm a I'm a really good beef guy. You know when I got when I when I moved from beef to sheep, that was the first specie I bought. I said, you know, they just like little cows. I can't do that. They're not like little cows. But it's hard. So then, you know, but we got reasons for good and hired some people

But is the hogs making money?

Yeah? Yeah, the hogs are making money.

Is goats making money?

Yeah? Yeah, yes, let me see, you know. And the reason I'm the reason I'm that says yes. But the reason I'm not saying hell yeah is we you know, in a in a farm like hours, where everything is integrated and working together, it's really hard to identify a single line. So let's let's talk about the difference in linear and cyclical. We do that. Yeah, most businesses are very linear. You're just next, next, next, next. A farm

Help me understand that.

Say that again, so most linear businesses, uh, you know, you can pull a monthly report or quarter the reporter now you're report and get a pretty good indicator of how your business is doing financially. Can I understand I'm saying in a farm, I may show I'm losing money, but if I'm moving it from a half cent organic model to five percent organic model, it's not on there. Yeah, if my herd went from being uh, where you probably

I can just that all that stuff's not getting capture. You're rehabilitating the landscape future generations. That's not showing up in your quarterly.

Report, and it manifests itself as wealth generationally. We we we got a little management team. I used to run that farm absolutely autonomous, just me, and as it grew, we've we've brought other people in management, and we have a meeting once a week Thursday afternoon my office, and we talk about things we want to do. And it never pays off in the month, a quarter, or a year. It's all very long term, very generational. I love that, but it's very problematic.

Since you're selling all the stuff that you produce, and you know how many acres you got, you kind of have.

A rare.

And I know this goes against a little bit of what you're just saying that you don't do a quarterly report, but you probably wind up with a kind of rare glimpse for an egg producer into this acreage spins off this many dollars worth of food because it doesn't get lost in some broader equation, meaning if you grow corn and you're selling corn for ethnol, you're selling corn for feed, You're never you would never answer the question like, oh no,

You know we do, and we know that we got that, we got, I gotta, I got.

I mean, that's got to be an interesting number. Do you does that number? Does that ratio as you've become better and learned this has that like dollars of off put per acre of land? Have you gotten better at it?

Yes, yes, a lot better. And I can I mean, I don't even need to look at those finacials. I can tell that riding around in my jeep. I mean it looks better. I mean, I mean I can, I mean it looks better.

Years ago, I was with my friend Kevin Murphy down in Kentucky and we were driving around hunting cottontail rabbits, and he was telling me it was gonna be a good day at hunting because we were going to an Amish farm. And he said, that's where the game is at. The game is on the Amish farm. And he pointed to a number of farming practices. And this is gonna sound like horror. I don't mean, you know, it's gonna sound like I'm generalizing. He had a call. You just

Heck yeah, was on that Armish farm.

And he'd point around and be like that, that that. But you just knew when you got there, You're like, wow, it is a different looking for so absolutely yeah, because you'll have the vocabulary for it.

Well, so there are One of the most beneficial creatures on my farm is a dung beetle. It's a beetle that is flighted beetle that is drawn to fresh manure, particular calmnure, and when the dung beetle gets there, it somehow gathers the most nutrient dense part of the feces, and that fresh always went as fresh. If it's been there a while, they don't go to it. And it digs a vertical eighteen inch shaft into the ground about as big as that pencil, and the dirt comes up

I know the animal, but I didn't know they did that.

Oh man, it's wonderful.

I can pay someone to do that.

Well, guess what I said. We saw dunge beatles when I was a kid. I didn't see them anymore. There was a few give cattle wormer to kill the worms in the system. It's toxic to the dung beetle when they lay the eggs and the feces. No kidding, really, So when I saw dung beetles, I can I know right where I was. I was driving along. I saw that dirt at the top of that fresh cavity, and I slammed on brakes and backed up, and it was

It keeps thee because uh sorry about that, it keeps the nutrients from stratifying.

You're just being on the top with the manua goes the water can go down in those holes. I mean, it's just and the horn flies and face flies, which are a horrible blood sucking insect for cattle raised in that fresh cattle manule. That's where they leave their eggs too. When they those dung beetles aerate it, you don't get the horn flies the face flies production. So it's like it's like a gift from God in terms of insect control, fertility,

Uh, when you moved away from de Warmer? Did you move away from you? Don't do any kind of hormones on here? We're don't And that was the That was the implant hormone, right.

Yeah, mostly there are a number of them, but the most common one goes in the skin behind the ear and it slowly releases over about a used to be one hundred days. I ain't used it for a long time. I don't know what you got now, Jude.

I got more and more friends doing that. Man, you don't do that too it would you do it?

I did do it for a year.

You and you they do it in their butt. No, you know you guys know about this.

No, I can guess who you've been hanging out with.

I'll tell you who later. He's he's really on the fence about it because he's got friends.

What look like I do.

He's got friends, and there's a lot of he's got friends. There's a lot of guys that are getting a little capsule. You cut the skin on your butt and you put this little capsule in there, and then and then you're you're and then you're and then you're like you know, you're, you're whatever. You're more of a superman.

This this this, I hope this doesn't take too long. I'll try to make this short.

But you wouldn't do that.

I would. Hell, I went to university. But I'll tell you this. When I was at University of Georgia in the seventies, uh, steroids which just just a rumor, and I heard about them, and I told my guy that I thought Mike could get me some steroids, give me some of that for you. Yeah, And he didn't. But I happened to have reproductive physiology that quarter. There's a quarter system back then. And one of the things we did is we had one hundred mail chicks, little yellow chicks.

Come at you on the other end, souped up chickens.

Yeah, they were just still a little yellow up. They would run from you. Said, oh hell yeah, that's that steroid. I'm gonna kick me some of that step. I can't wait. So the last well, I hadn't got it yet. Last day we killed them and dissected them, and those little birds that run from you on that end, it was different doses all the way up from zero to whatever. The testicles that big, those down there, they had the

So I told them, my guy, I don't want to get into this too long. But There's a couple of details I got to add in here about this is the guys I know are post reproductive age. I caught wind of this and I told my wife, I'm like, listen, if these people that I know do this and they can start smoking me up a hill, I'm gonna have a hard time not doing it. Really, Yeah, I don't want what I don't want to get smoked up going up a hill.

Is this human growth horm? Is this steroids?

It's probably I could start gaming people, but I don't want to name them. But if they can, if it turns out that they went from me being able to smoke them up a hill to them smoking me up a hill, it's gonna be very hard for me to stomach this.

A little way to go.

Years old, How quick you get up at hell, you're gonna wish all your stuff is still away.

There's there's a conversation often having my kids. My kids will laugh about you know, we'll laugh about stuff like my dadd used to love to tell the story that when he was in the in the military, and you'd get your c rations, there'd be three cigarettes in there, right, and you talk about that, you'd be on a forest march and they would call a cigarette break right, and then you know, and we laugh now like, oh, how stupid.

Absolutely?

What are some of the things that you look at in our agricultural practices? What are some of the things that you look at in the one hundred years, I'll be like, can you believe those idiots? Not only did that mean?

I used to so I used to artificially or artificially insumminate my cattle. I would buy a semen, pay for it, and then put it in the in the cow when she was in estras or heat. And the semen I was buying were from these big, monster, non natural bulls. They had a you know, their claim to fame is they had a RUBI that big, And it was like that was the only thing that mattered, you know, And today you know I close. Not only do I not buy semen anymore, I closed the herd. It's a I

Yeah, he's like on the mountain around the prairie or whatever. At a time like you'd have.

Been siren, Siren the buffalo herd or what. So you know that I'm I'm telling that story and reference to you about the silly things we do, and and there are a bunch of others. But you know, just now that was the wrong thing, ending money too, not improve my herd.

So that's not so much an issue of that's not so much an issue of AI. It's an issue of the source for the semen.

Right. No, well, I mean, are those AI I've learned as artificial intelligence when I when I was, it's always been an artificial insemination to.

Me, Oh, I still think that's what it means. Good for you.

Younger than you must be.

But in the argument for it, though, the argument for artificial insemination, as I understand it, you can crack me on this. An argument for it is that you can synchronize, correct, you can synchronize so that your cows are calving within a very narrow window of time.

Those two shaparate things. So I'm confusing stuff. Okay, you know, I mean, it's all right, I get it. But they do use hormone implants to synchronize the cow. And but they could they could still breed them naturally. That's a separate shot that.

Okay. Yeah, so you can use a hormone to bring them into estrous heat. Okay, so that you then because they have the same the gestation period is pretty.

Fixed two eighty six ages.

Okay, So you use a hormone to bring them in at the same time, and then you can breed them naturally or breed them with artificial essemination to make sure that then you're when it comes to calving time, you have a narrow window, a narrower window of calving time and requires less of your attention to be around to make sure everybody births out.

You also don't do that, right.

Don't so that and and you know it does everything say is true, But mostly people do that so they can put together the truck load of same size, same sex cattle. Sex is that doesn't control sex, but you and that doesn't mean anything to me because we slaughter cows fIF to two weeks a year. Uhh.

So that, yeah, that's interesting. You've kind of pulled yourself away from.

That need everything. We pulled ourself away from everything.

You don't need to have everybody on such and such day always six hundred pounds.

Don't want it, don't want it. I want to have calves. We were so we have a herd where we are are finishing our animals on grass, and once a month we shut that herd up and pull out everything visually that we think is big enough ready to slaughter. And that's how we do it. And I don't want to have all of them one month and eleven months nothing going on.

Does anybody hunt on your farm?

Yeah? I did an employees hunting. I was. I was an avid hunter all my life. That that that and uh, uh cease to do that when I got so involved in my career and I still have employees at hunt.

Uh, that's funny mentioned that because I was like being brought up, we hunted different farms in our community, and my dad was it was just an explaining why. I mean, at that time farmers did hunt. I mean they did not hunt in our area. My Dad's like, the last thing these people want to deal with is a dead animal. It's like it's just like the last the end of the day. And he went going have another dead thing, you know what, You got to mess with it because it's just not like a fun thing for him.

The way that worked in my community growing up here, when when we were kids, we were avid hunters and fishermen and trappers because that's what you did. My dad didn't know how to play baseball. He wouldn't gonna be able to tell me how to. You know, that wasn't something to happen. So the way we kids spent our time was and the television was a black and white

And oh you mean when he said you're coming with me, he meant working, Yeah, not hunting. Yeah, he's pulling you off hunting. Correct, that's pulling you off of hunting and fishing to get working.

Yeah. And I could still have hunted and fish, but by that time I wanted to run the farm. That was that was my my goal.

When you look at yeah, I don't, I know, I don't I'm not asked. I don't want to embarrass you, but you've been public about how many acres you guys have under control.

You sharing, No, we own about two thousand acres inherited about thoules Makers. I bought about fowles Maker. We rent a little over a thousand acres and then we graize soul of otake or raise about two thousand acres, so it's a little over five thousand acres total.

As you've gone through this process, and have you seen what have you seen in terms of wildlife?

Yet?

You have the dung beetle example, but what have you seen in terms of wildlife habitat? Does it wind up decreasing because you need to use so much because you found ways to use so much more of the landscape, meaning your goats and cheap have replaced deer.

You know, that's a good that's a good question. And uh, but the wildlife has increased. But the sportsman and you it's not going to like this much. When you manage for the benefit of a specie, you do so at the detriment of the other species. Now, we don't see many deer on our farm. A lot of them passed through because it's open.

You know.

They they're on their way somewhere else. But there's a tremendous amount of life on the farm. I started mentioning this to you. I was I was driving down a paved road that bisects my farm three four years ago. And it wasn't late in the afternoon. I'm dusk, but it wasn't raining. And I went through a place of the road was wet. I said, what was that? And I backed up and there were millions of little toad frogs,

No, I can back up on this. That's changed everywhere. And what I mean, I said, I can back up on that. Like amphibians. Yeah, it's just changed.

But I got. What I'm saying is I got them. Yeah, No, I'm with you here, and they've been calm in their back.

You know.

I was raised frog gigging and catching crawfish and you know the other things. And the amphibians, you're right, Amphibians like the canary and the coal mine to be indicator that it ain't right, and they're back on my farm.

Of the side.

We had seventy eight bald eagles on my farm. They were killing me. They were eating my chickens. And I mean, I told you chickens has not been a good deal of for us. That's not even counting this. But there was seventy eight. That's the d n R guy made that estimate. I don't know how you tel, but that's what he said. There's a bunch of them and they were about to put me hide the chick post pasture poltry business.

And we are very because you got your chickens running around out in the opening.

Yeah, it's I mean, and you know it's not like an eagle would go in there and get a bird and eat it. I don't I don't mind. It's like tithe into nature, you do that. But they would land and just kill and kill and kill and eat the ain't us out and kill another one and eat the

He was fencing his dog, fencing the dogs.

Literally, and it worked worked very well. We still have some eagles and some predation, but it's not debilitating the way it was.

So, how tell me about the process of doing your book? Did you write it?

Yeah?

Uh so uh the Mark Mark Gerald.

Contacted me about solicited writing a book about us.

Did he make you your proposal? All that?

He didn't? Hm, it's in honesty, h h he uh we we. I talked to him the first time. I told him, I said, I can't write a book, you know, I just not the way that works. I had never read many books, and he uh ultimately found a wonderful person to write it in the lady name Amy Lee Grave, and who her we fell in love with. She's a sweetheart. She's by the same age as my daughters, and and uh and my daughter got involved in it, and she wanted the book, so she I worked for my daughter.

So then you were able to start downloading all your knowledge.

And we had a phone call every Friday afternoon for two three four hour phone call. And she's bread. You know, she would have a list of questions. She started asking her questions and she would challenge you. I say, I'd be telling my story. Responded to whatever she could asked about. And she said, wait a minute, you told me so, and so I said, I say that on July fifth, you told me.

Getting cross examined.

Yeah, I see that ain't the same thing I told you. You know, it was different, you know, but she she, you know, she when when I read the book, I couldn't believe how right she got it. Yeah.

Well no, I mean it really. I mean it's like it's like you're telling the stuff.

It's all my stuff.

But I should know if you needed someone to help you with the organ Yeah.

That's back on that linear cyclical. Yeah, if I start telling you a stir, I'm probably gonna get off on something else. Probably we know, we'll we know, we'll finish that one unless you remind me and that that that's the way this would have been.

How many people come you know, because how many people come to your place every day? Like if people are listening, they just go it. If they're in Georgia, they just go to your place right and tour and eat and see everything.

We uh, we got an open gate policy that you can go. We we do tours, we know, and I really will them do that, but you know they can't. You know, they show up thirty minutes after you did a tour, and my daughters do and when they got people that work with them, that do them, but they we we let them go in. We got maps, We give it to you. You go anywhere you want to ask anything, you want to Well, you know we are we're under so much competition of greenwashed product by big companies.

Meaning there's no like whatever terminology you can use to describe to a consumer what it is you're doing. You're going to see that terminology mimicked by someone who picks up that word.

Absolutely. Let me give you an extreme example. I'll give you. But uh, in this country, you can import grassfeed beef from twenty other countries and label it product of the USA legally on the package. If value is added here, it's cut or wrapped or ground. Is that right? Yeah?

Man, if you want to put product of the USA on a piece of sown fabric, I'm not sure. Shit's a lot higher bar than that.

Well, I'm telling you the law got changed. I think it was twenty fifteen. We were doing pretty good and the law got changed, and the suddenly you know, we're not doing so good anymore. Huh. We had a we had a big wholesale customer last week that my daughter was talking to and they had a I wasn't meeting at a video meeting online. I mean they showed you know, the stats on how much they've drown, and you customly picked up this was this grocer, that grocer, the other grocer.

Because they're chasing that name grass fed beef, well, not chasing the implication, like what the implications are?

They let the assumption be it's American. They are in America's got a very American name, headquartered in Texas. You know, it's a very god him.

Do you do you do you worry that the whole thing is gonna go could put some's gonna have to go back the other traction?

It's going it, Yes, And I worry about it a lot. And I really think we okay, I mean White Opa, we've been doing it longer than the others. And we started twenty five years ago. We sell twenty five million dollars stuff a year. We're vertically integrated. We it could we're not doing very well, but it's okay. We got we got we got some debt, but we got a lot of assets. And I think we gonna be okay. I got friends and and people I care a lot about. That it has not been okay, and that bothers me

The sad part is there'd be a bunch of people happy if it didn't work, because they're sitting there and it's like, man, this is kind of challenging that here he is talking about a bunch of stuff I'd rather not talk about drawn making us, you know, people questioning assumptions, and then if it didn't work, they'd be like, ah, good, you're right, because that was getting uncomfortable.

And of course, of course, the you know, the large multi national meat processes are so big and so powerful, and we're they're not worried about how much I sell. They spill more than I sell, ye, but they don't want people asking the questions. And we talk a lot about how we do it. It just be better than I talk about that so, and they've done such a

Police years ago, I had a we were interviewing a bison producer, and that's kind of a in the West, that's a little bit of a touchy subject, like beef versus bison. And they're talking. He's talking about a lot of the heat they get, you know, the cattle and the things. And he had an interesting statistic where he's like, man, there's two million cows in this state. I got four thousand buffalo. But the amount of the focus out that is f Like, let's just look at the numbers for a minute here.

I don't have that prejudice, but I got I got one hundred and fifty something miles of fence on my farm because we got it cross fenced into the thirty acre paddocks. It's not just and uh when and I used to be the president of the American Grassfeld Association way back a long time ago, and the bison producers in there, and those poor folks couldn't hardly give away bison. But I started tess one tile of grill and seeing other things, said, you know, I believe this bison thing

Looked like something from a prison.

Yeah, and uh, I said, you know, I'm too old to start building one hundred and fifty something mile. I still I still win it from the first time I built it. I can't start by again. You never reminded me of going seeing Daddy.

Really well, man, I do uh one. I hope your book does good. A bold return. Make sure I get a bolder I want to get the subtitle Bolder Turn to giving a damn One Farm. Six Generations in the Future of Food by Will Harris from White Oak Pastures. I hope your book does good. It's really it's really interesting. It's a it's an interesting informative read from someone who observes agg agriculture from the outside. And that's me, right, Like I spent a lot of time on farms and ranches,

Well, there's a lot wrong with the way we produce food in this country, sadly, and I was part of that, My dad was part of the leadership, and my made the decision to go on another way and have really been pleased with the results, but ready to admit that the financial benefit is not going to make room for a lot of people to do it. It's sad. I hope that changes. I don't know whether it will or not.

Oh yeah, it's it's it's I mean, even just talking you today, you're I'll tell you one thing you're not. You ain't a huckster.

M hm.

Like you seem pretty you seem pretty open to the trade offs, you know. You know, but I think that if we had more time, I think we would get into and probably could just touch on it for a minute. I mean there's also a gamble here and and and you explained that if when people look at regenitive agriculture, organic agriculture, whatever, and you can make the claim like, well, how are you going to feed eight billion people on that? And you raise some questions like, uh, I don't know

You know.

It's just like like what is gonna be the thing we run out of?

You know, you know, the the the there's so many losers in the food production system that we have.

Now.

I've been criticized for being critical of the farmers. Really don't intend to be. They came up in an industrial food production system and embraced it and got good at it, and it's taken risk and that's the way they produce food and they see nothing wrong with it, and I didn't either, But there there are downsides and there are risks, and there are problems with it and their environmental you know, I don't even talk about health and safety and all that.

It's gonna be forced down at at some point.

I don't know how how bad it's got to get. You know that, you know the UH. I quit using the term organic because you can legally have certified organic vegetables grown in a house with artificial lights and high high gris panically no soil. It's certif out organic. Now there's a lot wrong with that, and we could we could go down a whole long list of things that we do that are I think disingenuous and wrong and and damaging and unhealthy. But until the consumer decides to

You wish it was cheap?

Oh?

I wish? You know A question I hate is I can be telling people, a group of people, what I think we ought to do to farm to make food better. For that where the land and the animal and climate and rural communities and whatever else. And I think I did a good job. And they say, but what are you gonna do about all the people that are starving? How about you handling that? I got a good idea. Let that be your project. You know, I corrected a

Man. I hope you. I mean, it's a great book, but I hope you're keeping more detailed notes too, because if it's all, uh, you know, if in a hundred years people like, holy shit, we should have listened to that guy from Georgia, I hope he wrote them down eighteen inches of peanuts shells, dead cow.

I give you my word. I hadn't written much. Now, I promise you that.

How did how do identify a dung beetle when you see one? You know, well, thanks for coming on the show, and thanks for doing the book.

Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed it.

This is fun. Uh, you're gonna hate me because, uh but what what is the pup date?

Sipton last September, last September.

Scrub that out, Phil. I just wanted to make sure I had it right with available.

Now, very very available now.

Okay, yeah, if you don't, if you don't believe it.

Available, get it anywhere anywhere boats are sold. Boulder turned to giving a damn one farm six generations in the Future of food, Will Harris. If you get into the acknowledgments, you'll see our good friend Mark Jerald listening to the acknowledgments. Mark's good guy. But don't don't everybody go send the Mark your proposals.

Don't.

Yeah, don't send them all your proposes. It's just I don't know. I don't know if he digs around, you know, and publishing lingo. They call that the slush pile, and and and I don't know that they. I can't make any promises that he's going to dig around through his mail and find your stuff. So if you don't hear from him, it's not that it wasn't a good idea. It might just be that he never looked. All right, well, thank you man, and uh wait, Oat Pastures. They go

Absolutely.

I might go in there and you might see me out there kicking through those peanuts shells trying to find out what exactly is going on under there.

Everybody, everybody wants to see it. It's just beautiful grass. It's just high I mean yeah, really, yeah, it's great.

A lot of a lot of possums.

Yeah, you know, we talked about that. If you keep it, if you keep it covered, it's incredible. How few apostles, bobcats, raccoons very few?

Well, yeah, there's no vultures undercover. If there's no vultures, If there's no vultures, I believe it. All right, thank you very much for coming on, and everybody go check out the book. Thank you, thank you. All.

The sun is rising, a light up the coach making a stand all day. There's a cold case, a long storm out over under seven hundred second half. Please round the dogs to the northwest corner the creek. If the water rained down season comes, we'll find someplace to hunt. No, they're gonna miss this ground. We're selling the farm in the morning, all the words and the fields and the fence. And I wish somebody could help me in a way that.

It all made sins while we're raising hell and night, even if it's the very last.

Time, So long to the good days, because the room has been taken it hard.

It's been fifteen years since she.

Cried our hear of birth, young who loves after the lamb went to sleep last night and he died.

Id eyo stew the farm in the morning.

All the roads that we made in the mud, we'll be leave been.

A lifetime behind us. The generation texts us blood.

Over raising hell and night, even if it's the very last time, and.

So much for the good thing. There's a new bunch of deer in the bottom. I promise to my daughters and sons. Don't know how I'm gonna make up the memory.

I won't stop until I'm done. Don't know what time we gotta leave here, tomorroom.

Don't know what I'm gonna say s to them? How for upond by tonight. But we're gonna be burning one anyway. We're selling the farm in the morning. All the bucks send the snacks in the hogs. It's a world, this passion memory shift in a couple of saddle songs, Well were raising hell the knife, even if.

It's the very last time.

And then don't give up on the good days.