Doug Lindamood | Factory Farms Vs. Regenerative Agriculture & The SonRise Ranch Way

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00:51 Which means you'll unfortunately never hear my voice again. 1930s President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed the nation through a series of radio broadcast known as the fireside chats His aim was to reassure the common man that our society would recover from its troubled times. I'm Greg Carlwood These are the higher side chats.

01:30 Alright, Hiresight Shatters bringing the heat from sunny San Diego. I'm Greg Carlwood and it's clear by now that the events of 2020 have caused an untold amount of stress anxiety and uncertainty with millions of people across the world thrust into a not so helpful fear state at a scale we've never known before We've seen the panic that scarcity can cause when the conveniences of modern life are disrupted And the shock that sets in when supply chains we become so dependent on show the slightest weakness It hasn't been the best year, but the most effective medicine for that and the strongest hedge against getting caught up in it again is to take the necessary action to have a plan beyond suckling at the teat of a shaky unsustainable system until it all breaks down. Well that starts with food security and I've personally found the ripple effects of getting high quality grass-fed animals from a local producer are so positive I can't believe I didn't do it sooner!

02:25 Your meat is of a much higher quality, including parts of the animal you don't typically get at the grocery store yet nutrient experts say are needed for optimal health. You form deeper bonds with the people you care about when you split an animal with them, knowing that they're in a better place along with you. Your money is no longer contributing to the sick factory farming system we all know is wrong and giving your business to that local farm is helping ensure decentralized and independent food supply chains will be around next time the oily appendages of The Big Machine try to lock it down all in one fell swoop Well, raise a glass to today's guest the great Doug Lindemood the proprietor of Sunrise Ranch an all-natural regenerative non-industrial non chemical non government subsidy funded family farm in Oceanside California.

03:11 At Sunrise Ranch, they raise humanely treated antibiotic-free organic fed no soy no GMO beef pork and truly free range chicken. And they employ holistic planned grazing methods to feed their animals the freshest rapidly growing green grass possible that simultaneously builds rather than depletes the land and surrounding environment Needless to say they're deeply committed to the principles of small farming and regenerative agriculture Doug's hard work has definitely been a big help to your humble host in 2020, and I couldn't be more psyched to have him here. The restorative rancher king of the pasture and sustainable answer to our broken corporate system. Doug my man welcome to the higher side. Thank you Greg it's good to be with ya. Yes this is gonna be a lot of fun thanks for doing it most interviews I do around here don't really relate to my personal life like this one does but over the summer some friends and I split a cow from you

04:07 Had a big get-together and laid out all these cuts on the table, and did the draft system you recommended. And not only was it fun but it prompted more group meals despite the lockdowns, contributed greatly to everyone's mental and physical health, and instead of being tempted to talk about conspiracies I could just focus on the positive! So that was a godsend man To get us started here, talk to us about how you started the ranch because I understand you were also looking for a better way largely due to your wife's health at the time. Right? That's right. Uh, he was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease and we were forced to the precipice of a decision as to how we were going to handle this where are we going to go the natural route or are we gonna go with the pharmaceutical route

04:55 And what are the prospects that how if you decide to go natural how do you source that stuff where did it get it what should I be looking for questions do ask and just became this. Long circuitous journey that we made we found a piece of the puzzle fairly easy when it came to organics in terms of vegetables and fruits thats not too hard to come by but what stopped us was milk and dairy we just couldn't figure that out And so we combine some of my natural farm experience from a very early days as a kid on the ranch and we stepped out into the unknown. I got a couple milk cows if you can believe that, that's pretty bold start off but we started with some milk cows i was probably the only guy going to grad school in a nice suit and tie throughout today having milked cow in the morning and needed to get back enough time to milk the cow at night

05:50 And of course most people don't realize that a milk cow, modern milk cows just overly productive. One of the reasons early settlers always had milk cows with them was because they're vibrantly productive and I can remember in our early days walking in and evening milking with 12 gallons of milk from our milk cow and going hey kids did you guys get a cup of milk? They were going yeah dad we got a cup of milk and we've had plenty of milk for the day. And I was stumped like what do I do with all this extra milk And we ended up giving it away. We ended up starting cow shares and all kinds of stuff with our neighbors, and we eventually started sunrise ranch from that just in abundance of production

06:29 Very cool and kudos to you for just diving in like that seems pretty intimidating but i think a lot of people will find that when they even just start with the vegetable garden or couple fruit trees that, even then an inexperienced person will be surprised with the yields that they end up getting interesting here that also seems to be true with dairy. And of course we've talked about how one good size cow can feed a family of four for year that surprise me when I heard it Going back to your story when you decided to go with food be thy medicine that's a bold and difficult choice and it does take a sort of bravery because we have this big monolithic system telling us otherwise, add feels risky to go against all that advice and take things in your own hands. Of course everyone has to make their own choices but what advice would you have for people who

07:24 No they should do this intellectually but worry that when faced with a real decision point they might not have the strength to go against the so called experts of the system it seems really difficult. Yeah it is correct and the first thing i would say is you're not alone, you're gonna feel like your loan and your not thats the most important thing we had two Overcome that feeling of man i'm like the only person doing this the fact is that especially with you know social media and modern chat groups and everything i mean if u decide. Can you determine what to grow something grow anything grow, the smallest thing there's support out there there's a group for somebody that wants to start a strawberry patch i guarantee it and the knowledge is their

08:08 But you've got to be tenacious and you've got to press in and you've got to kind of follow that aggressively if you will. One of the big drawbacks of our current system Greg is that about 1.9% of Americans are growing the other 98.1% of American's food for them right now I laugh because in the early days of grass fed beef for our company we go to a group chat or talk or something western a price meeting just gathering and we tell people hey yeah we grow grass bed be if you know where grass but cattle company and what are you could hear the music stop. I mean it was really something else right every good work,

08:48 And it dawned on me, Greg that 50 years ago that would not have gotten anybody's attention. Everybody had a cow in the backyard our agricultural umbilical was well attached It isn't anymore That is simple fact its an unusual sort of curiosity so gathering that knowledge number one its little more scarce than it was in the past but second thing is most us know those in agriculture industry Yes i'm having degrees but that's not a formal education with the education that you get in the agricultural world is what we farmers and ranchers and cattleman call pass it down. Which is just three word phrase that means my great grandfather top my grandfather who taught my dad will teach me, add a lot of it is just experience one of my favorite things as you can google experience

09:38 And so a lot of that knowledge is tacitly embedded in our farmers, in our ranchers and our cattlemen and our agriculturalists. And it can be kind of hard to get out. Those folks by the way are not necessarily very verbal but there's a whole other generation coming up that's excited about it that are newbies if you will they weren't third fourth fifth generation farmers and ranchers they're going at all again and its just beautiful because it blossoming into a whole another world breaking those paradigms that allowed new methods to come forward and allow expansion in the areas where we thought things might work but maybe were afraid to because if we failed we could let great grandpa down.

10:18 Our new generation of ranchers and cattlemen indirect marketers don't have that baggage so to speak. We don't have all the experience but the big advantage we found is that when i wanted to do something new in ranching i didn't have to go check with great grandpa be worried about what he thought, i just did it and if it worked great and if you didn't want was on me and i need a figure something else out Yes i mean that's a great point about how the last few decades we have just been kind of wind off that self sufficient lifestyle and thrust right into dependence and not even on the same quality of food or food production cuz it's all corporate ties now and that is obviously a huge issue

11:01 I think a lot of people realize that sustainable pasture raised animals are no real comparison to what factory farming produces, but can you talk to people about the differences between a steak they would get from Sunrise vs. a corporate grocery store? What makes one so much better than the other because clearly all cows are not created or raised equally, are they?" That's right! They're NOT The main difference is that the fat in a grass fed beef is just comprised entirely different. From the fat and conventionally raised beef one that is perhaps reason if you'd like, grass beach has to grow a whole lot slower we harvested at twenty eight months usually twenty two twenty nine months that's when

11:47 It's fully ready for harvest but from that time until it's ready we find that the fat that is grown in animal is comprised. Mechanically of a whole bunch of different content than your conventional beef so, we've done some statistical tests on it we done some analytical test and we found out its about four to six times more nutritionally dense then you would get in supermarket So not only is it comprised differently but it tastes differently and cooks different latests an entirely different animal no pun intended. It's more nutritionally dense requires a lot more patients one of the problems that we've had is that as we introduce this, nutritionally dance product to new customers that have just come off of you know xyz grocery store in her kind of curious looking at our beef is that the kitchen skills

12:41 That went away when we industrialized our food are very hard to learn almost as equally as hard as the ranching skills. And that can be a real tough hill to climb that people will become is society very easily adapted to how long do i microwave this for when in fact, you're having somebody afford your fifty dollars take a look at what you know this requires great care and how you handle it how you cook it When the people do take the time to overcome that barrier they see an abundance on the other side of it taste so much better. It's so much richer your body resonates with those vitamins and minerals that are only president grass-fed beef you feel fuller interestingly enough many of our customers start with. The biggest box that they can get so they'll get a subscription say to the ranch in the by the biggest one i can't

13:33 And over time we notice that it actually decreases in size switch to a smaller size and then they'll space it out a little more. And its fascinating to me because I really see that as such a blessing because what im noticing is, is our recipient is actually filling up on less which is just beautiful thing you don't see that in our modern chemically oriented production oriented society of industrial food If you look at the super sizes always gotten bigger and bigger and bigger since fast food came out so they're actually headed the opposite direction we are we notice our customers will actually eat less. They'll sit down in a meal, and the meat portion will be smaller say that i had been in the past and it's more filling its more nutrient dense

14:19 Mm-hmm. I can definitely attest to it tasting better and cooking a bit differently, and that's a great point about the skills required to cook! There is no point in getting premium nutrient dense meat and then using seed oils or Crisco or a cheap aluminum pan to cook in... Or throwing some steaks on the grill with chemical soaked Walmart charcoal It's all a learning process and no small task to cook a healthy meal from beginning to end And we talked a bit about getting sunrise started in the catalyst for all that, but paint a picture for people of the size and scope of where you're at now obviously there's been some growth but it still basically a family run operation right. Yeah it is in fact my son is full time with us now he's my oldest my daughter runs our entire distribution warehouse division we have oh gosh handful employees know more than about eight or so

15:18 We're still small family farm when you call the phone we answer it's kinda cool i love doing that people go gosh i got a human yeah you talking to your rancher what can I do for ya in fact we use that as a selling point i sort of. Oh my god maybe press the edges of sarcasm sometimes all talk to people no go well how do i find out the quality of my me like this is really simple just call costco and ask talk to the rancher, there's always along pregnant pause and i don't know i'm just getting you'll never be able to do that So we're what's called single source beef. When we raise an animal on our ranch and it eventually makes it through that process, when we hand it to a customer there is number on our package that can tell us... We can trace all the way back to who its mother or father was, what bull it came from On our ranch, where it was born how it lived, what grasses it grazed I could tell you in our cattle records what pastures it grazed in We currently have about 5 thousand acres that we lease in totality

16:10 It's divided up into four separate units one of them is pretty big it's a good probably forty minutes or so on a four wheeler full speed to get from one end to the other there are parts that we can only get back to you on horseback. But they're pretty expensive we got good roads we've had, a lot of time to work on these were old conventional ranches where cattle were just left to do whatever they do on a day-to-day basis and a cow by nature they are grass Connoisseur they can seek out a bunch of grass that they need for that particular day the taste is certain way during a certain season. I joke around and i say look cows basically have two jobs in that is to breed any so they're very good at that they can devote fifty percent of their time to each you know if you just sat on this old cigarette well only thing you gotta do is breathe me you go was not about life be pretty good both those things and so, cows can graze and find grass in places it would just blow your mind

17:09 That can be good and that can be bad on a conventional ranch. They're just left to do that And the sad fact is that they'll go out They'll take a bite of a particular type of grass and they'll go get something else and then the next day They'll come back and take a bite of that same grass They took the previous day that abuses the grass, and it doesn't give it a chance to grow Our job as regenerative cattle ranchers is to go in and prevent that second bite? They're allowed to take the first but we have to prevent them from taking the second bite because that grass has to be able to grow back if And that is how we prevent a degradation of the system and we in fact enhance it through carbon sequestration and building up of carbon and recycling of nutrients. So, it's a big facility We've been at like I said for many years and over the time over a long period time we begin to see changes in these conventional ranches that we took over and we get to see the ecosystem responding to the natural massaging of a cow incorrect proportion and incorrect timing

18:06 Mm-hmm. Yeah, there are a lot of nuances and biomimicry factors factors that go into the regenerative approach that you have. And I'm sure we will get into a lot of that stuff because it is super interesting to see the intelligence of nature just emerge and it just needs a little bit of shepherding and a little tweaking, and you can really optimize everything in the effects are quite shocking really but speaking out on one phone call I had with maybe you or someone on the team were talking about the differences in the meat USDA meat, which people consider that or their condition to think that's like the highest standard. But there are some requirements even there that legally it needs to have I think it was lactic acid added to it or something of that effect? It's not just yours is grass-fed but also doesn't have a lot of the preservatives and additives

19:03 Go into the meet that you're gonna get a costco or even some of these grocery stores that people consider to be the more natural ones in their neighborhood. Even even some other added chemicals are making it into that me is that right, That's right dragon this is a sad sort of saga and story it was one that we brought upon ourselves and i say we collectively cuz frankly were responsible for this you know maybe i wasn't the guy in the usda making decisions but the fact is that. This is what happens when we started detached from, the things that we should be responsible for so we in the cattle industry and certainly the usda bear the burden of this and its kind of interesting story what happened many many years ago was

19:42 Cattle producers wanted a way to effectively feed larger amounts of protein to their cattle because large amounts of protein and cattle will put on good muscle in fact quickly. And the USDA said well we got an idea you could be carry on to cows carry on is that simple word that means ground up, decaying animals yes believe it or not this actually happened Of course because you can't rebel against nature like that within a few years we had a terrible outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Which is basically what we call mad cow disease

20:22 And it really does make a cow mad. It drives them crazy, and if you can imagine an herbivore like a cow being forced to act in a carnivore way—and again these were finely ground up nutrients that they were putting into their feed to help them build on bulk—it made him crazy! There was actually something that happened on the spinal column in the brain and then actually made him mad, and became Mad Cow Disease. And it could actually be passed through the meat In a twist of circumstances we actually knew a family member that died from it was very terrible. It wasn't long after that the USDA said okay we made a huge mistake you can feed carry on don't do that because we have this outbreak of mad cow disease that's killing people and obviously killing cows, any couldn't be contained in so one of the ways they decided they could partially contain is they would take the brain in the spinal column out every animal that they are listed so that kind helped a little bit

21:17 But what we ended up with was we ended up with an outbreak of a disease that was running rampant through our systems and so as a result the USDA had to step in and heavily control the outbreak of mad cow disease. That was one element that was kind of harbinger bad things become the other was what we would all commonly know is equal life Now e-coli again has another sorted sort of history that goes behind it and this is a really fascinating one. When we were head to head with the Soviets, there was a guy by the name Earl Butz who came up with a great idea at least it might have been great at the time that said hey I've got an idea let's out produce the Russians lets just out produce them mine is bigger better faster and one of the ways he decided to do that as secretary of agriculture was he encouraged small farms to get out in all farms become big

22:11 his mantra was plant head road to head row go for it all that you can full steam ahead boys and american agriculture took off in. Corn farmers with the introduction of genetically modified materials and pesticides were producing a hundred sixty bushels an acre when their great-great grandfather may have been lucky to get out eighty or ninety And so these bumper crops came in and corn was prolific everywhere. And of course somebody one day woke up and said well what do we do with all this and we ended up with a lot of corn, can we didn't know what to do it while our smartest scientist if you're smart has an asterisk next to it decided to come up with things like corn syrup and. Corn ethanol and all these wonderful products and in the cattle industry they said let's be corn to cows as well

22:59 Well there's only one way you can get a cow to eat corn and that is to give them no other choice. And so you do that by simply locking them in what we call feedlot which is basically offence area, don't give me the choice to grass and got a force of the corn and they're going to do that it's a little bit like chocolate, i can probably get you take some of it but he wouldn't wanna live off of it if she did become very fat and that was the objective they wanted to use corner make house fat And of course just like carry on and the mad cow disease we got sort of an odd cousin out of that and not was redeveloped in the cows first stomach chamber that would be its room normally where it for men's grass.

23:40 The corn entered in their into that stomach area and an equal i wish there are millions of them present everywhere became president was adapted not to. I'm out the line environment but in a city compartment it became adapted to live in that environment now, under normal conditions when you get any call i got perhaps come through the animals digestive system accidentally gets on a piece of meat doesn't happen often but in history has been no in the process If that piece of meat made it through the cooking process, which would be another barrier and made it into your stomach you have an acidic stomach. So an alkaline adapted E-coli wouldn't survive in your stomach and have no chance at making it. You would kill it instantly but because we fed corn we ended up with a new E-coli O157H7, a certain strain that was particularly resistant to an acidic environment

24:33 And we ended up with a problem because if it made it through all those checks and balances, and did actually make into your body. It was already adapted to survive in an acidic environment and would kill you. So the USDA again in their reactive mode...and I understand that don't fault the USDA they're evil people there just trying to do the best they can reacted to that they said okay what we have to do is we have to now spray all meat with lactic acid because lactic acid will kill the E-coli If by chance it got through And so this lactic acid would actually destroy O157H7 or has been shown to do that. And so all meat from that point forward had to be sprayed with a lactic acid as per USDA guidelines So what you have is, you have a system that isn't running the way it's supposed to

25:20 And the fix on top of the fix on top of the fixes always these reactionary things to try and get things to work all i need to get it to work we need a stop hurting people with equal understandably make sense but, the fact is if you could just step back ago no one ever raise their hand should be feeding corn to cows. No one ever raised her hand said should we be feeding carry-on ground up animals turner before And that is what makes the difference in grass fed as we just go back to the basics and we just look i gotta get back to basics what does a cow eat in nature. What's the descendant of the buffalo what did the buffalo grass man and ate nothing but grass, grass grass and only grass can you see in that we avoid all those problems with bypassing completely i've never worried about equal life my beef ever never not a single before you're doing this thirteen years never had any issue why. We just simply don't give me an environment where it can flourish

26:17 Yeah that makes so much sense and i definitely remember hearing about the mad cow panic back in the day. And it's just a great example of why centralized systems are just too risky one mistake, Can ripple out and do so much damage because there's basically only five farms in the country supporting everybody so yeah it's it's much better to have decentralized local systems even if something bad were to accidentally happen Fallout isn't nearly as nationwide as if something goes wrong in a Tyson plant it's just kind of insane that we would allow ourselves to be so vulnerable but that is the system or and a few corporations rise the top choke out all the other ones lobby so that

27:05 The regulations are too much for small farms to accommodate and they just kind of do their thing. It's an unfortunate system, definitely we need to change much of it." And you're absolutely right great one of the beauties of being a director answer is that i am totally and personally connected all my customers they can pick up the phone and they can ask us questions which has incredible power that was just one of the beauties of the. Frankly the capitalistic system in its early days there was wonder what accountability when we blur those lines and allow giant,

27:41 agricultural corporations on the industrial level to operate they lose that connection with their consumers a loose accountability frankly it's an accountability. And so, you know my customers can call me and ask me questions and they can go hey I've got a question about how you do this. And if it doesn't fit them there's probably a rancher out there that would love to have their business. You know we've had a number of people call us say look i want corn fed beef and I go well its just not something we provide but im sure theres hard working rancher out there that would like to do that. I don't agree with that method is not something that I endorse or would do for many many other reasons other than the fact that actually isn't good for the cows not good for the person certainly not good for the environment

28:20 But the beauty of the system is in the free market ideas and free market products you know if i'm out there and peddling my where and the guy next to me is doing his, what let's begin may the best man when let's just move forward and what we're noticing it's beautiful as people are becoming more conscious of this. There's always a silver lining some of this that people are now beginning to say wait a second what am i supporting with my food dollar what giant corporate For an entity that controls eighty percent of the beef production in the us what are they doing with this money and am i helping the environment or my hurting it, where am i maybe even just slightly tipping the scales in the environments favor you know. I don't know that we can solve all the world's climate problems with grass fed beef

29:07 I think we can play a good part but it's gonna take a collective effort and it's gonna take people putting on their thinking caps listening to shows like this and going she never knew that and giving it some thought. And taking that step to kinda go well you know i think i wanna seek out somebody or some small family are perhaps, different rancher something other than sunrise be fine with me but you know somebody that we could support him become connected to link to you maybe those people should i cant raise beef myself but i can certainly sports somebody does Mm-hmm. Well said and let's get into 2020 a bit We were hearing all this stuff about the food supply breaking down meat packing plants were forced to close Social distancing is a tough thing to follow in a Tyson chicken plant It made a lot of us feel like we might be vulnerable To food scarcity for the first time in a lot of our lives How did all this affect you?

30:00 What are your thoughts on what we saw in the world of meat production in the first half of this year? Boy, that's a great question. Greg and I don't know how many days we have for this broadcast because there's lots of it's a long subject One of the things that we saw initially was the scarcity and i think that made panic and panic of course you have to really resist that feeling of self protection. And a course those store shelves began empty out quite quickly of course during that time we saw huge number of customers come to us We've always been a small family ranch we have loyal loyal loyal group of supporters. We have customers that have been with us from day one instead in the rain to get our product those people were most interested in protecting because, we could literally have a website and someone would come just buy out the entire inventory so that was a bit of a problem it was a bit of an issue that we struggled with initially the other thing what's that

30:59 Remember the current food production is controlled on the beach side and i'm only gonna talk about me for just a moment we can talk about poultry in that sort of thing and hogs later but the entire beef production system, is controlled by four major international companies. I want name you can look him up on the internet but about 80 percent of all beef production and the way they've done that is a built vertically integrated operation so they buy cattle, process cattle package cattle to give it to the supermarket so when the stores started to be overrun those companies thought hey this is an excellent opportunity for us to raise prices because everybody in america understand supply and demand so we can use this as an opportunity to increase price.

31:45 And that's exactly what they did. If you notice the price of supermarket beef, it kind of did what gas did if you ever remember the days when gas was $1.99 or 99 cents at one point it went up and we thought oh it'll spike up and it will come back down in a would do that a couple times and then eventually just stayed super high because the collective shock wears off in society over time same thing with be so what they did when they raise their prices under the auspice of hey we've had to shut down all our plants was he just kept the prices high That pushed a lot of consumers to find local ranches it push a lot of people define local production system so the problem is that and this is very complicated but. It's understandable and that is that you know we raise beef but we also have to process that beef and we can't just harvest the beef right on our ranch in and throw it in packages its gotta go to usda shopper got to go to a custom harvest facility

32:38 Those are two different entities entirely, and what we noticed was that all the custom shops in all of the USDA harvest facilities immediately booked out. Because you see over time since small ranching and small farming has depleted over many many years since the farm crisis in the 80s until now those shops began to close those mom-and-pop small butcher shops that say do 14 animals a week or 12 animals a week as opposed to 500 a day So, the small shops, the small butcher plants booked out. I mean you can't get a butchering appointment right now—I can raise beef—but I can't get a butchering appointment until 2021, late 2021. Now thank goodness we had really good relationships with our USDA and our custom butcher shops so we had a long-standing relationship with them and they secured us all of the butchering allocation that we needed to keep the company running and were very grateful for that.

33:32 With all the demand in the world, it would be as if Greg, it'd be as if you had a tomato garden and you decided one day that tomatoes were popular and everybody wanted to pay ya lot of money for a tomato. And Sacramento said hey that's great Greg, you can raise a tomato but you have to wash it in a sink in Northern California before you sell it so you'd have to harvest all your tomatoes drive them all up to Northern California wash them all in a special sink they only have then drive em' back to your customer in Southern California it's just not practical and that what happened in this giant silo eyes. Meet system that we have is you can help producers everywhere but if you don't have a legal way to get into the consumer after its been quote federally inspected, you're in trouble you can't get that product to the customer so there's a huge bottleneck in the meat system

34:17 And i think the large producers knew that small producers like us and we be able to grab some of their customers and we did with a lot of great converts a lot wonderful people came over in there final steak was from costco when they're first grass fed was from us and never leave again. What it was hard game it was kinda weird if you really had to work hard to get those people added into our system and frankly the small farm industrial director non-industrial system that we run is really not suited Run gigantic operations it's just we're not that mature as a nation in terms of our production facilities man yes those bottlenecks were exactly the kind of thing that people were starting to worry about also the fact that it seems like.

35:02 Typical sales a lot of them were going to restaurants and then their clothes also the nationwide school program there not buying food as they had routinely for so long it just radically changed. The way the american family would spend their food dollar i'm sure does adjusting that is difficult, Yeah and so there are some great positives of this last year i mean it like i said try to be a real positive kind of guy the cows get out we go well you know what were gonna learn how. Get the cows back in then so we can try to take optimistic approach to things one of the great things was americans went back to their kitchen that was really good for your small local farmer because when you got back to your kitchen you want no,

35:45 I'm tired of the same bland old big chain box store food again i think i'll go find a small farmer who grows tomatoes or chickens are beef and get some really high quality stuff and so they invested in that we saw great dividends from that weed again developed a lot of great relationships to that time period. So that was real plus we also notice that Yes there was a strain on our small system but there is a lot more value we get phone calls and have what's equivalent to it. Thirty or forty minute conversation with people who had never even knew that they could buy stuff outside of grocery store, especially meet that was just for them they just never tried before you try for the first time their blown away it also helped us as a company it was really need because we would come up with this is the beauty of

36:32 Small business and i'm not saying this to tell my own heart i mean i got wonderful people that are supporting me in surrounding me advising me you know it was half the time its their idea and i just vote on it. Sign a new law one of the kids came into dad why don't we store beef for our customers and i thought why would do that make it will allow him to, to have a full supply and we have cold storage we have gigantic cold storages that we store our beef pork and chicken in once it comes off the ranch for harvest. We back up generators there were people that were wanting to stock up but these are urbanites they don't have the room to put in a giant you know stand-up freezer say in their apartment in downtown l.a. or what have you and so what we would do is we'd allow him to buy

37:14 They would harvest it, have it cut the way they wanted under a custom program and we would put their name on it. We would just keep in storage for them and just charge them small monthly fee and then we were there own personal food supply so they weren't going to store or getting online entering web order form that says hey send me a box of my beef and we'd put on one of our delivery trucks and get a box of their beef. It was their beef personally cut for them So that was a neat, innovative thing. I got to see that. That probably would have never happened short of COVID-19 yeah that was a genius idea cuz when i started having the conversation with friends hey you guys wanna split a cow that was the first concern was i just don't have anywhere to put it and then no, i did tell them about that option will okay that will be plan b first we'll just try to split amongst enough people that won't be inconvenient and then plan b will be that storage so

38:08 Yeah, I thought that was a really great idea from just a business perspective. Cause that is probably the number one thing people are dealing with is like well what does it cow even look like when it's cut up and do I have enough room? So kudos to you for that one! You know in your blog talking about some of the things of 2020 there is a point where you say In the next few months the food supply in America will be in the ICU and I have had several other guests say similar things But i don't know that people have really seen a shortage or the empty freezers in grocery stores that they might have expected and obviously there's a lot of other issues with factory farming we've talked about but do you think that. The meat production chain is through the woods on this problem more not really,

38:53 You know i don't think so what i meant by that was that. The small farmers that are constantly finding the large industrial system the farmers like us that are swimming upstream and Frankly we get abuse hurled on just about every side we don't quite fit into the ranching community you know where cowboy habit sometimes aware of any and you know some times that just. Send my ranger buddies through the moon it is can understand why i would drive a small pickup truck in not a big loud diesel one or no, you just don't fit around here doug that's ok with us we like to kind of swim opposite stream because we think thats were innovation has made

39:31 What's interesting about that is we also face a lot of that on the other side the non production side the customer side people will often stand at the farmers market and say you know why is your beef more expensive than walmart. And which point i have a whole lot of explaining to do so i tell people we equally offend on both sides and we just have unique ranching methods that sort of virgin lunatic. And what we have definitely had unique product it's hard to grasp in terms of the consumers mind to wrap around, But when i say that i think industrial food is gonna take a blow on this what i mean by that is the small farmers are much more agile. And much more adaptive and i'll give you great example when we can put that idea of storing before customers man, yeah i don't think tyson could've done that i don't think they could have moved at fast and if i can take ten other ranchers

40:24 10 other interns and train on my ranch for a year ago guys here's how you move and boy spin circles around the big boys i mean just outmaneuver. You can turn a small frigate whole lot faster than you can turn a battleship, and i tell those guys just move fast you know let's innovate and that's what america is built on his great ideas moving faster quickly iterate and i think this was one of the first harbingers bad news for industrial meat I think industrial me as we move forward is going to have the curtain lifted more and more and they're going to be a whole lot of people. American society that begin to start and look in investigate say there's something not right about this low quality product,

41:09 huge industrial subsidies tons of lobbying and rules and i think there's going to be a backlash i think that this was kind of the first blow. Where the american consumer started to wake up a little bit Yeah, a bit of a silver lining definitely applies to me. And even before the COVID stuff I would hear some talk about what almost seemed like an attack on small farmers through either corporate lobbying or government regulations that would almost push them out of business or seem as though they were designed too do you see certain regulations in our system as mechanisms that actually seemed to hurt small farms and are tilted towards helping the corporate ones?

41:53 Yeah greg and that's a sad commentary unfortunately it's not veiled in any way large producers can lobby congress for rule changes. We saw this when grass fed got redefined by the usda as not like you and i would think, when you and i think of grass bed we like to think of account on pasture eating nothing but grasses entire life They were lobby the usda got lobbied for a rule change that said grass fed the word fed english language is past tense so. If it was fed grass it is grass bed in other words greg if you ate an orange today tomorrow you would be orange but in fact you need oranges your whole life you were just fed and orange, show its a little bit of a play on words we see that sort of thing they'll lobby usda for. A real change somebody will come up with example something that's self created

42:46 They'll find it say a piece of the nail in meet any go well that's kinda gross and actual wouldn't mail like you would know to boards together. Can i peace me and they got okay that we gotta have a rule change we need metal detectors at every usda plant, Will the large producers that run five thousand head of cattle a day through their butchering plant go let's no problem will just throw that in with the next order of whatever we get and install giant metal detectors. At the end of the assembly line so every package of meat becomes off gets run through metal detector weekend detective there is a piece of shard metal or a piece of nail or something in the meeting will be able to scan for that now take that same rule change apply it to the small usda producer that

43:28 been, you know passed down his USDA plant on artisanal butcher a guy that hand cuts steaks and does I don't know 14 beef. A week do you think he can install $1 million metal detector on the end of his assembly line? No but the rule remains the same USDA says nope we got one size fits all yeah gotta have a metal detector any sort of made that as an example love it is not veiled the USDA and to the large producers do not want small competition There's a few practical reasons for that it's somewhat understandable, you stay inspector can go spend eight hours at the plant where they do five hundred animals in a day and he can inspect all of them or you can go spend eight hours in a plan where they do.

44:12 Two animals in a day and can inspect both of them so there's no in terms of number of animals inspected per man hour or person our. There some trade offs there you can see how government is trying to say what we need to cut back and be more efficient but in reality a lot of times unfortunately that's available for yeah we just really don't want this small producer around their bad competition. Yeah we see that across So many different industries that sometimes you find the biggest corporations lobbying for regulations or certain changes because they're willing to take the gamble that there are the only ones who can comply and a lot of mom and pop shops will not be able to it is a sad thing but it is a strategy in

44:56 the greed dominated world. And what about climate change regulation? Because we are hearing people like Kamala Harris say that the government could and should limit Americans access to red meat to fight climate change, which just really sounds insane to me but how would you respond to someone saying that this is a problem that we probably do need to limit our access to red meat I mean climate change regulation has got to be something that is on your mind these days No it constantly is and i'm a fan of saying that its not the cow what's the how. And if cattle are used correctly they can actually fight climate change but unfortunately we have an entire industrial system that isn't using cattle correctly you have to understand great where u and i are sitting, if there were five hundred years ago seventy million buffalo would be roaming across the great northern plains in western united states

45:48 And that heard of buffalo would be moving very quickly not a truck but they would be sort of taking a step by eat take a step bite it. And they will be pruning the ecosystem now the beautiful thing about printing the ecosystem is number one reduces fire hazard when the ecosystem is pruned and trampled, that doesn't mean that prevents fire but what does those fires burn a whole lot less hot In addition to that, it would prevent any of the shrubs from growing in proliferation like we see them on the western landscapes in California which burns almost all the time. And there would be a whole lot more grass available because the grass is going to respond to the cow that's grazing at think about like a teeter totter

46:32 you know the old classic teeter totter with a balance point in the middle and on one side you have a cow, and on the other side of the grass. As the cow trims the grass, it has to respond by growing because its whole goal in life is to go to seed, get tall and grow seeds. And then of course the cow trims again but what's unique is that the cows out the back end dumping fertilizer that causes the grass to grow so you see the whole system as a interrelated balance related ecosystem that one is feeding off the other. And so in an effort to reduce climate change, to bring back the carbon levels in the atmosphere

47:11 One of the things plants do is they send a root system down into the ground and we have a picture this on our instagram fascinating about halfway down our instagram feed there's some bearded guy with red bearded guy with a hat i found the photo because it illustrates so well, add one side to the photo he is holding in his hand the root system of a perennial grass. And on the other side behind him, he has the root system exposed of an annual crop. Now you and I both know that annuals need to be planted annually—that's where they got their name—and perennials are ever-present. What's beautiful about a perennial grass is that for every foot above ground there are roughly two feet below ground of root system

47:56 And those roots do a whole number of things. They infiltrate and break up the ground so that when it rains, the ground can hold or the capillary action of the water can actually be sequestered deeper into the ground We estimate that there's an additional 23 thousand gallons of water being held underground on a perennial system than there would be on an annual system So thats' the first thing is theres a deepening of the roots the roots in that picture are as tall as the man holding them, which is really astonishing. And on behind them where you see he's growing barley they're maybe just a few inches deep and again those roots are through our buscular mycorrhizal fungi which is sort of a gluey substance in the ground They're storing carbon at the end up their filament which are like little fingers that are storing carbon below ground so we can actually take atmospheric carbon and draw it down

48:51 What you can only do that if you have the balance to the teeter totter perennials will only grow so tall and less their print. Well we cant get out there with a weed whacker in prune all the perennials what do use well we should use ruminants, ruminant our cows water buffalo bison don't really have those around in our region so cal's are actually right answer for that so if we employ the cow we can actually draw down atmospheric carbon and of course All the other subjects we've been talking about we can have a better product happier animal healthier animal, better society we can create local jobs and connections in community interaction you can have local accountability and we can fight the big giant industrial farm system which is kinda one of my goals in life. I'm too and to really drive this home you do say on the website that

49:44 We've estimated that it takes only 1.78 calories of petroleum to produce a single calorie of beef or pork from our ranch, far less than the nine calories needed in conventional corn-fed CAFO industrial systems." Well I'm sure the grazing that you just broke down is a major factor there but are there other processes that also have a big impact on that? Yeah the higher carbon number has to do with If I'm grazing cattle, the perennial grasses are responding to the cow. And so the only inputs I really need are that water rain sunlight air things that are pretty much kind of free waters debatable but you could just do it from annual rains if he wanted to and when i'm doing that with a corn based system because i'm going against nature i'm having to pay the upfront cost of all that in terms of petrocarbons in terms of fuels

50:40 I've got to grow the corn in the midwest and then i gotta run a harvester out to go ahead and green harvest that man i'm gonna ship it to train in the train has to ship it out to the west coast and the west coast distributor has to put on a truck can get into the feedlot. And so im actually swimming upstream i'm actually doing quite a bit of extra work where as, i could just take those same cows and just graze them on grass grown on hillsides In addition to that it's not a very good use of our resources in order to grow corn we gotta have arable land we gotta have flatland is well irrigated and drained correctly. It's gonna be accessible cattle can graze on the side of the hill you couldn't use really for anything else

51:21 You could grow California chaparral on the side of that hill if you'd like to. It'll get really dry, it'll get really really crisp and the first spark will light it off and it will burn like crazy That's the other thing you can do with a hillside in California We prefer just take grass and cows put the two together which are naturally symbiotic in nature have the cow prune the grass and the grass respond to the cow And that system actually creates its own food for the cow which is just wonderful So when we came up with that 9.25, that was a graduate school exercise that I did for my master's thesis and We came up with that caloric input if we ran through quite a bit of algorithms and spreadsheets to try to figure that out There's a bunch of different factors in there But really what it had to do with was basically all the infrastructure required just to get the feed to the cow when in fact The cow is actually standing on feet all along hmm men

52:16 Does seem quite simple but i'm also really interested in the intelligence of it all and the intelligence of nature that emerges through. The complex processes that are going on that maybe we took for granted or we didn't realize like the, networks of roots and fungi underneath the surface. But in one of your videos, you use a great line that you have been ranching with less hubris and more humility letting the intelligence of nature do its thing as you're breaking down with the grazing in the grass. And I like that but what are some other places on the ranch that you see that intelligence in nature with what you do? Maybe things that you didn't expect at first

52:59 Well, one of the things we never expected was the actual interaction of multi-species together. And this blew my mind the first time we did this I just couldn't believe it! It's quite a bit of... oh gosh, I don't know gusto if you will to try to just raise one animal type again it goes back to that overwhelming sense of wow I sure hope I know what I'm doing What we found that was really fascinating is cows have a huge amount of potassium in their urine And we know that potassium is one of the three sought out elements. We have nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus N P and K those are in the farming world in the agricultural world those are the basics of what you need for fertilizers Of course they're all chemically made but we know that cows actually secrete that in their urine Potassium comes out in their urine naturally and plentifully What we didn't know and what we didn't realize was that nitrogen comes from chicken manure

53:57 And we also found that there was a symbiotic relationship between chickens and room minutes now why is that well simply because ruminants manure a lot. Chickens do to but room and it's been newer a very high pile of. Manure and that is attractive to bugs all kinds of books mostly flies but bugs have all types beetles i kind of thing, add of course birds love bugs so that was interesting sort of interrelationship that I never seen before and then again think back to being a kid in watching you know the videos of the serengeti what have you need seal water buffalo and there be a bird perch on its back

54:36 Waiting for dinner to be delivered and you go out that's kinda interesting those are symbiotic relationships nature puts us together, can i begin to think what if we could do that on the ranch. And so what we found was that chickens would actually spread manure patties if we ran them into the field behind our house so imagine a group of cows being grazed and their contained by electric wire and they're moved every day, and so the rancher builds another electric wire single wire that lightweight electric wire that we use on the ranch. Connects it to the charger moves the cows into the next rotation and then about two or three days later after their manure has had a chance to kind of dry up and mature We move our chickens in And the chicken's will naturally spread them in new route of the way looking for the bugs So I get free manure spreading but what are the chickens also doing at that time? Well there too in their manure which happens to be very high in nitrogen

55:28 And i thought wow it's fascinating so we have nitrogen and potassium all on one field. And then one day i read a study about how pigs have very high concentration of phosphorus in their manure and i went wait a second i could run my pigs and i can use them to tell the ground, delight me massage the ground in addition to deposit eating phosphorus for free and so what i ended up with was in a natural setting in a natural way i was able to get nitrogen potassium. Foster is on my field and keep my animals happy healthy and moving all the time so it became a synergistic effect and surprise the daylights out of us as to how that ecosystem response do that. We got the basic idea was from just realizing that no where in nature do we ever see a mono species or a monocrop

56:19 You only see that if humans are involved and so we begin to see a diversity of plant life the seed bed is ever present in dormant for as much as one hundred years, began to come to life because certain nutrients were available that had been available for perhaps many many years are now available through those manures and through that system began to grow better grass space. And hold more carbon hold more water provide more feed for the animals that were actually grazing on it was this beautiful balancing as one would not shop the other would not shop in the other would not shop and they would sort of almost cannot try to outdo each other that blue our mind.

56:56 Yeah that is really interesting i'm sure most people listening are well aware that mono crop agriculture is way worse than high bio diverse food gardens but i had not thought much about scaling that up to the animal level but you're right you don't see it in nature its always a big melting pot so you would expect these things enter play with each other as they seem to do that is awesome. Yeah the neat thing about that great was what was happening below the surface i'm a fan of saying that as a cattle rancher your business happens below the hook, that is to say most cattle ranchers are focused on the cattle and understand that you have some cattle care need to take care of some breeding issues etc things like that but

57:40 All of your activity really needs to be focused below the hook because what's happening below the ground is more important. To your system then what's happening above your ground if you take care of everything below the surface, everything about this service will be thrown in for free you have healthy cattle you'll have healthy ecosystems you have good water cycles and mineral cycles If you focus entirely on the animal, you'll focus too much on the animal to much on how the animals condition is and you'll deplete below ground system eventually like a bank account you just withdraw too much money in go bankrupt. i make sense to me and you know we do have listeners all around the world and in every state many of them had their jobs disrupted by coven all that stuff if some of them out there were thinking about maybe taking this leap towards ranching or at least maybe securing their own.

58:33 meet for their own inner circle and family maybe raising a couple cows or something like that any advice for avoiding beginners mistakes are getting over some of the hurdles a person would have in the first stages when they just start thinking about maybe getting excited about taking the reins in this area. Well i think one of the greatest pieces of advice i could give is seek out those with perhaps a little bit more experience than you've got and it could be anything from zero to sixty right i mean i tag along very very closely to some of my most. You know some guys are more experienced in this area jules alton comes to mind gay brown i follow these guys real close they probably don't know me very well but i follow them and i look at what they're doing because im sort of more advanced than that we been doing this for awhile for the beginner, one of our visions greg is we've got our

59:21 eyes on a project that we've been working on for few years now. It's coming along nicely, I can't give the location or the details but it'll be in the San Diego area We want to start a farm school. We want to start a very simple place where you can come and the very serious minded who are perhaps business-minded and actually want to start a production farm can come into an internship with us And then stay on for the remaining year so they would do a summer and we could teach them and pour into them as much as we possibly could On an ex to that farm school is we got a location where we think we could do, can i have a main cabin with a few outlying buildings and would be able to host people for a week at the time when we thought we could you if your tracks in one of the tracks would be who. Would be what we call the home stutter track we call it blues clues the farm curious

1:00:06 And what is you come out for a week on the ranch and get it eat on the ranch to stay on the ranch and then we'll have basic courses free to do for with this is for that, mr and mrs accountant from downtown san diego who bought their. Retirement property out in the boonies and they don't know the first thing about cabin or how to repair fence or what have you basically be sort of a crash course In home studying right we will do everything we can to teach you a week and then come stay with us there be limited number of folks get a common, and we think something like that would be very valuable there's almost no place where you can go and get that practical. day to day down home experience i mean you can go and get a degree in ag sciences from land grant university and learn how to gps program the latest tractor that cost two hundred fifty thousand dollars to row the crops all on its own but nobody will teach it had like collect eggs do I wash eggs how do we take care of him what would look for if a calf sick

1:00:59 You know, how do I take care of a pig? How do I keep the pig in? Uh...how do I milk a cow?" You know these are all the things that we think we could cover in a week. We'd probably give you just enough information to be dangerous and then I say get your head out and keep my phone number. You'll be able to call if you got any questions but I think it would just really neat for people that there's this whole move to get to the country and I think people are getting into the country and they don't know what to do when they get there. Yeah that is a great idea i would love to see something like that i'm sure i have some buddies that would enjoy taking a course like that with me and know there was a local place called the heart and trotter, it was like a butcher shop and its now been bought out in their kinda change in the way they do things but for awhile they were offering.

1:01:41 classes and breaking down an animal and once we bought the car that become interesting just to learn how to break it down cuz you get these forms on how you want the butcher to butcher at two custom, break it down in your life i don't know do whatever you would be because i have no clue what all yeah and not it would just be a good way to get closer to meet so stuff like that i'm all in favor of. That's awesome yeah you know i mean you can harvest chicken quite easily and chicken can make three meals for family and they don't compete with you in the food supply. They can live off of kitchen scraps and all kinds of good stuff from the backyard, in the garden from last summer. And it's just a really efficient way to become self-sufficient. You know we're... The farm school will be for everybody that wants to be a production regenerative agriculture intern and wants to really learn as a business all the way to people who are just kinda curious about farming and could we support ourselves on five acres? Well yeah! You certainly can

1:02:36 Yeah that was gonna be one of my big questions is obviously it's very expensive to get any kind of land in california what is the minimum that you could if you were just like an inner circle of five. Six seven couples who are trying to maybe start their own thing just for themselves what is like the minimum amount of land that a couple of cows need well depends on the environment and it depends on the rainfall Unfortunately i'm gonna have to turn the question on its toes and the reason for this is we now live in such a regulatory world. That you could have all the land in the world or just enough to do what you wanted to do but, the city or the state of the county won't allow you to have the animals that is the biggest hindrance we have to actually using ecosystem effectively to support people

1:03:27 When you look around california just in the area that you and i live there's a tremendous amount of productive capacity just in terms of the grass. And yet, the political will of people is we don't wanna see animals anywhere we have some friends who live just inside it's and they were fined for having chickens. You think yourself what your fine for having chickens can find in your own yard So it's really not so much an issue of how much land do i need or how much do i have available i mean there is a certain lower limit to that and it depends on the grass production whether not you have water available but really your biggest hurdle right now is that. The systems of government don't want animal production near people and its really odd because again we talked about how in nature we always see species integrated,

1:04:19 In other words, throughout antiquity people would live with animals. They wouldn't necessarily have them sleep in their beds although I think that happened in the castles in the old days to keep you warm but I mean the animals and people coexisted to a certain degree The food supply was integrated with the Homo sapien And so the idea that we separate those things is again it's completely agnostic to how nature actually operates There are plenty of usable pastures Grass production all around us there's river valleys that need grazed with cattle there's hillside city to be cleaned and could produce good clean before. But as a society were very much into saying no that needs to be, natural area or preserved well what's natural about an area that has no animals is nothing natural about whatsoever

1:05:08 We see ecological preserves all the time in san diego county and in the area that we live it just astonishes me you'll drive by there be a giant chain link fence, add a big white sign on the front that says ecological area don't enter. I think okay maybe that's valid maybe keep humans out but where is the animals were there cows that are grazing that were the buffalo if you wanted to be really, really natural. You see the buffalo would go through there they'd keep the fire danger down they would trample the soils they would aerate the soil with their hoofs and allow for water infiltration the grasses would respond. You remove half of that and you have that unbalanced teeter-totter where one side just falls to the bottom

1:05:46 Yes, those are great points and I know we're nearing the end of the line here but i'm going to throw this in because it is relevant. I pulled this off the blog but you wrote about one of these policies and said does anyone remember the cattle free by 93 campaign? It was the well-intentioned but horribly misguided concept that all cattle must be off public land by 1993. It worked! Well, the campaign did at least... But the results have been disastrous If you look around at public land today, a mere 15 years later, you begin to see the beginnings of desertification. Small brown strips are starting to appear on hillsides everywhere without cattle on public lands my children's children will eventually be living in a sand dune." And that was a pretty well-written eye opening example and it speaks to exactly what you're talking about

1:06:36 Yeah this is what alan savory has been harping on for many many years and he was the one that had the ted talk about the spread of desertification in hell. How we are headed in a particular direction thats at some point gonna destroy us when we remove ruminant grazing animals from an ecosystem the grasses grow, for a season until they begin to seed. And then they seed again and in the next season, they do the same thing and over time they eventually give way to what we call woody stemmed plants or taprooted plants which are what we would think of as brush. We see brush all over Southern California. That brush has just one stem that goes into the ground it has a fairly shallow root system

1:07:24 And because it grows up and sort of spreads out like a tree creates a small section of shade. Underneath it no grass grows, and so what you have is sorta bear spot underneath it and then of course as there still no animals who come in trample that brush it's just left to grow the grasses next to it begin to receive as well and it tends toward a steamy tap rooted brush again. So you have say two of them beside each other and then they shade or co shade each other and so more grass is, begin to disappear in overtime we see hillside that was once a lush pasture because it has no animal pressure on nothing is pressurizing

1:08:07 The plants remember we talked about that weightlifter in the gym right there is no resistance and so nature in its effort to cover the scar tissue of the land is beginning to spread brush because it has no animal to counterbalance the growth of the grass. And so we lose our grasslands and we slowly replace them with brush lands well eventually over time the brushland even begin deteriorate And we begin to see desert occasion between the pieces of brush and so the hills that we see in california that were once covered with cattle and there are all kinds of reasons why people wanted cattle free by ninety three they're all kinds of historical reasons why they didn't want. Cattle on public land will now that's over these years it's all given way to brush and now the brushes becoming a problem because what are we seeing by the millions of acres every year in california were saying horrific fires,

1:08:58 And those fires burn very very hot now what's fascinating. Is about this time a year and half ago we lost one of our grazing units to a fire in my favorite word is loss because it was anything but that You see because I had grazing rights on it a fire burned through it, It was so thick with brush you couldn't even walk in it. It literally couldn't walk through and we really couldn't graze that many more than just a few head of cattle every year on what remaining grass was there but when that fire burned through they completely obliterated all that brush and what was left was a bunch of charcoal if you will and bare ground And because the seed bed was present and always has been present

1:09:43 As soon as we got our first rains a whole bunch of clovers and grasses started to come up now at that point we were at a critical junction. We could have said oh no let's put up our white signs in our chain link fences and lets let this be a natural area. And i can guarantee you what would happen over the next course of many many years is as that quote natural area with no animals grazing on it, progress through its life cycle we would just ended up with brush again and we had a huge fire hazard just waiting to be sparked off by the latest electrical store We decided not to do that because we're cattle grazers and we know how to manage cattle on a grassland. We brought in our cows, so we brought them in for very strict grazing. So as soon as the spring brought forth those prolific grasses, we brought in the pruners are four-legged pruning machines and we briefly moved them in controlling them with our portable electric wire in our system and didn't allow him to take the second bite they moved in. They cut off the seed bed of the seed heads from those grasses

1:10:43 and those grasses then grew deeper and richer, and again we moved them in on a temporary grazing process. Again not leaving the cattle on continually but removing them from the ecosystem on a time-oriented program And then we allowed it to recover and allowed it to recover and now what were saying is a restoration of the grassland because you see where mimicking what nature would have done with the great western herds. In antiquity, the great western herds would've been moving step every few minutes as they pass through that area they would agree that trampled it would be moved in kept very tight high density pressure Thousands of pounds per acre and then the ground would have rested they would've been promoted in. Pushed in their progression by the presence of pack hunting animals predators we don't have a predator is what we have electric fence if they don't wanna touch the electric fence so we simply train them to move instead up an electric fence are not gonna go back and grace area again it allows the ground to rest and recuperate those grasses or grown deeper the seed bed begins to flourish

1:11:48 The ground begins to hold moisture and we fought in the opposite direction of the tap rooted stem e would be brushes that are threatening california. Wow, man. Nature is a beautiful thing and your range of knowledge is just so impressive. This has been a lot of fun. Lots of useful information for people for sure before I cut you loose we got to save some room to talk about your store and all that good stuff because this audience is all over also talked to him about your delivery range and the variety of products you offer So we raise beef, pork and chicken and we harvest all of that on sort of a weekly basis.

1:12:31 Whatever we get from the ranch in terms of production is what was offered to the public through a web store we do everything through website. You're certainly allowed to come up to the warehouse and place an order and get it immediately, can we have a staff on few days out of the week that manages that one day i'm there and i love to talk to our customers really enjoy sitting down talking people so if you are curious i'd love to talk to you but ultimately we service customers directly out of her website We attend kind of a smattering of farmers markets just simply because that is traditionally how we've always done it. We've always gone to farmers markets they allow for relaxed fun environment where people can talk and be educated we also get a chance to reach out in the third of the unknowing public people that have stopped by never heard about this grass but beef thing tell me about it gives us a chance to share some more expertise and kinda peak behind the curtain like we don't over last hour so great

1:13:26 We do offer delivery direct to people's houses and that's been really popular during the COVID thing just because you know it's kind of convenient to have a box of meat that you select on our website. And again we sell all the way down to the individual piece of meat so you could order one steak, one package ground beef there There's no minimum order and we offer delivery so i can come up on your door step will bring the doorbell take six steps back if you have that necessary to keep a healthy and that's everything in wave and then drive away income get the box me right after. So we have a bunch of different methods that we used to kinda sell our product. That's all on the USDA side, that's the federally inspected meat that we have to have looked at by a USDA inspector and their reason that has been looked as an inspector is if I take one of our animals and break it down into 1000 different pieces and send in 1000 different directions The USDA wants to know where each of those went so we need to kind of record where they went

1:14:24 What's on the other side of that spectrum is when people buy a whole or half cow and we have a great program where people can actually own a beef while it's live on the ranch. Believe it or not you actually transfer title of a beef like he would a car title in california so we have to have a brand inspector come out they inspect the bee fits transferred over to the new owner, and then from that point on we just simply act as contractors because were at your bidding is to win it gets butchered how it gets cut up you know, what kind of cuts you get out it. And for that it can go to a single family or up to three other partners and split a cow and we've had all kinds of people do these split ups and thats sort of thing thats different kinda tasting beef both sides are dry aged but one doesn't have the lactic acid present because its non-USDA

1:15:10 But it has a different taste entirely and its really really delicious that's sort of our favorite of all the men that we did our house is the custom beef we call. And so those whole beef and happy programs are really popular They have been through the pandemic lots of people interested in those it can be anywhere from a hundred sixty five pounds all the way up to like four hundred pounds of meat they come in five different sizes. Believe it or not in the cat world we have just like in the dog world you have chihuahuas all the way up to huskies, we have big cows and little cows you know angus is a medium breed cal if u wanna big one we look for a limousine or charlie. And because my cows are kind of a mixed bag of marbles we got to one of each out there and so somebody wants a large people find a large breed cow, will butcher that under the custom program for him and have it delivered their house those are two kinda separate things in there sold through the website would you most of our commerce website but also answer the phone we love to talk to customers. That's kinda our pitch

1:16:04 Awesome. And because this audience did just hear about the importance of organ meat from Sally Fallon Morrell, something I saw on your website that i'm probably going to do next time quite creative because I do find it a little difficult to know what to do with those organs and eat liver but you do mix Oregon meet into your ground beef and i thought that was pretty genius cuz obviously i can eat a hamburger and that's the way to get some of those organ meets in do you without needing to prepare a liver dish that's pretty good. Yeah thats really popular now people do that on their custom beef as well we've had a whole bunch of people that say look i, when u grind up all the ground beef like i don't know seventy five percent of it normal and then i'd like a batch of organs mixed in as well so that's real popular

1:16:51 It's a great way to kind of, if the taste of the organs don't suit you that's a great way to take that in and not be overwhelmed by the taste. Hmm...that's awesome! That's awesome! Well I I know business is good, but I hope what I do can maybe throw a little fuel on the fire. I look forward to that book coming out and getting many sunrise meets outta you so...I really appreciate what you do it's been a pleasure to talk to ya sometimes people get so paralyzed by overthinking about the problems they forget to focus a little bit on the solutions and this is a big one so thanks again man keep doing what you're doing take care

1:17:32 All right thank you greg we appreciate it. Serenity now dear people of the internet how about that thc walk in the walk we've talked for so long practicing what i preach really though not a lot episodes have anything to do with my personal life obviously this one does a bit, And I know it's like split one local beef and I start acting like Harry Homesteader over here. Like having Bitcoin or joining a gym, one of those things you can't just shut up about but there are so many THC episodes too many actually where i get off the call all jazzed up and motivated I tell myself I'm definitely going to dig further into that and incorporate it into my life routine whatever may be

1:18:19 And then two days later, it's all about that next show and it just gets lost. And this one kind of worked in the reverse order but local farms and ranches are my meat supply now Me and my people we split a cow from Doug A pig from another local place and then my lovely special lady drove almost five hours up to our buddy Justin's farm so she could kill and pluck and prep some chickens for our group down here She's more gangster than I, but we have been eating good. And just to elaborate on what i said in the intro when you start asking your friends and family about something like this everybody worries about the space a whole cow where is that gonna go

1:19:06 And you do need a bit of room, let's say. But you can always split it down more and more! Doug recommended we do a draft system and... We made a great day out of it! Carried in all the boxes when the truck arrived Everything is labeled and butchered down to cuts that were familiar with We had this giant mountain of meat spread out on the table We drew high card for the draft order And just started picking It worked out great, except there was only one large brisket. So that was something we agreed to make together at a later date We did that it was awesome Don't call the cops But we all went home happy with all sorts of cuts and like clockwork the conversation Starts being had about cooking and animal fats and lard. We got this premium meat. We want to treat it in a premium way

1:19:55 This all happened right at the time I'm preparing for Sally Fallon Morrell's episode and i've just been introduced to the Weston A. Price Foundation so it all came together, and its given some friends of mine a new interest in cooking for others its more like next level excitement did create more group meals I mean, COVID's quite scary but when you get that phone call hey we're grilling up a set of those sunrise ribs if you want to try them or let's make one of those chickens Teresa killed how do you say no? i mean we're all in our 30s. We don't have kids. We get excited about brisket alright! I'm just messing around but i do think that i've incepted some people into a food be thy medicine philosophy without even having to bring up a lot of the stuff we talk about around here

1:20:48 And I really shouldn't give myself that much credit because this is something we all know. Eat trash, feel like trash etc etc But we just seem to forget it when the media tells us were all helpless in the wake of this deadly disease sweeping the nation Frankly for a lot of people its easier to believe that Because if your only and best defense Is putting on a mask That's a helluva lot easier than kettlebell swings and being disciplined about your diet right? To admit we have some say in our health is to admit we have some responsibility too. So yeah, this was obviously a THC episode for me but I hope you still found Doug to be a knowledgeable guy worth spending some time with

1:21:35 When I started checking his blog, i thought i found more than enough to work with. The salt lick stuff was interesting the biomimicry regenerative approach to farming something we should all talk about especially in the wake of this persistent narrative that we have to get rid of all the cows or the earth's gonna just implode on itself But obviously this audience is all over the US, all over the world really. In fact I got a strange email from Podstatus that THC is ranking very well in Turks and Caicos! Number four in the self-improvement category in Turks and Caicos

1:22:16 Hi there and hello. Also doing pretty good in Bermuda, number 13 in self-improvement I mean I wish you guys were sharing it around like they're doing in Turks and Caicos but you know...13's alright not in the top 10 The point is that I hope this conversation inspires you to see what's available in your area It's very very unlikely that you can't find a local ranch somewhere wherever you are But it is concerning that you probably won't find many. Maybe two or three or four options? There's only a handful and that is pretty close to zero, if it were to go that way. Like in my situation, if Doug decided he'd rather trade stocks and a nice air-conditioned office then what options would I have?

1:23:06 So, you know we like to thank certain people for their service. We like to make airplane announcements and clap and cheer for various different positions I don't know who's doing that for the rancher but that is a service i'm very thankful for And i'm so so fortunate that this is what Doug decided to do! So find a local rancher and get involved in that exchange If you're anywhere near Southern California from The Greater LA Area Down to my neck of the woods. I definitely hope you give Sunrise a call, tell them you liked hearing Doug on THC and that you need the good stuff! Organ meats mixed into your ground beef, bone broth, lard and some of the best ribs steaks and tri tips i've ever had. I'm actually going to be up at The Warehouse this Saturday around 9am

1:24:00 to pick up one of our Thanksgiving turkeys which I'm pretty psyched about trying. Maybe i'll see you there! I know I'm laying it on thick, It is one of those days but I hope to keep supporting Sunrise as long as I can because I can't afford that kind of land out here and I just want to make sure I'm in good with my meat guy But when I think back to how Ice Age Farmer was talking about the food supply, I have yet to feel like i've seen any real empty shelves in the meat department. And it's not to say that we didn't see some cracks in the system or that it couldn't still come but I never want to hype up something that isn't a real concern though I guess we could say just because we haven't had a crisis situation doesn't mean we shouldn't change the way we do things either

1:24:54 Doug gave us plenty of reasons why he knows the business well and i do find myself being really interested in those areas where we see, the intelligence of nature and the abundance that springs out of that regenerative approach it's night and day between. The reality and perception when it comes to self sustainability at least i feel like i was conditioned to expect the yields to be low and scarce and risky, as opposed to getting gallons of milk each day from one cow or of course chickens lay an egg into existence every day. Or one cow can feed a family of four for year I guess you know i really do start to feel a little gypped systematically thrust into system dependence raised in that type of model because we all were And now that my habits are formed and I already feel so far behind

1:25:51 It's such a huge undertaking to try and get back to living like that somehow, as opposed to Doug's kids who are just raised with food production being part of their lives. Honestly my parents were always dedicating a huge amount of the yard to growing fruits and vegetables with pretty overabundant yields and huge fruit trees And even now they have probably the best home garden I know of But any non-grocery meat source was just completely foreign. Finding a local farm didn't feel important, and it definitely wasn't as easy as it is now with the internet so really we have no excuses maybe money but even that think about how often in the old world we used to go out with our friends you know? We're not doing that anymore and even if you can instead of going out and paying these high prices

1:26:45 Have them over for a good meal. Make them, bring the whiskey you show them what you know about grilling and now you're probably saving money and eating better versus the experience you might have had going out I don't know. I guess i'll stop my rambling and patting myself on the back, you know I appreciate you guys and all the loyalty and love that you've shown some random guy on the internet We have a great great audience even if we don't all know each other If you liked the first hour of today's show there's always a second hour for plus members I try to bring you the best I try to bring you useful stuff

1:27:27 In the second hour of today's show with SunriseDog, we talked about comparing the corporate pork and chicken industries to the small farm ways. System vulnerability and EMPs can't believe he wrote his master's thesis on that sort of thing. The truth about raw dairy proper cooking and getting access to these parts of the animal that we just don't get in the grocery store. The importance of bone broth what's going on with the dry aging, the spiritual aspects of ranching and regenerative agriculture and some tips for taking the leap towards self-sustainability.

1:28:05 It's gonna get hard out there for a pimp and networks are important. I think they're going to try to kick us out of the party, so we have to be able to have parties of our own. I just heard that Ticketmaster, one of the first companies to say something is planning mandatory COVID-19 vaccine verification for concert attendance They said negative test will work as well but we all know about PCR testing So not cool When they make that a requirement at the grocery store, you're gonna need to know a guy like Doug. But either way hope you found all this stuff useful hopefully way more useful than election coverage extract yourself some Ormus have a grass-fed steak structure your water get that sweet sweet sunshine and ain't nothing gonna hold you back take care of you and yours it's getting wild out there be the example you wish you had

1:29:03 I've done my part. Your move, freedom takers, frankenfood makers and factory farming fascists! You're welcome. Sometimes when i get down i eat a bunch of corporate junk Stuff that makes you fat Yeah it's for making industry Discipline makes it, I don't have to face it Wrong wrong Got an addiction to the digital technology

1:30:15 And then I try to quit and but it's too hard to discipline is no fun I Discipline, I don't have to face off the big conspiracy and every one of them