Digital Social Hour - Lack Of Transparency In Meat Industry, Importance of Local Farmers & Building Company with Jocko | Jeff Smith DSH #248

Episode Date: January 27, 2024

On today's episode of Digital Social Hour, Jeff Smith talks about the corruption in the beef industry, how he plans on growing Colorado Craft Beef, and addresses if grass-fed beef is healthier. APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://forms.gle/qXvENTeurx7Xn8Ci9 BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [e-mail] SPONSORS: Opus Pro: https://www.opus.pro/?via=DSH Deposyt Payment Processing: https://www.deposyt.com/seankelly Digital Social Hour works with participants in sponsored media and stays compliant with Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations regarding sponsored media. #ad LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Now there's thousands of meat companies in the U.S. What do you think made yours so enticing for these guys to partner with you? It's the story, man. You know, there's a lot of people that sell meat. But man, when you take that and you start looking at where all the food comes from, you know, cotton for a hoodie or leather for shoes or whatever it is, you know, so many people are disconnected from where things come from. Yeah, we just buy it and don't even think about it. Welcome back, guys guys i got a fellow carnivore here today he's got a great company called colorado craft beef how's it going jeff smith going very good man thanks for having me absolutely so you sent over some meat and it was delicious man i

can't wait to hear your story when did you uh start this company so my wife and i actually started the company in 2017 and she is is a fifth-generation cattle rancher. So she actually, we respectfully call her our cow nerd because she actually has a master's degree in cow nutrition. That is a thing, believe it or not. Really? Yeah. So she went to school for almost a decade just to be a nutritionist for ruminant animals. Takes that long?

By the time you go through grad school and do your practicals and everything else, it takes a lot of time. So, you know, marry up, be the ugly one. You met her just a minute ago. I took care of that. But we started the company with the intent of taking the ranch to more generations. So what's interesting, and there's a lot of people in agriculture that get it kind of spun around. So while my wife is fifth generation, Colorado Craft Beef is our way of taking the company forward. So it's not paid for with family money. It's not paid for with other people giving us land or cattle. This is our way of paying homage to the five generations before us that have been at the same place for a hundred years and showing that we want to be there. Right.

And it's been a ton of fun. We've got some cool new partners. I don't know if you saw anything about that. No. So we just actually launched the video like 10 days ago. Okay. We are now business partners with Jocko. Wow.

We are business partners with Brian and Pete, who also founded Jocko Fuel with Jocko, and then a bunch of guys from their camp that's huge so like chris cavallini who's buddies with bradley yeah he's one of our investors uh and then you have travis mills uh dave burke who works for jaco uh dr sean baker who wrote the carnivore diet book um so the the metaphor i've been using is it's like bro from back in the yankees days you know yeah the people that like steak and that's an all-star lineup just humble to be in the room man yeah you

go to a meeting and you know call up a meeting and jaco jumps into your meeting it's like how the hell did i get here it's just a little crazy now there's thousands of meat companies in the u.s what do you think made yours so enticing for these guys to partner with you? It's the story, man. You know, there's a lot of people that sell meat. And it all comes out of a food system. Because to feed that many people, we have to have a system, right? Like we're in Vegas right now.

How much food do you think comes in here every day? So much. And how much of it's produced within 100 miles of here? That I don't know. Almost none. Really? Yeah. Wow. Yeah, you got to go to the central Valley of California or like if you want salad

and it's the off season, like it is right now, you're coming out of Yuma, Arizona. Uh, you want to bring beef in here. It's probably coming out of Western Idaho. Yeah. I never thought about that. So I'm an agricultural industry expert. That's what I've done my whole career. My degree is in agricultural business. Uh, I've done a lot of work in the corporate space, doing capital projects and things like that, high-level sales stuff for people like Coors and Land O'Lakes. And then I did a stint in private equity. So where we call my wife, my cow nerd, I'm the money nerd. Good combo. Yeah. Having offsetting but complementary skills is very helpful. But man, when you take that and you start looking at where all the food comes from, you know, cotton for a hoodie or leather for shoes

or whatever it is, you know, so many people are disconnected from where things come from. Yeah, we just buy it and don't even think about it. Sure. I mean, so the average human in the United States eats 78 pounds of beef a year. Wow. Those are rookie numbers.

They are coming up though. They're coming up. They were at the bottom back in the 80s. Okay. So if you take that and you look at New York proper, I did this math a couple of weeks ago, just as a talking point. How many cows a day do you think it takes to feed

New York City proper at 78 pounds per person per year? How many cows a day would need to go into New York City proper? Not the metro, not the boroughs, just New York proper. I don't even know. 6,000. A day? Yeah. Wow.

So how many cows do we harvest in this country a week? It's got to be astronomical, right? 600,000. A week? Mm-hmm. Wow. And 3 million pigs. 3 million pigs.

Yeah, people love their bacon. And 40 million chickens. Yeah, I could see that. People love chickens. 100%. Well, and also their bacon. And 40 million chickens. Yeah, I could see that. People love chickens. 100%. Well, and also, you know, you think of what you yield. That's the market term off of a cow. You're going to yield 450 pounds of meat.

Off one cow? Yeah, on a chicken, you're going to get about three. Right. On a pig, you're going to get a couple hundred, maybe 150. So when you start thinking about that scale, it just gets crazy. Yeah. So to what, you know, what we've put together for the guys like Jocko to get behind is, one, the story of the ranch and what we're doing. So we're very odd in the fact that we don't have a mother cow herd.

So we buy calves from other ranches and we dictate health protocols to them. So when we take calves that are ready for us, because our ranch isn't set up for cows, We don't have farm ground. We actually live in sandy soil. So you can't have cows out year round. We own our own feed yard. So we then take cattle to that. And then with the partnership with Jocko and all those guys, we actually bought our own harvest facility. So that box of beef you got came from us again and again and again before it landed on your step. Wow. Why did you decide to make all that in-house compared to probably saving money, just outsourcing it? Would you really save? I mean, I listened to your episode with Tai Lopez.

Yeah. That guy, for what he does, he knows a lot about ag. I really respect what he says. He's a very sharp guy too, which is listening to him is like drinking from a fire hose, right? Yeah, he's smart. But are you really saving money outsourcing at that point? You know, you could have somebody else own a feed yard, but then are they doing what you want? Now, how do I look at a customer and talk them through the process if I'm not doing the work? Right. You're not hands-on. Sure. Well, or at least involved in the business, making management decisions for animal health, feed efficiencies, feed quality, packaging quality.

So owning that supply chain is really what helped Jocko and those guys come on board. That's cool. Because that's what they do, right? You know, they have Origin Jeans, they have Origin Geese, they have Jocko Fuel, they have all these different things, and it's about American-made. Absolutely. And it's about getting those supply chains back. Yeah. So in terms of feed quality, I'm curious, it's all about margin, I'd assume, with these bigger meat companies.

Is there a really good quality food going into these cows in America? Yeah. So the thing to understand about that is a lot of people want a, this is what we feed everywhere answer. That really doesn't work because what they're eating needs grown. And certain regions only allow for certain things to be grown. Like actually in California, they feed a lot of almond waste. Just almond shells are actually ground into a flour and they mix it in the ration. Where we're at, you know, we have silage, we have corn. We can get brewer's waste from some of the big breweries around us.

What's that? It's like, so when you make beer, you have the mash and then it soaks the water through and things like that. Okay. And then we haven't used any, but it's very commonplace in the industry that you'll see that brewer's waste to be used. Or where I'm from in Oregon, they grow a lot of, they manufacture a lot of bread. So you'll see brewery or excuse me, bread waste being fed.

Or if you're in an area that grows a lot of vegetables, carrot waste, stuff that comes out of these industries that won't go in a can of food you're going to get, but they aren't going to waste it. So it'll be utilized in other stuff. So with a cow, the cool thing about a cow compared to a chicken or a pig, we can take stuff

that we can't eat, like grass, like where we live, we have cattle on grass all summer. Well, that soil isn't good enough to grow crops, but those cows take that non-farmable land and upcycle grass into steak, which is pretty stinking cool. I love that. And when you look at the feed quality, you know, in our region, we're doing a lot of distillers grains. Um, we have silage, which is chopped corn that's packed in very tightly with machinery. So you can have an, a stored product. Yeah. Um, because as opposed to like Southern California or Florida or Hawaii, we don't have grass year round. It goes dormant. You can't have cattle out on dormant grass. There's not enough nutritional value.

Right. So it's all very, I wouldn't even call it regional. It's like micro regions all around the country. Yeah. That makes sense. Now, is there any truth to a steak that is grass fed or grass finished being healthier for you? Healthier is a very subjective term. Some of the nutritional people I follow and have talked to at length, the way they describe it as very easy. The grass finished community, which we are not grass finished. Okay. We finished with different grain combinations based on the time of year. Um, but again, it's our whole process, you know, we have to do what we have to

do within the confines of our region. Um, so we do feed with a concentrate ration. A lot of times it contains corn. Um, you know, and quite frankly, we do that on purpose because of the meat quality side of things, we can get to that in just a second, but with respect to the grass fed grass finish side of things, if well, the general talking point of the grass finish community is we are three times higher in omega six. I believe it is.

Well, cool. But beef typically doesn't have very many omegas. So three times zero is still pretty much zero. Right. If you want omegas, eat fish. Yeah. And then there's some talking points about regeneration and regenerative agriculture, and there's talks about sustainability and different things like that. And when you start looking at the micro regions I just mentioned,

sustainability becomes a moving target. You know, what you do in Georgia or Florida, I can't do in Colorado. What you do in Northwest Washington, you know, by the Puget Sound, we can't do in Eastern Washington. Just climate, climate, right? So it's very interesting to see how that kind of shakes out. But in general, if you want omegas, eat a fish. But to the meat science kind of shakes out. But in general, if you want omegas, eat a fish. Um, but to the meat science side of things, the reason that we finish cattle

with grain and most of the industry, literally 97% of the industry finishes with a grain and or concentrate diet is because of the meat quality. So when you get a marbled steak and it's that bright white fat, that's from a concentrate ration. Got it. Because if you get the yellow fat that you've probablybled steak and it's that bright white fat. Yeah. That's from a concentrate ration. Got it. Because if you get the yellow fat that you've probably seen, and it sometimes tastes a little gamey, like it's got a little pungent something going on. That fat has a ton of beta carotene, which came from grass. Okay.

And when they go on a concentrate diet, it flushes that beta carotene, the fat turns white. So that when you cook with that fat, it's that buttery flavor. The Wagyu, right? Yeah. Well, not even Wagyu, just the white fat. Because Wagyu is actually a breed. It's a Japanese breed of cattle. So yeah. That makes a lot of sense. What are some myths about the ranching and agriculture industry you want to address? The biggest one is I think a lot of people outside of agriculture think that ag takes all the time, that we are taking from mother nature, that we are, you know, for lack of a better term, you know, pillaging what we have. And that couldn't be further from the truth. You know, if you are on the East Coast or you're where we live, you're on the West Coast, you know,

my wife's family has been at the same location for 110 years. Why would you treat the land badly? Yeah. You're still going to be there, right? Why would you create a problem for yourself? Um, so I think the biggest misconception within the general public about agriculture is that, oh, I know people that do it like this, you must do it like that, or you're hurting the land

or you're doing any number of negative things instead of maybe asking questions. And that's one of the main reasons we founded the company was to engage with the public, talk to them about how this stuff has to work. Because 85% of the beef in the United States comes from four companies. And by the way, that's not us.

Is Tyson one of them? Yeah. I see them everywhere. It's Tyson, Cargill, National Beef, and JBS. Wow. But at the same time, I'm not going to demonize those guys because how else do you feed 330 million people? Yeah.

There has to be someone, right? Yeah. I mean, if you take everything back to what it was 100 years ago, we can't feed a population that size. Wow. You just can't. Because of the logistics. Absolutely. It's economy of scale.

Like we have our own harvest facility that we own. Well, our cost of taking a live steer and converting them to boxed product is about two and a half times what the big guys pay. Wow. And we own it. We, our scale of economy does not allow us to be as low cost as they are, which is just math. No hate on them. I mean, they're doing thousands a day and we're doing thousands a year.

So you're more quality over quantity. I don't even know if I'd say quality over quantity. I just say we're just smaller. Right. I mean, the biggest quality difference, and this is probably what you tasted in the beef, is we age every one of those animals for 21 days. It tasted unlike any other beef I've had. There you go.

Yeah. So, you know, you have the name craft beef. So you can talk about what we craft all the way through the process. We're actually implementing DNA testing so that we can understand the genetic potential of different cattle and where they're going to land in the cycle. Wow. So that's craft. Interesting.

Where are we getting our feed from? That's craft. Where are the cattle coming from? That's craft. They're on grass at our place and they have certain protein tubs that they can get if the grass starts to wash out in the summertime. And then take that into the feed yard where we finish them, which, mind you, the finishing, the grain finishing process

is only going to be about 120 days. So when everybody thinks, oh, you put them in a feed yard forever, it's like, no, man, feed yards are expensive. They're very expensive to run. So it's just four months of them eating nonstop? Not really nonstop. It's ran by a licensed nutritionist. I'll actually show you on my phone later.

The entire software system that runs feed yards on my phone. Wow. And it's linked up. I can tell you what the feed truck's doing. I can tell you what weight we put into everything, like down to the minute. That's crazy. It's all cloud-based. But it's a very definitive conversion process because when they go from a

grass situation on pasture to the feed yard, you start them at a very low concentrate level, you have to slowly change the stomach profile, the bug profile, because basically the way a cow's stomach works is like a whiskey. Still you're feeding the microbiome of that, of their gut and their gut produces the amino acids, the proteins, everything else that they then absorb. Wow. I didn't know there was this much thought into this. By the way, I am mimicking everything the lady through the wall over there told me. And she's probably like, that's like 80% correct. So, um, it makes sense though. Cause you got to change their diet to get the quality. If you go on vacation in Italy and you start eating pasta every day, dude, on day four,

you're going to be like, I'm just going to go float in the ocean. I'm just not going to do anything. No, you notice that, especially when you travel, because I'll travel to countries and I'll get sick because my gut's not used to that bacteria. And so we are managing that whole process. And to be clear, that's what the industry does. Like cattle operators have to do this. Pig farmers have to do this. Sheep farmers have to do this. It's just, it's animal husbandry is the actual term. Yeah.

But it's management of the resources. And to the people that, you know, don't understand like, oh, you love this industry, but you're taking cows and making them at the stake. Like that's a little like controversial. Right. Why else would we have cows? And I mean that lovingly, but also from like a lesson teaching perspective. We have two little girls. And we have dogs.

We have a couple of cats. We have horses. That's all their friends, right? Like Boots, the cat, is the mascot around the ranch. That little orange turd like thinks he runs the place. Yeah. But, and the horses, you know, they love their horses. The little girls love the horses and just can't wait to go see them.

Yeah. Not to say we don't love the cows, but the cows don't love you back. How else do you teach your kid? Yeah, it's snowing, man. It's 10 below. It's blowing 20 miles an hour, and guess what? Ice needs broken. Now, we don't have them doing that quite yet, but that's what I do all winter.

We take care of stuff. That's just what you have to do. And it's a different level of connection when it's an animal that doesn't love you back. We have a big Pyrenees dog. He's awesome. His name's Toph. But taking care of him, I'm like, hey, buddy, you okay? And taking care of the cows, you try to talk to them,

and they're just like, whatever, man. They're just hanging out. But you have to do it. And that labor of love and that labor of sacrifice is one of the things that I think a lot of people lose on agriculture. Yeah, I mean, they've been, cows have been eating for who knows how long. I mean, it's normal at this point,

but yeah, vegans always make that argument about, you know, how they feel and stuff. Well, yeah. And I've, so I do jujitsu and we have a couple of guys in my gym that are full on

vegans. Yeah. They're jacked too. It's very bizarre. So if I tap one of them there, I'm like, Hey man, if you'd have a steak yesterday and if they get me, they're like, you could have gotten hey, man, if you'd have had a steak yesterday.

And if they get me, they're like, you could have gotten out of that if you could have went a little faster if you didn't eat a steak yesterday. You know, it's very jovial. And I asked them one time. I said, hey, man, why are you guys vegan? They're like, man, they're like, it's not even an ethical thing for us. We just stopped eating meat one day and we felt better. See, that I can relate with. A hundred percent.

I'm like, dude, do you? Absolutely. Like I wouldn't be so bold as to say everybody has to do it my way or everybody should be carnivore. I have a very different body type than 90% of people. But you take guys who are just like, I feel better when I do this.

Yeah. I think when they released all those slaughterhouse videos on Netflix, they were playing with people's emotions. A hundred percent. And I think a lot of people fell for it. Yeah. Even I did for a bit.

Yeah. And you should, right? Like you want to be empathetic. You want to have some empathy. You know, Gary Vee talks about that a lot. But at the same time, you have to be realistic as well. Because if all you're eating is tofu, that's made out of soybeans. Tofu's terrible for you, I heard. Absolutely. It's made out of soybeans. But if you watch how soybeans are harvested and some of the environmental impacts of that, and by the way, I'm not bashing on soybeans. That's part of the food system that feeds 330 plus million people because we export a ton of product. Right. But you have to just understand what you're doing. You have to make an informed decision. If you are in Minnesota and you are vegan and you think avocados are the best

protein source, I think the closest avocados to Minnesota are in Arizona when they're grown. Wow. That's far. Well, how does that happen? And well, a lot of them come out of Mexico. So now you're talking about, well, it's better for the environment. Well, how are those grown in a different country? You don't know. So if you really want to have that impact, you know, that attachment to where your food comes from, regardless of what you want to eat, you just have to be very cognizant of that. Absolutely. A big criticism I see online with farms is pesticides. What have you seen with all these local farms? Do you see them using pesticides every day?

No. So like if you're talking about Roundup, like that's a big one, right? So that's actually a herbicide. Okay. So pesticides are bugs. Like for instance, you know, soybeans have a, the way they grow, they kind of get canopied over and you have this really humid, like under, under canopy layer. And there's a lot of bugs that live in there. So you can get aphid infestations and stuff like that. Or in wheat, you can get different worms or you can get a fungicide to deal with any sort of rotting issue because you got too much rain at the wrong time. But Roundup's usually the most common that everybody kind of hammers against. The one thing to know is nobody's out there throwing this stuff around without any sort of understanding because it's expensive.

Roundup? Oh, yeah. If you buy a gallon of Roundup concentrate, it's hundreds of dollars. Wow. Hundreds and hundreds of dollars. And now if you go apply that to a 600-acre field. Yeah, they already have thin margins too, the farmers. A hundred percent.

So now I'm not to say that this is all well and good and we shouldn't find a better solution because we absolutely should. But we have to do it in a measured way that we keep people fed as we adjust the system. Right. Right. You don't just go rip the Band-Aid off and say, we're going to figure it out because quite literally people could die. Yeah. So the idea is if they don't use the Roundup, everything will die, all the crops. So they kind of have to use it right now. Not really. So the, and I'm not much of a crop guy. I'm more of a bring it to me. Like I did a lot of seed processing and a lot of like

grain handling and a lot in the ag space, of course, with beef. Yeah. But a great example is where I'm from in Oregon, a very, very popular dry land wheat area. So we don't have irrigation. They grow special varieties up there that are actually exported to Eastern Asia. So very common in like noodles and things like that. So the Roundup that's applied there is actually not applied on the wheat. They do pre-emergent spraying is what it's called. So they go out, they plant the wheat and then

they will spray the crop or spray the leftover grass that was growing naturally before the wheat comes up. So the wheat never actually touches Roundup. Okay. But they do that because you want to have that grass, that cover crop layers, what they call it, where you have a root zone holding the soil

together, you plant through the root zone, you stuff on the top and then the wheat grows through and it doesn't have all the nutritional pressures of other crops growing in that space. Got it. Um, so it's called pre-emergent, uh, in the corn world, they will sometimes spray

Roundup when the corn is relatively short, you know, a foot or two tall. Cause once it gets too tall, you can't get machinery in there. But in general, what they're spraying for is they're spraying to mitigate weed pressure and mitigate overgrowth because that starts to actually choke out the crop.

Got it. I'm not voting for or against Roundup. I'm just explaining why and how they use it. Yeah. It's good to understand their perspective because I feel like their perspective was never shown in the media. A hundred percent. It was just like, oh, they're using it. It use it. Yeah. It's good to understand their perspective. Cause I feel like their perspective was never shown in the media. It was just like,

Oh, they're using it. It's terrible. Sure. And a good friend of mine in Illinois, I walked him through this whole thing. He goes, yeah,

man, but where I live, he's just West of Chicago. He goes, that stuff's put everywhere. Are you telling me that at that level of concentration across this entire space, it's still good?

Man, I don't have that data. I don't know. I said, but if you start taking the amount of corn that's produced in that region and you decrease it by 30% because you have too much weed and pest pressure, what does that do to the local supply? So the price would go up a lot. There you go.

Yeah. And the thing, you know, to that point that a lot of people don't understand, in the United States, we spend about 8% to 10% of our discretionary income on food. It's a very, very low percentage. In Europe, it's like 20 to 40%. Wow. You go to South Korea, it's like 55%. South Korea is one of the highest. I wonder why it's so low here. Because we produce so much and because we export so much and because our systems are so efficient. So, you know, to our business model with Colorado craft beef, we support all those guys, you know, grow food, feed people.

Step one, step two, do not food shame. Like if somebody wants to buy organic or non-organic, let them make the decision they need to make for their family. And at the end of the day, our pricing at Colorado Kraft Beef is higher than commercial beef. I would say commercial beef in the grocery store is still nutritious. It's safe. It's healthy. And if that's what you need to feed your family, beef is the best protein you can give them. I have no judgment. We can do some things that make our quality different, but we have a higher cost. And if you want to support that model, vote with your dollar. You don't have to do that every day.

I mean, we've got customers all around the country. We ship nationally. We're 95% direct to consumer. And when somebody in South Carolina calls and cancels their subscription, I usually follow up and I'm like, hey, I see you canceled your subscription. You've had it for like nine months. Is everything okay? And usually it's, man, hey, I see you canceled your subscription. You've had it for like nine months. Is there everything okay? And usually it's, man, everything's great. We love your company. I found a local guy. Heck yeah, go do that.

Wow. That's cool that you have that mindset. Well, you should, right? Like if the math was the only thing at play, we should have no reason to move beef more than 30 miles from where we are. We could feed everybody in that small spot. It's still a very small spot. Like in a perfect world, we wouldn't ship outside of Colorado.

We wouldn't have to. Like mathematically speaking, if we produced everything we possibly could with our system, we wouldn't have to ship outside of Colorado if we had full buy-in. But we have competitors. Then you also understand that we have access to different feed in our region that other people don't. We have access to better climate than other people. Like if you're feeding cattle

in South Texas, it's a different type of cattle. They may not marble, you know, all these different things that make quality a thing. So Colorado is one of the best states. So it's, what they call it is the feeding triangle and the feeding triangle is Omaha, Denver, Amarillo, Texas, and about like 85 or 90% of all the fed cattle in the United States, which would be, you know, what you would call high end beef comes out of that triangle. Wow. And we are right in the middle of it. So we have access to great feed. We have a lower price point because of our location. And we're able to pass a lot of that on through efficiency. It's just an interesting dynamic when you start talking to producers in other regions. Yeah. I've got friends, we've got friends all over

and we've got friends that buy from us and two of our other companies that we know. No big deal. Like The market is big enough. And the one thing we talk about a lot within the agricultural space is, depending on how you do the math, about 1% of the United States population is involved in agriculture. You might see it as high as 2%. It's still not that many people. And that's when you're starting to include the ag accountants, the ag attorneys, all the ancillary ag people. But man, the people in ag that start tearing other ag people down, it's so bananas.

You just can't help but laugh. You're like, bro, we're on the same team. It's all ego, dude. It is. That happens in any industry. Absolutely. I imagine you catch podcast heat. Oh, yeah.

And you're like, I'm sorry, man. Clearly, you need another guest. Why you got time to bother me? Dude, I love other podcasts. I want every podcaster to win. Absolutely. And that's really what it comes down to. And ag is one of those weird things.

So everybody's like, my way is perfect. And I'm like, cool. Do that then. That's funny. It's very bizarre as you start looking around and you start like capturing all the different value chains and what people can do. Like actually the reason – I knew they fed almond waste, but I wasn't super familiar with it. But Chad Mendez, the UFC fighter, he's part of an almond-based beef company that's out of Central California. Wow.

I've never even heard of almond based beef. Well, they take the hulls off the almonds and they grind them into a flour or chips and then they mix it in the ration because it's this great protein source. And it's got high fat content and stuff like that, but it's waste product in the almond industry, not food waste. There's a lot of people that say, oh, it's garbage. I'm like,

no, we can't send it to Saudi Arabia because it's not that quality of almond. Right. But it's still got a lot of feed value. Yeah. You know, what should we do? Throw it in the landfill?

Maybe not the best idea. Yeah. But, you know, Chad Mendez went on Rogan's podcast and was talking about that. And I was like, I immediately followed him. And I sent him a message. I was like, hey, man, that's really cool. Wow. So you're open.

You should be. But, like, I'm not so stubborn as to think we should feed everybody. I can't. Health is one of those really divisive things though for a lot of people. Yeah. The other really weird one that we play in is the barbecue space. Oh yeah? Those guys are so tribal. You shouldn't use this barbecue. You should use the other one. And if you use this one, you're an idiot. I'm like, man, you're adding heat and salt. There's only so much you can do. I can see that. Yeah. People, when I got the Traeger, they're like, you're smoking your meat? You're not barbecuing? I'm like, yeah, why not? Yeah. Or the guys are like, well, you're using

a Traeger. You're cheating. You should use a stick burner. I'm like, man, that'd be great, but I don't have the time. I like to push the button and pick the temperature. Yeah, push it and go inside. That's right. Yeah. Now when it comes to beef rankings, I know there's a system. How does it work and how do you get to the highest level? Cool. So in the United States with typical fed beef, and I mentioned fed beef just a little while ago. So to clarify that term, that is cattle under 30 months of age in the United States. If they're over 30 months of age, they cannot be graded. So if you are looking at a graded beef, it is typically select, choice, or prime. So that's USDA grades. So you can go to the grocery store, go online, and it's

USDA choice, USDA prime. Then you can go into the Wagyu scale, which is totally different because Wagyu is its own market. It's all by itself. The A5, I believe, is the top of that. So if you, you know, just down the road, like I think last time we were in town, we went to dinner at Lakeside, Lakeside in the wind. And they had an A5, like, sampler. It was outstanding. They have to bring you the paper, right?

I forgot. To confirm it. Maybe. They had a really good cocktail that night too. But, you know, they bring it out and it's awesome. Don't get me wrong. But it's also something that you eat like three bites and you're like, okay, I'm good. It's rich, yeah.

It's very, very rich. And that's where, you know, those are just the grades. And the grade is basically the proportion of fat to muscle in a cut. Yeah. And it's measured at the ribeye. Got it. Because that's the, and it's, and that's the whole carcass grade.

So you could have a prime ribeye and then, you know, something looks a little different, but that's how they grade the entire carcass. Oh, so the whole cow gets one grade. Yeah. Okay. Well, and typically it's done by the side. Got it.

So the half a beef. But then when you throw in some of the other stuff, like what we's done by the side. Got it. So the half a beef. But then when you throw in some of the other stuff, like what we can do with the aging, that kind of takes that grade and makes it not as prominent. So what's the science behind aging 21 days? What does that do to the meat? Well, the first thing you have to have is a fat covering on the animal so that as it ages and it starts to get, how much meat experience you got, Sean? I eat it a lot. I mean. So when you start to age meat, or if you go to like Gallagher's at New York, New York, and they've got that crust, that funk that's on the outside in the

aging cooler, you got to trim that off, right? You aren't going to eat that on the steak. Because that's bacteria. Not really. It's just, it's like really gross jerky. Got it. Got it. But that's called the pericarp. And that happens on carcasses when you age them. And it works best to age carcasses when you have a fat covering on them, which comes from the grain finishing side.

And you have something to trim and you're not into the meat. So it insulates the meat. First thing, you have to have something that you can actually age. From there, what the aging process does is you lose a ton of water weight. So it condenses the flavor. And then what happens is there's enzymes inside that meat, just natural occurring enzymes that start to break down a lot of the connective tissue. So any of the collagen, any of the different fibers that are in there, especially on the fed beef side, because they aren't old enough that you have a cartilage issue or any of the joints have started to harden. Got it. Does that make sense? Yeah. So it's basically condensing

the flavor. And then what's really nice about that, like a good math problem, is you end up with about 30% more cooked weight because you don't have all the water loss. Wow. So typically, if you do the math on like a brisket or something, we've done this for some catering companies with the beef company. I'm like, here's going to be your yield. And they're like, well, that's too high. I said, no, it's because we've aged it. And what we're selling you is, you know, aged beef. So it's actually more condensed, more flavorful. You're going to lose less water. And they're like, oh man, that's great. Wow. So they get 30% more meat? Yeah. 30% net. Wow. That's a lot, man.

Yeah. Well, when you got to break the math down for them, because they're like, well, how cheap is it? Well, cheap's a relative term. What's your final product going to be? I love me some brisket, man. That on the Traeger's. You should have told me, dude.

I'll hook you up. I got you. Oh, man. Thank you so much. Well, Jeff, it's been a pleasure learning about the meat industry. Anything you want to close off with or promote? Man, just vote with your dollar. Give us a shot if you want. The nice thing with our model is you don't have to subscribe. You can buy a one-off. But find good producers. Support the people you want to support. Absolutely. It costs no money to be nice. A lot

of people struggle with that. Yeah, for sure. I love it. Thanks so much for coming on, man. Absolutely, dude. Thank you. Thanks for watching, guys, and I'll see you tomorrow.