Digital Social Hour - The McBee Dynasty, Green Washing & Issues with the Meat Industry I Steven McBee DSH #383

Episode Date: March 30, 2024

Steven McBee comes to the show to talk about greenwashing and issues with the meat industry, APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://forms.gle/D2cLkWfJx46pDK1MA BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [e-mail] SPONSORS: Deposyt Payment Processing: https://www.deposyt.com/seankelly 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/ Digital Social Hour works with participants in sponsored media and stays compliant with Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations regarding sponsored media. #ad Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You know, these companies try to say that they're environmentally friendly, but it's all BS. It's not made in the USA. It's shipped and imported from other countries, which is fine. I mean, those other countries produce good beef. It's, you know, why would you say a product is made in the USA when it was shipped from Australia or New Zealand? And so you're not giving them, you know, factual data about the products they're buying. Right. Wherever you guys are watching this show,

I would truly appreciate it if you follow or subscribe. It helps a lot with the algorithm. It helps us get bigger and better guests and it helps us grow the team. Truly means a lot. Thank you guys for supporting. And here's the episode. All right, guys, we got Stephen McBee here.

We got a cowboy in the building. Thanks for coming on, man. Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Love the hat. Oh, yeah. It sticks out like a sore thumb here in Vegas, but this is what we roll or how we roll back in Missouri. Yeah. You don't come to Vegas often, do you? I do not. This is my second time. Last time I was here for the National Finals Rodeo Convention.

But other than that, I've never been out here. I was there. Really? Yeah. Okay. Do you enjoy it? Yeah, it was my first time at a rodeo event, so I didn't know what going on to be honest but it's fun whether you're experienced in rodeo or not it's a good time yeah my friend was there competing and uh supported him shout out to tyson durfee he's a champ oh that's awesome yeah but yeah there's like six events right oh yeah which

one's your favorite uh i like the barrel racing myself okay yeah yeah it's pretty cool and then yeah and then roping as well it's pretty fun i feel like people say the riding ones usually yeah bull riding usually yeah have you ever done any of those no yeah no no i'm a rancher i'm not necessarily like a true cowboy as far as getting on a bull and riding it i'm a farmer and rancher um more work than than actual play i feel that and i want to dive into that 40 000 acres it's in two states was that a family business it is yeah it's my three younger brothers and my dad. We've grown this thing since really 2010 is whenever we started growing it exponentially. And now we're up to 40,000 acres.

We run a couple thousand head of cattle and it's one of the largest operations in the entire country for family owned. Wow. And there's a direct to consumer meat business tied into that. We just launched this actually last year. we took over a failing meat company facility there nearby. And we're actually just now launching the website to be able to ship nationwide. So, if you think of sending out farm-to-table beef across the country, place your order online, whether it's subscription or a one-time purchase, we're able to send it out. It's literally beef that is born, raised, grown on my farm, complete transparency, and it's

actually grown using regenerative and sustainable agriculture, which is huge. So what does that regenerative agriculture look like? Yeah. So if you think about big food, and I call big food, there are these giant corporations that basically run all of the beef industry. You have four major players in the entire country. And whenever you talk about greenhouse gases and the emission that comes from raising beef, you think about commercial ag, industrial ag, it's so bad for the environment. It truly is. And everyone in our industry tries to deny it and say, hey, you know, raising beef is not bad for the environment. In an industrialized setting, it is. And so what we're doing is we're actually running regenerative and sustainable agriculture which is rotational grazing running cover crops uh making sure that

all of our beef have plenty of pasture to graze on and then what we're able to do with that is actually bring carbon from the air back into the soils where it belongs wow so we're actually a carbon negative beef producer that is huge man that is cool. I don't know if you know, Dr. Zach Bush, but he was talking about the soil epidemic right now. Is that a problem? Because he was saying in like 20 years, there'll be no nutrients in the soil. Correct. Yeah. Because industrialized ag is, uh, for better or worse, literally stripping the soil of every nutrient it has. And so that's what, whenever you transition to regenerative and sustainable agriculture, you're actually putting nutrients back into the soil. So if you think about it, uh, for thousands

of years, mother nature had it all figured out. Um, you know, there was no issue issues with, uh, carbon up in the air. There was no issues with the ozone layer. There's no issues with, um, you know, all of the major weather events and weather patterns that we're having nowadays. And it all stems from industrialized ag that came about about a hundred years ago. And so what we're able to do is it's called advanced or leading edge practices with what we're doing on our farm, but it all goes back to what mother nature was doing years before we were ever here. And so it's like the smarter we think we are, mother nature was 10 times smarter than we

ever could be. Can't defeat Mother Nature, man. You can't. She had it all figured out for thousands of years, and we came along and disrupted the ecosystem. And now we're just learning how to integrate ourselves back into that ecosystem without completely disrupting it. Right. So these big four food companies that are in industrial ag, they do it because of profit margins. Correct.

So they're probably never going to go this route, this sustainable route. They never will. They never will. And it's, you know, you don't want to call them evil because they're providing food for our entire nation, but it's just not a good system. The centralized food system is horrible for the environment. You think about some of these big producers, JBS is down in the Amazon, and they're actually taking out a lot of the rainforest to put it into cattle pasture. And then they're also, because of how

much money they have and because of the lobbyists within those companies, they're able to persuade the government to enact certain policies and also push the government inspectors on these beef companies to basically do things that anyone else wouldn't get by. So in 2017, JBS was selling tainted and rotten meat because they were able to persuade the Brazil government inspectors that the meat was okay with an under the table payment. Wow, that's gross. You just don't, no one gets away with this

unless you're one of those big four. Yeah. And they control the food system. And then you have a force majeure event like coming in, in 2020, shut down our food system. And then you have a force majeure event like coming in, in 2020, shut down our food supplier. Remember, all the grocery stores were completely wiped clean of all of our beef, pork, chicken. That's because we had this centralized food supply where there's hundreds of thousands of workers in these facilities, and they all got shut down overnight.

That's crazy. That's why you need these small producers, these local farm-to-table producers that are doing things the right way that actually care about the animals that they produce. And it's not just a number on a spreadsheet. I actually stopped eating meat from grocery stores because I used to do it. And then the more I looked into it, a lot of the marketing is manipulation. It's all manipulation. When they say grass-fed, you think it's healthy, grass-finished.

It's called greenwashing. So basically, these companies try to say that they're environmentally friendly, but it's all BS. It all comes down to how they're able to pay off the government inspectors or the USDA labeling requirements. And there's a lot of gray areas within the labeling requirements. So if you look at 85% of the grass-fed beef that is on the grocery store shelves today, it says made in the USA. It's not made in the USA. It's shipped and imported from other countries, which is fine. I mean, those other countries produce good beef. It's, you know, but just don't lie about it. Why would you say a product is made in the USA when it was shipped from Australia or New Zealand or whatever it may

be? And you're actually lying to the consumer. And so you're not giving them, you know, factual data about the products they're buying. Right. And that's a long route from Australia. That's not fresh at that point. No, it's not. And so you think about grass-fed beef coming from Australia. A lot of times these animals are shipped over alive in shipping containers on a big container ship like what you would see importing products from China or whatever it may be. You think that animal is humanely and ethically treated whenever it's on a shipping container for three weeks coming over from Australia or New Zealand?

Definitely not. The fact they're shipping it's even more concerning. It's insane. I thought they were flying them. No, no, they're shipping them in containers. And then they're still feeding them grass so they can call them grass fed. Wow. They live in a shipping containers for three weeks before they're ever on US soil.

And I just found out they only need to feed them grass at the end of their life. Correct. Before they could just be eating whatever. Correct. And it's still grass finished or whatever. Correct. They can still get away with the grass fed label by doing that. Like I said, there's a lot of gray area and these big companies manipulate and distort their data to be able to come off as environmentally friendly and like they're actually caring about these animals, but there's no humane or ethical treatment from these big companies. There's no way they're doing, uh, Tyson food group is doing 155,000 beef per week through their facility.

And they only have 14 facilities. Damn. So that's 11,000 beef per facility per week. Crazy. And that's just beef. They do chicken too. They do chicken, pork. I mean, it's just insane.

And there's no way to have a regenerative, sustainable agriculture system or ranching system whenever you're doing that type of capacity. Yeah, there's no way because you're one of the biggest and you're a couple thousand. A couple thousand. Yeah. A couple thousand head of cattle and 40,000 acres of row crop. Yeah. And you're probably one of the biggest in the US. Yes, we are. Wow. And we're just now like really working on trying to implement all of the regenerative

and sustainable practices we can. It's been a transition. We didn't start out this way. We were unfortunately in the commercial or commoditized market. And so we were doing things the way that they were and just didn't feel right about it. You know, we care about our animals and we care about what we're doing to our ground and wanting to improve it every single day that we operate. Wow. And so over the last five years, we've been transitioning to a regenerative and sustainable model. And it's just so much better. It makes us feel better whenever we're going out and raising these

animals that we care so much about. We know they're being humanely and ethically raised. And then whenever we sell that to a consumer, they can feel good about what they're buying. Yeah. Hats off to you because you're giving up making a ton of money for this just because it's what right thing to do. For four to five years, it is straight capital investment. And there are absolutely no black bottom lines. It's all red. I mean, you're losing money for four to five years making this transition. And that's why so many small farmers and ranchers struggle to make that transition because you go into it saying, for four to five years, I'm losing money. And we're just now

getting to the tail end of that, to where we've turned things around and we run a really, really sustainable model. Yeah. Is it true? A lot of farmers are struggling to make a living right now. It absolutely is. Yeah. Because this commoditized market. So basically those four big, uh, beef, pork, and chicken suppliers, they don't have to sell their meat at a profit because they have um uh markets set up overseas for all of the internal organs of those animals to where they're making the most money wow so they take the internal organs usually the reproduction organs yeah and they powderize them and turn it into a nutritional supplement into a pill form that's where they make their margin i never knew that so the meat side they could sell it at a loss. They don't care because that's not where their true money is made. It's made on

the internal organs that they're selling for medical nutrient supplies. Dude, I never knew that. That's so fascinating. So is that what you guys do too with your organs? You have to be huge to have enough internal organs to set up that market model to send it overseas in containers. We're not big enough yet, so we have to rely on actually selling the meat products. But we're a zero-waste facility. So those internal organs get made into dog treats and dog products. So basically, every single part of a beef we utilize.

We have all of the actual meat that comes from the cow, all the internal organs, the femur bones, the hooves, the cheekbones, the tongue that get made into dog products. And then the rest of it, we actually compost on the farm. We let it compost for three to four months, and then we utilize it on our crop fields as nutrients. So we're using every single piece of that animal that we can. And you just don't get that whenever you have a big commercial company or centralized ag, they're taking the internal organs, sending them overseas for medical supplies. And then the rest of what's called offal, they're just dumping in a landfill. Yeah, that's crazy. I saw the average lifespan

chart of chickens and cows recently. And because they inject them with so much steroids and stuff, it's actually crazy. Yeah, how much they've dropped down the maturity chart. Yeah. So they're taking what should be a two to three year lifespan lifespan to raise that cattle maturity and they're getting it done in nine to twelve months because of how many hormones and basically steroids they're pumping into these animals to get them to grow faster because the faster throughput they get through their uh facilities and through their pastures and feedlots obviously the more money is made yeah and it's just not the way mother nature was set up from the beginning. So whenever you take industrialized ag and you break and disrupt that ecosystem,

you get what we have today where beef production is the worst major food commodity on the environment out of everything we do. Beef production is the worst. And that's industrialized ag. That is not regenerative and sustainable farming because, like I said, we're actually carbon negative. We're pulling down more carbon from the air than what our beef are actually producing. Wow. It's so crazy. Because then humans are now eating that meat. They're eating the organs and supplements. And they're basically eating God knows what, like steroids and stuff. Correct. Yeah. All of the hormones, all of the GMOs, everything you could possibly pump an animal full of. That's what these

industrialized large scale food companies are doing to these animals. And then big food shuts down the local farms, right? I used to order from an Amish farm, site got shut down. Correct. Because they sold raw milk. Correct. Yeah. Big food has completely almost monopolized the beef market or basically beef, pork, and chicken because a local farmer can't compete. They can't sell their meat at a loss like these big companies are doing at break-even or a loss

because that's our revenue stream. That's our profit model. For your families. It is. It is. And so that's the good thing about finding a local farmer to source your meat from is that you know it's going directly to that family and that local community to help preserve, you know, this lifestyle that we all know and love. Yeah. I try to go to farmer's markets because even like vegetables and fruit, I can't trust the mass produce companies making those. Correct. Who knows what they're putting in that? Oh, it's just as bad. And I'm not as well versed on the vegetables and fruit size. I just know the meat side of the industry. And just knowing that I would never touch big food on the vegetable and fruit side either. Yeah.

Do you guys just do cows? We do cows. We just got into pork and then also bison as well. Nice. I love me some bison. Yep. Joe Rogan loves bison. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, we're quickly growing our bison herd, all grass-fed on the bison. Hoping to get that to about 500 animals here within the next couple years. Nice. And then we'll start actually selling that as well on our direct-to-consumer sound hard to control though right they're wild yeah yeah you take a cow and you can pretty much run it through um you know our our pastures whenever we're doing rotational grazing basically we're making sure that our cows are not feeding on a pasture for too long and completely uh tearing up the grass and nutrients in that and we're rotating them around, rotational grazing. You try to do that with bison and it is like a cow on steroids that is madder than hell, can jump eight foot fences, can cut and juke faster than any running back in the NFL.

It gets pretty intense whenever you're working bison. They can jump eight foot fences? Oh yeah, easily. And they're like super heavy. They're insane athletes. That's crazy. Wow. Let's talk about the McBee dynasty. Yeah. Yeah. We've got a reality show coming out here in March. And actually,

by the time this thing airs, it'll probably be out on Peacock, all 10 episodes dropping on March 11th. We filmed it last year and it was really just to showcase what we do as a family and what a modern day farming and ranching operation looks like. So many people are not well versed into what takes place in rural America. It's flyover states for a reason. And we want to showcase what our life and lifestyle is all about. Yeah. Did you get inspiration from Yellowstone? We did get inspiration from Yellowstone. We like to think that we were the real life Yellowstone before Yellowstone came about. Yeah. My brother, it's funny, looks exactly like Casey Dutton. We happen to have a helicopter on the farm. There's a lot of similarities between us and Yellowstone. And whenever Yellowstone first started getting popular, we had a lot of people

coming up to us saying, hey, you know, you guys need to watch this show. It is exactly what you guys are like. And here we are a couple of years later having a reality show out of it. I love that, man. How much of reality is scripted versus on the spot filming it is this show specifically is 100 unscripted it's just following us around day to day to see what our lives are about and it was funny um our production company going into the show they were a little concerned about how much excitement or drama could happen on a farm and ranch. About one week into filming, they were like, all right, there's no concern here. We've got more than enough to work with.

So it was an interesting experience. We filmed for about four months last year, and it's going to be released on Peacock. Are you interested in coming on the Digital Social Hour podcast as a guest? Well, click the application link below in the description of this video. We are always looking for cool stories, cool entrepreneurs to talk to about business and life. Click the application link below and here's the episode, guys. March 11th, all 10 episodes are dropping. And then on USA Network, 1110 Central is when the first episode airs. Wow, that's exciting. It seems right now the cowboy lifestyle is super hot, too, on social media. Cowboys in. Beyonce has the number one song in country music right now. If you obviously Yellowstone's number one show on TV, it seems like every 10 or 15 years cowboy and country kind of comes back in. And we happen to time it out right to where it is the

hot ticket right now. We're excited about it. You know, we said we've been wearing Carhartt for years now, and all of a sudden it's a, it's a fashion choice for everyone. Everyone's rocking Carhartt on Instagram and we're out there getting dirty in it. You know, we've got cow shit on our Carhartt. I don't think very many people do that anymore, but it's how we've always lived. I love that. Balancing family and business is curious to me because you got, you said you got three brothers, three younger brothers and your dad's the guy that started this all. Yes. Yeah. So my dad's the ringleader of it.

And then really what's interesting in this show is, you know, as he's gotten older, as us boys have gotten older as well, we've taken over a majority of running the operations. And so now my dad is trying to see which one of us is truly going to be considered the next leader of the farm. And so this show has a little bit of Yellowstone and a little bit of succession coming into it. I don't know if you've ever seen succession. It's a billionaire trying to decide, you know, which one of his kids are going to take over the operation. And that's what we've got here on the farm. Yeah. And you're the oldest, right? I am the oldest. Yeah. I would say I'm the front runner right now. You want that title? I do. Yeah. I wouldn't want one of my little brothers to have it, but, uh, they're're they want it bad, too.

They're not giving up easy. Damn. OK, so right now it's all like equal and then he's going to hand it down eventually. Yeah. And really, the episodes are going to showcase, you know, what goes into his decision making, what his thought process is and how all of us boys feel like we're fit on our own to run the farm. And things get intense.

There's definitely some moments throughout a bunch of the episodes where um you know it almost comes to blows and by the end of season one i think the audience is going to be in for a bit of a shock seeing what happens wow dad's you and your brothers get a little scrappy always always we've been we've been hyper competitive since growing up in sports and so so everything we do, we're always getting into arguments, getting into fights. And so with the farm on the line, it's like we ratcheted that up to 10 and there's not one of us giving up. Damn, that's cool, man. I'm gonna check that out. It sounds really unique because so many shows these days are just like the same thing. Yeah. But I've never heard of something like this. We've been fortunate enough to watch the first few episodes. And of course, you're watching

yourself and you're trying to watch it from a viewer's perspective. And whenever you're watching it and you're in, you remember living through it in real time, but watching it back on TV, you're like, holy, that was great. Like that was a pretty wild moment. And there's a lot of those throughout each one of these episodes. And so I'm excited for America to see what the farm and ranch life is all about. I think they're going to be a little bit shocked with all the drama that can come from a so-called small town farming operation. But yeah, it'll be fun. I love it, man. Your younger brother, Cole, is considered the wild child.

Yes, he is. Was he pretty crazy growing up? Oh, yeah, he absolutely was. I mean, I remember whenever Cole was in high school, my dad would be leaving for different work trips we have a few different businesses obviously farming and ranching being the main one my dad would head out of town and cole would be staying in his house and he would throw these parties and in our town of 1700 people gallatin missouri you would not think that there would be that many people at a party but there'd be kids from five counties over that would come in. And there was one night Cole threw a party and we all came back the next day to an absolute mess.

There was a tractor in the middle of the pond. No way. One of the drunk kids had hopped in the tractor, driven it into the middle of the pond, trash all over the place. And I don't know what Cole's game plan was to try and hide this, but he just didn't say anything about it.

So my dad comes back from a strip that next morning, pulls into the gate and looks down at the pond and there's a tractor cab sitting in the water he's like cole what the hell and cole tried to play it off like oh yeah i had a couple friends over there's 300 people holy it was project x out in bfe out in the middle of nowhere damn that is wild i used to have parties when my mom would leave. I was an only child. Yeah. So that's so relatable. One time my girl was across the road.

People go crazy, man. Things get out of hand. Yeah. And it's never like the close friends that show up to the party. It's always the friends of the friends. Yeah, those are the ones. The ones that you hardly know.

They'll punch holes in your walls. Yeah, they don't give a shit about you. No. Were you a big partier growing up? Actually, no. It's funny. My brother Jesse and I, who are the two oldest, we were straight-A students, like super on the straight and narrow. Really didn't do much growing up other than just work.

And then my brother Cole is the polar opposite. Wow. Cole is the life of the party anytime he walks into the room. And so it's funny watching the different dynamics and different personalities on the show and seeing how polar opposite Cole is. And I mean, honestly, just how much funny is. Yeah, I mean, it's good. It's a good time whenever you walk into a bar with my brother Cole. I love that, man. Even though you're opposites, you still get along. We do. We do. Yeah, we have our moments of disputes. But for the most part, we understand we're family at the end of the day. And we know it's us against the world or that's how we live out our life on the farming operation

we deal with so many challenges whether it comes to mother nature throwing us a wrench whether it be a drought or a flood um you know obviously being a big fish in a small pond we live in a town of 1700 people and we're one of the largest family-owned farming operations in the united states of it puts a big target on our back, though. Right. And so you have a bunch of, I say a bunch, there's a small percentage of locals that just don't like us because we're trying to do something outside of the status quo. When you live in a small town, you're supposed to get married, settle down, have kids,

and just kind of live your life and just do your own thing, work a normal job. So for us trying to build a large farming and ranching operation now with the reality TV show, it just creates this buzz around the small town. And a lot of people don't like it. Wow. A lot of people don't want to have it's like jealousy or just like it's a mix of jealousy and then just rumors. I mean, there's people around our town. I've had a call one time from someone saying they just heard that my dad was arrested at the local subway on drug distribution charges. And I'm sitting in my farm office looking at my dad sitting in his office. And I'm like, really? I'm sitting right here watching him. And they're like, well, so-and-so just said they saw it.

Wow. And that's kind of what you deal with in a small town is just small town rumors and small town gossip. Yeah. Because there's nothing else to do, right? Nothing else to do. Everyone's living a slower paced life. And there's so many good things that come out of a small town. Unfortunately, that is one negative aspect to it. Dude, there was more people in my high school than your whole town population. It's crazy, isn't it? 1,700 people. Yeah. So my house up there in that small town i'm five miles from my nearest neighbor damn i would actually i wouldn't mind that it's pretty nice yeah you could blast music it's pretty nice the only thing that uh it sucks a little bit is you can't door dash anything

so there's no such thing as door dash no such thing as uber nearest grocery store is 35 minutes away so whenever you go there you better have everything you need or else it's a haul to get back to the grocery store. You got to shop for the whole month if you're going out there. You do. Damn. And you got fresh meat. Oh yeah. So thankfully I've got the meat covered, but everything else, it's a long ways to the grocery store. You got eggs too? Oh yeah. Yeah. We've got plenty of chickens running around. Now what's this thing with the eggs, right? Because there's a lot of marketing there too about like so many different terms, pasteurized and all that. Oh yeah, absolutely. So again, it's all this gray area and greenwashing when it comes down to free range chickens, pasture raised chickens, but to get like organic free range chickens, they only have to be let out

into a pasture for 20 minutes a day. Wow. So the rest of the time they could be actually kept in a cage. And so it's, it's, it's a fine line and you really have to do your research. And that's why knowing your farmer, buying from a local source where you can look, see, feel, touch the farm, and know how they're raising those animals or those chickens, that's really the best way to ensure that you're buying meat or eggs that was sustainably, humanely, ethically raised. Because you could look at a website and look at some of these people that have labels of organic, free range, pasture raised. It's all BS at the end of the day. There's so many ways that you could hide it, get under the table with it. So unless you know your farmer and you have a farm where you can drive around it, where they're posting videos showcasing

what they're doing, full transparency, there's no way to ensure that what you're buying is humanely and ethically raised. Wow. So this term organic, you know, what do you think of that with with meat in particular? Does it even matter? Yes and no. I mean, the idea of organic is great. But again, the follow up and validation of what organic really means has so many faults within it because there's so many ways to flirt the line to be able to receive the label of organic without actually being an organic or humanely ethically raised beef that i mean we're working on our certification but if you came to our farm right now we run a better operation than 95 of these so-called organic operators that get the label. And so we encourage

people, come check out our farm, come look at the videos. We'll show you how we're raising our beef, bison, pork, and soon to be chickens, because we want people to show, or we want people to know how we're raising these animals so they feel better about what they're buying. So they have full confidence in who we are as a farming operation and how much we care about these animals we literally put our lives at stake whenever we're raising these animals on the farm because that is our livelihood it's not just a number on a spreadsheet like it is to so many of these people it's not a 155 000 beef processed per week each one of these animals mean something to us right and usually it does to a small town farmer because their livelihood is attached to that one

specific animal. And that's why I think from a consumer perspective, it is so important to really do your research whenever you're buying meat. And now they're actually doing studies on if the animal is traumatized, how it affects the meat and they're finding that it does affect the quality. It absolutely does. So cortisol levels rise whenever you have a stressed out animal and it actually affects the meat texture and quality because cortisol shoots throughout the bloodstreams, which obviously would include the meat as well. they're actually playing almost what you'd hear at a massage parlor as far as music goes. Oh, wow. They're actually massaging them and feeding them some of the highest quality fats you could. So from olives is a lot of times what they finish them off on is like olive juice or olive fat. And that's all because they want to keep the cortisol levels as low as possible before processing them.

So the meat's highest quality. And that's like the best Wagyu in the world, right? Japanese. Oh yeah. Yeah. A5 Japanese is unbelievable. And that's what we're, it's going to be tough to get to where we're massaging each cow. I don't know if we'll ever get there. Um, but we're trying to get those cortisol levels down as much as possible and give the quality of life to these animals that they deserve. Yeah. I definitely agree with it. And that's, that's not even including the spiritual side of it too too. Correct. Like, I believe there's energy transference. Oh, there is. I mean, whenever you're on a small town farming operation, if you drive around one of our farms during calving season, which is actually taking place right now, every single morning, you know, we're tagging it, putting our tag in its ear and getting in there nice and close with the calf and its mom. It's a special feeling that I really can't describe.

And it's tough to put words around unless you're there in person to feel it and, you know, understand what takes place whenever you're running a farming operation and the responsibility that comes with raising those animals. Wow. So you'll just wake up and a new calf is born. Oh yeah. Multiple. You don't have to be there for the process. They just do it. Sometimes we have to be there for the process. Sometimes we'll actually have to, um, get up to the mama if she's having issues or the calf is turned and we actually have to pull the calf out of her. And that's a pretty special process too. Like I said, there's, there's a responsibility that comes with it because it doesn't matter what's going on in our personal lives, right?

It could be a Friday night. I could have a big dinner planned down in the city that we've been planning for a month. And then all of a sudden, if we have a mama that's calfing and she's having issues calfing, that dinner gets put on the back burner and we're canceling it. And we're staying there with that animal all night long, helping it calf out. And so a lot of times we're pulling those calves, I'd say 15% of the time we have to pull them. Well, and the rest of the time it's all done naturally. Yeah. I think when you witness the birth of any animal, right?

It's a special feeling. I remember when I was in Mexico, I released baby sea turtles into the water. I was crying tears of joy, man. Oh, it's awesome. And it's such a neat feeling. A lot of people call us hypocrites because it's like, how on one hand can you say you love these animals so much? And then on the other, obviously process them and then eat them. And, you know, for us, like I said, it's such a passionate love for what we do and the respect we have for these animals.

We understand that with each animal that we process and, you know, turn into incredible meat products, there's a sacrifice there by that animal. And so we respect the absolute hell out of them. We love them to death and we want to raise them in a humane and ethical way, uh, to the utmost extent. I mean, as, as great of a life as they can have. And then understanding that we want to utilize that whole animal throughout the processing process to make sure that we're showcasing our respect. Yeah. You know, it's the same thing. We're, we're hunters as well. So we our respect. You know, it's the same thing. We're hunters as well. So we hunt deer on our farm.

It's the same thing. We wouldn't kill that animal if we didn't have, you know, full intentions of utilizing every single portion of that animal. Yeah. And making sure that its sacrifice actually benefits us. And I think that's important, right? Because some people hunt for fun and then they just leave the animal and... Correct.

Yeah. Trophy hunting, just going out there to kill an animal for fun. Like you said, I never understood that. I mean, there's always a bittersweet moment whenever you take the life of an animal. But understanding that through its sacrifice, it's going to help out your life and it's going to feed your family, feed yourself. It's a special feeling and it's something that we have the utmost respect for every single animal that lives on our

farm. I love that. Steven, it's been fun getting to know your world, man. Anything you want to promote or close off with? You know, really just this show. We're excited to bring this to America. Really fun time filming and it's going to be very insightful for you guys to see how much stress and pressure comes from a family farming operation, how much drama comes from it. But like I said, our backs are against the wall. We have so many issues facing small town farming operations. And we're just out here

trying to survive as a family. We love each other. And at the end of the day, we know we've got each other's back and it's going to be neat to see it all play out. Can't wait to check out the show. Can't wait to order

some of your meat, man. Oh, thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thanks for coming on. And thanks for watching, guys. See you next time.