Cole Mannix: Working Land Stewardship and Food Systems

Speaker 1 0:01 I'm Jimmy from Missoula, Montana, and you're listening to the wild idea. Bill 0:07 Welcome to our 50th episode of the wild idea podcast conversations for a wild and connected world. I'm Bill Hodge, and along with my, let's say adversary and colleague Anders Reynolds, we have loved bringing you our curiosity about the connecting point between wild nature and our collective human nature to these conversations. And there's 50 episodes. Can you believe it? Time flies. Man, wow. It's, it's, Anders Reynolds 0:32 I'm truly impressed. If you had told me the beginning of this we were gonna make it to 50, I don't think I would have believed you. Bill 0:38 I've read a crazy stat one time that the average podcast, like only 2% of podcasts, make it to their 100th episode, we're halfway home, baby. Oh shit. Today we are in person and mostly still friends, and we have landed in a really special place, the union restaurant, part of the food web that is the Old Salt co op for a conversation on land stewardship and the intersection of working lands and wild lands with Cole manics. You know, we're actually recording this before we even get to our February break. So let me ask you, in a forward, looking retroactive way, what'd you do with your February break? Anders Reynolds 1:18 I'm so glad you asked Bill. I was so excited to see the Super Bowl where blank won the championship. Seriously, I do have a good project picked out for February. I'm gonna do something that is not only constructive, but I think will feed my soul. And that is, I'm gonna listen to the first 49 episodes of the wild idea, and I'm gonna catalog all your little mispronunciations, errors and contradictions, and brother, I bet that Excel sheet will be Bill 1:49 full well. I always look forward to your show notes. It's always helpful for you to hear all the ways that I've screwed up. And let me just say, I'm a pretty big guy. It's been really nice for you to carry me as much as Anders Reynolds 2:02 I think we know who's gonna take us to the next 50 episodes. Bill 2:05 It's been really fun, though, and I'm glad we're getting to do this episode in person. Anders Reynolds 2:10 I know it's a great way to celebrate 50 to do it live with the incomparable Cole mannex, who is here with us today. Bill 2:17 Yeah, it's gonna be really fun. And Cole, we're just super excited to have you join us, and we're excited for next week when we'll have Terry Tempest Williams on as well, but this is all in the virtual so looking forward to it, and let's get to the conversation with Cole. Cole, just a huge thanks for hosting us here at the Union, a stunning restaurant, a stunning butcher shop, a stunning experience all rolled into one. You know, you and I walked to this building a few years ago when it's but an idea. How does it feel to see what it's become? Cole Mannix 2:48 Oh, I'm really proud of it, and it's fun to do a live podcast in it too. I've never done that before, but I the union is something that we hope becomes a flagship and the home base of our whole brand and ethos. And right in the middle of the restaurant is our big land is kin sign, and we have Dale Livesey paintings, landscape paintings upstairs or or really nice prints of those paintings. Anyway, yeah. And I also just, it's an old building in Helena, you know, early 1900s that Toby who owned it last as Burton ernie's. It was really a community place for a long time, and Toby's family happened to own the Union Market, which was kind of the last butcher shop in town that closed. And so in a lot of ways, it's very exciting to have it up and running, and it's also scary as hell, because restaurants are hard and so we're it's a huge learning experience, a big space, and I'm really grateful to the whole team here that makes it happen. Speaker 2 3:47 It feels Anders Reynolds 3:48 great to be here. This is such a cool spot. I wish people could see what we were talking about. They need to come on down if they want to see it for themselves. Cole, thanks for having us. The Union, as you were mentioning, is sort of the end point for the Old Salt cooperative, which is a rancher owned project focused on regenerative agriculture. I'm wondering if you could just tell our listeners about it. You know what? What problem is the co op trying to solve? Cole Mannix 4:14 Yeah, really, the core problem is that we are trying to be as old salt Co Op, our own marketplace, not just a meat brand, but an integrated marketplace, from restaurants to a food and music and cultural festival to meat packing to e commerce meats to a little bit of distribution as well. That is an alternative to the way that ranchers usually sell their livestock as calves or as yearlings into a pretty anonymous commodity supply chain that has become incredibly consolidated over the years, and as it's gotten big and anonymous as customers and producers, we start to lose our relationship with each other. I think so this little food. Marketplace that we're trying to create as right now five ranches that formed it, and now more than 100 workers who are working in the business and trying to make it happen, and dozens of investors and 1000 or more customers. We're just a community of people who are trying to say, how do we how do we build a an economy that actually sends money back upstream, where stewardship actually happens, like really good food work, really good land work takes talent applied over time, and that takes bandwidth and opportunities and it takes money. How can we build a marketplace that sends value and opportunity and empowers the upstream, rather than consolidating it all downstream, which is kind of what our food system was built over time, evolved over time. To do Bill 5:52 you mentioned that the co op is made up of ranchers, ranch families, really including your own. And I think we can all agree that the ranching community has a tremendous amount of clout in the West, right when it comes to us, politics, when it comes to to culture. I wonder if you could talk a bit about what the public may get right about ranching and what the public may not know, or maybe the public gets wrong about ranching and the role that ranching plays in an arid west. Cole Mannix 6:23 Well, my first experience kind of outside of the Montana bubble that I was raised in, I went to a school on a town that didn't have a store. Was very small, K through eighth that had 30 kids in it total. And then Helena was where I went to undergrad, mostly, and and Helena was the big city for me, big city, 30,000 people. And then when I got to Boston for graduate school, a lot of the questions I got were, didn't you know ranching is kind of problematic from an ecological perspective? Didn't you know that meat is problematic from a health perspective? And you know, we were taught as kids to question our own bias, and that was something dad in particular really harped on. So I knew, you know, and I still know or have a bias, and I've got blinders on that you need to work on your lens. So for me, it was an opportunity to really start reading and dive as deep as I possibly could into these topics. And I think, just like almost anything you can think of in the world, there's versions of ranching that need a lot of work. But I had also come from a context, grown up in a context, and then just gotten to know ranching families across the West, and then later, after the Boston experience, worked for a group called Western landowners Alliance, which is a membership group of rancher conservationists. And so I had certainly seen where ranching could be a massive win, win, intact habitat that was at least maintaining and in some case improving in its fertility and ecological function. And so I knew, like I also knew what it could look like. It got me really interested in the sort of the enabling conditions of the economy. Like, how does raising good food while taking excellent care of ecology? How is that either enabled by our current economic conditions and policy or or not? And so basically, Old Salt is my journey, and saying really hard to change these big picture trends as we're each so small, right? But how can I build a working model in my backyard with the relationships ranchers, people I know of a food system and economy that would empower really good stewardship, and so what I have seen is that I remember a quote in particular by this fellow who was part of the founding group of maupai Borderlands, Jim Corbett, who said that ranching is now one of the Last livelihoods, human livelihoods that is compatible with wild biotic communities. He was talking about a working lands model, and he started off being very anti cattle. He was a Quaker. He was very much part of the cattle free by 93 kind of attitude. But he came to see in the collaboration that happened between ranchers and conservation groups in Mount pie down in Arizona, he came to see that actually livestock operations are kind of a way of supporting, you know, producing something that people need and buy at the same time as cohering with the ecological history and the evolution of how that landscape came to Be in the first place with these large ungulates and those herds on grasslands. Well, I'll put Anders Reynolds 9:46 Yeah, you mentioned that relationships Empower stewardship, and that made me curious about what land stewardship you know, particularly on public land you. Has in common with land stewardship in a working land context. You mentioned working lands too, and I wonder if you've done any thinking about that dichotomy. Cole Mannix 10:09 Yeah, for sure. I mean, stewardship, for me, is just another word, word for care, right? And I think you know, you could talk about raising the child and that stewardship, that's it's nothing other than love, and that means it needs to be patient, and it needs to be very observant, and it needs to recognize that each child or each landscape is quite different, and stewardship in the context of something that needs to be in the black in order to stay intact, Bill 10:40 and the notion we can we can relate to very much, yeah. Are we on the black belt? We're working hard. Cole Mannix 10:48 You know, in the world of ranching and private lands, if you can't figure out how to pay the bottom line as you are doing your management, then you know you're going to go away, and some other regime, management regime, regime of care is going to replace you. And so, you know, obviously on public lands, we have to think of what is the carrying capacity of the various different animals that use that, and also the various different people that use that, it has impacts, right? And that carrying capacity is different when you're using it for the production of food for sure, and obviously on a lot of our public lands, they're integrated with these privately owned lands and this kind of working land space, my own family's place, lots of Forest Service lease, lots of BLM lease, state lease from the state and a lot of the West was Set up, kind of with the knowledge that high country and low country, winter ground and summer country sort of go together. You know, you need the low country to survive during the winter, if you're an animal, doesn't matter whether you're a cow or an elk, and the high country is where you go in the summertime. Anders Reynolds 11:56 Let's dig into that, the the idea of public land a little bit more. You know, if the union is the endpoint federal lands are, or maybe the foundation of the co op. And I wonder if you could tell us about federal land grazing and how your family and there are other ranchers in the co op approach land stewardship on those leases. Yeah. Cole Mannix 12:17 I mean, first of all, our operations hugely depend on the access to grazing in the high country. And it you have to graze High Country different than you graze kind of native grasses in that between kind of rolling hills, sagebrush country. And you need to graze that country different than you graze irrigated bottom land, right, which a lot of times are introduced European grasses, for example, for us, we're trying to give 60 day rest periods impact with a lot of cattle, these irrigated bottom lands, and then get off for at least 60 days to allow recovery. Whereas when we get into some of the uplands, which is a lot of times the public lands, both that kind of medium elevation ground and the high country. In that case, we're trying to graze every we're trying to give two growing seasons of rest. The metabolism on those lands often drier, different regime of grass, it burns a little slower, and so you need to impact it and get it off of it for longer to allow longer recovery. And the goal with grazing always is to have the right balance of you don't want cattle to be able to cherry pick plants, because they'll go to their favorites first, and they'll put a lot of pressure on those. And those, those eventually start decreasing a lot of times. Those ones that get pressure are the ones that are most nutrient dense. So you want to, you know, the ideal is to be able to really focus cattle, make them put their head down and graze whatever is in front of them, and then move along and don't come back until adequate recovery has been allowed. And then, of course, like if you're up in the high country, there's some challenge, there's some challenge. There's some other challenges. So in my neck of the woods, it's a lot of grizzly bear presence and Wolf presence. What's really helpful in that context is human presence, so that you can know where the cattle are trying to stay out of high pressure areas, stay out of larkspur when it's blooming. That takes human presence, and human presence in the high country with a whole bunch of cattle is sort of increasingly scarce to find, hard to find that skill set, right? So some, in some cases, people are experimenting with this virtual fence, with these collars that kind of tell cattle, like, beep, beep, beep, beep, you're getting close to the border, and you try to use that signal to herd. So one of I'll just give it a quick example, one of our members, J Brel ranches. They operate in the gravelly mountains on a large 25,000 Oh, acre Anders Reynolds 14:49 lease Bill knows that's one of my favorite places. A lot of Cole Mannix 14:52 grizzly bears per square inch, right? Yeah, yep, for sure. And these guys, you know, came in, it was, they worked, I think, with national. Life Federation. They worked with perk they worked with greater Yellowstone coalition. Hillary and Andrew Anderson, who are the managers at JBL, changed their lives to figure out, okay, we're going to change the type of cow that's grazing up here, yearlings, instead of mother cows with vulnerable baby calves. We're going to change the density. We're going to half of the time. So instead of four months up there, there's two months. And we're literally going to tow our four kids with us and live in the back country, use virtual fence and try to herd these cattle in a way that decreases the risk of grizzly bear conflict. And they've been really successful in that. But it, it, there's not just sort of, Oh, I'm just going to implement the regenerative practices instead of the other practices. It's change your life around a priority. And in their case, the priority is we want they believe in grazing and they believe in cattle, but they, as much as anything, they believe that it is a way to use land while truly honoring the other animals that live there, right, like grizzly bears, but like the entire rest of the complement of species that uses the gravelly range, right? Yeah. So in their case, they just made an extra commitment in their life of we want to ranch in a way that is is quite coherent with wild things and wild places. Bill 16:20 Yeah, I think, I think it goes back to my question originally about about what maybe the general public doesn't get about ranching and and, you know, you mentioned you went with biases, but you immediately met the biases that you heard when you got to Boston. And I think that my big takeaway is there's an awful lot of ranching done in a way that they're trying to do it right in the gravellies, trying to minimize grizzly livestock interactions, so that we don't have to, because you not only end up with dead livestock, you end up with dead grizzly bears too, right? I think that's really important to talk about, but it's such a fine line to do it right, but do it right in a way that you can still keep doing it right. We talk about being in the black right. And one thing that has stuck with me since you and I were walking this beautiful building at the time was a mess because you were you were taking it back down to the studs, back down to the bones, and it's just hard to see it. Folks, go to our website. I took some pictures. You'll see just how beautiful this facility is. But when we were walking out, you shared a stat with me that just really stood out about how hard it is to get this right, and one of the barriers to getting that right, and that is the percentage of beef consumed in Montana that was actually raised in Montana, a high beef production state. Could you talk a little bit about that barrier for ranchers to get it right? Cole Mannix 17:47 Yeah, and this is, this is true of Montana, but it's really true of the broader food system in the United States, right? Which is that of all of the meat animal products consumed in Montana, less than 2% were raised and processed here. And, you know, in a state where livestock outnumber people substantially, and that is the food system we've created, it has there's kind of two elements, I would say to that, how has the food system come to be the way it is? Number one is geopolitical, security we wanted as a country to be able to not run out of basic commodities. We had experiences like the Dust Bowl. We were trying to create an insurance policy that gave us leverage and security in this global context of free trade and a great big Navy that took a certain approach after World War Two, about how are we going to keep the peace? We're going to allow all these economies to grow? That's number one, how our food policy was kind of designed. And then the other thing is less about design and just more about the way that unless you actively work against it, power consolidates over time, and so people that have money have a business interest, they start lobbying. They start influencing policy. They start trying to build them a moat around their business risk management. And eventually, what that means is that they are able to not through competition, but through working in the background on policy come to gain more and more power, and we in many industries in this country, have gotten to that place. But food is a particularly extreme example. Walmart sells more food, or what I should say is Walmart sells as much food as the next seven retailers combined. Consolidation of power in the food system starts there. It goes down through Cisco, US foods, the big distributors, then down to the Packers. JBS, a Brazilian company, is the largest meat company in the world and the largest in the US massive companies like Cargill, and as those companies grow. People, they have incredible efficiencies, and they know how to do it. But when an element of that big, spread out system breaks, a plant that has 1000 workers, gets covid, for example, it's cheap. It's cheaper. Instead of the hogs that can't go to that plant, they're just going to get buried in a tren instead of going to a processor that is no longer available, and instead of just being kept on feed for longer, it's cheaper to just cut your losses and bury them. That's an ugly reality of what is a very large but a quite a brittle food system. And ultimately, what that food system does is it concentrates money and opportunity downstream in the hands of a few businesses and their founders and their investors. In order to reverse that system, we have to build a food system that actually sends far more of the opportunity and the money back upstream to feed stewardship that is ultimately so Old Salt Co Op built a parent company in which investors got less than they normally would, founders got less than they normally would, and workers and ranchers got more share of that parent company than they normally would. So if old salt works, the more we feed, the more people purchase from Old Salt, the more is sent back to those people that are actually using the business. So it's sort of distributes through business, you know, opportunity, money, resiliency Anders Reynolds 21:31 you're describing. You know, so much of our current condition, so much of, I think, what Bill and I engage with on, on conservation today, I'm still kind of struck by something you said earlier about human presence being scarce. So much of modern conservation exists in that tension between the human either being absent on the land or sort of central to its management. So I was really pleased to hear you talk about the detrimental impacts of human presence growing more scarce. I think it's a good reminder that we are a part of that system, a radical part of that system, like we've got to look at ourselves and deal with our place in the system. And I guess I just wonder, through the co op and through the union here, are you feeling like that message is getting through? Do you feel like more and more people sort of recognize the way of life that you're describing to us like right now? Cole Mannix 22:37 I think people are gradually recognizing it, but I think it's, it's a very hard message to say. Most people want to know, oh, why is this product better than that product? They think that there's a set of attributes that should be able to set a product apart from another product, so they can just make a decision. And I'm not so interested in the product itself as I am the shelf it's sitting on. It's a structural problem that I'm trying to communicate the way that it actually gets to you. You know, basically the things you feed with your dollars and with your time, they grow. And if you feed your dollars and time into the box store world, we will continue to see extraction from the land and from rural, from the from the country. Anders Reynolds 23:20 Yeah, the way you spend your money is a vote for the world you want to live in. Cole Mannix 23:24 And I think, like, it's always going to be the long game for me to not, I don't actually really like to hair split over product attributes. What I want to sort of, what I'm trying to show with Old Salt is health is a whole. You can't just put a different sticker on a on a meat product, and then try to get it into the same old system and expect a new outcome. So we have to create this whole alternative, and then kind of meet people where they're at. So you might come into the restaurant having no idea of the larger kind of thing that the restaurant is a part of, and most people will for years before they ever even really get it. You might come to this festival for because Nikki Lane was playing, or because Eduardo Garcia was cooking, and it might take you several years to realize, oh, this is part of this different kind of marketplace, and it's okay for me to to know that people are going to do to come to their understanding of what, how this is different, gradually, but I need enough people to come to that understanding and to fall in love with it soon enough to survive, right? Because what we're doing is probably goes without saying. It's tremendously not advisable if you want a comfortable life. Bill 24:36 You know, I, I really admire that you, you told the full picture of the system that we have, and that there was a good intent behind the fact that global markets were going to be connected. You know, we had Frank yucatur on the podcast, and he talked about, you know, one of the things he wrote a book called The brown and the green, the green and the brown. And he talked about one of the lead ups. Do World War Two was Germany was running out of the capacity to feed their own people. That was part of that expansion. Obviously, there were a whole lot of other things going on with German politics, but that was a big one, right? And so, so there is something noble about a system that was created to recognize that we sort of have global systems. I mean, we all know now we have a climate global system that's connected and activities around the globe affect things on the other side of the globe, but but that does mean, as you said, that the whole system is set up to be to make it very hard for me, as a Montana resident, to make sure that the protein that I'm buying at the store is Montana. Montana raised protein raised by ranchers who are good stewards of the land, good stewards of of the full production of the land, because it's also wildlife production, right? It's, it's, it's all of those things. And I just think it's, I mean, it's one of the things I've loved about Old Salt Co Op since, since we first met and got involved in the festival. And we'll talk about the festival in a second. But it's, it's, it's, it's a really big idea. It's a really big we were talking about this before we hit record. It's a big idea, but it's obviously a big risk. But you're not just tilting against like a system that is inherently evil. You're just tilting against a system that could work better, both for the consumer, who obviously, these days, is concerned about inflation and prices of putting food on their table, but for the producer as well, right? Cole Mannix 26:25 Absolutely, I think food, you know, geopolitical food security is one of the things I mentioned, is that's how the food system was designed. But even if you don't count the plant that closes because of covid and then the hogs being buried in the barrel pit, even if you don't count that kind of fragility. Clearly, it's not very secure if we're running out of harvests in the most fertile area of our country, the bread basket, because a whole bunch of corn and soy and anti and haber bosch and, you know, fertilizer, nitrogen, and all these, you know, pesticides and herbicides that we've come to use are not allowing for the long term fertility. That is real security we've got, you know, 50 massive, big plants real security would be 500 medium sized ones. And, you know, 5000 smaller plants, so that we have redundancy in the system. So I care about, you know, security too. I just think security looks like distributed economic opportunity, more of our neighbors doing well. And this is a problem. That problem is not very specific to agriculture. It transcends our economic reality in America right now is like we need to basically treat each other as if our health is part of each other, which it is, yeah. Anders Reynolds 27:49 And your last answer, you mentioned the Old Salt festival, yeah. And I want to make sure we get to talk about that a little bit, because one of the extensions of the work of the co op is that festival back on your family's ranch in helenville, can you share the origins of that idea and share what it does for building awareness, for land stewardship and not just the co op? Cole Mannix 28:12 Yeah, for sure, I think it comes from feeling like you when you do ranch tours, for example, you can just only go so deep. It's, you know, you look at a couple things and and then you move on and about. I remember being part of different Blackfoot challenge meetings. Blackfoot Challenge is a conservation organization that have kind of came to be in the valley that I grew up in partnership of land owners and and ranchers and residents and agencies and nonprofits that said, Hey, we care about what the future of this 1.5 million acre watershed that involves private and public looks like. And I remember being part of Blackfoot challenge discussions about, how do we advertise? How do we get to out to the world? What happens in this valley? Bill 28:55 Hey, more beers are here, guys. Oh, my God, another stout, please. There's another stout on the way. I love it. I remember Jim speaking of the festival I gotta have a beer, you know, yeah, Cole Mannix 29:04 Jim stone, you know, all the tours of the Blackfoot challenge hosts, you know, he's famous for, you know, the yellow school busses doing the tour. And he's, you know, out the back door of the bus pitching beers to the other people on the ATV Behind them, yeah, and it was, it's about fun, like we need to be able to spend time together and break bread or rib eye, whatever, whatever, and have a beer together over an extended period of time and just kind of be together. So the Blackfoot challenge ended up being a significant sponsor of Old Salt festival. And meanwhile, we were trying to say, how do we differentiate what we're really trying to do with a different kind of marketplace? Well, I went to the family and I had my way, I had one idea for a particular location. Anders Reynolds 29:50 Feels like you're the kind of guy that approaches the family with a lot of ideas. Cole Mannix 29:55 God bless. So it's my, you know, my my siblings, my cousins, my parents. My aunts and uncles at all ranch together, and at one point I suggested a particular area on the ranch where the Blackfoot River Runs Through, and my uncle Randy called it an abomination. It was that was a little too close to like sacred ground. And so we found another really good location, and honestly, the family was incredibly supportive of such a crazy idea. And now, you know, we expect about 4000 people this year, and they come for several days. Some people day trip in from Missoula and and and Helena or Sealy lake or Lincoln or Drummond nearby. Some people RV. Some people tent camp. We have a limited amount of glamping. And we have live fire cooking that one of our team members from Old Salt, Andrew mace, has really been the brainchild of all of our culinary activations to date. And so Andrew kind of brought that esthetic and culinary experience. And then we have a general store with makers who are making beautiful things from all across the West, we have a talks on wildlife conservation, talks on the food system, talks on how do we activate capital, both debt and and investment, into this kind of building a new infrastructure for a better food system that serves land and people. And it's just really fun. We blow an anvil up into the air with black powder, some ranchy fun. I think this year we're having like a cowboy, cowgirl speed dating, and it's just having good college fun. But you know, it's probably 80% people from Missoula or Seattle or salt lake, or folks who are raising their family in an urban environment, but care about land and food and are trying to go deeper. And maybe 20% people that are in ranching and conservation. So let's say like 600 people who they do this for a living. And so it's kind of this powerful networking experience. If you're in if you've got a project, you might find your next business partner, but at the same time, it's just fun with kids. There's a lot of kids running around too, which nice adds an element that Anders Reynolds 32:11 I don't see it a lot of fast, are you taking pictures of us? Speaker 2 32:15 Bill, unbelievable, get back to my multi task. Back to the mic. Bill 32:19 Yeah. I mean, I have my pitch for the festival, but give folks a pitch for the Old Salt festival for 2026 and don't forget the dates. Yeah. What could they expect? Cole Mannix 32:31 The dates are June 19 to the 21st so think summer solstice. It's easy, easiest way to kind of remember when it is always thinking about the summer solstice. So longest summer day of the year. And this year, I'm excited to there's a fellow named Bill Schindler who wrote a book called eat like a human, and has a lot he's going to make a presentation about the role of fire and the role of food processing fermentation and in the evolution of humanity, and it's kind of a cool overlap, because meanwhile, the Blackfoot challenge and their partners are doing another thing about bringing prescribed fire back to the landscape from the perspective of mitigating risk in the WUI, the wildland urban interface. Thank you. Thank you. Mitigate. And also like improving habitat by setting sage brush back and creating more mosaic of grassland and sagebrush for wildlife and birds, and, you know, mitigating this problem of extreme fire in the West. And so it's kind of a cool overlap there woman named Meriwether Hardy is the like great, great, great, great, great grand daughter, I think, or grand niece to Meriwether Lewis and Merriweather will be there to kind of help us reimagine, like, what is the new place that we can go as a society, to create a society to match the scenery? How do we be? How do we change ourselves to be able to live in the Western United States, this beautiful but fragile ecosystem, in a way that, like our kids would be proud of, and where our where our actual civilization and culture can endure. So there's some really and there's, of course, there's some wonderful musicians, like the kitchen dwellers are classic favorite around here. We also have jams that happen. They're more like String Band jams the midnight on fire. Awesome. We're actually going to talk about one of the panels will be on this big project up in the gravelly mountains. Going to talk about how Hillary and Andrew Anderson came to try to reduce conflict with grizzly bears by changing the way their ranching operation worked on this 25,000 acres of a wild country. So there's a little bit of something for everybody. There's horses and mule packing. And, you know, the kids love to see the equestrian side of things. There's a panel on the well being economy, which is kind of everything from changing the way we think is GDP really a good metric of economic health. you know, and in the same way as like, does the calorie count on this package really tell me much about nutrition? So just talking about, what is the kind of business that we can do in these landscapes that actually takes care of them and each other? Bill 35:14 Yeah, I my pitch folks to come to helm Ville in June is you're not going to experience anything else like it. It is, it's not a music festival, but there's great music. It's not a Culinary Festival, but there's great food and great demonstrations on how to take advantage of the protein that's produced in Montana. It is, it's just such a unique the anvil flying in the air, one of my favorite moments, or going to listen to cold jam at the copper queen with the copper queen. And, I mean, there's just like, it's just a really unique in an era where there's not a lot unique. I mean, I think back to when Bonnaroo, the music festival in Manchester, Tennessee, first started, that was unique. It was really cool. Well, now there's a music festival every other weekend across the Pacific Northwest. But this is not a music festival, but it is a weekend. And indeed, you brought up the the ranch walks and the ranch talks like like Blackfoot challenge does I went, I went on one a year ago or a little over a year ago with in the Ruby Valley. Those are great. I got to hear a lot of interesting things about getting carbon back in the soil, but there's nothing like spending that full weekend of immersing yourself in the talks. But yeah, maybe finding a cold beer here and there as I'm reaching for my watch out. Yeah, yeah. Salute, and and yet, you know, having that connection to the ground that sort of sits with you. I mean, it has sat with me every year that I've been at the festival. I just think it's a really cool deal. And tickets are on sale now, right? Cole Mannix 36:51 Yep, yeah, we gradually kind of announce more about what the programming is going to be over the course of the early spring and mid spring. And I think too The other thing about it is this is taking place. It's not too far from civilization, where Missoula and Helen are nearby, but the Blackfoot valley itself is basically this little example where people have come together. This is far beyond ranching. It has to do with a whole bunch of nonprofits over the years, from from conservation easement groups, land trusts, to the Nature Conservancy, to the Trust for Public Land, to Trout Unlimited, to the way that the actual Blackfoot challenge works. There's been so much for 40 years, has it gone into collaborating over the future of this landscape? And you're surrounded by that the ranch itself is under conservation easement, and you're, you know, the highway, you can just barely hear it, but you're kind of in this little nook where stars are out and it's, you know, you're here, you're hearing a bird. So it's kind of a little part of the world that is worth visiting, yeah. Bill 37:56 I mean, I think one thing I talked to this couple sitting in front of my camper. I think it was year one, maybe year two. They were from Minnesota. They had just delivered their daughter to summer camp for a couple of weeks in Bozeman, and they were like trying to find something else to do. And they randomly found, found out about the Old Salt Festival, and they had had a blast and and I guess my additional pitch to folks, because we have listeners all across the country, you know, all over the world, really, all over the world, honestly, we do, and which is kind of exciting, but it's, it's, you know, you know, it's kind of a love hate thing here in Montana. But people have impressions of Montana if they've not been here, whether, whether they're 60 years old, and it was A River Runs Through It, which, by the way, the ranch sits in the middle of the Blackfoot Valley. So there's that, or those who maybe watched another TV show that's come on in the last 10 years or so. If you want to experience what I think feels the most authentic to me. And I say this is not a native Montanan, but it is. It is that weekend of just being in it. I mean, it's just, it's being it's the best way to be in Montana, if you're not from here, coming to the festival, learning about the work that the ranches collectively are doing for land stewardship and and just also having a great time while you're doing it. I just think it's a great extension to all that is the co op brand. One thing we haven't touched on is other ways people can engage with their brand. We've talked about the union. Come have dinner here at Helena, anywhere near Helena, come have dinner at the Union. But online they can. They can purchase product from the co op and all of that protein raised here in Montana, right? Cole Mannix 39:40 That's right, yeah, right across the street from the unions is the outpost, which is our smash burger shop, which is our oldest business, and really just a fun little spot. If you've ever gone to the gold bar, we're kind of a little partnership in and it's a good burger if you're stopping through and then Old Salt co op.com is where we sell meat online to. To folks anywhere in the lower 48 and we continue to add new product lines and some fun merch, and so check us out. Anders Reynolds 40:08 Yeah, please check them out. Cole, speaking of authentic you've offered our listeners so much deep and thoughtful and authentic thinking, and I really enjoyed our time here with you at the Union today. And I know a podcast isn't a system shaking Co Op, but from one misadventure to another. Thank you so much for spending time with us today. This has been great. Cole Mannix 40:34 I'm grateful for you having me, and I wish you luck with wild ideas. Pretty darn cool. Bill 40:38 Thank you. Yeah, cool. Thanks for being here. We certainly hope you've enjoyed our 50th episode, and if this is your first listen, we have had a whole lot more out there for you to enjoy. And we hope you will share a little project here with our with our or your family and friends we probably need to share with our family. Should I've done that? Yeah, you should have done that already. Take a little time to give us a review and a rating on your favorite podcast app coming up next week. Pretty excited to announce this. To wrap up our first year, one of my favorite authors, Terry Tempest Williams, will be joining us, whoa for episode 51 excited for that. We're also going to be bringing you a little more on the passion for the roadless rule with a live webinar where you can join the conversation. And until then, you can sign up for our newsletter, The Wild idea.com and we hope to see all of you on down the trail. Announcer 41:30 The wild idea is a production of wild idea media and hosted by Bill Hodge and Anders Reynolds, production and editing by Bren Russell at podlad Digital, support by Holly wilkeshevsky At day pack digital. Our theme music Spring Hill Jack is from railroad Earth and was composed by John skihan. Our executive producer and ring leader is Laura Hodge. You can find the wild idea wherever you listen to or download your favorite podcast. If you have a minute, please take a minute to give us a rating, and if you really like us, we hope you'll subscribe. Learn more about us at the wild idea.com you. Transcribed by https://otter.ai